christianity

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Welcome to c/Christianity

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"Let it be very clear, then, that when the church preaches social justice, equality, and human dignity; when the church defends those who suffer poverty or violence, this is not subversive nor is it Marxism. This is the authentic magisterium of the church.
-Óscar Romero


RULES :

1. Be Respectful
-This applies to everyone and all you do, but to clarify while atheists etc. are welcome, this is not a place to bash Christianity.

2. No Denominational Infighting
-Try to reframe from inflammatory statements regarding or painting with too large a brush. We are all comrade whether we be Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox or so on.

3. No Racism, Misogyny, Homo&Transphobia etc.
-Or using religion to justify bigotry.

4. Follow Hexbear's Code of Conduct
-Obviously


Resources :

Online Bible Translations

Institute for Christian Socialism

List of LGBT-Friendly Churches


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founded 4 years ago
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And what they say in their absence

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Are you Christian?

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Dear God, l commit all our plans, dreams and aspirations into hands. These are only products of our thoughts,what we truly want is what you want for us because we know that is what will truly be best us In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen

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Israeli occupation Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly canceled plans to attend the inauguration of Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican due to concerns over a possible arrest linked to a pending warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC), according to Israeli media outlet Ynet.

The decision followed behind-the-scenes inquiries made by the occupation government with both Italian and Vatican officials to assess whether Netanyahu could enter the country without facing detention. However, responses from both parties were reportedly ambiguous, and it remained unclear whether they would comply with the ICC's warrant should Netanyahu set foot on their soil.

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I thought this looked interesting - and have found CAC’s events and reflections insightful. The event description includes this: “Together, we’ll courageously imagine a spirituality rooted in love and spacious enough for the complexity of our world today. Christianity has been shaped by empire and by mystics, by resistance and renewal—so what can it become now through us?”

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By this I don't mean the morality of creating such a lifeform, but how your faith would inform the meaning, implications, and ethical ramifications of existing alongside such a being.

I think such a thing is a fascinating question, but when works of fiction featuring such beings incorporate Christianity at all, they tend to either 1) have the creature be a mindless monster that must be killed as an example of Why Man Shouldn't Play God, or 2) have Christians as villains who wrongly believe #1. I'm hoping to hear a different perspective, and I figured this would be the place to ask.

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It’s weird having a yankee Pope, but he seems to have spent a lot of his time in Latin America and chose to speak in Spanish…so there is that.

I’ve also seen a lot of talk that suggest his taking the name Leo signifies his desire to highlight Catholic Social Teaching as it pertains to capitalism and the problems of our modern world such as his predecessor and most recent namesake did.

I’ve also seen a lot of MAGA people losing their mind and Steve Bannon in an interview saying he’d be a dark horse pick but potentially one of the worst because woke (lol).

Personally, I hope he continues the focus on God’s mercy Francis’s papacy had and continues the Church down the synodal path he set it on.
I hope he continues to advocate for the Palestinian people.
And a bit more selfishly, I hope he doesn’t reverse Francis’s position on the blessing of same sex couples and trans people being allowed to be God parents and baptized.

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

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Idk how to feel about it.

I feel like Francis did a lot to rekindle my faith, but it is still so dim. Now my feed is filled with so many outside voices reporting and politicking and it seems this whole thing will almost be a referendum on his Papacy.

Idk

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Significantly absent in the long obituaries for Pope Francis in both the New York Times and the Washington Post were mentions of his deep concern for the suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza. In Francis’s last public message on Easter Sunday, just hours before he died, he had called for a ceasefire in Gaza, and condemned the “deplorable humanitarian situation” there.

The obits also failed to note that Pope Francis had personally telephoned the Holy Family Church in Gaza just about every evening since Israel invaded the territory in October 2023 — including the Saturday night before Easter. The church’s pastor, Rev. Gabriel Romanelli, remembered: “He said he was praying for us, he blessed us, and he thanked us for our prayers.” Other church members said that the Pope “would make sure to speak not only to the priest but to everyone else in the room.”

Pope Francis’s concern for Gaza and Palestine did not start in October 2023. Rev. Munther Isaac, a Palestinian Christian theologian and Lutheran pastor, told Democracy Now:

I think no Palestinian will ever forget when Pope Francis, in 2014, stopped his car, went down, stepped down and prayed at the separation wall separating Jerusalem from Bethlehem — a moment that touched all of us and continued to speak to us for years.

