The Watson(ians) a blog of our lives, dreams and hopes.

This is one of my favorite Christmas movies of all time.

I am about to make a big step here.

The politics of America are shaped by an Atheist and a Deist more than any Judeo-Christian source, including the Bible or Jesus.

so, in my opinion, the calling of America as ‘a Christian nation’ is patently false.

Yes, we have the most churches per capita besides the Vatican City, but for a country founded by Separtists, schismatics and Deists, we are not or ever been a Christian nation.

The foundation of America was built not on the Bible or some Christian belief, but was built on the philosophies of John Hume and John Locke through the writings of Thomas Jefferson.  TJ has his defenders (both major political parties), but he was a Deist at best and most likely an Atheist from what I can gather from his writings.  Here are a few quotes that I have floating around for TJ:

The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.-Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, January 24, 1814

and

As you say of yourself, I too am an Epicurian. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us.

-Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Short, Oct. 31, 1819

There are many more, but I just wanted to give a brief glimpse of a man we honor as the founder of our country.  Jefferson was an Objectivist before there was Objectivism.  He believed in the soverignty of the individual and the ability of that individual to pursue his/her own happiness at the expense of others.  And for those needing a crash course, he wrote the Declaration of Independence with (honestly) a lot of slandering of the good king, King George, and was a primary author of the Articles of the Confederation & the US Constitution.

For the modern day Right (Republicans and Libertarians among other splinter groups), Ayn Rand and Objectivism has become their common rallying point for their political philosophy.  As a brief overview, Ayn Rand was a Russian-American novelist who immigrated to America in the 1920s and wrote two influential books: ‘The Fountainhead’ and ‘Atlas Shrugged.’  Rand called her political philosophy as Objectivism, stating: 

“the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”

No mention of faith or other’s well being mentioned in that statement.  It is ‘his own happiness’ that is the main goal.  Objectivism is a naturally Darwinian (‘survival of the fittest’) & selfish philosophy that has been the building block of the modern day GOP, Libertarian party & especially the Tea Party movement.

This is not even going into account of the Darwinian theories that abound within our ideas of education, poverty reduction & the budgetary process.  The arguments that I see going forth from most of the GOP major candidates line up more with the words of Rand or Jefferson than with the words of Jesus.  And I have to agree that I heard the same thing on the Democrat side in 2008 but substitute ‘Marx’ for ‘Rand’ and you still have the same Atheist just a different philosophy.  

And I’m not saying I want America to be a “Christian” nation.

but I do want to see our churches, pastors and denominations quit wholeheartdly backing canidates of any party knowing that their policies are built upon a foundation of Atheism and selfishness.

(Christian Origins and the Question of God: volume 1)

Augsburg Fortress Publishers; 1st North American edition (September 1992)

My review of +Wright’s book begins where he begins: at the orgins of how we think.  +Wright introduces us to a form of literary critcism that is new to me:  critical realism.  +Wright puts it this way: 

… I propose a form of critical realism. This is a way of describing the process of “knowing” that acknowledges the reality of the thing known, as something other than the knower (hence “realism”), while fully acknowledging that the only access we have to this reality lies along the spiralling path of appropriate dialogue or conversation between the knower and the thing known (NTPG p.35)

Critical realism’s use in theology stemmed from the writings of philosopher Michael Polanyi, who believed that the language of science and the language of theology are very similar and that should be are starting point. It is worth noting that Polanyi was and still is a driving philosophical force in the emergent church movement (especially in the writings of Brian Mclaren & Doug Pagitt).

+Wright then leads us on a journey describing how the critical realist philosophy works and will lead us to our conclusions about Judaism and Christianity in the 1st centuries.  I have to admit, for someone not currently in academia, I read and re-read this section.  It honestly took me 2 months to get through the first 150 pages.  I researched the footnotes and the other theologians he mentions.

