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Illustration by Brian Hubble
THE PROPHETS CAN only be understood if you understand that their context is an ideological “totalism” that intends to contain all thinkable, imaginable, doable social possibilities. That totalism always wants to monopolize imagination and technology so that there seem to be no serious alternatives.
In the ancient world of the Bible, that totalism is represented and embodied by the monarchy of Solomon in the Jerusalem temple. The king was surrounded by priests in the temple and by scribes who did the fine print to legitimate everything. And that totalism was completely intolerant of any alternative thinking.
We are able, in the Old Testament, to identify many of the features of Solomon’s totalism. First of all, it was an economy of extraction that regularly transferred wealth from subsistence farmers to the elite in Jerusalem, who lived off the surplus, and the device and strategy for that extraction was an exploitative tax system.
That totalism also needs a strong military. Solomon was an arms dealer. Partly, Solomon’s military was for show, and partly it was for intimidation. The totalism also had to exercise enormous economic opulence to impress people with wealth, so that Solomon’s temple is essentially an exhibit of Solomon’s much, much gold. The temple, and the priests who operated the temple, fashioned a series of purity laws to determine who the purer people and the impurer people were, to determine who had access and who was excluded from the goodies.
The three-chambered temple of King Solomon is a lot like a commercial airline. There was the outer court for women and gentiles. There was the inner court for guys in suits. And there was the holy of holies where only the high priests could go. And that’s a lot like the tourist cabin and the first-class cabin and the cockpit where only the high priests can go. Everything is delineated by rank, and therefore by opportunities that come with it. And this whole enterprise of extraction and exhibit and grandiose commoditization was all blessed by a very anemic God, whose only function was to bless the regime. So that under Solomon, you get a chosen king, a chosen city, and a chosen land, to the exclusion of all those who were not chosen.
What you can see in the biblical record is that this totalism was completely impatient with and intolerant of any alternative thinking. It was prepared to crush any alternative thinking, which was represented by the prophets.
What you get is the expulsion of the prophets, or the killing of the prophets, because they challenge the totalism that was legitimated by this anemic God.
Eruptions of Poetry
IN THE WAY the history of the Old Testament works, for 400 years you get a recital of the kings of the family of Solomon, and these are the point persons for the extraction system. But when you read along in First and Second Kings, what you see periodically are eruptions of poetry. These are the prophets who come from nowhere. They regularly unsettle the kings, and they come to occupy space in the historical recital. You can see first of all that those prophets are without a pedigree. They don’t have any credentials that legitimate what they want to say. Second, they come from nowhere. They are people who do not accept the truth of the totalism, and the way they articulate their coming from elsewhere is that they either say, “Thus says the Lord,” or they say “The word of the Lord came to me,” and “the Lord” becomes a kind of a signal that this is a word that will not fit or accommodate the totalism.
The prophets, moreover, were deeply grounded in the old covenantal traditions and the wisdom traditions, so they knew that there were structures and limits inherent to the way of creation that could not be violated with impunity. They have a very vigorous notion of the governance of God. But along with that sense of tradition, they have an acute sense of social reality.
MY EXPERIENCE BEING color-shamed began when I was 5 years old and still living in the Philippines. My mom and aunts often told me that I could be mistaken for “the maid’s daughter,” due to my darker brown skin. Even at a young age, I understood it was intended as an insult.
As I grew up, billboards, films, television shows, and magazines bombarded me with images of white Americans and Filipinas with white facial features. Mestiza Filipina models and actresses—celebrities admired by young girls like me—advertised skin-whitening products.
Color-shaming by other Filipinas continued after I moved to the United States at age 7. My mom, titas (aunts or older women), and lolas (grandmothers or elderly women) told me to “stay away from the sun” and “try not to get so dark.” They told me I would look even prettier if I had lighter skin.
This skin color hierarchy didn’t come just from other Filipinos. In junior high a boy I liked told my friend I was “too brown for his taste.” A white woman once asked my white boyfriend what he saw in me, a “brown chick.” When I was 27, I walked into a restaurant and a white lady told her friends, “Let’s get out of here. It’s getting too brown up in here.” Others have suggested I marry a white man instead of a Filipino so I can make “pretty light-skinned babies.” Not to mention the mostly white faces of U.S. mainstream media.
