Modern biblical scholarship has enabled critically thinking Christians to understand what the historical Jesus actually said and what was tacked on later to serve the interests of Rome and early church leaders, but those original messages remain politically inconvenient today, writes Rev. Howard Bess.
There is much religiosity in the U.S., with the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority even approving Christian prayers at the start of government business. But there is little appreciation of the radical political and economic message at the center of Jesus’s teachings, writes Rev. Howard Bess.
Pay inequity has worsened across the U.S. economy, but perhaps nowhere more than in the fast-food industry where CEOs and other top executives fatten their compensation as their fast-food workers subsist on taxpayer-provided food stamps, as Michael Winship explains.
Exclusive: The concentration of power in the hands of billionaire “oligarchs” may be most alarming in places like Ukraine but the United States is moving in the same direction as wealth is consolidated at the top — and both elections and media are up for sale, says Robert Parry.
America’s rich, who are consolidating more and more of the nation’s wealth in their own hands and giving less and less back, see themselves as “victims” of class envy, and some billionaires even liken their plight to the Holocaust, a stunning deviation from reality, notes Michael Winship.
Even as some college presidents – and athletic coaches – pull down salaries over $1 million, “adjunct professors,” who make up a majority of the teachers, often earn poverty-level pay, another example of America’s income inequality, writes Lawrence S. Wittner.
Nazi metaphors should be avoided except in the most extreme cases of human cruelty. But that metaphor is especially obscene when today’s pampered rich, like billionaire Tom Perkins, compare themselves to persecuted Jews, as Bill Moyers and Michael Winship observe.
Martin Luther King Day is a rare moment in American life when people reflect – even if only briefly – on the ideals that guided Dr. King’s life and led to his death. Thus, the struggle over King’s message can be intense, pitting a bland conventional view against a more radical call for profound change,…
The Christmas season celebrates the regal myth of Jesus – his supposedly miraculous birth and royal lineage as a king of kings – but that loses sight of the historical Jesus and his revolutionary message of justice for the poor and powerless, as Rev. Howard Bess reflects.
The Grand Irony may be that Earth is the only spot in the Universe where intelligent life evolved, and it then made the Earth unlivable, the ultimate crisis in an age of an ossified order that poet Phil Rockstroh addresses.