This week, if we learned anything about America, it’s that we have a country out of touch with itself.
This past week, Pepsi tried a commercial in which a high fructose carbonated soda can bring the entire country together by solving racial differences. How? By reinforcing racial stereotypes.
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Part III—Jesus was just another dirty Refugee
In the third act of Flannery O’Connor’s short story, having stood on the assumption that none of the world’s miseries are her responsibility, Mrs. McIntyre justifies her own lack of care for those in her care, rejecting the call of the Gospel. Expecting her employees to be grateful to work for her, she hypocritically fails to embrace gratefulness. Like someone who only reads half of the creation account, she wants to be a master without being a caretaker. The world revolves around her.
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Part II—All the Colorful, Useless Peafowl
[Read part I here]
In part two of O’Connor’s story, Mrs. Shortley has left the farm and Mrs. McIntyre is left with the displaced Pole and her black workers. We’re given more insight into her character through her conversations with the older farmhand, Astor. While Astor remembers well her husband, the Judge, Mrs. McIntyre is haunted by her late husband. Astor has noticed two things: The decline of the peacocks and the incline of Mrs. McIntyre’s greed.
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For fans of Flannery O’Connor, “The Displaced Person” is a a short story that occupies a special place, not only because it exhibits her love for peacocks, but because of its more overt religious themes. The story takes place on a farm, the inciting incident being the hiring of a “displaced person” (or refugee) from Poland. O’Connor, a devout Catholic, is one of America’s most famous writers, known for her southern stories of grotesque people encountering beautiful grace.
Some preachers have concluded that because Nehemiah built a wall for the Lord, and President Trump wants to build a wall for America, that somehow Trump’s wall is the will of God and Christians must support the effort, because Trump is God’s Nehemiah for America. Because Nehemiah and because a wall.
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I’ve followed and appreciated from “day 1” what Crash Course has done to educate people. Anyone with neutral net access can get entertaining, thought-provoking introductions to various subjects, getting a quick survey of topics.
The downside, of course, is that these speedy courses can reduce or misrepresent complex and nuanced understandings of the world.
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Forsythia
I walked my dog about the day
After a mild snow melting
The pavement soaked by
The gushing of swollen
Grasses saturated and dark
Littered with chunks of snow.
The air was fresh and crisp
My flannel sleeves rolled up
And beside the damp Bradford pears
Broke the yellow forsythia blooming
the first of bushes of the spring
In these rusty Virginia hills.
The Good Samaritan is a loaded parable, packed with applications and implications. It’s one of Jesus’ most powerful reversals of cultural expectations in his time. Perhaps the one lesson we always take away from it the most is that we should always stop and help people when we have a chance, no matter the excuse.
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“Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.”
-Albert Einstein, Jewish German immigrant to America
In 1942 Gerald Smith founded the Christian Nationalist Crusade, a political organization aimed at making America more Christian. What did that mean? Using their magazine, The Cross and the Flag, Smith’s organization took a stand against, among other things, Jews, jazz music, and interracial marriage. To make America more…Christlike?
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Chain mail has been around for a long time. You may have been first introduced to them when you first received an email telling you that if you didn’t forward it to at least 5 people, something bad would happen. Or if you did forward it to at least 50 people, something good would happen. The more gullible people were, the more viral the email.
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CALEB COY 