Month: February 2026

Donald Trump’s Nakedness, His STFU SOTU Speech

Readings for the Second Sunday of Lent: Genesis 12: 1-4a; Psalm 33: 4-5, 18-19, 20,22; 2 Timothy 1: 8b-10; Matthew 17: 1-9

The Gospel reading for this Second Sunday of Lent is about the “transfiguration” of Jesus.

It’s about how the primitive Christian community’s understanding of Jesus and his significance changed following their experience of what they came to call his “resurrection.”

After that experience, whatever it was, they came to see him clearly as the New Moses and the New Elijah. As such he would introduce a New Order that would embody liberation of society’s most marginalized (Moses) and outspoken confrontation against the given imperial order (Elijah).

Jesus himself called that New Order the Kingdom of God.

It is what the world would look like if God were king instead of Caesar.

That vision should take on new meaning for Americans in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s disgraceful State of the Union Message last Tuesday. It should even embolden the profane response STFU.

Trump’s Un-transfigured World

If you watched the speech, you know what I mean.

It seemed like the dying gasp of the ruling Septuagenarian and Octogenarian classes.

It was a flailing, lie-filled proclamation of a Golden Age that never existed and that never will be if we follow the path the failed braggart president celebrated.

It was the opposite of God’s Kingdom – a world with room for everyone.

I mean, Trump’s SOTU celebrated division, wealth and power, and a militarism while targeting the poorest people on our planet. He had the staggering nerve to tone-deafly call them what the Epstein Files are revealing the political class itself to be: lawless rapists, pedophiles, robbers, drug dealers, gang members and murderers. And Trump’s crowd are blackmailers besides.

Making those allegations, the president revealed his own nakedness and that of his mindless Maga colleagues who mindlessly jumped to their feet to applaud the beauty of the Emperor’s non-existent robes.

Yes, the Files, the coverups, the sweetheart deals for Epstein and Maxwell, the redactions, the months-long failures to disclose, and the reduction of Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice to the President’s private law firm are revealing everything.

The Emperor indeed has no clothes. He’s shamelessly parading around stark naked and tiny.

And reminiscent of the Hans Christian Anderson story, it’s the little children he’s imprisoning (with their bunny ears and Spiderman backpacks) who proclaim the emperor’s embarrassing nudity.

No clothes! Naked!  Tiny. Or as Joseph N. Welch put it to Senator Joseph McCarthy “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”,

Jesus’ Transfigured World

The tale of Jesus’ Transfiguration tells an opposite story.

It’s the story of a poor construction worker – a former immigrant, a prophetic teacher of unconventional wisdom, the death row inmate whom empire jailed, tortured and submitted to imperial capital punishment – whose life and teaching revealed a New Order that was shining and pure because it had room for everyone.

And in today’s reading, it’s his transformed clothes and the spiritual company he keeps that tell the story.

Matthew puts it this way: “His face shone like the sun and his clothes became white as light. And behold, Moses and Elijah appeared to them, conversing with him.”

That is, the one whose imperialized class status would eventually reduce him to nakedness on Mt. Calvary is perceived by his first followers as magnificently clothed.

Even more, Matthew’s account of Jesus’ Transfiguration has him conversing with Moses and Elijah.

Moses, of course, is the great liberator of the enslaved and poor.

Elijah was the courageous prophet who not only spoke truth to power but resisted false gods who take the side of the rich and powerful rather than God’s truly chosen ones, the poor and oppressed.

Don’t Let the Democrats off the Hook

But none of this should let the Democrats off the hook just because some of them refused to attend the STFU SOTU affair. Don’t let them get away with just not being Trump.

It’s time for us to echo Zohran Mamdani, the most popular politician in the country.

In my novella, Against All Odds: How Zohran Mamdani Became President and Changed America Forever, I imagine a moment like this. Not because of special foresight, but because systems built on secrecy, oligarchy, militarism, and spectacle inevitably crack. In that story, hidden ledgers surface. Blackmail networks become visible. The machinery of power is exposed. The old guard responds the only way it knows how — with louder threats, more force, and louder applause.

Sound familiar?

But exposure alone is not liberation.

Which brings us back to the mountain of Transfiguration.

That scene depicted there is not mystical escapism. It is political theology. It declares that the authority of empire is provisional — that the true sovereignty belongs to the God who sides with slaves, captives, resident aliens, and the poor.

Luke makes the program explicit: “He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor… to proclaim liberty to captives… to set at liberty those who are oppressed.”

That’s a rival social order.

And if the imperial system is unraveling before our eyes — if its nakedness is becoming visible — then what must follow is not nostalgia or revenge, but reconstruction.

