Chris Hedges writes in part, "...the liberal church, like the rest of
the liberal establishment, looked the other way while the poor and
workingmen and -women, especially those of color, were ruthlessly
dis empowered and impoverished.."
For my thinking, the Church and the Liberal establishment did not look
the other way, so much as they were bought out.
Of course the Church, Liberal and otherwise, has always been the tool
of the Ruling Classes. The hollow promises of a Land Beyond the
River, has always been far worse than merely Hope Deferred. It has
been, Hope Denied. But despite all the evidence that God is unable to
manage His Earthly Affairs, people continue to cling to some vague
notion that God moves in mysterious ways, and knows where He is going.
I have said many times that one of the biggest barriers to true
democracy is our refusal to come to terms with the understanding that
there is no God. And we are not somehow above the other life on this
planet. Our own ignorance and smugness stand in our way of real
Freedom.
Carl Jarvis
On 1/25/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>
> The Suicide of the Liberal Church
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_suicide_of_the_liberal_church_201601
> 24/
>
> Posted on Jan 24, 2016
> By Chris Hedges
>
> The chapel of The General Theological Seminary in New York City. The
> seminary, founded in 1817, sold much of its property to developers in
> recent
> years. (Julie Jacobson / AP)
> Paul Tillich wrote that all institutions, including the church, are
> inherently demonic. Reinhold Niebuhr asserted that no institution could
> ever
> achieve the morality of the individual. Institutions, he warned, to extend
> their lives when confronted with collapse, will swiftly betray the stances
> that ostensibly define them. Only individual men and women have the
> strength
> to hold fast to virtue when faced with the threat of death. And decaying
> institutions, including the church, when consumed by fear, swiftly push
> those endowed with this moral courage and radicalism from their ranks,
> rendering themselves obsolete.
> The wisdom of Tillich and Niebuhr has been borne out in the precipitous
> decline of the liberal church and the seminaries and divinity schools that
> train religious scholars and clergy. Faced with shrinking or nonexistent
> endowments, mounting debts, dwindling memberships, a lack of employment for
> their graduates and growing irrelevancy in a society that has little use
> for
> tepid church piety and the smug arrogance that comes with it, these
> institutions have fallen into physical and moral decay.
> The number of adults in the mainline Protestant churches-Presbyterian,
> Unitarian-Universalist, Lutheran, Methodist, Episcopalian,
> Congregationalist-decreased from about 41 million in 2007 to 36 million in
> 2014, according to the Pew Research Center. And the average age of the
> congregant is 52. The Catholic Church also is being decimated; its decline
> has been exacerbated by its decades-long protection of sexual predators
> within the priesthood and the Vatican's relentless campaign, especially
> under John Paul II, to force out of the church priests, nuns and lay
> leaders
> who focused their ministries on the poor and the oppressed. The Catholic
> Church, which has lost 3 million members over the last decade, has seen its
> hold on the U.S. population fall to 21 percent from 24.
> Mainline seminaries and divinity schools have been merging or closing, and
> enrollment at such schools has declined by 24 percent in the last decade.
> Andover-Newton, founded in 1807, recently shut down. Lutheran Theological
> Seminary at Gettysburg, Pa., and Lutheran Theological Seminary at
> Philadelphia plan to merge. Union Theological Seminary, where black
> liberation, feminist, womanist and queer theologies have their roots,
> appears to be on the verge of selling "air space" to a developer to
> construct a luxury 35-to-40-story condominium building on its campus.
> General Theological Seminary in New York City, a school founded in 1817,
> has
> sold much of its property to developers, and it ended tenure for its
> faculty
> after the professors went out on strike to demand the removal of Dean and
> President Kurt Dunkle. Dunkle, who epitomizes the infusion of corporatism
> into the church, worked for many years as a lawyer doing commercial
> litigation before being ordained.
