[There are] two very different types of society. One type is a universal or functional society. You have, at least in theory, equal access to properly due goods and services irrespective of who you are or whom your know....
[If you are expected to "know someone who knows someone,"] universal or functional societies call it corruption, bribery, nepotism, influence peddling, or old-school-tie-ism. But almost all of the past world and some...of the present world consider it none of the above, just normal procedure, just business as usual.

Another type is a patronal or influential society. Your access even to appropriate goods and services depends inevitably on whom you know and whom that person knows. You are a client appealing directly upward to a patron or a client appealing indirectly upward to a patron via a broker....

When I was working on The Historical Jesus in the late 1980s,...[the] question I asked was this: Granted that humans related to one another patronally in that ancient world, how else but patronally could they relate to the Divine? Was religion, with its priest or prophets, its teachers and mystics, its temples, sacrifices, and prayers, an unavoidable broker or intermediary between the human and the Divine?... Or was religion a way of bringing the community and the Holy into as unmediated a confrontation as possible? If Jesus was the only way to God, did that mean he was, on the one hand, a broker of power or, on the other, a model of holiness? Did he control access to the Jewish God of justice or incarnate fully the Jewish God of justice?

— John Dominic Crossan,
A Long Way from Tipperary: What a Former Irish Monk
Discovered in His Search for the Truth
HarperCollins Publishers, 2000, pp. 111-12

From Eleventh Month, 2005:

In a Tree House

Light
Will someday split you open
Even if your life is now a cage,

For a divine seed, the crown of destiny,
Is hidden and sown on an ancient, fertile plain
You hold the title to.

Love will surely bust you wide open
Into an unfettered, blooming new galaxy

Even if your mind is now
A spoiled mule.

A life-giving radiance will come,
The Friend's gratuity will come —

O look again within yourself,
For I know you were once the elegant host
To all the marvels of creation.

From a sacred crevice in your body
A bow rises each night
And shoots your soul into God.

Behold the Beautiful Drunk Singing One
From the lunar vantage point of love.

He is conducting the affairs
Of the whole universe

While throwing wild parties
In a tree house — on a limb
In your heart.

— Shams-ud-din Muhammad Hafiz (c.1320-1389)
translated by Daniel Ladinsky
The Subject Tonight is Love: 60 Wild and Sweet Poems of Hafiz
North Myrtle Beach, SC: Pumpkin House Press, 1996, p.13

From Tenth Month, 2005:

God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment:
"How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked?
Give justice to the weak and the orphan; maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute.
Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked."
They have neither knowledge nor understanding, they walk around in darkness; all the foundations of the earth are shaken.
I say, "You are gods, children of the Most High, all of you; nevertheless, you shall die like mortals, all fall like any prince."
Rise up, O God, judge the earth; for all the nations belong to you!

— Psalm 82

[This psalm] is, for me, the single most important text in the entire Christian Bible, and it comes, of course, from the Jewish Bible. It is, for me, more important than John 1:14, which speaks of the Word of God becoming flesh and living among us. Before celebrating that incarnation, we must address a prior question about the character of the divinity involved. And that short psalm best summarizes for me the character of the Jewish God as Lord of all the world.

It imagines a mythological scene in which God sits among the gods and godesses in divine council. Those pagan gods and goddesses are dethroned not just because they are pagan, nor because they are other, nor because they are competition. They are dethroned for injustice, for divine malpractice, for transcendental malfeasance in office. They are rejected because they do not demand and effect justice among the peoples of the earth. And that justice is spelled out as protecting the poor from the rich, protecting the systematically weak from the systematically powerful. Such injustice creates darkness over the earth and shakes the very foundations of the world.

Peoples and nations write constitutive texts, record constitutive histories, tell constitutive stories, and make constitutive laws. Those foundations judge everything they do thereafter. One must, therefore, be very careful about constitutive proclamations. They may come home to haunt you. So also with a religion and its God. Psalm 82 tells us how we are to be judged by God but also how God wants to be judged by us. Everything else that God says or does in Bible or life should be judged by that job description. Is this or that the transcendental justice defined in Psalm 82 at work? Or is this or that just transcendental testosterone?

— John Dominic Crossan,
The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened
in the Years Immediately after the Execution of Jesus
HarperCollins Publishers, 1998, pp. 575-76

Note: For reviews of this book, see Amazon.com Editorial Reviews and Book review by Anthony Campbell.