In Against All Odds, the answer to systemic collapse is not personality cult or partisan fury, but the institution of a Republic of Care. It is clarity. It is the articulation of a simple, material program centered on ordinary people’s lives. Among others, the items in such a program would include:

  • Affordability
  • Universal health care
  • Full employment
  • Higher wages
  • Free education through college
  • Environmental protection
  • Expanded voting rights
  • An end to oligarchic distortions like the Electoral College
  • Strict term limits in every branch of government
  • Drastic reductions in military spending.
  • No endless wars
  • Immigration reform rooted in dignity
  • The dismantling of structures whose primary function is coercion at home and abroad.

In liberationist terms, none of that is utopian dreaming. Mamdani’s election proved that. The reforms just listed are what happen when the needs of the poor become the criteria of policy.

Conclusion

Trump’s embarrassing speech was the voice of Caesar defending a crumbling temple.

The Transfiguration is the unveiling of another possibility altogether.

Empires grow louder when they weaken. They shout about enemies. They celebrate force. They promise greatness. That is what dying systems do.

But the biblical tradition suggests something else: when Pharaoh hardens his heart, liberation accelerates. When Ahab clings to power, Elijah’s voice sharpens. When Rome crucifies, resurrection faith spreads.

Lent invites us to see clearly — to recognize naked empire and to imagine, without apology, a transfigured order grounded in justice for the poor.

Our petite impotent emperor is exposed.

The question now is whether we have the courage to climb the mountain with Peter, James and John to see what comes next.

Lent, Empire, and the God We Worship

Readings for the first Sunday of Lent: Genesis 2: 7-9, 3: 1-7; Psalm 51: 3-6,12-13, 17; Romans 5: 12-19; Matthew 4: 1-11.

Today is the first Sunday of Lent. Its readings begin with the creation myth in Genesis. They conclude with the famous story of Jesus’ temptations in the desert.

But let me begin not in Eden or in the wilderness, but in Washington, Brussels, and Tel Aviv — and in the shadow places of our own national story.

We live in a country that represents roughly 4.5 percent of the world’s population yet assumes a decisive voice in nearly every corner of the globe. We maintain military installations across continents. We speak of “rules-based international order” while reserving to ourselves the authority to determine when rules apply.

The war in Ukraine grinds on amid NATO expansion despite promises to the contrary. Gaza has become a landscape of genocide even as our government supplies arms and diplomatic cover.

Regime-change interventions in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan have left instability that outlives the speeches that justified them. And at home, the Epstein scandal remains a symbol of elite circles that appear shielded from consequences that would crush ordinary people.

Whatever one’s political alignment, it is difficult to deny that we inhabit an imperial moment.

That is why the Gospel today matters. Because the final temptation Jesus faces is not about private morality. It is about his rejection of empire.

How Animals Became Human

But before we get to the desert, we must pass through Genesis. And Genesis is stranger than we usually allow. It’s a sacred myth about how the animals became human.

Nonetheless, we were taught — many of us in catechism classrooms that did not encourage too many questions — that this story explains how a perfect world fell apart because of disobedience. But biblical scholarship has long suggested something more subtle and more interesting. The story reads less like a fall from perfection and more like the painful emergence of moral consciousness.

God forms the human being from the soil — adamah — and breathes into it. The human is an earth creature animated by divine breath. The animals are already there. What distinguishes this creature is not biology but awareness.

The serpent does not tempt with gluttony. The fruit is “desirable for gaining wisdom.” The promise is that “you will be like gods, knowing good and evil.” The issue is not appetite; it is autonomy. It is the claim to define good and evil independently of the Giver of breath.

And here is where the text becomes theologically uncomfortable. The God portrayed in Genesis can sound petty and jealous. (In fact, as biblical scholars Mauro Biligno and Paul Wallis have suggested, the plural Elohim in today’s reading might not refer to God at all, but to “Powerful Ones” pretending to divine identity. But that’s another story.) In any case, the prohibition from on high appears arbitrary. The threat — “you shall die” — sounds disproportionate. If we read the story naïvely, we are left with a deity who seems insecure about competition.

Many Christians resolve that discomfort by refusing to wrestle with the text. We flatten it. We moralize it. We turn it into a children’s story about disobedience and punishment. That is the fundamentalism many of us were raised on — including in Catholic form — a fundamentalism that often ignores biblical scholarship and historical context in favor of simple certainty.

But the deeper issue in Genesis is not that God fears competition. It is that humans actually do become like God. In the end the Powerful Ones (Elohim) admit  “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil.” However, the moment the earth creature claims ultimate moral sovereignty, alienation follows. Shame. Blame. Fear. Violence. The story is mythic, but it describes something real: despite God-like powers, when creatures enthrone themselves as divine, relationships fracture.

The serpent’s whisper — “you will be like gods” — does not remain in the garden. It scales upward into civilizations.

Empires are what happen when that whisper becomes policy.

