Why Holding on too Tightly Is a Bad Idea | [D]mergent.

Developing Young Leaders: The Church’s Need for Good Grandparenting Skills.

I want to argue that access to women’s healthcare takes precedence over the freedom of religious groups not to have to participate in systems they find offensive. Women deserve some control over their lives (as much as control of one’s life is something one can be said to possess)–which is to say, how and with whom they desire to see those lives unfold. I am profoundly troubled by a state of affairs that allows men to dictate to women the appropriate use and care of women’s bodies.

Contraception has arguably been as liberating to women and the projects they take up for themselves as any other single phenomenon in history.  Consequently, any move that appears to take a step back, toward wresting control from women, strikes me as wrongheaded tout court.

On the other hand, I also want to resist the government telling me that I need to participate in something I find offensive on religious grounds. My primary commitments, to the extent that they are rooted in some sort of status defined by citizenship, are not first to the government of the United States of America, but to that new transnational community made manifest in the reign of God. Consequently, when my loyalties find themselves in conflict, I am neither necessarily persuaded nor cowed by the admonition to “do my duty as a U.S. citizen.” I do render unto Caesar, but my submission is always tempered by the knowledge that, in the end, it all belongs to God.

Nevertheless, in this issue of mandating employers to provide contraception, I come down on the side of the government against the Catholic bishops. I think it’s true that the equity achieved for women by compelling certain Catholic institutions (not churches) to provide contraception through the insurance policies they administer outweighs the need of the Catholic hierarchy to keep its institutional hands clean.[1]

I find my inconsistency when it comes to this issue vexing. When I take a stand on an issue, I like to stand on firmer ground than what may be interpreted as “mere preference.” In other words, I don’t like to leave myself open to the charge that “he’s just saying it’s true because that’s what he wants to be true.” I like my hard-won moral positions to be unassailable against charges of individual moral convenience. And while I do believe that a woman’s access to contraception ought to prevail over the objection that, in some cases, that access must be accomplished by trampling the theological prerogative of the Catholic Church, I find myself troubled by inhabiting a position that compels people of faith to do something they find offensive on religious grounds.

On the other hand, I wonder why the Catholic Church isn’t nearly as concerned to speak up on my behalf when, as a Christian pacifist, I am compelled to pay taxes to support armed conflict, which I find morally offensive, and of a theological nature more pressing than contraception. Where is the carefully practiced ecclesiastical umbrage of my colleagues in the episcopate when I am forced to support the violent taking of human life, for the simple reason that those humans happen to have been born in a time zone and with a passport different from my own?

If postmodernism has taught us anything, perhaps it is that the rigor of principled consistency is always just beyond our reach, and that to make it the sine qua non of moral reasoning is to have doomed oneself to a stultifying and, I think, damaging rigidity.

Whatever the case, I’m fine with being inconsistent in this particular instance.

Somebody help me out here. How did we let this happen? We told kids that to make it in this world that we constructed that they had to get a college education. Then, we defunded their education so dramatically that to get that education they had to sign a mortgage on their future. (Actually, not really even a mortgage–because people can walk away from mortgages.) Student loan debt is harder to remove than that drunken tattoo of skeletons in top hats smoking cigarettes and playing five-card draw that you got after an especially bad run-in with a bottle of $7 vodka in Daytona Beach.

This is the thing most older people don’t quite get, I think. If you have $100,000 in student loans, what happens if you can’t find a job–or the only job available to you is stocking the self-help shelves at Barnes and Noble or slinging lattes as a barista at Starbucks? The government gives you a little leeway with forebearances and so on, but in this economy the government feels like it can only forebear so much.

And when the government can’t wait any longer, it comes after you like a heat-seeking missile in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Only, in this case, the bomb doesn’t blow up once in an ugly but survivable bankruptcy, it keeps blowing up the rest of your life. You can’t walk away from your student loans–with a few rare exceptions–ever. Your credit, and therefore, your purchasing power and employability (thanks to credit checks by prospective employers) will be almost certainly perpetually devastated.

