Religion & Law

Moore's new documentary, Capitalism:  A Love Story, will soon be out.  (I'm sure Rick is salivating!)  In today's NYT, it is said:

As much as Mr. Moore sometimes plays a comic-book version of class warrior ? Left-Thing vs. the Republic of Fear! ? his politics are not grounded in class as much as in Roman Catholicism. Growing up in Michigan, he attended parochial school and intended to go into the seminary, inspired by the priests and nuns who ... inherited a long tradition of social justice and activism in the American church.

?The nuns always made a point to take us to the Jewish temple for Passover seders,? he said. ?They wanted to make it clear that the Jews had nothing to do with putting Jesus up on the cross.?

Along with a moral imperative, Catholicism also gave a method. Mr. Moore idolized the Berrigan brothers, the radical priests who introduced street theater into their activism, for example, mixing their own napalm to burn government draft records. Their actions were a form of political spectacle that, conceptually, is Marxist ? workers seizing means of production and all that ? and it influenced some of Mr. Moore?s best-remembered stunts.

Read the rest, here.