Jesus’ Temptations in the Desert

Which brings us to the desert. Matthew tells us that Jesus is led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted. The temptations escalate. First, appetite: turn stones into bread. Reduce humanity to consumption. Then spectacle: throw yourself from the temple and force divine validation. Manipulate religion to secure legitimacy. And finally, the decisive offer: all the kingdoms of the world and their magnificence — in exchange for worship.

This is the climax. Empire is offered as destiny.

And here the contrast with Genesis becomes luminous. The first humans grasp at godlike autonomy. Jesus refuses it. He refuses to reduce life to bread. He refuses to weaponize God. And he refuses political domination secured by kneeling before a lesser power.

“The Lord your God shall you worship, and him alone shall you serve.”

That sentence is not pious abstraction. It is a political declaration. It means that no nation, no military alliance, no economic system, no leader can claim ultimate allegiance. It means that empire — however benevolent it imagines itself — is not God.

This is precisely where much contemporary Christianity falters. Christian fundamentalism, whether Protestant or Catholic, often aligns itself enthusiastically with imperial power. It baptizes national projects. It equates military strength with divine blessing. It reads Scripture in a way that reinforces dominance rather than questions it. The same tradition that once rejected liberation theology for being “too political” now blesses drones, sanctions, and occupation without hesitation.

And yet the Gospel we read today shows Jesus rejecting the very thing many Christians defend.

He rejects empire as diabolical.

Paul & Psalms

Paul’s letter to the Romans reframes the story. Through one human being came sin — the pattern of grasping autonomy. Through another came obedience — the pattern of trust. The contrast is not between sexuality and purity, or rule-breaking and rule-keeping. It is between self-deification and worship.

Psalm 51’s cry — “Create in me a clean heart” — becomes, in this context, a plea for undivided allegiance. A clean heart is not one that never doubts. It is one that refuses to kneel before false gods.

Lenten Conclusion

Lent, then, is not about chocolate or minor self-denials. It is about allegiance. It is about whether we will continue participating in systems that assume the right to dominate the earth and dictate history — or whether we will align ourselves with the one who refused.

If Genesis tells the story of animals becoming human through moral awareness, the desert tells the story of a human refusing to become a god.

And that refusal leads to a cross, because empire does not tolerate rivals or dissent.

We begin Lent in a world intoxicated with power. The kingdoms are still on offer. They are offered to nations. They are offered to churches. They are offered to each of us in smaller ways — security in exchange for silence, comfort in exchange for complicity.

The question is not whether temptation exists. The question is before whom we will kneel.

Dust breathed upon by God does not need to become divine. It needs only to remain faithful.

And that, perhaps, is the most subversive act of all.

Returning to Rome: Redrawing My Map of God and the World

I am back in Rome — a city that once formed me more deeply than I knew at the time. This time Peggy and I will be here for three months visiting our diplomat son, his wife, and our three little granddaughters.

More than fifty years ago, as a young priest, I walked these same streets believing I stood near the center of the Christian world. Rome felt solid, ancient, authoritative. Theology here carried the weight of centuries. I absorbed its categories, its rhythms, its confidence. That was soon after Vatican II (1962-’65). I was only beginning to question the map I had inherited.

Now, decades later, I find myself returning not as a defender of that center nor as its adversary, but as someone who has been slowly reshaped by teachers, students, and experiences far from these stones. Being here again has stirred gratitude — and reflection. I see more clearly how much of my life has been an apprenticeship in learning to redraw the map I once took for granted.

Learning to Turn Things Over

To begin with, my teachers here in the Eternal City were dynamite in terms of creatively upsetting my theological and even political certainties. I think especially of Magnus Lohrer and Raphael Schulte at the Atheneum Anselmianum on Rome’s Aventine hill. That first year in Rome, lectures at the Anselmo were in Latin. Regardless, Lohrer and Schulte called all my categories into question. They had me seriously reading non-Catholic theological giants for the first time. I brought it all home to unending lunch and dinner debates with the fifteen or so young priests (who were also pursuing terminal degrees in Rome) at our Columban house on Corso Trieste 57.

But the deepest fissures in my theological and political certainties came after Rome – in Brazil, Nicaragua, Cuba, and especially in Costa Rica, where Peggy and I became fellows at the Departamento Ecumenico de Investigaciones, a liberation theology think tank. The center of it all was Franz Hinkelammert who became not only my teacher, but colleague and friend. As an economist and theologian, he adopted critical thinking as his own central category.

I remember telling him, somewhat playfully, that I thought I had figured out the method behind his approach to the discipline: he seemed always to take what passed as “common sense” and quietly invert it with exquisite historical,  philosophical, and theological insight. Markets are described as free. Economic growth is described as necessary. Sacrifice of the vulnerable is described as realistic. He would simply ask: who benefits? who suffers? what “god” is being served?

He smiled when I said that — a smile that felt less like approval and more like invitation. He was not urging me toward cynicism. He was urging me toward attentiveness.

