Progressive Faith Sermons - Dr. Roger Ray

During the pandemic, we’ve witnessed a mass exodus of people, especially women, from the workforce, returning and staying home as caregivers to the young, the old, the sick, and the disabled. It’s another instance of exposing the USA’s lack of infrastructure and policy to support this most basic of social functions. At the same time, caregiving jobs are often among the most labor-intensive and lowest paid. Time and again, our society has demonstrated how little we value caregiving, a trend rooted in racist, sexist, and ableist norms. With greater awareness of these limitations and their impacts, we can begin to ask: What might a society look like that reorients itself around supporting and valuing the giving and receiving of care?

Direct download: 20220925_Sermon.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 7:00am EDT

Chapter 16 of the Gospel of Luke contains what has been called one of Jesus’ “strangest parables,” a tale of a rich man with a clever manager, who wiggles his way out of economic and social ruin. Rather than speeding by the economic aspects of this story, we can use it as an opportunity to both better understand how debt and economic justice often go hand in hand (then and now) and better act to create societies where people’s lives are valued for their humanity, and not for their potential to be exploited for profit.

Direct download: 20220918_Sermon.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 7:00am EDT

On this 21st anniversary of the 9-11 terror attacks, we pause to consider the story of one detainee from our prison in Guantanamo Bay, Mansoor Adayfi. He was just a teenager, a Yemeni far from home in the wrong place at the wrong time and was sold by Afghanis to the American soldiers who were looking for al Qaeda terrorists. Mansoor was innocent but he was none-the-less held prisoner and tortured nearly to death for 14 years. He serves as an example of how a fear-based war on terror turned America into terrorists.

Direct download: 20220911_Sernon.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 7:00am EDT

Labor Day is a compromise holiday in America because we didn’t want to honor labor on the first day of May, May Day, as it is observed all over the rest of the world. May Day, some of our early 20th century presidents and capitalists believed, was too closely associated with Communism and Socialism and we never wanted to be a part of that. America wants to honor laborers, they just never really wanted to pay them very much. Somehow, in the richest country in the world, we still can’t figure out how to honor labor by paying workers a living wage and until we can do that, we will continue to stand on the verge of class warfare.

LA Progressive article mentioned at 14:50: https://www.laprogressive.com/ economic-equality/the-economic-policy-façade

Direct download: 20220904_Sermon.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 7:00am EDT

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