An article here that gives occasion for some more things that come to mind:

Body and Soul: The moral of the story

The moral of the story

Jim Wallis has an op-ed in today’s New York Times. It’s pretty much the same speech Wallis has been delivering to Democrats for years:

1. Come back to issues like reducing poverty that Democrats used to fight for and frame them in moral, perhaps even Biblical, terms.

2. Realize that saving the environment is a faith issue.

3. Point out that access to health care, child care, and increasing options for women will all decrease the number of abortions. This is a better frame for the issue than “choice.”

4. Be willing to give a little on abortion restrictions — especially parental notification.

5. Help protect children against “Hollywood sleaze and Internet pornography.”

6. Make a moral issue of reducing global poverty rather than military power as the basis for international leadership.

I made the following comments,

re: your statement:
I don’t think there’s a damn thing government can do about this — the commercialization or the sleaze — that wouldn’t be worse than the problem.

I don’t hear Wallis saying it’s a government job. That’s what a lot of people have mistaken in God’s Politics. It’s not all about “Politics” as in “government”, but in public disoucrse, and Wallis rightly emphasizes family and villager responsibilities here. He is saying this in direct and intended contrast to the “solutions” or “rants” of the Religious Right on this issue. So I feel he is saying concerning “what government can do about it” is saying “nothing; the problem there is one parents and churches and communities have to handle/should handle/must handle”.

The very fact that everybody has an opinion on what Wallis is saying is an indicator of how deeply his message has penetrated and is causing these issues to be debated, explored, and best of all, recognized. Wallis has been attacked from ALL sides , left , right, and orthodox, even other “radicals”. But he has broght these things into the limelight as effectively as anybody I have seen in decades. People who speak and write “way above the heads” of most Americans will NOT have the impact he has. When I hear people say about Wallis “He oversimplifies”. When one is talking ethics and politics and theology, this will ALWAYS happen. A message like Wallis’ —and yes, the SAME one he has preached for years, reached its most popular appeal in the wake of the extremism of the political right, and the cynicism that has been engenedered by the hubris of the Religious Right. Thank God for Jim Wallis.

(There’s a bit of re-hashing here, but I might just include a bit of slightly different wording and hopefully, insight as well, but we’ll see)
….. I want to write a little about that re: what I think is a crtitique that is more inappropriate than “wrong”. I say this because I can agree theologically with the questions that are raised about Wallis’ “God’s Politics” narrative by some proponents of Radical Orthodoxy, and yet not agree with their zeroing in on Jim Wallis with such things as “he’s basically just a humanist” (which he is nowhere close to being), or that he is a “Constaninian of the Left” (I find this frustrating because if it were not for Wallis, there would be far more nationalistic/Constantinian Christians circulating.) The church would have one less voice for helping us resist the lure of the nationalist agenda , and especially to the nationalist idolatries inherent in this seduction for members of the Kingdom against which there are no rivals. Moreover, there would be one less “accessible” voice, which is the important point here. Will Stanley Haeuerwas, as much as I feel indebted to him for his insights, and continue to devour his books, have such an impact on a larger portion of church folks in this country? I seriously doubt it. Perhaps if the church has its intended effect; but it paradoxically needs to have a lot of these previously disenfranchised people participating. Most new converts to Christianity are won by the witness of a particular community, one doing a work of mercy which resonates with the sense of calling that from which they felt compelled to look “elsewhere” other than the Church, feeling that the church did not care about such things. The Church of the Saviour is one such community.

And so thank God for not for Wallis and Sojo, but Stanley Hauerwas, and Radical Orthodoxy, and the church. We’re ALL in this. I think that’s pretty important; and we need to be focusing on how some of the embodiments work, and how churches can embody these. THat’s what excites me also about some of James K.A. Smith’s upcoming projects.