MEN'S DISCUSSION GROUP
TUESDAYS AT 10:00 AM
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Tuesday, December 3
I'm back from vacation and looking forward to the Men's Group on Tuesday (tomorrow) and the Women's Group on Wednesday.
My favorite discussions start with a good question. The article for this week asks two good questions - who do you bring with you? Who brought you to where you are? I'd like to know what you think.
Two Questions
Debie Thomas, Christian Century 11.13.24
Recently I’ve been offered two questions that feel like gifts. The first came from a pastor who gave a talk at a conference I attended. He said that he opens Sunday services by inviting congregants to name a person or persons they’ve brought into the church with them that morning. Whose spirit is with you today as you enter into worship? To whom are you particularly grateful or indebted? Whose blessing, guidance, provocation, or love accompanies you especially powerfully at this moment?
Some congregants name a beloved and deceased family member: “My grandmother who read me bedtime Bible stories when I was a little boy.” “My husband of 32 years; he had the most gorgeous singing voice.” Others name writers, activists, theologians, or artists who have inspired them especially powerfully that week: Toni Morrison. Howard Thurman. Mary Oliver. Julian of Norwich. Desmond Tutu. Still others name biblical characters: Mary Magdalene. Daniel in exile. Hagar, who named God.
The point of the question, the pastor said, is to challenge the extreme individualism that often infiltrates American religion. The harmful and deceptive idea that each of us is a spiritual Lone Ranger, showing up in church on our own strength and by our own initiative, to do Christianity all by ourselves.
The second question, related to the first, came from one of my seminary professors. In the context of inviting us students to reflect more deeply on our vocational paths, she asked, “Which of your ancestors ordained you?” Her point was to remind us that we were inspired, shaped, set apart, recognized, or otherwise “ordained” by the people who came before us. Our commissioning began decades or even centuries before us. We are not self-made for the work of God. We come from others, are shaped by others. We carry others in our spiritual bones.
For me, these two questions feel like invitations from God — invitations to give thanks, to feel held, and to grieve. On the one hand, these questions assure me that I’m never alone in the life of faith. I am not alone when I show up for worship, even to churches I’ve never been in before. I never have to pull myself up by my own spiritual bootstraps, because I stand in a stream of care, calling, provision, and blessing that long predates me. On the other hand, the two questions remind me that I have legacies I need to mourn. Messy, imperfect legacies that affect how I approach God, both in worship and in vocational discernment. I am not a blank slate.
At this particular moment in my life, I’m especially aware of the female relatives and ancestors I carry with me. I come from powerful women of faith whose imprints on my life are both consequential and complicated. These are women who proudly trace their Christian lineage back to the first century, when the apostle Thomas brought the story of Jesus to South India. They spent their Sunday mornings sitting cross-legged on straw mats in tiny village churches, trusting God for everything from eternal salvation, to timely monsoons for their family’s crops, to sufficient bowls of rice to fill their children’s bellies.
I come from two grandmothers who woke up at dawn and knelt by their beds every morning to commend each of their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren to God. I come from a mother-in-law who was a missionary and a mystic as well as a pastor’s wife, who served thousands of people at her table in Calcutta and experienced Jesus’ presence in ways so palpable, I am full of admiration and envy. I come from a mother — also a preacher’s wife — whose cover-to-cover knowledge of the Bible is as astounding to me as her unwavering, rocklike faith.
I come from all of these remarkable women. These are the women who taught me how to pray, how to worship, how to serve, how to love. Their spirits accompany me to church on Sunday mornings. These are the women who ordained me, who instilled in me the deep and abiding God-hunger that shapes my life. It is their love for Christ and the church that birthed mine. Their examples of servanthood I hope to emulate.
And yet. These are also the women I left behind in my search for a more expansive Christianity. These are also the women who won’t accept the mainline church I now attend as legitimate. These are also the women whose earnest interpretations of the Bible forbid them from sanctioning the ordination of women in any denomination. The same ancestral convictions that call me also block me.
This is the rub, the pain and fracture that mark my heritage. This is the gap I stand in, between blessing and brokenness.
Who do you bring into worship with you? Which of your ancestors ordained you? To ask these questions, to sit with them in ways that honor their complexity, is to both celebrate and grieve the pasts that made us. It is to reject the myth that we are masters of our own faith, free to plow ahead in worship or in discernment without ever looking back. It is to invite God to work in nuanced ways in our hearts and minds, ways that honor the grayness, the brokenness, the both-ands that form and tether us. Our ancestral callings don’t have to be perfect; God will work with what God is given.
I am grateful to stand in a stream of faithfulness that goes back centuries. My gratitude doesn’t take away from the sadness I feel for what I don’t and can’t have. But neither does the sadness erase the ancestral blessings I benefit from each day. Both are real, and both, in their own sacred ways, are gifts to treasure.
My favorite discussions start with a good question. The article for this week asks two good questions - who do you bring with you? Who brought you to where you are? I'd like to know what you think.
Two Questions
Debie Thomas, Christian Century 11.13.24
Recently I’ve been offered two questions that feel like gifts. The first came from a pastor who gave a talk at a conference I attended. He said that he opens Sunday services by inviting congregants to name a person or persons they’ve brought into the church with them that morning. Whose spirit is with you today as you enter into worship? To whom are you particularly grateful or indebted? Whose blessing, guidance, provocation, or love accompanies you especially powerfully at this moment?
Some congregants name a beloved and deceased family member: “My grandmother who read me bedtime Bible stories when I was a little boy.” “My husband of 32 years; he had the most gorgeous singing voice.” Others name writers, activists, theologians, or artists who have inspired them especially powerfully that week: Toni Morrison. Howard Thurman. Mary Oliver. Julian of Norwich. Desmond Tutu. Still others name biblical characters: Mary Magdalene. Daniel in exile. Hagar, who named God.
The point of the question, the pastor said, is to challenge the extreme individualism that often infiltrates American religion. The harmful and deceptive idea that each of us is a spiritual Lone Ranger, showing up in church on our own strength and by our own initiative, to do Christianity all by ourselves.
The second question, related to the first, came from one of my seminary professors. In the context of inviting us students to reflect more deeply on our vocational paths, she asked, “Which of your ancestors ordained you?” Her point was to remind us that we were inspired, shaped, set apart, recognized, or otherwise “ordained” by the people who came before us. Our commissioning began decades or even centuries before us. We are not self-made for the work of God. We come from others, are shaped by others. We carry others in our spiritual bones.
For me, these two questions feel like invitations from God — invitations to give thanks, to feel held, and to grieve. On the one hand, these questions assure me that I’m never alone in the life of faith. I am not alone when I show up for worship, even to churches I’ve never been in before. I never have to pull myself up by my own spiritual bootstraps, because I stand in a stream of care, calling, provision, and blessing that long predates me. On the other hand, the two questions remind me that I have legacies I need to mourn. Messy, imperfect legacies that affect how I approach God, both in worship and in vocational discernment. I am not a blank slate.
At this particular moment in my life, I’m especially aware of the female relatives and ancestors I carry with me. I come from powerful women of faith whose imprints on my life are both consequential and complicated. These are women who proudly trace their Christian lineage back to the first century, when the apostle Thomas brought the story of Jesus to South India. They spent their Sunday mornings sitting cross-legged on straw mats in tiny village churches, trusting God for everything from eternal salvation, to timely monsoons for their family’s crops, to sufficient bowls of rice to fill their children’s bellies.
I come from two grandmothers who woke up at dawn and knelt by their beds every morning to commend each of their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren to God. I come from a mother-in-law who was a missionary and a mystic as well as a pastor’s wife, who served thousands of people at her table in Calcutta and experienced Jesus’ presence in ways so palpable, I am full of admiration and envy. I come from a mother — also a preacher’s wife — whose cover-to-cover knowledge of the Bible is as astounding to me as her unwavering, rocklike faith.
I come from all of these remarkable women. These are the women who taught me how to pray, how to worship, how to serve, how to love. Their spirits accompany me to church on Sunday mornings. These are the women who ordained me, who instilled in me the deep and abiding God-hunger that shapes my life. It is their love for Christ and the church that birthed mine. Their examples of servanthood I hope to emulate.
And yet. These are also the women I left behind in my search for a more expansive Christianity. These are also the women who won’t accept the mainline church I now attend as legitimate. These are also the women whose earnest interpretations of the Bible forbid them from sanctioning the ordination of women in any denomination. The same ancestral convictions that call me also block me.
This is the rub, the pain and fracture that mark my heritage. This is the gap I stand in, between blessing and brokenness.
Who do you bring into worship with you? Which of your ancestors ordained you? To ask these questions, to sit with them in ways that honor their complexity, is to both celebrate and grieve the pasts that made us. It is to reject the myth that we are masters of our own faith, free to plow ahead in worship or in discernment without ever looking back. It is to invite God to work in nuanced ways in our hearts and minds, ways that honor the grayness, the brokenness, the both-ands that form and tether us. Our ancestral callings don’t have to be perfect; God will work with what God is given.
I am grateful to stand in a stream of faithfulness that goes back centuries. My gratitude doesn’t take away from the sadness I feel for what I don’t and can’t have. But neither does the sadness erase the ancestral blessings I benefit from each day. Both are real, and both, in their own sacred ways, are gifts to treasure.
Tuesday, November 12: Combined Discussion Group
Our topic will be how to deal with disappointment. Arthur Brooks wrote this about hope and disappointment: Hope does not require that you make any prediction about what might happen. It simply asks that you believe that whatever happens, you will have the ability to make circumstances better and you can give some thought to what that action might be.
How to Deal with Disappointment
Arthur Brooks, The Atlantic 11.7.24
As two scholars described it recently in the Annual Review of Anthropology, disappointment is “the messy, friction-filled, and unsatisfying gap between lived experiences and expectations that have not come to pass.” The feeling is similar to regret, in that it involves a past event that didn’t turn out the way you had hoped. But whereas regret involves wishing you had done something differently, disappointment does not necessarily involve your decision-making agency. Because of this distinction, psychologists writing in the journal Cognition and Emotion find that regret more often leads to self-reproach, in contrast with the usual unhappiness associated with disappointment, which comes from a sense of powerlessness.
For example, you might vote for a candidate and regret it (that is, reproach yourself for doing so). But if the candidate for whom you voted loses, that can also give you a sense that you have no say over how you are governed — that’s where the powerlessness comes in.
The above research casts additional light on the psychological dimension of this difference between regret and disappointment. If a person disappoints you, that typically results in your feeling anger. But if an outcome is the disappointment, that is usually accompanied more by sadness.
Such findings tend to focus on what psychologists call “disconfirmed expectancies,” meaning a difference between what you think will or should happen and what actually happens. This involves the neuromodulator dopamine, which governs both rewards and the anticipation of rewards in our brains.
How this works: Imagine that at about 11 a.m., your stomach growls and you think about lunch. Your mind goes to a turkey sandwich you enjoyed last week from a local deli, which gives you a response from dopamine neurons to elicit anticipation and make you form a plan to go there at noon. If, when you arrive and get the sandwich, it is just what you expected, you get no additional dopamine response. But if the sandwich is even more delicious than you remembered, you will get an extra neurochemical spritz, which teaches you to come back again. But if the deli is closed, God forbid, your dopamine response will drop, making you feel mildly depressed—or, in a word, disappointed.
The most psychologically painful disappointments are those in which the hope of reward contrasts most sharply with the actual outcome. The closed deli involves a minor dopamine dip from which you’ll probably recover in minutes. But if, say, you truly expect your beloved to propose marriage and instead they skip town on you, the dopamine deficit will be a lot more severe and harder to endure — perhaps leading to a period of anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure that is characteristic of dysregulated dopamine levels and clinical depression.
Disappointment is especially severe for optimists: They predict outcomes that are above average, and much better than any negative occurrence. This means that they tend to have bigger “disconfirmed expectancies” than non-optimists. Writing in the journal Emotion in 2010, two psychologists studied how students felt before and after receiving exam results. They found that people with more optimistic expectations did not feel better than their peers beforehand, but did on average feel worse after learning their scores, because the optimists tended to be further from reality.
Our lives are filled with uncertain outcomes, often involving the things we care about most deeply. To have any positive expectations means that disappointment is part of life. This has led some thinkers to conclude that the only answer is pessimism. The 19th-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer famously made this case when he argued that “we generally find pleasure to be not nearly so pleasant as we expected, and pain very much more painful.” One conclusion from that: Expect nothing good ever, or even expect the worst, and you will never be disappointed.
Then again, Schopenhauer was well known for being a miserable person, so that may not be the best strategy. Better, I believe, to maintain hope amid life’s uncertainties — but to distinguish hope from optimism. Many people use the terms almost interchangeably, but they are different.
Optimism involves an element of prediction — as we just saw, expecting a good outcome in a way that may be borderline delusional. Hope involves a belief that even if a disappointing result to a situation occurs, you can do something to improve that outcome — in the words of one team of researchers on the subject, “having the will and finding the way.” Because of this, as I have written, hope is far superior to optimism where happiness is concerned.
Hope does not require that you make any prediction at all about what might happen. It simply asks that you believe that whatever happens, you will have the ability to make circumstances better and you can give some thought to what that action might be.
In an odd way, this is halfway what people are doing when they announce a plan to leave America if the wrong candidate wins the election. But the contemplated action — leaving home and going into exile — is foolish and extreme; much better would be to say, “If the bad guy wins, I will be disappointed, but regardless of the disappointment, I will work as much as I can to make things around me better.” The same is true for other letdowns in life. If you’re yearning for a big promotion, don’t predict whether you will or won’t get it. Just be honest with yourself that you hope for the reward, and think logically about what constructive action you can take if, in fact, you are passed over.
In addition, because disappointment is part of the useful neurobiological learning process that you’ve inherited for your evolutionary fitness, look for the valuable lessons of a setback. The psychiatrist Carl Jung believed that when we are disappointed, we can actually choose between bitterness and wisdom—the latter being “the comforter in all psychic suffering.”
The problem with the leave-the-country approach is that it succumbs to bitterness instead of looking to learn. The same goes for a disappointment such as a bad breakup. The bitter response is “I’ll never date again.” A wise response is to figure out how to avoid getting entangled in future with a person who shares your ex’s problematic traits (that jerk).
I wrote this column to soothe anyone who might be suffering from postelection disappointment, and to provide a better way to cope. But perhaps you aren’t disappointed: Maybe your candidate won, and you’re elated right now. That can also be an opportunity for wisdom—if you choose to take it.
Today you taste victory, but remember: Defeat is just around the corner, because that’s how life works. Reflect on this truth, and take the opportunity to show some grace to the neighbors and family members whose candidate lost and who are disappointed — because they’re feeling today the way you will surely feel tomorrow. Think of this as a chance to time travel, and bring a bit of kindness to comfort your future disappointed self.
How to Deal with Disappointment
Arthur Brooks, The Atlantic 11.7.24
As two scholars described it recently in the Annual Review of Anthropology, disappointment is “the messy, friction-filled, and unsatisfying gap between lived experiences and expectations that have not come to pass.” The feeling is similar to regret, in that it involves a past event that didn’t turn out the way you had hoped. But whereas regret involves wishing you had done something differently, disappointment does not necessarily involve your decision-making agency. Because of this distinction, psychologists writing in the journal Cognition and Emotion find that regret more often leads to self-reproach, in contrast with the usual unhappiness associated with disappointment, which comes from a sense of powerlessness.
For example, you might vote for a candidate and regret it (that is, reproach yourself for doing so). But if the candidate for whom you voted loses, that can also give you a sense that you have no say over how you are governed — that’s where the powerlessness comes in.
The above research casts additional light on the psychological dimension of this difference between regret and disappointment. If a person disappoints you, that typically results in your feeling anger. But if an outcome is the disappointment, that is usually accompanied more by sadness.
Such findings tend to focus on what psychologists call “disconfirmed expectancies,” meaning a difference between what you think will or should happen and what actually happens. This involves the neuromodulator dopamine, which governs both rewards and the anticipation of rewards in our brains.
How this works: Imagine that at about 11 a.m., your stomach growls and you think about lunch. Your mind goes to a turkey sandwich you enjoyed last week from a local deli, which gives you a response from dopamine neurons to elicit anticipation and make you form a plan to go there at noon. If, when you arrive and get the sandwich, it is just what you expected, you get no additional dopamine response. But if the sandwich is even more delicious than you remembered, you will get an extra neurochemical spritz, which teaches you to come back again. But if the deli is closed, God forbid, your dopamine response will drop, making you feel mildly depressed—or, in a word, disappointed.
The most psychologically painful disappointments are those in which the hope of reward contrasts most sharply with the actual outcome. The closed deli involves a minor dopamine dip from which you’ll probably recover in minutes. But if, say, you truly expect your beloved to propose marriage and instead they skip town on you, the dopamine deficit will be a lot more severe and harder to endure — perhaps leading to a period of anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure that is characteristic of dysregulated dopamine levels and clinical depression.
Disappointment is especially severe for optimists: They predict outcomes that are above average, and much better than any negative occurrence. This means that they tend to have bigger “disconfirmed expectancies” than non-optimists. Writing in the journal Emotion in 2010, two psychologists studied how students felt before and after receiving exam results. They found that people with more optimistic expectations did not feel better than their peers beforehand, but did on average feel worse after learning their scores, because the optimists tended to be further from reality.
Our lives are filled with uncertain outcomes, often involving the things we care about most deeply. To have any positive expectations means that disappointment is part of life. This has led some thinkers to conclude that the only answer is pessimism. The 19th-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer famously made this case when he argued that “we generally find pleasure to be not nearly so pleasant as we expected, and pain very much more painful.” One conclusion from that: Expect nothing good ever, or even expect the worst, and you will never be disappointed.
Then again, Schopenhauer was well known for being a miserable person, so that may not be the best strategy. Better, I believe, to maintain hope amid life’s uncertainties — but to distinguish hope from optimism. Many people use the terms almost interchangeably, but they are different.
Optimism involves an element of prediction — as we just saw, expecting a good outcome in a way that may be borderline delusional. Hope involves a belief that even if a disappointing result to a situation occurs, you can do something to improve that outcome — in the words of one team of researchers on the subject, “having the will and finding the way.” Because of this, as I have written, hope is far superior to optimism where happiness is concerned.
Hope does not require that you make any prediction at all about what might happen. It simply asks that you believe that whatever happens, you will have the ability to make circumstances better and you can give some thought to what that action might be.
In an odd way, this is halfway what people are doing when they announce a plan to leave America if the wrong candidate wins the election. But the contemplated action — leaving home and going into exile — is foolish and extreme; much better would be to say, “If the bad guy wins, I will be disappointed, but regardless of the disappointment, I will work as much as I can to make things around me better.” The same is true for other letdowns in life. If you’re yearning for a big promotion, don’t predict whether you will or won’t get it. Just be honest with yourself that you hope for the reward, and think logically about what constructive action you can take if, in fact, you are passed over.
In addition, because disappointment is part of the useful neurobiological learning process that you’ve inherited for your evolutionary fitness, look for the valuable lessons of a setback. The psychiatrist Carl Jung believed that when we are disappointed, we can actually choose between bitterness and wisdom—the latter being “the comforter in all psychic suffering.”
The problem with the leave-the-country approach is that it succumbs to bitterness instead of looking to learn. The same goes for a disappointment such as a bad breakup. The bitter response is “I’ll never date again.” A wise response is to figure out how to avoid getting entangled in future with a person who shares your ex’s problematic traits (that jerk).
I wrote this column to soothe anyone who might be suffering from postelection disappointment, and to provide a better way to cope. But perhaps you aren’t disappointed: Maybe your candidate won, and you’re elated right now. That can also be an opportunity for wisdom—if you choose to take it.
Today you taste victory, but remember: Defeat is just around the corner, because that’s how life works. Reflect on this truth, and take the opportunity to show some grace to the neighbors and family members whose candidate lost and who are disappointed — because they’re feeling today the way you will surely feel tomorrow. Think of this as a chance to time travel, and bring a bit of kindness to comfort your future disappointed self.
Tuesday, November 5
This week's reading is from the Christian Century's weekly posting of sermon ideas for the upcoming Gospel lesson. I find it to be a good discussion reading about Jesus's interaction with Martha when her brother, Lazarus, had died. Jesus said he is the resurrection and the life. He then asked her, "Do you believe this?" Regardless of what you believe (or don't believe), you are welcome at the discussion.
Do You Believe This?
Niveen Ibrahim Sarras, Christian Century 10.30.24
Niveen Ibrahim Sarras is pastor of St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in Neenah, Wisconsin, and an Old Testament scholar.
John 11:17-26
When Jesus arrived [from Jerusalem], he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days. (Bethany was a little less than two miles from Jerusalem). Many people of the Jewish faith had come to comfort Martha and Mary after their brother’s death. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went to meet him, while Mary remained in the house. Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died. Even now I know that whatever you ask God, God will give you.”
Jesus told her, “Your brother will rise again.”
Martha replied, “I know that he will rise in the resurrection on the last day.”
Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me will live, even though they die. Everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”
The gospel reading for All Saints Day, from the raising of Lazarus, aligns with themes of resurrection and hope for both the living and the departed. The extended passage, John 11:1-45, is also assigned in Lent, underscoring resurrection and new life as central motifs anticipating Easter.
This narrative vividly illustrates Jesus’ profound love and authority over death. The text highlights Jesus’ deep affection for Lazarus, Martha, and Mary, while the mourners recognize Jesus’ compassion as he weeps in solidarity with those grieving Lazarus. The evangelist John seeks to convey to his audience—and to us—that Jesus is intimately present in our grief.
Although Jesus knows he will raise Lazarus, the visible sorrow of those mourning evokes a genuine empathetic response, leading him to weep alongside them. His love, tears, and the restoration of life exemplify his deep compassion.
Jesus does not visit the home of Mary and Martha to offer traditional condolences. He seems uninterested in the ritualistic aspects of Jewish mourning, fully aware that death will not have the final say over Lazarus. Notably, Jesus is not alone in stepping outside traditional norms; Martha also deviates from customary mourning practices by leaving her guests to meet him directly. Her urgency to see him and express her grief override the cultural expectations of mourning.
For Martha and Mary, their grief is compounded: they have lost not only their brother but also their male protector and provider, leaving them particularly vulnerable in a patriarchal society. The raising of Lazarus mirrors the narrative in Luke 7:11-17, where Jesus resurrects the son of the widow of Nain, moved by compassion for her loss of her sole male protector.
In her conversation with Jesus, Martha professes her belief in the resurrection on the last day. Jesus responds with the profound declaration, "‘I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?’" (John 11:25-26). This statement does not suggest physical immortality but rather liberation from the power of death. Jesus does not promise Martha a miracle but rather a new life grounded in faith and trust in him.
Jesus’ question to Martha extends beyond their immediate context and is directed at all believers. Every Christian, when confronted with the death of a loved one, must grapple with this same question. Martha responds by affirming her faith, acknowledging Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of God—a confession that stands as a foundational element of the church's faith. Her proclamation aligns with the central purpose of the Gospel of John: to lead others to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and to find life in His name (John 20:31).
After the stone is removed from the cave, Jesus prays out loud, expressing gratitude to the Father for having already heard him — implying that he has previously prayed for Lazarus, possibly in silence. This prayer recalls the intimate relationship between Christ and us, where he intercedes on our behalf (Romans 8:34).
With a commanding voice, Jesus cries out, “Lazarus, come out!”—a declaration infused with life-restoring power. Jesus does not address Lazarus as one who is dead but as one who merely sleeps. Lazarus then emerges from the tomb, still wrapped in burial clothes. John’s phrase “the dead man came out” carries an element of irony, highlighting Jesus’ victory over death.
Jesus instructs those present to remove the grave clothes—the shroud—symbolizing that the garments of death are rendered obsolete, for the one who was dead is now alive. This act echoes the prophecy of Isaiah 25:7: “And He [God] will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples.” Although Lazarus is raised, he will accompany Jesus to Jerusalem—where he will face death again alongside Jesus (John 12:9-10).
John seeks to reassure his audience and us that what Jesus did for Lazarus, he will do for all believers.
Do You Believe This?
Niveen Ibrahim Sarras, Christian Century 10.30.24
Niveen Ibrahim Sarras is pastor of St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in Neenah, Wisconsin, and an Old Testament scholar.
John 11:17-26
When Jesus arrived [from Jerusalem], he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days. (Bethany was a little less than two miles from Jerusalem). Many people of the Jewish faith had come to comfort Martha and Mary after their brother’s death. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went to meet him, while Mary remained in the house. Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died. Even now I know that whatever you ask God, God will give you.”
Jesus told her, “Your brother will rise again.”
Martha replied, “I know that he will rise in the resurrection on the last day.”
Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me will live, even though they die. Everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”
The gospel reading for All Saints Day, from the raising of Lazarus, aligns with themes of resurrection and hope for both the living and the departed. The extended passage, John 11:1-45, is also assigned in Lent, underscoring resurrection and new life as central motifs anticipating Easter.
This narrative vividly illustrates Jesus’ profound love and authority over death. The text highlights Jesus’ deep affection for Lazarus, Martha, and Mary, while the mourners recognize Jesus’ compassion as he weeps in solidarity with those grieving Lazarus. The evangelist John seeks to convey to his audience—and to us—that Jesus is intimately present in our grief.
Although Jesus knows he will raise Lazarus, the visible sorrow of those mourning evokes a genuine empathetic response, leading him to weep alongside them. His love, tears, and the restoration of life exemplify his deep compassion.
Jesus does not visit the home of Mary and Martha to offer traditional condolences. He seems uninterested in the ritualistic aspects of Jewish mourning, fully aware that death will not have the final say over Lazarus. Notably, Jesus is not alone in stepping outside traditional norms; Martha also deviates from customary mourning practices by leaving her guests to meet him directly. Her urgency to see him and express her grief override the cultural expectations of mourning.
For Martha and Mary, their grief is compounded: they have lost not only their brother but also their male protector and provider, leaving them particularly vulnerable in a patriarchal society. The raising of Lazarus mirrors the narrative in Luke 7:11-17, where Jesus resurrects the son of the widow of Nain, moved by compassion for her loss of her sole male protector.
In her conversation with Jesus, Martha professes her belief in the resurrection on the last day. Jesus responds with the profound declaration, "‘I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?’" (John 11:25-26). This statement does not suggest physical immortality but rather liberation from the power of death. Jesus does not promise Martha a miracle but rather a new life grounded in faith and trust in him.
Jesus’ question to Martha extends beyond their immediate context and is directed at all believers. Every Christian, when confronted with the death of a loved one, must grapple with this same question. Martha responds by affirming her faith, acknowledging Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of God—a confession that stands as a foundational element of the church's faith. Her proclamation aligns with the central purpose of the Gospel of John: to lead others to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and to find life in His name (John 20:31).
After the stone is removed from the cave, Jesus prays out loud, expressing gratitude to the Father for having already heard him — implying that he has previously prayed for Lazarus, possibly in silence. This prayer recalls the intimate relationship between Christ and us, where he intercedes on our behalf (Romans 8:34).
With a commanding voice, Jesus cries out, “Lazarus, come out!”—a declaration infused with life-restoring power. Jesus does not address Lazarus as one who is dead but as one who merely sleeps. Lazarus then emerges from the tomb, still wrapped in burial clothes. John’s phrase “the dead man came out” carries an element of irony, highlighting Jesus’ victory over death.
Jesus instructs those present to remove the grave clothes—the shroud—symbolizing that the garments of death are rendered obsolete, for the one who was dead is now alive. This act echoes the prophecy of Isaiah 25:7: “And He [God] will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples.” Although Lazarus is raised, he will accompany Jesus to Jerusalem—where he will face death again alongside Jesus (John 12:9-10).
John seeks to reassure his audience and us that what Jesus did for Lazarus, he will do for all believers.
Tuesday, October 29
We had a wonderful week of discussing the supposed origin of good and evil. If anything, it was a primer for this week - C.S. Lewis and his universal approach to right and wrong using Natural Law. To cut to the chase, he said this about humankind: two laws govern all of humanity - we know what is right; we don't do what is right. (Editor's note: the third law is we expect others to do right).
Right and Wrong, The Law of Human Nature
C.S. Lewis, excerpt from Simply Christian
This Law about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the "laws of nature" we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong "the Law of Nature," they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law - with this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it. We may put this in another way. Each man is at every moment subjected to several different sets of law but there is only one of these which he is free to disobey. As a body, he is subjected to gravitation and cannot disobey it; if you leave him unsupported in mid-air, he has no more choice about falling than a stone has. As an organism, he is subjected to various biological laws which he cannot disobey any more than an animal can. That is, he cannot disobey those laws which he shares with other things; but the law which is peculiar to his human nature, the law he does not share with animals or vegetables or inorganic things, is the one he can disobey if he chooses.
This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that everyone knew it by nature and did not need to be taught.
I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behavior known to all men is unsound, because different civilizations and different ages have had quite different moralities.
But this is not true. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to our own. Humans have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to - whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or everyone. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any
woman you liked.
It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. Now if we are agreed about that, I go on to my next point, which is this. None of us are really keeping the Law of Nature.
First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.
We all know what it feels like to be prompted by instinct - by mother love, or sexual instinct, or the instinct for food. It means that you feel a strong want or desire to act in a certain way. And, of course, we sometimes do feel just that sort of desire to help another person: and no doubt that desire is due to the herd instinct. But feeling a desire to help is quite different from feeling that you ought to help whether you want to or not. Supposing you hear a cry for help from a man in danger. You will probably feel two desires - one a desire to give help (due to your herd instinct), the other a desire to keep out of danger (due to the instinct for self-preservation). But you will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, and suppress the impulse to run away. Now this thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot itself be either of them.
You might as well say that the sheet of music which tells you, at a given moment, to play one note on the piano and not another, is itself one of the notes on the keyboard. The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys. Another way of seeing that the Moral Law is not simply one of our instincts is this. You probably want to be safe much more than you want to help the man who is drowning: but the Moral Law tells you to help him all the same.
Here is a third way of seeing it: If the Moral Law was one of our instincts, we ought to be able to point to some one impulse inside us which was always what we call "good," always in agreement with the rule of right behavior. But you cannot. There is none of our impulses which the Moral Law may not sometimes tell us to suppress, and none which it may not sometimes tell us to encourage. It is a mistake to think that some of our impulses — say mother love or patriotism — are good, and others, like sex or the fighting instinct, are bad. All we mean is that the occasions on which the fighting instinct or the sexual desire need to be restrained are rather more frequent than those for restraining mother love or patriotism. But there are situations in which it is the
duty of a married man to encourage his sexual impulse and of a soldier to encourage the fighting instinct. There are also occasions on which a mother's love for her own children or a man's love for his own country have to be suppressed or they will lead to unfairness towards other people's children or countries. Strictly speaking, there are no such things as good and bad impulses. Think of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the "right" notes and the "wrong" ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The Moral Law is not any one instinct or any set of instincts: it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts.
I conclude then that though the differences between people's ideas of Decent Behaviour often make you suspect that there is no real natural Law of Behaviour at all, yet the things we are bound to think about these differences really prove just the opposite. I have met people who exaggerate the differences, because they have not distinguished between differences of morality and differences of belief about facts. For example, one man said to me, "Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?" But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did - if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather, surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did.
There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.
Right and Wrong, The Law of Human Nature
C.S. Lewis, excerpt from Simply Christian
This Law about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the "laws of nature" we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong "the Law of Nature," they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law - with this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it. We may put this in another way. Each man is at every moment subjected to several different sets of law but there is only one of these which he is free to disobey. As a body, he is subjected to gravitation and cannot disobey it; if you leave him unsupported in mid-air, he has no more choice about falling than a stone has. As an organism, he is subjected to various biological laws which he cannot disobey any more than an animal can. That is, he cannot disobey those laws which he shares with other things; but the law which is peculiar to his human nature, the law he does not share with animals or vegetables or inorganic things, is the one he can disobey if he chooses.
This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that everyone knew it by nature and did not need to be taught.
I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behavior known to all men is unsound, because different civilizations and different ages have had quite different moralities.
But this is not true. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to our own. Humans have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to - whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or everyone. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any
woman you liked.
It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. Now if we are agreed about that, I go on to my next point, which is this. None of us are really keeping the Law of Nature.
First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.
We all know what it feels like to be prompted by instinct - by mother love, or sexual instinct, or the instinct for food. It means that you feel a strong want or desire to act in a certain way. And, of course, we sometimes do feel just that sort of desire to help another person: and no doubt that desire is due to the herd instinct. But feeling a desire to help is quite different from feeling that you ought to help whether you want to or not. Supposing you hear a cry for help from a man in danger. You will probably feel two desires - one a desire to give help (due to your herd instinct), the other a desire to keep out of danger (due to the instinct for self-preservation). But you will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, and suppress the impulse to run away. Now this thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot itself be either of them.
You might as well say that the sheet of music which tells you, at a given moment, to play one note on the piano and not another, is itself one of the notes on the keyboard. The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys. Another way of seeing that the Moral Law is not simply one of our instincts is this. You probably want to be safe much more than you want to help the man who is drowning: but the Moral Law tells you to help him all the same.
Here is a third way of seeing it: If the Moral Law was one of our instincts, we ought to be able to point to some one impulse inside us which was always what we call "good," always in agreement with the rule of right behavior. But you cannot. There is none of our impulses which the Moral Law may not sometimes tell us to suppress, and none which it may not sometimes tell us to encourage. It is a mistake to think that some of our impulses — say mother love or patriotism — are good, and others, like sex or the fighting instinct, are bad. All we mean is that the occasions on which the fighting instinct or the sexual desire need to be restrained are rather more frequent than those for restraining mother love or patriotism. But there are situations in which it is the
duty of a married man to encourage his sexual impulse and of a soldier to encourage the fighting instinct. There are also occasions on which a mother's love for her own children or a man's love for his own country have to be suppressed or they will lead to unfairness towards other people's children or countries. Strictly speaking, there are no such things as good and bad impulses. Think of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the "right" notes and the "wrong" ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The Moral Law is not any one instinct or any set of instincts: it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts.
I conclude then that though the differences between people's ideas of Decent Behaviour often make you suspect that there is no real natural Law of Behaviour at all, yet the things we are bound to think about these differences really prove just the opposite. I have met people who exaggerate the differences, because they have not distinguished between differences of morality and differences of belief about facts. For example, one man said to me, "Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?" But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did - if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather, surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did.
There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.
Tuesday, October 21
Where did our belief about good and evil come from? If you say the Bible, that's a good start. The author for this week, however, believes it has to do with human development. I'd like to know what you think.
The Invention of Good and Evil Book Review
Hanno Sauer. Translated by Jo Heinrich.
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “How humans invented good and evil” Culture 10.12.24
Trial by boiling water was not as bad as it sounded. In medieval Europe, those accused of grave crimes might be ordered to plunge an arm into a bubbling cauldron to retrieve an object. If they were scalded, that was God’s way of revealing their guilt. The chance of acquittal would seem to be zero, but 60% of those who underwent this ordeal got off. How come?
The answer is that defendants believed in divine judgment. The guilty, convinced that God knew all, confessed to avoid the extra punishment of scalding. The innocent assumed they would be acquitted, so they refused to confess. The priests who prepared the cauldron knew this, and did not want to undermine their own authority by condemning someone who might later prove innocent. So they did not heat the water as much as they pretended to.
Hanno Sauer of Utrecht University has made a heroic effort to chart how morality has changed since the first humanlike animals began to populate Africa 5m years ago, and to predict how it might change in the future. It is a rich, complex narrative, full of unexpected twists like the inquisitors’ tale. He blends insights from evolutionary biology, cognitive science and anthropology to ask what makes people good, evil, or a bit of both?
Much of his argument hinges on a trait that sets humans apart from other animals: the extraordinary complexity of their social relations. People’s early ancestors lived in an unstable environment, the African savannah, and developed “an unusually spontaneous and surprisingly flexible capacity for co-operation”.
Since a hunting party might be successful one week but return empty-handed the next, rules emerged about sharing meat with the wider group, to maximize every member’s chance of survival. Competition with other bands of hunter-gatherers over territory swiftly turned violent, however. “Inwardly, our ancestors were family-centric pacifists, but outwardly, they were gangs of murderers and plunderers,” the author writes. Wars ravaged hunter-gatherer societies yet involved great individual altruism. When each person’s survival depends to a large degree on the clan’s, people have an incentive to co-operate selflessly to defend it. From an evolutionary perspective, such self-sacrifice made sense only if the beneficiaries were closely related.
Early hunter-gatherer bands probably included no more than 150 or so people. To collaborate in larger groups, people needed new rules, vigorously enforced. This is perhaps why all human societies have devised ostentatiously nasty punishments. Cave paintings from 20,000 years ago depict ritual garroting; in ancient Greece torturers roasted victims in a hollow bronze bull, their screams being amplified by the bull’s horns.
“A species that kills its most [aggressive] members over hundreds of generations creates a strong selection pressure in favor of peacefulness, tolerance and impulse control,” reckons Mr Sauer. In effect, “We domesticated ourselves.” When it is socially required, humans can show enormous restraint and consideration; unlike, say, chimpanzees, which if crammed together on an airplane for a long flight would undoubtedly kill each other. Humans “are to chimpanzees as golden retrievers are to wolves”, argues Mr Sauer.
Rules against killing strangers allowed people to co-exist in much larger societies. This, in turn, fostered the development of sophisticated cultures. Just as science depends on the steady accumulation of thousands of small innovations, so culture evolves over time, with ideas accumulating and being refined from one generation to the next. This process yields plenty of rotten customs but also the benefits of everything from reading and music to cities and double-entry book-keeping.
For millennia, the kinship group was the most important social unit, and morality was understood largely as the duties owed to one’s relatives. But in Europe the Roman Catholic church blew this system apart with a series of reforms that ended around 500 years ago. It banned cousin marriage and changed inheritance rules, encouraging people to choose their own spouses and bequeath assets as they pleased. This weakened kinship groups (which relied on cousin marriage to keep property within the clan) and fostered a more individualistic morality. People became more likely to feel guilt (at having done something wrong) than shame (because their aunts disapproved). The effects of these reforms can still be measured in Italy: people in the provinces that were under stronger papal control 500 years ago are more likely to donate blood even today.
The rise of individualism paved the way for modernity, with contract-based business, participatory politics, impersonal bureaucracies and the pursuit of science unconstrained by religious dogma. This has made the world richer, and richer countries are happier than those that remain poor.
The idea that rules can govern a society has spread far beyond Europe, albeit unevenly. Fully 70% of Norwegians say they trust strangers, whereas only 5% of people from Trinidad and Tobago agree. Mr Sauer thinks universal norms will probably keep spreading but is unsure. As the Holocaust proved, humankind’s ancient suspicion of out-groups has not vanished, and skillful demagogues can harness it in catastrophic ways. Examples are too numerous to list.
Looking at the past five years, the author finds much to worry about. “Morality seems to be boiling over” in the West, he writes. People’s moral vocabulary has become “mangled”. Woke activists describe words as “violence” and use this claim to try to justify restrictions on free speech. They also divide the world simplistically into “oppressors” and “oppressed”, sometimes ascribing original sin by skin color. And political tribes of left and right have come to see the other lot not merely as misguided, but evil.
Yet despite the fury of the culture wars, Mr Sauer sees “an enormous…unrealized potential for reconciliation”. After hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, people share more moral values than they think, and this could help them cast off the identity politics that tells them they are enemies. “Between the extremes of ‘being on time is white supremacy’ and ‘we must revitalize Western Christianity’s cultural hegemony,’ there is a silent majority of reasonable people,” he concludes. He is surely right.
The Invention of Good and Evil Book Review
Hanno Sauer. Translated by Jo Heinrich.
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “How humans invented good and evil” Culture 10.12.24
Trial by boiling water was not as bad as it sounded. In medieval Europe, those accused of grave crimes might be ordered to plunge an arm into a bubbling cauldron to retrieve an object. If they were scalded, that was God’s way of revealing their guilt. The chance of acquittal would seem to be zero, but 60% of those who underwent this ordeal got off. How come?
The answer is that defendants believed in divine judgment. The guilty, convinced that God knew all, confessed to avoid the extra punishment of scalding. The innocent assumed they would be acquitted, so they refused to confess. The priests who prepared the cauldron knew this, and did not want to undermine their own authority by condemning someone who might later prove innocent. So they did not heat the water as much as they pretended to.
Hanno Sauer of Utrecht University has made a heroic effort to chart how morality has changed since the first humanlike animals began to populate Africa 5m years ago, and to predict how it might change in the future. It is a rich, complex narrative, full of unexpected twists like the inquisitors’ tale. He blends insights from evolutionary biology, cognitive science and anthropology to ask what makes people good, evil, or a bit of both?
Much of his argument hinges on a trait that sets humans apart from other animals: the extraordinary complexity of their social relations. People’s early ancestors lived in an unstable environment, the African savannah, and developed “an unusually spontaneous and surprisingly flexible capacity for co-operation”.
