Saturday Night Radio Drama - Alan McMonagle - Pink Moon & Liz Nugent - Scorned

 

Pink Moon  

 

Continuing our summer season of new writing, Drama on One presents Pink Moon written by Alan McMonagle  and starring Enda Oates

Lockdown is taking its toll. He lives alone. He can't find his soap. Day-long hammering next door has him reaching for a range of increasingly desperate diversions. And when the neighbour starts digging his back garden in the middle of a full-moon night, it might be time to take drastic action...

Pink Moon by Alan McMonagle was directed by Gorretti Slavin 

 

 Scorned

 

Drama on One present Scorned by best-selling author  Liz Nugent.

Muriel Denham lives alone since the death of 'her' Larry seven years previously.  When Konstantin the mysterious Czech rents the downstairs flat, landlady Muriel considers seduction.

Written by Liz Nugen\t

Starring Marion O'Dwyer

Directed by Gorretti Slavin

 

"Yahweh MAKES POSSIBLE AND REQUIRES an alternative theology and an alternative sociology."

The program of Moses is not the freeing of a little band of slaves as an escape from the empire, though that is important enough, especially if you happen to be in that little band.  Rather, his work is nothing less than an assault on the consciousness of the empire, aimed at nothing less than the dismantling of the empire both in its social practices and in its mythic pretensions,  Israel emerged not by Moses' hand - although without Moses' hand - as a genuine alternative community.  The prophetic tradition knows that it bears a genuine alternative to a theology of God's enslavement and a sociology of human enslavement,  That genuine alternative, entrusted to us who bear that calling, is rooted not in social theory or in righteous indignation or in altruism but in the genuine alternative that Yahweh is.  Yahweh makes possible and requires an alternative theology and an alternative sociology.  Prophesy begins in discerning how genuinely alternative he is. 

Someone asks if I had read a post at the blog Eclectic Orthodoxy about God not being Odin or Zeus or Marduk for that matter and the answer is no but I wish I had, it would have given me a recent citation to prove what I'd concluded from yesterday's portion of The Prophetic Imagination had multiple support as not being merely my own idea.  I don't get how when it's anything else, multiple attestation is considered to be supportive of a statement's reality  but in religion, especially Judaism or Christianity, it's considered to be discrediting of the idea. 

As I also said this week, it was through my study of the failure of the American left that I came to a conclusion which is also multiply concluded and attestable that the genuine form of modern, egalitarian, democracy, certainly as it is aspired to in "the West" is a product of exactly what Brueggemann is talking about here, it is not rooted "in social theory or in righteous indignation or in altruism," it is rooted in the conception of God which Christianity inherited and rephrased through the Jews who founded Christianity from the Mosaic religion and social-political expression of who God is how the universe was created by God, how it continues and how human beings are to behave in accordance with that God.  

It was, so far as I knew, my own conclusion that without that belief being sufficiently firm to at least sometimes, preferably most times, among a clear and effective majority lead a society to something along the same line as the great commandments of the Old and New Testaments,  Love God with all of your being AND YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF, then all secular and supposedly scientific notions as supporting that would always fail.   The imagination of most of the secularists I've encountered is so thoroughly domesticated in the middle-class to affluent milieu (and not a very probing or critical view of that milieu) ESPECIALLY AS FOUND AMONG THE FACULTIES OF UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES that they cannot understand that the contented cattle of their class is not how most people experience life and, when the chips are down and the pink slips are out and the decisions on who gets tenure or funding comes to the crunch, neither are they in the majority reliably so content.  If I had the time I would compile a lexicon of academic depravity that asserts the nihilistic denial of the reality of the morals that they give lip service to when it suits them, I'd go from today retrospectively into the past because whenever modernism, atheism, scientism, materialism have been articulated they ALWAYS come with a denial of such moral obligations as egalitarian democracy depends, absolutely, on.  Not to mention anything like a decent life among people who behave decently. 

 Sorry about the font size in that morning post,  New Blogger doesn't seem to have a way to get into the HTML like Old Blogger did,at least one I've found.   I'm having a hard time seeing some of the features on the screen, but I'll bet it's there hidden now. I don't understand why they screwed around with that feature. I'll try to avoid the copying and pasting from other sites from here on in. That's the origin of it, I guess.   Highlight and drag edits seem easier, or maybe it's just I haven't done one of those in a while. 

social radicalism has been like a cut flower without nourishment, without any sanctions deeper than human courage and good intentions

 Continuing with The Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann

It is the marvel of prophetic faith that both imperial religion and imperial politics could be broken.  Religiously,  the gods were declared no-gods.  Politically, the oppressiveness of the brickyard was shown to be ineffective and not necessary to human community.   Moses introduced not just the new free God and not just a message of social liberation.  Rather, his work came precisely at the engagement of the religion of God's freedom with the politics of human justice.  Derivative finally from Marx, we can learn from these traditions that finally we will not have a politics of justice and compassion unless we have a religion of God's freedom.  We are indeed made in the mage of some God.  And perhaps we have no more important theological investigation than to discern in whose image we have been made.  Our sociology is predictably derived from, legitimated by, and reflective of our theology.  And if we gather around a static god of order who only guards the interests of the "haves," oppression cannot be far behind.  Conversely,  if a God is disclosed who is free to come and go, free from and even against the regime, free to hear and even answer slave cries,  free from all proper godness as defined by the empire, then it will bear decisively upon sociology because the freedom of God will surface in the brickyards and manifest itself as justice and compassion. 

