October 2022 – About Things That Matter

Economic Systems: Notes on My Conversation with My 13 year-old Granddaughter

Last evening, my granddaughter, Eva (who’s about to celebrate her 14th birthday) and I had a remarkable hour-long conversation about economic systems. The topic was the focus of one of the classes she’s taking here in Spain, where the government is run by a coalition of socialists and rechristened communists (in a party called “Podemos” (“Yes, We Can!”). Whereas in the United States one can hardly use the word “socialism” without suffering opprobrium, I’ve learned that it’s the opposite here in Spain. Discussing socialism in clear and objective ways is de rigueur in school.,

Since Eva’s classes are in Spanish (and she’s only been here a couple of months), she had a hard time understanding the thrust of her teacher’s remarks and of observations by her fellow students.

So, Eva asked me about the differences between capitalism and socialism — a topic I’ve taught about and have tried to simplify or years and years.

She was very attentive as I shared what I know. Afterwards, we promised to continue the discussion. And to that end, I made up the following notes on the similarities and differences between capitalism, socialism, mixed economies, Marxism, communism, and fascism. I promised Eva that if she just understood and memorized what appears below in bold, she’d be streets ahead of most college students (and many professors!).

I sent her the notes with the following message:

Dearest Eva,

Really enjoyed our discussion last evening. It drove me to compose the attached summary for you. Please study it. Bring your questions the next time we get together for a chat. Learn as much of it as you can. THERE WILL BE A QUIZ! I’ll expect ready answers to my questions.

Love,

Baba

Economic Systems

Key Terms

Means of production = what produces consumer goods, viz., land, mines, forests, factories, oceans

Markets: Places where goods are sold and bought

Free Markets: No regulation. Anything (including people) can be bought and sold

Open Markets: Anyone can be a buyer or seller regardless of age or other restrictions

Earnings: Profit, income, wages. . ..

Capitalism

(An Economic System comprising the following elements)

1.Private ownership of the means of production

2. Free and open markets

3. Unlimited earnings

[In its pure form, this type of “free market capitalism” exists only in the illegal black market, where the Mafia, for example, sells anything (or anyone) without regulation or paying taxes. Note also that the three points indicated above summarize the ENTIRE economic program of the U.S. Republican Party that always seeks PRIVATIZATION, DEREGULATION OF MARKETS, AND LOWER TAXES.]

Socialism

(The opposite of capitalism. It is an economic system comprising the following elements)

Public ownership of the means of production
Controlled or regulated markets
Capped or otherwise limited earnings (e.g., by income taxes).

[In its pure form, socialism does not and never has existed. That’s because ALL economies represent mixtures of capitalism and socialism. That is, they are “mixed economies.” The question is, “mixed in favor or whom — the rich or the poor?”]

III

Mixed Economies

(Economic systems embodying some elements of free market capitalism and some of socialism featuring the following elements)

Private ownership of some enterprises and public ownership of others [e.g., in the U.S. the government (i.e., the public through their elected representatives) is the country’s biggest landowner (through its national park system); it also owns the U.S. postal system, and the rail system. In many other “capitalist” countries, governments also own electrical grids, energy sources (such as oil), water supplies, and transportation systems (like airlines).
Some free and open markets and some that are regulated. [For instance, in the U.S., regulations insist that minors cannot buy tobacco products or alcoholic drinks. Restaurants must maintain standards of cleanliness or risk being closed by government authorities. The same with food factories.]
Limited earnings usually by a “progressive” income tax (meaning that those with larger incomes pay in taxes a higher percentage of their income).

Economies can be mixed in favor of entrepreneurs as in the United States (offering them government subsidies, tax breaks, and deregulation) or in favor of workers as for example in Cuba or China (offering them free healthcare, education, subsidized food and housing, etc.)

Marxism

(The philosophy of Karl Marx, who was a socialist and a communist — see below.) His analysis held that

Capitalism necessarily exploits workers and the environment [“Necessarily” because the market system has workers competing with one another for scarce jobs. They therefore bid one another down as they seek employment until they end up working for the lowest wage possible. Also, few entrepreneurs seeking to maximize profits will ever voluntarily add costs to their production by protecting the environment (e.g., by adding scrubbers to their smokestacks or filters cleansing any effluents pouring into nearby rivers). Those who do protect the environment voluntarily drive up their costs of production and will be undersold and driven out of business by competitors lacking environmental consciences.]
The workers will inevitably rebel against such exploitation, replacing capitalism with socialism.
Socialism will eventually evolve into communism.

