RT @nick_routledge: @HootenWilson The danger? Swapping one form of metaphysical deception, at the level of being, for another. The real wound runs deeper—a mimetic architecture of violence so embedded, so internalized, it poses as reality itself. The messianic rends the veil. What history forgets, glory reveals.
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Pictured speaker / quoted attribution: Nick quoting Walter Brueggemann Saved source record associated with pictured writing; full saved record, not an exact pictured excerpt. Passage boundary: Source: archive.nickroutledge.org/post/1951996863739031847 Preserve quoted-author distinctions; the containing tweet does not confer authorship. @TaraAnnThieke #WalterBrueggemann: "How badly we have read the New Testament. We thought it was about private sin and going to heaven when, in fact, it's essentially about a neighborhood alternative in economics. Jesus was executed because the Empire is scared to death of a neighborly economy."
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Pictured speaker / quoted attribution: Nick Saved source record associated with pictured writing; full saved record, not an exact pictured excerpt. Passage boundary: Source: archive.nickroutledge.org/post/1949659609121349980 Preserve quoted-author distinctions; the containing tweet does not confer authorship. @lukeburgis When capitalism's no longer moored to value in any intrinsic or moral sense, it becomes pure instrumental recursion, regardless of substance. Sports, grief, water, attention, illness—all's grist for the yield mill. This isn't a misfire: it’s metaphysical psychosis made normative.
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Pictured speaker / quoted attribution: Nick; nested posts 1–4 and Ursula Le Guin quote; final Hart quote Saved source record associated with pictured writing; full saved record, not an exact pictured excerpt. Passage boundary: Source: archive.nickroutledge.org/post/1960028042715435461 Preserve quoted-author distinctions; the containing tweet does not confer authorship. The true malaise isn't moneytheism but the ontology beneath it—beingness reduced to conditionality; a deep-seated distortion of relation to the Real; posture, inner and outer, sealing life against love. A metaphysical lie so deep it shapes the soul. Materialism is but its shrine. 1/ Turning the tables. Perhaps we imagine our primary conundrum as a species relates to the immutability of political economy or whatever name we give a totalizing foreground with its unshakable priorities and demands holding us captive, at a distance from life and each other. @Gestwa “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings” - Ursula La Guin, #NationalBookAwards. 2/ Our world is all about the money, it seems. Quid pro quo priorities, principles and perspectives, I tell ya. But what if, at a deeper, more substantive level, it ultimately concerns a moment-to-moment relationship with a transformational as distinct from transactional reality? 3/ The notion, neither so original nor so modern as we might imagine, even as a vast, interlocking, global matrix of trans-national actors profitably, militantly, commonly and similarly vested in commanding us to be fooled by appearances, heralds a recent twist to our captivity. 4/ Jesus? Murdered by a religious and political cabal precisely because He insisted on the ultimate veracity of a transformational, as distinct from transactional compass with regard to life itself. What, then, does a functional alternative to power politics effect and require? Subtweet: The true crisis is epistemic. When we removed Reality as a category pertaining to God, capitalism filled the void—becoming our theology, our fate. A “monstrously metastasized psychosis,” says Hart, “in its essence, evil.” The Kingdom eclipsed. The eschaton deferred. For now.
Open original document@RxOnlyFL @cognazor 'He is Risen’? So what, if our everyday allegiance forsakes the costly obedience of messianic identity for the very powers and principalities Jesus came to exorcise. Loisy saw the counterfeit: “Jesus announced the Kingdom, but it was the Church that arrived.” Come out of her.
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Illich reliable, here. With the Constantinian concession, we could be authentically 'born again' _and_ be possessed by exactly what Jesus came to end - the "idolatrous spells cast over people" (Wink) by the vast array of institutions and epistemologies they epistemically secure. There is a joke in which Satan is talking with one of his fallen angels while looking at the foibles of humans on the earth. “What should we do?” implores the helper. “See there, a human has gotten hold of a piece of truth!” Unperturbed, the Prince of Darkness replies, “Don’t worry, these humans will try to institutionalize it, and then it will belong to us again.” Echoes likewise in Illich, whose leading thesis is that Western modernity represents a perverted attempt to encode and institutionalize the NT's principles as rules of behavior, duty, and laws in a corrupting structural deception so pervasive that we no longer realize it’s there.