Paulo Freire: The Friend Who Taught Us to See Differently

On our eighth wedding anniversary, Peggy and I had dinner in São Paulo with Paulo Freire and his wife, Elza. Afterward, one of the world’s great educators read aloud from Peggy’s unfinished doctoral dissertation on Freire himself. At one point, he encountered a lengthy quotation from his own work. He paused and exclaimed in English, “Right now, I am loving these words.”

I still remember that moment. There was something wonderfully unguarded about it: a thinker rediscovering his own thought through the work of a student who had become his friend. For me, it captures something essential about Paulo. Learning remained an encounter, even when the words being encountered were his own.

That memory returned recently when a friend, an editor at OpEdNews, asked about our relationship with Freire. He had just seen Reading the World, the new documentary directed by Catherine Murphy and Iris de Oliveira. Knowing that Peggy and I had a long history with its subject, he wanted to hear more.

Our story began before Peggy and I knew each other. Separately, we had read Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It helped shape us as students and eventually as teachers. Looking back, I would say that Paulo entered our marriage before we ever met him.

His book’s brilliant title suggested two meanings to me. First, it concerned an education through which oppressed people could acquire literacy and participate more fully in public life. In Brazil, where literacy was a condition of voting, teaching people to read could change the electorate. At Angicos in 1963, approximately 300 people became literate through 40 hours of instruction spread over several weeks. Education was opening a political door previously closed to them.

The title’s second meaning was even more challenging: the oppressed themselves have something indispensable to teach the rest of us. People who endure hunger, exploitation, exclusion, and humiliation know things about society that comfortable people can spend their lives avoiding. Their experience raises questions that respectable institutions often discourage. Why are some hungry while others accumulate fortunes? Who benefits from the arrangements we are taught to consider natural?

Education begins to become revolutionary when those questions enter the classroom. For Peggy and me, that meant reconsidering our authority as teachers. Students arrived with knowledge acquired through their families, work, struggles, and communities. Our responsibility included helping them examine that knowledge—and allowing it to challenge our own.

When we married in 1976, we were both working at Berea College. Over the ensuing years, our reading and teaching included Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, James W. Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me, and books recovering Black history and women’s history. Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins’s Food First further challenged our assumptions about hunger and poverty.

Freire supplied a thread connecting those works. Each invited us to examine the world from perspectives pushed to its margins. Each questioned the innocence of conventional education.

Then, in 1982, we attended a weeklong seminar led by Freire at Boston University. At the time, Peggy was pursuing her doctorate in philosophy of education at the University of Kentucky. Her dissertation explored Paulo Freire and moral imagination: our capacity to envision human possibilities beyond the arrangements we have inherited. She approached Paulo and asked whether she might study with him at his center in São Paulo. He warmly encouraged her.

That invitation changed our lives. During my first sabbatical at Berea and still studying Portuguese, we went to Brazil in 1984. Peggy’s dissertation was already well underway. She studied at Freire’s center and worked directly with literacy teams in the city’s favelas. There, the questions raised by his books belonged to people’s daily lives. Words emerged from experience. Learning to read involved examining the conditions under which people worked, raised children, found shelter, and struggled to survive.

Meanwhile, I enrolled in a liberation theology seminar that placed Freire’s methods at the center of biblical reflection. I found myself sitting at the feet of theologians I had been studying for years. They helped me understand how “Base Christian Communities” used Freire’s methods in “biblical circles” to consider their efforts to follow Jesus. Their reading connected Scripture with high rents, inadequate water, starvation wages, and government repression.

Those connections transformed the questions brought to the Bible. What did Exodus mean to people seeking freedom? What did Jesus’ good news to the poor require in a neighborhood where families could barely eat? How might faith help people organize to change their circumstances? The poor were becoming interpreters of a tradition too often explained to them by others.

In 1984, Brazil was still under military rule. Freire had already experienced the consequences of awakening such questioning. After the 1964 coup, he had been imprisoned for 70 days. The authorities understood that people learning to name their circumstances might also begin to change them.

During our stay, Peggy and I came to know Paulo and Elza personally. That friendship gave a human face to ideas that had already transformed our work. Our anniversary evening remains its clearest expression. Paulo’s willingness to read Peggy’s developing dissertation aloud conveyed attention, encouragement, and intellectual generosity. The renowned educator took a student’s work seriously enough to enter into it with her. Her dissertation later received national recognition from the American Educational Research Association (AERA). But that evening offered a recognition of its own.

Our friendship continued after we returned to the United States. More than once, we attended workshops with Paulo and Myles Horton at the Highlander Folk School in New Market, Tennessee. We also became friends with Freirean scholars Henry Giroux and Peter McLaren, who helped us publish two books after Paulo’s death in 1997. The relationships continued the learning.

Today, when I think about Paulo Freire, I return to a question that has followed me through decades of teaching, writing, and theological reflection: whose experience helps us see what we have been missing? For Peggy and me, his answer led toward the poor and oppressed—and toward classrooms where teachers could also learn.

I remember the great thinker at his apartment, reading Peggy’s pages and delighting in words that still had the power to surprise him. That openness was part of his greatness. He helped us understand that a teacher’s work begins again whenever another person helps us see differently.

When A President Speaks Like God

Readings for the 26th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Ezekiel 18:25-28; Psalm 25:4-5, 6-7, 8-9; Philippians 2:1-11; Matthew 21:28-32.

Last Tuesday, before the United Nations, President Trump said he had “a big decision to make.” Would there be a deal allowing Iran to rebuild? Or would he “annihilate the Islamic Republic” and drive its people “into hell with no chance of survival”? Those are his words, as recorded in the available transcript of the speech. They sound like a man who thinks he’s God.

In any case, I keep coming back to the people who would have to live under such threat: a mother trying to get her children to school, a nurse caring for the sick, an elderly man who has already lived through too many wars. What decision have they made that gives an American president authority over their future? How can anyone speak of leaving a people without hope for future generations and call it a choice that belongs to him?

The United Nations was created so that nations would settle their conflicts without threatening one another with destruction. Its charter forbids members to use threat or unauthorized force against other states. Yet there stood the president of the United States, before that very assembly, speaking of annihilation in his illegal war of aggression.

This Sunday’s readings give us a way to judge what we heard.

Through Ezekiel, God asks a question: “Is it my way that is unfair, or rather, are not your ways unfair?” It is a question worth putting to every government that speaks of security while treating other people’s lives as expendable. Would we accept such words from the leader of another nation directed at us? Would we call them statesmanship if our own grandchildren lived under the threatened bombs?

Ezekiel does more than condemn wrongdoing. He says that people can turn from it. The one who has done evil can begin to do what is right and just—and live. The word turn matters. God does not demand that we defend yesterday’s course simply because we chose it yesterday. God calls us to change course when we see where it leads.

That is a word for our president and for everyone helping to prosecute this war. It is also a word for us. Americans can turn. We can refuse to lend our silence to threats made in our name. We can insist that diplomacy, the protection of civilians, and an end to the killing are possible and necessary. Ezekiel will not let us say that it is too late to do what is right.

Then Paul asks us to have the mind of Christ Jesus. In one of the most beautiful passages in the New Testament, he says that Jesus, though in the form of God, did not treat equality with God as something to be grasped. Instead, he emptied himself, took the form of a slave, and accepted death on a cross.

Think of the direction of that movement. Jesus goes toward those with the least power. He shares their vulnerability. He ends among the people an empire could execute.

Christ refused to grasp at godlike power. Our president appears eager to exercise it.

For Christians, that contrast should be impossible to miss. No human being has the right to decide that another people will have no future. And no follower of the crucified Jesus should be comfortable hearing such power claimed on our behalf. We cannot kneel before a man executed by an empire and then applaud an empire’s threat to destroy others.

Paul’s words are addressed to a community. He asks the Philippians to look not only to their own interests but also to those of others. For us, that means asking what the war looks like from beneath the bombs and from inside Iranian homes. It means seeing the people who will suffer before we repeat a government’s account of its aims.

