Pope Francis Gets Boost from Leading Cultural Marxist Publisher!

If you’re one of those people who wastes time railing against entities belonging to a vague entity known as Cultural Marxism, which is supposedly taking over higher education, then you might have something to worry about.

Even though I spent a good decade or so in a Public Ivy, the University of Washington, earning my doctorate in Comparative Literature, I can honestly say I never saw this tribe conspiring to corrupt the youth of Seattle.

You might be too busy joining up with Catholics for Donald Trump on Twitter and railing against the “Cultural Marxists” to notice that America’s leading leftist publisher, Verso Books, recently published Laudato Si’ under the title Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality: On Care for Our Common Home. The blurb for their edition is quite something:

In the Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality, the beloved Pope exhorts the world to combat environmental degradation and its impact on the poor. In a stirring, clarion call that is not merely aimed at Catholic readers but rather at a wide, lay audience, the Pope cites the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change, and does not hesitate to detail how it is the result of a historic level of unequal distribution of wealth.

It is, in short, as the New York Times labeled it, “An urgent call to action . . . intended to persuade followers around the world to change their behavior, in hopes of protecting a fragile planet.”

With an insightful and informative introduction by Harvard professor Naomi Oreskes, famed for her bestselling Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.

But Pope Francis is not the first theologian to infiltrate Verso Books. The pope’s boss, none other than the second person of the Trinity, has a book published with them as well, The Gospels: Jesus Christ, which features notes from  Giles Fraser and an introduction from Terry Eagleton. In it where Eagleton proclaims with an intensity as scorching as a glass of whiskey going down your throat that:

In his crucifixion and descent into hell, Jesus in St. Paul’s view is “made sin,” identifying with the scum of the earth, enduring a solidarity with suffering, evil and despair in order to transfigure it through his resurrection…Only if his desolate cry on the cross (“My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”) is taken seriously…could there, in fact, be any hope of resurrection…. If he lay down confidently expecting to spring up again, he would not have been raised from the dead. There is no smooth teleology at work here. Only if his death was a cul-de-sac could it become a horizon. He seems to die in bewilderment, uncertain why his father is demanding this futile action of him, yet faithful to him even so. It is because his action is fruitless, a dead-end and absurdity, that it can bear fruit in the lives of others.

I could keep going, but I’d like to highlight Paul Virilio, a disciple of the famous Abbé Pierre, who is almost exclusively published by Verso.