Tried With Fire

pg. 49 "Any experience of vulnerability without authority is painful, but the deepest and most intractable examples of suffering are communal and multigenerational. ... even if you are personally materially well-off, if your community is mired in suffering - if your parents, people and nation have known little for generations but enforced helplessness due to tragedy and injustice - then you are not free from the oppressive reality of suffering. And this kind of suffering is far deeper, and far less tractable than the suffering all of us experience a individuals - because simply escaping it as an individual does nothing to change the fundamental systems of vulnerability without authority. " Strong and Weak, Andy Crouch, InterVarsity Press, 2016, pp. 60-61. (italics mine)

I finally started reading  Strong and Weak by Andy Crouch this morning. I had gotten the book on the strength of this podcast interview . His concept of authority and vulnerability is intriguing. Based on the following grid, he argues that we need both. If both are absent or one trait is taken away, we can no longer flourish . Yes, it's a popular buzzword, but think of it as simply being able to fully live as image-bearers of God. pg. 27 Flourishing is NOT : -  the perfect life as seen on TV commercials. - health. - growth. - affluence. - gentrification. Flourishing IS : - a description of a community , not just the property of an individual. (I found this aspect very interesting.) - the presence of true authority, which is the capacity for meaningful action  and a gift given by God to his image bearers. "The sorrow of the whole human story is not that we have authority, it is the way we have misused and neglected authority." (pp. 35, 39) - the p...

I finished listening to White Trash: The 400-Year-Old-History of Class in America by LSU history professor, Nancy Isenberg. If you believe that America is a classless society founded on the principle of equal opportunity for all, this book will burst that bubble. The following quote from the epilogue jumped out at me because it accurately assesses, in my opinion, how politicians have manipulated different sectors in society including the "Christian vote."  Moved by the need for control, for an unchallenged top tier, the power elite in American history has thrived by placating the vulnerable and creating for them a false sense of identification - denying real class differences whenever possible. pg. 313. I also highly recommend this Pass the Mic podcast with Andy Crouch, author and executive editor of Christianity Today. His take on the dynamics of the 2016 election, politics, and the treatment of the vulnerable is spot on. Now when "class inequality" is...