Loving the Foreigner and Alien in Your Land

Lest we as Christians think, as some do and behave, that God's love is only for our friends and fellow church members, our cliches and special few relatives, let us be reminded again that God's love is to be given through us to all men - to those outside one's church fellowship, to the homeless, the foreigner and alien working and living in our lands, to the stranger and the unlovely, to those who give us pain and harm, to any and all men and women and children that we meet.

To remember, that we were once "foreigners and aliens" to the very God who loved us and made us his sons and daughters, adopting us into his blood-bought family as his own. It is love that removes barriers between men and women, nations and countries, gangs and ghettos, colours, ethnicities, cutlures, and nationalities. We are bearers of a "New Country" without borders, without armed guards, without barbed walls, without bigotry and racial hate.

We are to be mindful to help and give and share in our lives even in the little things, the things we may overlook, that may be a blessing to someone else - our speech, our tone of voice, how we would look to someone in respect or disrespect, our mannerisms and airs. What we own or throw out, what we spend or should withhold in spending, where we go or would avoid going, and how we use our time or how we should better use our time.

Let the Christian not live vain, meager, mean and selfish lives... let us learn to live in a richness and fullness that bears the very love God has given to us - without measure, abundant, beyond gold and silver, selfless, serving, sacrificial.

- skinhead

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Biblical injunctions regarding aliens in our midst

http://www.patheos.com/community/rogereolson/2011/06/23/biblical-injunctions-regarding-aliens-in-our-midst/

by Roger Olson

June 23, 2011

Thanks to my colleague and dean David Garland for compiling the following list of biblical injunctions regarding

I. How God’s People are to Treat Aliens and Strangers Among Them

Exodus 22:21 (NRSV)

21. You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.

Exodus 23:9 (NRSV)

9. You shall not oppress a resident alien; you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.

Leviticus 19:33 (NRSV)

33. When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien.

Leviticus 23:22 (NRSV)

22. When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest; you shall leave them for the poor and for the alien: I am the Lord your God.

Leviticus 24:22 (NRSV)

22. You shall have one law for the alien and for the citizen: for I am the Lord your God.

Numbers 15:16 (NRSV)

16. You and the alien who resides with you shall have the same law and the same ordinance.

Deuteronomy 1:16 (NRSV)

16. I charged your judges at that time: “Give the members of your community a fair hearing, and judge rightly between one person and another, whether citizen or resident alien.

Deuteronomy 24:20-21 (NRSV)

20. When you beat your olive trees, do not strip what is left; it shall be for the alien, the orphan, and the widow.

21. When you gather the grapes of your vineyard, do not glean what is left; it shall be for the alien, the orphan, and the widow.

Deuteronomy 27:19 (NRSV)

19. “Cursed be anyone who deprives the alien, the orphan, and the widow of justice.” All the people shall say, “Amen!”

Jeremiah 7:4-12 (NRSV)

4. Do not trust in these deceptive words: “This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.”

5. For if you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly one with another,

6. if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt,

7. then I will dwell with you in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your ancestors forever and ever.

Zechariah 7:10 (NRSV)

10. do not oppress the widow, the orphan, the alien, or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another.

Malachi 3:5 (NRSV)

5. Then I will draw near to you for judgment; I will be swift to bear witness against the sorcerers, against the adulterers, against those who swear falsely, against those who oppress the hired workers in their wages, the widow and the orphan, against those who thrust aside the alien, and do not fear me, says the Lord of hosts.

II. We are all Aliens and Foreigns

Psalm 39:12 (NRSV)

12. “Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear to my cry; do not hold your peace at my tears. For I am your passing guest, an alien, like all my forebears.

Ephesians 2:12 (NRSV)

12. remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.

Ephesians 2:19 (NRSV)

19. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God,

1 Peter 1:1-2 (NRSV)

1. Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To the exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, 2. who have been chosen and destined by God the Father and sanctified by the Spirit to be obedient to Jesus Christ and to be sprinkled with his blood: May grace and peace be yours in abundance.

1 Peter 2:11-12

11. Beloved, I urge you as aliens and exiles to abstain from the desires of the flesh that wage war against the soul. 12. Conduct yourselves honorably among the Gentiles, so that, though they malign you as evildoers, they may see your honorable deeds and glorify God when he comes to judge.

III. Show Hospitality to Strangers (a command, not advice)

Romans 12:13 (NRSV)

13. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.

Hebrews 13:2 (NRSV)

2. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.

1 Peter 3:9 (NRSV)

9. Be hospitable to one another without complaining.

Pre-Marital Ideals and Expectations

An Open Letter to Donald Miller on Your Engagement

http://blog.christianitytoday.com/women/2011/06/an_open_letter_to_donald_mille.html

First, congratulations. Second, let's talk about that list of qualities we should want in a spouse.

by Karen Swallow Prior

posted June 23, 2011

Dear Donald,

First of all, I’m a fan. I’ll admit I’m not young enough or hip enough to have discovered you on my own, but the college students I teach help me to keep up with the times, and they introduced me to your work some years ago. I love it all, especially A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. I wish I’d had your books when I was languishing in youth group hell many years ago.

I’m thrilled to learn of your recent engagement. As someone who’s been married for 26 years—to the same man, no less—I can fully rejoice with you and Paige in your anticipation of the blessings, challenges, joys, pains, and memories this covenant relationship will bring.

In addition to two and a half decades of marriage, I bring the second-hand experiences of a fair number of hook-ups, break-ups, engagements, broken engagements, marriages, searching, longing, and questioning on matters of love and marriage: when you work with college students, you get to live through a lot of this with them. I’ve had the chance to watch a lot of young people make good decisions and bad. (And I made a few of each in my day.)

So when I heard about your recent post, “What are You Looking for in a Spouse? Why not Create a List?”— I was intrigued. It’s a good thing to know one’s self well enough before entering a lifelong partnership to be able to identify in a potential mate a handful of deal-breakers. For the Christian, of course, the first of these non-negotiables is being equally yoked. There are likely a few qualities that are essential to one’s being and therefore non-negotiable. One such non-negotiable for me would be a love of animals. Not an abstract kind of love, but the kind that turns pets into family members who share the furniture with the humans. A spouse who didn’t share this value would doom one or the other, and therefore both, to perpetual misery. I encourage my students to identify such non-negotiables when they seek my advice, as they often do.

But upon reading your post—which includes a list of qualities that your fiancée, Paige, sought in the man of her dreams long before she had met her future husband—my intrigue grew into concern.

You see, a list like the one in your post—a list of more than a dozen traits the dream husband should exhibit, most of them self-centered, focusing on how a future spouse will treat “me” and make “me” feel—doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for God to bring a partner who can meet needs we don’t even know we have, needs God knows more intimately than we or our spouses can ever know.

While Paige wrote that her dream spouse would be someone who “is always thinking about me,” I can pretty much guarantee that neither your first fight nor your 91st will be about how much thinking you did about her on any given day. It will be about who forgot to mail the credit card payment or who didn’t roll up the car windows before it rained, or whether or not you really need more towels, again.

