Category Archives: Politics

Perspectives on the news: underlying assumptions behind political speech and action. Intersections between faith and politics.

Pope Francis on Economics

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POPE FRANCIS' GENERAL AUDIENCE

“Just as the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills.” – Pope Francis, TIME Person of the Year, Nov. 29, 2013

The economic disciples of Ayn Rand’s “virtue of selfishness” – many of whom attend Mass or other Christian worship services on Sunday only to act on Monday as though they never had – have met their match in Time‘s Man of the Year. Economics is a spiritual matter – first, last, and always. Thank you, Pope Francis for speaking the truth with clarity.

Wading in the Water

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“Wade in the Water” keeps welling up from some deep place of yearning this morning, waiting for 2014. Like the American slaves who sang “Wade in the Water” from the waters edge, I’m wading by the banks of the old order, yearning for something already conceived in the heart but not yet delivered, the new order conceived in Mary’s Magnificat when the mighty are pulled from their thrones and those of “low degree” are lifted up. We can’t part the waters, but we can “wade in the water” – no easy thing – with expectation that “God’s gonna trouble the water.” Sweet Honey in the Rock gives voice to the old slave song.

John the Baptist, Jesus, and Mandela

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Preached the Sunday after the death of Nelson Mandela, this sermon sought to tie together the first anniversary of the tragedy of Sandy Hook in Newtown, CT (December 15) and the date of Reconciliation Day in post-Apartheid South Africa (December 16), the date in 1977 when Nelson Mandela marked a quote from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in what became known as The Robbins Bible, a complete works of Shakespeare that had been smuggled into the Robbins Prison by an Indian inmate.

Warren, Mandela, and Truth

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This morning’s Washington Post ran the story “Think tank’s criticism of Elizabeth Warren’s populist policies leads to Democratic feud”. Click HERE to read the story.

The story runs the day after the death of one of the world’s great leaders who turned his vision into reality in South Africa: Nelson Mandela. It was reading the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr. and biographies of Gandhi that Mandela became the voice that changed Apartheid.

Reading the online “comments” on today’s Washington Post article about Senator Warren led me to leave my own comment, as follows.

Elizabeth Warren rankles the feathers of all who have yet to see the insidious assault of crony capitalism on the integrity of a democratic Republic. Right, left, and center thinking people in this country recognize we have a VERY serious systemic problem that required redress. Think tanks, like political parties themselves, belong to the people who pay their bills. Senator Warren does not work for a think tank, and does not work for the Democratic Party. She represents the people with conscience, clarity, and boldness that cut to the quick. That’s to be applauded. Dismissing her as an unrealistic idealist is also to dismiss Abraham Lincoln, Sojourner Truth, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, and, particularly apt for today, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu who saw something better for their societies.

Chime in with your views.

Stopping Crony Capitalism

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“Cashing in on public service by lobbying for unethical corporations is offensive to the American people….” Click HERE to read the petition to stop a former U.S. Senator from turning her Washington, D.C. public service into private insider influence on behalf of the likes of Monsanto.

It’s called “Crony capitalism.”

Cutting the umbilical cord that keeps money flowing from the public treasury to private sector corporations whose lobbying resources are unmatched by the voting public is an act of patriotism on behalf of the integrity of a democratic Republic. A nation governed by Crony Capitalism is not a country “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

Consider signing the petition and passing it along to your friends. Thanks!

Nelson Mandela

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Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela


Forever
A mandala
Mandela’s
Black Center
Radiated
Warm light
To the cold
Perimeter
Of the circle
Of White
Darkness

A Light
In the
Dark night
His light
Does not
Dim.

– Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, Dec. 5, 2013

Out from the caves of fear

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Fear.

“There is no passion so contagious as that of fear,” wrote Michel de Montaigne.

During the five minute drive to Auburn Manor in downtown Chaska Monday morning, I turn on the radio to hear what they’re saying about the Vikings’ overtime victory over the Bears.