“Well, they should have thought of that before they borrowed all that money.”

I understand the “personal responsibility” argument here. I’m not saying young people don’t have some responsibility for making good decisions. But, let’s be honest, that’s way too easy.

We’ve frittered away the inheritance given to us by our parents and grandparents –fairly priced secondary education–on an outsized military and tax cuts for rich people.

Since we got snookered into believing that our highest moral duty was to protect the tax rates for the “job creators,” we knew that there was a ready source of cash available to make up for the revenue that we would inevitably lose to tax cuts. So, the governors’ offices across the country dispatched memos to the public universities explaining that because of the vicissitudes of the economic situation and the necessities of blah, blah, blah, the universities were going to have to cut their budgets by however many percentage points. However, those same universities needed to remember how committed they were down at the capital to public secondary education, blah, blah, blah.

As a consequence, those universities had to make up the lost revenue somewhere. Tuition is a great place to do it, they figured. So, tuition at public universities continues to rise at rates that far exceed the rate of inflation.

How do these kids–who’ve been told since they were in Stride-Rites that to get anywhere in this world that they need a college education–avail themselves of access to public post-secondary education?

Student loans, of course–which we make enticingly available to kids who’ve got no other way to get the money they need for the education we told them they had to have.

Somebody help me out. How did we let this happen on our watch? How is it that we sold our children’s inheritance so the wealthiest among us might realize more wealth? Worse, how can we muster the galactically large stones to look 20 and 30 somethings in the eye and let them think the reason they can’t make it is because they’re lazy slackers?

I don’t get it. I thought we were better than this.

By “classes” I don’t mean the more or less useful signifiers employed by sociologists to help us understand the distribution of wealth; instead, I mean the kinds of structures that operate more in the realm of the determinative, rather than the descriptive.  That is to say, neither wealth nor poverty is any longer a class in which one finds oneself due to the happenstance of birth or the vagaries of the job market, but a kind of inescapable trajectory from which escape is increasingly unlikely.

Stephen Marche writes:

If your daddy was rich, you’re gonna stay rich, and if your daddy was poor, you’re gonna stay poor. Every instinct in the American gut, every institution, every national symbol, runs on the idea that anybody can make it; the only limits are your own limits. Which is an amazing idea, a gift to the world — just no longer true. Culturally, and in their daily lives, Americans continue to glide through a ghostly land of opportunity they can’t bear to tell themselves isn’t real. It’s the most dangerous lie the country tells itself.

If Marche is right, perhaps political and cultural pundits would do better to describe the current situation, especially as articulated by the Occupiers, as “caste warfare.”

plutocracy: a state or society governed by the wealthy

Like many people, I’ve been following the political donnybrook that masquerades as our national discourse on the disparity of wealth. (It’s as bad as it’s ever been.) There’s a lot of talk about “job creators” and “fiscal responsibility” by those on the right, along with healthy doses of whining when such lofty sounding phrases are questioned.

The argument by those who contend that the wealthy must be protected from the suggestion that they don’t already give enough, an especially nimble plutocratic dance move, goes something like this:

“The wealthy earned their wealth through hard work. Moreover, the wealthy create jobs with their wealth. Therefore, everyone who’s not wealthy has a vested interest in the wealthy accruing as much unfettered wealth as possible. So, let’s don’t make them feel bad for being so successful.”

Leaving aside the myth of the “job creators,” it’s important to articulate the assumptions that underly this sentiment. At its base, the “don’t tax the wealthy” approach to governance assumes that society will be better off in the long run if wealthy people not only get to keep all of their wealth, but are appreciated for the mere fact of being wealthy. On this account, not only is wealth a communal good in the abstract, those who possess wealth, unless proven otherwise, also find themselves on the noble end of the moral spectrum in virtue of their wealth.