Since a hunting party might be successful one week but return empty-handed the next, rules emerged about sharing meat with the wider group, to maximize every member’s chance of survival. Competition with other bands of hunter-gatherers over territory swiftly turned violent, however. “Inwardly, our ancestors were family-centric pacifists, but outwardly, they were gangs of murderers and plunderers,” the author writes. Wars ravaged hunter-gatherer societies yet involved great individual altruism. When each person’s survival depends to a large degree on the clan’s, people have an incentive to co-operate selflessly to defend it. From an evolutionary perspective, such self-sacrifice made sense only if the beneficiaries were closely related.
Early hunter-gatherer bands probably included no more than 150 or so people. To collaborate in larger groups, people needed new rules, vigorously enforced. This is perhaps why all human societies have devised ostentatiously nasty punishments. Cave paintings from 20,000 years ago depict ritual garroting; in ancient Greece torturers roasted victims in a hollow bronze bull, their screams being amplified by the bull’s horns.
“A species that kills its most [aggressive] members over hundreds of generations creates a strong selection pressure in favor of peacefulness, tolerance and impulse control,” reckons Mr Sauer. In effect, “We domesticated ourselves.” When it is socially required, humans can show enormous restraint and consideration; unlike, say, chimpanzees, which if crammed together on an airplane for a long flight would undoubtedly kill each other. Humans “are to chimpanzees as golden retrievers are to wolves”, argues Mr Sauer.
Rules against killing strangers allowed people to co-exist in much larger societies. This, in turn, fostered the development of sophisticated cultures. Just as science depends on the steady accumulation of thousands of small innovations, so culture evolves over time, with ideas accumulating and being refined from one generation to the next. This process yields plenty of rotten customs but also the benefits of everything from reading and music to cities and double-entry book-keeping.
For millennia, the kinship group was the most important social unit, and morality was understood largely as the duties owed to one’s relatives. But in Europe the Roman Catholic church blew this system apart with a series of reforms that ended around 500 years ago. It banned cousin marriage and changed inheritance rules, encouraging people to choose their own spouses and bequeath assets as they pleased. This weakened kinship groups (which relied on cousin marriage to keep property within the clan) and fostered a more individualistic morality. People became more likely to feel guilt (at having done something wrong) than shame (because their aunts disapproved). The effects of these reforms can still be measured in Italy: people in the provinces that were under stronger papal control 500 years ago are more likely to donate blood even today.
The rise of individualism paved the way for modernity, with contract-based business, participatory politics, impersonal bureaucracies and the pursuit of science unconstrained by religious dogma. This has made the world richer, and richer countries are happier than those that remain poor.
The idea that rules can govern a society has spread far beyond Europe, albeit unevenly. Fully 70% of Norwegians say they trust strangers, whereas only 5% of people from Trinidad and Tobago agree. Mr Sauer thinks universal norms will probably keep spreading but is unsure. As the Holocaust proved, humankind’s ancient suspicion of out-groups has not vanished, and skillful demagogues can harness it in catastrophic ways. Examples are too numerous to list.
Looking at the past five years, the author finds much to worry about. “Morality seems to be boiling over” in the West, he writes. People’s moral vocabulary has become “mangled”. Woke activists describe words as “violence” and use this claim to try to justify restrictions on free speech. They also divide the world simplistically into “oppressors” and “oppressed”, sometimes ascribing original sin by skin color. And political tribes of left and right have come to see the other lot not merely as misguided, but evil.
Yet despite the fury of the culture wars, Mr Sauer sees “an enormous…unrealized potential for reconciliation”. After hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, people share more moral values than they think, and this could help them cast off the identity politics that tells them they are enemies. “Between the extremes of ‘being on time is white supremacy’ and ‘we must revitalize Western Christianity’s cultural hegemony,’ there is a silent majority of reasonable people,” he concludes. He is surely right.
Tuesday, October 15
Discussion groups this week are happening in person and online.
For the in-person meeting, please attend if you are already on the island.
Our discussion this week will be on the article by David Brooks, The Junkification of America; however, the first part of both discussion groups will be a check-in to hear how each person is doing.
The Junkification of American Life
David Brooks, NY Times 9.5.24
Back in February, the music historian Ted Gioia wrote an essay on the state of American culture. He argued that many creative people want to create art (work that puts demands on people), but all the commercial pressures push them to create entertainment (which gives audiences what they want). As a result, for the past many years, entertainment (superhero movies) has been swallowing up art (literary novels and serious dramas). But now, Gioia observed, even the entertainment business is in crisis. Hollywood studios are laying off employees. The number of new scripted TV series is down. That’s because entertainment is being swallowed up by distraction (TikTok, Instagram). People stay on their phones because it’s easier. Each object of distraction lasts only a few seconds and doesn’t require any cognitive work; the audience just keeps scrolling.
Our dopamine-driven brains drive us to choose cheap distraction over entertainment and art. A 15-second video causes a dopamine release in the brain, which creates a desire for more stimulus, which leads to the habit of more scrolling on your phone, which leads to an addiction to more stimulus. If distraction is swallowing entertainment in our culture, addiction is also swallowing distraction. Gioia wrote: “The tech platforms aren’t like the Medici in Florence, or those other rich patrons of the arts. They don’t want to find the next Michelangelo or Mozart. They want to create a world of junkies — because they will be the dealers.”
The phenomenon Gioia describes isn’t happening just to culture; it recurs across American life. We have access to wonderful things. But they require effort, so we settle for the junky things that provide the quick dopamine hits. We could all be eating a Mediterranean diet, but instead it’s potato chips and cherry Coke. We could enjoy the richness of full awareness, but booze, weed and other drugs provide that quick reward. Think of all the things in American life that seem to offer that burst of stimulation but threaten to be addictive — gambling, porn, video games, checking email.
The result is we’re now in a culture in which we want worse things — the cheap hit over the long flourishing. You reach for immediate gratification, but it fails to satisfy. It just puts you on a hamster wheel of looking for the next mild stimulus and pretty soon you’re in the land of addiction and junk food, you just keep scrolling, you just keep snacking. As the psychiatrist Anna Lembke writes in her book “Dopamine Nation,” “The paradox is that hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, leads to anhedonia, which is the inability to enjoy.”
The great volume of advice that flows from these people seems to fall into three buckets. First, there is the self-binding bucket. Create rules so you don’t have easy access to the things that tempt you: No phones in school. No carbs in your diet. No alcohol in the house. A woman I once knew got dumped by her boyfriend; of course she came home with a big tub of ice cream.
Halfway through the tub she grew disgusted with herself and threw it in the trash. Ten minutes later she was digging through the trash so she could eat some more. Finally, she poured dishwashing soap on the ice cream to help her resist temptation. Effective self-binding.
Then there is the here and now bucket. Don’t go searching for the next dopamine hit; enjoy the life that you already have around you. The neuroscientist Kent Berridge has shown that the wanting circuits in the brain are different from the liking circuits. So try to stimulate the liking circuits by amping up your enjoyment of the life you already have.
For example, Lembke, the psychiatrist, had a patient who suffered from depression and anxiety and spent her life plugged into Instagram, YouTube and all the rest. Lembke suggested that the patient walk through her days without any devices and let her own thoughts surface.
The patient was dumbstruck at the suggestion. “Why would I do that?” she asked. Lembke said it’s a way of becoming familiar with yourself and not being consumed by distractions. “But it’s so boring,” the patient countered. Boredom can be good, an opportunity for reflection, Lembke argued. Finally, the patient agreed to put down her phone during walks. Later, she reported back to Lembke: “It was hard at first. But then I got used to it and even kind of liked it. I started noticing the trees.”
The third bucket is the higher desires bucket. That’s based on the premise that you usually can’t control a desire through sheer willpower. But you can replace a low desire with a higher desire. Pregnant women give up alcohol because the appeal of a drink is dwarfed by their love for their coming child.
Dopamine can sometimes sound like the bad guy in this conversation, but all in all, it’s an awesome neurotransmitter. It’s what drives us to create, to learn, to build, to improve. Dopamine pushes us to boldly go where no person has gone before. America was practically built on dopamine. As William Casey King argues in his book “Ambition, a History,” throughout most of European history, ambition was regarded as a terrible sin. But when the New World was
discovered, people decided that ambition is mostly a virtue, driving us to explore.
The problem with our culture today is not too much desire but the miniaturization of desire, settling for these small, short-term hits. Our culture used to be full of institutions that sought to arouse people’s higher desires — the love of God, the love of country, the love of learning, the love of being excellent at a craft. Sermons, teachers, mentors and the whole apparatus of moral formation were there to elongate people’s time horizons and arouse the highest desires.
The culture of consumerism, of secularism, of hedonism has undermined those institutions and that important work. The culture has changed. As Philip Rieff noticed all the way back in his 1966 book, “The Triumph of the Therapeutic,” “Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased.”
We have schools to train our minds and gyms to train our bodies. We get less help training, elevating and regulating our desires. History suggests you can elevate people’s desires by giving them access to what is truly worth wanting. I imagine the cultural decline that Gioia described in his essay can be turned around if people can experience, at school or somewhere else, the emotional impact of a great film, a great novel, a great concert. It’s more desirable than a TikTok. Once you’ve tasted the fine wine, it’s harder to settle for Kool-Aid.
For the in-person meeting, please attend if you are already on the island.
Our discussion this week will be on the article by David Brooks, The Junkification of America; however, the first part of both discussion groups will be a check-in to hear how each person is doing.
The Junkification of American Life
David Brooks, NY Times 9.5.24
Back in February, the music historian Ted Gioia wrote an essay on the state of American culture. He argued that many creative people want to create art (work that puts demands on people), but all the commercial pressures push them to create entertainment (which gives audiences what they want). As a result, for the past many years, entertainment (superhero movies) has been swallowing up art (literary novels and serious dramas). But now, Gioia observed, even the entertainment business is in crisis. Hollywood studios are laying off employees. The number of new scripted TV series is down. That’s because entertainment is being swallowed up by distraction (TikTok, Instagram). People stay on their phones because it’s easier. Each object of distraction lasts only a few seconds and doesn’t require any cognitive work; the audience just keeps scrolling.
Our dopamine-driven brains drive us to choose cheap distraction over entertainment and art. A 15-second video causes a dopamine release in the brain, which creates a desire for more stimulus, which leads to the habit of more scrolling on your phone, which leads to an addiction to more stimulus. If distraction is swallowing entertainment in our culture, addiction is also swallowing distraction. Gioia wrote: “The tech platforms aren’t like the Medici in Florence, or those other rich patrons of the arts. They don’t want to find the next Michelangelo or Mozart. They want to create a world of junkies — because they will be the dealers.”
The phenomenon Gioia describes isn’t happening just to culture; it recurs across American life. We have access to wonderful things. But they require effort, so we settle for the junky things that provide the quick dopamine hits. We could all be eating a Mediterranean diet, but instead it’s potato chips and cherry Coke. We could enjoy the richness of full awareness, but booze, weed and other drugs provide that quick reward. Think of all the things in American life that seem to offer that burst of stimulation but threaten to be addictive — gambling, porn, video games, checking email.
The result is we’re now in a culture in which we want worse things — the cheap hit over the long flourishing. You reach for immediate gratification, but it fails to satisfy. It just puts you on a hamster wheel of looking for the next mild stimulus and pretty soon you’re in the land of addiction and junk food, you just keep scrolling, you just keep snacking. As the psychiatrist Anna Lembke writes in her book “Dopamine Nation,” “The paradox is that hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, leads to anhedonia, which is the inability to enjoy.”
The great volume of advice that flows from these people seems to fall into three buckets. First, there is the self-binding bucket. Create rules so you don’t have easy access to the things that tempt you: No phones in school. No carbs in your diet. No alcohol in the house. A woman I once knew got dumped by her boyfriend; of course she came home with a big tub of ice cream.
Halfway through the tub she grew disgusted with herself and threw it in the trash. Ten minutes later she was digging through the trash so she could eat some more. Finally, she poured dishwashing soap on the ice cream to help her resist temptation. Effective self-binding.
Then there is the here and now bucket. Don’t go searching for the next dopamine hit; enjoy the life that you already have around you. The neuroscientist Kent Berridge has shown that the wanting circuits in the brain are different from the liking circuits. So try to stimulate the liking circuits by amping up your enjoyment of the life you already have.
For example, Lembke, the psychiatrist, had a patient who suffered from depression and anxiety and spent her life plugged into Instagram, YouTube and all the rest. Lembke suggested that the patient walk through her days without any devices and let her own thoughts surface.
The patient was dumbstruck at the suggestion. “Why would I do that?” she asked. Lembke said it’s a way of becoming familiar with yourself and not being consumed by distractions. “But it’s so boring,” the patient countered. Boredom can be good, an opportunity for reflection, Lembke argued. Finally, the patient agreed to put down her phone during walks. Later, she reported back to Lembke: “It was hard at first. But then I got used to it and even kind of liked it. I started noticing the trees.”
The third bucket is the higher desires bucket. That’s based on the premise that you usually can’t control a desire through sheer willpower. But you can replace a low desire with a higher desire. Pregnant women give up alcohol because the appeal of a drink is dwarfed by their love for their coming child.
Dopamine can sometimes sound like the bad guy in this conversation, but all in all, it’s an awesome neurotransmitter. It’s what drives us to create, to learn, to build, to improve. Dopamine pushes us to boldly go where no person has gone before. America was practically built on dopamine. As William Casey King argues in his book “Ambition, a History,” throughout most of European history, ambition was regarded as a terrible sin. But when the New World was
discovered, people decided that ambition is mostly a virtue, driving us to explore.
The problem with our culture today is not too much desire but the miniaturization of desire, settling for these small, short-term hits. Our culture used to be full of institutions that sought to arouse people’s higher desires — the love of God, the love of country, the love of learning, the love of being excellent at a craft. Sermons, teachers, mentors and the whole apparatus of moral formation were there to elongate people’s time horizons and arouse the highest desires.
The culture of consumerism, of secularism, of hedonism has undermined those institutions and that important work. The culture has changed. As Philip Rieff noticed all the way back in his 1966 book, “The Triumph of the Therapeutic,” “Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased.”
We have schools to train our minds and gyms to train our bodies. We get less help training, elevating and regulating our desires. History suggests you can elevate people’s desires by giving them access to what is truly worth wanting. I imagine the cultural decline that Gioia described in his essay can be turned around if people can experience, at school or somewhere else, the emotional impact of a great film, a great novel, a great concert. It’s more desirable than a TikTok. Once you’ve tasted the fine wine, it’s harder to settle for Kool-Aid.
Tuesday, October 1
The discussion groups will be running as normal this week, for those who already are on the island. Please do not travel to the island to participate; instead, join the conversation on Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
Balance is the key to many aspects in life. Our author for this week asserts that self-obsessing can keep us alive but also ruin our happiness.
Stop Obsessing and Get Happier
Arthur Brooks, The Atlantic 9.26.24
If you haven’t experienced serious depression, you almost certainly know someone who has. According to Gallup, the proportion of Americans who have been diagnosed with clinical depression at some point in their lifetime reached an all-time high last year, at 29 percent. People describe such a spell as involving a suffocating sadness, an inability to feel pleasure, and a lethargy that makes the smallest tasks seem insurmountable.
Someone I knew and loved for many years, who lived with disabling depression, told me, “All I think about is myself,” she told me. Her depression, she said, was like living with a person who won’t stop talking, droning on and on about the most tedious topics in the world and making it impossible to concentrate on anything else. This is a phenomenon known as maladaptive self-focus, which does indeed characterize—and perpetuate—major depression.
This symptom contains valuable information for all of us. Even if, mercifully, you are not depressed, you would nonetheless probably like to be happier. You think about yourself a great deal, as we all do, but this almost certainly hurts your happiness, even if your self-preoccupation is not maladaptive. Fortunately, you can learn to think about yourself less—and reap benefits for your well-being.
One study revealed that when one man talked with another man, about 53 percent of the conversation, on average, was spent discussing his own experiences or relationships. When a woman spoke with another woman, she talked about herself and her relationships or experiences about 39 percent of the time. But that is just the beginning; typically when we aren’t talking to others, or are not otherwise engaged, our brains switch to the default mode network—at which point our thinking becomes almost entirely self-referential. Even while we sleep, we are inevitably the star in our dreams. We basically think and talk about ourselves all day and all night.
Researchers have shown that people who think about themselves a lot tend to get along well with others and get ahead in life. Even when such self-focus is pathological, as it is with narcissists, it can still confer benefits. As two psychologists argued in 2015, and other studies have largely confirmed, narcissists tend to do well in short-term mating and dominance hierarchies. In other words, they find it easy to get dates and are initially persuasive as leaders.
That’s the upside, but the downside is very significant. Constant self-absorption generally makes you feel terrible. One 2002 meta-analysis of more than 200 studies found a marked positive correlation between self-focused attention and negative affect (bad feelings). Excessive self-referential thinking appears to be especially misery-making for anxious people.
In addition, highly self-focused people tend to struggle to maintain emotional stability. The reason for this is that thinking about yourself causes your worries and afflictions to intrude more into your thinking, and that tends to induce such harmful emotions as anger and jealousy. Arguably worst of all, self-referential thinking can make relationships harder. I noted above that narcissists do well in short-term dating, a finding long-observed by researchers. That is one kind of success, but not something associated with the deep satisfaction of an enduring relationship. Notably, casual sex lowers happiness for most people. That is particularly true for women, who are 21 percent more likely than men to say that a hookup ultimately makes them feel lonely, 19 percent more likely to say that it makes them unhappy, and 14 percent more likely to say that it makes them feel regret.
As I have previously written, studies across the span of people’s lives show that secure, long-term relationships are key to the highest levels of life satisfaction. This requires thinking a lot about your partner, and thus less about yourself, which leads to higher, more stable well-being. Most of life is made up of experiences and impulses we need to keep in balance. Exercise is good, but if you get too obsessed with it, you can harm your physical and mental health. So it is with thinking about yourself. You can’t stop entirely, nor would you want to if you care about staying alive and well. But I am confident that most of us could cut back a bit on the self-referential thinking and gain substantial happiness benefits. The problem is that willpower alone doesn’t work because, ironically, “I won’t think about myself” is an entirely self-referential intention. The solution is constructive distraction.
1. Bring happiness to others.
A number of researchers over the years have undertaken experiments in which participants are assigned activities and behaviors that they enjoy, as opposed to actions that elevate others (such as making a point of expressing gratitude). You might think that the pleasure principle would win out, but the scholars have consistently found that doing something for another person confers a significant happiness advantage over having a good time for yourself. Two effects are surely at work here: First, when you are looking for ways to help another, you are distracted from your own preoccupations and problems; second, by bringing happiness to someone else, you can “catch” that happiness through what behavioral scientists call emotional contagion.
2. Serve the world.
An act of kindness toward another person works well, so does an act of kindness to the world in general. Researchers compared acts of generosity directed at specific individuals with general good deeds toward the broader world. This didn’t entail Nobel Peace Prize–winning actions, but simply such small-scale generous, considerate behavior as picking up litter or donating to a charity. The researchers found that these good deeds were similar in their beneficial effect on well-being as those aimed at a particular individual.
3. Be more mindful.
One of the most common characteristics of self-referential thinking is that it is both retrospective and prospective, about what I’ve done and what I plan to do. So it makes sense that greater discipline about paying attention to the present might help to displace the self-focused thinking that ruminates on the past and the future. One way to improve that present-focused discipline is through mindfulness training, and this comes in at least two basic varieties: focused attention (such as single-point meditation) and open monitoring (such as training to observe the moment with reaction or judgment). Practicing these techniques has been shown by researchers to lower self-referential thinking and reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety. These days, any
number of mindfulness methods and apps are widely available to help you learn these skills.
Early Christian writers, such as Saint Augustine in the fourth century, are credited with the concept of a state of being that involves being curved in on oneself leading to a restless discomfort with life. Augustine’s famous answer for this, in the first paragraph of his Confessions, was “Our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee.” Whether centered on God or not, spiritual traditions teach the paradoxical truth that only by looking outside ourselves can
we find ourselves. In the words of the 13th-century Zen Buddhist master Dōgen Zenji: To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.
Stop Obsessing and Get Happier
Arthur Brooks, The Atlantic 9.26.24
If you haven’t experienced serious depression, you almost certainly know someone who has. According to Gallup, the proportion of Americans who have been diagnosed with clinical depression at some point in their lifetime reached an all-time high last year, at 29 percent. People describe such a spell as involving a suffocating sadness, an inability to feel pleasure, and a lethargy that makes the smallest tasks seem insurmountable.
Someone I knew and loved for many years, who lived with disabling depression, told me, “All I think about is myself,” she told me. Her depression, she said, was like living with a person who won’t stop talking, droning on and on about the most tedious topics in the world and making it impossible to concentrate on anything else. This is a phenomenon known as maladaptive self-focus, which does indeed characterize—and perpetuate—major depression.
This symptom contains valuable information for all of us. Even if, mercifully, you are not depressed, you would nonetheless probably like to be happier. You think about yourself a great deal, as we all do, but this almost certainly hurts your happiness, even if your self-preoccupation is not maladaptive. Fortunately, you can learn to think about yourself less—and reap benefits for your well-being.
One study revealed that when one man talked with another man, about 53 percent of the conversation, on average, was spent discussing his own experiences or relationships. When a woman spoke with another woman, she talked about herself and her relationships or experiences about 39 percent of the time. But that is just the beginning; typically when we aren’t talking to others, or are not otherwise engaged, our brains switch to the default mode network—at which point our thinking becomes almost entirely self-referential. Even while we sleep, we are inevitably the star in our dreams. We basically think and talk about ourselves all day and all night.
Researchers have shown that people who think about themselves a lot tend to get along well with others and get ahead in life. Even when such self-focus is pathological, as it is with narcissists, it can still confer benefits. As two psychologists argued in 2015, and other studies have largely confirmed, narcissists tend to do well in short-term mating and dominance hierarchies. In other words, they find it easy to get dates and are initially persuasive as leaders.
That’s the upside, but the downside is very significant. Constant self-absorption generally makes you feel terrible. One 2002 meta-analysis of more than 200 studies found a marked positive correlation between self-focused attention and negative affect (bad feelings). Excessive self-referential thinking appears to be especially misery-making for anxious people.
In addition, highly self-focused people tend to struggle to maintain emotional stability. The reason for this is that thinking about yourself causes your worries and afflictions to intrude more into your thinking, and that tends to induce such harmful emotions as anger and jealousy. Arguably worst of all, self-referential thinking can make relationships harder. I noted above that narcissists do well in short-term dating, a finding long-observed by researchers. That is one kind of success, but not something associated with the deep satisfaction of an enduring relationship. Notably, casual sex lowers happiness for most people. That is particularly true for women, who are 21 percent more likely than men to say that a hookup ultimately makes them feel lonely, 19 percent more likely to say that it makes them unhappy, and 14 percent more likely to say that it makes them feel regret.
As I have previously written, studies across the span of people’s lives show that secure, long-term relationships are key to the highest levels of life satisfaction. This requires thinking a lot about your partner, and thus less about yourself, which leads to higher, more stable well-being. Most of life is made up of experiences and impulses we need to keep in balance. Exercise is good, but if you get too obsessed with it, you can harm your physical and mental health. So it is with thinking about yourself. You can’t stop entirely, nor would you want to if you care about staying alive and well. But I am confident that most of us could cut back a bit on the self-referential thinking and gain substantial happiness benefits. The problem is that willpower alone doesn’t work because, ironically, “I won’t think about myself” is an entirely self-referential intention. The solution is constructive distraction.
1. Bring happiness to others.
A number of researchers over the years have undertaken experiments in which participants are assigned activities and behaviors that they enjoy, as opposed to actions that elevate others (such as making a point of expressing gratitude). You might think that the pleasure principle would win out, but the scholars have consistently found that doing something for another person confers a significant happiness advantage over having a good time for yourself. Two effects are surely at work here: First, when you are looking for ways to help another, you are distracted from your own preoccupations and problems; second, by bringing happiness to someone else, you can “catch” that happiness through what behavioral scientists call emotional contagion.
2. Serve the world.
An act of kindness toward another person works well, so does an act of kindness to the world in general. Researchers compared acts of generosity directed at specific individuals with general good deeds toward the broader world. This didn’t entail Nobel Peace Prize–winning actions, but simply such small-scale generous, considerate behavior as picking up litter or donating to a charity. The researchers found that these good deeds were similar in their beneficial effect on well-being as those aimed at a particular individual.
3. Be more mindful.
One of the most common characteristics of self-referential thinking is that it is both retrospective and prospective, about what I’ve done and what I plan to do. So it makes sense that greater discipline about paying attention to the present might help to displace the self-focused thinking that ruminates on the past and the future. One way to improve that present-focused discipline is through mindfulness training, and this comes in at least two basic varieties: focused attention (such as single-point meditation) and open monitoring (such as training to observe the moment with reaction or judgment). Practicing these techniques has been shown by researchers to lower self-referential thinking and reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety. These days, any
number of mindfulness methods and apps are widely available to help you learn these skills.
Early Christian writers, such as Saint Augustine in the fourth century, are credited with the concept of a state of being that involves being curved in on oneself leading to a restless discomfort with life. Augustine’s famous answer for this, in the first paragraph of his Confessions, was “Our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee.” Whether centered on God or not, spiritual traditions teach the paradoxical truth that only by looking outside ourselves can
we find ourselves. In the words of the 13th-century Zen Buddhist master Dōgen Zenji: To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.
Tuesday, September 24
Arthur Brooks is back this week to talk about how to say the unsayable. Recognizing that we are heading into the time when we gather with family and friends, our author gives us some tools to help us to speak our mind without being ostracized. And yes, there is a faith element to this as well.
The Right Way to Say the Unsayable
Arthur Brooks, The Atlantic 9.19.24
As a social scientist, I like to ask people about their most unspeakable view. I am really interested in what people keep bottled up. What I have found over the years is that nearly everyone has beliefs they feel they cannot share. Even under systems that are truly free, which at least nominally permit full and frank expression, you may still be reluctant to divulge certain secretly held beliefs for fear of being ostracized by those you care about. Such shunning is, for normal people, excruciatingly painful. This fear does not mean you are weak or a fraud. Good evolutionary reasons account for your harboring this caution. But if you feel a need to come clean—to say what you really think—you don’t have to be bound by that fear. Understanding how ostracism works, and how you can manage it, will set you free.
For your ancestors, conformity meant survival. When humans clung to one another against the elements, predators, and warlike rival tribes, to go against the group was to risk being cast out and dying alone in the wilderness. We’ve come a long way since those primitive days, of course, but your limbic brain has not caught up with this reality; it is still terrified of social rejection. Indeed, you have a piece of neurological hardware on board called the anterior cingulate cortex, which is dedicated to detecting rejection and making it acutely painful.
Ostracism threatens at least four psychological needs: belonging, self-esteem, control, and meaning. If you are rejected by your friends or family, you lose the identity of belonging to a particular group and the meaning this brings to your life; you feel diminished by disapproval; and you lose control of your social situation. However, some people are able to stand up for their beliefs even in the face of group disapproval. They possess a special virtue: moral courage.
Moral courage, which involves acting in accord with one’s convictions despite a natural fear of retaliation or punishment, is not easy to muster. “It is curious,” Mark Twain wrote, “that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare.” Fortunately, moral courage isn’t just a virtue; it is also a skill that can be developed. Here are four steps to help you do so:
1. Make the threat real.
Fear of ostracism is difficult to deal with because it is a form of worry so we broadly imagine ostracism as really bad and something to be avoided. But when we make our fears specific, we can prepare ourselves and devise defenses. To help you do that, aim to answer the following
questions as precisely as possible:
• What do I believe that I’m not stating because I’m afraid?
• Why exactly do I hold this controversial belief?
• What good could it do if I spoke up?
• Realistically, what would happen if I did?
2. Don’t go in hot.
A lot of the time, people get in trouble for their opinions because they bottle them up and then finally explode with the truth at an inopportune moment or in a way that is especially disadvantageous. For example, if you don’t like how your sister-in-law treats your brother but have held it in, you might find yourself yelling about it in a hostile, unplanned way at the Thanksgiving table. Learn how to manage the best time and manner to share your concern by
answering these questions:
• When is it best to share this information with as little emotion as possible?
• What is the most favorable venue for doing so?
• Who needs advance warning that this is going to happen?
• What form of retribution can I anticipate and thus eliminate?
3. Practice, practice, practice.
An extraordinary facet of human intelligence is our ability to practice future scenarios we have never experienced in order to eliminate errors we have never made. Early in my professorial career, I delivered my economics lectures twice before ever getting in front of the class. I would imagine students getting confused about a hard point of theory, so I’d find different ways to explain it without getting flustered. Similarly, you can practice different ways of saying your hard truths, envision the reaction of the people concerned, and make adjustments. When you confess your contrary belief publicly, make it the tenth time you have heard yourself say the words.
4. Tell it slant and with love.
As you practice telling the truth in different ways, consider the advice that Emily Dickinson gave in her poem “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” In other words, find a way to divulge your belief subtly—indirectly or bit by bit. “The Truth must dazzle gradually,” she advises, “or every man be blind.” Maybe this involves standing up for someone else who holds a controversial view without stating it as your own or suggesting that an issue can be seen in more than one way. Perhaps you can own your view over a period of time rather than dramatically, all at once—like soaking and gently working at a Band-Aid, rather than ripping it right off.
Perhaps after reading all this, you are wondering whether saying what you really think is worth the trouble. That is something you must decide for yourself. Moral courage does not come without risks, and the path of least resistance in our world may be to just swallow your views—or change them to agree with the masses. It is not the easy path. But that’s the point.
The Right Way to Say the Unsayable
Arthur Brooks, The Atlantic 9.19.24
As a social scientist, I like to ask people about their most unspeakable view. I am really interested in what people keep bottled up. What I have found over the years is that nearly everyone has beliefs they feel they cannot share. Even under systems that are truly free, which at least nominally permit full and frank expression, you may still be reluctant to divulge certain secretly held beliefs for fear of being ostracized by those you care about. Such shunning is, for normal people, excruciatingly painful. This fear does not mean you are weak or a fraud. Good evolutionary reasons account for your harboring this caution. But if you feel a need to come clean—to say what you really think—you don’t have to be bound by that fear. Understanding how ostracism works, and how you can manage it, will set you free.
For your ancestors, conformity meant survival. When humans clung to one another against the elements, predators, and warlike rival tribes, to go against the group was to risk being cast out and dying alone in the wilderness. We’ve come a long way since those primitive days, of course, but your limbic brain has not caught up with this reality; it is still terrified of social rejection. Indeed, you have a piece of neurological hardware on board called the anterior cingulate cortex, which is dedicated to detecting rejection and making it acutely painful.
Ostracism threatens at least four psychological needs: belonging, self-esteem, control, and meaning. If you are rejected by your friends or family, you lose the identity of belonging to a particular group and the meaning this brings to your life; you feel diminished by disapproval; and you lose control of your social situation. However, some people are able to stand up for their beliefs even in the face of group disapproval. They possess a special virtue: moral courage.
Moral courage, which involves acting in accord with one’s convictions despite a natural fear of retaliation or punishment, is not easy to muster. “It is curious,” Mark Twain wrote, “that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare.” Fortunately, moral courage isn’t just a virtue; it is also a skill that can be developed. Here are four steps to help you do so:
1. Make the threat real.
Fear of ostracism is difficult to deal with because it is a form of worry so we broadly imagine ostracism as really bad and something to be avoided. But when we make our fears specific, we can prepare ourselves and devise defenses. To help you do that, aim to answer the following
questions as precisely as possible:
• What do I believe that I’m not stating because I’m afraid?
• Why exactly do I hold this controversial belief?
• What good could it do if I spoke up?
• Realistically, what would happen if I did?
2. Don’t go in hot.
A lot of the time, people get in trouble for their opinions because they bottle them up and then finally explode with the truth at an inopportune moment or in a way that is especially disadvantageous. For example, if you don’t like how your sister-in-law treats your brother but have held it in, you might find yourself yelling about it in a hostile, unplanned way at the Thanksgiving table. Learn how to manage the best time and manner to share your concern by
answering these questions:
• When is it best to share this information with as little emotion as possible?
• What is the most favorable venue for doing so?
• Who needs advance warning that this is going to happen?
• What form of retribution can I anticipate and thus eliminate?
3. Practice, practice, practice.
An extraordinary facet of human intelligence is our ability to practice future scenarios we have never experienced in order to eliminate errors we have never made. Early in my professorial career, I delivered my economics lectures twice before ever getting in front of the class. I would imagine students getting confused about a hard point of theory, so I’d find different ways to explain it without getting flustered. Similarly, you can practice different ways of saying your hard truths, envision the reaction of the people concerned, and make adjustments. When you confess your contrary belief publicly, make it the tenth time you have heard yourself say the words.
4. Tell it slant and with love.
As you practice telling the truth in different ways, consider the advice that Emily Dickinson gave in her poem “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” In other words, find a way to divulge your belief subtly—indirectly or bit by bit. “The Truth must dazzle gradually,” she advises, “or every man be blind.” Maybe this involves standing up for someone else who holds a controversial view without stating it as your own or suggesting that an issue can be seen in more than one way. Perhaps you can own your view over a period of time rather than dramatically, all at once—like soaking and gently working at a Band-Aid, rather than ripping it right off.
Perhaps after reading all this, you are wondering whether saying what you really think is worth the trouble. That is something you must decide for yourself. Moral courage does not come without risks, and the path of least resistance in our world may be to just swallow your views—or change them to agree with the masses. It is not the easy path. But that’s the point.
Tuesday, September 17
Are you ready to take a break from all that is happening in our news cycle and focus on yourself for a moment? Our author for this next week asks: What does a life well lived look like? He gives us these three ways to view our lives so far and to plot a course for the new future: befriending our mind, using values as a compass, evaluate what we spend our daily/hourly attention on.
Three Keys to Mindfulness
Willem Kuyken, Ph.D., Psychology Today 8.22.24
Hiking in the Lake District of England, I stopped for lunch in a cemetery. There was a headstone with a name and this simple inscription: “A Life Well Lived.” What does a life well lived look like? It’s a question that we’ve all asked in one form or another.
Perhaps you’re interested in living your life well, or you have a nagging feeling that your life isn’t quite as you’d imagined, or maybe you appreciate that you have a good life and you’d like to keep it that way—or even build on these foundations, because who knows what the years
ahead may bring? What does mindfulness have to do with this? Mindfulness offers three keys that can help you unlock a life well lived.
1. Befriending Your Mind
In order to befriend your mind, first ask yourself: What does friendship mean to you? What words or phrases best describe your friendships? What does a good friend do for you — now and over the years — through the good and the bad patches of your life?
I’ve posed these questions to hundreds of people in workshops around the world, and here is what people say most often. “Mindfulness is about our mind being and becoming our best friend.” Does your idea of a good friend describe how you feel about your own mind? Maybe you already talk to yourself in affirming ways, with messages like “You’ve got this,” “Steady,” “Take a breath,” and “I’ve got your back; it will be OK.” Or maybe the voice you use with yourself is critical — “I can’t do that” — or demanding — “I don’t have time.”
If you already have a sense of your mind as a friend, you can always develop that friendship further. You can choose to befriend your mind, so it becomes as practiced and natural as putting on your shoes before you go out. If you don’t feel like your mind is your friend, it is possible to befriend your mind so it accompanies you in whatever challenges you experience in life.
2. Using Your Values as Your Compass
Certain ideas and values have become mainstream:
I measure myself by how much I get done and what I'm bringing in, whether on a personal level or for the greater good. I put myself first because it is a dog-eat-dog world. I've got to always be on point—you know, look amazing, stay youthful, stay in shape. If I let my guard down, I’ll get taken advantage of. Busyness is good. Being tough is good; being kind is soft.
From an early age, we feel pressure to have an opinion about who we are, other people, what we like and don’t like, our favorite this or that, and what we want to do when we grow up. We may claim certain “values” just to avoid uncertainty or to avoid feeling ashamed of not knowing what our values are. With all the pressure on us to do well, be better, achieve, prove we deserve our place in the world, or look a certain way, we may simply adopt prevalent ideas without question. When we do, we may end up pursuing someone else’s vision for our life.
Of course, productivity is necessary, but few people at the end of their lives look back and say, “I had a good life because I was productive and successful in this dog-eat-dog, getting-ahead world.” And if they do, did it make them and the people around them happy?
Ask yourself right now what makes you happy. What or whom do you care most about? What are you passionate about? No need to overthink—just note what comes up, then let it go and see what else comes up. And don’t worry if not much arises; that’s fine, too.
Your answers to these questions of what matters most point to your values. We’re all different, and an important part of living well is knowing what’s meaningful to us.
Here are some of the values that people often mention.
Good relationships with my loved ones, family, friends. Faith. Laughter. Being true to myself. Managing change, it’s a part of life. Coping. Adventure. Being safe. A rich bank of memories.
Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, your values, like a compass, point you in the right direction. Values are at the root of mindfulness; they guide how we are in the world and what we say and do. And just as important, they guide what we don’t say or do. Faith provides a set of values that can provide a sense of belonging and meaning.
Mindfulness will bring to life how your values can be your sense of direction, your compass. Your role is to explore your values and how they can guide you. To embrace your values and be courageous enough to value what is truly important. Try asking, “Is this enlarging and in line with my values or ultimately diminishing?” Seek out what enlarges you, whatever that is. It may be people in your life, sports, art, a favorite phrase, or an idea. Who and what enlarges you? Can they be what protects you, vitalizes you, and gives you a sense of purpose?
3. Waking Up and Paying Attention
There are a lot of pulls on our attention, and this can give us a sense of being fragmented. With all the demands on us, it’s easy to react by checking out and sleepwalking through life. Zoning out can be comfortable, but there are many good reasons to live with a sense of being fully awake.
Leading the life we want means waking up and paying attention. Attention is one of your most important resources. What you focus on shapes what you think, your decisions, what you feel, and, ultimately, your reality. It's like the spotlight that illuminates certain conversations, people, successes, problems, and feelings while leaving others in the shadows.
How much of today have you been awake? I don’t mean awake literally; I mean awake in the sense of feeling alive. Twenty-five percent, 50 percent, most of the day?
Practical Steps to Begin
Every moment is already here, waiting for you to pay attention to it. In a sense, you don’t need to do anything differently. It is more of an adjustment in how you approach your day, choosing to pay attention on purpose, with attitudes of curiosity and friendliness.
1. Start Small: Begin with simple mindfulness practices like mindful breathing.
2. Reflect Daily: Take a few moments each day to reflect on your attitude and values.
3. Stay Consistent: Regular practice is key to developing and sustaining mindfulness.
Three Keys to Mindfulness
Willem Kuyken, Ph.D., Psychology Today 8.22.24
Hiking in the Lake District of England, I stopped for lunch in a cemetery. There was a headstone with a name and this simple inscription: “A Life Well Lived.” What does a life well lived look like? It’s a question that we’ve all asked in one form or another.
Perhaps you’re interested in living your life well, or you have a nagging feeling that your life isn’t quite as you’d imagined, or maybe you appreciate that you have a good life and you’d like to keep it that way—or even build on these foundations, because who knows what the years
ahead may bring? What does mindfulness have to do with this? Mindfulness offers three keys that can help you unlock a life well lived.
1. Befriending Your Mind
In order to befriend your mind, first ask yourself: What does friendship mean to you? What words or phrases best describe your friendships? What does a good friend do for you — now and over the years — through the good and the bad patches of your life?
I’ve posed these questions to hundreds of people in workshops around the world, and here is what people say most often. “Mindfulness is about our mind being and becoming our best friend.” Does your idea of a good friend describe how you feel about your own mind? Maybe you already talk to yourself in affirming ways, with messages like “You’ve got this,” “Steady,” “Take a breath,” and “I’ve got your back; it will be OK.” Or maybe the voice you use with yourself is critical — “I can’t do that” — or demanding — “I don’t have time.”
If you already have a sense of your mind as a friend, you can always develop that friendship further. You can choose to befriend your mind, so it becomes as practiced and natural as putting on your shoes before you go out. If you don’t feel like your mind is your friend, it is possible to befriend your mind so it accompanies you in whatever challenges you experience in life.
2. Using Your Values as Your Compass
Certain ideas and values have become mainstream:
I measure myself by how much I get done and what I'm bringing in, whether on a personal level or for the greater good. I put myself first because it is a dog-eat-dog world. I've got to always be on point—you know, look amazing, stay youthful, stay in shape. If I let my guard down, I’ll get taken advantage of. Busyness is good. Being tough is good; being kind is soft.
From an early age, we feel pressure to have an opinion about who we are, other people, what we like and don’t like, our favorite this or that, and what we want to do when we grow up. We may claim certain “values” just to avoid uncertainty or to avoid feeling ashamed of not knowing what our values are. With all the pressure on us to do well, be better, achieve, prove we deserve our place in the world, or look a certain way, we may simply adopt prevalent ideas without question. When we do, we may end up pursuing someone else’s vision for our life.
Of course, productivity is necessary, but few people at the end of their lives look back and say, “I had a good life because I was productive and successful in this dog-eat-dog, getting-ahead world.” And if they do, did it make them and the people around them happy?
Ask yourself right now what makes you happy. What or whom do you care most about? What are you passionate about? No need to overthink—just note what comes up, then let it go and see what else comes up. And don’t worry if not much arises; that’s fine, too.
