By Ched Myers With Matthew Colwell. Published on Journey into Freedom website. 15 pp. A recent PBS series introduced a new term into our popular lexicon: “Affluenza.” This “virus” is indeed widespread in North American society, easily contracted in a consumer environment that celebrates excess and attributes magical powers to products. Unfortunately, our churches and…
By Ched Myers Catholic Agitator, November 1996, 2 pp. The history of culture suggests that one of the most primal human impulses is to try to institutionalize the divine presence in a sacred place, a shrine, or a cult. When such sites are established, a second impulse invariably follows: the cult becomes identified with political…
By Ched Myers The Other Side. 5 pp. “This is my body” should lie at the heart of our liturgy— and at the heart of our politics. We have arrived again at the quadrennial rite we call presidential elections. Like so many liturgical forms, the ritual remains long after the substance behind it has atrophied.By…
By Ched Myers Catholic Agitator, August 1996. 2 pp. At that time Mark wrote his gospel, the restoration of the great Second Judean Temple had recently been completed, a huge project begun almost a century earlier under the native tyrant, Herod the Great. This temple was a magnificent structure, considered one of the architectural wonders…
By Ched Myers The Witness, July-August, 1996, 2 pp. Most of us in the U.S. suffer from a profound alienation from history. In our imperial culture, inconvenient historical narratives have tended to be silenced while legitmating narratives have been mystified. We live with a peculiarly unaccountable, if not amnesiac, relationship toward the past. Whether we…
By Ched Myers The Witness, April, 1995. 4 pp. When I reached Kaho’ olawe, I kissed the ground.Through my work with indigenous people throughout the Pacific, which had focused on their struggles for self-determination and particularly their struggles around issues of land and land rights, I’d developed a fairly keen sense of the pain that…
By Ched Myers The Witness, Nov, 1994. 2 pp. There is a world of difference between costume and uniform in the context of public space. Costuming – through dress, mask or voice – seeks to make a cultural, sub-cultural or personal statement by challenging dominant cultural codes; in exercises image-ination. Uniforms seek to build self-…
By Ched Myers Sojourners, June, 1994. 2 pp. Populist culture and mass cultural are different beasts. We see this distinction in the difference between a joke passed around the office and an Eddie Murphy movie, between Irish music in the local pub and a Guns ‘N Roses concert, between a church quilting circle and Guess?…
By Ched Myers In Theology Without Foundations: Religious Practice and the Future of Theological Truth, ed. by Stanley Hauerwas, Nancey Murphy and Mark Nation, Nashville: Abingdon, 1994. 14 pp. At a crucial juncture in his mission, Mark’s Jesus was confronted by members of the ruling Jerusalem establishment, and who demanded that present his political credentials:…
By Ched Myers The Witness, April, 1993. 3 pp. Enter again the sacred circle of Story. Begin again at the end, as we are ever invited to do.Peter had followed Jesus at a distance, right into the courtyard of the high priest (Mk 14:54). Twilight. The fisherman finds himself standing in the palace courtyard of…