Hasn’t the individualistic question about personal salvation almost completely left us all? Aren’t we really under the impression that there are more important things than that question…? I know it sounds pretty monstrous to say that. But, fundamentally, isn’t this in fact biblical? Does the question about saving one’s soul appear in the Old Testament at all? Aren’t righteousness and the Kingdom of God on earth the focus of everything, and isn’t it true that Rom. 3.24ff. is not an individualistic doctrine of salvation, but the culmination of the view that God alone is righteous? It is not with the beyond that we are concerned, but with this world as created and preserved, subjected to laws, reconciled, and restored. What is above this world is, in the gospel, intended to exist for this world; I mean that, not in the anthropocentric sense of liberal, mystic pietistic, ethical theology, but in the biblical sense of the creation and of the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

[John de Gruchy. Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Witness to Jesus Christ (Making of Modern Theology) (p. 280). Kindle Edition.]

This seemed at least tangentially related to the current debate on the New Perspective on Paul.

*

The CEO also contributed to the 6th-largest bank failure in U.S. history, and cost Americans 2,000 jobs as a result of the scheme. Oh, and they also tried to cash in on $500 of government funds from the TARP — although they ultimately failed.

Liberty and justice for all.

*

I thought I just wanted to pass;
Good grades were all I cared for.
My college made me take the class
More stuff for me to ignore!
But then I found out that
His theories weren’t so bad:
Labor and class combat,
What a very clever man!

CHORUS
I read some Marx, and I liked it;
The friend of the proletariat.
I read some Marx, just to try it;
Hope Adam Smith don’t mind it!
It felt so wrong,
It felt so right;
Men of the working class, unite!
I read some Marx, and I liked it;
I liked it!

There is a spectre hanging o’er
The face of Europe!
‘Tis communism, and it’s more
Than just a social hiccup.
A time will come soon when
The masses rise as one
To carve out their place in
The brand new poetry to come!

CHORUS

Marx is the man, he’s working for you;
The bourgeoisie, they just ain’t your crew.
Alienation of labor is bad,
Commodification is not a good fad.
The capitalists are greedy you see;
A shorter workday, now that’s what we need!
I’m reading some Marx, and I’m liking it;
Rise up now, proletariat!

CHORUS

*

If only corporations could have free rein without all this government regulation, the common person would truly live in paradise.

Who knew Wittgenstein was into photography?

Ideology is a powerful beast. While many middle-class folks on the Right want to defend laissez-faire principles, they’re the very ones who are being pillaged by the same principles they espouse.

The fact that any notions of further economic deregulation are being entertained at all in the wake of the financial meltdown is utterly stupifying. It’s one thing for political and corporate elites to suggest such things, but this is even being taken up by the masses (i.e the Tea Party).

It is a case of Stockholm syndrome par excellence: people believing in the very ideology that enslaves them.

§

Daniel writes,

I’m often puzzled by how easily American Christians get swept up and overpowered by nationalistic narratives of war. Going beyond the debate about pacifism and just-war theory, I would at least expect Christians to be more suspicious of the grandiose narratives that nation-states use to justify violence. To be sure, we cannot underestimate the power of these narratives. Usually clothed in utilitarian language, and endorsed by most of the news sources available to us, they take on an aura of objectivity. They simply make sense. It becomes hard to resist them. One way to resist such narratives is to recognize that they are just that—narratives. They represent one way of looking at things. By no means are they absolute. Once this is realized, they are able to be called into question. “Perhaps, this story has missed the picture. Perhaps, its focus has sidelined important obligations that we should have never forgotten.”

Resistance to a nationalistic narrative of war requires an alternative narrative to counter it. And given the hegemony that militaristic narratives enjoy, any counter-narrative will almost always be a marginalized narrative. Christians need to recognize that the Gospel itself is a marginalized narration of the state-of-affairs, one in which the King of the cosmos conquers through death on a cross. So Christians do have the resources for resistance. But the question is, do we still have the imagination to question the primacy of militaristic narratives? Can we re-imagine things in such a way that there is room for us to love our enemies?