Beauty Erasers
IN Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins, theologian Miguel A. De La Torre describes how dominant cultures view oppressed peoples as objects. But the problem runs deeper, explains De La Torre: “Persons viewed as objects accept their oppressors’ worldview as their own,” he writes, and “often feel compelled to behave and act according to the way in which they have been constructed by others.”
While colorist and racist comments pained me deeply, it had not occurred to me how I had internalized these messages of brown-skin inferiority. And yet, I had: As a teen I used toxic chemicals to bleach my hair blonde, wore blue contacts, pinched my nose every night to form it thinner, and purchased shades of foundation lighter than my own skin tone. More recently, I highlighted my hair light brown and bought contour makeup to give the illusion of having white facial features: a thinner and pointier nose, higher cheekbones, a more chiseled bone structure. The more I looked like the white models and actresses on my Pinterest page, the more confident I felt.
If someone had asked me why I dyed my hair or wore so much makeup, I would have said it was my personal preference; I would not have attributed it to the constant stream of images promoting white beauty standards in the U.S and the Philippines. I did not realize I was conditioned to want to look white.
An abandoned home in Detroit / Erin Kirkland / Redux
“THE BRIGHTMOOR NEIGHBORHOOD has one of the highest percentages of water shutoffs—and high rates of infant mortality, due to shutoffs. The ground is dry. People are very tense. You see a lot of skin diseases and rashes, especially on kids. You see it in guarded conversations. People aren’t going to come right out and tell you, ‘My water is shut off,’ but they may say to you, ‘I can’t boil those hot dogs—they’ll have to go in the microwave.’
We hear the narrative so often that people should just pay their water bill, but you can’t budget your way out of poverty. I am a disruptor of narratives. No, the lack of water is not because of your sin, or because you’re a bad parent, or because you buy a hair weave or spend money on a cellphone. None of that is true. Why don’t people have water? Because of unjust systems—because people are commodified, that’s why. If I saw you as a human being, I would be concerned that your baby doesn’t have enough bottles because you don’t have the water to make them with.
Illustration by Matt Chase
AMERICA'S OPENNESS TO refugees has been a distinct feature of our country from its foundation. Our nation was established by communities facing discrimination elsewhere for their religious practices. In the periods when the country was not open to refugees and asylum seekers, such as during the Holocaust, it later became clear that we were on the wrong side of history.
The Trump administration announced this fall an annual admissions ceiling of 18,000 refugees for the next fiscal year, its third straight year of drastic reductions and a historic low. By comparison, almost 85,000 refugees were admitted in President Obama’s last year in office. Trump’s actions come at a time when the number of people fleeing conflict around the world is the highest since World War II.
Faith-based organizations in the United States have been at the forefront of refugee resettlement. The Trump administration decision threatens the already precarious structures around resettlement, which are largely religiously based. For many, the scriptural obligation to care for the stranger is a core religious belief. By having this capacity for service undercut, in many ways the faithful—across the spectrum from conservative to progressive—are unable to fulfill their religious obligations for care. The administration’s refusal to engage the many faith-based leaders and organizations who called for more, not less, openness to welcoming refugees decries its alleged commitment to religious freedom.
Illustration by Matt Chase
EVERYWHERE I GO I’m having the same conversation: Young and old alike seem to be streaming out of the church. On Oct. 17, the Pew Research Center released an update on America’s changing religious landscape. According to Pew, “The share of U.S. adults who are white born-again or evangelical Protestants now stands at 16 percent, down from 19 percent a decade ago.” Christians are attending church at the same rate as a decade ago, but fewer people are identifying as Christian.
Church-attendance rates among affiliated Christians haven’t risen as the dispassionate have left. It seems passion for church is dimming even among the affiliated. In conversations across America, I hear the same mantra: “Church hurts too much.”
I get it.
I haven’t had a home church since December 2015. On that last Sunday, amid the river of hashtagged lives that has flowed across social media since Trayvon Martin’s murderer was set free in 2013, a pastor rose to the stage. White, male, and hip, he stood in the heart of empire—Washington, D.C.—and flipped through sacred texts written by brown, colonized, and serially enslaved people, landing on the book of Acts. He read a passage from the book that chronicles how the Holy Spirit moved through the earliest church to destroy hierarchies of human belonging imposed by empire. He read the passage and never came back to it. Later, hundreds of people swayed to three chords, inspired by the Bible’s teaching on how to overcome conflict at a workplace.
