Marilynne Robinson makes that point as well in her book Reading Genesis, pointing out how God cares for all mankind, and pointing out that Hagar is the first person in the Bible visited by an angel, as a bit of trivia.
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Nailed it.
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Popping my head in because I was just reading the poetry of St. John of the Cross (San Juan de la Cruz, which sounds more normal in Spanish than in English), and I wanted to share one of my faves. He predates the Reformation and is still considered one of the greatest poets in the Spanish language. Anyway, the English translation followed by the Spanish, to give a sense of the rhythm and rhyme. @Christy might enjoy this one.
EL PASTORCICO
I
Un pastorcico solo está penado
ageno de plazer y de contento
y en su pastora puesto el pensamiento
y el pecho del amor muy lastimado.
II
No llora por averle amor llagado
que no le pena verse así affligido
aunque en el coraçón está herido
mas llora por pensar que está olbidado.
III
Que sólo de pensar que está olbidado
de su vella pastora con gran pena
se dexa maltratar en tierra agena
el pecho del amor muy lastimado!
IV
Y dize el pastorcito: ¡Ay desdichado
de aquel que de mi amor a hecho ausencia
y no quiere gozar la mi presencia
y el pecho por su amor muy lastimado!
V
Y a cavo de un gran rato se a encumbrado
sobre un árbol do abrió sus braços vellos
y muerto se a quedado asido dellos
el pecho del amor muy lastimado.
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“What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.”
Dorothy Sayers
(As quoted in ‘The Myth of Good Christian Parenting‘)
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Wow, is that applicable to the current situation in the U.S.!
It reminds me of a notice posted in multiple places on the local community college campus telling Latinos how to respond if ICE hassles them; one thing it emphasizes is that they are not “brown people”, they are valued individuals.
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We have been reading “The Hiding Place,” by Corrie Ten Boom, with the kids at night. I’m struck by the godliness of Corrie and her family–her sister, Betsy, prayed for peace as the Germans bombed them, but also for the German pilots, who she described as confused young men, entrapped by a horrible regime.
When Corrie and her father saw Jews being loaded on to the back of a truck, she cried, “Oh, Father! Those poor people!” In reponse her father said, “Yes, those poor people, the Germans–for they have touched the apple of God’s eye.”
We learned that her father fired only one person in his 60 years as a watchmaker–a member of the Nazi party who treated an old employee shamefully, because of the Nazi ideology of treating the elderly and others as useless to society . Even then, he tried to remonstrate with him. In response, the man gazed at the whole family with extreme contempt as he left.
It is a great text for us to remember and study virtue.
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“…the purpose of a university education: to cause reflection, not be a reflection.”
-Greg Lukianoff
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That’s super!
“Jesus is victorious over violence not because he rules with the sword, but because the sword does not rule him.”
Phuc Luu in “Jesus of the East”
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“Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.”
G.K. Chesterton
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'Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.’
-Eric Hoffer
More from Phuc Luu and his book: “Jesus of the East” which I just finished. This paragraph is from the last pages of that work.
There is also a war at the forefront of Christian faith. This war is fought for the identity of Jesus. Much about Jesus has been lost over two millennia. This struggle might not be relevant if Christianity had simply come and gone, dying off like an ancient myth. But retellings of the Jesus story in the lives of people who have encountered this Jesus persist. These stories tenaciously continue because people are still befriending this Jesus. Some of the retellings are gentle, tender, transformative, and worthy of the Nazarene rabbi, but others repeat the story of conquest and empire, of a Christianity that colonized and continues to colonize. Those stories are stories of “Jesus” in name only because they are incompatible with the story that was handed down to us by the first Christians. In many ways, those stories are not a remembering of Jesus, but rather require the active forgetting of Jesus.
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There’s an Antiochene Orthodox church in the area where many of the new members are young former evangelicals who couldn’t match the Jesus of the scriptures with the Jesus preached by their church.
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Does he mean by “a devil” the one or ones whom the mass movement opposes or sets up as a scapegoat?
That’s my understanding. “Scapegoat” is the perfectly descriptive word for it too!
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I’ve just been mulling over how it is to be a minority, the subject of prejudice. One example comes from Harold Abrams in “Chariots of Fire.” It reminds me of an interview with a Black man with similar struggles that I heard on National Public Radio.
“It’s an ache, a helplessness, an anger. One feels humiliated.
“Sometimes I say to myself, ‘Hey, steady on, you’re imagining all this.’
“And then I catch that look again. Catch it on the edge of a remark, feel a cold reluctance in a handshake.”
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I think that painting the abolitionists in the struggle against American slavery as heroes is inadequate, and somewhat dishonest. The struggle of 10 million enslaved humans in 250 years of going through all the suffering they did, and remained human, showed the true heroes. –adapted from Brian Stevenson Loving America Honestly | The Ezra Klein Show
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I don’t think that greatness is defined by who has the most powerful military; I don’t think that greatness is defined by who has the most money; I don’t think that greatness is defined by who has done the most innovation with regard to technology; it’s not defined by who gets to the moon first or to Mars first. Those are all notable and laudable achievements. But when I think about human history and when I think about the human struggle, I am quite convinced that greatness is defined by our capacity to love one another; our capacity to care for people we don’t have to care for, our capacity to show mercy, our capacity to help those in need, our capacity to get beyond boundaries and borders that have either artificially or naturally limited us; our capacity to unlock opportunities for those who have been unfairly bound and burdened. That’s greatness. –Brian Stevenson.
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I would add that unless we have managed to imbue those qualities into AI, we have not truly achieved artificial intelligence.
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