> "What doomed General Seminary was not just financial mismanagement, but
> unethical leadership," Rob Stephens, a third-year student for the ministry
> at Union and part of a student movement fighting Union's building project,
> said when I spoke with him by phone. "That is what made the faculty walk
> out. The Union administration, board of trustees and all of us need to
> learn
> this lesson and put a halt to the project. The Union administration has
> said
> that Union, by building this luxury condominium, was being as bold as the
> original founders. This is one thing I can agree on. The original founders
> envisioned a place for privileged, white men. The original founders called
> abolitionism 'fanaticism.' The founders' values won't get us through this
> storm. Union is bigger than the administration and board. Union should be
> for all God's people. If built, this luxury condominium would be a middle
> finger to Harlem. It would be a middle finger to faith-based social
> movements.
> "This seminary has turned Black Lives Matter into a commodity," he went on.
> "They sell this campus as being allied with Black Lives Matter and other
> social justice movements. But if we are readers of the Bible, we know that
> saying one thing and doing another leads to internal combustion.
> Inconsistency of values and actions can only lead to failure. As a seminary
> community, how can we have more faith in an unstable housing market than in
> the Gospel? You can't reconcile luxury condominiums built by an anti-union
> contractor and no affordable housing with the gospel of Jesus. This is
> another example of mainline Christianity casting their lot with capitalism
> instead of community. When will we learn?"
> The self-identified religious institutions that thrive preach the perverted
> "prosperity gospel," the message that magic Jesus will make you rich,
> respected and powerful if you believe in him. Jesus, they claim, is an
> American capitalist, bigot and ardent imperialist. These sects selectively
> lift passages from the Bible to justify the unjustifiable, including
> homophobia, war, racism against Muslims, and the death penalty. Yet there
> are more students-2,067-at the evangelical Gordon-Conwell Theological
> Seminary alone than at the divinity schools and seminaries of Yale,
> Harvard,
> Union, Vanderbilt and Chicago, whose combined enrollment is 1,537.
> The doctrine these sects preach is Christian heresy. The Christian faith-as
> in the 1930s under Germany's pro-Nazi Christian church-is being distorted
> to
> sanctify nationalism, unregulated capitalism and militarism. The mainstream
> church, which refuses to denounce these heretics as heretics, a decision
> made in the name of tolerance, tacitly gives these sects credibility and
> squanders the prophetic voice of the church.
> Kevin Kruse in his book "One Nation Under God: How Corporate America
> Invented Christian America" details how industrialists in the 1930s and
> 1940s poured money and resources into an effort to silence the social
> witness of the mainstream church, which was home to many radicals,
> socialists and proponents of the New Deal. These corporatists promoted and
> funded a brand of Christianity-which is today dominant-that conflates faith
> with free enterprise and American exceptionalism. The rich are rich, this
> creed goes, not because they are greedy or privileged, not because they use
> their power to their own advantage, not because they oppress the poor and
> the vulnerable, but because they are blessed. And if we have enough faith,
> this heretical form of Christianity claims, God will bless the rest of us
> too. It is an inversion of the central message of the Gospel. You don't
> need
> to spend three years at Harvard Divinity School as I did to figure that
> out.
>
> The liberal church committed suicide when it severed itself from
> radicalism.
> Radical Christians led the abolitionist movement, were active in the
> Anti-Imperialist League, participated in the bloody labor wars, fought for
> women's suffrage, formulated the Social Gospel-which included a huge effort
> to carry out prison reform and provide education to prisoners-and were
> engines in the civil rights and anti-war movements. Norman Thomas, a
> longtime leader of the Socialist Party of America, was a Presbyterian
> minister.
> These radicals generally were not embraced by the church hierarchy, which
> served as a bulwark of the establishment, but they kept the church vital
> and
> prophetic. They made it relevant and important to the oppressed, the poor
> and to workingmen and -women. Radicals were and are its hope.