I turn to the ESPN sports channel. But it’s not about sports. It’s Glenn Beck advising listeners to buy food insurance. On the heels of the call to buy food insurance in preparation for catastrophe comes the advice on how to buy your first gun.

Passion. Contagion. Fear. They’re everywhere. Not just Glenn Beck and the far right, but on the left, in the middle, and among the apathetic and the cynical. Fear does not have one opinion. It is a contagious passion that has a thousand different voices. While the foundations of the familiar shake, we are infected by a pandemic of fear.

Fear does terrible things to a person and to a society. It is for this reason that the New Testament Gospels see fear as the root source of ill-will, self-absorption, greed, and war. The “Fear not” uttered by the heavenly messengers in Luke’s birth narrative is repeated in the middle and at the end of the Christ story. “Fear not, little flock.” “Fear not, for I am with you.” It is both invitation and command: “For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear…”.

We are always prone to fall back into fear. We fear because we are mortals. We die and we know it. We seek to secure ourselves against the threats, overt or covert, that cast death’s dark shadow over us.

In such times the psalmist comes to mind. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” I will buy no food insurance. I will buy no gun. To do so is to run straight into the arms of death as a living power that robs us of life’s goodness and meaning.

“Man’s self-absorption is the movement of our flight from death,” writes Sebastian Moore OSB. “This is what is meant by the scripture’s description of man as ‘under the shadow of death’. It does not mean ‘man knowing he will die’ but ‘what man does and becomes under this knowledge.’. It is not to our mortality, our animality, that scripture offers a remedy. It is to the death that we become in our self-absorption. It is to what we allow death to become in us by fleeing from it in the hopeless pride of man.” (The Crucified Jesus Is No Stranger, Paulist Press, 1977)

I turn off the radio. I dial back the passion. I interrupt the contagion of fear by repeating an old psalm, and drive over to the community food pantry to volunteer.

Before the Planetry REQUIEM

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If scientists are right (see Nature), by 2020 the first effects of Climate Departure should already be a part of the human experience.

In light of both science and faith, Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church in Chaska, MN is issuing this invitation in anticipation of Earth Day, 2020, in hopes it will catch on. The Call is conceived by visual artist and scientist John Lince-Hopkins, a member of Shepherd of the Hill:

EARTH DAY
Wednesday, April 22, 2020

A GLOBAL CALL TO CREATIVE PEOPLE OF ALL TYPES TO CREATE, PERFORM, AND DISPLAY THEIR BEST WORKS:
COMPOSERS,
MUSICIANS,
MUSICAL GROUPS,
RECORDING ARTISTS,
AUTHORS,
POETS,
VISUAL ARTISTS,
PHOTOGRAPHERS,
VIDEOGRAPHERS,
FIBER ARTISTS,
PERFORMANCE ARTISTS,
DANCERS,
…AND THOSE UN-NAMED.

JUST SEVEN SHORT YEARS TO CREATE SEMINAL WORKS ABOUT THE STATE OF OUR PLANET AND OUR REALIZATION OF THE INEVITABLE CONSEQUENCES OF OUR CLIMATE TO ALL LIVING THINGS AND THE ECOSYSTEMS THAT SUPPORT THEM.

Think Globally, Act Locally!

The World in a Tunnel

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Can the whole world shrink to the size of a walking path tunnel in Chaska, Minnesota?

On our morning walk, while Barclay sniffs his way along the path for signs of smaller creatures who might not have made it through the night, my eyes were drawn to the graffiti on the both sides of the tunnel. Boldly painted in black or red, the logos belonged to gangs or gang wannabes.

Eight years at the Legal Rights Center in Minneapolis left me we a knowledge of graffiti and tagging. Our defense attorneys sometimes defended “taggers”, self-proclaimed creative artists who used public space as their canvasses. Other times the graffiti was posted by a gang member to announce the gang’s claim to a block or a neighborhood. Often the gangs were competing for control. In that case, there were at least two “tags” and sometimes many: Latin Kings, the Crips, or the Gangster Disciples. The graffiti meant, “Don’t mess with us. We own this neighborhood.”

