I have a Ph.D. I am not boasting (well – maybe a little – I worked hard for those three letters!) just stating a fact and providing some context. The title of my dissertation (which stretched to 426 pages including the bibliography) was “Political Majorities, Political Minorities and the Common Good: an analysis of understandings of democracy in recent Christian political ethics.”

I am interested in politics. I cast my first vote for president in the 1980 election. My candidate did not win. There never was a president Barry Commoner (the 1980 Citizen’s Party candidate – Commoner was an environmentalist and economic populist whose concerns included developing a more just and sustainable economy – sounds relevant 27 years later). I have voted in every presidential election since, and in most other elections in which I am eligible to vote. I am interested in politics, but my interest is much more in politics broadly understood than in electoral politics. As a pastor, I think it is important that I keep my electoral politics to myself. I have ideas and opinions about candidates and policy votes, but I choose to keep those to myself so I can better work with people of faith whose convictions lead them in different directions in this kind of politics. However, there is an enormous overlap between politics, understood as the way we make decisions about how we live together in human community, ethics (thought and lived), and Christian spirituality. In the areas where politics overlaps with morals and with spirituality, I feel free to offer my thoughts. More than that, I am convinced that the Christian faith has profound implications for our life together in community, for politics. I am in good company. “The way of Jesus was both personal and political. It was about personal transformation. And it was political, a path of resistance to the domination system and an advocacy of an alternative vision of life together under God” (Marcus Borg, Jesus, 226). As someone whose vocation is teaching and preaching the Christian faith, I have some responsibility for tracing the trajectory from gospel and Christian spirituality to the moral life to politics.

Whew! I am amazed at how quickly I move from biography to abstract thinking – I hope you are hanging on. That’s just me. Back to biography – which will no doubt lead to ideas and back again.

The way of Jesus is a way of personal and social transformation. I also have a long history of thinking about personal transformation (my college majors were psychology and philosophy). My recent conversations with Buddhism have been primarily focused on how it helps me think about the inner transformational psychology of Christian spirituality. When Jesus says, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let you hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid” – I want to know more about cultivating that peace within.

But I am also reading through the New Testament and keep bumping up against the fact that Jesus said and did things that were countercultural and anti-imperial. He encouraged care for the least, the down-an-out, the poor, the hungry, those on the margins, in a society where the powerful were feared and the well-off were considered blessed. He let people refer to him as “son of God” when that was an imperial title.

So I have some of these thoughts running through my mind, when the June issue of Harper’s arrives in the mail. The cover has a picture of the president and it indicates that inside there will be a whole section of articles on “undoing Bush.” O.k. that’s more than a little partisan. But what grabbed my attention most in this issue were the articles that were more nonpartisan, articles that offered more sweeping critiques of our political and cultural life. Earl Shorris begins his article on “The National Character” with this line. “The undoing of the American character has a long history.” This goes beyond partisan analysis. Shorris talks about “the wound of fear” that seems to characterize our national life, and he believes its effects are profound. “One can say with some certainty that a fearful person is unlikely to be temperate, prudent, or just. It is reasonable to think that as courage improves the moral character of a person or a government, fear worsens it.” Garret Keizer writes about global warming in another section of the magazine, one not devoted to “undoing Bush.” Keizer, who also happens to be a Christian clergyperson, is frustrated that discussion of global warming have not been tied to more far reaching discussions of politics, economics and life together on planet earth. “It is not enough to acknowledge that global warming exists; we also need to ask what global warming means. Surely one thing it means is that a culture that has as its highest aim the avoidance of anything remotely resembling physical work must change its life. If you want an inconvenient truth, there it is: that the very notion of convenience upon which our civilization rests is a lie that is killing us.”

I have a deep appreciation for the United States and have benefited from the freedoms it offers and the prosperity that exists. In my dissertation I argued “that a morally legitimate state would be a democratic state” (p. 412), and the United States continues to be a wonderful (though not perfect) experiment in democratic governance. At the same time, there is truth in the words of Shorris and Keizer. Our politics and culture are infected in unhealthy ways by fear. This is easier to assert than to analyze. Are any discussions of things like Avian flu simply contributions to fearfulness? I don’t think so, though some certainly are. Global warming, as an issue, is in danger of becoming another addition to our culture and politics of fear. How we discuss difficult issues matters. Furthermore, beyond our fearfulness, some of our assumptions and practices may be unhealthy addictions contributing to our ill-being as a society.

My reading of the gospels and of Christian faith tells me that cultures and societies often overreach. They lose their way. We should not be surprised about this. While the United States remains a wonderful place in countless ways, in others we seem to be losing our way. A global economy based on unlimited consumption is probably a step in the wrong direction. My reading of the gospels and of Christian faith tells me that God’s work is one of on-going transformation – transformation of the human heart, transformation of human relationships, transformation of life together in community. The peace Jesus wanted to leave was not just inner peace, but peace with others and with the earth itself. And they all seem connected. Peace is an antidote to fear. Peace within allows us to face reality more fearlessly, and change more courageously. With peaceful minds and hearts we can look for shared solutions more creatively. Some of the change we may be called upon to make in the future in the interest of a more just, peaceful and sustainable world (a world more akin with God’s dream for it) will be difficult. We will need a strong sense of peace and courage to make such changes.

All this is to say that in our complex world, in a world filled with wonder and with wickedness, with beauty and brutality, with love and loneliness, with the overstuffed and the underfed, I hear the gospel speak, and in powerful ways. I hear it speak good news.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David