Illustration by Matt Chase
IMAGINE YOURSELF IN a darkened theater. At center stage sits a woman, child on her lap, both wrapped in tonal greys. A tiny stream of light falls from above. Off left, large animals shift their weight on floorboards, chuff-chuffing their breath; foreign tongues murmur them calm. Off right, the only sound is of metal rasps running repeatedly down the length of blades; random sparks flare off the cutting teeth. This is Epiphany. Everything is waiting to happen. We know the narrative detail: Mary and Jesus, a manger, the Magi’s star-trekking journey with camels and gifts to honor a “newborn king” (while Herod, like Pharaoh, plots a bloody offense). But Epiphany is a season for paradigm shifts. What if we scramble the details? Imagine this. Off left, the chuff-chuffing of foreign tongues come not from men calming beasts, but camels praying as they approach the child, the spiritual waterhole for the world. The camels have not brought kings or astrologers, but a guild of bakers, who extend platters of fresh bread toward the child. At center, the woman wrapped in a cloak of ultraviolet leans back on her stool: She has given birth to a star, filling them both with light. At her side stands a human child. He gazes off right. The sound of rasps and swords, boots and shouted commands fascinate him. Slowly, the child lets go his mother’s hand, relaxes his throat muscles, measures his breath. In a world of bread and circuses, he has made brothers of soldiers. He is a sword-swallower and eats their pain.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
IN 2015, POPE FRANCIS directed a provocative question to the U.S. Congress: “Why are deadly weapons being sold to those who plan to inflict untold suffering on individuals and society?”
As the source of roughly 36 percent of the world’s military exports, the United States is the largest weapons supplier in the world. According to data released last spring by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the U.S. exported arms to at least 98 countries in the past five years. These deliveries often included advanced weapons such as combat aircraft, short-range cruise and ballistic missiles, and guided bombs.
Ten of the 25 countries buying the most weapons from the U.S. are NATO members or part of other U.S. security alliances. In 2017, the U.S. set a record of $75.9 billion in weapons sales in a year, pursuant to congressional approval. Saudi Arabia is the biggest recipient of U.S. arms. In August 2018, the Saudi military used a 500-pound, MK 82 guided bomb built by Lockheed Martin, a U.S. weapons manufacturer, to destroy a school bus in a market in the Yemeni town of Dahyan. They killed more than 50 people, including 40 children. One of the victims, Ali Mohammed Hassan Da’i, was 10 years old. Another, Ali Zaid Hussein Tayeb, was 9 years old.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
IN OCTOBER, POPE FRANCIS convened hundreds of people in Rome to discuss the Indigenous face of the church in the Amazon. The three-week, multitrack meetings, which included lay leaders, members of religious communities, priests, expert witnesses, bishops, cardinals, and leaders of Indigenous organizations, was the result of a two-year listening process during which more than 65,000 people in the Amazonia region were asked: What are the most pressing issues you face?
The agenda used for the synod of bishops at the Vatican, as well as the wide variety of interconnected parallel gatherings around the city—under the umbrella of “The Amazon: Common Home” (la Casa Comun)—outlined the collected wisdom: Listen to the voice of Amazonia. Pursue ecological conversion. Support the prophetic Indigenous church.
One parallel gathering met in the Church of Santa Maria in Traspontina, a 10-minute walk from St. Peter’s Basilica. Hundreds of Amazonian Indigenous leaders and guests met at Santa Maria to pray, listen, and conceive a new world—one that celebrates the eternal truth of the proclamation of Jesus Christ: We are all loved. We all belong. All creation is deeply connected.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
IN THE PAST three years, the Trump administration has upended decades of legal precedent that created a humane legal process for asylum seekers to enter the U.S. and build a life for themselves while they wait to plead their case in front of an immigration judge.
Asylum is a protection available to foreign nationals already in the United States or at the U.S. border who meet the international law definition of a “refugee.” A refugee is a person who can’t go home because of “past persecution or a well-founded fear of being persecuted in the future” due to their race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion, according to the United Nations.
On the U.S. Southern border, these are people fleeing organized violence and government repression. Under Trump administration “third-country” agreements, the U.S. will now be deporting many asylum seekers back to the same countries that they are fleeing.
While this scenario is exactly what Trump’s lead immigration policy adviser, Stephen Miller, has always dreamed of, it is not one we have to accept.