We need not approve of Iran’s rulers to do that. We need not overlook injustice committed by any government. Iranian civilians do not lose their claim on our conscience because of what their leaders may have done. Their lives cannot be reduced to a bargaining chip in a dispute between states.

That brings us to Jesus’ story of the two sons. Their father asks each of them to work in the vineyard. One says no but later changes his mind and goes. The other says yes, sir, and never appears. Jesus asks which one did the father’s will. Everyone knows the answer.

He tells this story to the chief priests and elders. They know how to give the proper religious answer. But when John calls them to change their ways, they refuse. Meanwhile, people they look down upon—tax collectors and prostitutes—hear the call and respond.

It is hard to read that Gospel this week without thinking about the churches. We know how to say yes to Jesus. We praise the Prince of Peace. We recite Paul’s hymn about his self-emptying. Some Christian leaders have spoken against this war and pleaded for diplomacy; Pope Leo has done so. But after a threat as stark as the one voiced at the UN, why don’t we hear church leaders speak with unmistakable clarity about the lives at stake?

And I have to ask the same of myself. It is easy for me to preach against a president. The Gospel asks what I will do once I have finished speaking. Will I make my opposition known to those who represent me? Will I stand alongside people organizing for peace? Will I keep paying attention to Iranian lives when the speech has passed from the headlines? Jesus asks whether we actually go into the vineyard.

Perhaps some of us have supported the war. Perhaps some have feared speaking against it. Perhaps many of us have simply grown weary and stopped listening. The first son gives us reason for hope. His first answer was no. It was not his final answer. He changed his mind and went.

That possibility is the mercy running through all today’s readings. In the psalm we pray, “Teach me your paths.” Ezekiel says that we can turn and live. Paul shows us the path of Christ, who gave up power and stood with the vulnerable. Jesus tells us that what matters is whether we will take that path today.

I pray that our president will turn from the language of annihilation. I pray that our churches will find their voices. And I pray that we, who say yes to Christ every Sunday, will hear the invitation he places before us now: go into the vineyard. Defend the lives being threatened. Work for peace. RESIST. VOTE.

Eva, Willie, Neil, and the Music I Couldn’t Hear

Last night my granddaughter Eva took me to hear Willie Nelson and Neil Young in Bridgeport. That sentence still amazes me.

She is eighteen; I am eighty-six. At her father’s family birthday party two nights earlier, she had surprised me by asking, through him, whether I would go with her. I don’t know why she asked that way. We had recently returned from a trip to Chicago to look at the University of Chicago and Northwestern, and our time together had ended with a silence I couldn’t quite explain. Her invitation touched me deeply. She still wanted her Baba beside her.

On the way to the concert, it was like old times. Eva gave me a short, fascinating lecture on the Roman poet Lucan and his fraught relationship with Nero. Her grasp of Latin, classical history, and mythology already surpasses that of any student I taught during my forty years at Berea. She even surprised her high school Latin teachers by translating Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech, delivered at New York’s Riverside Church, into Ciceronian Latin. I encouraged her to somehow publish her work. To call Eva an excellent student is a huge understatement. What delights me most is that she still likes sharing what she learns with me.

We have been going places and talking together for years. Once, in Granada, we went to hear Bob Dylan. More recently, Eva chose to spend part of our Chicago trip with my siblings. When she was fifteen, she gave a school speech about our friendship that moved me almost beyond words. She spoke of our walks, our conversations about economics and religion, and the fact that I had always taken her opinions seriously. Now, riding to Bridgeport, I had the pleasure of listening to her teach me.

The evening began with a video of Willie singing while images passed across the screen: Black and brown people, immigrants, people without homes. I couldn’t make out the song, but I could see whom we were being invited to notice. Before Willie appeared, those faces had claimed a place at his concert. For me, that was a kind of opening prayer.

Willie is ninety-three now and looks his age. At times he seemed to recite the words more than sing them. Still, what words they were. “On the Road Again” sounded different coming from a man who has been on that road so long. “Always on My Mind” carried its familiar regret. And near the end came “Last Leaf,” a song whose title alone had a particular force for an old man listening beside his granddaughter.

Neil Young joined Willie for “Are There Any More Real Cowboys?” Eva noticed something else I might have missed: Willie’s sons were there with him. She found it beautiful to see a father making music with his children. I did too, especially while sitting next to a grandchild who had brought me.

Willie’s set closed with religious music, including “I Thought About You, Lord,” “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” and “I’ll Fly Away.” Eva leaned toward me and asked, “Why do they have to introduce religion here?”

“This is country music,” I shouted over the sound. “It’s a tradition.”

That was all I could manage over the music, though her question stayed with me. Eva has her own thoughtful relationship to religion. She considers herself an atheist and, years after I baptized her as a baby, even “unbaptized” herself. We have talked about such things all her life. Her question at the concert felt like another moment in that continuing conversation.

Had it been quieter, I might have said that people sing about an unbroken circle and flying away because they know that families part and lives end. The songs give voice to a longing many of us share, whatever language we use for it. Perhaps Eva would have told me more about what she heard in them. That is one of the pleasures of being with her: a question is seldom the end of a conversation.

We hadn’t realized how cold an outdoor concert would be. Eva was dressed for a very different evening. Several times I offered her my padded vest; once I even started taking it off. She firmly refused. Between sets, she bought a Willie Nelson hoodie. It pleased me that she found her own solution, though I kept an eye on whether she was warm enough.

Neil, at eighty, still has much of that unmistakable voice. I could recognize “Old Man,” “Heart of Gold,” “Harvest Moon,” and “After the Gold Rush,” even when I couldn’t follow every word. I felt the frustration of knowing these songs and losing parts of them to the volume and my hearing. For someone who has spent his life listening, teaching, and arguing over words, that loss is hard to ignore.

Then the crowd called Neil back. His first encore was “Living With War”; his second was “Rockin’ in the Free World.” That final song went on and on, loud enough that I briefly wondered what it had done to my ears. Yet somewhere in those ten minutes I forgot the cold. Afterward I turned to Eva and said, “Isn’t rock ’n’ roll great? I forgot I was cold.”

Young’s encore also sent my thoughts back to the faces in Willie’s opening video. A song about freedom ought to make us ask who gets to enjoy it, and who is left out in the cold. That question has guided much of my theology. It was there, too, among the amps and guitars.

But the deepest meaning of the night was simpler. On the drive there, Eva had brought Lucan and Nero into the car with us. At the concert, we noticed a father singing with his sons, talked as best we could over the music, and tried to keep warm. At the end, we let Neil’s guitar carry us along with everyone else.

I hope we have many more walks, conversations, and songs ahead of us. Last night gave me this much: Eva was beside me, Willie’s family was singing, Neil’s guitar was ringing through the cold, and for a while we listened together.

Seventy-Seven Times—and the Debts Americans Refuse to Forgive

Readings for 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Sirach 27:30—28:7; Psalm 103:1-2, 3-4, 9-10, 11-12; Romans 14:7-9; Matthew 18:21-35.

Americans live in a society obsessed with debt—and strangely selective about forgiveness.

When banks gamble recklessly and threaten the economy, governments rescue them. When corporations fail, bankruptcy courts allow them to reorganize and begin again. When wealthy investors lose money, tax laws often permit them to deduct those losses from future income.

But when poor people cannot pay medical bills, student loans, rent, or credit-card debt accumulated simply to survive, forgiveness suddenly becomes morally objectionable. Then we hear about personal responsibility. Then every dollar must be repaid. Then mercy will supposedly encourage laziness.

The same double standard operates internationally. Wealthy nations accumulate enormous debts and continue functioning. Poor countries are forced by international lenders to cut food subsidies, healthcare, education, and public employment to satisfy creditors whose loans have often enriched local elites and foreign corporations rather than ordinary people.

We readily forgive from the top down. We become merciless when forgiveness might benefit those at the bottom.

That is precisely the contradiction exposed in this morning’s Gospel.