+Wright mentions a ‘hermenutic of love’ throughout the middle part of his methodology section.  By this he means, a deep attentiveness to the Scripture, to allow it to be what it is, “the readiness to let the other be the other, the willingness to grow and change in oneself in relation to the other.” (64) 

One of my favorite quotes on his proposed ‘hermenutic of love’ that +Wright writes is: 

“means that the text can be listened to on its own terms…If it is puzzling, the good reader will pay it the compliment of struggling to understand it, of living with it and continuing to listen…Each stage of this process becomes a conversation, in which misunderstanding is likely, perhaps even inevitable, but in which, through patient listening, real understanding (and real access to external reality) is actually possible and attainable. What I am advocating is a critical realism – though I would prefer to describe it as an epistemology or hermeneutic of love…” (64).

What this hermeneutic teaches us is that our reading of the Bible can’t be from an abstract, ahistorical point of view like Rudolf Bultmann who argued the only historical fact needed for a Christian is Christ crucified. According to +Wright, we need to understand the culture, literary styles and beliefs of those writing and living the Scriptures in order to understand what they are trying to tell us.  This is a difficult process, but I believe, with +Wright’s ‘critical realism/ hermenutic of love’ we can gain a better understanding.  

For me, the most important point I got out of this section though was a better way to study and read Scripture, not necessarily for a personal devotional use, but for a historical-theological study of the Scripture.  I am new to philosophy as a discipline, and these first 144 pages were difficult to go through without that philosophy hat firmly on. But I believe that this first section set up the rest of this work and the next five books in his Christian Origins and the Question of God series and gave us, as readers, a better understanding of Scriptural study.

(part 2 will deal with theology and worldviews in the New Testament)

(just to clarify, the “+” in front of Wright’s name is shorthand for Bishop and, though retired from the Bishophoric, I include it to honor the man and the office he has held)

Jake Collier.

Jake has a huge heart for directing people to God through his music.

But it’s not the cookie-cutter, no creativity crap that you here on the radio.

This is heartfelt, incredibly soulful and very musically creative music.

And Jake is in the process of recording an EP.  so enjoy and contribute.

because we all need good art for a good cause.

Go check out his site here and give his new song, ‘Bones’ a listen.

I’ve listened to it 5xs already this evening.

As a quality in pastors, I seriously believe that leadership is overrated…

there are thousands of seminars that you can go to on the next best thing on leadership.

there are pastors who are known to be the ‘best’ leaders

but something always stands out to me in Scripture, Jesus calls out the leaders more than the followers.

Jesus doesn’t say be a great leader.

It’s not in there.

He says, ‘Pick up your cross and follow me.’ 

Follow.

That’s something that I don’t seen spoke on often. 

and I see that as the problem with most issues in the modern church.

Everybody wants to be a leader.  Nobody wants to follow. 

There are people who God has called to lead.  To pastor.  To shepard. To create.

But this IS NOT everybody.

While writing this, I found this incredible TED talk.

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THERE IS A STORY of Tolstoi’s called “How Much Land Does A Man Need?” It is the story, as I remember it, of a peasant who left his good land and home to go to the South, where he had heard there were thousands of fertile acres for the asking. He made his way to the nomad tribe and asked for some of their land. The chieftain told him he could claim as his own the amount of land he could encompass on foot, from sunup to sundown. When he had rested from his journey he set out running at a pace he felt he could sustain, for he had great confidence in his own strength and endurance, and began to stake out his land. But his greed was greater than his endurance, so his strength began giving out towards the close of the day. By the time he had run the immense boundaries he had chosen for himself, he fell dead at the feet of the Cossack chieftain. He ended in a six-foot grave dug merrily by his scornful hosts, who sensed that the earth was the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.

We had a man living with us once who claimed that all illness was a punishment for some fault. When Sunday visitors came in happily with bunches of poison ivy, picked because of their bright colors or pretty berries, he labeled the visitors as “acquisitive.” It was the fault he most despised, perhaps because it was the one he was most guilty of himself. He wanted to be poor, yet he looked upon all things around him as his own and gathered them to himself.

