Thursday, April 01, 2021

Addendum to the Tim Keller Essay

I thought I was finished after recent Part I, Part II, Last Part, on Tim Keller's discussion of the Christian obligation to speak for the voiceless and defend the oppressed, concluding with my pointed questions of "Yet who are the actual voiceless, and who has a voice? Who are the real people with power, and who are disadvantaged?"  I don't say oppressed because I think that's a hard proof for anyone in America, other than on the individual level of someone with an abusive family member they cannot get away from. Maybe living in a violent neighborhood is oppression, but it gets difficult to assign who the oppressors are in that case.

Looking for something else, I came across Scott Siskind's I Can Tolerate Anything But the Outgroup, which I linked to recently.  However, as that was among many other links, it might be better to showcase it here. People show lack of tolerance along political and cultural lines more than racial ones. Part VI discusses the research giving evidence for that. Measurements range from 30% to double the amount of discomfort or even active avoidance on the basis of politics/culture rather than race.

You might find Tim Keller Goes For a Walk fun.

3 comments:

Grim said...

“Horticultural Pelagianism” is a great line.

james said...

Quite a bit of "outgroup" on display in that "takes a walk" ...

G. Poulin said...


The "least ones" of Matthew 25, the ones who are the Lord's brethren and who must be attended to, are his disciples, i.e., Christians. And everyone understood this for the first one thousand eight hundred years of the church's history. The notion that the least were the poor-in-general was a nineteenth-century novelty that has since become ubiquitous, to the detriment of the gospel.