Dred Scott & SCOTUS Spreading Dread Throughout the Land

I spoke 4 DMs in the past about “interrupting” our DM on braveness and sacrifice of non secular activists akin to Alexei Navalny and Sister Dot and Frederick Douglas and Sojourner Fact and Harriet Tubman. 

Why such an interruption?   As a way to converse to the present resolution by SCOTUS to take up the ex-president’s complete immunity case and thereby delay a trial on the January 6 effort to erase an American presidential election by a present presidential candidate.

However actually there’s much less of an interruption than we think about.  In 1857, 167 years in the past, there was one other Supreme Courtroom that yielded to highly effective forces of evil, the very evil of slavery that Douglass and Fact and Tubman addressed head-on.  The Dred Scott Determination took place in 1857. 

Discover the notorious wording:  Dred Scott Determination.  Dred / Dread.  Scott / SCOTUS.  A Dreadful Determination.  Final week’s dreaded SCOTUS resolution, which I suggest in yesterday’s DM will reside in infamy, is upon us.  The choice is “dreadful” and spreads DREAD throughout the land so far as we will see.

In fact, “Dred Scott” in 1857 was the title of a freed slave.  I shared his story in yesterday’s video.  His story is America’s of the 19^th century and carries as much as at this time. The Supreme Courtroom resolution, denying that slaves had rights as residents or as human beings, had main affect on the explosion of the Civil Warfare that engulfed America three years later. 

The Civil Warfare, the place over 700,000 American lives have been sacrificed, however which did outcome within the Emancipation Proclamation and later the amendments 13, 14 and 15 to the Structure supposedly guaranteeing full rights of citizenship to ex-slaves (and stopping insurrectionists from ever taking energy within the U.S. authorities).

“Supposedly” as a result of earlier than lengthy the KKK and lynchings and Jim Crow legal guidelines substituted for the guarantees made and progress gained by the Civil Warfare and amendments gained to the structure to enshrine them.

So, in an actual sense now we have not “interrupted” our reflections on the holiness of individuals like Navalny, Stang, Douglas, Fact and Tubman. Somewhat, we wrap them collectively, some 19^th century heroes and sheroes, with late 20^th and 21^st century ones. 

We bear in mind what occurs when a Supreme Courtroom makes supremely misguided choices—dreadful ones that unfold dread throughout the land—whether or not that occur in 1857 or 2024.

See Matthew Fox, Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Reworking Evil in Soul and Society.

And Fox, A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Consciousness with Social Justice

Banner Picture: Portraits of Dred Scott and his spouse Harriet Scott. Pictures by John H. Fitzgibbon of St. Louis, MO, 1857. Library of Congress.

Queries for Contemplation

What do the phrases “dread” and “Dred Scott” and “Scott” and “SCOTUS” and “dreadful” set off in you in gentle of the 1857 and  2024 Supreme Courtroom choices?

Really useful Studying

Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Reworking Evil in Soul and Society

Visionary theologian and best-selling writer Matthew Fox gives a brand new theology of evil that essentially modifications the normal notion of excellent and evil and factors the best way to a extra enlightened remedy of ourselves, each other, and all of nature. In evaluating the Japanese custom of the 7 chakras to the Western custom of the 7 capital sins, Fox permits us to assume creatively about our capability for private and institutional evil and what we will do about them. 
“A scholarly masterpiece embodying a greater imaginative and prescient and depth of notion far past the grasp of anybody single science.  A breath-taking evaluation.” — Diarmuid O’Murchu, writer of Quantum Theology: Religious Implications of the New Physics

A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Consciousness with Social Justice

In A Spirituality Named Compassion, Matthew Fox delivers a profound exploration of the that means and observe of compassion. Establishing a spirituality for the longer term that guarantees private, social, and international therapeutic, Fox marries mysticism with social justice, main the best way towards a gentler and extra ecological spirituality and an acceptance of our interdependence which is the substratum of all compassionate exercise.
“Properly price our deepest consideration…Places compassion into its correct focus after centuries of neglect.” –The Catholic Register