At the same time, he did not like to work, to be exploited, he called it, in our present acquisitive, competitive society, so he preferred to gather furniture and even slightly spoiled food from off the city dump near the farm, and felt he was exemplifying voluntary poverty.

Another family moving in with us, on one of our Catholic Worker farms, felt that the beautifying which had made the farmhouse and its surroundings a charming spot was not consistent with a profession of poverty. They broke up the rustic benches and fence, built by one of the men from the Bowery who had stayed with us, and used them for firewood. The garden surrounding the statue of the Blessed Virgin, where we used to say the rosary, was trampled down and made into a woodyard filled with chips and scraps left from the axe which chopped the family wood. It was the same with the house: the curtains were taken down, the floor remained bare, there were no pictures—the place became a scene of stark poverty, and a visiting bishop was appalled at the “poverty.” It had looked quite comfortable before, and one did not think of the crowded bedrooms or the outhouse down the hill, or the outdoor cistern and well where water had to be pumped and put on the wood stove in the kitchen to heat. Not all these hardships were evident.

On another farm we owned—a larger place where we could accommodate more children in summer, more families, more men from off the road—there was the same lack of plumbing arrangements and the same need to heat the place with wood fires Even the nearby city helped us out by bringing logs from trees which had fallen in storms and blocked the highways, to increase our store of fuel. The place was old and beautiful, and had a carefully tended flower garden with peonies, iris, forsythia, perennials and annuals that delighted the eye and kept our chapel furnished with color and fragrance. Here one of our prosperous visitors looked around with a censorious eye and commented, “You call this voluntary poverty? I could not afford a country home like this.”

She did not see the three sets of outhouses set back in the trees and bushes which had to be used winter and summer (the temperature often dropped to 10 below zero); nor did she see our bare dormitories with their double-decker beds crowded together, nor the living quarters of a family over the carriage shed that was heated only by an old stove in the middle of the barnlike structure, nor the wayfarers’ dormitory down below where men came in from off the road at any hour of the night or day (and sometimes with a bottle to keep themselves warm!). No doors were ever locked in that farm by the road.

It is not right to justify oneself, but we tried to point out how ungrateful we would be to God and to our benefactors if we did not, by hard work and care, improve what we had received in the way of land and house. The very men who had come to get help had stayed to give help and had made the place what it was by constant hard labor.

But the poor, it seems, have no right to beauty, to order. Poverty must be squalor, filth, ugliness, to be esteemed as poverty. But this is destitution, and it was usually from such destitution that our family had come “up in the world.” Our visitors did not recognize true poverty—voluntary poverty now-offered up by these men for the sake of their fellows … a poverty on the part of students and volunteers as well as men from the Bowery, which meant no money to jingle in the pocket, no wages, having to ask for tobacco, to wear the clothes which “came in”and to have no privacy, which is the greatest desire, the greatest need of all.

Right now on our farm at Tivoli, New York, there are five hermits in the woods who have rebuilt old campsites so that, winter and summer, they can live alone.

During the 33 years that the Catholic Worker has been published and the Houses of Hospitality and farms have grown up around the United States, there has always been this misunderstanding of poverty.

For a long while, poverty was denied—we just did not have any, according to popular belief, in our affluent society. Many a time I was queried by students, “where is poverty? We do not have any around this prosperous Middle West, for instance.” I was asked this question at Notre Dame, when I spoke there, and to show that there was poverty Julian Pleasants and Norrie Merdzinski, both Notre Dame students. started a House of Hospitality in the off-bounds section of South Bend. With the help of Fr. Putz and Fr. Mathis they kept it going during their student years, to care for unemployed and unemployable men off the road. The same question was asked me in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and I could only point out that where there was a Good Shepherd home for delinquent girls, and an Indian reservation, and a prison and a public ward in the hospital, there was poverty. You could always find poverty at the public dump, or in the prison or hospital. All founders of religious orders and societies searched out poverty.