Under his influence, I began to recognize how easily societies sanctify their own arrangements. The market can become providence. National security can become destiny. Even theology can become a cloak for power. What I once called realism I learned to approach more cautiously.

That habit of questioning did not make me certain. It made me slower to accept easy answers.

Learning to Relocate the Center

Another teacher, Enrique Dussel, unsettled me in a different way. I first met him in Brazil during a seminar specifically on liberation theology. The cream of the crop – theologians I had been reading for years – were there.

I still see Dussel at a whiteboard, sketching a world map from memory. He did not begin in Athens, as my education had. He began in Egypt. He traced the movement of civilizations across Asia. He lingered over China’s long intellectual and cultural history before Europe entered the frame at all.

“Wherever I lecture,” he would say, “people repeat the same historical story: ancient, medieval, modern.” Then he would perceptively add, “That story is not universal. It is European.” Leonardo da Vinci’s futuristic drawings were lifted straight from Chinese engineers.

I felt enlarged listening to him. The world was older and more intricate than the timeline I had inherited. Europe’s achievements remained real, but they were no longer singular or central in the way I had assumed.

After his lectures, I found myself trying to reproduce his map — not because I wished to argue, but because I wanted to see as he saw. His point was not so much to diminish Europe, as to free history from provincial boundaries.

That lesson stayed with me. Once you realize that a “center” may simply be a perspective, you become cautious about every center — political, economic, even theological.

Encounters in the Global South

My years of teaching in the United States and traveling in Latin America and other parts of the Global South deepened that reorientation. Theology in Brazil, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Cuba, and Mexico was not an abstract discipline. It was bound up with hunger, repression, resilience, hope.

Through thinkers like Pablo Richard and Elsa Tamez, I saw how scripture could sound different when read from below rather than from established centers of power. Through Rosemary Ruether, I came to see how deeply gendered our language about God and authority has been. Helio Gallardo showed how The United States’ regime change policies prevented human development throughout the Global South. Vandana Shiva widened my awareness of how economic systems scar both land and people in the name of progress. And Dom Hélder Câmara reminded me, in his gentle way, that charity without justice leaves underlying structures intact. He famously said, “‘When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.’

None of these encounters destroyed my faith. They complicated it. They forced me to acknowledge that what I had once regarded as neutral theology was often shaped by social location and power.

Over time, I began to describe myself not simply as Catholic, bus as belonging to the Church’s “loyal opposition.” I still claim that designation. I did not wish to abandon the Church. I owed it too much. But I could not ignore its entanglements with empire or its silences in the face of suffering.

I learned that loyalty without critique can drift toward idolatry. But critique without love can harden into bitterness. Holding both has never been simple.

The God I Was Taught — and the God I Pray To

Returning to Rome has also stirred memories of the God-image that accompanied my early formation.

God was Creator, Lawgiver, Judge, Punisher (even Torturer!). Sin was pervasive. Conscience was vigilant. That framework gave me seriousness and discipline. It also sometimes fostered fear and self-scrutiny that felt heavier than grace.

Over the years, influenced by the teachers I have named and by the communities I have encountered, that image loosened. I began to see how easily our political imaginations shape our theology. A hierarchical society imagines a hierarchical heaven. An imperial culture imagines a commanding deity.

Genesis says something simpler and perhaps more daring: we are clay, animated by breath. Clay is not flawless. It is vulnerable, shaped by experience, capable of cracking and reforming. The problem in Eden is not embodiment but mistrust — the suggestion that God is withholding, that God is threatened by human growth.

Slowly, I found myself praying less to a divine Auditor and more to a Life-Giver. Paul’s contrast between Adam and Christ came to sound less like courtroom procedure and more like two ways of being human: hiding in shame or standing in trust.

That shift did not happen overnight. It came through study, mistakes, conversations, disappointments, and, occasionally, grace.

Sitting in Trastevere

Recently, sitting in Santa Maria in Trastevere, I felt the weight of all these strands all at once.

Trastevere was once a district of the marginal — dockworkers, Jews, early Christians. Yet the Church that took root among them eventually learned to speak the language of empire. The basilica’s golden mosaics shimmer above centuries of compromise and devotion alike.

The Church, I realized again, is both clay and gold.

So am I.

If my children sometimes experience my positions as strong or unsettling, I understand. They did not sit in those classrooms. They did not travel in those communities. They did not hear those lectures. My convictions were not born of sudden rebellion. They accumulated slowly, sometimes against my own initial resistance.

I do not claim to see perfectly now. If anything, these teachers made me more cautious about certainty. They taught me to ask whose voices are missing, whose suffering is hidden, which assumptions have gone unquestioned.

Returning to Rome does not feel like a triumph. It feels like a reminder. A reminder of where I began. A reminder of how much I was given. A reminder of how much I had to unlearn. And a reminder that any map — even the one I now hold — remains partial.

