Richard Beck: “The Fence of Matthew Shepard“
In James Cone’s recent book The Cross and the Lynching Tree he makes the argument that the cross and the lynching tree need to form a dialectic. If the two are separated the cross becomes innocuous and meaningless. As Cone writes:
Unfortunately, during the course of 2,000 years of Christian history, this symbol of salvation has been detached from any reference to the ongoing suffering and oppression of human beings. … The cross has been transformed into harmless, non-offensive ornament that Christians wear around their neck.
Cone argues that during the Civil Rights struggle the Christian symbol of salvation should have been, though it was not, connected with the lynching tree — an actual and ongoing location of human oppression and cruelty. For when the two become separated — when the cross hung around our neck or in our church fails to bring to mind current and ongoing locations of cruelty in our world — then the Christian faith has lost its way.
The cross, to be a truly Christian symbol, must bring to mind the lynching trees of the world.
Christ hangs from the cross as blacks hung from trees. As Matthew Shepard hung from a fence.
Cursed scarecrows all.
As it says in the Good Book: “Anyone who is hung on a tree is under God’s curse.” (Deut. 21.23)
Until we see Jesus standing with the cursed we will never understand the central symbol of our faith nor what it means to be a Christian.
Wendell Berry on Corporate Personhood
The folly at the root of this foolish economy began with the idea that a corporation should be regarded, legally, as “a person.” But the limitless destructiveness of this economy comes about precisely because a corporation is not a person. A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. Unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive, as most persons finally do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the future as the lifetime of the children and grandchildren of anybody in particular. It can experience no personal hope or remorse, no change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money. The stockholders essentially are usurers, people who “let their money work for them,” expecting high pay in return for causing others to work for low pay.
Charles Fey: “Free to Have What Isn’t Divvied Up“
It’s no coincidence that folks like the Koch brothers, the independently wealthy, and big corporate interests back this idea of “liberty” via sound money. After all – they legitimately want freedom. But the freedom they want is a different kind of freedom. Their idea of freedom is to hold onto great swathes of capital apportioned to them, by hook or crook. Freedom, to those of with the cash, is simply a license to walk the earth unfettered as one of Rand’s unquestioned makers of man’s fortune.
Liberty, to these “libertarians”, is about drawing a great big opaque dollar sign over thousands of years of human history that apportioned wealth to them and their parents.
Of course, that’s only really freedom for those that woke up with or accumulated the money. That’s only freedom for a blessed few chosen by some whim of fate or by dint of the non-dilutable vault of precious metals buried beneath some family estate. Which is to say it isn’t really freedom at all.
Chauncey DeVega: “An Air Raid Siren: Chris Matthews Was Right About Republican Racism in South Carolina, But Wrong About ‘Dog Whistle’ Politics“
In 2012, Republican candidates are using overt signals, what are for all intents and purposes blaring air raid sirens and signal flares that race, whiteness, and American identity are deeply intertwined. The appeals to white racism by the Tea Party GOP during the primaries are not background rhythms or subdued choruses. They are the driving guitars of Blue Oyster Cult’s “Godzilla,” the chorus of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems,” the opening moments of the Notorious B.I.G’s “Kick in the Door,” or the flipped samples of Justice’s “Stress.” You feel it. You know it. To deny the obvious is to close one’s ears to a driving drum line and cadence that travels up through your shoes and to your bones.
Zack Hunt: “The Myth of Sola Fide“
We have so many years of personal context built up around us from what we’ve learned via Sunday School teachers, pastors, parents, and pop theology books that it has become so ingrained in our subconscious it prevents us from reading or hearing what is actually being said about the faith. This is particularly true as it pertains to the Bible.
We have so many sacred cows in evangelicalism (inerrency, creationism, gender roles, sola fide, etc.) which have been impressed upon us since birth that it becomes all but impossible for most of us to recognize that many of the passages we string together to make our case for these theological positions don’t actually, or to more specific, they don’t literally say what we think or want them to say; especially when we place those passages in context.
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