--from Vincent D. Rougeau's book, Christians in the American Empire, Oxford Univ. Press, 2008. [Vincent Rougeau is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame. His father is a shareholder in the law firm where I am employed.]
American culture has a particular propensity for celebrating notions of freedom that are rooted in extreme versions of individual autonomy. Increasingly, this has driven American law and politics away from understandings of the human person that are situated in communal values like solidarity and sharing. Hurricane Katrina and the near destruction of New Orleans exposed an American governing elite that was shockingly cavalier in its disregard for meaningful emergency preparedness and virtually incapable of demonstrating the kind of community-bonding leadership and compassion one would expect in a crisis of such magnitude. American politics has continued to descend to shocking new lows, with corruption scandals enveloping prominent members of Congress from both parties, as well as some of President Bush's closest advisors. Nevertheless, American power elits continue to nurture a culture of self-promotion and greed in order to maintain their social and economic dominance, to justify current structural inequalities in American society, and to promote the creation of economic and political structures around the world sympathetic to their interest. p. 3-4
In this book I argue that the social, economic, and political life of the United States has reached a crisis point that will require many Christians to make some difficult choices about the nature of their participation in American democracy and society. p. 6
I argue in particular that it is somewhat disingenuous for Christians who align themselves with the Republican Party to claim their political choice is demanded by a meaninful understanding of the intellectual traditions of Christianity. The Republican political program is driven not only by neoconservatives but also by ideologues who embrace libertarianism, nativism, free-market capitalism, militarism, and moral absolutism in ways that are completely at odds with modern understandings of orthodox Christian theology. p. 7
Despite its being cast as a "crusade" by President Bush and neoconservative intellectuals, the Iraq War has little to do with Christianity, properly understood. It is simply one step in a broader process of bolstering America's world power and creating a civil religion sympathetic to the social, political, and economic objectives of key elites in the United States.
Thoughtful American Christians must recognize that, regardless of who occupies the White House, the United States has not been selected to be a special recipient of divine favor, nor has God chosen the United States to play a unique role among the world's nations. Attempts to justify U.S. economic and military hegemony by likening the nation's foreign policy to a divinely inspired moral role in world affairs should be dismissed out of hand as irresponsible political pandering by people anxious to preserve their grip on power. Why is the United States more deserving of God's favor than any other nation on earth? Are our wealth and military power proof of our favored position? Orthodox Christian theology rejects any attempt to link wealth and temporal power to God's favor. Indeed, if any group can lay claim to a special relationship with God, it is the poor. In the final analysis, no U.S. political party or presidential administration has any right to claim a Christian mandate for a quest to maintain world dominance.
By exposing some of the powerful imperatives that drive legal and political choices in the United States, I hope to explain why key priorities of America's governing and social elites part with the ethos that should underlie Christian citizenship in a democratic society. I also argue that religious influences on political choices in pluralist democracies have certain pragmatic limits and that it is absurd and dangerous for Christians to see American politics as a means for creating a coherent Christian culture in the United States. Diverse societies filled with people of varying beliefs represent the current reality for most liberal democracies worldwide. It is a political and cultural environment that Christians committed to human dignity and respect for individual conscience should embrace, and it is one in which a Christian can both survive and thrive. Working from an active and respectful Christian participation in pluralist, secular democracies, I propose an approach to political engagement and civic life for Christians that nurtures human dignity through the enhancement of community life and social solidarity and rejects the heavy-handed power of military violence, the social emptiness of radical personal autonomy, and the winner-take-all mentality of loosely regulated free-market capitalism.
A Christian's public life must be rooted in charity and love. In a deomcracy, Christian citizens should look closely at the assumptions and values that shape law and public policy and then determine whether, on balance, the apparatus of state strives to promote the dignity and participation of citizens in the nation's common life.... The Christian's role is to assess the overall direction of the society and ask hard questions about what type of community the nation's political and legal actors are attempting to create. How do our leaders understand what supports a decent and dignified human existence, and how does this vision affect our nation's relationships to other human communities around the world? pp. 7-8
Christians in the United States could exhort their fellow citizens to be less materialistic, nationalistic, and self-centered and challenge them to become more charitable, more cosmopolitan, and more open to the transformative power of engagement with others, both home and abroad. p. 9
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Zero Tolerance 2
Letter to the Editor, Style Weekly
Copyright © 2009 Judith J. Bentley
This Letter to the Editor was published in Style Weekly on February 11, 2009.
