Leftist Christian

The blog has been quiet for a very long time. That shows me as busy, I suppose. I have a new job, but it's not a great job. First of all, my previous job ended, and I started this new job immediately after. Basically, it's resume writing. Resume writing as a strictly comission proposition. And I've been in training for about four weeks. Already I'm watching the paper ads and thinking about other possible jobs. The boss is horrible. He's this odd, frugal, quiet, passive aggressive individual who often sighs (you know, what Al Gore was lambasted for in the 2000 election). The sigh is probably aimed at me quite often, but who knows? The headquarters for this job is in downtown Chicago in a very prominent building. Two rooms of this office are (not exaggerating) to the ceiling with boxes, papers, and other junk. One of those two rooms is the room I must sit in every day. And often he will sit right next to me, checking how many hits his web site has gotten, or more ofte...

Part of me wants to give Bush's administration some benefit of my vast doubt about its motives or aims. Paul Wolfowitz being chosen to head the World Bank is in some ways but one more in a long list of oxymoronic choices (Michael Moore has detailed in one of his books how Bush's cabinet members all sit in positions for which there is a direct conflict of interest). The World Bank already takes at least a questionable role in exploiting "third-world" nations and entrenching them in debt. Wolfowitz, though, is the very exemplar of a neo-con--can any good come of this? Does anyone for a minute believe he has the poor's best interests at heart? It's a mockery, really. I was a bit late in doing so, but I signed my protest to the prospect of drilling for oil in Alaska through JohnKerry.com. By the way, how many unsuccessful presidential candidates go on to be a strong voice for positive change? My vote in November is just confirmed for me with every one of the maili...

Is "indirection" a word? Everything's a word--just waiting to be used. I've been buying too many CD's, as usual (getting into Sufjan Stevens, Early Day Miners; discovering Damon & Naomi, though I should have been listening to them all along). On a whim, bought a Lakland bass. Reading God's Politics by Jim Wallis and it's kind of changing my life, or at least affirming a lot of things I had been thinking and challenging me as I ponder a new career. As far as Spring Break goes, I will have completed no books and possibly no DVDs by the end of it. Goes without saying that I won't have gone anywhere. For a half second I considered going to South by Southwest. Basically, I just looked at the web site and didn't see anything that appealed to me. There's a peace rally at the end of this week that I'm thinking of attending--that would be something positive. There are two fully drafted blogs on specific subjects that I've neglected to post. ...

The defense of many religious conservatives for their position has to do with their view of the role of the government and its relation to their view of the root of humankind’s problems. They say we are naïve when we suggest that there is a relationship between the evil things that people do (I’ll not shrink from such an absolutist characterization) and one’s socioeconomic status. This is a compelling argument for many. Higher murder rates, higher crime rates—robbery and murder are undoubtedly evil, and the rates of such are generally higher in urban centers. Why is that? As I see it, one can either hold an unstated racist answer or an acknowledgement of a correlation between certain crimes of desperation and poverty. And if one is to believe the right, one would have to hold a rather narrow view of sin. Many of its proponents do—sin is confined to things, and only certain things—that one can see. If we believe, though, that we are all susceptible to any kind of sin, the right condit...