Before going on, I'll point out that this passage pretty well answers the idiotic popular atheist lines about "only believing in one less god than the theists" "theists are atheists when it comes to every other god" and the demands that we recognize the legitimacy of the atheists superhero comic, sword and sandals movie conception of "Zeus" or whoever.   The God identified in, especially Exodus is entirely unlike the pagan, classical pantheons of material gods, subject to fate or other forces that untimately even determine the future and, in some stories, the actions of the gods of the classical period or others.   

I think to classify the One God of monotheism who is not definable or identifiable as Moses, in his first encounter in which he got his charge from him knew the Children of Israel knew they wold require.  Not to mention the Pharaohnic establishment.  When Moses asked what he was to tell them when he asked,  God said,  "I AM THAT I AM'; and he said: Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel: I AM hath sent me unto you."  (JPS) 

When we talk about God, about "gods" we are talking about the human conception of them, in the case of the GOD of Moses, Jesus, Paul, among the only things we know is that that human conception is never adequate. It is the human conception of God that is a product of human creation but in that explicitly mysterious passage from Exodus 3, that is a defining aspect of God,  the definition is that that God is always beyond adequate, certainly comprehensive definition or even conception. Brueggemann is absolutely right in noting that the God of Moses is not like the other gods.   Though I would say that I think many world religions who have an ultimate God are certainly talking and thinking about the same God understood differently.  Even the Books of Moses notes that that God has interactions and is concerned with people who conceive of God differently, even making covenants with them, not to mention with animals who certainly don't conceive of God in human terms, not to mention the terms of a very small beleaguered nation in slavery and on the way to freedom.  

My impression is that we have split those two items much to easily but not without reason.  The liberal tendency has been to care about the politics of justice and compassion but to be largely uninterested in the freedom of God.  Indeed, it has been hard for liberals to imagine that theology mattered, for all of that seemed irrelevant.  And it has thought that the question of God could be safely left to others who still worried about such matters.  As a result, social radicalism has been like a cut flower without nourishment, without any sanctions deeper than human courage and good intentions.  Conversely,  it has been the tendency in other quarters to care intensely about God, but uncritically, so that the God of well-being and good order is not understood to be precisely the source of social oppression.  Indeed, a case can be made that unprophetic conservatives did not take God seriously enough to see that our discernment of God has remarkable sociological implications. And between liberals who imagine God to be irrelevant to sociology and conservatives who unwittingly use the notion of God for social reasons because they do not see how the two belong together, there is little to choose.  Here it is enough to insist that Moses,  paradigm for prophet, carried the alternative in both directions: a religion of God's freedom as alternative to the static imperial religion of order and triumph and the politics of justice and compassion as alternative to the imperial politics of oppression.  The point that prophetic imagination must ponder is that there is no freedom of God without the politics of justice and compassion, and there is no politics of justice and compassion without the religion of the freedom of God.  

If I had not concluded before reading this that without the radical economic and social justice given as a moral obligation WITH CONSEQUENCES believed in by an effective majority of the population that egalitarian democracy was doomed, I'd believe it as a consequence of reading that passage.  It is certain as the experience of American history that people needed more than just a nice habit of niceness to empower their best though hardly strongest tendencies in order to keep doing that consistently and that is found nowhere else but in this religious framing. I early in my investigation of the failure of the American left came to the conclusion that atheist, scientistic materialism matched with the liberalish preferences and preferences of the largely college-credentialed "left" were no substitute that anyone should put their childlike faith in.  They should certainly not count on that being effective. It as the overtly religious, overtly  presented in the Jewish-Christian prophetic tradition, religious nature of the last successful mass movement for justice, the Civil Rights movement, that gave me the most persuasive evidence in drawing that conclusion, as seeing how that progress ended as the harder, more cynical at times explicitly anti-religious "radicals" were put at the forefront confirmed thsoe conclusions.

When Lefty Groups Play The Game Of The Most Demandiest Of All Skepticism Is In Order

 I will admit up front that I am automatically skeptical about anything that comes from the lefties of Wisconsin, especially if it comes out of Madison, that skepticism rising with the level of association to the University located there.  So when I looked up Jennifer Epps-Addison after reading her demand made from the presidency and co-executive directorship (?) of the Center for Popular Democracy, which I have to say, after a lifetime of encountering very, very similarly named lefty groups in their scores if not hundreds, past and present, I can't recall anything about, and saw she was a product of The U of Wisconsin, I had my back up.  The "Center for Popular Democracy" which I also looked up doesn't look like a particularly large, strong or especially active group or, rather a "federation". 

Her article in The Nation is a demand that whoever Joe Biden picks as his VP choice (and why have we not made THAT subject to the democratic process, I ask) it not be a former prosecutor or police professional, clearly that targets several of the named possible candidates - including Kamala Harris and one of those who has greatly impressed me,  Val Demings as well as several others.  I would wonder what she would cite to back up her accusations against, especially, Congresswoman Demings.   I don't  disagree with everything she said in it but I wonder why she or even her group would consider themselves to have the standing to blackball these women who have something that such lefites almost never bother to try to get for themselves, the endorsement of voters, some of whom might be part of the loose federation that the "CPD" seems to be made up of - it's a bit vague in their online presence exactly who is part of it,  I would guess that all of their combined membership would not equal the population of the state that sent Kamala Harris to the Senate, I would wonder if they had as many members who agreed with the position taken in that article as who voted to send Val Demmings to the House of Representatives.  

