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I. Introduction: The Story of Odysseus
Overview of Odysseus' journey: violent travel and eventual
homecoming as a metaphor for human excellence of purpose that reclaims a
homeland.
Is the merit of Odysseus' tactics
what defines his success, or does the story mislead?
Polytropos: complex, "multifarious," tactic-driven survival often admired
in modern society.
Contrast with Christ’s critique of
merit and peace as the authentic virtue, challenging Roman ideals of virile
success.
II. Defining Realism and Arete
The valorization of complexity in modern society and
how strategic thinking has evolved into careerism of mammon.
Realism becomes about survival
tactics rather than moral virtue. Realism and nuance framed as choosing the lesser evil. Picking
battles. Being a survivor. Being a professional.
Now, winning is the only thing.
(Lombardi).
In that we seek our place on a frozen mountain top, basking
like a statue in the acclaim of glory in which we can sleep blessed.
Contrast the modern ideal with peacemaking as the true
arete.
Peacemaking is prophetic and defined by grace, not by
ego-driven strategies.
Peacemaking requires soul training,
empathy, and a kinesthetic connection to others. DANCE
Odysseus and Heroism: The modern society’s
valorization of tactical survival and strategic thinking—symbolized by
Odysseus—can be misleading in terms of what true virtue is. This argument is
valid in that it critiques how modern definitions of "heroism" can
be narrow, focusing on violent survival tactics rather than moral virtue
which keeps us in our roles in the Kingdom of God.
III. The Trinity and Logic
The Trinity as an embodiment of
perichoretic grace challenges rationalist logic.
Trinitarian oneness is about shared
purpose, not static forms.
Grace transcends materialism and
identity politics, calling for the elevation of creation and the Greatest
Commandment (GR) as the foundation for moral action.
Trinitarian Theology and Logic: the Trinity undermines binary logic by the dance of perichoresis (mutual indwelling) and Trinitarian oneness. grace and shared purpose come down from the rigid structures
of rationality and materialist configurations of christian doctrine to take an active role on the ground.
IV. Critique of Modern Political
Discourse
Modern political discourse has
devolved into "us vs. them" rhetoric driven by identity politics.
Media and elites stoke anger and
resentment, commodifying identity and weaponizing language to create
division.
Politics focuses on stereotypes,
undermining compromise and deliberation.
V. Impact of Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism has privatized all
human activities, commodifying them and alienating individuals.
Public policy is shaped by
corporate interests, leaving society fractured.
Neoliberal language creates a stultifying monoculture of
anomie and nihilism
where wealth is the only source of meaning.
·
Language is mistrusted.
·
Art creates nausea at its supposed privilege seeking
biases.
·
Tech and crypto industries fuel this monoculture,
·
fostering identity politics as existential battles.
VI. Theological and Moral Failings
in Political Rhetoric
Both left- and right-wing identity
politics focus on victimhood and power rather than moral deliberation.
Language manipulation by political
figures creates enemies and dehumanizes opponents.
Fascism arises from the
manipulation of struggle and identity politics to mobilize hatred and
violence.
Christians are drawn into
"lesser evil" justifications, which distort the Logos (divine
reason) and create moral confusion.
Fascism and Language Manipulation and the agonistic framing of
identity politics. This draws parallels
between modern authoritarian trends and earlier fascist regimes, which used
language and identity to create an existential enemy. The use of Jules Barbey
d'Aurevilly's quote to argue spiritual
corruption in religious institutions aligns with political agendas of mammon seeking.
VII. Spiritual Corruption
Mammon manipulates language and
creates a world of materialism and power-seeking.
Neoliberal financialization
furthers the privatization of all human activity, leading to a disconnected
society.
The degradation of language mirrors
the rise of fascism, turning political and religious discourse into tools for
division.
VIII. Solutions: Grace, Legacy, and
Recollection
Grace is the ultimate solution. It
creates a legacy of virtue and peace, countering the divisiveness of identity
politics.
The sermon calls for the rejection
of neoliberalism and materialism.
