An excerpt from Kelly Brown Douglas' Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God, a theological response to the murder of Trayvon Martin and other young African-Americans.

The transcendent freedom of God is essential for a black faith born on the soil of the oppressor's faith, directed presumably to the same God.  It was an awareness of God's transcendent freedom that enabled enslaved men and women to know that the God their enslavers spoke of was not truly God.  They recognized that their enslaver's God was as bound to the whips and chains of slavery as were their own black bodies.  Their enslaver's God was for all intents and purposes a white slave master sitting on a throne in heaven keeping black people in their place as chattel.  The black enslaved knew that this was not the God who encountered them in their free African lives.  They were certain, furthermore, that this was not the God they encountered in the Bible.  The God of their enslavers simply was not free.  The God of the enslaved, which they soon understood to be the God of the Bible, was free.  Doubtless, it was the African religious heritage of the enslaved that facilitated their profound understanding of God's freedom and transcendence.

The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A soldier returns home with amnesia thinking it is fifteen years earlier, before he met his wife and was in love with another woman. This story ultimately raises the questions of which is more important, the truth or happiness and how these relate to our obligations. A short novel, well written, engaging, and provocative.

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Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Among the greatest books I've ever read. I don't think I've ever been so moved reading a work of history. Branch is a marvelous writer. I felt as if I was reading the story of the founding of the country and that this story and these leaders should be as familiar to us as our abiding fascination with the 18th century founders. He doesn't appear to pull any punches in describing the scenes of horror. The sequence of the first Freedom Ride bus is tense and harrowing, even when you already know the basic contours of the story. Everyone should read this volume.

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Found this good video of philosopher Harry Frankfurt summarizing his views on bullshit. I'm going to use the video in class next week.

 

BULLSHIT! from Think Nice on Vimeo.

From John Cobb's Jesus' Abba. 

The modern scientistic vision leads to concluding that there is no such thing as reason or thought [because of determinism], no distinction between truth and falsehood, and nothing that could be called 'meaning.'  Most adherents of the modern worldview do not press consistency very far in this direction.  There is, of course, no empirical evidence for these conclusions.  They follow from a rarely examined metaphysics.

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I believe that Abba is in every cell in the body calling it to do its part for its own well-being and for the well-being of the whole.  When we pray for healing for ourselves, we are aligning ourselves with Abba's working within us.  We are also directly affecting our bodies, encouraging the cells to be open to what Abba wants to do in them and with them.

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Mutual respect cannot mean that we hold that every opinion is worthy of equal respect.

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A good education involves a continual expansion of awareness of possibilities not previously imagined.

Jesus Abba: The God Who Has Not Failed by John B. Cobb Jr.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Succinctly and in a confessional style John Cobb gives a passionate, intelligent presentation of of the key theological and philosophical positions of process theology. This might be a great introduction to that school for those who don't know it.

My favourite line fits paradoxcially with the subtitle. In a discussion of prayer and divine power Cobb writes, "My guess is that God often fails."

Process thought has been arguing for more than a century against traditional notions of divine power, and you can sense some frustration on Cobb's part that these arguments still have to be made. Just yesterday I saw a post of a friend's on Facebook angry about what he perceived as God's role in a friend's illness and why some were suggesting prayer. I wrote that I had a different understanding of prayer and rejected that understanding of divine power. I agree with Cobb that the great mass of humanity would be liberated into new thriving and greater, problem-solving community if we would just rid ourselves of bad metaphysics, particularly the Greco-Roman notion of divine power that is actually alien to the Judaeo-Christian notion.

I once heard Cobb asked if someone had to learn all the details of process theology, and he answered no that it was sufficient "if you believe that God is not a jerk." Though he doesn't use that line in this volume, that's what it is about--Jesus' vision of a God who is loving parent of an infant and not a jerk.

And so divine power is the lure, as Whitehead called it, or "the call forward" in Cobb's phrase. God is that Spirit which calls us forward to the ideals. Anyone sitting in my congregations will realize that I use this language all the time--without getting into in-depth exigesis of process philosophy and its sometimes difficult terminology.

This volume is probably the last published work of a wise, compassionate soul, his final hopeful message for the world.

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Ars Poetica - Poems | Academy of American Poets

 

Enjoyed this paragraph from John Cobb's Jesus' Abba in my reading today:

In these and many other instances people realize that the world contains possibilities that cannot be measured in terms of degrees of pleasure, enjoyment, or satisfaction.  There is something more, something much more, a treasure or many treasures that belong to a different dimension of experience.  These moments of blessedness feel like a gift.  It is natural to give thanks.

Ross Douthat writes on how virtual reality (particularly gaming, pornography, and social media) have altered behaviors in young adults and adolescents.  The digital world has helped alleviate some social problems while generating others.

According to this article on Vox, Susan Rice believes that the world has never been better.  This is indicative of the long view that the Obama foreign policy team takes and which it struggles to communicate to the general public.  This paragraph is a good summary of the article:

The result is a sharp tension at the heart of the Obama administration’s foreign policy. Team Obama tries to take the long view, and occasionally succeeds — see the Paris climate change agreement or the Iran nuclear deal. But the issues that command attention from both the American public and American allies often are more immediate, and require the Obama administration to divert resources toward daily crises that they would prefer to mostly ignore. These issues, like Syria, have come to define Team Obama’s time in office in the public eye.