“We Love Americans—but Not Their Leaders”: The Message Democrats Refuse to Learn

A brilliant Iranian-produced video has been making the rounds online. It’s simple—disarmingly so. In some versions it’s rendered in LEGO animation, in others with straightforward narration. But its central message lands with unusual force:

“We love Americans—but not their leaders.”

That line deserves careful attention. Because in a political culture saturated with noise, it cuts through with something rare: clarity.

More than that, it exposes a fundamental weakness at the heart of Democratic messaging in this country.

For years now, the Democratic Party’s primary appeal has boiled down to a single claim: “We’re not Trump.” And to be sure, that distinction matters. Donald Trump’s authoritarian impulses, his open contempt for democratic norms, and his appeal to the ugliest strains of American political life are real and dangerous.

But here’s the problem: “We’re not Trump” is not a vision. It’s a contrast. And at this point in our history, contrast is not enough.

The viral video makes that painfully clear. Its power lies in a distinction most political leaders—Democrats included—refuse to make: the difference between a people and the system that governs them.

It says, in effect, that ordinary Americans are not the problem. They are not hated abroad, not even by those we’re taught to fear. Instead, what people around the world distrust—often with good reason—are the policies and power structures that operate in Americans’ name.

That insight turns our usual narrative upside down.

We are accustomed to hearing that “they hate us for our freedoms,” or that foreign adversaries represent some deep cultural or civilizational threat. But the video suggests something far more unsettling—and far more plausible. It suggests that ordinary people across national boundaries have more in common with each other than with their own political and economic elites.

That idea is not new. It echoes through the work of liberation theologians and critical thinkers who have long insisted that the real divide in our world is not between nations, but between those who benefit from systems of domination and those who suffer under them. What’s new is seeing that insight distilled into a form that millions can grasp in a matter of minutes.

And that is precisely why it resonates. That’s because it speaks to lived experience.

Americans know—at least at some level—that something is deeply wrong. They see endless wars justified in the name of freedom. They see economic systems that reward a tiny elite while leaving millions struggling. They see political leaders, from both parties, who promise change and deliver continuity.

Under those conditions, the claim “We’re not Trump” begins to sound less like a solution and more like an evasion.

The unspoken question becomes unavoidable: Not Trump? Then what, exactly?

If Democrats want to answer that question credibly, they will have to do something they have so far resisted. They will have to break not only with Trumpism, but with the broader system that made Trump possible—and that continues to function quite comfortably without him.

That means acknowledging truths that are politically inconvenient.

It means admitting that war-making is not a Republican monopoly. It means recognizing that corporate influence distorts Democratic governance no less than Republican. It means confronting the reality that empire—however politely described—has been a bipartisan project for decades.

Without that reckoning, Democratic appeals will continue to fall flat, especially among younger voters who have grown up watching these patterns repeat.

This is where movements outside the party structure—groups like the Arc of Justice Alliance—have an opportunity that establishment Democrats seem unwilling to seize.

They can say what others won’t.

They can affirm solidarity not just with Americans, but with ordinary people everywhere—those in Iran, in Gaza, in Russia, in Ukraine—who are so often reduced to abstractions in geopolitical narratives. They can refuse the easy logic that demands we choose sides between competing powers while ignoring the human cost on all sides.

Most importantly, they can tell the truth about the system itself.

That truth is not complicated, even if it is uncomfortable. It is simply this: the structures that generate violence, inequality, and fear are deeply embedded. They do not change automatically when one party replaces another. And they will not be transformed by rhetoric that defines itself only in opposition to the latest political villain.

The viral video points toward a different kind of politics—one grounded not in fear, but in recognition. It invites Americans to see themselves as others see them: not as enemies, but as potential allies trapped within a system that often acts against their own deepest interests.

That is a message worth hearing.

But it is also a message that carries an implicit challenge. Because once we accept the distinction between people and power, we can no longer hide behind it. We are forced to ask where we stand—and what we are willing to say.

“We’re not Trump” is a start. But it is a small one.

The moment demands more: a willingness to say not only what we oppose, but what we reject—and what we are prepared to build in its place.

Until that happens, videos like this one will continue to do what our political leaders will not: tell a truth that is both simple and, for that very reason, difficult to ignore.

Presidential Assassination? Only Shocking When It Happens Here

The reports came in the usual way—breaking news, partial details, a lot of urgency and not much clarity. Another alleged attempt on the life of Donald Trump. Another moment where we’re all supposed to stop and say, “How could this possibly happen here?”

But that’s the part that rings hollow.

Because if we’re honest—even just a little honest—the real question isn’t “How could this happen?” It’s “Why are we surprised?”

We live in a country that has, for a very long time, accepted the idea that it’s OK to eliminate leaders we don’t like—as long as they’re somewhere else. Iran. Cuba. Iraq. Libya. You name it. We don’t always call it assassination. We have cleaner words for it—“operations,” “interventions,” “defensive measures.” But the result is the same. People in power get targeted and killed because they’re seen as a threat to our interests.

And somehow, we’ve convinced ourselves that what’s normal over there should be unthinkable over here.

That’s a hard line to maintain.

There’s an old phrase about chickens coming home to roost. It’s not about revenge. It’s about consequences. If violence becomes part of the way a country operates in the world, it doesn’t just stay neatly contained. It seeps back. It shapes how people think—about power, about enemies, about what’s acceptable. In biblical terms, you reap what you sow.

So when something like this happens—or is alleged to have happened—we act shocked. But maybe the shock is the least believable part of the whole story.

What’s even harder to ignore is how this fits into the broader American experience of violence. Because, frankly, this kind of threat isn’t new. It’s just new for the people at the very top.

Schoolchildren in this country grow up with it.

They practice lockdown drills. They’re told what to do if someone comes into their classroom with a gun. Parents send them off in the morning with a quiet, unspoken fear in the back of their minds. And when something does happen—yet another shooting—it dominates the news for a few days and then fades, replaced by the next story.

