Lacking the structure and support of the organized church, radical forms of Christianity never thrive for very long, starting with Pentecost itself and the first “sharing of all things in common” (Acts 2:44-45), the desert fathers and mothers, and the early Celtic monastics. Unless such groups become strongly institutionalized, and even juridical about it, they tend to be short-lived or very small.
Could ISIS Exist Without Islam?
“But I want to answer a slightly different question, which is: If Islam did not exist … would a group like ISIS, with all the other realities as they are, exist today and do the same things?”
“My answer to that hypothetical question is a resounding yes.” Discussing global terrorism at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Mogahed, who formerly led research on Muslims with the polling organization Gallup, said that extremist groups all over the world commit the same kinds of violence using what she called “the local social currency” to justify it. “That is sometimes Christianity. That is sometimes Judaism. That is sometimes Buddhism. And it is sometimes secular ideologies. So a world without Islam would still have a group like ISIS—they would just be called something else that may be less catchy.”
.. It’s not, she said, the group’s interpretation of Islamic texts that drives its brutality—it’s the group’s desired brutality driving its interpretation of the texts. “We start at the violence we want to conduct, and we convince ourselves that this is the correct way to interpret the texts,” she said.
Obama’s Grace
Here is another reason to watch rather than just read about the presentation. It reinforces the fact that this was a major national ceremony, involving fundamental discussion of national issues and prospects, in which all the major participants were black: president, preachers, mourners, congregation. I can’t think of a comparable previous event. Someone writing about our time will, I think, note it as an important step that this was treated not as a “minority” commemoration but as a central American discussion.
.. I have my complaints about and disappointments with Obama. But I hate the conventional D.C.-media disdain for him as a guy too cool, too aloof, and too generally above-it-all to be interested in the grimy work of public affairs. Think of the columns that begin, “Barry is bored …” We can’t yet fully reckon the ways his era has changed our country, from the long aftermath of the 2008 recession to the consequential court decisions good and bad.
Looking ‘White’ In the Face (Race and Philosophy)
In the gospel Jesus announces his ministry by saying he has come to proclaim good news to the poor and imprisoned and the year of the Jubilee, which meant massive economic redistribution every 50th year! Can you imagine the Christian right voting for that? The great scandal of the United States is that it has produced an anti-gospel, the extremes of appalling wealth and poverty. But instead of playing the prophetic role of Amos denouncing the American Jeroboam, instead of working to close that gap, the policies of the right wing are exacerbating it.
.. The secular left, on the other hand, won’t touch religion with a stick and abandons the ground of religion to the right. So both the left and the right have a hand around the throat of prophetic religion.
.. Prophetic does not mean the ability to foretell the future. It means the call for justice for “the widow, the orphan and the stranger,” the affirmation that the mark of God is on the face of everyone who is down and out, and a prophetic sensibility requires walking a mile in the shoes of the other.
I remember years ago, the president of a local college (in the Quaker tradition) took a year’s leave of absence to work as a trash collector.
.. I can only assume her intentions were good but I think she was misguided. You can’t be an “intentional” victim, adopt it freely, because that means you are always free to walk away from it if the going gets rough, take a few weeks off for a holiday, or just you change your mind. So it ends up making a mockery of the oppressed — the biting edge of oppression is that is not of your own choosing!
.. This problem also comes up in Christian theology — God intentionally assumed our mortal condition but it wasn’t an inescapable plight visited upon the divine being without its consent.