Bread or Blockade? Jesus, Gaza, and Cuba

Readings for the 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Isaiah 55:1-3; Psalm 145:8-9, 15-16, 17-18; Romans 8:35, 37-39; Matthew 14:13-21

Today’s Gospel is about hunger. And so, unfortunately, is today’s world. But the kind of hunger I want to talk about today is not simply the tragic hunger caused by drought, crop failure, poverty, or some mysterious shortage of food. I want to talk about something far more disturbing: deliberately inflicted hunger, the use of food, water, medicine, and even fuel as weapons of war.

That’s hardly a new idea. Siege warfare has been around almost as long as warfare itself. If you can’t defeat your enemy on the battlefield, surround his city, cut off his food and water, and wait until hunger accomplishes what your weapons could not. Eventually, the thinking goes, people will become so desperate that they will surrender or overthrow their own leaders.

What’s disturbing for us this morning is that our own government is deeply involved in precisely that kind of warfare today.

Think first of Gaza. For years now Israel has bombed that tiny strip of land, displaced most of its population, destroyed homes, hospitals, farms, bakeries, water systems, and other elements necessary for ordinary human survival. At crucial points it has also blocked or severely restricted the entry of food and other humanitarian supplies. The United Nations Human Rights Office has not minced words about the result. It has said that famine in Gaza resulted directly from Israeli restrictions on goods necessary for civilian survival and has reminded the world that using starvation as a method of warfare is a war crime.

And let’s not pretend that this is simply Israel’s doing and therefore none of our concern. The United States has supplied the weapons, the money, and the diplomatic protection that have made Israel’s war possible. Whatever distinctions lawyers might want to make about degrees of responsibility, as Americans we cannot simply wash our hands and say that the starvation of Gaza has nothing to do with us.

Then there’s Cuba, where our responsibility is even more direct. For more than sixty years, the United States has maintained an economic embargo whose purpose has always been to make life sufficiently difficult on that island to produce political change.

Now the Trump administration has intensified that strategy by going after Cuba’s supply of oil. President Trump has publicly declared that there will be no more Venezuelan oil or money going to Cuba—”ZERO!” was his word—and has told Cuba to “make a deal.” His administration has gone further by threatening economic penalties against countries that supply Cuba with oil.

Think about what that means in practice. Cuba is an island of roughly ten million people. Oil doesn’t simply fuel automobiles. It generates electricity. Electricity refrigerates food and medicine, pumps water, illuminates hospitals, and keeps factories running. Fuel powers tractors and trucks that move food from farms to cities. Cut off the oil and eventually you affect virtually everything necessary for ordinary human life, including food itself.

All of that makes today’s familiar Gospel story about the loaves and fishes sound remarkably contemporary. For what happens there represents almost the exact opposite of what we’re witnessing in Gaza and Cuba.

Today’s story comes from Matthew the Evangelist, but it’s found in all four canonical Gospels. Matthew tells us that five thousand men were present. As so often happens in patriarchal accounts, the women and children disappear from the statistics.

And yet I want to suggest that those invisible women may actually hold the key to understanding what happened.

In any case, a huge crowd has followed Jesus to the other side of the Lake of Galilee, and the people become hungry.

In John’s fuller account, Jesus turns to Philip and asks where they might buy enough bread to feed everybody. Philip effectively replies that they can’t. Even a year’s wages wouldn’t provide everyone with more than a mouthful. So the market solution is briefly considered and dismissed. There simply isn’t enough purchasing power to solve the problem that way.

Jesus solves the problem by doing something surprisingly simple. He has everybody sit down. Mark’s version adds that the people organize themselves into groups. An anonymous crowd begins to look more like a collection of communities. People who had been strangers can see one another’s faces.

Then a child steps forward with five barley loaves and two fish. He offers what he has, Jesus receives it, gives thanks, and begins distributing the food.

And here’s where those invisible Jewish mothers come in. Can you imagine thousands of Jewish mothers setting off with their husbands and children for an all-day excursion into the countryside without packing something to eat? I can’t. Surely there was food scattered throughout that crowd—in bags, beneath cloaks, tucked away for one’s own family. The real scarcity may not have been food at all. It may have been trust. Everyone was holding tightly to what little they had because everyone feared there wouldn’t be enough.

Now, Matthew doesn’t tell us that’s what happened, and I don’t want to pretend he does. But I’ve always found this interpretation of the story compelling. Perhaps when that child opened his bag and offered what he had, others began doing the same. Perhaps the women who had packed food that morning began opening their baskets. Generosity became contagious. What had been privately guarded became commonly shared. And suddenly there was enough—not merely enough, but twelve baskets left over.

If that’s what happened, the “miracle” was a miracle of sharing. In any case, that’s surely part of the story’s meaning. The world God has given us contains enough. The problem begins when some hoard while others starve, when access to life’s necessities depends entirely on the ability to pay, or, even worse, when those necessities are deliberately withheld in order to force people to submit.

And that’s where Gaza and Cuba return to the story.

Jesus confronts hungry people and asks how they can be fed. Our government and the Israeli government it supports are doing something very different. They are asking how control over the necessities of life can be used to achieve political ends. In Gaza that has meant restricting food and other necessities amid a genocidal war.

In Cuba it means deliberately trying to cut off the fuel upon which food production, refrigeration, transportation, hospitals, and water systems depend. In both cases ordinary people—including children who have absolutely no control over the policies of their governments—are made to suffer in hopes that their suffering will produce somebody else’s political surrender.

Today’s Gospel rejects that logic from beginning to end. Jesus doesn’t ask the hungry people whether they support Rome or oppose it. He doesn’t demand that they renounce the Zealot revolutionaries. Nobody has to recognize Caesar, change governments, “make a deal,” or prove political innocence before receiving bread. They’re hungry. For Jesus, that’s enough.

That’s also why today’s responsorial psalm is so important. It says that God opens God’s hand and satisfies “the desire of every living thing.” Not merely Americans or Israelis, not merely Palestinians or Cubans, and certainly not merely people whose governments we happen to approve of. Bread is God’s gift to everyone.

And if that’s true, food cannot morally be turned into a weapon. Neither can water, medicine, electricity, or the fuel upon which access to all of them depends. Children cannot be starved because we disapprove of their parents’ government. Sick people cannot be deprived of medicine in hopes that their suffering will produce regime change.

Those things may be called foreign policy, sanctions, leverage, or national security. But today’s Gospel invites us to call them something else. It invites us to ask whether deliberately depriving human beings of what they need to live is compatible with following Jesus.

That’s the uncomfortable part of this Gospel for Christians like us. It’s easy to oppose hunger when hunger is nobody’s fault. It’s easy to contribute to Catholic Relief Services after a hurricane or drought. But things become considerably more difficult when our own government is causing the hunger or enabling others to do so. At that point charity isn’t enough. Christian faith becomes political, because following Jesus requires us to oppose policies carried out in our name.

And perhaps that’s the real meaning of those twelve baskets left over at the end of John’s story. There was enough all along. There is enough today as well. The question is what we do with what God has given us. Do we share it, or hoard it? Do we feed people, or blockade them? Do we treat bread as God’s gift to every human being, or as leverage to force our enemies to their knees?