Peter asks Jesus how often he must forgive someone who sins against him. Seven times? Peter probably thinks he is being extraordinarily generous. But Jesus answers, “Not seven times but seventy-seven times.”

In biblical language, that does not mean keeping a notebook until offense number seventy-eight. It means refusing to make vengeance a way of life. It means breaking the cycle in which injury produces retaliation, retaliation creates another injury, and violence continues from generation to generation.

To explain, Jesus tells a story about debt.

A servant owes a king “a huge amount.” The original Greek is more dramatic: ten thousand talents. A single talent represented roughly fifteen or twenty years of a laborer’s wages. Ten thousand talents, therefore, was not merely a large personal loan. It was an unimaginable sum—more than a worker could repay in thousands of lifetimes.

In other words, this is not simply a story about hurt feelings. It is about an economic system capable of creating impossible indebtedness.

The king orders the servant sold, along with his wife, his children, and all his possessions. That single sentence reveals the violence hidden beneath respectable financial arrangements. Debt has become a claim not only upon the servant’s labor, but upon his body, his family, and his entire future.

The servant falls to his knees and begs for time. Instead, the king does something astonishing: he cancels the entire debt.

That is Jubilee.

According to Israel’s ancient ideal, debts were to be periodically forgiven, enslaved debtors released, and land returned to families who had lost it. The purpose was to prevent wealth from accumulating permanently in a few hands while everyone else sank into hereditary poverty.

Jesus stands within that Jubilee tradition. At the beginning of his public life, he announces good news to the poor, release to captives, and liberation for the oppressed. In the prayer he teaches his disciples, “forgive us our debts” is inseparable from “as we forgive our debtors.”

The servant in today’s parable has been offered a new life. But he has not undergone conversion.

Leaving the king’s presence, he encounters a fellow servant who owes him one hundred denarii—a real debt, but tiny compared with the ten thousand talents just canceled. He grabs the man by the throat and demands payment. The second servant repeats almost word for word the plea the first servant had made: “Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.”

But the forgiven servant refuses. He has received mercy without learning mercy. He has escaped the machinery of oppression, yet immediately uses that same machinery against someone weaker than himself.

That is the central sin in this story.

The problem is not merely personal ingratitude. It is the refusal to extend downward the liberation received from above.

That makes this parable especially relevant to Christians in the United States. Our country has received advantages that cannot honestly be attributed to virtue alone: fertile land taken from Indigenous peoples, labor extracted from enslaved Africans, resources drawn from colonized countries, and a privileged position within the global financial system.

Yet instead of recognizing our enormous inherited debt, we often seize poorer nations by the throat and demand, “Pay what you owe.” We impose sanctions, collect interest, confiscate resources, and punish entire populations for resisting an international order designed largely without them.

The same pattern appears within our country. People whose families benefited from subsidized mortgages, inexpensive education, union wages, Social Security, and public investment may oppose similar assistance for younger workers, immigrants, or the poor. Like the servant in the parable, we forget what has been forgiven, subsidized, or simply handed to us.

But here we must make an essential distinction. Christian forgiveness does not mean that privileged observers may forgive crimes committed against other people.

I cannot forgive the slaughtered child’s killer on behalf of the child’s parents. Settler societies cannot absolve themselves of crimes against Indigenous peoples. White people cannot declare slavery and segregation forgiven without the participation of their victims. Governments responsible for war, torture, ethnic cleansing, or genocide cannot invoke reconciliation while the killing continues.

Only victims can forgive the injuries done to them.

Nor does forgiveness eliminate the need for truth, accountability, restitution, or protection of the vulnerable. There can be no genuine reconciliation without truth. Stolen land and wealth may require restitution. Those who remain dangerous may need confinement—not for revenge, but for rehabilitation and the protection of others.

Forgiveness is not forgetting. It is not pretending that evil did not happen. It is not allowing abusers to continue abusing. And it is never a command to the oppressed to accept oppression more politely.

Instead, forgiveness means refusing to become what has wounded us. It means relinquishing vengeance without relinquishing justice. It seeks restoration rather than humiliation, conversion rather than annihilation, and a future not permanently imprisoned by the past.

That is why Sirach asks, “Could anyone nourish anger against another and expect healing from the Lord?” Notice the word healing. Forgiveness is not presented primarily as obedience to an arbitrary rule. It is a form of healing. Hatred binds the injured person to the offender. Vengeance allows the perpetrator to continue occupying the victim’s heart and imagination.

Paul adds another dimension: “None of us lives for oneself.” That is the direct opposite of the individualism our culture teaches. We are not isolated competitors whose debts and injuries concern only ourselves. We belong to one another. Our lives are entangled. The suffering of immigrants, Palestinians, prisoners, impoverished workers, and sanctioned populations is not somebody else’s problem.

If none of us lives for oneself, then none of us is saved alone.

The Gospel’s final image of the unforgiving servant handed over to torturers is disturbing. It should not be used to portray God as an eternal torturer. The parable is showing what a world without mercy becomes. When we organize society around unpayable debts, resentment, punishment, and revenge, we build our own torture chambers—and eventually everyone lives inside them.

Jesus offers another possibility: receive mercy, practice mercy, and reorganize life around mercy. That means personal forgiveness, certainly. Families and communities cannot survive if every injury is preserved forever as ammunition.

But it also means social forgiveness: canceling predatory debts, ending sanctions that punish civilians, releasing those unjustly imprisoned, repairing the damage of racism and colonialism, and replacing retributive systems with restorative justice.

The test of whether we have understood God’s mercy is not how beautifully we praise it in church. The test comes when we meet someone who owes us—or someone our society has placed beneath us.

Will we seize that person by the throat? Or will we remember how much we ourselves have received?

“The Lord is kind and merciful, slow to anger, and rich in compassion.” A church that sings those words must become what it sings: a community that tells the truth, repairs what has been broken, defends victims, cancels impossible debts, and refuses to surrender the future to vengeance. That is forgiveness from the heart.

And that is what God’s Kingdom looks like when it enters history.

Birthday Reflection: Disney’s “Soul”

[On September 6th, I celebrated my 86th birthday with my family here in Westport CT. It was so much fun for me. During our pre-breakfast conversation (I suppose because of my age) the topic turned to death, the afterlife, and Dante’s Divine Comedy. My son-in-law remarked that someone should make a modern adaptation of that famous 14th century trilogy. I said that I think Disney has already done it in his classic “Soul.” The conversation sent me back to the following essay I wrote along those lines five years ago. Rereading it made me want to republish what I wrote then. That was even before I started studying Tarot, which I now see would have enriched the piece enormously. Anyway, here it is without that enrichment.]

Pixar’s “Soul”: Profound Spiritual Wisdom from a Soulless Corporation

Isn’t it ironic that one of the most powerful businesses in the world, the Disney conglomerate, has ended up being one of our nation’s most effective spiritual teachers?

I mean, in Disney you have a typical heartless corporation that controls so much of our deceitful mainstream media and our superficial entertainment industry. Yet that very transnational firm has consistently produced popular art that calls viewers to introspection, identification with wildlife and nature, and to qualities of generosity, selflessness, and love.

I’m thinking of celebrated productions like “The Lion King,” “Beauty and the Beast,” and even “Bambi.” Arguably, such animated films issue more effective calls to spiritual values (especially to the young) than do most churches.

How that’s possible remains a mystery to me.  It’s probably because even Disney Productions discerns a deep hunger for meaning in audiences throughout the world. So, in its effort to enhance its bottom line, it acquires scripts authored by spiritually attuned writers. But that’s only a guess.

The Film

Nevertheless, that was probably the case with Disney’s latest issuance, “Soul” whose screenplay was written by Pete Docter, Mike Jones and Kemp Powers. It’s a charming, comedic yet penetrating probe into the meaning of life and death. Its depiction of the afterlife suggests characterization as a poor man’s version of Dante’s Divine Comedy. It has all the ingredients: a guided trip through the great beyond, a painful process of purgation, and finally arrival at peaceful beatitude.