People have offered one another sanctuary in various forms throughout history. Christianity has a long tradition of such radical welcome—including biblical texts making clear the mandate to “welcome the stranger” and hundreds of churches that opened their doors as sanctuaries to runaway slaves in the 1860s, civil rights and anti-war activists in the 1960s, and migrants from Central America in the 1980s.
OIL PIPELINES LEAK. This fall, the Keystone Pipeline spilled almost 400,000 gallons of tar sands oil—an especially dirty fossil fuel—in its second large-scale leak in two years. The pipeline’s owner, TC Energy (née TransCanada), wants to build the Keystone XL extension despite the environmental threats.
But leaks aren’t the reason that oil pipelines are problematic. To expand the use of fossil fuels in the context of the climate crisis that has begun to destroy our planet is an immoral and even criminal act. That’s why actions such as those of the so-called “valve turners” (page 32) are not only justified but a necessary alarm clock for a still-somnolent public.
Illustration by Ellen Weinstein
THIS SUMMER, WHILE working on a forthcoming book, I spent a great deal of time thinking, praying, and wrestling with identifying a moral vision and narrative that would be capable of uniting our country and counteracting its perilous levels of polarization. When I look back over American history, “the beloved community” stands out as perhaps the most hopeful and transformational moral vision, one that I believe can be recast and reimagined to unite most Americans around a bigger story of us. The beloved community combines civic ideals with deep spiritual and religious values—that’s why it’s a vision that can resonate across religions and with those who check “none of the above” on religious-identification surveys.
The term was coined in the early days of the 20th century by the philosopher-theologian Josiah Royce. However, it was Martin Luther King Jr., as well as other leaders in the civil rights struggle, who popularized the term. Dr. King spoke about the beloved community in a 1956 speech he gave at a rally following the Supreme Court decision desegregating buses in Montgomery, Ala. King said, “the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opponents into friends. It is this type of goodwill that will transform the deep gloom of the old age into the exuberant gladness of the new age. It is this love which will bring about miracles in the hearts of [people].”
Abby Stein. Photograph by Amy Lombard.
IT'S A WARM September morning, and roughly 20 women are gathered in a women-only coworking space in Brooklyn. After brief introductions, a poem honoring the first month of the Muslim calendar, and a hymn from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (widely known as the Mormon church), Abby Stein speaks about the upcoming Jewish High Holy Days.
Stein grew up in a strict Orthodox Jewish community and was assigned to be male at birth. From a young age, she says, she knew she was a girl, but didn’t have the vocabulary to describe what she was feeling. Gender roles were so strict in her community that, according to Stein, the concept of being gay or transgender simply didn’t exist.
“Forget separate roles,” Stein tells me. “Men and women aren’t even supposed to interact.”
For several years beginning when she was 9, Stein prayed every night that God would make her a girl while she slept. She began questioning her belief in God: “How can I trust my parents and teachers about something as big as God and religion that touches our entire lives when they could be mistaken about something so existential as who I am?”
Stein got married, was ordained as a rabbi, and had a son. But by her early 20s, it wasn’t working. She watched YouTube to learn English (she’d previously spoken only Yiddish and Hebrew), studied for her GED, and eventually left the community. She came out as transgender while an undergraduate at Columbia University and is now an activist in both transgender and formerly Orthodox communities.
Stein has found a new home in several LGBTQ-inclusive Jewish spaces, but she finds them limiting. “All of these communities, even the ones as progressive as they are, they still follow a very set tradition,” she says. At the September gathering, Stein discusses the biblical story of Ruth and her mother-in-law, Naomi, who share a deep love that some consider romantic. “If you ask me,” says Stein, with a half-joking grin, “everyone in the Bible is queer.”
Things are different at Sacred Space, a multifaith gathering that meets on the first Sunday of every month. The gathering is both a refuge for women who have left their religious traditions and a seminar for those who still hope to change their faith communities from within. No one religion is playing host. Everyone is welcome to bring their own traditions; only sexism, racism, homophobia, and other forms of exclusion are off the table.
Illustration by Stuart McReath
WHEN I TOLD my oldest son I was writing about universal basic income (UBI), he said, “All I know is that the Silicon Valley guys are pushing it, so it must be bad.” And he had a point. UBI has entered U.S. political debate most prominently as Silicon Valley’s favorite solution to a problem mostly of its own creation—massive permanent job loss due to artificial intelligence and robotics.
