I do love people on my own. I love the attractive and intelligent and thoroughly loveable people who make it easy for me to love them. I love people who think like me and I love people who appreciate me and I love people who make me a better person. I am specifically in love with a woman who is beautiful and intelligent and kind and funny and humble and talented and charming.... etc.

Unfortunately, those aren't the people God commands us to love.

God commands us to love the poor, the needy, the oppressed. Have you ever worked at a soup kitchen? The smell makes you want to throw up. You can't tell what is supposed to smell like food and what it supposed to smell like unwashed, filthy human being. It's not easy to love the poor. It's much easier to walk past them on the street, to think that it's somebody else's job to take care of them. There's a kid in my church's youth group who is addicted to heroin, an alcoholic, father to an unborn child at the age of 17, a violent kid who tried to kill someone in a car. If you think it's easy to love someone like that, think again. There are days I would like nothing better than to kill this kid and spare the world his abject stupidity. But I must love him, because God knows, no one else will.

God commands us to love our enemies. When I listened to political commercials on the radio during election season, it was all I could do not to scream and drive my car into the ditch out of rage. People say the most stupid, ignorant things. My enemies wanted me to vote for Candidate X because Candidate Y was threatening the sacntity of marriage with those terrifying homosexurals! I want to hate my enemies. I want to walk up to them and hit them in the face, I want to make them experience an ounce of the suffering they casually dole out to others. But I don't get to do that. I get to love them. When they steal my coat, I've got to give them my jacket as well. Do you think that's easy, or pleasant?

When I talk about God's love, I am not talking about what Bonhoeffer describes as cheap grace. Being a Christian does not mean you can sin however much you want because God is ok with it in the end. The confession of faith is not some game of spin-the-bottle where you hope you pick the right flavor so you can get into heaven. We are murderers, all of us. People ask why Christ's death was necessary for God's forgiveness. It wasn't! God was forgiving us simply by appearing to us as Christ! But we couldn't take it. We couldn't accept this radical notion of love, this idea that our wealth is not our own, this idea that people unlike us in every respect are God's children just like us. So we crucified God. We crucified God because God loved us. We are, as Forde writes, caught in the act. But God stills loves us. It is up to us to choose to be loved. That is the confession of faith, the baptism of the spirit. The acknowledgement of our flawed nature, of our need for grace and forgiveness, is what allows God's love to come through to us. We are caught in the act, and caught by it.

I don't know what else I can say. I have, unbeknownst to you, referenced three theologian-philosophers in this short letter, including one who attempted to assassinate Hitler during WWII and risked everything he had to stand up for the Jews. Yet I suspect you will continue to act as though I have just made this up off the top of my didactic little head, like it's all just love babble that has no application in the world. It may sound like love babble to you, but this love babble is the reason I drive to church every Wednesday to put up with other people's obnoxious children, to sympathize with their angsty teens. This love babble makes me join activist groups like OutFront that are fighting to achieve equal political rights for all people. This love babble makes me turn off the lights and the heat, makes me bike to commute when I can, makes me a vegetarian. This love babble is my life, and frankly, I don't care if you think it makes me an idiot.

If you think the world is great, or that the majority of oppression is imposed by religion, then you're clearly oblivious to the fact that nearly half the world's population lives in poverty, including 2 billion people who are living in such squalid conditions that their lives are threatened by it every day. You are also clearly not aware that major, multinational corporations, and our inaction against them, are largely responsible for these conditions.

It's nice for us in middle-class America to think that the world is peachy, but if you go just about anywhere else, including the lower-class neighborhoods of our own cities, I think you'll see that the picture is not as pleasant as we might think.

don't think most people actually do defend it from religious grounds. The practice has no basis in either Christianity or Islam. It is solely a cultural practice and I think it is defended from the standpoint that it controls the woman's sexual appetite and therefore the honor of her future marriage. Obviously that raises a whole other set of questions as to why anyone might think a woman's chastity is so much more important than a man's, and so on.