J.R. Daniel Kirk: “Christmas Contagion“
If an unclean object comes into contact with a clean object, the clean becomes unclean. Uncleanness is more powerful than the cleanness an object might carry around.
Priests are holy and eminently clean. But they can’t go into the same room with a dead person: the unclean dead defiles the living clean.
Jesus messed all this up.
Jesus came and touched the unclean, declaring to them, “You are cleansed.”
zunguzungu, “Grieving Mohamed Bouazizi“
Someone like Mohamed Bouazizi does not normally get to be a sacrificial victim; as “bare life” he was the sort of person who could normally be killed with impunity or die without significance. And so, it is precisely the non-event of bare life’s extinction that registers the normality of that subject’s exclusion from political life.
What accounts for the difference? How did the routine violence of economic exploitation and political exclusion come to register as the kind of subjective violence it has? How did his death come to register as grievable? Most importantly, how did it come to be retroactively read as a violence done to him, and by a Tunisian state to whose illegitimacy that it, in turn, testifies and bears witness? These are not easy questions, and I wouldn’t pretend to have more than the beginnings of an answer. But these are the important questions, not election results and projections. How did Mohamed Bouazizi’s life come to have value? How did it become something we could grieve?
Rather than the spectacle with which we are so tiresomely familiar — the figure of the Islamist suicide bomber, whose status as “terrorist” testifies first to the illegitimacy of the act and then to the legitimacy of the targeted regime — Boazizi’s act somehow came to mean precisely the reverse, showing us the illegitimacy of the Tunisian state which killed him, as it was grieved by chanting crowds in the streets. And we see something similar, everywhere that people stand up and demand that no, this life has value, this sacrifice has meaning. Sentimentality can be a trap; thinking that sorrow is a substitute for political action has a long history of liberal complicity in racialized injustice, from Uncle Tom’s Cabin onward. But our politics can also change as we learn to grieve, as we learn to declare that such deaths aren’t normal, and we learn to find a loss in those whose deaths would normally mean nothing to us. That’s when the normal becomes subject to change. In this sense, as Ebrahim Moosa puts it, the “jubilation, conversations, speeches, greetings, protests, banners, deaths, wounds, and other expressions” of grief and rage and solidarity all collectively form an aesthetics of politics, a new way of sensing what is possible and of feeling what is wrong. And while the outcome of all of these political struggles are unclear — if the endpoint of the Arab Spring is far from certain — then as he puts it, “there is one certainty: the people have changed the order of the sensible.”
Jamie Wright: “Using your poor kid to teach my rich kid a lesson“
When we descend upon the impoverished to improve our family’s perspective, we may as well be saying to the mothers of these children, “Pardon me, I’m just gonna use your poor kid to teach my rich kid a lesson for a minute. I’ll be out of the way in no time – Oh, and I’ll leave you some shoes…. and a toothbrush.”
The not-so-hidden lesson there, the lesson we’re teaching kids worldwide, from the suburbs to the ghettos, is that “The rich are Blessed” — which, of course, means that the poor… can suck it.
… Truly, the biggest lessons your kids will learn about gratefulness will happen at home. If you’re materialistic, you can expect them to be the same. If you’re stingy and selfish, your kids will be, too.
If you practice generosity, you will raise generous kids. Hold loosely to the things of this world, and so will they. If you demonstrate your gratefulness for the life you’re living, your kids will pick up on that and do the same. “Grateful” should be learned at home and applied in the world, not the other way around.
(See her whole series on short-term missions here.)
John Shore: “Is Hell Real? What Are We, Six?“
So, to state something so obvious I should be embarrassed to type it: No one has any idea — none, zero, zilch, nada, void, total blank — what happens to anyone after they die.
Could be heaven awaiting. Could be hell. Could be a Dairy Queen; could be a dentist’s waiting room; could be a six-room ranch-style igloo; could be interplanetary pinochle tournament.
No. One. Knows. It’s. Not. Knowable.
And if at this moment you’re inclined to grab your Bible, stop yourself. It’s not in there. You can pretend the Bible tells you what happens to people after they die, but you wouldn’t be fooling even yourself. Paul enjoins us to give up childish things, and you can’t get more childish than pretending the Bible is a magical window that lets you see beyond life. It isn’t. It doesn’t. You can’t. Trying to use the Bible as proof of what happens after we die is like trying to use a telescope to row a canoe. Wrong instrument. Wrong purpose. Only results in you still haplessly floating about.
Peter Dorman: “Shopping Is Not a Perfect Substitute for Politics“
Shopping can be better or worse. You can have no labels at all and drift inexorably to the lowest common denominator in all aspects of food production outside the purview of the consumer. Or you can have labels like the ones we have today and give shoppers a choice in how much social responsibility they want to trade off for price, product differentiation or other consumerly objectives.
Don’t expect these labels to do everything, however. They have to be kept simple and standardized, so they can’t address all the practices that arise in different environmental conditions. Also, they are assigned to production on a producer-by-producer basis, so they can’t take into account the interactions at a regional or sectoral level. For instance, even if it were possible to insert language about sustainable water withdrawals into the organic standards, what constitutes sustainable depends on what other users sharing the same groundwater resources are doing. An individual farm may simply be the wrong unit of observation.
Real solutions require regulation and coordination, stuff like water and soil conservation districts. Reducing the burning of fossil fuels in food production and distribution requires a systematic control over carbon emissions, such as the permit system I’ve pushed in the past (such as here and here). And better labor practices require better labor laws and health unions to enforce them. You shouldn’t expect shopping to take care of all this.
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