Though traditionally revered in Cambodia’s majority-Buddhist society, monks today are not immune to the government’s crackdown on civil society actors. But where efforts at civic organization meet rebuke, Cambodia has seen the rise of one act of conservation — the holy ordination of trees — which originally emerged in Thailand and has risen in practice under the auspices of the Buddhist faith.
I listen to the whirlwind: its commands and its shouts and its splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces. Whirlwinds shout in the world, from hurricanes and typhoons and earthquakes and podiums and Twitter and text messages. You get slowly sucked in until you are spinning, too, in the whirlwind, and gods are all around telling you to be louder and faster and better and both more ashamed and more bold all at once.
While the National Council encompasses many denominations, its constituent bodies represent a declining share of the religious population. Neither the Roman Catholic Church nor most large evangelical denominations belong to it. More importantly, political leaders do not view it as the voice of religious people as they did in the early 20th century.
Of course the system is rigged — systems are always rigged to protect the wealth, power, and self-interest of those who created them, those who benefit from them. That’s not hyperbole; that’s reality, that’s human nature, and that’s what the Bible calls sin. And that’s why systems need to be held accountable — to the common good rather than just the system makers and controllers. And that’s why Jesus calls us to protect, in particular, "the least of these" who are most vulnerable to the systems' exploitation. This is why defending systems that just maintain the powerful’s own self-interest while neglecting the interests of others, especially the most vulnerable, is not just bad politics — it’s bad theology.
Sister Anupama, who led the protests in Kochi, said that the survivor approached the superior general in early 2017 with concerns about harassment — she was facing disciplinary action because of her resistance to “lie down with” the Bishop. Her concerns were ignored. In June 2017, before reaching out to church officials in northern India and the Vatican, she first revealed to a parish priest and bishop in Kerala that she had been abused by Mulakkal. The complaint then reached the Cardinal Mar George Alencherry, the head of the Syro-Malabar church, but no action was taken.
According to a report earlier this week from The Associated Press, more than 53,000 voter registration applications have been sitting on hold with Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s office. The people on the list are predominantly black, and may not even know their voter registration has been held up.
“How can we afford it?” That’s the perennial question that confronts anyone who dares to propose progressive policy changes. A recent example is CNN’s Jake Tapper grilling congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over whether tax money could fund items on her platform such as Medicare for all, a federal job guarantee, and cancelation of student loan debt. For those who are religious and politically progressive, this question is particularly challenging. While many are good at articulating the moral imperative of providing health care to all or protecting the environment, they can stumble on the issue of economic feasibility. So, when I was told about an economics conference in New York City that might connect to this topic, I was intrigued.
On the 20th anniversary of her canonization, we have the opportunity to reassess St. Edith Stein’s life and legacy. Instead of remembering her simply as a tragic victim, we can take a deeper look at the work she undertook during her lifetime. Over the course of four decades, Stein dedicated her life to civic engagement and political resistance. From volunteering with the Red Cross in World War I, to participating in the women’s suffrage movement in Prussia, to fighting for equal educational opportunities for women, to writing against the rise of the Nazi regime, Stein is much more than the “Holocaust martyr” – she is the patron saint of political resistance.
Do you feel powerless to challenge and change the deeply entrenched privilege that was on display last week? Don’t give into that feeling. You have the power to change the world. Look at how it’s changing already.
Like Sasse, moderate pastors who don’t want to upset the conservatives in their churches find themselves talking about how “all of us” are broken. How “all of us” are to blame. They talk about how social media is hurting us. How a broken sexual ethic is hurting us. And if the sexual abuse victims sitting in their congregation are anything like me, they are thinking, “No. A man hurt me.”