Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“Peter could not know Jesus apart from knowing himself in relation to Jesus. He did not know himself until Jesus showed him who he was.”

“Regeneration should not be reduced to a change in physical location but in one’s understanding of belonging.”

“To implore a man is a desperate attempt through sheer intensity to make our system of values pass into him. To implore God is just the contrary: it is an attempt to make the divine values pass into ourselves. Far from thinking with all the intensity of which we are capable of the values to which we are attached, we must preserve an interior void.”

“That is why we read in the Gospel: 'I say to you that these have received their reward.' There must be no compensation. It is the void in our sensibility which carries us beyond sensibility.”

“Christ experienced all human misery, except sin. But he experienced everything which makes man capable of sin. It is the void which makes man capable of sin. All sins are attempts to fill voids.”

“The presence of the dead person is imaginary, but his absence is very real: hence forward it is his way of appearing.”

“Purification is the separation of good from covetousness.”

“The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.”

“North America as the kingdom of God is the traditional interpretation of American religion. It treats Jesus as an immigrant, forced to assimilate to be accepted in America. It also forces a narrative of exclusion/inclusion based on the prescriptions of whiteness, which is also a social construction.”

“There is an internal calling that is genuine and an external calling from the American empire that is entirely and purposefully misleading to ensure command, control, and a life lived in comparison to others which keeps the capitalist machinery going with race, ensuring the American mind-wheels turning in service to it.”

“it is mortifying that a lousy oligarchy with only half the number of inhabitants proves itself just as strong as an unwieldly, helpless democracy” -Friedrich Engels

“even in America the bourgeois republic exposes itself in thoroughgoing fashion so that in the future in can never again be preached on its own merits but solely as a means and a transition to a social revolution...” -Friedrich Engels

“I must say I cannot work up any enthusiasm for a people which on such a colossal issue allows itself to be continually beaten by a fourth of its own population…” -Friedrich Engels

“Despite all the screams of the Yankees, there is still no sign whatever available that the people regard this business as a real question of national existence.” -Friedrich Engels

“The miser deprives himself of his treasure because of his desire for it.”

“Human misery would be intolerable if it were not diluted time. We have to prevent it from being diluted in order that it should be intolerable.”

“We must leave on one side the beliefs which fill up voids and sweeten what is bitter. The belief in immortality. The belief in the utility of sin: etiam peccata. The belief in the providential ordering of events—in short the 'consolations' which are ordinarily sought in religion.”

“You are the only you that has ever lived; your idiom is the only idiom of its kind in all the existences, and if you cannot hear the sound of the genuine in you, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.” –Howard Thurman

“The North American church exchanged its prophetic voice for power plays, to be in pictures with this piece of work in progress, on the brink of self-destruction, attacking itself again—first the Civil War and now an insurrection. "This is America. " ”

“It will take years for Lincoln to learn to combine his legal scruples as an attorney with the demands of the Civil War. This is the appalling condition of a democratic government and its greatest evil. In France a hundred men, convinced for good reasons, would carry the nation with them, but in order that our government may take a step, nineteen millions must previously put themselves in motion.”

“Hence [Lincoln's] appeal to the border states to renounce the institution of slavery voluntarily and under the conditions of a favorable contract. He knows that it is only the continuance of slavery in the border states that has so far left slavery untouched in the South and prohibited the North from applying its great radical remedy. He errs only if he imagines that the...slaveholders are to be moved by...speeches”

“The gospel was supposed to make waves. Jesus' followers must discuss how the church in North America conspired with capitalism to drown out its implications during American slavery and how baptism's meaning was watered down to protect the master and slave classes and the competing ways of human being and belonging.”

“Anxiety to keep the "loyal" slaveholders of the border states in good humor and fear of driving them into the arms of the secession—in a word, a tender regard for the interests, prejudices, and sensibilities of these ambiguous allies have afflicted the Union government with incurable paralysis since the beginning of the war, driven it to take half measures, forced it to hypocritically disavow the principle at issue”

“The present struggle between South and North is thus nothing less than a struggle between two social systems: the system of slavery and the system of free labor. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer peacefully coexist on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other.”

“The Union would thus not in fact be dissolved, but rather reorganized, a reorganization on the basis of slavery, under the acknowledged control of the slaveholding oligarchy. The plan for such a reorganization was openly proclaimed by the leading Southern spokesmen at the Montgomery Congress…which leaves open the possibility of each state of the old Union joining the new Confederacy.”

“The oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders used the Montgomery Congress not only to proclaim the separation of the South from the North; it also exploited the Congress to overturn the internal system of government of the slave states, to completely subjugate that part of the white population which had still maintained some degree of independence under the protection of the democratic Constitution of the Union.”

“Galatians 3:27-28 and Colossians 3:10-11 specifically provide the spiritual framework for this recreation narrative and the raceless gospel, which is a liberating message that transcends the carnal categories of race. Forgotten before it was ever put into practice, it is considered by some scholars to be the church's first creed.”

“Roselius...declared the Montgomery constitution is not a constitution, but a conspiracy. It does not inaugurate a government by the people, but a detestable and unrestricted oligarchy. ”

“There is only one fault: incapacity to feed upon light, for where capacity to do this has been lost all faults are possible. 'My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me.' There is no good apart from this capacity.”

”Even between 1856 and 1860 the political spokesmen, lawyers, moralists, and theologians of the slaveholders' party had tried to prove not so much that Negro slavery is justified but rather that color is immaterial and that slavery is the lot of the working class everywhere."