This week, however, I got involved in a discussion in another context that contested the moral superiority of the United States to the 'fascist and totalitarian nation-states' of the mid-20th century. While, to understate the obvious, I am not a big fan of Hitler, Mussolini, or Lenin, I tend to see the United States as the inverse of such totalitarian regimes, with its own version of totalitarianism, the totalitarianism of democratic free-market capitalism, that is at least every bit as pernicious because it is not as obvious in its totalitarian controls. The Serb philosopher Slavoj Žižek, in the past few years has helped me see this. Last week he published an article in a periodical "In these Times" concerning the misinformation about looting in New Orleans (available at http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/printer_102205G.shtml) and its implications about the underlying power structures in the world. His commentary is biting, but very perceptive, it seems to me:

"In the much celebrated free circulation opened up by the global capitalism, it is "things" (commodities) which freely circulate, while the circulation of "persons" is more and more controlled. We are thus not dealing with "globalization as an unfinished project," but with a true "dialectics of globalization." The segregation of the people is the reality of economic globalization. This new racism of the developed world is in a way much more brutal than the previous one: Its implicit legitimization is neither naturalist (the "natural" superiority of the developed West) nor culturalist (we in the West also want to preserve our cultural identity). Rather, it's an unabashed economic egotism - the fundamental divide is the one between those included into the sphere of (relative) economic prosperity and those excluded from it."

Obviously, a commitment to the catholicity of the church must call for very different commitments. This is why only the church can be the location for a true humanism, for such a humanism is suspended from the transcendent, from God who has revealed God's very Self in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. This is why our response must always be local, by personal direct action in the works of mercy, even as we have our eyes on the church catholic that transcends the local to the body of Christ spread throughout the world. This is why we must have our imaginations freed by the lives of those who have come before us, and those whose lives today show us creative actions, not to accept the way things are as natural -- they are not. We live in a sinful world, a world characterized by its lack. We act, as Pastor Jeff said last week in his sermon, not to be responsible, not to make a difference, but to be obedient to the kingdom of God that God has made known to us in the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus, a kingdom that we continue to catch glimpses of in the lives of the saints.

Although Žižek is an atheist, he interestingly has a much better grasp on the significance of the church and the Christian tradition than many Christian modernists and post-modernists that one to sustain Christianity as a sub-type of a human spirituality to help guide the fate of the nation-state. Obviously, if public opinion really mattered, the United States would be pulling out of its unjust occupation of Iraq today.