Souljonz Blog Has Now Moved, I Repeat Souljonz Blog Has Now Moved!

Important SoulJonz Alert!                                                        Important Souljonz Alert!

This blog has now been moved and will now be known as the “The Critical Cleric” blog.  The address is  http://thecriticalcleric.typepad.com/ .  The reasons for this move are many but mainly it is to connect my blogging with my actual work of Religious Cultural Criticism.  Whatever the case, I hope you join us at the Critical Cleric so that we can continue our conversation and even take it to the next level.

Billy Michael Honor

Presbyterian Pastor “Agent of Justice” in film “Changeling”

John Malkovich as the Rev. Gustav Briegleb, a Presbyterian pastor who campaigned against Immorality and corruption in Los Angeles from the 1920s-1940s. Photo courtesy of Universal Studios

John Malkovich plays Presbyterian minister the Rev. Dr. Gustav Briegleb in Clint Eastwood’s new film Changeling.

The film tells the story of how in 1928 the minister came to the aid of Christine Collins, a mother who was wrongly imprisoned in a psychiatric ward because she insisted that the boy whom the police had returned to her was not her kidnapped nine-year-old son, Walter.

Fearful of being discredited in the eyes of the public, L.A. Police Captain J. J. Jones brushed aside Collins’ objections as signs of a confused woman out of touch with reality. Pressured by him, she took the boy home, but continued to protest the mistaken identity.

The captain then had Collins arrested and committed to the psychiatric ward of L.A. General Hospital where her treatment was anything but gentle or understanding. Although one examining physician declared her normal, and a woman who had taken care of Walter also said the boy claiming to be him was an imposter, the captain continued to assert that Collins was delusional.

Neither of the foregoing are depicted in the film, no doubt due to time constraints — the film runs two hours and twenty minutes. Also left out of the film version of the story are the series of stormy hearings of the Police Board and the trial of the kidnapper.

In the film, several real life characters are merged for the sake of the story. In the film Briegleb is depicted as a radio preacher, though none of the 176 times mentions of him between 1921 and 1943 in the Los Angeles Times cite that ministry. Briegleb was a colleague and friend of Methodist minister R.P. Shuler, who did conduct a radio ministry.

Brieglieb and Shuler were community activists and partners in challenging the vice and crime of the city and the corruption of the police and city officials.

In the film, Briegleb is first seen preaching to his St. Paul’s Presbyterian Church congregation about the kidnapping of Walter, mentioning that he has kept the distraught mother and her boy in his prayers.

The scene is in keeping with several reports during the Twenties of the pastor discussing current crimes, especially in his Sunday night sermons —yes, Presbyterians were expected to attend services twice a Sunday in those days.

Briegleb tells the congregation that although he is sure that the police are doing all that they can to find the boy, he does not have much confidence that they will do so — the LAPD “being the most, violent, corrupt, and incompetent police force this side of the Rocky Mountains.”

During the five months following the abduction of her son the anxious mother struggles to keep her hope alive for Walter’s welfare. A single mother (her husband had been in prison for a number of years), she works as a supervisor at the telephone company, where she moves up and down on roller skates to assist the line of operators with problem callers.

Collins is overjoyed when the police call to tell her that they have received a message from the sheriff’s office in DeKalb, IL, that a boy claiming to be Walter has been found and will be sent to Los Angeles (at her expense).

Her dismay is barely concealed when she looks at the boy and exclaims that he is not her Walter. Captain Jones, with Police Chief Davis close by to soak up the public acclaim over the boy’s return, browbeats her, telling her to “try him out for a couple of weeks.”

Out of desperation to resume the search for Walter, Collins repeatedly calls and visits Captain Jones’ office, but he refuses to listen to her arguments that her son was three inches taller than this boy and, unlike the imposter, had not been vaccinated (the filmmakers change vaccination to circumcision).