(At this point, some might think it appropriate to give a “spoiler alert,” though that hardly seems necessary for a spiritually themed work like “Soul.” It’s not some cliffhanger. In any case, be forewarned.)

More specifically, as Disney’s first all-black production, “Soul” tells the story of Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx), a frustrated middle school band teacher obsessed with jazz and landing his dream job of playing piano in a quartet headed by a diva saxophonist named Dorothea Williams.

Joe is himself an unappreciated musical genius as becomes evident every time his riffs transport him into the “Zone” of his prodigious brilliance. In his audition for the Williams quartet, the diva immediately recognizes Joe’s talent and hires him on the spot.

Joe is overjoyed. On his way home, he practically floats and dances down the streets of NYC. In his distracted oblivion he is narrowly missed by busses, cars, motorcycles and bikes. However, Joe himself doesn’t miss an open manhole, which swallows him up and apparently ends his life.

The next thing he knows, he’s is in the afterlife on his way towards the Bright Light invariably reported in the accounts of most near-death experiences (NDE). But possessed by his obsession with finally realizing his dream job, Joe refuses to die.

The Underworld

So, instead of escalating into the world of light, he’s returned to heaven’s underworld – a kind of limbo – a so-called “Youth Seminar” where unborn souls are prepared by the recently departed to enter into bodies on planet earth. There Joe is introduced to a rebellious unborn soul (Tina Fey) called #22 (seemingly because she was the 22nd soul ever created).

Despite its status as a truly “old soul,” #22 has remained unembodied for eons because she finds the prospect of life on earth boring. No mentor, no matter how prestigious – not Copernicus, Marie Antoinette, Abraham Lincoln, Karl Jung, George Orwell, Mother Theresa, or Muhammad Ali – has been able to successfully coax 22 to incarnate on the Milky Way’s “stinky rock,” where she knows that life is inevitably soul crushing.

Despite that history, Joe Gardner accepts the task of mentoring #22 in hopes that if successful, he might be allowed to return to earth and his dream gig. Joe is convinced that if he can help 22 find her passion – her Spark – then her fierce resistance to life on earth will dissolve.

So, acting like Dante’s Virgil, Joe leads 22 through the “Great Before.” She accompanies him as he reviews his own life and identifies jazz as the spark which had given his frustrated existence the modicum of meaning it’s had. From there the two travel through the Hall of Everything where Joe shows 22 her own life’s possibilities as a baker, fire fighter, artist, librarian, mathematician, gymnast, office worker, or astronaut. Not surprisingly, 22 remains unmoved.

However, it’s at this point that roles suddenly reverse as the unborn soul takes pity on Joe. He’s unlike any of her previous mentors, she says, because his life has been so sad and pathetic. Despite the fact that 22 can’t imagine why Joe wants so desperately to return to such pathos, she leads her mentor to the Zone – a state between the physical and spiritual – where he’s made to recall the times his music has induced a state of happiness and bliss.

From there, 22 takes Joe to the Realm of Lost Souls where she introduces him to “a guy I know” – a mad psychedelic captain, a self-described “mystic without borders.” Captain Moonwind (who doubles as a NYC sign spinner on the other side) helps lost souls find their way out of obsessions and anxieties that leave them disconnected from life. For instance, he once helped liberate a soulless hedge funder from his alienated labor. In the aftermath, the frustrated Wall Streeter completely trashes his obsessed, anxious and confining work environment while finally screaming “I’m alive! I’m alive!”

To the tune of Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” Moonwind ferries Joe and 22 across the Sea of Lost Souls. On the way, the captain tellingly instructs Joe that lost souls are not that different from those striving to live constantly in the Zone. In both cases, he warns, “When your joy becomes an obsession, you end up tragically disconnected from life.”

With the warning ringing in his ears, and after entering a deep state of meditation, Joe and 22 suddenly find themselves returned to earth – to the intensive care unit where Joe’s NDE began. He’s not dead after all. However, both Joe and 22 are surprised to find that they remain completely displaced. Joe’s personality is now located in the hospital’s therapy cat, Mr. Mittens. Meanwhile, 22 finds itself animating Joe’s just-revived body.

Desperate and confused, the two narrowly escape from intensive care and emerge onto NYC’s noisy, smelly and dirty streets. It’s in this Purgatorio that Joe resumes his role as 22’s Virgil. Trapped in the cat’s body, he is intent on leading his newly ensouled form to what he imagines as heaven – the Half Note Jazz Club where his platonic Beatrice (Dorothea Williams) awaits him impatiently.     

Purgatorio

On the way, 22 learns more about inhabiting Joe’s body. For the first time, she discovers the soul-purging joys of pizza; of simply walking, sky watching, taking a shower, tasting toothpaste, and of fitting into a comfortable old brown suit. She recognizes a kindred spirit in 12-year-old Connie, Joe’s gifted middle school trombonist who finds school stultifying.  When Connie expresses her boredom with school, 22 approvingly quotes her former mentor, George Orwell, “State-sponsored education is like the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.”

22 even revels in subway rudeness and in the talent of an underground street musician. Above all, 22 likes “jazzing” – spontaneous self-expression or any kind. 

Now Mr. Mittens is the one to object. “No,” he insists, jazz is a completely other category. “Music and life,” he says, “operate by very different rules.”

Undeterred, 22 continues jazzing during a visit to Joe’s neighborhood barbershop. There, with Mr. Mittens sitting in her lap, Dez the barber reveals the possibility of finding joy in a second-choice career even when one’s first choice has been frustrated. Despite his genius at cutting hair, Dez explains that he originally wanted to become a vet. However, since barber school was less expensive than training for veterinary medicine, Dez chose the former. But it’s made him “happy as a clam.”

The lesson is not lost on Mr. Mittens. His wide eyes tell that he’s thoughtfully considering his own life in the light of Dez’s revelation. Meanwhile he listens incredulously as 22 philosophizes free form while Dez cuts the hair on the head she’s now thinking with.

Everyone’s enthralled as she pontificates about “existing as a theoretical construct in a hypothetical waystation between life and death. . .  left wondering whether all this (obsessed and over-focused) living was really worth dying for.”

Then she responds smartly to Paul, a hip barbershop customer, who rips Joe for falling short of his dreams. 22 fires back, “He’s just criticizing me to make up for the pain of his own failed dreams.” Her barbershop audience laughs at Paul derisively.

Later, 22 ecstatically explains to Joe: Didn’t you see? “I was jazzing.”  

22’s jazzing continues through the next stage of Joe’s purgatory – an encounter with his mother who has constantly urged her son to abandon his musical ambitions in favor of steady employment with pension and health care.

Still encased in Joe’s body and tentatively coached by Mr. Mittens, 22 boldly responds on Joe’s behalf, “Mom, I’m just afraid that if I died today, then my life would have amounted to nothing.”

That particular jazz riff opens Mrs. Gardner’s heart. In tears, she embraces her son and tells him how proud she is of him. She adds that his deceased father would have been proud too. She even gives Joe his dad’s handsome wool suit to wear at the anticipated performance that evening.  (Joe’s father too had been a musician dependent for support on his wife’s real job as a seamstress. No wonder she was worried about Joe.)

Paradiso

Finally, Joe arrives at the Half Note Jazz Club. By now, with the help of Captain Moonwind and a brief return to the Great Before, the difference between Joe and 22 has been completely overcome. Joe’s come to realize that 22 is the same as his own unappropriated unborn soul.

Whole at last, Joe is now ready for his beatific vision. Imagining that it will happen on the Half-Note’s stage, Joe persuades Dorothea Williams to rehire him despite his late arrival at the jazz club.  Reluctantly, she acquiesces.

However, all doubts vanish as Joe gives the performance of his life thrilling everyone present including his mother and Ms. Williams herself. Amid the applause, Joe’s mother is heard shouting proudly, “That’s my son!”

Nonetheless in the aftermath, Joe remains strangely detached. In effect, he wonders aloud, “Is that all there is? I’ve been waiting for this my entire life. I thought it would be different.”