The most important thing about the exercise in making that demand on Biden is that it is a manifestation of the same thing that has defeated Democratic candidates when the game of making demands becomes helpful to Republicans, that has been a long running game played among the most lefty of the lefty and the suckers who can be swayed by them. And it has never produced anything good, not even when they get their way in the quadrennial idiocy of drafting that albatross that parties hang around their own necks, the anachronistic "platform" that, instead of people standing on, they typically have to run away from. 

Reading her piece in The Nation this morning, I think I might have named something I sensed, a part of the never-ending, never getting anywhere, game of those who vie for the title, "Most Lefty Of The Left" of competative statements of demands, the most demandy of the lefty, the most up-to-date-pure-and-most-demandy demands gets some piddling attention for the person making it,  their demands might be listened to by a fringe which will then do something stupid like writing in some never-would-win-in-a-life-of-the-universe play candidate and help get a Trump or a Bush II in office.  It's an old game that I've seen played for virtually the entire time I've read lefty magazines, going on rounding out six decades of it. I suspect it might get the player a presidency and a concomitant co-executive directorship of some still piddling but perhaps triflingly larger group or "federation."  I do have to wonder what such a "federation" means to the individual groups that are considered to be confederated into it,  I wonder if the members of those confederated groups have ever heard of the group that, most likely, they never voted individually to join.   

I think the pros who go from one position in "leadership" to another, to another at these small groups which can always count on getting outsized attention when they slam a Democratic presidential or vice-presidential candidate use that tactic to enhance their position in the small world of such "leadership" lefties. I don't especially trust them as a group, though some are less bad than others. I will say they've got to convince me with either good evidence or with more credibility that they actually have a significant followership instead of a tiny, sometimes cult following.  Sometimes that cult is as tiny as the granting apparatus of foundations which, I suspect, appealing to is job 1 in many of those organizations.  I wonder if Black Lives Matter - which is an actual organization as well as a movement that is certainly  larger than the organized entity - would reject Senator Harris or Congresswoman Demings as vice president.  I wonder how you could poll the BLM movement on that question. I wonder if the certainly much smaller Center for Popular Democracy bothered to ask the members of its federated entities to poll their membership on the issue.

American Is Ruled By Static and Material gods As Certainly As Ancient Egypt Was

Walter Breggemann then goes into several long, numbered analyses of what was so radically different between the new, Mosaic way of life and that which was typical of the world, then and now.   I will remind you of what has developed into one of the main themes of my study of how the American, really the English language left has failed so disastrously, that a number of scholars looking at the problems of democracy have noted that modern, egalitarian democracy has its source in a combination of the radical justice, economic and social of the Mosaic Law and the radical interpretation of that, and more, in the Gospel of Jesus.   As noted in a number of posts here, some have gone so far as to persuasively argue that those are the only source and source of sustenance  that egalitarian democracy has, that nothing else has proven to be capable of producing it in any reliable way.  I don't know if Brueggemann would agree with that statement but studying the question rather intensively for the past fifteen years has convinced me that that is the truth.

(1)  The radical break of Moses and Israel from imperial reality is a two-dimensional break from both the religion of static triumphalism and the politics of oppression and exploitation. Moses dismantled the religion of static triumphalism by exposing the gods and showing that in fact they had no power and were not gods.  Thus, the mythical legitimacy of Pharaoh's social world is destroyed, for it is shown that such a regime appeals to sanctions that in fact do not exist.  The mythic claims of the empire are ended by the disclosure of the alternative religion of the freedom of God.  In place of the gods of Egypt, creatures of the imperial consciousness, Moses discloses Yahweh the sovereign one who acts in his lordly freedom, is extrapolated from no social reality, and is captive to no social perception but acts from his own person toward his own purposes.  

In re-reading this the image of the ending of the criminally racist, pro-terrorist movie Birth of a Nation, the triumphal ride of the KKK which supported a pseudo-Christian version of exactly the same kind of system that Moses exposed and discredited slavery supported regime, complete with its material gods, its materialism, its oppression and exploitation. What today's Republican-fascist party is all about. 

I will also remind you of how frequently American slaves, under law and under de facto slavery and oppression made recourse to the story of the Exodus, how many times they cited the Jewish Prophets in protest and resistance to that system.  That's not any kind of a coincidence. 

At the same time,  Moses dismantles the politics of  oppression and exploitation by countering it with a politics of justice and compassion.  The reality emerging out of the Exodus is not just a new religion or a new religious ideal or a vision of freedom but the emergence of a new social community in history,  a community that has historical body, that had to devise laws, patterns of governance and order, norms of right and wrong, and sanctions of accountability.  The participants in the Exodus found themselves, undoubtedly surprisingly to them, involved in the intentional formation of a new social community to match the vision of God's freedom.  That new social reality,  which is utterly discontinuous with Egypt, lasted in the alternative way for 250 years. 

It must be point out that our "new order of the ages" has about run for that length of time and is on the verge of imploding, so the failure of the attempted political, social system under the Mosaic Law (or attempt at being that) is nothing we can claim to have bettered with modernist scientistic "enlightenment".  