> The loss of an array of prophetic voices on the national scene such as Phil
> and Daniel Berrigan, William Stringfellow, Rabbi Abraham Heschel, Dorothy
> Day and Martin Luther King Jr. left the liberal church as morally bankrupt
> as the rest of the liberal class. James Baldwin, who grew up in the church
> and was briefly a preacher, said he abandoned the pulpit to preach the
> Gospel. The Gospel, he knew, was not heard most Sundays in Christian houses
> of worship. And today with most ministers wary of offending their aging and
> dwindling flocks-counted on to pay the clergy salary and the bills-this is
> even truer than when Baldwin was writing.
> The church is also a victim of the disintegration of the civic associations
> that, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed, are vital to the maintenance of a
> healthy democracy and the common good. Robert Putnam in his book "Bowling
> Alone" chronicled the broad disengagement from political and public life.
> He
> lamented, correctly, the loss of this "social capital." Those who no longer
> join parents' organizations, gardening and historical clubs or fraternal
> orders, who do not show up at town hall or city council meetings, also no
> longer attend church. There is little, given this cultural malaise-much of
> it driven by the constant availability of entertainment through the
> Internet
> and electronic devices-that the church can do to blunt the public's retreat
> from public space.
> What remains of the church, if it is to survive as a social and cultural
> force, will see clergy and congregants leave sanctuaries to work in
> prisons,
> schools, labor halls and homeless and women's shelters, form night
> basketball leagues and participate in grass-roots movements such as the
> anti-fracking struggle and the fight to raise the minimum wage. This shift
> will make it hard to financially maintain the massive and largely empty
> church edifices, and perhaps even the seminaries, but it will keep the
> church real and alive. I had a dinner a few months ago with fellow teachers
> in the prison where I work. We discovered, to our surprise, that every one
> of us had seminary degrees.
> William Stringfellow, who worked as a lawyer in Harlem in the 1950s and
> 1960s, in his book "My People Is the Enemy," wrote of the church:
> The premise of most urban church work, it seems, is that in order for the
> Church to minister among the poor, the church has to be rich, that is, to
> have specially trained personnel, huge funds and many facilities, rummage
> to
> distribute, and a whole battery of social services. Just the opposite is
> the
> case. The Church must be free to be poor in order to minister among the
> poor. The Church must trust the Gospel enough to come among the poor with
> nothing to offer the poor except the Gospel, except the power to apprehend
> and the courage to reveal the Word of God as it is already mediated in the
> life of the poor. When the Church has the freedom itself to be poor among
> the poor, it will know how to use what riches it has. When the Church has
> that freedom, it will be a missionary people again in all the world.
> Stringfellow repeatedly warned Christians, as well as Christian
> institutions, not to allow the fear of death to diminish the power of
> Christian witness. Faith becomes real on the edge of the abyss. "In the
> face
> of death," he wrote, "live humanly. In the middle of chaos, celebrate the
> Word. Amidst Babel, speak the truth. Confront the noise and verbiage and
> falsehood of death with the truth and potency and efficacy of the Word of
> God."
> During the rise of the American species of corporate fascism-what Sheldon
> Wolin called "inverted totalitarianism"-the liberal church, like the rest
> of
> the liberal establishment, looked the other way while the poor and
> workingmen and -women, especially those of color, were ruthlessly
> disempowered and impoverished. The church and liberals were as silent about
> the buildup of mass incarceration as they once were about lynching. The
> mainline church refused to confront and denounce the destructive force of
> corporate power. It placed its faith in institutions-such as the Democratic
> Party-that had long ceased to function as mechanisms of reform.
> The church, mirroring the liberal establishment, busied itself with
> charity,
> multiculturalism and gender-identity politics at the expense of justice,
> especially racial and economic justice. It retreated into a narcissistic
> "how-is-it-with-me" spirituality. Although the mainline church paid lip
> service to diversity, it never welcomed significant numbers of people of
> color or the marginalized into their sanctuaries. The Presbyterian Church,
> for example, is 92 percent white. It pushed to the margins or sought to
> discredit liberation theology, which called out the evils of unfettered
> capitalism, white supremacy and imperialism. The retreat from radicalism-in
> essence the abandonment of the vulnerable to the predatory forces of
> corporate capitalism-created a spiritual void filled by protofascist
> movements that have usurped Christian symbols and provided a species of
> faith that is, at its core, a belief in magic. This Christian heresy is
> currently on public display at Donald Trump and Ted Cruz political rallies.