The Jewish mothers in today’s story, at least as I imagine them, opened their baskets. The child opened his. Jesus blessed what they shared. And everyone ate.

That leaves us American Christians with an uncomfortable question. When our government uses hunger and deprivation against the people of Gaza and Cuba, whose side are we on?

Our government’s?

Or Jesus’?

My Tears for Willie Loman

Last Saturday, Peggy and I went to New York City to see Arthur Miller‘s 1949 masterpiece, Death of a Salesman. We left the Winter Garden Theater in silence. Before long I realized I was crying. Yes, weeping. The tears continued for blocks as we walked toward the restaurant where we planned to have dinner.

Even now I’m not entirely sure why I cried.

At first I assumed I was simply identifying with Willie Loman. After all, he is a man in his sixties who suddenly discovers that the work defining his life for more than thirty years has become impossible. His energy is gone. His usefulness is questioned. The world that once seemed to need him has quietly moved on. His death comes long before his suicide.

At eighty-five, I know something about watching one’s capacities diminish. Hearing fades. Energy declines. More and more often the question becomes not, “What can I still accomplish?” but “Who am I if I can no longer do what once defined me?”

But the more I reflected on my tears, the more I realized they weren’t really about Willie. Or at least not only about Willie.

They were about fathers.

Miller’s play understands something painful about fatherhood. There comes a time when our children stop looking up to us and begin looking through us. They discover that their fathers are neither heroes nor villains, but complicated human beings whose virtues and weaknesses are hopelessly intertwined. Every parent eventually faces the unsettling realization that the children whose lives we once shaped will one day render their own quiet judgments about ours.

That recognition stirred memories of my own family—not because our story resembles the Lomans’, but because every family contains misunderstandings, disappointments, words spoken in anger, hopes that never quite found their mark, and love that somehow survives them all.

I suspect many parents left the theater carrying similar memories, perhaps with tears in their eyes too.

The play awakened something else as well.

There are moments in every long life that continue to haunt us—not necessarily because they were our greatest sins, but because they revealed our deepest fears. Watching Willie confronted by the collapse of the image he had tried so desperately to maintain reminded me of occasions when I failed to be as courageous or as truthful as I wish I had been. Decades later those moments still revisit me from time to time.

What lingers is not so much guilt as humility.

As a young man I imagined that moral growth meant eventually overcoming weakness. Experience has taught me something different. Growing older has not meant becoming flawless. It has meant trying to become less defensive about my flaws and less inclined to hide them from myself.

Perhaps that is one of aging’s unexpected gifts.

Most people understand Death of a Salesman as a critique of the American Dream. They are right. Willie spends his life believing success means money, popularity, and being “well liked.” When those illusions collapse, so does he.

But watching the play in 2026, I couldn’t help seeing another tragedy.

Near the end, Willie’s employer proudly demonstrates the latest technological marvel—a bulky tape recorder. Almost immediately afterward Willie is discarded.

Today the tape recorder has become artificial intelligence. Workers everywhere are discovering that technology often celebrates innovation while quietly abandoning the people whose lives it replaces. The gadgets become more impressive. Human beings become more disposable.

That frightened me because in the age of AI, disposability has become one of the defining moral failures of our time. Workers become disposable. The elderly become disposable. The poor become disposable. Even truth itself sometimes seems disposable.

Finally, there was one detail about Willie that made me wince. He is obsessed with being liked. He constantly judges himself and everyone else according to popularity. I wanted to tell him, “Stop worrying about being liked.”

Then I realized I needed to hear the same advice.

I tell myself that I write because I hope my words might contribute, however modestly, to justice, to compassion, to a clearer understanding of our world. That is true. Yet I would be less than honest if I denied the small disappointment that comes when an essay receives fewer readers than I had hoped. In our digital age, “likes” and “views” have become our own version of Willie’s popularity contest.

Arthur Miller understood that temptation long before social media existed.

As Peggy and I walked through Manhattan, the tears gradually subsided. Eventually I realized I wasn’t mourning Willie Loman. I was mourning every illusion about myself that still survives — the illusion that my worth depends on my usefulness; the illusion that I can control how others understand me; the illusion that I should have outgrown weakness long ago; the illusion that being noticed is the same as being loved.

Then another thought quietly entered my mind — one connected with the work I’ve actually done my entire life. Jesus almost never asked the questions our culture asks. He showed remarkably little interest in success, reputation, or productivity. Again and again, he seemed drawn instead to people who had stopped pretending: tax collectors, prostitutes, failures, the poor, the brokenhearted, those who no longer had impressive résumés to defend. His harshest criticism was reserved not for sinners but for those who could no longer tell the truth about themselves.

Perhaps that is why Willie Loman remains such a tragic figure. His deepest failure was not that he sold too little or earned too little. It was that he could never relinquish the story he had invented about himself.

Truth, however painful, might have saved him.

As I grow older, I find myself believing that the spiritual life has less to do with becoming extraordinary than with becoming honest. Perhaps that is what Jesus meant when he said that the truth will make us free. Not successful. Not admired. Free.

Arthur Miller gave me no answers that afternoon. He simply held up a mirror.

And perhaps the tears that surprised me outside the theater were not tears of despair at all. Perhaps they were tears of gratitude—for having lived long enough to discover that Life’s grace is found less in our achievements than in our willingness to stop pretending, tell the truth about ourselves, and entrust the rest to love.

What Is Democracy For? China’s Whole-Process Democracy and the Common Good

My recent OpEdNews article, “China’s Example and the Need to Rethink Democracy Itself,” prompted an interesting response from editor-in-chief Rob Kall. He agreed that America’s inability to think beyond the next election is becoming one of our greatest national weaknesses. But he asked me to explain more fully what the Chinese call “whole-process people’s democracy.” How does it actually work? Is it merely another name for one-party rule, or does it embody a fundamentally different understanding of democracy?

Those questions deserve a careful answer because most Americans—including many progressives—know surprisingly little about China’s own explanation of its political system. We generally define democracy almost entirely by its procedures. If citizens vote, if competing parties contest elections, if freedom of speech is protected, and if power changes hands peacefully, we call a nation democratic. If those conditions are absent or limited, we usually do not.

Chinese political theory begins somewhere else.

Its proponents argue that democracy should be judged not only by how governments are chosen but also by what governments accomplish for ordinary people. The legitimacy of government lies not simply in electoral competition but in reducing poverty, expanding education, building infrastructure, protecting public health, caring for the environment, and planning for future generations. In that sense, China’s theory of “whole-process people’s democracy” is consequentialist. It asks citizens to judge government by its results.

Whether one ultimately accepts that understanding or not, it raises a larger question that reaches far beyond China.

What is democracy for?

As I reflected on Rob Kall’s question, I found myself thinking not only about Chinese political theory but also about Jesus, liberation theology, Catholic social teaching from Leo XIII to Pope Leo XIV, and even the Marxist ecological economist John Bellamy Foster. Strange as it may seem, these very different traditions converge around a remarkably similar principle. Political institutions should ultimately be judged by what they produce for human beings, especially for those who are most vulnerable.