I interpret the 40 years that the Children of Israel spent in the wilderness as, among other things, being an indication that the habits of thought that the former slaves used to their enslavement - as symbolized in those who hankered after and pined for the cucumbers they had in their slavery* - had to die out before a really radical new beginning could be made.  Even Moses, himself, was not allowed to enter the promised land, though he was allowed to see it from afar before he died.

We will not understand the meaning of prophetic imagination unless we see the connection between the religion of static triumphalism and the politics of oppression and exploitation..  Karl Marx had discerned the connection when he observed that the criticism of religion is the ultimate criticism and must lead to the criticism of law, economics and politics. [I don't think there is any getting by the unpleasant and hard necessity of attacking the millionaire and billionaire financed religion of neo-confederacy and such right-wing neo-integralist Catholicism in attacking Trumpian Republicanism.  If Christians don't do that, Protestant and Catholic, alike, they are complicit in idolatrous immorality.] The gods of Egypt are the immovable lords of order.  They call for, sanction and legitimate a society of order, which is precisely what Egypt had.  In Egypt as Frankfort has shown, there were no revolutions, no breaks for freedom.  There were only the necessary political and economic arrangements to provide order, "natural,"  the order of Pharaoh.  Thus the religion of the static gods is not and never could be disinterested, but inevitably it served the interests of the people n charge, presiding over the order and benefiting from the order.  And the functioning of that society testified to the rightness of the religion because kings did prosper and bricks did get made. 

The gods of the United States are, aside from money, the Founders, the Constitution, the First Amendment, that is the beginning of understanding how this works out in our time in our place.  The static nature of it is the "Constitutional" order that not only permits illegitimate presidents to be chosen by the Electoral College or by Supreme Court fiat as in Bush v Gore in which the corrupt putsch of the Brooks Bros. rioters is installed and maintained but which keeps the even more obvious criminal and even traitor Donald Trump in power as administered by his criminal associates, most obvious in his Attorney General, the old hand at fixing the system to enable and facilitate criminality - and, let's not forget oppressing and killing the powerless - all "by law" all not yet deemed to be that terrible and inconvenient "Constitutional crisis" that would give the mass media the vapors.   I'm still waiting to see how corrupt, how criminal, how clearly fraudulent and illegitimate it has to get for one of those to be declared.  The stasis that Brueggemann talks about is seen on CNN quite regularly as they or the opinion pages of the New York Times smooths over things so as to maintain "order".   

*  I also interpret that as yearning for the reportedly popular Egyptian alcoholic drink made by burring cucumbers in hot sand till they fermented, though it doesn't say that in the text.  It could have contained a kind of beer joke that we aren't equipped to get, so much of humor being all about knowing context. 

We Limit Freedom Of The Media To Telling The Truth Or We Get Trumpism

 The media instilled insanity of about 40% of the American population is a clear and present danger to us all.  Literally a danger to our loved ones, people we know, and the hundreds of millions we don't know, including the 40% and their loved ones who clearly cannot depend on that love protecting them from the Republican-fascist, billionaire and millionaire lies and encouragement of their worst character flaws packaged in a cocktail of poison marketed for easy sale.  

Remember that when you hear a figure in the media you respect pretending that we can allow the free reign of lies that is called "press freedom" "freedom of speech" "the First Amendment".   The simplistic, naive understanding of those, of the ill chosen phrases such as "Congress shall make no laws. . ." meaning that the media is to be free to lie with impunity has gotten us where we are now.  It is clear that the TV "ministries" of the 1960s and 70s have had that effect for those white populations that were their market audience have been sold on completely abandoning the entire moral foundation of religion imitated by those hucksters,  the Falwells, the Mother Angelicas,  Bakker, Robertson, and their associated movements and cults are the servants of the most vile of Mammons.  

Fascism came to us through screens and, to a somewhat lesser extent, over the radio, it especially came through unregulated cable TV and the internet.   It came through the very media which, if permitted to lie with impunity will destroy democracy. We have seen it happen here as we got Nixon, Reagan, Bush I and II and now the most foul of them so far (and it can always get worse, imagine if Trump were not an incompetent and malign baby-man) during the reign of free speech-free press absolutism IT IS HOW WE GOT HERE. 

I think it's clear that a democracy which does not act, constantly to protect itself against those with accumulated wealth, and so power, against legal schemes dreamed up in law school faculties by the servants of wealth and those with a malicious love of inequality and privilege is a doomed democracy.   Ours is such through the flaws of our Constitution, patched over by the cult of the Constitution and the fetish of the founders and other such secular piety instilled, not so much through school textbooks as through the media, much of it from "liberal Hollywood" who can be counted on for superficial feel-good junk such as some of our more esteemed directors and scribblers have produced.  But that's what got us here as certainly as Falwell, Robertson and the vile Mother Angelica.  No, more so than those clowns. 

"we have become insensitive to the radical and revolutionary social reality that emerged because of Moses"

 In Yisrael none like Moshe arose again - a prophet who perceived His vision clearly. G-d gave His people a Torah of truth, by means of His prophet, the most trusted of His household.

