1. Please Be a CVA Sustainer!
We don’t charge for membership, but our ministry does have expenses for which donations are essential. Among other things, we distribute about 100,000 booklets at Christian events each year. To become a CVA Sustainer or to renew your Sustaining membership, please go HERE and scroll down to DONATIONS at the bottom of the page (all donations are tax-deductible).
2. What Does Eating Meat Mean?
“Eating meat normalizes the murderous oppression of other animals to the
point of making it imperceptible. Because everyone participates in it
directly and on a daily basis, and because the link between extreme violence
against animals and thoughtless human enjoyment of its results is
unmistakable and straightforward, meat-eating powerfully reiterates human
identity by joining all humans in a common front against animals.
Meat-eating is the fundamental act which restates, with incontrovertible
clarity and absolute generality, the most basic tenet of the shared
worldview which holds our species together: its unconditional and undisputed
superiority to all others, and consequently its right to life and death on
them. Eating meat is indeed important, not for our health but for our
identity.”
-
Carmen Dell’Aversano, “Analyzing Categories: Harvey Sacks and Critical
Animal Studies” Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Vol. 12, no. 4, pp.
5-20
Comment
I think there is much truth in this passage. It accords with the insights of René Girard (who died about two weeks ago at age 92) that cultural identities are grounded in the scapegoating process. What brings groups together is their collective expulsion (which is often violent) of those they regard as “different” and therefore “inferior.”
Girard held that the tendency to participate in the scapegoating process is universal. Can we transcend this proclivity, or is humanity (and humanity’s countless victims) doomed to suffer the consequences of this tragic flaw in human nature for as long as humans walk the earth? In the next essays, I will attempt to address this question.
- Stephen R. Kaufman, MD
3. This Week’s Sermon from Rev. Frank and Mary Hoffman
Obedient Children Inherit Heaven