Recently picked up Justo L. González' book, Faith and Wealth. I've been a fan of his since reading his two volume 'Story of Christianity' for my mdiv and was excited to get into this, as wealth — and its relationship to both society and faith — is something I think about a fair amount. I'm still in the first chapter, which is looking at several pre-Christian understandings of wealth and I wanted to note something that stood out while reading this morning.

While writing about property ownership, González mentions that a major difference between the Roman legal system and the Jewish one is that under the latter owners of the land were required to offer some of it to the poor. This was called the pe'ah (meaning corner) and included the edges of the field, any fruit that fell to the ground, and anything the harvesters left over after their first pass. There was significant debate over some of the applications of this, but the core of it was that the poor had actual rights to the land that superseded the rights of the owners.

This is a fascinating example to bring into conversations of wealth redistribution and the relationship between private and public; because here we have a public legal framework enforcing the stewardship of private property ownership in a way that upholds a social policy in favour of the poor. It isn't quite common ownership but perhaps more rooted in the idea that we never truly own the land, it is more of a gift that we can share with others.

Still (slowly) working my way through Happy City and was reading this section yesterday on the way cars began to change the shape of our cities in the early 20th Century. The author notes that

"For most of urban history, city streets were for everyone. The road was a market, a playground, a park, and yes, it was a thoroughfare, but there were no traffic lights, painted lanes, or zebra crossings. Before 1903 no city had so much as a traffic code. Anyone could use the street, and everyone did."

Today, it seems to have been collectively decided that the streets are, actually, not for everyone. Despite the 'share the road' signs that are common in rural areas, we have largely closed the book on any debate that maybe our streets could become public spaces once again. For most people, it's not really something they think could be any different. Streets are for cars. Period. But even I'm old enough (and I'm not that old) to remember a time when riding my bike as a kid through the streets was perfectly normal behaviour - and much safer. Something I've written about elsewhere. We just seem to have abandoned the idea that it could be any different.

But it wasn't always this way. As cars first entered the scene people rose up en masse against the private interests of drivers. They fought to keep streets public; banning things like curbside parking and keeping speed limits to 16 km per hour. And when a driver killed a pedestrian, they were met by an angry mob.

What's particularly interesting about this shift is the way that auto companies were the ones who drove it (pardon the pun). One of the more significant changes was the way they seemed to move the burden of safety onto the pedestrian, rather than the driver. They did this by intentionally designing and legislating streets to keep pedestrians in their place. Again, this perhaps seems like a very unremarkable thing today; but this is why understanding the history of change can be useful. The author quotes urban historian, Peter Norton on how this change came to be.

"They had to change the idea of what a street is for, and that required a mental revolution, which had to take place before any physical; changes to the street."

There's a lesson here in how we both win and lose the fight for public spaces, as well as an important reminder that things that feel permanent emerged from some place at some time. Sometimes that's enough for starting to imagine that we can do better.

Continuing through Devlin's memoir; she attributes her early political consciousness to her father (who died while she was a kid).

She recalls a story in which she came late to tea and began flipping through the loaf of bread to get to one of the highly coveted square end pieces. Her father stopped her and asked, "do you expect any other human being to eat the food you have rejected as not fit for your consumption?" He then said those five slices of bread that she flicked through would be her dinner and/or breakfast and that no one else would eat that bread but her. In her reflection, he did this not to teach a lesson in obedience but one in having consideration for others.

Her father would also tell the kids stories at bedtime that came out of Ireland's history. Stories of legend and of political struggle. They were told, as she notes, "by an Irishman, with an Irishman's feelings." She remembers one of her first nursery rhymes being a poem about the English flag being found wherever there was 'blood and plunder.'

I often wonder about how much we have given over to technology when it comes to raising our kids. Not just time, but the underlying values of the creators of that tech. What's behind the stories and songs that our kids consume? Anything? Or is it just mindless entertainment? Maybe it's just teaching them to be a good consumers...

There's a value in understanding the history of things, including the people you admire. You can't separate who Devlin became with how she was raised and that's an important reminder for us as parents.

Finally got a used copy of Bernadette Devlin's memoir and started reading it over the weekend. I'm just getting started and I'm sure more notes and reflections will come. However, a couple things stood out that I wanted to briefly comment on.

In the forward she acknowledges the protest movement in Northern Ireland of which she is just one small piece. Of her generation of struggle she writes, "we were born into an unjust system; we are not prepared to grow old in it." I love that. It captures both the bigness of the problem as well as the hope needed to keep going in resistance to it. This is the sort of mantra I want for parenting as well; teaching my kids that the world they have inherited is not their mess but it needs to be their fight. And to root themselves in the history of struggle that came before them, people just like Bernadette.

Another thing I wanted to draw attention to is the way she specifically points to her religious upbringing as what helped radicalize her. She writes,

"If it hadn’t been for the fact that I had an essentially Christian background from my mother, poverty would have made me bitter rather than socialist."

There are many, MANY good reasons to turn away from Christianity - both in its present and historical expressions, and I fault no one for doing so - however, there is also a strong legacy of struggle and justice within it. This again speaks to the sort of tradition that I want to raise my kids in. Not the forms of it that are tied to capitalism and colonialism, but to seek truth in the saints who fought for justice on behalf of the most vulnerable and oppressed. This is, in my opinion, the only kind of faith worth having.

Spent my long weekend quarantined in my room and reading William T. Cavanough’s Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of Church. It’s a reasonably quick read, comprised of 9 interconnected essays that explore the way nationalism in the West has more or less replaced religion. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of his argument was in his dealing with America, a nation where many might argue that the Christian religion is still alive and well.

Cavanough suggests that America as a nation came to view itself as God’s blessing to the world, replacing the priority of the church. In this way, American style freedoms are thrust upon the rest of the world with evangelistic zeal. In a particularly acute moment Cavanough suggests that “[America doesn’t] worship God, we worship the freedom to worship God.” This subtle distinction, I believe, really starts to help diagnose the state of American evangelicalism. It idolizes itself.

In a later essay he outlines the rules that allow this idolatry to perpetuate:

“American civil religion can never acknowledge that is is in fact religion: to do so would be to invite charges of idolatry. Here liturgical gesture is central, because gesture allows the flag to be treated as a sacred object, while language denies that that is the case. Everyone acknowledges verbally that the nation and the flag are not really gods, but the crucial test is what people do with their bodies, both in liturgies and in war.”

There’s a passage in the book of Isaiah that Jesus references. In it, the prophet condemns Jerusalem for coming near to God with their mouths and honouring God with their lips while their hearts were elsewhere. The thing about self-deception is we usually can’t diagnose it ourselves. I also think it’s fitting that that judgement is communal and not individual. Cities, communities, and especially nations often have narratives of self-deception woven in. These are places of belonging and identity making.

Cavanough’s overall brilliance in these couple essays is in highlighting the way the development of the nation-state generally has replaced the role of religion across Europe and North America and specifically how in the case of America, it has blurred the lines between nation and god.