Your answers to these questions of what matters most point to your values. We’re all different, and an important part of living well is knowing what’s meaningful to us.
Here are some of the values that people often mention.
Good relationships with my loved ones, family, friends. Faith. Laughter. Being true to myself. Managing change, it’s a part of life. Coping. Adventure. Being safe. A rich bank of memories.
Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, your values, like a compass, point you in the right direction. Values are at the root of mindfulness; they guide how we are in the world and what we say and do. And just as important, they guide what we don’t say or do. Faith provides a set of values that can provide a sense of belonging and meaning.
Mindfulness will bring to life how your values can be your sense of direction, your compass. Your role is to explore your values and how they can guide you. To embrace your values and be courageous enough to value what is truly important. Try asking, “Is this enlarging and in line with my values or ultimately diminishing?” Seek out what enlarges you, whatever that is. It may be people in your life, sports, art, a favorite phrase, or an idea. Who and what enlarges you? Can they be what protects you, vitalizes you, and gives you a sense of purpose?
3. Waking Up and Paying Attention
There are a lot of pulls on our attention, and this can give us a sense of being fragmented. With all the demands on us, it’s easy to react by checking out and sleepwalking through life. Zoning out can be comfortable, but there are many good reasons to live with a sense of being fully awake.
Leading the life we want means waking up and paying attention. Attention is one of your most important resources. What you focus on shapes what you think, your decisions, what you feel, and, ultimately, your reality. It's like the spotlight that illuminates certain conversations, people, successes, problems, and feelings while leaving others in the shadows.
How much of today have you been awake? I don’t mean awake literally; I mean awake in the sense of feeling alive. Twenty-five percent, 50 percent, most of the day?
Practical Steps to Begin
Every moment is already here, waiting for you to pay attention to it. In a sense, you don’t need to do anything differently. It is more of an adjustment in how you approach your day, choosing to pay attention on purpose, with attitudes of curiosity and friendliness.
1. Start Small: Begin with simple mindfulness practices like mindful breathing.
2. Reflect Daily: Take a few moments each day to reflect on your attitude and values.
3. Stay Consistent: Regular practice is key to developing and sustaining mindfulness.
Tuesday, September 10
This week we are going to talk about faith through the lens of living like a Christian even if you don't believe all of it. Living like a Christian - seeking love, unity and forgiveness - is a path towards happiness or at least having a sense of a greater purpose in life. The article is a book review in Christianity Today which is a more conservative, evangelical magazine when compared to the Christian Century. ... which makes this article even more interesting in my opinion.
Live Like a Christian, Even if You’re Not Sure What You Believe
A book review by Aaron Damiani, Christianity Today 8.20.24
Author Elizabeth Oldfield is a failed atheist. She originally lost her faith while working as a religion writer for the BBC. Yet she found herself dissatisfied with the bleakness of modern, irreligious life. She craved the communal meaning and moral vision of Christianity, despite her intellectual doubts.
Eventually, Oldfield accepted the welcome of intelligent, kind-hearted Christians who were unafraid of her questions. They showed her a way of life and a quality of love that drew her back into the Christian faith through practices and postures that helped her become more human. In her book Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times, Oldfield extends the same welcome to her readers, especially those who are allergic to religious dogma but are nevertheless hungry for meaning and luminosity, longing to be “free, resilient, joyful, brave.”
Oldfield, now host of The Sacred podcast and a member of an intentional Christian community outside London, offers a vision of human flourishing through a surprising paradigm: the seven deadly sins. She makes a fresh, literate case that the stubborn old vices of wrath, sloth, avarice, lust, pride, envy, and gluttony are still with us. In the words of her first chapter title, language borrowed from the Christian author Francis Spufford, we still have a “human propensity to f— things up.”
And yet, each of these sins offers an opportunity to embrace a more connected human life of peacemaking, community, belovedness, and even ecstasy. As a friend to many non-failed atheists, Oldfield is careful to stay in conversation with people of little to no Christian faith. Her approach is gentle, calibrated to avoid putting out a smoldering wick or breaking a bruised reed of spiritual curiosity.
Her invitation is this: If you yearn to become a more loving and generous person, to mend our world with justice and healing, try the Christian path. It’s useful, even if you aren’t sure about some (or even all) of its truth claims. Lay down the burden of knowing exactly what you believe and take up some life-giving behaviors instead. And if God surprises you with love, then let it be.
For instance, in one chapter (“Wrath: from Polarization to Peacemaking”), Oldfield recounts a miserable experience she had speaking to a leftist political gathering where she had been asked to represent the religious perspective. Reacting to rude and dismissive treatment, she found herself reaching for categories coined by author Jon Yates, writing off people who are “Not Like Me,” or NLM for short, in contrast to “People [who are] Like Me,” or PLM. She illustrates how prevalent this dynamic is within human relationships, no matter which issue, cause, or belief is in play. By giving in to base us-and-them instincts, we form tribes and reduce people to less-than-human objects of contempt. Yet when Oldfield tried practicing the teachings of Jesus from the
Sermon on the Mount, she found a way to return to the conversation and bless those who cursed her.
As she observes, “these people who looked like the enemy, who perhaps saw me as an enemy, turned out to be walking worlds of meaning, bruised and beautiful and as endlessly fascinating as humans always are.” Oldfield then commends peacemaking practices that Christians, Buddhists, atheists, and others have found helpful, such as loving your enemies, standing your ground, and interrupting cycles of retribution with a simple question: “Can we start again?”
Throughout the book, Oldfield shows herself to be a generous social weaver. She treats the Christian tradition less as a homeland to protect than a well-worn hearth of hospitality, where neighbors of all stripes can sit around the table and yearn for the same transformation of soul and society.
There was, however, one subject that Oldfield didn’t mention often enough: the Cross. In a book about sin and its cure, especially written from a Christian perspective, this was a missed opportunity. Near the end of the book, Oldfield explains her reticence:
You may have noticed I haven’t talked a lot about the crucifixion in this book. … I don’t think I can make it “useful.” This is a book designed for those in search of spiritual core strength and curious about what the practices, postures and principles of Christianity might have to teach them. It’s not primarily for those actively seeking faith. … The crucifixion, for me, is Holy Ground, a place to approach only if you fall into the latter category.
How “useful” is the cross of Christ in addressing our deepest human ills and making us fully alive in turbulent times? We could do worse than pose this question to members of the global, suffering church, including the Anglican Dalits of India, the evangelicals imprisoned in China, the Coptic Christians of Egypt, and the Catholics in Myanmar. They might explain how the Cross offers a model of reconciliation amid conflict, an icon of Christ’s generosity in response to treachery, and a crown of humility before the preening pride of this age.
I agree with Oldfield that the Crucifixion is holy ground. Yet from the beginning, it was equally a public scandal, open for all to see, not just because it was God’s greatest gift but also because it put the human condition on perfect display. Scoundrels and soldiers, including at least one centurion, all watched the debacle up close. They were up to their ears in deadly sins, yet there they stood on holy ground, spitting distance from the Son of God. Some of them believed, despite themselves.
Believe it or not, this kind of thing still happens. Oldfield, using her considerable gifts of communication, could have brought her readers there without insulting their intelligence or violating their well-earned trust.
Toward the end of each chapter, Oldfield offers readers a practice or two that will help curb darker impulses and ground them in virtue. She downplays theological distinctives in favor of an ecumenical approach, identifying some resonance with other faith traditions. By inviting us into practices like gratitude, charitable giving, “begin again” conversations, and technology sabbaths, Oldfield is betting that they might open minds, souls, and communities to God’s love.
Oldfield is correct that the Cross is not a math equation to solve. The Cross is a mystery to live, by grace, as we cast away the works of darkness and put on the armor of light, from one degree of glory to the next.
Live Like a Christian, Even if You’re Not Sure What You Believe
A book review by Aaron Damiani, Christianity Today 8.20.24
Author Elizabeth Oldfield is a failed atheist. She originally lost her faith while working as a religion writer for the BBC. Yet she found herself dissatisfied with the bleakness of modern, irreligious life. She craved the communal meaning and moral vision of Christianity, despite her intellectual doubts.
Eventually, Oldfield accepted the welcome of intelligent, kind-hearted Christians who were unafraid of her questions. They showed her a way of life and a quality of love that drew her back into the Christian faith through practices and postures that helped her become more human. In her book Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times, Oldfield extends the same welcome to her readers, especially those who are allergic to religious dogma but are nevertheless hungry for meaning and luminosity, longing to be “free, resilient, joyful, brave.”
Oldfield, now host of The Sacred podcast and a member of an intentional Christian community outside London, offers a vision of human flourishing through a surprising paradigm: the seven deadly sins. She makes a fresh, literate case that the stubborn old vices of wrath, sloth, avarice, lust, pride, envy, and gluttony are still with us. In the words of her first chapter title, language borrowed from the Christian author Francis Spufford, we still have a “human propensity to f— things up.”
And yet, each of these sins offers an opportunity to embrace a more connected human life of peacemaking, community, belovedness, and even ecstasy. As a friend to many non-failed atheists, Oldfield is careful to stay in conversation with people of little to no Christian faith. Her approach is gentle, calibrated to avoid putting out a smoldering wick or breaking a bruised reed of spiritual curiosity.
Her invitation is this: If you yearn to become a more loving and generous person, to mend our world with justice and healing, try the Christian path. It’s useful, even if you aren’t sure about some (or even all) of its truth claims. Lay down the burden of knowing exactly what you believe and take up some life-giving behaviors instead. And if God surprises you with love, then let it be.
For instance, in one chapter (“Wrath: from Polarization to Peacemaking”), Oldfield recounts a miserable experience she had speaking to a leftist political gathering where she had been asked to represent the religious perspective. Reacting to rude and dismissive treatment, she found herself reaching for categories coined by author Jon Yates, writing off people who are “Not Like Me,” or NLM for short, in contrast to “People [who are] Like Me,” or PLM. She illustrates how prevalent this dynamic is within human relationships, no matter which issue, cause, or belief is in play. By giving in to base us-and-them instincts, we form tribes and reduce people to less-than-human objects of contempt. Yet when Oldfield tried practicing the teachings of Jesus from the
Sermon on the Mount, she found a way to return to the conversation and bless those who cursed her.
As she observes, “these people who looked like the enemy, who perhaps saw me as an enemy, turned out to be walking worlds of meaning, bruised and beautiful and as endlessly fascinating as humans always are.” Oldfield then commends peacemaking practices that Christians, Buddhists, atheists, and others have found helpful, such as loving your enemies, standing your ground, and interrupting cycles of retribution with a simple question: “Can we start again?”
Throughout the book, Oldfield shows herself to be a generous social weaver. She treats the Christian tradition less as a homeland to protect than a well-worn hearth of hospitality, where neighbors of all stripes can sit around the table and yearn for the same transformation of soul and society.
There was, however, one subject that Oldfield didn’t mention often enough: the Cross. In a book about sin and its cure, especially written from a Christian perspective, this was a missed opportunity. Near the end of the book, Oldfield explains her reticence:
You may have noticed I haven’t talked a lot about the crucifixion in this book. … I don’t think I can make it “useful.” This is a book designed for those in search of spiritual core strength and curious about what the practices, postures and principles of Christianity might have to teach them. It’s not primarily for those actively seeking faith. … The crucifixion, for me, is Holy Ground, a place to approach only if you fall into the latter category.
How “useful” is the cross of Christ in addressing our deepest human ills and making us fully alive in turbulent times? We could do worse than pose this question to members of the global, suffering church, including the Anglican Dalits of India, the evangelicals imprisoned in China, the Coptic Christians of Egypt, and the Catholics in Myanmar. They might explain how the Cross offers a model of reconciliation amid conflict, an icon of Christ’s generosity in response to treachery, and a crown of humility before the preening pride of this age.
I agree with Oldfield that the Crucifixion is holy ground. Yet from the beginning, it was equally a public scandal, open for all to see, not just because it was God’s greatest gift but also because it put the human condition on perfect display. Scoundrels and soldiers, including at least one centurion, all watched the debacle up close. They were up to their ears in deadly sins, yet there they stood on holy ground, spitting distance from the Son of God. Some of them believed, despite themselves.
Believe it or not, this kind of thing still happens. Oldfield, using her considerable gifts of communication, could have brought her readers there without insulting their intelligence or violating their well-earned trust.
Toward the end of each chapter, Oldfield offers readers a practice or two that will help curb darker impulses and ground them in virtue. She downplays theological distinctives in favor of an ecumenical approach, identifying some resonance with other faith traditions. By inviting us into practices like gratitude, charitable giving, “begin again” conversations, and technology sabbaths, Oldfield is betting that they might open minds, souls, and communities to God’s love.
Oldfield is correct that the Cross is not a math equation to solve. The Cross is a mystery to live, by grace, as we cast away the works of darkness and put on the armor of light, from one degree of glory to the next.
Tuesday, September 3
The NY Times has started a series of personal essays about how to live with regret. The first essay is about the complicated feelings of regret the author feels about becoming a parent.
Here is how the series begins: Who among us hasn’t spent at least one fitful night thinking over something we said or did that we wish we could take back. Eventually, we push these thoughts out of our minds and drift off to sleep. But perhaps we shouldn’t discard them so quickly. Perhaps, if we sat with it for a minute, regret could teach us something.
How to Live With Regret
Cornelia Channing, NY Times 8.8.24
“No regrets.” It’s a phrase you come across a lot these days. It’s on T-shirts and bumper stickers. It is tattooed on forearms and emblazoned on the covers of self-help books. At first glance, it seems like a pretty straightforward bit of wisdom. After all, regret is a dirty word. Wouldn’t it be better, and healthier, to simply move on? No regrets. It’s a nice idea. But is it real?
Who among us hasn’t spent at least one fitful night thinking over something we said or did that we wish we could take back. Eventually, we push these thoughts out of our minds and drift off to sleep. But perhaps we shouldn’t discard them so quickly. Perhaps, if we sat with it for a minute, regret could teach us something. In his book “The Power of Regret” the writer Daniel Pink argues that regret is an unavoidable fact of life and that it should be embraced as a useful and instructive emotion. What we regret, he says, can teach us about who we are. It is a tool that can help tune our moral compasses, strengthen our values and keep us from repeating the same mistakes over and over again.
In an effort to better understand the nature of regret, and the role it plays in all our lives, Times Opinion is starting “How to Live With Regret,” a new series of personal essays in which writers grapple with regrets of all kinds. In our first installment, the writer Miguel Macias discusses the complicated feelings of regret he has around having a child.
The Emotion I Didn’t Expect as a Parent: Regret, by Michael Marcias
I’ve always been a little suspicious of regret. As someone who has suffered from depression for many years, I’ve learned to focus on the positive. I could, and did, apply this same logic to my daughter, focusing on all of the wonderful things that parenthood has brought: Olivia’s smile, for instance. She is happier than I probably have ever been, and what an incredible blessing. But there have been hard moments too. And if I allowed myself to regret having a child, even for a moment, what would that mean? Would it make me a horrible person? And even if it did, it wouldn’t change the reality.
I thought regret was a dangerous and unhelpful feeling, so I pushed it out of my mind. But pretending it wasn’t there did not make it go away. And eventually I learned to stop trying to banish it. I tried instead to sit with the feeling and stare at it head on for a few minutes. What could I learn from it? And somehow, I have found comfort in allowing myself to feel regret. I have always had a bit of a rebellious nature, and it feels, in a way, pleasantly subversive and liberating to allow myself this forbidden thought, even in the privacy of my own mind. It is at the very least a reprieve from the feeling that parenthood should be a constant delight.
Like when Olivia refuses to stay still for even a single minute so I can change her diaper, or when I look away from her for just a few seconds and find that she has managed to get into trouble. I could continue the laundry list of things that drive me crazy — I think most parents know what they are. We are supposed to love it, to think it is the most wonderful thing we have ever experienced. We are told we will become better people as a consequence of being parents. And maybe that’s true for some people. But there are other truths as well.
I am not a perfect father. Heck, I’m not a perfect person. I do the best I can. But there are some things about me that have not changed. Like the fact that, despite my love for Olivia I don’t really enjoy playing with her. I mean, I can play for 10 to 20 minutes, but after that I get bored and frustrated that I am wasting time, and that my to-do list is just growing. Yes, I am that person.
Having a child might not be the best decision I’ve ever made. Not just for myself, but for my daughter. But allowing myself to accept that having a child may not have been “right” has been humbling and comforting. It has forced me to admit to myself that I will never know if this, or any, decision was the right one.
In my mind, the notion of regret is directly connected to the notion of certainty. Most people need some kind of certainty in life. We try to make life simple; we want our choices to be clear. Just like optimism, it’s probably a survival tactic. We need to think that things will get better in order to keep going. After all, who can live a life where we are always second-guessing our decisions? It’s easier by far to tell ourselves that everything happens for a reason; it’s definitely less painful not to continuously revise our own history, or simply be convinced that we have made no mistakes.
But life is long, and it has many chapters. We open new doors and close old ones. We change jobs, we marry, we divorce; we move to other neighborhoods, other cities, other countries. Friendships start, end or change over time. We are healthy, we are sick. We lose people we love. At every turn we leave behind versions of ourselves that we will never be and versions of our lives that we will never live. How can we possibly not second-guess anything? Not wonder how things might have been if we had made that other decision, taken the other job, gone on a date with that other person? If we don’t allow ourselves to feel regret -- really feel it and come to some sort of peace with it — we risk being haunted by it.
And so I face my feelings of regret about having a daughter. I am able to contemplate them, allow myself to own it, and let it go. It doesn’t consume me. I have come to understand that my abundant love for my daughter and the complicated feelings of regret I have around becoming a parent do not contradict one another. They both are true. And, though I can’t be sure, I suspect that I’m not the first parent ever to feel this way. I suspect that others grapple with similar regret, though they may feel they can’t express it.
Olivia has taught me a great deal in the short time she’s been alive. For instance, when I am in a bad mood, everything in the world seems irritating: the person walking too slowly in front of me, the bicyclist riding on the sidewalk way too fast, the teens standing in the middle of the street being loud. Then Olivia waves and smiles at a stranger from her stroller, saying “Hola,” and suddenly the world melts. People smile at her, wave back, laugh with joy. I look at them, nod my head and smile back, suddenly at peace. This might not be the life I once wanted, but it’s the life
I have, and there’s so much about it that’s wonderful.
Here is how the series begins: Who among us hasn’t spent at least one fitful night thinking over something we said or did that we wish we could take back. Eventually, we push these thoughts out of our minds and drift off to sleep. But perhaps we shouldn’t discard them so quickly. Perhaps, if we sat with it for a minute, regret could teach us something.
How to Live With Regret
Cornelia Channing, NY Times 8.8.24
“No regrets.” It’s a phrase you come across a lot these days. It’s on T-shirts and bumper stickers. It is tattooed on forearms and emblazoned on the covers of self-help books. At first glance, it seems like a pretty straightforward bit of wisdom. After all, regret is a dirty word. Wouldn’t it be better, and healthier, to simply move on? No regrets. It’s a nice idea. But is it real?
Who among us hasn’t spent at least one fitful night thinking over something we said or did that we wish we could take back. Eventually, we push these thoughts out of our minds and drift off to sleep. But perhaps we shouldn’t discard them so quickly. Perhaps, if we sat with it for a minute, regret could teach us something. In his book “The Power of Regret” the writer Daniel Pink argues that regret is an unavoidable fact of life and that it should be embraced as a useful and instructive emotion. What we regret, he says, can teach us about who we are. It is a tool that can help tune our moral compasses, strengthen our values and keep us from repeating the same mistakes over and over again.
In an effort to better understand the nature of regret, and the role it plays in all our lives, Times Opinion is starting “How to Live With Regret,” a new series of personal essays in which writers grapple with regrets of all kinds. In our first installment, the writer Miguel Macias discusses the complicated feelings of regret he has around having a child.
The Emotion I Didn’t Expect as a Parent: Regret, by Michael Marcias
I’ve always been a little suspicious of regret. As someone who has suffered from depression for many years, I’ve learned to focus on the positive. I could, and did, apply this same logic to my daughter, focusing on all of the wonderful things that parenthood has brought: Olivia’s smile, for instance. She is happier than I probably have ever been, and what an incredible blessing. But there have been hard moments too. And if I allowed myself to regret having a child, even for a moment, what would that mean? Would it make me a horrible person? And even if it did, it wouldn’t change the reality.
I thought regret was a dangerous and unhelpful feeling, so I pushed it out of my mind. But pretending it wasn’t there did not make it go away. And eventually I learned to stop trying to banish it. I tried instead to sit with the feeling and stare at it head on for a few minutes. What could I learn from it? And somehow, I have found comfort in allowing myself to feel regret. I have always had a bit of a rebellious nature, and it feels, in a way, pleasantly subversive and liberating to allow myself this forbidden thought, even in the privacy of my own mind. It is at the very least a reprieve from the feeling that parenthood should be a constant delight.
Like when Olivia refuses to stay still for even a single minute so I can change her diaper, or when I look away from her for just a few seconds and find that she has managed to get into trouble. I could continue the laundry list of things that drive me crazy — I think most parents know what they are. We are supposed to love it, to think it is the most wonderful thing we have ever experienced. We are told we will become better people as a consequence of being parents. And maybe that’s true for some people. But there are other truths as well.
I am not a perfect father. Heck, I’m not a perfect person. I do the best I can. But there are some things about me that have not changed. Like the fact that, despite my love for Olivia I don’t really enjoy playing with her. I mean, I can play for 10 to 20 minutes, but after that I get bored and frustrated that I am wasting time, and that my to-do list is just growing. Yes, I am that person.
Having a child might not be the best decision I’ve ever made. Not just for myself, but for my daughter. But allowing myself to accept that having a child may not have been “right” has been humbling and comforting. It has forced me to admit to myself that I will never know if this, or any, decision was the right one.
In my mind, the notion of regret is directly connected to the notion of certainty. Most people need some kind of certainty in life. We try to make life simple; we want our choices to be clear. Just like optimism, it’s probably a survival tactic. We need to think that things will get better in order to keep going. After all, who can live a life where we are always second-guessing our decisions? It’s easier by far to tell ourselves that everything happens for a reason; it’s definitely less painful not to continuously revise our own history, or simply be convinced that we have made no mistakes.
But life is long, and it has many chapters. We open new doors and close old ones. We change jobs, we marry, we divorce; we move to other neighborhoods, other cities, other countries. Friendships start, end or change over time. We are healthy, we are sick. We lose people we love. At every turn we leave behind versions of ourselves that we will never be and versions of our lives that we will never live. How can we possibly not second-guess anything? Not wonder how things might have been if we had made that other decision, taken the other job, gone on a date with that other person? If we don’t allow ourselves to feel regret -- really feel it and come to some sort of peace with it — we risk being haunted by it.
And so I face my feelings of regret about having a daughter. I am able to contemplate them, allow myself to own it, and let it go. It doesn’t consume me. I have come to understand that my abundant love for my daughter and the complicated feelings of regret I have around becoming a parent do not contradict one another. They both are true. And, though I can’t be sure, I suspect that I’m not the first parent ever to feel this way. I suspect that others grapple with similar regret, though they may feel they can’t express it.
Olivia has taught me a great deal in the short time she’s been alive. For instance, when I am in a bad mood, everything in the world seems irritating: the person walking too slowly in front of me, the bicyclist riding on the sidewalk way too fast, the teens standing in the middle of the street being loud. Then Olivia waves and smiles at a stranger from her stroller, saying “Hola,” and suddenly the world melts. People smile at her, wave back, laugh with joy. I look at them, nod my head and smile back, suddenly at peace. This might not be the life I once wanted, but it’s the life
I have, and there’s so much about it that’s wonderful.
Tuesday, August 27
Who is Jesus? Who is God? When did Jesus become God? How does the Holy Spirit fit into this? Can there be three in One?
The early Church wrestled with these questions and I am going to invite us to ponder them also. The reading is a book review with the title When Did Jesus Become God. In the book, two New Testament theologians debate that question - one believes Jesus is not, and thus did not become, God. The other believes Jesus is God. I'd like to know what you think.
Debating the Nature of Jesus
Zen Hess, Christian Century 8.22.24
[In this article, Zen Hess reviewed Robert Stewart’s book When Did Jesus Become God? He references the theology of “Adoptionism” without adequate definition. Adoptionism believes Jesus was born a human – not God – but God adopted Jesus because of how he lived his life. It happened at either his baptism, the transfiguration, the Last Supper, the crucifixion or in the resurrection, or at some other point. This theology did not make it into the Nicene Creed and, some believe, the Creed was assembled to refute Adoptionism.]
In 2022, Ligonier Ministries conducted a survey called “The State of Theology” to explore how Americans respond to various theological questions. One statement to which respondents were asked to reply said, “Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God.” Of the evangelical Christian respondents, 44 percent either somewhat or strongly agreed with the statement! Mainline Protestant numbers were not far from the US public generally: 49 percent agreed that Jesus was not God.
The US church has a Christology crisis on its hands. It will need more than a book to remedy it. Still, When Did Jesus Become God? affords clergy and laity alike a wonderful little resource for thinking more deeply and carefully about Jesus, the New Testament, and Christian tradition.
Robert Stewart opens the book with a wonderfully helpful primer on how to assess the arguments historians make and introduces notable features of arguments about the historical Jesus. He briefly discusses the “criteria of authenticity,” which were once quite the rage among New Testament scholars who sought to identify the authentic sayings of the historical Jesus. Stewart’s overview of these criteria echoes the hesitancy many New Testament scholars feel about them today.
Stewart’s chapter prepares readers for the book’s main feature: a transcript of a debate between two well-known New Testament scholars, Bart Ehrman and Michael Bird, which was held at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in 2016. The debate centers on a Christological question: When did Jesus become God? Ehrman does not think Jesus ever became God. Instead, he attempts to answer the question, “When did the followers of Jesus start believing that he was God?”
For Ehrman, the first Christians believed Jesus was God when they began to believe God had raised Jesus from the dead. Ehrman points out that the earliest gospel, Mark, depicts the disciples as struggling even to see Jesus as the Messiah, let alone understanding his divinity. Ehrman takes this as a strong indicator that the disciples did not believe Jesus was God during Jesus’ lifetime (though he recognizes that the author of Mark may have believed Jesus was divine at his baptism). Ehrman points to passages in Acts and Romans that, he contends, show that the earliest Christians saw Jesus’ resurrection as the moment when God adopted Jesus into the divine life.
But Ehrman recognizes that the New Testament appears to bear witness to a variety of opinions about when Jesus became God. If the very earliest followers of Jesus believed he became God at the resurrection, then later generations began to believe he became God at his baptism (Mark) or his birth (Matthew and Luke) or was God from the beginning (John). Ehrman notes that between Christ’s resurrection and the Council of Nicaea in 325, the church entertained a variety of answers to the question of when (and how) Jesus became God. Those other options (including adoptionism) lost out at Nicaea, if not before then, for various reasons that Ehrman does not elaborate on in this debate.
Bird’s opening statement casts doubt on Ehrman’s argument in numerous ways. He challenges Ehrman’s exegesis of relevant New Testament texts, his handling of Jewish and Greco-Roman sources, and his claims that certain groups held to adoptionist theology. By casting doubt on Ehrman’s interpretation of various sources, Bird attempts to show that neither New Testament texts nor the earliest Christian authors subscribed to the idea of adoptionism. In his conclusion, Bird suggests that adoptionism — which he argues is inherently dependent on merit — is incongruous with the “gospel of grace as the early church knew it.” The alternative Bird commends, by way of quoting Justo González, is Nicene: Jesus “must be more than the adopted
son of God. He must be God adopting us as sons and daughters.”
Overall, in my estimation, there is no clear winner in this debate. Instead, the debate helps those listening to it realize that negotiating New Testament texts and church history can be quite difficult. What I appreciate about both Ehrman and Bird is that they aren’t interested in making things more complicated (as some scholars like to do). Rather, they aim to make the New Testament more accessible to people without academic training.
Yet making ancient texts genuinely accessible requires dealing seriously with the complexities that enshroud the New Testament and early Christian texts. Some of these are historical and literary complexities. What sorts of writing are the gospels anyway? How much do Paul’s writings reflect his Jewish or his Roman context and traditions? Other complexities are more theological. How does the Spirit reveal the truth about Jesus? Must it have happened all at once, like a flash of lightning, or could it have dawned more slowly over the course of generations, even centuries? And how do we reckon with and relate to the theological diversity of the church’s first centuries? While these complexities are real and serious, they need not prevent us from seeking the most plausible conclusions about who Christ was and is.
This book provides some of the basic tools to start engaging these complexities more thoughtfully. It also provides two accessible responses to an important question about Christology, which might serve as case studies for practicing analysis of historical arguments —whether those arguments focus on who Christ was or wasn’t, what the Bible says, or what the church has taught.
This book won’t give you a clear answer to the Christological question. But it will give you tools and resources to think more deeply (and, I hope, more passionately) about who Jesus was, is, and will be. I like how Ehrman puts it: “Saying [Jesus] is God is the beginning of the question, not the end of it."
The early Church wrestled with these questions and I am going to invite us to ponder them also. The reading is a book review with the title When Did Jesus Become God. In the book, two New Testament theologians debate that question - one believes Jesus is not, and thus did not become, God. The other believes Jesus is God. I'd like to know what you think.
Debating the Nature of Jesus
Zen Hess, Christian Century 8.22.24
[In this article, Zen Hess reviewed Robert Stewart’s book When Did Jesus Become God? He references the theology of “Adoptionism” without adequate definition. Adoptionism believes Jesus was born a human – not God – but God adopted Jesus because of how he lived his life. It happened at either his baptism, the transfiguration, the Last Supper, the crucifixion or in the resurrection, or at some other point. This theology did not make it into the Nicene Creed and, some believe, the Creed was assembled to refute Adoptionism.]
In 2022, Ligonier Ministries conducted a survey called “The State of Theology” to explore how Americans respond to various theological questions. One statement to which respondents were asked to reply said, “Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God.” Of the evangelical Christian respondents, 44 percent either somewhat or strongly agreed with the statement! Mainline Protestant numbers were not far from the US public generally: 49 percent agreed that Jesus was not God.
The US church has a Christology crisis on its hands. It will need more than a book to remedy it. Still, When Did Jesus Become God? affords clergy and laity alike a wonderful little resource for thinking more deeply and carefully about Jesus, the New Testament, and Christian tradition.
Robert Stewart opens the book with a wonderfully helpful primer on how to assess the arguments historians make and introduces notable features of arguments about the historical Jesus. He briefly discusses the “criteria of authenticity,” which were once quite the rage among New Testament scholars who sought to identify the authentic sayings of the historical Jesus. Stewart’s overview of these criteria echoes the hesitancy many New Testament scholars feel about them today.
Stewart’s chapter prepares readers for the book’s main feature: a transcript of a debate between two well-known New Testament scholars, Bart Ehrman and Michael Bird, which was held at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in 2016. The debate centers on a Christological question: When did Jesus become God? Ehrman does not think Jesus ever became God. Instead, he attempts to answer the question, “When did the followers of Jesus start believing that he was God?”
For Ehrman, the first Christians believed Jesus was God when they began to believe God had raised Jesus from the dead. Ehrman points out that the earliest gospel, Mark, depicts the disciples as struggling even to see Jesus as the Messiah, let alone understanding his divinity. Ehrman takes this as a strong indicator that the disciples did not believe Jesus was God during Jesus’ lifetime (though he recognizes that the author of Mark may have believed Jesus was divine at his baptism). Ehrman points to passages in Acts and Romans that, he contends, show that the earliest Christians saw Jesus’ resurrection as the moment when God adopted Jesus into the divine life.
But Ehrman recognizes that the New Testament appears to bear witness to a variety of opinions about when Jesus became God. If the very earliest followers of Jesus believed he became God at the resurrection, then later generations began to believe he became God at his baptism (Mark) or his birth (Matthew and Luke) or was God from the beginning (John). Ehrman notes that between Christ’s resurrection and the Council of Nicaea in 325, the church entertained a variety of answers to the question of when (and how) Jesus became God. Those other options (including adoptionism) lost out at Nicaea, if not before then, for various reasons that Ehrman does not elaborate on in this debate.
Bird’s opening statement casts doubt on Ehrman’s argument in numerous ways. He challenges Ehrman’s exegesis of relevant New Testament texts, his handling of Jewish and Greco-Roman sources, and his claims that certain groups held to adoptionist theology. By casting doubt on Ehrman’s interpretation of various sources, Bird attempts to show that neither New Testament texts nor the earliest Christian authors subscribed to the idea of adoptionism. In his conclusion, Bird suggests that adoptionism — which he argues is inherently dependent on merit — is incongruous with the “gospel of grace as the early church knew it.” The alternative Bird commends, by way of quoting Justo González, is Nicene: Jesus “must be more than the adopted
son of God. He must be God adopting us as sons and daughters.”
Overall, in my estimation, there is no clear winner in this debate. Instead, the debate helps those listening to it realize that negotiating New Testament texts and church history can be quite difficult. What I appreciate about both Ehrman and Bird is that they aren’t interested in making things more complicated (as some scholars like to do). Rather, they aim to make the New Testament more accessible to people without academic training.
Yet making ancient texts genuinely accessible requires dealing seriously with the complexities that enshroud the New Testament and early Christian texts. Some of these are historical and literary complexities. What sorts of writing are the gospels anyway? How much do Paul’s writings reflect his Jewish or his Roman context and traditions? Other complexities are more theological. How does the Spirit reveal the truth about Jesus? Must it have happened all at once, like a flash of lightning, or could it have dawned more slowly over the course of generations, even centuries? And how do we reckon with and relate to the theological diversity of the church’s first centuries? While these complexities are real and serious, they need not prevent us from seeking the most plausible conclusions about who Christ was and is.
This book provides some of the basic tools to start engaging these complexities more thoughtfully. It also provides two accessible responses to an important question about Christology, which might serve as case studies for practicing analysis of historical arguments —whether those arguments focus on who Christ was or wasn’t, what the Bible says, or what the church has taught.
This book won’t give you a clear answer to the Christological question. But it will give you tools and resources to think more deeply (and, I hope, more passionately) about who Jesus was, is, and will be. I like how Ehrman puts it: “Saying [Jesus] is God is the beginning of the question, not the end of it."
Tuesday, August 20
Does God let us fail? If so, why does (a loving God) allow us to fail?
The Book of Proverbs tells us: Although the righteous fall seven times, they rise again; but the wicked stumble when calamity strikes.
If that's too deep, how about Babe Ruth's famous quote: Don’t let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game.
Our faith also encourages us to think this way too - to not live fearfully, or to fear failure, but to keep playing.
How to Overcome a Fear of Failure
Arthur Brooks, The Atlantic 2.25.21
For years, I was haunted by a fear of failure. I spent my early adulthood as a professional French hornist, playing in chamber-music ensembles and orchestras. Playing the French horn, prone as it is to missing notes, is a virtual high-wire act in every concert. I lived in dread, and it made my
life and work misery. Fear of failure is not just a problem for French hornists. Looking bad in front of others is arguably the most common dread people face. This explains why, for example, researchers have found that public speaking is college students’ most common fear; some scholars have famously asserted that people fear it even more than death.
Fear of failure can have surprisingly harsh consequences for our well-being. For some, it can lead to debilitating anxiety and depression, a diagnosable malady called atychiphobia. But even before it reaches that point, it can steer us away from life’s joyful, fulfilling adventures, by discouraging us from taking risks and trying new things.
But the fear of failure seems to actually be about unknown outcomes, at least for those who are most anxious. Researchers have also found that people who strongly fear failure have a composite of two personality characteristics: low achievement orientation (that is, they don’t take much pleasure from accomplishments and meeting goals) and high test anxiety (a fear of not performing well at a crucial moment). In other words, they’re motivated less by the possibility of winning and gaining something of value, and more by their anxiety about the possibility of messing up.
Perfectionism and the fear of failure go hand in hand: They lead you to believe that success isn’t about doing something good, but about not doing something bad. If you suffer from a fear of failure, you’ll know exactly what I mean. Where striving for success should be an exciting journey toward an amazing destination—as the climber George Mallory said, to ascend the mountain “because it’s there”—it feels instead like an exhausting slog, with all your energy focused on not tumbling over a cliff.
Surprisingly, people who fear failure do not need to extinguish the fear itself in order to make themselves happier. Instead, the best way to tame a fear of failure is to hone courage. Stanley Rachman, a psychologist, showed this in his research in the 1980s and then in the following decades on people in dangerous professions, such as paratroopers and bomb defusers. They too tended to fear failure—and messing up in such cases might be dire indeed. But they were able to tap into reserves of courage to act anyway. As Rachman argues, fearlessness is abnormal, and even dangerous, because it leads to foolish risk taking and bad leadership. Courage, on the other hand, helps you to balance prudence and resolve, even if the only thing you’re defusing is an office conflict.
The good news is that all three of these drivers—an aversion to uncertainty, an attachment to the appearance of perfection, and a lack of courage—are qualities most of us would rather rid ourselves of. Facing the fear of failure is more than just dealing with a problem; it is an opportunity to grow in virtue. You can start this growth with three practices.
Focus on the present.
I once had a conversation with an oncologist about what it’s like to give people a dire, late-stage-cancer diagnosis. He said that some of his patients—people with a particular need to control tightly all parts of their lives—would immediately go home and start researching their prognosis on the internet. He would counsel them not to do this, because it would only make them sick with worry. Instead, he told them, start each day with this mantra: “I do not know what will happen next week or next year. But I know I have the gift of this day, and I will not waste it.” He said it helped not just their outlook about the disease but also their overall approach to life. I recommend this same refrain to anyone suffering from a fear of failure. Own the unknown future
through gratitude for the known present, and watch your happiness rise, as you enjoy what you have in front of you.
Visualize courage.
Remember that one of the most common fears of failure involves public speaking. Even the thought of giving a speech in front of a group makes some people panic. The solution to this problem is simple: exposure. That doesn’t mean you need to haul a soapbox to your town square every day; just simulating a speech environment has been shown to lower people’s fear significantly. Anyone can use this idea through simple concentrated imagination. Instead of avoiding the source of your fear even in your own mind, spend time each day visualizing scary scenarios, including possible failures. Picture yourself acting with courage, despite the fear. I did this extensively early in my teaching career, imagining everything from the prosaic (forgetting my notes) to the absurd (realizing after an hour-long lecture that my fly was unzipped the whole time—something that subsequently happened in real life). I soon found that I was, in fact, more courageous in front of the class as a result.
Litanize humility.
In Dante’s Divine Comedy, Satan is depicted as a victim of his terrible pride by being frozen from the waist down in ice of his own making. Fear of failure and perfectionism are like that –freezing you in place with thoughts of what others will think of you or what you will think of yourself. An early-20th-century Spanish cardinal, Rafael Merry del Val y Zulueta, composed a beautiful prayer called the “Litany of Humility.” The prayer does not ask that we be spared
humiliation, but that we be given the grace to deal with the fear: “From the fear of being humiliated, / Deliver me, O Jesus.” It continues: Deliver me from the fear of being despised. From the fear of suffering rebukes. From the fear of being calumniated. From the fear of being forgotten. And from the fear of being ridiculed.
Make your own version of the litany of humility, religious or not, and recite it each night. Even if the items seem ridiculous to you, if you want relief, you have to state your desire. Only then will your fear cease to be a phantom menace and instead become concrete—and thus conquerable. If all of the above strategies seem too time consuming, there is one last, tried-and-true method to develop courage in the face of failure: fail. And then, survive what the dark unknown truly holds.
That is what eventually cured me.
The Book of Proverbs tells us: Although the righteous fall seven times, they rise again; but the wicked stumble when calamity strikes.
If that's too deep, how about Babe Ruth's famous quote: Don’t let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game.
Our faith also encourages us to think this way too - to not live fearfully, or to fear failure, but to keep playing.
How to Overcome a Fear of Failure
Arthur Brooks, The Atlantic 2.25.21
For years, I was haunted by a fear of failure. I spent my early adulthood as a professional French hornist, playing in chamber-music ensembles and orchestras. Playing the French horn, prone as it is to missing notes, is a virtual high-wire act in every concert. I lived in dread, and it made my
life and work misery. Fear of failure is not just a problem for French hornists. Looking bad in front of others is arguably the most common dread people face. This explains why, for example, researchers have found that public speaking is college students’ most common fear; some scholars have famously asserted that people fear it even more than death.
Fear of failure can have surprisingly harsh consequences for our well-being. For some, it can lead to debilitating anxiety and depression, a diagnosable malady called atychiphobia. But even before it reaches that point, it can steer us away from life’s joyful, fulfilling adventures, by discouraging us from taking risks and trying new things.
But the fear of failure seems to actually be about unknown outcomes, at least for those who are most anxious. Researchers have also found that people who strongly fear failure have a composite of two personality characteristics: low achievement orientation (that is, they don’t take much pleasure from accomplishments and meeting goals) and high test anxiety (a fear of not performing well at a crucial moment). In other words, they’re motivated less by the possibility of winning and gaining something of value, and more by their anxiety about the possibility of messing up.