In Chaska this morning the tunnel walls were filled with gang symbols, most likely by kids who are gang “wannabes”, kids in a small city pretending to be gangsters the way my generation used to play cops and robbers or Cowboys and Indians. You couldn’t be both a cop and robber. You couldn’t be a cowboy and an Indian. You were either in the one gang or the other. We’re all in some kind of gang where we get our sense of identity and the security that comes with belonging to something.

Walking through the tunnel was like living for a moment in a microcosm of the world where the small town folks’ claims of ownership and the threats of violence mirror and replicate the power of greed, the lust for power and “the good life” that filters down from The Boss, Trump’s Tower, Wall Street, the Mall, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Washington, D.C. where the will to security and power is the motive force.

Meanwhile, six-month-old Barclay, the 10-pound puppy on my leash ignores the walls and sniffs the macadam for a mouse that has already died, unaware of handwriting on the walls of the superior species of his master.

– Gordon C. Stewart, Saturday morning, November 16, 2013

Climate Change and the Nations

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Haggai by Giovanni Pisano, Sienna, Italy.

Haggai by Giovanni Pisano, Sienna, Italy.

“The Philippines envoy to the UN climate change conference has issued an emotional announcement that he will go on hunger strike unless talks lead to a “meaningful outcome”. Click HERE to read the whole story in The Independent.

Naderev “Yeb” Sano is not the only one who’s fasting. So is a dear friend in Pennsylvania. Carolyn and I were in kindergarten together. Our families were best friends. We grew up in each others’ living rooms. We went to the same church. Went to Sunday School and Confirmation together. Graduated from high school together. Our parents retired to the same retirement community in Cornwall, Pennsylvania where one after the other they each came to the end of their lives concerned about the shape of the future. Carolyn and I come by it naturally, I suppose, and the Kidder DNA and the Stewart DNA, although different, is like the DNA of the entire human species: essentially the same.

What happens to the human species if the scientists have it right? How do we care for each other across the planet – ONE species in the Philippines, Poland, the Netherlands, Argentina, and the USA – facing the daunting changes that are coming? If we believe that we are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers, what changes will we make individually and together to exercise that responsibility?

Carolyn and “Yeb” Sano have decided to fast until the meeting in Warsaw leads to a meaningful outcome. Fasting is not for everyone, although I can’t help wonder what impact it would have if there were a fast across the world that spoke louder than words to the national representatives gathered this week by the United Nations in Warsaw, Poland.

In place of fasting this morning I looked again at the strange little book of Haggai in Hebrew Scripture, and what did I see? A civil leader named Zerubbabel and a religious leader named Joshua trying to lead their people during a time of colonial occupation. We, too, live under colonial occupation – the occupation of international greed and neglect of the planet, its people, and the environment itself. Perhaps Carolyn and “Yeb” are like the prophet Haggai, whose term of ministry BTW was less than four months. “The word of the LORD (the word is in caps because it refers to the reality that is beyond all human naming and controlling, “YHWH”, which is no name at all) came a second time to Haggai on the twenty-fourth day of the month, ‘Speak to Zerubbabel, governor of Judah, saying, I am about to shake the heavens and the earth, and to overthrow the throne of kingdoms; I am about to destroy the strength of the kingdoms of the nations… On that day, says the LORD of hosts, I will take you, O Zerubbabel, my servant,… and make you like a signet ring; for I have chosen you, says the LORD of hosts.” (Haggai 2:20-23).

The climate shaking that has driven “Yeb” and Carolyn to fasting is no respecter of nations. It knows no national boundaries. Nationalist thinking has outlived its time. There is only one people. Only one human species in a wonderful diversity of geography, culture, color, religion, and language. The “kingdoms of the nations” are gathered today in Warsaw, and one of their representatives from the Philippines is shaking the presumption of all of the thrones. The national delegates bear the equivalent of the king’s signet ring to sign and seal agreements and documents on behalf of the modern equivalent of their kings. Sometimes in life a person IS like a signet ring for a new order, a man for our time like Naderev “Yeb” Sano.