Lashing out at her, the officer shouts, “What are you trying to do, make a lot of fools out of us all? Are you trying to shirk your duty as a mother and have the State provide for your son? You are just a fool.” He then has her arrested and committed to a psychiatric ward without a warrant.

John Malkovich accurately portrays the minister as a forceful personality who knows his way around police stations and law courts as much as he does around a pulpit and church sanctuary. It is his championing of her cause that arouses the public to demand justice for the oppressed woman.

He brings a top notch lawyer, who agrees to work pro bono, to take up her case against Captain Jones and the Police Department. It is eventually revealed that the imposter is 12-year-old Arthur Hutchens from Iowa, a runaway who, having heard about the Collins kidnapping, fooled the authorities into believing that he was the missing boy so that he could get a free ride to California in the hope of meeting his hero, the movie western star Tom Mix.

Late in the film when a sex addict is caught and convicted of murdering a number of boys, probably including Walter, and burying their bodies on his chicken farm, Briegleb counsels the distraught mother. Even though the kidnaper has been caught and it turns out that Walter was probably one of his victims, Collins continues to believe that he is alive and will eventually be reunited with her.

Her false hope is cruelly fostered by the killer, who during her visit with him just before his execution, refuses to say one way or another if her son was one of those whose bodies were dug up near the chicken coop where the boys had had been imprisoned..

The minister gently suggests that she should move on with her life. At that point the pastor drops from sight as the film deals with the last years of Collins’ life, during which she continues to hope that her son is alive somewhere.

The Rev. Briegleb almost seems like a character conjured up by some Hollywood scriptwriter, though he was obviously a prominent religious figure in Los Angeles for more than 20 years until his death in 1943.

Ordained into the Congregational Church in 1905, he became a Presbyterian either while serving a church in Philadelphia or when he was called to pastor Westlake Presbyterian Church of Los Angeles in 1917.

A few years later he is in the news for leading a campaign against a notorious dance club called “The Pink Rat.” Later he and his friend Shuler made news as they personally led a raid on a gambling operation in a circus tent. Fortunately the police were with them and saved them from the wrath of the patrons who were massing to attack the pair.

Relentlessly campaigning against lewd dancing and gambling, the two ministers at times were called to be witnesses in court trials. They also got into serious legal difficulties when Shuler criticized a judge on his radio program. The judge cited both ministers for contempt of court, and Shuler served some jail time.

This was the heyday of the infamous Fatty Arbuckle scandal — a young starlet died in his hotel room after a sexual escapade — and Briegleb vociferously attacked Hollywood morality.

At the 1921 Presbyterian General Assembly in Des Moines, Briegleb accused cowboy movie star William Hart and other movie makers of ridiculing Protestant ministers because the latter were leading campaigns to censor movies. (Hart had written a screenplay in which a minister robs a stage coach in order to finish paying for the building of his church.)

Briegleb’s censorship efforts revealed a somewhat darker side — that he was anti-Semitic. During a meeting of the Ministers’ Union, which he chaired, he accused movie producers of making immoral movies because “85% of the industry is controlled chiefly by Jews and that some of the latter care only for the money and not the moral effect of their pictures.”

But in other areas, Briegleb was ahead of his time. His first evening sermon at St. Paul’s Presbyterian Church in 1926 was entitled “Three Wise Women and their Fool Male Friends.”  The Times (reporting on a sermon!) remarked: “’The beautiful-but-dumb’ idea of womankind is not shared by Dr. Briegleb, who deprecates the attempt of the ‘lords of creation’ to belittle the intelligence and judgment of their sisters.”

Briegleb also took part in the Fundamentalist controversy that wracked the Presbyterian Church during the Thirties. Speaking in Cleveland at the 1934 General Assembly, he rejected the Independent Board for Foreign Presbyterian Missions that the schismatic Rev. J. Gresham Machen had set up to rival the denomination’s official board.

Though he died at 61, Briegleb, with his passion for justice and coming to the aid of the underdog, made his mark on a city in which official corruption was running rampant.  

