This week GM printed a full page ad in Automotive News magazine to make a public apology. They said:

While we’re still the U.S. sales leader, we acknowledge we have disappointed you. At times we violated your trust by letting our quality fall below industry standards and our designs become lackluster. We proliferated our brands and dealer network to the point where we lost adequate focus on our core U.S. market. We also biased our product mix toward pickup trucks and SUVs. And we made commitments to compensation plans that have proven to be unsustainable in today’s globally competitive industry. We have paid dearly for these decisions, learned from them and are working hard to correct them by restructuring our U.S. business to be viable for the long-term.

This gesture could easily be interpreted as “too little too late”, a desperate P.R. campaign, or as a “bizarre” and “pointless exercise” as some analysts have put it.  While I do not know the hearts of the executives at GM, I would like to take this apology at face value and accept it.

The heart of our faith is about relationships.  How they are broken and how they are fixed.  Righteousness is the term we use that means “right relationships.”  It may sound like an oversimplification, especially in light of all of the complex market instruments that are in use today, but the root of all of this financial mess and turmoil are broken relationships, broken social covenants.

Read the rest of the post here…

And for something related, but completely different…

During the buildup to the war in Iraq I wrote an op-ed piece for a campus ministry newsletter that the editor refused to publish. Essentially I argued that empires are always deceitful and the American empire was no exception.

When the President of the United States uses phrases like “Operation Infinite Justice,” “Shock and Awe,” and “Enduring Freedom,” Christians should recognize the arrogant deceit involved.

Or when he confidently proclaims that “the liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world, it is God’s gift to the world” the imperial overtones should be clear to all of us, and Christians should recoil at such blasphemy.

The editor was having nothing of it. This was offensive and anti-American and he would not allow it to be published in what was a bi-national campus ministry publication. It was clear that as an American citizen he found my rhetoric hurtful and assumed that our colleagues in the United States would find it similarly hurtful.

This was neither the first nor the last time that I have met such a reaction to saying such things. My comments at Messiah College published on this blog a couple months ago occasioned similar reactions on campus.

I have also been suggesting to American audiences for some time that a form of mass hypnosis happened prior to the war on Iraq whereby all the President had to do was put “Iraq” and “9/11” in the same sentence enough times and the whole population would come to believe that there actually was a connection between the two. This is deceit and it is the kind of deceit that we have come to expect of empire.

The response is often dead silence.

Although the response to these comments was much more enthusiastic during my time at Origins NYC in Manhattan this past weekend, there were some who made it clear that this kind of criticism was hurtful.

I had made my Iraq and 9/11 comment while talking about Romans and during the break a young man came to talk with me. He came with an attitude of love and respect. He did not rail against me, nor was he aggressive.

He was hurt.

And he was worried that perhaps other people in the room, especially the younger people, found this hurtful as well. The issue that he was raising was one of feelings. Such a critique of their President, such a critique of their nation, indeed such a connection of the terms ‘empire’ and ‘American’ hurts. So this young man was asking me to tone it down a little.

Not always bad advice.

People who will walk into a room and denounce everything a lot of folks present hold dear, all in the name of being ‘prophetic’ need to be told to get off of their high horse. They need to drop their own self-righteousness (which I recognize as a Canadian vice in relation to our neighbours to the south) and show a little more care. Truth and love, prophetic critique and pastoral care, must always go together.

This is profoundly true.

And yet. And yet, I’m still struggling with just why it is that some folks at the heart of an empire have such thin skins. Why is it that some American Christians (certainly not all) are so sensitive when they hear criticism of American foreign policy, American pretension, American deceit?

Maybe some of our American readers can help me understand this sensitivity. But I’ll tell you what I’m thinking. It seems to me that the closer you are to the heart of empire, the more defensive you become of the inherent goodness of that empire.