I was hired in 1989-90 as a lead teacher in RPS’s first alternative school. My colleague and I had somehow to reach functionally illiterate students labeled at risk, many of whom had come to us straight from juvenile detention. Our mission was to give them hope for a better future through hard work and daily drills in reading, language, math, science and social skills.
We soon realized that what was required of us was much more than we could give -- we could not replace their fathers, many of whom were either incarcerated or whose whereabouts were unknown. We could not provide the love and guidance from mothers who had abandoned them to drugs and prostitution. Since most of them had no one at home to help them with their homework, they didn’t do any. And we certainly knew that sending them home for their disruptive behavior just so our nerves could have a break was no answer. They didn't want to be in school anyway so it was a short-term remedy for us and a reward for them, not a punishment.
At the end of that year to cut costs, I was one of eleven teachers laid off. I could not have lasted another year -- my colleague died of a heart attack after the school year ended leaving behind a wife and two little girls. Now, nearly 20 years later, Chris Dovi's article (“The Big Expulsion,” January 21) sadly exposed the brokenness that persists in our inner city public schools.
Susan Eaton, a researcher with the Harvard Law School's Institute of Race and Justice whose study, The Children in Room E4, is based only on the last eight years, suggested in a PBS interview two things that would be easy for schools to do now without expending an enormous amount of money—include a civics curriculum and institute alternatives to zero tolerance discipline (suspension that leads to dropping out that leads to incarceration). The only thing easy about her suggestions is her rhetoric.
But I do agree with her assessment that it will require a reorientation and a look at our priorities as to whether we as a community are willing to provide opportunities for poor children to participate in our larger society or whether we will continue, in our indifference or outright contempt, to keep them isolated and quarantined in our inner cities, those pockets our President has called history’s confinement, repositories for the scars and legacy of slavery.
413 words
Copyright © 2009 Judith J. Bentley
This Letter to the Editor was published in Style Weekly on February 11, 2009.
I was hired in 1989-90 as a lead teacher in RPS’s first alternative school. My colleague and I had somehow to reach functionally illiterate students labeled at risk, many of whom had come to us straight from juvenile detention. Our mission was to give them hope for a better future through hard work and daily drills in reading, language, math, science and social skills.
We soon realized that what was required of us was much more than we could give -- we could not replace their fathers, many of whom were either incarcerated or whose whereabouts were unknown. We could not provide the love and guidance from mothers who had abandoned them to drugs and prostitution. Since most of them had no one at home to help them with their homework, they didn’t do any. And we certainly knew that sending them home for their disruptive behavior just so our nerves could have a break was no answer. They didn't want to be in school anyway so it was a short-term remedy for us and a reward for them, not a punishment.
At the end of that year to cut costs, I was one of eleven teachers laid off. I could not have lasted another year -- my colleague died of a heart attack after the school year ended leaving behind a wife and two little girls. Now, nearly 20 years later, Chris Dovi's article (“The Big Expulsion,” January 21) sadly exposed the brokenness that persists in our inner city public schools.
Susan Eaton, a researcher with the Harvard Law School's Institute of Race and Justice whose study, The Children in Room E4, is based only on the last eight years, suggested in a PBS interview two things that would be easy for schools to do now without expending an enormous amount of money—include a civics curriculum and institute alternatives to zero tolerance discipline (suspension that leads to dropping out that leads to incarceration). The only thing easy about her suggestions is her rhetoric.
But I do agree with her assessment that it will require a reorientation and a look at our priorities as to whether we as a community are willing to provide opportunities for poor children to participate in our larger society or whether we will continue, in our indifference or outright contempt, to keep them isolated and quarantined in our inner cities, those pockets our President has called history’s confinement, repositories for the scars and legacy of slavery.
413 words
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Happy Birthday, Mozart!
Happy Birthday, Mozart!
January 27
“When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer — say traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep — it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best, and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not, nor can I force them."
--Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, born January 27, 1756 in Salzburg, which is now in Austria.