Recollection of the past, not
nostalgia, is necessary to meet current challenges.
IX. Attendance to Grace and
Peacemaking
Trinitarian ousia (essence) is
about shared purpose and accompaniment.
The sermon emphasizes the need for
a reflective approach to the past, grounded in grace and the Greatest
Commandment.
Modern political language,
distorted by mammon, leads to moral confusion.
The solution lies in peacebuilding,
reconciliation, and the restoration of narratives of meaning.
It’s not nostalgia.
These are ghosts--shades that try to live again by inhibiting
the future’s energies of betterment from arriving: the kingdom of God.
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We call these travels through
the gods’ anger “odysseys.”
The Characterization asserted at
the outset that Odyesseus was a much-turned, much-armed, much-tacticed man
the basis of his merit? Or is this epic a cartoon that misleads?
“Complicated:”one who chooses his battles.
That’s the professional’s arete, the one who survives in the market
of human price assigning judgements.
“Nuanced” we may call him, who always chooses the lesser evil. "Realism:" that lesser evils frame and occasion the good.
The experience of odysseys sets a
culture to framing and shaping the terms of its excellence, how through
battle and struggle has ensured our hero’s survival and thus his virile
virtu-s are timeless and unchangeable.
Contrast polytropos in
Hebrews. Many tactic-ed virtue and peace.
As ever, Christ is the paradigm
critique of any notion of merit.
I am here this morning not to pick
a new battle with ancient Athens but to deny the resurgence of Roman Imperial
notions of success and victory through virile beastliness.
The virtu-s of Wolfs and dogs. Vs.
the authentic virtues of sheep
II. Defining Realism and Arete
Modern Romans (I’m not address RCC)
valorize virile complexity and strategic thinking (as arete) are true sources
of virtue. Strategic thinking warring on the fields of finance make every one
into careerists of mammon ready to step over others—to win a limited share of
honor manifest in wealth alone.
In this context, “Realism” becomes
defined as choosing the lesser evil to always survive. This is the weed of
existentialism framed by philosophy.
To endure by individual wit and
tactic alone and isolated into what ever chaos one finds oneself thrown.
Polytropos is the existentially
“complicated” one, so late-modern. The kind of person we admire as a
“survivor” without asking how or why. The kind of professional we admire
who has learned to “pick his battles” as he climbs mountains and
hierarchies. Who shoots first and asks questions later.
By contrast
Peacemaking is the real excellence
of polytropos. It
is ousia (essence) the human essence of which shares with the divine
accompaniment and shared action, guided by grace, not by ego.
Peacemaking is prophetic, shaped
by virtue and wisdom, and not by strategic power. It is kinesthetic as it
learns the soul’s full range of empathy in order to begin to comply with the
GR duty.
·
Peacemaking reads the full context of conflict and
through experience and wisdom,
·
anticipates how to keep the peace through virtue and
·
bides and observes to offer positive solutions.
·
These require travels and experiences at
least as varied and ranging as Odysseus’, with a far broader range of soul
training through the arts and kinesthetic processing of beauty,
·
poignancy, awe, and the sublime
·
that has gentled our inner boxer,
·
our inner pugilist,
·
where we have learned to take off our inner boxing
gloves a
·
and have learned to tap our hearts to connect our
heels with a partner,
·
not an identity.
So Not only prophetic is the
many-tacticed peacemaker, but dances---
perichoretic grace (mutual
indwelling), challenges rationalist paradigms of fixed "systems." Nimbleness for the overarching end of peacemaking, not self-aggrandizing
Trinitarian oneness is not bound
by mathematical logic, but by shared purpose and flourishing,
undermining materialistic and
static formalism.
Ousia is dynamic and ever-present
accompanying energy of care that contradicts simplistic, binary thinking of
opposing forces,
.
the energetic accord and alignment
and active attendance to grace spreading is what makes Jesus God: his
elevation of the GR is a full commitment to the creation. The creation as
god intends every eternal thing. So that every deprivation and oppression in
extremis transcends materialism as usual and the divisive politics of
identity winning,
of partisans who are frozen into a
type that wins.