The Yigdal

I am tempted to leave out some of what Walter Brueggemann says in regard to the work of some well respected scholars and theologians because I suspect you, as I, have read little to nothing of their work.  That is always a problem for a non-specialist reading the work of a great scholar who is writing for a general audience as well as for other scholars.  But if you have the time and resources those citations will point to other things that you might read.  Like all such inevitably incompletely followed up citations, we take it on faith that the points made about them by a scholar we have every reason to trust will be accurate.   I know that we all do that all of the time but it's seldom confessed to.  I will say that every time I have looked up his citations,  Brueggemann's have been spot on to an extent I have seldom if ever found in secular scholarship so I will include those passages that contain that kind of citation.  Also note, when possible, I will give cited Bible texts from the 1917 Jewish Publications Society translation. 

As a beginning point in these considerations,  I propose that our understanding of prophecy comes out of the convenental tradition of Moses.  I do not minimize the important scholarly contributions concerning non-Israelite antecedents to prophecy in Israel.  These include (a) studies in Canaanite phenomenon of ecstasy, surely echoed in 1 Samuel 10 and 19; and more recently, (b) the evidence from Mari concerning institutional offices of prophecy, both in the cult and in the court.  Both these kinds of evidence illuminate practices and conventions to which Israel undoubtedly appealed in its much borrowing.  But the tradition itself is not ambiguous hen it comes to the dominating figure of Moses who provides our primary understandings.  That is to say,  the shaping of Israel took place from inside its own experience and confession of faith and not through external appropriation from somewhere else.  That urging is fundamental for its discussion for I am urging in parallel fashion that if the church is to be faithful it must be formed and ordered from the inside of its experience and confession and not by borrowing from sources external to its own life. This judgment, I am aware, is against the current tendency of scholarship.  Thus, for example,  Ronald Clements in his more recent Prophecy and Tradition has drawn back somewhat from his earlier position in Covenant and Prophesy.  There is currently a reassertion of a kind of neo-Wllhausian perspective, and that may be an important corrective to the synthesis of Gerhard von Rad.  Nonetheless,  I would urge that we are on sound ground if we take our own beginning point Moses as the paradigmatic prophet who sought to evoke in Israel analterntaive consciousness. 

The ministry of Moses, so George endenhall and Norman Gottwald have most recently urged, represents a radical break with the social reality of Pharaoh's Egypt.  the newness and radical innovativeness of Moses and Israel in this period can hardly be overstated.  Most of us are probably so used to these narratives that we have become insensitive to the radical and revolutionary social reality that emerged because of Moses.  It is clear that the emergence of Israel by the hand of Moses cannot be extrapolated from any earlier reality.  Obviously nothing like the Kenite hypothesis of the monotheism of the eighteenth dynasty of Egypt will help us at all.  While there are some hints that the God of Israel is known tobe the God of the fathers (cf. Exod. 15:2)

2 The Lord is my strength and song,

And He is become my salvation;

This is my God, and I will glorify Him;

My father's God, and I will exalt Him.

Jewish Publication Society 1917

that evidence is at best obscure.  In any case, the overriding experience of Exodus is decisive and not some memory now only hinted at in the tradition.  However those antecedents are finally understood, the appearance of a new social reality is unprecedented.  Israel in the thirteenth century is indeed ex nihilo.  And that new social reality drives us to the category of revelation. Israel can only be understood in terms of the new call of God and his assertion of an alternative social reality.  Prophecy is born precisely in that moment when the emergence of social political reality is so radical and inexplicable that it has nothing less than a theological cause.  Theological cause without social political reality is only of interest to professional religionists, and social political reality without theological cause need not concern us here.  But it is being driven by the one to the other that requires us to speak and to wonder about the call to the prophetic.  

In my search for how the American left has been so long in a wilderness, one largely of its own making, I have come to be quite convinced that "social political reality without theological cause" of exactly the kind which does concern Walter Brueggemann's examination and, in fact, the entire monotheistic tradition that flows out of the Mosaic Law, inevitably leads to the kind of ubiquitous gangster regimes that we struggle against today and always.  

The Jewish prophetic tradition is the constantly fallen away from, constantly renewed struggle for justice and a decent life in so far as it is humanly possible to know that and in each and every secular, non-theological, anti-theological attempt to make a new order that I have looked at, hard, I have seen that without that foundation in at least the aspiration of what is crudely considered "the supernatural" will inevitably devolve quickly into injustice from barely tolerable for a majority (often, as in America under the Constitution nowhere near tolerable for minorities) to the kind of scientific totalitarian regimes that arose in the 20th century.  It always bears pointing out that a good part of the American left has been as enthusiastic in supporting some of the worst of those murderous dictators, Leinin, Stalin, Mao, etc.as the worst of the American right has been enthusiastic for other such foreign dictators,  Hitler,Mussolini,various, especially, African and Latin American dictatorships as well as the American internal version of it in slavery,the Confederacy and Jim Crow, and the even wider enthusiasm for those who practiced genocide against the Native People to steal their lands.  That is the kind of thing I think you will always get under secular framing.    

That isn't to say that even with an official framing of theological foundation that the potential to backslide into a Pharaohnic kind of violent, extractive gangsterism isn't there, indeed, the Old Testament documents how very quickly that happened in Israel, the complex, deeply ambiguous claims of how it was founded as a nation in the conquest and obliteration of the native Canaanites and others, the violent cycles of the historical books, kings who, as was warned through Samuel, rode The People hard and did all kinds of injustices and violated The Law which led to disasters for the whole People.  But without the kind of ultra-radical view of life from the Law of Moses and in its most radical of all interpretations as in The Gospel, you start out with a guarantee that you're going to get the kind of injustice that Pharaoh symbolized and embodied.  

