Jonathan's blog

From an article titled "Obama: Democrats Must Court Evangelicals" by David Espo of the AP in The Washington Post:

Sen. Barack Obama chastised fellow Democrats on Wednesday for failing to "acknowledge the power of faith in the lives of the American people," and said the party must compete for the support of evangelicals and other churchgoing Americans. "Not every mention of God in public is a breach to the wall of separation. Context matters," the Illinois Democrat said in remarks to a conference of Call to Renewal, a faith-based movement to overcome poverty. "It is doubtful that children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance feel oppressed or brainwashed as a consequence of muttering the phrase `under God,'" he said. "Having voluntary student prayer groups using school property to meet should not be a threat, any more than its use by the High School Republicans should threaten Democrats." …His speech included unusually personal references to religion, the type of remarks that usually come more readily from Republicans than Democrats. "Kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side of Chicago, I felt I heard God's spirit beckoning me," he said of his walk down the aisle of the Trinity United Church of Christ. "I submitted myself to his will and dedicated myself to discovering his truth." …Obama coupled his advice with a warning. "Nothing is more transparent than inauthentic expressions of faith: the politician who shows up at a black church around election time and claps _ off rhythm _ to the gospel choir." At the same time, he said, "Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering the public square."

Via Scott Freeman's blog, an excerpt from Michael Lerner's book, The Left Hand of God:

When Jews were enslaved by Egyptian imperial power, they were subjected to genocidal measures on the part of Pharoah (who sought to kill all the male children), constant physical oppression, material deprivation, and religious repression. It was in this context that they responded to the death of the Egyptian army sinking into the waters of the sea by celebrating God as a man of war: and proclaiming, "Your Right Hand O Lord, is Mighty in Power" (Exodus 15:3-6) Yet history often shows that this is a difficult balance to maintain, because once one justifies using violence and domination over others in some circumstances to overthrow oppressive rule, one can develop a psychological proclivity for using violence to solve one's pressing problems. What the prophets saw, and what has happened once again in contemporary Israel, is that the Torah tradition could be used to justify a social order that was in many respects the exact opposite of the loving message of God. When the message of the Right Hand of God, developed for the powerless, is adopted instead by the powerful, existing inequalities and systems of oppression are ignored and calls for social justice, peace and nonviolence are dismissed as pretty thoughts about some future messianic era (for Jews) or a Second Coming (for Christians). Arguing that the "real world" is too dangerous for the demands of the Torah, the Prophets, and Jesus to be taken seriously, the powerful insist that the only path to peace and social justice is to impose their own religous vision on the whole world, and to accept cruelty and injustice as inevitable until that apocalyptic transformation has taken place. The purveyors of this distortion can always refer, as they always have, to external threats as evidence that the world is not yet ready for the transformative call of the Left Hand of God. Jesus railed against the Jewish establishment of his day, like other prophets had done in their own time, and once again highlighted a commitment to the poor and the oppressed. Jesus insisted that people not duplicate Rome's oppressive rule in the way that they treated each other. His followers and many early Christians understood this message clearly "understood, as did the powerful in Rome, that it was a revolutionary message calling upon the faithful to reject the power of tyrants and embrace the power of love, which would ultimately be more forceful than anything Rome could deliver. Just as the message of Torah was tragically turned into its opposite by "the religious" and their establishment, so Christianity, taken over by Constantine, became its opposite, a system that provided justification for the powerful while ignoring or even actively subverting the needs of the poor and the powerless" These perversions of Judaism and Christianity took place in the name of the original vision, drawing on the texts and the justifications that could be found there because at one point those triumphalist texts had provided needed empowerment for the poor and the downtrodden, and had been a psychologically necessary buttress against despair. In the United States, the powerful have appropriated God and religion to justify imperial rule around the globe. They are not intent on using power to rectify the situation of the powerless. On the contrary, as their domestic moves make clear, they redistribute wealth upward from the poor to the rich. The global system of capital that they have created has had that same impact, increasing the suffering of the powerless while empowering a small class within each society to act as the guardian of the interests of Western capital in third-world countries. The Religious Right allies with and provides much of the ideological cover for this development. It allows the powerful to worship their own power and then, taking the work of their own hands, declare it the God to be worshipped by all. This is pure idolatry. It allows America, the most powerful and arrogant of all the arrogant and powerful nations that exist today, to identify itself in its own mind with the oppressed children of Israel and thus to imagine that its use of force is divinely sanctioned.

