Having Left Twitter Because Musk Acquired It, I'm Resuming This Blog

 

Photo of Leslie Jordan by Shawn Miller/Library of Congress, from discussion of his book How Y'All Doing?: MIsadventures and Mischief from a Life Well-Lived with Megan Mullally on the Main Stage at the National Book Festival, 3 September 2022; Library of Congress Life - 20220903SM2320, from Wikipedia, available for sharing via Creative Commons

Because I've now left Twitter after Elon Musk acquired it — I refuse to do anything to enrich that man in any way — I'm going to switch back to this blog to provide the kind of religious-political commentary I was providing on Twitter. I will appreciate it if anyone who happens to read my postings here and thinks they're worth sharing would do so, so that I can re-establish an audience for the blog.

Quote for Day: Intersectionality Is a "Lens, a Prism, for Seeing the Way in Which Various Forms of Inequality Often Operate Together and Exacerbate Each Other"

Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the powerful term "intersectionality," talks to TIME Magazine about what she intends with that term:

John Gehring on Why Catholic Bishops Need a Year of Abstinence on Preaching about Sexuality

John Gehring, "Why Catholic bishops need a year of abstinence on preaching about sexuality":

Yet Another Queer Catholic Teacher Hounded Out of Job: Why This Situation Will NOT Change

Meanwhile, it will be interesting to see how the Archdiocese deals with this: “Catholic priest in Indy charged with kidnapping, confinement and domestic battery of wife” https://t.co/PVlOKjRbL5

— Brian K. (@bmk) February 28, 2018

In my last posting here, I asked, 

As neo-Nazi groups celebrate the killing of a gay Jewish student (and as white supremacist hate groups make tremendous inroads on college campuses), where are the churches, the defenders of the least among us, the defenders of human rights and the conscience of societies as they decry prejudice, discrimination, and violence?

A Twitter Thread in Response to Franklin Foer on What's Wrong with the Democrats

No mention at all of the significant role played by gerrymandering and voter suppression to lock in GOP control, as a minority. 1) https://t.co/PYX2jepDyW

— Bill Lindsey (@wdlindsy) June 21, 2017

This is a Twitter thread in response to Franklin Foer's "What's Wrong with the Democrats?" in the latest issue of The Atlantic. 

Pope Francis' Recent Remarks on Gender Theory and Pastoral Accompaniment of Gay People: My Response in a Nutshell

In a nutshell, in case this was not clear when you read my posting yesterday about Pope Francis' recent remarks regarding "gender theory" and the need for gay people to be accompanied pastorally: the word "accompany" has built right into it a reference to bread. We accompany others by sharing (cum) bread (panis). Those we accompany become our companions, those with whom we break bread.

No One Should Be Placed in the Position in Which Rakeyia Scott Was Placed: American Racism and the Heritage of Slavery

Last week, I finished reading Edward Baptist's book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (NY: Basic Books, 2014), a masterful work of history situating American slavery within the context of a global capitalistic economic system from which many people beyond slaveholders in the American South benefited — though the ties of many people outside the American South to the economic system of slavery that enriched them have seldom been acknowledged. Today, as I listen to Keith Scott's wife Rakeyia pleading with police to spare her husband's wife in the video she took on her phone of his fatal encounter with Charlotte police, the first thing that flashes through my mind was the countless number of mothers and wives that pled in anguish on auction blocks not to have their families torn asunder.

"I'm Done Believing That Religion Will Help Black People Get Justice in America": God, Guns, and Race in America, July 2016

Church. If yours was silent, indifferent, passive, defensive, vague concerning this week's pain - time to teach, grieve, or maybe, move on.

— Joan Brown (@jmbbrown) July 10, 2016

Then and Now: A Nation Awash with Blood, Torn by Racially Driven Violence, Unwilling to Learn — My Reflections on Dallas Shootings

Charles Pierce, Politics Blog at Esquire

The universe has physical laws: For every action, there's a reaction.

Bloody Summer of 2016 and Coming U.S. Elections: "A Great Sorting on the Trump Question Is Coming" (As Guns Fail [Again] to Save Us)

America,
Put the gun on the ground and step away.
Please.

