Just War

Just War is very hard to define.  There are sooooo many questions that have to be answered before you can decide whether war is necessary, and most of them cannot be answered concretely but change with every situation and every perspective.  I thought Daniel Bell has lined up how we should approach just war in the simplest way possible.  He challenges every aspect of just war and it's validity in the world and comes to the conclusion that we need to take up the challenges and be just people before we can consider making choices about just war.  I totally agree with this statement.  I think that you need to be just in order to choose when just war is necessary.  Bell talks about how we can't consider ourselves to be the true authority on these kind of situations and that God is the only one who can decide the fate of man.  This is pretty intense and I think it's also the thing that people have the most trouble believing in.  This kind of happens in Isaiah, when the Assyrians attacked Judah and the Jews ended up ditching thier faith in God and allying with the Babylonians, which just led to bigger problems in the future.  Just war is really the decision that we make when we have to take authority over God, which seems crazy, but must be necessary in some situations.  I believe that maybe we shouldn't always believe God will magically make everything right, but that he has left us the tools to approach war and other violent situations in the most God-like way possible.

Dorothy Day

The chapter "Community" was the part of Dorothy Day's book where I think the key idea of the whole book is discussed.  In my eyes, this idea is "making love".  This is not referring to sex as many may assume but actually to the act of giving and receiving in order to show people's appreciation for each other.  I totally agree with this statement.  Just like in Claiborne, Day talks about how love simply consist of the small acts that we can do for each other.  It's pretty crazy the similarities between how Claiborne lives today and the hospices and farmhouses that Dorothy and Peter helped set up throughout the country.  They both seem like places you go when you want to simply live.  I really think that she has it right saying that we don't need a lot of things that we get and that we're pretty simple.  All we really need is food, love, and shelter, not movies, alcohol, and drugs.  As I've said before, I don't think I could ever live that way, but I believe that it would probably make you appreciate the quality of how we live today.  It's hard to think that some people live without the necessities provided for them everyday.  Personally, I think that the hospices that Day and Peter created are a lot more important than the paper.  Writing is just writing and people can simply read it and forget, but the hospices show people through actions how to live and love.  This would give me more hope, knowing that people care for me and that if we work together we can support each other.  I really wish that I could have met Peter because I think that he was someone who had a true belief in the good of all people.  I don't know if they still have places like these today, but if they do they should definitely keep it going.

Final Project

I'm still very unsure about my final project.  I'm pretty much down for anything, but I'd like to do something pretty cool just for the sake of it.  One thing I think might be pretty awesome is if I did a documentary about people's view on how just America is before and after I say some facts about some very unjust things that our country does (which I haven't compiled yet).  I thought it would be cool to let people know about some situations that they could help change for our country and its people.  If this doesn't work out, I would maybe like to do a project that involves notifying people about the little things they can do to make justice more prevalent in our society.  And by little things I mean the stuff that Shane Claiborne talks about such as simply "going down" to the level of others and loving and caring for people.  But I would also like to point out many things that you can do in more of a charity sense, such as places to volunteer at around Nashville and around the world.  I'm not really sure what kind of project this will be (i.e. poster, website, or whatever) but I think it could be cool.

Isaiah

Isaiah must have had a crazy hard life.  From reading Heschel, you can just tell that this guy is so passionate about both God and the people on Earth that he is torn between the two.  I'm still trying to understand the fact that Heschel believes that these profits were acquantinces of God.  I mean, where do people go now a days if they start saying they've had conversations with God? to the insane asylum.  I bet you if I was there when Isaiah was preaching I probably would have thought he was crazy.  Just like we talked about in class, I think that the Bible is so intriguing because the people in it make the same mistakes that we make all the time.  In this case, it was not trusting solely in God.  There were a few lines that I did like a lot that were in Isaiah and I thought helped me understand why this God of the old testament seems so much meaner than the God of the new testament.  My favorite is "He is both smiting and healing", or as Heschel puts it "There is no redemption with affliction."  It kind of started to make sense to me that living for God isn't the easiest thing to do, but although it seems like he's doing something very wrong at some points, that it's all for good in the end.  This is quite a way to go about things, but it's definitely a way to find out who truly is faithful and believes that God is almighty.  As can be seen in Isaiah, both kings were not faithful enough in the Lord to not rely on other nations.  This brings us once again to the fact that the people in the Bible are so similar to us today, cause we really do the same thing now.

I thought that Rabbi Flip was the man.  His views on the bible and life were pretty amazing.  I really enjoyed how he didn't try to glorify anything in the bible and just told it how it was.  I agree with him in the sense that not everything in the bible should be taken literally and that the Bible was written by humans inspired by God and not by God himself.  I really don't read the bible at all, though one time when I got back from Church camp I read the whole thing.  I really didn't understand anything at all and I think Rabbi Flip had a good idea on how to look at many stories of the Bible.  I liked the Jewish terms he used to show how the clergy tries to dissect the Bible and find hidden meaning, but even more I enjoyed his way of putting the Bible into today's perspective because we are more than 2000 years past the time it was written.  I wasn't able to check out Ecclesiastes, but I did read Esther.   I tried to follow the technique that Rabbi Flip had been talking about but had a little trouble.  I got the main story down cause it's pretty straight forward, but I was having trouble figuring out what the "hidden meanings" were and how to apply them to life.  In my opinion, it seemed to me like the Jews were kind of hypocrites when it came to them stopping Haman's decree and making their own.  They straight up killed all of these people and it seems like an unjust act because as we all now "two wrongs don't make a right".  But anyway, anyone have better luck with Esther?