Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“scapegoating characterizes much personal, political, and public discourse. People on the Left accuse the Right of being merely "pro-birth" while being pro-war and pro-gun… People on the Right accuse the Left of being "pro-abortion"…and thus not "pro-life"… By concentrating on the other group's goat, both sides can avoid being completely consistent. …works quite effectively to keep both of us from being honest.”

“For our purposes here, the image of the scapegoat powerfully mirrors and reveals the universal, but largely unconscious, human need to transfer our guilt onto something (or someone) else by singling that other out for unmerited negative treatment. This pattern is seen in many facets of our society and our private, inner lives—so much so that we could almost name it "the sin of the world" ”

“What then can escort us on our way? One thing, and one thing only: philosophy. This consists in keeping the divinity within us inviolate and free from harm, master of pleasure and pain, doing nothing without aim, truth, or integrity, and independent of others' action or failure to act.”

“A Christian is invited, not required, to accept and live the cruciform shape of all reality. It is not a duty or even a requirement as much as a free vocation. Some people feel called and agree to not hide from the dark side of things or the rejected group, but in fact draw close to the pain of the world and allow it to radically change their perspective.”

“Christians are meant to be the visible compassion of God on earth more than "those who are going to heaven." They are the leaven who agree to share the fate of God for the life of the world now, and thus keep the whole batch of dough from falling back on itself.”

“Jesus the Christ, in his crucifixion and resurrection, "bring all things together all things in himself…" (Ephesians 1:10). This one verse is the summary of Franciscan Christology. Jesus agreed to carry the mystery of universal suffering. He allowed it to change him ("Resurrection") and it is to be hoped—us, so that we would be freed from the endless cycle of projecting our pain elsewhere. ”

“Hear Jesus's words in John's Gospel: "I did not come to condemn the world, but to save it" (12:47), or in Matthew: "Come to me all you who labor and are overburdened, and I will give you rest.... for I am gentle and humble of heart. Yes, my yoke is easy and my burden is light" (11:28-30).”

“Girard understands Hebrews's frequent "once and for all" language (7:27, 9:12, 26, 10:10) in a quite definitive way as the end of any need for any sacrifices by which to please God. The problem of divine love is settled forever from God's side. In our insecurity, we keep recreating "necessary sacrifices." ”

“It is not God who is violent. We are.
It is not that God demands suffering of humans. We do.
God does not need or want suffering—neither in Jesus nor in us.”

“"Go, learn the meaning of the words, 'what I want is mercy, not sacrifice'!" Jesus said throughout the Gospels (Matthew 9:13, 12:7). He was quoting the prophet Hosea, who further added, "I want knowledge of God, not your holocausts" (6:6). Notions of sacrifice keep us in the retributive—justice framework and outside of the essential Gospel of grace and undeserved love.”

“Far too many evils have been committed in history under the manipulative cry of "sacrifice," usually violent and necessary sacrifice for an always "noble" cause. … But I believe Jesus utterly undoes the very notion of sacrificial requirements for God to love us—first in himself, and then in all of us.”

“The Franciscans, however, led by John Duns Scotus (1266-1308), refused to see the Incarnation, and its final denouement on the cross, as a mere reaction to sin. Instead, they claimed that the cross was a freely chosen revelation of Total Love on God's part. In so doing, they reversed the engines of almost all world religion up to that point, which assumed we had to spill blood to get to a distant and demanding God.”

“Anselm never thought out the disastrous implications of his theory, especially for people who were already afraid or resentful of God. In authoritarian and patriarchal cultures, most people were fully programmed to think this way—working to appease an authority figure who was angry, punitive, and even violent in his reactions. … People respond to this kind of God because it fits their own story line. ”

“Once a person recognizes that Jesus's mission (obvious in all four Gospels) was to heal people, not punish them, the dominant theories of retributive justice begin to lose their appeal and their authority.”

