Category: Film & Book Reviews
A Book I Will Read
I’ll be purchasing the book, Winner -Take- All Politics, to read this spring. Here is a bit of a review from The Christian Century.
How the Rich Got Richer
by Anthony B. Robinson | Feb. 24, 2011 | The Christian CenturySince the late 1970s the wealthiest 1 percent of the nation’s population has pocketed more than 35 percent of the real national income growth, which is more than the bottom 90 percent of the population combined. Or looking at it from a different angle, between 1979 and 2006 the bottom 20 percent of the population had real income growth of 0.3 percent and the middle 20 percent had real income growth of 0.7 percent, while the top 1 percent enjoyed real income growth of an astonishing 260 percent.
Members of the middle class have stayed even economically amid the overall growth in the economy, but they’ve done so by working more or borrowing more—and often both. With the Great Recession—induced in large part by the failure to regulate banks and financial institutions, which allowed the wealthiest to become wealthier still—neither working more nor borrowing more remains an option. This decline of a stable and secure middle class, which once carried the freight for civil society, is the real story of the last 30 to 40 years in the U.S.
The decline of the U.S. middle class has a great deal to do with the multiple signs of a culture in disarray, from high divorce rates to rampant addiction, from Americans working so many more hours to the erosion of civic institutions. It has had an impact on the churches too. Churches that play a broad public role have struggled, while those that emphasize a more private salvation and a gospel of prosperity—which fit these times and their growing desperation—have grown.
Sighting’s Reminding Me Why I Like Jim Wallis
It is not uncommon to find a reprint (digital) of Martin Marty’s “Sightings” on this blog. My apologies if you are a “Sightings” subscriber, but sometimes they are too good to not digitally republish. This is the kind of weekly writing (one could call it journalism) our expression of Christian witness, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) needs to be receiving from the OGMP or from seminary professors teaching at a DOC related seminary. Yes, I plan on purchasing Wallis’s new book.
Jim Wallis on Values and Morals
February 1, 2010
by Martin E. Marty
In 1957, young Harvard-bred historian Timothy Smith, of the Church of the Nazarene, knocked a lot of us budding ordinary historians – secular, “mainstream,” and whatnot – off our library stools with his book Revivalism and Social Reform. We had been trained to look for the roots of American social Christianity in the liberal Protestant Social Gospel (post-1907) and progressive Catholicism (post-1919). Smith back-dated such movements by a half-century, to revivals around 1857, which, he argued, added concern for morality and ethics in the social order to the private-and-personal moral agenda of older evangelicalism. Having fought against dueling, profanity, Sunday mails, et cetera, these revivalists found new ways to address slavery, poverty, and inequality. Imperfect, they did chart a course.
Smith died in 1997, but historians in his train often remind us of how things were back when evangelicals were evangelical and not Evangelical, as if a quasi-political party. These years their ancient cause – dated from the eighth century before Christ, among the Hebrew prophets – is revived on many fronts. This week we will sight one of them, Jim Wallis’s Sojourners, which we have been reading for two-score years. This is not a blurb for the magazine – Sightings sights, it does not blurb – but it is time we put into print (or online) some notice of the kind of concern it’s shown through the decades. Jim and a colleague dropped by the other for day a chat, in the week when he’d made a repeat visit to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and we made up a bit for lost time.
The Martys welcome all kinds of company, even someone like Wallis, whom Christian anti-Communist Crusaders (there are still such) call “pro-Marxist, pro-Communist, even pro-Socialist,” the third of which is a term applied to anyone to the left of Genghis Khan these days. Wallis was on a book tour for his new Rediscovering Values on Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street: A Moral Compass for the New Economy. This is not a blurb for the book – Sightings sights, it does not blurb – but he gave us a theme for the week, as did a chapter from the book in the February Sojourners. His choice of words like “Values” and “Morals” instead of “Biblical” or “Christian” may enlarge the zone of discourse, but he has not left his evangelicalism behind.
Wallis has always been puzzled by the way some Evangelicals specialize in quoting the six biblical verses which refer or may refer to homosexuality, but consider it out of bounds for believers to notice the six hundred or six thousand that reference Mammon, money, riches-and-poverty. Like the ancient prophets, he names names: not Edom and Moab, Assyria and Babylon, but Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Citigroup, which, bailed out with the public’s money, had rewarded themselves at the time he wrote with $8.66 billion (that’s eight thousand six hundred and sixty million) in bonuses, while, Wallis adds, “the average bank teller at Bank of America makes only $10.75 an hour – just over $22,000 a year.”
He notices that the financial services industry spent $223 million lobbying Congress to fight any regulations or restrictions. (He wrote that before the recent Supreme Court decision that will allow the banking industry and others to advertise and lobby and influence Congress in amounts that will make that $223 million look like peanuts.) You get the idea. Next week Sightings may be back to appraising our moral framework from a Crypto-Capitalist viewpoint. After all, we’ll now have to do something compensatory lest this column get typed as – gasp! – not “prophetic” but – sh-h-h-h! – populist.
References:
Watch Stewart and Wallis: http://www.hulu.com/watch/122028/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-jim-wallis.
Sojourners is online at www.sojo.net.
Martin E. Marty’s biography, current projects, publications, and contact information can be found at www.illuminos.com.
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In 2010’s first edition of the Religion and Culture Web Forum (“The Uses and Misuses of Polytheism and Monotheism in Hinduism”), Wendy Doniger explores the complex nature of Hindu theology and its relationship to historical and political issues by focusing on a simple question: “Is Hinduism monotheistic or polytheistic?” Her answer offers intriguing implications for the distinction between theological identities of “one” and “many” in Hinduism and–as respondents with expertise in other theological traditions reflect–beyond. With invited responses from Martin Marty, Willemien Otten, Katherine E. Ulrich, and Ananya Vajpeyi. http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/webforum/index.shtml
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Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
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Attribution
Columns may be quoted or republished in full, with attribution to the author of the column, Sightings, and the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.