Articles

 Keith agrees and engages with physicist Mark Buchanan's thesis in his book Forecast: What Physics, Meteorologists, and Natural Sciences Can Teach Us About Economics. Let us not return to the equilibrium delirium of current economic ideology. 

The development of the righteous/wicked dichotomy in the Old Testament

The popular notion of a great and cataclysmic end of the world is more populyptic and works against the insight of the biblical, apocalyptic perspective.

"There is nothing more precious in the world than human lives." --Michail Gorbachev

God loves humans. There is probably no more of an accurate sound bite for Christian anarchism than that. 

What would happen if somehow, the “unaffiliated” were presented with and allowed to interact with the world inside the parables of the kingdom? What would happen to our little world if we did that?

This is a scary thought for us religious folk. For inside that world there is no church, no dogmas, no ministers or priests, no tradition, nor the Bible. There is really no Jesus even. What is most present in the parables is a powerful reality thrusting its way into ours.

Having embraced an Anabaptist notion of Christian anarchy in my early adult years, I found Aristotle Papanikolaou's book The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy a welcome and challenging exploration into the Christian response to "culture wars" and involvement in politics. 

 The unifying nature of sacrifice always works best when the true nature of the victim and the act of dismemberment are concealed and disconnected from the community. Victims of consumptive greed and wealth expansion work best when they are invisible and silent. It is the victim, however, who sees most clearly what is going on. 

In America, sacrifice is held up as nearly the most fundamental of virtues. Indeed, one pundit recently wrote that moral authority is only achieved through sacrifice.  Nothing betrays our double-mindedness about our violence toward one another as the use of the word hero.   

 Like no other day in our hard-driving, capitalistic American life, however, we have managed to retain a subversive vestige of Sabbath’s radical core. 

 I have struggled over just what to make of the Christian story being high-jacked as the vessel of choice to revisit that same black hole of glossy-eyed pop culture every year.     

"Here’s the irony of tyranny. It was the landed oligarchs who slapped the tyranny label on a “leader of the people” who challenged ruling elites’ claim to absolute power over the public domain."

 Warning: this Christmas article is not for children, nor was the story of Jesus’ birth.  The biblical narrative of his birth is a clash of worlds, of empires, of political wills and armies. 

Luke 15:11-32

I am going to violate principles I’ve known about reading the Bible, in this case a parable, to render a different way of looking at what is typically known as the parable of the prodigal son. 

If there is anything this pandemic and our social discord is revealing, it is how powerful belief is and how much it drives political will.

 Our current version of the American myth needs a transformation if we want to break our gridlock, but story lines can be stubbornly resistant to revision especially from those who most benefit from it. 

They who control reproduction control production, or is it the other way around?

 But a funny thing happened on my way to exploring the definition of retribution. Its root is tribe. Fundamentally, the consequence for disturbing the universal balance is to be “re-­‐tribed,” i.e. to take back tribe.  

 The parable of the vineyard and the tenants in Luke 20:9-19

When the owner of the vineyard comes, what will that mean for us?

The biblical model of womb economic justice needs to find its way into our current morass over abortion, at least for Christians. Properly understood “pro-life” means for one thing that  seizures of livelihood outside of the womb are as violent as invasive procedures inside it. 

I embrace socialism for the basic reasons that: 1) I am a social creature 2) Everyone else is a socialist. The real distinction is only in the kind of socialism we are talking about, and 3) the Bible tells me so. 

The parable of the vineyard and tenants in Luke 20: 9-19

When the owner of the vineyard comes, what will that mean for us?

In his article, "Yahweh the Revolutionary: Reflections on the Rhetoric of Redistribution in the Social Context of Dawning Monotheism," Baruch Halpern challenges some of the hermeneutical foundations that liberation theologians have relied on to promote a redistribution agenda from the Old Testament. This article engages Halpern's critique in order to clarify his own "liberation tendencies."