Submitted by
Richard Burden on October 5, 2008 - 3:18pm.
Mary E. Hunt, a feminist theologian who is co-founder and co-director of the Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual (WATER), and occasionally blogs over at Religious Dispatches, offers her assessment of a debate "in which the bar was set so low as to be subterranean, [and] values-related issues were almost entirely ignored." It's a substantial take on the confection that passes for political discourse these days. Read the whole essay here.
Below are some highlights.
No one raises fundamental moral questions about the nature of unfettered market capitalism, private property, or the common good. At best we hear a plea for an amorphous middle class, while the poor simply fade from view. We missed a chance for careful structural analysis of how the economy works, who profits and who loses. Now is the time to use our economic knowledge to provide for everyone, not revel in the ignorance of Joe Six-pack about some mysterious system that is beyond us all.
. . .
No one risks a go at moral tough love like suggesting that maybe it is time for a jubilee—to erase old debts and start fresh by sharing the earth’s goods equitably among the earth’s people. What if the US would use only its share of the earth’s energy resources and not several times that as we do now? Such suggestions are labeled naïve, rejected as absurd, written off as the stuff of wide-eyed idealists, as if what we face now were palatable to any but the wealthy. Sometimes just raising such matters helps to gain perspective on current problems. That is the role of moral discourse.
. . .
Politics has always been a dubious business. While the smoky backrooms have given way to spin rooms, the same shallow approach to issues, the same playing fast and loose with facts and truth persists. What if we took serious stock of the “polis,” the city-state of Greek origin, where the citizens govern themselves? What if we decided our polis was too important to be left to the politicians? What if we really embraced democracy and made it happen?
. . .
This erosion of confidence in our political system, in our politicians is a great loss. Perhaps it is simply a cue to others of us to step into the void with continued insistence on truth, calling a spin a spin, and getting on with the business of assuring quality education about and widespread participation in the democratic process.
. . .
It is time to bracket personalities and hairstyles. It is time to get on with the work of finding, affirming, and voting our values.
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Richard Burden's blog
Moral discourse
This is refreshing--thanks Richard. I do believe the kind of moral discourse that Mary Hunt mentions is what has been lacking.
The time is long overdue for Christians to speak with conviction and passion about those issues that we have been lax to name as "moral": the structure of our economy and the nature of our democracy--both have everything to do with the way we care for one another, our earth, and especially 'the least among us'.
Insisting on truth is a good place to start.