We’ve gotten used to it. That’s the truth.

So when a president or former president faces danger, there’s a strange kind of leveling going on. For once, the risk isn’t limited to ordinary people. It touches the most protected individual in the country. And suddenly it’s a national crisis.

But for a lot of families, that crisis has been going on for years.

There’s another detail here that’s worth noticing. In the coverage of this latest incident, even readers of The Washington Post—not exactly a fringe outlet—responded with a lot of skepticism. Comment after comment questioned what really happened, suggesting it might be staged or exaggerated, wondering who benefits politically from the story.

That kind of reaction would have been unthinkable not so long ago. Now it’s almost expected.

And that says something important too. People don’t trust what they’re being told anymore. Not from politicians. Not from the media. Not from anyone, really. Everything is filtered through suspicion.

That may or may not be justified in any particular case. But the overall effect is clear. We no longer share a common sense of reality. And when that goes, everything becomes unstable. If you can’t agree on what’s true, it’s much easier for fear, anger, and even violence to take hold.

None of this is to say that an attempt on anyone’s life—Trump’s or anyone else’s—should be taken lightly. It shouldn’t. That’s not the point.

The point is that we don’t seem to apply the same level of concern across the board.

Violence against powerful people shocks us. Violence against ordinary people, especially kids, barely slows us down anymore. Violence carried out in our name overseas is explained away, justified, or simply ignored.

And then, every once in a while, something happens here at home that reminds us of the world we’ve helped create.

When that happens, we call it shocking. We call it unprecedented. We treat it as something that doesn’t belong.

But maybe it does belong. Maybe it’s part of the same pattern we’ve been living with for a long time—only now it’s harder to look away.

That’s the uncomfortable thought.

Not that something like this could happen—but that, given everything else, it almost had to.

When the Inner World Collapses: “Primary Trust” and the Sound of “Kaching”

The other day I found myself listening—really listening—to the background noise of our culture. Not the loud political arguments or the endless commentary about war and elections. Something more basic than that.

It was the sound beneath it all.

“Kaching.”

It’s the sound of the cash register, the market ticker, the bottom line. It’s the unspoken assumption that whatever matters must be measurable, bankable, convertible into profit. That’s the real world, we’re told. Everything else—reflection, imagination, interior conversation—is at best a luxury and at worst a problem.

How impoverishing! Too bad.

Such reflections were stimulated by seeing the play “Primary Trust” at the Country Playhouse here in Westport, CT. As the play unfolded, I found myself inwardly applauding the theater’s artistic director, Mark Shanahan. He had the courage to present what seemed to be a brave act of resistance to the values I’ve just lamented.

The play centers on Kenneth, a quiet man who has built a life around routine, books, and a nightly visit to a tiki bar where he drinks mai tais and talks with his best friend Bert. As it turns out, the mai tais represent for Kenneth his own “ties” to a past characterized by the premature death of his mother and the feelings of abandonment that followed.

Only gradually do we realize that Bert is not “real” in the conventional sense. He’s part of Kenneth’s inner world—his ongoing conversation with life’s invisible dimensions – memory, loss, the transcendent, and whatever within us refuses to surrender to the prevailing ethos.

Within that ethos, a discovery like Kenneth’s usually ends the discussion. We diagnose. We label. We move on.

But “Primary Trust” won’t let us do that.

It invites us to look again.

That’s because Kenneth is not empty. He’s not insane. He comes out of a world of old books and inward dialogue. He lives with a kind of attentiveness that most of us have long since traded in for survival and Kaching. Even his name suggests it—Ken: to know. He knows things, though not the kinds of things that show up on a résumé.

In fact, there’s a sense in which Kenneth’s inner life is more real than the world that surrounds him. It’s slower, deeper, more attentive to presence—even if that presence takes the form of someone unseen.

And then comes the turning point.

It happens, significantly, in a bank.

Of all places.

Kenneth has lost his job in the bookstore—that sanctuary of memory and reflection—and now finds himself employed in the very heart of the “Kaching” world. Numbers, transactions, polite exchanges with customers. The measured, monetized version of reality.

And it’s precisely there that his inner world erupts.

Bert begins to distract him. Press him. Threaten, in effect, to leave.

It’s a strange scene, but also a revealing one. Because what’s happening is not simply that Kenneth is “losing focus.” It’s that the world he has relied on to hold himself together is beginning to fracture.

At the same time, a real customer stands before him—another human being, with needs, questions, expectations.

Kenneth dismisses her. Abruptly. Rudely.

And just like that, he loses his job.

If you wanted a single image to capture the play’s central tension, that would be it. A man caught between two worlds—one inward, one outward—failing, at least in that moment, to inhabit either one well.

It’s tempting to read that scene as proof that Kenneth’s inner life is the problem. That it distracts him, disables him, renders him unfit for the real world.

But I think that misses something important.

Because the bank itself—the setting of that collapse—is not neutral. It represents a world that until his arrival has no real place for the kind of attentiveness Kenneth embodies. A world that measures worth in transactions and efficiency. A world where “knowing” has been replaced by calculating.

“Kaching.”

And yet—and this is where the play refuses easy conclusions—the alternative is not simply to retreat further into the inner world.

Because that world, for all its richness, is also controlled. It is safe. It is predictable. Bert may challenge Kenneth, but never in ways that truly escape Kenneth’s own boundaries. There is no real otherness there.

Which brings us to Corrina.

She enters Ken’s world not as an idea, not as a projection, but as a presence he cannot control. She listens, but she also responds. She’s patient, but not infinitely so. In short, she’s real in a way that Bert cannot be.

And that’s where things get risky.

Because to move toward Corrina is to risk losing Bert.

To move toward relationship is to risk the collapse of the carefully constructed world that has made survival possible.

