This sermon got Father Mike removed from his church - the Faith Community of St. Sabina. To their credit, the St. Sabina family is standing with their pastor. Mary Mitchell writes an interesting article in the Chicago Sun-Times about this situation pointing out that Cardinal Francis George moved slow to remove a pedophile priest, but with great haste pushed Father Mike to the side!
SYMBOLS VS. SUBSTANCE
(Click here to listen to Mumia Abu-Jamal recite this powerful essay himself.)
[col. writ 4/12/08] (c) ‘08 Mumia Abu-Jamal
Our national politics is largely the stuff of illusion.
It is the stuff of spin. It is the manipulation of images to pluck the heartstrings, or to stoke the furnaces of emotion.
Any emotion will do: love, hate, fear, all are but instruments upon which politicians will play to move people to the polls, to get them either to vote for them, or against their opponents.
What all of this really means in the day-to-day lives of many of the voters, is actually quite minimal, for politicians don’t really care about what voters want; they care about those who can afford them — those who pay them well for their services.
In essence, politics is a business, and voters are merely bare necessities.
We see this in the vast, obscene amounts of money raised for virtually all political offices.
At bottom, politics is the elevation of symbol over substance, for it seeks to create the illusion of change, while leaving unchanged the essential power relations at the lower levels of society.
Politics is great for changing forms, but it stumbles at changing essentials.
Black preachers agree to disagree
Area pastors react differently to the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. scandal
By Kelly Brewington
Sun reporter
May 1, 2008
The Rev. Alvin C. Hathaway Sr. considers the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. to be a tremendous pastor and a brilliant theologian. But sitting in the audience of the National Press Club in Washington this week, Hathaway found himself wincing at some of the remarks by Sen. Barack Obama’s embattled former pastor.
“When Jeremiah Wright says an attack on him is ‘an attack on the black church,’ that’s kind of stretching things,” said Hathaway, pastor of Baltimore’s Union Baptist Church. “I think it’s potentially dangerous.”
He is not the only one who thought so.
On Tuesday, Obama condemned Wright’s remarks, characterizing them as disrespectful, offensive and not accurately portraying the perspective of black churches.
Wright’s plunge back into the national spotlight - in which he has defended his fiery remarks, praised the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan and accused the media of distorting his words - has sparked an intense reaction in Baltimore’s black faith community. Some pastors assert that Wright is not the spokesman of the black religious tradition - one as diverse as the black community itself.
Others have defended Wright’s remarks as rooted in a rich history of black ministers using the pulpit to challenge injustices. They fear that the Wright backlash has overshadowed the black churches’ history, value and good deeds.
“Many of us pastors are pained,” said the Rev. Johnny Golden, pastor of New Unity Church Ministries in Baltimore and president-elect of the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance. “We see a lot of what he is saying and we understand it, but his comments have wounded the opportunity of Mr. Obama to make gains and opportunity for America to embrace its ideals.”
Tuesday I watched youtube videos of Dr. Jeremiah Wright’s presentation at the National Press Club kicking off the Legislative Days of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Pastor’s Conference. After watching them and Wright’s presentation live on CNN Sunday night at the Detroit NAACP Freedom Fund Banquet, I must say that he did a fantastic job of carefully explaining the particulars of Black Liberation Theology and the prophetic tradition in America. I especially appreciated his NAACP presentation Sunday night where he spoke masterfully about differences being just that - differences, not deficiencies. For the past few days, White America has been exposed to a fabric of Black Religious Life that it rarely, if ever, sees. As Dr. Wright said, the Black Church is much like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man - mainstream culture is trained not to see it and when glimpses of it appear, the conclusion is that it is something backward, loud, and uncouth.
While I’m sure that White America brought its own biases to Wright’s presentation (mainly because of corporate-controlled fascist media’s mission to control and shape the thoughts of the masses), those who came with an open mind saw a different (not deficient) line of thought, life, and belief that all too often flows in the undercurrent of mainstream America.
While I agree with others who have expressed appreciation of Wright’s words, it’s interesting to see how, White America aside, some African Americans are expressing radically different sentiments about the Reverend’s presentation.
