“The church has no enemies. Its only enemies are those who willfully declare themselves so.” – Archbishop Oscar Romero

Here is a short interview with Stanley Hauerwas. You will find the interview towards the bottom. Hauerwas makes a few points that Christians, especially in America need to hear.

This quote is fitting for our time. “You know, I’m not trying to call Christians out of being politically involved; I just want them to be there as Christians. And instead, what they get is they think they have a personal relationship with Jesus, which makes it OK for them to do anything that they damn well please, in the name of what’s important for national defence. Well, Jesus is a political saviour, and that prayer is a political prayer. And that’s the kind of seizing of the imagination I’m trying to help Christians regain in America. Because in America, Christians just cannot distinguish themselves – what it means to be Christian, they assume it goes hand in hand with what it means to be an American. And that’s just a deep mistake. But how to help Christians recover that difference is very difficult indeed.”

“Culturally, it is impossible not to see physical suburbanization  as one of the fruits of America’s historic inclination towards individualism.  This is not to suggest that our suburbs lack or must necessarily lack the communal associations regarded by Tocqueville as essential to virtue, civility, and just democratic politics. Nevertheless, compared to the traditional city, suburbia seems morally and culturally deficient in two noteworthy respects. The first is suburbia’s comparative class homogeneity, most starkly evident when one compares the uniformity of housing in virtually any suburban residential development with the variety of housing types that can be found on urban residential streets. The second is that the very nature of the postwar suburb requires a dissociation of daily communal life from physical place, a dissociation that not only fails to sustain both the social reality and the aesthetics of communal life but positively undermines them.” Philip Bess, Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Sacred (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2006), 22-23

“Take Christmas away, and in biblical terms you lose two chapters at the front of Matthew and Luke, nothing else. Take Easter away, and you don’t have a New Testament; you don’t have a Christianity; as Paul says, you are still in your sins. We shouldn’t allow the secular world, with its schedules and habits and parareligious events, its cute Easter bunnies, to blow us off course. This is our greatest day.” N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: Harper Collins, 2008), 257.

“The power of the state grew in concert with the rise of capitalism, because of direct state subsidies for business and international trade, the development of state sanctioned standardized monetary and taxation systems, and the emergence of a centralized legal system which made possible the commodification and contractualization of land, goods, and especially labour. In other words, the impersonal and centralized state accompanied the invention of the autonomous individual liberated from the confines of the traditional group and now relating to other individuals on the basis of contract. Property – including one’s own self in the form of one’s labour – became alienable. Thus was born both the capitalist and the wage labourer.” William T. Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination (New York: T&T Clark, 2002), 74.

For the most part, Christians have accepted the integrating role of the state on the assumption that the state is ’secular’ and therefore neutral apparatus for the working out of conflict among different interests. To see the state as an alternative soteriology; and civil society as inseparable from the state, is to begin to notice the inherent conflict between state practices and the practices such as the Eucharist which Christians take for granted. True peace depends not on the subsumption of this conflict, but on the recovered sense of its urgency.” William T. Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination (New York: T&T Clark, 2002), 52.

“The rise of the modern secular state is a historically contingent event that has produced more, not less violence. It has done so not by secularizing politics, but by supplanting the imagination of the body of Christ with a heretical theology of salvation through the state.” William T. Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination (New York: T&T Clark, 2002), 5.

“People tend to think of nonviolence as a choice between using force and doing nothing. But for Jesus, the real choice takes place at another level. Nonviolence is less a matter of ‘not killing’ and more a matter of showing compassion, of saving and redeeming, of being a healing community. One must choose between doing good to the person placed in one’s path, or the evil which one might be doing by mere abstention. For Jesus, there is no no-man’s-land, enabling us to portion our attitudes, to do a little good to our neighbor without taking the risk of becoming involved for his sake, or to do him a little harm while still remaining charitable.” Andre Trocme Jesus and the Nonviolent Revolution (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004), 146.

Here is a story to bring things a little closer to home. This is just one of countless examples where ordinary citizens are paying out of their own pocket what developers and big businesses should be paying themselves.

“If there be among you a poor man of one of thy brethren within any of thy gates in thy land which Yahweh thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not harden thine heart, nor shut thine hand from thy poor brother: But thou shalt open thine hand wide unto him, and shalt surely lend him sufficient for his need, in that which he wanteth. Beware that there be not a thought in thy wicked heart, saying, The seventh year, the year of release, is at hand; and thine eye be evil against thy poor brother, and he cry unto Yahweh against thee, and it be sin unto thee. Thou shalt surely give him, and thine heart shall not be grieved when thou givest unto him: because that for this thing Yahweh thy God shall bless thee in all thy works, and in all that thou puttest thine hand unto. For the poor shall never cease out of the land: therefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land.” Deuteronomy 15:7-12