In that sense, the bank scene is more than a plot point. It’s a kind of collapse—almost what the Tarot would call a Tower moment. Everything that seemed stable is suddenly revealed as fragile. The structures fall. The old securities no longer hold.

And as anyone who has lived long enough knows, those moments are not optional. They come whether we want them or not.

The question is what follows.

In the Tarot sequence, the Tower is not the end. It’s followed by the Star—a card of quiet hope, of reorientation, of a different kind of light. Not the harsh glare of the marketplace, but something softer, more enduring.

Something like trust.

And that, of course, is the title of the play: Primary Trust.

Not trust in the market. Not trust in the structures that promise security. But something more basic—the capacity to trust reality itself, including the presence of others who cannot be controlled.

Even the play’s small details seem to gesture in that direction.

Take the drinks.

Kenneth’s mai tais are sweet, almost childlike, a bit escapist. They belong to a world of fantasy, of tiki bars and softened edges. They soothe.

Martinis, by contrast—the drink Corrina orders—are sharper, clearer, less forgiving. They don’t cushion reality; they present it.

Different spirits, you might say.

Different ways of inhabiting the world.

By the end of the play, nothing is neatly resolved. Kenneth doesn’t suddenly become someone else. He doesn’t abandon his inner life—and thank God for that.

But something shifts.

He begins, tentatively, to step into a world where he is no longer the sole author of the conversation. Where the other is truly other. Where trust is no longer self-contained.

And that, it seems to me, is the real point.

Not that the inner world is an illusion to be overcome.

And not that the world of “Kaching” is where truth resides.

But that we are called—each of us—to pass through the collapse of our certainties, to hold on to whatever depth we have been given, and at the same time to risk the encounter that makes love possible.

It’s a hard passage.

From mai tais to martinis.

From the Tower to the Star.

From a world we can manage to one we cannot. But it may be the only way any of us ever really learns to live.

When “God on Our Side” Becomes Dangerous:Vance, the Pope, and the Many Faces of Violence

Not long ago, I wrote about what I called the “dangerous simplicity” of Pope Leo XIV’s claim that “God is never on the side of those who use violence.” At the time, the point may have seemed abstract—more a matter of theological nuance than urgent public concern.

However, a recent exchange between JD Vance and Pope Leo XIV has brought the issue sharply into focus. In fact, somewhat ironically, Vance’s attempt to challenge the pope ends up illustrating exactly the point I was trying to make.

I mean, the JD Vance- Pope Leo disagreement has all the markings of a classic argument: one side appealing to moral clarity, the other to historical reality. But beneath the surface, something more revealing is happening.

In trying to correct the pope, Vance ironically ends up exposing a deeper truth about violence itself – even the violence directly involving vice-president himself and the United States foreign policy he supports.

The Vance-Leo Exchange

The pope’s statement about nonviolence is simple, even beautiful: “God is never on the side of those who use violence.” It sounds like something that ought to end the discussion. Who could be against that?

But Vance pushes back. He begins politely enough: “I like that the pope is an advocate for peace… I think that’s certainly one of his roles.” Then comes the challenge: “On the other hand, how can you say that God is never on the side of those who wield the sword?”

And then he goes straight to the example that almost always ends arguments: World War II.

“Was God on the side of the Americans who liberated France from the Nazis?” he asks. “Was God on the side of the Americans who liberated Holocaust camps and liberated those innocent people? I certainly think the answer is yes.”

The Conceptual Complication

Most people instinctively agree. It’s hard not to. The defeat of Nazism feels like the clearest possible case of justified violence. But that’s exactly where things get interesting.

Because once you admit that not all violence is the same, the pope’s simple statement starts to unravel. And that’s the point.

“Violence” isn’t one thing. It comes in different forms, and if we don’t distinguish between them, we end up confused or, worse, manipulated.

Start with what might be called structural violence. This is the kind most people don’t notice because it’s built into everyday life. It’s the violence of systems that quietly destroy people: poverty wages, lack of healthcare, racism, occupation, economic exploitation, colonialism, imperialism, and wars launched for power or profit. No bombs need to fall for this kind of violence to be deadly.

Then there is defensive violence. This is what Vance is talking about, whether he realizes it or not. It’s the violence used to resist oppression. When Palestinians revolt against settler colonialism, when Iranians resist a war of agression, that’s defensive violence. It’s visible, it’s messy, and it’s almost always condemned by those in power. But it’s also widely recognized as legitimate, even in international law.

Next comes repressive violence. This is what happens when those in power try to crush resistance and restore the unjust system. It comes wrapped in phrases like “law and order,” “security,” or “self-defense.” But its real aim is to keep things exactly as they are – to defend the status quo, illegal occupation, colonialism, unwarranted attacks. . ..

And finally, there is terroristic violence. This is the deliberate use of overwhelming force, fear, and destruction to achieve political goals. It is often associated with non-state actors, but historically it has been most devastatingly practiced by states themselves.

Once you see these distinctions, everything looks different.

The Nazi Example: Gaza & Iran

Take Vance’s World War II example. The Nazi regime embodied structural and terroristic violence on a massive scale. The Allied response can reasonably be understood as defensive violence aimed at stopping that destruction. So far, so good.

But now bring that same framework into the present.

Vance insists, “I certainly think the answer is yes” when asked if God was on the side of those who liberated the camps. Yet at the same time, he supports policies that many observers describe as enabling or excusing mass violence elsewhere. He also adds, almost as a safeguard, “And I agree, Jesus Christ certainly does not support genocide…”

The irony is hard to miss.

Because when it comes to Gaza, what many see is not defensive violence but something much closer to repressive and terroristic violence. Entire neighborhoods flattened. Civilians trapped. Children buried under rubble. These are not incidental side effects. They are the predictable outcomes of overwhelming force used in densely populated areas.