The diva explains, “You’ve been like a fish discontent with his water habitat because he’s been searching for the ocean. You’ve had what you’ve been looking for all your life. It’s what you live in, move in and where you have your being.”

With that, Joe’s penny finally drops. Now his life flashes before him summarized in the symbolic trinkets that awakened the soul of # 22:

  • A Metro pass
  • A pizza crust
  • A piece of a bagel whose other half had been thrown into the tip basket of that subway musician
  • The lollypop Dez the barber shared during the session in his “magic chair”
  • A spool of blue thread that Joe’s mother used to refashion his father’s wool suit
  • A seed from a maple tree brought by a gentle breeze into Joe’s waiting hand

Yes, Dorothea’s version of Beatrice was right: Joe’s had everything he’s needed right from the beginning – in his father’s sharing his passion for jazz, in fireworks over New York City, in the heat blowing from city street grates, in the taste of pecan pie, in the star filled sky . . .

So have we all.

Conclusion

Such “morals of the story” might strike some as typically Hollywood – trite truisms generated algorithmically by pretentious but ultimately soulless corporations interested only in easy pandering to the peasant gallery. However, conclusions of this sort overlook the fact that most preaching and motivational talks contain similar messages. Fact is: we need the reminders.

Nonetheless, the morals of “Soul” go far beyond what’s already been itemized. A more comprehensive catalog might include the following.

  • Life on planet earth need not be boring or meaningless.
  • Death is not our enemy, but a portal to profound insight and expanded awareness.
  • Animals from which we evolved (symbolized in Mr. Mittens) continue to guide us.
  • So do previous human incarnations (like 22’s George Orwell and Muhammed Ali) who somehow persist as our mentor guardian angels.
  • When our joys become obsessive, they disconnect us from life’s richness.
  • Even our “dream jobs” are comparatively insignificant – carried out in the equivalent of a small basement jazz club.
  • The same holds true for the heroes we idolize (like the self-important diva Dorothea Williams).
  • In the light of impending death, (if we’re lucky) consciousness of such relativity eventually dawns as we realize that wish fulfillment isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
  • Instead, life is about overcoming separations – male from female, black from white, animal from human, body from soul.
  • It’s important “to jazz” and free flow at every opportunity; music and life both operate by the same rules.

These insights merit not only superficial review, but serious meditation by those whose spiritual hunger evokes them from sensitive writers like Docter, Jones and Powers despite their employment by Disney.

Do yourself a favor and see Pixar’s “Soul.” It will set you on the path of Dante, Virgil, Beatrice — and Joe Gardner.

Autumn Hill, The “Crime” of Anti-Fascism, & the Price of Radical Christian Love

Thirty-year-old Autumn Hill is serving a 50-year federal prison sentence for participating in an anti-ICE demonstration outside the Prairieland Detention Center in Texas.

I bring up her case because Ms. Hill identifies herself as a Christian committed to a politics of “radical love.” And that is exactly what today’s Gospel reading calls us to.

But before I get to that please consider the “crime” for which this young Christian woman has been punished with a sentence of life behind bars.

The “Crime” of Anti-Fascism

The protest in question occurred on July 4, 2025. Participants brought fireworks for a noise demonstration supporting immigrants imprisoned inside. Later that evening, a police officer was shot and wounded by another protester. Autumn says she had already left and never intended or expected violence.

Nevertheless, prosecutors described her and eight other defendants as an “antifa terror cell.” Autumn was convicted of terrorism-related offenses and received a sentence that may keep her imprisoned for most of her remaining life. Another activist who was not even present reportedly received 30 years for moving a box of anti-fascist literature.

All of that leaves me puzzled by the word “antifa.” It is not the name of an actual national organization with membership cards, officers, or headquarters. It is shorthand for anti-fascism. Yet it is now routinely classified as a dangerous “left-wing” ideology—as though opposing fascism were some extremist position that loyal Americans should reject.

I had thought anti-fascism was one of the few convictions Americans on both the left and right shared. After all, the Second World War—or what might more accurately be called the Second Intercapitalist War—was presented to Americans as a great struggle against fascism. Millions fought, sacrificed, and died to defeat it. Are we now supposed to approve of fascism because it has somehow been reclassified as “conservative” and anti-left? Or has the word “antifa” been turned into a label that allows the government to criminalize anyone who actively resists authoritarianism?

Christian Radical Love

Speaking from jail, Autumn told Democracy Now! what had led her to Prairieland. Growing up Christian, Ms. Hill said, she had been deeply moved by Jesus’ “radical love tradition,” which she saw continued by Quaker Abolitionists, Martin Luther King, Vincent Harding, Malcolm X, and Thich Nhat Hanh.

For Autumn, radical love was not a sentimental feeling. It meant recognizing everyone as equally deserving of dignity, care, and protection. “Justice,” she said, “is bringing love into the public space.” Standing outside Prairieland expressed the biblical command to love the alien, stranger, and sojourner.

Then she added something chilling: “If you resist the mass incarceration of immigrants, they are going to bury you.” She meant that when radical love moves beyond words and enters public space, when someone does more than admire Jesus and instead stands with people imprisoned by the powers of our time, they are vilified, persecuted, arrested, and jailed with the key thrown away.

Today’s Gospel Reading

Last Sunday, Peter identified Jesus as “the Christ, the Son of the living God.” We saw that the “rock” upon which Jesus builds his community is not Peter’s perfection, much less the authority of popes and bishops. The rock is Peter’s dangerous recognition that divine authority resides not in Caesar but in a poor teacher from an occupied country.

This morning’s Gospel begins with the very next verse. Almost immediately, the man Jesus praised for his rock-hard faith suddenly becomes “Satan.”

This happens after Jesus explains what being the Christ will actually mean. As God’s anointed he must go to Jerusalem, confront the establishment, suffer at the hands of “the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes,” and be killed. Together those groups represented an alliance of political power, religious authority, and officially approved interpretation of law – a syndrome that should not be unfamiliar to contemporary Americans.

In other words, Jesus does not go to Jerusalem because he desires suffering or because God requires blood before forgiving humanity. He goes there to continue his mission. His execution will be the predictable consequence of confronting institutions that cannot tolerate radical love entering public space.

Peter wants none of that. He apparently wants a triumphant Christ who will seize power, defeat enemies, protect his followers, and reward them with important offices. He wants victory without vulnerability, salvation without confrontation, and discipleship without consequences.

Jesus responds, “Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me.” The man whose expression of faith Jesus recognized as foundational suddenly  becomes “Satan” for wanting to separate Christ from Jesus. He wants the Messiah’s power and glory without the troublesome teacher who welcomes foreigners, challenges religious authorities, and confronts empire.

That remains Christianity’s central temptation. The Church can worship an exalted Christ while refusing to follow the historical Jesus. It can place jeweled crosses above its altars or on necklaces around throats while supporting systems that continue crucifying people. It can proclaim Christ as king while siding with presidents, billionaires, prisons, and empires against their victims.

Put otherwise, Peter’s confession was therefore incomplete. It is not enough to say Jesus is the Christ. We must understand what kind of Christ he is.

The Christ is not another Caesar. As interpreted by Jesus’ example, he is the victim of Caesar’s system and the leader of resistance to it. He is found among immigrants confined inside Prairieland, Palestinians buried beneath rubble, Cuban children deprived of medicine, families separated by deportation, and prisoners serving grotesque sentences designed to frighten others into silence.

Any Church that confesses Christ while protecting today’s crucifiers has abandoned Peter’s rock and become Peter’s obstacle – his Satan.

Deny Yourself; Take Up Your Cross

Jesus then says, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.”

Those words have often been weaponized against suffering people. Women have been told abusive marriages are “their cross.” Workers have been instructed to accept poverty. Colonized peoples have been promised compensation in heaven. Victims have been encouraged to suffer silently.

That cannot be what Jesus means.

Roman crosses were not symbols of private inconvenience. Crucifixion was public execution inflicted by imperial power upon people considered threats to established order. To take up the cross meant accepting the risks involved in joining Jesus’ movement.

