Dear Tig,
New Yorker writer and FRONTLINE correspondent Atul Gawande reports on a doctor in Camden, N.J., who actually seeks out the community’s sickest — and most expensive — patients
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If you have not yet watched Frontline's "From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians," I encourage you to do so. http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/01/frontline-online-clickable-icons-with.html
Last night, I began my second viewing.
At Chautuaqua, I spent considerable time in lecture and seminar with John Dominic Crossan who is among the half dozen theologians the "Jesus to Christ" repeatedly interviews.
Thanks to Frontline, I am struck by Christianity's early appeal to slaves -- and other oppressed people -- because it posited universal equality before God.
Although we are far from achieving equality in our own time -- and in significant ways are regressing -- educated professionals like ourselves tend to presume equality.
Sadly, presumption and oblivion are joined at the waist.
In fact, equality is a "new thing under the sun" and was brought to us by the son of God whose brothers and sisters we are.
This radical idea of equality -- diametrically opposed to the top-down, dog-eat-dog, dominance-submission hierarchies of "the zoological world" -- is also explored in "How Christianity Gave Us Gay Marriage." http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/02/how-christianity-gave-us-gay-marriage.html
The profoundest truths are paradoxical.
Among other manifestations, "the last shall be first."
And the first last.
Love
Alan
