Tuesday, October 11, 2016

Haiti: The New Comedians

While the world's attention was diverted by the gaudy spectacle of Haitian affairs this weekend, a humanitarian disaster was quietly unfolding on the presidential debate stage... Sorry, bad joke. I guess there is just something about the awful precision with which patterns in U.S.-Haiti relations repeat themselves, time and again, year after year, that invites a mordant satire -- though it is a satire without laughter, a sarcasm without mirth. Even Haiti's deadly natural disasters (a poorly chosen term for them, for their consequences are always most unnatural), of which Hurricane Matthew is only the most recent instance, tend to inspire ridicule-- not, to be sure, of the island or its people or the victims of catastrophe -- but of the pretensions of the false friends who always descend upon Haiti after the fact, from the ranks of both native political and military cadres and former colonial occupiers, bearing empty ameliorative promises and in the end thieving as much as they bestow. The protagonist, Brown, of Graham Greene's The Comedians, provides an example of such gallows humor in the face of environmental catastrophe. He observes, apropos a new literacy campaign announced by the brutal Duvalier regime in Haiti, under which the novel is set, that "No details [of the campaign] were given. Perhaps he was depending on a satisfactory hurricane. Hurricane Hazel in '54 had eliminated a great deal of illiteracy[.]"

Wednesday, October 5, 2016

Tweedle-Dum

*Sigh*... You must have felt it too -- that twinge of nostalgia in watching the VP debate last night, when you saw Kaine and Pence up there, two chrome-plated monosyllabically-named bland middle-aged dudes with their matching ties (with the red for the Democrat and blue for the Republican, in a playful reversal that probably took some planning). I shed a silent tear, in regarding them, for the derisive left-wing blog post I might once have written, under different circumstances-- in a world, that is, in which these two and Hillary Clinton were our only candidates, and a certain hard-up real estate investor I could name did not exist -- or was safely confined to reality TV.

Tuesday, October 4, 2016

Once to Every Soul and Nation (Sermon)

First preached this past Sunday, 9/2/16. Names and places redacted. Trinitarian friends will have to forgive my somewhat polemical (and hence, perhaps not 100% fair) rendering of intellectual history toward the end of this -- sometimes you're just trying to make a point, you know?

Class Stories (Sermon)

This was first preached this past August. Names and places redacted.

Close Calls and Second Chances (Sermon)

I haven't generally been posting my sermons to this blog, but I suppose I could start. Some of them, of course, simply don't translate very well outside the Sunday morning setting, but I think this one stands on its own. This was first preached on January 31, 2016 and was considerably revised this past summer. Names and places redacted.