Of course, this conflation of wealth and honor isn’t new. The whole idea of describing character and behavior as noble comes from its historic attachment to the nobility (L. nobilis)–that class of citizens who were “well-known or prominent”–which class, generally speaking, also implied an association with wealth.

However, the equating of virtue and wealth doesn’t just have implications for how we view wealth and wealthy people and their responsibilities to society; it also affects how we view poverty and poor people. If being wealthy is understood to be a communal good, then being poor cannot help but be understood as a communal vice–a status to be avoided. Poor people have not only themselves to blame as individuals, perhaps just as importantly, the implication is that they’re not pulling their communal weight. The idea that poor people, as Stephen Schwarzman says, don’t have “skin in the game” is worthy of comment.

Asking those who have very little if any skin left to put in the game strikes me as not only outrageous, but as something that people who claim to follow Jesus have a stake in denouncing–loudly. This cultural pressure applied to the poor, grousing that the poor need to do more, reminds me of the story that opens Luke 21.

Pretty famous story, actually. The widow’s mite. In the story Jesus has just finished a rather heated exchange with the scribes, a group of well-heeled professional theological pundits, whom Jesus has warned everyone to keep an eye on. Immediately preceding the story of the widow’s mite is an especially pointed exhortation to watch the scribes, because “they devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.”

And with that cautionary admonition about the way the scribes treat widows, Jesus looks up to see some rich people putting their gifts into the temple treasury. He notices a widow adding her two small copper coins, and remarks, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them; for all of them have contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in all she had to live on (21:3–4).”

Traditionally, this passage has been used as a way to spur giving in church. The message is something like, “You can give more–even if you think you can’t. Sacrificial giving is a privilege you don’t want to deny yourself.” Or, in a more popular–though, I would argue facile–rendering: “Give until it feels good.”

And while I consider “sacrificial giving” an honorable act, I think that is only a secondary point here. Given the way Luke sets up this story, I think he has his sites set a bit higher up the socio-economic ladder.

What do I mean?

I would like to suggest that this story in Luke’s hands is a way of challenging a system that pressures a poor widow (arguably the most vulnerable class of people in the ancient Near East) to forfeit her last two bits so that she too can have some “skin in the game.” That is to say, the wealthy (identified as “rich people”) and the powerful (identified as “the scribes, who ‘devour widows’ houses’”) contribute to a set of power arrangements whereby they sacrifice a small percentage, while getting to feel superior to the poor and the powerless, whose contributions in real wealth are tiny by comparison.

In other words, Jesus’ scorn is aimed not just at the fact that the wealthy contribute relatively little as a percentage of what they own compared to the poor (who contribute at an extraordinarily higher percentage relative to what they actually own), but that the wealthy and the powerful help to perpetuate a religio-political structure that leaves the poor and the powerless feeling like they must surrender every last cent in order to be full participants. Making those at the bottom feel less than human so they’ll cough up more to keep those at the top from having to “sacrifice” more is an abomination according to Jesus.

In fact, read this way, the next two verses about the destruction of the temple suggest not just some prophecy about the devastation of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., or a supercessionist end to traditional Judaism, or even an oblique reference to the resurrection, but a commentary on how the current system of power arrangements that revolves around a structure that pressures the poor to sacrifice even more to be considered participants will be overthrown in the coming reign of God.

The assertion that we in America live in a plutocracy, where the wealthy and the powerful get to call all the shots, seems to me not even worth arguing. Anyone with even a little sense knows who’s in charge.

All I’m arguing is that people who follow Jesus–a man killed by plutocrats for challenging a similar system–don’t have any real stake in propping up a plutocracy.

The responsibility of those who follow Jesus is to live faithfully by embodying justice in our lives and relationships–which always carries with it the potential (and sometimes the necessity) of getting crossways with the powers and principalities.

Hope no one ever told you this was going to be easy.

U.S. presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich, calls Palestinians an ‘invented’ people – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

Gov. Rick Perry’s anti-gay Christianity – Guest Voices – The Washington Post.