Today was pretty busy. I wrote the parish letter - now that I have a team that will help me compose the entire newsletter, I can focus more concretely on my contribution. Then, I went to the local religious leader's lunch where we heard an advocate for affordable housing. Our county needs it: we're one of the ten most expensive markets in the country, with a median price of $685,000. You're average professional can't live here unless they're making but loads or are millionaires. The organization is working for people who make $75,000 a year. You see, where I live, that's working class. Don't let anyone tell you there isn't class warfare in this country. I see it all the time.
I gave a presentation at our local college called "Which corrupts more: money or religion" and had a good group of kids. We were talking about just war, when one student started grilling me. He started off by saying that religion has killed more people than... blah blah. I schooled him a bit, reminding him that religion and politics were so fully enmeshed before the religious wars that it was impossible to distinguish between the two. Only if we considered communism a religion could we say that religion had caused more deaths than any other form of ideology.
I had said that not a single mainline church had supported the war on just war grounds. "Should Israel have bombed Iraq?" I said, I'm not sure. We then got into an argument about whether Israel has nuclear weapons. "They haven't admitted it," he said. I said there might be some wisdom in not admitting it, but they probably had them. He'd never heard of Vanunu. He was combative, and resisted liberal pieties. Good for him, on some level - he forced people to rethink things. He was a bit obnoxious, but I remembered that he was just a kid and gained my composure when offering my glib retorts. "No, you can't go after a state just because they harbor terrorists. That's wrong. You can go after the terrorists in other ways, and you can put pressure on the state. But you can't invade."
My adult ed class at church discussed Rowan Williams book The Wound of Knowledge this evening. What was interesting is how he understood Christian reflection upon God - that by affirming history, we close ourselves off to "timeless truths." This theology - a concrete, particular, incarnational form of life - means that the problems Christians face will be obstinate, strange, ambiguous and contradictory. He remarked that one aspect of God is that he provokes crisis and division.
And now, off, for a beer and a cigar. I didn't give either up for lent. Just meat and dairy. So tonight I had ma pa tofu for dinner. Delicious.
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