Communism

(A vision of the future embraced by some socialists.) All communists are socialists; some socialists are communists, most are Marxists who envision a future with

No classes (rich or poor)
No state (because they see the state as enforcing dictatorships – either the “dictatorship of the capitalists” (whereby a small body on boards of directors decide unilaterally on what is produced, where it is produced, and what to do with the profits) or the “dictatorship of the proletariat” (Marx’s term for the working class). Under the envisioned proletariat’s dictatorship, workers, e.g., through their labor unions, and as co-op owners of the means of production decide what to produce, where to produce it, and what to do with the profits.
Abundance for all

Fascism

Police state capitalism. It is the form capitalism (or more accurately an economy mixed in favor of entrepreneurs rather than workers) tends to assume when it is threatened by socialist movements or by other malfunctions such as falling profits, widespread unemployment, high inflation, etc. It is:

Capitalism in crisis
Enforced on workers by police and military forces
Blaming “the usual suspects” for capitalism’s malfunctions (e.g., Jews, Muslims, terrorists, socialists, labor unions, communists, immigrants, asylum seekers, non-whites, women, the disabled . . ..)

Remember: THERE WILL BE A TEST!!

Report from Spain: I Meet Simon the Street Busker

Since coming to Spain, I’ve made it my business to improve my Spanish. I recently met a very interesting and unlikely friend who’s helping me with that. Let me tell you about him.

But first a word about my Spanish.

I started learning it in 1985 in Nicaragua where I spent six weeks of study at a language school called Casa Nicaraguense de Español. The point there was to spend the mornings in class and the afternoons learning about the Revolution that was then celebrating its sixth anniversary. It was my first experience of living in a revolutionary situation.

Getting some fluency in Spanish wasn’t so hard for me, since I already had studied Latin, French, Italian, and Portuguese. So I could get along.

Seven years later, Peggy and I did an intensive three-month Spanish course in San Jose, Costa Rica at a school set up there to equip evangelical missionaries from the States to learn enough Spanish to convert Tico Catholics to evangelical Protestants.

Both Peggy and I did well enough in our courses for us to participate in a semester-long workshop on liberation theology in a think tank in San Jose called the Departamento Ecumenico de Investigaciones (DEI). We were the first North American “invited researchers” allowed into those hallowed halls where everyone was suspicious of Yankees. (I remember being told about worries that I might be CIA!)

But while Peggy’s Spanish has since taken off because of her work with Spanish-speaking immigrants and refugees, mine has remained where it was twenty years ago.

So, now that we’re in Spain long term, I find myself scrambling to get back on top of Español. To that end, I enrolled for ten hours of conversation with language teachers at a school just minutes away from our apartment in Granada’s picturesque Albaicin barrio. My intention was not just to improve my Spanish, but to learn about Spanish history. I was especially interested in knowing about the years when the fascist caudillo, Francisco Franco ruled the country (1939-’75). My four language teachers at the local school were happy enough to help me with that project.

I learned not only about Franco and how he came to power, but also about Spain’s current government which happens to be run by two left-wing parties, the socialist Spanish Workers’ Party, and a rechristened Communist party called Podemos (“Yes, we can!”). The country’s president is the socialist leader, Pedro Sanchez. But its most popular politician is the Podemos politician (and communist) Yolanda Diaz who is Spain’s Second Deputy Prime Minister.

All of that was fine. I really enjoyed conversations with the teachers just mentioned. But as my daughter, Maggie, said, “Why are you paying $50 an hour for conversations, when you could have the same experience for free with any elderly person sitting on a park bench down in the Plaza Larga?”

I had to admit she had a point. So, just recently I decided to locate such a person. I went down to the local Senior Center and struck up a conversation with a woman there. Her name was Carla. And she was very kind. However, she wasn’t really interested in conversational exchange. She just wanted someone to complain to about how terrible her life had become. The “conversation” was all one-way. On top of that, she spoke so quickly and with such dialect that I only understood about 20% of her complaints.

I decided to seek conversation elsewhere.

So, I approached an interesting looking busker playing at the entrance to the Plaza Larga which around here resembles an outdoor living room where locals gather at the many outdoor cafes and bars for cappuccinos and charlas.

The man’s name is Simon. He’s 60 years old and hasn’t a spare pound on his 5’3” frame. He wears a black tee, and at first peers out at you suspiciously from serious brown eyes framed with long and scraggly gray hair.

After I introduced myself and explained my language project, Simon warmed up and agreed to share a café con leche now and then and talk. He wasn’t interested in getting paid. “Just coffee,” he said.

Turns out that Simon is Chilean, living here for the last fifteen years without papers or passport. He plays a quietly thoughtful guitar.

I’d describe Simon as an old hippie. Looking out at the world, he sees a madhouse that he wants no part of. He’s discovered that he can live by singing and nothing other than his faith that Life will provide him with whatever he needs. It always does, he says. His busking brings him an income of about ten euros a day, sometimes a bit more. And that’s all he needs.

Simon tells me that he lives in a simple house in San Miguel Arriba, a leisurely half-hour ‘s uphill walk from the Plaza Larga. At home, he cooks the vegetables he purchases at his local market on a butane stove. He defecates in a bag and disposes of his personal waste “more ecologically,” he said than the rest of us. It’s important, he says, to take care of his health, because he has no medical insurance.

Simon’s mother died when he was very young. So, he was raised by his father who was an automobile mechanic usually paid in kind by his customers. His dad was an anarchist who always kept a statue of La Virgen prominently displayed in the house.

