Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“Human love can reach right into death, then, but not if it is merely human love. Such a realization should ease loneliness—even for the griever who is left alone; it should also, in time, help to propel one back into life. Nothing is served by following someone into a grave.”

“I’m not suggesting that ministering angels are going to come down and comfort you as you die. I’m suggesting that Christ’s suffering shatters the iron walls around individual human suffering, that Christ’s compassion makes extreme human compassion—to the point of death, even—possible.”

“I am a Christian because of that moment on the cross when Jesus, drinking the very dregs of human bitterness, cries out, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? I am a Christian because I understand that moment of Christ’s passion to have meaning in my own life, and what it means is that the absolutely solitary and singular nature of extreme human pain is an illusion.”

“...in seven billion completely singular and, it can often seem, completely sealed-in ways. It is one thing to recognize this intellectually; it is quite another to have it brought home to you at the edge of death—your own or someone else’s.”

“Everyone is in his life to the uttermost. That clamor in your head, that endless quick-fire free association whose engine is ego, that blood compulsion in the brain beating onward, onward, onward: this is going on in the minds of seven billion people on the planet...”

“The inscription upon which Thaddeus Stevens finally settled... "I repose in this quiet and secluded spot," it reads, "not from any natural preference for solitude. But, finding other cemeteries limited as to race, by charter rules, I have chosen this that I might illustrate in my death the principles which I advocated through a long life: EQUALITY OF MAN BEFORE HIS CREATOR."”

“as a shrewd tactician Lincoln knew that politics is the art of the possible... not getting too far ahead of public opinion. In response, one of Stevens's early biographers reasonably asked "how public opinion was ever to be brought to a higher plane... if the surgent and radical anti-slavery men had all kept still, or had uttered nothing but pleasant and honeyed words for Lincoln and his Cabinet."”

“Stevens was famously savage in verbal combat with the paladins of inequality and oppression. But he could also be unsparing about allies who seemed to him backward, cowardly, or simply laggard. Many writers have since faulted him for so sternly criticizing Abraham Lincoln's refusal to move more swiftly and decisively than he did in support of emancipation and black rights generally.”

“On key issues of the day, however, Stevens regularly staked out a position well in advance of public opinion. He did that when he fought for public education for all and when he rejected a discriminatory Pennsylvania state constitution, when he supported abolitionism, when he participated in the Underground Railroad, and when he opposed concessions to the slave states in 1850.”

“Stevens was of course no plaster saint. He had his flaws, and in pursuit of political effectiveness he took a number of missteps. His sojourn among nativists, which violated his democratic principles, was one of those. So was his sometime support for colonization. Recurring doubts about universal manhood suffrage, still another.”

“As a fellow Pennsylvania congressman observed, "too frequently in men of all stations the generous impulses and noble sentiments of youth give place, with advancing years and prosperity, to the fossil petrifaction of humanity called conservatism. But this dry rot of the soul never tainted Thaddeus Stevens." To a radical Republican contemporary, indeed, he came to seem the very "embodied spirit of revolution" ”

“Stevens's devotion to creating a better society had animated his successful fight in the 1830s to protect Pennsylvania public schools from their narrow-minded opponents and especially his decades-long fight against slavery and racial oppression. The passing of time ... only increased the determination and consistency with which he pursued that goal. In that respect, as in so many others, he was unusual.”

“Late in the House's 1868 summer session, Stevens seemed to rally. "For a few days the old vivacity returned," a colleague later remembered, along with "the brilliant repartee and unexpected sallies that all enjoyed so much." But that was only the guttering flame's final flicker. On August 11, at age seventy-six, Thaddeus Stevens died.”

“Stevens seemed to be surviving only by the sheer force of will. "His illness [is] progressing rapidly," the French observer Georges Clemenceau noted, " Once in a while a sardonic smile... flickers over his livid face. If it were not for the fire smoldering in the depths of his piercing eyes, one might imagine life had already fled from that inert body, but it still nurses all the wrath of a Robespierre." ”

“Stevens... "I do not hold that it is necessary to prove a crime as an indictable offense......" Impeachment was "a purely political proceeding. It is intended as a remedy for malfeasance [that is, improper conduct] in office and to prevent the continuance thereof." It was "not intended as a personal punishment for past offenses." ”

“When men and women are loyal to ourselves and others, when we love justice, we understand fully the myriad ways in which lying diminishes and erodes the possibility of meaningful, caring connection, that it stands in the way of love.”