Clay, Breath, and Ongoing Revision

The longer I live, the less interested I am in appearing marble. Marble is impressive, but rigid. Clay is humbler, more exposed, more capable of change. Genesis names us clay. The Spirit breathes.

If there has been a “crime,” it was never Rome itself. It was the temptation to mistake any center — any institution, any system, any theology — for the whole.

The teachers who shaped me did not hand me a new dogma. They handed me a way of seeing: turn the claim over, redraw the map, listen to the margins, be wary of sanctified power, hold loyalty and critique together.

Rome, with all its beauty and ambiguity, is a fitting place to remember that.

I return not to condemn, nor to congratulate myself for having moved beyond something, but to give thanks for the long, unfinished work of being reshaped.

The map has been redrawn more than once in my life. It may yet need redrawing again.

For now, I remain grateful — for Rome, for the margins, for the teachers who widened my world, and for the breath that continues to animate clay.

The Commandments and the Epstein Revelations: Whom Does God’s Law Really Protect?

Readings for the Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time: Sirach 15:15-20; Psalm 119; 1 Corinthians 2:6-10; Matthew 5:17-37

Let me say it straight out: the Epstein affair is not primarily about sex. It is about law. It is about whether the commandments — and the legal systems supposedly derived from them — apply equally to everyone.

For decades, Jeffrey Epstein moved among billionaires, politicians, royalty, financiers, academics, and cultural elites. His crimes were known. Complaints were made. Investigations occurred. Yet he received an extraordinary plea deal. Associates remain shielded. Documents remain sealed. Networks remain largely untouched.

Meanwhile, poor defendants fill prisons for far lesser crimes – and in the case of immigrants and asylum seekers, for no crimes at all. Petty theft, drug possession, probation violations, and “illegal” border crossings — these are prosecuted with relentless enforcement of law.

If you want a relevant commentary on such two-tiered systems of “justice,” look no further than today’s liturgical readings. They are explosive in their contemporary application.

Sirach: God Commands No Injustice

 Start with Sirach 15: 15-20. There the book’s author says: “If you choose, you can keep the commandments… He has set before you fire and water… life and death.”

At first glance, that sounds like individual moral exhortation. Choose good. Avoid evil. But Sirach adds something devastating: “No one does he command to act unjustly; to none does he give license to sin.”

That line destroys every attempt to sanctify unjust systems like ours. I mean in the United States, injustice is routinely protected by law. After all, Epstein’s plea deal in 2008 was legal. The shielding of his powerful associates has been legal. Non-disclosure agreements are legal. Sealed records are legal.

But Sirach says God commands no injustice.

If the law functions to shield predators when they are rich and well-connected while punishing the poor with mechanical severity, then the issue is not simply moral failure. It is structural perversion.

Liberation theology (i.e. non-literalist biblical interpretation supported by modern scripture scholarship) reminds us that “choice” is structured. The poor do not choose within the same field of protection as billionaires. There, fire and water are not distributed evenly. Life and death are not equally accessible.

The commandment is not merely “Don’t sin.” The deeper question is: Does the legal order reflect God’s refusal to legalize injustice?

Psalm 119: Blessed Are Those Who Follow the Law

Now look at today’s responsorial psalm. It’s refrain proclaims: “Blessed are they who follow the law of the Lord.”

But what is the law for?

As José Porfirio Miranda and Norman Gottwald argue, the Decalogue emerged not as abstract piety but as social protection. It arose among people resisting royal systems that accumulated land, wealth, and power in elite hands.

Both theologians remind us that biblical law was a shield for subsistence households. “You shall not steal” originally meant: the powerful may not confiscate the livelihood of the vulnerable. “You shall not covet” meant desire backed by power must be restrained.

In that light, now ask the uncomfortable question: when billionaires operate in networks of mutual protection and the law seems reluctant to expose them fully, is that still Torah? Or is it what the prophets called “corruption at the gate?”

Psalm 119 blesses those who follow God’s law — not those who manipulate civil law to protect privilege.

Paul: The Wisdom of the Rulers

In the same spirit of Sirach and Psalm 119, Paul speaks of “a wisdom not of this age, nor of the rulers of this age… who are passing away.” He also adds something chilling: “None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”

The cross was a legal execution. It was state-sanctioned. It was justified under Roman law and enabled by religious authority.

That’s Paul’s point.

The rulers always believe their system is rational and necessary. Franz Hinkelammert reminds us that ruling ideologies present themselves as inevitable. Markets are inevitable. Elite networks are inevitable. Certain people are untouchable.

When the Epstein affair reveals how proximity to wealth and power appears to blunt accountability, we are witnessing what Paul calls “the wisdom of this age.” A wisdom that protects itself.

The rulers crucified Jesus legally. Legality is not the same as justice.

Jesus: Fulfilling the Law by Protecting the Vulnerable

In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus declares:
“I have not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it.”

