Francis and Trump: Opposites Competing for the American Soul


John ThatamanilABC Religion and Ethics 28 Sep 2015

Donald Trump and Pope Francis are incarnations of the kind of power to which they appeal. To choose between them is to make a basic human decision about the shape of a worthy life. Credit: Aristide Economopoulos / Sean Rayford / Getty Images

The two most popular figures in American life in recent weeks are polar opposites: Pope Francis and Donald Trump.

Trump is a favourite candidate of white nationalists and xenophobes. The Pope, by contrast, speaks tirelessly on behalf of the poor, the marginalized, immigrants and the planet - "our common home."

The Pope points away from himself and to the needs of others. Trump constantly points to himself. Trump has no platform save Trump. His core message is, "I am great. I will make the nation over in my own image, and so it too will be great again."

Read more at
http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2015/09/28/4320668.htm

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Spikenard Sunday/Palm Sunday by Kurt Vonnegut

by Columbia Lutherans on Thursday, March 29, 2012 at 11:55am • THE SERMON “I am enchanted by the Sermon on the Mount. Being merciful, it seems to me, is the only good idea we have received so far. Perhaps we will get another idea that good by and by-and then we will have two good ideas. What might that second good idea be? I don’t know. How could I know? I will make a wild guess that it will come from music somehow. I have often wondered what music is and why we love it so. It may be that music is that second good idea’s being born. “I choose as my text the first eight verses of John twelve, which deal not with Palm Sunday but with the night before-with Palm Sunday Eve, with what we might call ‘Spikenard Saturday.’ I hope that will be close enough to Palm Sunday to leave you more or less satisfied. I asked an Episcopalian priest the other day what I should say to you about PalmSunday itself. She told me to say that it was a brilliant satire on pomp and circumst
Read more

The Parable of the Talents – A View from the Other Side

May 18, 2010 http://godspace-msa.com/2010/05/18/the-parable-of-the-talents-a-view-from-the-other-side/ As promised here is the second article on economics as presented in the Parable of the Talents .  It presents a very compelling and challenging view of this parable that I think has a lot to say in our present economic situation . This articles is from “Towering Trees and Talented Slaves”, commentary of Ched Myers and Eric DeBode, originally published in  The Other Side Online, © 1999 The Other Side, May-June 1999, Vol. 35, No. 3. The complete article was originally published atwww.theotherside.org/archive/may-jun99/myers.html. The article is no longer available at that site and apparently has all but disappeared from the Internet. The Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14-30   Even more problematic than our sentimentalizing of kingdom parables is the way we misread Jesus’ parables about the world, reading them as if they were kingdom parables—with disastrous consequenc
Read more

Am I A Conservative?

Image
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/jacobs/am-i-a-conservative/ By Alan Jacobs • May 31, 2013, 7:55 AM Am I a conservative? Heck if I know. All I know for sure is that the good people here at The American Conservative are interested enough in what I have to say to give me a platform on which to say it. For which I am genuinely grateful. I am not and never have been a Republican. I feel roughly as alienated from that party as I do from the Democratic Party. I hold a number of political views that strong-minded Republicans typically find appalling: I think racism is one of the greatest problems in American society today; I am not convinced that austerity programs are helpful in addressing our economic condition; I am absolutely convinced that what many Republicans call free-market cap
Read more