Perfectionism and the fear of failure go hand in hand: They lead you to believe that success isn’t about doing something good, but about not doing something bad. If you suffer from a fear of failure, you’ll know exactly what I mean. Where striving for success should be an exciting journey toward an amazing destination—as the climber George Mallory said, to ascend the mountain “because it’s there”—it feels instead like an exhausting slog, with all your energy focused on not tumbling over a cliff.
Surprisingly, people who fear failure do not need to extinguish the fear itself in order to make themselves happier. Instead, the best way to tame a fear of failure is to hone courage. Stanley Rachman, a psychologist, showed this in his research in the 1980s and then in the following decades on people in dangerous professions, such as paratroopers and bomb defusers. They too tended to fear failure—and messing up in such cases might be dire indeed. But they were able to tap into reserves of courage to act anyway. As Rachman argues, fearlessness is abnormal, and even dangerous, because it leads to foolish risk taking and bad leadership. Courage, on the other hand, helps you to balance prudence and resolve, even if the only thing you’re defusing is an office conflict.
The good news is that all three of these drivers—an aversion to uncertainty, an attachment to the appearance of perfection, and a lack of courage—are qualities most of us would rather rid ourselves of. Facing the fear of failure is more than just dealing with a problem; it is an opportunity to grow in virtue. You can start this growth with three practices.
Focus on the present.
I once had a conversation with an oncologist about what it’s like to give people a dire, late-stage-cancer diagnosis. He said that some of his patients—people with a particular need to control tightly all parts of their lives—would immediately go home and start researching their prognosis on the internet. He would counsel them not to do this, because it would only make them sick with worry. Instead, he told them, start each day with this mantra: “I do not know what will happen next week or next year. But I know I have the gift of this day, and I will not waste it.” He said it helped not just their outlook about the disease but also their overall approach to life. I recommend this same refrain to anyone suffering from a fear of failure. Own the unknown future
through gratitude for the known present, and watch your happiness rise, as you enjoy what you have in front of you.
Visualize courage.
Remember that one of the most common fears of failure involves public speaking. Even the thought of giving a speech in front of a group makes some people panic. The solution to this problem is simple: exposure. That doesn’t mean you need to haul a soapbox to your town square every day; just simulating a speech environment has been shown to lower people’s fear significantly. Anyone can use this idea through simple concentrated imagination. Instead of avoiding the source of your fear even in your own mind, spend time each day visualizing scary scenarios, including possible failures. Picture yourself acting with courage, despite the fear. I did this extensively early in my teaching career, imagining everything from the prosaic (forgetting my notes) to the absurd (realizing after an hour-long lecture that my fly was unzipped the whole time—something that subsequently happened in real life). I soon found that I was, in fact, more courageous in front of the class as a result.
Litanize humility.
In Dante’s Divine Comedy, Satan is depicted as a victim of his terrible pride by being frozen from the waist down in ice of his own making. Fear of failure and perfectionism are like that –freezing you in place with thoughts of what others will think of you or what you will think of yourself. An early-20th-century Spanish cardinal, Rafael Merry del Val y Zulueta, composed a beautiful prayer called the “Litany of Humility.” The prayer does not ask that we be spared
humiliation, but that we be given the grace to deal with the fear: “From the fear of being humiliated, / Deliver me, O Jesus.” It continues: Deliver me from the fear of being despised. From the fear of suffering rebukes. From the fear of being calumniated. From the fear of being forgotten. And from the fear of being ridiculed.
Make your own version of the litany of humility, religious or not, and recite it each night. Even if the items seem ridiculous to you, if you want relief, you have to state your desire. Only then will your fear cease to be a phantom menace and instead become concrete—and thus conquerable. If all of the above strategies seem too time consuming, there is one last, tried-and-true method to develop courage in the face of failure: fail. And then, survive what the dark unknown truly holds.
That is what eventually cured me.
Tuesday, August 13th
This week, we are returning to the normal Discussion Group schedule.
The topic for the week is the theme of waiting. Oddly enough, my Reflection for last Sunday was about waiting. Yolanda Pierce also wrote about waiting in her monthly column for the Christian Century. Attached is her theological assertion about waiting and God's providence. I'd like to know what you think.
The Spirituality of Waiting
Yoland Pierce, The Christian Century 8.5.24
The bag of microwave popcorn was taking too long. In the span of 20 seconds, I checked on it twice, wondering why I wasn’t hearing the reassuring pop of the first kernels. And although it was barely a minute between when I put the bag in the microwave and when I took it out to shake the steaming popcorn into a bowl, it felt like forever. Disappointed in my own impatience, I thought my primary transgression was that I had gone too long between meals, so that all too familiar combination of hunger and anger had me shaking my metaphorical fists at a kitchen appliance. But with time and reflection, I realized that the real issue was the frustration I was feeling in this season of waiting on God.
The prophet Isaiah tells us that those who wait for God will renew their strength. It’s a passage filled with incredibly uplifting promises: the faint will be given power; the powerless will be strengthened; you will be able to run and not grow weary, to walk and not faint (40:28–31).
These are the exact promises I needed to hear after the end of a long semester, a long season, and a long year. Yet there was that one pesky word at the beginning of the promises: wait.
As people of faith, we are between time people. We live in the tension between the already and the not yet, between the now and the is to come. We live in the tension between the command to wait and the fulfillment of what we have been promised. We have so many blessed assurances, promises in which we are confident, and yet it feels as if we spend a lot of time waiting on God to answer our prayers, hear our concerns, and meet our needs.
We wait for one door to be opened and other doors to be closed. We wait for healing. We wait for reassurance that our labor has not been in vain. We wait for some sign that we are on the right path. We wait for hope to emerge in dry and weary places. We wait to feel seen and heard, to know that we are loved with an everlasting love.
We live in the tension of the between time, this liminal space. We live in the certainty of God’s justice yet waiting to see it prevail; in the assurance that the last will be first and the meek will inherit the earth yet also in a present reality in which the powers and principalities threaten to overwhelm our hope. The work is already finished, and victory can be proclaimed! At the same time, there is much that is left undone, and time is filled with swift transition. Both statements are true in this liminal space, this threshold area, this waiting room, this between time in which God dwells.
If God is present in the seed that is being planted and in the harvest that is yielded, then God is also present during the time when it doesn’t look like much is happening at all. God is present in the soil doing its work beneath the surface, that duration of time when our human eyes fail to perceive anything happening. If God is present in the rising of the sun and the going down of the same, then God is also present in the darkness, in those moments when we wrestle with the evidence of things not seen. In this between time, we rest in the knowledge that God never fails. A harvest will come, and the sun will surely rise again.
Waiting on God is an active process. As we wait for God’s divine justice, we can work to love our neighbors as ourselves. As we wait to hear from God, we can labor to do that which is required of us: caring for the widowed, the orphaned, the stranger, the unhoused, the least, the lost, and the lonely. As we wait for God’s mercy, we can extend as much grace to others as God has so lovingly extended to us. As we wait for the new heaven and the new earth, we can act as the hands and feet of God. And as we wait to feel the fullness of God’s love for us, to feel affirmed and comforted, we can speak life to all the dry bones that surround us.
As I finally settled in with my microwave popcorn, it occurred to me that as much as I think I am waiting on God, as much as I struggle with this between time of my prayer and God’s answer, perhaps God is also waiting on me.
What if God is lovingly, patiently, and tenderly waiting for me?
For my active surrender, my acknowledgment that God is God and I am not?
For me to admit the limits of my human understanding and simply trust and obey?
Maybe the between time is about not just God’s work but also my own: the work that I must do to be ready to receive the instructions, the next assignment, the blessings, or the answers.
Waiting is hard. The between time feels interminable. The is to come seems far away. And also, at the very same time, God’s promises are true and will come to pass. We walk in the promise that those who hope and wait in God will renew their strength.
The topic for the week is the theme of waiting. Oddly enough, my Reflection for last Sunday was about waiting. Yolanda Pierce also wrote about waiting in her monthly column for the Christian Century. Attached is her theological assertion about waiting and God's providence. I'd like to know what you think.
The Spirituality of Waiting
Yoland Pierce, The Christian Century 8.5.24
The bag of microwave popcorn was taking too long. In the span of 20 seconds, I checked on it twice, wondering why I wasn’t hearing the reassuring pop of the first kernels. And although it was barely a minute between when I put the bag in the microwave and when I took it out to shake the steaming popcorn into a bowl, it felt like forever. Disappointed in my own impatience, I thought my primary transgression was that I had gone too long between meals, so that all too familiar combination of hunger and anger had me shaking my metaphorical fists at a kitchen appliance. But with time and reflection, I realized that the real issue was the frustration I was feeling in this season of waiting on God.
The prophet Isaiah tells us that those who wait for God will renew their strength. It’s a passage filled with incredibly uplifting promises: the faint will be given power; the powerless will be strengthened; you will be able to run and not grow weary, to walk and not faint (40:28–31).
These are the exact promises I needed to hear after the end of a long semester, a long season, and a long year. Yet there was that one pesky word at the beginning of the promises: wait.
As people of faith, we are between time people. We live in the tension between the already and the not yet, between the now and the is to come. We live in the tension between the command to wait and the fulfillment of what we have been promised. We have so many blessed assurances, promises in which we are confident, and yet it feels as if we spend a lot of time waiting on God to answer our prayers, hear our concerns, and meet our needs.
We wait for one door to be opened and other doors to be closed. We wait for healing. We wait for reassurance that our labor has not been in vain. We wait for some sign that we are on the right path. We wait for hope to emerge in dry and weary places. We wait to feel seen and heard, to know that we are loved with an everlasting love.
We live in the tension of the between time, this liminal space. We live in the certainty of God’s justice yet waiting to see it prevail; in the assurance that the last will be first and the meek will inherit the earth yet also in a present reality in which the powers and principalities threaten to overwhelm our hope. The work is already finished, and victory can be proclaimed! At the same time, there is much that is left undone, and time is filled with swift transition. Both statements are true in this liminal space, this threshold area, this waiting room, this between time in which God dwells.
If God is present in the seed that is being planted and in the harvest that is yielded, then God is also present during the time when it doesn’t look like much is happening at all. God is present in the soil doing its work beneath the surface, that duration of time when our human eyes fail to perceive anything happening. If God is present in the rising of the sun and the going down of the same, then God is also present in the darkness, in those moments when we wrestle with the evidence of things not seen. In this between time, we rest in the knowledge that God never fails. A harvest will come, and the sun will surely rise again.
Waiting on God is an active process. As we wait for God’s divine justice, we can work to love our neighbors as ourselves. As we wait to hear from God, we can labor to do that which is required of us: caring for the widowed, the orphaned, the stranger, the unhoused, the least, the lost, and the lonely. As we wait for God’s mercy, we can extend as much grace to others as God has so lovingly extended to us. As we wait for the new heaven and the new earth, we can act as the hands and feet of God. And as we wait to feel the fullness of God’s love for us, to feel affirmed and comforted, we can speak life to all the dry bones that surround us.
As I finally settled in with my microwave popcorn, it occurred to me that as much as I think I am waiting on God, as much as I struggle with this between time of my prayer and God’s answer, perhaps God is also waiting on me.
What if God is lovingly, patiently, and tenderly waiting for me?
For my active surrender, my acknowledgment that God is God and I am not?
For me to admit the limits of my human understanding and simply trust and obey?
Maybe the between time is about not just God’s work but also my own: the work that I must do to be ready to receive the instructions, the next assignment, the blessings, or the answers.
Waiting is hard. The between time feels interminable. The is to come seems far away. And also, at the very same time, God’s promises are true and will come to pass. We walk in the promise that those who hope and wait in God will renew their strength.
Tuesday, August 6th - Combined Men's and Women's Discussion Group
The topic for next week is an article in the WSJ that claims women are both sadder and happier than men. It seems to be a fitting article for having both men and women in discussion together. Now I pray that both groups will show up.
Why Are Women Both Sadder and Happier Than Men?
Emily Bobrow, Wall Street Journal 3.22.24
A forthcoming paper in the journal Social Indicators Research meta-analyzes surveys of 167 countries and finds that always and everywhere, regardless of how the question is asked or what measure is used, women say they are more anxious, more depressed, more tired and more pessimistic than men. They are less likely than men to recall smiling or enjoying themselves the day before and are more likely to say they are stressed, lonely, restless and worried about their finances. Women typically report more chronic pain and poorer health and are more likely to take antidepressants.
And yet: Women everywhere are still more likely than men to say they are happy and satisfied with their lives. In Gallup World Poll surveys of 167 countries between 2005 and 2021, women from Australia to Saudi Arabia typically rated their lives as high if not higher than men.
The fact that women can be both sadder and happier than men has baffled economists. Some economists call it the “female happiness paradox.” There are plenty of theories. Blanchflower and Bryson, for example, write that it shouldn’t be surprising that women feel more stress, fatigue and anxiety than men, given that women “face a world that, even today, is patriarchal structured by men, for men.” Women in poorer countries typically have fewer opportunities, less education and lower incomes. Even in the more egalitarian households of rich countries, women still tend to do the lion’s share of the childcare and housework, regardless of whether they work full time outside the home.
A 2023 Pew Research Center analysis of American Time-Use Survey data found that in the 29% of American marriages in which both partners earn similar incomes, fathers spent over four hours more on leisure each week, while mothers clocked in over six hours more of caregiving and housework. Many mothers are also managing this juggle on their own: The share of births to unmarried moms in the U.S. has been around 40% for years, according to U.S. census data. As for why women still often say they are happier, Blanchflower and Bryson suggest that they may have more ways than men to feel like their lives are going well. Being a good mother or homemaker or friend or daughter is still a source of pride and respect.
“Women are the head of operations in the home. We’re making sure that everything is running smoothly,” Simone Colbert, a single mother who works as a doula in Brooklyn, told me. “We want to see our homes clean, our families taken care of, and I think there’s satisfaction in getting it all done, but it’s also exhausting to be the one who makes sure it all gets done.”
Other economists argue that women report being both more miserable and more fulfilled than men because they simply have lower expectations for what a good life looks like. A Gallup World Poll survey data from 102 countries to show that men and women rated the life satisfaction of hypothetical characters differently. When asked to assess the quality of life for a happily married and financially comfortable 40-year-old woman with terrible back pain, or of a 50-year-old divorced man with a high-paying job and a good relationship with his daughter, women consistently offered higher ratings than men. This could be because “women are socialized to feel that they should be more thankful for what they have.”
American female happiness declined in both absolute terms and relative to men between the 1970s and the early 2000s — despite the real gains in education, wages and opportunities enjoyed by women over that period. In a 2009 paper, they wrote that American women may have been happier in the 1970s because they didn’t expect to have it all. By the 1990s, when more women hoped to balance a happy home with a fulfilling career, it was perhaps harder to stay sunny while learning these ambitions were hubris.
By the mid-2000s, however, American women returned to reporting being mostly happier than men. Carol Graham, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has spent decades studying well-being measures around the world, suggests that American female happiness may have rebounded because by 2000 women’s labor participation had reached 60%, almost double what it was in the 1950s. As a result, women striving for work-life balance had more role models, less stigma and perhaps more accommodating partners than they would have had a decade or two before.
This bewilderment is odd to me, because the “female happiness paradox” doesn’t seem all that paradoxical. The sources of fatigue, anxiety and occasional joylessness in my own life — my family, my job, my marriage, the needs of my friends — are also the main sources of meaning.
This raises what should probably be a more pertinent question for economists: What is going on with men? If men around the world are indeed more likely than women to say they smiled, had fun, slept well and feel fine, why aren’t they also saying they are satisfied with their lives, particularly in countries that are presumably rich in economic opportunities? Shouldn’t we be talking about a male unhappiness paradox?
The problem may be that men are less in touch with their feelings. Researchers Blanchflower and Bryson acknowledge that though men are less likely than women to say they are depressed, they are more likely to die from deaths of despair, including drug overdoses, alcoholism and suicide.
Though women in Europe and the U.S. are far more likely than men to discuss and attempt suicide, men are nearly four times as likely to actually kill themselves. “I think we should be much more worried about male unhappiness right now,” Graham told me.
Stevenson insists these surveys are still valuable, but she notes that there is often a real gap between what people say and what they do. “Right now people are telling us they are miserable about the economy, yet we have one of the strongest economies we’ve seen since the late 1990s, with unemployment near record lows and spending at record highs,” she said. Although Americans are saying they feel anxious about the economy, they are also splurging on vacations: “I don’t think we know the answer as to how to interpret what that means.”
Perhaps the answer is not to fixate on presumed paradoxes but to consider the ways that data on feelings help us to understand ourselves. These surveys may not accurately tell us who is actually suffering more, or even what people are really feeling, but they do make plain that pleasure and enjoyment are not reliable tickets to a satisfying and meaningful life. Buried in this data is another fortifying truth: Stress, fatigue and anxiety are not terribly fun to feel, but they may be some of the inevitable ingredients of a rich and full life.
Why Are Women Both Sadder and Happier Than Men?
Emily Bobrow, Wall Street Journal 3.22.24
A forthcoming paper in the journal Social Indicators Research meta-analyzes surveys of 167 countries and finds that always and everywhere, regardless of how the question is asked or what measure is used, women say they are more anxious, more depressed, more tired and more pessimistic than men. They are less likely than men to recall smiling or enjoying themselves the day before and are more likely to say they are stressed, lonely, restless and worried about their finances. Women typically report more chronic pain and poorer health and are more likely to take antidepressants.
And yet: Women everywhere are still more likely than men to say they are happy and satisfied with their lives. In Gallup World Poll surveys of 167 countries between 2005 and 2021, women from Australia to Saudi Arabia typically rated their lives as high if not higher than men.
The fact that women can be both sadder and happier than men has baffled economists. Some economists call it the “female happiness paradox.” There are plenty of theories. Blanchflower and Bryson, for example, write that it shouldn’t be surprising that women feel more stress, fatigue and anxiety than men, given that women “face a world that, even today, is patriarchal structured by men, for men.” Women in poorer countries typically have fewer opportunities, less education and lower incomes. Even in the more egalitarian households of rich countries, women still tend to do the lion’s share of the childcare and housework, regardless of whether they work full time outside the home.
A 2023 Pew Research Center analysis of American Time-Use Survey data found that in the 29% of American marriages in which both partners earn similar incomes, fathers spent over four hours more on leisure each week, while mothers clocked in over six hours more of caregiving and housework. Many mothers are also managing this juggle on their own: The share of births to unmarried moms in the U.S. has been around 40% for years, according to U.S. census data. As for why women still often say they are happier, Blanchflower and Bryson suggest that they may have more ways than men to feel like their lives are going well. Being a good mother or homemaker or friend or daughter is still a source of pride and respect.
“Women are the head of operations in the home. We’re making sure that everything is running smoothly,” Simone Colbert, a single mother who works as a doula in Brooklyn, told me. “We want to see our homes clean, our families taken care of, and I think there’s satisfaction in getting it all done, but it’s also exhausting to be the one who makes sure it all gets done.”
Other economists argue that women report being both more miserable and more fulfilled than men because they simply have lower expectations for what a good life looks like. A Gallup World Poll survey data from 102 countries to show that men and women rated the life satisfaction of hypothetical characters differently. When asked to assess the quality of life for a happily married and financially comfortable 40-year-old woman with terrible back pain, or of a 50-year-old divorced man with a high-paying job and a good relationship with his daughter, women consistently offered higher ratings than men. This could be because “women are socialized to feel that they should be more thankful for what they have.”
American female happiness declined in both absolute terms and relative to men between the 1970s and the early 2000s — despite the real gains in education, wages and opportunities enjoyed by women over that period. In a 2009 paper, they wrote that American women may have been happier in the 1970s because they didn’t expect to have it all. By the 1990s, when more women hoped to balance a happy home with a fulfilling career, it was perhaps harder to stay sunny while learning these ambitions were hubris.
By the mid-2000s, however, American women returned to reporting being mostly happier than men. Carol Graham, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has spent decades studying well-being measures around the world, suggests that American female happiness may have rebounded because by 2000 women’s labor participation had reached 60%, almost double what it was in the 1950s. As a result, women striving for work-life balance had more role models, less stigma and perhaps more accommodating partners than they would have had a decade or two before.
This bewilderment is odd to me, because the “female happiness paradox” doesn’t seem all that paradoxical. The sources of fatigue, anxiety and occasional joylessness in my own life — my family, my job, my marriage, the needs of my friends — are also the main sources of meaning.
This raises what should probably be a more pertinent question for economists: What is going on with men? If men around the world are indeed more likely than women to say they smiled, had fun, slept well and feel fine, why aren’t they also saying they are satisfied with their lives, particularly in countries that are presumably rich in economic opportunities? Shouldn’t we be talking about a male unhappiness paradox?
The problem may be that men are less in touch with their feelings. Researchers Blanchflower and Bryson acknowledge that though men are less likely than women to say they are depressed, they are more likely to die from deaths of despair, including drug overdoses, alcoholism and suicide.
Though women in Europe and the U.S. are far more likely than men to discuss and attempt suicide, men are nearly four times as likely to actually kill themselves. “I think we should be much more worried about male unhappiness right now,” Graham told me.
Stevenson insists these surveys are still valuable, but she notes that there is often a real gap between what people say and what they do. “Right now people are telling us they are miserable about the economy, yet we have one of the strongest economies we’ve seen since the late 1990s, with unemployment near record lows and spending at record highs,” she said. Although Americans are saying they feel anxious about the economy, they are also splurging on vacations: “I don’t think we know the answer as to how to interpret what that means.”
Perhaps the answer is not to fixate on presumed paradoxes but to consider the ways that data on feelings help us to understand ourselves. These surveys may not accurately tell us who is actually suffering more, or even what people are really feeling, but they do make plain that pleasure and enjoyment are not reliable tickets to a satisfying and meaningful life. Buried in this data is another fortifying truth: Stress, fatigue and anxiety are not terribly fun to feel, but they may be some of the inevitable ingredients of a rich and full life.
Tuesday, July 30
Following an excellent discussion on prayer, I thought we should jump into one of the most difficult parts of the Bible - the story of King David, Bathsheba and her husband Uriah. From 2 Samuel 11:1-15, King David sees Bathsheba bathing, sleeps with her and when he finds out she's pregnant invites her husband Uriah home from the front lines (to hopefully sleep with his wife and cover up David's deed). Uriah refuses to (because the rest of his unit is fighting) so David orders Uriah's commanding officer to have him killed in battle.
This lesson was one of the Old Testament stories on the lectionary for this Sunday. I went with the miracle story of the prophet Elisha who feeds 100 people because it matches the Gospel lesson. Nevertheless, this story of King David remains. What do we do with it? What happens when heroes of our day do something that is the opposite of heroic?
Our author for next week, Pastor Joanna Harader, wrote a piece that is normally used by preachers to prepare their weekly sermons. I thought it would be good for us to talk about. She writes, In this story, both Bathsheba and Uriah have what King David lacks: integrity.
In the Lectionary, David, Bathsheba, and Uriah
A Commentary on 2 Samuel 11:1-15
Joanna Harader, The Christian Century 7.22.24
Joanna Harader is a Mennonite pastor and author of the forthcoming Lenten devotional Prone to Wander.
As a child, I loved The Cosby Show, and Bill Cosby’s pudding commercials, and his comedy bit about eating cake for breakfast. (Just the other day I ate a cupcake for breakfast based on his reasoning that cake includes milk and eggs.) When sexual assault accusations against him began to emerge publicly, I didn’t know how to reconcile the lovable TV dad with the man who drugged and raped women.
As an adult, I had a passing appreciation for the comedy of Louis C. K., partly because of how he addressed issues of sexism. But it turns out that even as his stand-up routines acknowledged the ways women are often victimized, he was, himself, victimizing women.
And of course it is not just comedians who fall from grace. It has become public knowledge that Anabaptist theologian John Howard Yoder and L’Arche founder Jean Vanier both committed spiritual and sexual abuse against multiple victims. [Editor’s note: the NY Times reported today that over 200,000 people were abused in New Zealand by the government and church organizations]
Honestly, the list of entertainers and church leaders who have turned out to be abusers is depressingly long. It’s almost as if power and prestige somehow facilitate abusive patterns and protect perpetrators!
Take King David, for example. His literal position on the roof of what is surely the tallest house in town allows him to watch Bathsheba bathe in what she surely thinks is the privacy of her own home. And his political and social position mean that when he commands it, she doesn’t dare refuse to go to the palace or to have sex with him.
It’s hard to know what to do with David, this sexual predator and murderer who is also an important part of our faith tradition. How do we deal with people who abuse their power in such egregious ways?
In our contemporary context we take people to court, we remove them from their positions, maybe we remove their books from reading lists. But what about in the context of biblical interpretation? What does it mean to remove power from King David as readers of the biblical text?
Maybe it means, in part, talking about this week’s reading not as the story of David and Bathsheba but as the story of Bathsheba and Uriah. Maybe it means shifting our focus from David’s abuse to Bathsheba’s resilience and Uriah’s virtue.
The biblical writer, David, and the messengers all objectify Bathsheba in this story. Yet despite these efforts to silence her, Bathsheba manages to have a voice. After her forced sexual encounter with the king, she misses her period and sends word to David: “I am pregnant.”
In situations where I feel pitted against people or institutions with a great deal of power, it is tempting to simply slouch away and hope nobody notices me. Calling attention to myself seems like it would be exhausting and possibly dangerous. But Bathsheba doesn’t slink away and hide, she says something to the king that is guaranteed to get his attention. She reclaims her voice and asserts control over her violated body. She claims what power she can and refuses to be silenced or cast aside. She truly is a hero in this story.
Uriah is also to be commended. So often the moral failures of a leader are used as an excuse for those following that leader to slack off themselves, to skim a little from the top, to not do quite the job they are expected to do. We know that David is slacking off because it is “the time when kings go out to battle” and David is lying around on his rooftop couch. When Uriah is brought home, he could easily justify going to sleep in his bed with his wife — his leader is relaxing at home, so why shouldn’t he? But Uriah maintains his virtue; he lives by his values even though his leader, the king, is not doing the same.
In this story, both Bathsheba and Uriah have what David lacks: integrity.
It is easy to feel disappointed, even disoriented, when we find out that our would-be heroes aren’t so heroic after all. In our disorientation, perhaps we can reorient around those whose quiet courage and integrity challenge those who use their power in self-serving ways. Whenever there is a King David abusing people and power, we can usually also find Bathshebas those who insist on speaking the truth regardless of the consequences. We can usually also find Uriahs, behaving with integrity even in the context of a corrupt system.
In our moments of disappointment and disorientation, perhaps we can reimagine the public narratives in ways that honor God and provide hope for God’s people.
This lesson was one of the Old Testament stories on the lectionary for this Sunday. I went with the miracle story of the prophet Elisha who feeds 100 people because it matches the Gospel lesson. Nevertheless, this story of King David remains. What do we do with it? What happens when heroes of our day do something that is the opposite of heroic?
Our author for next week, Pastor Joanna Harader, wrote a piece that is normally used by preachers to prepare their weekly sermons. I thought it would be good for us to talk about. She writes, In this story, both Bathsheba and Uriah have what King David lacks: integrity.
In the Lectionary, David, Bathsheba, and Uriah
A Commentary on 2 Samuel 11:1-15
Joanna Harader, The Christian Century 7.22.24
Joanna Harader is a Mennonite pastor and author of the forthcoming Lenten devotional Prone to Wander.
As a child, I loved The Cosby Show, and Bill Cosby’s pudding commercials, and his comedy bit about eating cake for breakfast. (Just the other day I ate a cupcake for breakfast based on his reasoning that cake includes milk and eggs.) When sexual assault accusations against him began to emerge publicly, I didn’t know how to reconcile the lovable TV dad with the man who drugged and raped women.
As an adult, I had a passing appreciation for the comedy of Louis C. K., partly because of how he addressed issues of sexism. But it turns out that even as his stand-up routines acknowledged the ways women are often victimized, he was, himself, victimizing women.
And of course it is not just comedians who fall from grace. It has become public knowledge that Anabaptist theologian John Howard Yoder and L’Arche founder Jean Vanier both committed spiritual and sexual abuse against multiple victims. [Editor’s note: the NY Times reported today that over 200,000 people were abused in New Zealand by the government and church organizations]
Honestly, the list of entertainers and church leaders who have turned out to be abusers is depressingly long. It’s almost as if power and prestige somehow facilitate abusive patterns and protect perpetrators!
Take King David, for example. His literal position on the roof of what is surely the tallest house in town allows him to watch Bathsheba bathe in what she surely thinks is the privacy of her own home. And his political and social position mean that when he commands it, she doesn’t dare refuse to go to the palace or to have sex with him.
It’s hard to know what to do with David, this sexual predator and murderer who is also an important part of our faith tradition. How do we deal with people who abuse their power in such egregious ways?
In our contemporary context we take people to court, we remove them from their positions, maybe we remove their books from reading lists. But what about in the context of biblical interpretation? What does it mean to remove power from King David as readers of the biblical text?
Maybe it means, in part, talking about this week’s reading not as the story of David and Bathsheba but as the story of Bathsheba and Uriah. Maybe it means shifting our focus from David’s abuse to Bathsheba’s resilience and Uriah’s virtue.
The biblical writer, David, and the messengers all objectify Bathsheba in this story. Yet despite these efforts to silence her, Bathsheba manages to have a voice. After her forced sexual encounter with the king, she misses her period and sends word to David: “I am pregnant.”
In situations where I feel pitted against people or institutions with a great deal of power, it is tempting to simply slouch away and hope nobody notices me. Calling attention to myself seems like it would be exhausting and possibly dangerous. But Bathsheba doesn’t slink away and hide, she says something to the king that is guaranteed to get his attention. She reclaims her voice and asserts control over her violated body. She claims what power she can and refuses to be silenced or cast aside. She truly is a hero in this story.
Uriah is also to be commended. So often the moral failures of a leader are used as an excuse for those following that leader to slack off themselves, to skim a little from the top, to not do quite the job they are expected to do. We know that David is slacking off because it is “the time when kings go out to battle” and David is lying around on his rooftop couch. When Uriah is brought home, he could easily justify going to sleep in his bed with his wife — his leader is relaxing at home, so why shouldn’t he? But Uriah maintains his virtue; he lives by his values even though his leader, the king, is not doing the same.
In this story, both Bathsheba and Uriah have what David lacks: integrity.
It is easy to feel disappointed, even disoriented, when we find out that our would-be heroes aren’t so heroic after all. In our disorientation, perhaps we can reorient around those whose quiet courage and integrity challenge those who use their power in self-serving ways. Whenever there is a King David abusing people and power, we can usually also find Bathshebas those who insist on speaking the truth regardless of the consequences. We can usually also find Uriahs, behaving with integrity even in the context of a corrupt system.
In our moments of disappointment and disorientation, perhaps we can reimagine the public narratives in ways that honor God and provide hope for God’s people.
Tuesday, July 23
What is prayer? Why do we do it? Is true prayer reciting a set prayer from memory or a book, or is prayer talking to God the way one would talk to a friend, or a medical doctor, or a police officer. Our author for next week, who is Dean of Vanderbilt Divinity School, talks about prayer in the context of a phone call home. She writes,
Beyond the words we say, [like a parent] God hears the hidden parts of our hearts. We can recite the words of the Lord’s Prayer or quote from the psalms, each time using the same exact words. Yet God listens to the deep recesses of our soul, whether we are speaking from a posture of sorrow and doubt or from a position of joy and gladness.
Phoning Home
Yolanda Pierce, Christian Century, 7.12.24
Yolanda Pierce is dean and professor at Vanderbilt Divinity School and author of In My Grandmother's House: Black Women, Faith, and the Stories We Inherit.
College and university campuses often host summer programs for high school students. After a few weeks of respite once the undergraduates head home, the arrival of dozens or hundreds of teenagers marks a different mood on campus. You can’t help but feel the excitement of these adolescents as they experience their first taste of college life and, I imagine for many, their first extended stay away from home. The typical college junior is already jaded about life on campus. A high school junior, however, is noticeably excited about spending a few weeks living in a dormitory and eating cafeteria food.
I heard the group of high schoolers long before I saw them. A group of four young Black teenage boys joined me at the smoothie counter in the student center. As we all waited patiently for our drinks, they laughed, joked, and presumably shared TikTok videos on their phones. I just enjoyed this brief time in their happy presence. I took delight in the fact that they were spending their summer on a college campus and that the realities of racism or harmful stereotypes hadn’t derailed this possible stepping stone to a college education.
One young man stepped away from the line to take a phone call, which was shocking to me because I’m often reminded that Generations Z and Alpha don’t actually answer their phones. My own daughter texts me from another location in our house, content to have an extended conversation back and forth via texts, despite the fact that a one-minute voice call would quickly answer my questions about dinner.
The teen returned to his friends at the smoothie counter with a sheepish “my mom” to his peers’ unasked question of why he answered the phone. But it was said with a smile, and with tenderness, and with obvious love for the mother on the other end of the line. This was someone’s beloved son; some mother somewhere had sent her precious bundle away from home to enrich his life and to open up doors of opportunities for him. I couldn’t help but think that there may have been a quick “I love you” that ended the phone call, perhaps with a furtive look around to make sure that no one else heard.
On this college campus during a late summer afternoon, I had a glimpse of a young man moving through the world, interacting with his peer group, and enjoying the first freedoms of adolescence. I saw this child, loved by God, made in God’s own image, who was also dearly precious to the person who had called him. And I couldn’t help but reflect on the human and spiritual value of something as simple as a phone call to or from home—those small gestures of connection that remind you that you are not alone in this world.
I understood why that mother needed to hear her son’s voice, despite what I am sure were many text messages exchanged between them. When you are close to someone, the sound of their voice tells you so much. You can hear their sorrow or joy; you can tell if something is wrong or if everything is going right, just by listening to them say a few words. And for those who love you and know you well, even the slightest changes in your tone or inflection can tell them more than thousands of written words ever could.
This is the truth that is revealed when we pray to God. Beyond the words we say, God hears the hidden parts of our hearts. We can recite the words of the Lord’s Prayer or quote from the psalms, each time using the same exact words. Yet God listens to the deep recesses of our soul, whether we are speaking from a posture of sorrow and doubt or from a position of joy and gladness. Sometimes, “surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life” is a prayer of praise and thanksgiving. And sometimes those same words are a cry for help, an expression of our deepest longing. The God who knows you, the God who formed you, hears the inflection in your voice and in your heart, not simply the words on your lips.
If a human parent or spouse or best friend loves you so much that merely greeting them by phone can solicit an “Are you OK?” or “What’s wrong?” then surely the matchless and perfect love of God exceeds even these human responses. When we pray, when we spiritually phone home to God, we are assured of a divine presence that understands our utterances, groans, and silences. We are promised that the Holy Spirit will make intercession for our sighs that are too deep for words.
Sometimes I want to walk around campus and tell our students to answer those phone calls from home. I want to tell them to save that voicemail or audio message from a parent or a sibling. I want to hold up a sign to remind them that someone who loves you is calling. Someone whose time on this earth is finite needs to hear your voice. In the fullness of time, you understand how precious those calls from home are—that they will not always last. And one day you may mourn the loss of that beloved person who insisted on hearing your voice just to know that you were OK.
If that inevitable day of loss comes, we can rest in the promise that we can always call our spiritual home. That as we pray, as beloved children of God, we are heard, seen, affirmed, and cherished. We can remember that there is a heavenly parent who rejoices in the sound of our voices, comforts us in our silences, and understands our every tone and inflection.
Beyond the words we say, [like a parent] God hears the hidden parts of our hearts. We can recite the words of the Lord’s Prayer or quote from the psalms, each time using the same exact words. Yet God listens to the deep recesses of our soul, whether we are speaking from a posture of sorrow and doubt or from a position of joy and gladness.
Phoning Home
Yolanda Pierce, Christian Century, 7.12.24
Yolanda Pierce is dean and professor at Vanderbilt Divinity School and author of In My Grandmother's House: Black Women, Faith, and the Stories We Inherit.
College and university campuses often host summer programs for high school students. After a few weeks of respite once the undergraduates head home, the arrival of dozens or hundreds of teenagers marks a different mood on campus. You can’t help but feel the excitement of these adolescents as they experience their first taste of college life and, I imagine for many, their first extended stay away from home. The typical college junior is already jaded about life on campus. A high school junior, however, is noticeably excited about spending a few weeks living in a dormitory and eating cafeteria food.
I heard the group of high schoolers long before I saw them. A group of four young Black teenage boys joined me at the smoothie counter in the student center. As we all waited patiently for our drinks, they laughed, joked, and presumably shared TikTok videos on their phones. I just enjoyed this brief time in their happy presence. I took delight in the fact that they were spending their summer on a college campus and that the realities of racism or harmful stereotypes hadn’t derailed this possible stepping stone to a college education.
One young man stepped away from the line to take a phone call, which was shocking to me because I’m often reminded that Generations Z and Alpha don’t actually answer their phones. My own daughter texts me from another location in our house, content to have an extended conversation back and forth via texts, despite the fact that a one-minute voice call would quickly answer my questions about dinner.
The teen returned to his friends at the smoothie counter with a sheepish “my mom” to his peers’ unasked question of why he answered the phone. But it was said with a smile, and with tenderness, and with obvious love for the mother on the other end of the line. This was someone’s beloved son; some mother somewhere had sent her precious bundle away from home to enrich his life and to open up doors of opportunities for him. I couldn’t help but think that there may have been a quick “I love you” that ended the phone call, perhaps with a furtive look around to make sure that no one else heard.
On this college campus during a late summer afternoon, I had a glimpse of a young man moving through the world, interacting with his peer group, and enjoying the first freedoms of adolescence. I saw this child, loved by God, made in God’s own image, who was also dearly precious to the person who had called him. And I couldn’t help but reflect on the human and spiritual value of something as simple as a phone call to or from home—those small gestures of connection that remind you that you are not alone in this world.
I understood why that mother needed to hear her son’s voice, despite what I am sure were many text messages exchanged between them. When you are close to someone, the sound of their voice tells you so much. You can hear their sorrow or joy; you can tell if something is wrong or if everything is going right, just by listening to them say a few words. And for those who love you and know you well, even the slightest changes in your tone or inflection can tell them more than thousands of written words ever could.
This is the truth that is revealed when we pray to God. Beyond the words we say, God hears the hidden parts of our hearts. We can recite the words of the Lord’s Prayer or quote from the psalms, each time using the same exact words. Yet God listens to the deep recesses of our soul, whether we are speaking from a posture of sorrow and doubt or from a position of joy and gladness. Sometimes, “surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life” is a prayer of praise and thanksgiving. And sometimes those same words are a cry for help, an expression of our deepest longing. The God who knows you, the God who formed you, hears the inflection in your voice and in your heart, not simply the words on your lips.
If a human parent or spouse or best friend loves you so much that merely greeting them by phone can solicit an “Are you OK?” or “What’s wrong?” then surely the matchless and perfect love of God exceeds even these human responses. When we pray, when we spiritually phone home to God, we are assured of a divine presence that understands our utterances, groans, and silences. We are promised that the Holy Spirit will make intercession for our sighs that are too deep for words.
Sometimes I want to walk around campus and tell our students to answer those phone calls from home. I want to tell them to save that voicemail or audio message from a parent or a sibling. I want to hold up a sign to remind them that someone who loves you is calling. Someone whose time on this earth is finite needs to hear your voice. In the fullness of time, you understand how precious those calls from home are—that they will not always last. And one day you may mourn the loss of that beloved person who insisted on hearing your voice just to know that you were OK.
If that inevitable day of loss comes, we can rest in the promise that we can always call our spiritual home. That as we pray, as beloved children of God, we are heard, seen, affirmed, and cherished. We can remember that there is a heavenly parent who rejoices in the sound of our voices, comforts us in our silences, and understands our every tone and inflection.
Tuesday, July 16
"My wish is to die in my own bed, cared for by people I love - clean, comfortable and relatively free from pain."
That's how our article this week begins. The author, Katy Butler, then highlights five steps we need to take (now) to achieve what she calls a "good end of life." Butler has spent years interviewing hundreds of people who have witnessed good deaths and hard ones; she has consulted top experts in end-of-life medicine; as a result, she has advice for us on how to get the best from our imperfect health-care system and how to prepare for a good end of life. It all starts with a good conversation about what you think a good ending would be.
To help us find words for ourselves, let's talk about this next week. (Let me know if you would prefer to talk to me one-on-one about this).
Preparing for a Good End of Life
Katy Butler, WSJ 2.8.19
My wish is to die in my own bed, cared for by people I love—clean, comfortable and relatively free from pain. But in our technologically advanced society this simple, old-fashioned and once-inexpensive death is harder to achieve than you might think. According to a 2017 Kaiser Foundation study, 7 in 10 Americans hope to die at home. But half die in nursing homes and hospitals, and more than a tenth are cruelly shuttled from one to the other in their final three days. Nobody I know hopes to die in the soulless confines of an Intensive Care Unit. But more than a quarter of Medicare members cycle through one in their final month, and a fifth of Americans die in an ICU. I don’t want that to be my story. I’ve spent the past three years interviewing hundreds of people who have witnessed good deaths and hard ones, and I consulted top experts in end-of-life medicine. This is what I learned about how to get the best from our imperfect health-care system and how to prepare for a good end of life.
