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Outline of a Christian Political Philosophical Theology

I defend a position in political thought that I call Christian anarcho-socialist liberalism. The idea is to create a Christian political philosophical theology that integrates the best elements from socialism, liberalism and anarchism. The Christian Gospel is about far more than politics, and it must never be reduced to politics, though it does have many important political implications. When we combine the Bible, classical Christianity, political theory and postmodern thought, we can create a visionary and powerful Christian political philosophical theology. Christian-humanistic values and ideals must be implemented in postmodern society in the age of globalisation. I am convinced that we can combine a strong emphasis on religious liberty with a strong emphasis on social justice for the poor and the weak. What I present here is a vision and an outline of a Christian political philosophical theology. You might also say that I here present an approach to a postmodern political philosophical theology. My political thought is to a great extent inspired by thinkers such as Zygmunt Bauman, Noam Chomsky and Cornel West, but it also contains many original and dynamic dimensions that transcend these thinkers.

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The Confederate Question Never Closed

An old professor’s epigram, tested against the monuments, the forts, the flag, a Supreme Court ruling from this spring, and the counterfeit history of emancipation now spreading online. An old history professor of mine once offered a sentence that has outlasted most of what I learned in his classroom. The South lost the battle, he said, and won the war. He meant that the Confederacy was more alive in the present than it had been on the April morning when Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. The claim sounded like provocation at the time. It reads now like a weather report. Army forts carry the names of men who took up arms against the United States. The Supreme Court has just rewritten the rules that protected Black voters in the states most determined to suppress them. A battle flag the rebel armies never managed to carry into Washington was paraded through the Capitol in 2021. My professor’s epigram deserves a hearing, and it deserves a harder examination than its admirers usually give it, because one half of it is true in a way that should alarm anyone who wants a working democracy, and the other half is false in a way that can disarm the people who would defend one.

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Reflecting on The Empire State Building and the Not Yet Rebuilt Twin Towers

For nearly two years, I looked with awe and admiration at the Empire State Building as I walked from Penn Station to my former office on 36th street. What a beautiful building, I thought to myself, and one that so many people call home for the duration of their work day. It is this very same home that people pass by and stare at from a distance, taking photos — countless photos, in most cases — and paying different amounts of money for tours around and on top of the building. The building top has been used as a destination in a number of movies, one of the most famous being Sleepless in Seattle, in which Tom Hanks meets Meg Ryan and they end up falling in love.

When you take the significance we have come to put on this building and how iconic it is in the New York City skyline, it is hard to not think of another set of buildings that were at one point also quite significant in the New York Skyline that were obliterated thanks to the heinous acts of 11 evil men who perpetrated An American tragedy. It has now been nearly ten years to the day that our beautiful Twin Towers were destroyed, and yet the rebuilt Towers will not be complete until at least the last quarter of 2013 — that’s over two years from now.

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Dr. Howard Stein on Golf and the Principle of Consideration

It’s spring, and an old man’s fancy turns to thoughts of golf.  My thoughts concentrate on three conditions that no longer seem to exist, neither in golf nor in the society.  Golf, as the game was designed and expected to be played, is out of sync, out of joint, with the society determined to paralyze the game.

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When Beauty Leads To Death Threats

There are many ways to voice your disapproval of something. For example, when people disagree with me on my journal, they don’t hesitate to tell me. When I am at a meal and I mention that I only buy music in vinyl format, someone will inevitably voice their disapproval by speaking up and saying so. My friends in school protested the first Gulf War by walking out of class — not sure what that accomplished, but it definitely got the teachers to know how their students felt about the war. The one way to air disapproval with which I cannot agree, however, is that of death and the death threat.

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Will Bloggers Spread Egyptian News?

A government exists to serve the people it represents, not to oppress that people and to stifle any kind of information exchange that might benefit said people in any way. So it has been in Egypt where, after protesters got together and started angrily demanding that their president step down, the government started shutting down communication with the outside world — from making use of their own internet ‘kill’ switch, blocking access to the internet to normal citizens to completely shutting down mobile cell phone service.

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The Ground Zero Mosque: The Bigger of Us, the Better of Us

Fox are bashing Muslims again.  I guess it wasn’t enough to demonize the religion on their television shows “Lie to Me” and “24” and so they are now the major force behind the movement to ban a mosque at Ground Zero.

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