Francis knew that once you are in an authority position in any institution, your job is to preserve that institution, and your freedom to live and speak the full truth becomes limited.
.. The early Franciscans said the first Bible was not the written Bible, but creation itself, the cosmos.
.. The job of religion and theology is to help us look in the mirror that is already present. All this “mirroring” eventually effects a complete change in consciousness.
It’s Chicken or Fish
.. are there a few good elected men or women in the Republican Party who will stand up to the president’s abuse of power as their predecessors did during Watergate?
.. But we already know the answer: No.
The G.O.P. never would have embraced someone like Trump in the first place — an indecent man with a record of multiple bankruptcies, unpaid bills and alleged sexual harassments who lies as he breathes — for the answer to ever be yes.
.. Virtually all the good men and women in this party’s leadership have been purged or silenced; those who are left have either been bought off by lobbies or have cynically decided to take a ride on Trump’s Good Ship Lollipop to exploit it for any number of different agendas.
.. Are there tens of millions of good men and women in America ready to run and vote as Democrats or independents in the 2018 congressional elections and replace the current G.O.P. majority in the House and maybe the Senate?
Nothing else matters — this is now a raw contest of power.
.. they enjoy, exercising raw power against their opponents.
.. Democrats and independents should not be deluded or distracted by marches on Washington, clever tweets or “Saturday Night Live” skits lampooning Trump. They need power.
.. they have power and are not afraid to use it, no matter what the polls say.
.. they will use that power to cut taxes for wealthy people, strip health care from poor people and turn climate policy over to the fossil fuel industry until someone else checks that power
.. The party has lost its moral compass.
.. Just think about that picture of Trump laughing it up with Russia’s foreign minister in the Oval Office, a foreign minister who covered up Syria’s use of poison gas. Trump reportedly shared with him sensitive intelligence on ISIS, and Trump refused to allow any U.S. press in the room. The picture came from Russia’s official photographer. In our White House!
.. it is a threat to the rule of law,
freedom of the press,
ethics in government,
the integrity of our institutions,
the values our kids need to learn from their president and
America’s longstanding role as the respected leader of the free world.
The European Crisis
In Europe as in the United States, recent trends in culture and economics have elevated an educated upper class while separating it, geographically and ideologically and in every other way, from a declining and fragmenting working class.
In Europe as in the United States, a growing immigrant population serves this upper class while seeming to compete with downscale natives for jobs, housing and social benefits. In Europe as in the United States, the center-left coalition has become a kind of patronage arrangement between the multicultural meritocracy and minority groups both new and old, while the white working class drifts rightward and votes for Brexit, Trump and now Le Pen.
.. these problems are worse in Europe, part of a systemic crisis that’s more serious than our own.
They’re worse because Europe is stuck with a horribly flawed experiment in political economy, a common currency without a common fiscal policy or a central political authority capable of claiming real legitimacy.
.. They’re worse because Europe has had sub-replacement fertility for much longer than the United States
.. mass immigration seem more culturally threatening to natives even as it seems more desirable to technocrats.
.. They’re worse because Europe is a continent of ethno-states without a strong assimilative tradition
.. Finally, they’re worse because European governance has a greater democracy deficit than the United States, and because the European ruling class already relies more than its American counterpart on illiberal methods — restrictions on speech that would be the envy of our campus commisars, counterterrorism methods that would make Jeff Sessions blush, even the spread of “voluntary” euthanasia as a solution to age and illness and unhappiness — to maintain the continental peace.
.. This is a tangle of problems that no single statesman or party, however brilliant, is likely to cut through; they can be only managed, not resolved.
But much of elite European politics seems to be organized around the premise that they are really problems only because they might lead to an extremist party taking power. So the important thing is to concentrate every effort on delegitimizing and defeating and excluding critics (be they right wing or, as in many Mediterranean countries, far left) rather than solving the problems that the outsiders often quite accurately identify.
.. the policy alternative that the right-wing populists often offer —
- hard limits on immigration, new financial support for families,
- a re-emphasis on national sovereignty,
- the unwinding of the euro
— is in some ways less extreme than the open-borders and onward-to-federalism fantasies still nursed by the elite
.. in which secularism gives ground to religious pluralism even as it firmly demands certain forms of assimilation.
All Spirit, No Body: Evangelicalism’s Gnostic Problem
How is it possible to have any sort of human identity without being embodied institutionally. For politics we have parties, for business we have companies, for sex we have marriage. All of these human activities require some kind of exclusion based on a positive identity. Democrats are not Republicans. Ford’s cars are not Toyota’s.
.. The ministry of the word has always involved distinguishing and excluding. The keys of the kingdom were given to open the gates of heaven to believers and to shut them to unbelief.
.. The result is a form of Christianity that does not want to have enemies but knows that it has them because its positive assertion of evangelical identity means that evangelicalism is not fundamentalism or liberalism. The reason it cannot have enemies is the same as why it cannot have members. Evangelicalism eschews institutional embodiment.
.. Born-again Protestantism cannot resolve its inherent tension between the anti-formal nature of the conversion experience – the gateway into evangelicalism – and the need for formal qualities that will make evangelicalism cohere as a distinct Christian identity.
.. Evangelicalism never amounted to a full-blown religious tradition, but was rather a style of personal living everywhere combined with conventional attitudes and actions.
.. it is one of the least disciplined and impossible to define expressions of Christianity. In fact, because of its inability to achieve the heft of a religious tradition but only to add up to a spiritual style, evangelicalism has left many of its adherents with the dilemma of not knowing how to practice, maintain, and pass on a faith that eschews the means of practicing, maintaining and passing on any form of Christianity.
.. The ordinary way that God saves is through the means of his word, read and preached, and visibly signified and sealed in the sacraments, with the enlivening work of the Spirit. In other words, God instituted forms to mediate grace through the external senses of the human body. Evangelicals implicitly recognize this whenever they publish books, set up preaching tours, arrange Christian Rock festivals, or print a new line of t-shirts. These evangelical forms mediate evangelical devotion. And they show that the original impulse of evangelicalism, to escape forms, is impossible.