Well, a mess indeed and Joseph
no fool to think twice before
saying yea. Thereafter,
in the early morning, hearing
a voice from yon olive grove
singing loud as a songbird
born of revolution: “God
hath scattered the proud
in the imagination of their
hearts. Hath put down the
mighty from their seats, and
exalted them of low degree.
Hath filled the hungry with
good things; and sent the rich
empty away” the carpenter
shook his head only once,
believing then the angel,
and declared (in the old style)
“She hath incited a riot in
my heart and I shall ne’er let
this maiden depart from my sight
as long as we both shall live –
or first comes the kingdom
upon this earth.” And so
it was. Thanks be to God.

By Eliisa Bojanic

Reflections on being a privileged white American in a starving world (real talk edition:)

“What exactly are you doing?” I ask myself often. Why is everything going so wrong around me? What am I doing here? Why do I have so much while others have so little? Why is it possible for me to walk down the street with an iPhone in my hand that costs enough (if bought in this country) to feed a family for a year, while I kneel down to give 100 pesos to the woman begging outside of my school. 100 pesos. 100 pesos. That’s $2.25 give or take. It will feed her all day. But the food will not be nutritious. It will be rice and meat cooked in oils and fats that could and will eventually destroy her body. Fresh food after all is for the rich. But then she was never even given an opportunity to know what coronary artery disease is, or how the poison of this world will kill so many.
Continue reading “Enough” →

From Arundhati Roy’s recent piece in The Guardian on visiting Edward Snowden:

What sort of love is this love that we have for countries? What sort of country is it that will ever live up to our dreams? What sort of dreams were these that have been broken? Isn’t the greatness of great nations directly proportionate to their ability to be ruthless, genocidal? Doesn’t the height of a country’s “success” usually also mark the depths of its moral failure? And what about our failure? Writers, artists, radicals, anti-nationals, mavericks, malcontents – what of the failure of our imaginations? What of our failure to replace the idea of flags and countries with a less lethal Object of Love? Human beings seem unable to live without war, but they are also unable to live without love. So the question is, what shall we love?… Continue reading “For A Country?” →

From Walter Wink in Engaging the Powers (1992):

Without a clear idea of the contrast between God’s domination-free order and the Domination System, the gospel is proclaimed in a sociopolitical vacuum, a timeless, placeless, noncontextual, eternal nowhere. Gospel truths are handled like everlasting principles entirely unrelated to the specificity of any real world. And the Powers are consequently reduced to general structural constants ostensibly prevailing ineluctably everywhere and in every time…The gospel has a very specific context: the Domination System. And the gospel has a specific response to that system: the liberating message of Jesus…The gospel is not an ideal beyond realization. It is rather a continual lure toward the fullest conceivable life for all.

An excerpt from Rebecca Solnit’s recent dispatch “Calculated Risk” from the climate summit in Paris, originally posted on the Harper’s Magazine blog:

Obama spoke of his summer trip to Alaska, whose melting permafrost and burning tundra are “a preview of one possible future”—though it’s the present, not the future, for Alaska. Still, Obama did acknowledge one of the central facts of the day: “We know the truth that many nations have contributed little to climate change but will be the first to feel its threats.”
Continue reading “When Some of the Less Famous Leaders Took Their Turns” →