Karen Armstrong, Religion, and Hugo Chavez

In my last post on  Joe's School, I linked readers to Jim Wallis' column "Class Warfare", which raised the issue of the moral imperative of a just and fair --read progressive-- tax code.   And that in turn got me to thinking about writer, scholar, and savant Karen Armstrong, whose book The Battle for God I am currently reading.

I stumbled across Armstrong a couple of weeks ago on C-SPAN'S Book TV, talking about her memoir, The Spiral Staircase, and then saw her again on Bill Moyer's NOW.   My wife happened to see it too, and went out and bought both the memoir and The Battle for God, a remarkable history of the rise of "fundamentalism" in all three of the montheistic religions of the West.

Needless to say, it's topical, what with our incursion into Iraq and our war against Islamist "fundamentalists", or terrorists.  (See my April 22 and 23 posts in Joe's School.)

But putting that aside for the moment, Armstrong most intrigues me with her insistence on the unanimity, the profound similarities, within Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, as she points out  in the Moyers interview:

"I suppose one of my hopes in life is to try to get Jews, Christians and Muslims to realize the profound unanimity, the unanimous vision that they share, and to join hands together to stop the kind of cruelty, violence and obscenity, moral obscenity that we saw on September the 11th."

She repeats the same sentiment in this interview in the New York Times wherein she calls "compassion" the most important religious virtue, going "right across the board in all the world religions."

That brings me to Hugo Chavez and this article from Sojourners.  The author relates this story of a Venezuelan nun, Sister Begona Plagaro:

"Begoña, a religious sister of the Society of the Sacred Heart, has worked since 1991 in a barrio called El Estanque, one of the thousands of desperately poor "squatter neighborhoods" that surround Venezuela’s capital city. Though uncertain about Chávez, Sister Begoña decided to take her chances with the poor. 'They were the first to really understand the Chávez project,' she says. If supporting Chávez was a mistake, she would rather err with the poor than against them."

In the ongoing, admittedly minor family dispute over Chavez (my sister-in-law is Venezuelan), I would say that Sister Begona sums up my position pretty well:  I guess I, too, would "rather err with the poor than against them."

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