J. Michael Straczynski has written of his Changeling screenplay: “My intention was very simple: to honor what Christine Collins did. My job was to tell the story as honestly as I could and honor the fight she waged and how she never once lost faith and kept looking for her son…”

In the process, Straczynski has also honored a courageous Presbyterian minister who also deserves to be remembered.

The Rev. Ed McNulty is editor of Visual Parables and author of three film books published by Westminster John Knox Press, including his latest book, Faith and Films.

 

 

Presenting “President Barack Obama” Mission Accomplished!

President Elect Barack Obama

Its 11:15 Tuesday Night November 4, 2008 and I have just watched Barack Obama become the first President of Color in the history of the Western World.  Needless enough to say, I am soo ELATED I can hardly type these words.  So let me just say, Ladies and Gentleman I present to you,

The President of the United States of America—Barack Hussein Obama

YES WE DID!

Why I didn’t but did vote for Obama!

It seems almost strange that after at least 18 months of Presidential campaigning and political theatrics it all comes to an end in one day, which happens to be Today.  It’s  kinda of like that feeling I get when I am watching a great movie that happens to be extremely long and I know it’s the last scene.  Part of me is disappointed that it has to end but another part of me is relieved that it does in fact have an ending.  Personally I think my election season came to a climax after I waited 5 and a half hour to vote on Friday.  After this most interesting event everything else that happens for me this election is just a crescendo to my climax.  You would have had to be there to understand. 

Whatever the case, I did cast my vote.  And those who read this blog regularly know I have supported Senator Obama since way back in February 2007.  I mostly supported him early because of his political platform of “a politics that builds bridges and not walls”.  This resonated with me because it was roughly equivalent to my religious platform of “religion that reconciles and not separates.” For this reason, as well as many more, I have supported Senator Obama, but perhaps what I have supported more than anything is the opportunity for our country to truly reform itself and turn the page by embracing a new generation of politics. 

And this is why I did not vote for Barack Obama.  I may have checked his name on a ballot but I didn’t vote for him.  I voted for something greater than him.  I voted for what Obama represents.  I voted for a new day in American History.  A day not categorized like the last, a day where my generation has the opportunity to chart its own course.  So I didn’t vote for Obama, I voted for us’ the now/next generation of 21^st century Americans. 

Apparently I’m not the only one….Read this Note from the Daily Kos written by someone else who didn’t vote for Obama:

 I’m a middle-class white guy living in Jacksonville, Florida. I’ve got a wife and two kids. Because the kids had no school today, I took a vacation day from work, and took the kids downtown to vote early. Fifty-nine minutes later, two smiling children and I proudly sported “I Voted” stickers.
But I didn’t vote for Obama.

I voted for my ancestors, who believed in the promise of this country and came with nothing as immigrants.

I voted for my parents, who taught in the public schools for decades.

I voted for Steve, an acquaintance of mine from Kentucky (Killed by an IED two years ago in Iraq).

I voted for Shawn, another who’s been to Iraq twice, and Afghanistan once, and who’ll be going back to Afghanistan again soon — and whose family earned eleven bucks a month too much to qualify for food stamps when the war started.

I voted for April, the only African-American girl in my high school — it was years before it occurred to me how different her experience in our school must have been.

I voted for my college friends who are Christian, Jewish, Mormon, and yes — Muslim.

I voted for my grandfathers, who worked hard in factories and died too young.

I voted for the plumber who worked on my house, because I want him to get a REAL tax break.

I voted for four little angels from Birmingham.

I voted for a bunch of dead white men who, although personally flawed, were willing to pledge their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor, and used a time of great crisis to expand freedom rather than suspend it.

I voted for all those people and more, and I voted for all of you, too. But mostly, I voted selfishly. I vote for two little kids, one who has ballet in an hour, and one who has baseball practice at the same time. I voted for a world where they can be confident that their government will represent the best that is in this country, and that will in turn demand the best of them. I voted for a government that will be respected in the world. I voted for an economy that will reward work above guile. I voted for everything I believe in.

