Roy Herndon Smith re: A Confession of Faith in a Time of Crisis http://reclaimingjesus.org/ While I am very glad to read this confession as an attempt to counter the identification of "Christianity" with oppressive sectarian authoritarian absolutism--one might call it "Chistianicism"--it also articulates why I no longer consider myself to be a "Christian." The confession begins and…
Category: politics
Paving the Road to Hell: Good Will Alienation 2
When Matt Damon focuses on the fantasy that exposure of their sexual cruelty will ruin rich and powerful white men’s lives, he exacerbates his alienation from the reality of the intersectional destructiveness of sexual cruelty.
Paving the Road to Hell: Good Will Alienation 1
Damons’ and Travers’ alienating discourse is an instance of an engrained social behavior that unintentionally reinforces patterns of cruelty. Confrontation of sexual cruelty requires confrontation of this alienation.
Paving the Road to Hell
Recently, I have noticed a repeated pattern in a number of discussions of current events. Someone with good intentions makes an argument that enacts what I call “structural cruelty.” I am using “structural cruelty” as a more apt term than “structural violence” for the afflicting of suffering through relatively stable and often institutionalized patterns of social interaction. The most obvious example of such structural cruelty is the impoverishment of large numbers of people under hierarchical political-economic orders, such as capitalism, feudalism, and authoritarian and totalitarian socialism.
America 15
America sits
and practices detachment,
observing it all.
America 14
America dreams.
A mass of opacity,
white nothing other—
America 13
America lies
in a bed, not her bed, in
a room, not her room,