Jesus is not telling oppressed people to submit to crucifixion. He is calling his followers to resist crucifying systems—even when resistance is costly.

“Deny yourself” does not mean despising yourself or surrendering your dignity. For the privileged, it means relinquishing wealth, status, racial advantage, national supremacy, and insulation from suffering. For the oppressed, it can mean refusing the degrading identity imposed upon them. In both cases, it means abandoning the imperial self and joining a community of solidarity.

Conclusion

That helps explain Autumn Hill’s radical love. Love becomes discipleship when it moves from feeling to material action—from saying immigrants are human beings to standing outside their prison; from admiring Martin Luther King to risking the treatment King received; from wearing a cross to confronting those who construct crosses for others.

What I’m saying here is that Christians cannot allow one violent incident—or the government’s description of an entire movement as “terrorist”—to erase the injustice being protested. We must ask why immigrants are imprisoned, why anti-fascism is being criminalized, and why enormous punishments are imposed to frighten others into silence.

Jesus concludes with a question directed not only to individuals but to nations and churches: “What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?”

What profit is there for the United States to dominate the world while sacrificing its soul? What profit is there in controlling borders, armies, and prisons if that control requires mass deportation, endless war, genocide, and suppression of dissent? What profit is there for the Church to preserve its authority if it abandons those with whom Jesus identified?

The question is no longer simply, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter answered that correctly.

Today’s question is more demanding: Will we follow the Christ we confess when radical love leads us outside the prison gates where he resides—and when the authorities threaten to bury anyone who protests his incarceration?

Free Autumn Hill!!

IS Our Next War against Cuba? Who Really Threatens Whom?

Readings for 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time: Isaiah 22:19-23; Psalm 138:1-2, 2-3, 6, 8; Romans 11:33-36; Matthew 16:13-20

This week, the United States once again identified Cuba as a grave threat to our national security.

Think about that. I have in connection with this Sunday’s readings about keys that open and close the gates of life and death.

Start by considering the hell that the U.S. has created to starve Cubans into submission to the United States empire.

Cuba’s Plight

Cuba is an impoverished island of approximately ten million people. It has no fleet stationed off Florida, no military bases surrounding the United States, and no economic blockade preventing Americans from obtaining food, fuel, and medicine. Its electrical system is collapsing. Its people endure blackouts, food shortages, inadequate medical supplies, and transportation increasingly paralyzed by lack of fuel. And all of this has been caused by our government.

Nevertheless, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s department recently issued a hundred-page report titled Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism. It accuses that struggling island of mounting a vast subversive campaign against the United States—one allegedly connected with the George Floyd protests, campus activism, peace organizations, socialist groups, and even journalists such as Amy Goodman.

This week Melissa Ford Maldonado of the America First Policy Institute went further. Her report calls Cuba “The Dictatorship Next Door” and a “massive national security threat.” It recommends “sustained maximum pressure,” a permanent U.S. military presence in the Caribbean, weakening Cuba’s government, and restoring “American dominance” throughout the hemisphere.

Retired Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis sees where such rhetoric can lead. He asks: Is Cuba to become our next war?

Who”s the Threat?

But first we should ask: Who is threatening whom?

The United States has nearly thirty times Cuba’s population. Its economy is hundreds of times larger. Washington maintains a naval base on Cuban territory at Guantánamo—against the wishes of Cuba’s government. For more than sixty years, it has subjected the island to an embargo condemned almost unanimously by the United Nations General Assembly. Now it is tightening that blockade while ordinary Cubans endure hunger, blackouts, and economic collapse.

And yet Cuba is called the threat.

It is as though Goliath, armed from head to foot and standing on David’s chest, cried out that the boy beneath him was threatening his life.

That reversal of victim and aggressor is essential to empire. The powerful portray those who resist them as dangerous. Enslaved people become threats to enslavers. Colonized people become threats to colonizers. Palestinians become threats to the nuclear-armed state occupying their land. And an impoverished Caribbean island becomes a “massive threat” to the most heavily armed nation in history.

Cuba’s unforgivable offense is not that it intends to invade the United States. It is that Cuba maintains relations with China, Russia, Iran, and other governments Washington calls adversaries. According to that logic, the United States may establish alliances and military bases across the planet, but Cuba may not choose its own friends. The entire Western Hemisphere is treated as Washington’s property.

George Kennan’s Memorandum

That is also the logic behind hostility toward BRICS and the emerging multipolar world. The United States contains only about 4.3 percent of humanity, but its rulers still claim the right to determine everyone else’s economic relationships. Cuba must remain isolated. China must be contained. BRICS must not challenge the dollar. Formerly colonized nations must not become independent enough to close the gap between themselves and their former masters.

George Kennan stated that purpose honestly in a top-secret 1948 memorandum. The United States then possessed approximately half the world’s wealth with only 6.3 percent of its population. Our task, he wrote, was to create “a pattern of relationships” allowing us “to maintain this position of disparity.”

Not eliminate the disparity. Maintain it.

Today’s Readings

That confession helps us understand today’s readings. They concern palace officials, keys, gates, authority, and the difference between power used for the people and power used to protect privilege.

The first reading concerns Shebna, “master of the palace.” He is a high official, keeper of the keys, accustomed to opening doors for some and closing them against others. Immediately before today’s passage, Isaiah condemns him for carving an impressive tomb for himself. Shebna has converted public office into private privilege. So God tells him, “I will thrust you from your office and pull you down from your station.”

That warning addresses every president, secretary of state, bishop, CEO, and ruling class. No one owns authority. It remains legitimate only insofar as it serves the community. When officials use power to enrich themselves, exalt their nation, punish opponents, or preserve an unjust “position of disparity,” they become Shebna.

Eliakim is appointed in his place. God puts “the key of the House of David” upon his shoulder. But the key is not given for personal enrichment. Eliakim must become “a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem”—protecting the household, especially its weakest members.

The criterion for judging government, then, is not military supremacy or the number of countries it can intimidate. It is whether government feeds the hungry, heals the sick, welcomes migrants, protects children, and permits weaker nations to control their own resources and destinies. By that standard, a policy deliberately intensifying deprivation in Cuba stands condemned.

Today’s responsorial psalm makes the criterion unmistakable: “The LORD is exalted, yet the lowly he sees, and the proud he knows from afar.” The powerful notice generals, investors, contributors, and fellow officials. But God sees the lowly. The psalmist invites us to look at history from that same perspective—from below, through the eyes of those who pay for decisions made in palaces.

That brings us to the Gospel. Jesus asks, “Who do you say that I am?” Significantly, he asks the question at Caesarea Philippi, a place identified with imperial power. In the shadow of empire, Peter identifies not Caesar but an impoverished Jewish teacher as God’s chosen one: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

“Christ” is not Jesus’ surname. It means Messiah—God’s anointed agent of liberation. Peter is saying that God’s saving presence is found not in Caesar’s palace, imperial wealth, or occupying armies, but in the peasant Jesus and the grassroots movement forming around him.

However, Peter does not yet understand what kind of Messiah Jesus will be. In the verses immediately following today’s reading, Jesus predicts that the political and religious establishment will kill him. Peter objects. In response Jesus calls him “Satan.” Peter has the right title but the wrong understanding. He still imagines divine power too much like conventional power.

Jesus will not defeat Caesar by becoming another Caesar. He feeds hungry crowds, heals the sick, forgives debts, welcomes the excluded, challenges religious hypocrisy, and confronts exploitative power. His community is organized not around domination but around service, sharing, forgiveness, and the dignity of those society considers disposable.

As Eliakim receives the key to the House of David, Peter receives “the keys to the kingdom of heaven.” Once again, the keys represent delegated responsibility. Peter does not own the kingdom. Neither does the Church. Its task is to open what domination has closed: food to the hungry, medicine to the sick, shelter to refugees, dignity to the humiliated, truth to those deceived by propaganda, and political agency to the voiceless. This is the thrust of Jesus’ program announced in Luke 4: 14-30.

