Easter Week, 1957. Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day helps defend the racially integrated Christian community, Koinonia Farm, in Americus, GA, against the KKK. This photo of her, we now learn from Koinonia, was probably taken at a different time.

With thanks to Brian McLaren for posting this (here).

From Peter Rollins on ways in which he denies the resurrection … and so do we all:

At one point in the proceedings someone asked if my theoretical position led me to denying the Resurrection of Christ. This question allowed me the opportunity to communicate clearly and concisely my thoughts on the subject, which I repeat here.

Without equivocation or hesitation I fully and completely admit that I deny the resurrection of Christ. This is something that anyone who knows me could tell you, and I am not afraid to say it publicly, no matter what some people may think…

I deny the resurrection of Christ every time I do not serve at the feet of the oppressed, each day that I turn my back on the poor; I deny the resurrection of Christ when I close my ears to the cries of the downtrodden and lend my support to an unjust and corrupt system.

However there are moments when I affirm that resurrection, few and far between as they are. I affirm it when I stand up for those who are forced to live on their knees, when I speak for those who have had their tongues torn out, when I cry for those who have no more tears left to shed.

In my last piece, I argued that a very special almost intimate resonance existed between Obama and large numbers of intellectuals and opinion-makers, and that this resonance gave a distinctive stamp to his Presidency. This resonance has deep roots in such things as the special character of the American Presidency, the decline of the party system, and the rise and character of the media. Here, however, I simply want to identify Obama’s particular and unique appeal, without yet judging or even analyzing, except briefly at the end.

The first major characteristic that gives Obama his special, in many ways unconscious, appeal is the fact that he is an African-American. Since the days of slavery, when the spirituals identified the slaves as the chosen people, Americans have believed that a young, black Moses would save them from what WEB DuBois called this “empty desert of dust and dollars.” The hope for a black salvationalist figure pervades evangelical Protestantism, Communism (and not only in the United States) and artistic modernism, e.g. in popular music and humor. Like Martin Luther King, Obama comes out of a Salvationist and messianic tradition, but what is interesting is what he does with that tradition: He seeks to repudiate it (The Reverend Wright incident showed how difficult this is). Nonetheless, Wright notwithstanding, Obama does not present himself as a representative of black America, as King or Jesse Jackson did, but as someone who can bring red and blue (NB: not black and white) together, Furthermore, certain aspects of his biography – birth in Hawaii, African father, Indonesian upbringing – soften and muffle his African-American image in ways that make it more global in an age during which America is struggling with global isolation and rejection of its supposed leadership.

Cross-posted as a Morning Feature at Daily Kos.

Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann and other luminaries are skewering Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) for crowing about his insertion of a new IRS rule into the Health Care Reform Bill after first voting against HCR. Because he has publicly mocked and blocked HCR (along with other Repubs), and because the importance of his new rule is only appreciated by hospital financing aficianados, his announcement had the loft of a lead comforter.

I love Rachel Maddow. I wake up every weekday at 5:00 am to her podcasts. And I am no fan of Chuck Grassley. But I am ecstatic about the Grassley rule. You will be too, once you understand it.

“Have a seat!” I’d say on April Fool’s Day, offering a classmate a little wooden chair. If she were foolish enough to accept my kindness, I’d jerk it back and she’d fall on her butt. Or I’d point to a friend’s shirt: “Oh my God! There’s a spider on your pocket!” He’d look, and everyone would laugh.

I’m sorry to say I delighted in these pranks, even occasionally when played on me.

There’s a certain jocular joy to April Fool’s Day that children and immature people love. And you can’t celebrate it alone. Jokes and pranks require others. Could even April Fool’s Day have a crazy spiritual aspect?

HOLY FOOLS

Every spiritual tradition has a wise fool. The Jewish tradition offers Badchan, the wedding jester, who warns the bride of the groom’s faults (We have to recognize the wisdom in that, no?) and whose quips can be quite off-color.