Have a vision. Imagine what it would take to die in peace and work back from there. Some doctors assume that everyone wants to extend life until there is no joy left in the living of it. They’re mistaken. In the Kaiser study, most people cared much more about not having their families financially burdened by their care or distressed by tough medical decisions; having their medical preferences honored; and dying in peace spiritually, with their loved ones around them. Living as long as possible was at the very bottom of most people’s lists.
Advanced medicine is replete with treatments (ventilators, dialysis, defibrillators, feeding tubes, to name a few) that postpone death and prolong misery without restoring health. Get clear on what gives your life joy and meaning. When you can no longer enjoy those things, what medical treatments would you refuse? Nobody can answer this for you. We vary widely in how much suffering we’re willing to endure for more time on earth.
Talk to those you love about what a good “quality of life” means to you and put it in writing in a letter or advance directive. Appoint someone with people skills and a backbone to speak for you if you can no longer speak for yourself. The best choice for your “health care agent” isn’t necessarily a close family member. In a crisis, he or she may be too overwhelmed to let you go.
Stay in charge. If your doctor isn’t curious about what matters to you or won’t tell you what’s going on in plain English, fire that doctor and find another. That’s what Amy Berman did when a prominent oncologist told her to undergo chemotherapy, a mastectomy, radiation and then more chemo to treat her stage-four inflammatory breast cancer. This course would have destroyed her quality of life without curing her rare, and usually lethal, variant of breast cancer. Instead, she engaged another oncologist who asked her, “What do you want to accomplish?” Ms. Berman said that she was aiming for a “Niagara Falls trajectory:” To live as well as possible for as long as possible, followed by a rapid final decline.
It has been eight years since then, and Ms. Berman is now 59. She hasn’t undergone surgery or chemo, been hospitalized or gone into debt. A daily estrogen-suppressing pill slows her disease, and a one-time intense burst of “palliative radiation” eliminated pain from cancer cells that had spread to her spine. She’s kept working, ridden a jet ski to the Statue of Liberty, written for the Washington Post, watched her daughter graduate from college and gone snowmobiling in Iceland. “Most doctors,” she says, “focus only on length of life. That’s not my only metric.”
Know the trajectory of your illness. If you face a frightening diagnosis, ask your doctor to draw a sketch tracking how you might feel and function during your illness and its treatments. A visual will yield far more helpful information than asking exactly how much time you have left. It may help you, in particular, to recognize the advent of the precarious health stage that I call the “house of cards.” This fragile state is marked by repeatedly returning from hospital stays worse off than before. At this stage, consider shifting your emphasis from cure to comfort.
All of this may be easier for people with money, but that is not the only determinant of a good decline and death. Two of the best deaths I studied involved people with little savings, and some of the worst were inflicted on people with plenty of money and rolodexes full of influential names. Don’t be afraid of hospice. It won’t make you die sooner, it’s covered by insurance, and you are more likely to die well, with your family supported and your pain under control.
Find your tribe and arrange caregivers. Dying at home is labor-intensive. Hospices provide home visits from nurses and other professionals, but your friends, relatives and hired aides will be the ones who empty bedpans and provide hands-on care. You don’t have to be rich, or a saint, to handle this well. You do need one fiercely committed person to act as a central tentpole and as many part-timers as you can gather. People who die comfortable, well-supported deaths at home tend to have one of three things going for them: money, a good government program or a rich social network of neighbors or friends. So don’t wait until you’re at death’s door to deepen your relationships and find your posse. You just need to get together regularly and share an activity face to face.
Think of death as a rite of passage. In the days before effective medicine, our ancestors were guided by books and customs that framed dying as a spiritual ordeal rather than a medical event. A spiritually mature individual was expected to contemplate it ahead of time. Without abandoning the best of what modern medicine has to offer, return to that spirit. Don’t reduce the end of your life to a medical procedure or strip it of ceremony and humanity. Make sure you live and die as a full human being.
Over the years, as I’ve listened to hundreds of stories, I’ve learned this: Those who contemplate their aging, vulnerability and mortality often live better lives and experience better deaths than those who don’t. They get clear-eyed about the trajectory of their illnesses, so they can plan. They regard doctors as their consultants, not their bosses. They enroll in hospice earlier, and often feel and function better — and sometimes even live longer — than those who pursue maximum treatment. And they often die with less physical suffering, and just as much attention to the sacred, as our ancestors did.
There is a way to a peaceful, empowered death, even in our era of high-tech medicine. If you accept the reality of death and plan for it rather than fight it, you can restore dignity, community and, yes, even beauty to your final passage. That’s not to promise it will be easy. I wish I could guarantee you a vigorous old age, a short decline and a swift, painless death. But let’s face it: No matter how bravely you adapt to loss, and how carefully you navigate our fragmented health system, dying will still represent the ultimate loss of control.
But you don’t have to be a passive victim. You retain moral agency. You can keep shaping your life all the way to its end — as long as you seize the power to imagine, to arrange support and to plan.
That's how our article this week begins. The author, Katy Butler, then highlights five steps we need to take (now) to achieve what she calls a "good end of life." Butler has spent years interviewing hundreds of people who have witnessed good deaths and hard ones; she has consulted top experts in end-of-life medicine; as a result, she has advice for us on how to get the best from our imperfect health-care system and how to prepare for a good end of life. It all starts with a good conversation about what you think a good ending would be.
To help us find words for ourselves, let's talk about this next week. (Let me know if you would prefer to talk to me one-on-one about this).
Preparing for a Good End of Life
Katy Butler, WSJ 2.8.19
My wish is to die in my own bed, cared for by people I love—clean, comfortable and relatively free from pain. But in our technologically advanced society this simple, old-fashioned and once-inexpensive death is harder to achieve than you might think. According to a 2017 Kaiser Foundation study, 7 in 10 Americans hope to die at home. But half die in nursing homes and hospitals, and more than a tenth are cruelly shuttled from one to the other in their final three days. Nobody I know hopes to die in the soulless confines of an Intensive Care Unit. But more than a quarter of Medicare members cycle through one in their final month, and a fifth of Americans die in an ICU. I don’t want that to be my story. I’ve spent the past three years interviewing hundreds of people who have witnessed good deaths and hard ones, and I consulted top experts in end-of-life medicine. This is what I learned about how to get the best from our imperfect health-care system and how to prepare for a good end of life.
Have a vision. Imagine what it would take to die in peace and work back from there. Some doctors assume that everyone wants to extend life until there is no joy left in the living of it. They’re mistaken. In the Kaiser study, most people cared much more about not having their families financially burdened by their care or distressed by tough medical decisions; having their medical preferences honored; and dying in peace spiritually, with their loved ones around them. Living as long as possible was at the very bottom of most people’s lists.
Advanced medicine is replete with treatments (ventilators, dialysis, defibrillators, feeding tubes, to name a few) that postpone death and prolong misery without restoring health. Get clear on what gives your life joy and meaning. When you can no longer enjoy those things, what medical treatments would you refuse? Nobody can answer this for you. We vary widely in how much suffering we’re willing to endure for more time on earth.
Talk to those you love about what a good “quality of life” means to you and put it in writing in a letter or advance directive. Appoint someone with people skills and a backbone to speak for you if you can no longer speak for yourself. The best choice for your “health care agent” isn’t necessarily a close family member. In a crisis, he or she may be too overwhelmed to let you go.
Stay in charge. If your doctor isn’t curious about what matters to you or won’t tell you what’s going on in plain English, fire that doctor and find another. That’s what Amy Berman did when a prominent oncologist told her to undergo chemotherapy, a mastectomy, radiation and then more chemo to treat her stage-four inflammatory breast cancer. This course would have destroyed her quality of life without curing her rare, and usually lethal, variant of breast cancer. Instead, she engaged another oncologist who asked her, “What do you want to accomplish?” Ms. Berman said that she was aiming for a “Niagara Falls trajectory:” To live as well as possible for as long as possible, followed by a rapid final decline.
It has been eight years since then, and Ms. Berman is now 59. She hasn’t undergone surgery or chemo, been hospitalized or gone into debt. A daily estrogen-suppressing pill slows her disease, and a one-time intense burst of “palliative radiation” eliminated pain from cancer cells that had spread to her spine. She’s kept working, ridden a jet ski to the Statue of Liberty, written for the Washington Post, watched her daughter graduate from college and gone snowmobiling in Iceland. “Most doctors,” she says, “focus only on length of life. That’s not my only metric.”
Know the trajectory of your illness. If you face a frightening diagnosis, ask your doctor to draw a sketch tracking how you might feel and function during your illness and its treatments. A visual will yield far more helpful information than asking exactly how much time you have left. It may help you, in particular, to recognize the advent of the precarious health stage that I call the “house of cards.” This fragile state is marked by repeatedly returning from hospital stays worse off than before. At this stage, consider shifting your emphasis from cure to comfort.
All of this may be easier for people with money, but that is not the only determinant of a good decline and death. Two of the best deaths I studied involved people with little savings, and some of the worst were inflicted on people with plenty of money and rolodexes full of influential names. Don’t be afraid of hospice. It won’t make you die sooner, it’s covered by insurance, and you are more likely to die well, with your family supported and your pain under control.
Find your tribe and arrange caregivers. Dying at home is labor-intensive. Hospices provide home visits from nurses and other professionals, but your friends, relatives and hired aides will be the ones who empty bedpans and provide hands-on care. You don’t have to be rich, or a saint, to handle this well. You do need one fiercely committed person to act as a central tentpole and as many part-timers as you can gather. People who die comfortable, well-supported deaths at home tend to have one of three things going for them: money, a good government program or a rich social network of neighbors or friends. So don’t wait until you’re at death’s door to deepen your relationships and find your posse. You just need to get together regularly and share an activity face to face.
Think of death as a rite of passage. In the days before effective medicine, our ancestors were guided by books and customs that framed dying as a spiritual ordeal rather than a medical event. A spiritually mature individual was expected to contemplate it ahead of time. Without abandoning the best of what modern medicine has to offer, return to that spirit. Don’t reduce the end of your life to a medical procedure or strip it of ceremony and humanity. Make sure you live and die as a full human being.
Over the years, as I’ve listened to hundreds of stories, I’ve learned this: Those who contemplate their aging, vulnerability and mortality often live better lives and experience better deaths than those who don’t. They get clear-eyed about the trajectory of their illnesses, so they can plan. They regard doctors as their consultants, not their bosses. They enroll in hospice earlier, and often feel and function better — and sometimes even live longer — than those who pursue maximum treatment. And they often die with less physical suffering, and just as much attention to the sacred, as our ancestors did.
There is a way to a peaceful, empowered death, even in our era of high-tech medicine. If you accept the reality of death and plan for it rather than fight it, you can restore dignity, community and, yes, even beauty to your final passage. That’s not to promise it will be easy. I wish I could guarantee you a vigorous old age, a short decline and a swift, painless death. But let’s face it: No matter how bravely you adapt to loss, and how carefully you navigate our fragmented health system, dying will still represent the ultimate loss of control.
But you don’t have to be a passive victim. You retain moral agency. You can keep shaping your life all the way to its end — as long as you seize the power to imagine, to arrange support and to plan.
Tuesday, July 9
There is a shift going on in the faith life of individuals in America (and North America and the UK and probably other areas too). Is it an overall decline in belief or is it a spiritual awakening? Our author for next week has reason to believe there is both a shift and an awakening happening but, like most movements, it's too difficult to see until we are past it. I'd like to know what you think.
Are we in the Middle of a Spiritual Awakening?
Jessica Grose, NY Times, 7.3.24
When I asked readers who identified as spiritual but not religious to reach out to me, I was astounded by how much variety there was in the faith experiences of individuals in this group. Some said they found spirituality both in the beauty of the physical world and in communing
with other people.
“I found the 12-step program to be sort of a spirituality that worked for me,” a woman named Maggie who lives in the Northeast told me. “It’s about making a connection with a higher power. It’s about trying to improve that connection with prayer and meditation,” she said. Maggie lost her taste for organized religion, she said, after being disappointed by the way her church handled a situation in which a minister had an affair with an employee. She finds the 12-step program to be free of that kind of hypocrisy and appreciates the “bone-scraping honesty” of her fellow group members. People talk about “what’s really going on in their lives,” she said. “It’s refreshing and often relatable, and it feeds me.”
As I read and listened to the wide range of spiritual stories that readers shared with me over the past few weeks, I thought about the way that nones — the catchall term that describes atheists, agnostics and nothing-in-particulars — can imply blankness and almost a kind of nihilism.
But as I learn more about the idea and the history of being spiritual but not religious, and the growth of this self-definition over the past few decades, alongside the documented move away from traditional church attendance, I wondered if I hadn’t given enough weight to new expressions of faith. Rather than seeing this moment as reflecting the slow demise of organized religion in America, one that leaves some people bereft of community and meaning, it’s worth asking if we’re in the middle of the birth of a messy new era of spirituality.
First, I want to be honest that I’m not going to be able to give a definitive answer through the data here. The polling around questions of spirituality is pretty noisy, because the terms “spiritual” and “religious” are “so amorphous and they overlap so greatly,” said Robert Fuller, a professor of religious studies at Bradley University. It’s also important to note that spiritual beliefs have been part of American faith since the earliest days of colonization. “Colonial Americans were especially eclectic when it came to their beliefs about the supernatural,” Fuller writes. “While less than one in five belonged to a church, most subscribed to a potpourri of unchurched religious beliefs including astrology, numerology, magic and witchcraft.”
When you get granular about what people believe today, specific beliefs don’t always track neatly with the labels that people use for themselves. As I wrote last year in a series about nones, many people who identify as having no religion in particular still go to church and still believe in a higher power. Pew Research tried to rectify the overall lack of good data on spirituality with a big report in December. Pew acknowledges that this is a tough topic to pin down because definitions of spirituality are all over the map: Though church attendance has definitively declined and formal religion is important to many fewer Americans than it used to be, “the evidence that ‘religion’ is being replaced by ‘spirituality’ is much weaker, partly because of the difficulty of defining and separating those concepts.”
That said, Pew’s survey found that “22 percent of U.S. adults fall into the category of spiritual but not religious.” Pew found that some of the things that most S.B.N.R.s believe are that “people have a soul or spirit in addition to their physical body” and “there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, even if we cannot see it.” They are also likely to believe that animals and elements of nature like rivers and trees can have “spirits” or “spiritual energies.”
In his book, which was published in 2001, Fuller describes S.B.N.R.s as “seekers” who often “view their lives as spiritual journeys, hoping to make new discoveries and gain new insights on an almost daily basis. Religion isn’t a fixed thing for them.” They tend to value intellectual freedom and “often find established religious institutions stifling.” Even at that time, Fuller wrote that “unchurched spirituality” was “gradually reshaping the personal faith of many who belong to mainstream religious organizations.” And I would argue that this kind of spiritual influence has increased.
While confidence in and adherence to organized religion has dropped since the aughts, according to a 2023 Associated Press-NORC poll, 63 percent of American adults believe in karma, 50 percent believe “that the spirits of those who died can interact with the living,” 42 percent believe “that spiritual energy can be rooted in physical objects,” 34 percent believe in astrology and reincarnation, and 33 percent believe in yoga “as a spiritual practice.”
There’s another, more nebulous concern that I have heard — and expressed myself — that organized religion is an obvious way to find meaning outside oneself and to form community, and that those things may be harder for some people to achieve without the ready-made structure that existing churches, temples and mosques offer. Reporting this piece has changed my thinking somewhat, because I’ve been focused on the decline: the decaying church buildings with their fraying exteriors and cold, emptying pews. What we may be seeing instead are the first shoots of regrowth, of something else that’s too new and diffuse to really track or understand properly.
Many spiritual communities form online, which means that cataloging them is even more difficult. “There’s such a large number by now of groups that form over affiliations with S.B.N.R. or nones that it’s hard to know where to begin,” said Linda Ceriello, an assistant professor of religious studies at Kennesaw State University. “These sorts of groups had plenty of momentum prior to the pandemic, but that circumstance cemented their presence and utility for so many.” She made it clear to me that we won’t know the full shape of the change until this period is in the rearview.
Still, I was most moved hearing from Brent Wright, an Indiana-based hospital chaplain, who also believes that we’re in some kind of transitional period. When we spoke, he said, “Those of us who are living right at the cusp of this shift are the ones bearing the burden of the cultural assumptions that came before us that we’re breaking out of, but then bearing the uncertainty of what does this mean?” He talked about the profound, transcendent spiritual connection he experiences through his work with patients. “I can look in their eyes and they look back and whatever our conversation is, whatever the content on the surface of the words, there’s a spiritual connection,” he said. “There’s a togetherness and aliveness that is profoundly rooted in the fact
that we are both simply human beings and we’re here right now and I care.” I can’t think of a deeper, more meaningful experience than that.
Are we in the Middle of a Spiritual Awakening?
Jessica Grose, NY Times, 7.3.24
When I asked readers who identified as spiritual but not religious to reach out to me, I was astounded by how much variety there was in the faith experiences of individuals in this group. Some said they found spirituality both in the beauty of the physical world and in communing
with other people.
“I found the 12-step program to be sort of a spirituality that worked for me,” a woman named Maggie who lives in the Northeast told me. “It’s about making a connection with a higher power. It’s about trying to improve that connection with prayer and meditation,” she said. Maggie lost her taste for organized religion, she said, after being disappointed by the way her church handled a situation in which a minister had an affair with an employee. She finds the 12-step program to be free of that kind of hypocrisy and appreciates the “bone-scraping honesty” of her fellow group members. People talk about “what’s really going on in their lives,” she said. “It’s refreshing and often relatable, and it feeds me.”
As I read and listened to the wide range of spiritual stories that readers shared with me over the past few weeks, I thought about the way that nones — the catchall term that describes atheists, agnostics and nothing-in-particulars — can imply blankness and almost a kind of nihilism.
But as I learn more about the idea and the history of being spiritual but not religious, and the growth of this self-definition over the past few decades, alongside the documented move away from traditional church attendance, I wondered if I hadn’t given enough weight to new expressions of faith. Rather than seeing this moment as reflecting the slow demise of organized religion in America, one that leaves some people bereft of community and meaning, it’s worth asking if we’re in the middle of the birth of a messy new era of spirituality.
First, I want to be honest that I’m not going to be able to give a definitive answer through the data here. The polling around questions of spirituality is pretty noisy, because the terms “spiritual” and “religious” are “so amorphous and they overlap so greatly,” said Robert Fuller, a professor of religious studies at Bradley University. It’s also important to note that spiritual beliefs have been part of American faith since the earliest days of colonization. “Colonial Americans were especially eclectic when it came to their beliefs about the supernatural,” Fuller writes. “While less than one in five belonged to a church, most subscribed to a potpourri of unchurched religious beliefs including astrology, numerology, magic and witchcraft.”
When you get granular about what people believe today, specific beliefs don’t always track neatly with the labels that people use for themselves. As I wrote last year in a series about nones, many people who identify as having no religion in particular still go to church and still believe in a higher power. Pew Research tried to rectify the overall lack of good data on spirituality with a big report in December. Pew acknowledges that this is a tough topic to pin down because definitions of spirituality are all over the map: Though church attendance has definitively declined and formal religion is important to many fewer Americans than it used to be, “the evidence that ‘religion’ is being replaced by ‘spirituality’ is much weaker, partly because of the difficulty of defining and separating those concepts.”
That said, Pew’s survey found that “22 percent of U.S. adults fall into the category of spiritual but not religious.” Pew found that some of the things that most S.B.N.R.s believe are that “people have a soul or spirit in addition to their physical body” and “there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, even if we cannot see it.” They are also likely to believe that animals and elements of nature like rivers and trees can have “spirits” or “spiritual energies.”
In his book, which was published in 2001, Fuller describes S.B.N.R.s as “seekers” who often “view their lives as spiritual journeys, hoping to make new discoveries and gain new insights on an almost daily basis. Religion isn’t a fixed thing for them.” They tend to value intellectual freedom and “often find established religious institutions stifling.” Even at that time, Fuller wrote that “unchurched spirituality” was “gradually reshaping the personal faith of many who belong to mainstream religious organizations.” And I would argue that this kind of spiritual influence has increased.
While confidence in and adherence to organized religion has dropped since the aughts, according to a 2023 Associated Press-NORC poll, 63 percent of American adults believe in karma, 50 percent believe “that the spirits of those who died can interact with the living,” 42 percent believe “that spiritual energy can be rooted in physical objects,” 34 percent believe in astrology and reincarnation, and 33 percent believe in yoga “as a spiritual practice.”
There’s another, more nebulous concern that I have heard — and expressed myself — that organized religion is an obvious way to find meaning outside oneself and to form community, and that those things may be harder for some people to achieve without the ready-made structure that existing churches, temples and mosques offer. Reporting this piece has changed my thinking somewhat, because I’ve been focused on the decline: the decaying church buildings with their fraying exteriors and cold, emptying pews. What we may be seeing instead are the first shoots of regrowth, of something else that’s too new and diffuse to really track or understand properly.
Many spiritual communities form online, which means that cataloging them is even more difficult. “There’s such a large number by now of groups that form over affiliations with S.B.N.R. or nones that it’s hard to know where to begin,” said Linda Ceriello, an assistant professor of religious studies at Kennesaw State University. “These sorts of groups had plenty of momentum prior to the pandemic, but that circumstance cemented their presence and utility for so many.” She made it clear to me that we won’t know the full shape of the change until this period is in the rearview.
Still, I was most moved hearing from Brent Wright, an Indiana-based hospital chaplain, who also believes that we’re in some kind of transitional period. When we spoke, he said, “Those of us who are living right at the cusp of this shift are the ones bearing the burden of the cultural assumptions that came before us that we’re breaking out of, but then bearing the uncertainty of what does this mean?” He talked about the profound, transcendent spiritual connection he experiences through his work with patients. “I can look in their eyes and they look back and whatever our conversation is, whatever the content on the surface of the words, there’s a spiritual connection,” he said. “There’s a togetherness and aliveness that is profoundly rooted in the fact
that we are both simply human beings and we’re here right now and I care.” I can’t think of a deeper, more meaningful experience than that.
Tuesday, July 2
At the last men's discussion, we talked about Christian Nationalism. I said I'd look for an article that talked about it and, after slicing through a large number of pieces, I have landed on one that raises two questions: what is it (which is undefined) and, more importantly, where should there be separation of church and state. I can't think of a more appropriate place to talk about both questions than at church. I'd like to know what you think about it.
What Does “Christian Nationalism” Even Mean?
Jonathan Tran, The Christian Century, 6.12.24
Jonathan Tran teaches theological ethics at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He is author of The Vietnam War and Theologies of Memory and Foucault and Theology.
Fear over Christian nationalism is running rampant, showing up everywhere from books and podcasts about the January 6 insurrection to Sunday sermons about idolatry. But the way we talk about Christian nationalism comes with all kinds of problems. Until we resolve these problems, all this fear about Christian nationalism might amount to fearmongering.
First, what is Christian nationalism? Sometimes it is presented as an ideology and sometimes as a conspiracy. Sometimes it identifies a specific group of people, other times a diffuse set of associations. Some see Christian nationalists as aggrieved Americans with diminished power; others see them as secretly pulling the strings of American politics. Christian nationalists might have arrived on the scene in 2016, or maybe they’ve been here all along. Their aspirations may be theocratic (a system of government where clerics rule in the name of a god) or libertarian (a system which maximizes personal and political autonomy). Oftentimes Christian nationalists are described as evangelicals, which, it so happens, comes with as many definitions as Christian
nationalism.
The more things Christian nationalists are, the scarier they sound. Yet if Christian nationalists are all of these things, then they are none of them. Concepts that try to do everything end up doing nothing.
Second, lots of the literature on Christian nationalism deals in circular reasoning. We don’t easily see this because it often comes dressed in what looks like data. But as sociologists Jesse Smith and Gary Adler show in “What Isn’t Christian Nationalism?” it is data that gets paraded out in redundant, question-begging ways something to the tune of “Christian nationalism caused the January 6 insurrection” when in reality the logic amounts to “Christian nationalism caused Christian nationalism.”
Third, those who worry a lot about Christian nationalism seem surprisingly unthoughtful about a central issue it raises: the question of how the church should relate to the state. This question can be approached as one for political theorists, who might wonder, for example, where the state ends and the church begins. It can be approached from the perspective of Christian ethics, which might wrestle with Christian citizens’ obligations to Caesar and to God. These are enormously complicated questions, and over the course of the millennia they have been debated we’ve seen many different answers. Yet people worried about Christian nationalism often talk about it as if there is but one settled answer to the question, and Christian nationalists are those on the wrong side of it.
Until we come to some resolution on these problems, it will be hard not to see those scaring us about Christian nationalism as fearmongers; but isn’t fearmongering one of the things we worry most about with Christian nationalists? Aren’t we right to distrust the way they scream “CRT!” or “fake news!” at everything they don’t like? But how is regularly using a term as undefined and question-begging as “Christian nationalism” any different? One might answer, “Well, the difference is they’re Christian nationalists and we’re not.”
That answer speaks for itself.
That answer also reveals the hypocrisy of it all. Indiscriminately using a term that means everything and nothing licenses a view of one’s political rivals as unsophisticated, devoid of difference and diversity, simpletons of one mind, flat to the point of banality, reducible to one thing — something like January 6. Perhaps that’s really the reason for using the term so loosely: while it does little conceptually.
But using the term does so much politically – generating little light but lots of heat – with the rhetorical benefits that come with these two problems:
1) We question-beg so as not to have to come to any conclusions we didn’t start with, dealing in repetitions so that we can avoid anything that might make us think.
2) We presume ourselves in possession of the only answer regarding church and state, presupposing we must be right because we’re us and they must be wrong because they’re them. And not just wrong but irremediably wrong.
Many on the right and on the left have suffered at the hands of a nation that cares more for profit than for people. To deny that suffering by disparaging people as Christian nationalists lends credence to something they might already believe: that America not only doesn’t care about them but doesn’t even see them. Calling them Christian nationalists will not help them feel seen. It might, however, lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy where the unseen mobilize along sectarian lines. We might rather save our fear for that.
What Does “Christian Nationalism” Even Mean?
Jonathan Tran, The Christian Century, 6.12.24
Jonathan Tran teaches theological ethics at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He is author of The Vietnam War and Theologies of Memory and Foucault and Theology.
Fear over Christian nationalism is running rampant, showing up everywhere from books and podcasts about the January 6 insurrection to Sunday sermons about idolatry. But the way we talk about Christian nationalism comes with all kinds of problems. Until we resolve these problems, all this fear about Christian nationalism might amount to fearmongering.
First, what is Christian nationalism? Sometimes it is presented as an ideology and sometimes as a conspiracy. Sometimes it identifies a specific group of people, other times a diffuse set of associations. Some see Christian nationalists as aggrieved Americans with diminished power; others see them as secretly pulling the strings of American politics. Christian nationalists might have arrived on the scene in 2016, or maybe they’ve been here all along. Their aspirations may be theocratic (a system of government where clerics rule in the name of a god) or libertarian (a system which maximizes personal and political autonomy). Oftentimes Christian nationalists are described as evangelicals, which, it so happens, comes with as many definitions as Christian
nationalism.
The more things Christian nationalists are, the scarier they sound. Yet if Christian nationalists are all of these things, then they are none of them. Concepts that try to do everything end up doing nothing.
Second, lots of the literature on Christian nationalism deals in circular reasoning. We don’t easily see this because it often comes dressed in what looks like data. But as sociologists Jesse Smith and Gary Adler show in “What Isn’t Christian Nationalism?” it is data that gets paraded out in redundant, question-begging ways something to the tune of “Christian nationalism caused the January 6 insurrection” when in reality the logic amounts to “Christian nationalism caused Christian nationalism.”
Third, those who worry a lot about Christian nationalism seem surprisingly unthoughtful about a central issue it raises: the question of how the church should relate to the state. This question can be approached as one for political theorists, who might wonder, for example, where the state ends and the church begins. It can be approached from the perspective of Christian ethics, which might wrestle with Christian citizens’ obligations to Caesar and to God. These are enormously complicated questions, and over the course of the millennia they have been debated we’ve seen many different answers. Yet people worried about Christian nationalism often talk about it as if there is but one settled answer to the question, and Christian nationalists are those on the wrong side of it.
Until we come to some resolution on these problems, it will be hard not to see those scaring us about Christian nationalism as fearmongers; but isn’t fearmongering one of the things we worry most about with Christian nationalists? Aren’t we right to distrust the way they scream “CRT!” or “fake news!” at everything they don’t like? But how is regularly using a term as undefined and question-begging as “Christian nationalism” any different? One might answer, “Well, the difference is they’re Christian nationalists and we’re not.”
That answer speaks for itself.
That answer also reveals the hypocrisy of it all. Indiscriminately using a term that means everything and nothing licenses a view of one’s political rivals as unsophisticated, devoid of difference and diversity, simpletons of one mind, flat to the point of banality, reducible to one thing — something like January 6. Perhaps that’s really the reason for using the term so loosely: while it does little conceptually.
But using the term does so much politically – generating little light but lots of heat – with the rhetorical benefits that come with these two problems:
1) We question-beg so as not to have to come to any conclusions we didn’t start with, dealing in repetitions so that we can avoid anything that might make us think.
2) We presume ourselves in possession of the only answer regarding church and state, presupposing we must be right because we’re us and they must be wrong because they’re them. And not just wrong but irremediably wrong.
Many on the right and on the left have suffered at the hands of a nation that cares more for profit than for people. To deny that suffering by disparaging people as Christian nationalists lends credence to something they might already believe: that America not only doesn’t care about them but doesn’t even see them. Calling them Christian nationalists will not help them feel seen. It might, however, lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy where the unseen mobilize along sectarian lines. We might rather save our fear for that.
Tuesday, June 11
Last Thursday was the anniversary of D Day. There was an interesting guest piece in the Wall Street Journal by Michael Snape, a professor at Durham University and trustee of the Royal Army Chaplains’ Museum in Shrivenham, England. His article highlights a piece of history regarding the invasion as the "Great Crusade". Below is one of the comments to the article that serves as a good way to remember this day:
On Utah Beach, 80 years ago, under fierce shelling, my dad jumped into a shallow bomb crater. Another soldier was already in there. They huddled together. The other man had a pocket Bible. Amid the carnage and chaos, they read key verses and recited the 23rd Psalm. In a brief lull, they jumped from their foxhole and never saw each other again. Dad became a Christian that day, calling it "baptism by fire."
God’s Place in D-Day’s Great Crusade
Michael Snape, WSJ 6.6.24
As the West marks the 80th anniversary of D-Day, there is a telling instance of amnesia. The religious significance of Operation Overlord, the Allied forces’ invasion of France on June 6, 1944, is largely ignored. That misses an essential part of the history.
In an order distributed to the expeditionary force, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower hailed the cross-channel invasion as a “Great Crusade” and invoked “the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.” That language might grate against 21st-century sensibilities. In the intervening decades, a tide of secularization, the growth of multifaith societies, and the bitter legacy of subsequent conflicts have infused such sentiments with a toxicity they didn’t possess in 1944. In many Catholic and mainline Protestant churches, now in thrall to a functional pacifism born of the nuclear age, such militancy seems alien and unsettling, something best forgotten.
Yet World War II, and D-Day in particular, wasn’t the “notably secular affair” historian Paul Fussell once claimed it to be. Operation Overlord was carried out primarily by countries in which Judeo-Christian beliefs and values were normative and unifying. Despite popular misconceptions, the shock of World War I hadn’t made the Lord of Hosts redundant. A generation after the Great War, faced with an apparently existential threat, the Western and historically Christian democracies still sought comfort, definition and inspiration in a faith that set them apart from the neopaganism of Nazi Germany.
This identity was evident in the wartime broadcasts of King George VI (“Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church of England”), in the rhetoric of Winston Churchill, who rallied the British people to the defense of “Christian civilization,” and in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s insistence that freedom of worship was one of America’s ultimate war aims.
Notwithstanding the dislocation and moral panics of the war years, the U.S. and Britain witnessed a striking cultural revival of Christianity.
Both nations saw a surge in religious broadcasting — think of C.S. Lewis’s lectures on the BBC that became the book “Mere Christianity.” Hollywood films such as “Mrs. Miniver” (1942) and “The Song of Bernadette” (1943) celebrated the virtues of simple Christian faith, the former helping to steel the U.S. for war. As news of the D-Day invasion spread, houses of worship filled for services, perhaps the “greatest wave of mass intercession in history,” as one magazine described it.
These characteristics were also reflected in the Allied forces, served in wartime by as many as 18,000 uniformed chaplains. Solemn services and confessions preceded D-Day, and specially built mobile churches accompanied the troops after the invasion. The majority of soldiers who landed wore identification tags bearing their religious affiliation, which determined how they would be cared for if wounded or killed.
Faith mattered to military morale. In armies that lacked deterrents against desertion and weren’t driven by a totalitarian ideology, shared religious values and sentiments were an important motivator. For Gen. Bernard Montgomery, a bishop’s son, “the Lord mighty in battle” featured as a recurrent trope in his pre-battle messages to soldiers. Likewise, his colorful and outspoken rival, Gen. George S. Patton, told his GIs that they weren’t only materially better off than their German foes, but “in the place of his blood-glutted Woten” — Odin, a German pagan God —“we have with us the God of Our Fathers Known of Old.”
Such strident appeals could have purchase only in societies that believe in God. An estimated 95% of U.S. soldiers and 99% of British self-identified as Christian or Jewish. A symptom of this was an almost universal turn to prayer in the face of danger among fighting troops. While the dictum that “there are no atheists in foxholes” was hyperbole, extensive wartime surveys of American infantrymen showed that prayer was the most important source of personal support “when the going was tough.”
The same wasn’t true of Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Officially, the Luftwaffe and German units of the SS had no chaplains. While Gott mit uns — “God with us” — was inscribed on German Army belt buckles, German soldiers captured on D-Day were surprised by a visit from a German-speaking British chaplain concerned for their religious welfare. According to Marten Eineg, who was among the captured, this approach was received with derision. Similarly, senior German Army chaplains were surprised to learn that whereas their own divisions might have two chaplains (Catholic and Protestant), many Allied divisions had at least 15.
For our own generation, D-Day may seem to have scant connection with religion, beyond its lingering association with some terminology embarrassing to modern ears. Yet to many contemporaries, it marked a decisive moment in a life-or-death struggle between the Judeo-Christian democracies of the West and the malignant pagan forces of Nazi Germany. The success of D-Day, like that of the Dunkirk evacuation four years earlier, was naturally and widely taken as providential.
On Utah Beach, 80 years ago, under fierce shelling, my dad jumped into a shallow bomb crater. Another soldier was already in there. They huddled together. The other man had a pocket Bible. Amid the carnage and chaos, they read key verses and recited the 23rd Psalm. In a brief lull, they jumped from their foxhole and never saw each other again. Dad became a Christian that day, calling it "baptism by fire."
God’s Place in D-Day’s Great Crusade
Michael Snape, WSJ 6.6.24
As the West marks the 80th anniversary of D-Day, there is a telling instance of amnesia. The religious significance of Operation Overlord, the Allied forces’ invasion of France on June 6, 1944, is largely ignored. That misses an essential part of the history.
In an order distributed to the expeditionary force, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower hailed the cross-channel invasion as a “Great Crusade” and invoked “the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.” That language might grate against 21st-century sensibilities. In the intervening decades, a tide of secularization, the growth of multifaith societies, and the bitter legacy of subsequent conflicts have infused such sentiments with a toxicity they didn’t possess in 1944. In many Catholic and mainline Protestant churches, now in thrall to a functional pacifism born of the nuclear age, such militancy seems alien and unsettling, something best forgotten.
Yet World War II, and D-Day in particular, wasn’t the “notably secular affair” historian Paul Fussell once claimed it to be. Operation Overlord was carried out primarily by countries in which Judeo-Christian beliefs and values were normative and unifying. Despite popular misconceptions, the shock of World War I hadn’t made the Lord of Hosts redundant. A generation after the Great War, faced with an apparently existential threat, the Western and historically Christian democracies still sought comfort, definition and inspiration in a faith that set them apart from the neopaganism of Nazi Germany.
This identity was evident in the wartime broadcasts of King George VI (“Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church of England”), in the rhetoric of Winston Churchill, who rallied the British people to the defense of “Christian civilization,” and in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s insistence that freedom of worship was one of America’s ultimate war aims.
Notwithstanding the dislocation and moral panics of the war years, the U.S. and Britain witnessed a striking cultural revival of Christianity.
Both nations saw a surge in religious broadcasting — think of C.S. Lewis’s lectures on the BBC that became the book “Mere Christianity.” Hollywood films such as “Mrs. Miniver” (1942) and “The Song of Bernadette” (1943) celebrated the virtues of simple Christian faith, the former helping to steel the U.S. for war. As news of the D-Day invasion spread, houses of worship filled for services, perhaps the “greatest wave of mass intercession in history,” as one magazine described it.
These characteristics were also reflected in the Allied forces, served in wartime by as many as 18,000 uniformed chaplains. Solemn services and confessions preceded D-Day, and specially built mobile churches accompanied the troops after the invasion. The majority of soldiers who landed wore identification tags bearing their religious affiliation, which determined how they would be cared for if wounded or killed.
Faith mattered to military morale. In armies that lacked deterrents against desertion and weren’t driven by a totalitarian ideology, shared religious values and sentiments were an important motivator. For Gen. Bernard Montgomery, a bishop’s son, “the Lord mighty in battle” featured as a recurrent trope in his pre-battle messages to soldiers. Likewise, his colorful and outspoken rival, Gen. George S. Patton, told his GIs that they weren’t only materially better off than their German foes, but “in the place of his blood-glutted Woten” — Odin, a German pagan God —“we have with us the God of Our Fathers Known of Old.”
Such strident appeals could have purchase only in societies that believe in God. An estimated 95% of U.S. soldiers and 99% of British self-identified as Christian or Jewish. A symptom of this was an almost universal turn to prayer in the face of danger among fighting troops. While the dictum that “there are no atheists in foxholes” was hyperbole, extensive wartime surveys of American infantrymen showed that prayer was the most important source of personal support “when the going was tough.”
The same wasn’t true of Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Officially, the Luftwaffe and German units of the SS had no chaplains. While Gott mit uns — “God with us” — was inscribed on German Army belt buckles, German soldiers captured on D-Day were surprised by a visit from a German-speaking British chaplain concerned for their religious welfare. According to Marten Eineg, who was among the captured, this approach was received with derision. Similarly, senior German Army chaplains were surprised to learn that whereas their own divisions might have two chaplains (Catholic and Protestant), many Allied divisions had at least 15.
For our own generation, D-Day may seem to have scant connection with religion, beyond its lingering association with some terminology embarrassing to modern ears. Yet to many contemporaries, it marked a decisive moment in a life-or-death struggle between the Judeo-Christian democracies of the West and the malignant pagan forces of Nazi Germany. The success of D-Day, like that of the Dunkirk evacuation four years earlier, was naturally and widely taken as providential.
Tuesday, June 4
This week's reading is an edited-for-length commencement address delivered by Ken Burns, an American filmmaker known for his documentary films which chronicle American history.
He addressed the 2024 undergraduate class of Brandeis University, a historically Jewish, nonsectarian university in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Burns made an impassioned case for identifying and examining our own limiting assumptions and binaries, which he likened to a kind of slavery. Using a play on words, he talked about the U.S. and "us" and said there is no "them." In America there is no "other;" it is all us.
Ken Burns’ 2024 Commencement Address
Ken Burns, Brandeis University, 5.20.24
I am in the business of history. For nearly 50 years now, I've come to understand a significant fact, that we are not condemned to repeat, as the saying goes, what we don't remember. That is a beautiful, even poetic phrase, but not true. Nor are there cycles of history as the academic community periodically promotes. The Old Testament, Ecclesiastes to be specific, got it right:
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again.
There is nothing new under the sun.
What those lines suggest is that human nature never changes or almost never changes. This often gives us the impression that history repeats itself. It does not. "No event has ever happened twice, it just rhymes," Mark Twain is supposed to have said. I have spent all of my professional life on the lookout for those rhymes, drawn inexorably to that power of history.
In January of 1838, shortly before his 29th birthday, a tall, thin lawyer prone to bouts of debilitating depression addressed the young men's lyceum in Springfield, Illinois.
"At what point shall we expect the approach of danger?" He asked his audience, "Shall we expect some trans-Atlantic military giant to step the earth and crush us at a blow?" Then he answered his own question. "Never. All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we must live through all time or die by suicide."
It is a stunning, remarkable statement, one that has animated my own understanding of the American experience. That young man was of course Abraham Lincoln, and he would go on to preside over the closest this country has ever come to near national suicide, our civil war, and yet embedded in his extraordinary, disturbing, and prescient words is also a fundamental optimism that implicitly acknowledges the geographical forcefield two mighty oceans east and west and two relatively benign neighbors north and south have provided for us since the British burned the White House in the War of 1812 and inspired Francis Scott Key.