From Ninth Month, 2005:

Some of my civil liberties comrades may have become First Amendment fundamentalists who suspect that any spiritual or religious values are a violation of church/state separation. That perspective, in turn, may be contributing to a backlash that might eventually lead to re-imposition of religion in a far more virulent form than it had taken in the past. The fact is that most Americans are religious, and many have come to feel that their religion is under assault by a militant secularism that allows no place for their beliefs and shows no respect to their culture....

Secularists often talk about religious wars, witch burnings, the Inquisition, and the general persecution of nonbelievers, rightly pointing out how disgusting these were. Yet why blame religion for these distorted uses of religion without similarly blaming atheism or secularism for the First World War..., the Second World War..., and the mass murder of millions under self-avowed secular regimes led by Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot? The inconsistencies are just one of the many reasons that the Religious Right has been able to portray secularists as aggressively trying to destroy their religious heritage....

There is a massive undermining of religious and spiritual sensibilities in the modern world, but the main problem is not secularists but rather the materialism and selfishness that have become the common sense of global capitalism. Free market ideology encourages us to see each other in narrow utilitarian terms, to "look out for number one" and maximize "the bottom line" of money and power. It is the values of capitalism that are undermining our spiritual capacities....

[The] solution is not to impose religion or spirituality through the mechanisms of the state, but rather to challenge the capitalist ethos in every aspect of life.... Conversely, the most effective way to defend the separation of church and state is to insist that spiritual values have an important role in public policy to counter the values of capitalist social relations. However, those values should be argued for on universal moral grounds and not on the grounds that they are mandated by a particular religious tradition.

Religious and spiritual people have as much right as anyone else to have their values presented and argued for in the public sphere. And, if they are convincing, adopted by others who do not share their religious perspective but can respond to the universal ethical content of those beliefs.... But when their arguments don’t resonate universally, as they do not in the case of abortion or homosexuality, where many religious people come up with different conclusions..., we want to be sure that no state mechanism can be used to impose them on the rest of us.

That does not mean keeping spiritual values out of the public realm, which essentially leaves that realm dominated by capitalist values. Let’s take the most essential issue: what counts as "efficiency, rationality, or productivity." In the contemporary world, these are defined largely by how much any given institution can produce money, power, or some other empirically verifiable outcome. But there is no scientific experiment that will ever prove that this is the only scientific standard for rationality or efficiency.

[It] is equally valid to demand a "New Bottom Line" in which institutions get assessed as rational, efficient, and productive not only to the extent that they maximize money and power but also to the extent that they maximize love, caring, ethical and spiritual sensitivity, and enhance our capacity to respond to other human beings and to nature with awe, wonder, and radical amazement. We don’t cite Divine or religious authority to legitimate this position. But we do claim that this spiritual perspective has a right to be championed in the public sphere because it offers a redemptive alternative to the allegedly neutral, "values free" ethos of capitalist social organization.

— Michael Lerner,
"When the Right Breaks the Barrier,
How Should a Spiritual Left Respond?"
Tikkun: A Bimonthly Jewish & Interfaith Critique
of Politics, Culture & Society
July/August 2005, v. 20, n.4, pp. 33-35

From Eighth Month, 2005:

These exchanges [over Judge John G. Roberts' religious views] threaten to convey a subtler message, not partisan at all but at least as questionable. The message has little to do with Judge Roberts in particular but much about the way Americans assume that serious religious commitments can be related to professional or public life in general....

Those offering [apologists'] descriptions probably don't intend the impression that they leave, which is of a warm but conventionally contained religious faith.... But the lingering impression is ultimately shaped by the poverty of the culture's categories for understanding how a devout religious faith can be related to professional or public responsibilities.

That impoverished understanding breaks down into two dichotomous possibilities:

One possibility assumes that a serious religious commitment entails fairly direct guidance for making professional or public choices as well as personal ones. Some believers testify to finding that kind of guidance in the verses of a sacred text, the opinions of religious authorities or introspective searching into their own hearts.