Under a universal basic income policy, all U.S. citizens would receive from the government a regular, permanent payment of, say, $1,000 per month, regardless of their other income or employment status. It wouldn’t get rid of the grotesque income inequality in the U.S. In fact, it wouldn’t even guarantee each person a decent standard of living. But it would get everyone up to the official poverty level.
Tech industry UBI proponents include Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Tesla founder Elon Musk, and Amazon kingpin Jeff Bezos. But the idea is most identified with former Silicon Valley entrepreneur Andrew Yang, who made it the defining issue of his long-shot campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Still, UBI is an idea much older and bigger than any of its shadier supporters. While the term “universal basic income” is of fairly recent coinage, the idea that every human deserves some share of the earth’s bounty is an old one. In 1797, one of America’s founding philosophes, Thomas Paine, wrote that “the earth, in its natural uncultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race.” But, Paine continued, “the system of landed property ... has absorbed the property of all those whom it dispossessed, without providing, as ought to have been done, an indemnification for that loss.”
Paine proposed a single payment at the attainment of adulthood as compensation for the loss of our natural right to the earth. Paine was echoing the ideas of some of the earliest Christian teachers, including St. Ambrose (340-397 C.E.), who wrote: “God has ordered all things ... so that there should be food in common to all, and that the earth should be the common possession of all. Nature, therefore, has produced a common right for all, but greed has made it a right for a few.”
So universal basic income is not just the latest Silicon Valley fad. It’s rooted in an understanding of the origins of wealth and of our obligations to each other that is consistent with both our democratic and religious traditions.
But that still leaves plenty of room for debate about whether UBI is the right solution for America’s most pressing social and economic woes.
How Would UBI Work?
ECONOMIC DEBATE OVER the past 50 years has offered a variety of UBI-type proposals, from Richard Nixon’s negative income tax to the social wealth dividend proposed by some contemporary democratic socialists. The best-known and most-debated current UBI plan is the one proposed by the Yang campaign. This version of UBI rests on three pillars:
First, it is “universal.” Everyone gets it, without conditions—from Warren Buffett down to the apparently able-bodied guy with the “Please Help” sign at the exit ramp. That, of course, raises the first blizzard of objections. Why give money to rich people who don’t need it or purportedly irresponsible people who might waste it?
Paying for UBI would almost certainly involve new taxes on the wealthy, so Warren Buffett wouldn’t be keeping his $1,000 per month. As to the fear of aiding the “undeserving poor,” it’s true that historically most of the meager social benefits offered in the U.S. are means-tested (for those with the very lowest incomes) and conditional upon some form of good behavior (hours worked, clean drug tests, etc.). This has helped create a culture that stigmatizes public benefits as “welfare” and brands beneficiaries as, if not sinful, at least defective.
HANNAH ARENDT SAID we can ask of life, even in the darkest of times, a “redemptive element,” and art can be that—an affirmation of right, light, truth, some beleaguered beauty. But note well: Art is no escape from the problems of the world but, rather, a repurposing, a resistance. And, of course, this phenomenon of violence into art can go both ways. Michelangelo’s bronzes, including his colossal papal statue of Pope Julius II, were melted down into cannons and other weapons during the French Revolution. It’s our choice.
Here are four artists who chose to turn trauma—civil war, natural disasters, apartheid, and female genital mutilation—into sights to behold.
Ralph Ziman, South Africa
Designed and put into service in apartheid South Africa in the 1980s, the so-called Casspir, a mine-resistant and ambush-protected vehicle, has been subverted. Says South African artist Ralph Ziman: “The Africanization of the Casspir seemed to take away the terror it once evoked ... people felt comfortable to approach it, touch it, and share their stories and memories.” He elaborates on his intention: “To make this weapon of war, this ultimate symbol of oppressing ... to reclaim it, to own it, make it African, make it beautiful, make it shine.”
Born in South Africa in 1963, Ziman grew up in a strict system of institutionalized racial segregation and political and economic discrimination—“apartheid,” which translates in Afrikaans to “apartness.”
“I have vivid memories,” he says of his first sighting of a Casspir. It was April 1993. Charismatic leader Chris Hani had been gunned down outside his house in a Johannesburg suburb by a white nationalist. The artist drove to the funeral and saw columns of Casspirs descending the dusty streets; heavily armed police fired tear gas, shotguns, and automatic weapons. More of the same occurred the next day in Soweto, where police and army units parked their Casspirs along the highway and exchanged gunfire with members of the African National Congress. “Tear gas and smoke burned our eyes and into our memories, along with the sight of armed men on the Casspirs ... for me, covering this beast with beads is catharsis,” says Ziman.