I

But it is not to discuss solutions proffered by government or city agencies that I wish to write, though this long introduction was necessary to clarify the subject. War, and the poverty of peoples which leads to war, are the great problems of the day and the fundamental solution is the personal response which each of us makes to the message of Jesus Christ. It is the solution which works from the bottom up rather than from the top down, and makes for readiness to join in larger regional solutions like the organizing of farm workers with Cesar Chavez, community solutions of Saul Alinsky, village solutions like Vinoba Bhave’s in India, etc.

The wonderful thing is that each one of us can do something about the problem, each one of us can give his response and can go as far as the grace of God leads him; and God “ordereth all things sweetly,” and there is no need to be afraid as to where such a response will lead US.

“Ask and you shall receive,” Jesus told us, and this asking may be just that question “What shall we do?” Samuel asked it, St. Paul asked it—“Lord, what will you have me do?” and they seemed to get direct answers. Paul was struck blind, literally and to everything else around him except that one great fact, “whatever ye do to the least of these My brethren, ye do to Me.” If you feed them, clothe them, shelter them, visit them in prison (or go to prison and so are with them!), serve the sick, in general perform the works of mercy, you are serving Christ and alleviating poverty by direct action. If you are persecuting them, killing them, throwing them in prison, you are doing it to Christ. He said so.

When the crowd was moved by John the Baptist and asked, “What shall we do?” he said to them, “He who has two coats give to him who has none.” He also said, “Do injury to no man. Be content with your pay.” Or with no pay at all. If you are voluntarily giving away what you have, giving your coat, don’t expect thanks or the reform of the recipient. We don’t do it for that motive, with the expectation of reward. We must do it for love of Jesus, in His humanity, for love of our brother, for love of our enemy.

Charles Peguy in one of his poems, God Speaks, tells the story of the prodigal son and comments, “That’s the kind of a Father we have, who loves even to folly, who forgives seventy times seven, who rushes out to embrace and feast the prodigal son.” This is the kind of love we must have for the poor. The kind of love which will give away cloak also if coat is demanded of you.

Nobody is too poor to help another. The stories in the New Testament are of the widow’s mite, of the little boy’s loaves and fishes, of the cloak, of the time given when one is asked to walk a second mile.

Another Russian story which profoundly moved me was The Honest Thief, by Dostoievsky of the hardworking tailor who lived in a corner of a room, and yet who took in one of the destitute he encountered. The guest begged and drank and the tailor suspected him of stealing his one treasure, an old army coat. He spoke to him harshly, but when the thief ran away, the tailor searched him out and brought him back to his corner to nurse him in his illness. “Love is the measure by which we shall be judged.” And by not judging we too shall not be judged.

I am thinking of how many leave the Church because of the scandal of the wealth of the Church, the luxury of the Church which began in the very earliest day, even perhaps when the Apostles debated on which should be highest in the kingdom and when the poor began quarreling as to who were receiving the most from the common table, the Greek Jews or the Jerusalem Jews. St. Paul commented on the lack of esteem for the poor, and the kowtowing to the rich, and St. John in the Apocalypse spoke of the scandal of the churches “where charity had grown cold.”

It has always been this way in the Church. On the one hand the struggle for detachment, to grow in the supernatural life which seems so unnatural at times, when the vision is dim.

Thank God for the sacraments, the food of life which we can receive to strengthen us. Thank God for the Word made flesh and for the Word in the Scriptures. Thank God for the Gospel which St. Therese pinned close to her heart, and which the murderer Raskolnikoff listened to from the lips of a prostitute and took with him into the Siberian prison. The Word is our light and our understanding, and it is also our food.

TWAS Michael Harrington’s book The Other America, and Dwight McDonald’s long review and analysis of that book in the New Yorker, that made the problem explode in this country, to use an expression of Abbe Pierre, who himself works with the destitute and homeless. This book of Mike’s, which came as a result of his two-year stay with us as one of the editors of the Catholic Worker, started the War on Poverty program.