>
> The last scenes of this decline are being played out at schools such as
> Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Tillich and Niebuhr taught at
> Union. America's most important theologian, James Cone-who opposes the
> condominium building project on the campus-teaches there.
> The president of the seminary, Serene Jones, says that unless part of the
> seminary's quadrangle is handed over to the developer, the seminary will
> not
> have the funds to survive (although she and her administration have refused
> to make school finances public). If Jones gets her way, Union will become
> part of the vast gentrification project being waged against the poor,
> especially poor people of color, in Morningside Heights and West Harlem.
> "With these development rights, we envision the creation of a beautiful,
> slender building that is visually in keeping with the neighborhood and that
> is set on the northeast end of the quad," Jones wrote in an open letter to
> the Union community last December. "We want our newest building to feel
> like
> it has always been part of the current campus. We chose this location after
> thorough analyses showed that this was the best, and only, suitable site."
> Union is working with the developer L+M Development Partners on
> construction
> plans. The firm has a history of hiring shady subcontractors-including MC&O
> Construction (found guilty of stealing $830,000 in 2013 from workers on a
> project of NYSAFAH contractor Procida Realty & Construction), RNC
> Industries
> LLC of Holtsville, N.Y. (repeatedly cited by the Occupational Safety and
> Health Administration for unsafe working conditions that have led to
> fatalities), and Ro-Sal Plumbing (which settled, for a class-action
> complaint filed by workers over unpaid wages).
> It is bad enough that Union would collaborate with companies charged with
> safety violations, workers' compensation fraud and wage theft, but it is
> also abetting the driving of poor families, many of them of color, from
> their homes throughout the city. Apartment rents have risen in New York by
> 75 percent since 2000. The poor are being pushed out of neighborhoods
> around
> Union, in some cases into homeless shelters and the streets.
> Students, and a few of Union's faculty members, have risen up in
> opposition.
> They charge, in the words of first-year student Yazmine Nichols, whom I
> interviewed by phone, that "there is a lack of honesty and transparency on
> the part of the administration."
> "No one knows," she told me, "how far along the plans are, whether there
> will be affordable housing units. All these things are question marks.
> "It is hard to get the school galvanized around something they [the
> students
> and faculty] have no information about," she added. "And this is part of
> the
> administration's plan-divide and conquer by not providing information.
> People are left guessing and speculating.
> "We need to ask ourselves what it means to exist as a theological
> institution," Nichols continued. "Are we truly existing if we do not hold
> onto the core values the institution is predicated on? This is a question
> about what it means to be a seminary geared to social justice. What does it
> mean when homeless people are sleeping outside seminary dormitories? With
> growing income inequality and a shrinking middle class, we must begin
> asking
> the question, 'Affordable for whom?' What we mean by 'affordability' is
> that
> housing ought to be affordable for people of color who fall at or below the
> NYC poverty line. What does it mean to worship God and theologize in a
> world
> where people are suffering? What does it mean for an institution to thrive
> in the presence of that suffering? What is the purpose of Union's
> existence?
> For Union to exist with a luxury condominium is for Union not to exist at
> all, at least not the Union I applied to. Union may continue to exist
> physically, but the soul of Union will be gone."
> Fear has driven church and seminary leaders into the hands of those the
> Gospel condemns as exploiters of the poor and the oppressed. They have
> turned their backs on Christian radicals, who alone can infuse new life
> into
> the church. The institutions believe alliances with the powerful and the
> wealthy will save them. They are wrong. Once they stand for nothing they
> become nothing.
> "There is a mourning among the declining members of mainline Christianity,"
> Rob Stephens, the Union student, said in the interview. "I don't share
> that.
