Walter Brueggemann:

I believe that the possibility of passion is a primary prophetic agenda and that it is precisely what the royal consciousness means to eradicate.… Passion as the capacity and readiness to care, to suffer, to die, and to feel is the enemy of imperial reality. Imperial economics is designed to keep people satiated so that they do not notice. Its politics is intended to block out the cries of the denied ones. Its religion is to be an opiate so that no one discerns misery alive in the heart of God. Pharaoh, the passive king in the block universe, in the land without revolution or change or history or promise or hope, is the model king for a world that never changes from generation to generation. That same fixed, closed universe is what every king yearns for— even Solomon in all his splendor. […]

In the imperial world of Pharaoh and Solomon, the prophetic alternative is a bad joke either to be squelched by force or ignored in satiation. But we are a haunted people because we believe the bad joke is rooted in the character of God himself, a God who is not the reflection of Pharaoh or of Solomon.… He is a God uncredentialed in the empire, unknown in the courts, unwelcome in the temple. And his history begins in his attentiveness to the cries to the marginal ones. He, unlike his royal regents, is one whose person is presented as passion and pathos, the power to care, the capacity to weep, the energy to grieve and then to rejoice. The prophets after Moses know that his caring, weeping, grieving, and rejoicing will not be outflanked by royal hardware or royal immunity because this one is indeed God. And kings must face that.

Jürgen Moltmann:

As a result of this hope in God’s future, this present world becomes free in believing eyes from all attempts at self-redemption or self-production through labor, and it becomes open for loving, ministering self-expenditure in the interests of a humanizing of conditions and in the interests of the realization of justice in the light of the coming justice of God. This means, however, that the hope of resurrection must bring about a new understanding of the world. This world is not the heaven of self-realization, as it as said to be in Idealism. This world is not the hell of self-estrangement, as it is said to be in romanticist and existentialist writing. The world is not yet finished, but is understood as engaged in a history. It is therefore the world of possibilities, the world in which we can serve the future, promised truth and righteousness and peace. This is an age of diaspora, of sowing in hope, of self-surrender and sacrifice, for it is an age which stands within the horizon of a new future. Thus self-expenditure in this world, day-to-day love in hope, becomes possible and becomes human within that horizon of expectation which transcends this world. The glory of self-realization and the misery of self-estrangement alike arise from hopelessness in a world of lost horizons. To disclose to it the horizon of the future of the crucified Christ is the task of the Christian church.

Jürgen Moltmann:

(c) The history which is initiated and determined by [God’s] promise does not consist in cyclic recurrence, but has a definite turn towards the promised and outstanding fulfillment. This irreversible direction is not determined by the urge of vague forces or by the emergence of laws of its own, but by the word of direction that points us to the free power and the faithfulness of God. It is not evolution, progress, and advance that separate time into yesterday and tomorrow, but the word of promise cuts into events and divides reality into one reality which is passing and can be left behind, and another which must be expected and sought. The meaning of past and the meaning of future comes to light in the word of promise.

(d) If the word is a word of promise, then that means that this word has not yet found a reality congruous with it, but that on the contrary it stands in contradiction to the reality open to experience now and heretofore. It is only for that reason that the word of promise can give rise to the doubt that measures the word by the standard of given reality. And it is only for that reason that this word can give rise to the faith that measures present reality by the standard of the word. “Future” is here a designation of that reality in which the word of promise finds its counterpart, its answer, and its fulfillment, in which it discovers or creates a reality which accords with it and in which it comes to rest.

(e) The word of promise therefore always creates an interval of tension between the uttering and the redeeming of the promise. In so doing it provides man with a peculiar area of freedom to obey or disobey, to be hopeful or resigned. The promise institutes this period and obviously stands in correspondence with what happens in it. This, as [Walther] Zimmerli has illuminatingly pointed out, distinguishes the promise from the prophecies of a Cassandra and differentiates the resulting expectation of history from belief in fate.