At the same time, those who resist are quickly labeled “terrorists,” regardless of the conditions that gave rise to their resistance. This is exactly how the language of violence gets turned upside down. Structural violence becomes invisible. Defensive violence becomes criminal. Repressive violence becomes “security.” And large-scale destruction becomes “self-defense.”

The same pattern appears in the escalating conflict with Iran, which critics describe as a “war of aggression.” In that case, what is being framed as preemptive defense can just as easily be seen as structural and repressive violence on a global scale. Once again, the categories matter.

Jesus & Nonviolence

This is where the pope’s statement, for all its appeal, begins to look less helpful. Saying that “God is never on the side of those who use violence” might inspire people in the abstract. But in the real world, it risks putting the enslaved and the enslaver, the occupier and the occupied, the bomber and the bombed, all in the same moral category.

That’s not clarity. That’s confusion.

And confusion, in matters like these, is dangerous.

There is another layer to this discussion that makes things even more complicated. Christians often speak of Jesus Christ as if he were simply “nonviolent.” But that description, taken without qualification, can mislead.

Jesus lived under Roman occupation, one of the most brutally efficient systems of structural and repressive violence the world has ever known. The authorities who executed him did not see him as harmless. They saw him as a threat. His message challenged the legitimacy of their power and exposed the injustice built into their system. So they executed him by crucifixion, a method of execution they reserved for rebels against the state.

To call him simply “nonviolent” risks stripping away that context. It can turn a figure who confronted empire into one who passively accepts it.

Conclusion

And that brings us back to a hard but necessary truth: appeals to “nonviolence” are often used selectively. They are frequently directed at those who are already suffering, while those who benefit from structural violence continue largely unchallenged.

That is why some have gone so far as to say that “nonviolence” can function as a kind of scam. Not because the ideal itself is worthless, but because it is so easily weaponized. The powerful celebrate their own violence as necessary or heroic. The resistance of their victims is condemned as dangerous or immoral.

In the end, the exchange between Vance and Pope Leo XIV doesn’t settle anything. Instead, it exposes the fault line.

Vance is right to challenge the idea that all violence is the same. His World War II example makes that clear. But he stops short of applying that insight consistently to the present.

The pope is right to insist that violence is morally perilous and cannot be casually justified. But his sweeping statement risks erasing distinctions that are essential for understanding what is actually happening in the world.

Between those two positions lies a more difficult path. It requires looking honestly at the different forms violence takes and asking, in each case, who is doing what to whom and why.

Only then does the question of where God stands begin to make any sense at all.

What Does Prayer Mean in An Age of Empire? The Dangerous Simplicity of Pope Leo’s “Nonviolence”

Suddenly, everyone is talking about prayer and theology.

That comes as a surprise to many who, since Harvey Cox’s The Secular City, have assumed that secularization had effectively removed God from serious political consideration. Yet recent controversies have forced the issue back into public view.

The debate surrounding Pete Hegseth’s prayer about U.S. policy in Iran –so reminiscent of Mark Twain’s haunting “War Prayer” has reopened questions many thought settled.

It has even produced the strange spectacle of Donald Trump adopting quasi-messianic language, while J.D. Vance publicly disputes Pope Leo XIV about whose prayers God hears and whose God ignores.

I have addressed those developments elsewhere. Here I want to press further into the deeper issue: What is prayer? What are its political implications? And what does the Bible itself reveal about the competing claims made in God’s name, especially about nonviolence?

What Does Prayer Mean?

To begin with, what exactly is being invoked when Hegseth appeals to the Psalms and asks God to “break the teeth” of enemies, to leave women widowed and children orphaned?

And what does the pope mean when he insists that Jesus rejects such petitions outright and stands unequivocally for nonviolence?

In both cases, the underlying assumption seems the same: a supernatural being “out there,” watching events unfold and selectively intervening on behalf of one side or another.

But can such imagery still be taken seriously?

We live in the age of the James Webb Space Telescope, which reveals a universe so vast that our planet becomes nearly invisible within it. We also live in the age of quantum physics, where matter dissolves into energy and probability. In such a world, the idea of a localized deity monitoring human conflicts and deciding which missiles hit their targets strains credulity.

Is God “up there” listening? Is Jesus literally seated at the Father’s right hand, weighing petitions and choosing sides?

Or are such images relics of an earlier worldview that no longer corresponds to what we know about reality?

And Then There’s the Bible

It is true that the Bible itself often reflects that older worldview. Its language presumes a cosmos structured in ways we now recognize as outdated.

Yet that does not render the Bible irrelevant. On the contrary, its enduring significance lies elsewhere.

As scholars such as Pablo Richard have emphasized, the Bible does not present a single, unified picture of God. Instead, it stages an internal conflict– a “struggle of the gods.”

On one side stands the God of Moses: the liberator of slaves, the defender of the poor, the protector of widows, orphans, and immigrants.

On the other side stands the God claimed by kings and elites, beginning with the royal ideology of David and Solomon, a God invoked to justify wealth, hierarchy, domination, and even genocide.

The prophets– Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah– consistently take the side of the former against the latter.

Jesus clearly stands in that prophetic tradition: a marginal figure, an artisan, an outsider, a victim of imperial violence. His execution by crucifixion– Rome’s punishment for political dissidents– makes unmistakable where he stood.

In this sense, while the Bible does not address modern cosmology, it does address a far more urgent question: Whose side is Ultimate Reality on? Does Dr. King’s long arc of history really bend towards justice for the poor and marginalized?

The Bible refuses to let that question be answered cheaply.

Was Jesus Unequivocally “Nonviolent?”

This brings us to the claim that Jesus was simply “nonviolent.”

Stated without qualification, that claim risks obscuring more than it reveals. It can even function as a form of moral disorientation– especially for those subjected to systemic oppression.

“Violence” is not a single, simple category. It has at least four distinct forms.

First, there is structural violence: embedded in laws, institutions, and social arrangements that quietly destroy lives. Slavery, segregation, economic deprivation, denial of healthcare, and wars of aggression all belong here.