— Amanda Kerri (@eternalkerri) July 8, 2016

Swords. And Dying by Them.

What follows is a series of excerpts from things I read/watched this morning, which all seem to me to have a common theme, one about taking swords and dying by them (Matthew 26:52). Violence is in the air we breathe, throughout the world. Our choice is not whether we shall or shall not breathe. It's whether we shall or shall not cooperate with the violence that is part and parcel of our daily existence.

Quote for Day: Naomi Klein on Why We're Stuck with Climate Change — It's about the Economic Elite, Stranglehold, and the Fetish of Centrism

Naomi Klein is incisive — and powerful — as she explains why the human community is unable to address climate crisis that is now threatening the whole planet and therefore all of our existences:

A Reader Writes: "Sadly, Our Church Does Not Consider Racism 'Inherently Disordered'"

Another powerful, thought-provoking statement I'm just seeing here this morning, from Rolando, in response to the Ferguson situation and a question Michael Sean Winters asked last week at National Catholic Reporter: How deep is the racism? Here's Rolando's reflection:

Ryan Budget: "I Love Rich People"

Sometimes the title says it all: "What Ryan's Budget Really Says: 'I Love Rich People.'" That's Dean Baker at Common Dreams.

Angus Sibley: Does Paul Ryan Follow Ayn Rand or St. Thomas Aquinas?

Angus Sibley at National Catholic Reporter on the ways in which Paul Ryan's Randian ideas--"extreme individualism; absolute belief in free markets and the sanctity of private property; adulation of entrepreneurs and traders; and withering contempt for the state"--are seriously at odds with Catholic social teaching:

Jeremiah Goulka's Conversion Story: From GOP to Reality-Based World

Speaking of the imprisoning effect of being on top (as I just did in my remarks about Hanna Rosin's end-of-men thesis as summarized by David Brooks): I find Jeremiah Goulka's description of his movement from youthful Republicanism to adult reality a fascinating conversion story.  Goulka entitles his essay "Joining the Reality-Based Community: Or How I Learned to Stop Loving the Bombs and Start Worrying."  He employs familiar tropes of classic conversion stories like that of Saul-Paul in the Christian scriptures or of St. Augustine in his Confessions: once I was blind, and then I could see.  Once my eyes had scales across them; then the scales fell off and I recovered my sight.

Thomas Harrington on Aggressive Cluelessness Then and Now: Parallels for Contemporary Catholic Discussion

I've made no secret (and here) of my admiration for Trinity College professor Thomas S. Harrington.  Harrington's a professor of Iberian Studies who does what any really capable historian does: he tells a compelling story about the area of the past in which he has expertise, and he then draws parallels between that story and the story of the present.

Dialing Back the Crazy: Leading Republicans Call Out Bachmann's Islamophobia

When even the crazies call Michelle Bachmann crazy, you know she's gone waaay 'round the bend.

News Flash: Power (and Money) Corrupt--Findings of New University of California Study

Here's what acquiring wealth (and status) can do to you, according to a recent study by psychologist Paul Piff and others at the University of California, Berkeley, who examine what happens to an individual's ethics as he or she acquires wealth and status:

Where Fools Rush In: Commentary on Limbaugh's Faux Pas and Right's Attack on Women's Contraceptive Rights

At Alternet, Naomi Cahn and June Carbone (rightly) note that Rush Limbaugh's recent slimy, misogynistic attack on Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke proves they were correct when they argued in their book Red Families v. Blue Families (2010) that the political and religious right would eventually try to use contraception as a wedge issue "because at a symbolic level it represents the social changes they oppose . . . ."  Contraception--when women use it and expect to have access to it as routine healthcare--is shorthand for: society is going to the dogs; families are falling apart; people are becoming hypersexualized; the work ethic is going down the drain; no one salutes the flag anymore; they've taken God out of the schools; the queers are getting out of hand; children no longer obey; people are killing babies; black people expect handouts; a black socialist-Muslim president is turning America into a dictatorship;

menarelosingcontromenarelosingcontrolwhitemenarelosingcontrol, etc.