But even when the contradiction is resolved authentically by a new situation established by the liberated liberators, the former oppressors do not feel liberated. On the contrary, they genuinely consider themselves to be oppressed. Conditioned by the experience of oppressing others, any situation other than their former seems to them like oppression. Formerly, they could eat, dress, wear shoes, be educated, travel, and hear Beethoven; while millions did not eat, had no clothes or shoes, neither studied nor traveled, much less listened to Beethoven. Any restriction on this way of life, in the name of rights of the community, appears to the former oppressors as a profound violation of their individual rights – although they had no respect for the millions who suffered and died of hunger, pain, sorrow, and despair. For the oppressors, “human beings” refers only to themselves; other people are “things.” For the oppressors, their exists only on right: their right to live in peace, over against the right, not even exercised, but simply conceded, of the oppressed to survival.
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, pg 57-58
Category: Excerpts
Excerpts #3
The primary function of religious belief is not to describe the world or to determine the rightness or wrongness of particular actions, but to form a community that understands itself as having a particular mission in the world. To be sure, that mission involves beliefs about the nature of the world and what one should and should not do, but those judgments are mediated by the practices that have been established as essential to being a people of a particular sort. Put starkly, for the Christian the question of the use or non-use of in vitro fertilization will be determined primarily by whether such a procedure is appropriate to our understanding of what kind of community we should be and in particular what kind of attitudes about parenting we should foster. In other words, it is not a questions of whether in vitro fertilization is right or wrong, but a practical judgment of whether this kind of technique furthers or is compatible with our community’s understanding of itself. Issues such as in vitro fertilization are fundamentally symbolic in that they are primarily determined by the wisdom of a community.
Stanley Hauerwas, Suffering Presence: Theological Reflections on Medicine, the Mentally Handicapped, and the Church pg 143-44.
Excerpt #2
Committed Christians see in their life of faith not merely an ethical stance in which they want to be consistent, nor a set of rules they want to be sure not to break, but a gracious privilege which they want to share. They guide their lives not so much by “How can I avoid doing wrong?” or even “How can I do the right?” as by “How can I be a reconciling presence in the life of my neighbor?”
John Howard Yoder, What Would You Do?, pg 40
Justin DaMetz 