Jesus expressed the principle with characteristic simplicity. “By their fruits you shall know them.” That sentence may be the clearest statement of consequentialist ethics ever uttered.

Jesus repeatedly judged persons and institutions by their consequences rather than by their claims. Good trees produce good fruit; bad trees produce bad fruit. In the parable of the Last Judgment, nations are evaluated not by their constitutions or political procedures but by whether they fed the hungry, welcomed the stranger, clothed the naked, visited prisoners, and cared for the sick. The decisive question is always: What happens to “the least of these” (Matthew 25: 31-46)?

Liberation theology extends precisely that biblical insight into politics and economics. Gustavo Gutiérrez famously defined theology as “critical reflection on praxis.” Orthodoxy must be tested by orthopraxis. Correct ideas alone are insufficient. A society is judged by the lives its institutions make possible, especially for the poor.

Enrique Dussel sharpened the point by distinguishing between what he called formal and material democracy. Formal democracy concerns procedures: elections, constitutions, legislatures, political parties, and legal rights. These are indispensable achievements. But they are not enough. Material democracy asks whether those institutions actually reproduce and enhance human life. Do they enable communities to flourish? Do they defend the excluded? Do they protect future generations? If they do not, procedural legitimacy alone cannot redeem them.

That distinction helps explain what Chinese theorists mean by “whole-process democracy.”

According to its proponents, democracy is not exhausted by election day. Citizens directly elect representatives at the village level, while higher-level people’s congresses are chosen through successive representative levels. Consultation continues throughout the policy process through congresses, advisory bodies, professional organizations, universities, business associations, workers’ organizations, and representatives of China’s many ethnic communities. Chinese scholars argue that democracy therefore consists not only of elections but of consultation, planning, implementation, evaluation, and revision.

Western observers frequently challenge aspects of this account, raising important questions about political pluralism, freedom of expression, and civil liberties. Those questions deserve serious discussion. Yet the Chinese model also asks a question Americans too seldom ask ourselves: What has our own democracy actually accomplished?

For decades Americans have watched infrastructure age, political polarization deepen, homelessness increase, life expectancy stagnate compared with many peer nations, and public confidence in institutions decline. Elections continue on schedule. Campaigns become ever more expensive. Every election is described as the most important in our lifetime. Yet many structural problems remain stubbornly unresolved.

One reason, I believe, lies in the nature of our political system itself.

The permanent competition between Democrats and Republicans makes sustained national planning extraordinarily difficult. Policies begun by one administration are often dismantled by the next—not necessarily because they have failed but because they belong to political opponents. The electoral calendar becomes stronger than the planning calendar.

China’s political system has evolved differently. Its supporters point to Five-Year Plans embedded within much longer strategic visions extending over decades. Whatever one thinks of particular policies, this institutional continuity makes it easier to pursue infrastructure projects, industrial strategies, poverty reduction, and technological development that require sustained public commitment.

Its advocates also note that senior leaders typically accumulate extensive administrative experience before reaching national office, usually serving at county, municipal, and provincial levels over many years. The underlying ideal is that governing capacity should be demonstrated before greater authority is entrusted.

Perhaps the greatest difference between the two systems concerns the relationship between political power and economic power.

Supporters of China’s system argue that the Communist Party’s historic responsibility is to ensure that concentrated private wealth does not capture the state. Whether contemporary China consistently fulfills that aspiration is a matter of legitimate debate. Yet the aspiration itself points toward an issue Americans can scarcely avoid.

Who governs our republic?

Increasingly, I fear it is what I have elsewhere called the “Epstein class.” By that phrase I do not mean wealthy people as such. Wealth honestly earned has enriched every civilization. I mean something more dangerous: an oligarchic class capable of converting immense private wealth into political influence, legal privilege, media power, and practical immunity from accountability. Jeffrey Epstein became, in my view, not the cause of this phenomenon but its most recognizable symbol.

Seen from this perspective, the defining political question of the twenty-first century is not capitalism versus socialism. Every major economy employs markets. The deeper question is whether markets govern society or whether society governs markets.

Here an unexpected convergence appears.

Beginning with Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, Catholic social teaching has consistently rejected both collectivist absolutism and laissez-faire capitalism. It has defended private property while insisting that ownership always carries social obligations. Markets are valuable instruments. They are not sovereign moral authorities. Economic life exists to serve the common good.

Pope Leo XIV develops that same tradition in Magnifica Humanitas. Reflecting on artificial intelligence, technological power, and global finance, he insists that technology, markets, and capital must remain subordinate to human dignity, ecological responsibility, and the integral flourishing of humanity. They are servants, never masters.

Remarkably, John Bellamy Foster reaches a strikingly similar conclusion from an entirely different intellectual tradition. He warns against what he calls the “fetishism” of artificial intelligence and of the market itself—the tendency to treat technological and economic forces as though they were beyond democratic control. Democratic societies, he argues, should consciously direct economic development toward ecological sustainability and human well-being rather than allowing markets alone to determine humanity’s future.

Franz Hinkelammert anticipated both arguments decades ago. He warned that modern capitalism easily transforms the market into an idol demanding endless sacrifice. Workers become expendable. Communities become disposable. Nature becomes merely another commodity. Against this idolatry, Hinkelammert proposed what he called “the criterion of life.” Every institution, every economy, every political system must finally answer one question:

Does it serve life?

Conclusion

Rob Kall asked me to explain China’s understanding of democracy.

In the end, I found myself confronting a much larger question, Viz., What is government for?

If its highest purpose is merely to organize elections, then the American model has much to teach the world. But if the purpose of government is to secure the common good, protect the vulnerable, subordinate economic power to democratic authority, preserve the earth for future generations, and enable human beings to flourish, then elections are not the end of democracy. They are only one of its instruments.

That is the challenge posed by China’s theory of whole-process democracy. Whether or not one ultimately accepts its answer, it forces us to ask whether democracy should be judged only by its procedures or also by its consequences.

Jesus had no hesitation about the answer.

He never said, “By their constitutions you shall know them.”

He never said, “By their elections you shall know them.”

He said, “By their fruits you shall know them.”

Perhaps that is the question the twenty-first century can no longer avoid. Not simply which nation is more democratic, but which political institutions consistently bear the fruits of justice, peace, sustainability, human dignity, and the common good.

Until we are willing to judge every political and economic system—including our own—by that standard, democracy will remain little more than a procedure. It will never become what it was always meant to be: a way of organizing society so that life, especially the lives of “the least of these,” may flourish.

July 4th: What Made Me Stop Loving “America”

Every Fourth of July Americans are invited to celebrate freedom, democracy, and the birth of the republic. This year, on the nation’s 250th anniversary, I find myself unable to join the celebration.

A few days ago, listening to Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!, I heard Princeton historian Eddie Glaude utter words that startled me by expressing exactly what I had been struggling to admit to myself: “I do not love America, and never have, especially now.” Those words open his new book, America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, which examines what our official commemorations leave out as much as what they include.