Full Article

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For anyone who is interested in left wing/historical materialist inroads to discuss Christianity, i have been reading a physical copy of Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed William R Herzog that i found in a used bookstore.

I cannot recommend it enough, it goes into various aspects of ancient Palestinian history from the worth of a talent to the treatment of day laborers by landowners' hired help, to the proportion of people within various classes in the time period discussed. It directly compares Jesus to Paolo Freire, specifically the period of time where Freire was targeted by the government for the results of his educational methods.

It takes a lot of the unpalatable and paternalistic metaphorical readings of the kingdom of heaven as a place run by a tyrant, and recontextualizes the stories as being about a real time and place where people lived and struggled.

context- I am an ex Catholic turned transsexual communist, and while I may not follow the tenets of the Church anymore and have resentment for the harm it did to me and countless others, I recognize that it has provided comfort and can be a difficult framework to negotiate with. I'm sharing this less as "see, the Church is cool after all!!" and more "if you have the patience to actually sit down and talk to people, this may be a useful reference."

reposted from news megathread, per a suggestion in a reply.

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And here's a clip of his God Damn America speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYqrXVNfYUI

And here's the full Chickens Coming Home to Roost sermon, it's long but it's also a really cool example of rhetoric and speech and is BASED AS FUCK. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUtZNQ0REFA

Yes this is basically a subtweet about how it's ridiculous to demonize "Christianity" because of the Bible.

I am not and have never been a member of the Church of Christianity, nor will I ever, but I respect the liberatory and militant strains within it.

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They meet in 2016

Full Article in English for you anglo-saxon nerds that dont speak spanish

There is curiosity, admiration, and respect in their gazes. Two leaders, face to face. Fidel Castro, 89 years old and retired from public life, but always conscious of being a global icon. And Francis, the Pope of mercy, but also the new global leader, idolized by the masses around the world. The Pontiff who, in less than two years, changed the face of the Church, launched the Vatican Spring, and became an icon of hope for the "discarded."

Two wise people, laden with the life experience that comes with years of living. Surely they both wanted to see each other, greet each other, and speak. Fidel would be eager to meet the Argentine Pope, the first Latin American Pope, the Pope who is exposing savage capitalism and who wants to inaugurate a new era for the "common home" based on mercy and Samaritan peace.

Bergoglio would also be eager to see Fidel, the icon, the commander, the supreme and steadfast leader, the leader for decades of the only communist country in the world that did not persecute the Catholic Church. The Fidel who studied with his Jesuit brothers in Havana. Perhaps that's why the gifts exchanged were aimed at those coordinates.

Fidel gave the Pope a book by Dominican priest Frei Betto, entitled Fidel and Religion, a true classic, to explain the Cuban leader's special religiosity, a kind of devout atheist. And the Pope reciprocated with books by Armando Llorente, the late Jesuit who was Fidel Castro's teacher and mentor at the Colegio de Belén in Havana in the 1940s. His last encyclical, Laudato Si', on integral ecology, was also included.

Two world-famous figures, one in its decline and the other in its heyday. Two icons of their respective revolutions. Fidel's, an attempt at socialism based on equality with evident losses of freedom, in retreat. Francis's, based on the equality of mercy, which could prevail in the 'global village'.

Two men of drive and character. One left his mark on his homeland and even extended his influence, especially throughout Latin America. The other is reaching the hearts of the masses around the world with his actions and his discourse based on the "tenderness of God" and the denunciation of the injustices caused by an "inexigenous system." Both, and logically each in their own way, fought for the dignity of the human person, for the discarded, for those abandoned in the face of life's challenges, for the outcasts of humanity.

It was the long-awaited photo. It will be the photo, or one of the photos, of the Pope's visit to Cuba that will endure in time and go down in history. Two fighters, face to face. Two men who chose to blaze a trail, taking the risk of making mistakes. Because, as Francis says, "I prefer a Church in ruins than at a standstill" or "I prefer to ask for forgiveness than permission."

What they talked about was the least of it. They say it was the environment. What mattered were the glances and the innuendos. Who would have told the old comandante that he was going to greet a Pope from the same land as his beloved Che Guevara, who, if he were alive today, would be 87 years old and happy with his fellow countryman!

