Audio: “Torture and the Eucharist” by William Cavanaugh

I received a request from Ariah, a regular reader, to include audio and video here on the blog.  I currently don’t feel like I have anything to say that can’t be typed up, so on occassion I will include audio and video from people who say things much more eloquently than I can write them.

I encourage you to listen to William T. Cavanaugh’s lecture on Torture and the Eucharist.  The audio comes in two segments (Cavana1.mp3 and Cavana2.mp3) courtesy of the Catholic Audio Blogspot.

This lecture paints a very powerful picture of what William has called Theopolitical Imagination.  Theopolitical imagination is the practice of asking oneself what the world would be like if God were alive and working, and then taking active steps toward that reality.  At first, this may sound dangerous because it is a similar imagination that drives the jihad or even communism (i.e. the resulting economic system that begins imagining that God does not exist).  The difference in Christian theopolitical imagination is that we base our action on personal sacrifice rather than reward.  This is the crux of Torture and the Eucharist.

Viewed through McLuhan’s lens, “The medium is the message…”

Cavanaugh’s lecture on the Eucharist affects more than our view of torture — it reminds the church of its greater call for justice.  When the church breaks the bread and drink the wine in its intended fashion, it does so as the Body of Christ.  Similarly, when the church gives food to the hungry, water to the thirsty, shelter to the stranger, comfort to the afflicted, and company to the imprisoned, it not only gives them to Christ but it does this as his Body.

If the medium is the message, then Cavanaugh is reminding the church of a piece of Christ’s message that is often forgotten — subversive social justice.  This is a topic recently picked-up in Brian McLaren’s book the Secret Message of Jesus, where McLaren talks about Christ’s rhetoric of Kingdom and its political implications in Roman occupied Jerusalem.  McLaren and Cavanaugh’s positions are united in the power of the Christ’s work of reconciliation.  Christ’s message was politically subversive because it called for reconciliation with God and fellow man (i.e. not just any fellow man, or the abstracted man of the human race, but the man down the street you see every day — the neighbor).

As I live here in the greater Las Vegas area, I want to keep asking, what does it mean for the Church to embody Christ’s work of reconciliation for the city at large to see.  What implications does the Gospel of Reconciliation have on the racial, socioeconomic, religious, and moral tensions within this City of Perpetual Lights?

~ by sexyreligion on October 20, 2007.