Another brilliant and hilarious web 2.0 marketing ploy along the lines of The Sith Sense and The Subservient Chicken: Send a Snakes on a Plane prank call from Samuel L. Jackson (via Waxy.org) In other funny Samuel L. Jackson news, it's been reported that he will play the voice of God in a new audio version of the Bible (via Digg).

On Tuesday we went to the Deep Creek area in the Great Smokey Mountains National Park near Bryson City. We took a couple short hikes to see waterfalls (Juneywhank and Tom's Branch), watched tubers float down Deep Creek, picnicked, and let the boys play in the creek. That evening we ate at The Jarrett House (built circa 1884) in Dillsboro.

From an article titled "Presbyterians and the Holy Trinity: Let Us Phrase" by K. Connie Kang of the LA Times:

When referring to the Trinity, most Christians are likely to say "Father, Son and the Holy Spirit." But leaders of the Presbyterian Church (USA) are suggesting some additional designations: "Compassionate Mother, Beloved Child and Life-giving Womb," or perhaps "Overflowing Font, Living Water, Flowing River." Then there's "Rock, Cornerstone and Temple" and "Rainbow of Promise, Ark of Salvation and Dove of Peace." The phrases are among 12 suggested but not mandatory wordings essentially endorsed this month by delegates to the church's policy-making body to describe a "triune God," the Christian doctrine of God in three persons. The Rev. Mark Brewer, senior pastor of Bel Air Presbyterian Church, is among those in the 2.3-million-member denomination unhappy with the additions. "You might as well put in Huey, Dewey and Louie," he said. "Any time you get together representatives of 2 1/2 million people, you get some really solid people and some really wacky people," he said, referring to the delegates who attended the 217th General Assembly in Birmingham, Ala. Other assembly actions attracted larger notice, such as endorsing medical marijuana and giving local authorities the ability to ordain gays and lesbians living openly with same-sex partners. But now, through blogs and discussions during and after services, word is spreading about the additions to the traditional Trinity. Others include "Sun, Light and Burning Ray" and "Speaker, Word and Breath." The wordings are meant to reflect particular aspects of worship, so a prayer noting God's "wrath in the face of evil" might use "Fire That Consumes, Sword That Divides and Storm That Melts Mountains." Some of the suggestions are familiar ones, such as "Creator, Savior, Sanctifier" and "Rock, Redeemer, Friend," which other denominations already use… Written by a diverse panel of working pastors and theologians, the report noted that the traditional language of the Trinity portrays God as male and implies men are superior to women. "For this and other distortions of Trinitarian doctrine we repent," the report said. Daniel L. Migliore, a member of the committee that spent five years crafting the report, said critics miss the point. "What we are speaking of is supplementary ways of referring to the triune God - not replacements, not substitutes," said Migliore, professor of systematic theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. And the Rev. Rebecca Button Prichard, pastor of Tustin Presbyterian Church, who headed the panel that wrote "The Trinity: God's Love Overflowing," strongly defended it as theologically sound. "What people are afraid is that they think we are taking 'Father, Son and Holy Spirit' away from them," she said. "We're not. What we want to say is that no words can fully describe God. And so we want people to seek a variety of expression, so we can do justice to the greatness of God." The concept that the omniscience of God is beyond comprehension - and, hence, human language - dates to antiquity. In ancient Israel, Jews did not dare to invoke the name of God - Yahweh - who declared in the Decalogue, "You shall have no other gods before me." But critics of the new designations say the wordings are confusing and reflect a concession to touchy modern sensibilities.