Simon was schooled by the Jesuits in Chile and went as far as his freshman year at a private university, where he studied special education for children suffering from dyslexia and other developmental problems. He left school though to become an artisan working in metal and wood.

He took up with a woman he lived with for several years, fathering three children (ages 15 to 8) none of which (“sadly,” he says) he ever sees.

Simon is interested in theology and was amused by the fact that I had been a priest. The Jesuits, he said, taught him well and set him on a spiritual path that he’s followed ever since. It has led him to Shamanism and the Psycho-magic of the Chilean artist and filmmaker, Alexander Jodorowsky. Psycho-magic allows practitioners to heal and even perform operations using nothing but their imaginations.

Simon now finds himself studying Tarot – as a fallback, he laughed, and source of income should he somehow become unable to busk any longer.

I thoroughly enjoyed my first conversation with Simon. On parting we agreed that we are somehow kindred spirits, and both look forward to future conversations.

Over his protests, I gave him ten euros anyway.

Liberation Theology: the Answer to Tom Paine’s Prayers?

A recent OpEdNews article entitled “Jesus for the Left, Jesus for the Right” adopted the following lead, “The fact that the religious left and the religious right can both use the Bible to back up their opposing agendas shows us that the Bible is meaningless.”

I found the essay interesting, especially since it quotes me as a liberation theologian advocating a “Jesus for the left” position that (in my brother-author’s opinion) is no more well-founded than the “Jesus for the right” view. Both are simply matters of bias, he held. Each side merely chooses biblical texts that support its prejudices while ignoring problematic ones that contradict them. The left likes socialism and selects accordingly. The right opposes socialism and does the same thing.

As his remedy, my dialog partner argued for:

Reason not the Bible
Deism not religion
Thomas Paine not Jesus

This Article

What follows here attempts a largely appreciative response to my friend’s argument. In fact, I and most liberation theologians and biblical scholars agree with Paine’s critique of pre-Enlightenment religions founded on the naïve approaches to the Bible enumerated in the article under review.

Nonetheless, I found my friend’s critique did not go far enough. His equation of Jesus- for-the-left with Jesus-for-the-right remains mired in Thomas Paine’s pre-modern approach to biblical texts.

I wish it had gone further.

I mean my friend’s piece ignored the fact that “Jesus for the left” theology takes seriously relevant discoveries in archeology, history, ancient languages, and in texts like the Dead Sea Scrolls. It wrestles with developments in literary analysis and critical studies involving recognition of diverse literary forms. It does the detective work of redaction criticism that traces down the historical and political reasons for editors’ changes in scrolls over centuries of revision with its additions, omissions, contradictions, and errors.

In other words, Jesus-for-the-left scholarship is founded on scientific method and advances unknown to Thomas Paine and other sons and daughters of the Enlightenment. Unfortunately, they are also largely ignored by Jesus-for-the-right advocates who as a result remain vulnerable to the criticisms of Paine and my brother author.

Without getting too far into the weeds of modern biblical scholarship, let me show what I mean by first expressing appreciation for Paine’s critique of religion, by secondly illustrating the advances in biblical science since Paine, and thirdly by reflecting on liberation theology as a politically powerful alternative to Paine’s 18^th century Deism.

Paine’s Criticism

A great deal of Thomas Paine’s criticism of traditional religion as understood before the Enlightenment was spot on. That approach to the Bible was unscientific. It understood the Bible as a single book inspired by a single author (viz., God). Before the advent of modern biblical scholarship, the Bible’s interpreters tended to read texts literally as though they were all infallible statements of historical fact. This led to the inanities and contradictions Paine struggled against and which my dialog partner rightly lampooned.

So, as a seeker of truth, Paine could write with reason:

“I do not believe in the creed professed by … any church that I know of . . . All national institutions of churches . . . appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind and monopolize power and profit. . . Whenever we read the obscene stories . . . with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind. . .The Bible and the Testament are impositions upon the world. . . The fall of man, the account of Jesus Christ being the Son of God, and of his dying to appease the wrath of God, and of salvation, by that strange means, are all fabulous inventions, dishonorable to the wisdom and power of the Almighty.”

Harsh words, no?

However, I don’t know a single liberation theologian who would argue with Paine’s criticism. In fact, it is a principal purpose of liberation theology to free humans from what Paine rightly calls the terror and enslavement of religious forms meant to consolidate the power and profit of the professionally religious. Liberation scholars do so by basing their approach to the Bible on the discoveries of modern scientific scholarship.

Paine would have welcomed both their commitment to science and the revolutionary implications of their work.

Biblical Science

The discoveries in question are myriad and complex.

At the simplest level though, they tell us that what we call “The Bible” (The Book) is not a book at all, but a collection of books – an entire library written by different authors at different times, under vastly different circumstances, and for different and often contradictory purposes involving what we call today “class struggle.” No wonder then that we often find an upper-class God supporting the royal classes with their debaucheries, exploitation of the poor, and bloody wars all fought (as they are today) in the name of their deity.