Yet, this matter of the list isn’t really my greatest concern.

My greatest concern is that you both realize that whatever qualities each of you identifies as non-negotiable must be already present in the other person. Here’s my plea, to both of you: Don’t enter into marriage with the expectation that one or both of you will “change,” at least not in some pre-determined, pre-scripted way.

You don’t put it quite this way in your post (in fact, Paige says you have all 15 qualities of her dream man already), but the idea creeps in rather stealthily (as such ideas are wont to do) when you say that one “great thing about creating a list is that Paige helps me become this man,” and later, “Paige is helping me become her dream come true.” This sounds as though you’re both banking on her changing you.

This notion that a man will change for a woman goes all the way back to Adam’s bite of the apple, but has more salient and recent precedents in Victorian thinking and Romanticism. It’s Victorian to think it is the woman’s role to “civilize” a man and make him a more suitable husband. It’s romantic to think such a thing is possible.

Of course, both husbands and wives do change over the course of a long marriage. Indeed all people change over time. They just don’t necessarily change in the ways we want or expect. And that’s not a bad thing. The long-haired, skinny guitarist in a rock band that I married years ago is now a mild-mannered school teacher who’d rather swing a golf club than a guitar axe. Likewise, the waif my husband wed who hid her insecurities behind too much black eye make-up and aspired to change the world as a social worker has become a cynical academic with few wifely qualities, save an overindulgence in footwear that borders on neurotic.

Yet, each of us is for the other, I firmly believe, what God knew we needed. Through God’s grace, we have brought out the best in each other over the years, even though that best wouldn’t likely have been found on any list either us might have written so many years ago.

I pray for the same grace for you and Paige as you grow, both as individuals and as spouses to each other. And I pray that the changes each of you undergoes in your great marriage adventure are both delightful and surprising.

Your fan,

Karen

The Civil Rights of Gay Marriage

As an introduction, let me say that I nearly turned this video off because I was so offended by its visceral content until about halfway through when a small twist occurred to the initial plot lines. Consequently, I've added this video more than a year after writing my original article below because it so powerfully dovetails with its argument for equality and respect to people different from  what we perceive as "mainstream America."

And while listening, remember that Snider is speaking from a passionate heart to the ills and abuses that he is observing in an American society of intolerance and short-sightedness created by a Christian culture built of fear, labeling, bullying, and misunderstanding.

R.E. Slater

November 5, 2012

OFFICIAL Preacher Phil Snider gives interesting gay rights speech

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=A8JsRx2lois

Where Do We Stand as Christians?

Obviously the topic of gay rights will have strong arguments from both sides of the referendum yet the article below is not given to say either "yea" or "nay" to its passage, but to show the many political sides of institutional change that must come as state's review their subsequent policies and practices. As example, adoption agencies that are state-funded will be forced to withdraw from budgeted funding, state legislatures will need to rewrite a variety of exclusions and exceptions - both religious and civil - to their newly adopted bill, public forums and elections will be more polarized than ever, and the list could go on and on.

However, I do sympathize with the passing of New York's Gay Rights bill (as soundly stated in J.R. Daniel Kirk's previous article - http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2011/06/gay-marriage-in-new-york.html) and will elucidate more my reasonings in later articles. And yet, it is important to note that passage of major political bills like this one will require major societal re-structuring in outlook and demeanor for many years to come.

A simple example of this "political struggle of wills" would be that of the 1960s Civil Rights movements that America is still "working through" these past 40-50 years - and now well into the 21st Century. More to the point, had minority rights been a part of the American platform at the founding of its 13 Colonies addressing the disallowal of acts of slavery in each state's original charters, then the Civil War may not have been fought with the same bloody consequences and destructive toll that it had placed upon its divided citizenry. And even at that, had Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation been properly adopted by both the federal and state legislatures of the United States at the conclusion of the Civil War, then subsequent civil rights acts, abuses, practices and grievous infractions would not have been so horribly endured by America's black citizenry for as long as it had with so many negative consequences. Nor would the Civil Rights Marches (Civil Rights movement) have occurred nearly 100 years later after the Emancipation Proclamation was made!

I say all of this not only as a form of history lesson, but to state that we as American citizens must work to preserve our unions in a more peaceful state of harmony and not disruption. When we see so many examples of badly conducted individual rights, a corrupt and divisive government, unlawful acts of personal shame and harm being enacted before us and nearly everywhere around us - from the workplace, to sports teams, to the town halls, and worship centers around America. We can do better than that. For this is not a plea to lessen our beliefs and opinions, but to better express them in more personally responsible behaviors, speech and actions.

For thus was America so formed - to protect the rights of all individuals and not just our own. To understand why another's rights are so important to protect; to work together as a society towards civil agreements; and towards a more tolerant, pluralistic union of, for, and by the people. A people who on better days can show a truer humanity than ever was witness by mankind. Who seek the life, liberty and justice of every man, woman and child America has come to represent. And must now determine to argue and debate in far better form than we have in the past, realizing that all citizens - as all people everywhere - must be represented in government and not just the loudest, the best politically organized, nor by the fearful, who dread acts of change to "traditional societal norms". This is the America that is supposedly based on the Christian principals of truth and justice, each tempered in love. So then, let us dedicate and commit ourselves to these very purposes as hallowed acts of grace, longsuffering, charity, mercy and forgiveness. Let us not be negligent of them. For these are ours both to keep as well as to share.

skinhead

June 28, 2011

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New York Approves Gay Marriage

http://blog.christianitytoday.com/ctpolitics/2011/06/new_york_approv.html

by Tobin Grant

posted June 24, 2011

New York will become the sixth state to approve same-sex marriage (the District of Columbia also allows gay marriage). Because of the state's large population, the number of Americans living in states that allow gay marriage will more than double. With New York, 35 million Americans will live in states with gay marriage, one in nine Americans.

The New York Senate approved a new same-sex marriage bill tonight by a vote of 33 to 29. Even though nearly all Republicans voted against the bill, the Republican-controlled Senate passed the bill because of four Republicans who voted with the Democrats. Only two Republican Senators openly backed the bill until just before the vote when Sen. Stephen Saland (Rep.) said he would give the bill the 32nd vote needed for passage. Only one Democrat, Sen. Ruben Diaz, voted against the measure. Only two Republican Senators openly backed the bill prior to the vote.

Additional votes were gained only after a majority in the Senate reached agreement on religious protections in the bill. Shortly before the gay marriage bill vote, the religious exemptions were reportedly passed by a 36-26 vote. The bill passed by the State Assembly included protections for clergy and churches. It did not include explicit protections for faith-based nonprofits. In Illinois, for example, the recent civil unions law has meant that Catholic Social Services could no longer receive state funds for its foster care and adoption services. The nonprofit has a policy against placing children with same-sex couples.

