Forty years ago, in the wake of the rebellion at Attica Prison, Rev. Robert Polk of the Riverside clergy founded the Riverside Prison Ministry. Throughout this past weekend, the Prison Ministry has been celebrating this anniversary . . .
Late this month, we will celebrate Thanksgiving. In 1863, just one week after his speech at Gettysburg, Pres. Lincoln made the proclamation that sets this holiday. It read, in part:
“It has seemed to me fit and proper that . . . the gracious gifts of the Most High God . . . should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and voice by the whole American people. . .
In the first pages of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, the reader confronts a Columbus quite different from the one we learned in school. Soon after his ship arrived, Columbus wrote of the Arawak Indians who swam out to meet it: “They are well-built . . . and so naïve and free with their possessions. They never say No. . . They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane… They would make fine servants… With fifty men, we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want . . .”
Last Sunday, leaning in close to the prayer of Psalm 91, we felt after an answer to the question, how God protects, how God saves. Our thought hung close to the personal experience. We said little of our self in relation to any community, or to larger joined purposes in the world. Yet now,
In a church of the liberal Protestant stripe, if a preacher never spoke of salvation, few would notice, for it has become ecclesiastically incorrect to talk about salvation. The word has become toxic for lots of reasons . . .
Last July, the Public Religion Research Institute reported results of a survey which showed that among adults born after 1980, one sixth are conservatives, but one quarter are progressives. Robert P Jones, head of PRRI, says, “The percentage of religious conservative shrinks in each successive generation . . .”
Such an appalling story. The beloved city is besieged. Famine—man-made, war-made—has them by the throat. No crops come from the fields for no one dares venture outside the city walls. No one is free. Everyone is terrified.
Late last spring, I read a new book by Nick Turse called “Kill Anything That Moves.” I recall the moment I finished it. I closed the cover and laid it on the table and wept some while in silence.
This is the lesson that must be learned. Spiritually speaking, there is no other lesson to learn. It is the one commandment. God comes to nothing.
Meditate with me on this promise, this hope, this possibility: Food for all. When there is food for all, then there will be no more war, no more greed, no more racism, no more mean streets, no more mass incarceration, no more border police, no more deportation, no more joblessness, no more fracking the foundations of the earth, no more lousy education, no more lousy housing, no more . . .
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