{"id":6433,"date":"2005-06-21T10:36:54","date_gmt":"2005-06-21T10:36:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/06\/trotsky-and-stbenedict.html"},"modified":"2005-06-21T10:36:54","modified_gmt":"2005-06-21T10:36:54","slug":"trotsky-and-stbenedict","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/06\/trotsky-and-stbenedict.html","title":{"rendered":"Trotsky and St.Benedict"},"content":{"rendered":"

Furious and fascinating piece from Books and Culture (a CT brand), a review of two books, including Jim Wallis’. You can get a taste from the opening para:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

I didn’t vote last November 2nd. Not that friends and colleagues didn’t beg me to perform my "civic duty." To them, Every Vote Counted in an epic conflict between the forces of light and darkness; to me, it was Imperialism, Plutocracy, and Capital Punishment versus Imperialism, Plutocracy, and Abortion. Eclipsed by those triads of iniquities, "my vision," to borrow Jim Wallis’ words, "was not running in this election." So I stayed home on election night, watched a movie on the couch with my beloved wife, and retired in the knowledge that the empire would remain in someone’s untrustworthy hands. (I also won $50 predicting both the winner and the margin of victory. Why should William Bennett have all the fun?)<\/p>\n

The triumphant triad was the right-wing version of our nation’s civil religion, the perverse religiosity of late-capitalist America, the current incarnation of the earthly city marked, as Augustine wrote, by "its lust after domination." That civil religion\u2014whose sectarian disputes are the "culture wars"\u2014defines redemption as inclusion in the capitalist market and pledges allegiance to what Philip Bobbitt has called a "market state," which facilitates capital mobility and labor "flexibility" while promising a bare and ever-shrinking minimum of justice and protection. Whatever the name of the covenant theology\u2014"globalization," "neo-liberalism," "democratic capitalism"\u2014its beatific vision is the worldwide expansion of individual "choices," whose mediation through "values" occasions the virulent but circumscribed sectarian differences. Its most compact creedal statement, promulgated by the Bush Administration in the fall of 2002, is the National Security Strategy of the United States<\/span>, outlining the doctrines of "preemption"\u2014what William Kristol of The Weekly Standard<\/span> has candidly termed imperialism\u2014and of "opening societies" to "the single sustainable model for national success": "free markets and free trade," i.e., deference to unfettered corporate prerogatives in investment and labor practices.<\/p>\n

As its clerisy, the civil religion features a punditocracy whose job it is to control and patrol the borders of permissible discussion. These ubiquitous commentators do have their quarrels and indeed may be cast as bitter antagonists, conservative versus liberal, religious versus secular. And yet, oddly enough, wherever they take their stand in the culture wars, they never compromise their underlying commitment to the Empire of Expanding Choices.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Do read the whole thing before you comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Furious and fascinating piece from Books and Culture (a CT brand), a review of two books, including Jim Wallis’. You can get a taste from the opening para: I didn’t vote last November 2nd. Not that friends and colleagues didn’t beg me to perform my "civic duty." To them, Every Vote Counted in an epic…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nTrotsky and St.Benedict - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/06\/trotsky-and-stbenedict.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Trotsky and St.Benedict - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Furious and fascinating piece from Books and Culture (a CT brand), a review of two books, including Jim Wallis’. You can get a taste from the opening para: I didn’t vote last November 2nd. Not that friends and colleagues didn’t beg me to perform my "civic duty." To them, Every Vote Counted in an epic…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/06\/trotsky-and-stbenedict.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2005-06-21T10:36:54+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"awelborn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Trotsky and St.Benedict - Via Media","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/06\/trotsky-and-stbenedict.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Trotsky and St.Benedict - Via Media","og_description":"Furious and fascinating piece from Books and Culture (a CT brand), a review of two books, including Jim Wallis’. You can get a taste from the opening para: I didn’t vote last November 2nd. Not that friends and colleagues didn’t beg me to perform my "civic duty." To them, Every Vote Counted in an epic…","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/06\/trotsky-and-stbenedict.html","og_site_name":"Via Media","article_published_time":"2005-06-21T10:36:54+00:00","author":"awelborn","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/06\/trotsky-and-stbenedict.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/06\/trotsky-and-stbenedict.html","name":"Trotsky and St.Benedict - Via Media","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website"},"datePublished":"2005-06-21T10:36:54+00:00","dateModified":"2005-06-21T10:36:54+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/06\/trotsky-and-stbenedict.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/06\/trotsky-and-stbenedict.html"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/06\/trotsky-and-stbenedict.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Trotsky and St.Benedict"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/","name":"Via Media","description":"Amy Welborn","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a","name":"awelborn","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","caption":"awelborn"},"description":"Amy Welborn was born in 1960, the only child of a now-retired professor of political science, a teacher-librarian-artist mother,deceased since 2001, was a teacher, librarian and artist. The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6433"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6433\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}