teeming sea of blue
green, lavender, yellow, and
unnamed atmospheres
masses: fire
stepping through the rip in the grid
into the conflagration
of words
masses: after armageddon
gravestones of nightmares
disintegrate into dust
in dawn’s gentle light
masses: rain
painting by marlene vine, poem by roy herndon smith in the early falling dusk rain spatters on the screen and glass between dark distortions of branches holding deep mauve to blue-grey emptiness and sorrow blotching into joy in the reverberant clarity of the present blurring into the lost was and the unknown will be
leaves
ratty, lumpy shag rugs
of dead leaves cover the ground
of memories
cheeses 1-3
silkiness melting
sun baking
the creamy light deepening
On Religion: “On the night he was betrayed”: Why Antisemitism Characterizes Many of the Most Destructive Contemporary Conspiracy Theories
Many of the most destructive and counter-factual contemporary Western conspiracy theories are antisemitic because they are new versions of what the gospel scholar Burton L. Mack calls Mark’s apocalyptic “myth of innocence”, otherwise known as the Christian Gospel, that has, since the fourth century ACE, shaped Westerners’ assumptions about reality as a struggle between a wholly innocent, betrayed, and afflicted, but ultimately omnipotent and triumphant, power and the evil, but ultimately doomed, rulers of this world. In this reality, as a Catholic priest once said, “there has to be a betrayer.” And, throughout Western history, not only conspiracy theories, but dominant ideologies of both ruling institutions and revolutionary powers have followed Mark in naming the Jews as the guilty betrayers and cruel persecutors and murderers not only of saviors, but innocence itself.
freedom
we’re the wind
roaring through raggedy trees
on a wild november day
fish
a fish doesn’t exist
outside of brown leaves drifting
over the pavement
On Religion: Chris Hedges, Heresy, Christian Orthodoxy, and Imperialism
abstract: Hedges’ claim that “the Christian Right” has contaminated “the Christian religion“ with “aspects” of “American” society—“imperialism, capitalism, chauvinism, violence and bigotry”— that are alien to Christianity is historically false. These evils have characterized the most dominant strands of Christianity throughout its history. Hedges’ denunciation of the Christian right as heretical implicitly enacts an orthodoxy that has authorized and even required Christian “imperialism, … chauvinism, violence and bigotry.” When Hedges denounces the Christian right as heretical, he implicitly uses the orthodox logic that equates imperial might with sacred rightness, precisely the logic that the historical Jesus, according to a great deal of historical evidence, subverted.
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