Sure, I filled in the circle next to the name Obama, but it wasn’t him I was voting for — it was every single one of us, and those I love most of all. Who else is there to vote for?                   

Dr. Cornel West Lectures Matt Bai On Tavis Smiley About Obama and So-called Post Racial Politics

Pastor Tony Evans says Christian Unity Vital on Nov. 4 and Beyond

A well-known pastor says Christians must rise above petty political bickering in the upcoming presidential election.

Dr. Tony Evans is pastor of Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas, Texas, and also founder of the ministry called The Urban Alternative. He believes Christians must seek God’s direction through prayer and scripture when it comes to casting their votes. Evans adds it is clear there is no perfect political party or candidate.

“If we had a Kingdom Party where all the issues were aligned tightly to the Bible, then we would all know which way to vote and we’d vote for that platform, candidate, and party. Since we don’t have that, and no [single] political party, Democrats or Republicans, fully encompasses the values of the Kingdom, you’re going to have divided priorities,” Evans contends. “And the Bible gives us freedom to do that in Romans 14, to vote our conscience based on the information we have. But let’s live as one people of God in how we function.”
 
Regardless of the outcome of the presidential race, Evans says it will be vital for Christians in America to be unified for the cause of Christ after the election.

Source: One News Now

Souljonz Book of the Month/ Race: A Theological Account

(I have been keeping track of the work of Professor J. Kameron Carter for some time now.  I consider him one of the most promising scholars on the Religious and Theological Studies scene.  This is why I was most excited when I received his first book “Race: A Theological Account” that has just been released this month.  I have been unwisely cheating my assigned readings from my seminary courses and reading Carter’s book instead, and I have to agree with Professor James Cone when he calls it an “intellectual tour de force”.  I highly recommend it to anyone seriously interested in the study of how historic Christian theology has been the chief perpetuator of racial notions of supremacy and difference.  But if you don’t believe me, just read what others are saying below.    Billy Michael Honor)

Duke Divinty Professor J. Kameron Carter

Review

“An intellectual tour de force! This book demonstrates great intellectual range and theological imagination; it should be read by all students of theology, religious studies and African American religion and history. I have nothing but praise for this work by a young African American scholar who must be reckoned with.” –James H. Cone, Charles Augustus Briggs Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology, Union Theological Seminary

 

“Jay Kameron Carter has written an extraordinarily insightful and sophisticated analysis of race as it has been constructed in modern philosophy and theology. His study reconceptualizes modernity and demonstrates the centrality of religion to any understanding of racism.” –Susannah Heschel, Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies, Dartmouth College

Product Description

In Race: A Theological Account, J. Kameron Carter meditates on the multiple legacies implicated in the production of a racialized world and that still mark how we function in it and think about ourselves. These are the legacies of colonialism and empire, political theories of the state, anthropological theories of the human, and philosophy itself, from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment to the present.

Carter’s claim is that Christian theology, and the signal transformation it (along with Christianity) underwent, is at the heart of these legacies. In that transformation, Christian anti-Judaism biologized itself so as to racialize itself. As a result, and with the legitimation of Christian theology, Christianity became the cultural property of the West, the religious ground of white supremacy and global hegemony. In short, Christianity became white. The racial imagination is thus a particular kind of theological problem.

Not content only to describe this problem, Carter constructs a way forward for Christian theology. Through engagement with figures as disparate in outlook and as varied across the historical landscape as Immanuel Kant, Frederick Douglass, Jarena Lee, Michel Foucault, Cornel West, Albert Raboteau, Charles Long, James Cone, Irenaeus of Lyons, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor, Carter reorients the whole of Christian theology, bringing it into the twenty-first century.

