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Not much blogging this week around here, as I have been in a thinking/observing/listening mode, not only online, but also in-person. We’ve had protests, we’ve had looting, we’ve had threats (yesterday against our mayor, rumors of gatherings downtown that shut down the downtown early afternoon), we’ve had tension.
And in the midst of it, life does go on, as it must. Dinners prepared, piano played, groceries checked out, friends visited, bikes ridden, walks taken, an afternoon spent with a friend and neighbor – whose political and worldviews are mostly at a 180 from mine. But when you refuse to live in a bubble…that’s your life.
Some people seem to find that difficult to understand and accept. Let me tell you, that if you have suffered great loss, it’s not so hard to grasp.
How can you just…go on…as if nothing’s happening?
Especially with social media, the temptation is there to be All Crisis All The Time. I can see it my feeds – people who are just…On Top Of It…posting endlessly about the Crisis de Jour – and I say it that way, not to demean the importance of this moment, but simply because…these people were doing the same thing with Covid. And then the same thing with their anxiety over Trump. And then the same thing about climate change…or whatever.
My husband died on a Tuesday. We had the funeral that weekend, so early the next week, I was faced with the question…Should the kids go back to school? It seemed strange. Too soon. Disrespectful, maybe?
But then…what else are they going to do? Sit around and think about their loss? No. It would be sad and weird, but really, what else is there to do? but keep living life. Every person around us is the product of a life of loss and tragedy, great and small. We all don’t just stop in the face of that and contemplate our losses all day. We move on. We have to.
And especially when there’s a dimension of injustice and social strife that we’re in the midst of – we can’t sit still. We have to keep moving. We have to bring fresh vision and conviction into the world beyond our own living room, into relationships beyond our screens.
It’s not that we go on as if nothing’s happening.
Something’s happening. So we must go on, go out, and right into it, whoever we are, using whatever we have –
Something my friend and colleague Ann Engelhart did, as noted by her daughter on Instagram. Follow Ann here, and see a focused version of the image on the posters she made:
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Who do people trust for Corona virus info? In Zambia, it’s a nun on the radio:
When Sister Astridah Banda, a Catholic nun and social worker in Zambia, first went on the air, she recalls that people were jolted by her manner. “People are always surprised to see sisters can joke,” she says. “They think you’re always serious and praying – and in such instances, I look at myself and say ‘Madame, you and I are one and the same.”
And now she’s branching out in her subject matter with a show she started in March — the “COVID-19 Awareness Programme.”
….
Banda says the radio station has an estimated reach of 1.5 million people, with audiences in the Eastern, Central, Luapula and Copperbelt provinces of Zambia.
She hopes to expand the radio program into all regions of the country by convincing additional stations across the country to air it.
Alight is behind her, hoping to export a similar model to Banda’s in its regional efforts across Africa.
“We’ve actually had some sisters in Uganda start radio programs as well,” says Stephanie Koehne, who works on Alight’s initiatives with nuns in Africa. People trust nuns, she says, and “I’m seeing the radio really serve as a key place for [sisters] to spread their messages, for them to really be able to reach massive amounts of people. Our ultimate goal is work with sisters across Africa to figure out how to activate radio.”
Banda wants to keep tapping into this power. “I want people to know that we Sisters are a force to reckon with.”
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For Christians, politics cannot be either all or nothing. The public exercise of power cannot be a matter of indifference to Christians insofar as their charge is to love others in imitation of Christ, lest the powerful who would exercise it in exploitative, selfish, tyrannical ways harm the persons that Christians are charged to love. Caring about others therefore implies caring about politics. At the same time, the public exercise of power cannot serve as the be-all and end-all for Christians, because it is only a means to the higher end of shared life in the body of Christ—“that they may all be one”—as a prefiguring hope of eternal life in the communion of saints with God. Being a Christian means avoiding idolatry, and so never mistaking politics for an end in itself or the ultimate source of human fulfillment. Christians should never neglect politics or political theology, but neither should they ever inflate their significance.
The challenges of political theology and the civil dimensions of ecclesiology vary depending on the historical realities that have produced the political, social, economic, and cultural circumstances in which Christians find themselves. Our own, Western liberal democracies in the early 21st century remain critically indebted to the efforts made to manage the disruptions of the Reformation Era. Through the conflicts of 16th and 17th century Europe, the Church became the churches. Rulers from Portugal to Poland opted for rival versions of Christianity and, with conspicuously uncivil expressions of ecclesiology on public display, they engaged in recurrent religio-political violence that precipitated profound changes in the place of the churches in society and in the circumstances for Christian political theology in Europe and North America.
We are the heirs of that history and its enduring influence. The decisive importance of the Reformation Era for understanding the subsequent course of European and North American history, up to the present moment, is clearer if we compare it to the antecedent circumstances of the Church in Latin Christendom in the centuries between the Gregorian revolution and the eve of the Reformation.
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Today’s St. Boniface. Here’s more.
From the Loyola Kids Book of Saints.
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Trinity Sunday coming this weekend:
From the Loyola Kids Book of Signs and Symbols
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This looks like an interesting new book, reviewed by Rowan Williams here:
We still use the word “medieval” as a term of opprobrium: all sorts of things, from Islamist terrorism to faulty plumbing, are described as such when we want to signal a range of negative aspects. Something “medieval” is archaic, life-denying, sub-rational, obstinately ill-informed or incompetent, and so on. And by contrast, “renaissance” is usually a sunnier word. It evokes exuberance and creativity, intellectual freshness. A “renaissance man” (and it usually is a man) is someone endowed with an almost superhuman galaxy of qualities and skills.
As many scholars have pointed out, this odd bit of chronological snobbery is largely a 19th-century creation, from the days when the Renaissance was seen as the precursor of the Age of Reason, the moment somewhere around the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century which saw the beginnings of Western civilisation’s liberation from dogma and bigotry. It is not news for historians that the story is more complex than this – or that it was also a period (particularly in Italy) of ceaseless and destructive warfare.
The publishers of Catherine Fletcher’s book have described it as an “alternative history of the Italian Renaissance”, but it is in fact a finely-written, engaging and clear essay in rather straightforward narrative history. It is none the worse for that, but is it really the case that we have failed to notice the “stranger and darker” side of Italian politics in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, as they suggest?
Professor Fletcher’s introductory chapter quite rightly notes that we are familiar enough with the stereotype of violent and corrupt machinations in Italian courts of the period (thanks to historical soaps about the Borgias and the Tudors), and that we need to penetrate more fully those systemic aspects of the society that colluded with or promoted slavery, sexual exploitation and the like. This book succeeds admirably in highlighting some of the features and figures of the period that have indeed slipped below (or never been spotted on) the radar.
Fletcher is particularly good, for example, on the initially surprising fact that women were more likely to wield political influence in princely states than in republics (think of the formidable figures of Lucrezia Borgia or Isabella d’Este). Elections in republics reflected classical prototypes that gave no public role to women. Elective rule typically produced a whole cohort of male leaders, in contrast to the princely state where a ruler’s spouse was expected to pick up the reins when her husband was away at war. Princely and aristocratic wives who ran their husband’s domain in their absence or after their death constitute a formidable cohort of influential rulers.
I’ve put The Absence of War up on Wattpad.
And here’s my son playing some Haydn for you. Complete playlist here.
For more Quick Takes, visit This Ain’t the Lyceum!