Marginal Christianity

          We need to start at the beginning with a confession. We’re all liberals – conservatives, republicans, libertarians, democrats, tea partiers, et al. Different kinds of liberals to be sure. Out liberalism is shared at such a deep level that we think we’re really different. But not so much.           We are liberals because we have been nurtured by the western liberal tradition beginning with the Renaissance all the way to post-modernity or wherever we are today. And at the heart of this tradition is the notion freedom, individualistically conceived, with choice as its primary good.           The right and left (of whatever stripe) do disagree and argue with each other – a lot! But what they argue about is freedom of choice. Who gets it and who is being deprived of it. That’s what we primarily fight about. Some are mad at the 1% who e...

March 17, 2016 by Teresa B. Pasquale 0 Comments   I love all things zombie. I have never been a Trekkie or a SciFi Superfan — although I do love Marvel Films — but since I first saw  The Night of the Living Dead as a pre-teen in my parent’s sunroom one summer afternoon I was hooked on all things zombie-genre. This intimate and lifelong relationship hit a new depth when The Walking Dead came on AMC. It was the zombie genre that I loved but extended beyond the disappointingly too-short time frame of a film, and it was so well curated that it elevated itself beyond its primarily horror base and into the field of what I would consider a morality play. Each week, with metaphors about belief, faith, love, life, and survival, it delved into the deepest layers of human nature. It told the story of us, society, all of us, being played out in front of a post-apocolyptic background. Each week offered something to be considered about not just who the ch...

  An economic system that rewards psychopathic personality traits has changed our ethics and our personalities             Paul Verhaeghe theguardian.com , Monday 29 September 2014 04.00 EDT                    'We are forever told that we are freer to choose the course of our lives than ever before, but the freedom to choose outside the success narrative is limited.' Photograph: Lefteris Pitarakis/AP We tend to perceive our identities as stable and largely separate from outside forces. But over decades of research and therapeutic practice, I have become convinced that economic change is having a profound effect not only on our values but also on our personalities. Thirty years of neoliberalism, free-market forces and privatisation have take...

http://www.contemplative.org/blog/the-freedom-of-lent/ Posted on February 7, 2013 by Blog Administrator Cynthia Bourgeault Commenting on Kabir Helminski’s Living Presence – chapter 7 – “Voluntary Attention” Thomas Merton has a wonderful tape on the difference between choice-freedom and response-freedom. Merton says the real freedom begins often as an experience more deeply in situations where we have no choice – that’s where we begin to discover freedom. In this particular tape he speaks about response-freedom describing coming down to the refectory for the evening meal. It’s Lent and in the monastery the meal is always the same; you get bread, runny soup and there’s a boiled egg. You have no choice. But, if you’re a person who’s free inside  it’s like, ‘Oh! There’s a boiled egg!  How lovely!’ It’s wonderful, and you get all excited and your day is made because there’s this boiled egg , and you’ve seen it as something good and wonderful.  You h...