All of that becomes even more complicated when we realize most of the literary forms within the Bible are far from history as we understand it. Yes, there are “Annals of Kings” (like Saul, David, and Solomon). But those represent the work of court historians whose job was to glorify their employers, not to tell the truth; all of them must therefore be taken with a grain of salt.

But besides such “histories” the Bible also contains myth, legend, debate, and fiction. There are letters. There are ancient laws that seem superstitious and ludicrous to moderns. There is poetry and song. There are birth stories and miracle accounts that all follow predetermined patterns. There are prophetic texts and wisdom literature including proverbs, jokes, and plays on words. And then there’s that strange literary form called “apocalypse” which, scholars tell us, was a form of resistance literature written in code during times of foreign occupation and oppression. If all of these are read as history, as statements of fact, or as somehow predicting the future, it’s easy to see how misunderstandings result.

What’s more, virtually all biblical scholars (even the most politically conservative like Josef Ratzinger, aka Benedict XVI) tell us that the Bible’s basic story is that of the formation of the Jewish people. And that account, the scholars say, begins not in Eden, but in Egypt and the deliverance of slaves from bondage there. It’s a story of liberation. All the rest is commentary.

The rest is also an account of the struggle between the poor and oppressed on the one hand against the royalty, generals, priests, and scribes on the other who consistently tried to wrest away from the poor a God the privileged wanted to support the elites’ status quo. It was a struggle between the establishment and the prophets who defended the poor as God’s favorites. What we find in the Bible then is a “battle of gods,” a kind of theogony.

According to the scholars I’m referring to, Jesus appeared in the Jewish prophetic tradition. He was a poor man himself – a prophet, a mystic, a storyteller, a healer, a social critic, an opponent of oppression by priests, kings, and emperors. And the one certain thing we know about him was that he offended the Establishment (Rome and its temple and court collaborators) to such an extent that they arrested, tortured, and killed him. Significantly, they used a form of execution reserved for rebels, revolutionaries, and terrorists.

Yes, Jesus was on the side of the poor and oppressed. But close examination of texts shows that even the evangelists (Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John) often altered the Master’s radical pronouncements to suit their own more conservative purposes. Scholars like those in the famous Jesus Seminar have developed criteria for (tentatively) separating the wheat of Jesus’ own words from the chaff of his editors. Liberation theologians avail themselves of such scholarship.

Alternative to Deism

So, if it’s all so complicated, why not just pitch it all in favor of Paine’s reason and Deism which conceptualizes God as the Great Watchmaker in the sky who set the world spinning according to its own rules and hasn’t been heard from since? Why not just reason everything out abstractly?

To my mind, the answer is because we are human beings. And humans need stories. Perhaps some, like my dialog partner find abstract reason and an even more abstract concept of God more inspiring and helpful. If so, good on them.

But I repeat: most of the rest of us need stories. In fact, many like Nesrine Malik hold that with everything falling apart in our world, we need more not fewer stories.

My reply is that we already have the stories we need. And the ones found in the Bible are shared across the western world and by Islam. We all know those tales. They can bring us together and shed a penetrating transcendent light on issues that plague our world just as they did those of Jews living under foreign imperialism – including Jesus and the early Christians under Rome.

When those issues are confronted in the face of the liberating God of the Exodus or of Jesus and his pronouncements about God’s Kingdom, they can generate the power to move people to revolutionary action.

The experience inspired by liberation theology in Latin America during ‘70s and ‘80s is proof enough of that. Without liberation theology one cannot explain the Nicaraguan revolution, nor similar movements in El Salvador, Brazil, or Argentina. One cannot explain the pink tide that subsequently swept all of Latin America including the Bolivarian Revolution of Hugo Chavez.

What I’m saying is that liberation theology provides a scientifically based revolutionary potential that Tom Paine would have admired.

(However, it must also be acknowledged that without liberation theology, one cannot explain the rise of the religious right in America and elsewhere in the world. Its Jesus-for-the-right was instrumentalized for reactionary purposes by the Reagan administration precisely to combat liberation theology which was seen by the CIA and State Department as a threat to U.S. national security.

That is, besides inspiring social activism, liberation theology evoked the exact type of persecution and martyrdom suffered by the early church under Rome. Such parallels say a great deal about liberation theology’s authenticity.)

Conclusion

I hope it is evident from the foregoing that I very much respect what my friend wrote in “Jesus for the Left, Jesus for the Right”. However, I worry about its call to surrender religion and spirituality to right-wing forces. To my mind, there is no more powerful or important ground to defend.

Like the Constitution and American history, spirituality has always been and remains contested terrain. The fact that the left and right have differing interpretations and narratives by no means proves anything about “meaninglessness.”

In fact, it’s quite the opposite. The struggle over history’s versions, over the Constitution’s interpretations, and especially over biblical texts only serves to illustrate their importance and the need to approach them with the scientific spirit of Thomas Paine.

Had he been exposed to modern biblical science, I believe Paine would have embraced liberation theology. He may have seen it as his counterpart, Noam Chomsky does in the film clip at the head of this essay. Paine may even have accepted liberation theology as the answer to his prayers.

