Chris Hedges on academic solutions to suffering and more....

Began reading Chris Hedges new book called Losing Moses on the Freeway, The 10 Commandments in America.

Wow.... he has a lot to say. As a preacher's kid, a Harvard Seminary graduate who lived and attempted to do youth work in Roxbury while in seminary, and then 15 years as a war correspondent for the NY Times, covering, on the front lines of battle, every major world conflict from the late 80's on....well, let's just say he has more experience and more perspective than most voices around us.

I could quote many powerful passages from the first 100 pages... but here is one. Some of you know of my sentiment about the benefits of a seminary education. Here is one thing Hedges has to say:

In Roxbury we were ordinary men and women. The powerful and destructive forces of the ghetto were a daily reality of our impotence and smallness. But many of those who taught theology at Harvard had a barely disguised distain for the Bible and an inflated view of their intellect in shaping the world. They assumed the right to speak on behalf of the poor and oppressed, although they knew nothing about them. The romantic images they conjured about the oppressed bore little correlation to the brutal life in the ghetto. The solutions they offered, using such catch words as "empowerment" were only possible if they kept themselves isolated and removed. The intrusion of relaity on their illusions would, after all, only obliterate them.
........ These discussions were an intellectual shell game, intriguing, even interesting, but finally meaningless without the visceral experience of the world. (p.48)