Post by Atticus Pizzaballa on Nov 7, 2021 21:20:28 GMT -5
Not sure how many of you have heard of this new attempt to secularize society by eliminating any thread of Christianity or any other religion from it. The Church has spoken out against this for many years through various Popes since the idea has its roots in Europe and now its growing seeds in America which seems to be embraced by some progressives like AOC. Here is some information for your thoughts and maybe your interests as this new ideology can overshadow and yes de-Christianize America.
A former Bush campaign adviser who is running as a Democrat in Texas’ lieutenant governor race said Sunday that Jesus Christ today would be declared "woke" by conservatives.
Matthew Dowd, who is seeking his party’s nomination to take on Republican Dan Patrick, said he came to the realization in church that today’s "wokeness" is just another term for human decency
"As I sat in church today I was thinking that if Jesus were here today he would be accused of being woke," he tweeted. "How about we just say it is human decency to treat all with respect and dignity and that it is constitutional to say all men and women are equal."
"Lovely service at church today at Chapel in the Hills in Wimberley," he wrote in an earlier tweet. "'Let your joy be in your journey, not in some distant goal.’ Let us each find joy in meaning and service with compassion and respect of others. It is there that happiness resides."
Dowd, a former ABC News political analyst, was an adviser to George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign and the chief strategist for Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign.
Dowd's comments came after Democratic strategist James Carville sparked the ire of progressives for blaming Democrat Terry McAuliffe's loss in Virginia on "stupid wokeness" and the progressive agenda.
"What went wrong is stupid wokeness," Carville said. "Don’t just look at Virginia and New Jersey. Look at Long Island, Buffalo, look at Minneapolis, even look at Seattle, Washington. I mean this ‘defund the police’ lunacy, this take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools, people see that. And it really has a suppressive effect on all across the country on Democrats. Some of these people need to go to a woke detox center or something."
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., fired back at Carville, saying "wokeness" is a term "almost exclusively used by older people these days."
"And before people disingenuously complain ‘woke’ is denigrating to older people, it’s actually pundits like Carville using terms like ‘woke’ to insult voters under 45 that’s denigrating," she tweeted. "Don’t wonder why youth turnout falls when Dems talk about them like this. We need everyone."
Merriam-Webster added the word woke to its dictionary in 2017, defining it as, "aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)." The Oxford dictionary adopted it the same year, defining it as "originally: well-informed, up-to-date. Now chiefly: alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice."
Many Americans regard wokeness as connected to cancel culture, censorship, and Critical Race Theory, which may have played a major role in the Democrats' recent election defeats in Virginia. Liberal commentator Bill Maher has repeatedly criticized wokeness and cancel culture on his show over the past few months.
www.foxnews.com/politics/former-bush-adviser-texas-democrat-jesus-woke
POLITICS & SOCIETY
NEWS
LOS ANGELES (CNS) -- The Catholic Church must proclaim Jesus Christ “boldly” and “creatively” in the face of new secular movements that promote “social justice,” “wokeness” and “intersectionality,” among other beliefs, as the answer to all of society’s ills, Los Angeles Archbishop José H. Gomez said Nov. 4.
“We need to tell our story of salvation in a new way, with charity and confidence, without fear,” he said. “This is the church’s mission in every age and every cultural moment.”
Archbishop Gomez made the comments in a videotaped address for the upcoming 23rd Catholic and Public Life Congress in Madrid, which organizers said will focus on political correctness and “the dangers of this mega-ideology,” such as preventing debate and limiting freedoms.
Gomez: The Catholic Church must proclaim Christ “boldly” in the face of new secular movements that promote “social justice,” and “wokeness” as the answer to all of society’s ills.
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He spoke on “the rise of new secular ideologies and movements for social change in the United States and the implications for the Catholic Church.”
The church needs to understand these movements “as pseudo-religions, and even replacements and rivals to traditional Christian beliefs,” he said, because “they claim to offer what religion provides.”
“With the breakdown of the Judeo-Christian worldview and the rise of secularism, political belief systems based on social justice or personal identity have come to fill the space that Christian belief and practice once occupied,” he said.
“We all know that while there are unique conditions in the United States, similar broad patterns of aggressive secularization have long been at work in Spain and elsewhere in Europe,” he said.
The church needs to understand these movements “as pseudo-religions, and even replacements and rivals to traditional Christian beliefs,” he said.
