Unlearning Empire Part 11: Good Friday

Good Friday. For centuries, Christians have tried to explain the cross. Some of those explanations have done enormous damage — glorifying suffering, justifying harm, making violence look holy. Today we slow down and look at the cross honestly: not as divine punishment, but as imperial violence. Not as God requiring a sacrifice, but as God entering the deepest wounds of the world to heal them from the inside. We talk about René Girard's scapegoat mechanism, Womanist theology's warning about glorified suffering, and James Cone's insistence that we cannot understand the gospel until we can see the cross and the lynching tree together.

Content note: This episode discusses violence, scapegoating, and lynching.

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