Opponents of the Assembly bill also wanted exemptions for individuals and businesses who objected to gay marriage for religious reasons. These individuals could be in violation of local ordinances. They could also be forced to allow gay couples to use their facilities. For example, without exemptions, critics argued, a business that rents its facilities for weddings could not refuse a couple simply because they were a same-sex couple.

Even the broadest religious exemptions would not be enough for some opponents of same-sex marriage. Family Research Council's Peter Sprigg said “the principal objection to homosexual 'marriage' has nothing to do with religion.”

“At its heart, marriage is neither a civil institution nor a religious institution. Instead, marriage is a natural institution—rooted in the order of nature itself,” Sprigg said. “The core message of the opposition to homosexual 'marriage' is not just, 'Don’t make us perform same-sex weddings in our church.' Instead, it is: 'Society needs children, and children need a mom and a dad.'”

The new bill still needs to be approved by the Assembly (because of the new religious exemptions) and then be signed by the governor. The Assembly is expected to approve the new language quickly. The signature of Gov. Andrew Cuomo is all but certain. The governor has been an outspoken advocate for same-sex marriage in New York. The measure will go into effect 30 days after he signs it.

The outcome of the bill has been in doubt for weeks. The State Assembly has passed same-sex marriage legislation four times in the past five years. The Senate has never approved it. In 2009, the Senate voted 38-24 against same-sex marriage. After the 2010 election, Republicans gained control but the Senate lost some key opponents to gay marriage. By the end of last week, a handful of senators from both parties announced they would be changing their positions, bringing the number of announced supporters to 31, one shy of the number needed for passage.

GOP Senators debated whether to allow the bill to be considered. Part of the delay was reportedly due to negotiations over more religious exemptions for groups such as adoption agencies. With more protections, Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos (Republican) decided to let the bill be considered.

Prior to the vote, the New York capitol was filled with protesters for both sides. One side singing hymns and spirituals chanting “God says no.” The other side included a smaller group of Jewish and Christian leaders calling out “God is love.”

Opponents of same-sex marriage delivered 63,000 petitions and held a press conference outside of the Republican conference room. In addition to featuring leaders like National Organization for Marriage President Brian Brown, the press conference included New York Giants receiver David Tyree.

Tyree was the hero of the Giants Super Bowl win in 2007. Tyree told the New York Daily News he “probably would” give up the Super Bowl to stop same-sex marriage.

Nothing means more to me than that my God would be honored,” Tyree said. “Being the fact that I firmly believe that God created and ordained marriage between a man and a woman, I believe that that's something that should be fought for at all costs.”

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The Futility of the Theological Argument over Gays and Lesbians

An Interview with Theologian Walter Brueggemann

by Nancy Rosenbaum, producer

July 3, 2011

Listen to the Interview here -

http://blog.onbeing.org/post/7188276014/walter-brueggemann-on-the-futility-of-the

Protestant theologian Walter Brueggemann once compared LGBTQ people to canaries in a coal mine, likening these proverbial birds to society’s most vulnerable members. Determining how the canaries are treated, says Brueggemann in an interview with The Witness, “is always the test case about whether we are following Jesus.”

Earlier this spring, Krista sat down with Brueggemann in our studios. In the audio clip excerpted here, he explains why he thinks gay and lesbian sexuality “has such adrenaline” in and beyond church communities. For Brueggemann, there’s no point in having a theological discussion about homosexuality. He thinks homophobia is a proxy for people’s ill-defined fears about an old world order that’s rapidly disappearing:

“It is an amorphous anxiety that we’re in a free fall as a society. And I think we kind of are in free fall as a society, but I don’t think it has anything to do with gays and lesbians particularly.”

Last week in New York, that collective “amorphous anxiety” got trumped by Governor Andrew Cuomo’s dogged push for social change with the passage of the Marriage Equality Act by the state legislature.

According to The New York Times, Governor Cuomo gathered all of the state’s Republican senators at his home to plead his case for the bill’s passage. “Their love is worth the same as your love,” he reportedly told the senators. “Their partnership is worth the same as your partnership. And they are equal in your eyes to you. That is the driving issue.”

Gay Marriage in New York

Daniel Kirk in his article further below states the necessity as Christians to support the "Marriage-Equality Act" or Gay Marriage bill, passed in New York State on June 14, 2011. Not because we would condone gay marriage or homosexuality, but because the civil rights of gays and lesbians must be allowed and protected for a whole host of reasons. And though this may mean that by this legislation we inadvertently "free" people to do what we believe is wrong or sinful, we must do so in a socially constructive way granting justice to all segments of American society and not just some segments of our society (as argued in the next article - http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2011/06/new-york-approves-gay-marriage.html).

If you must, I urge you to read and re-read Kirk's article below until you understand the force of his argument. For it shows the many innuendos that can come out of this bill if it is not passed. It is the only right thing that we can do given the incorporated laws of this land. For America is not a non-religious country but a pluralistic constituency primarily founded in Christian principals but necessarily yielding to other religious and humanitarian expressions of its democratic laws as it must underneath its current enactments of charters and government.

And though I believe Christianity expresses democracy's ideals the best (despite Christian-Americans oft refusals to practice those ideals), the United States Constitution speaks to all citizenry's religious freedoms and not just to those who are Christian. Consequently, as democratized Christians, we must legally accept and actively articulate America's incorporation of all its citizenry's beliefs and practices, regardless of religious or non-religious preference and practice. It is both Constitutional as well as democratic.

However, by the very nature of pluralism, we may see a dilution of basic human rights and freedoms through succeeding legal interpretations as America moves from its originating Christian idealisms to a postmodernistic pan-theism of religious expression. To hope in the superiority of humanistic idealism may be to belatedly discover a grossly failing sub-standard from that of Christianity's ultimate expression vouchsafed through Scripture's witness and testimony. One found in the biblical records of its faith adherents (known as the remnant of God) - both in the highs and the lows of their faith observance. For their errors and failings can be as instructive as their successful faith observance to God's laws. And this is true for us as well - both as individuals and as a democratic society.

And yet the hope of Scripture is that of incorporating all men and women of all nations and cultures, heritages and religious practices, into a heavenly kingdom that is at once pluralistic, trans-national and trans-cultural. Importantly, the Scriptures also note that it is God's Son and divine/human representative Jesus, who is both the center and foundation for this pluralistic postmodern society. Not Buddha, not Mohammad, not humanism, not a religion other than that of Christ. For this is the heart of Christianity's "future" and its millennial hope of destiny.

For if the Kingdom of God is the template for America's Constitutional form of government - as it could be for any nation on earth - than there can be hope. But to the extent that we move away from Christ than I deem our society to eventually fail in the very pluralism that it legally espouses and defends. By this very act of choice must each succeeding American generation determine its understandings and responsibilities as a free society unguardedly open to all walks and manners of living. We cannot force this line of observance but must demonstrate by our societal behaviors and responses how this democratic ideal may be obtained. For if we were to force our religious preferences upon an American society composed of a multitude of ethnicities and lifestyles then we would but create disharmony, dissonance, anarchy and perhaps revolution. Which may or may not succeed in emulating America's earlier idealisms and laws, and could be much the worse for the conflict created.