How U.S. Capitalism Works: House Painters That Cover the Earth

“I heard you paint houses.”

“Yes, sir, I do. I also do my own carpentry.”

Those were among the first words exchanged between Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) and his “house painter,” Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) in Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman.”

Of course, in the Mob’s parlance, “painting houses” refers to the blood splashed on walls when hitmen like Frank Sheeran do their work. “Carpentry” refers to getting rid of the resulting corpses. Sheeran does both.

I was reminded of “The Irishman” recently, when Antony Blinken all but admitted that the United States was responsible for the terrorist attack that (against international law) destroyed civilian infrastructure represented by Nord Stream pipelines One and Two.

Blinken said the attack presented America with a “tremendous” business opportunity – to sell natural gas to Europe.

His remarks made me realize first that the U.S. is in fact the most active “house painter” and “carpenter” in the world. Like the Sherwin-Williams’ claim, it “covers the earth” – with hitman efficiency. It gets rid of bodies by just not counting them — or at least by vastly undercounting them.

Think about the paint spilled.

“America” is responsible for virtually ALL the wars waged on the planet since WWII: Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ethiopia, Sudan, Ukraine. . . That’s the short list. And those wars have taken millions of lives – turned walls bloodred across the globe.

Remember, it’s not China that started and funded those conflicts. Neither is it Russia. It’s the United States.

But that’s not the end of the “Irishman” connections. Think about the logic behind the Nord Stream attacks. It’s how gangsters operate. It’s what “our” government does. It’s what capitalists do routinely instead of competing according to free market theory.

In fact, few of the most powerful among them seem to even like “natural” marketplace dynamics where business concerns succeed by producing a better product or service. No, they prefer to adopt mob tactics and simply whack their competitors. They deconstruct their rivals’ infrastructure.

Do you remember this scene from “The Irishman?” It’s where “Whispers” (“not that Whispers; the other one”) asks Frank Sheeran to do what’s necessary to put a competitor’s laundry business out of commission. Here’s the exchange:

Note the similarities between Whispers’ request and Blinken’s intimations about U.S. involvement in Nord Streams’ destructions.

Like Blinken, Whispers is a business front man. He’s financing an Atlantic City laundry service that’s making money hand over fist.

Face it: Blinken is also a front man for oil, gas, and arms industry concerns.

However, both men have powerful competitors. Whispers’ challenger calls itself Cadillac Linen. It’s located in Delaware. It’s underselling Whispers’ business and threatening to take away its customers.

That’s like Russia and China for Blinken. They’re both outcompeting the United States in energy and manufacturing. That has Blinken, Wall Street, and powerful oil and gas concerns exactly in Whispers’ position. As they keep insisting, they’re “more than a little concerned.”

In both cases, something must be done. But what? Whispers’ could lower his prices and upgrade his product to better compete. According to capitalist theory, that’s the way to win back his hotel and restaurant clientele now seeking lower costs and superior service with Cadillac Linen.

For his part, Blinken could simply recognize that Russia and China now enjoy overwhelming logistical benefits. They’re both much closer than the U.S. to the main buyers of their products.Their shipping costs are therefore lower. There’s nothing nefarious about that. Capitalist theory calls it “comparative advantage.”

Additionally, with its higher “social wages” (i.e., government subsidies in areas of food, rent, healthcare, entertainment, education, etc.) China can easily outcompete America with lower wages for its workers.

Under its present form of capitalism (with all but non-existent “social wages”) the U.S. simply can’t keep up. To get back in the game, Blinken’s handlers could decide to match China’s social programs to compensate for lower wages. They could arrange for workers to have nationalized health care and free college tuition. They could institute nationwide rent control and stop treating food and medicine as commodities instead of as human rights.

Alternatively, and according to capitalist theory, they could simply accept the fact that they can’t compete, back out of the relevant markets and seek prosperity elsewhere.

That’s the way the system’s supposed to work.

But no. Both Whispers and Blinken instead choose bombing over free market competition. Whispers wants Sheeran to do to Cadillac what he and the U.S. army did to Berlin during World War II. He wants him to destroy his competitors absolutely.

Blinken evidently chose something similar relative to Russia’s Nord Stream I and II. All fingers point to U.S. involvement in the pipelines’ destruction. After all, “Dark Brandon” Biden had threatened to do the deed. Additionally, more than any other suspects, America had the motivation and capacity for performing the task in question. As Blinken’s words indicate, Wall Street, and U.S. energy concerns, and America itself benefit most from the destruction of Nord Stream I and II. As Blinken admits, the destruction of Russia’s property is “tremendous” for America.

It’s hard to believe the United States wasn’t responsible.

In their recent co-authored book, The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power, Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad compare the United States to the Mafia. Their identification is more than apt. Like the Godfather, U.S. mobsters demand that everyone bend the knee or else. Their answer to most problems of market competition involves threats, sanctions, guns, and bombs – almost never lower prices, product improvement, increased social wages, or diplomacy. Instead, in the form of death squads, hitmen like Frank Sheeran, and lethal drones, they continue to “cover the earth” with red just like the Sherwin-Williams ad says.

