Today we will continue to look at components for the practice of hope. Walter Brueggeman shares his consideration about the particular shape of despair in dominant Western society. To this despair, we must respond in transformative ways.
One tool for...self-securing that is legitimated by a closed ideology in the name of the holy is uncriticized technology that would seem to deliver a capacity for limitless power and control. The practical cost of such technology in terms of human infrastructure is characteristically unrecognized and kept invisible, so that huge investments in technologies of control are made to seem both normal and moral, as well as inescapable.
"We're doing the right thing...We are working with evil powers that must be overcome...We must give up some freedoms so that those who are evil will not prevail over us." Well, this kind of fear mongering, especially when there is a "good verse evil" or "our faith verses another faith," is the gateway to utter control. This is well used method of totalitarianism. This becomes all the more pervasive due to the many ways the media and technology is used among us. It is so easy to spread fear and to shape stories that fit one side over and against another. I must say that this is again the way both the political and religious right and left are working in our day. One casts itself as righteous by using the voices available through the many avenues of technology that we are both blessed and cursed to have these days. We must be very alert to the "uncriticized" technology that is so often seen as "truth." Someone said to me that a close relative has been quite naive in her compassion for others until this relative started using the internet for information. Well the resources of the internet, if used without a critical eye, can lead us to a hell of a vision for life and make it sound like heaven. In the midst of a community of hope, we must develop and ear and an
eye for truthfulness. That again must come from those age old tools call dialogue and critical thinking and truth-seeking.
Connection: Don't buy it all - even this devotion. Questioning for the purpose of coming to understand something from another point of view is vital to our life together.
You have gifted us with many ways to find how your will is to be manifest among us, O God. Now we need the wisdom to use those gifts appropriately and use them to bring your people closer to one another. Encourage us to use the wisdom you have given to all of us. Amen.
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