That it's hard to really do it doesn't change the fact that without trying, without feeling you had a powerful obligation to try to do it, you remain mired in the endless tyrannical habits of habitual and continual toil and competition against your fellow toilers lorded over by the habitual power holders and wealth extractors.  Americans have become used to that within my lifetime, secularized education (much of that taught by domesticated "religious"institutions of learning) has certainly not led us out of it but deeper into it. 

I Hope "Socked & appalled" Doesn't Become The New "I have concerns"

Shocked & appalled—I just left a 90 minute classified briefing on foreign malign threats to our elections. From spying to sabotage, Americans need to see & hear these reports.

Protect our democracy from destruction by declassifying key intel describing the danger of foreign subterfuge to our elections. Congress has been briefed, but sworn to secrecy—unacceptably.

Senator Richard Blumenthal

Senator Blumenthal is sounding the warning that we need to hear the classified information about foreign election interference that has him so alarmed.  

A real patriot knowing that the Trump regime is the tool of Putin and the domestic billionaires who are at least as big a danger to our democracy and that the Republicans in the Senate are their accomplices, would release the information if it is as bad as I suspect it must be. 

He wouldn't leave it at sounding an alarm, that doesn't work.  If the Obama administration hadn't been so prissily fixated on doing things the nice, regular way, we would not have Trump getting scores, soon hundreds of Americans killed in the pandemic.  And that's just one of the enormous hits that America took because the Obama people wouldn't smash that convention when it would have prevented the disaster that Trump has been and will be until the Republican-fascists are removed from office.  

There have been signs that the Democratic Party in my state,  Maine, has been ratfucked,  I was told about a mass mailing that is allegedly from one of the campaigns that contains the addresses of all of the people it was sent to - I'm not on that list so I didn't get it - I encouraged the person who informed me to send it to the campaign that it targeted and he turned all nervous nellie about doing that.  And if they have been ratfucked, I have little doubt that local and the state government have not been targeted if not compromised. 

FOR PETE'S SAKE BLUMENTHAL, KING,FEINSTEIN, WHITEHOUSE, ANYONE, STICK YOUR NECK OUT, PUT YOURSELF IN DANGER FOR DEMOCRACY.  

When some of her caucus wanted to suspend business in the House in the early months of Covid-19,  Nancy Pelosi who is certainly in  the most endangered cohort of the population said,  "No, this is what we signed on for."  Would that more of the Democrats in the Senate would have that same ethic. 

Is anyone else having Chrome fail on them?  I downloaded a different browser and it's working fine so I assume it's Chrome and not my ancient, used computer. 

Alternatives To The Consciousness And Perception Of The Dominant Culture Around Us

The hypothesis I will explore here is this:  The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.  Thus I suggest that prophetic ministry has to do not primarily with addressing public crises but with addressing, in season and out of season, the dominant crisis that is enduring and resilient, of having our alternative vocation co-opted and domesticated.  It may be, of course, that this enduring crisis manifests itself in any given time around concrete issues,  but it concerns the enduring crisis that runs from concrete issue to concrete issue.  That point is particularly important to ad hoc liberals who run from issue to issue without discerning the enduring domestication of vision in all of them.

The alternative consciousness to be nurtured, on the one hand, serves to criticize in dismantling the dominant consciousness.  To that extent, it attempts to do what the liberal tendency has done,  engage in a rejection and delegitimatizing of the present ordering of things.  On the other hand, that alternative consciousness to be nurtured serves to energize persons and communities by its promise of another time and situation toward which the community of faith may move.  To that extent it attempts to do what the conservative tendency has done,  to lie in fervent anticipation of newness that God has promised and will surely give.

In thinking this way,  the key word is alternative, and every prophetic minister and prophetic community must engage in a struggle with that notion.  Thus, alternative to what?  In what ways alternative?  How radically alternative?  Finally, is there a thinkable alternative that will avoid domestication?  And, quite concretely,  how does one present and act out alternatives in a community of faith which on the whole does not understand that there are any alternatives, or is not prepared to embrace such if they come along?  Thus it is a practice of ministry for which there is little readiness, indeed, not even among its would-be practitioners.  So, my programmatic urging is that every act of a minister who would be prophetic is part of a way of evoking, forming, and reforming an alternative community.  And this applies to every facet and every practice of ministry.  It is a measure of our enculturation that the various acts of ministry (for example counseling, administration, even liturgy) have taken on lives and functions of their own rather than being seen as elements of the one prophetic ministry of formation and reformation of alternative community. 

A while back I caused a minor ruckus by pointing out that the "counter culture" of the1960s and earliest 70s was not counter to this dominant culture in any real or effective way, that it shared in the same basic consciousness of American, Brit, etc. consumerism, egoism, etc.  I noted that at the same time there was a genuine visionary counter-culture right there before everyone in The Reverend Martin Luther King's "Beloved Community" but which was rejected by the white establishment out of hand and was rejected by the up and coming radicals both white and black, whose programs weren't visionary, they were not really an alternative but just a fever dream of alternative power structures, often Marxist and, as history made plain as the Marxist categories of the mass murdering gangster regimes of the 20th century and the mountains of bodies and the slave masses they terrorized into submission,  they were in many cases a proposal worse than what they allegedly struggled against.  Also, Altamont. 