(f) If the promise is not regarded abstractly apart from the God who promises, but its fulfillment is entrusted directly to God in his freedom and faithfulness, then there can be no burning interest in constructing a hard and fast juridical system of historical necessities according to a scheme of promise and fulfillment—neither by demonstrating the functioning of such a schema in the past nor by making calculations for the future. Rather, the fulfillments can very well contain an element of newness and surprise over against the promise as it was received.

Chris Owen:

In Eddie Glaude’s great book on Baldwin, Begin Again, Glaude quotes Ralph Ellison: “The way home we seek, is man’s being at home in the world, which is called love, and which we term democracy.” Ellison’s impressionistic sentence, delivered in a short speech upon receiving the National Book Award for Invisible Man in 1953, tells us a few things. Democracy is not, in the first place, a procedure. The procedures and structures of democracy—voting, say, or the separation of powers—depend on a democratic aspiration, a vision of the good. This moral vision underwrites the procedures and structures. It’s the blood to the bones. But the content of this moral vision, Ellison tells us, is a vision of love. And this love is itself a different way of seeing: You are not invisible. You are my brother. As brothers, we stand as equals in need of the grace of our Father. No one is innocent. We all come at a cost.

You can guess who:

Ultimately it’s not the Trump enthusiasts of the Republican Party who supply most of the fuel that keeps the reactor running, it’s frauds like [Nikki Haley].

George Hunsinger:

[W]hen the more grandiose and romantic flourishes in Girard are placed to one side, regardless of how pervasive they may be, along with many claims that are incautious and ill conceived, much that is worth retrieving still seems to remain. Consider, for example, this comment on the Sermon on the Mount:

Jesus invites all men to devote themselves to the project of getting rid of violence, a project conceived with reference to the true nature of violence, taking into account the illusions it fosters, the methods by which it gains ground, and all the laws that we have verified in the course of these discussions. Violence is the enslavement of a pervasive lie; it imposes upon men a falsified vision not only of God but also of everything else.

The acuity of an insight like this seems largely to transcend the inadequacies that may otherwise attend it. The question I wish to pursue is this: How might the essence of such an insight be upheld within a richer and more complex biblical framework? How can Girard’s theological deficiencies be avoided while some of his deepest insights and suggestions are retained?

A friend reminded me that this Kenyan Prayer is much like a line from Mary Oliver’s poem “Mysteries, Yes.”

I like her more explicit praise for the humility of those who laugh and bow their heads — a combination with impossible-to-overstate significance and value.

CS Lewis’s devil Screwtape has a lengthy letter to his nephew Wormwood where he speaks of a group of “thoroughly reliable people; steady, consistent scoffers and worldlings.” It is, perhaps above all, not scoffing per se but laughter that makes them so. Though not just any kind. Of the different causes of human laughter, flippancy is regarded as the most “useful” for a thriving “Lowerarchy.”

Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. … It is a thousand miles away from joy: it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practise it.

But when joy accompanies laughter, affection is close at hand. Screwtape warns his nephew that this can be true even in a joke. In sincere joking between affectionate people there is a “pretext” to the joke which shows that the joke itself is not the real cause. “What that real cause is,” says Screwtape, “we do not know.” Even as he describes its connection to joy — that “meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience, quite opaque to us” — he admits that he doesn’t have any idea of its source or its cause.

I’m no Lewis scholar and I don’t even recall if I’ve ever read The Screwtape Letters all the way through. But I think it’s safe to say that the cause, at least as far as we can trace it — and this self-evidently explains its opacity to Screwtape — is praise. Joy can produce the deepest, bust-a-gut laughter imaginable, but it is a joy and a laughter that fundamentally takes the world — and everything and everyone in it — not only seriously but reverently. And even then it knows that it can’t really lay hands on the source.

“The world looks back,” says Christian Wiman, “at the eye that is strong enough (fortified by memory, alert to goodness) and weak enough (made quiet, the ego not eradicated but refined) to see it.”

It starts and ends in reverence and anticipation. We must, as Mary Oliver says, look and laugh with astonishment and bow our heads.