And perhaps the Pope thought, like many Latin Americans, that the "Cuban revolution," despite its many flaws and errors, was an example of resilience and, in a certain sense, a preferential option for the people, for the most humble. In the style of Liberation Theology or the Theology of the People, which is what Francis always followed.

A photo that sums up, then, almost a century of Latin American history. With a comandante, who no longer wears the olive-green suit, but rather the blue tracksuit, branded Adidas, one of the great capitalist multinationals. And with a Pope, arrived from the end of the Argentine world, who has lit the flame of the revolution of mercy in the Church and in the world. Angel and devil, some will say. Two great leaders, others will say.

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I know a lot of Hexbear will be crab emoji-ing, but I’m genuine sad at his passing.
I’d like to think it happening on Easter is symbolic of something.

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Palestinian Christians are condemning a move by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) to collaborate with a leading pro-Israel advocacy group on an online tool that aims to define Palestinian resistance as antisemitic.

In a letter sent late last month from Kairos Palestine to the USCCB Committee’s head, Bishop Timothy Broglio, sixteen Palestinian Christian leaders representing Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant denominations and church organizations express their deep disappointment regarding the USCCB’s endorsement of the American Jewish Committee’s online resource, Translate Hate. The bishops’ Committee on Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, in partnership with the AJC, added its own annotations to the AJC’s resource, which offers glossary of “antisemitic terms, phrases, conspiracies, cartoons, themes, and memes” and titled it, Translate Hate: The Catholic Edition.

The Kairos Palestine letter charges the bishops’ document was “adopted without any form of consultation with Palestinian Christians, rendering us invisible and nonexistent in a discourse that directly impacts our lives and communities.”

It comes, they write, “at a time of immense suffering for our people, as tens of thousands are being killed, starved, and displaced under Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and the West Bank including East Jerusalem—actions condemned by leading international and Israeli human rights organizations.”

Full article palestine-heart

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Óscar Romero was an Archbishop of San Salvador and social activist who was assassinated on this day in 1980 after giving a sermon where he urged government soldiers to desert their ranks and stop carrying out state oppression.

Romero spoke out against social injustice, assassinations, and torture happening during the Salvadoran Civil War. Although initially perceived as a conservative, Romero became an activist after the assassination of his friend and fellow priest Rutilio Grande in 1977.

During the civil war, Romero was a prominent figure in El Salvador, giving popular radio sermons in which he reported disappearances, tortures, murders, and other repressed information each Sunday. In a media landscape that was heavily censored, Romero became an important source of news for what was going on in the country. According to listener surveys, 73% of the rural population and 47% of the urban listened regularly.

In 1980, Romero was assassinated while celebrating Mass in the chapel of the Hospital of Divine Providence, the day after he gave a sermon urging soldiers to listen to "God's orders" and desert their ranks rather than continuing to oppress the domestic population. Romero's funeral was interrupted by smoke bombs and rifle shots from surrounding buildings that were fired into the mourning crowd, killing dozens.

In 2000, The Guardian named Oscar Perez Linares as the assassin, using declassified CIA documents as evidence. Investigations by the UN-created "Truth Commission for El Salvador" concluded that the extreme right-wing politician and death squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson had given the order to kill Romero. Both died before being brought to justice for their role in Romero's murder.

"A church that doesn't provoke any crises, a gospel that doesn't unsettle, a word of God that doesn't get under anyone's skin, a word of God that doesn't touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed — ​what gospel is that?"

Óscar Romero

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The first thing I see when tuning in is some choir singing the Battle Hymn of The Republic.
There is something really perverse about taking a song about freeing slaves and singing it in honor of a man who is about to unleash fascist goon squads on immigrants.

“His truth is marching on”
is it!!??

Carrie Underwood singing “America The Beautiful” all somberly after Trumps speech full of racist dog whistles and petty grievances made my eyes want to roll out the back of my skull.
And I had to turn it off when the Rabbi and Reverend and whoever else were going to start leading prayers.

It’s all just show to these people…just ritual they never bother trying to internalize.
They don’t care about God’s Grace…or His Will…or Filial Love.
It fills my heart with such deep sadness, it’s hard to describe.

This is how we Hallow His Name?
I feel such deep shame in being a Christian and an American and a human.
Every day we fail him and it’s only by his everlasting love and steadfast mercy we will be spared.

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