“"Learning to live as a man of conscience means deciding that your loyalty to the people whom you love is always more important than whatever lingering loyalty you may sometimes feel to other men's judgment on your manhood." [Stoltenberg] ”

“Loving justice for themselves and others enables men to break the chokehold of patriarchal masculinity. In the chapter titled "How We Can Have Better Relationships with the Women in Our Lives," Stoltenberg writes: "Loving justice between a man and a woman does not stand a chance when other men's manhood matters more."”

“But Stevens was far less concerned with punishing a hated individual or penalizing past crimes than with clearing the path for positive congressional action in the South. When a Democratic opponent denounced impeachment's motives as political, Stevens readily agreed. The fight to remove Johnson, he acknowledged, was "wholly political" in purpose—it was, he meant,... a struggle over government policy.”

“Thaddeus Stevens shared with the House reports that "the most horrible murders and outrages that it is possible for man to imagine are daily being committed in these States without there being... any effort made, to punish the perpetrators." For Reconstruction to succeed, Stevens concluded, Andrew Johnson had to go. That meant impeachment, which Stevens supported from an early date.”

“If Stevens could not provide freed people with the farms he believed they needed and deserved, he would still fight to secure their civil and political rights and personal safety. And it soon became apparent that not even the Reconstruction Act of 1867 would guarantee either. The enactment of that law did not put an end to...Johnson's campaign to obstruct congressional action in the ex-Confederacy.”

“Republicans also wondered nervously where—if they began redistributing landed property to exploited and impoverished people—that road would lead. "If Congress is to take cognizance of the claims of labor against capital," Henry Raymond's New York Times warned, "there can be no decent pretense [sic] for confining the task to the slave-labor of the South.”

“The principal obstacle confronting Stevens's proposals was his party's aversion to abolishing the private-property rights of plantation owners in peacetime. The challenge of treason and armed rebellion had reconciled those northern politicians to the abolition of...human property. But most balked at infringing upon claims to another form of property, property in land, that remained as close to their hearts as ever.”

“The steps [land redistribution] proposed "can be condemned only by [secessionist] criminals and their immediate friends... and which is un-tempered with a single grain of justice, and to those religionists who mistake meanness for Christianity, and who forget that the essence of religion is to 'do unto others what others have a right to expect from you."”

“Although Stevens ultimately voted for Trumbull's bill, he warned his colleagues that denying to "every adult freedman a homestead on the land where he was born and toiled and suffered" would earn them "the censure of mankind and the curse of Heaven." So he tried again in March 1867, this time seeking to modify the judicial land-seizure procedures that hobbled the Second Confiscation Act. ”

“In 1865 Stevens called for confiscating the plantations of southerners who owned at least 200 acres of land. He had no designs, he said, on the property of "the poor, the ignorant, and the coerced" among the white population.... It would mean, he calculated, seizing nearly four hundred million acres of land. "Divide this land into convenient farms, Give, if you please, forty acres to each adult male freed man." ”

“The younger Stevens accepted considerable differences in wealth among the population as inevitable byproducts of civilization's advance. As the need to destroy slavery in the United States had pushed him to reverse his youthful condemnation of revolutions, so now the revolutionary transformation that he sought compelled Stevens to recognize extreme economic inequality as a threat to democracy.”

“So much Western theology has been constructed on a fundamental disfigurement of the mind and reality. In neglecting the voices of women, who are more attuned to the immanent nature of divinity, who feel that eruption in their very bodies, theology has silenced a powerful—perhaps the most powerful—side of God.”

“Lee Bontecou, my wife, my grandmother—if this consciousness I’m describing is gendered (and I think it is), it is clearly feminine. The single most damaging and distorting thing that religion has done to faith involves overlooking, undervaluing, and even outright suppressing this interior, ulterior kind of consciousness.”

“When my grandmother—whose reading was limited to the Bible and Guideposts, and whose life was circumscribed by the tiny yard around her tiny house in tiny Colorado City, Texas—died twenty years ago, I was pierced, not simply by grief and the loss of her presence, but by a sense that some very particular and hard-won kind of consciousness had gone out of the world... not consciousness as intellectuals define it.”