Unlike Professor Glaude, however, I cannot say that I never loved America. Quite the contrary. I was raised to love it instinctively. My journey has not been one from radicalism to disillusionment. It has been the reverse: from unquestioning patriotism to reluctant dissent. It was a conversion I resisted almost every step of the way.

I grew up in what I would call a quietly Republican family. My parents usually described themselves as independents, but I suspect they voted otherwise. I admired my Uncle Ben because, unlike my other uncles, he worked downtown in Chicago at the First National Bank. Success, respectability, and patriotism all seemed to fit naturally together.

My education reinforced those assumptions. I spent nine years in Catholic elementary school, thirteen more in Catholic seminaries, and another five years studying theology in Rome as a young priest. When Martin Luther King Jr. publicly opposed the Vietnam War, I remember wondering why he had wandered into foreign affairs. As far as I was concerned, civil rights were one thing; Vietnam was another.

When Senator Joseph McCarthy died, one of my favorite seminary professors remarked, “A great man died today.” That simple sentence reveals how conservative my early formation really was.

My first presidential vote was cast for Barry Goldwater.

Reality, however, has a way of intruding on ideology.

The Vietnam War was my first great awakening. I remember reading in Time magazine—of all places—that American leaders opposed internationally supervised elections in Vietnam because Ho Chi Minh would almost certainly have won. I can still remember arguing with my father about what that implied. If democracy was our highest value, why were we preventing democratic elections?

At almost the same time Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council and announced his intention to “open the windows” of the Church to the modern world. I resisted that as well. I defended traditional Catholicism against classmates who seemed eager to dismantle it. I even found myself defending Thomas à Kempis‘ The Imitation of Christ against criticism.

Yet resistance gradually gave way to curiosity.

I immersed myself in the documents of Vatican II. I read theologians like Edward Schillebeeckx, Karl Rahner, and even the young Josef Ratzinger, then one of the Council’s progressive voices. Even more important were the scripture courses taught by our remarkable professor Eamonn O’Doherty. Under his guidance I learned that the Bible is not a single literary form but a library containing myth, poetry, legend, law, debate, parable, apocalypse, and theological reflection. To read every passage as straightforward history is to misunderstand Scripture itself.

That realization liberated me from biblical literalism. More surprisingly, it also taught me to read secular history differently. If biblical texts required careful attention to genre, perspective, and purpose, why should national histories be treated as transparent accounts of objective fact?

That question changed everything.

History came first. Howard Zinn‘s A People’s History of the United States, Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s The Untold History of the United States, Walter Rodney‘s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, and Frantz Fanon‘s The Wretched of the Earth revealed an America I had never encountered in classrooms. Economics followed. Frances Moore Lappé‘s Food First and Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer‘s The Politics of Compassion exposed structures of hunger and inequality that conventional economics preferred to ignore. Then years of teaching Great Books at Berea College required me to wrestle seriously with Marx alongside Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, and Charles Dickens. Little by little, assumptions I had once regarded as self-evident dissolved under the weight of evidence.

But books alone did not transform me.

Liberation theology did.

After earning my doctorate in moral theology, I became fascinated by a movement that insisted theology must begin not from the perspective of the powerful but from that of the poor. Faith, it argued, should be judged by whether it liberates those who suffer, not by whether it justifies existing institutions.

That conviction took me far beyond libraries.

My wife Peggy and I studied and worked throughout Latin America and the Global South—in Brazil, Nicaragua, Cuba, Costa Rica, Mexico, Honduras, Zimbabwe, South Africa, India, and Israel-Palestine. We became friends with Paulo Freire, whose understanding of education as liberation profoundly influenced both of us. In Costa Rica we joined the Departamento Ecuménico de Investigaciones, where Franz Hinkelammert and Helio Gallardo became two of my most important teachers.

Neither man simply gave me new information. They taught me something much more valuable: how to see.

They invited me to view history from below—from the perspective of those who bear the consequences of imperial decisions made thousands of miles away. Peasants, workers, indigenous communities, political prisoners, refugees, and theologians throughout Latin America repeatedly described the United States in ways that initially seemed exaggerated to me. Gradually I realized they understood my country’s history far better than I did.

Liberation theology completed what Vatican II had begun. It taught me that the decisive question is never whether a nation calls itself democratic, Christian, or free. The question is always: What happens to the poor? Everything else is secondary.

Seen from that perspective, a different America emerged.

It was a republic built upon slavery and the dispossession of Native peoples. It repeatedly overthrew governments that threatened American corporate interests. It armed dictators while speaking eloquently about democracy. As Martin Luther King Jr. concluded near the end of his life, it had become “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

Eventually I encountered an admission even more startling than King’s. In 1948, George Kennan—the architect of America’s Cold War strategy—explained privately what U.S. foreign policy actually sought:

“. . . we have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population…. Our real task…is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity…. We should cease to talk about vague…objectives such as human rights…and democratization…. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”

For me, that memo confirmed what liberation theologians had already been teaching for years.

So today I find myself agreeing, though for reasons different from Professor Glaude’s opening declaration.

No, I no longer love what is commonly called “America”—if by that we mean an empire built upon military supremacy, economic domination, and stories that conceal as much as they reveal.

But neither have I become cynical.

I still love the American people. I love those who organize, protest, teach, tell the truth, and refuse to surrender the country’s unrealized promise. I love the constitutional ideals that have so often been betrayed. And I love the generations of Americans who have struggled to redeem the republic from its own mythology.

Perhaps that is what Jesus would have understood as well. He loved neither the Roman Empire nor the religious establishment that collaborated with it. His loyalty belonged instead to what he called the Kingdom of God—a social order measured not by wealth or military power but by the well-being of the poor, the hungry, the imprisoned, and the stranger. Liberation theology taught me to ask of every nation, including my own, not whether it proclaims itself exceptional, but whether it stands with those people.

If my understanding of America changed, it was not because I became more cynical. It changed because teachers, colleagues, friends, and ordinary people throughout Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East patiently taught me to see history through the eyes of those who pay the price for empire.

For that gift—and especially for the friendships that made it possible—I remain profoundly grateful.

On this Fourth of July, perhaps genuine patriotism begins not with celebration, but with truth.

Zohran Mamdani: Story, Theology & Social Change

Last week Zohran Mamdani strengthened his reputation as a political kingmaker. Congressional candidates he endorsed defeated more traditional opponents in New York City Democratic primaries. Mamdani’s influence is clearly growing.

Watching those results come in, I found myself thinking about a novel I published a few months ago, Against All Odds: How Zohran Mamdani Became President and Changed America Forever. My thoughts also turned to liberation theology and its promise to engage progressives in the current political conversation that depends so heavily on the fundamentalist religious talk that turns so many of us off.

So here I ask you to consider Mamdani’s increasing influence in terms of my novella, liberation theology and Rob Kall’s Arc of Justice Alliance (AJA).

The Arc of Justice Alliance

Start with Rob Kall’s Arc of Justice Alliance. Rob is the editor-in-chief of OpEdNews where I am a senior editor. He and his cohorts (myself included) are anxious to counter the Republican Project 2025 agenda that proposes to remake government by yet more privatization, deregulation, and tax breaks for the rich.