Tweet this
“An elite leadership class has risen in our countries that has little interest in religion and no real attachments to the nations they live in or to local traditions or cultures,” said Archbishop Gomez, who is president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
“This group, which is in charge in corporations, governments, universities, the media, and in the cultural and professional establishments,” he said, “wants to establish what we might call a global civilization, built on a consumer economy and guided by science, technology, humanitarian values and technocratic ideas about organizing society.”
“There is no need for old-fashioned belief systems and religions,” he added. “In fact, as they see it, religion, especially Christianity, only gets in the way of the society they hope to build.”
Secularization means “de-Christianization,” as many popes have pointed out, he said. “For years now, there has been a deliberate effort in Europe and America to erase the Christian roots of society and to suppress any remaining Christian influences.”
“We recognize that often what is being canceled and corrected are perspectives rooted in Christian beliefs -- about human life and the human person, about marriage, the family.”
Tweet this
Archbishop Gomez noted the congress’ program alluded to “cancel culture” along with political correctness.
“We recognize that often what is being canceled and corrected are perspectives rooted in Christian beliefs -- about human life and the human person, about marriage, the family and more. ... The ‘space’ that the church and believing Christians are permitted to occupy is shrinking,” he said.
Amid the pandemic and government response to it, everyone noticed “dramatic social changes,” he said, but these changes were already at work and were just “accelerated” by the pandemic.
“The new social movements and ideologies that we are talking about today were being seeded and prepared for many years in our universities and cultural institutions,” he explained.
In the U.S., amid the tension and fear created by the pandemic and social isolation, “these movements were fully unleashed in our society” with the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, by a white policeman and the protests that followed in many cities, Archbishop Gomez said.
“For many people in my country, myself included, (Floyd’s) tragedy became a stark reminder that racial and economic inequality are still deeply embedded in our society.”
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“For many people in my country, myself included, (Floyd’s) tragedy became a stark reminder that racial and economic inequality are still deeply embedded in our society,” he said.
These new movements are part of a wider “absolutely essential” discussion “about how to build an American society that expands opportunities for everyone, no matter what color their skin is or where they came from, or their economic status,” Archbishop Gomez added.
But people are increasingly turning to these “woke” movements, rather than religion, for “an explanation for events and conditions in the world,” he said. “They offer a sense of meaning, a purpose for living, and the feeling of belonging to a community. ... Like Christianity, these new movements tell their own ‘story of salvation.’”
“Now more than ever,” he said, “the church and every Catholic needs to know” the Christian story, “and proclaim it in all its beauty and truth.”
People are increasingly turning to these “woke” movements, rather than religion, for “an explanation for events and conditions in the world,” he said.
Because, he said, there is another story out there -- “a rival ‘salvation’ narrative that we hear being told in the media and in our institutions by the new social justice movements.”
Catholics and other Christians, he said, believe “we are created in the image of God ... and we are saved through the dying and rising of Jesus Christ ... (who) calls us to follow him in faith, loving God and our neighbor, working to build his kingdom on earth, all in confident hope that we will have eternal life with him in the world to come.”
The “woke” story, he explained, says that “we cannot know where we came from, but we are aware that we have interests in common with those who share our skin color or our position in society. ... We are liberated and find redemption through our constant struggle against our oppressors, by waging a battle for political and cultural power in the name of creating a society of equity.”
“We all want to build a society that provides equality, freedom, and dignity for every person,” Archbishop Gomez said. “But we can only build a just society on the foundation of the truth about God and human nature. ... Unless we believe that God is our Father, there is no reason for us to treat others as our brothers and sisters.”
The Catholic Church must “understand and engage” these movements as “dangerous substitutes for true religion.”
“Today’s critical theories and ideologies are profoundly atheistic,” he continued. “They deny the soul, the spiritual, transcendent dimension of human nature; or they think that it is irrelevant to human happiness. They reduce what it means to be human to essentially physical qualities -- the color of our skin, our sex, our notions of gender, our ethnic background or our position in society.”
“No doubt,” he added, “we can recognize in these movements certain elements of liberation theology. They seem to be coming from the same Marxist cultural vision. Also, these movements resemble some of the heresies that we find in church history.”
“These new movements have lost the truth about the human person” because they deny God, he said. “No matter how well-intentioned they are, they cannot promote authentic human flourishing.”
In the United States, “these strictly secular movements are causing new forms of social division, discrimination, intolerance and injustice,” he added.
www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2021/11/05/archbishop-gomez-social-justice-woke-241785
I like the inner meaning between the two photo's ...
