Who Drives the Trump Train? "It's Not the Economy, Stupid" — Racism Connects to Misogyny Links to Heterosexual Male Entitlement . . .

Hashtagdion on the Facebook feed of Stop Telling Lies

In this election cycle in which many straight white men behaving badly (and some black men, and some old boys of the other gender, and some LGBTQ folks) are bringing terrible shame to themselves, I think constantly of how prescient theologian Beverly Wildung Harrison was. As she showed us in her classic essay Making the Connections, oppressive social -isms do not exist in isolation from each other. They are always connected.

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, Legacy: Celebrating the Power of Ordinary People Acting Together to Bring About Effective Change

I have long thought that Martin Luther King, Jr., was put to death by the powers that be when he began to make the connections (a nod to Beverly Wildung Harrison as I use that phrase) between American militarism, the exploitation of working-class Americans of all colors and creeds by unbridled capitalism, and racism. As long as he confined his activist organizing to civil rights for people of color, the powers that be let King be, while keeping a close watch on him through his odious nemesis J. Edgar Hoover.

Beverly Wildung Harrison on Connections Between Racism and Misogyny, and Story of Donald Sterling: These -Isms Hang Together in Web of Patriarchy

Recently, when I wrote about Andrew Sullivan's take on Jonathan Rauch's essay calling for special tolerance for those who oppose same-sex marriage out of sincere religious conviction, I concluded by noting, 

In Memoriam: Beverly Wildung Harrison and Tissa Balasuriya

 Two very important Christian theologians have died in recent weeks, and I'd like to take note of both of them and their contributions. In mid-December, ground-breaking feminist ethicist Beverly Wildung Harrison died. At Religion Dispatches, Mark Hulsether offers a fine eulogy of Harrison, noting that she was integral to the move of Union Seminary in New York in the direction of liberation theology in the latter decades of the 20th century--a move decried, as Hulsether notes, by neoconservatives and centrists alike. But one consonant, as he also points out, with the heritage of the institution, which has been home to such illustrious political theologians and social ethicists as Reinhold Niebuhr, John Coleman Bennett, Paul Tillich, and Robert McAfee Brown, followed by James Cone, Dorothee Sölle, Larry Rasmussen, Gary Dorrien, and Cornel West.