I’ve been following Kester Brewins “Dirty Heaven” series over at his blog (1, 2, 3). It’s basically him reflecting on the above RSA video. What a great read! Here are a few things I’m thinking about after watching the video: I’m pretty much agreeing with Kester that the typical “Utopian” view of Heaven needs re-thought….
Posts Tagged
Jesus
Real Jesus vs. Republican Jesus
Illustration via the PBH Network
It’s like making use of slaves
Very often our cheap goods are produced because of low wages. It’s like making use of slaves— slave labor may be cheaper and thus slave-produced goods would be cheap, but this is unjust. The purpose of an economy is to allow everyone, producer and consumer (and most of us are both), to live in a…
Eating with Whores
[T]able fellowship [is] a map of economic discrimination, social hierarchy, and political differentiation…What [Jesus] advocates, therefore, is an open commensality, an eating together without using table as a miniature map of society’s vertical discriminations and lateral separations…Since Jesus lived out his own parable, the most predictable counteraccusation to such open commensality would be immediate: Jesus…
Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth.
Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn “a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law – a man’s enemies will be the members of his own…
Jesus: A Sociopath? A Prophet? Or a bit of both?
I suspect there is a very fine line between growing up to be a sociopath and growing up to be a prophet. I know of a story from about fifty years ago. There’s this little first grader, let’s call him Teddy. His teacher thinks he has done something severely wrong and confronts him. He denies…
When you have more than you need, and others have none.
There are no peace churches in the United States. Because when you have got more than you need, and other people do not have enough to live on, you only keep the excess by violence. You do not keep it by appeals to faith or to love or to reason. And the churches are up…
Food Not Bombs
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. –Martin Luther King Jr. www.foodnotbombs.net
The Pax Romana
As Klaus Wengst writes: “That Pilate had Jesus executed on the cross shows that the death of Jesus is indissolubly bound up with the political peace that there was at that time, the Pax Romana, produced and guaranteed by Roman power. In the view of the procurator this execution, like many others, was virtually an…