Mass Suffering and Televised Masses: Watch Me Eat for You! Watch ME!

Coronavirus: A Spanish bishop has hit out at the “bombardment” of the faithful with coronavirus TV broadcast and livestreamed Masses, asking:

“Aren’t we treating believers as if they don’t know how to pray, and should depend on the clergy to do so?"https://t.co/oWX8Vcu6Y2

— Novena News (@novenanews) March 26, 2020

What We Are Now Living Through Creates a Serious Crisis of Religious Faith

In the video above, discussing the death of 16-year-old Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez in a detention center for immigrants this past May, Mika Brzezinski states that Nancy Pelosi is filling a leadership void and a moral void in this country. Joe Scarborough then states that evangelicals used to fill this moral void and no longer do so:

Father Tom Doyle's Recent Lecture, "What the Sexual Abuse Phenomenon Has Done to the Catholic Church"

I'd like to point you today to a resource Ruth Krall has told me about: as the video at the head of the posting indicates, recently, a lecture that Father Tom Doyle gave last month at Gonzaga University has come online in video format. The lecture is entitled "What the Sexual Abuse Phenomenon Has Done to the Catholic Church," and was presented under the auspices of Gonzaga's Flannery Lecture series.

I Learn to Read and Am Given a Bible-Story Book: A Southern Baptist Boy in 1950s Arkansas Learns the Facts of Life

I am six years old. I have just learned to read. It is 1956. Television has come on the scene. But we read, tell each other stories, rather than watch it. T.v. is too new to hold much interest for us. Books are more reliable for entertainment and education.

Quote for Day: John Pavlovitz on How Sideways We've Gotten When We Care More About Fellings of Bullies Than Lives of Those They Bully

"This is how sideways it's all gone here: that there are people apparently more concerned about the feelings of the bullies than about the very lives of those being bullied. I refuse to be one of those people." https://t.co/UdaAPmXEhr

— John Pavlovitz (@johnpavlovitz) February 9, 2018

"The Fish Rots from the Head" and American Catholic Reasons for Choosing Trump: My Take

It’s all-out war on the poor at this point. https://t.co/v89ZgmRQCd

— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) November 17, 2017

In an article yesterday at Vox entitled "'The fish rots from the head': a historian on the unique corruption of Trump's White House," U.S. presidential historian Robert Dallek tells Sean Illing that "the Trump administration easily ranks among the most corrupt in American history." Dallek states,

As Manafort Goes Up in Flames, Major White Evangelical Leaders Tweet About . . . Something Else, Anything but Manafort

.@RobertJeffress discusses the importance for Christ followers to fight for religious freedom. #FamilyTalk https://t.co/wdZkNSf6iu

— Family Talk (@DrJamesDobsonFT) October 30, 2017

 

As the man who managed the campaign of the moral monstrosity placed in the White House by eight in ten white evangelicals and some six in ten white Catholics and Mormons goes up in flames on #MuellerMonday — the man I'm talking about is Paul Manafort, of course — it's fascinating to see what the leading white evangelical epigones of that moral monstrosity in the White House are tweeting about this morning.

The tweet above is what Reverend Robert Jeffress tweeted* just after news broke about Manafort's and Gates' indictments.

In the News: Hurricanes, America's Moral Crisis with Trump, and What Are Churches Good for Again?

Some pieces I've read in the last few days that, to my way of thinking, tell a story. I hope you'll agree: what story do you hear as you read this commentary?

Neal Gabler, "America's Moral Crisis": 

As Day Goes On, William J. Barber's Prophetic Moral Testimony about Trump-Ryan Take Health Care Away Death Bill

Reverend William J. Barber II speaking yesterday at a protest of the Trumpcare legislation — by way of Charles Pierce: 

Reactions to the Trumpcare "Healthcare Plan" = Tax Cut for the Super-Rich: "How About Everyone Gets the Same Healthcare Coverage Congress Gets. Easy!"

Matt Shuham at Talking Points Memo

David Dayen, "The Republican Health-Care Bill Is the Worst of So Many Worlds":

Fundamentally, the ACHA is a tax cut bill, which just happens to make millions of Americans sicker and more vulnerable in the process.

Good, Bad, Ugly: Week in News — "We Judge This to Be Hypocrisy Unprecedented in the History of American Politics"

Journalists know: When leaders go berserk, furiously denying there's anything going on, blaming others--that's when you're getting close.

— Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof) March 4, 2017

The past week in tweets and newsfeed, as I've captured it for you readers (reflecting my  preoccupation with matters like the obligation to speak truth and defend the least among us, and what happens to social groups that succumb to moral vacuity and do not push back against leaders channeling dark, destructive energies):

Authoritarian Shysters Do Not Want Us Making Connections; Making Connections Is the Essence of Being An Adult Moral Thinker with a Developed Conscience

Charles Pierce then adds,

A Reader Writes: With ICE Raids in My City and a Parish Half Hispanic, My Parish Priest Is a Magical Being with His Head . . . Someplace

Thanks to Dulcis Memoria for this valuable comment in a thread here this morning:

Well, you'll be happy to know that the priest at the parish where I sing is doing his part to comfort the 57% and ignore the stranger in our midst.

Holding the Moral Center As Trump Takes Office: "We Must Resist. There Are No Sidelines. There Is No Middle Ground."

Continuing Moral Witness: Churches and Their Apologists Offer Language of Healing in Face of Trump Presidency. We Need Language of Resistance.

"The Further A Society
Drifts From The Truth,
The More It Will Hate
Those That Speak It."
~George Orwell pic.twitter.com/CgIxTakB3n

— relombardo (@relombardo3) January 11, 2017

Things I have read Trump supporters/apologists saying on social media today:

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):

On Moral Trump Cards and Moral Blindness: "Pro-Life" Voters and the Election of Trump

📈 Top lookups right now, in order:
fascism
bigot
xenophobe
racism
socialism
resurgence
xenophobia
misogynyhttps://t.co/Y1nrjCtOWq

— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) November 13, 2016

Leah Mickens, commenting here a few moments ago:

The abortion issue has become a way for Catholics to not have to deal with the real world.

Jennifer Finney Boylan on Moral Imagination and the Anti-Trans Agenda of the GOP: Once Again, What Good Does Church Do?

Jennifer Finney Boylan argues that developing "moral imagination" — the ability to imagine the lives of those different from ourselves, and to empathize with those different from ourselves — is an essential human task. We become fully human precisely by developing this ability in ourselves. We are not fully human when we have not developed it.

About the Fifty Percent of White Catholics Reporting They Will Vote for Trump: It's Donald Trump!

About the fifty percent of white Catholics who reported to Pew pollsters that they support Donald Trump, as opposed to the forty-six percent of white Catholics reporting that they favor Hillary Clinton:

Droppings from the Catholic Birdcage: "It Is Another Thing Entirely When You Think That the Positions Being Taken in Your Name Are Doing Affirmative Harm to People"

At his Sound of Sheer Silence blog, Michael Boyle notes that Cardinal Robert Sarah is the new darling of the Catholic right, particularly in the U.S. As Michael notes, Sarah was flown across the Atlantic to deliver a bombastic speech to the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in May. He used his platform there to attack marriage equality and to mount the by now very tired accusation that the West is engaging in "ideological colonization" of Africa by appealing to African nations to respect the rights of women and LGBTQ people.