Second, there is defensive violence: the response of those who resist such conditions. When oppressed peoples fight back, their actions are immediately visible and condemned by the powers that be– yet they are widely recognized as legitimate, even under international law.

Third, there is repressive violence: the state’s attempt to crush resistance and restore the original injustice, often under the banner of “law and order.”

And finally, there is terroristic violence: the deliberate use of fear and destruction to achieve political ends– a practice historically employed most devastatingly and frequently by states, even as they label resisters “terrorists.”

In this light, to describe Jesus simply as “nonviolent” is not only inadequate; it risks distorting the reality of both his life and his context. The Roman authorities who executed him certainly did not regard him as harmless.

Conclusion

We are left, then, with the question that has been with us from the beginning: What does prayer mean in the world just described?

Whatever it means, it cannot be what figures like Hegseth, Trump, or even the pope seem to assume. Prayer is not a way of persuading a distant deity to intervene on behalf of our causes, bless our wars, or guarantee our victories.

Nor can the question of God’s allegiance be resolved by lifting isolated biblical texts or by invoking abstract slogans like “nonviolence,” as though such words settled anything at all.

The Bible itself will not allow that kind of evasion. It presents instead a conflict– deep, unresolved, and unavoidable– between competing visions of God, of humanity, and of justice. It exposes how easily “God” becomes the sacred cover for power.

But our problem runs even deeper. In the light of the James Webb Space Telescope and of quantum physics, the very notion of God must be rethought. The old image of a supreme off-planet being ” watching, judging, intervening, is no longer credible.

What we have called “God” must instead be understood as the creative energy of the universe– indeed, of a universe of universes– the living source in which everything participates, including the mysterious energy of consciousness itself. This is not an object among others, but the depth of reality, the Thou we may still address, not because it sits above us, but because it lives within and among us.

In biblical language, it is the Creator. In Paul’s words, it is “the one in whom we live and move and have our being.” Such a reality cannot be captured by any nation, claimed by any empire, or enlisted in any war. It recognizes no borders, no chosen peoples in the exclusionary sense, no privileged civilizations. The earth belongs to all. Its gifts are not the possession of a few, but the common inheritance of everyone– each of us entitled to no more than our one-eight-billionth share.

Seen in this light, prayer changes meaning entirely.

It is no longer a request for favors from above. It is an act of alignment with the deepest currents of reality itself. It is a way of opening ourselves to the creative, life-giving energy that stands against domination, exclusion, and death.

And so the issue returns to us, stripped of illusion.

When we pray, we are not stepping outside history. We are locating ourselves within it. We are aligning ourselves– consciously or not– with one side of an ongoing struggle between the forces that sustain life and those that diminish it.

This is not theology as speculation. It is theology as decision.

To pray is to choose.

And the choice we make– however piously we disguise it– places us either with the flourishing of the whole or with the systems that deny it.

So the question remains, now more demanding than ever:

When you pray, are you aligning yourself with the life of the whole– or with the powers that divide and destroy it?

Locked Doors: Faith After Iran, After Epstein

Readings for Second Sunday of Easter: Acts 2: 42-47; Psalm 118: 2-4, 13-15, 22-24; 1 Peter 1: 3-9; John 20: 19-31

What if life can be no different from what our senses relentlessly report? Turn on the news. Cities in Iran and beyond reduced to rubble. Children buried beneath concrete. Leaders speaking of “security” while entire populations live in fear.

And at the same time, the slow, unsettling revelations surrounding the Epstein files continue to expose networks of wealth, privilege, and exploitation that reach into the highest levels of our political and economic life. Taken together, such realities make it difficult to sustain even the most basic trust in the goodness of the world or the integrity of those who govern it.

In such a moment, it is not hard to recognize ourselves in doubting Thomas centralized in this morning’s gospel. His voice is not foreign to us. It speaks from deep within: life is tragic, death wins, power protects itself, and truth is buried along with its victims. Yeshua is gone, and anyone who imagines otherwise is clinging to illusion.

More than that, Thomas’s fear feels painfully contemporary. The forces that executed Jesus have not disappeared; they persist in new forms. They still silence, still threaten, still destroy. One can almost see him glancing toward the door: Are you sure it’s locked?

Today’s Gospel reading does not dismiss that voice or treat it with contempt. It takes Thomas seriously precisely because his doubt is grounded in what appears self-evident. Dead bodies do not return. Empires crush resistance. Those who challenge entrenched power rarely prevail. In that sense, Thomas is simply being realistic. And yet, in the midst of that closed and fearful space, something happens that exceeds every expectation.

Yeshua appears again among his fearful friends. Not as a denial of crucifixion, but bearing its marks. The wounds remain visible. Violence is neither erased nor explained away; it is exposed and, somehow, rendered powerless. He turns to Thomas not with reproach, but with warmth. “Look at my hands,” he says in effect. “It’s really me.” Thomas’s response is immediate and unguarded: “My Lord and my God.”

But what is striking is not Thomas’s confession so much as Yeshua’s response to it.

There is no rebuke. No shaming. Instead, one can almost hear an acknowledgment born of shared experience. You are only human, he seems to say, and I know what that means. On the cross, my own senses told me that I had been abandoned. I too felt the darkness closing in. I too knew what it was to stand at the edge of despair. Faith, in that moment, was anything but easy.

That recognition changes everything. It tells us that faith is not the absence of doubt, nor the refusal to see what is plainly before us. It is what emerges in spite of misgivings. And from there, the Gospel moves to its most challenging point.

What truly astonishes, what truly delights, is not simply that Thomas eventually believes, but that there are those who commit themselves to God’s future without the reassurance of seeing. Those who trust life’s ultimate goodness when the evidence points in the opposite direction.