Dorothy Day on the second week of Advent (Ave Maria, December 3, 1966, pp.21-22, 29.)

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*sorry for the delay as I was having posting issues last night.  Grace & Peace, J*

Beloved, now is the acceptable time spoken of by the Spirit, the day of salvation, peace and reconciliation: the great season of Advent. This is the time eagerly awaited by the patriarchs and prophets, the time that holy Simeon rejoiced at last to see.

This is the season that the Church has always celebrated with special solemnity. We too should always observe it with faith and love, offering praise and thanksgiving to the Father for the mercy and love he has shown us in this mystery. In his infinite love for us, though we were sinners, he sent his only Son to free us from the tyranny of Satan, to summon us to heaven, to welcome us into its innermost recesses, to show us truth itself, to train us in right conduct, to plant within us the seeds of virtue, to enrich us with the treasures of his grace, and to make us children of God and heirs of eternal life.

Each year, as the Church recalls this mystery, she urges us to renew the memory of the great love God has shown us. This holy season teaches us that Christ’s coming was not only for the benefit of his contemporaries; his power has still to be communicated to us all. We shall share his power, if, through holy faith and the sacraments, we willingly accept the grace Christ earned for us, and live by that grace and in obedience to Christ.The Church asks us to understand that Christ, who came once in the flesh, is prepared to come again. When we remove all obstacles to his presence he will come, at any hour and moment, to dwell spiritually in our hearts, bringing with him the riches of his grace.

In her concern for our salvation, our loving mother the Church uses this holy season to teach us through hymns, canticles and other forms of expression, of voice or ritual, used by the Holy Spirit. She shows us how grateful we should be for so great a blessing, and how to gain its benefit: our hearts should be as much prepared for the coming of Christ as if he were still to come into this world. The same lesson is given us for our imitation by the words and example of the holy men of the Old Testament.

St. Charles Borromeo.Bishop of Milan, Italy. 16th Century CE

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I answer, they must do so, first of all and especially, because God tells them so to do. But besides this, I observe that we see this plain reason why, that they are one day to change their state of being. They are not to be here for ever. Direct intercourse with God on their part now, prayer and the like, may be necessary to their meeting Him suitably hereafter: and direct intercourse on His part with them, or what we call sacramental communion, may be necessary in some incomprehensible way, even for preparing their very nature to bear the sight of Him.

Let us then take this view of religious service; it is “going out to meet the Bridegroom,” [see Matt. 25: 6] who, if not seen “in His beauty,” [Isaiah 33: 17] will appear in consuming fire. Besides its other momentous reasons, it is a preparation for an awful event, which shall one day be. What it would be to meet Christ at once without preparation, we may learn from what happened even to the Apostles when His glory was suddenly manifested to them. St. Peter said, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” [Luke 5: 8] And St. John, “when he saw Him, fell at His feet as dead.” [Rev. 1: 17] This being the case, it is certainly most merciful in God to vouchsafe to us the means of preparation, and such means as He has actually appointed.

When Moses came down from the Mount, and the people were dazzled at his countenance, he put a veil over it. That veil is so far removed in the Gospel, that we are in a state of preparation for its being altogether removed. We are with Moses in the Mount so far, that we have a sight of God; we are with the people beneath it so far, that Christ does not visibly show Himself. He has put a veil on, and He sits among us silently and secretly. When we approach Him, we know it only by faith; and when He manifests Himself to us, it is without our being able to realize to ourselves that manifestation. Such then is the spirit in which we should come to all His ordinances, considering them as anticipations and first-fruits of that sight of Him which one day must be.

When we kneel down in prayer in private, let us think to ourselves, Thus shall I one day kneel down before His very footstool, in this flesh and this blood of mine; and He will be seated over against me, in flesh and blood also, though divine. I come, with the thought of that awful hour before me, I come to confess my sin to Him now, that He may pardon it then, and I say, “O Lord, Holy God, Holy and Strong, Holy and Immortal, in the hour of death and in the day of judgment, deliver us, O Lord!”

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