China especially is adopting a different tack. And if it can avoid being provoked into responding in kind to American Mafia tactics, it will probably come out on top.

China’s just better at capitalist dynamics than the U.S. or E.U.

Rediscovering Mary Magdalen but Losing the Historical Jesus: Clysta Kinstler’s “The Moon under Her Feet”

Everybody loves Mary Magdalen. That’s true for me especially.

As I’ve shown in previous articles (e.g., here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) I’m intrigued by recent attempts by Magdalene scholars like Lynn Picknett to restore the Magdalene (whatever the term might mean) to the status accorded her in the Gnostic Gospels as “the apostle of apostles.”

Traditionally identified by a hostile Christians patriarchy as a forgiven, humiliated, and groveling former prostitute, the Magdalene of the new scholarship would even further rehabilitate her into an Egyptian priestess and quasi-goddess.

That’s the case with Clysta Kinstler’s 1989 novel, The Moon under Her Feet. The book was recently recommended to me by a dear friend and fellow Magdalene admirer. The Moon was reviewed early on in the New York Times. It is beautifully written. Its endnotes alone are worth the book’s purchase. They reveal the author’s careful research and startling ability to make overlooked connections between relevant scholarly pursuits including history, mythology, and biblical interpretation.

Nevertheless, as a liberation theologian, I must admit my disappointment with Kinstler’s tale. It indeed provides intriguing insights about main character, the Magdalene. But as for her ultimate lover, Yeshua of Nazareth, Kinstler’s novel falls prey to the trap set by the Emperor Constantine in the 4^th century.

The trap transforms Yeshua from a prophetic working-class revolutionary into a socially harmless Egyptian “dying and rising” god with little relevance to the world he sought to replace – one dominated then and now by imperialism, oppression, and unnecessary poverty all obscured by a justifying set of myths supportive of ruling classes and their self-serving social order.

Let me show you what I mean by first describing Mary Magdalen as portrayed in The Moon under Her Feet, second by doing the same for Yeshua her ultimate consort, and third by contrasting that figure of Yeshua with his portrayal in liberation theology. My conclusion will underline the importance of making such contrast.

The Moon and the Magdalen

Throughout The Moon under Her Feet, its main character, Mari Anath, gradually assumes her role as head of the Jerusalem Temple’s priesthood of women. According to Kinstler’s account, these holy women still represented an essential part of the Jewish tradition. “Mari” was an extremely popular name in first century Palestine. “Anath” was the Hebrew equivalent of the Greek warrior-goddess, Athena. “Magdalene” signified the high priestess’ office. For Kinstler, the term actually meant “high priestess.”

The holy women in Magdalene’s cloister resided inside the Temple’s entrance, just beyond the location of the currency exchange services where the despised Roman denarius was traded for the ritually more acceptable Jewish shekel.

Mistrusted by the patriarchal Pharisees and Jewish high priests, the women within the Temple convent enjoyed the reverence of ordinary Jews who still honored Ashera, the traditional but officially suppressed spouse of Yahweh. From Israel’s earliest origins, peasants, craftspeople, fishermen, the poor, beggars, and social outcasts insisted on worshipping Ashera alongside Yahweh. In fact, their devotion meant that no king could enjoy popular support without the blessing of the High Priestess – without her anointing and union with her in a ritual marriage called Hieros Gamos.

Therein lies a major theme of The Moon under Her Feet. For as the high priestess, Mary the Magdalene had to negotiate marriage invitations from her first husband, Phillip the Herodian, and from his brother Herod Antipas. Philip sought Mary’s blessing on his tetrarch rule over his four Jewish provinces. The quest of his brother, Herod Antipas, was to validate his claim to a Goddess-blessed kingship of the Galilee, the region of Palestine where Yeshua was born.

Accordingly, the Magdalene joined Philip’s harem as a teenager thus confirming the legitimacy of his tetrarchy. Later, after securing an amicable divorce from Philip, Mary found herself the object of his brother’s quest for Goddess confirmation of his own reign over Galilee which his subjects were loath to recognize, since he was so obviously a mere puppet of Israel’s Roman occupiers.

To escape her fate, Mari Anath induces a near death experience in which she travels to the underworld and thereby achieves a vastly intensified spiritual enlightenment which subsequently serves her well as the consort of Yeshua. Her famous anointing of his feet with tears and precious ointment officially designates Yeshua as God’s Christos (messiah). The consummation of marriage with him represents the Hieros Gamos required of any valid king. Without the Magdalene, Jesus is no messiah. He is no king (Kinstler 260).

The Moon and Yeshua

Before assuming her duties as head priestess, Mari Anath’s role model was her namesake, Almah Mari. As reigning high priestess, Almah became the mother of Yeshua who precisely as her offspring, had been pre-designated to be Israel’s expected Messiah – its liberator from Roman domination.

“Almah Mari” meant “pure maiden,” or “virgin.” However, the latter term did not connote asexual abstinence, but independence from male claims to spousal ownership.