Imagine that kind of trust in a world such as ours. Imagine holding fast to the conviction that another future is possible, a future with room for everyone, when war and exploitation seem to define the present. That is the faith Yeshua blesses. It is not credulity; it is courage.

At this point, the first reading from Acts takes on a new and unsettling clarity. The description of the early Christian community is not a sentimental aside. It is a direct social and economic alternative to the world Thomas fears and we recognize all too well. They held everything in common. No one claimed private ownership. There was not a needy person among them. In other words, they organized their life together around the conviction that God’s future had already begun to take shape in their midst.

Set that alongside what we see in our own time. A world where wealth is concentrated, where the vulnerable are exploited, where violence protects privilege, and where even the exposure of wrongdoing seems unable to bring about accountability. Against that backdrop, the Acts community stands as a quiet but radical contradiction. It embodies a different logic, one rooted not in fear or accumulation, but in shared life and mutual care.

This is what resurrection faith looks like when it takes flesh in history. Not an escape from the world’s suffering, but a refusal to let that suffering have the final word. Not a denial of death, but a commitment to life that persists even in death’s shadow. The doors may still be locked; the threats are real enough. But within those very conditions, another way of living becomes possible.

That is the invitation extended to Thomas, and to us. Not simply to believe a proposition about life after death, but to participate in a way of life that anticipates and embodies God’s promised future. A way of life that insists there can, and must, be a world where no one is left in need.

Working for that world, for fullness of life for everyone even when the evidence seems to deny its possibility, that is what faith finally means. May it be ours.

Easter Against the Empire of Death: Did Jesus Rise — Or Did His Movement?

Readings for Easter Sunday:ACTS 10:34A, 37-43; PS 118: 1-2, 16=17, 22-23; COL 3:1-4; JN 20: 1-4.

Did Jesus really rise from the dead? Or is belief in a bodily resurrection no more credible than belief in the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus?

That question, provocative as it sounds, is not new. It has been quietly — and sometimes not so quietly — asked by serious biblical scholars for more than a century. And today, voices within liberation theology and critical biblical scholarship are giving us fresh ways to approach it without abandoning faith, but by deepening it.

Everything depends, as always, on what we mean by “really.”

Let’s begin where the earliest Christians themselves began — not with doctrine, but with experience.

After Jesus’ execution, his followers were shattered. Their movement appeared finished. Rome had done what Rome always does: it crushed yet another threat to imperial order. The disciples scattered, returned to their former lives, and tried to make sense of their failure. Then something happened — something unexpected, transformative, and difficult to describe.

Women in the community reported experiences of Jesus as alive.

That detail is crucial. Scholars from across the spectrum — including liberation theologians like Gustavo Gutiérrez and feminist exegetes such as Elsa Tamez — emphasize that the prominence of women as first witnesses is historically significant. In a culture where women’s testimony was legally discounted, inventing such a story would have been counterproductive. The tradition preserves it precisely because something happened that could not be denied — even if it could not be neatly explained.

But what happened?

The earliest written testimony we have comes not from the gospels, but from Paul — writing around the year 50. And Paul is strikingly clear: his experience of the risen Jesus was visionary. He saw a light, heard a voice, and interpreted that encounter as equivalent to those of earlier disciples. “Last of all,” he writes, “he appeared also to me.”

Paul never met the historical Jesus. Yet he claims equal authority because his experience was of the same kind. That fact alone has led many contemporary scholars — including figures like John Dominic Crossan — to suggest that resurrection “appearances” were not encounters with a resuscitated corpse, but powerful visionary or communal experiences of presence.

When we turn to the earliest gospel, Gospel of Mark, the pattern deepens. There are no appearances of the risen Jesus at all. The tomb is empty; a young man announces that Jesus “has been raised”; the women flee in fear and say nothing to anyone. That’s where the original gospel ends.

No appearances. No triumphal conclusion. Just silence and trembling.

Later gospels — Gospel of Matthew, Gospel of Luke, and Gospel of John — add increasingly detailed stories. But even there, something curious persists. Jesus is consistently difficult to recognize. Mary mistakes him for a gardener. Disciples walk with him for miles without knowing who he is. Others see him — and doubt.

This is not what one would expect if the point were to describe a straightforward resuscitation.

Instead, the texts seem to be grappling with an experience that exceeded ordinary categories. As N. T. Wright himself — no skeptic about resurrection — admits, the gospel accounts point to something that is neither simple physicality nor mere metaphor. The language strains to express a transformed mode of presence.

Liberation theologians push this further.

For thinkers like Jon Sobrino, resurrection is not about the revivification of a corpse, but about God’s vindication of a life committed to the poor and executed by empire. In that sense, Easter is God’s “No” to crucifixion systems — and God’s “Yes” to the victims of history.

That insight changes everything.

It means resurrection is not primarily a claim about what happened to Jesus’ body. It is a claim about what happens to history when the victims of injustice are remembered, honored, and made present again in communities of resistance.

In that light, the resurrection stories begin to make new sense.

Jesus is encountered “in the breaking of the bread.” He is present where two or three gather in his name. He is identified with “the least of these.” These are not secondary theological ideas — they are the very substance of resurrection faith.

The community discovers that Jesus is still with them — not as a corpse returned to life, but as a living presence wherever justice, sharing, and compassion take flesh.

This is why the early Christian communities described in Acts held all things in common. They were not simply remembering Jesus; they were embodying him. Resurrection was not an abstract belief. It was a new way of living — a new social reality.

A different world had opened up.

And that world stood in sharp contrast to the dominant one — the world governed by empire, market logic, and systems of exclusion. As my friend and mentor Franz Hinkelammert would later put it, the struggle is always between a system that sacrifices human beings and a vision of “a world where everyone fits.”

Easter belongs to that second world.

So does belief in resurrection require us to imagine a corpse walking out of a tomb?

Not necessarily.

