My hope this All Saints Sunday is that we would fully and faithfully engage in the realities of life and death, so that those who have gone before us will continue to inspire us to work towards love for those around us in the land of the living.
The grass seemed greener in Orthodoxy, I’ve realized, because my yearning for authenticity and escape reflected a structural lack embedded in late capitalist dystopia… Today, it seems to me more honest to learn to live with this lack, than to imagine that any faith, flag or folkway can fully fill it.
Many foundational myths of community formation and development situate “after the storm” as the moment when positive change began to happen for them as a people… Isaiah 53:4-12 can be understood as an act of collective storytelling to imagine life “after the storm.”
If we put Amos’ critique in more contemporary language, the “trampling” and “levies of grain” decried in 5:11 are the twin burdens of rents and fees, which often led to cycles of impoverishment and debt slavery. The lifestyles of the rich are financed by extracting from the poor.
At first, as I read Psalm 26, the words do not fit neatly on my tongue. I would like to know the story of this indignant plaintiff who so angrily proclaims their integrity in sharp contrast to evildoers and hypocrites.
This essay is a storied and theological proposal for non-violent, disruptive anti-fascism.
God provides a reminder: whatever reforms might take place in the formal leadership structure, God is going to keep favouring those outside that structure. The centre might expand, but God’s preference for the margin is not going away.
Jean-Luc Marion waded into political discourse with his 2017 book Brève apologie pour un moment catholique (Brief Apology for a Catholic Moment) which uses aspects of his phenomenological and theological project to argue for a model of non-political politics: one based exclusively on the perfect will of the Triune God.
To undertake the reformation of desires is a calling, with no guarantees of success, but some promise of God’s grace along the way.
At the base of Christofascism lies the response of uncritical obedience. For this reason, Christians need to become aware of how their own language of obedience functions Christian moral systems and concepts of faith.
Divine Wisdom calls. It is publicly accessible. We may not recognize the voice because we might not be listening for it. But it is there beckoning to us.