The other possibility restricts serious devotion to the strictly personal. Faith, often embodied in specific ritual observances, provides a sense of meaning, discipline, inspiration and solace. Religion inculcates honesty, care and loyalty in family and other personal relationships; but apart from elementary injunctions to decency and bars to lying and cheating, other activities are governed by the separate codes and demands of the workplace, whether that is a corporate law firm, a science laboratory, the United States Senate or the Supreme Court.

Many conservatives, especially religious ones, applaud the first way of relating religious commitment to professional and public life as authentic; they scorn the second way as half-hearted and inconsistent, a kind of amputated faith. They have a point. But is the first way, which many liberals, both secular and religious, fear as potentially arbitrary and intolerant, the only alternative?

This dichotomy between the personal and the public comes naturally to a Western culture that for half a millennium has been gradually freeing areas like law, science, medicine, politics and economics from direct oversight by religion. What gets overlooked is that there are good religious reasons for welcoming much of the autonomy that these areas of human activities have eked out.

Thus the devoutly religious judge who works within a secular framework of constitutional interpretation, the scientific researcher who rules out divine interventions in her empirical search for causes or the entrepreneur who operates on the basis of market dynamics may be doing so not because they have set their religious faith aside, or compartmentalized it into their personal and family lives, but precisely because their faith informs them that these may be the best ways of putting their particular talents at the service of God and their neighbors.

— Peter Steinfels,
"Beliefs: Roberts Nomination Raises the Issue
of the Role of Religious Faith in Public Life"
New York Times, 7/30/05

From Seventh Month, 2005:

Dietrich Bonhoeffer pondered the future of the church in Germany as it lay in the ruins of its fatal allegiance to Hitler. "The time of words is over" he wrote. The language of the Christian faith had lost its credibility and power, and..being a Christian would now...be limited to the quiet practices of "prayer and righteous action." I wonder whether it is not time to give Bonhoeffer's meditation a new hearing.

American patriotism has become a cult of self-worship.... Forgetting the crucial difference between discipleship to Jesus Christ and loyalty to nation, the God most Americans trust is a simulacrum of the holy and righteous God, a reification of the American way of life.

[The Christian left] movement to reclaim the soul of politics...has not fully reckoned with the grave, systemic results of the religious saturation of the public square, with the theological meaning of this saturation, and the death-by-a-thousand-equivocations of the language of faith....

What should Christians do in response to the desecration of religious language in its recent political and public rehearsals...? [We] find ourselves unable to imagine any public argument capable of restoring integrity and depth to the sacred symbols of the faith. What shall we then do? "All Christian thinking and speaking" must be born anew out of the discipline of holy silence, Bonhoeffer wrote. We must have the courage and the humility to recognize that God is most certainly tired of our talk....

Holy silence is not then the same as the withdrawal of religion from the public square.... Rather, holy silence is shaped by a passion for faith's integrity, and it hides faith's mysteries in acts of compassion and preserves them in prayer, liturgy, devotional life, and worship. Holy silence is a season of concentrated attention to faith's essential affirmations, during which we bear witness to the authenticity of our faith in the practices we keep.... The discipline of holy silence prepares us for a time when we may speak of God once more as one who comes to us from a country far from our own.

Let us then live with passionate worldliness in our anxious and violent age, and may the convictions of our faith be nurtured in the audacity of our hope and the generosity of our love. The hour is late. Let's get busy and keep silent. (18)

— Charles Marsh,
"A Call for Quiet," in Harvard Divinity Bulletin
Volume 33, Number 1, Spring 2005

From Sixth Month, 2005:

It is almost a cliché that the biblical Jewish prophets demanded social justice as covenantal responsibility. They did not suggest it as a nicer way to live together. They did not propose it to create a kinder, gentler country. Social justice was for them the human face of divine justice.

'If,' as Léon Epsztein insists, 'they had been asked whether they considered themselves primarily to be religious reformers or social reformers, they would probably have protested violently against the distinction.' They would have been right.

The one and only God, the God of righteousness and justice, made a covenant with a people of righteousness and justice to live in a land of righteousness and justice under a law of justice and righteousness. The Jewish prophets were not, in other words, inventing something new and transient. They were demanding something old and permanent in new circumstances. (198)

— John Dominic Crossan,
The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened
in the Years Immediately after the Execution of Jesus
San Francisco, Ca.: HarperCollins Publishers, 1998

From Fifth Month, 2005:

In Sydney Pollack's new political thriller, The Interpreter, white African Silvia Broome struggles with her rage at the genocidal dictator of her home country.

