What It Costs

This one doesn't go for an hour and twenty minutes.  There is an interesting series of videos in which Walter Brueggemann, Bishop Thomas Breidenthal and the Reverend Jane Gerdsen answer questions at a bar in Cincinnati, they're all short but good.  This one in particular, answering the question How does the church help end the vicious cycle of violence and death?   Notice that there is a pause after the question and the first thing that Brueggemann says is that they don't know how to do that.  Things get more interesting from there. Gerdsen's point that trying to end violence often came with a huge cost to those who tried to do it.  The example of that in Breidenthal's story about modern martyrs in the Solomon Islands who died trying to do that is an event I'd never heard or read about. The number of modern martyrs in Christianity probably is far larger than those killed under various Roman imperial persecutions - the video posted here the other day in which Noam Chomsky talked about the housekeeper and her daughter who were murdered when U.S. trained and backed forces murdered six Jesuit intellectuals in El Salvador is just one in a large number of such cases.  

As with the Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh North Carolina, according to the media and the common received wisdom, things like this aren't supposed to happen in such places as Cincinnati. The good news for those who see through the lyin' curtain of the media and the official line, there are deeply committed people in those places whose social and political vision is similar to that which fueled the civil rights victories of the last period of liberal success.   Promoting and helping them will do a lot more to make change than pretending they don't exist.  That's what the corporate media has done for the past thirty six or more years.   Disappearing those who work for progress happens here just as it did in Central America, only it's the free press that does it here.