“Restorative justice, of course, comes to its full demonstration in the constant healing ministry of Jesus. Jesus represents the real and deeper level of teaching of the Jewish Prophets. Jesus never punished anybody! Yes, he challenged people, but always for the sake of insight, healing, and restoration of people and situations to their divine origin and source.”

“We stay inside of what some call the "myth of redemptive violence," which might just be the dominant story line of history. It's time for Christianity to rediscover the deeper biblical theme of restorative justice, which focuses on rehabilitation and reconciliation, not punishment.”

“First, that all things have been of the same kind from everlasting, coming round and round again, and it makes no difference whether one will see the same things for a hundred years, or two hundred years, or for an infinity of time. Second, that both the longest-lived and the earliest to die suffer the same loss. It is only the present moment of which either stands to be deprived…”

“As long as we employ any retributive notion of God's offended justice (required punishment for wrongdoing), we trade our distinctive Christian message for the cold, hard justice that has prevailed in most cultures throughout history.”

“As long as we employ any retributive notion of God's offended justice (required punishment for wrongdoing), we trade our distinctive Christian message for the cold, hard justice that has prevailed in most cultures throughout history.”

“At best, the theory of substitutionary atonement has inoculated us against the true effects of the Gospel, causing us to largely "thank" Jesus instead of honestly imitating him. At worst, it led us to see God as a cold, brutal figure, who demands acts of violence before God can love God's own creation.”

“I know the theory of substitutionary atonement is central to the faith of many. But the questions of why Jesus died and what is the meaning and message of his death have dominated the recent Christian narrative, often much more than his life and teaching. As some have said, if this theory is true, all we needed was the last three days or even three hours of Jesus's life.”

“I hope to address how our commonly accepted atonement theory—especially as accomplished through the life, suffering, and death of Jesus—led to some serious misunderstandings of Jesus's role and Christ's eternal purpose, reaffirmed our nar-row notion of retributive justice, and legitimated a notion of "good and necessary violence" all the way down.”

“The early church never heard of this… Until we see this explanation of why Jesus had to die for what it is and what it isn't, we'll struggle to liberate our notions of both Christ and Jesus and to see them as a revelation of the infinite love of the Trinity, not some bloody transaction "required" by God's offended justice in order to rectify the problem of human sin. ”

“This theory of atonement ultimately relies on another commonly accepted notion-the "original sin" of Adam and Eve, which we were told taints all human beings. But much like original sin, which we considered earlier, most Christians have never been told how recent and regional this explanation is, and that it fully relies upon a retributive notion of justice.”

“Christians say, "Jesus died for our sins," but in recent centuries one theory did take over. … referred to as the "penal substitutionary atonement theory," especially once it was developed after the Reformation. Substitutionary atonement is the theory that Christ, by his own sacrificial choice, was punished in the place of us sinners, thus satisfying the "demands of justice" so that God could forgive our sins.”

“Scholars say that ceremonies normally confirm and celebrate the status quo and deny the shadow side of things… whereas true ritual offers an alternative universe, where the shadow is named…. In the church, I am afraid we mostly have ceremonies. Most masses I have ever attended are about affirming the status quo, which seldom reveals and often even de-nies the shadow side of church, state, or culture.”

“Feminine power is deeply relational and symbolic—and thus transformative—in ways that men cannot control or even understand. I suspect that is why we fear it. ”

“Today on many levels, we are witnessing an immense longing for the mature feminine at every level of our society—from our politics to our economics, in our psyche, our cultures, our patterns of leadership, and our theologies, all of which have become far too warlike, competitive, mechanistic, and non-contemplative. We are terribly imbalanced.”

“In Mary; humanity has said our eternal yes to God. A yes that cannot be undone. A corporate yes that overrides our many noes.”

“If Christ and Jesus are the archetypes of what God is doing, Mary is the archetype of how to receive what God is doing and hand it on to others. In art, she is invariably offering Jesus to the observer or inviting us to come to him.”