What it requires is something far more demanding: the recognition that the powers of death — political, economic, and cultural — do not have the final word. It asks us to believe that life can emerge from defeat, that community can arise from despair, and that the executed ones of history are not forgotten.

It asks us to live as if that were true.

In our own time — with images from Gaza, from war zones, from systems that bury the poor under literal and metaphorical rubble — the question of resurrection becomes painfully concrete. Are those lives simply extinguished? Or do they continue to cry out, to summon us, to demand a different world?

Easter answers that question.

It says that the crucified are not gone. They are present. They are calling. They are — in a very real sense — risen.

And so the real question is not whether Jesus rose from the dead.

The real question is whether we are willing to enter the world that his followers discovered — a world beyond domination, beyond fear, beyond the logic of death itself.

A world where, against all odds, life has the last word.

That is Easter.

And that, whatever else one believes, is anything but childish.

Palm Sunday: Jesus and the Politics of Empire

Readings for Palm Sunday: John 12:12-16; Isaiah 50:4-7; Psalm 22:17-24; Philippians 2:6-11; Mark 14–15

This year we enter Holy Week while the world watches scenes of immense human suffering. In Gaza’s genocide, entire neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble and thousands of children have been buried beneath the debris of bombs.

In Iran, threats of widening war grow louder each day, with our country once again demonstrating its willingness to ignore international law and rain destruction on distant populations in the name of security, stability, and geopolitical dominance. The language used to justify such violence is familiar: order must be preserved, enemies must be crushed, and empires must defend their interests.

A Revolutionary Demonstration

Against that backdrop we hear the readings for Palm Sunday. The contrast could hardly be sharper. The story begins with a procession—crowds shouting, palms waving, cloaks spread on the road. Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey while the people cry out, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”

For many Christians this scene has been domesticated into a harmless religious pageant. Children wave palm branches. Congregations sing joyful hymns. The political edge of the story disappears.

But in its original setting, Palm Sunday was anything but harmless.

Jerusalem at Passover was a tense and dangerous place. The Roman Empire ruled the region through military force and economic exploitation. The Temple establishment collaborated with the occupiers, helping maintain order among the population. Passover itself commemorated Israel’s ancient liberation from imperial Egypt, which meant the festival carried explosive political symbolism. The Roman authorities knew this. Every year they reinforced their garrisons to prevent revolt.

Into this volatile situation comes Jesus.

The Gospel story describes a demonstration in which people wave palm branches and shout “Hosanna, Son of David.” Those details matter. In Jewish history palms were symbols of national liberation. They had been waved during the successful revolt of the Maccabees two centuries earlier. To raise palms during Passover was to recall a moment when a foreign empire had been defeated.

The chant “Hosanna”—“Save us!”—carried similar meaning. Addressing Jesus as “Son of David” invoked the memory of Israel’s ancient kings and the hope that God would once again deliver the people from foreign domination.

Even the donkey was political theater. Roman generals entered cities on war horses after military victories. Jesus deliberately stages a counter-procession: a working class king riding a peasant’s animal, representing an entirely different vision of power.

In other words, Palm Sunday was not simply a religious celebration. It was a dramatic public protest against imperial domination.

The authorities understood that immediately. Within days Jesus would be arrested, tortured, and executed by the Roman state using a form of capital punishment reserved for insurgents: crucifixion.

This political dimension of the story is essential if we are to understand the rest of Holy Week. Jesus was not killed because he preached kindness or interior spirituality. Rome crucified him because his message and actions threatened the stability of empire.

Palm Sunday Today

That should force us to examine our own historical moment.

We live in a world still organized around imperial power. Military alliances, economic sanctions, and overwhelming military force are used to maintain global hierarchies of wealth and influence. Our own country claims the right to intervene anywhere always with devastating consequences for civilian populations.

The suffering we witness today—from Gaza to Yemen to Sudan, from Ukraine to Iran—is inseparable from those structures of power. The victims are always the same: the poor, the displaced, the children, the elderly. The language used to justify the violence consistently echoes the rhetoric of ancient empires. Security must be protected. Order must be maintained. Resistance must be crushed.

But the biblical tradition consistently stands with those who suffer under such systems. It stands against systems like our own.

Isaiah, in today’s reading, speaks of the servant who refuses to turn back even when struck and humiliated. Psalm 22 gives voice to a victim surrounded by violent enemies. Paul’s letter to the Philippians describes Christ emptying himself, taking the form of a slave rather than grasping power.

These texts reveal a God who sides not with imperial might but with those crushed beneath it.

That is why Jesus’ vision of the “Kingdom of God” was so dangerous. It promised what biblical scholars often call the Great Reversal. In that kingdom the last would be first and the first last. The hungry would be filled while the rich would be sent away empty. Power would flow downward toward those who had been excluded and oppressed.

Empires including America’s cannot tolerate that kind of vision. Their stability depends on maintaining existing hierarchies. And so prophets who speak of reversal—whether in ancient Jerusalem or in our own world—inevitably find themselves marginalized, silenced, or worse.

Which Jesus Do We Follow?

Palm Sunday therefore asks us a difficult question: Which Jesus do we follow?

Is it the harmless spiritual teacher who promises inner peace while leaving unjust systems untouched? Or is it the historical Jesus who rode into Jerusalem as part of a protest movement against empire, proclaiming a radically different social order?

The answer matters.

Because if the Jesus just described is the real one, then discipleship cannot be separated from questions of justice, war, and the suffering of the vulnerable. Following him means asking uncomfortable questions about the systems in which we ourselves live. It means refusing to baptize violence simply because it is carried out by our own government or allies.

Against Despair

It also means refusing despair. Holy Week ends not with the cross but with resurrection. The powers of empire believed they had eliminated a dangerous troublemaker. Instead they unleashed a movement that at its best has continued to challenge systems of domination for two thousand years.

So as we wave our palms today, we should remember what those branches originally signified: a people’s hope that God’s justice would one day overcome the violence of empire.

