Back from Trip, Thinking About American Catholicism, the "Both-Sides" False Equivalency Argument, and Ethics of Survival

I'm sorry to have been silent for a week. Steve and I spent last week in New Orleans visiting friends and family, and as we did so, I couldn't keep up with blogging — even, to any great degree, with following the news. I'm back now, and among all that I might talk about (the dire situation in Puerto Rico and the morally bankrupt response of the Trump administration to it; the event of mass murder in Las Vegas last evening), what is foremost in my mind today, for the purpose of this blog, is a discussion I read in the past day or so at the National Catholic Reporter site.

Keeping the Moral Center Alive in Age of Retrenchment: Valuable Commentary from Last Week

There have to be very low circles reserved in hell for people who laugh while removing healthcare coverage from... https://t.co/YKS444hnRo

— Bill Lindsey (@wdlindsy) January 14, 2017

A selection of things I've read this week on disparate topics, but all bound together by a common concern to keep moral perspectives alive in discussions of public issues — at a point at which powerful forces in public discourse seek to obliterate the moral center (nor can you expect to hear such morally probing discourse in your white evangelical, Catholic, and Mormon churches, for the most part — since that constituency placed Trump in the White House and has set fresh hell into motion in the name of a "pro-life" ethic):

Brittmarie Janson Perez, "On the Informal Powers Trump Brings to the Presidency"

I'm honored today to have an outstanding, timely, minatory (as in, warning us of a threat we'd be foolish to ignore) essay to share with you from Brittmarie Janson Perez, entitled "On the Informal Powers Trump Brings to the Presidency." Brittie's essay follows:

For Consideration: Assortment of Thought-Provoking Statements About Current Events and Ethics — from Trump to Prosperity-Gospel Preachers to Churches and LGBTQ People

As the first work week of 2017 gets underway following the New Year's holiday, here's a collection of items I've read in the past few days, which you may find interesting. The only strong thematic connection between them is that they're all, in one way or another, commenting on current events from an ethical standpoint:

Those Gotcha Planned Parenthood Videos Again: Where There's No Novum, There's No Spirit — On the Dead Thinking, Rhetoric, and Tactics of the Anti-Abortion Movement

Three days ago, Colleen left a powerful comment here. She writes, 

Purity and Danger: On the Racist Subtext of Current U.S. Debates about Latino Immigrant Children and the Ebola Virus

Some days lately as I read the news, I wonder, "Did Mary Douglas have some kind of crystal ball that allowed her to see fifty years into the future when she wrote her book Purity and Danger in the early 1960s?" So much happening today seems almost as if it is lifted from the footnotes of that classic essay — as if it is being scripted to prove the validity of Douglas's analysis.

Financial Transparency Emerges as Major Theme in St. Paul-Minneapolis Abuse Story: Outstanding MPR Report (and Nicole Sotelo on Knights of Columbus)

To my mind, one of the strangest claims that apologists for the Catholic hierarchy who want to assist the hierarchy by bashing survivors of clerical sexual abuse make is that the Catholic church is and always has been transparent in its handling of finances. This claim is so obviously counterintuitive that I can't quite fathom the reasons some apologists try to trot it out as a weapon against survivors and those who stand in solidarity with survivors.

Catholic Ethicist Daniel Maguire on Pope's Interview as End of the Catholic Church's "Pelvic Zone Orthodoxy"

Catholic ethicist Daniel Maguire on Pope Francis's comments in the interview released yesterday:

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.

Why I Keep Blogging: People Are Suffering (and Notes on Margaret Farley's Vatican Condemnation)

My reasons for thinking it's important for everyone to think about these issues is because people are suffering. All over the place, people are suffering.

Sr. Margaret Farley, addressing members of the Catholic Theological Society of America Friday evening and explaining why she wrote the book Just Love, for which the Vatican has just condemned her.