Advisedly, it would be better to support our current system of government - to lift it up when others decry it, to make it strong for the weak, more just for the ridiculed, wise for the foolish, courageous for the despised, receptive to the downtrodden. It is to each succeeding generation's charter of obligations to better present and expand the ideals of democracy than the previous generation's presentation, while preventing those who would trample it casually or selfishly, ruthlessly or blindly, from its undoing. For opportunity requires leadership --> leadership requires wisdom --> wisdom demands justice --> justice creates vision --> and vision sees opportunity.

skinhead
June 27, 2011

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http://www.jrdkirk.com/2011/06/25/gay-marriage-in-new-york/

by J.R. Daniel Kirk

posted June 25, 2011

New York’s state legislature has approved a gay marriage bill, and governor Andrew Cuomo has signed it into law.

As the states take up this issue one-by-one, I’ll keep working out my thoughts on the issue. I think that this is a complex issue for Christians. Here’s what it comes down to for me:

As long as the state is in the marriage business, Christians should support gay marriage as an embodiment of our calling to love our neighbor as ourselves

First, I understand that there is a strong religious argument for the “definition” of marriage being the joining of one man and one woman. However, the state is not in the business of adhering to or adjudicating religious principles.

Second, to my mind, the best possible scenario is this: (1) the state does not marry anyone or recognize anyone’s marriage; (2) the state performs civil unions for any two persons who wish to join their lives for mutual support; (3) these civil unions are performed by civil servants, not ministers of the churches; and (4) churches can marry before God whomever they deem fit to marry in accordance with their religious convictions.

However, since this is not the case, and since the state has chosen to assign certain rights and privileges to married couples, people with religious convictions have to figure out not one problem, but two.

First, what do we think about homosexuality within the context of our religious community of faith?

But then the second, related but separable question is, What do we think about homosexual marriage within the state in which we find ourselves?

Here’s where, historically, Christians have done poorly: we have failed to realize that our answer to Question 1 does not determine that we attempt to enforce that answer as we take up Question 2.

I want to suggest that even those of us who do not support gay marriage within our faith communities have an obligation to support it in civil law as an expression of our calling to love our neighbor as ourselves.

What if there were a law that schools could only teach evolution and had to teach evolution in Biology class? I don’t mean that public schools had to do this, but all schools and educational programs had to adhere to this. What if we didn’t have the freedom to enact our wrongheaded desire to deny evolution and embrace creationism as an alternative?

If we want the freedom to make our own religious decisions about education and our view of the world and how to best educate our children, we are required to secure for those who disagree with us about every religious decision the freedom to enact their irreligious or non-religious or differing religious understanding of what a fruitful life here on earth looks like.

Similarly, what if our law-makers increasingly enacted provisions of sharia law? Do we want people determining what we can and can’t eat based on religious convictions with which we don’t agree? We’ve grown to anticipate that our representatives in various state legislature will enact laws for justice that do not infringe on our own free practice.

As Christians, we need to learn how to hold our own religious views while seeking liberty and justice for all–not just those who happen to believe as we do. In part, this will mean that we free people to do what we would believe is wrong.

: About J.R. Daniel Kirk:

Professor at Fuller Seminary, resident of San Francisco, consumer of dark chocolate, brewer of dark beer, reader of Flannery O'Connor, watcher of the Coen Brothers, listener of The Mountain Goats.    All Posts by J. R. Daniel Kirk | Share By Email

NT Wright - What Is Hell Like? Does It Even Exist?

Tom Wright has a very direct and succinct way of expressing the most difficult concepts in very elegant and personal terms. I find this with Rob Bell too who likewise would say the same thing as is heard here by Mr. Wright though many would construe Bell to be a universalist denying hell.

However, in truth, Bell is not a universalist but believes in libertarian free will which is just the opposite of universalism. Who preaches the enormity of our choices in this life - whether to proceed to a fuller and richer humanity in submission to the Creator God of grace, salvation and truth, or to proceed to a progressively de-humanizing state of non-humanity by the rejection of God, his love, salvation and truth. This is the nature of hell. Not its many vivid Christian descriptions and imageries.

For as Wright says herewith, hell is more than these things, and worse than these things, whom the NT writers have borne witness to. Far better is it to be part of God's plan of joining earth and heaven than it would be to reject any participation in this plan at all. We want to be part of this celebration, this cosmic party, this reunion and harmonizing of our soul to creation to the very divine itself. Not to stand outside of it mad and alone and willfully refusing joyous participation.

It makes no sense while it makes all the sense in the world. And so, judgement comes by our own "hands" if you well, by our own refusals to be a part of the salvation that is in Jesus, Lord of Heaven and Earth. And it is no party. It is exactly what we want and within it we will make no concessions but to a greater hardness. We will get all the hell we want and this is sad.

So fear then this enslavement, this hardness of heart and blindness to the truth. Haste to come to the living Lord God who daily seeks body and soul, heart and mind, spirit and will, in the greatest of freedoms and most wondrous of joys, life and love. Whatever the pain, the heartache, the guilt, the betrayal, the wrong or sin, repent and come to the Giver of Life, who is very Life himself.

- skinhead

http://100huntley.com/search.php?query=nt+wright

Transcript: " The word hell has had a checkered career in the history of the church. And it wasn't hugely important in the early days. It was important, but not nearly as important as it became in the middle ages. And the in the middle ages, you get this polarization of heaven over here and hell over there, and you have to go to one place or the other eventually. So you have the Sistine Chapel, with that great thing behind the altar. This enormous great judgment seat, with the souls going off into these different directions. Very interestingly, I was sitting in the Sistine chapel just a few weeks ago. I was sitting for a service, and I was sitting next to a Greek Orthodox...who said to me, looking at the pictures of Jesus on one wall. He said, these I can understand. The pictures of Moses on the other wall, he said, those I can understand. Then he pointed at the end wall of judgment, and said, that I cannot understand. That's how you in the West have talked about judgment and heaven and hell. He said, we have never done it that way before, because the bible doesn't do it that way. I thought, whoops. I think hes right actually. And whether you're Catholic or Protestant, that scenario which is etched into the consciousness of Western Christianity really has to be shaken about a bit. Because if heaven and earth are to join together. Its not a matter of leaving earth and going to heaven. Its heaven and earth joined together.

and hell is what happens when human beings say, the God in whose image they were made, we don't want to worship you. We don't want our human life to be shaped by you. We don't want who we are as humans to be transformed by the love of Jesus dying and rising for us. We don't want any of that. We want to stay as we are and do our own thing. And if you do that, what you re saying is, you want to stop being an image bearing human being within this good world that God has made. And you are colluding with your own progressive dehumanization. And that is such a shocking and horrible thing, so that its not surprising that the biblical writers and others have used very vivid and terrifying language about it. But, people have picked that up and said, this is a literal description of reality. Somewhere down there, there is a lake of fire, and its got worms in it and its got serpents and demons and there coming to get you. But I think actually, the reality is more sober and sad than that, which is this progressive shrinking of human life. And that happens during this life, but it seems to be that if someone resolutely says to God, I'm not going to worship you...its not just "I'll not come to church." Its a matter of deep down somewhere, there is a rejection of the good creator God, then that it is a choice humans may make. In other words, I think the human choices in this life really matter. Were not just playing a game of chess, where tomorrow morning God will put the pieces back on the board and say, Ok that was just a game. Now were doing something different. The choices we make here really do matter. There's part of me that would love to be a universalist, and say, it'll be alright. Everyone will get there in the end. I actually...the choices you make in the present are more important than that."

