by Stephen Phelps | Aug 19, 2012 | economic justice, history, sermon 2012, stewardship
In the year 1712, the future began. Thomas Newcomen developed the first useful steam engine. Supplanting the power of a few hundred horses to drain water from the bottom of a coal mine in Dudley, England, Newcomen’s engine enabled much more coal to come up from the earth. Therefore more power came to homes and businesses. Jobs began to multiply. The standard of living improved and, to be a rather short-spoken about it, before long people began to think that this earth was a good place to live, with a future.
by Stephen Phelps | Aug 5, 2012 | economic justice, environment, food insecurity, hunger, sermon 2012, Uncategorized
Unlike gun control or our criminal justice system, which no politician will discuss, hunger and poverty have sometimes mattered to elected leaders. Yesterday, I heard President Lyndon Johnson’s voice on the radio, coming from 1964. He was declaring “war on poverty” in that famous Texas drawl. Yet how tragic was the news that followed. One out of six of us is poor; that is, has less than $23,000 for a household of four. The news story went on to report that although malnutrition is not the scourge in America that it had been before President Johnson started the Food Stamp program, unlike the poor in Johnson’s day, today’s poor are generally employed—and hungry.
by Stephen Phelps | Jul 15, 2012 | economic justice, inequality, sermon 2012
In 1908, Winston Churchill wrote, “The seed of Imperial ruin and national decay [lies in] the unnatural gap between the rich and the poor [and] the swift increase of vulgar . . . luxury.” In the same decade, Republican President Teddy Roosevelt said, “The supreme political task of our day is to drive the special interests out of our public life.” A generation later, his cousin President Franklin Roosevelt would offer that “political equality is meaningless in the face of economic inequality.” Justice Louis Brandeis of the U.S. Supreme Court framed his concern in ominous terms: “We can have a democracy, or we can have great wealth in the hands of a comparative few, but we cannot have both.”
by Stephen Phelps | Apr 5, 2012 | criminal justice, disability, economic justice, hunger, identity, inequality, Lent, mass incarceratiom, sermon 2012, suffering
Now, though the hour is night and many are deep in the sleeps of denial and cynicism, of fear and self-betrayal, know this: Beneath the last garment that covers our life with kindness and community; at the base of bereavement; in the basement beneath the broken beams of all a person built or dreamed, there yet a mystery awaits: Your being, your eye, You absolute: irreducible, precious without price: being.
by Stephen Phelps | Mar 18, 2012 | economic justice, Lent, sermon 2012, suffering
If we would be strong in faith and mature in seeing; if we will not pretend that God is safely in control of all our evil; if we will affirm that neither is any good man at the top of power able to solve our nation’s sorrows, though a greedy man can make them sorer; then we may begin to feel after God truly, who is moving deeper down and deeper in than we ever thought
by Stephen Phelps | Jan 15, 2012 | economic justice, militarism, nonviolence, racism, sermon 2012, social justice, spiritual community
n this day of honor for our prophet Martin Luther King, it is well that we remember that no individual, no matter how skilled or gifted, ever simply leads a people out of the valley of the shadow of sleep. No, the rising of a people is a work far more complex. It resists all science and prediction. But this much is sure. The greatness of a leader hangs on the people’s awakening to the severity of their crisis.
Recent Comments