Texas Democrat candidate and former Bush adviser says Jesus today ‘would be accused of being woke’
Matthew Dowd is seeking his party’s nomination to take on Republican Texas Lt. Gov. Dan PatrickA former Bush campaign adviser who is running as a Democrat in Texas’ lieutenant governor race said Sunday that Jesus Christ today would be declared "woke" by conservatives.
Matthew Dowd, who is seeking his party’s nomination to take on Republican Dan Patrick, said he came to the realization in church that today’s "wokeness" is just another term for human decency
"As I sat in church today I was thinking that if Jesus were here today he would be accused of being woke," he tweeted. "How about we just say it is human decency to treat all with respect and dignity and that it is constitutional to say all men and women are equal."
"Lovely service at church today at Chapel in the Hills in Wimberley," he wrote in an earlier tweet. "'Let your joy be in your journey, not in some distant goal.’ Let us each find joy in meaning and service with compassion and respect of others. It is there that happiness resides."
Dowd, a former ABC News political analyst, was an adviser to George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign and the chief strategist for Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign.
Dowd's comments came after Democratic strategist James Carville sparked the ire of progressives for blaming Democrat Terry McAuliffe's loss in Virginia on "stupid wokeness" and the progressive agenda.
"What went wrong is stupid wokeness," Carville said. "Don’t just look at Virginia and New Jersey. Look at Long Island, Buffalo, look at Minneapolis, even look at Seattle, Washington. I mean this ‘defund the police’ lunacy, this take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools, people see that. And it really has a suppressive effect on all across the country on Democrats. Some of these people need to go to a woke detox center or something."
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., fired back at Carville, saying "wokeness" is a term "almost exclusively used by older people these days."
"And before people disingenuously complain ‘woke’ is denigrating to older people, it’s actually pundits like Carville using terms like ‘woke’ to insult voters under 45 that’s denigrating," she tweeted. "Don’t wonder why youth turnout falls when Dems talk about them like this. We need everyone."
Merriam-Webster added the word woke to its dictionary in 2017, defining it as, "aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)." The Oxford dictionary adopted it the same year, defining it as "originally: well-informed, up-to-date. Now chiefly: alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice."
Many Americans regard wokeness as connected to cancel culture, censorship, and Critical Race Theory, which may have played a major role in the Democrats' recent election defeats in Virginia. Liberal commentator Bill Maher has repeatedly criticized wokeness and cancel culture on his show over the past few months.
www.foxnews.com/politics/former-bush-adviser-texas-democrat-jesus-woke
POLITICS & SOCIETY
NEWS
Archbishop Gomez: The church must confront ‘woke’ social justice movements that aim to ‘cancel’ Christian beliefs
LOS ANGELES (CNS) -- The Catholic Church must proclaim Jesus Christ “boldly” and “creatively” in the face of new secular movements that promote “social justice,” “wokeness” and “intersectionality,” among other beliefs, as the answer to all of society’s ills, Los Angeles Archbishop José H. Gomez said Nov. 4.
“We need to tell our story of salvation in a new way, with charity and confidence, without fear,” he said. “This is the church’s mission in every age and every cultural moment.”
Archbishop Gomez made the comments in a videotaped address for the upcoming 23rd Catholic and Public Life Congress in Madrid, which organizers said will focus on political correctness and “the dangers of this mega-ideology,” such as preventing debate and limiting freedoms.
Gomez: The Catholic Church must proclaim Christ “boldly” in the face of new secular movements that promote “social justice,” and “wokeness” as the answer to all of society’s ills.
Tweet this
He spoke on “the rise of new secular ideologies and movements for social change in the United States and the implications for the Catholic Church.”
The church needs to understand these movements “as pseudo-religions, and even replacements and rivals to traditional Christian beliefs,” he said, because “they claim to offer what religion provides.”
“With the breakdown of the Judeo-Christian worldview and the rise of secularism, political belief systems based on social justice or personal identity have come to fill the space that Christian belief and practice once occupied,” he said.
“We all know that while there are unique conditions in the United States, similar broad patterns of aggressive secularization have long been at work in Spain and elsewhere in Europe,” he said.
The church needs to understand these movements “as pseudo-religions, and even replacements and rivals to traditional Christian beliefs,” he said.