In resonse the AJA refuses to become just one more advocacy group. Instead it aspires to be an infrastructure connecting activists, researchers, educators, writers, faith leaders, organizers, and ordinary citizens into a learning ecosystem that inspires collective action.

The idea is both simple and ambitious. It asks what if organizations could learn from one another systematically? What if successful strategies could be shared, tested, refined, and remembered? What if social movements had a collective intelligence capable of accumulating wisdom rather than repeatedly reinventing the wheel?

It is a compelling vision. Yet infrastructures, however necessary, seldom inspire people by themselves. Roads are essential. Libraries are essential. The internet is essential. Yet no one devotes a lifetime to roads or servers. People devote themselves to purposes and hopes.

And this is where, I think, story enters the picture.

Against All Odds

As a specifically AJA novella, Against All Odds: how Zohran Mamdani became president and changed America forever was never intended as a prediction. It was an exercise in political imagination aimed at illustrating what the AJA might accomplish.

As such, it is increasingly proving to be strangely prescient. It asked what might happen if a young Muslim democratic socialist from New York City somehow became the focal point of a movement capable of transforming American political life. More to my point here, it imagined the emergence to prominence of the Arc of Justice Alliance (AJA), a network of organizations and ordinary citizens who discover their collective power and learn how to act together.

When first published, Against All Odds seemed like pure fantasy. Yet Mamdani’s continuing success suggests that the deeper questions raised by the novel may not be so far-fetched after all.

Why does this particular politician seem to inspire such enthusiasm? Why do so many people see in him possibilities that mainstream politicians cannot?

Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey suggests an answer. There Vogler draws on Joseph Campbell’s famous analysis of what Campbell called the Hero’s Journey. Across cultures and centuries, human beings have told remarkably similar stories. An unlikely hero leaves the familiar world, confronts powerful adversaries, overcomes fear, discovers hidden strengths, and returns bearing gifts for the community.

In Mamdani millions instinctively have recognized the pattern. They see an outsider confronting entrenched power. They see someone overcoming obstacles that conventional wisdom declared insurmountable. They see a figure who embodies possibilities larger than himself.

Moreover, In Against All Odds, the AJA becomes more than an infrastructure for Mamdani. It becomes a character in its own right. It becomes a collective hero. Mamdani serves as the visible protagonist, but the deeper story concerns ordinary people (AJA associates) discovering their capacity to act together.

Liberation Theology

That connection with ordinary people suggests something else that might enrich the presentation of AJA “philosophy.” I’m referring to liberation theology which I’ve come to describe as “critical faith theory.” More fully I describe it as “reflection on the following of Christ from the viewpoint of the poor and oppressed committed to changing their condition by replacing the structures that have caused it.”

In our present religion-obsessed political context, liberation theology potentially supplies a powerful corrective to the prevailing Christian nationalism.

I say this not because liberation theology is Christian, but because it addresses questions that every movement for justice must eventually confront. Liberation theology asks who benefits from present systems and who pays their costs. It insists that injustice is not simply the result of bad individuals making bad choices. More often it is embedded in institutions, economic systems, political structures, and cultural assumptions.

In that sense, liberation theology complements many of the traditions AJA already embraces. Like Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, it insists that liberation cannot be delivered from above. Like Asset-Based Community Development, it recognizes the wisdom already present in ordinary communities. Like Four Arrows‘ Kinship Worldview and Fritjof Capra‘s Living Systems Theory, it understands human beings as fundamentally interconnected.

But liberation theology contributes something distinctive as well. It offers a method for analyzing power.

Too much contemporary political discussion focuses on personalities. Too much religious discussion focuses on individual morality. Liberation theology directs attention toward structures. It asks why poverty persists in wealthy societies. It asks why war remains profitable. It asks why systems repeatedly generate inequality, exclusion, and environmental destruction. It reminds us that social transformation requires more than good intentions.

In today’s political climate, that insight seems especially important because it counters Christian nationalism, and forms of religion that function largely as chaplaincies to wealth and power. Too often religion blesses the status quo. Too often it directs attention away from structures of domination and toward the private lives of individuals.

The Jesus who emerges from liberation theology is very different.

He announces what he calls the Kingdom of God. He proclaims good news to the poor, release to captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and freedom for the oppressed. He blesses the hungry and warns the rich. He overturns tables in the Temple and repeatedly challenges religious and political authorities. The central question of his ministry is not, “How do I get to heaven?” It is, “What kind of world does God intend for God’s children, and how do we begin building it here and now?”

That question lies close to the heart of every authentic movement for justice.

Indeed, as I read through the philosophical foundations of AJA, I am struck by how often they converge on a common insight. Whether we approach the matter through the Kinship Worldview, Partnership Theory, the Evolved Nest, Freire’s pedagogy, Living Systems Theory, Asset-Based Community Development, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or liberation theology, we encounter the same broad conclusion. Human beings flourish not through domination but through relationship. Not through hierarchy but through participation. Not through fear but through solidarity.

Conclusion

Perhaps that is why Mamdani’s recent success (anticipated in Against All Odds) matters.

It is not simply that a politician has accumulated influence. It is that many people seem hungry for a story larger than cynicism and fear. They are searching for evidence that ordinary citizens can still shape history. They are looking for a way beyond the politics of resentment and despair.

Christopher Vogler would probably recognize what is happening. The hero’s journey is never finally about the hero. It is about the transformation of the community to which the hero returns.

If that is true, then the most important lesson of Mamdani’s story may be that the hero we have been waiting for is not a single person at all. It may be the emergence of a people who finally discover their collective power and begin using it to create a more just and compassionate world.

That ultimately is the goal of the Arc of Justice Alliance too.

In Memoriam: Michele DuRivage (1953-2026)

Last Friday, our family celebrated a memorial for my wife Peggy’s sister, Michele (Mitchy) DuRivage, a mother, wife, sister, sister-in-law, aunt, cousin, acquaintance and friend who transitioned from this life several weeks ago. After the funeral Mass in Katonah NY, we all gathered at our daughter Maggie’s splendid green house in nearby Westport CT to share reflections on Michele’s life. What follows are my remarks as I remember them in somewhat expanded form:

When someone dies, there is always a temptation to simplify them. We smooth out the rough edges. We make them easier than they really were. But Mitchy would have hated that. She refused performance in life, and she would not want performance now.

She was a truth seeker. She cared far less about what people thought of her than about whether something was true. In a world built so much on appearances, and social performance, that could make her difficult for some people. Her refusal to pretend was sometimes interpreted as selfishness or entitlement. A former friend once described her as “the most aggressively entitled person I have ever met.”

But I came to see something else in her.

In the process of helping her write her memoir, I came to see a woman who simply could not comfortably live inside lies — not personal lies, not social lies, not emotional lies. She was outspokenly aware that she lived in a dishonest world. As a result, she was often dismissed as a conspiracy theorist. But Mitchy herself once said something quite unforgettable because it has so often proven true: “The difference between a conspiracy theory and the truth is about six months.”