More videos can be found at www.100huntley.com and more of NT Wright's thoughts can be found in his book "Surprised by Hope":

http://www.amazon.com/Surprised-Hope-Rethinking-Resurrection-Mission/dp/0061551821

http://www.harpercollins.com/books/Surprised-Hope-N-T-Wright/?isbn=9780061551826

Book Description

For years Christians have been asking, "If you died tonight, do you know where you would go?" It turns out that many believers have been giving the wrong answer. It is not heaven.

Award-winning author N. T. Wright outlines the present confusion about a Christian's future hope and shows how it is deeply intertwined with how we live today. Wright, who is one of today's premier Bible scholars, asserts that Christianity's most distinctive idea is bodily resurrection. He provides a magisterial defense for a literal resurrection of Jesus and shows how this became the cornerstone for the Christian community's hope in the bodily resurrection of all people at the end of the age. Wright then explores our expectation of "new heavens and a new earth," revealing what happens to the dead until then and what will happen with the "second coming" of Jesus. For many, including many Christians, all this will come as a great surprise.

Wright convincingly argues that what we believe about life after death directly affects what we believe about life before death. For if God intends to renew the whole creation—and if this has already begun in Jesus's resurrection—the church cannot stop at "saving souls" but must anticipate the eventual renewal by working for God's kingdom in the wider world, bringing healing and hope in the present life.

Lively and accessible, this book will surprise and excite all who are interested in the meaning of life, not only after death but before it.

Just Who Are the "REAL" Christians?

Guest Post: Are You in the “Real” Christian Camp?
http://rachelheldevans.com/real-christian-camp-laura-ziesel

by Laura Ziesel
posted June 25, 2011

Today’s guest post comes to us from Laura Ziesel. Laura is a freelance writer and editor living in Azusa, California with her husband. She blogs on matters of faith, gender, church culture and more at www.lauraziesel.com. She is also a contributing writer for The Redemptive Pursuit, a weekly devotional for women. I think a lot of you will relate to her thoughts here!

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

My husband and I have lived in a combined total of 17 unique cities (3 outside of the U.S. or its territories). And we're still quite young. Now that we are adults calling the shots, one of the most important aspects of settling into a new "home" is to find a Christian community. We look for this community in a church, because we believe in the accountability and humility required to be part of a church body. And we look for a church that will both be challenging to us and a place where we can serve.

Exactly a year ago we were driving across the country from Boston to suburban Southern California. Never having lived in California, we were excited about experiencing the newness together. But what we were not excited about was figuring out the landscape of denominations available to us. Why? Because whether or not we want to admit it, we are driven by the belief that there are two main camps of Christians out there: the real Christians and the cultural-only Christians.

Now the complicating factor is that on top of our "Us vs Them" paradigm is the fact that our concept of who the real Christians are has changed over the course of our lives. Unfortunately, American Christianity seems to be divided along our political ideological lines. The extremes of each camp can be characterized (from my perspective) in the following ways:

Conservative Christian: sexually chaste; wears Gap clothing; believes that women can/should not be pastors; denounces homosexuality; equates Christianity with American patriotism; believes that humans are born sinful; submits to the authority of the Bible; esteems Church leaders; takes lots of missions trips to needy places elsewhere.

Liberal Christian: sexually permissive; wears non-branded clothing (well, maybe Birkenstocks); believes that women can/should be pastors; embraces homosexuality; equates Christianity with global citizenship; believes that humans are born good; interprets the Bible casually; believes in organic Church leadership; takes lots of missions trips to needy places just down the block.

Growing up, the real Christians in my mind were conservative Christians. I literally believed that Democrats could not be real Christians. Really. I'm not exaggerating. I would say, about what I have categorized as liberal Christians, "Oh, they're only cultural Christians." But then I went to college and I started to learn about my own culture and how it affected my perspective of the world. And I overcorrected, finding myself saying, about conservative Christians: "Oh, they're only cultural Christians."

Now my husband and I find ourselves in the lovely world of the in between: We don't feel at home in either camp. We believe that both camps err in major and minor ways in regard to orthodoxy and orthopraxy. But, we still feel that we're forced to choose, more or less, between the two camps. And we hate this.

I realized today that my hatred of being torn between these two perceived camps has created a new category of real Christians in my (ever so self-absorbed) mind: Real Christians are those who don't feel at home in either conservative or liberal camps. Now I think everyone is questionable and few have found The Way.

I obviously have a sickness of needing to determine if someone is a friend or an enemy. If only I could focus on the real enemy.

One of my college professors used to say, "The nearer the theological proximity, the greater the vilification." He was right.

Hopefully we won't move for awhile. 'Cause if we do, we're screwed.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Do you feel like you have to choose between two Christian “camps”? How do you decided? How have your biases changed through the years?


(Be sure to check out Laura’s awesome blog!)

Fresh Water Preservation vs Fracking for Natural Gas in NE America

Sportsmen Alliance for Marcellus Conservation: Fishermen, Hunters Take On Fracking
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/25/sportsmen-alliance-for-marcellus-conservation-fracking_n_884589.html

By KEVIN BEGOS

posted 06/25/11

WHITELEY, Pa. -- Fishermen are gearing up and hunters are taking aim – for Marcellus Shale gas drilling.

A new coalition of outdoors groups is emerging as a potent force in the debate over natural gas drilling. The Sportsmen Alliance for Marcellus Conservation isn't against the process of fracking for gas, but its members want to make sure the rush to cash in on the valuable resource doesn't damage streams, forests, and the various creatures that call those places home.

The movement grew out of grass-roots anger as passionate outdoorsmen found their questions about drilling and wildlife brought few answers from local or state officials.

"Either we didn't get a response or the answer we got didn't seem feasible or acceptable. It didn't seem like the people who were in charge had their pulse on what was actually happening," said Ken Dufalla of Clarksville, Pa.

Energy companies have identified major reserves of natural gas throughout the Marcellus Shale, which underlies much of New York and Pennsylvania, and parts of Maryland, Ohio and West Virginia.

More than 3,300 wells have been drilled across Pennsylvania in just the last few years. The boom has raised concerns about the use of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a drilling technique in which water, sand and a small amount of chemicals are used to open gas-bearing shale formations deep underground.