Tweet this
“An elite leadership class has risen in our countries that has little interest in religion and no real attachments to the nations they live in or to local traditions or cultures,” said Archbishop Gomez, who is president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
“This group, which is in charge in corporations, governments, universities, the media, and in the cultural and professional establishments,” he said, “wants to establish what we might call a global civilization, built on a consumer economy and guided by science, technology, humanitarian values and technocratic ideas about organizing society.”
“There is no need for old-fashioned belief systems and religions,” he added. “In fact, as they see it, religion, especially Christianity, only gets in the way of the society they hope to build.”
Secularization means “de-Christianization,” as many popes have pointed out, he said. “For years now, there has been a deliberate effort in Europe and America to erase the Christian roots of society and to suppress any remaining Christian influences.”
“We recognize that often what is being canceled and corrected are perspectives rooted in Christian beliefs -- about human life and the human person, about marriage, the family.”
Tweet this
Archbishop Gomez noted the congress’ program alluded to “cancel culture” along with political correctness.
“We recognize that often what is being canceled and corrected are perspectives rooted in Christian beliefs -- about human life and the human person, about marriage, the family and more. ... The ‘space’ that the church and believing Christians are permitted to occupy is shrinking,” he said.
Amid the pandemic and government response to it, everyone noticed “dramatic social changes,” he said, but these changes were already at work and were just “accelerated” by the pandemic.
“The new social movements and ideologies that we are talking about today were being seeded and prepared for many years in our universities and cultural institutions,” he explained.
In the U.S., amid the tension and fear created by the pandemic and social isolation, “these movements were fully unleashed in our society” with the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, by a white policeman and the protests that followed in many cities, Archbishop Gomez said.
“For many people in my country, myself included, (Floyd’s) tragedy became a stark reminder that racial and economic inequality are still deeply embedded in our society.”
Tweet this
“For many people in my country, myself included, (Floyd’s) tragedy became a stark reminder that racial and economic inequality are still deeply embedded in our society,” he said.
These new movements are part of a wider “absolutely essential” discussion “about how to build an American society that expands opportunities for everyone, no matter what color their skin is or where they came from, or their economic status,” Archbishop Gomez added.
But people are increasingly turning to these “woke” movements, rather than religion, for “an explanation for events and conditions in the world,” he said. “They offer a sense of meaning, a purpose for living, and the feeling of belonging to a community. ... Like Christianity, these new movements tell their own ‘story of salvation.’”
“Now more than ever,” he said, “the church and every Catholic needs to know” the Christian story, “and proclaim it in all its beauty and truth.”
People are increasingly turning to these “woke” movements, rather than religion, for “an explanation for events and conditions in the world,” he said.
Because, he said, there is another story out there -- “a rival ‘salvation’ narrative that we hear being told in the media and in our institutions by the new social justice movements.”
Catholics and other Christians, he said, believe “we are created in the image of God ... and we are saved through the dying and rising of Jesus Christ ... (who) calls us to follow him in faith, loving God and our neighbor, working to build his kingdom on earth, all in confident hope that we will have eternal life with him in the world to come.”
The “woke” story, he explained, says that “we cannot know where we came from, but we are aware that we have interests in common with those who share our skin color or our position in society. ... We are liberated and find redemption through our constant struggle against our oppressors, by waging a battle for political and cultural power in the name of creating a society of equity.”
“We all want to build a society that provides equality, freedom, and dignity for every person,” Archbishop Gomez said. “But we can only build a just society on the foundation of the truth about God and human nature. ... Unless we believe that God is our Father, there is no reason for us to treat others as our brothers and sisters.”
The Catholic Church must “understand and engage” these movements as “dangerous substitutes for true religion.”
“Today’s critical theories and ideologies are profoundly atheistic,” he continued. “They deny the soul, the spiritual, transcendent dimension of human nature; or they think that it is irrelevant to human happiness. They reduce what it means to be human to essentially physical qualities -- the color of our skin, our sex, our notions of gender, our ethnic background or our position in society.”
“No doubt,” he added, “we can recognize in these movements certain elements of liberation theology. They seem to be coming from the same Marxist cultural vision. Also, these movements resemble some of the heresies that we find in church history.”
“These new movements have lost the truth about the human person” because they deny God, he said. “No matter how well-intentioned they are, they cannot promote authentic human flourishing.”
In the United States, “these strictly secular movements are causing new forms of social division, discrimination, intolerance and injustice,” he added.
www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2021/11/05/archbishop-gomez-social-justice-woke-241785
I like the inner meaning between the two photo's ...