Rauschenbusch at the Oscars

Your meditation for Oscar night:

The idealization of evil is an indispensable means for its perpetuation and transmission. But the most potent motive for it's protection is its profitableness. Ordinarily sin is an act of weakness and side-stepping, followed by shame the next day. But when it is the source of prolific income, it is no longer a shame-faced vagabond slinking through the dark, but an army with banners, entrenched and defiant. The bigger the dividends, the stiffer the resistance against anything that would cut them down. When fed with money, sin grows wings and claws.

-- Walter Rauschenbush (The Theology of the Social Gospel.  Nashville: Abingdon, 1917, p. 66)