Then he radicalizes it. “You have heard it said, ‘You shall not kill.’ But I say to you, whoever humiliates…”

Jesus’ point is that dehumanization precedes violence. When victims are dismissed because they lack status, when their testimony is doubted because they are young, poor, or socially marginal, contempt is already at work.

“You have heard it said… You shall not commit adultery. But I say to you, whoever looks with lust…”

Could these words be more pertinent to the Epstein Affair? In a world where wealthy men are allowed to treat vulnerable underage girls and women as property, lust backed by power means coercion. Jesus targets the interior logic of such domination.

His teaching on divorce does the same thing. It sides with the economically vulnerable spouse. Legal permission did not equal justice.

Notice the pattern: every intensification of the commandment in today’s readings closes loopholes that allow the powerful to exploit the weak.

That is fulfillment of the law. If a legal system permits exploitation through influence, money, and secrecy, it has not fulfilled the law. It has hollowed it out.

Two Systems

The Epstein affair is not an anomaly. It is a revelation.

It reveals what liberation theology has long argued: sin is social as well as personal. Structures can be sinful. Systems can crucify.

When poor defendants encounter swift prosecution while elite networks encounter delay, protection, and opacity, we are not witnessing isolated moral failure. We are witnessing two systems.

Sirach sets before us life and death. The death-dealing system is one where law bends upward. The life-giving system is one where law protects the vulnerable first:

  • “Blessed are they who follow the law of the Lord.”
  • Blessed are those who refuse to equate legality with justice.
  • Blessed are those who demand that commandments function as protection for the powerless.
  • Blessed are those who see through the “wisdom” of powerful elites

Jesus did not abolish the commandments. He sharpened them until they pierced hypocrisy.

Before us remain fire and water. The question is not whether we personally avoid wrongdoing.

The question is whether we will accept a system where justice is negotiated by wealth — or insist that the law once again become what it was meant to be: protection and good news for the poor.

AI, Environmental Justice, and Who Pays the Bill

I recently wrote an essay suggesting that artificial intelligence might serve as a kind of moral companion in our political and spiritual confusion. Not a burning bush. Not divine revelation. Just a disciplined interlocutor — one that helps clarify arguments, test assumptions, and deepen moral imagination.

I’ve experienced that personally while writing Against All Odds. AI has helped me structure ideas, sharpen analysis, and think more clearly. That led me to wonder: might this technology assist moral discernment in a fractured age?

A former student of mine at Berea College answered with a bracing reality check.

He wasn’t interested in metaphors. He was interested in data centers.

He described attending a town hall meeting after a hyperscale data center opened in a predominantly Black and poor community near him. Residents were worried about air quality, water consumption, constant noise, diesel backup generators, and long-term health effects. Wealthier neighborhoods had blocked similar facilities. This one could not.

His point was simple and unsettling:

How can you call AI morally promising when its infrastructure burdens marginalized communities?

He added that AI consumes far more energy than a standard web search. It requires massive computational power. It uses water for cooling. It relies on an electrical grid still heavily dependent on fossil fuels. And these facilities are rarely built in affluent suburbs.

In short: Who pays for your moral imagination?

That is not a frivolous question. It is a liberation theology question.

And he’s right to ask it.

If we celebrate the benefits of AI without naming its environmental footprint, we risk drifting into technological romanticism. It is easy to praise illumination while ignoring cooling towers and diesel generators.

But here’s where the conversation deepens.

AI did not invent the data center economy. Streaming services, cloud storage, cryptocurrency, social media, Zoom calls, online shopping — all of these already depend on massive server farms. Most of us participate in that system daily.

AI increases demand. It accelerates the curve. But it sits inside a digital infrastructure we were already using without much moral scrutiny.

So the real issue isn’t “AI versus no AI.”

The issue is how the digital economy externalizes its costs onto communities with the least political power.

That’s the environmental justice problem.

And it doesn’t disappear if we stop using chatbots while continuing to stream movies and store photos in the cloud.

The AI system I consulted about my student’s critique did something interesting. It didn’t defend itself. It acknowledged the material burden — and then widened the frame.

The core problem isn’t whether AI can clarify moral thought.

The core problem is governance.

Who regulates data centers?
Who decides where they are built?
Who enforces environmental protections?
Who ensures the transition to renewable energy?
Who protects poor communities from becoming sacrifice zones?

If AI use is not accompanied by advocacy for sustainable energy, fair siting practices, and strong environmental regulation, then my student’s critique stands.

But here’s the tension we cannot ignore.

AI is also uniquely capable of analyzing environmental injustice. It can process zoning data, identify discriminatory siting patterns, correlate health outcomes, expose regulatory capture, and help activists build evidence-based arguments.

The same technology that depends on infrastructure can help scrutinize that infrastructure.

That is not hypocrisy. It is the modern condition.

Every industrial system carries costs. The question is not whether costs exist. The question is whether we are honest about them — and whether we organize politically to reduce them.