The myth of American innocence, of America as a force for good, for morality, for progress and for freedom in the world is a very powerful myth. And it is a myth not at all uncommon in empires. All empires tell such stories about themselves. How else could they justify their imperial aggression and control?

And when that myth has a deep hold on your life, when that is the story that you imbibed with your mother’s milk (or Nestle’s formula as the case may be) then some outsider coming in and telling you that it is a lie, that is an imperial deceit, has got to be deeply painful.

Or is there more to it than this? Probably. And I want to understand that more. So help me out here folks…

Bono was once asked, “so how do you dismantle an atomic bomb?” And he answered, “with love, with love.” So how do you remix the empire? With love, with love.

And how do we put together this love with truth? How do we remix a dominant, deceitful and powerful worldview with love? How do we love in truth when we are remixing the empire both “out there” and deep within our own lives?

Welcome to all those visiting from Zack Exley’s blog or article over at the Huffington Post. We hope you’ve had a chance to scout out the Litany of Resistance, to poke around at some of the other resources, and to scan through some of the recent blog posts from Brian Walsh and other contributors to this site.

Those of you not arriving by way of Zack’s Revolution in Jesusland blog should probably go check out his first in a series of articles on Shane Claiborne and the upcoming Jesus for President tour. Zack notes:

In Jesus for President, Shane and Chris unambiguously take aim at capitalism and empire; and they are much more explicit that Jesus calls upon his followers to actively resist systems and structures of oppression in ways that will ultimately put you in danger.

I suppose if you were to read through some of our posts, or if you were to ask us directly, we’d say something similar. The scriptures call us to resist oppressors and structures of oppression.

And being that we’re in an Easter frame of mind, it probably wouldn’t be too far off to mention that the scriptures similarly call us to follow Christ in the very same journey of resistance that led him to death on a Roman cross.

How committed are any of us to the fight against oppression? I suppose one test would be to see if we could follow that commitment, even if it meant our own self-sacrifice to find ourselves one step closer to the abiding shalom of a neighbourhood, a city, a country, or the entire world.

Questions of faith and politics, when they confront Jesus, must confront the fact that Christ didn’t run for anything. In fact, as theologian and author NT Wright stated recently:

He acted as if he were a different kind of ruler altogether, with a ‘kingdom’ that didn’t originate from the present world (otherwise, he said, his servants would fight to rescue him) but instead was meant FOR this present world, to transform and heal it.

The present way we do politics and government is, alas, part of the problem, and he would have challenged it (its huge cost, its pretense of participation which is shamelessly manipulated by the media, its cult of personality, its ignoring, all too often, of the actual needs of the poor, etc. etc.) just as he challenged the power structures of his day.

Wright goes on, interestingly, not to ask which party Jesus would run for (whether Democrat or Republican, Liberal, Green, Conservative or NDP) but rather, getting to the heart of the matter:

The real question is, what sort of a cross would today’s system be intent on using to kill him?

And that is indeed an important question. What principalities and powers at work in the world today are working against the good news that Jesus preached and embodied? What systems and structures of oppression would take Jesus to the electric chair, would use him as a pharmaceutical test subject, would send him to Gitmo on trumped up charges?

Those are the kinds of things we’ve been exploring around here at empire.remixed. And if you check out the Jesus for President tour itinerary, you’ll notice that Shane Claiborne, Chris Haw, and the rest of the JFP crew will be joining us in Toronto on June 30, 2008. We’ll be tackling some of these issues there, in a more public and interactive forum. More details of the event will soon be forthcoming.

In the coming weeks we’ll post some commentary on and interviews with Shane and Chris on why and how it might make sense to be talking about “Jesus for President” even in Canada, a nation headed by a Prime Minister, and organised by an altogether different political structure.

We’ll discuss what it might mean to cultivate a theologically-informed political imagination, whether in the heart of Jesusland, or north of the border. And we’ll keep on tackling a variety of issues as they arise and challenge us with what it might mean to live lives of faith in various theological and political contexts.