Notes from a Tuesday morning

Christine — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 18:17:00 +0000

Theology Tuesdays and Thursdays, as I now think of them, wind up being more reflective than the other five days in the week, as a rule. Between my Early Christianity class and Liberation Theology, I look for a place sit, read, write, reflect. Today, it is in a café down the street. Law students at the table behind me review for an exam on property laws, legislators from the capital discuss a bill being introduced by a party who “needs a lot of help,” and a WU employee eats breakfast with students from her office.

My notes on an Edward P. Jones story I am writing about grow; in a few days, I’m going to hear him read in person. Pulitzer prize winner. Macarthur “genius” grant. Reading his fiction, I am struck by the broad sweep of social issues that a few pages can encompass, his analysis more penetrating and “real” than a dozen volumes of non-fiction. That is why English appealed so much to me as a major; we are all studying the same thing, all of us who are interested in culture and society and politics and race and gender and poverty and oppression and beauty and art and what it means to be human. We simply look at it from different perspectives. Jones’s perspective happens to be particularly congenial for me.

A few moments outside, walking from café to library. The sounds of a flute float out the open window of a studio in the music building, filtering through the leaves of a cherry tree which only lately has started to show leaves under the blooms, bouncing off of rhododendrons and whispering joy to my spirit, whatever that may be.

I learn we have a new pope. Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Ratzinger, has been virulently against liberation theology in the past and participated in church crackdowns on some of its great theologians…Boff, Gutierrez, etc.

The music of the flute is silenced and for a while, I grieve.

Oscar Romero: Twenty five years after his death

Christine — Fri, 25 Mar 2005 02:00:00 +0000

BBC NEWS Programmes File on 4 Requiem for RomeroTwenty-five years ago today, Archbishop Oscar Romero was shot dead while saying Mass in a small chapel at a cancer hospice in San Salvador, El Salvador. … Oscar Arnulfo Romero’s assassination focused the attention of the world on the scale of repression in the small Central American republic. And at his funeral a few days later, people around the globe saw on their own television screens the kind of political terror that had been unleashed to stop growing demands for change in one of the most unequal societies in Latin America. Tens of thousands of mourners who had gathered for Romero’s funeral Mass in front of the cathedral in San Salvador were filmed fleeing in terror as army gunners on the rooftops around the square opened fire. Forty people were killed. One person who was there told us he remembered the piles of shoes left behind by those who escaped with their lives.

It is rather against the current to have heroes today, but Romero has long been one of mine. I’ve written about him before, so I’m not going to elaborate further here. Read more at the BBC site. I learned about Romero and Liberation Theology, which has become something of a passion for me, at the same time, and it’s difficult to separate the two. A theology that is all about justice and social change? Ending the oppression of the poor? Sound good to you? It does to me.

To tie this in with my post from earlier, Romero wrote to then-president Jimmy Carter not long before he (Romero) was assassinated, asking him to stop providing guns to the El Salvadoran government because they were only being used to kill the people of El Salvador. Guts. Relevance. I like him.

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Notes from a Tuesday morning

Oscar Romero: Twenty five years after his death