Lincoln's words that day suggest what is so great and so good about the people who happen to inhabit this lucky and exquisite country of ours. That's the world you now inherit: our work ethic and our restlessness, our innovation and our improvisation, our communities and our institutions of higher learning, our suspicion of power. The fact that we seem resolutely dedicated to parsing the meaning between individual and collective freedom; What I want versus what we need. That we are all so dedicated to understanding what Thomas Jefferson really meant when he wrote that mysterious phrase, "The pursuit of happiness".
But the isolation of those two oceans has also helped to incubate habits and patterns less beneficial to us: our devotion to money and guns and conspiracies, our certainty about everything, our stubborn insistence on our own exceptionalism blinding us to that which needs repair, especially with regard to race and ethnicity. Our preoccupation with always making the other wrong at an individual as well as a global level.
I am reminded of what the journalist I.F. Stone once said to a young acolyte who was profoundly disappointed in his mentor's admiration for Thomas Jefferson. "It's because history is tragedy," Stone admonished him, "Not melodrama." It's the perfect response. In melodrama all villains are perfectly villainous and all heroes are perfectly virtuous, but life is not like that. You know that in your guts and nor is our history like that. The novelist, Richard Powers recently wrote that, The best arguments in the world, won't change a single person's point of view. The only thing
that can do that is a good story. I've been struggling for most of my life to do that, to try to tell good, complex, sometimes contradictory stories, appreciating nuance and subtlety and undertow, sharing the confusion and consternation of unreconciled opposites.
But it's clear as individuals and as a nation we are dialectically preoccupied. Everything is either right or wrong, red state or blue state, young or old, gay or straight, rich or poor, Palestinian or Israeli, my way or the highway. Everywhere we are trapped by these old, tired, binary reactions, assumptions, and certainties. For filmmakers and faculty, students and citizens, that preoccupation is imprisoning. Still, we know and we hear and we express only arguments, and by so doing, we forget the inconvenient complexities of history and of human nature. For example, three great religions, their believers, all children of Abraham, each professing at the heart of their teaching, a respect for all human life, each with a central connection to and legitimate claim to the same holy ground, violate their own dictates of conduct and make this perpetually contested land a shameful graveyard. God does not distinguish between the dead. A very wise person I know with years of experience with the Middle East recently challenged me, "Could you hold the idea that there could be two wrongs and two rights?"
In a filmed interview I conducted with the writer James Baldwin, he said,
"No one was ever born who agreed to be a slave, who accepted it. That is, slavery is a condition imposed from without. Of course, the moment I say that I realize that multitudes and multitudes of people for various reasons of their own enslave themselves every hour of every day to this or that doctrine, this or that delusion of safety, this or that lie. Anti-Semites, for example, are slaves to a delusion. People who hate Negroes are slaves. People who love money are slaves. We are living in a universe really of willing slaves, which makes the concept of liberty and the concept of freedom so dangerous.”
Baldwin is making a profoundly psychological and even spiritual statement. He knew, just as Lincoln knew, that the enemy is often us. We continue to shackle ourselves with chains we mistakenly think is freedom.
I have had the privilege for nearly half a century of making films about the US, but I have also made films about us. That is to say the two letter, lowercase, plural pronoun. All of the intimacy of "us" and also "we" and "our" and all of the majesty, complexity, contradiction, and even controversy of the US. And if I have learned anything over those years, it's that there's only us.
There is no them. And whenever someone suggests to you, whomever it may be in your life that there's a “them”, run away. “Othering” is the simplistic binary way to make and identify enemies, but it is also the surest way to your own self imprisonment.
Okay, let me speak directly to the graduating class. Watch out, here comes the advice.
Be curious, not cool. Insecurity makes liars of us all. Remember, none of us get out of here alive. Grief is a part of life, and if you explore its painful precincts, it will make you stronger. Do good things, help others. Leadership is humility and generosity squared. Remember the opposite of faith is not doubt. Doubt is central to faith. The opposite of faith is certainty.
Don't confuse success with excellence. Do not descend too deeply into specialism. Do not get stuck in one place. "Travel is fatal to prejudice," Twain also said. Be in nature, which is always perfect and where nothing is binary. Its sheer majesty may remind you of your own atomic insignificance, as one
observer put it, but in the inscrutable and paradoxical ways of wild places, you will feel larger, inspirited, just as the egotist in our midst is diminished by his or her self regard.
Choose honor over hypocrisy, virtue over vulgarity, discipline over dissipation, character over cleverness, sacrifice over self-indulgence. Do not lose your enthusiasm, in its Greek etymology the word enthusiasm means simply, "god in us". Serve your country. Insist that we fight the right wars. Denounce oppression everywhere. Convince your government, as Lincoln understood, that the real threat always and still comes from within this favored land. Insist that we support science and the arts, especially the arts. They have nothing to do with the actual defense of our country; They just make our country worth defending.
Remember what Louis Brandeis said, "The most important political office is that of the private citizen." Vote. You indelibly underscore your citizenship, and most important, our kinship with each other when you do. Good luck and godspeed.
He addressed the 2024 undergraduate class of Brandeis University, a historically Jewish, nonsectarian university in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Burns made an impassioned case for identifying and examining our own limiting assumptions and binaries, which he likened to a kind of slavery. Using a play on words, he talked about the U.S. and "us" and said there is no "them." In America there is no "other;" it is all us.
Ken Burns’ 2024 Commencement Address
Ken Burns, Brandeis University, 5.20.24
I am in the business of history. For nearly 50 years now, I've come to understand a significant fact, that we are not condemned to repeat, as the saying goes, what we don't remember. That is a beautiful, even poetic phrase, but not true. Nor are there cycles of history as the academic community periodically promotes. The Old Testament, Ecclesiastes to be specific, got it right:
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again.
There is nothing new under the sun.
What those lines suggest is that human nature never changes or almost never changes. This often gives us the impression that history repeats itself. It does not. "No event has ever happened twice, it just rhymes," Mark Twain is supposed to have said. I have spent all of my professional life on the lookout for those rhymes, drawn inexorably to that power of history.
In January of 1838, shortly before his 29th birthday, a tall, thin lawyer prone to bouts of debilitating depression addressed the young men's lyceum in Springfield, Illinois.
"At what point shall we expect the approach of danger?" He asked his audience, "Shall we expect some trans-Atlantic military giant to step the earth and crush us at a blow?" Then he answered his own question. "Never. All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we must live through all time or die by suicide."
It is a stunning, remarkable statement, one that has animated my own understanding of the American experience. That young man was of course Abraham Lincoln, and he would go on to preside over the closest this country has ever come to near national suicide, our civil war, and yet embedded in his extraordinary, disturbing, and prescient words is also a fundamental optimism that implicitly acknowledges the geographical forcefield two mighty oceans east and west and two relatively benign neighbors north and south have provided for us since the British burned the White House in the War of 1812 and inspired Francis Scott Key.
Lincoln's words that day suggest what is so great and so good about the people who happen to inhabit this lucky and exquisite country of ours. That's the world you now inherit: our work ethic and our restlessness, our innovation and our improvisation, our communities and our institutions of higher learning, our suspicion of power. The fact that we seem resolutely dedicated to parsing the meaning between individual and collective freedom; What I want versus what we need. That we are all so dedicated to understanding what Thomas Jefferson really meant when he wrote that mysterious phrase, "The pursuit of happiness".
But the isolation of those two oceans has also helped to incubate habits and patterns less beneficial to us: our devotion to money and guns and conspiracies, our certainty about everything, our stubborn insistence on our own exceptionalism blinding us to that which needs repair, especially with regard to race and ethnicity. Our preoccupation with always making the other wrong at an individual as well as a global level.
I am reminded of what the journalist I.F. Stone once said to a young acolyte who was profoundly disappointed in his mentor's admiration for Thomas Jefferson. "It's because history is tragedy," Stone admonished him, "Not melodrama." It's the perfect response. In melodrama all villains are perfectly villainous and all heroes are perfectly virtuous, but life is not like that. You know that in your guts and nor is our history like that. The novelist, Richard Powers recently wrote that, The best arguments in the world, won't change a single person's point of view. The only thing
that can do that is a good story. I've been struggling for most of my life to do that, to try to tell good, complex, sometimes contradictory stories, appreciating nuance and subtlety and undertow, sharing the confusion and consternation of unreconciled opposites.
But it's clear as individuals and as a nation we are dialectically preoccupied. Everything is either right or wrong, red state or blue state, young or old, gay or straight, rich or poor, Palestinian or Israeli, my way or the highway. Everywhere we are trapped by these old, tired, binary reactions, assumptions, and certainties. For filmmakers and faculty, students and citizens, that preoccupation is imprisoning. Still, we know and we hear and we express only arguments, and by so doing, we forget the inconvenient complexities of history and of human nature. For example, three great religions, their believers, all children of Abraham, each professing at the heart of their teaching, a respect for all human life, each with a central connection to and legitimate claim to the same holy ground, violate their own dictates of conduct and make this perpetually contested land a shameful graveyard. God does not distinguish between the dead. A very wise person I know with years of experience with the Middle East recently challenged me, "Could you hold the idea that there could be two wrongs and two rights?"
In a filmed interview I conducted with the writer James Baldwin, he said,
"No one was ever born who agreed to be a slave, who accepted it. That is, slavery is a condition imposed from without. Of course, the moment I say that I realize that multitudes and multitudes of people for various reasons of their own enslave themselves every hour of every day to this or that doctrine, this or that delusion of safety, this or that lie. Anti-Semites, for example, are slaves to a delusion. People who hate Negroes are slaves. People who love money are slaves. We are living in a universe really of willing slaves, which makes the concept of liberty and the concept of freedom so dangerous.”
Baldwin is making a profoundly psychological and even spiritual statement. He knew, just as Lincoln knew, that the enemy is often us. We continue to shackle ourselves with chains we mistakenly think is freedom.
I have had the privilege for nearly half a century of making films about the US, but I have also made films about us. That is to say the two letter, lowercase, plural pronoun. All of the intimacy of "us" and also "we" and "our" and all of the majesty, complexity, contradiction, and even controversy of the US. And if I have learned anything over those years, it's that there's only us.
There is no them. And whenever someone suggests to you, whomever it may be in your life that there's a “them”, run away. “Othering” is the simplistic binary way to make and identify enemies, but it is also the surest way to your own self imprisonment.
Okay, let me speak directly to the graduating class. Watch out, here comes the advice.
Be curious, not cool. Insecurity makes liars of us all. Remember, none of us get out of here alive. Grief is a part of life, and if you explore its painful precincts, it will make you stronger. Do good things, help others. Leadership is humility and generosity squared. Remember the opposite of faith is not doubt. Doubt is central to faith. The opposite of faith is certainty.
Don't confuse success with excellence. Do not descend too deeply into specialism. Do not get stuck in one place. "Travel is fatal to prejudice," Twain also said. Be in nature, which is always perfect and where nothing is binary. Its sheer majesty may remind you of your own atomic insignificance, as one
observer put it, but in the inscrutable and paradoxical ways of wild places, you will feel larger, inspirited, just as the egotist in our midst is diminished by his or her self regard.
Choose honor over hypocrisy, virtue over vulgarity, discipline over dissipation, character over cleverness, sacrifice over self-indulgence. Do not lose your enthusiasm, in its Greek etymology the word enthusiasm means simply, "god in us". Serve your country. Insist that we fight the right wars. Denounce oppression everywhere. Convince your government, as Lincoln understood, that the real threat always and still comes from within this favored land. Insist that we support science and the arts, especially the arts. They have nothing to do with the actual defense of our country; They just make our country worth defending.
Remember what Louis Brandeis said, "The most important political office is that of the private citizen." Vote. You indelibly underscore your citizenship, and most important, our kinship with each other when you do. Good luck and godspeed.
Tuesday, May 28
This week's article was recommended to me by one of our discussion members. It's an interview with Sebastian Junger about a book he wrote involving a near-death experience. I included a photo of the journalist because you have most likely read, or watched, his war reporting over the past two decades. I appreciate near-death experiences from journalists because they treat their remarkable journey with a sense of objectivity. I'd like to know what you think.
Reporting Live from the Brink of Death
Elisabeth Egan, NY Times, 5.21.24
Over the course of his reporting career, Sebastian Junger has had several close calls with death. A bullet whizzed past his face in Afghanistan; another time, a bomb exploded in his Humvee. Even when he wasn’t covering war, death was a theme in his work. In the introduction to his memoir, “In My Time of Dying,” which Simon & Schuster will publish on May 21, he describes his own near-drowning while surfing — the shock of being shoved underwater as if by an invisible hand, the flashbulb memory of dirty dishes in his sink, the way the shadow of death suddenly eclipsed an ordinary day.
“I was young,” Junger writes, “and had no idea the world killed people so casually.”
On June 16, 2020, Junger found himself face-to-face with mortality in a way he’d never been. One minute he was enjoying quiet time with his wife at a remote cabin on Cape Cod in Massachusetts; the next, he was in excruciating pain from a ruptured aneurysm. Hours later, as a doctor inserted a large-gauge transfusion line into his jugular vein, Junger sensed his father’s presence in the room. His father had been dead for eight years — and he’d been a scientist and a rationalist — but there he was, trying to comfort his son. It didn’t work.
Junger writes, “I became aware of a dark pit below me and to my left.” It was “the purest black and so infinitely deep that it had no real depth at all.” He was horrified, knowing that “if I went into that hole I was never coming back.” Junger survived. Later, he had questions — lots of them. His memoir braids a journalist’s best efforts at answers with a sexagenarian’s complicated acceptance of the inevitable. Last month, Junger, 62, visited the Book Review to talk about his medical ordeal and its aftermath, including his research into near-death experiences and the uncertainty he has learned to live with, if not embrace. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you arrive at such a personal subject?
I came out of the hospital kind of broken. My body healed quickly, but I wound up with psychological issues that are apparently very common for someone who almost died. I couldn’t be alone; I couldn’t go on a walk in the woods. Everything was evaluated in terms of how long it would take me to get to the E.R. — like if I have an aneurysm now, I’m going to die.
I started writing things down in a notebook because that’s just what I do with experiences and observations. I went to a therapist for a while because after I finished being super anxious, I got incredibly depressed. I recognized this sequence from combat trauma, except it was way worse.
You write a book because something comes alive in you while you do it and that’s your obsession for a while. It took a good two years for that point to come.
How would you describe your relationship with spirituality and religion?
I was raised to be skeptical of organized religion. So I just cruised through life without any particular thought of spirituality — and no particular need for it. I didn’t have a child, thank God, who died of cancer; nothing happened to me that was so unbearable that I had a need to reach out to a higher power. I was blessed. I’ve had a lucky life. Not easy, but lucky.
So, what did you feel while you were in the emergency room?
There was my father, inexplicably. He was communicating — not like you are, with language, but there was communication. He was like, “It’s OK. You don’t have to fight it. You can come with me.” I was puzzled: “What are you doing here? I’m just here for belly pain.” I was like, “Go with you? You’re dead! I want nothing to do with you!”
The pit was this infinite dark emptiness that opened up underneath me. I was like, “What is that?” I was getting pulled into this thing. That’s when I started getting scared. I said to the doctor, “You have to hurry, I’m going. Right now. You’re losing me.”
The nurse said, “Keep your eyes open so we know you’re still with us,” and it dawned on me: I may not make it out. They might not have an answer to this. It was a terrible feeling.
The next day in the I.C.U., the nurse said, “You almost died last night.” Then I remembered my father. Of course, as a journalist, I’m doubting myself: Are you sure you’re not cooking this thing up? But my wife said, “The first thing you told me when I walked in was, I saw my dad.” That’s how she knew how serious it had been.
How did the experience change the way you think?
It never crossed my mind to start believing in God. But what did happen was I was like, maybe we don’t understand the universe on a fundamental level. Maybe we just don’t understand that this world we experience is just one reality and that there’s some reality we can’t understand that’s engaged when we die. All this stuff happens — ghosts and telepathy and the dead appearing in the rooms of the dying — that’s consistent in every culture in the world.
Maybe we just keep bumping into this thing that we’ll never understand because we’re basically a dog watching a television. Maybe anything’s possible; and clearly anything’s possible because the universe happened. If there’s ever an example of “anything can happen,” it’s the universe popping into existence from nothing.
I researched the science enough to understand legitimate explanations for neurological phenomena, and it left me with this question: But why all the same vision?
You write, “Finding yourself alive after almost dying is not, as it turns out, the kind of party one
might expect. You realize that you weren’t returned to life, you were just introduced to death.”
Getting back to normal life meant learning how to forget that we’re all going to die and could die at any moment. That’s what normal life requires. Two nights before I went to the hospital, I dreamed that I had died and was looking down on my grieving family. Because I had that experience, which I still can’t explain, it occurred to me that maybe I had died and the dream was me experiencing a post-death reality and that I was a ghost. I went into this very weird existential Escher drawing. Am I here, or not? At one point, I said to my wife, “How do I know I didn’t die?” She said, “You’re here, right in front of me. You survived.” I thought, “That’s exactly what a hallucination would say.” Returning to normal meant stopping thinking like that.
What do you hope readers will take away from the book?
We’re all in an emotionally vulnerable place; it’s just part of being in a modern society with all its wonderful benefits. Every once in a while I write something that allows people to navigate a little bit better. Maybe this book will bring some comfort.
Reporting Live from the Brink of Death
Elisabeth Egan, NY Times, 5.21.24
Over the course of his reporting career, Sebastian Junger has had several close calls with death. A bullet whizzed past his face in Afghanistan; another time, a bomb exploded in his Humvee. Even when he wasn’t covering war, death was a theme in his work. In the introduction to his memoir, “In My Time of Dying,” which Simon & Schuster will publish on May 21, he describes his own near-drowning while surfing — the shock of being shoved underwater as if by an invisible hand, the flashbulb memory of dirty dishes in his sink, the way the shadow of death suddenly eclipsed an ordinary day.
“I was young,” Junger writes, “and had no idea the world killed people so casually.”
On June 16, 2020, Junger found himself face-to-face with mortality in a way he’d never been. One minute he was enjoying quiet time with his wife at a remote cabin on Cape Cod in Massachusetts; the next, he was in excruciating pain from a ruptured aneurysm. Hours later, as a doctor inserted a large-gauge transfusion line into his jugular vein, Junger sensed his father’s presence in the room. His father had been dead for eight years — and he’d been a scientist and a rationalist — but there he was, trying to comfort his son. It didn’t work.
Junger writes, “I became aware of a dark pit below me and to my left.” It was “the purest black and so infinitely deep that it had no real depth at all.” He was horrified, knowing that “if I went into that hole I was never coming back.” Junger survived. Later, he had questions — lots of them. His memoir braids a journalist’s best efforts at answers with a sexagenarian’s complicated acceptance of the inevitable. Last month, Junger, 62, visited the Book Review to talk about his medical ordeal and its aftermath, including his research into near-death experiences and the uncertainty he has learned to live with, if not embrace. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you arrive at such a personal subject?
I came out of the hospital kind of broken. My body healed quickly, but I wound up with psychological issues that are apparently very common for someone who almost died. I couldn’t be alone; I couldn’t go on a walk in the woods. Everything was evaluated in terms of how long it would take me to get to the E.R. — like if I have an aneurysm now, I’m going to die.
I started writing things down in a notebook because that’s just what I do with experiences and observations. I went to a therapist for a while because after I finished being super anxious, I got incredibly depressed. I recognized this sequence from combat trauma, except it was way worse.
You write a book because something comes alive in you while you do it and that’s your obsession for a while. It took a good two years for that point to come.
How would you describe your relationship with spirituality and religion?
I was raised to be skeptical of organized religion. So I just cruised through life without any particular thought of spirituality — and no particular need for it. I didn’t have a child, thank God, who died of cancer; nothing happened to me that was so unbearable that I had a need to reach out to a higher power. I was blessed. I’ve had a lucky life. Not easy, but lucky.
So, what did you feel while you were in the emergency room?
There was my father, inexplicably. He was communicating — not like you are, with language, but there was communication. He was like, “It’s OK. You don’t have to fight it. You can come with me.” I was puzzled: “What are you doing here? I’m just here for belly pain.” I was like, “Go with you? You’re dead! I want nothing to do with you!”
The pit was this infinite dark emptiness that opened up underneath me. I was like, “What is that?” I was getting pulled into this thing. That’s when I started getting scared. I said to the doctor, “You have to hurry, I’m going. Right now. You’re losing me.”
The nurse said, “Keep your eyes open so we know you’re still with us,” and it dawned on me: I may not make it out. They might not have an answer to this. It was a terrible feeling.
The next day in the I.C.U., the nurse said, “You almost died last night.” Then I remembered my father. Of course, as a journalist, I’m doubting myself: Are you sure you’re not cooking this thing up? But my wife said, “The first thing you told me when I walked in was, I saw my dad.” That’s how she knew how serious it had been.
How did the experience change the way you think?
It never crossed my mind to start believing in God. But what did happen was I was like, maybe we don’t understand the universe on a fundamental level. Maybe we just don’t understand that this world we experience is just one reality and that there’s some reality we can’t understand that’s engaged when we die. All this stuff happens — ghosts and telepathy and the dead appearing in the rooms of the dying — that’s consistent in every culture in the world.
Maybe we just keep bumping into this thing that we’ll never understand because we’re basically a dog watching a television. Maybe anything’s possible; and clearly anything’s possible because the universe happened. If there’s ever an example of “anything can happen,” it’s the universe popping into existence from nothing.
I researched the science enough to understand legitimate explanations for neurological phenomena, and it left me with this question: But why all the same vision?
You write, “Finding yourself alive after almost dying is not, as it turns out, the kind of party one
might expect. You realize that you weren’t returned to life, you were just introduced to death.”
Getting back to normal life meant learning how to forget that we’re all going to die and could die at any moment. That’s what normal life requires. Two nights before I went to the hospital, I dreamed that I had died and was looking down on my grieving family. Because I had that experience, which I still can’t explain, it occurred to me that maybe I had died and the dream was me experiencing a post-death reality and that I was a ghost. I went into this very weird existential Escher drawing. Am I here, or not? At one point, I said to my wife, “How do I know I didn’t die?” She said, “You’re here, right in front of me. You survived.” I thought, “That’s exactly what a hallucination would say.” Returning to normal meant stopping thinking like that.
What do you hope readers will take away from the book?
We’re all in an emotionally vulnerable place; it’s just part of being in a modern society with all its wonderful benefits. Every once in a while I write something that allows people to navigate a little bit better. Maybe this book will bring some comfort.
Tuesday, May 21
The reading for next week is a classic discussion group piece - there will be something in it that you will agree with and something you will disagree with.
Here is a snippet:
All attempts to obscure reference to the ineliminable sexual difference between man and woman are to be rejected.
Can you guess who wrote it? If you said Pope Francis, you would be correct. (I didn't even know "ineliminable" was a word) In the same piece, he affirmed the “inherent dignity of every human being," which we say in the renewal of our baptismal vows.
Can we take parts of religion and spirituality that we agree with, like a buffet, or do we need to take the entire plate of food as is? What about human nature? Can we have pierced ears or tattoos or cut our hair? Can we wear reading glasses or is that eliminating a part of how we were created and thus degrades our dignity? I'd like to know what you think.
Pope Francis Shuts Down the Cafeteria
Raymond J. de Souza, WSJ 4.11.24
Guest commentary: Fr. de Souza is a priest in Kemptville, Ontario; pastor of Holy Cross Church; and economics professor at Queen’s University.
Is Pope Francis trying to close the cafeteria?
On an Easter Sunday appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Cardinal Wilton Gregory, archbishop of Washington, lamented that President Biden is a “cafeteria Catholic” who “picks and chooses dimensions of the faith to highlight while ignoring or even contradicting other parts.”
This week the Vatican published a “declaration” from its doctrinal office titled “Dignitas Infinita,” or “infinite dignity,” in which Pope Francis strongly affirmed the “inherent” dignity of every human being and identified a list of assaults against it: abortion, surrogate childbearing, euthanasia, capital punishment, poverty, war, the travails of migrants, human trafficking, sexual abuse, marginalization of the disabled and digital violence.
The text quotes extensively from his predecessors demonstrating that concerns for human dignity inform all of Roman Catholic teaching and can’t be neatly aligned with a conservative or liberal political agenda. Mr. Biden likes Pope Francis on immigration but not abortion. He thinks the pontiff is bringing him a menu. Pope Francis, for his part, thinks the president mistakes table d’hôte (a meal served to all guests at a fixed price) for à la carte.
Much of the media paid attention to the document’s language on gender theory, which Pope Francis has previously called “the ugliest danger” today. The text was unambiguous:
“All attempts to obscure reference to the ineliminable sexual difference between man and woman are to be rejected.”
That’s broad and would seem to cover not only medical interventions but the use of language, including forms of address and prayers.
Pope Francis is trying something that Pope Benedict XVI attempted in his own treatment of Catholic social teaching. The church is for economic freedom and the rights of workers. It is both pro-life and pro-poor. It teaches that both contraception and in vitro fertilization are intrinsically immoral. It defends human rights and the obligation to act for the common good.
In 2009 Benedict stressed the “strong links between life ethics and social ethics,” meaning that promoting social justice begins with the right to life. Francis would say that you can’t be pro-life without being passionately concerned about the indignity of poverty.
“The Church forcefully maintains this link between life ethics and social ethics,” wrote Benedict in his encyclical “Caritas in Veritate,” or “charity in truth.” “A society lacks solid foundations when, on the one hand, it asserts values such as the dignity of the person, justice and peace, but then, on the other hand, radically acts to the contrary by allowing or tolerating a variety of ways in which human life is devalued and violated, especially where it is weak or marginalized.”
This week’s declaration takes the same approach. Pope Francis appeals to the reality of human nature, a claim that the declaration notes is open to “reason alone,” without any reference to religious teaching.
“‘Nature’ refers to the conditions particular to us as human beings, which enable our various operations and the experiences that characterize them.
We do not create our nature; we hold it as a gift and we can nurture, develop, and enhance our abilities.”
To act against nature is to degrade it, and to act against reason. Pope Francis quotes Benedict’s famous address to the British Parliament on the slave trade — that “misuse of reason” gave rise to that evil and to the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century. Benedict established the link between nature and human nature more explicitly at the Bundestag in Berlin in 2011. Reason demands that we respect both.
“Something is wrong in our relationship with nature, that matter is not just raw material for us to shape at will, but that the earth has a dignity of its own and that we must follow its directives. We must listen to the language of nature and we must answer accordingly. Man too has a nature that he must respect and that he cannot manipulate at will.”
Failure to do so leads to obvious tension, such as opposing genetic modification of crops but allowing puberty blockers for minors. Or hailing Pope Francis for his concern about the climate while ignoring his insistence that marriage is a part of a healthy human ecology. In each case, the world has lost its sense of nature.
This hints at the metaphysics behind the disputes over sex and “gender identity.” Is my body, my identity, something over which I exercise autonomous power, so that my will can determine what and who I am? Or do I have a nature that I and others must respect? While that needn’t be a theological argument, it often is. For if I can remake myself into something contrary to my given nature, I desire to be a creature no longer but a creator, a god.
The debate over dignity is a debate about who God is.
The Catholic answer: Only God is God — we aren’t.
Here is a snippet:
All attempts to obscure reference to the ineliminable sexual difference between man and woman are to be rejected.
Can you guess who wrote it? If you said Pope Francis, you would be correct. (I didn't even know "ineliminable" was a word) In the same piece, he affirmed the “inherent dignity of every human being," which we say in the renewal of our baptismal vows.
Can we take parts of religion and spirituality that we agree with, like a buffet, or do we need to take the entire plate of food as is? What about human nature? Can we have pierced ears or tattoos or cut our hair? Can we wear reading glasses or is that eliminating a part of how we were created and thus degrades our dignity? I'd like to know what you think.
Pope Francis Shuts Down the Cafeteria
Raymond J. de Souza, WSJ 4.11.24
Guest commentary: Fr. de Souza is a priest in Kemptville, Ontario; pastor of Holy Cross Church; and economics professor at Queen’s University.
Is Pope Francis trying to close the cafeteria?
On an Easter Sunday appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Cardinal Wilton Gregory, archbishop of Washington, lamented that President Biden is a “cafeteria Catholic” who “picks and chooses dimensions of the faith to highlight while ignoring or even contradicting other parts.”
This week the Vatican published a “declaration” from its doctrinal office titled “Dignitas Infinita,” or “infinite dignity,” in which Pope Francis strongly affirmed the “inherent” dignity of every human being and identified a list of assaults against it: abortion, surrogate childbearing, euthanasia, capital punishment, poverty, war, the travails of migrants, human trafficking, sexual abuse, marginalization of the disabled and digital violence.
The text quotes extensively from his predecessors demonstrating that concerns for human dignity inform all of Roman Catholic teaching and can’t be neatly aligned with a conservative or liberal political agenda. Mr. Biden likes Pope Francis on immigration but not abortion. He thinks the pontiff is bringing him a menu. Pope Francis, for his part, thinks the president mistakes table d’hôte (a meal served to all guests at a fixed price) for à la carte.
Much of the media paid attention to the document’s language on gender theory, which Pope Francis has previously called “the ugliest danger” today. The text was unambiguous:
“All attempts to obscure reference to the ineliminable sexual difference between man and woman are to be rejected.”
That’s broad and would seem to cover not only medical interventions but the use of language, including forms of address and prayers.
Pope Francis is trying something that Pope Benedict XVI attempted in his own treatment of Catholic social teaching. The church is for economic freedom and the rights of workers. It is both pro-life and pro-poor. It teaches that both contraception and in vitro fertilization are intrinsically immoral. It defends human rights and the obligation to act for the common good.
In 2009 Benedict stressed the “strong links between life ethics and social ethics,” meaning that promoting social justice begins with the right to life. Francis would say that you can’t be pro-life without being passionately concerned about the indignity of poverty.
“The Church forcefully maintains this link between life ethics and social ethics,” wrote Benedict in his encyclical “Caritas in Veritate,” or “charity in truth.” “A society lacks solid foundations when, on the one hand, it asserts values such as the dignity of the person, justice and peace, but then, on the other hand, radically acts to the contrary by allowing or tolerating a variety of ways in which human life is devalued and violated, especially where it is weak or marginalized.”
This week’s declaration takes the same approach. Pope Francis appeals to the reality of human nature, a claim that the declaration notes is open to “reason alone,” without any reference to religious teaching.
“‘Nature’ refers to the conditions particular to us as human beings, which enable our various operations and the experiences that characterize them.
We do not create our nature; we hold it as a gift and we can nurture, develop, and enhance our abilities.”
To act against nature is to degrade it, and to act against reason. Pope Francis quotes Benedict’s famous address to the British Parliament on the slave trade — that “misuse of reason” gave rise to that evil and to the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century. Benedict established the link between nature and human nature more explicitly at the Bundestag in Berlin in 2011. Reason demands that we respect both.
“Something is wrong in our relationship with nature, that matter is not just raw material for us to shape at will, but that the earth has a dignity of its own and that we must follow its directives. We must listen to the language of nature and we must answer accordingly. Man too has a nature that he must respect and that he cannot manipulate at will.”
Failure to do so leads to obvious tension, such as opposing genetic modification of crops but allowing puberty blockers for minors. Or hailing Pope Francis for his concern about the climate while ignoring his insistence that marriage is a part of a healthy human ecology. In each case, the world has lost its sense of nature.
This hints at the metaphysics behind the disputes over sex and “gender identity.” Is my body, my identity, something over which I exercise autonomous power, so that my will can determine what and who I am? Or do I have a nature that I and others must respect? While that needn’t be a theological argument, it often is. For if I can remake myself into something contrary to my given nature, I desire to be a creature no longer but a creator, a god.
The debate over dignity is a debate about who God is.
The Catholic answer: Only God is God — we aren’t.
Tuesday, May 14
Our author for this week is Anne Lamott. We have used two of her pieces from the Washington Post and they worked well. This piece is an interview about her newest book, Somehow. She covers grace, forgiveness, parenting, grandparenting, addiction and aging. It is a compelling interview full of plenty of things to talk about.
Love, Sobriety and Aging: A Conversation with Anne Lamott
Katherine Rowland, The Guardian 5.7.24
When I spoke with Anne Lamott, she was in a “hotel-motel” in Ypsilanti, Michigan, halfway through a cross-country book tour, flaunting sparkly pink nails. Lamott has found Christ-like qualities in the abyss of addiction, and even ways to shepherd her own neuroses when they arrive at the writing desk like damaged relatives. I spoke with Lamott over Zoom. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Your book launched last month and the next day you celebrated your 70th birthday. Does that number carry any particular significance for you?
Anne Lamott: It certainly sounds old. When I was younger, I really loved drugs and alcohol, and I didn’t think I’d see 18. And then I didn’t think I’d see 21. Then I didn’t think I’d see 30. Then I got sober when I was 32 – almost 38 years ago – and I thought, oh, I’ve reached the mountaintop. Then I had a kid and felt this urgency to try to stay alive, which I hadn’t felt for a long time. Then I saw 50.
But I loved my 60s. I felt at the height of my mental and spiritual and psychological wellness. As you get older, you just start throwing stupid stuff off your airplane that kept you flying low for so long. You just think, I don’t have the time. I don’t care anymore. I don’t care what my butt looks like. By my age, you’ve seen so many people die, many of them younger.
And so you get serious about understanding we’re all on borrowed time, and that you’ve got to make a decision about how you’re going to live this one short, precious life.
How does that realization change the stakes when it comes to love?
Over the years, I have picked some terrible but charming and well-known men.
Sometimes attractive and sometimes not. But I always secretly knew that if they were a woman, they wouldn’t be my best girlfriend. And then when I was 62 I met this guy, Neal Allen. And just after one coffee with him, I realized that if he were a woman, he would be my best girlfriend.
That’s the value I held out for and that’s what I encourage people who still long to find a soulmate to hold out for: it should be a person who you want to talk to for the rest of your life.
In December, you wrote in the Washington Post about the slow descent of “the creaking elevators of age”. Apart from death, what awaits you at the end of your ride?
I’m a Sunday school teacher. I teach my kids that death is a pretty significant change of address. And I do believe that the soul is immortal. I don’t know what that will translate into. [The spiritual teacher] Ram Dass said it’s like taking off a pair of really tight shoes. I think I agree with that.
There is so much money and attention being spent on longevity these days, which, I think, entails a certain denial of death. I was chatting a while back with people who work in end-of-life care, and their view was that our fear of death detracts from our ability to live a good life.
There’s an American way of forward thrust: you must always be moving and you must be moving higher in terms of recognition or acclaim or stature. I developed that toxic self-consciousness. It kept me from being here, breathing it all in and observing with a small degree of amusement and wonder and tenderness, because I was so fixated on what I looked like and how I was coming across and how I was doing.
The forward thrust has to do with the fear of death, because if you keep moving very quickly, then you’re going to outrun the abyss. The abyss isn’t going to open at your feet and swallow you up.
But everything I’ve learned that’s of any importance, I’ve learned because the abyss opened up and swallowed me. Christians call it the dark night of the soul; an alcoholic will call it a bottom. And when you hit that bottom and you have to be in it for a little while, you find out who you really are.
Your parents were atheists. How did you come to Christianity?
Well, it was really an accident, believe me. I avoided Christianity like the plague. I feel about Christians the way everybody feels about Christians. I love what Gandhi said, that he loved Christ, but it was Christians he had a problem with, and that’s totally how I feel about it.
And then at the end of my drinking, there was this flea market near this tiny house where I was living. And I’d go over there because when you’re really hungover you want greasy food and strong coffee. And I could hear music wafting out of this ramshackle, cruddy looking church with a Charlie Brown Christmas tree outside of it. It was the music of the Weavers and Joan Baez and Pete Seeger that my parents had been very fond of. So I just started going over there because I loved the music.
For me, one definition of grace is just running out of any more good ideas. So I get my greasy food and my strong coffee. I was hungover every single day, and I just went and sat down, and they didn’t hassle me. They didn’t try to get me to join them or to figure out anything or to take Bibles. They just got me water. They could see I was a really sad, damaged person.
I always left before the sermon because it was just too ridiculous for words. And then one day I didn’t, and I experienced saying to Jesus, kind of bitterly: “OK, fine, you can come in.” And I just tried that out, and it was really sweet.
What role did that new faith play in your sobriety?
I converted a year before I got sober. So I had a kind of gap year at church, where I was very smelly and weird and arrogant all at the same time. I had terrible self-esteem because of the way I was living and then I was very arrogant because I’ve been raised to think that the Lamotts were better and more educated. I stayed there for a year and then I got sober. Church did not get me sober, but my deterioration did and I finally had no place to go. I would have died, I think.
And so I just gave recovery a shot.
What made you ready for Neal to enter your life?
I was raised in the 1950s and early 1960s to understand that women take care of everybody else and that your value comes from being a flight attendant to everybody in the world. I also have a really warm and open heart and I like to take care of people, but my life force was entirely spent on my son and his little baby and the baby’s mother and everybody around me. I was depleted.
And one day, my older brother, who’s a fundamentalist Christian, was staying with me and I said, “I’m just so isolated. I just am so empty right now. I’m all used up.” And he said some sort of happy Christian horseshit. I adore him, but it was like a bumper sticker and I was just furious. I got in the car and started driving and crying and pounding the steering wheel and telling my son and grandson and the baby mama and my parents and my brothers how much I
hated and resented that they sucked me dry and how sad I was.
Later, I came back to town and I called my mentor, Bonnie, of 38 years. And I said, “I’m nobody’s priority.” And she said, “You’re not anybody’s priority because you’re not your own. You’re going to need to take a few months off to have to have a love affair with yourself. You’re going to start with getting the overpriced tamales at the health food store and some flowers. And you’re going to have to do that every day.”
And I was like, no, no, it’s too California. I’m not going to do that. But when all else fails, follow instructions. So I did it. And about three months later, I met Neal. There’s a site called OurTime that’s an offshoot of Match for older people. I met him and we had coffee and we’ve never been apart.
You watched your son battle with addiction. What happened during that time?
Oh, God, it was so awful. He’s got almost 14 years clean and sober now, by the grace of God, but at about age 14, he started to get drunk and stoned a lot of the time. He got into meth and anything he could get his hands on and it was just terrifying. And I did what you do if you’re a mother. I tried everything. I sent him off to the highest peak of the Allegheny mountains for three months, and then to an organic tofu farm. And when he came home, he was dealing the next day. He got his girlfriend pregnant at 19, and they had the baby, and he just got worse and worse.
Nothing I tried worked. Eventually, I left him in jail. The bail bondsman said, “Oh, my God, Ms Lamott, you’re the first mother in my 20-year history as a bail bondsman who left her child in jail.” And, you know, I’m not positive he’d still be alive if I hadn’t. And then I said, “You can’t come over. You can’t be on the property wasted.” And he stomped off. I didn’t know when we’d ever talk again. But then about 10 days later, he called to say that he had a week
clean and sober.
If you were to offer advice to those of us who are watching loved ones suffer, what would you say?
There are these little acronyms in the recovery movement, and one of them is the five M’s: We try to manage others. We martyr ourselves, we manipulate them, and we mother them and the entire world. And the fifth one is so awful: we monitor them, like I’m an android or something, where I can monitor people’s behavior and the number of drinks they’re having or whether I can smell pot on them. I just learned to release him. Bonnie taught me this tool, which was to close my eyes and picture the person there and to push them away into the arms of their own destiny.
I had to make peace with the fact that maybe I would lose [my son]. It wasn’t anything but a nightmare. Either he would die driving drunk, or he’d commit suicide or he’d overdose. And I just had to release him.
Love, Sobriety and Aging: A Conversation with Anne Lamott
Katherine Rowland, The Guardian 5.7.24
When I spoke with Anne Lamott, she was in a “hotel-motel” in Ypsilanti, Michigan, halfway through a cross-country book tour, flaunting sparkly pink nails. Lamott has found Christ-like qualities in the abyss of addiction, and even ways to shepherd her own neuroses when they arrive at the writing desk like damaged relatives. I spoke with Lamott over Zoom. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Your book launched last month and the next day you celebrated your 70th birthday. Does that number carry any particular significance for you?
Anne Lamott: It certainly sounds old. When I was younger, I really loved drugs and alcohol, and I didn’t think I’d see 18. And then I didn’t think I’d see 21. Then I didn’t think I’d see 30. Then I got sober when I was 32 – almost 38 years ago – and I thought, oh, I’ve reached the mountaintop. Then I had a kid and felt this urgency to try to stay alive, which I hadn’t felt for a long time. Then I saw 50.
But I loved my 60s. I felt at the height of my mental and spiritual and psychological wellness. As you get older, you just start throwing stupid stuff off your airplane that kept you flying low for so long. You just think, I don’t have the time. I don’t care anymore. I don’t care what my butt looks like. By my age, you’ve seen so many people die, many of them younger.
And so you get serious about understanding we’re all on borrowed time, and that you’ve got to make a decision about how you’re going to live this one short, precious life.
How does that realization change the stakes when it comes to love?
Over the years, I have picked some terrible but charming and well-known men.
Sometimes attractive and sometimes not. But I always secretly knew that if they were a woman, they wouldn’t be my best girlfriend. And then when I was 62 I met this guy, Neal Allen. And just after one coffee with him, I realized that if he were a woman, he would be my best girlfriend.