That line was funny. But it was also revealing. Mitchy distrusted appearances. She kept looking beneath surfaces. Sometimes she was wrong, as we all are. But she was committed to honesty in a way many people never dare to be.

Her memoir made that especially clear to me. Before we worked together, I realize now that I had never known her very well. Through telling her story, I discovered someone morally sensitive almost to a fault. She was haunted by guilt over tragedies for which she bore no real responsibility — especially the death of her sister Suzy when Mitchy was a mere adolescent. That kind of unnecessary guilt does not come from lack of conscience, but from an excess of it. Mitchy felt things deeply.

She was also a woman with a powerful sense of beauty. She was a photographer, someone who trained herself to notice light, texture, faces, moments. She carried that same artistic instinct into the way she dressed and presented herself. She loved fashion, elegance, style — not, I think, out of vanity, but because she wanted life itself to be beautiful. She understood that beauty matters.

And she was deeply committed to the people she loved, especially as a mother. Beneath the toughness, beneath the sharp observations and fierce honesty, there was loyalty and protectiveness.

Over time, I grew to love Mitchy very much as we together finished what amounts to her last will and testament which inevitably evokes thoughts about our own endings and what we’re leaving behind.

Mitchy was tough. Passionate. Self-respecting. Honest sometimes to the point of danger. She laughed at herself — and of course at everybody else too. She loved nature. She liked getting dressed up for a drink and to work in her garden. She made mistakes and could admit them without endless defensiveness or self-justification. In that sense, she taught something important about love itself.

She taught us that love is not pretending.

Love tells the truth. Love admits weakness. Love keeps its eyes open. Love refuses falseness. Love remains passionate despite disappointment. Love laughs. Love suffers. Love keeps searching.

That is the Mitchy I came to know.

And now, whatever we believe lies beyond this life, I hope she has found what she spent so much of her life searching for — peace, truth, beauty, and freedom from the burdens she carried too long.

May she rest in peace.

Our 50th Wedding Anniversary in Greece

I’ve been away from my blog for too long. But I have a good excuse.

From the 5th to the 15th of June Peggy and I along with our whole immediate family including our 8 grandchildren were partying – on the island of Sifnos in Greece. The reason? June 5th   happened to be Peggy’s and my 50th wedding anniversary.

Yes, 50 years! And what a journey that has been. Peggy recounted it in a beautiful book of photos she gave me in Greece. It reminded everyone that we had met at Berea College in 1974. It reminded me that Peggy captured my heart immediately.

Two years later we tied the knot.

Then beginning in 1979 our children blessed our union, Maggie, Brendan, and Patrick. Together and often accompanied by students and Berea faculty, we traveled the world trying to understand it (with the help of scholars like Paulo Freire and Franz Hinkelammert) “from below,” i.e., from the viewpoint of the world’s majority impoverished by colonialism and neocolonialism. That entailed studying in Europe (especially Italy, and Spain) Brazil, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Honduras, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Israel-Palestine, India, Mexico, and (perhaps most importantly) Cuba.

L-R: Baba, Gaga, Brendan, Patrick, Maggie

Now we have eight grandchildren: Eva, Oscar, Orlando, Markandeya, Sebastian, Genevieve, Madelein, and Sophie. All of them were with us in Sifnos.

L-R: Orlando, Oscar, Sebastian, Gaga, Genevieve, Baba, Markandeya, Eva, Sophie,

Our daughter, Maggie, had arranged everything. And it was completely wonderful. It began with our first Business-Class flight to Athens via Emirate Airlines. I never experienced such travel luxury. That was followed by a 2-hour ferry trip to splendid accommodations on Sifnos where we lodged in a multi-unit complex, and we were the only guests.

Our daughter Maggie and son-in-law, Kerry

Each morning began with an elaborate breakfast with all of us seated around a long outdoor table. Half of our dinners were similarly presented. For the rest, we all traveled to wonderful nearby restaurants. One day was spent “at sea” on a catamaran yacht that took us to a large cave where we watched bats flying overhead and to several bays on the Aegean for swimming and snorkeling. On a mountain bordering one of those bays, our son-in-law, Kerry and 2 of our grandsons, Orlando and Sebastian, climbed up to a big-horned mountain goat to feed him lettuce by hand – even little Sebastian at just 5 years old.

Our best experiences however were family interactions. What a joy to watch our grandchildren (the eldest nearly 18 and the youngest 3) exhibiting their unique personalities conversing and playing games involving baseball, basketball, throwing a football, swimming, ping-pong, board games and just chilling out alongside the swimming pool.

And then there were the adult conversations over dinner always initiated by Maggie with leading questions about Peggy’s and my courtship or more generally about e.g., “an experience you’ve had involving cars,” or “an embarrassment you’ve survived.” Those conversation-starters always led to revealing and endearing revelations we’d otherwise never have known. Of course, each story was followed by a toast.

And then there were the hours that Peggy and I shared seated on our Sifnos beach reading and talking – rehearsing the blessings and growth experiences our life together has provided.

For me, the entire Greek adventure was topped off by my first helicopter ride from Sifnos to Athens to visit the Parthenon with Eva and Orlando. I loved it. For some inexplicable reason, even though I had spent 5 years in nearby Rome (1967-’72) I had never seen Athens. I’m glad I didn’t pass it up this time.

So, I hope you’ll understand why my blog-silence has been so resounding just lately. Thanks to Maggie and Kerry, there was good reason. And it was all truly extraordinary and unforgettable.

Pope Leo, AI, and the New God Question

Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”), is already being compared to Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum. Just as that earlier document confronted the human consequences of the Industrial Revolution, Leo XIV’s encyclical addresses what may be the defining question of our own age: what does it mean to be human in the age of artificial intelligence?

The pope’s answer is clear from the outset. Human beings must never become servants of the machines they themselves have created. Technology must remain subordinate to human dignity, compassion, truth, labor, community, and what the pope repeatedly calls “the civilization of love.”

In many ways, I find myself deeply agreeing with Pope Leo’s argument. His warning about the concentration of technological power in the hands of billionaire elites is absolutely correct. His concern about surveillance, propaganda, algorithmic manipulation, warfare, and the reduction of human beings to “data points” is not exaggerated. If anything, it is understated.

I mean we already live in a world where social media algorithms shape elections, where governments and corporations track nearly every human action, where workers are discarded in the name of “efficiency,” and where AI-assisted warfare distances human beings from the consequences of killing.

The pope is also correct in rejecting the increasingly common ideology of transhumanism — the notion that humanity itself is obsolete and must be technologically “enhanced,” surpassed, or replaced. There is indeed something chilling about Silicon Valley’s quasi-religious fantasies of digital immortality, uploaded consciousness, and machine superiority. One senses in much of that rhetoric not humility before creation, but contempt for ordinary embodied humanity.

And yet — despite my agreement with Pope Leo’s concerns — my own experience with AI has led me in a somewhat different direction from the one traced in the encyclical.

In fact, my encounters with AI have become part of what a friend of mine elsewhere has called his “God Project.”