Already, preliminary water testing by sportsmen is showing consistently high levels of bromides and total dissolved solids in some streams near fracking operations, Dufalla said. Bromide is a salt that reacts with the chlorine disinfectants used by drinking water systems and creates trihalomethanes. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says trihalomethanes can be harmful to people who drink water with elevated levels for many years.

Dufalla stands alongside Whiteley Creek, a little mountain stream in Greene County. But something is wrong. The grass is lush and the woods are green, but the water is cloudy and dead-looking.

"It used to be a nice stream," teeming with minnows, crawfish and other aquatic life, he told The Associated Press. No more, said Dufalla, a former deputy game and fish warden for Pennsylvania.
He's worried that nearby gas drilling has damaged the creek, either from improper discharges of waters used in fracking, or from extensive withdrawals of water. The drilling industry says numerous studies have shown fracking is environmentally safe, but Dufalla and other sportsmen want to be sure.

The goal is to build a water quality database that identifies problem areas and makes that information available to the public. Currently, there's little scientific information about whether or how much fracking water impacts wildlife.

Numbers suggest that many people share Dufalla's concerns, in Pennsylvania and throughout the region. Two years ago his local chapter of the Izaak Walton League (a fishing group) had 19 members. Today there are 111.

More than half a dozen existing outdoors groups are part of the Sportsmen Alliance, and collectively they have more than 60,000 members in the states that overlay the Marcellus. Numbers like that mean there's an established grapevine to reach sportsmen and women, and the ties to national groups bring access to experts and funding.

Members of the Sportsmen Alliance are scheduled to meet in July with Michael Krancer, the new secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, said Katy Dunlap, a spokeswoman for Trout Unlimited, a national fishing group based in Arlington, Va.

"We are making specific requests with regards to Wilderness trout waters in Pennsylvania," Dunlap said, such as additional review of proposed wells near such waters.

Some areas may be too environmentally sensitive for drilling, and the Sportsmen Alliance is building a list of places that need special protection, Dunlap said. "Places that once you destroy, you can't take back," she said.

Whether the drilling industry would accept additional limits in some areas remains to be seen. So many wildlife lovers have expressed concern over drilling that the Sportsmen Alliance has moved beyond relying on volunteers.

Earlier this year Dave Sewak began working full-time across Pennsylvania, giving educational talks and training a network of volunteer water testers. "We support the energy development; we just want to see it done right the first time. I think hunters and fishermen are the original environmentalists," said Sewak, a Windber, Pa. resident. He's paid by Trout Unlimited.

There has been considerable public debate over how and if fracking impacts drinking water supplies, but Dufalla and other sportsmen are worried that even low concentrations of fracking chemicals may affect aquatic invertebrates – the tiny water bugs that grow into mayflies and stoneflies, which are in turn eaten by fish and birds.

The sportsmen worry that a stream without bugs could quickly become a stream without fish, and then a valley with fewer birds, and so on up the food chain.

There are signs that both the drilling industry and sportsmen are trying to find common ground. Patrick Creighton, a spokesman for the Marcellus Shale Coalition, a drilling industry business group, told the AP his group has already met with numerous outdoors groups.

"It's a relationship that we're building," he said. They're also working with local groups on a set of "best management practices."

Some pro-drilling outdoorsmen said that's exactly the area that needs work.

Ed Gaw leased drilling rights to a five-acre tract of his 140-acre farm in Evans City, Pa., to the T.W. Phillips Co. and fracking began in the spring of 2009. The next year the drillers did what they considered to be a basic restoration.

"Their idea of reclaiming a site and mine were kind of night and day," said Gaw, who knew when he signed the lease that the landscape would never look as it had before.

But Gaw didn't just complain. He got to work, investing about $20,000 in a restoration that included planting hundreds of spruce and fruit trees. Now there are more deer on the property than before drilling began, he said.

But no one wanted to talk about restoration in the beginning. Gaw remembers telling the drilling company that a beautiful restoration would be in their long-term interest too, but they didn't see the point. "I'm going [to] take you guys kicking and screaming into this model recovery," he recalls saying.

He was right.

Last year, the Pennsylvania Game Commission sponsored a field day on the issue of reclamation at the Gaw Farm, which is about 30 miles north of Pittsburgh. At the time state officials echoed some of Gaw's concerns.

"Landowners have received a wealth of information across the state on leasing, but little attention has been paid to reclamation and habitat recovery," said Tim Hoppe, Northwest Region Wildlife Diversity Biologist for the Game Commission.

Part of the challenge for outdoorsmen and industry is that there isn't much scientific information on how or if fracking impacts wildlife in the Marcellus Shale region.

University of Pennsylvania biologist Margaret Brittingham is just starting such a project, with support from the Pennsylvania Game Commission. The study will look at how drilling changes the forest habitat, and how it could impact wildlife. But it will be a few years before results are in, and that's just one study.

In the meantime, the sportsmen know the value of keeping their hooks sharp and their powder dry, so to speak.

Trout Unlimited and some of the other sportsmen groups have staff attorneys and a history of organizing and funding successful water quality lawsuits.

Dufalla hopes the volunteer water testing database becomes a tool for negotiating with state officials and the drilling industry.

If the testing shows an ongoing pattern of water quality problems near drilling operations the sportsmen may file lawsuits, he said.

"It's the last thing you want to do," Dufalla said.

But some people in rural communities are past accepting assurances by the industry that fracking doesn't cause environmental problems. Some who don't even hunt or fish have joined the effort to patrol waterways.

Waynesburg resident Chuck Hunnell, 68, said a recent public meeting on drilling was the most radical one he's ever been to. But what he sees in the community he grew up in has turned him into an activist monitoring the drilling industry.

"And now until I breathe my last breath, I'm going to be checking on these people," Hunnell said.

Constructive or Critical Thinking?

Thinking Critically About Critical Thinking

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2011/05/the-preferential-option-for-the-poor

The Public Square

R.R. Reno

June/July 2011

When faculties meet to discuss the goals of higher education, the scientists want fact-based knowledge while the humanists insist on the more plastic arts of interpretation. The psychologists, economists, and sociologists promote their favorite methods and theories. But at a certain point, everyone almost always agrees: College professors are supposed to teach “critical thinking.”

It’s a consensus that often extends beyond the walls of the academy. Whether discussing current events or moral issues, we quickly slide into habits of mind that focus on social and historical causes, psychological factors, and other layers of influence that shape our beliefs and opinions. We may not have read Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, but these days most of us are masters of suspicion, quick to adopt a critical stance and eager to avoid being taken in.

As a young teacher I was part of the critical-thinking consensus. I tried to inculcate into my students a questioning, skeptical attitude. What are your assumptions? How can you defend your position? Where’s your evidence? Why do you believe what you believe? Why are you so sure?