That’s the value I held out for and that’s what I encourage people who still long to find a soulmate to hold out for: it should be a person who you want to talk to for the rest of your life.
In December, you wrote in the Washington Post about the slow descent of “the creaking elevators of age”. Apart from death, what awaits you at the end of your ride?
I’m a Sunday school teacher. I teach my kids that death is a pretty significant change of address. And I do believe that the soul is immortal. I don’t know what that will translate into. [The spiritual teacher] Ram Dass said it’s like taking off a pair of really tight shoes. I think I agree with that.
There is so much money and attention being spent on longevity these days, which, I think, entails a certain denial of death. I was chatting a while back with people who work in end-of-life care, and their view was that our fear of death detracts from our ability to live a good life.
There’s an American way of forward thrust: you must always be moving and you must be moving higher in terms of recognition or acclaim or stature. I developed that toxic self-consciousness. It kept me from being here, breathing it all in and observing with a small degree of amusement and wonder and tenderness, because I was so fixated on what I looked like and how I was coming across and how I was doing.
The forward thrust has to do with the fear of death, because if you keep moving very quickly, then you’re going to outrun the abyss. The abyss isn’t going to open at your feet and swallow you up.
But everything I’ve learned that’s of any importance, I’ve learned because the abyss opened up and swallowed me. Christians call it the dark night of the soul; an alcoholic will call it a bottom. And when you hit that bottom and you have to be in it for a little while, you find out who you really are.
Your parents were atheists. How did you come to Christianity?
Well, it was really an accident, believe me. I avoided Christianity like the plague. I feel about Christians the way everybody feels about Christians. I love what Gandhi said, that he loved Christ, but it was Christians he had a problem with, and that’s totally how I feel about it.
And then at the end of my drinking, there was this flea market near this tiny house where I was living. And I’d go over there because when you’re really hungover you want greasy food and strong coffee. And I could hear music wafting out of this ramshackle, cruddy looking church with a Charlie Brown Christmas tree outside of it. It was the music of the Weavers and Joan Baez and Pete Seeger that my parents had been very fond of. So I just started going over there because I loved the music.
For me, one definition of grace is just running out of any more good ideas. So I get my greasy food and my strong coffee. I was hungover every single day, and I just went and sat down, and they didn’t hassle me. They didn’t try to get me to join them or to figure out anything or to take Bibles. They just got me water. They could see I was a really sad, damaged person.
I always left before the sermon because it was just too ridiculous for words. And then one day I didn’t, and I experienced saying to Jesus, kind of bitterly: “OK, fine, you can come in.” And I just tried that out, and it was really sweet.
What role did that new faith play in your sobriety?
I converted a year before I got sober. So I had a kind of gap year at church, where I was very smelly and weird and arrogant all at the same time. I had terrible self-esteem because of the way I was living and then I was very arrogant because I’ve been raised to think that the Lamotts were better and more educated. I stayed there for a year and then I got sober. Church did not get me sober, but my deterioration did and I finally had no place to go. I would have died, I think.
And so I just gave recovery a shot.
What made you ready for Neal to enter your life?
I was raised in the 1950s and early 1960s to understand that women take care of everybody else and that your value comes from being a flight attendant to everybody in the world. I also have a really warm and open heart and I like to take care of people, but my life force was entirely spent on my son and his little baby and the baby’s mother and everybody around me. I was depleted.
And one day, my older brother, who’s a fundamentalist Christian, was staying with me and I said, “I’m just so isolated. I just am so empty right now. I’m all used up.” And he said some sort of happy Christian horseshit. I adore him, but it was like a bumper sticker and I was just furious. I got in the car and started driving and crying and pounding the steering wheel and telling my son and grandson and the baby mama and my parents and my brothers how much I
hated and resented that they sucked me dry and how sad I was.
Later, I came back to town and I called my mentor, Bonnie, of 38 years. And I said, “I’m nobody’s priority.” And she said, “You’re not anybody’s priority because you’re not your own. You’re going to need to take a few months off to have to have a love affair with yourself. You’re going to start with getting the overpriced tamales at the health food store and some flowers. And you’re going to have to do that every day.”
And I was like, no, no, it’s too California. I’m not going to do that. But when all else fails, follow instructions. So I did it. And about three months later, I met Neal. There’s a site called OurTime that’s an offshoot of Match for older people. I met him and we had coffee and we’ve never been apart.
You watched your son battle with addiction. What happened during that time?
Oh, God, it was so awful. He’s got almost 14 years clean and sober now, by the grace of God, but at about age 14, he started to get drunk and stoned a lot of the time. He got into meth and anything he could get his hands on and it was just terrifying. And I did what you do if you’re a mother. I tried everything. I sent him off to the highest peak of the Allegheny mountains for three months, and then to an organic tofu farm. And when he came home, he was dealing the next day. He got his girlfriend pregnant at 19, and they had the baby, and he just got worse and worse.
Nothing I tried worked. Eventually, I left him in jail. The bail bondsman said, “Oh, my God, Ms Lamott, you’re the first mother in my 20-year history as a bail bondsman who left her child in jail.” And, you know, I’m not positive he’d still be alive if I hadn’t. And then I said, “You can’t come over. You can’t be on the property wasted.” And he stomped off. I didn’t know when we’d ever talk again. But then about 10 days later, he called to say that he had a week
clean and sober.
If you were to offer advice to those of us who are watching loved ones suffer, what would you say?
There are these little acronyms in the recovery movement, and one of them is the five M’s: We try to manage others. We martyr ourselves, we manipulate them, and we mother them and the entire world. And the fifth one is so awful: we monitor them, like I’m an android or something, where I can monitor people’s behavior and the number of drinks they’re having or whether I can smell pot on them. I just learned to release him. Bonnie taught me this tool, which was to close my eyes and picture the person there and to push them away into the arms of their own destiny.
I had to make peace with the fact that maybe I would lose [my son]. It wasn’t anything but a nightmare. Either he would die driving drunk, or he’d commit suicide or he’d overdose. And I just had to release him.
Tuesday, May 7
We have two competing pieces on aging. The first one page article is about "super-agers" who are, "Individuals, age 80 and up, but they have the memory ability of a person 20 to 30 years younger." Unfortunately, the research shows very little on how to be a super ager (except for the last sentence of the second to last paragraph which is the reason why we're reading this article).
The second one page article is how to have better brain health. I sure hope drinking coffee and having a weekly discussion about age is on that list. Regardless, I'd like to know what you think.
A Peak Inside the Brains of Super-Agers
Dana Smith, NY Times 4.29.24
When it comes to aging, we tend to assume that cognition gets worse as we get older. Our thoughts may slow down or become confused, or we may start to forget things. But that’s not the case for everyone. For a little over a decade, scientists have been studying a subset of people they call “super-agers.” These individuals are age 80 and up, but they have the memory ability of a person 20 to 30 years younger.
A paper published Monday in the Journal of Neuroscience helps shed light on what’s so special about the brains of super-agers. The biggest takeaway, in combination with a companion study that came out last year on the same group of individuals, is that their brains have less atrophy than their peers’ do. The research was conducted on 119 octogenarians from Spain: 64 super-agers and 55 older adults with normal memory abilities for their age. The participants completed multiple tests assessing their memory, motor and verbal skills; underwent brain scans and blood draws; and answered questions about their lifestyle and behaviors.
The scientists found that the super-agers had more volume in areas of the brain important for memory, most notably the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex. They also had better preserved connectivity between regions in the front of the brain that are involved in cognition. Both the super-agers and the control group showed minimal signs of Alzheimer’s disease in their brains. “By having two groups that have low levels of Alzheimer’s markers, but striking cognitive differences and striking differences in their brain, then we’re really speaking to a resistance to age-related decline,” said Dr. Bryan Strange, a professor of clinical neuroscience at the Polytechnic University of Madrid, who led the studies.
No precise numbers exist on how many super-agers there are among us, but Dr. Rogalski said they’re “relatively rare,” noting that “far less than 10 percent” of the people she sees end up meeting the criteria. But when you meet a super-ager, you know it, Dr. Strange said. “They are really quite energetic people, you can see. Motivated, on the ball, elderly individuals.”
Experts don’t know how someone becomes a super-ager, though there were a few differences in health and lifestyle behaviors between the two groups in the Spanish study. Most notably, the super-agers had slightly better physical health, both in terms of blood pressure and glucose metabolism, and they performed better on a test of mobility. The super-agers didn’t report doing more exercise at their current age than the typical older adults, but they were more active in middle age. They also reported better mental health.
But overall, Dr. Strange said, there were a lot of similarities between the super-agers and the regular agers. “There are a lot of things that are not particularly striking about them,” he said. For example, there were no differences between the groups in terms of their diets, the amount of sleep they got, their professional backgrounds or their alcohol and tobacco use. The behaviors of some of the Chicago super-agers were similarly a surprise. Some exercised regularly, but some never had; some stuck to a Mediterranean diet, others subsisted off TV dinners; and a few of them still smoked cigarettes. However, one consistency among the group was that they tended to have strong social relationships, Dr. Rogalski said.
While there isn’t a recipe for becoming a super-ager, scientists do know that, in general, eating healthily, staying physically active, getting enough sleep and maintaining social connections are important for healthy brain aging.
How to Change Your Mind-Set About Aging
Holly Burns, NY Times 9.20.23
A decades-long study of 660 people published in 2002 showed that those with positive beliefs around getting older lived seven and a half years longer than those who felt negatively about it. Since then, research has found that a positive mind-set toward aging is associated with lower blood pressure, a generally longer and healthier life and a reduced risk of developing dementia. Research also shows that people with a more positive perception of aging are more likely to take preventive health measures — like exercising — which, in turn, may help them live longer. You can’t stop the march of time, but you don’t have to dread it. Here are some ways to help shift your thinking.
Notice where your age beliefs come from.
From the crotchety neighbor to the clueless Luddite, negative stereotypes of aging are everywhere. Taking in negative beliefs about aging can affect our view of the process — and our health, said Becca Levy, a professor of epidemiology at Yale. A 2009 study, for example, found that people in their 30s who held negative stereotypes of aging were significantly more likely to experience a cardiovascular event, like a heart attack or stroke, later in life than those with positive ones. To change your negative age beliefs, you first need to become more aware of them, Dr. Levy said. Simply identifying the sources of your conceptions about aging can help you gain some distance from negative ideas. “People can strengthen their positive age beliefs at any age,” Dr. Levy said. In one 2014 study, 100 adults — with an average age of 81 — who were exposed to positive images of aging showed both improved perceptions of aging and improved physical function.
Find aging role models.
If you associate aging with only loss or limitation, “you’re not getting the full picture of what it means to age,” said Regina Koepp, a psychologist who specializes in aging. Instead, she said, “shift your attention — look around for role models, see who’s doing it well.” Dr. Levy recommends coming up with five older people who have done something you deem impressive or have a quality that you admire, whether it’s falling in love later in life, showing devotion to helping others or maintaining a commitment to physical fitness.
Don’t mistake forced positivity for optimism.
Research suggests that optimistic women are more likely to live past 90 than less optimistic women, regardless of race or ethnicity. But thinking more positively about aging doesn’t mean papering over real concerns with happy thoughts — or using phrases like “You haven’t aged!” as a compliment. Instead, try to look at the honest reality with optimism. If you’re feeling deflated that your tennis game isn’t as strong in your 70s as it once was, Dr. Ginne said, remind yourself: “No, I can’t play tennis like I did when I was 50, and I can only play for 10 minutes. But I can still play.”
Don’t dismiss the benefits.
Focus on what you’re gaining, too. Research has shown, for example, that emotional well-being generally increases with age, and certain aspects of cognition, like conflict resolution, often improve in later life. With time, “we’re likely to develop more resilience,” Dr. Koepp said. Successful aging doesn’t mean you won’t get sick, encounter loss or require care at some point, she said. And no one said that changing any mind-set is easy. But if you can, she added, it may allow you to see yourself more clearly “as a person with lived experience and wisdom” as you age.
The second one page article is how to have better brain health. I sure hope drinking coffee and having a weekly discussion about age is on that list. Regardless, I'd like to know what you think.
A Peak Inside the Brains of Super-Agers
Dana Smith, NY Times 4.29.24
When it comes to aging, we tend to assume that cognition gets worse as we get older. Our thoughts may slow down or become confused, or we may start to forget things. But that’s not the case for everyone. For a little over a decade, scientists have been studying a subset of people they call “super-agers.” These individuals are age 80 and up, but they have the memory ability of a person 20 to 30 years younger.
A paper published Monday in the Journal of Neuroscience helps shed light on what’s so special about the brains of super-agers. The biggest takeaway, in combination with a companion study that came out last year on the same group of individuals, is that their brains have less atrophy than their peers’ do. The research was conducted on 119 octogenarians from Spain: 64 super-agers and 55 older adults with normal memory abilities for their age. The participants completed multiple tests assessing their memory, motor and verbal skills; underwent brain scans and blood draws; and answered questions about their lifestyle and behaviors.
The scientists found that the super-agers had more volume in areas of the brain important for memory, most notably the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex. They also had better preserved connectivity between regions in the front of the brain that are involved in cognition. Both the super-agers and the control group showed minimal signs of Alzheimer’s disease in their brains. “By having two groups that have low levels of Alzheimer’s markers, but striking cognitive differences and striking differences in their brain, then we’re really speaking to a resistance to age-related decline,” said Dr. Bryan Strange, a professor of clinical neuroscience at the Polytechnic University of Madrid, who led the studies.
No precise numbers exist on how many super-agers there are among us, but Dr. Rogalski said they’re “relatively rare,” noting that “far less than 10 percent” of the people she sees end up meeting the criteria. But when you meet a super-ager, you know it, Dr. Strange said. “They are really quite energetic people, you can see. Motivated, on the ball, elderly individuals.”
Experts don’t know how someone becomes a super-ager, though there were a few differences in health and lifestyle behaviors between the two groups in the Spanish study. Most notably, the super-agers had slightly better physical health, both in terms of blood pressure and glucose metabolism, and they performed better on a test of mobility. The super-agers didn’t report doing more exercise at their current age than the typical older adults, but they were more active in middle age. They also reported better mental health.
But overall, Dr. Strange said, there were a lot of similarities between the super-agers and the regular agers. “There are a lot of things that are not particularly striking about them,” he said. For example, there were no differences between the groups in terms of their diets, the amount of sleep they got, their professional backgrounds or their alcohol and tobacco use. The behaviors of some of the Chicago super-agers were similarly a surprise. Some exercised regularly, but some never had; some stuck to a Mediterranean diet, others subsisted off TV dinners; and a few of them still smoked cigarettes. However, one consistency among the group was that they tended to have strong social relationships, Dr. Rogalski said.
While there isn’t a recipe for becoming a super-ager, scientists do know that, in general, eating healthily, staying physically active, getting enough sleep and maintaining social connections are important for healthy brain aging.
How to Change Your Mind-Set About Aging
Holly Burns, NY Times 9.20.23
A decades-long study of 660 people published in 2002 showed that those with positive beliefs around getting older lived seven and a half years longer than those who felt negatively about it. Since then, research has found that a positive mind-set toward aging is associated with lower blood pressure, a generally longer and healthier life and a reduced risk of developing dementia. Research also shows that people with a more positive perception of aging are more likely to take preventive health measures — like exercising — which, in turn, may help them live longer. You can’t stop the march of time, but you don’t have to dread it. Here are some ways to help shift your thinking.
Notice where your age beliefs come from.
From the crotchety neighbor to the clueless Luddite, negative stereotypes of aging are everywhere. Taking in negative beliefs about aging can affect our view of the process — and our health, said Becca Levy, a professor of epidemiology at Yale. A 2009 study, for example, found that people in their 30s who held negative stereotypes of aging were significantly more likely to experience a cardiovascular event, like a heart attack or stroke, later in life than those with positive ones. To change your negative age beliefs, you first need to become more aware of them, Dr. Levy said. Simply identifying the sources of your conceptions about aging can help you gain some distance from negative ideas. “People can strengthen their positive age beliefs at any age,” Dr. Levy said. In one 2014 study, 100 adults — with an average age of 81 — who were exposed to positive images of aging showed both improved perceptions of aging and improved physical function.
Find aging role models.
If you associate aging with only loss or limitation, “you’re not getting the full picture of what it means to age,” said Regina Koepp, a psychologist who specializes in aging. Instead, she said, “shift your attention — look around for role models, see who’s doing it well.” Dr. Levy recommends coming up with five older people who have done something you deem impressive or have a quality that you admire, whether it’s falling in love later in life, showing devotion to helping others or maintaining a commitment to physical fitness.
Don’t mistake forced positivity for optimism.
Research suggests that optimistic women are more likely to live past 90 than less optimistic women, regardless of race or ethnicity. But thinking more positively about aging doesn’t mean papering over real concerns with happy thoughts — or using phrases like “You haven’t aged!” as a compliment. Instead, try to look at the honest reality with optimism. If you’re feeling deflated that your tennis game isn’t as strong in your 70s as it once was, Dr. Ginne said, remind yourself: “No, I can’t play tennis like I did when I was 50, and I can only play for 10 minutes. But I can still play.”
Don’t dismiss the benefits.
Focus on what you’re gaining, too. Research has shown, for example, that emotional well-being generally increases with age, and certain aspects of cognition, like conflict resolution, often improve in later life. With time, “we’re likely to develop more resilience,” Dr. Koepp said. Successful aging doesn’t mean you won’t get sick, encounter loss or require care at some point, she said. And no one said that changing any mind-set is easy. But if you can, she added, it may allow you to see yourself more clearly “as a person with lived experience and wisdom” as you age.
Tuesday, April 30
Are you familiar with Carl Jung? If not, this two page article by Arthur Brooks will introduce you to his five pillars of happy living. Brooks also includes his seven-point summary. I'd like to know what you think. For me, the discussion group is a source of happiness.
Jung’s Five Pillars of a Good Life
Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic 4.11.24
In the world of popular psychology, the work of one giant figure is hard to avoid: Carl Jung. If you think you have a complex about something, the Swiss psychiatrist invented that term. Are you an extrovert or an introvert? His too. When it comes to happiness, though, Jung can seem a bit of a downer. “‘Happiness,’” he wrote, “is such a remarkable reality that there is nobody who does not long for it.” So far, so good. But he does not leave it there: “And yet there is not a single objective criterion which would prove beyond all doubt that this condition necessarily exists.”
Jung is stating the manifest truth that we cannot lay hold of any blissful end state of pure happiness, because every human life is bound to involve negative emotions. Rather, the objective should be progress — or, in the words of Oprah Winfrey, “happierness.”
In 1960, as he neared the end of his long life, Jung shared his own strategy for realizing that goal of progress. Jung believed that making progress toward happiness was built on five pillars.
1. Good physical and mental health
Jung believed that getting happier required soundness of mind and body. His thesis is supported by plenty of research. For example, the longest-running study of happiness (the Harvard Study of Adult Development) has shown four of the biggest predictors of a senior citizen’s well-being are not smoking; drinking alcohol moderately if at all; maintaining a healthy body weight; and exercising. Even more important for well-being is good mental health. Good health practices seem not to raise happiness, but rather to lower unhappiness. Today, many emotion researchers have uncovered evidence of a phenomenon that Jung did not conceive of: Negative and positive emotions appear to be separable phenomena and not opposites; well-being requires a focus on each. Furthermore, researchers have identified how activities such as physical exercise can interrupt the cycle of negative emotion during moments of heightened stress, by helping moderate cortisol-hormone levels.
2. Good personal and intimate relations, such as those of marriage, family, and friendships
The intertwined notions that close relationships are at the heart of well-being and that cultivating them will reliably increase happiness are unambiguously true. Indeed, of the four best life investments for increasing personal satisfaction, two involve family and friendships (the others are in faith or philosophy, and meaningful work). And as for marriage, an institution that has taken a beating over recent decades, more and more evidence is piling up from scholars that being wed makes the majority of people happier than they otherwise would be.
3. Seeing beauty in art and in nature
Jung believed that happiness required one to cultivate an appreciation for beautiful things and experiences. Although this might sound intuitively obvious, the actuality is more complicated.
First, a big difference exists between beauty in nature and beauty in art. Specifically, engagement with nature’s beauty is known, across different cultures, to enhance well-being. Second, with aesthetic experience, happiness depends on the artistic mood. For example, experiments have shown that if you listen to happy music on your own, it makes you feel happier; if you listen to sad music while alone, it makes you feel sadder.
4. A reasonable standard of living and satisfactory work
As with physical and mental health, employment and income seem tied more to eliminating unhappiness than to raising happiness. For one thing, scholars have long shown that unemployment is a reliable source of misery: Depressive symptoms typically rise when people, both men and women, are unemployed. Work itself helps protect mental health. My own assessment of the evidence is that money alone cannot buy happiness, nor can spending money to acquire possessions make one happy; but having the money to pay for experiences with loved ones, to free up time to spend on meaningful activities, and to support good causes does enhance happiness.
5. A philosophical or religious outlook that fosters resilience
Jung argued that a good life requires a way of understanding why things happen the way they do, being able to zoom out from the travails of life, and put events (including inevitable suffering) into perspective. The son of a pastor, Jung was deeply Christian in his worldview, but everyone, he thought, should have some sense of transcendent belief or higher purpose. Research clearly backs up Jung’s contention. Religious belief has been noted as strongly predictive of finding meaning in life, and spirituality is positively correlated with better mental health; both faith and spiritual practice seem protective against depression.
Taken together, Jung’s ideas about happiness and his five pillars of well-being stand up solidly to modern research findings. I propose this practical seven-point summary:
1. Do not fall prey to seeking pure happiness. Instead, seek lifelong progress toward happierness.
2. Manage as best you can the main sources of misery in your life by attending to your physical and mental health, maintaining employment, and ensuring an adequate income.
3. If you’re earning enough to take care of your principal needs, remember that happiness at work comes not from chasing higher income but from pursuing a sense of accomplishment and service to others.
4. Cultivate deep relationships through marriage, family, and real friendships. Remember that happiness is love.
5. If you have discretionary income left over, use it to invest in your relationships with family and friends.
6. Spend time in nature, surround yourself with beauty that uplifts you, and consume the art and music that nourish your spirit.
7. Find a path of transcendence—one that explains the big picture in life and helps you comprehend suffering and the purpose of your existence.
Beyond the scientific research that supports this strategy, we also have the evidence of its effectiveness in the example of Jung’s life. He made his list to mark his 85th birthday, which was to be the last one he celebrated. By all accounts, he made progress toward happiness over his life, had a long and devoted marriage, died surrounded by the people he loved, and was satisfied that he had used his abilities in a meaningful way that served others. In this world, that sounds pretty good to me.
Jung’s Five Pillars of a Good Life
Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic 4.11.24
In the world of popular psychology, the work of one giant figure is hard to avoid: Carl Jung. If you think you have a complex about something, the Swiss psychiatrist invented that term. Are you an extrovert or an introvert? His too. When it comes to happiness, though, Jung can seem a bit of a downer. “‘Happiness,’” he wrote, “is such a remarkable reality that there is nobody who does not long for it.” So far, so good. But he does not leave it there: “And yet there is not a single objective criterion which would prove beyond all doubt that this condition necessarily exists.”
Jung is stating the manifest truth that we cannot lay hold of any blissful end state of pure happiness, because every human life is bound to involve negative emotions. Rather, the objective should be progress — or, in the words of Oprah Winfrey, “happierness.”
In 1960, as he neared the end of his long life, Jung shared his own strategy for realizing that goal of progress. Jung believed that making progress toward happiness was built on five pillars.
1. Good physical and mental health
Jung believed that getting happier required soundness of mind and body. His thesis is supported by plenty of research. For example, the longest-running study of happiness (the Harvard Study of Adult Development) has shown four of the biggest predictors of a senior citizen’s well-being are not smoking; drinking alcohol moderately if at all; maintaining a healthy body weight; and exercising. Even more important for well-being is good mental health. Good health practices seem not to raise happiness, but rather to lower unhappiness. Today, many emotion researchers have uncovered evidence of a phenomenon that Jung did not conceive of: Negative and positive emotions appear to be separable phenomena and not opposites; well-being requires a focus on each. Furthermore, researchers have identified how activities such as physical exercise can interrupt the cycle of negative emotion during moments of heightened stress, by helping moderate cortisol-hormone levels.
2. Good personal and intimate relations, such as those of marriage, family, and friendships
The intertwined notions that close relationships are at the heart of well-being and that cultivating them will reliably increase happiness are unambiguously true. Indeed, of the four best life investments for increasing personal satisfaction, two involve family and friendships (the others are in faith or philosophy, and meaningful work). And as for marriage, an institution that has taken a beating over recent decades, more and more evidence is piling up from scholars that being wed makes the majority of people happier than they otherwise would be.
3. Seeing beauty in art and in nature
Jung believed that happiness required one to cultivate an appreciation for beautiful things and experiences. Although this might sound intuitively obvious, the actuality is more complicated.
First, a big difference exists between beauty in nature and beauty in art. Specifically, engagement with nature’s beauty is known, across different cultures, to enhance well-being. Second, with aesthetic experience, happiness depends on the artistic mood. For example, experiments have shown that if you listen to happy music on your own, it makes you feel happier; if you listen to sad music while alone, it makes you feel sadder.
4. A reasonable standard of living and satisfactory work
As with physical and mental health, employment and income seem tied more to eliminating unhappiness than to raising happiness. For one thing, scholars have long shown that unemployment is a reliable source of misery: Depressive symptoms typically rise when people, both men and women, are unemployed. Work itself helps protect mental health. My own assessment of the evidence is that money alone cannot buy happiness, nor can spending money to acquire possessions make one happy; but having the money to pay for experiences with loved ones, to free up time to spend on meaningful activities, and to support good causes does enhance happiness.
5. A philosophical or religious outlook that fosters resilience
Jung argued that a good life requires a way of understanding why things happen the way they do, being able to zoom out from the travails of life, and put events (including inevitable suffering) into perspective. The son of a pastor, Jung was deeply Christian in his worldview, but everyone, he thought, should have some sense of transcendent belief or higher purpose. Research clearly backs up Jung’s contention. Religious belief has been noted as strongly predictive of finding meaning in life, and spirituality is positively correlated with better mental health; both faith and spiritual practice seem protective against depression.
Taken together, Jung’s ideas about happiness and his five pillars of well-being stand up solidly to modern research findings. I propose this practical seven-point summary:
1. Do not fall prey to seeking pure happiness. Instead, seek lifelong progress toward happierness.
2. Manage as best you can the main sources of misery in your life by attending to your physical and mental health, maintaining employment, and ensuring an adequate income.
3. If you’re earning enough to take care of your principal needs, remember that happiness at work comes not from chasing higher income but from pursuing a sense of accomplishment and service to others.
4. Cultivate deep relationships through marriage, family, and real friendships. Remember that happiness is love.
5. If you have discretionary income left over, use it to invest in your relationships with family and friends.
6. Spend time in nature, surround yourself with beauty that uplifts you, and consume the art and music that nourish your spirit.
7. Find a path of transcendence—one that explains the big picture in life and helps you comprehend suffering and the purpose of your existence.
Beyond the scientific research that supports this strategy, we also have the evidence of its effectiveness in the example of Jung’s life. He made his list to mark his 85th birthday, which was to be the last one he celebrated. By all accounts, he made progress toward happiness over his life, had a long and devoted marriage, died surrounded by the people he loved, and was satisfied that he had used his abilities in a meaningful way that served others. In this world, that sounds pretty good to me.
Tuesday, April 23
We have two, one-page articles for next week. The first one, written by a priest from the Church of England, wonders how God might bless a divided America (and what the Episcopal Church can do to help). The second is written by a Presbyterian pastor who challenges this Sunday's Gospel lesson - about the Good Shepherd - and specifically Jesus' claim that he will lay down his life for the sheep. The author writes the following: A dead shepherd isn’t helpful to anyone, least of all to sheep left vulnerable to predators, starvation, and scattering. What’s a flock to do without the abiding presence of the rod and staff that comfort?
God's blessing to a divided nation and a dead shepherd. Should be an interesting discussion.
How Might God Bless a Divided America
Samuel Wells, Christian Century 4.11.24
It’s hard to know how to ask God to bless America right now. On a recent visit to the East Coast, I found friends and peers in a mixture of panic and denial about the coming November election. I did one thing on my visit, however, that gave me three thoughts about how not to feel so paralyzed. I went to church.
It was a conventional Eucharist at an Episcopal church. But three moments struck me in a special way. The first was the prayers of the people. As I reflected on the prayers of the people, I pondered whether it is too small a thing that such a prayer service be an endorsement of one administration. Surely the Holy Spirit could make it an event where a wondrously kaleidoscopic diversity of Americans each took the microphone to articulate their respective prayers for the ensuing years. Maybe America could be offered this invitation:
“Let your heart expand. Let your mind encompass. Let your soul grow, through meeting, enjoying, and embracing one another. We believe we’re going to spend eternity together. So we’d best start today. Because Christianity’s about living God’s future now.”
America, like the church, shouldn’t be about where we’re all separately coming from. It should be about where we’re all together going.
The second moment that struck me was the offertory procession, in which the bread, wine, and money were brought to the altar. As I saw this taking place, my imagination again went to what the liturgy might be saying to this divided country. I thought about Isaiah 2:2: “In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established; all the nations shall stream to it.” I imagined every tribe and race and people streaming into this church, proudly bearing the trophies and symbols and glories of their heritage and narrative and dreams — each one saying, These aren’t our identities to be protected — these are our gifts to be shared.
Gifts are given to be a blessing. God has blessed America with everything it needs to flourish and to be a blessing to the world. In some kind of national pageant, the whole nation could offer its gifts to bless each other. Identities could be affirmed and transcended. Possessions could be turned into gifts. Differences could become assets. Diversity could enrich. The life of the nation could become a prayer that the Holy Spirit would turn the water of its existence into the wine of God’s essence and turn life into eternal life. Maybe that’s how God could bless America.
My final pondering came during the distribution of communion. I recalled a visit to a convention in the Deep South. Several congregations were an even split of Democratic and Republican. But rather than a source of discomfort, tension, and denial, I wondered if it were a holy, rich, important opportunity. So I said, “Your diocese could be a beacon of hope. Because every Sunday your congregation comes to that altar rail, and what it is this: we may be divided on culture wars, foreign policy, and migration, but this altar rail reminds us we are one body because we’re members of Christ’s body. And who we are together is more fundamental than what we think apart. The Holy Spirit is giving you the power to witness to the whole world about our fundamental identity as Christ’s body, an identity that transcends political divisions.”
There is widespread dismay about the direction the United States is going. The most distressing thing about this is the sense of powerlessness among its people. And when those people are Christians, it’s even more distressing, because in worship those people have in their daily and weekly practice the gifts God gives to reimagine the world. For Christians, politics doesn’t begin or end with our choice on a voting slip but with God’s choice to be with us.
A Dead Shepherd Isn’t Helpful to Anyone
Austin Shelley, Christian Century 4.15.24
In the poem “Introduction to Poetry,” Billy Collins laments his students’ tendency to approach a poem with weapons drawn. The former US poet laureate paints a portrait of the delight he hopes they will embrace when encountering verse:
I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive.
For months I’ve struggled with this week’s lectionary verses from the Gospel of John. Of all the
gospels, it is the fourth that waxes poetic. From its soaring prologue to its tender post-resurrection breakfast on the shoreline — where Jesus repeatedly asks Peter, “Do you love me?”— metaphor and sensory imagery abound.
Initially lacking a more sensitive approach, I tried unsuccessfully to torture a confession out of Jesus’ insistence that the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. Does a good shepherd actually do this? Right out of the gate, I questioned Jesus’ assumption. Such a sacrifice seems both unnecessary and shortsighted. Fellow interrogators might agree that a dead shepherd isn’t helpful to anyone, least of all to sheep left vulnerable to predators, starvation, and scattering. What’s a flock to do without the abiding presence of the rod and staff that comfort? How are the sheep to remain safe, healthy, and together without the soothing tenor of the trusted voice that leads them beside still waters and makes them to lie down in green pastures?
The text’s stoic silence in the face of this inquisition pushed me further. And what of these other sheep from another fold? Did Jesus indeed have the power to lay down his life in order to take it up again? Or shall we believe instead a testimony at odds with John’s gospel account, the witness borne by the epistle to the church at Philippi: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:5–8).
Either way, we end up nailing Jesus to a cross to find out what he really means.
Pressing an ear against the Fourth Gospel’s hive may prove to be a more fruitful endeavor. What if we as students of scripture were to take into account the time elapsed between the life, death, and resurrection of the historical Jesus of Nazareth and the first circulation of this gospel account decades later? What if we were to consider that particular passage of time to be the catalyst for transforming prose into poetry, for coloring the gospel writer’s memories of the person of Jesus with the stained-glass hues of the Spirit of Jesus with whom he had abided for many long years? What if, as part of our wrestling this text for a blessing, we were to submit to its strength instead?
If we were to entertain such a nuanced approach, if we were to assume the posture of those who listen intently to the inner melody the poem hums, if we were to wander into the room of John 10 and feel its walls for a light switch — I believe it is entirely possible that we would hear for ourselves the voice of the Good Shepherd who knows us as his own. Moreover, we would learn something true of him that turns out to be mighty good news: that defying all logic to the contrary, he laid down his life for the sheep. As the Father commands, may we as the body of Christ take it up again.
God's blessing to a divided nation and a dead shepherd. Should be an interesting discussion.
How Might God Bless a Divided America
Samuel Wells, Christian Century 4.11.24
It’s hard to know how to ask God to bless America right now. On a recent visit to the East Coast, I found friends and peers in a mixture of panic and denial about the coming November election. I did one thing on my visit, however, that gave me three thoughts about how not to feel so paralyzed. I went to church.
It was a conventional Eucharist at an Episcopal church. But three moments struck me in a special way. The first was the prayers of the people. As I reflected on the prayers of the people, I pondered whether it is too small a thing that such a prayer service be an endorsement of one administration. Surely the Holy Spirit could make it an event where a wondrously kaleidoscopic diversity of Americans each took the microphone to articulate their respective prayers for the ensuing years. Maybe America could be offered this invitation:
“Let your heart expand. Let your mind encompass. Let your soul grow, through meeting, enjoying, and embracing one another. We believe we’re going to spend eternity together. So we’d best start today. Because Christianity’s about living God’s future now.”
America, like the church, shouldn’t be about where we’re all separately coming from. It should be about where we’re all together going.
The second moment that struck me was the offertory procession, in which the bread, wine, and money were brought to the altar. As I saw this taking place, my imagination again went to what the liturgy might be saying to this divided country. I thought about Isaiah 2:2: “In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established; all the nations shall stream to it.” I imagined every tribe and race and people streaming into this church, proudly bearing the trophies and symbols and glories of their heritage and narrative and dreams — each one saying, These aren’t our identities to be protected — these are our gifts to be shared.
Gifts are given to be a blessing. God has blessed America with everything it needs to flourish and to be a blessing to the world. In some kind of national pageant, the whole nation could offer its gifts to bless each other. Identities could be affirmed and transcended. Possessions could be turned into gifts. Differences could become assets. Diversity could enrich. The life of the nation could become a prayer that the Holy Spirit would turn the water of its existence into the wine of God’s essence and turn life into eternal life. Maybe that’s how God could bless America.
My final pondering came during the distribution of communion. I recalled a visit to a convention in the Deep South. Several congregations were an even split of Democratic and Republican. But rather than a source of discomfort, tension, and denial, I wondered if it were a holy, rich, important opportunity. So I said, “Your diocese could be a beacon of hope. Because every Sunday your congregation comes to that altar rail, and what it is this: we may be divided on culture wars, foreign policy, and migration, but this altar rail reminds us we are one body because we’re members of Christ’s body. And who we are together is more fundamental than what we think apart. The Holy Spirit is giving you the power to witness to the whole world about our fundamental identity as Christ’s body, an identity that transcends political divisions.”
There is widespread dismay about the direction the United States is going. The most distressing thing about this is the sense of powerlessness among its people. And when those people are Christians, it’s even more distressing, because in worship those people have in their daily and weekly practice the gifts God gives to reimagine the world. For Christians, politics doesn’t begin or end with our choice on a voting slip but with God’s choice to be with us.
A Dead Shepherd Isn’t Helpful to Anyone
Austin Shelley, Christian Century 4.15.24
In the poem “Introduction to Poetry,” Billy Collins laments his students’ tendency to approach a poem with weapons drawn. The former US poet laureate paints a portrait of the delight he hopes they will embrace when encountering verse:
I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive.
For months I’ve struggled with this week’s lectionary verses from the Gospel of John. Of all the
gospels, it is the fourth that waxes poetic. From its soaring prologue to its tender post-resurrection breakfast on the shoreline — where Jesus repeatedly asks Peter, “Do you love me?”— metaphor and sensory imagery abound.
Initially lacking a more sensitive approach, I tried unsuccessfully to torture a confession out of Jesus’ insistence that the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. Does a good shepherd actually do this? Right out of the gate, I questioned Jesus’ assumption. Such a sacrifice seems both unnecessary and shortsighted. Fellow interrogators might agree that a dead shepherd isn’t helpful to anyone, least of all to sheep left vulnerable to predators, starvation, and scattering. What’s a flock to do without the abiding presence of the rod and staff that comfort? How are the sheep to remain safe, healthy, and together without the soothing tenor of the trusted voice that leads them beside still waters and makes them to lie down in green pastures?
The text’s stoic silence in the face of this inquisition pushed me further. And what of these other sheep from another fold? Did Jesus indeed have the power to lay down his life in order to take it up again? Or shall we believe instead a testimony at odds with John’s gospel account, the witness borne by the epistle to the church at Philippi: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:5–8).
Either way, we end up nailing Jesus to a cross to find out what he really means.
Pressing an ear against the Fourth Gospel’s hive may prove to be a more fruitful endeavor. What if we as students of scripture were to take into account the time elapsed between the life, death, and resurrection of the historical Jesus of Nazareth and the first circulation of this gospel account decades later? What if we were to consider that particular passage of time to be the catalyst for transforming prose into poetry, for coloring the gospel writer’s memories of the person of Jesus with the stained-glass hues of the Spirit of Jesus with whom he had abided for many long years? What if, as part of our wrestling this text for a blessing, we were to submit to its strength instead?
If we were to entertain such a nuanced approach, if we were to assume the posture of those who listen intently to the inner melody the poem hums, if we were to wander into the room of John 10 and feel its walls for a light switch — I believe it is entirely possible that we would hear for ourselves the voice of the Good Shepherd who knows us as his own. Moreover, we would learn something true of him that turns out to be mighty good news: that defying all logic to the contrary, he laid down his life for the sheep. As the Father commands, may we as the body of Christ take it up again.
Tuesday, April 16
Old, retired and apparently invisible. That's the topic for next week. Karen and Stephen Yoder - retired from the Wall Street Journal - wrote an article about what they are dealing with in retirement.
I'd like to know when you feel invisible. Does it get better, or worse; and, are there tips or compassionate ideas you can share with others who have become invisible too.
We’re Old, Retired, and Apparently Invisible
Karen Yoder & Stephen Yoder, Wall Street Journal, 4.3.24
The first couple of years in retirement are often the most difficult. Stephen Yoder, 66, a longtime Wall Street Journal editor, joined his wife, Karen Yoder, 67, in retirement in late 2022. In this monthly Retirement Rookies column, they chronicle some of the issues they are dealing with in retirement.
Karen
It was a June afternoon in the Rockies just after I retired when we agreed that we must be turning into ghosts. We had been cycling in the mountains since breaking camp before dawn, and we decided to splurge on a private room in a hostel. We checked in and headed through to the bike-storage area, walking our rig by young hostelers congregated in the common spaces. We must have been a sight: two bedraggled 60-somethings pushing a tandem bicycle laden like a pack mule. Except no one seemed to see us.
We crossed the living room, where 20-something hikers with ruddy faces studied their computer screens. No one looked up. We inched through the kitchen, where others were sautéing onions for a group meal. “Excuse us. Sorry to interrupt,” one of us said as we squeezed through. “That sure smells good.” They turned a bit, giving us space. But not a word. Not a “How’s it going?” nor “Where’d you come from?” nor “Cool rig.” Nor eye contact.
“We’re invisible,” Steve whispered in the hallway. In our room, we plopped on the bed and laughed. “Nobody even acknowledged our existence,” I said. “We’re too old to see.”
We had noticed a growing feeling of being unseen before, but nothing like this. The episode inspired our secret code words for similar incidents. “We’re invisible,” one of us whispers, and we smile wryly as we recall our hostel encounter. It’s a code we’re using more often these days as we move deeper into retirement and more often sense that younger people in the same room are looking right through us.
Sometimes the feeling isn’t so much invisibility as irrelevance. I was with some younger gal pals recently, standing in a tight circle drinking coffee at an event. My friends chattered about their insanely busy workweeks, asking each other how they balance their professional lives with raising children and volunteer work.
