Wendell Griffen: "Chickens of Racism, Materialism and Militarism Have Come Home to Roost in the Convergence of Trump’s Presidency and the COVID-19 Pandemic"

 I'd like to point readers to a valuable essay my friend Wendell Griffen published two days ago in Baptist News Global. It's entitled "Our national curse: the cruel convergence of Trump’s presidency and the COVID-19 pandemic." Wendell does an impressive job of connecting the dots to show that "the chickens of racism, materialism and militarism have come home to roost in the convergence of Trump’s presidency and the COVID-19 pandemic." He writes:

"The Republican Party's Vision for the Family": On the Rise and Fall of Governor Bob "As the Family Goes, So Goes the Nation" McDonnell

Rachel Maddow, commenting in the video clip above on how "family man" Bob McDonnell's wife-dumping defense failed him yesterday when the court hearing his case returned a guilty verdict against him and his wife on eleven counts of corruption:

Pat Robertson on Macaroni and Cheese: Is That A Stupid Thing?

I'm perplexed by Pat Robertson's response to Condoleeza Rice's observation that her family always ate macaroni and cheese at Thanksgiving dinner.  Robertson asked Rice if this mysterious dish is "a black thing."

People of Faith as Signs and Counter-Signs to the Gospel: Schillebeeckx, Pat Robertson, Benedict, Mary Daly

A number of valuable articles have come online in the past day or so, which connect to recent postings on this blog. In what follows, I’d like to share these resources with readers.

First, America has just published an editorial statement commemorating Dutch theologian Edward Schillebeeckx, who died in December. As do my reflections at Open Tabernacle (and here) (cross-posted to Bilgrimage), the America editorial emphasizes the notion of sacramentality running through all of Schillebeeckx’s thought, his influence at Vatican II, and the way in which his sacramental view of the church calls the church to be a sign of God’s salvific love in the world, and not a counter sign to this love:

This sacramental view of the world, and of the church’s role within the world, remained at the heart of Father Schillebeeckx’s writing, preaching and teaching for over seven decades. It was also central to the vision of the Second Vatican Council, which he helped to shape as an advisor to Cardinal Bernard Alfrink and the Dutch bishops.

In the decades following the council, Father Schillebeeckx was acutely aware of how difficult it had become for many to believe that God holds open a future full of hope amid a world of radical suffering, especially when the church’s own witness had been compromised. In the face of those real stumbling blocks, Father Schillebeeckx reminded his readers that “God is new each moment” and that in situations of injustice (whether in the world or in the church) the Spirit of God is actively at work, prompting resistance, hope, courage and change.

I posted yesterday about Rev. Pat Robertson’s abominable attempt to blame the people of Haiti for the disaster that has just befallen them. For a smorgasbord of valuable reflections on Robertson’s statement, please see Religion Dispatch’s round-up of responses to Robertson today. As Arianna Huffington noted yesterday in a discussion with former right-wing evangelical leader Frank Schaeffer, Robertson gives religion a bad name.

Several days ago, I noted that a persistent theme running through Catholic thought about gay people and gay relationships is that gay folks and our relationships are self-centered, narcissistic. My posting demonstrates that this contention has long been part and parcel of the current pope’s approach to gay people and relationships.

And Benedict continues the meme: yesterday, the pope met with young people from the Lazio region of Italy. His address to them focuses on “authentic” sex education, which, in Benedict’s view, recognizes that the church needs to say no to particular behaviors and “lifestyles” (code words for “gay”), because these behaviors and “lifestyles” are all about the narcissism of couples who do not procreate and therefore do not contribute in a generative way to society.

If readers believe I’m reading too much into these comments by Benedict, please do a google news search of the terms “pope” and “Lazio” and read the 385 news articles already linked to google’s search engine for Benedict’s remarks yesterday. If you do so, you’ll see that a persistent subtext running through these articles is the generous rightness of heterosexual relationships and the selfish wrongness of homosexual ones.

Finally, I’ve been touched by the powerful memorial pieces appearing online following the death of theologian Mary Daly. I’ve been collecting a number of these, and may do a synopsis of them down the road.

Meanwhile, I’m particularly taken with Francis X. Clooney’s eulogy for Mary Daly at America yesterday. I’m struck in particular by the following observation:

Mary Daly was by all accounts a radical thinker. I am not a scholar of her work, and cannot summarize it with any precision, but my sense that when she assessed the condition of women in the modern world, in religions, and in the Catholic Church, all taken in light of her own experience trying to make her way as a pioneering woman theologian – with multiple doctorates — in a 1960s Church not quite ready for women theologians, she came to the stark conclusion that there was no simple remedy to the bias, as if small changes would right the wrongs and make women equal to men. Rather, the biases and distortions so harmful to women permeated the entirety of human experience, and traditional religions were infected with pervasive bias, in ideas, language, practices, and social structures. Accordingly, women had to be radical in their critiques, taking apart of the whole structures and not just adjusting details. For this, women were better off outside the religions, Catholicism included, and for a time at least, better off nurturing their own conversations and ways of living, without the presence, help or hindrance of men, even well-meaning men. So Mary Daly was a Catholic intellectual who decided for theological reasons, and by personal imperative, that she could no longer be a Christian.