She describes the indigenous people's approach to murder. The murderer is bound and thrown into a river. If the murder victim's family let him drown, justice is served, but the survivors will struggle with grief for rest of their lives. If they save the murder's life, their grief is believed to end there.

Silvia ends her account by saying, "Vengeance is a lazy form of grief."

From Fourth Month, 2005:

If we are faithful to our measure of Light, we shall be guided up toward God, and up to a greater measure of the Truth. To go beyond our measure and imitate persons who have a greater measure than we have, is to be deceitful and to represent ourselves as something more than we are.

To take a specific example of the use of this conception, the Quakers have all along considered participation in war to be unchristian. Nevertheless, if a man feels that his conscience urges him to fight, he must be faithful to the measure of Light he has, however small this may be. If he is really faithful and if he waits upon the Lord so as to sensitize himself to the reception of more Light, a greater measure will be given him. He will eventually come to see the error of all fighting. In his first state he would be a coward if he did not fight; in his second state he would be a coward if he did fight. (28)

— Howard H. Brinton,
Friends for 300 Years:
The history and beliefs of the Society of Friends
since George Fox started the Quaker movement
Wallingford, Pa.: Pendle Hill Publications, 1952

From Third Month, 2005:

Fox's use of the term "that of God in every one" [ see note] is found most repeatedly... where he is writing pastorally to Friends about the life of Christ or exhorting Quaker ministers in their work. The incessant refrain...is that all their endeavors are to "sound deep to the witness of God in every man."
(see 1 Thess. 1:8)....

The famous social testimonies of the early Friends arose not out of a political or sociological analysis, presented with a few biblical proof-texts as garnish. These early testimonies instead began simply as those things which Friends could no longer do without diminishing or even belying the message of Christ's salvation that they preached....

[As Fox wrote:] "So speak the truth,...in all your occasions, and in all your tradings, dealings, and doings, speak the truth, act in the truth, and walk in the truth, and this brings righteousness forth. For it answereth the witness of God in everyone; which lets every one see all the deeds and actions they have done amiss, and words which they have spoken amiss." (136, 141)

— Douglas Gwyn,
Apocalypse of the Word: the Life & Message of George Fox
Richmond, Ind.: Friends United Press, 1986

Web Editor's Note: Some modern Friends tend to humanize the phrase "that of God," as if it referred to some generic, indwelling divinity in each person, or simply to the inherent value of each individual. While there is nothing wrong with such a sentiment, Fox and the first Quakers meant something much more specific by the phrase—and something much more challenging to their peers and to us.

"That of God" refers to the indwelling "witness of God" in each person: that is, to the Christ within. When Fox or others ministered to "that of God" in an individual, they understood themselves to be acting to enliven the "witness of God" within that other person.

The inner Christ begins the process of salvation for that person by being an unimpeachable inner witness to what he or she has done or spoken "amiss." If the person becomes willing to listen to that witness, he or she might experience "convincement"—that is, an inner awareness of having been "convicted" of those failings. Then Christ can lead the individual into a life which is truer to what God wants to enable us all to live.

Living the testimonies, therefore, means listening to "the witness of God" within ourselves, letting ourselves be shown "those things which [we can] no longer do without diminishing or even belying the message of Christ's salvation." By doing this, we also may become "outer witnesses" for those who see and hear us—and, perhaps, we help them to become more willing to listen to their own indwelling witness.

From Second Month, 2005:

Renunciation is not giving up the things of the world,
but accepting that they go away.

— Zen precept

From First Month, 2005:

Listen now. The intellect derives from the senses, which are limited, and come from the body. The intellect therefore is also limited, and it can never truly know reality, which is infinite and eternal.... Intellect has no real mettle, you see, and at the first threat, into a hole it scuttles.

But love is divine. It comes from the realm of the infinite, and is entrusted to the heart as a gift from God. Love has no calculation in it. "God loves you" is the only possible sentence!... Love is the pearl of an oyster living in the ocean, and intellect lives on the shore and cannot swim.

Bring up the oyster, sew the pearl onto your sleeve for all to see. It will bring courage to the intellect.

Love is the king that must rescue his coward slave.

Do you understand? (221)

Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt
(New York, NY: Bantam Books, 2003)