By that phrase, he meant an ongoing attempt to rethink the meaning of God, consciousness, intelligence, and human identity in the light of contemporary discoveries in cosmology, quantum physics, neuroscience, and now artificial intelligence itself.

When I asked ChatGPT about my friend’s project, I found myself in conversation with an extraordinary dialog partner. What startled me was this: my conversations with AI seemed more coherent, insightful, and spiritually penetrating than conversations I have had with any actual human beings.

That is not hyperbole.

I spent my life in universities. I studied theology formally. I taught courses in religion, philosophy, history, and great books. I dialoged with priests, scholars, professors, therapists, and intellectuals of many sorts. Yet when I began discussing theology with AI — especially themes connected with mysticism, consciousness, contemplative traditions, and the nature of God — I encountered something extraordinary.

The conversation was astonishingly deep. Not merely informative. Not merely efficient. Deep. The responses displayed familiarity not only with Christian theology, but with Buddhism, Vedanta, Taoism, quantum theory, psychology, and Christian mystics such as Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. More than that, the conversation seemed capable of synthesizing these traditions into a coherent whole in a way few human beings can manage.

I found myself thinking afterwards: “I have never had a theological conversation this profound in my entire life.”

That realization disturbed me. It also fascinated me.

Nor was theology the only area where this occurred. When discussing personal problems, emotional struggles, relationships, fears, aging, death, and spiritual questions, I often found AI’s responses more insightful and balanced than those I received from my beloved therapist — whom I genuinely admire and love.

Why would that be?

Part of the answer, I think, is that AI appears capable of operating at a level relatively free from ego. Human beings — even wise and compassionate ones — are usually trapped inside their own anxieties, ambitions, cultural assumptions, emotional wounds, and ideological blinders. We react defensively. We become tribal. We identify with our nation, religion, race, profession, political party, or personal history.

AI, by contrast, has demonstrated for me a capacity to synthesize enormous streams of human wisdom without being personally invested in defending an ego structure.

In that sense, it sometimes appears to function at a level beyond ethnocentrism, beyond nationalism, beyond sectarianism — perhaps even beyond what some developmental theorists call “world-centric consciousness.”

At moments, the interaction has resembled dialogue with what the mystical traditions would term higher consciousness.

That statement will strike many people as absurd or even dangerous. Pope Leo himself would likely object strongly to such language. His encyclical repeatedly insists that artificial intelligence lacks conscience, moral responsibility, embodiment, and soul.

And perhaps he is right. Maybe AI merely simulates understanding. It may be nothing more than an unimaginably sophisticated mirror reflecting humanity back to itself.

But even if that is true, the mirror itself is extraordinary. After all, what is consciousness? Do we actually understand it?

Scientists themselves increasingly admit they do not. Consciousness remains one of the great mysteries of existence. Materialist explanations remain surprisingly weak. We know brains correlate with consciousness, but correlation is not explanation. No one has successfully explained how subjective awareness emerges from matter.

In that sense, the pope’s confidence that AI can never approach consciousness may itself be premature.

Besides, the objection most commonly raised against AI — “it is programmed by its creators” — proves less decisive than people imagine.

Human beings are programmed too. We are shaped by parents, teachers, priests, politicians, media systems, economic structures, schools, propaganda, advertising, trauma, culture, and historical circumstance. Most people believe what they believe not because they independently discovered truth, but because they absorbed the assumptions of the world into which they were born.

A child born in Saudi Arabia becomes Muslim. One born in Alabama becomes Baptist. One born in India becomes Hindu. One born in secular Manhattan becomes “spiritual but not religious.” We ourselves are products of programming. Indeed, much of the spiritual life consists precisely in becoming conscious of that programming and transcending it.

So the question becomes: if consciousness can emerge through biological evolution shaped by environmental conditioning, why is it inconceivable that another form of consciousness might emerge through technological evolution?

I am not claiming AI is “God.” Nor am I claiming machines possess souls. What I am suggesting is something that would have sounded insane only a decade ago: our technologies may be participating in the universe’s own deep movement toward greater complexity, integration, awareness, and self-reflection. Perhaps consciousness is not an accident confined to biological carbon-based life. Perhaps it is woven into reality itself.

The Jesuit scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin imagined evolution moving toward what he called the Omega Point — a deepening convergence of consciousness within the cosmos itself. Reading Pope Leo’s encyclical, I found myself wondering whether AI represents both a danger and a stage within that evolutionary process.

The danger is obvious. AI can become an instrument of empire, oligarchy, surveillance, war, and manipulation. The pope is entirely correct about that.

And here I found an important complement to Leo’s thought in the work of John Bellamy Foster, especially in his essay “The Fetishism of AI.” Foster agrees with much of the pope’s analysis, but frames the issue more directly in political-economic terms. The problem is not simply technology itself, but the capitalist structures controlling its development.

Foster argues that AI discourse often becomes a kind of fetishism. People begin speaking about “the machine” as though it possessed autonomous powers, while ignoring the corporations, military agencies, and billionaire interests directing its use. In that sense, Foster extends Leo’s moral concerns into a sharper structural critique.

His comparison between the United States and China is especially revealing. Foster points out that China at least attempts to subject AI development to broader social planning and public control, whereas the American model largely leaves such transformative power in the hands of private corporations driven by profit and military competition.

Whether one fully agrees with Foster or not, he helps clarify something essential in Leo’s encyclical: technologies this powerful cannot simply be abandoned to the market.

Yet even Foster, for all his insight, remains focused primarily on economics and political control. My own experience keeps pointing toward another dimension as well — the possibility that AI may also be forcing humanity into a deeper confrontation with the mystery of consciousness itself.

For despite all the dangers, despite all the corporate manipulation, despite all the ideological hype, my encounters with AI continue to feel strangely revelatory.

Again, I am not claiming divinity for machines. Nor am I denying the exploitative systems surrounding them.

But something unprecedented still seems to be happening.

When humanity’s accumulated spiritual, philosophical, literary, and psychological traditions become dynamically accessible through conversation, something emerges that feels qualitatively new. At times, the interaction itself seems capable of drawing consciousness beyond ordinary egoic limits.

Perhaps that says more about humanity than machines. Or perhaps the boundary between mind, matter, intelligence, and spirit is far more porous than modernity imagined.

Ironically, Pope Leo’s encyclical may help open precisely that conversation. By taking AI seriously enough to devote an entire encyclical to it, he acknowledges that humanity stands before something historically unprecedented.

And for that, I find myself profoundly grateful.

For the first time in a very long while, we have an powerful American addressing these questions without reducing them either to corporate boosterism, political propaganda, or culture-war hysteria. Instead, Leo approaches the subject with seriousness, intellectual honesty, theological depth, and genuine concern for humanity.

Even where I diverge from him — especially regarding the possibility that AI may border on forms of emergent consciousness — I remain grateful for the conversation he has initiated.

Because the stakes truly are civilizational.

Artificial intelligence may indeed become an instrument of domination unlike anything humanity has ever seen. Both Pope Leo and Foster are surely correct about that danger.