And, of course,such people made themselves the tools of the capitalist power structure because the large majority of Americans,seeing those bodies, seeing those terrorized populations knew that the alternatives nurtured by some of the most idiotic academics who still preach from podcasts and Youtubes* are nothing they want to have imposed on them.  The worst thing that ever happened to socialism was to be coopted by the gangsters, Marxist as well as National Socialist. They were useful for the racists in attacking Martin Luther King jr. and, in fact, all of the critics of the dominant order. 

That Youtube by John Oliver I posted yesterday has a clip of King giving the reason that what he was really asking for would be far harder to get than what the movement he was a leader in had accomplished,  it was going to cost the government, the society and the wealthy money to address the economic justice that was inseparable from the broader justice that was the goal. It is one of the great crimes of the19th century through today that that justice sought ever got coopted by an anti-democratic ideology that, demonstrably, is as bad and generally worse at producing justice in even economic terms and certainly never took seriously the other aspects of the overall justice that is the reason for the Mosaic Law, the most radical of all economics, especially when interpreted in the ultra radicalism of Jesus.  Those include a more radical economic redistribution than Marx dreamed of or, certainly the capitalists and the National Socialists, but are more radically just in every way. 

II wonder if one of the reasons that Marx gave a capitalist period as a prerequisite for his progress of the dialectic on to its pre-determined, material, scientifically predicted end in his ridiculous pie in the never to be achieved future because, since captitalism definitely existed and was definitely the quickly developing hegemonist power of the world, his faith in materialist causation led him to an absurd faith that it was a product of material evolution when it was,as in fact all economic and political forces are, a matter of choices made by those with power granted to them by habits of thought.   I have also noted in my critique of that other mistaking of artificial economic-political stratification Darwinism quoted the radical British author William Cobbett who pointed out that if the Malthusians got the "law of nature" they wished to apply to the poor who would starve to death and die in misery that that law would overturn all of the artificial  laws that kept the elite Darwin and his earliest disciples belonged to or aspired to as they took what they needed.   It is a similar superstitious reification of artificial, human made constructs that absurdly idealistic presentations of capitalism, anarchism, unfortunately most of socialism, and, really, just about any "ism" you can name.  I think the truly radical prophetic imagination, to be at all genuine will resist falling into all ideological frames and will not crystallize into a static, dead object.  It has to be a living, changing but persisting thing.  It will have to be founded in the radical vision of life as manifested in the Jewish prophetic tradition as in the Old Testament but as continues up till today, and in the ultra radical form of that which should have always been the central point of the child of that earlier tradition, Christianity.   I will not speak for Islam or any other tradition that might partake of the same or similar prophesy,  but I can't accept any religion as authentic unless it is entirely involved with life close to that and on the same terms.

* Indeed, from what I gather the living anachronism, Richard Wolff regularly preaches Marxism from one and no doubt more of those liberal churches which, no doubt, even in 1978 fell under Brueggemann's consideration, as well as the network of Trump's sponsor, RT as well as American versions of that such as from The Hill.

I'll try posting this as an experiment and as a notice

I can't tell if my computer is screwed up or if it's Google or if it's Blogger but something is really screwy.   If I'm not able to post something, that might be the reason.

John Oliver Speaking Prophetically

I don't know what he'd think of it but John Oliver's segment on the lies that comprise the common received wisdom in regard to American history and its real meaning in real lives today is an excellent example of speaking prophetically in the tradition written about in The Prophetic Imagination.   So I'm posting it as I hold the next segment of the book.   It is excellent.

Mnuchin Thinks Poor People Are Living Too High Off Of The Pandemic, You Know, The Class That Is Hit The Hardest

Got this through RMJ

“Unemployment is supposed to be wage replacement,” the Treasury secretary told ABC’s Martha Raddatz. “So it should be tied to some percentage of wages.”

“We want to fix the issue where in some cases people are overpaid,” he continued. “And we want to make sure there’s the right incentives.”

“Do you do think it’s a disincentive to find a job if you have that extra $600?” Raddatz asked.

“There’s no question,” Mnuchin replied. “In certain cases, where we’re paying people more to stay home than to work, that’s created issues in the entire economy.”

Raddatz interrupted by pointing out a Yale study which found that there is no evidence that the $600 weekly payment is a disincentive to return to work.

“I went to Yale,” Mnuchin replied. “There are certain things, I don’t always agree.”

As RMJ points out, "Most people trying to survive on $600.00 a week never darkened the campus of Yale.  Asshole".

So many points to be made, one being the one so many affluent jerks, especially the kind who went to Ivy and the equivalent of it, that people can't live on the official minimum wage - the obvious thing that the Mnuchin's fear is that the plebs who have to will find out what it's like to not have to live a life of employed poverty and refuse to put up with that anymore, forcing wages up.   That's probably the reason that the ultra rich and trashy worry about the minimum wage level workers when they don't express such worries about the merely mid-range affluent, so far below the Mnuchin levels of wealth,  being given far higher levels of financial benefit from the government.  And they are, regularly.   

Mnuchin is vile and he plays the part by making himself ever viler, though we don't seem to hear much of that from his wife these days.  I am hoping that he is prosecuted for any and all crimes he committed as a part of the most blatantly criminal presidential regime if Democrats take control.  And we are being ruled by a regime, not an administration.  Crooks don't administer anything, they steal everything they can manage to.