For the Magdalene, her mentor was the very incarnation of Isis-Ashera, “Queen of All the Worlds; Mistress of Heaven, Earth and Hell; Mother of all things; eternal Wisdom, Truth and Beauty; keeper and protectress of all who call upon” her (14, 148). Those titles reflected Almah Mari’s love for Egypt to which she (and her son) often returned for inspiration and study.

According to the Magdalene’s faith, Almah Mari’s son, Yeshua, followed the path of typical deities belonging to the Egyptian mystery cults so popular in Rome and its provinces during the first century of the common era. Characteristically, they were virgin born, descended to earth, lived there and taught a while, were sacrificially killed, journeyed through the underworld to conquer its forces of darkness, rose from the dead, and finally ascended to heaven. From there, they offered eternal life to devotees who participated in rituals where the god’s body was eaten in the form of bread and whose blood was drunk in the form of wine or ale (41, 73).

More specifically, the Magdalene understood Yeshua as the incarnation of Osiris and the very presence of Dumuzi, the oldest of the mystery cults’ dying and resurrected gods (306). According to the Magdalen’s mythically complex theology, Yeshua was his own father — the spouse of his mother impregnated by the Sacred King Sharon. [Soon afterwards, Sharon took his own life thus following the ritual prescribed for gods of the mystery cults in question (40).]

In Kinstler’s story, Yeshua was also the identical twin brother of Seth, whom Yeshua later renamed Judas Scarios (204). As Seth, Judas had won the heart of the Magdalene, fathered two children with her, and eventually married her as the last of her three husbands (following Philip Herod, and Yeshua himself).

Jesus in Liberation Theology

Rejecting such speculation and complex mythologies, liberation theology emphasizes what can be known of Jesus from history, archeology, written records, laws, and the predictable constants of class struggles across the centuries against imperialism and its exploitation.

It employs what Jesuit theologian Roger Haight calls the secular “principle of analogy.” It holds that “we cannot normally expect to have happened in the past what is thought or proven to be impossible in the present.” This means that liberation theology is committed to demythologizing the religious understandings that Kinstler’s tale takes so seriously. It recognizes them for what they were – ideologies justifying relationships of royal classes over disempowered subjects.

To Haight’s analogy principle about the past, I always add the corollary, “we can expect to have happened in the past what normally occurs in similar circumstances in the present.” This recognizes for instance that one can justifiably assume that imperially occupied and oppressed people in first century Palestine normally responded the way their counterparts do in the modern world: they harbored deep resentments, formed resistance movements, attacked their oppressors, and suffered the brutal consequences at the hands of merciless occupiers who despised the insurgents. Extensive Roman records show that this was indeed the case in first century Palestine.

From that perspective, the Yeshua of liberation theology emerges as one of innumerable miracle-workers in Palestine claiming to be the “messiah.” In context, that term could mean only one thing: restoration of Israel’s independence from its Roman imperial occupiers.

Like all such would-be Christs, Jesus was executed by the Romans who killed criminals like him using the method they reserved for insurgents – hanging on crosses publicly displayed to discourage others tempted to follow suit. After consumption by dogs and vultures, what was left of executed insurgents like Jesus probably found final disposal in a common grave.

However, what separated Jesus from others like him was a distinctive belief that soon after his execution emerged among his female disciples. Led by an obscure figure called Mary Magdalene, the women gradually persuaded doubtful male disciples that their Master had somehow returned to life.

The belief spread and caused Jesus’ followers to reassemble in communities that lived according to Jesus’ “communistic” ideals. They sold their surplus possessions, distributed the proceeds to the poor, and held everything else in common (Acts 2:42-47).

In other words, Jesus’ followers continued to embody what liberation theologians describe as the divine “preferential option for the poor.” Awareness of that option coincided with Israel’s own national beginnings. Those origins revealed the Hebrew God, Yahweh, as the champion of slaves in their resistance to Egyptian slavers.

For Israel, Yahweh was the enemy of everything Egyptian, including Egyptian gods and their accompanying mythologies, the culture’s royal families, and (of course) its temples with their priests and priestesses.

With all of this in mind, liberation theology is highly critical of understandings that emerged with the emperor Constantine in the 4^th century of the Common Era that transformed a working-class prophet into a Roman “mystery cult” God.

After Constantine, Jesus became interchangeable with those earlier-described dying and rising gods such as Osiris, Isis, and Mithra. To repeat, that’s pretty much what happened to Jesus. He became one of those gods – for Constantine and the Christian tradition he shaped – and now for Clysta Kinstler.

Conclusion

I remember reading somewhere that after Nicaea and its “definition” of Jesus’ identity as “fully God and fully man,” it became virtually impossible to distinguish Christian worship ceremonies (what became the “Mass”) from those honoring dying and rising gods such as Isis, Osiris, Mithra, or the Great Mother. I wondered how that was possible.

After reading The Moon under Her Feet, I find my question answered. I see how easily even a crucified peasant prophet like Yeshua – one said to have been executed and risen from the dead – could be transformed from a working-class hero to a harmless royal god.