My student was not telling me to stop thinking. He was telling me to widen the moral frame.

He was right.

If I speak about AI as morally useful, I must also speak about its environmental footprint. I must name who bears the burden. I must advocate regulation, renewable transitions, and community protections.

Hope without cost-accounting is naïve.

But cost-accounting without imagination is sterile.

The real challenge is integration.

AI is not a miracle descending from heaven. It is an industrial artifact embedded in an unequal economy. Any moral use of it must include political responsibility.

At the same time, dismissing AI as irredeemably immoral risks abandoning a tool that can assist critical thought and even environmental justice itself.

So where does that leave me?

More cautious.
More grounded.
But not retreating.

The exchange clarified something important.

The moral question is not: “Is AI good or bad?”

The moral question is: “Who benefits? Who pays? And what are we willing to change?”

If this technology is to be morally serious, it must be paired with environmental reform. If we use it, we must demand cleaner energy, tighter regulation, and just siting practices.

Otherwise, we are merely consuming another invisible convenience while someone else breathes the exhaust.

That is the debate.

And it is one worth having — not to score points, but to raise the standard of our moral speech.

Because in the end, the most important thing AI did in this exchange was not generate prose.

It forced a deeper conversation about justice.

And that conversation — not the code — is where moral progress begins.

Why Isaiah and Jesus Sound Like Marx (Again)

Readings for the 5th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Isaiah 58:7-10; Psalm112:4-9; 1 Corinthians 2:1-5; Matthew 5:13-16.

For the past two weeks, I’ve been saying (here and here) something that makes some people nervous: that the teachings of Jesus and the practice of the earliest Christian communities contain themes that can only be described as Marxist, socialist, even communist. Not in the caricatured sense tossed around on talk shows. Not in the Cold War sense. But in the deeply biblical sense—rooted in shared bread, structural justice, and God’s bias toward the poor.

Today’s readings don’t retreat from that claim. They double down.

Let’s start with the prophet and then move on to the Psalms, Paul, and Jesus.

Isaiah 58: God’s Politics of Bread

In Book of Isaiah 58, God is not interested in private piety detached from public justice. Isaiah says: Share your bread with the hungry. Shelter the oppressed and the homeless. Clothe the naked. Remove oppression from your midst.

This is not charity as a hobby. This is social reorganization. The prophet does not say, “Pray more and the hungry will be spiritually nourished.” He says: share your bread. Bread is economic. Bread is material. Bread is about who owns what and who eats.

The prophet assumes something structural: hunger is not accidental. Homelessness is not random. Oppression is not an individual moral failure; it is embedded in systems. And the remedy is not spiritualization—it is redistribution.

Psalm112:4-9

The Responsorial Psalm is often read as describing personal virtue. But listen carefully.

“Lavishly he gives to the poor.”
“He conducts his affairs with justice.”

The psalmist describes someone whose economic behavior is transformed. The just person lends without exploitation. He is not shaken by “evil report.” He is steadfast in justice.

This is not the portrait of a nationalist strongman obsessed with dominance. It is not the image of someone defending borders, hoarding wealth, or equating divine favor with market success. It is the image of someone who destabilizes unjust systems by generosity.

Franz Hinkelammert, the German-Latin American economist and theologian, warned that modern capitalism turns the market into an idol—demanding sacrifice of human lives in the name of “efficiency.” Hinkelammert argued that when profit becomes sacred, people become expendable.

Psalm 112 offers a different sacred center: the poor.

The just person’s heart is firm not because he has secured his investments—but because he trusts in the Lord while giving away resources.

That is profoundly anti-idolatrous. And therefore, profoundly political.

Paul in Corinth: Power in Weakness

In First Epistle to the Corinthians 2, Paul says something revolutionary:

“I did not come with sublimity of words or wisdom… but with Jesus Christ, and him crucified.”

The crucified one is not a nationalist hero. He is an executed victim of empire. (Crucifixion was the form of capital punishment reserved for insurrectionists.) Paul refuses rhetorical domination. He refuses identification with the elite. He centers the cross—an instrument of state terror.

Liberation theology has always emphasized this: the cross reveals God’s identification with victims. God is not neutral between oppressor and oppressed. God is found among those crucified by history.

Paul’s refusal of “persuasive words of wisdom” is also a critique of ideological manipulation. Faith must not rest on elite rhetoric, but on divine power manifest in solidarity with those empire hates and kills.

That is why Christian nationalism feels threatened by the cross.

Christian nationalism prefers triumph. It prefers cultural dominance. It prefers flags draped over crosses.

But Paul gives us a broken body instead.

Jesus: Salt and Light

Now the Gospel.

In Gospel of Matthew 5, Jesus says: “You are the salt of the earth.” “You are the light of the world.”

Salt preserves from decay. Light exposes what is hidden.

