Marginal Christianity

What Does the Church in America Do in the Coronavirus Pandemic? "The notion that the elderly should give themselves over to infection so that millions can return to their subsistence existence while the disparity with the wealthy can continue to increase is not a rational proposal. If protecting the economy as it is presently organized is a reasonable proposal, I’m sure they’re taking volunteers in hospitals across the country." - Barry Harvey One thing the church does not/must not do is support proposals that privilege the American (or any) economy over people. To so fetishize the economy is idolatry and participation in the larger idolatry of American exceptionalism. The church stands with and under this crisis with its people (of both church and nation). The church shares God’s view that the health and well-being of a community depends on its care for the victims and the vulnerable in their midst. To so care is to meet the needs of those at the margins and t...

Methodists have their “Five Essential Freedoms” they consider definitional for who they are. They are “Freedoms of (or for) . . .” These freedoms are: Freedom of all races to worship together. Freedom of women to be treated as equal in the church and at home. Freedom of the poor to have dignity in church and in the world. Freedom of the laity to have authority.  Freedom of the Holy Spirit to move in worship. In my opinion, these are all laudatory “freedoms.” Christians ought to be free to exercise or experience each one in their churches or Christian gatherings. They ought also, gain in my opinion, be free to advocate for and support such ways of living in the larger world to whatever degree possible. But simple “ought to’s” won’t get us there. If anything is clear in our time is that neither knowledge or moral suasion are much help as primary movers of change. We’ve tried them both for more than two centuries now as chief assumptions...

David Brooks FEB. 21, 2017 Most of us came of age in the last half of the 20th century and had our perceptions of “normal” formed in that era. It was, all things considered, an unusually happy period. No world wars, no Great Depressions, fewer civil wars, fewer plagues. It’s looking like we’re not going to get to enjoy one of those times again. The 21st century is looking much nastier and bumpier: rising ethnic nationalism, falling faith in democracy, a dissolving world order. At the bottom of all this, perhaps, is declining economic growth. As Nicholas Eberstadt points out in his powerful essay “ Our Miserable 21st Century ,” in the current issue of Commentary, between 1948 and 2000 the U.S. economy grew at a per-capita rate of about 2.3 percent a year. But then around 2000, something shifted. Read more at: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/21/opinion/this-century-is-broken.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-c...

  Posted on Sep 7, 2015 By Robert Reich Shutterstock This post originally ran on Robert Reich’s website .                                                              I An economy depends fundamentally on public morality; some shared standards about what sorts of activities are impermissible because they so fundamentally violate trust that they threaten to undermine the social fabric. It is ironic that at a time the Republican presidential candidates and state legislators are furiously focusing on private morality – what people do in their bedrooms, contraception, abortion, gay marriage – we are experiencing a far more significant crisis in public morality. We’ve witnessed over the last two decades in the United States a steady decline in the willingness of people in leading posit...

  April 18, 2015 Zeynep Tufekci   CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — THE machine hums along, quietly scanning the slides, generating Pap smear diagnostics, just the way a college-educated, well-compensated lab technician might. A robot with emotion-detection software interviews visitors to the United States at the border . In field tests, this eerily named “embodied avatar kiosk” does much better than humans in catching those with invalid documentation. Emotional-processing software has gotten so good that ad companies are looking into “mood-targeted” advertising, and the government of Dubai wants to use it to scan all its closed-circuit TV feeds.   Yes, the machines are getting smarter, and they’re coming for more and more jobs.   Not just low-wage jobs, either.   Today, machines can process regular spoken language and not only recognize human faces, but also read their expressions. They can classify personality types, and have started being a...