To: Johannes Pilch who wrote (662916 ) 11/28/2004 10:20:28 AM From: Eveningstar Read Replies (3) | Respond to "Jesus was a dissident on the fringes of the Empire of his day. As Father Gregory Boyle says, "Jesus stood with everybody who was nobody. He made a beeline (always) to stand with those on the margins, those whose dignity had been denied, the poor and excluded, the easily despised, the demonized, and those whose burdens were more than they could bear. And they killed him for it." Father Luis Barrios agrees, saying that the historical Jesus was ignored by the authorities until "he went downtown" to challenge the elite. As the Christian radical Cornel West writes in "Democracy Matters," "prophetic Christianity" is being eclipsed by "Constantian Christianity"; that is, the very Empire that crucified Jesus later transformed him into the symbol of an expansionary state religion. This is what the Machiavellians like Rove and the neo-conservative non-believers have done through the Bush presidency: build the beginnings of a theocratic state just beneath the surface of the Republican Party, a shadow network of believers nesting in every crevice of bureaucracy available."progressivechristiansuniting.org ubook.org progressivechristiansuniting.org
