Love is patient and kind. Equality? Equality is forever. Equality has been denied, and Equality is pissed. Turns out, Equality is what happens when Love grows up.
Category: advocacy
Lawrence O’Donnell Takes Off The Gloves: National Defense Authorization Act, Soft Journalism, and the Spoonfed Two Party System
Taking a cue from the pages of Superman, Lawrence O’Donnell lambasted the mainstream media Wednesday night for their failure to cover the Third Parties debate and for failing to address this little nightmare:
Imagine if Congress passed a bill that the president signed that allowed indefinite detention without charge or trial. That would be issue one at any presidential debate, wouldn’t it? The media’s favorite debate moderator, Martha Raddatz, would have forced a full discussion of that one at the vice presidential debate, wouldn’t she? Well, Congress did pass that law last year and President Obama signed it and he never mentioned it on his list of his accomplishments in any of the debates. And he was never asked about it, not by the media’s second favorite debate moderator, Candy Crowley, and not by Mitt Romney. It never came up at the two-party presidential debates.
Watch the video here. It starts with the drug war (I’m not for legalization, but am for reform), and if that bothers you, fast forward to the part about the National Defense Authorization Act. I kind of like how someone on Examiner.com put it:
But in the most shocking segment, O’Donnell laid out a serious charge against President Obama and the failure of the media and the public to hold him responsible due to a certain law that he signed called the National Defense Authorization Act, which according to O’Donnell will allow the government to detain, interrogate, prosecute or just make people who it suspects to be terrorists disappear without a trial of any kind, and this includes American citizens! O’Donnell then blasted all of the moderators of the three presidential debates between Obama and Romney for not bringing this issue up, and then he blasted the cowardly Mitt Romney for also being to [sic] sheepish to ask President Obama about this issue, instead of crowing about how he would repeal Obamacare, when he should be repealing this monstrosity.”
O’Donnell encouraged people to vote for third party candidates, especially in swing states.
Good for you, Larry. Even if you were a few hours late to the party:
Who’s Coming to Dinner?
And Jesus said “Give away your power. Give away your wealth. Believe in God. Believe also in me. Believe in people. Proclaim good news to the poor and justice to the oppressed.” And they opened their homes to him: tax collectors, widows, men and women of little means, immigrants and foreigners and heathens. Homeless, Jesus lived and preached among them. “Believe in people,” Jesus said, “believe in God. Believe in me.” Offered power, he refused it. People sitting in high places were enraged but Jesus mounted no defense. And he went to die without a protest, like a lamb lead to the slaughter. And he continued to confound them.
It Could Have Gone This Way (Version 2)
It Could Have Gone This Way
And the rich young ruler asked Jesus, “Teacher, what must I do to be saved?” And Jesus said, “Sell all you have, give it to the poor, and come, follow me.” And the rich young ruler did as Jesus commanded, investing his wealth in subversive ways. He built up the broken, brought the poor to great feasts, honored the old and the sick and the gay in the synagogue and in public. And the Roman authorities arrested him as a political radical, a disturber of peace and he said unto them “You have said we disrupt the peace. But lo, we are making it.” And the Romans, ashamed at this disgrace, beat him and kept him in custody. His friends, the poor and the weary and weak, remembered the vision Jesus had given him. And they continued in that way, and all were built up, and lo, none were cast aside or turned away.
(Mark 10 re-imagined).
Oh, Kashi, Only 8 People Believe You
Not sure when Kashi launched their new page/PR campaign to quell the backlash over their use of a bunch of crap they say they don’t use, but if you Google “kashi” the first thing that comes up in the sponsored results in a link to this page:
Really, guys, they mean it this time.
Related articles
- Lesson From Kashi Controversy: ‘Natural’ Doesn’t Equal Organic Or GMO-Free (blisstree.com)
- Consumers Are Mad Because Kashi Products Aren’t Organic Or GM-Free (businessinsider.com)
Finding Faith and Losing Sleep
Because of important things happening where I live, I’ve been thinking a lot about Christians who have relationships of trust with politically and economically powerful people of faith, and and how the former can best connect the later to community constituencies with far less (if any) access. Certainly, Christians who operate across these spheres are called to be bridge-builders, but to build good bridges, I suspect we must know both shores of the chasm. It’s not enough for Christians of privilege to connect Christians of greater privilege with these constituencies by edict. It seems to me that however well we know the rich, we’re called to know the poor better, to know the poor more.
In some senses, bridges and chasms are failures of language. In Christ, we’re called into the bleed of Venn circles, to the realization that we’re all in this together. Sometimes, that’s hard to remember.
This morning, I led the discussion in the Adult Education hours at church in place of the traveling John Franke. I wanted to explore the relationships of Hebrew prophets to power and consider how best we, as Christians in Allentown called into the bleed, can be most faithful. Last night, I read this passage from Pete Rollins before bed.
Don’t read Pete Rollins before bed. Do read Pete Rollins, though. How does “Finding Faith” land for you? I closed the early session by reading this story as a devotion with this disclaimer: “there’s no right or wrong way for it to land. It kept me awake last night and I wanted to share it with you.”
And I want to share it with you.
Chris Cocca 