It seems as though many Christians remain quite comfortable with the mainstream narratives of war. But we need to resist; we need to remember our story. In the mean time, maybe we will have to find inspiration from Muslim, Palestinian poets in Brooklyn.

From the scene:

ARTHUR:  Old woman!
DENNIS:  Man!
ARTHUR: Old man, sorry.  What knight lives in that castle over there?
DENNIS:  I’m thirty-seven.
ARTHUR:  What?
DENNIS:  I’m thirty-seven, I’m not old!
ARTHUR:  Well, I can’t just call you ‘man.’
DENNIS:  Well, you could say ‘Dennis’.
ARTHUR:  Well, I didn’t know you were called ‘Dennis.’
DENNIS:  Well, you didn’t bother to find out, did you?
ARTHUR:  I did say sorry about the ‘old woman,’ but from the behind you looked—
DENNIS:  What I object to is you automatically treat me like an inferior!
ARTHUR:  Well, I am king…
DENNIS:  Oh king, eh? Very nice.  And how’d you get that, eh?  By exploitin’ the workers! By hangin’ on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society! If there’s ever going to be any progress—
WOMAN:  Dennis, there’s some lovely filth down here.  Oh—how d’you do?
ARTHUR:  How do you do, good lady.  I am Arthur, King of the Britons. Who’s castle is that?
WOMAN:  King of the who?
ARTHUR:  The Britons.
WOMAN:  Who are the Britons?
ARTHUR:  Well, we all are. We’re all Britons, and I am your king.
WOMAN:  I didn’t know we had a king.  I thought we were an autonomous collective.
DENNIS:  You’re fooling yourself.  We’re living in a dictatorship! A self-perpetuating autocracy in which the working-classes—
WOMAN:  Oh there you go, bringing class into it again.
DENNIS:  Well, that’s what it’s all about! If only people would–
ARTHUR:  Please, please good people.  I am in haste.  Who lives in that castle?
WOMAN:  No one live there.
ARTHUR:  Then who is your lord?
WOMAN:  We don’t have a lord.
ARTHUR:  What?
DENNIS:  I told you.  We’re an anarcho-syndicalist commune.  We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week.
ARTHUR:  Yes.
DENNIS:  But all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting.
ARTHUR:  Yes, I see.
DENNIS:  By a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs,—
ARTHUR:  Be quiet!
DENNIS:  —but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more—
ARTHUR:  Be quiet!  I order you to be quiet!
WOMAN:  “Order,” eh? Who does he think he is?
ARTHUR:  I am your king!
WOMAN:  Well, I didn’t vote for you.
ARTHUR:  You don’t vote for kings.
WOMAN:  Well, how did you become king, then?
ARTHUR:  [angels sing] The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water signifying by Divine Providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. [singing stops] That is why I am your king!
DENNIS:  Listen—strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.  Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony!
ARTHUR:  Be quiet!
DENNIS:  Well you can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just ’cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!
ARTHUR:  Shut up!
DENNIS:  I mean, if I went around sayin’ I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they’d put me away!
ARTHUR:  Shut up!  Will you shut up!
DENNIS:  Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the system!
ARTHUR:  Shut up!
DENNIS:  Oh!  Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help! Help! I’m being repressed!
ARTHUR:  Bloody peasant!
DENNIS:  Oh, what a give away.  Did you here that, did you here that, eh?  That’s what I’m on about—did you see him repressing me? You saw it, didn’t you?

It’s been imaged in artists’ renderings, but never before in actual photos from another spacecraft: the sight of a space shuttle berthed at the International Space Station. This view of shuttle Endeavour, taken by Italian astronaut Paulo Nespoli from aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule on May 23, is the culmination of 36 space shuttle missions to build the outpost over the past 12 years. NASA wanted the shot before it retires the shuttle fleet after one final mission in July.

You can see even more stunning photos at the original site.

Image credit: Paulo Nespoli/NASA.