Yesterday I was on assignment to cover the Pennsylvania Primary for My Urban Report.com. I have to tell you that I am an Obama supporter, but I had our team out getting un-biased coverage of all candidates—we even reached out to the Republicans and interviewed a McCain supporter.
Our reporter, Adrienne Hall asked four questions:
1. Who do you support and why?
2. What issues are important to you in your decision to support the candidate?
3. Do you think the (mainstream)media has been doing a good (fair) job in covering the candidates and the issues?
4. Is there anything else you’d like to add?
I thought these questions were fair and gave each side to present their case. The interesting thing that came across is that a majority of Hillary Clinton supporters wanted to know the questions in advance and where was this going to air and why where we there? Of course, you know where I am going—the race card. Yes, our crew was all black and one of our workers had a Barack shirt on at first, but I intentionally asked him to wear another one so people wouldn’t feel the bias. Does every African-America support Obama? No—we have evidence here when we interviewed Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs-Jones of Ohio. (see photo)
The interesting part was that most of the Obama supporters both white and black didn’t ask for the details of questions at all. Is there really a racial divide in our Democratic party and we are just too scared to talk about it—that is another blog post in itself, so I digress.
For those of you who are skeptical, I am looking to partner with a another production company out of Charlotte, North Carolina (who happens to have an all white crew) and they will ask the same questions and represent myurbanreport.com during the May 6 primary in North Carolina.
Chip Dizárd is the Co-Founder and Creative Director of Absolute Presence, a web site development firm that began in 2002. He has worked on many diverse projects and clients which include church and ministry web sites, political campaign, business and most recently in May of 2007 his firm designed and implemented the official web site of the City of Baltimore. Visit Absolute Presence today! (He’s also a blogger.)
My Vote’s for Obama (if I could vote) …
by Michael Moore
April 21st, 2008
Friends,
I don’t get to vote for President this primary season. I live in Michigan. The party leaders (both here and in D.C.) couldn’t get their act together, and thus our votes will not be counted.
So, if you live in Pennsylvania, can you do me a favor? Will you please cast my vote — and yours — on Tuesday for Senator Barack Obama?
I just received word that Dr. Jeremiah Wright will be delivering the 11AM morning message this Sunday, April 13, 2008 at the Historic Bank Street Memorial Baptist Church (Norfolk, VA) where the pastor is Rev. William Dixon.
I’m sure that Wright’s phone is blowing up these days so I wondered how Bank Street confirmed him for this Sunday. According to this article, Bank Street has the hookup. Someone from the church is related to Dr. Wright and the church will be celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Booster’s Ministry.
Kudos to my seminary brother, William Dixon for bringing Dr. Wright to the Norfolk area.
Unfortunately, however not everyone considers Dr. Wright’s presence in Norfolk a blessing. Of course you expect certain folks to frown upon his coming, but another African American pastor?!? Oh come on.
The media frenzy over the remarks of Barack Obama’s former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, raise critical challenge to the prophetic role and voice of the black church. These “incendiary” remarks have set off a firestorm in the media, exposing the deep divide that exists on Sundays - America’s most segregated hour of the week. This controversy serves as a stark reminder that the problem of the color line that still divides the U.S. and its churches. This often misguided debate obscures the rich and necessary prophetic role of the black church. Most coverage fails to capture the competing narratives and self-definitions of the U.S. that coexist depending on one’s race and social location. While I’m uncomfortable with some of Dr. Wright’s overly provocative rhetoric, and disagree with some of his claims (like his suggestion that AIDS was a creation of the U.S. government), I still vehemently defend the prophetic tradition that Rev. Wright has advanced over the course of 36 years of ministry. I agree with the Rev. Otis Moss III, the new Pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, that we do a grave disservice by boiling down over 207,000 minutes of Dr. Wright’s preaching into a handful of 30-second sound bites, most taken out of context.
REMARKS OF SENATOR BARACK OBAMA: ‘A MORE PERFECT UNION’
Philadelphia, PA | March 18, 2008
As Prepared for Delivery
“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”
Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.
The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.
Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution - a Constitution that had at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.