Compassion and justice

A teaching of Jesus & John

By Morris Dean

[Published originally on September 1, 2009.]

An email discussion I’ve been having about health care reform with a small circle of Yale classmates recently put me in mind of something I’d read about the political philosopher John Rawls (1921-2002). I’d read, perhaps in an obituary, that he held something like

Thor’s Day: A holy reminder

Thou shalt not ignore the evidence

By Bob Boldt

How hard it is to change a mind based on new evidence and a reassessment. The outrage over Ferguson police conduct is valid, but let’s be honest about who Michael Brown was. Months ago a couple of white, Liberal friends on Facebook defriended me when I suggested Brown might not be a very suitable candidate for the Gandhi award. More evidence now points to the fact that Brown was indeed a bully, a thief, a thug, and not an innocent trying to surrender (hands up!) to officer Wilson. Perhaps Brown was a product of the rampant hostility largely engendered by the Ferguson police’s brutality toward their community, but it still seems that Brown gave Wilson no out but to kill him. I think the Jonathan Capehart piece in The Washington Post (“‘Hands up, don’t shoot’ was built on a lie”) pretty well sums up my conclusions after reading the Justice Department’s 86-page memorandum “...regarding the criminal investigation into the shooting death of Michael Brown by Ferguson, MO police officer Darren Wilson.”

At least it can’t happen in America

By motomynd

Can you even begin to imagine the horror of living in a country where you could be falsely accused of trying to kill the president and other political leaders, surrounded by hooded men carrying machine guns, paraded in front of the public, and imprisoned? No trial, no hearing, no chance at rebuttal: Just snatched at gunpoint, and locked up.

Thor's Day: The tie that binds

By Morris Dean

The English word "religion" derives through Old French from the Latin religiō, whose ultimate origins are obscure, but some modern scholars favor the derivation from ligare (bind, connect), probably from a prefixed re-ligare, i.e., re (again) + ligare, or "to reconnect." [Wikipedia]

Early Fall

[The photograph was sent to me by my friend Ina, the first in a set captioned: "When God paints, He uses all His colors." The photo appears to have been retouched by Thomas Kincaid to add a patina of wispy spirituality.]

Tomorrow will only be the autumnal equinox, but already today copious leaf fall heralds that this will be, or is, an early Fall. Fall has long been my favorite season, despite its literal fall into death and decay. I asked my wife on our walk if she thought the season was named because of leaf fall. She thought so. "And Spring for vegetation springing up out of the ground."

I shall have my own leaf fall one day...I started to say that it seems more matter-of-fact to me now that I have made up my mind about afterlife, but that felt false. I made up my mind about afterlife years ago, perhaps at the very beginning. Hell has always seemed too macabre an invention to credit. Perhaps I have never feared either heaven or hell, believing in neither.

Heaven might be where, if there were such a place, I would be set up as reward for having written, talked, and voted for justice and the common good, for valuing goats equally with sheep.

Hell might be where, if there were such a place, I could be cast as punishment for sympathizing as much with creatures of the bush as with high-and-mighty man, for thinking Yahweh's pal Moses imagined that the burning bush spoke to him, for ridiculing the flaming Bush of contemporary political infamy, for disrespecting bush¹-eschewing Bible-thumpers, for judging the golden tablets of the founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to have been a hoax motivated in part by his desire for polygamous bush².
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1. As in a man's or a woman's triangle of pubic hair.
2. As in several women's triangles of pubic hair.