Category: Cloud of Witnesses

The Cost Benefits of Healthy Children

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marian wrightFrom Marian Wright Edelman in a recent article on the Flint water scandal:

Children and families everywhere would benefit immediately from stronger, clearer and consistent national standards for measuring, monitoring, and reducing lead exposure that are enforced. The incalculable child harm from lead poisoning should be reason enough to act now with great urgency and persistence. And the nation’s bottom line would benefit too. Every dollar invested to decrease lead hazards yields an estimated return of $17:1 to $221:1. These cost benefits exceed the return on vaccines long considered one of the most cost-effective public health interventions.

The Living Christ

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Thich NhatFrom Thich Nhat Hanh’s Living Buddha, Living Christ (1995):

If you do not really look at Jesus’ life, you cannot see the way. If you only satisfy yourself with praising a name, even the name of Jesus, it is not practicing the life of Jesus. We must practice living deeply, loving, and acting with charity if we wish to truly honor Jesus…The living Christ is the Christ of Love who is always generating love, moment after moment. When the church manifests understanding, tolerance, and loving-kindness, Jesus is there. Christians have to help Jesus Christ be manifested by their way of life, showing those around them that love, understanding, and tolerance are possible.

A Liberating & Unifying Force

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DorotheeFrom Dorothee Soelle in The Strength of the Weak: Toward a Christian Feminist Identity (1984):

The most important virtue in this kind of religion is not obedience but solidarity, for solidarity asks that we change the image of God from that of a power-dispensing father to one of a liberating and unifying force, that we cease to be objects and become subjects involved in this process of change, that we learn cooperation rather than wait for things to come to us from on high.  These are all elements of mystical piety.

The Power of Economic Withdrawal

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Dr. King2From Dr. King’s last public speech (“I’ve Been to the Mountaintop“) in Memphis, TN on April 3, 1968:

We have an annual income of more than thirty billion dollars a year, which is more than all of the exports of the United States, and more than the national budget of Canada. Did you know that? That’s power right there, if we know how to pool it. 

We don’t have to argue with anybody. We don’t have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don’t need any bricks and bottles. We don’t need any Molotov cocktails. We just need to go around to these stores, and to these massive industries in our country, and say, “God sent us by here, to say to you that you’re not treating his children right. And we’ve come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda fair treatment, where God’s children are concerned. Now, if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you.

5 Years Later: Blessed Are The Organized

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BlessedA Summary of Jeffrey Stout’s Blessed are the Organized by Tommy Airey

Democracy, in the sense I am commending, opens up space for minority voices because it is committed both to freedom as non-domination and the avoidance of arbitrary exclusion. Neither of these things can be achieved, according to the tradition of grassroots democracy, unless a lot of ordinary people get organized and actually hold officials accountable. These are things that require action.
Jeffrey Stout

In Blessed Are The Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America (2010), Princeton political science professor Jeffrey Stout recounts a back-and-forth he had with his 20-something son about deeply dysfunctional economic conditions in the U.S. You know the basics: the American worker has been tremendously productive for their company, but isn’t even coming close to sharing the wealth. In fact, since the 1960s, more income went to the top 1% of Americans than the bottom 50% combined. At the end of this casual, fact-filled conversation, Stout’s son proclaimed, “We’re fucked!”
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Thomas Merton

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merton 2The heart of man can be full of so much pain, even when things are
exteriorly “all right”. It becomes all the more difficult because
today we are used to thinking that there are explanations for
everything. But there is no explanation of most of what goes on in our own hearts, and we cannot account for it all. No use resorting to the kind of mental tranquilizers that even religious explanations
sometimes offer. Faith must be deeper than that, rooted in the unknown and in the abyss of darkness that is the ground of our being. No use teasing the darkness to try to make answers grow out of it. But if we learn how to have a deep inner patience, things solve themselves, or God solves them if you prefer: but do not expect to see how. Just learn to wait, and do what you can and help other people. Often it is in helping someone else we find the best way to bear our own trouble.
— Thomas Merton from his Christmas letter, 1966

The Time is the Time of No Room Raids on the Unspeakable

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merton-pbsBy Thomas Merton (+December 10+)

We live in the time of no room, which is the time of the end. The time when everyone is obsessed with lack of time, lack of space, with saving time, conquering space, projecting into time and space the anguish produced within them by the technological furies of size, volume, quantity, speed, number, price, power and acceleration. Continue reading “The Time is the Time of No Room Raids on the Unspeakable” →

Welcome to the Cult

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Cloud of Witnesses, Theological Animation1 Comment

WesBy Tommy Airey

Here’s an easy way to figure out if you’re in a cult: If you’re wondering whether you’re in a cult, the answer is yes.
Stephen Colbert

Not too long ago, in the years of early adulthood, I was attending a church in Southern California with weekend attendance in the tens of thousands. This was Respectable Religion. The pastor prayed at Obama’s inauguration. But something dreadful was percolating inside of me as I took inventory of what was happening all around me.
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