Christianity has far too easily called individual, private behaviors sins while usually ignoring or even supporting structural and systemic evils such as war, colonization, corporate greed, slavery, and abuse of the Earth. All of the seven capital sins were admired at the corporate level and shamed at the individual level.
.. This left us utterly split in our morality, dealing with symptoms instead of causes, shaming people while glorifying systems that were themselves selfish, greedy, lustful, ambitious, lazy, prideful, and deceitful. We can’t have it both ways. Evil lurks powerfully in the shadows, in our unconscious complicity with systems that serve us at others’ expense. It has created worldviews of entitlement and privilege that were largely unrecognized until rather recently.
.. Only contemplative, nondual consciousness is capable of seeing things like this without also being negative or self-righteous. Once you can clear away the web of illusion you will be able to see that every created thing is still made in the image of God
.. There is no profane place, person, or creature. We can even find the sacred in seemingly secular human endeavors like sex, food, work, economics, and politics, as we’ll see later this year.
.. “Christ is everything and he is in everything” (Colossians 3:11). To see this is to have “the mind of Christ.”
Unhinged Activists Never Enter the ‘Real World’ Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/448037/campus-snowflakes-will-never-face-real-world-weinstein-sulkowicz
They move seamlessly from academia into government, art, and activism.
.. relishing their inevitable education in the so-called “real world.” The presumption is simple — these kinds of antics won’t fly when they’re trying to sell insurance or write code or balance a company’s budget. The “real world” is a harsh teacher, and soon they’ll have to grow up.
.. For the most committed campus radical, the “real world” doesn’t await; a lifetime of activism does. They’ll move seamlessly from academia into government, art, and politics, and sometimes right back into academia.
.. Yes, even ethics professors are beating people with bike locks now.
.. we live in hyper-partisan times and increasingly work in geographically separated ideological cocoons
.. Corporate boycotts directly extend campus politics into the world of commerce, and any person who works for a major progressive corporation knows very well what they risk if they publicly dissent from the company line on the same hot-button cultural issues that trigger campus meltdowns.
.. and a person of any ideology — if they so choose — can live their entire life without facing the stereotypical “wake-up call” that tends to moderate political extremes.
Bill O’Reilly and the Upside of Corporate Cowardice
led more than 50 companies, under pressure from protesters, to pull their ads from “The O’Reilly Factor.”
.. There’s little evidence that broad-based boycotts actually hurt a company’s bottom line; in fact, loyal customers often increase their patronage. Mr. O’Reilly’s ratings rose after the Times investigation
.. But boycotts can cause a significant drop in share price
.. In other words, shareholders react to their own fear of what might happen to the company’s brand, and not to what’s actually happening to its revenue.
The economist A. O. Hirschman might describe this as a triumph of voice over exit.
.. The basic allegations against Mr. O’Reilly have been known since 2004, when he settled his first lawsuit, but that didn’t stop companies from advertising until more women came forward.
.. but sometimes the fear to offend instills a kind of civility that other spheres of public life lack.
.. Trump won an election despite the creepy predatory comments he made on the “Access Hollywood” tape. But Mr. O’Reilly is being shown the door for acting toward women exactly as Mr. Trump had suggested (“When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”).
.. Steve King, a five-time congressman from Iowa, has plagued the public arena for years with his barely concealed white nationalism. By contrast, when Donald Sterling, the longtime owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, was heard on tape disparaging African-Americans, the N.B.A. revoked his right to ownership and put the team up for auction.
.. Coca-Cola spokesman after the company pulled ads from the Fox show “Married … With Children.”
.. Mercedes-Benz is a niche brand in the United States, but the company spends millions so that every consumer associates its vehicles with Jon Hamm uttering the phrase “The best or nothing,”
.. Don’t forget that he rehired Rebekah Brooks
.. More important, 21st Century Fox’s stock has slipped almost 6 percent since the Times investigation was published
.. Mr. O’Reilly’s lawyer is laying the blame for his client’s situation on a “smear campaign” that is “being orchestrated by far-left organizations.” That sounds like the kind of all-out political assault that Fox News and Mr. O’Reilly himself excelled at for years.
Behind Neil Gorsuch’s Non-Answers
“It’s not a matter of agreeing or disagreeing. It’s a matter of it being the law, and my job is to apply and enforce the law.” Gorsuch portrayed himself as a kind of judicial automaton, obligated to pay mindless obeisance to the Court’s prior rulings. This interpretation of the role of Supreme Court Justices is, to put it charitably, incorrect—they can and do overturn their earlier holdings. And Trump didn’t nominate Gorsuch simply because he knows how to follow precedent. He nominated Gorsuch because his career resembles a lab experiment synthesizing every trend in modern conservative thought.