This week I'm reading Chapter 2 of Mary Poplin's Is Reality Secular? She explains her own background and stance, because she admits that it is important to know where an author is coming from because it informs her writing. Here is my favorite paragraphs from the reading:
My colleagues and I were Marxists by ideology, not by lifestyle. Most "Marxists" in the university are more like Marx and his contemporary apologist Bill Ayers, both of whom lived partially off their capitalist fathers' fortunes. We also were living the good life; were we asked seriously to give up our own salaries to equalize things, we would have found another reason to revolt. As ivory tower Marxists, we were not serving the poor like Mother Theresa; we were admonishing the government to help the poor the way we wanted them to be helped (to become revoluntionaries). We would of course lead the revolution because we were the intelligentsia.
Upon his election, Pope Francis echoed his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, in his resistance to secularism when he said to the cardinals at his first mass, "If we do not confess Christ, what would we be? We would end up a compassionate NGO. What would happen would be like when children make sand castles and then it all falls down." He is making the audacious claim that with Christ real things happen that do not happen when we simply help others without him. This would have been incomprehensible to me until I spent two months at Mother Teresa's homes in Calcutta.
So, Marxism is both an intellectual and hypocritical response to addressing the world's need, and religious work apart from true devotion to Christ is really no less reprehensible. This is scary. As tempting it may be to expose the hypocrisy pervasive in Academia, I must first ensure I'm not participating in my own brand of it.
Is Jesus truly the motivator for my actions?