Freezing oneself off from growth,
from becoming actually is a loss, a loser
Through which political language
has devolved into “us versus them” rhetoric.
Modern media, elites, and identity
politics manipulate language, creating divisions that are empty of purposive
meaning but only to stoke anger and resentment.
Unfortunately finance with
crypto-concerns have learned techniques to commodifiy identity, where
language is weaponized to create false categories and tensions instead of
traditional focuses on deliberated compromise over issues on how best to
share and unify.
V. Impact of Neoliberalism
The move to financialize every and
all human activities to the breakdown of meaningful discourse and community,
subject them to prices rather than peacemaking dialogue has brought forth a
·
ghostly language of
·
Austerity for all but financiers,
·
privatization of public assets,
·
and endowing corporate power with rights of
political standing to shape social ties in its interests,
·
leaving individuals alienated and divided.
Its language of “branding” promotes
an aggressively stupifying monoculture where only wealth brings social
meaning. overpromised and underdelivered:
Technotainments, machine
intelligence, crypto, politics, education, and materialism Oozing like
flowing sewage, such tongues from social mediated networks and the anonymity
of AI manipulated chatbot guided “human agents” entering digitizable
responses into profit- and power-seeking systems.
Winning at all costs has delegitimated compromise,
with identity politics now
framed as existential battles of life and death between partisan
factions.
Every scholar and religious leader
who fails to pass a growing array of political and tribal loyalty tests and
partisan shibboleths of code words are immediately attacked with the
projections of the partisan’s inner, power-seeking, logos-perverting demons.
VI. Theological and Moral Failings
in Political Rhetoric
The sermon critiques both left- and
right-wing identity politics for focusing on victimhood and identity-based
power rather than moral deliberation.
political figures backed by shadowy
funny money manipulate language to create enemies and dehumanize opponents.
From this degradation of political
language spreads the idea of fascism to link to the supposed realism of
struggle (agon) and identity politics of the use of “lesser evils” to
mobilize hatred and violence.
What shocks me is the readiness of
Christians to involve themselves in not only participating but lending
their authority to “lesser evil” justifications:
What drives this
victory-at-all-costs mentality is the formation of power blocs through identity politics,
fractioning identities along ethnic, anatomical, and ideological lines.
crypto-finance manages these
proliferating identities and sorting and merging them for partisan and
manipulable energies—
to identify and align with the
victory program and invite their neighbors to their organizations—
their “true churches.”
Identity partisan politics starts
from two foundations:
·
indigeneity: supposed blood ties to native soil
(or the founding father’s soil of a particular way of reading the
Constitution),
·
and from those who claim to be most victimized
by these founding groups and lineages:
who are the most victimized—not in
terms of individual experience, by a claimed tie to others in that group
(“left handers”):
The most extreme partisans are
those who can be manipulated into joining the most angering complex of identities simultaneously both entitled and victimized:
their own identity as the true American one,
with some projecting murderous intent onto their opponents: “They kill
babies! They want to kill us!”
So we become 2nd Amendment people
in existentially framing of good versus evil, those under the Jezebel spirit
versus those in Christ,
Some Christians now lead the charge
in shape shifting religion from peacemaking ethics into identity politics
shaped by language claims of “persecution”
and increasingly feel called to
lead partisan coalitions united by collective grievance turning violent,
knowing they are bankrolled by
interests who recognize the symbolic usefulness of idiots who claim the
powerful name of Jesus now redirected by collective grievance
This astonishes me.
Lilliana Mason in her 2018 book
Uncivil Agreement explains:
"The conservative... Christian
Coalition grew steadily in support and influence in the...years [accompanying
neoliberal ascendancy]. By 1995 they had publicly paired with prominent
Republican senators and congressmen, including the Republican Speaker of the
House, Newt Gingrich, to announce the Contract with the American Family,
which sought the legislation of Christian morality."
