Smart people saying smart things

Registered Runaway: “The Accidental Oppressors”

The margins are not tantamount to sin.

Christ planted his ministry in the margins because He is on the side of the oppressed, not because it was cesspool of sinners. The trenches have held both the virtuous and the vile and to say that Jesus hung with ÒsinnersÓ is too simplistic. He hung out with the marginalized. The oppressed. Those pitched off the church train.

Look to the Bible and you will find a rich history of marginalized people who were not ostracized because they were sinful, but simply because they were different. Step into these stories and I promise you will see a redemptive and breathtaking circle growing wider and wider to make room for those that want to love Jesus, and that, to me, is one of the reasons I love the Bible. It is the story of God stepping in for the marginalized when man turns his back.

Mike Lux: “Dancing in the Streets vs. Baying at the Moon”

But for all that, what the progressive movement shares is a belief in community and the common good, a belief that our fates are woven together and that we should give a hand up to those of our brethren who have stumbled and fallen. We share the idea that, as Martin Luther King framed it, that we should have a society based on the principle of love, not intolerance. We believe that we should love our neighbors as ourselves, that we should be our brother€™s’ and sister€™s’ keepers, that we should treat others the way we would want to be treated. We believe that another’s death diminishes us all, and that an injustice to one is an injustice to all. We believe that our hearts should be bigger than our wallets.

And we believe in leaping, leaping and dancing for joy, in the streets and everywhere else, when good things happen that make people’s lives better. That makes me feel lucky to be on this side of the political aisle.

Mary Elizabeth Williams: “Huge document dump shows how Church protected abusers”

What is despicable isn’t just that these abuses occurred in the first place, or even that in so many cases, church administration knew about the abuse and actively endeavored to cover it up with apparently zero regard for the welfare of victims. It’s also that so many of the guys who let this happen remain in positions of authority in the church today. Guys like Cardinal Roger Mahony, who actively worked to “shield abusers from police” in Los Angeles, and Dolan, who seemed to have a far more urgent concern about “the potential for scandal” than actively removing abusers. It’s that these men, who were complicit in crimes against children because it conveniently served their employer, the Catholic Church, live in comfort in their positions of leadership. It’s that men like Dolan still get to a pulpit from which to pronounce, without any hint of irony, that issues like marriage equality constitute a “tragic” offense to humanity — “especially our children.” It’s that these creeps are still permitted to have any opinion whatsoever about what’s in the interests of “our children.”

Angela Bonavoglia: “The Bishops vs. Birth Control: It’s Not About the Money”

The bishops claim this mandate violates church teaching that artificial birth control is “intrinsically evil, “despite the fact that nearly 100 percent of Catholics don’t believe there is anything “intrinsically evil” about birth control and use it. The bishops claim birth control is the same as abortion; it isn’t. They claim to be protecting the institution’s “conscience,” thereby stepping all over Catholic Church teaching that defines conscience as “the most secret core and sanctuary” of a person, not an institution, and the Church not as the “men of God” but as “the people of God,” which would seem to include women. They claim the money at issue is “their” money, even though employees earn their health insurance as part of their compensation package, and many have to contribute to or pay the full amount of their health insurance premiums so this is at base a labor issue. And their claim that birth control is not a “health” service, in the face of current scientific knowledge and medical opinion, is tantamount to insisting that the sun revolves around the earth.

William Lindsey, “All Red, All Blue, No Purple? Andrew Sullivan on Religion and the Future of the Planet”

What happens to a faith community, I ask myself, when, in the name of preserving tradition, it sells out all that is most important to its tradition? What happens to a faith community that so succeeds in dumbing itself down by purging its thinkers, its poets, its artists, that the majority of those who remain are no longer capable of or interested in noticing the cognitive dissonance between what the community’s leaders claim they’re preserving in the name of tradition, and what the authentic tradition of the faith community is actually all about?

Faith communities like that surely don’t have a bright future in store for them. And their effect on the culture at large is usually not to be celebrated, as Andrew Sullivan rightly points out. It trends in the direction of bitter hostility to a world imagined as out of control, rather than in the direction of embrace of what is best in the surrounding culture.