Nick Catoggio:

For nearly 40 years, Joe Biden has been dedicated to fighting on behalf of his number one issue, which is Joe Biden being the president,” New Republic editor Osita Nwanevu tweeted after the Morning Joe segment. Anyone who talked themselves into believing Biden’s cause was nobler than that, as I did, is a fool and has now been made to feel like one.

One way or another, Joe Biden’s absurdly long political career will be over by January 20 of next year. He’s actively choosing to end it in the most humiliating, destructive, and villainous way possible.

The remarkable thing about the president’s heel turn from anti-Trump champion to prideful midwife of a Trump restoration is how Trumpy it’s been. Time and again over the last two weeks, he and his cronies have borrowed political tactics from his enemy’s playbook. […]

Whenever Trump’s fragile ego is confronted with a harsh reality that it can’t bear, he protects it by retreating into denial. The same is true of Biden lately. When Stephanopoulos asked him what his plan was to turn the campaign around, the president dodged by boasting about the size of his crowds—which sounds familiar. When he was confronted with the numerous polls showing him trailing, he scoffed and insisted that “All the pollsters I talk to tell me it’s a toss-up.”

Fake news, in other words. […]

I will make this as painful for you as I can, the president is telling his Democratic critics. If they try to end his presidential campaign, he’ll nurse a sense of betrayal among his supporters that risks a disaster for the left at the polls.

As of today, like Trump, Biden rules his party’s establishment not by affection but by fear. And like Trump, he’s not above lowbrow demagoguery aimed at “elites” to bind his grassroots supporters tightly to him. […]

The idea of “blue MAGA” is true to the spirit of this political era, though. Once again, instead of reckoning honestly with their leader’s unfitness for office, a party’s rank-and-file is rationalizing his flaws, scapegoating allies who dare to point them out as “disloyal,” and demanding that everyone get back to storming the cockpit in order to prevent the plane from crashing. […]

…[H]ad the party known the full extent of his debilitation, a serious opponent presumably would have emerged in order to spare Democrats from having to gamble the fate of the constitutional order on Joe Biden’s collapsing cognitive health. But that opponent never came because the White House aggressively deceived Americans on that subject.

Biden defrauded his party, depriving primary voters of a fully informed decision, and now he’s touting the success of that fraud as a reason for why he should be allowed to get away with it.

There’s a third absurdity to this fiasco, though: By now it should be clear to all that Kamala Harris, more so than Biden himself, is the “real” nominee this fall.

…Joe Biden might live until January 2029, but it’s inconceivable that he’ll be able to do the job until then. If he’s reelected, Harris will assuredly assume the presidency at some point.

So why not make her the nominee now and give Americans an honest choice? Asking them to reelect Joe Biden to a four-year term he certainly won’t complete is asking for their complicity in a second fraud.

I resent that I’m being asked to participate in it. And if I resent it, imagine how swing voters who don’t view Trump as some sort of providential judgment on America feel.

Christine Emba:

In a sense, Americans have been training themselves for years to become eager users of gambling tech. Smartphone-app design, as has been amply reported, relies on the “variable reward” method of habit formation to get people hooked—the same mechanism that casinos use to keep people playing games and pulling levers. When Instagram sends notifications about likes or worthwhile posts, people are impelled to open the app and start scrolling; when sports-betting apps send push alerts about fantastic parlays, people are coaxed into placing one more bet.

Smartphones have thus habituated people to an expectation of stimulation—and potential reward—at every moment. “You’re constantly surrounded by the ability to change your neurochemistry by a simple click,” Timothy Fong, a UCLA psychiatry professor and a co-director of the university’s gambling-studies program, told me. “There’s this idea that we have to have excessive dopamine with every experience in our life.”

The frictionless ease of mobile sports betting takes advantage of this. It has become easy, even ordinary, to experience the “excitement” of gambling everywhere.

Not “in a sense,” but actually and in every way training themselves ourselves with the exact same mental practices as those employed in and experienced through gambling addiction, and addiction of kind.