That hope remains as urgent now as it was on the road into Jerusalem.

Jesus’ Words: “Lazarus Come Forth” — Their Meaning in Gaza — and Iran

Despite distractions provided by the carpet bombings of Trump’s Epstein War in Iran, the genocide in Gaza continues.

For the past two years it has confronted us with images almost too painful to watch. Entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble. Hospitals destroyed. Families digging through shattered concrete searching for loved ones.

Human-rights organizations report that thousands remain buried beneath collapsed buildings—men, women, and children entombed by the violence of heartless slaughter.

The irony is difficult to miss. The state carrying out this devastation identifies itself as the homeland of the “People of God,” heirs to the biblical tradition that again and again insists that God’s special concern is for the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner.

Yet today the land of the prophets has become the site of mass graves of those very categories of victims buried under concrete and dust. In such a moment the Gospel summons we hear today presses itself upon us with frightening relevance: “Lazarus, come forth.” What could such words addressed to the dead possibly mean when so many lie buried under the rubble of war?

For an answer, consider the story’s details. They are a command to resist empire – Rome’s then and the condominium represented by Israel and the United States today.

Today’s Gospel

Today’s Gospel—the raising of Lazarus—may appear at first to be simply a miracle story. Jesus raises his friend Lazarus from the tomb after four days of death. But the narrative is much more than a display of supernatural power. In the Gospel according to John, the raising of Lazarus is the turning point that seals Jesus’ fate.

Notice what happens immediately after the miracle. The authorities in Jerusalem convene an emergency meeting. Their concern is not theological but political: “If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy our place and our nation.” In other words, belief in Jesus is ipso facto inimical to empire. 

Here’s why.

Jerusalem at the time was a colonial city under Roman occupation. Imperial troops controlled the land. Local elites—both political and religious—had learned to maintain their own authority by cooperating with that imperial system. They managed the Temple economy, collected taxes, and preserved order on Rome’s behalf. In return they enjoyed prestige, wealth, and protection.

Religion and empire were joined at the hip.

Jesus and the entire prophetic tradition he embodied contradicted that juncture. It’s as simple as that.

Israel’s Prophets (Including Jesus)

The prophets of Israel had seen this arrangement many times before.

Again and again, they warned that the covenant was never meant to enrich the powerful — much less gentile imperialists. The law of Moses insisted that society must protect those with the least power: the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the resident alien. Those four groups appear constantly in the Hebrew Scriptures because they represent people who cannot defend themselves.

Whenever rulers forgot them, the prophets spoke.

Amos for example thundered against those who “sell the righteous for silver and the poor for a pair of sandals.” Isaiah condemned leaders who accumulated land while the poor lost everything. Jeremiah denounced kings who built luxurious palaces through forced labor.

Those prophets were not enemies of their nation. They were faithful Israelites calling their society back to its founding vision. But because their words threatened the powerful, they were treated as dangerous troublemakers – in today’s terms, as “anti-Semites.”

Jesus stands squarely in that prophetic line.

Like the prophets before him, Jesus’ ministry constantly returns to the same themes: good news for the poor, release for captives, healing for the broken. He heals without payment, eats with social outcasts, and proclaims a God who prefers mercy to sacrifice. In him the ancient prophetic voice speaks again.

The raising of Lazarus becomes the moment when that voice can no longer be tolerated.

Why? Because Lazarus is more than a man returning to life. He represents what happens when those who have been buried—socially, politically, economically—begin to rise again. When the forgotten begin to breathe, when the oppressed stand up, when those written off as dead reclaim their dignity—systems built on injustice begin to tremble.

“Anti-Semitism” Weaponized

Throughout history, whenever prophetic voices expose injustice, the powerful rarely answer the criticism itself. Instead, they attack the critic. Jeremiah was accused of weakening the nation in time of war. Amos was expelled from the royal sanctuary because his preaching threatened the ruling class. Jesus himself is now declared a threat to public order.

From that day forward, the Gospel tells us, they decide to kill him.

We see similar dynamics in our own time. Criticism of violence, occupation, or injustice—particularly when directed toward the policies of the Israeli state—is often dismissed with the charge of “anti-Semitism.” The term properly refers to hatred of Jews as a people, and such hatred is sometimes real. But when the accusation is used to silence moral criticism of Zionist genocide, it becomes something else entirely: a political shield protecting power from accountability.

The prophetic tradition refuses such shields.

Its loyalty is never to rulers, governments, or empires. Its loyalty is to the God of justice who demands protection for the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner.

And that brings us back to the question with which we began.

The Threat of Resurrection

What does “Lazarus, come forth!” mean in a world where thousands lie buried beneath the rubble of Gaza – and Tehran?

It cannot simply mean a miraculous resuscitation of individuals. The Gospel is pointing toward something larger. The command is addressed to all who have been buried by systems of domination—those crushed by war, poverty, and political violence. It is a summons to life, dignity, and resistance against the forces that entomb human beings.

That is why the miracle becomes so dangerous.

Because once the dead begin to rise, the powerful begin to panic.

In fact, the irony deepens as the Gospel story continues. Not only do the authorities decide to kill Jesus. Later we are told they also plan to kill Lazarus himself—because his very existence is evidence that something new has begun.

Life is breaking out of the tomb.

Conclusion

The story of Lazarus therefore prepares us for what lies ahead. The conflict between prophetic truth and imperial power will soon reach its climax.

The cross was Rome’s instrument for eliminating those who threaten the system.But the Gospel insists that even the cross cannot bury the truth forever.

Because once the dead begin to rise, it becomes impossible to keep them in their graves.

Our call on this Fifth Sunday of Lent is clear: don’t allow yourself to be gaslit or intimidated. Recognize the burial of the innocent for the genocide it is. Name it.

Don’t be intimidated by weaponized charges of “anti-Semitism.”