Under Kinstler’s pen, the Master not only comes from the temple culture of which he was so critical, he even takes on royal appearance with “Hasmonean” features, reddish hair, and blue eyes that turned to hazel and then brown (146).

Yeshua ends up looking like this:

Meanwhile, contemporary forensic archeologists say Jesus probably looked like this:

In other words, by the process depicted in The Moon under Her Feet, the poor are once again robbed not only of a major hero, but of the God whose incarnation looks like them and champions their liberation and a world order structured in their favor.

Unanswered Prayers: God Is Not Our Errand Boy

Readings for 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Habakkuk 1: 2-3; 2:2-4; Psalm 95: 1-2, 6-7, 8-9; 2 Timothy 1: 6-8, 13-14; Luke 17: 5-10

This Sunday’s readings address the question of unanswered prayers and the frustration of those who look for evidence of God’s presence in the world but find none.

With that query hanging in the air, here are my “translations” of this week’s selections They represent a prayerful dialog between frustrated believers (like most of us) on the one hand and the Being some still call “God” on the other – with Yeshua’s own example and insight added at the end.

Please check out the actual texts here to see if I got the translations right. I’ll conclude with a few reflections of my own.

1.	Our Prayer

Habakkuk 1: 2-3; 2:2-4
  
 I’ve been praying
 Dear Mother, 
 For your Queen's Reign to come,
 For violence to cease
 For relief from our misery.
 Yet you seem deaf
 To my pleas.
 After all,
 Wars continue
 Violence increases
 Everyone’s at 
 Each other’s throat.
 What should I think?
  
2. God’s Response

 Only this:
 (And write it in stone!)
 My timetable,
 My order
 Is vastly different
 From yours.
 What’s invisible,
 What seems delay to you
 Is always 
 And perfectly timely for me.
 So, be patient
 Keep your commitment
 To my just order.
 My answer to prayer
 Is never late.
 It is omnipresent.
  
 3. Our Reply

Psalm 95: 1-2, 6-7, 8-9
  
 I have heard your response,
 Holy Mother.
 I’m thankful and happy
 For the reminder.
 Your words
 Are solid as rock.
 It’s true:
 You know far more
 Than us.
 You have never
 Let us down.
 I will therefore not ever
 Lose faith
 Against your 
 Proven fidelity.
  
 4. Light from Yeshua

2 Timothy 1: 6-8, 13-14
  
 Such words of response
 Are wise.
 They are the expression
 Of a Holy Spirit,
 Within us all.
 It can set
 The world ablaze
 With love.
 It is courageous
 And disciplined,
 It expresses the
 Strength of God.
 It enables us
 To endure even prison
 And hardships
 Of all kinds.
 It is the very Spirit
 Of Yeshua, the Christ.
  
 Luke 17: 5-10
  
 When Yeshua’s followers
 Prayed for stronger faith,
 He reminded them
 That even a little bit
 Can change
 Expectations profoundly.
 Never forget, he said,
 That you are not in charge;
 Love is.
 You are only Love’s servants.
 God is not
 Your errand boy
 Beholden to
 Culturally-shaped 
 Plans and needs.

My Own Reflections

With those readings in mind, i.e., when we allow the words of the Divine Mother to open our eyes and ears, when we listen to the prophets (her spokespersons), we see concrete manifestations of Goddess presence and siding with the poor everywhere. Right now, they’re evident, I think, in at least three areas, viz., in:

Nature Itself: Regardless of human efforts to obscure and deny the divine, its presence calls constantly to us in events so close to us and taken-for-granted that they’ve become invisible. I’m thinking about the sun, the ocean, trees, the moon, stars, wildflowers – and our own bodies whose intelligence performs unbelievable feats each moment of our lives.
Liberation Theology: This rediscovery of God’s preferential option for the poor has changed and is changing the world. One cannot explain the pink tide that swept Latin America during the 1970s, ‘80s, and 90s – not Brazil, Argentina, Nicaragua, Venezuela – without highlighting the inspiration provided by liberation theology. Neither can one explain the rebellion of the Muslim world against western imperialism without confronting Islam’s inherent liberating drive – again on behalf of the disenfranchised, impoverished, and imperialized.
Contemporary Social Movements: Think Occupy, Black Lives Matter, the Sunrise Movement, Yellow Vests, Standing Rock, the Green New Deal, and prophetic figures like (once again) Greta Thunberg, Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, and Pope Francis with his landmark climate encyclical Laudato si’. All these movements and figures stand on the side of the poor and are having their effect.

Conclusion

Martin Luther King once famously said that the moral arc of the universe is long, but that it bends towards justice. “Justice” in his vocabulary meant overcoming the laws and social structures crafted by the rich and powerful to keep the poor in their place. King (and Malcolm as well) was a practitioner of African American liberation theology. As such, he was gifted with eyes to see differently — to see the Judeo-Christian tradition as revealing a God on the side of the poor.

That’s what our Sunday liturgies of the word reveal consistently. This week is no exception. It invites us simply to open our eyes.