Bonhoeffer and King

A good book on two of my heroes:

Bonhoeffer and King: Their Legacies and Import for Christian Social Thought edited by Willis Jenkins and Jennifer M. McBride (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010).

The back cover states:

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King, Jr. -- these giants of recent Christian social thought are here reassessed for a new context and a new generation. Each combined activism, ministry, and theology. Each professed a kind of Christian realism and ended as a martyr to his respective cause. Here many of of the leading Christian social thinkers of our own day revisit the insights, causes, and strategies that Bonhoeffer and King employed for a new generation and its concerns: race, reconciliation, nonviolence, political violence, Christian theological identity, and ministry. Along with the editors, the illustrious gathering of  theologians, ethicists, and historians includes:  Michael Battle, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Stephen R. Haynes, Charles Marsh, and Glenn Stassen, among others.

 In his essay, "Preaching and Prophetic Witness," Raphael Gamaliel Warnock wrote:

Authentic preaching can only happen when one asks, What does the reality of God's incarnation in Christ demand? As Bonehoeffer says, "The Kingdom of God is not found in some other world beyond, but in the midst of this world ... God wants us to honor God on earth ... and nowhere else. God sinks the kingdom down into the cursed ground." 

This is one reason that I Declare World Peace.

MLK for Today

Monday, January 16 is the official holiday celebrating the birth of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Many of his speeches and sermons, regardless of the circumstances of his time, resonate very much for our own time, for today. In today's lingo, one can say that Dr. King worked on behalf of the 99%.

Here is a portion of his speech delivered on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York City to the group called Clergy and Laity Concerned. The speech is entitled,  Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. (The full text may be found here.)

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. on the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

Intervention in Libya

I have been quite concerned about the revolution/civil war that is going on in Libya. I am on the side of freedom and human rights for the people of that country who have been oppressed for forty years by their leader. I am, however, not happy with the military intervention by the coalition that includes the United States.  I believe along with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that peaceful means bring peaceful ends. I do not believe that war is the way to peace. I believe along with the Quakers that War Is Not the Answer.

I have seen some articles by others that seem to feel this way.

CODEPINK’s Medea Benjamin and journalist, Charles Davis have a piece entitled,  Instead of Bombing Dictators, Stop Selling Them Bombs. They write, “If the bitter lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan has taught us anything, though, it’s that wars of liberation exact a deadly toll on those they purportedly liberate – and that democracy doesn’t come on the back of a Tomahawk missile.” They tell us, the American taxpayers: “Instead of forking over $150 million a day to the weapons industry to attack Libya or selling $67 billion in weapons to the Saudis so they can repress not just their own people, but those of Bahrain, we – the ones being asked to forgo Social Security to help pay for empire – should demand those who purport to represent us in Washington stop arming dictators in our name.”

Richard Dawahare of Lexington wrote ‘Reality demands restraint’ for a blog on courier-journal.com. He concluded, “America should instead attend to the fallout of the continuing disaster in Japan, using our resources to help rebuild life, rather than reducing it in the sands of North Africa.” He also wrote a post on his own blog, The Peace Cow Field Journal, entitled, Attack on Libya seems right, is terribly wrong. “This smells like another neocon end-run using the veneer of humanitarianism as a smokescreen to hoodwink--ONCE AGAIN—an unwitting public,” he said there.

Alan J. Kuperman had a commentary,  5 things the U.S. should consider in Libya ,  in USA Today. Writing that intervening actually magnifies the threat to civilians in Libya and beyond, he wrote, “That is because armed uprisings, such as Libya's, typically provoke massive state retaliation that harms innocents.”  He listed five principles to guide humanitarian intervention, all of which apply to Libya.

A World Perspective

“Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective.” Martin Luther King, Jr.  


(Photo and quote from the Facebook page, War Is Obsolete)