SILLY . . .

Two quick things that crack me up:

1. I'm now the girl who wears a comfortable pair of shoes TO work, then changes into nice dress shoes AT work. Granted, I have not yet become the white-tube-sock-and-white-high-tops-wearing lady, but when I peel off my socks and boots to slip into some pointy high-heel pumps, I can't help but feel a little bit frumpy.

2. I have limited exposure to Sascha Baron Cohen as Ali G, but I thoroughly enjoyed him as King Julian in "Madagascar." Now, he's apparently bringing another one of his characters to life on the big screen. The title of this soon-to-be masterpiece? "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan." That is so awesome.

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NOT SILLY . . .

Barack Obama is everywhere in the news lately, and I for one don't mind that much. I'm not usually one for hero-worship of people I don't actually know, and politicians are usually last on my list (unfortunately, because I think there was a time and a place in this country's history when politicians WERE worthy of some degree of worship from the populace ... you know, back when public servants actually served the people ... although that statement in and of itself sounds so naive too ...). But Obama seems like the real deal. (Even as I say that, I feel a twinge in my stomach, as if I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the skeletons in his closet to come tumbling out, and I hate that I have become that cynical.) He intrigues me, so I picked up the latest issue of Time Magazine, which has his head big and front and center on the cover. The magazine excerpts his latest book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, and I excerpt the excerpt here. I apologize for the length of my excerpting ... some of it was too good to put aside ... another book to add to my growing pile of To Read's ...

... also points to a hunger for the product they are selling, a hunger that goes beyond any particular issue or cause. Each day, it seems, thousands of Americans are going about their daily rounds--dropping off the kids at school, driving to the office, flying to a business meeting, shopping at the mall, trying to stay on their diets--and coming to the realization that something is missing. They are deciding that their work, their possessions, their diversions, their sheer busyness are not enough. They want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives, something that will relieve a chronic loneliness or lift them above the exhausting, relentless toll of daily life. They need an assurance that somebody out there cares about them, is listening to them--that they are not just destined to travel down a long highway toward nothingness.
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Out of necessity, the black church had to minister to the whole person. Out of necessity, the black church rarely had the luxury of separating individual salvation from collective salvation. It had to serve as the center of the community's political, economic, and social as well as spiritual life; it understood in an intimate way the biblical call to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and challenge powers and principalities. In the history of these struggles, I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death; rather, it was an active, palpable agent in the world.
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And perhaps it was out of this intimate knowledge of hardship, the grounding of faith in struggle, that the historically black church offered me a second insight: that faith doesn't mean that you don't have doubts, or that you relinquish your hold on this world. Long before it became fashionable among television evangelists, the typical black sermon freely acknowledged that all Christians (including the pastors) could expect to still experience the same greed, resentment, lust, and anger that everyone else experienced. The gospel songs, the happy feet, and the tears and shouts all spoke of a release, an acknowledgment, and finally a channeling of those emotions. In the black community, the lines between sinner and saved were more fluid; the sins of those who came to church were not so different from the sins of those who didn't, and so were as likely to be talked about with humor as with condemnation. You needed to come to church precisely because you were of this world, not apart from it; rich, poor, sinner, saved, you needed to embrace Christ precisely because you had sins to wash away--because you were human and needed an ally in your difficult journey, to make the peaks and valleys smooth and render all those crooked paths straight. It was because of these newfound understandings--that religious commitment did not require me to suspend critical thinking, disengage from the battle for economic and social justice, or otherwise retreat from the world that I knew and loved--that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ one day and be baptized.
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When we abandon the field of religious discourse--when we ignore the debate about what it means to be a good Christian or Muslim or Jew; when we discuss religion only in the negative sense of where or how it should not be practiced, rather than in the positive sense of what it tells us about our obligations toward one another; when we shy away from religious venues and religious broadcasts because we assume that we will be unwelcome--others will fill the vacuum. And those who do are likely to be those with the most insular views of faith, or who cynically use religion to justify partisan ends.
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Of course organized religion doesn't have a monopoly on virtue, and one not need be religious to make moral claims or appeal to a common good. But we should not avoid making such claims or appeals--or abandon any reference to our rich religious traditions--in order to avoid giving offense. Our failure as progressives to tap into the moral underpinnings of the nation is not just rhetorical, though. Our fear of getting "preachy" may also lead us to discount the role that values and culture play in addressing some of our most urgent social problems. After all, the problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed, are not simply technical problems in search of the perfect 10-point plan. They are also rooted in societal indifference and individual callousness--the desire among those at the top of the social ladder to maintain their wealth and status whatever the cost, as well as the despair and self-destructiveness among those at the bottom.