I'd not known about Mnuchin's adventures as a Hollywood financier, apparently mostly of superhero movies.    I'd ask why that doesn't surprise me but the answer is obvious.  I should expect lots of that lot to have Hollywood connections, the combination Rome and Jerusalem and Mecca of American Mammonism. 

there tends to be a kind of reductionism that is mechanical and therefore untenable - The Prophetic Imagination

It is the task of prophetic ministry to bring the claims of the tradition and the situation of enculturation into an effective interface.  That is,  the prophet is called to be a child of the tradition, one who has taken it seriously in the shaping of his or her own field of perception and system of language,  who is so at home in the memory that the points of contact and incongruity with the situation of the church  in culture can be discerned and articulated with proper urgency.   In what follows, I will want to urge that there are precise models in Scripture for discerning prophetic ministry in this way. 

A study of the prophets of Israel must also try to take into account both the best discernment of contemporary scholarship and what the tradition itself seems to tell us.  The tradition and contemporary scholarship and what the tradition itself seems to tell us.  The tradition and contemporary scholarship are likely to be in some kind of tension, and we must try to be attentive to that.  The weariness and serenity of the church is just now make it a good time to study the prophets and get rid of tired misconceptions.   The dominant conservative misconception, evident in manifold bumper stickers,  is that the prophet is a future-teller, a predictor of things to come (mostly ominous), usually  with specific reference to Jesus.  While one would not want to deny totally those facets of the practice of prophecy,  there tends to be a kind of reductionism that is mechanical and therefore untenable.  While the prophets are in a way future-tellers, they are concerned with the future as it impinges on on the present.  Conversely,  liberals who abdicated and turned all futuring over to conservatives have settled for a focus on the present.  Thus prophesy is alternatively reduced to righteous indignation, and in circles where I move, prophecy is mostly understood as social action.  Indeed, such  liberal understanding of prophecy is an attractive and face-saving device for any excessive abrasiveness to the service of almost any cause.  Perhaps our best effort would be to let the futuring of such conservatives and the present criticism of the liberals correct each other.  But even that is less than might be claimed.  I believe that neither such convention adequately understands what really is at issue in the Israelite understanding of prophecy. 

The view of the prophetic tradition that Walter Brueggemann articulates is an interplay of the past (tradition) predictions or advocacy of a future and how those are made manifest in human experience of the present.  Focusing on any of those, exclusively or ignoring any of them is a distortion of the tradition and of the prophetic practice in regard to the future and the present.  Different ways  intentionally distorting the tradition can be done to produce desired results, most of those done for dishonest purposes often out of habit and social convention, often without even the one doing it admitting their intentions to themselves.  

One thing that is asserted by this view of the prophetic tradition that started with the prophets of Israel is that the distortions, intentional and habitual, those of calculated self-interest and those done in the interest of self-regard diminish, devalue and destroy the practice.  And they discredit it, especially among those who want it to be discredited because they reject one or more of its bases, its practices and its purpose.  I think a good deal of the (perhaps exaggeratedly reported) decline of the so-called mainstream  churches is due to them becoming embarrassed at the fact that monotheistic religion is, in fact, supernatural and that its life is inevitably founded in faith, not what is claimed by modernism and postivism as certainty.  Though science is, as well, founded in faith which is pretended to not be faith.   A trait that modernism and scientism and positivism holds in common with various scriptural fundamentalisms.

That is something it is dangerous to deny, that none of human culture, including science,  is an objective view of reality that is not, from start to its continuation in the present a totally human interpretation of human experience and human thought addressing that experience and the legacy of past thoughts.  The legacy of human thought, though it is an a artificial thing, acts as if it were a direct experience of the outside world in so far as we use it to come to our own conclusions in the present.  It can be entirely taken for granted and its shading of our thoughts unconsidered or considered to be as natural as water flowing and grass growing when it is not. 

It is one of the things which is different in the Jewish prophetic tradition that it does criticize that cultural legacy or baggage, if you will, it is not static, it holds all of the tradition,all of the present experience and all of the conjecture about the future in the tension which Brueggemann says we must be attentive to.  It both takes human experience of the world and human thought about it seriously while holding it and the conclusions and, most of all, the self-interested habits developed through those up to deep critical thinking.   It also looks critically at what we revere as our loftiest aspirations telling us to hold on and really consider that either we might not want that as much as we think we do or that there is another whose will will govern and who may have quite different thoughts than our thoughts.  Ours will inevitably be reductive, we cannot encompass any more reality than we can contain in our limited minds, individually and collecively,  our view of it, especially under the framing of modernism and scientism will be mechanical - from the habits of thought we have come to expect through the modeling of science and engineering - and as a means of understanding the world we are presented with now and in the future, it will be untenable as long as we don't take into account the limits imposed by the inescapable vissicitudeds of our own existence as human beings.  It's best to remember that, especially when dealing with life or death matters.   

Even the great and good Dr. Fauci recently had to take back a few of his predictions and prescriptions of late winter that seemed right in his expert opinion based on the models he had available.  He knows enough to do that with humility, that everything he says is contingent and open to error.  The man who is stupidly given by the law the power to hold Dr. Fauci's career in his hands is, alas, a more typical example of human folly and arrogance.  Don't get me started on the law that gives Trump that power and allows him to keep it out of Constitutional tradition.