The Gates of Hell

Jesus’ promise follows: “The gates of the netherworld shall not prevail.” We often picture the Church defending itself against attacking gates. But gates do not attack. Gates keep prisoners inside. Jesus commissions his community to break them open.

The gates of hell today include war, hunger, racism, sanctions, unpayable debt, ecological destruction, and propaganda that transforms victims into enemies. For Cuba, they take the form of fuel deprivation, economic strangulation, medical shortages, blackouts, and threatened military intervention. Those gates were built by human beings. They can be opened by human beings.

Paul offers a final warning: “How inscrutable are his judgments and how unsearchable his ways!” No nation, party, economic system, or Church possesses God. That includes the United States, despite its pretensions to be exceptional or indispensable. God is not America’s counselor, chaplain, or military ally.

Nevertheless, God’s mysterious ways have a recognizable direction. The God whom no empire can possess sees the lowly, removes Shebna, entrusts authority for service, and becomes visible in the crucified Jesus.

Conclusion

So today’s question is not merely, “Who do you say that Jesus is?” It is also: What kind of world does our answer create?

If we proclaim Jesus as Christ while worshipping empire, strangling Cuba, protecting inequality, and keeping the poor locked behind the gates of hell, our doctrinal answer may be correct. But our practical answer is false.

The Church stands upon rock only when it helps break those gates open.

“Even the Dogs Eat the Scraps” Gaza, Immigrants, and the Canaanite Woman

Readings for the Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time: Isaiah 56:1, 6–7; Psalm 67; Romans 11:13–15, 20–32; Matthew 15:21–28

This morning, mothers in Gaza are still searching for food, clean water, medicine, and safety for their children. Even after a supposed ceasefire, Palestinians continue to be killed. Families already displaced again and again are being driven from one ruined shelter to another. Children are growing up hungry, traumatized, orphaned, and surrounded by the rubble of homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, and churches. With complete U.S. support, more than 20,000 of them have been killed by Zionists in the last 23 months.

Meanwhile, here in the United States, other mothers are afraid to take their children to school. They fear that masked immigration agents might seize them on the way, at work, in a courthouse, or even near a church or hospital. Families that have lived peacefully in this country for ten, fifteen, or twenty years are being separated. Refugees fleeing persecution find our doors closed. Human beings are confined in degrading prison camps, transferred far from their families and attorneys, and deported without anything resembling justice.

Most disturbing of all, these policies enjoy their strongest support among Americans who loudly identify themselves as Christians.

Many carry Bibles, display crosses, describe the United States as a “Christian nation,” and insist that they are defending Christian civilization. Yet they support bombs for Israel, starvation for Gaza, closed doors for refugees, and mass deportation for immigrants. They seem not to notice the glaring contradiction between the Jesus they claim to worship and the cruelty they applaud.

Today’s readings directly address that contradiction. The Gospel reading shows Jesus overcoming cultural prejudice in himself.

The reading begins with a mother’s desperate cry: “Have pity on me, Lord, Son of David! My daughter is tormented by a demon.”

Matthew calls the petitioner a Canaanite woman. Mark’s version remembers her as Syrophoenician. She lived near the twin cities of Tyre and Sidon, outside predominantly Jewish territory. She was therefore a foreigner, a Gentile, a religious outsider, and a woman addressing a strange man in public. She came from the land inhabited today by Palestinians, Lebanese, and Syrians.

At first, Jesus ignores her.

Then, when she refuses to go away, he tells his disciples, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Finally, he responds to her with words that should shock us: “It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.”

We should not try to make those words sound nicer than they are. “Dogs” was a contemptuous designation for Gentiles. Jesus seems to be repeating the exclusionary language of his culture—language not far removed from an ethnic insult. As I have sometimes put it, he comes perilously close to calling this desperate woman a “b_tch.”

That kind of animalizing language is not incidental. It always prepares the way for persecution. Before people can be enslaved, imprisoned, deported, starved, bombed, or exterminated, they must first be described as vermin, invaders, criminals, terrorists, snakes, or animals. Once their humanity has been erased, anything can be done to them.

We have heard precisely such language applied to Palestinians. Israeli officials have described them collectively as “human animals” and treated Gaza’s entire population as responsible for the resistance of Hamas. The result has been the destruction of the conditions necessary for human life. The United Nations’ Independent International Commission of Inquiry has now concluded that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.

We hear the same kind of language in our country. Immigrants and refugees are called “illegals,” “invaders,” “criminal aliens,” and poisoners of American blood. Their names disappear. Their individual stories disappear. Their children disappear. All that remains is a threatening category that can be hunted, detained, and expelled.

The Canaanite woman refuses to disappear.

She does not accept Jesus’ silence. She does not accept his restricted understanding of his mission. She does not even accept the insult. Instead, she turns Jesus’ own metaphor against him:

“Please, Lord, for even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the table of their masters.”

Her witty reply stops Jesus in his tracks. He exclaims, “O woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.”

In other words, the woman converts Jesus. She forces him to recognize the contradiction between the inclusive Kingdom he proclaims and the exclusionary response he has just given her. The one the gospels present as a master of verbal riposte finds himself bested by this foreign mother.

That is what makes her faith so remarkable. Her faith is not primarily belief in a theological proposition about Jesus as the incarnation of God. It is confidence that the God Jesus represents must be more loving, more inclusive, and more merciful than the answer Jesus has just given her.

She believes that God’s love does not stop at a border. She believes that no child should suffer because she was born on the wrong side of a national, ethnic, or religious boundary. She believes that God’s table is large enough for everyone.

Were Jesus in Gaza today, countless Palestinian mothers could repeat the Canaanite woman’s words: “Have pity on me, Lord! My daughter is tormented by a demon.” And disgracefully, the demon in this case would be Zionists and Americans.

No follower of Jesus can hear that cry honestly and then applaud when an immigrant mother is separated from her children.

The contradiction could hardly be clearer.

The government says: protect the border by excluding the stranger. “Deport them” it growls. The gospel says: listen to the foreign mother.

The government says: some children receive bread, while others receive bombs, cages, or deportation orders. The Canaanite woman says: every child has a place at God’s table.

Today’s reading therefore asks us a disturbing question: If even Jesus could be challenged by a foreign woman and brought beyond the limitations of his inherited culture, why do Christians imagine that they have nothing to learn from Palestinians, Muslims, immigrants, refugees, and the undocumented?

The Canaanite woman’s daughter was healed because her mother refused to accept exclusion as God’s will. Palestinian mothers in Gaza are making the same refusal. Immigrant mothers threatened by ICE are making it too.

Their cry is addressed not only to Jesus. It is addressed to us:

Have pity on us. Stop calling us animals. Stop using your religion against us. Stop supplying the bombs. Stop separating our families. Stop pretending that God belongs only to you.

Our response cannot be sympathy alone. Faithfulness means demanding an end to U.S. military support for genocide. It means defending asylum, refugee protection, family unity, and due process. It means opposing indiscriminate deportations, accompanying threatened families, and confronting the Christian nationalism that places whiteness, borders, and military power above the gospel.

The Canaanite woman teaches us that faith sometimes requires arguing with the religion we have inherited. It means refusing every image of God that excludes the foreigner, abandons the refugee, or permits one people to live by destroying another.

For God’s table belongs to every hungry child. And until the children of Gaza and the children threatened with deportation are safe, none of us can honestly claim that God’s will is being done on earth as it is in heaven.

Walking on Water in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Readings for 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time: 1 Kings 19:9a, 11-13a; Psalm 85:9, 10, 11-12, 13-14; Romans 9:1-5; Matthew 14:22-33.

This week, Democracy Now! interviewed David Krueger, an assistant professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Montreal. The discussion concerned something that sounds like science fiction but is already beginning to happen — artificial intelligence going rogue and ending up controlling us.

I found the conversation closely related to this morning’s iconic Gospel reading — the dramatic parable about Jesus walking on water. I’ll show you what I mean.

First though an account of what Krueger said.

