Another further “clarification” of my previous post, which was written as a sort of “qualifier” of the post before that. So given that “democracy” can find its true fulfillment in something beyond and other than “democracy proper” (ie. as it usually construed), there is also the issue of how comparatively little I blog on my disgust of the Bush administration. Well, it’s not that I make little mention of it, becuase it still comes up under quite a few of my posts on various subjects. But I am doing hardly any browsing of the “political blogs” anymore, such as Daily Kos, TalkingPointsMemo, and I’ve not listened to any of the Al Franken Show for the past 4 or 5 months. It’s not “floating my boat” so to speak, any longer. I started heading in the direction of more theology, less commentary on the Bush administration’s antics after the election. I made a conscious effort to shift my attention (although, from time to time, various events and inane utterances on those events get a rise out of em —like the Rove stuff going on now) to theological and church exploration. I bought a Bonhoeffer DVD, started reading Hauerwas, God’s Politics came out, and the war in Iraq just kept on getting more and more troubling, as the “direction” we were all assured this was heading was not coming to pass (not that a “success” would have made it justifiable or more “accepatable”; even IF there were any “benchmarks” for success ever given (which there were not).

Also, I began to feel , with a news sense of urgency and sometimes outright depression, the lack of instances of church sufficient to the task to which she is called. The lack of “community” which so constitutes its power and existence, by virtue of “God being present in our midst, and by virtue of God working in and among those world-challenging relationships that are to exist among us. The lack of instances of communities who define themselves as non-violent people due to the life and teachings of the resurrected Jesus, and the resulting communities that grow and form as a result of our having been freed from the desire for our own security, and instead focues on the call we are receiving to live out models of the Kingdom of God, and therein displaying the “alternative society” and possibilities for alternatives that reveal the truth about our world.

Where is that?