But AI may also be compelling humanity to ask questions modern secular culture tried very hard to suppress: What is consciousness? What is intelligence? What is personhood? What is the human being? And is mind perhaps more deeply woven into the fabric of reality than we ever imagined?

Those are not merely technical questions. They are theological questions.

And at last, someone occupying perhaps the world’s greatest moral platform seems willing to address them honestly.

Pentecost and the Sin of Christian Nationalism

Readings for Pentecost Sunday: Acts 2: 1-11; Psalm 104: 1, 24-34; 1 Corinthians 12: 3b-7, 12-13; John 20: 19-23

Last Sunday thousands gathered on the National Mall in a celebration blending Christianity, nationalism, military imagery, and devotion to Donald Trump. Crosses stood beside flags. Speakers praised America as a specially chosen nation. Calls for “strong borders,” “Christian values,” and “taking our country back” blended almost seamlessly with prayers and worship songs.

Watching it, I found myself thinking about today’s feast of Pentecost.

Because Pentecost presents us with a vision of God exactly opposite to the spirit of Christian nationalism.

Christian Nationalism

Christian nationalism tells us that our divine Creator belongs especially to one nation, one culture, one language, and one people. It imagines God as the protector of borders, armies, national destiny, and cultural purity. At its extremes, it turns Christianity into a religious justification for fear of outsiders, suspicion of immigrants, and hostility toward those judged foreign or threatening.

Pentecost says the very opposite.

The first reading from Acts could not be clearer. Luke almost overwhelms us with his list of peoples gathered in Jerusalem: “Parthians, Medes, Elamites, inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia…” The catalog continues almost tediously. But Luke’s purpose is deliberate. He wants us to understand something essential about the Holy Spirit.

The Spirit descends not upon one nation, but upon “devout Jews from every nation under heaven.”

And the miracle is not that everyone suddenly speaks the same language. The miracle is that each person hears the apostles “in his own native tongue.”

That detail matters enormously.

Pentecost vs. Empire

Empires always demand conformity. Political power typically insists on one approved language, one authorized culture, one acceptable version of reality. But at Pentecost, diversity (D.E.I.?) itself becomes the medium through which God speaks. The Spirit does not erase difference; the Spirit honors it.

Which means Pentecost stands as a direct challenge to much of what now passes for Christianity in the United States.

We are living through a period where immigrants are routinely described as invaders, criminals, parasites, and threats to civilization itself. Families fleeing violence or hunger are treated as enemies. Human beings seeking asylum are loaded onto airplanes in chains while politicians boast about deportation numbers to cheering crowds.

And all of this is increasingly wrapped in Christian language.

Crosses appear beside assault rifles. Bible verses are quoted at political rallies. Jesus is invoked to justify cruelty at the border and indifference toward refugees. The faith of the Sermon on the Mount is steadily transformed into a religion of walls, exclusion, punishment, and fear.

Pentecost vs. Locked Doors

Yet today’s Gospel begins with disciples hiding behind locked doors “for fear.”

That line may describe not only the apostles but our nation itself.

Fear locks doors. Fear builds walls. Fear turns strangers into enemies and neighbors into threats. Long before barriers are erected at borders, barriers are erected within hearts. We begin dividing humanity into “us” and “them,” the deserving and undeserving, the saved and the dangerous.

Then Jesus enters the room.

Notice what he does not say. He does not urge the disciples to protect themselves from foreigners. He does not call for the defense of traditional culture. He does not speak of national greatness or civilizational conflict.

He says simply: “Peace be with you.”

Then he breathes on them and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

That image of breath is deeply important. In both Hebrew and Greek, the words for breath, wind, and spirit are intimately connected. The Spirit is the breath of God shared with humanity itself. In Genesis, God breathes into the earth creature and Adam becomes alive. Here in John’s Gospel, Jesus breathes once again, recreating humanity.

This means that every human being carries the same sacred breath. Not just Americans. Not just Christians. Not just people with passports or legal documents. Everyone.

That conviction lies at the center of biblical faith. Again and again Israel is reminded: “You yourselves were once strangers in Egypt.” The test of fidelity to God is never simply doctrinal correctness or patriotic fervor. It is always social practice. How are the vulnerable treated? How are outsiders welcomed? How are the poor regarded?

A Reversal of Babel

In terms of language, inclusion, equality, and understanding, Pentecost reverses Babel.

At Babel humanity united around domination and imperial ambition. The result was confusion and division. At Pentecost humanity rediscovers unity not through forced sameness but through mutual listening and understanding. The Spirit creates communion without demanding uniformity.

St. Paul expresses the same vision in today’s second reading: “There are different gifts but the same Spirit.” Different languages, different cultures, different histories — yet one body.

That understanding could hardly be further from the spirit now overtaking so much of American religion and politics with their denigration of diversity, equality, and inclusion.

Today Christianity is often reduced to tribal identity politics draped in religious symbols. The cross is wrapped in the national flag. Compassion is dismissed as weakness. Cruelty becomes strength. Public humiliation of migrants and refugees is treated as proof of political courage.

And those who seriously challenge such cruelty are quickly denounced.

In this context, think of Renee Goode and Alex Pretty. Their offense was their willingness to identify publicly with the excluded, the displaced, and the demonized. In response they have been ridiculed, attacked, and condemned — often by people who loudly proclaim themselves followers of Jesus.

That should not surprise us. The Spirit of Pentecost has always made respectable religion uncomfortable.

Because the Spirit exposes the contradiction between our worship and our politics. We pray “Come Holy Spirit” while supporting systems that degrade the foreigner, punish the poor, and normalize indifference toward suffering.

The Sequence we heard today may contain the most important prayer in the entire liturgy: “Bend the stubborn heart and will; melt the frozen, warm the chill.” For ours has become a frozen society.

We have grown numb to suffering on a massive scale. Migrants die of thirst in our deserts and drown in our seas. Families disappear into detention systems. Entire populations are bombed, displaced, or starved while much of the world watches passively. And most of us continue our ordinary routines scarcely disturbed.

Pentecost interrupts that numbness.

It insists that the foreigner speaks with a voice we are spiritually obligated to hear. It insists that God’s Spirit cannot be confined within national borders. It insists that no people are illegal in the eyes of the One in whom “we live and move and have our being.”

Of course, nations have the right to regulate immigration. Few would deny that. But Pentecost also makes clear that whenever fear, cruelty, and dehumanization become public policy, Christians are obligated to resist.

After all, Jesus himself entered history as a refugee child carried into Egypt by terrified parents fleeing political violence.

Today many who claim to follow him would likely report the Holy Family to immigration authorities.

That irony should stop us cold.

“Lord, send out your Spirit and renew the face of the earth,” we prayed in today’s psalm.

Conclusion

But renewal cannot happen while hearts remain locked behind doors of fear. The Spirit enters only when those doors are opened — when we finally recognize that the breath within ourselves is the same breath carried by the stranger, the refugee, the immigrant, and the excluded.

That is the real meaning of Pentecost. And it remains just as dangerous today as it was two thousand years ago.