> The mainline churches, by which we mean white denominations, are
> responsible
> for many of our greatest social ills, including white supremacy and
> patriarchy. If those parts of mainline Christianity need to die for renewal
> to take place, we need to learn how to embrace that. There is no
> resurrection without death."
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
> The Suicide of the Liberal Church
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_suicide_of_the_liberal_church_201601
> 24/
>
> Posted on Jan 24, 2016
> By Chris Hedges
>
> The chapel of The General Theological Seminary in New York City. The
> seminary, founded in 1817, sold much of its property to developers in
> recent
> years. (Julie Jacobson / AP)
> Paul Tillich wrote that all institutions, including the church, are
> inherently demonic. Reinhold Niebuhr asserted that no institution could
> ever
> achieve the morality of the individual. Institutions, he warned, to extend
> their lives when confronted with collapse, will swiftly betray the stances
> that ostensibly define them. Only individual men and women have the
> strength
> to hold fast to virtue when faced with the threat of death. And decaying
> institutions, including the church, when consumed by fear, swiftly push
> those endowed with this moral courage and radicalism from their ranks,
> rendering themselves obsolete.
> The wisdom of Tillich and Niebuhr has been borne out in the precipitous
> decline of the liberal church and the seminaries and divinity schools that
> train religious scholars and clergy. Faced with shrinking or nonexistent
> endowments, mounting debts, dwindling memberships, a lack of employment for
> their graduates and growing irrelevancy in a society that has little use
> for
> tepid church piety and the smug arrogance that comes with it, these
> institutions have fallen into physical and moral decay.
> The number of adults in the mainline Protestant churches-Presbyterian,
> Unitarian-Universalist, Lutheran, Methodist, Episcopalian,
> Congregationalist-decreased from about 41 million in 2007 to 36 million in
> 2014, according to the Pew Research Center. And the average age of the
> congregant is 52. The Catholic Church also is being decimated; its decline
> has been exacerbated by its decades-long protection of sexual predators
> within the priesthood and the Vatican's relentless campaign, especially
> under John Paul II, to force out of the church priests, nuns and lay
> leaders
> who focused their ministries on the poor and the oppressed. The Catholic
> Church, which has lost 3 million members over the last decade, has seen its
> hold on the U.S. population fall to 21 percent from 24.
> Mainline seminaries and divinity schools have been merging or closing, and
> enrollment at such schools has declined by 24 percent in the last decade.
> Andover-Newton, founded in 1807, recently shut down. Lutheran Theological
> Seminary at Gettysburg, Pa., and Lutheran Theological Seminary at
> Philadelphia plan to merge. Union Theological Seminary, where black
> liberation, feminist, womanist and queer theologies have their roots,
> appears to be on the verge of selling "air space" to a developer to
> construct a luxury 35-to-40-story condominium building on its campus.
> General Theological Seminary in New York City, a school founded in 1817,
> has
> sold much of its property to developers, and it ended tenure for its
> faculty
> after the professors went out on strike to demand the removal of Dean and
> President Kurt Dunkle. Dunkle, who epitomizes the infusion of corporatism
> into the church, worked for many years as a lawyer doing commercial
> litigation before being ordained.
> "What doomed General Seminary was not just financial mismanagement, but
> unethical leadership," Rob Stephens, a third-year student for the ministry
> at Union and part of a student movement fighting Union's building project,
> said when I spoke with him by phone. "That is what made the faculty walk
> out. The Union administration, board of trustees and all of us need to
> learn
> this lesson and put a halt to the project. The Union administration has
> said
> that Union, by building this luxury condominium, was being as bold as the
> original founders. This is one thing I can agree on. The original founders
> envisioned a place for privileged, white men. The original founders called
> abolitionism 'fanaticism.' The founders' values won't get us through this
> storm. Union is bigger than the administration and board. Union should be
> for all God's people. If built, this luxury condominium would be a middle
> finger to Harlem. It would be a middle finger to faith-based social
> movements.
