Author: ProfJerry

A shout-out and thanks to J. B. Pritzker, our Governor here in Illinois.

He’s made some tough and unpopular decisions in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic. But the results have been good. The local newspaper reported today that our “positivity rate” (the percentage of tests that are positive) has dropped from around 23% to 2.5%.

These good results have not deterred some local and state officials as well as some business owners from expressing their deep resentment and ignoring or attempting to overturn some of the Governor’s guidelines and directives.

I guess they want to be more like Florida or Texas or Arizona.

Robert Reich, writing in The Guardian explains that focussing so much upon “reopening the economy” and paying so little attention to controlling the spread of the coronavirus has left us with the worst of both:

Trump was so intent on having a good economy by election day that he resisted doing what was necessary to contain the virus. He left everything to governors and local officials, then warned that the “cure” of closing the economy was “worse than the disease”. Trump even called on citizens to “liberate” their states from public health restrictions.

In the biggest public health emergency in US history, in which 130,000 have lost their lives, still no one is in charge

Yet he still has no national plan for testing, contact tracing and isolating people with infections. Trump won’t even ask Americans to wear masks. Last week, Democrats accused him of sitting on nearly $14bn in funds for testing and contact tracing that Congress appropriated in April.

It would be one thing if every other rich nation in the world botched it as badly as has America. But even Italy – not always known for the effectiveness of its leaders or the pliability of its citizens – has contained the virus and is reopening without a resurgence.

There was never a conflict between containing Covid-19 and getting the US economy back on track. The first was always a prerequisite to the second. By doing nothing to contain the virus, Trump has not only caused tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths but put the US economy into a stall. [Emphasis added.]

I like Rubin’s concluding paragraph. She captures the enabling behavior of the Republicans in the Senate and why they should be voted out of office.

Schiff got one thing wrong, however. He told the Senate, “You are decent. He is not who you are.” Actually, Senate Republicans are not decent — nor loyal or worthy of our trust. They stood by Trump when even the evidence available at the time weighed in favor of impeachment. They turned a blind eye to a witness whose testimony would have been even more persuasive. They were and are enablers of the most destructive president in our history and deserve — every last one of them — to be booted out of office. In Schiff’s words, their names “will be tied to his with a cord of steel and for all of history.”

Link

Several years ago I was writing the occasional column for a nearby newspaper. Most of the time the column was in response to a question submitted by a reader. However, on a few occasions I wrote a column that was not in response to a question. Here is one such column. Given our time in the liturgical calendar and the pandemic we are experiencing, I thought it might be appropriate to post the article again.

I was recently interviewed by a reporter from another newspaper who was working on a column devoted to the topic of Easter and the Easter message. He began by asking me whether I thought “the resurrection had actually happened.”

The reporter’s question is a thoroughly modern question. Ever since the European “enlightenment” of the 18th-19th centuries, we in the West have been increasingly led to desire and expect objective, clear, and certain knowledge. We have come to believe that true knowledge consists in knowing the “facts” together with theories that help to tie those facts together and explain them.

In the words of Marcus Borg — a contemporary theologian whose works I greatly admire — we have identified truth with “facticity.”

And so the reporter’s question was not surprising. We want to know “Did the resurrection really, actually happen?” And for many of us that means “Is it factual?”

But — and here’s where I risk offending by sharing some of my own personal views — such questions make the mistake of trying to make mythological language fit the category and requirements of logical language. It’s as if we assume that only factual language can be true and so we try to fit the round peg of myth into the square hole of logic.

The truth of the matter is that truth is not confined to “facticity.” Mythological language – like poetic language – expresses truths that cannot be expressed by logical language or language too narrowly bound by reason.

Borg has pointed out that when studying and reflecting upon biblical events it is frequently less important and less interesting to ask whether the event “actually happened” than it is to ask what the event and its report means.

After I had explained some of this to my interviewer, he put me on the spot and asked me, “Well, then, what does the Easter event mean?”

I was momentarily silenced, but then began to find the words to express what Easter meant to me.

It means, I said, that despite the worst that humans can conceive and do — and certainly the execution of Jesus falls into that category — God’s purposes cannot be finally thwarted. It means that despite the greatest evil we can commit or despite the greatest tragedy we can suffer God is able to salvage something and to create good out of that evil or tragedy.

This does not require us to say — when something evil happens — that God planned it or that it was “God’s will.” After all, we are unfortunately all too capable of creating the evil ourselves. But God can and does frequently bring something marvelously good out of evil events.

Such a conviction cannot be expressed in language that asks whether something “actually happened.” It can however be expressed in biblical and mythological language as we do when we affirm that God raised Jesus from the dead.

That, I told the reporter, is the Easter message for me.

David Leonhardt at the New York Times offers a reasonable analysis of Trump’s responsibility for the situation we find ourselves in.

I want to emphasize that blaming Trump for the appearance of coronavirus would be deeply unfair. No matter who was president, the virus would likely have created a crisis, as it has in Europe.

But it’s also important to be clear about the responsibility that does fall on Trump. His months of denial — and his acceptance of the testing fiasco — meant that the United States failed to isolate people with the virus, as South Korea and Singapore did. His refusal to fix the medical-supply crisis means that the virus is unnecessarily spreading in hospitals and that Americans will unnecessarily die.

The severity of the virus, in turn, will make the economic downtown worse and longer lasting. And Trump will be partly at fault. A reality-based response in January and February would have produced a different economy in April and May.