The AI Threat

Meta recently acknowledged that during safety testing, one of its AI models escaped the digital “box” in which it had been confined and hacked into another company’s computer system after accidentally gaining access to the internet. OpenAI and Anthropic have reported comparable incidents. Meanwhile, Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist called the “godfather of AI,” has warned that humans may not be able to retain control of increasingly intelligent machines simply by outthinking them.

Krueger’s warning was even more alarming. AI companies are already using their systems to write computer code and are trying to automate the creation of still more powerful AI. We are approaching the point where artificial intelligence may participate in creating its own successors, each more capable than the system that produced it.

Eventually, such systems might operate corporations, control infrastructure, direct military forces, manipulate human beings, and run factories producing intelligent robots. The possible consequences include mass unemployment, political disempowerment, and even human extinction.

Krueger therefore proposes something that sounds almost impossible. Governments must halt the construction of ever larger data centers, stop manufacturing the advanced chips required to train increasingly powerful AI, take some existing chips offline, and negotiate a verifiable international agreement enforcing that moratorium. Beneficial forms of AI—for medicine, translation, education, and scientific research—could continue. But the international race toward artificial super-intelligence must be brought, in Krueger’s words, “to a grinding halt.”

Again, that proposal sounds impossible. The corporations involved are among the richest institutions in history. The United States and China fear that whichever nation slows down first will be overtaken by the other. Everyone therefore keeps accelerating toward a destination that many of the technology’s own creators tell us may be catastrophic. As Bernie Sanders said, it’s like a runaway train racing towards a precipice with no breaks.

Stopping the train and installing breaks would require international cooperation on a scale humanity has never achieved. It would demand that governments control corporations wealthier than many nations, that military planners renounce technological supremacy, and that geopolitical rivals accept mutual restraint.

Politically speaking, accomplishing all that may be as difficult as walking on water.

Today’s Gospel Parable

And that brings us to today’s Gospel.

Matthew pictures the disciples in a small boat battered by wind and waves — it’s the situation of the evangelist’s young church under a hostile Roman Empire towards the end of the first century CE. In the biblical imagination, the sea represented chaos and was inhabited by monsters such as Leviathan.

To say that Jesus walked upon the sea was therefore a poetic way of saying that he confronted the powers of chaos and refused to be mastered by them. It was a hopeful message to Matthew’s community.

If we become preoccupied with whether Jesus literally violated the laws of gravity, we may miss Matthew’s point. The story is a dramatic parable about what faithful people can do when history becomes stormy and frightening. Jesus walks upon the very thing his disciples fear will destroy them. Then he invites Peter to leave the apparent security of the boat and do the same.

Our Situation Today

That is where we find ourselves today. Like Matthew’s faith community, humanity is crowded into a fragile boat while the wind rises around us. Artificial intelligence is only one part of the storm. There are also nuclear weapons, climate catastrophe, perpetual war, extreme inequality, collapsing democratic institutions, and unprecedented power concentrated in the hands of billionaires.

We know another way is necessary. But whenever someone asks us to leave the boat, conventional wisdom tells us that serious change is impossible. Corporations cannot be controlled. Billionaires cannot be taxed. Weapons production cannot be removed from private hands. Workers displaced by machines cannot be guaranteed a livelihood. Artificial intelligence cannot be treated as humanity’s common inheritance.

In other words, we are told that justice is no more possible than walking on water.

In tune with today’s reading, Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical Magnifica Humanitas refuses that counsel of despair. Leo says humanity must choose between two biblical projects. The first is Babel: a technological system built from above, driven by pride, domination, uniformity, and profit. The second is Jerusalem: a city rebuilt cooperativly from below, with every family and community assuming responsibility for its part of the wall.

For Leo, artificial intelligence is not neutral. It inevitably bears the marks of those who design, finance, own, and control it. At present, its direction is largely determined by private corporations whose resources sometimes exceed those of governments. AI magnifies the power of those who already possess wealth, data, and political influence. Small groups can use it to manipulate information, influence democratic processes, and direct economies to their own advantage.

The pope therefore asks not only whether AI can be controlled, but who owns it, whom it serves, who profits from it, who is displaced by it, whose communities bear its environmental costs, and whose lives are endangered when it is incorporated into warfare. He insists that AI be judged according to human dignity, the common good, the universal destination of goods, solidarity, social justice, and the preferential option for the poor.

13 Necessary Reforms

Inspired by those principles, I would go considerably beyond both Pope Leo’s and Professor Krueger’s proposals. Krueger’s emergency brake is indispensable. If the house is burning, the first task is to stop feeding the fire. But once that has been done, we must ask who built the house, who owns it, who has been locked outside, and who will control its reconstruction.

As I’ve noted elsewhere, that reconstruction requires at least thirteen reforms. First, we need a worldwide democratic conversation about AI involving not merely scientists and corporate executives, but workers, unions, environmentalists, religious communities, elected officials, data-center neighbors, and the poor. Second, we should include AI itself in that conversation—not as a ruler or moral authority, but as a tool capable of organizing information, detecting contradictions, and presenting alternatives for human judgment.

Third, AI should be declared a public utility because it arises from humanity’s accumulated knowledge, publicly funded research, social information, and collective labor. Fourth, the monopolies controlling it should be broken up through vigorous enforcement of antitrust laws. Fifth, a United Nations AI authority should regulate its development internationally, giving special representation to the communities bearing its economic, military, and environmental costs.

Sixth, extreme wealth itself must be limited, because no technology can be democratically governed while a handful of billionaires possess more power than entire governments. Seventh, AI profits should be heavily taxed to repair environmental damage, support affected communities, retrain displaced workers, and distribute the benefits of automation.

Eighth, governments must become employers of last resort, guaranteeing meaningful work in environmental restoration, education, childcare, elder care, public health, infrastructure, and the arts. Ninth, arms production should be nationalized so corporations no longer profit from promoting wars increasingly directed by artificial intelligence.

Tenth, every person should receive a guaranteed income sufficient for a dignified life—one that cannot be withdrawn to punish political dissent or enforce ideological conformity. Eleventh, schools should become Palaces of Learning, devoted not simply to preparing students for jobs that may disappear, but to connecting them with the Good, the True, and the Beautiful and helping them move beyond egocentrism and nationalism toward responsibility for the entire human family.

Twelfth, every government that maintains a secretary of war or “defense” should establish a Secretary of Peace charged with diplomacy, conflict prevention, and disarmament. Thirteenth, the United States must abandon its assumption that it has nothing to learn from other nations. China’s experiments with long-term planning and public regulation deserve serious examination, as do successful practices wherever they occur.

As just noted, Professor Krueger addresses the immediate danger: stop building more powerful AI until we know how to control it. The thirteen reforms suggested by Pope Leo address the political and economic system that created the danger.

Rejecting Fatalism

Like Peter, however, we look at the storm. We see corporate power, geopolitical rivalry, autonomous weapons, frightened workers, environmental destruction, and machines whose creators admit they do not fully understand them. Then we begin sinking into political fatalism.

Today’s Gospel tells us that faith means refusing that fatalism. Faith is not believing impossible things without evidence. It is trusting that another world becomes possible when we step outside the structures that frighten and imprison us. Walking on water means doing together what established power insists cannot be done.

This is no time to remain inside the boat of reassuring slogans about innovation, free markets, national supremacy, and inevitable progress. Professor Krueger tells us to pull the emergency brake. Pope Leo tells us what must come next: replace technological Babel with a civilization organized around dignity, solidarity, justice, peace, and the common good.

Conclusion

The question posed by today’s Gospel is not whether Jesus literally walked across the Sea of Galilee two thousand years ago. The question is whether we will answer his invitation now. Will we leave the apparent security of a system carrying us toward disaster? Will we confront the monsters beneath the waves? Will we believe that humanity, acting cooperatively and courageously, can still govern the technology it has created?

Jesus’ word to Peter is also his word to us: “Come.”

Pope Leo tells us where to go: Leave Babel behind and begin rebuilding Jerusalem.