> "This seminary has turned Black Lives Matter into a commodity," he went on.
> "They sell this campus as being allied with Black Lives Matter and other
> social justice movements. But if we are readers of the Bible, we know that
> saying one thing and doing another leads to internal combustion.
> Inconsistency of values and actions can only lead to failure. As a seminary
> community, how can we have more faith in an unstable housing market than in
> the Gospel? You can't reconcile luxury condominiums built by an anti-union
> contractor and no affordable housing with the gospel of Jesus. This is
> another example of mainline Christianity casting their lot with capitalism
> instead of community. When will we learn?"
> The self-identified religious institutions that thrive preach the perverted
> "prosperity gospel," the message that magic Jesus will make you rich,
> respected and powerful if you believe in him. Jesus, they claim, is an
> American capitalist, bigot and ardent imperialist. These sects selectively
> lift passages from the Bible to justify the unjustifiable, including
> homophobia, war, racism against Muslims, and the death penalty. Yet there
> are more students-2,067-at the evangelical Gordon-Conwell Theological
> Seminary alone than at the divinity schools and seminaries of Yale,
> Harvard,
> Union, Vanderbilt and Chicago, whose combined enrollment is 1,537.
> The doctrine these sects preach is Christian heresy. The Christian faith-as
> in the 1930s under Germany's pro-Nazi Christian church-is being distorted
> to
> sanctify nationalism, unregulated capitalism and militarism. The mainstream
> church, which refuses to denounce these heretics as heretics, a decision
> made in the name of tolerance, tacitly gives these sects credibility and
> squanders the prophetic voice of the church.
> Kevin Kruse in his book "One Nation Under God: How Corporate America
> Invented Christian America" details how industrialists in the 1930s and
> 1940s poured money and resources into an effort to silence the social
> witness of the mainstream church, which was home to many radicals,
> socialists and proponents of the New Deal. These corporatists promoted and
> funded a brand of Christianity-which is today dominant-that conflates faith
> with free enterprise and American exceptionalism. The rich are rich, this
> creed goes, not because they are greedy or privileged, not because they use
> their power to their own advantage, not because they oppress the poor and
> the vulnerable, but because they are blessed. And if we have enough faith,
> this heretical form of Christianity claims, God will bless the rest of us
> too. It is an inversion of the central message of the Gospel. You don't
> need
> to spend three years at Harvard Divinity School as I did to figure that
> out.
>
> The liberal church committed suicide when it severed itself from
> radicalism.
> Radical Christians led the abolitionist movement, were active in the
> Anti-Imperialist League, participated in the bloody labor wars, fought for
> women's suffrage, formulated the Social Gospel-which included a huge effort
> to carry out prison reform and provide education to prisoners-and were
> engines in the civil rights and anti-war movements. Norman Thomas, a
> longtime leader of the Socialist Party of America, was a Presbyterian
> minister.
> These radicals generally were not embraced by the church hierarchy, which
> served as a bulwark of the establishment, but they kept the church vital
> and
> prophetic. They made it relevant and important to the oppressed, the poor
> and to workingmen and -women. Radicals were and are its hope.
> The loss of an array of prophetic voices on the national scene such as Phil
> and Daniel Berrigan, William Stringfellow, Rabbi Abraham Heschel, Dorothy
> Day and Martin Luther King Jr. left the liberal church as morally bankrupt
> as the rest of the liberal class. James Baldwin, who grew up in the church
> and was briefly a preacher, said he abandoned the pulpit to preach the
> Gospel. The Gospel, he knew, was not heard most Sundays in Christian houses
> of worship. And today with most ministers wary of offending their aging and
> dwindling flocks-counted on to pay the clergy salary and the bills-this is
> even truer than when Baldwin was writing.
> The church is also a victim of the disintegration of the civic associations
> that, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed, are vital to the maintenance of a
> healthy democracy and the common good. Robert Putnam in his book "Bowling
> Alone" chronicled the broad disengagement from political and public life.
