Monday, September 22, 2025

Sunday Closing Remarks

I’ve been reflecting on the “arguments” about how algorithms and social media are going to rule us all because, of course they are. I attended public schools through a Master’s degree, then got a law degree, then went to seminary. Growing up in the’60’s (and’70’s), I was told not to trust authority and not to trust the news. This is when Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America,” ended every broadcast with “And that’s the way it is.” (I had a friend, an adult, who told me she realized one day that Cronkite was wrong. That what he oversaw on CBS news for 30 minutes (including commercials) was hardly the full report on “the way it is.” It took me years to accept that she was right.)

All my education, and I was resolutely taught not to look behind the curtain. I trusted the news to report the “truth,” not just what was acceptable in mainstream America. I started learning some of that was bullshit in high school; but from my own reading, which was haphazard and disconnected for decades. It was in seminary that I learned more of the truth, or how to see the truth, than I was ever taught anywhere else.

I don’t mean the “gospel truth” the way fundamentalists and evangelicals throw that term around. That concept would take a whole other thread. No, I mean the truth we deny, the truth we refuse to see, the truth whose name we dare not speak, for fear our world would explode. 

🤯 

It probably would. 

Charlie Kirk would say seminary is where I got “woke.” He would mean it as an insult. I accept it as proof I know the truth. Well, some of it. The truth as I understand it, anyway. In that sense, seminary was the best education I ever received. It taught me the important lessons, chief among them this one:

Ideas don’t matter. Things don’t matter. People matter.

Which is an “unclean spirit” which should be “excommunicated” only to those who are afraid of the truth I’m speaking of. The fear it will make their world explode.

🤯 

Because it will.
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2 comments:

  1. The Thought Criminal2:56 AM

    "Woke" means taking doing unto others what you would have them do to you seriously in a real way. It means loving your neighbor as yourself, it means economic justice for the widow and orphan and stranger living among us. It means the very core of The Gospel, The Law and The Prophets. That's why America's indigenous form of fascists, the white supremacists and aristocrats have made it a dirty word for those who are "christians." As I heard a woman whose name I never knew say, it's easier to praise the Lord than it is to follow him. And Jesus said something like that about two-thousand years before she made that observation. I was woken by hearing the Gospel at mass, once it was read in English.

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  2. rick allen8:32 AM

    Or, to put it a bit more literally, to be woke is not to be asleep. How many times, I wonder, and in so many different expressions, do the scriptures exhort us to “Wake up”? And why are we so receptive to our masters when they tell us, no, stay sleeping?

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