Faith is about inverting the worlds values

"Having spent 20 years outside the US in societies that are being rent apart by violence I don't quite share America's mania for hope. When I covered the war in El Salvador and the war in the former Yugoslavia, it was standard practice for the Salvadoran military or in the case of the former Yugoslavian Serbian para-military to go in to villages and carry out massacres. And then they would block the roads. So both in El Salvador and in Bosnia we had to walk in - in the case of Yugoslavia with our satellite phones, the Serbs would often have snipers firing on us because they didn't want the massacre to be reported - and it was the ability to document the atrocity, to give the victims names, on the front page of the New York Times often, that was victory enough. That was Hope enough. It didn't mean that I wouldn't get up a few days later and do the same thing again. And we did this at tremendous risk. In Sarajevo alone 5 foreign journalists were killed and dozens were wounded - and I think, as i mentioned with my students, that Freedom and that Hope is embodied in the act of resistance itself. Most of the great rebels in history: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Sitting Bull, did not succeed in the eyes of the power elites, but as the theologian James Combs writes, "Faith is about inverting the worlds values".. I once had dinner with George Mcgovern, and as a teenager I had spent the summer working for him in his campaign, and at the dinner I told him about what he meant to me (I think I was 15 or something at the time) and he made comment at the dinner about loosing 49 states and I said yes, but you never betrayed that 15 year old boy. And I think that those of us who come out of traditions of faith have to have a different concept of time. We're all mortal and justice will exist long after we are gone, but it is these invisible witnesses, these magnificent figures who rise up in moments of extremity to do what is right even at the cost of their own life. And I think for those of us who follow it is about not betraying them - at that for me keeps hope alive - and there is this scene at the end of the Christian gospels where Jesus is abandoned by everyone - the crowd turns on him, his disciples flee, everyone abandons him - but three weeks later his disciples are picked up and brought before the court of the Sanhedrin and if they profess faith (in Jesus) they will be condemned to death - and they do.. and for me that is an example the power of the moral of the spiritual life, that is the "true" in the christian faith example of resurrection - and as (name) knows I was very close to my father who was an anti-war activist, a civil Presbyterian minister and so forth, but who was pushed aside by the institution itself because of his stances. And that for me was a very good lesson, because I grasped that no institution, even the one that you dedicated your life to will ever reward you for doing what is right."

"Virtue is its own reward"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP8YcfdHIN4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHzdBXbhVmQ