Good insights from Ben Dueholm today on some of the well-intentioned, newer liturgical confessions of sin.
benjamindueholm.substack.com/p/we-shouldn...
Ted Olsen
@tedolsen.bsky.social
1.2K followers 682 following 441 posts
Amateur Christian. Formerly: Associate Publisher and Editorial Director for Media and Trade Books, @ivpress.bsky.social; Executive Editor (etc) at @christianitytoday.com
![The show [the Little House on the Prairie reboot] also appears, perhaps inevitably, like an infomercial for the tradwife lifestyle, set to a soundtrack of whinnying horses and chirring bugs. The Ingalls girls wash their clothes in pristine streams, stoke fires while sucking peppermint sticks and slumber under patchwork quilts. Who wouldn’t yearn for this life?](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ah4uvrekvqvnyq263dlttogu/bafkreidj22qbuvvjewysloyk77ssh5jqxe5lhiddpvtjpzr7vugoeigu5a)
![From that extraordinary act of strategic self-definition flowed the necessary tactics. “We were going to be rid of segregation,” [Diane Nash] later said. “One of the things that I have learned over the years is that you really can’t change anyone but yourself and what we did in the South was change ourselves from people who could be segregated into people who could no longer be segregated. The attitude became ‘well kill us if that’s what you’re going to do, but you cannot segregate us any longer’ and once you change yourself the world has to fit up against the new you.”
From "Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement," by Thomas E. Ricks](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ah4uvrekvqvnyq263dlttogu/bafkreifxfyhccfwvbgvoepbytal47jreaakxstnptky2a36osciupfpzxi)
![I would like to march in protests too, but I can’t because I have arthritis in my knees. So I want my words to do my marching for me.
Like everybody else, I am an inhabitant of this planet; and I am a member of many other smaller communities too. I am an American citizen, for example. I was made a citizen from birth retroactively by the US government after World War II when babies born to US servicemen and German women were declared citizens from birth. My German mother came with me to the US as an immigrant without English when I was four years old and had no English either. Now I am a philosopher and a Christian -- a Catholic, actually. I identify as a woman. And so on.
I grieve the overwhelming evil that is impossible to ignore in every one of these communities. The sight of the suffering of desperate people trying to be immigrants to the US is unbearable. The inhumanity of separating their children from them, the viciousness of incarcerating small children alone, is unspeakable. And the cruelty we see on the daily news obscures but cannot hide the accelerating harm we are doing to the earth.
The people who should take the lead in governing us are vile, and so many of those who vote relish the vileness. That group includes some prominent Christians. Christians are meant to be salt and light for the world; their lives are meant to help other people taste and see the goodness of God. These people make the God they worship seem so hateful.
And so, like many other people, I mourn. But my mourning is without despondency, without the inward collapse of despair.
The baseness of injustice highlights the majesty of justice, whose power to call to people cannot be defeated by evil. The cruelty of those who rule, their indifference to the cry of the poor, illuminates by contrast the splendor of goodness and love. The growing dread at the increasing destruction of the planet testifies to its beauty. There would be less distress over [...]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:36n7wd7gg4tapamnog4zyyc6/bafkreidvwdsfwtac2b4gftp3oxwgfvwfeaxob6gmngpvu76rilfomtt7nm)