Neither a simple reiteration of Black Theology nor another expression of the new theological orthodoxies, this groundbreaking book will be a major contribution to contemporary Christian theology, with ramifications in other areas of the humanities.

 

Governor Palin, It might be Good To Remember!

After watching Governor Palin’s speech last night, I just have a few questions. 

What has been the major driving force behind most of the civil and social advancements (like women’s rights and racial equality) in our nation the last 60 years?

Is not the answer to this question, the mobilization of communities through the activism and organizing of individuals and groups involved in public service?  In fact, equal rights in this country were earned in large part by the service of the National Organization of Women (Now), the women’s suffrage movement, and the Chicago Equality League.  Is not Governor Palin as indebted to these groups and their service, as Senator Obama is to the NAACP, National Urban League, and the SCLC for their service?  For both of them have benefited greatly from the community work and organization of all of these groups, perhaps even more so from them, than from any particular political party in this country?

I ask these questions because it seems from her speech last night, that Governor Palin wants to make light of the magnanimous work of community service.  To my mind, the willingness to dedicate one’s self to the service of the other, is closely related to the service exemplified and defined by Christ (Mark 10: 43).  Perhaps if candidates of all kinds would put more emphasis on this criteria and not the criteria set by their political parties, they might actually be able to accomplish great things and not just talk about them.

“…Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, 44and whoever wants to be first must be servant of all. 45For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Mark 10: 43- 45        

The Republican Convention and the Language of Empire

At the moment after a very long day, where nothing quite went right all day, I turned on the TV. and there was former Senator (turned z list actor) Fred Thompson giving a speech at the Republican national convention.  Needless enough to say my night became as bad as my day was.  Not necessarily because it was the republican national convention but rather because it was a speech I have heard so many times before from both republicans and democrats alike. 

I call it “the benevolent empire” speech.  It’s the speech that we hear almost every four years about how anyone who criticizes American foreign policy is an unpatriotic and an ungrateful citizen of a country who has done so many great things all over the world.  We’ve all heard this before.  It’s the language of empire.  It’s stems from the notion that our nations’ so-called global good deeds cover a multitude of egregious global destruction, even if this destruction is perpetrated as a means to achieve the end which is almost always peace and economic prosperity.

To be sure, this is the language and the thought of empire and imperialism; principally because it proposes victory before peace and not justice and then peace.  In other words, imperial language is the language of blow it up and then make it better (Iraq) rather than the language of radical democracy which says make it right and it will be better.  I propose the latter is the most Godly and effective method of global engagement.  But of course you can’t make stuff right if you don’t thing that you’ve done anything thing wrong in the first place.

The True Meaning of Labor Day (Repost)

By James Wagner:

It’s not the barbeque, and it’s certainly not the traffic. It was born as an attempt to appease the working people of America. [Remember the Pullman strike in history class?] Unfortunately it seems to have worked too well.

The observance of Labor Day began over 100 years ago. Conceived by America’s labor unions as a testament to their cause, the legislation sanctioning the holiday was shepherded through Congress amid labor unrest and signed by President Grover Cleveland as a reluctant elction-year compromise.

Soon after, when the entire nation became thoroughly frightened by the bugbear of socialism and communism, the movement was de-radicalized. The real Left was gradually marginalized and almost totally eliminated from American culture and society. The workers’ movement itself became middle class, before it acquired the material benefits and political power which that adjustment should have delivered. And there it languishes.

In 1898, Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, called it “the day for which the toilers in past centuries looked forward, when their rights and their wrongs would be discussed…that the workers of our day may not only lay down their tools of labor for a holiday, but upon which they may touch shoulders in marching phalanx and feel the stronger for it.”Almost a century since Gompers spoke those words, though, Labor Day is seen as the last long weekend of summer rather than a day for political organizing. In 1995, less than 15 percent of American workers belonged to unions, down from a high in the 1950’s of nearly 50 percent, though nearly all have benefited from the victories of the Labor movement.

Happy Labor Day, but don’t forget.