Nota bene: precisely because the church is called to be a sacramental sign of God’s salvific, all-inclusive love in the world, it also has the potential to be a counter-sign to God’s love, when its own institutional life and behavior obscure everything that it exists to signify.

And Mary Daly’s experience of the church as counter-sign explains why she famously would not allow men in her classes to ask questions. As Clooney notes, he actually witnessed this teaching technique of Mary Daly’s at one of her lectures at Boston College—and when he did so, he cam to see and appreciation her point: “[U]nless we ourselves experience marginalization, the brute force of power imposed on us, we really won’t be able to get what it is like to be a perennially demeaned and oppressed person.”

Yes.

God's Oracles in 2009: White Men Rule (Again)!

The Deity (aka the Old White Man in the Clouds™, aka God) has been mighty busy of late. Goda'mighty busy. Talking to His appointed oracles in the world, doncha know. To white men. Men like Himself, which is, after all, how we happen to know He is Himself and not Herself.

As 2009 arrived, the Old Gent was, of course, intent as he always is to give His first hearing of the new year time to the Reverend Robertson in Virginia Beach, Virginia (http://video.google.com/videosearch?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&channel=s&hl=en&q=pat%20robertson%20predictions&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wv#). God spends quite a bit of his time in conferences with Pat at any moment in the year. But new year’s is a special time.

It’s a season in which the Deity chooses to open the secrets of the future™ to Rev. Robertson. Unfortunately for us, who would prefer to hear God’s word straight from the horse’s mouth with no interpretive screens, it appears that in these audiences with his Virginia oracle, God assumes the role of a doddering old gentleman—perhaps under the rubric of becoming all things to all men?—since Rev. Robertson’s usual mode of delivering his new year’s predictions requires him to issue disclaimers like, “If I heard correctly,” or, “If I understood right.”

Evidently when the Most High conferences with Reverend Robertson, He speaks in those maddening disconnected elliptical utterances so favored by the reminiscing elderly who are not quite there—in the same room with the rest of us. That befits the Deity, of course. One has to listen carefully, join the dots, and make inferences that are not directly spelled out in the meandering pronouncements.

And evidently Reverend Robertson does not always hear precisely, since he has made spectacularly off new year’s predictions in the past, including the submersion of the Pacific northwest by a tsunami due to that region’s tolerance of the gays. This year’s predictions are perhaps safer and more probable: recession, rising oil prices, wars and rumors of war.

Things are quite different when the Deity communes with another of his favored earthly embodiments, news commentator Mr. Tucker Carlson (http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/01/when-tucker-car.html). In contrast to the maddeningly evasive way in which He reveals Himself to Mr. Robertson, when contacting Mr. Carlson, God speaks out loud and very, very clearly. Perhaps He even shouts, as His representatives on television and radio are wont to do. Thinking as He does so that Flannery O’Connor had it right, when she observed famously that if one wishes to reach the deaf, ONE SHOUTS. All things to all men, depending on what said men happen to need . . . . To the doddering, one becomes doddering; to the stolid, stolid.

Not only is God speaking to His divinely appointed spokesmen: he’s also showing his face to specially favored recipients of divine self-revelation. Quarterback Kurt Warner has favored us with a picture of God in this new year: “the old man,” “gray hair,” “long beard,” according to Warner (http://vodpod.com/watch/1275009-qb-kurt-warner-draws-his-god). Unfortunately, when Mr. Warner recently drew God the Father, he ended up inadvertently sketching Jesus instead—entirely understandable, given that Jesus is the “young man” and God the Father the “old man,” as Mr. Warner brightly informs us.

Why men, one wonders? Why white men? Why white men whose primary interest in religion seems to be in finding a God who looks, talks, thinks, and acts suspiciously like them, one asks as one ponders the surprisingly various yet predictably patriarchal ways in which God reveals Himself to his favored representatives in the world? To pastors and football players and television gurus—to those most likely to speak for God, since they are, as well all know, most like God, His best buddies and primary defenders in a world hellbent on going to the multicultural, gender-bending dogs.

To ask these questions is perhaps to answer them.

And thank God that Stephen Colbert is getting in on the act, with his new “Yahweh or No Way” segment: www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/215452/january-08-2009/yahweh-or-no-way---roland-burris. With all due respect, Mr. God, would you plea'sir spend more time talking to Mr. Colbert and a tad bit less communing with Rev. Robertson, Rev. Huckabee, Pope Benedict, and Rev. Warner in the coming year?

Some of us find You a little more believable, Sir, when Stephen Colbert speaks on your behalf.