-- Mason, Lilliana. Uncivil
Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity. Chicago, Illinois ; London: The
University of Chicago Press, 2018, 33.
"In 1994, Newt Gingrich sent members
of the Republican Party a memo titled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.”
This memo came to be known as the GOPAC memo, and was meant to
instruct Republicans on what types of words to use when describing their
political opposition. As he wrote in the memo, 'This list is prepared so that
you might have a directory of words to
use in writing literature and mail,
in preparing speeches, and in producing
electronic media. The words and
phrases are powerful' (Gingrich 1994).
Gingrich’s list of recommended
words to describe Democrats included
betray, bizarre, decay, destroy,
devour, greed, lie, pathetic, radical, selfish,
shame, sick, steal, and traitors, among many others. To this day,
this is the type of language used by party
leaders to demonize opponents."
--Ibid., 132, emph. added.
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VII. Spiritual Corruption
The Bible helps us frame the
destruction of political concord.
Jeremiah wrote Here you are, trusting in deceptive words
to no avail. Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make
offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known.
And Jesus condemns going after the
false god mammon who promises wealth in exchange for service. Jesus in
Matthew 15:24-26 contrasted the sheep of Israel with those metaphorically
referred to as 'dogs'--spirits of fearfulness that lash out with disordering
expressions when cornered. Such spirits can be influenced--(un)leashed by a
certain kind of mammon's (Matthew 6:24) hand and finance-distorted
language--leading to agonistic (attack-posture) subservience as a means of
achieving self-respect through ecstatic --"standing outside of"
--imaging in anonymity and recurrence, the aesthetization of violence, and a
collective regimentation of bared teeth.
THIS is what our political culture
is teaching children: that winning is everything, accomplished by any means
necessary because we’ve convinced ourselves that our holiness is our ends
that justifies any means:
A fascist barks under the hand of
mammon, projecting biological agon as ontological and historically necessary:
machismo, alpha dog dominance, and contempt for other human expressions of
craft entice each generation, especially if they feel unsafe, disrespected,
or superannuated. Alain de Benoist, a political right thinker aware of
fascism’s allure, described reactionaries as clothed in atavisms of
"bitterness, sneering, derision, regret, nostalgia—showing the Right’s
ideal is always foregone, always spent."
Neoliberal financialization
privatizes and prices every dimension of human activity, shaping public
policy on private vice, austerities for all but financiers, and capital
unmoored from environmental and social origins. Now, capital is being
detached from any social purpose, creating radically decentering, private
cryptocurrency-mediated markets outside democratic assemblies, with private
vigilantes acting as sheriffs.
As finance drifted from its roots,
anger grew among those seeing themselves as “losers.” Language was
reconditioned to redefine “winning” in terms of wealth achievement only,
while politics became consumed with framing stereotypes: southern,
“Christian,” exurban, male, and Republican versus Democrat, womanist, black,
and urban. Compromise gave way to “winning” at all costs—not just
economically but in terms of social respect and “right to life.”
Fascism manipulates declining
societies by linking struggle (agon) to a specific place, giving it a
perceived genetic advantage. This struggle gains theological significance,
like the final rays of a setting sun over Pharaoh—a lost battle to be
reversed by resurrecting man through political identity that reconstructs
language to serve propaganda. Pastors are recruited to "win" the
nation and, by doing so, win the past and future.
Of the church’s complicity with the
manipulation of religious language and frameworks of meaning through partisan
demonization and degradation of the Logos of peacemaking, we may safely apply
the accountability implied through Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's quote,
"Night almost always falls first in the churches." A wolf is responsible who misleads the dogs, of
them: Isaiah 5:20:
Ah—“woe,” a lament for a death-- you who call evil good
and good evil,
who put darkness for light
and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
and sweet for bitter!
Tragically, the church is allowing
its language and logic—its Logos—to be inverted to serve political ends of
violent wealth seekers, leading to spreading moral confusion and the
acceleration of metacrises.
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