Congrats on your marriage!

especially the sneaky way in which state worship gets into our homes and our lives.

i am in the middle of it right now, which is why i thought of it.

seriously.

I’m doing research now on place and politics (Cresswell, Dirlik, Massey, Hardt & Negri, Esteva, etc.) which I hope to incorporate into my reflections on Appalachia and liberationist theology.

i find it interesting that you brought up the wv elections. you posted a while back (on CA i believe) about local v. national patriotism. if you remember, can you point me towards some of the references you listed?

this is the first election where i feel particularily strong about not voting, primarily because of the emotions i can see in myself towards particular canidates. i hate feeling so strongly, and yes almost religious, towards people making promises of change and hope when those are the things i expect from the eucharist and sunday’s homily.

but while i have no patriotic, jingoistic pride in me, i have been feeling more and more connected to my identity as a californian. i am concerned for california’s natural resources, beaches, state parks and for the rights of my gay and immigrant neighbors.
this is a challenge to someone with anarchist leanings, whatever that means. i’ve still some things to figure out.

thanks for the post.

Nope. Not accurate. Had Kucinich, Edwards, etc. have won the nomination I would have considered voting too. I will always consider voting. But I will not ever assume I have a duty to vote.

It also sounds like Michael clearly favors one party over the other, since his decision to abstain was not determined by the winner of the Republican primary but solely on the winner of the Democratic primary.

At this point in history, yes, I do “favor” the Demoratic party as a lesser of two evils, but not by much. I do not see a circumstance where I could ever tolerate a Republican candidate.

You also seem locked into binary two-party thinking. If I “favor” any party at all, it would probably be the Green Party.

That would mean that Michael lied on both counts. One, that he does not support a particular party; Two, that he does not support a particular candidate.

I do not support a particular party, but I do oppose a particular party. I do not support a particular candidate, but I do oppose a particular candidate. And had Hilary won, I would have opposed two particular candidates.

I have no reason to lie to anyone about whether I choose to vote or who I choose to vote for.

Did they teach Sophistry at the University you went to (my assumption is that it would have been a Jesuit university as well).

Does it take one to know one?

But my point was that elections are not insignificant – we elect politicians who create our laws that partially define how we are to live together.

I do think this is true the closer you get to real local communities. Which is why I will likely vote for WV governor, for example. (And I will vote against Joe Manchin.)

Zippy has some pretty interesting ideas about Catholics and the option of abstention, I’d check his site out.

And yeah, you’re right, that was a poor use of that phrase ‘how we organize our lives together’. Our lives have been organized before we have a say in the matter, in some fundamental ways. I happen to think most of those fundamental arrangements are pretty great, but that’s another matter. But my point was that elections are not insignificant – we elect politicians who create our laws that partially define how we are to live together. I meant to use the phrase in that more limited sense.

And I’m all for organizing society on a smaller scale.

I’m starting the NYC chapter of “People who want other people to shiver in the dark for Obama”!

I think more and more Catholics are seeing not voting as an option, especially as they wake up from the dream that any candidate is actually going to fulfill their anti-abortion dreams. The question I have been wrestling with lately, though, is whether and when Catholics have a duty not to vote. Looking forward to the book’s reflection’s on that topic.

I can’t follow you when you say that “voting is mostly a game”, though. It’s not a game – it’s how we organize our lives together in a democracy. It’s important.

I don’t agree that voting is how we organize our lives together. Our lives have mostly been organized before we even have a say in the matter. We vote in order to choose who will oversee a system that simply cannot and will not change via elections. Voting is a game in that we are given choices that are hardly real choices, given the ability of human beings to imagine and enact other ways of organizing society for themselves on a smaller scale. If we really want to have a say in how we organize our lives together, it could never be through voting. It would have to be through smaller scale organization of alternative social and economic structures, types of organization which are indeed happening throughout the world.