I wasn’t wrong. It’s good to critically examine your beliefs. The human mind is made for truth, not falsehood, and we do well to understand the cultural forces that shape our minds. It’s a mode of self-knowledge that helps us sift and weigh the evidence and arguments so as to avoid believing as true that which is actually false.

No, I wasn’t wrong, but then again I wasn’t altogether right either, because I wasn’t critically examining my commitment to critical reason. Reading and teaching (which is often the incentive to reread carefully) John Henry Newman helped me see that I was complicit with the modern tendency to make a god of critical reason, as if avoiding error rather than finding truth is the great goal of life.

Like Plato and St. Augustine, Newman presumes that human beings seek to know the truth. Our hearts are restless, not with fear of error, but with a desire to rest in God, who is the fullness of all truth. The fundamental and fulfilling activity of intellectual life, therefore, is to affirm truth rather than recoil from falsehood. We want to know, not to know that we don’t know.

Newman recognizes the value of critical methods in our efforts to seek the truth. Those methods involve parsing arguments, examining premises, and testing hypotheses. In his sermons on faith and reason, he sometimes calls this use of the mind “strict reason.” It slows us down, filtering our beliefs according to stringent and exacting standards of proof. In this way we are protected from the danger of overcommitting ourselves and thereby coming to believe as truth things that are in fact false.

But Newman also sees the danger of this strict reason. It is critical, not creative. Its methods “will pull down, and will not be able to build up.” Clear-minded and scrupulous analysis clears the underbrush of error—a very good thing to do—but it cannot plant the seeds of truth; it burns away the weeds but won’t fertilize the fields. To do so we must be receptive rather than cautious. We need to develop the habit of credulity, which literally means the capacity and willingness to accept or believe, for that is the only way truth can enter into our minds. To hold anything as true we have to be able to say, “Yes, I think that’s true.” Critical reason, by contrast, trains us to hesitate, interrogate, and withdraw our assent: “Hmm, I wonder if that’s true. Perhaps it’s false? How do I know it isn’t?” We don’t so much seek as wait—wait for compelling evidence or solid proofs.

Therein lies the danger of our enthusiasm for “critical thinking.” If we fear error too much and thus overvalue critical reason, we develop a mind active and able in doubt but largely untrained to move toward belief, which is, after all, the main work of the mind. A mentality too quick to find reasons not to nurture convictions runs the risk of ending up more empty than accurate.

In my experience it’s not just a risk but a reality. Although the modern university is full of trite, politically correct pieties, for the most part its educational culture is skeptical and cautious to a fault. Students are trained—I was trained—to believe as little as possible so that their minds can be spared the ignominy of error. The consequence is an impoverished intellectual life. The contemporary mind very often lives on a starvation diet of small, inconsequential truths—facts and theories unrelated to any deeper meaning—because those are the only truths of which we can be sure we’re avoiding error.

In a startling passage Newman writes: “I would rather have to maintain that we ought to begin with believing everything that is offered to our acceptance, than that it is our duty to doubt everything. The former, indeed, seems the true way of learning.” Of course we don’t face such a stark choice: believing or doubting everything. But by putting it in exaggerated terms, Newman helps us see that in the intellectual life we invariably lean one way or the other. We tilt in the direction of either believing in order to know or doubting in order to avoid error.

A great deal is at stake, and we are foolish indeed if we imagine, as I once did, that critical thinking offers nothing but advantages. We can rightly worry about getting on the wrong train in the foreign train station whose signs we can’t read. But we should also worry about dithering in the station too long and thus failing to get on the right train, which is the reason we went to the station in the first place. This, it seems to me, is the essence of Newman’s insight. Sometimes the dangers of failing to affirm the truth are far greater than the dangers of wrongly affirming falsehood.

If we see this danger—the danger of truths lost, insights missed, convictions never formed—then our approach to reasoning changes, and the burdens of proof shift. We begin to cherish books and teachers and friends who push us, as it were, onto certain trains of thought, romancing us with the possibilities of truth rather than always cautioning and checking our tendency to believe. Errors risked now seem worth the rich reward of engrossing, life-commanding truths—the truths that are accessible only to a mind passionate with the intimacy of conviction rather than coldly and critically distant.

There are some things that we can know only if we embrace them in love, giving ourselves to beliefs with a seemingly reckless abandon—and this critical reason cannot train us to do. As the ancient Greek translation of Isaiah 7:9 puts it, “Unless you believe, you shall not understand.” It’s a truth that St. Anselm formulated as a maxim, not just for the life of faith but for the life of the mind: Credo ut intelligam, I believe so that I may understand.

How to Help the Poor

The Preferential Option for the Poor

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2011/05/the-preferential-option-for-the-poor


"Want to help the poor? By all means pay your taxes and give to agencies that provide social services. By all means volunteer in a soup kitchen or help build houses for those who can’t afford them. But you can do much more for the poor by getting married and remaining faithful to your spouse. Have the courage to use old-fashioned words such as chaste and honorable. Put on a tie. Turn off the trashy reality TV shows. Sit down to dinner every night with your family. Stop using expletives as exclamation marks. Go to church or synagogue.

"In this and other ways, we can help restore the constraining forms of moral and social discipline that don’t bend to fit the desires of the powerful—forms that offer the poor the best, the most effective and most lasting, way out of poverty. That’s the truest preferential option—and truest form of respect—for the poor."

- R R Reno


The Public Square

R.R. Reno

June/July 2011

A year or so ago I got together with some college friends. Good guys—careers, families, some churchgoers, others not, all involved in their communities. For the most part bourgeois in the best sense. But a few were perplexed. They wanted to know why I had become a social conservative.

I wasn’t able to give a very good answer. But I’ve continued to think about it. Yes, I’ve come to see the moral urgency of protecting the unborn and defending traditional marriage, as well as restoring the virtues of civility and self-discipline. But there’s something more, and it concerns a basic biblical principle.

In the Gospel of Matthew we find Jesus warning us about how our lives will be judged. His words are pointed. We are to feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, and visit the prisoner. For what we do to the poor and the destitute—“the least of these my brethren,” says Jesus—we do to the Lord himself.

It’s a sobering warning, and I fear that I’m typical. For the most part I think about myself: my needs, my interests, my desires. And when I break out of my cocoon of self-interest, it’s usually because I’m thinking about my family or my friends, which is still a kind of self-interest. The poor? Sure, I feel a sense of responsibility, but they’re remote and more hypothetical than real: objects of a thin, distant moral concern that tends to be overwhelmed by the immediate demands of my life. As I said, I’m afraid I’m typical.

That’s why the modern Catholic tradition of social ethics has consistently insisted that the needs of the poor must take priority. In Octogesima Adveniens (1971), an encyclical marking the eightieth anniversary of Leo XIII’s seminal treatment of modern social issues, Rerum Novarum, Paul VI evoked the fundamental importance of a transformative spirit of self-sacrificial love. “In teaching us charity,” he wrote, “the Gospel instructs us in the preferential respect due to the poor and the special situation they have in society: the most fortunate should renounce some of their rights so as to place their goods generously at the service of others.”