Photo illustration by David Junkin / Photo of Greta Thunberg by Getty Images
INSPIRATION AND ENCOURAGEMENT can come from many places. For some, they’re found in a lifetime of work from a literary giant. For others, they emerge, unexpectedly, from an indomitable 16-year-old prophet with preternatural vision and determination. And many of us are heartened, and challenged to see differently, by the inspired imagination of artists—from a poet who urges us to “discover the truth of wonder and rejoice in the silent voice of God” (p. 39) to creatives around the world who transform the tools of trauma into affirmations of healing, redemption, and resistance.
Neon
Blessed Are the Merciful
In Clemency, Emmy winner and Oscar nominee Alfre Woodard plays Bernadine Williams, a prison warden preparing to oversee her 12th execution. Viewers enter Williams’ mind as she grapples with executing another prisoner. A film with emotional weight and pertinent themes, Clemency raises important questions.
Neon
Illustration by Ken Davis
BECAUSE OF PRESIDENT Trump's order to increase tariffs on imports, Christmas shopping this year could be more frenzied than usual. That last shipment of Chinese-made items is selling fast at Walmart, so you’ve got to shove your shopping cart into the fray if you want to preserve our constitutional right to low prices. Not to complain about Trump’s attempts to bring manufacturing back to the U.S., of course. We look forward to our factory smokestacks once again belching the sweet soot of freedom, but it probably won’t be in time for Black Friday.
I got a jump on shopping this year by buying that new acupuncture cell phone app. Just released, it’s really [ow!] great, although you have to [ow!] hold it just right or [ow!] it doesn’t work. Okay there ... that pressure point ... No more neck pain. Unless I get a phone call [ow!]. “Hello?” [ow!]
We’re especially looking forward to the holidays this year, since getting to Christmas means we made it past Thanksgiving, when for the first time in history the president declined to pardon the White House turkey and, instead—at the urging of adviser Stephen Miller—cooked it and its entire family.
Illustration by Ellen Weinstein
WE ARE LIVING in a moment of ruptured imagination brought on by the growing specter of deadly violence, which has triggered in many a crisis of faith. But these lectionary readings say to Christians, “Wait a minute, not so fast!” A promise-bearing deliverer has come to topple competing kingdoms and bring distress to wielders of death. Matthew’s message is, “Keep awake.” And the prayerful petitions of the psalms outline the marks of righteous governance: defending the poor, giving deliverance to the needy, and crushing the oppressor (Psalm 72:4).
Salvation comes in the form of a child and angels act as divine emissaries—quieting fear in one instance and stirring up disquiet in the hearts of others (Matthew 2). Were it not for an angel allaying Joseph’s fear about Jesus’ atypical paternity, life as a teenage single parent would have been Mary’s lot. Had an angel not appeared to Joseph in a dream urging him to flee to Egypt, or had a dream not disrupted the course of the Magi warning them to not return to Herod, the scriptural record would have unfolded very differently.
The promise of coming joy and peace reveals much more than incarnational presence. Jesus’ coming brings to our expectant minds the essential nature of a God who wields love and salvation. God always provides a way to secure such provisions. Angelic envoys, as Matthew narrates, stand ready to do God’s bidding.
Illustration by Livia Falcaru
Save for the sun, the nearest star
is more than twenty-five million
million miles away.
What has a single star
shining in Bethlehem
to do with us?
WISDOM RARELY SURPRISES. More rarely does it shock or scandalize. Yet, with The Universal Christ, Richard Rohr, the Franciscan priest and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation, aims to do both.
He starts with the Incarnation. Was it a startling, once-in-eternity event that explains Jesus Christ’s holiness? Rohr suggests instead that the Incarnation is the fundamental pattern for all creation. We live within, and are ourselves a party to, this ongoing incarnation—people, pets, and poppy seeds alike. Nothing lacks the divine impress. In this worldview, “a mature Christian sees Christ in everything and everyone.”
To underscore this view, Rohr provocatively disentangles the modifier “Christ” from “Jesus.” He reserves “Jesus” for Jesus of Nazareth. “Christ” is for the Divine Presence that has existed in all things since creation, both before and after Jesus of Nazareth demonstrated total, unrelenting acceptance of the divine.