I am reminded of interviewing community organizer Saul Alinsky, author of Rules for Radicals in the ’70’s when he called Jesus a community organizer.

He counted off the points of resemblance, which I duly noted and reported. (There’s a video on the matter which compares Alinsky and Jesus. It demonstrates how unlike each was to the other.)

Alinsky had many priest friends, including pastors in various Chicago neighborhoods beginning with the Back of the Yards in the mid-’30s.

With the blessing of Cardinal Mundelein, needless to say. And of Mundelein’s successors –in other neighborhoods for decades to come.

The “radical” reference is something of a bromide by now, albeit defensible in view of Jesus’ assigned and chosen role as upsetter of one covenant and replacing it with another.

At the same time, such terms are hugely attractive to proclaimers of revolution and, for that matter, radicalism. So it becomes a tricky business, this laying on the Savior terms that mean so many things that are  not always mutually compatible.

Context helps, of course, and yet when Francis uses one of those terms, he would be wise to get specific, I think, as would anyone else.

via Pope Francis at canonization of new saints Paul VI, Oscar Romero: ‘Jesus is radical’

Issue not being climate change, right? But what we can do about it.

“It will change,” Trump told 60 Minutes, without saying how.

No, main thing being it’s an ebb and flow thing, with long history of change dating long prior to industrialization.

So it’s a distraction. And howlers use it as one to get us not thinking about magnificent Trumpian achievements in U.S. economy. Tsk, tsk.

via The Independent