"Americans, however, don’t want to believe the United States is an empire. That reluctance was underscored in a 2003 debate sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, between British historian and journalist Niall Ferguson and neoconservative foreign policy advisor Robert Kagan, a founder of the Project for a New American Century and a leading advocate of the American invasion of Iraq. Ferguson, author of the book COLOSSUS: THE PRICE OF AMERICAN EMPIRE, argued the affirmative, saying, after a brief survey of American military, economic, and cultural power, that from a British perspective 'the only thing that is really quite remarkable about the American empire s the fact that [t]his is an empire in denial. It is an empire that refuses to acknowledge its own existence.'
"Kagan accepted Ferguson’s description of the vastness of American power but rejected the word 'empire' as a description, preferring 'global power.' 'Colonies are the touchstone of empire, he said, and he argued that while America had an imperial past, 'as American imperialism diminished, American power grew.' There is a difference between being the world’s greatest power, he suggested, and 'a country that seeks to exercise dominion over others, which is what the true definition of empire is.'. ."
". . . Richard A. Horsley argues in several books that Americans are uncomfortably discovering their country’s role in the world is not unlike that of the Romans. 'Many Americans are beginning to sense a serious discrepancy between prominent strands in their historical identity and the realities of their current position in the world,” he writes in JESUS AND EMPIRE: THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND THE NEW WORLD DISORDER. Indeed, some Americans “cannot avoid the awkward feeling that they are now more analogous to imperial Rome than they are to the ancient Middle Eastern people who celebrated their origins in God’s liberation from harsh service to a foreign ruler and lived according to the covenantal principles of social-economic justice.'
"Horsley, who has also edited IN THE SHADOW OF EMPIRE: RECLAIMING THE BIBLE AS A HISTORY OF FAITHFUL RESISTANCE, a collection of essays on how to read the Bible as a reaction to empire and a call to oppose imperial power in every age, observes that despite the unease Americans feel about the United States as an empire they cannot grasp Jesus’ message as it is directed to that empire because Jesus has been domesticated and his message depoliticized by generations — indeed centuries, stretching back to the early church — that have, in the interest of survival or power, compromised with empires. Further, he argues, since the Enlightenment they have cooperated in severing the religious from the political and economic, making of them realms that have little to do with one another, a separation that would not have been understood by or even conceivable to Jesus and his first followers"
From the article God and Empire by David E. Anderson, November 19, 2008.
"Kagan accepted Ferguson’s description of the vastness of American power but rejected the word 'empire' as a description, preferring 'global power.' 'Colonies are the touchstone of empire, he said, and he argued that while America had an imperial past, 'as American imperialism diminished, American power grew.' There is a difference between being the world’s greatest power, he suggested, and 'a country that seeks to exercise dominion over others, which is what the true definition of empire is.'. ."
". . . Richard A. Horsley argues in several books that Americans are uncomfortably discovering their country’s role in the world is not unlike that of the Romans. 'Many Americans are beginning to sense a serious discrepancy between prominent strands in their historical identity and the realities of their current position in the world,” he writes in JESUS AND EMPIRE: THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND THE NEW WORLD DISORDER. Indeed, some Americans “cannot avoid the awkward feeling that they are now more analogous to imperial Rome than they are to the ancient Middle Eastern people who celebrated their origins in God’s liberation from harsh service to a foreign ruler and lived according to the covenantal principles of social-economic justice.'
"Horsley, who has also edited IN THE SHADOW OF EMPIRE: RECLAIMING THE BIBLE AS A HISTORY OF FAITHFUL RESISTANCE, a collection of essays on how to read the Bible as a reaction to empire and a call to oppose imperial power in every age, observes that despite the unease Americans feel about the United States as an empire they cannot grasp Jesus’ message as it is directed to that empire because Jesus has been domesticated and his message depoliticized by generations — indeed centuries, stretching back to the early church — that have, in the interest of survival or power, compromised with empires. Further, he argues, since the Enlightenment they have cooperated in severing the religious from the political and economic, making of them realms that have little to do with one another, a separation that would not have been understood by or even conceivable to Jesus and his first followers"
From the article God and Empire by David E. Anderson, November 19, 2008.
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From the article:
"For Crossan, empire and civilization are essentially equivalent. Civilization itself, he writes, “has always been imperial — that is, empire is the normalcy of civilization’s violence.” America and the Rome of Jesus and Paul are not that different from one another. “As the greatest pre-industrial and territorial empire — just as we are the greatest post-industrial and commercial empire — Rome was the expression, no more and no less, of the normalcy of civilization’s violence, first-century style.” Violence is the defining characteristic of civilization and thus of empire."
RE: Jacques Ellul
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