Marginal Christianity

Appears in Winter 2017 Issue: Ancient Friendships by Gregory Thompson December 1 st , 2017 It may be the temptation of every age to see one's own time as uniquely haunted by the ghosts of the past or as disproportionately responsible for the shape of the future. It is a predictable form of generational vanity, I suppose. But even so, one could be forgiven for seeing our present days in just this way. I mean, honestly. Almost everywhere one looks, indeed even if one tries not to look, life in the West seems to have fused its historic dysfunctions into something new; into a dark carnival of open racial hatred, unabated economic inequality, and cartoonish political theatre—each made more menacing by the very real threat of annihilating violence. Yes, one could be forgiven. Martin Luther King, Jr. was slowly transformed from a courageous man with an extraordinary vision of democracy into little more than a highly quotable civic abstraction,; a figure that many revere...

Posted on Feb 1, 2015 By Chris Hedges NEW YORK— Malcolm X , unlike Martin Luther King Jr., did not believe America had a conscience. For him there was no great tension between the lofty ideals of the nation—which he said were a sham—and the failure to deliver justice to blacks. He, perhaps better than King, understood the inner workings of empire. He had no hope that those who managed empire would ever get in touch with their better selves to build a country free of exploitation and injustice. He argued that from the arrival of the first slave ship to the appearance of our vast archipelago of prisons and our squalid, urban internal colonies where the poor are trapped and abused, the American empire was unrelentingly hostile to those Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth.” This, Malcolm knew, would not change until the empire was destroyed. “It is impossible for capitalism to survive, primarily because the system of capitalism needs some blood to suck,” Malco...