January 27
“When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer — say traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep — it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best, and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not, nor can I force them."
--Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, born January 27, 1756 in Salzburg, which is now in Austria.
Zero Tolerance
Copyright © 2009 Judith J. Bentley
You pull out a hundred dollar bill for a 75 cent lunch.
“Ms. B, you make money like this?”
No, I come from the comfort of the cloistered corporate cocoon--
where our profits are kept in a city of style
Mother Teresa never visited.
We have zero tolerance for the likes of you
and the concentration camp we didn’t create
where you were orphaned and homeless, where you live
in boarded up buildings locked in rooms you will never leave.
And since your mother is a drug addict and prostitute
and your father’s permanent residence, the federal prison --
by the way, we’re making room there for you too--
you have nothing to look forward to.
There’s no one home to help you with your homework
and since you have been told you will never amount to anything,
you don’t do any. So let me see if you can spell “despair.”
Our new President explains that you were born into
“history’s confinement” where the poorest of the poor are housed,
a repository for the remaining legacy of slavery and violence,
where your daily bread is forced ignorance and internalized rage.
There are no jobs for you except the local street drug trade.
Over the brain dead megaphone, a stimulant or sedative we take
with our office cups of cappuccino or on the way home
to our suburban housewives, we occasionally hear how you’ve become
your own firing squad, saving us the trouble.
Otherwise, you attract little public notice
except when we see you slumped over
your schoolroom desk, your teacher’s arms folded tightly
across his chest. We would certainly not hold you.
In our committee conversations you are statistics
we consider with our tactics and rhetorical strategies.
We may alter our curriculum next year
to include civics lessons if it doesn’t cost too much.
That’s what a Harvard researcher says we should do.
She should know--she visited your classroom once
so she could write a book. Maybe it’ll be a best seller.
Well, I’m taking my kids to Italy next week.
It’s so cold in this City in the Winter.
But first, I’ll pray in church this Sunday,
“Give us this day our daily bread.”
Now for that story I promised you.
“Once upon a time in a City called Calcutta.…”
[Note: Judith Bentley is a writer, poet and legal assistant in a national law firm headquartered in Richmond. She served as one of two lead teachers in Richmond’s first alternative school.]
You pull out a hundred dollar bill for a 75 cent lunch.
“Ms. B, you make money like this?”
No, I come from the comfort of the cloistered corporate cocoon--
where our profits are kept in a city of style
Mother Teresa never visited.
We have zero tolerance for the likes of you
and the concentration camp we didn’t create
where you were orphaned and homeless, where you live
in boarded up buildings locked in rooms you will never leave.
And since your mother is a drug addict and prostitute
and your father’s permanent residence, the federal prison --
by the way, we’re making room there for you too--
you have nothing to look forward to.
There’s no one home to help you with your homework
and since you have been told you will never amount to anything,
you don’t do any. So let me see if you can spell “despair.”
Our new President explains that you were born into
“history’s confinement” where the poorest of the poor are housed,
a repository for the remaining legacy of slavery and violence,
where your daily bread is forced ignorance and internalized rage.
There are no jobs for you except the local street drug trade.
Over the brain dead megaphone, a stimulant or sedative we take
with our office cups of cappuccino or on the way home
to our suburban housewives, we occasionally hear how you’ve become
your own firing squad, saving us the trouble.
Otherwise, you attract little public notice
except when we see you slumped over
your schoolroom desk, your teacher’s arms folded tightly
across his chest. We would certainly not hold you.
In our committee conversations you are statistics
we consider with our tactics and rhetorical strategies.
We may alter our curriculum next year
to include civics lessons if it doesn’t cost too much.
That’s what a Harvard researcher says we should do.
She should know--she visited your classroom once
so she could write a book. Maybe it’ll be a best seller.
Well, I’m taking my kids to Italy next week.
It’s so cold in this City in the Winter.
But first, I’ll pray in church this Sunday,
“Give us this day our daily bread.”
Now for that story I promised you.
“Once upon a time in a City called Calcutta.…”
[Note: Judith Bentley is a writer, poet and legal assistant in a national law firm headquartered in Richmond. She served as one of two lead teachers in Richmond’s first alternative school.]
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