New Chicago Transport

Interesting and/or Notable Excerpts from Summer Reading

If we employ the conception of historic relativity, nothing is clearer than that the conception of liberty is always relative to forces that at a given time and place are increasingly felt to be oppressive. Liberty in the concrete signifies release from the impact of particular oppressive forces; emancipation from something once taken as a normal part of human life but now experienced as bondage.

At one time, liberty signified liberation from chattel slavery; at another time, release from class serfdom. During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries it meant liberation from despotic dynastic rule. A century later it meant release of industrialists from inherited legal customs that hampered the rise of new forces of production. Today, it signifies liberation from material insecurity and from the coercions and repressions that prevent multitudes from participation in the vast cultural resources at hand.

The direct impact of liberty always has to do with some class or group that is suffering in a special way from some form of constraint exercised by the distribution of powers that exists in contemporary society. Should a classless society ever come into being the formal concept of liberty would lose its significance, because the fact for which it stands would have become an integral part of the established relations of human beings to one another.


John Dewey. Liberalism and Social Action (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2000), 54

Interesting and/or Notable Excerpts from Summer Reading

About that time, I started more or less regularly attending the Sunday morning service, partly because, after I had taken care of the place, I didn't want to appear indifferent to what went on there, and partly (I confess) to receive the women's compliments on my work. They thought I was doing a good job, and I love to hear them say so.

The sermons, mostly, were preached on the same theme I had heard over and over at The Good Shepherd and Pigeonville: We must lay up treasures in Heaven and not be lured and seduced by this world's pretty and tasty things that do not last but are like the flower that is cut down. The preachers were always young students from the seminary who wore, you might say, the mantle of power but not the mantle of knowledge. They wouldn't stay long enough to know where they were, for one thing. Some were wise and some were foolish, but none, so far as Port William knew, was ever old. They seemed to have some from some Never-Never Land where the professionally devout were forever young. They were not going to school to learn where they were, let alone the pleasures and pains of being there, or what ought to be said there. You couldn't learn those things in a school. They went to school, apparently, to learn to say over and over again, regardless of where they were, what had already been said too often. They learned to have a very high opinion of God and a very low opinion of His works - although they could tell you that htis world had been made by God Himself.

What they didn't see was that it is beautiful, and that some of the greatest beauties are the briefest. They had imagined the church, which is an organization, but not the world, which is an order and a mystery. To them, the church did not exist in the world where people earn their living and have their being, but rather in the world where they fear death and Hell, which is not much of a world. To them, the sould was something dark and musty, stuck away for later. In their brief passage through or over it, most of the young preachers knew Port William only as it theoretically was ("lost") and as it theoretically might be ("saved"). And they wanted us all to do our part to spread this bad news to others who had not heard it - the Catholics, the Hindus, the Muslims, the Buddhists, and the others - or else they (and maybe we) would go to Hell. I did not believe it. They made me see how cut off i was. Even when I was sitting in the church, I was a man outside.

In Port William, more than anyplace else I had been, this religion that scorned the beauty and goodness of this world was a puzzle to me. To begin with, I didn't think anybody believed it. I still don't think so. Those world-condemning sermons were preached to people who, on Sunday mornings, would be wearing their prettiest clothes. Even the old widows in their dark dresses would be pleasing to look at. By dressing up on the one day when most of them had leisure to do it, they signified their wish to present themselves to one another and to Heaven looking their best. The people who heard hose sermons loved good crops, good gardens, good livestock and work animals and dogs; they loved flowers and the shade of trees, and laughter and music; some of them could make you a fair speech on the pleasures of a good drink of water or a patch of wild raspberries. While the wickedness of the flesh was preached from the pulpit, the young husbands and wives and the courting couples sat thigh to thigh, full of yearning and joy, and the old people thought of the beauty of the children. And when church was over they would go home to Heavenly dinners of fried chicken, if might be, and creamed new potatoes and creamed new peas and hot biscuits and butter and cherry pie and sweet milk and buttermilk. And the preacher and his family would always be invited to eat with somebody and they would always go, and the preacher, having just foresworn on behalf of everybody the joys of the flesh, would eat with unconsecrated relish.



Wendell Berry. Jayber Crow (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2000), 160-161

The other day I walked in to my apartment to find two strange guys standing in my kitchen. I was perturbed. I don't like to feel as though anyone can waltz into my home when they feel like it, even if they work for the landlord and are commissioned to paint my bathroom and put up tile behind my bathtub. I overcame my annoyance and began to talk to them about their work and the weather and whatever else seemed courteous but noncommittal.

It turned out they were not Russian but Romanian, as I learned when I returned home the next day. When they asked me what I did for work I said I worked at the Campaign for Better Health Care. I said I was trying to be a force for change in the fight for health care justice. The tall, young Romanian putting up my tile said, "Do you really believe in what you're doing?" With raised eyebrows and deadpan seriousness I said, "Yes, yes, I do as a matter of fact." But his question had caught me off guard, not because I didn't believe the work I am doing with the campaign is right, but because some small part of me (maybe not so small) believes that it won't make a difference. Some aching part of me is moaning in a low, reverberating and penetrating tone that the forces capable of real change reside in powers larger than any one, or three, or four, or 10,000, or 1,000,000 of us. My Jesus faith teaches me otherwise, but that light feels crowded out by the dark shadow of the "powers that be". I'm reminded of a different version of this scenario from a verse in John chapter 1.

Doubtless my Romanian friend's experiential reality shaped him in ways I wasn't; I'm sure he sees in ways I can't. His understanding of power may be colored by a history of suppressive government, but his understanding of power may also be a degree less naive than my own. The last eight years of our history, however, has done much to chip away an unabashed trust in the efficacy of our "by the people, for the people" nation to bring about justice. I want to reclaim this founding principal, but I have a distaste for politics as religion. Unfortunately their intersection is inevitable.

My Romanian friend parted by saying, "In this country if you have money you can live, if you don't have money you die." Yes, my friend, you may be right.