when the forty days were o’er . . .

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Sunday is Passion Sunday, another Holy Week begun. And I am more than usually skeptical about the certainties of Easter. The week’s collection of news stories complicates my skepticism for me — why do I keep at it, I ask myself, when the core beliefs no longer matter to me and the faith has come to seem a system of pale negations, as it did for Emerson. Part of the answer is simply that I do what I do. What I believe has come to be embedded in the ordinary round of my life, my religion more and more a set of qualifications I fully expect to become meaningless upon my death, closer to me now than it once was. The week’s news doesn’t help me much, but here are some stories that, for one reason or another, stand out.

This week the House of Bishops of my church formally consented to the deposition of John-David Schofield and William Cox. The background of both depositions is the complex of disputes about sex and gender in the present-day Episcopal Church. The House of Bishops also this week reacted to news that an invitation to the Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops is not possible for Bishop Gene Robinson. More sexual politics. In the Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis two women who were ordained Roman Catholic Womenpriests were excommunicated, and Catholic Archbishop Raymond Burke continued his efforts to remove Fr. Marek Bozek from his position as Pastor at St. Stanislaus Catholic Church.

I’m in the curious position of supporting the deposition of the two former bishops of the Episcopal Church and deploring the attempts of Archbishop Burke to discipline various members of his flock. If I had to play gotcha with some media type, I’d be caught in a drop-dead contradiction; but my two–let’s call them inclinations rather than positions–are embedded in two different histories that only accidentally come together in my experience. And apropos of one of those histories, I am not awaiting the new Pope’s promised challenge to Catholic educators, expected during his trip to the U. S. next month, with any pleasure. Benedict doesn’t have a good record with respect to academic freedom, and recent events adjacent to the SLU campus, here in St. Louis, don’t give me great comfort either.

Barack Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, was in the news a couple of times this week. First, this video, which Ben Smith calls “deeply racially confrontational,” traveled around the .net, apparently first posted by Fox News. Obama says he “vehemently condemn[s]” the statements in the video in an essay at Huffington Post. They certainly won’t help him get elected or help the United Church of Christ defend itself against the IRS. Funny, the Ferraro comments barely fade from the news and here’s this. It isn’t new, by the way, as Obama points out.

Then there’s this sermon, which I also have from Ben Smith, the sermon from which Obama borrowed the title for his second book, The Audacity of Hope. Smith seems to think the sermon shows a different side of Wright than the one on display in the video, saying the sermon is “much more about private despair and hope than about public life.”

I think The Audacity to Hope has a public dimension, and I also think the sermon fragment I see in the video could be a legitimate prophetic sermon about racism. It isn’t the fact that it is confrontational that is disturbing–it’s the personal attack and the too simple black vs. white argument about Jesus. Still, I share the hope that God knows what it is like to be black in a world run by rich white people, and I share the view that white privilege needs to confront itself. This isn’t a view promulgated just by the United Church of Christ. My own church devotes a special initiative to Dismantling Racism. Many of the materials we use were developed by Mennonites.

So, on Sunday I’ll help read the passion gospel and mark again how the prophetic message has been blunted in Jesus’ sermons and life story, starting with the gospel writers, been rendered “more about private despair and hope than about public life” — for a world that has never liked to be confronted with it’s hypocrisy and injustice. Afterwards I’ll collect my palm and go home, where I’ll put it away on top of the bookshelf.

last on Ferraro

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Ben Smith is now reporting that Clinton has expanded her disagreement with Ferraro’s characterization of Obama.

I said yesterday that I rejected what she said, and I certainly do repudiate it, and regret deeply that it was said. Obviously she doesn’t speak from the campaign, she doesn’t speak for any of my positions, and she has resigned from being a member of my very large finance committee.

Maybe it’s age, but I’m getting cynical enough to believe that both Ferraro’s comments and Clinton’s ernest repudiation of them will help Clinton with certain voters in Pennsylvania for whose benefit it has been claimed that 1) Obama has been afforded racial preference, and 2) anybody who points this out will be vilified as a racist by liberals and the liberal media.

— and everybody knows how powerful they are.

Ferraro steps down

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CNN is reporting that Geraldine Ferraro has stepped down from her post in the Clinton campaign. The CNN story quotes remarks by Ferraro and Ronald Reagan as reported in a 1988 Washington Post article. According to the Post Ferraro’s remarks then about Jackson were very similar to her remarks yesterday about Obama, and Reagan claimed that the press “did not ask Jackson tough questions because of his race.”

Clinton’s reply when questioned about Ferraro’s remarks echoed her reply to CBS reporters about remarks by her Texas supporter, Adelfa Callejo: “People get to express their opinions.”

— unless the people in question are Barack Obama and Louis Farrakhan, and Clinton has an opportunity to score some points against anti-Semitism.

gaming the system

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Last week my guy was the Islamofascist candidate for the Democratic nomination. This week he is the affirmative action candidate. As Geraldine Ferraro has now famously put the case:

If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.

Clinton says she disagrees. According to Marc Ambinder, “Arlington Center aides say that Clinton does not feel as if she has to apologize for Ferraro’s comments; after all, they are Ferraro’s, not her own.” No more her own than say, Louis Farrakhan’s anti-Semitic statements were her opponent’s?

I think the Clinton forces have inserted various wingnut issues into the campaign for the democratic nomination in a way that gives Clinton, herself, deniability, as a part of what has been termed the kitchen sink strategy. To be fair, some of this appears to be opportunistic, but it’s worth noting that Clinton’s disclaimers are pretty pale when they occur, pale enough to let the perpetrators off the hook. And the kitchen sink strategy started long before the most recent primaries, at least as far back as South Carolina when Bill Clinton campared Obama to Jesse Jackson.

If Obama is running a themed campaign with a clear goal, however idealistic, and it think it’s fair to say that he is, Clinton’s campaign has put the candidate, herself, at its center and seems bent on gaming the system at every turn in order to advance her cause. If some of the gaming is opportunistic, some of it is not. When you run a campaign that is primarily about yourself, you have to belittle your opponent.

The belittling strategy is called “let’s address reality and the problems we’re facing in this world,” according to Ferraro. That’s code for “Let’s talk about the inferiority of Obama, who has nothing to offer the country but words.” The focus on language is telling because it attacks a part of Obama’s identity. It’s pretty easy for such a focus to drift into other areas: race, religion, attacks on Obama’s constituents as groupies or cultists, etc.

— or is it drifting?

P. S. Tim Burke has a great post about this today.