Footnotes

I’m a fan of footnotes and parenthetical “brain burps.” In off-the-beaten-track and arriving with unexpected foreshadowing or new connections between prior experiences, information from aslant sneaks beneath consciousness—like earthworms invisibly preparing dirt for a next season’s possibility.

In the first chapter of a new book—Liberating the Politics of Jesus: Renewing Peace Theology through the Wisdom of Women—Nancy E. Before has this footnote:

Rather than being called to “Make America (sic) Great Again,” as followers of Jesus we are called to unmake the racist logic, customs, and laws that undergird the idolatrous illusion of (white) “manifest destiny” and its justification of expansionism, military intervention, plutocracy, and the abuse of nonwhite people by the United States.

A highfaluting and out-of-joint esoterism of theology in a transitional time of “spiritual, but not religious” finds it must dive deep into the mess of life. The simplistic ordering of self-imposed chaos to avoid intersectional offspring’s disruptive nature reduces both the genetic and intellectual pool.

Theology can both bolster an economy’s power and be an avenue of sabotage of the same. Most often, theology plays its supportive function and fades into irrelevance. Once in a while, theology reveals the persistence of idolatry that requires more than an adjustment in process—a needed make-over.

An important function of Peace Theology is its unmasking of the structural and cultural hiding of institutional disdain of human and nonhuman differences.

An appeal to one form of unity or another shape of uniformity is an intentional suicide by suffocation. Relying on output means trying to survive an increasing level of exhaled CO2. First, the brain goes, and then the body slips into stillness, awaiting a wormy revival.

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