“Preferential respect” became the handier slogan “preferential option,” a formulation that first emerged from liberation theologies in South America but has percolated into a great deal of Catholic pronouncement on social ethics in recent decades. It captures a fundamental Christian imperative. When we think about politics and culture, our first question should be: “What are the needs of the poor?”

Today, there is certainly material want in America. People who have lost their jobs can’t pay rent. Unmarried young women who have courageously refused to abort their children struggle to make ends meet. Illegal immigrants are exploited; the homeless need shelter; the hungry, food.

Some say the best way to meet these needs involves adopting tax policies designed to stimulate economic growth, along with redoubled efforts of private charity. Others emphasize public programs and increased government intervention. It’s an argument worth having, of course, and to a great degree our contemporary political debates turn on these issues. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that there is a unifying consensus: The moral character of a nation is measured to a large degree by its concern for the poor.

On this point I agree with many friends on the left who argue that America doesn’t have a proper concern for the poor. Our failure, however, is not merely economic. In fact, it’s not even mostly economic. A visit to the poorest neighborhoods of New York City or the most impoverished towns of rural Iowa immediately reveals poverty more profound and more pervasive than simple material want. Drugs, crime, sexual exploitation, the collapse of marriage—the sheer brutality and ugliness of the lives of many of the poor in America is shocking. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us, poverty is not only material; it is also moral, cultural, and religious (CCC 2444), and just these sorts of poverty are painfully evident today. Increasing the minimum wage or the earned-income tax credit won’t help alleviate this impoverishment.

We can’t restore a culture of marriage, for example, by spending more money on it. A recent report on marriage in America from the National Marriage Project under the leadership of W. Bradford Wilcox, When Marriage Disappears: The New Middle America, paints a grim picture. The lower you are on the social scale, the more likely you are to be divorced, to cohabit while unmarried, to have more sexual partners, and to commit adultery. One of the most arresting statistics concerns children born out of wedlock. In the late 2000s, among women fifteen to forty-four years old who have dropped out of high school, more than half of those who give birth do so while unmarried. And this is true not only of those at the bottom. Among high-school graduates and women with technical training—in other words, the struggling middle class—nearly half of the women who give birth are unmarried.

A friend of mine who works as a nurse’s aide recently observed that his coworkers careen from personal crisis to personal crisis. As he told me, “Only yesterday I had to hear the complaints of one woman who was fighting with both her husband and her boyfriend.” It’s this atmosphere of personal disintegration and not the drudgery of the job—which is by no means negligible for a nurse’s aide—that he finds demoralizing.

Teachers can tell similar tales. The wife of another friend told me that her middle-school students in a small town in Iowa were perplexed by Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter: “What’s the big deal about Hester and Reverend Dimmesdale gettin’ it on?” It was a sentiment that she wearily told me was of a piece with the meth labs, malt liquor, teen pregnancies, and a general atmosphere of social collapse.

Preferential option for the poor. A Christian who hopes to follow the teachings of Jesus needs to reckon with a singular fact about American poverty: Its deepest and most debilitating deficits are moral, not financial; the most serious deprivations are cultural, not economic. Many people living at the bottom of American society have cell phones, flat-screen TVs, and some of the other goodies of consumer culture. But their lives are a mess.

And why? It’s a complicated question that I can’t convincingly answer here. But I want to end with a suggestion, if not an argument.

On the question of social justice, Pope John Paul II once wrote, “The needs of the poor take priority over the desires of the rich.” For most of my life (I was born in 1959), the rich and well-educated in America have desired nothing more than the personal freedoms of bohemian liberation. The rich, we must be clear, include the secure and successful academic and professional upper middle classes. I am not talking only about people who live in penthouses, but about people like us and those we know.

This bohemian liberation has involved the sexual revolution, of course, with the consequent weakening of the constraining and disciplining norms of a healthy culture of marriage. But the ways in which the rich have embraced their freedoms hasn’t involved only sex and marriage. It also includes the verbal antinomianism typified by George Carlin’s campaigns to normalize obscenity, suburban librarians insisting on the right to view pornography, tech billionaires who dress like dockworkers, a feminism that mocks the social mores that make women ladies and men gentleman, and many other attacks on older notions of bourgeois respectability.

Here’s a typical story. A few months ago, a Northwestern University psychology professor invited a sex entrepreneur to speak to his class, and the visit concluded with a sexual performance that, as one newspaper discreetly reported, involved “a woman, a man, and an electric-powered device.”

The powers that be squirm a bit when lifestyle revolutionaries frighten the horses and bring bad publicity. Northwestern’s president, Morton Schapiro, put out an anodyne statement: “Many members of the Northwestern community are disturbed by what took place on our campus. So am I.” But elite sentiment remains indulgent, if not positively solicitous. The rhetoric of liberation (“Sexual minorities need to be accepted!”) throws up a smoke screen, and there’s lots of earnest talk about academic freedom. Meanwhile, the rich get their freedoms, which have very little to do with justice and everything to do with marrying wealth and status to the delicious benefits of a diminished conscience. And all this takes place in an environment furnished with the safety nets of therapists, detox clinics, watchful friends, and economic security.

The social reality of contemporary America is painfully clear. By and large, the rich and powerful don’t desire more wealth nearly as much as they desire moral relaxation and the self-complimenting image of themselves as nonconformists living a life of enlightenment and freedom in advance of dull Middle America. Meanwhile, on the South Side of Chicago—and in hardscrabble small towns and decaying tract housing of old suburbs—the rest of America suffers the loss of social capital.

I must admit that I often feel frustrated by my liberal friends who worry so much about income inequality and not at all about moral inequality. Their answer is to give reparations. Are we to palliate with cash—can we palliate with cash—the disorder wrought by Gucci bohemians?

No. Progressives talk about “social responsibility.” It is an apt term, but it surely means husbanding social capital just as much as—indeed, more than—providing financial resources. In our society a preferential option for the poor must rebuild the social capital squandered by rich baby boomers, and that means social conservatism. The bohemian fantasy works against this clear imperative, because it promises us that we can attend to the poor without paying any attention to our own manner of living. Appeals to aid the less fortunate, however urgent, make few demands on our day-to-day lives. We are called to awareness, perhaps, or activism, but not to anything that would cut against the liberations of recent decades and limit our own desires.

Want to help the poor? By all means pay your taxes and give to agencies that provide social services. By all means volunteer in a soup kitchen or help build houses for those who can’t afford them. But you can do much more for the poor by getting married and remaining faithful to your spouse. Have the courage to use old-fashioned words such as chaste and honorable. Put on a tie. Turn off the trashy reality TV shows. Sit down to dinner every night with your family. Stop using expletives as exclamation marks. Go to church or synagogue.

In this and other ways, we can help restore the constraining forms of moral and social discipline that don’t bend to fit the desires of the powerful—forms that offer the poor the best, the most effective and most lasting, way out of poverty. That’s the truest preferential option—and truest form of respect—for the poor.