This is not a call to privatized spirituality. It is a call to public transformation.

Notice: your light must shine so that others see your good deeds.

What deeds?

Isaiah has already told us: feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, dismantling oppression.

Jesus is not inventing a new ethic here. He is intensifying Isaiah’s.

A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden. This is a communal image. It evokes not isolated believers but a visible alternative society.

The earliest Christian communities took this seriously. They held goods in common. They redistributed resources so that “there was not a needy person among them.” That sounds dangerously close to socialism—because it is.

And here is where we must address the tension with voices like Charlie Kirk‘s, which argue that Christianity is fundamentally about individual salvation, private morality, and national strength.

In that framework, the market is sacred, property rights are absolute, and any talk of structural redistribution is labeled “Marxist” as if that ends the conversation.

But here’s the irony: Isaiah sounds more Marxist than the commentators who condemn Marx. Jesus sounds more socialist than the pundits who wave Bibles at rallies.

When Christians share bread, dismantle oppression, and organize communal life around the needs of the poor, they are not betraying the Gospel. They are embodying it.

Why This Theology Was Targeted

This is why liberation theology (i.e. authentic biblical theology informed by modern scripture scholarship) was perceived as dangerous.

In the early 1980s, the Reagan administration and policy strategists behind what became known as the Santa Fe Document explicitly identified liberation theology as a threat in Latin America. It aligned peasants and workers with biblical faith. It exposed structural injustice. It challenged U.S.-backed regimes.

So, it had to be neutralized.

The strategy was twofold: (1) Portray liberation theology as “Marxist infiltration,” and (2) Promote a privatized, depoliticized Christianity compatible with neoliberal economics.

    The result?

    • U.S.-sponsored death squads.
    • Assassinations of priests, nuns, and catechists. (Recall the slogan in El Salvador, “Be a patriot; kill a priest.”)  
    • A generation of Christians taught to fear the word “justice” if it implied systemic change.
    • A generation trained to equate patriotism with piety.
    • A generation suspicious of any theology that speaks of class.

    And so, the Left weakened—because it surrendered theological imagination — and often faith itself. Meanwhile, the Right grew strong—because it wrapped market ideology in biblical language.

    But Isaiah is still there.

    Paul is still there.

    Jesus is still there.

    And they continue to say: share your bread. Remove oppression. Shine with good deeds.

    The Conflict Today

    The conflict is not between Christianity and atheism. It is between two versions of Christianity. One blesses empire. The other stands with the crucified. One Christianity defends borders above human beings. The other remembers that Jesus himself was a refugee. One Christianity fears the language of class. The other recognizes that the Bible is saturated with it—rich and poor, debtor and creditor, slave and free.

    Christian nationalism proclaims, “Make the nation great again.” Biblical theology proclaims, “Make the poor visible again.”

    Christian nationalism identifies God with power. Biblical theology identifies God with victims.

    And today’s readings make clear which side the biblical text leans toward.

    Salt That Has Not Lost Its Taste

    Jesus warns: salt can lose its taste.

    What does that mean? It means faith can lose its transformative power. It can become bland, domesticated, harmless. When Christianity ceases to confront structural injustice, it becomes tasteless. When the Church fears being called “socialist” more than it fears ignoring the hungry, it has lost its saltiness. When Christians defend systems that produce homelessness while quoting Scripture about personal morality, the light dims.

    But when bread is shared, light breaks forth like dawn. When oppression is removed, darkness becomes midday. When communities embody economic justice—God says, “Here I am.”

    That is the promise of Isaiah.

    That is the power of the cross.

    That is the calling of salt and light.

    Conclusion

    For the past two weeks, I’ve suggested that Marx did not invent concern for the poor. The prophets did. Jesus did. The earliest Christians did.

    Marx analyzed exploitation. Isaiah condemned it. Jesus embodied resistance to it.

    To acknowledge this is not to baptize every socialist experiment in history. It is not to deny the complexities of economics. It is simply to be honest about the text.

    The Bible does not defend hoarding. It does not sanctify inequality. It does not idolize the nation-state. It calls for justice. And justice, in Scripture, is not abstract. It is bread, shelter, clothing, and dignity.

    So, if someone says that such preaching is “Marxist,” perhaps the better question is: why does Marx sound like Isaiah?

    If someone claims that Christian faith is about national power, perhaps we should ask: what do we do with the crucified Messiah?

    If someone insists that the Church should avoid politics, perhaps we should re-read Isaiah 58.

    The readings today are not subtle. They do not whisper. They’re about salt and light, bread and justice, capital punishment and resurrection.

    They do not endorse empire, domination or nationalism disguised as faith. Instead, they announce that authentic worship is inseparable from economic justice.

    And when that justice begins to take shape—when bread is shared, when the afflicted are satisfied—then, Isaiah promises, “your light shall rise in the darkness.”

    May we have the courage to let it shine.