Tag Archives: Empire

A Sermon on Holy Innocents

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Maggie Helwig

“And he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem, who were two years old or under” (Matthew 2:16).

We do not know, of course, if this was a historical incident. That’s a debate that’s not going to be settled. But I can easily treat it as historical because, if it did not happen at that exact time and place, it has happened a thousand other times. A routine atrocity in an unimportant country, recorded by almost no one; and if I named for you now Kraras or Fence of Legs or the Markale marketplace, these words would have no meaning for most or all of you, these small massacres in distant lands, as unremembered by the world in general as a slaughter of children in a corner of the empire was by the empire’s own chroniclers.

It is a part of the normal operations of power. But even worse, in this case, it is the direct result of the coming into the world of the Incarnate Word. Continue reading →

A Sermon Preached on the Fall of Empire

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Jeffrey Metcalfe

(Click here to listen)

James 3:13 – 4:3, 7-8a

Mark 9:30-37

Nobody knew how the invading army penetrated the city gates.

The idealists, still believing in the invincibility of the eternal city, thought it must have been treachery: some renegades, probably slaves, had let them in.

The realists, decrying recent municipal and national cut backs in infrastructure, were not surprised in the least. After all, hadn’t they been complaining to the magistrate about concrete falling from the gate?

The moralists, denouncing the loss of traditional values, blamed the church. To them it was obvious the country was being divinely punished.

Regardless as to how the gate was taken, no one disputed what happened next: houses burned, storehouses pillaged, captives taken, graves desecrated.

It could not be disputed.

Rome – the centre of the western world – had fallen, and with it, the hopes and dreams of an Empire.

It was at this moment that Augustine, a bishop and theologian of the church, did what bishops and theologians tend to do in troubled times. He wrote a book. Continue reading →

A Review of Britain’s Empire.

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Richard Gott Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt. New York: Verso, 2011, 568 pages.

Joshua Paetkau

In “Shooting an Elephant,” an autobiographical essay published in 1936, George Orwell speaks of time spent as a police officer in a Burmese town. At close quarters with the dirty work of imperialism the young Orwell had grown deeply disillusioned with the British Empire. At the same time he was possessed of a “rage against the evil-spirited beasts who tried to make my job impossible.” Torn between hatred of Empire and resentment of the local population Orwell is a solitary and conflicted figure who, in the end, acts not out of a sense of duty but a fear of looking ridiculous. As Orwell reflects on the existential quandaries of his younger days he is able to retroactively reconcile the incoherence of this earlier experience to a lack of education and an isolation that left him unable to gain perspective. “I did not even know,” he writes, “that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it.”[1] Continue reading →

Interrupting the Spirituality of Empire

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 Jeffrey Metcalfe

“When people become more concerned with the gratification of their own appetites than with their responsibilities to society, the days of that civilization are numbered.”[1]

- Le Déclin de l’Empire Américain, Denys Arcand (1986)

In 2011, one only needs to listen to the headlines – be they international, national, provincial, or municipal – to hear the signs of imperial decay, as the signifiers that once held their identity in the polis, such as citizen, have come to be usurped by the ubiquitous taxpayer.[2] The difference between the two is striking. Whereas the signifier citizen contains within it an understanding of the responsibilities that one’s belonging to a polis entails, a taxpayer assumes no such responsibility. A taxpayer is a consumer, one who pays a fee and expects a service in return. Or, perhaps as Arcand realized several decades earlier, a taxpayer is more consumed with her own appetites, a citizen with her obligations to others. Continue reading →

The Didache and the Ordo Romanus Primus

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Their Social Imaginaries and Contemporary Liturgical Implications

Jeffrey Metcalfe

“A Human being is by nature a political animal.”1

-Aristotle

As the Canadian scholar James K. Smith has argued, one might equally say that human beings are “liturgical animals,”2 for our politics do not proceed first from a theoretical idea, but are always and already arriving from a set of pre-cognitive practices, “carried in images, stories, and legends.”3  According to Charles Taylor, these precognitive practices combine to construct a social imaginary which posit answers to the question “what constitutes a fulfilled life,”4 thus creating the ground upon which political choices will be made.  If then, as Smith suggests, liturgy is a practice which operates on the precognitive level, forming a particular kind of social imaginary, then it follows that liturgy will be both a reflection and a production of political reality. Continue reading →