Sunday Readings: The Beloved Community

This book... is a portrait of the Christian faith as a set of social disciplines shaped by gratitude, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Biblical religion offers peacemakers and activists much more than pep talks and consolations, indeed a potent arsenal for imagining freedom, energizing social reform and forging solidarity with the poor. It is all well and good for Anthony Appiah to advise us, "live with fractured identities; engage in identity's play; find solidarity, yes, but recognize contingency, and above all practice irony." But what might it mean to settle down after all the fracturing and decentering and assaults on identity have run their course, to build community among the hopeless and excluded in places where irony is a condescending shrug? It is unlikely that anyone has ever read Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra or Jacques Derrida's Disseminations and opened a soup kitchen. But the Christian peacemakers who yesterday and today build beloved community with the poor and excluded "drink the earthly cup to the dregs" (D. Bonhoeffer) and bear glorious witness to the spirit of life in concrete and practical ways.

- Charles Marsch
The Beloved Community

Quote of the Week

I'm just outright stealing this quote from Josh Brown, who got it from Abraham Heschel, who, I believe, I quoted at length here before. Rabbi Heschel was a Hebrew scholar whose works and work had a tremendous influence on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But this is beautiful and I think that every Literature (and Math, Science, Spanish, History, Social Sciences...) teacher should have this committed to memory and hanging above their workspace.

The Greeks learned in order to comprehend. The Hebrews learned in order to revere. The modern man learns in order to use. To Bacon we owe the formulation, “Knowledge is power.” This is how people are urged to study: knowledge means success. We do not know any more how to justify any value except in terms of expediency. Man is willing to define himself as “a seeker after the maximum degree of comfort for the minimum expenditure of energy.” He equates value with that which avails. He feels, acts, and thinks as if the sole purpose of the universe were to satisfy his needs. To the modern man everything seems calculable; everything reducible to a figure. He has the supreme faith in statistics and abhors the idea of a mystery. He is sure of his ability to explain all mystery away.

Between God and Man.

Quote for the week

Novelist extraordinaire Raymond Chandler on the art of movies at Atlantic Monthly. Sixty years later, as prophetic as the day it came out.

The point is not whether there are bad motion pictures or even whether the average motion picture is bad, but whether the motion picture is an artistic medium of sufficient dignity and accomplishment to be treated with respect by the people who control its destinies. Those who deride the motion picture usually are satisfied that they have thrown the book at it by declaring it to be a form of mass entertainment. As if that meant anything. Greek drama, which is still considered quite respectable by most intellectuals, was mass entertainment to the Athenian freeman. So, within its economic and topographical limits, was the Elizabethan drama. The great cathedrals of Europe, although not exactly built to while away an afternoon, certainly had an aesthetic and spiritual effect on the ordinary man. Today, if not always, the fugues and chorales of Bach, the symphonies of Mozart, Borodin, and Brahms, the violin concertos of Vivaldi, the piano sonatas of Scarlatti, and a great deal of what was once rather recondite music are mass entertainment by virtue of radio. Not all fools love it, but not all fools love anything more literate than a comic strip. It might reasonably be said that all art at some time and in some manner becomes mass entertainment, and that if it does not it dies and is forgotten.

Quote for the week

We are about ending poverty, not simply managing it. We give people fish. We teach them to fish. We tear down the walls that have been built up around the fish pond. And we figure out who polluted it.

This is what I think community should be about. Not all communities. And not all capacities. And I think, in a sense, it's what I think teaching should be about, if I were to holistically live it out. Which I think I'd rather do than the paperwork. (But then again, easier said than done.)


From The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical, Shane Claiborne
(pdf file excerpt here)