> He
> lamented, correctly, the loss of this "social capital." Those who no longer
> join parents' organizations, gardening and historical clubs or fraternal
> orders, who do not show up at town hall or city council meetings, also no
> longer attend church. There is little, given this cultural malaise-much of
> it driven by the constant availability of entertainment through the
> Internet
> and electronic devices-that the church can do to blunt the public's retreat
> from public space.
> What remains of the church, if it is to survive as a social and cultural
> force, will see clergy and congregants leave sanctuaries to work in
> prisons,
> schools, labor halls and homeless and women's shelters, form night
> basketball leagues and participate in grass-roots movements such as the
> anti-fracking struggle and the fight to raise the minimum wage. This shift
> will make it hard to financially maintain the massive and largely empty
> church edifices, and perhaps even the seminaries, but it will keep the
> church real and alive. I had a dinner a few months ago with fellow teachers
> in the prison where I work. We discovered, to our surprise, that every one
> of us had seminary degrees.
> William Stringfellow, who worked as a lawyer in Harlem in the 1950s and
> 1960s, in his book "My People Is the Enemy," wrote of the church:
> The premise of most urban church work, it seems, is that in order for the
> Church to minister among the poor, the church has to be rich, that is, to
> have specially trained personnel, huge funds and many facilities, rummage
> to
> distribute, and a whole battery of social services. Just the opposite is
> the
> case. The Church must be free to be poor in order to minister among the
> poor. The Church must trust the Gospel enough to come among the poor with
> nothing to offer the poor except the Gospel, except the power to apprehend
> and the courage to reveal the Word of God as it is already mediated in the
> life of the poor. When the Church has the freedom itself to be poor among
> the poor, it will know how to use what riches it has. When the Church has
> that freedom, it will be a missionary people again in all the world.
> Stringfellow repeatedly warned Christians, as well as Christian
> institutions, not to allow the fear of death to diminish the power of
> Christian witness. Faith becomes real on the edge of the abyss. "In the
> face
> of death," he wrote, "live humanly. In the middle of chaos, celebrate the
> Word. Amidst Babel, speak the truth. Confront the noise and verbiage and
> falsehood of death with the truth and potency and efficacy of the Word of
> God."
> During the rise of the American species of corporate fascism-what Sheldon
> Wolin called "inverted totalitarianism"-the liberal church, like the rest
> of
> the liberal establishment, looked the other way while the poor and
> workingmen and -women, especially those of color, were ruthlessly
> disempowered and impoverished. The church and liberals were as silent about
> the buildup of mass incarceration as they once were about lynching. The
> mainline church refused to confront and denounce the destructive force of
> corporate power. It placed its faith in institutions-such as the Democratic
> Party-that had long ceased to function as mechanisms of reform.
> The church, mirroring the liberal establishment, busied itself with
> charity,
> multiculturalism and gender-identity politics at the expense of justice,
> especially racial and economic justice. It retreated into a narcissistic
> "how-is-it-with-me" spirituality. Although the mainline church paid lip
> service to diversity, it never welcomed significant numbers of people of
> color or the marginalized into their sanctuaries. The Presbyterian Church,
> for example, is 92 percent white. It pushed to the margins or sought to
> discredit liberation theology, which called out the evils of unfettered
> capitalism, white supremacy and imperialism. The retreat from radicalism-in
> essence the abandonment of the vulnerable to the predatory forces of
> corporate capitalism-created a spiritual void filled by protofascist
> movements that have usurped Christian symbols and provided a species of
> faith that is, at its core, a belief in magic. This Christian heresy is
> currently on public display at Donald Trump and Ted Cruz political rallies.
>
> The last scenes of this decline are being played out at schools such as
> Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Tillich and Niebuhr taught at
> Union. America's most important theologian, James Cone-who opposes the
> condominium building project on the campus-teaches there.
> The president of the seminary, Serene Jones, says that unless part of the
> seminary's quadrangle is handed over to the developer, the seminary will
> not
> have the funds to survive (although she and her administration have refused
> to make school finances public). If Jones gets her way, Union will become
> part of the vast gentrification project being waged against the poor,
> especially poor people of color, in Morningside Heights and West Harlem.
> "With these development rights, we envision the creation of a beautiful,
> slender building that is visually in keeping with the neighborhood and that
> is set on the northeast end of the quad," Jones wrote in an open letter to
> the Union community last December. "We want our newest building to feel
> like
> it has always been part of the current campus. We chose this location after
> thorough analyses showed that this was the best, and only, suitable site."
> Union is working with the developer L+M Development Partners on
> construction
> plans. The firm has a history of hiring shady subcontractors-including MC&O
> Construction (found guilty of stealing $830,000 in 2013 from workers on a
> project of NYSAFAH contractor Procida Realty & Construction), RNC
> Industries
> LLC of Holtsville, N.Y. (repeatedly cited by the Occupational Safety and
> Health Administration for unsafe working conditions that have led to
> fatalities), and Ro-Sal Plumbing (which settled, for a class-action
> complaint filed by workers over unpaid wages).
> It is bad enough that Union would collaborate with companies charged with
> safety violations, workers' compensation fraud and wage theft, but it is
> also abetting the driving of poor families, many of them of color, from
> their homes throughout the city. Apartment rents have risen in New York by
> 75 percent since 2000. The poor are being pushed out of neighborhoods
> around
> Union, in some cases into homeless shelters and the streets.
> Students, and a few of Union's faculty members, have risen up in
> opposition.
> They charge, in the words of first-year student Yazmine Nichols, whom I
> interviewed by phone, that "there is a lack of honesty and transparency on
> the part of the administration."
> "No one knows," she told me, "how far along the plans are, whether there
> will be affordable housing units. All these things are question marks.
> "It is hard to get the school galvanized around something they [the
> students
> and faculty] have no information about," she added. "And this is part of
> the
> administration's plan-divide and conquer by not providing information.
> People are left guessing and speculating.
> "We need to ask ourselves what it means to exist as a theological
> institution," Nichols continued. "Are we truly existing if we do not hold
> onto the core values the institution is predicated on? This is a question
> about what it means to be a seminary geared to social justice. What does it
> mean when homeless people are sleeping outside seminary dormitories? With
> growing income inequality and a shrinking middle class, we must begin
> asking
> the question, 'Affordable for whom?' What we mean by 'affordability' is
> that
> housing ought to be affordable for people of color who fall at or below the
> NYC poverty line. What does it mean to worship God and theologize in a
> world
> where people are suffering? What does it mean for an institution to thrive
> in the presence of that suffering? What is the purpose of Union's
> existence?
> For Union to exist with a luxury condominium is for Union not to exist at
> all, at least not the Union I applied to. Union may continue to exist
> physically, but the soul of Union will be gone."
> Fear has driven church and seminary leaders into the hands of those the
> Gospel condemns as exploiters of the poor and the oppressed. They have
> turned their backs on Christian radicals, who alone can infuse new life
> into
> the church. The institutions believe alliances with the powerful and the
> wealthy will save them. They are wrong. Once they stand for nothing they
> become nothing.
> "There is a mourning among the declining members of mainline Christianity,"
> Rob Stephens, the Union student, said in the interview. "I don't share
> that.
> The mainline churches, by which we mean white denominations, are
> responsible
> for many of our greatest social ills, including white supremacy and
> patriarchy. If those parts of mainline Christianity need to die for renewal
> to take place, we need to learn how to embrace that. There is no
> resurrection without death."
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/failed_states_and_states_of_failure_2016
> 0125/
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/failed_states_and_states_of_failure_2016
> 0125/
>
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/failed_states_and_states_of_failure_2016
> 0125/
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>
> http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/video_elizabeth_warren_anyone_who_says_
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