Nobody turned to me. I had decades of that frenetic pace. I did it; I survived. Perhaps I might have had a few tips to share? Nope, I thought silently. I’m retired. Too old to be relevant. Unseen. I’m thinking more often of how my 90-year-old mother must have felt when I pushed her wheelchair into a restaurant. She was sharp mentally but had suffered a bad fall. A restaurant employee turned to me and asked. “Where would she like to sit?” I turned to my mom, asking her, “Where would you like to sit, Mother?” She wasn’t invisible to me.
To be fair to young people everywhere, not all of them ignore us. At a Montana hostel last year, several geology students about to head into the mountains saw us and eagerly chatted us up in the common room. We asked about their studies and they grilled us on how we managed logistics during the bike trip we were on.
Back in San Francisco, we seem quite visible to many good friends young enough to be our children or grandchildren. We have some over at our house nearly every week. A group in their early 20s had us over for their Super Bowl party this year.
Maybe we’re at a stage where we need to take more initiative with people much younger than we. When I do reach out to younger people and pick their brains, I find they have so much to offer. How about asking their opinions and seeking their advice instead of waiting for them?
We’re certainly going to need younger people more as we navigate retirement. My dad, who lived to nearly 97, increasingly made friends with younger people as he aged. “My friends die off,” he would say, “so I need to make new, younger friends.”
Steve
It happened again at an upscale restaurant near our house recently. It was a rare evening of dining out, and by evening, I mean 5:30 p.m. There were still many empty tables, yet we were having a heck of a time getting our server’s attention—to order drinks, to order food, to request water refills. We could see him over there, tarrying cheerfully among young diners at other tables. But my hand gestures had no effect. “How can he not see us?” I said. Karen grinned and uttered the code: “We’re invisible.”
We later couldn’t flag our server down for even the bill, so we vowed to enjoy the restaurant’s ambience until he saw fit to free up our table for prime time. It took him about a half-hour. That was plenty of time for us to debate the invisibility theory. Perhaps our server was busy with tables we couldn’t see or had duties other than waiting tables? Maybe the younger tables had tipped him ahead? Had he pegged us as cheapskates when we didn’t order an entire bottle of wine?
We’ve added such debates to our protocol. After invoking the invisibility code, we ask: Are we imagining it? Is this, in fact, happening to everyone here and not just us? Have we been experiencing this kind of unseen-ness all our lives and are just now discovering it? And the hardest thing to admit: Maybe not everything is about us.
“OK, boomer,” I can just hear it when we lament our newfound invisibility. We’ve gone through life thinking we’re special, and are only now discovering we’re not so different after all. We may be oversensitive because our visibility is part of our continuing quest to find a new post-workplace identity, an existential task many retirees wrestle with after leaving the work world.
If we’re only imagining invisibility, we’re in good company. We polled some retired friends our age and they quickly vouched for the sense of often being unseen. One observed that the panhandlers downtown often don’t seem to bother approaching seniors.
And it isn’t just us baby boomers who feel an encroaching irrelevance. A long-retired minister I know talks sadly of how church leaders no longer listen to his ideas about the ministry. Several professors emeritus have lamented to me that their college successors didn’t seek their advice. Retired editors know very well that they’re yesterday’s news, but that doesn’t stop them from bemoaning their untapped expertise.
I heard the no-one-listens-anymore refrain so often in the past few decades that I began calling it “The Old Man’s Lament.” That would never be my lamentation, I vowed at the time.
I'd like to know when you feel invisible. Does it get better, or worse; and, are there tips or compassionate ideas you can share with others who have become invisible too.
We’re Old, Retired, and Apparently Invisible
Karen Yoder & Stephen Yoder, Wall Street Journal, 4.3.24
The first couple of years in retirement are often the most difficult. Stephen Yoder, 66, a longtime Wall Street Journal editor, joined his wife, Karen Yoder, 67, in retirement in late 2022. In this monthly Retirement Rookies column, they chronicle some of the issues they are dealing with in retirement.
Karen
It was a June afternoon in the Rockies just after I retired when we agreed that we must be turning into ghosts. We had been cycling in the mountains since breaking camp before dawn, and we decided to splurge on a private room in a hostel. We checked in and headed through to the bike-storage area, walking our rig by young hostelers congregated in the common spaces. We must have been a sight: two bedraggled 60-somethings pushing a tandem bicycle laden like a pack mule. Except no one seemed to see us.
We crossed the living room, where 20-something hikers with ruddy faces studied their computer screens. No one looked up. We inched through the kitchen, where others were sautéing onions for a group meal. “Excuse us. Sorry to interrupt,” one of us said as we squeezed through. “That sure smells good.” They turned a bit, giving us space. But not a word. Not a “How’s it going?” nor “Where’d you come from?” nor “Cool rig.” Nor eye contact.
“We’re invisible,” Steve whispered in the hallway. In our room, we plopped on the bed and laughed. “Nobody even acknowledged our existence,” I said. “We’re too old to see.”
We had noticed a growing feeling of being unseen before, but nothing like this. The episode inspired our secret code words for similar incidents. “We’re invisible,” one of us whispers, and we smile wryly as we recall our hostel encounter. It’s a code we’re using more often these days as we move deeper into retirement and more often sense that younger people in the same room are looking right through us.
Sometimes the feeling isn’t so much invisibility as irrelevance. I was with some younger gal pals recently, standing in a tight circle drinking coffee at an event. My friends chattered about their insanely busy workweeks, asking each other how they balance their professional lives with raising children and volunteer work.
Nobody turned to me. I had decades of that frenetic pace. I did it; I survived. Perhaps I might have had a few tips to share? Nope, I thought silently. I’m retired. Too old to be relevant. Unseen. I’m thinking more often of how my 90-year-old mother must have felt when I pushed her wheelchair into a restaurant. She was sharp mentally but had suffered a bad fall. A restaurant employee turned to me and asked. “Where would she like to sit?” I turned to my mom, asking her, “Where would you like to sit, Mother?” She wasn’t invisible to me.
To be fair to young people everywhere, not all of them ignore us. At a Montana hostel last year, several geology students about to head into the mountains saw us and eagerly chatted us up in the common room. We asked about their studies and they grilled us on how we managed logistics during the bike trip we were on.
Back in San Francisco, we seem quite visible to many good friends young enough to be our children or grandchildren. We have some over at our house nearly every week. A group in their early 20s had us over for their Super Bowl party this year.
Maybe we’re at a stage where we need to take more initiative with people much younger than we. When I do reach out to younger people and pick their brains, I find they have so much to offer. How about asking their opinions and seeking their advice instead of waiting for them?
We’re certainly going to need younger people more as we navigate retirement. My dad, who lived to nearly 97, increasingly made friends with younger people as he aged. “My friends die off,” he would say, “so I need to make new, younger friends.”
Steve
It happened again at an upscale restaurant near our house recently. It was a rare evening of dining out, and by evening, I mean 5:30 p.m. There were still many empty tables, yet we were having a heck of a time getting our server’s attention—to order drinks, to order food, to request water refills. We could see him over there, tarrying cheerfully among young diners at other tables. But my hand gestures had no effect. “How can he not see us?” I said. Karen grinned and uttered the code: “We’re invisible.”
We later couldn’t flag our server down for even the bill, so we vowed to enjoy the restaurant’s ambience until he saw fit to free up our table for prime time. It took him about a half-hour. That was plenty of time for us to debate the invisibility theory. Perhaps our server was busy with tables we couldn’t see or had duties other than waiting tables? Maybe the younger tables had tipped him ahead? Had he pegged us as cheapskates when we didn’t order an entire bottle of wine?
We’ve added such debates to our protocol. After invoking the invisibility code, we ask: Are we imagining it? Is this, in fact, happening to everyone here and not just us? Have we been experiencing this kind of unseen-ness all our lives and are just now discovering it? And the hardest thing to admit: Maybe not everything is about us.
“OK, boomer,” I can just hear it when we lament our newfound invisibility. We’ve gone through life thinking we’re special, and are only now discovering we’re not so different after all. We may be oversensitive because our visibility is part of our continuing quest to find a new post-workplace identity, an existential task many retirees wrestle with after leaving the work world.
If we’re only imagining invisibility, we’re in good company. We polled some retired friends our age and they quickly vouched for the sense of often being unseen. One observed that the panhandlers downtown often don’t seem to bother approaching seniors.
And it isn’t just us baby boomers who feel an encroaching irrelevance. A long-retired minister I know talks sadly of how church leaders no longer listen to his ideas about the ministry. Several professors emeritus have lamented to me that their college successors didn’t seek their advice. Retired editors know very well that they’re yesterday’s news, but that doesn’t stop them from bemoaning their untapped expertise.
I heard the no-one-listens-anymore refrain so often in the past few decades that I began calling it “The Old Man’s Lament.” That would never be my lamentation, I vowed at the time.
Tuesday, April 9
This week's article is written by a self-identified atheist who suggests that America needs more people attending Church (or a synagogue or mosque). He writes:
Maybe religion, for all of its faults, works a bit like a retaining wall to hold back the destabilizing pressure of American hyper-individualism, which threatens to swell and spill over in its absence.
The author also highlights that, for as much as the American public has tried, there is no substitute for the communal connections religion makes (again, from an atheist writer). I'd like to know what you think.
The True Cost of Not Attending Church
Derek Thompson, The Atlantic 4.3.24
As an agnostic, I have spent most of my life thinking about the decline of faith in America in mostly positive terms. Organized religion seemed, to me, beset by scandal and entangled in noxious politics. So, I thought, what is there really to mourn? Only in the past few years have I come around to a different view. Maybe religion, for all of its faults, works a bit like a retaining wall to hold back the destabilizing pressure of American hyper-individualism, which threatens to swell and spill over in its absence.
More than one-quarter of Americans now identify as atheists, agnostics, or religiously “unaffiliated,” according to a new survey of 5,600 U.S. adults by the Public Religion Research Institute. This is the highest level of non-religiosity in the poll’s history. Two-thirds of nonbelievers were brought up in at least nominally religious households, like me. (I grew up in a Reform Jewish home that I would describe as haphazardly religious.) But more Americans today have “converted” out of religion than have converted to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam combined. No faith’s evangelism has been as successful in this century as religious skepticism.
As secularism surged throughout the developed world in the 20th century, America’s religiosity remained exceptional. 7 in 10 Americans told Gallup that they belonged to a church in 1937, and even by the 1980s, roughly 70 percent said they still belonged to a church, synagogue, or mosque.
Suddenly, in the 1990s, the ranks of nonbelievers surged. An estimated 40 million people — 1 in 8 Americans — stopped going to church in the past 25 years, making it the “largest concentrated change in church attendance in American history,” according to the religion writer Jake Meador. In 2021, membership in houses of worship fell below a majority for the first time on record.
As the GOP consolidated its advantage among conservative Christians, religion seemed less appealing to liberal young people. In the late 1980s, only 1 in 10 liberals said they didn’t belong to any religion; 30 years later, that figure was about 4 in 10.
That relationship with organized religion provided many things at once: not only a connection to the divine, but also a historical narrative of identity, a set of rituals to organize the week and year, and a community of families. PRRI found that the most important feature of religion for the dwindling number of Americans who still attend services a few times a year included “experiencing religion in a community” and “instilling values in their children.”
The United States is in the midst of a historically unprecedented decline in face-to-face socializing. For example, young people, who are fleeing religion faster than older Americans, have also seen the largest decline in socializing. Boys and girls ages 15 to 19 have reduced their hangouts by three hours a week, according to the American Time Use Survey. There is no statistical record of any period in U.S. history where young people were less likely to attend religious services, and also no period when young people have spent more time on their own.
A similar story holds for working-class Americans. In 2019, a team of researchers published a survey based on long interviews conducted from 2000 to 2013 with older, low-income men without a college degree in working-class neighborhoods around the country. They found that, since the 1970s, church attendance among white men without a college degree had fallen even more than among white college graduates. For many of these men, the loss of religion went hand in hand with the retreat from marriage. “As marriage declined,” the authors wrote, “men’s church attendance might have fallen in tandem.” Today, low-income and unmarried men have more alone time than almost any other group, according to time-use data.
Did the decline of religion cut some people off from a crucial gateway to civic engagement, or is religion just one part of a broader retreat from associations and memberships in America? “It’s hard to know what the causal story is here,” Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at NYU, told me. But what’s undeniable is that nonreligious Americans are also less civically engaged. This year, the Pew Research Center reported that religiously unaffiliated Americans are less likely to volunteer, less likely to feel satisfied with their community and social life, and more likely to say they feel lonely. “Clearly more Americans are spending Sunday mornings on their couches, and it’s affected the quality of our collective life,” he said.
Klinenberg doesn’t blame individual Americans for these changes. In his book Palaces for the People, Klinenberg reported that Americans today have fewer shared spaces where connections are formed. “People today say they just have fewer places to go for collective life,” he said. “Places that used to anchor community life, like libraries and school gyms and union halls, have become less accessible or shuttered altogether.” Many people, having lost the scaffolding of organized religion, seem to have found no alternative method to build a sense of community.
America didn’t simply lose its religion without finding a communal replacement. Just as America’s churches were depopulated, Americans developed a new relationship with a technology that, in many ways, is the diabolical opposite of a religious ritual: the smartphone. As the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in his new book, The Anxious Generation, to stare into a piece of glass in our hands is to be removed from our bodies, to float placelessly in a content cosmos, to skim our attention from one piece of ephemera to the next. The internet is timeless in the best and worst of ways—an everything store with no opening or closing times. “In the virtual world, there is no daily, weekly, or annual calendar that structures when people can and cannot do things,” Haidt writes. In other words, digital life is disembodied, asynchronous, shallow, and solitary.
Religious rituals are the opposite in almost every respect. They put us in our body, Haidt writes, many of them requiring “some kind of movement that marks the activity as devotional.” Religious ritual also fixes us in time, forcing us to set aside an hour or day for prayer, reflection, or separation from daily habit. (It’s no surprise that people describe a scheduled break from their digital devices as a “Sabbath.”) Finally, religious ritual often requires that we make contact with the sacred in the presence of other people, whether in a church, mosque, synagogue, or over a dinner-table prayer. In other words, the religious ritual is typically embodied, synchronous, deep, and collective.
Making friends as an adult can be hard; it’s especially hard without a scheduled weekly reunion of congregants. Finding meaning in the world is hard too; it’s especially difficult if the oldest systems of meaning-making hold less and less appeal. I’m not advocating that every atheist and agnostic in America immediately choose a world religion and commit themselves to weekly church (or synagogue, or mosque) attendance. But I wonder if, in forgoing organized religion, an isolated country has discarded an old and proven source of ritual at a time when we most need it.
Maybe religion, for all of its faults, works a bit like a retaining wall to hold back the destabilizing pressure of American hyper-individualism, which threatens to swell and spill over in its absence.
The author also highlights that, for as much as the American public has tried, there is no substitute for the communal connections religion makes (again, from an atheist writer). I'd like to know what you think.
The True Cost of Not Attending Church
Derek Thompson, The Atlantic 4.3.24
As an agnostic, I have spent most of my life thinking about the decline of faith in America in mostly positive terms. Organized religion seemed, to me, beset by scandal and entangled in noxious politics. So, I thought, what is there really to mourn? Only in the past few years have I come around to a different view. Maybe religion, for all of its faults, works a bit like a retaining wall to hold back the destabilizing pressure of American hyper-individualism, which threatens to swell and spill over in its absence.
More than one-quarter of Americans now identify as atheists, agnostics, or religiously “unaffiliated,” according to a new survey of 5,600 U.S. adults by the Public Religion Research Institute. This is the highest level of non-religiosity in the poll’s history. Two-thirds of nonbelievers were brought up in at least nominally religious households, like me. (I grew up in a Reform Jewish home that I would describe as haphazardly religious.) But more Americans today have “converted” out of religion than have converted to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam combined. No faith’s evangelism has been as successful in this century as religious skepticism.
As secularism surged throughout the developed world in the 20th century, America’s religiosity remained exceptional. 7 in 10 Americans told Gallup that they belonged to a church in 1937, and even by the 1980s, roughly 70 percent said they still belonged to a church, synagogue, or mosque.
Suddenly, in the 1990s, the ranks of nonbelievers surged. An estimated 40 million people — 1 in 8 Americans — stopped going to church in the past 25 years, making it the “largest concentrated change in church attendance in American history,” according to the religion writer Jake Meador. In 2021, membership in houses of worship fell below a majority for the first time on record.
As the GOP consolidated its advantage among conservative Christians, religion seemed less appealing to liberal young people. In the late 1980s, only 1 in 10 liberals said they didn’t belong to any religion; 30 years later, that figure was about 4 in 10.
That relationship with organized religion provided many things at once: not only a connection to the divine, but also a historical narrative of identity, a set of rituals to organize the week and year, and a community of families. PRRI found that the most important feature of religion for the dwindling number of Americans who still attend services a few times a year included “experiencing religion in a community” and “instilling values in their children.”
The United States is in the midst of a historically unprecedented decline in face-to-face socializing. For example, young people, who are fleeing religion faster than older Americans, have also seen the largest decline in socializing. Boys and girls ages 15 to 19 have reduced their hangouts by three hours a week, according to the American Time Use Survey. There is no statistical record of any period in U.S. history where young people were less likely to attend religious services, and also no period when young people have spent more time on their own.
A similar story holds for working-class Americans. In 2019, a team of researchers published a survey based on long interviews conducted from 2000 to 2013 with older, low-income men without a college degree in working-class neighborhoods around the country. They found that, since the 1970s, church attendance among white men without a college degree had fallen even more than among white college graduates. For many of these men, the loss of religion went hand in hand with the retreat from marriage. “As marriage declined,” the authors wrote, “men’s church attendance might have fallen in tandem.” Today, low-income and unmarried men have more alone time than almost any other group, according to time-use data.
Did the decline of religion cut some people off from a crucial gateway to civic engagement, or is religion just one part of a broader retreat from associations and memberships in America? “It’s hard to know what the causal story is here,” Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at NYU, told me. But what’s undeniable is that nonreligious Americans are also less civically engaged. This year, the Pew Research Center reported that religiously unaffiliated Americans are less likely to volunteer, less likely to feel satisfied with their community and social life, and more likely to say they feel lonely. “Clearly more Americans are spending Sunday mornings on their couches, and it’s affected the quality of our collective life,” he said.
Klinenberg doesn’t blame individual Americans for these changes. In his book Palaces for the People, Klinenberg reported that Americans today have fewer shared spaces where connections are formed. “People today say they just have fewer places to go for collective life,” he said. “Places that used to anchor community life, like libraries and school gyms and union halls, have become less accessible or shuttered altogether.” Many people, having lost the scaffolding of organized religion, seem to have found no alternative method to build a sense of community.
America didn’t simply lose its religion without finding a communal replacement. Just as America’s churches were depopulated, Americans developed a new relationship with a technology that, in many ways, is the diabolical opposite of a religious ritual: the smartphone. As the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in his new book, The Anxious Generation, to stare into a piece of glass in our hands is to be removed from our bodies, to float placelessly in a content cosmos, to skim our attention from one piece of ephemera to the next. The internet is timeless in the best and worst of ways—an everything store with no opening or closing times. “In the virtual world, there is no daily, weekly, or annual calendar that structures when people can and cannot do things,” Haidt writes. In other words, digital life is disembodied, asynchronous, shallow, and solitary.
Religious rituals are the opposite in almost every respect. They put us in our body, Haidt writes, many of them requiring “some kind of movement that marks the activity as devotional.” Religious ritual also fixes us in time, forcing us to set aside an hour or day for prayer, reflection, or separation from daily habit. (It’s no surprise that people describe a scheduled break from their digital devices as a “Sabbath.”) Finally, religious ritual often requires that we make contact with the sacred in the presence of other people, whether in a church, mosque, synagogue, or over a dinner-table prayer. In other words, the religious ritual is typically embodied, synchronous, deep, and collective.
Making friends as an adult can be hard; it’s especially hard without a scheduled weekly reunion of congregants. Finding meaning in the world is hard too; it’s especially difficult if the oldest systems of meaning-making hold less and less appeal. I’m not advocating that every atheist and agnostic in America immediately choose a world religion and commit themselves to weekly church (or synagogue, or mosque) attendance. But I wonder if, in forgoing organized religion, an isolated country has discarded an old and proven source of ritual at a time when we most need it.
Tuesday, April 2
This week, let's talk about the wisdom of not knowing. The author, Heidi Haverkamp asks the following: Faith does not entail a search for information or receiving clear answers to life’s persistent questions, although churches and Christians try with things like Bible truths, catechisms, and creeds. I wonder if we often make what we think we know about God into an idol. I'd like to know what you think, or, don't know.
The Wisdom of Not Knowing
Heidi Haverkamp, The Christian Century, 3.28.24
I thought I’d love going to an all-inclusive resort: food and drink around every corner, all the time, for free. It was like a church potluck had exploded. At first it was a thrill. Then it got dull.
Then it got weird. It all started to look like junk.
In much the same way, it used to be fun to look for the answer to any question I ever wondered about, at any moment, on the internet. But in the last couple years, answering all my own questions has gotten tedious. An infinite, all-inclusive buffet for the mind is now spread before us online. There is more information available to human beings than there has ever been in human history. We can find out just about anything we have ever wondered about, at any time, and at almost any place on earth.
The human brain is baited for novelty and the unexpected. Our mental appetite for new ideas and information evolved to be insatiable — in order to keep us on guard from danger, as well as to constantly alert us to new food sources and to learn more about our surroundings to survive. The availability of novel information has grown to be constant and plenteous at a level we did not evolve to encounter. So much knowledge, but to what end? Our human desire for searching and learning can now overwhelm our attention span and immobilize us with distraction. Knowing has become a form of entertainment and compulsion, more like mindless snacking than a purposeful, sit-down meal.
Jesus did not seem to like answering questions much during his time on earth. He did not give explanations so much as offer tricky juxtapositions, reject hierarchies, and interrogate religious rules and regulations. He would turn questions around, dodge them, or answer with another question. After the crucifixion and resurrection, when he came back to meet his disciples, he did not explain what had happened or how. Instead, he said things like, “I am risen,” “Don’t be afraid,” “Peace,” and “Do you have anything to eat?”
Belief, for my Protestant ancestors, meant knowing the Bible, knowing what God asked of you, knowing what God wanted you to believe. My great-grandparents were Iowa farmers, and they read a chapter of the Bible aloud together every night after supper. Knowing the Bible and what it said — even the boring parts — was central to their relationship to God, to one another, and to their wider church community. For centuries, the West has valued knowing, comprehending, and solving. The Reformation put these values at the center of Christian practice, emphasizing preaching, scripture study, and catechisms — all in the vernacular — as more people learned to read and the printing press placed untold amounts of new information into their hands.
And yet, as technology is again changing our relationship to knowledge and learning, I wonder if the good news of the Christian life today is less about knowing than it is about opening ourselves to relationship and awe. Many churches today describe their mission as “knowing God and making God known.” Is there anything wrong with this? Probably not. But how do we subconsciously understand what “knowing God” means?
While the word know used to mean “to be acquainted with” or “to perceive,” in modern usage the emphasis has shifted toward having information about something or practical knowledge of it. The word now implies a sense of clarity and understanding that leaves less room for curiosity or mystery. What can we “know” about God, really? “Si comprehendus, non est Deus,” said Augustine: if you understand, it is not God. The word know is related to the Old High German word bichnāan, to recognize. “Recognizing” God sounds less poetic but makes a humbler confession than “knowing” in our modern sense.
Of course, what makes faith faith is not that we can claim to know or have comprehended God.
Faith does not entail a search for information or receiving clear answers to life’s persistent questions, although churches and Christians try with things like “Bible truths,” catechisms, creeds, and books upon books. I wonder if we often make what we think we know about God into an idol. When Job wonders why all those awful things happened to him, God does not offer an answer. God tells him that he is unable to know.
Buddhist teachers describe a spiritual practice called “don’t-know mind.” Zen master Shunryū Suzuki writes, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” In other words, letting go of our opinions, assumptions, and accrued knowledge frees us to be more open to reality, new ideas, and compassion. This is not a mind numbing or a dodging of responsibility but an invitation to humility and freedom. It is the practice of meeting each moment and each person as a beginner or novice, as someone with an open and curious perspective. Saying “I don’t know” can make a space between my mind and the world, or my mind and the person sitting across from me—whether it’s a close family member, a dear friend, or a total stranger. Then maybe the Spirit can enter into that space and do a new thing.
“I don’t know” might be the truest creed we can confess in our modern age. We know (or think we know) so much. But we cannot really know who God is or why terrible things happen. We cannot know how to heal the world or save the church. We cannot predict the way anything will turn out, the right decision every time, or how to live our happiest life. To become a more loving, just, and wise people, we may need to let go of needing to know. Not to hide in ignorance but to quit spending our energy grasping after information or defending our rightness and righteousness.
To say “I don’t know” as a prayer, confession, or meditation is not to give up but to witness to the gap of unknowing between us and God. A gap not of cold emptiness but of wonder; a gap where there is more space for relating to one another and a clearing for the path that leads us back again to the mystery and glory of God.
Jesus does not ask his disciples to know or explain much. He asks them to do things, mostly very slow-moving things: to listen, to pray, to see, to love, to follow, and to serve the people around them. He leaves them (and us) with teachings and parables that do not give much in the way of clear answers but are more like spiritual puzzles or invitations to start thinking and talking together. Less like a beautiful, all-inclusive buffet, more like a do-it-yourself potluck.
The Wisdom of Not Knowing
Heidi Haverkamp, The Christian Century, 3.28.24
I thought I’d love going to an all-inclusive resort: food and drink around every corner, all the time, for free. It was like a church potluck had exploded. At first it was a thrill. Then it got dull.
Then it got weird. It all started to look like junk.
In much the same way, it used to be fun to look for the answer to any question I ever wondered about, at any moment, on the internet. But in the last couple years, answering all my own questions has gotten tedious. An infinite, all-inclusive buffet for the mind is now spread before us online. There is more information available to human beings than there has ever been in human history. We can find out just about anything we have ever wondered about, at any time, and at almost any place on earth.
The human brain is baited for novelty and the unexpected. Our mental appetite for new ideas and information evolved to be insatiable — in order to keep us on guard from danger, as well as to constantly alert us to new food sources and to learn more about our surroundings to survive. The availability of novel information has grown to be constant and plenteous at a level we did not evolve to encounter. So much knowledge, but to what end? Our human desire for searching and learning can now overwhelm our attention span and immobilize us with distraction. Knowing has become a form of entertainment and compulsion, more like mindless snacking than a purposeful, sit-down meal.
Jesus did not seem to like answering questions much during his time on earth. He did not give explanations so much as offer tricky juxtapositions, reject hierarchies, and interrogate religious rules and regulations. He would turn questions around, dodge them, or answer with another question. After the crucifixion and resurrection, when he came back to meet his disciples, he did not explain what had happened or how. Instead, he said things like, “I am risen,” “Don’t be afraid,” “Peace,” and “Do you have anything to eat?”
Belief, for my Protestant ancestors, meant knowing the Bible, knowing what God asked of you, knowing what God wanted you to believe. My great-grandparents were Iowa farmers, and they read a chapter of the Bible aloud together every night after supper. Knowing the Bible and what it said — even the boring parts — was central to their relationship to God, to one another, and to their wider church community. For centuries, the West has valued knowing, comprehending, and solving. The Reformation put these values at the center of Christian practice, emphasizing preaching, scripture study, and catechisms — all in the vernacular — as more people learned to read and the printing press placed untold amounts of new information into their hands.
And yet, as technology is again changing our relationship to knowledge and learning, I wonder if the good news of the Christian life today is less about knowing than it is about opening ourselves to relationship and awe. Many churches today describe their mission as “knowing God and making God known.” Is there anything wrong with this? Probably not. But how do we subconsciously understand what “knowing God” means?
While the word know used to mean “to be acquainted with” or “to perceive,” in modern usage the emphasis has shifted toward having information about something or practical knowledge of it. The word now implies a sense of clarity and understanding that leaves less room for curiosity or mystery. What can we “know” about God, really? “Si comprehendus, non est Deus,” said Augustine: if you understand, it is not God. The word know is related to the Old High German word bichnāan, to recognize. “Recognizing” God sounds less poetic but makes a humbler confession than “knowing” in our modern sense.
Of course, what makes faith faith is not that we can claim to know or have comprehended God.
Faith does not entail a search for information or receiving clear answers to life’s persistent questions, although churches and Christians try with things like “Bible truths,” catechisms, creeds, and books upon books. I wonder if we often make what we think we know about God into an idol. When Job wonders why all those awful things happened to him, God does not offer an answer. God tells him that he is unable to know.
Buddhist teachers describe a spiritual practice called “don’t-know mind.” Zen master Shunryū Suzuki writes, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” In other words, letting go of our opinions, assumptions, and accrued knowledge frees us to be more open to reality, new ideas, and compassion. This is not a mind numbing or a dodging of responsibility but an invitation to humility and freedom. It is the practice of meeting each moment and each person as a beginner or novice, as someone with an open and curious perspective. Saying “I don’t know” can make a space between my mind and the world, or my mind and the person sitting across from me—whether it’s a close family member, a dear friend, or a total stranger. Then maybe the Spirit can enter into that space and do a new thing.
“I don’t know” might be the truest creed we can confess in our modern age. We know (or think we know) so much. But we cannot really know who God is or why terrible things happen. We cannot know how to heal the world or save the church. We cannot predict the way anything will turn out, the right decision every time, or how to live our happiest life. To become a more loving, just, and wise people, we may need to let go of needing to know. Not to hide in ignorance but to quit spending our energy grasping after information or defending our rightness and righteousness.
To say “I don’t know” as a prayer, confession, or meditation is not to give up but to witness to the gap of unknowing between us and God. A gap not of cold emptiness but of wonder; a gap where there is more space for relating to one another and a clearing for the path that leads us back again to the mystery and glory of God.
Jesus does not ask his disciples to know or explain much. He asks them to do things, mostly very slow-moving things: to listen, to pray, to see, to love, to follow, and to serve the people around them. He leaves them (and us) with teachings and parables that do not give much in the way of clear answers but are more like spiritual puzzles or invitations to start thinking and talking together. Less like a beautiful, all-inclusive buffet, more like a do-it-yourself potluck.
Wednesday, March 27 - Combined Discussion Group
Next week is Holy Week which means we are meeting on Wednesday as a combined group. There is no Tuesday meeting.
Also, this coming Monday, anyone and everyone is invited to meet in front of the ticket booth at Lecom Baseball Park at noon to watch the Blue Jays and Pirates. We'll purchase tickets in the same section, have lunch inside the park and enjoy the 1:05 start time.
Below is our article for Wednesday; David Brooks is asking for the American people to resist the lure of us-vs.-them thinking. I'd like to know what you think about his article.
Resist the Pull of ‘Us vs. Them’ Thinking
David Brooks, NY Times, 3.20.24
I’ve just finished a book tour, so I’ve been on the road for five months. I’ve probably been to 35 or 40 states. And I would say the predominant emotion I have heard when I ask people about politics during my travels is exhaustion — a sense of fatigue, a sense of discouragement, a sense of passivity, and especially among Democrats, a pessimism about the election.
We’re in the middle of the global surge in populism. Populism is belief that there’s a conflict, a class conflict. And the conflict is between the real Americans and the globalized elites. And in America, it’s mostly measured by levels of education. So it’s people with a high school degree who tend to be working class, who feel they are being oppressed, looked down upon, and condescended to, and morally scorned by members of the highly educated elites who live along the coasts.
And so, that’s the populism in America. It’s also the populism in Britain. It’s the populism in France, across Europe. In 2002, only 120 million people lived in their countries governed by populist parties. By 2019, more than 2 billion people lived under governments governed by populist parties. And so, this is surging. And what does global populism have in common? All these different national forms of populism, they are all based on zero sum thinking.
If you go back through human history, the human condition is tribal. And so, a zero-sum mindset, an us/them mindset is sort of, I think, woven into our nature.
The zero-sum mindset is the idea that we have a finite amount of goods in the world. And if I’m going to improve my lot in the world, I’ve got to take something away from you. And so, the zero-sum mindset is an ancient mindset that is behind most conquest and war.
The positive sum mindset is the idea that we have an infinite, a potentially infinite amount of good in the world. And then I can add some good, and you will benefit. When Steve Jobs does really well and makes $1 billion, it doesn’t hurt me. I get to enjoy the Mac. I get to enjoy my iPhone. People who work at Apple get to have great jobs. And so, his prosperity is not taking away other people’s prosperity. It’s mutually advantageous.
And that’s just a better way to live. It’s a better mindset to go through life, that life is not war and war. Life is competition, creativity, innovation, productivity, and sort of a measured sort of competition to add to each other’s benefit. And in many ways, our politics is a struggle to embrace this liberating idea against the darker angels of our nature, which want to really undermine it with us/them thinking.
People broke out of the zero-sum mindset through a series of intellectual revolutions we call liberalism. And liberalism is the belief that we want a society that’s pluralistic, that I want to pursue my own eccentric and dynamic life being a writer or being an architect or being a nurse.
And you get to pursue your own life, and the market and democracy are ways to keep our diversity coherent, so we can live together in an orderly way, in a safe way, in an affluent way, and liberalism based on respect and dignity for the individual.
And that, I think, is fundamentally different than populism, which is not so much based on respect and dignity of the individual. It’s based on homage, the bowing down to the leader. If I had to try to summarize what I believe, I would say, Mr. President, you’re involved in a fundamental and elemental struggle between two mindsets, two cultures, two systems of government, one of which is liberal and positive sum and growth oriented, and the other which is populist and zero sum and threat oriented. And so, we need you to be as big as the situation demands.
I think it would be wonderful if Biden got out of the role of being president, got out of fancy policies, and stressed that liberalism and liberal democracy is not just an abstract idea that John Stuart Mill thought of. Liberal democracy is something we live every day. It involves a concrete set of social actions, like starting a business, building a better school, working together with people and companies, rising from poverty to buy a house, raising your children not to be culture warriors, but to be innovators, to be entrepreneurs.
This is what liberal capitalism is. It’s the stuff we do every day. And it comes under threat when we decide to live in a society that’s not liberal, but is authoritarian, and suddenly you don’t have the freedom to dream what you want to dream because you’re enmeshed in a web of fear.
Also, this coming Monday, anyone and everyone is invited to meet in front of the ticket booth at Lecom Baseball Park at noon to watch the Blue Jays and Pirates. We'll purchase tickets in the same section, have lunch inside the park and enjoy the 1:05 start time.
Below is our article for Wednesday; David Brooks is asking for the American people to resist the lure of us-vs.-them thinking. I'd like to know what you think about his article.
Resist the Pull of ‘Us vs. Them’ Thinking
David Brooks, NY Times, 3.20.24
I’ve just finished a book tour, so I’ve been on the road for five months. I’ve probably been to 35 or 40 states. And I would say the predominant emotion I have heard when I ask people about politics during my travels is exhaustion — a sense of fatigue, a sense of discouragement, a sense of passivity, and especially among Democrats, a pessimism about the election.
We’re in the middle of the global surge in populism. Populism is belief that there’s a conflict, a class conflict. And the conflict is between the real Americans and the globalized elites. And in America, it’s mostly measured by levels of education. So it’s people with a high school degree who tend to be working class, who feel they are being oppressed, looked down upon, and condescended to, and morally scorned by members of the highly educated elites who live along the coasts.
And so, that’s the populism in America. It’s also the populism in Britain. It’s the populism in France, across Europe. In 2002, only 120 million people lived in their countries governed by populist parties. By 2019, more than 2 billion people lived under governments governed by populist parties. And so, this is surging. And what does global populism have in common? All these different national forms of populism, they are all based on zero sum thinking.
If you go back through human history, the human condition is tribal. And so, a zero-sum mindset, an us/them mindset is sort of, I think, woven into our nature.
The zero-sum mindset is the idea that we have a finite amount of goods in the world. And if I’m going to improve my lot in the world, I’ve got to take something away from you. And so, the zero-sum mindset is an ancient mindset that is behind most conquest and war.
The positive sum mindset is the idea that we have an infinite, a potentially infinite amount of good in the world. And then I can add some good, and you will benefit. When Steve Jobs does really well and makes $1 billion, it doesn’t hurt me. I get to enjoy the Mac. I get to enjoy my iPhone. People who work at Apple get to have great jobs. And so, his prosperity is not taking away other people’s prosperity. It’s mutually advantageous.
And that’s just a better way to live. It’s a better mindset to go through life, that life is not war and war. Life is competition, creativity, innovation, productivity, and sort of a measured sort of competition to add to each other’s benefit. And in many ways, our politics is a struggle to embrace this liberating idea against the darker angels of our nature, which want to really undermine it with us/them thinking.
People broke out of the zero-sum mindset through a series of intellectual revolutions we call liberalism. And liberalism is the belief that we want a society that’s pluralistic, that I want to pursue my own eccentric and dynamic life being a writer or being an architect or being a nurse.
And you get to pursue your own life, and the market and democracy are ways to keep our diversity coherent, so we can live together in an orderly way, in a safe way, in an affluent way, and liberalism based on respect and dignity for the individual.
And that, I think, is fundamentally different than populism, which is not so much based on respect and dignity of the individual. It’s based on homage, the bowing down to the leader. If I had to try to summarize what I believe, I would say, Mr. President, you’re involved in a fundamental and elemental struggle between two mindsets, two cultures, two systems of government, one of which is liberal and positive sum and growth oriented, and the other which is populist and zero sum and threat oriented. And so, we need you to be as big as the situation demands.
I think it would be wonderful if Biden got out of the role of being president, got out of fancy policies, and stressed that liberalism and liberal democracy is not just an abstract idea that John Stuart Mill thought of. Liberal democracy is something we live every day. It involves a concrete set of social actions, like starting a business, building a better school, working together with people and companies, rising from poverty to buy a house, raising your children not to be culture warriors, but to be innovators, to be entrepreneurs.
This is what liberal capitalism is. It’s the stuff we do every day. And it comes under threat when we decide to live in a society that’s not liberal, but is authoritarian, and suddenly you don’t have the freedom to dream what you want to dream because you’re enmeshed in a web of fear.
Tuesday, March 19
I was unsure if we could have a meaningful discussion about hell; but, we did. It seems only fair to have a discussion about heaven next. As such, the article attached is about heaven and where (what) it is.
Also attached are the two documents I shared this week - a quote sheet and the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church description of hell. Lastly, if you are interested in the book I referenced, here is the link (but don't read it at night): www.amazon.com/23 Minutes in Hell
Heaven Comes to Us
Thomas G. Long, Christian Century 5.3.11
For many thoughtful Christians, meaningful language about heaven has fallen steadily from their grasp. In a scientific age, "heaven" as a place where God reigns and people go when they die has gradually slipped the moorings of plausibility. In 1941, Rudolf Bultmann, his sledgehammer poised against the foundations of the three-story cosmos, confidently said, "There is no longer any heaven in the traditional sense." The official 1930s hymnbook in my denomination included over a dozen hymns on heaven. The current hymnal's index doesn't even list the category.
Good riddance—at least according to an increasing chorus of voices. N. T. Wright recently argued that any thought that Christian hope is about "going to heaven" is biblically unsupported, theologically bankrupt and ethically corrosive. Jesus scholar Marcus Borg once told an audience,
"If I were to make a list of Christianity's ten worst contributions to religion, on that list would be popular Christianity's emphasis on the afterlife."
More recently, media-savvy pastor Rob Bell published Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, in which he dismisses traditional evangelical notions of heaven and hell, calling them "misguided and toxic." When advance word leaked about Bell's new book, outraged conservatives pummeled him with what the New York Times called "a biblical hailstorm of Twitter messages and blog posts."
Yet the hope of heaven dies hard in the popular imagination. Polls show that nine out of ten Americans believe in heaven, regardless of religious affiliation, and 85 percent are persuaded that they "will personally go there."
Even more impressive is the astonishing success of Todd Burpo's Heaven Is for Real, which has topped the New York Times best-seller lists for several months. Burpo, pastor of a small Nebraska church, tells of how he and his wife nearly lost their three-year-old son Colton because of misdiagnosed appendicitis. The couple experienced the fear, rage and anxiety any parents would feel as their child came perilously close to death—and all of the relief and renewed faith when his life seemed to be miraculously spared.
Burpo then describes how Colton began to tell a mind-boggling story of having been transported from the operating table into heaven. He described his great-grandfather "Pop," dead for more than 30 years, and a sister who died in a miscarriage that Colton had never been told about. He also encountered John the Baptist and saw God and Jesus sitting on enormous thrones. Heaven, he said, is "for real."
The fact that Colton's heaven has all of the trappings of a fundamentalist vision, including pearly gates and a blue-eyed Jesus, raises a skeptical eyebrow. The fact that the book was ghostwritten by Lynn Vincent, who penned Sarah Palin's Going Rogue, raises the other eyebrow. Colton, now 11, seems like a sweet kid, but I came away from this book thinking that either he was carried in an out-of-body experience to a biblical wax museum in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, or he's been channeling images from his father's sermons back to his credulous parents. Cathal Kelly of the Toronto Star scoffs that the book is for "the sort of people who see angels in chicken salad. [Colton has] written a book that will be shelved under 'non-fiction' south of the Mason-Dixon Line."
But charity should prevail. The book's unexpected popularity tells us something. In sober moments of reflection, our culture may find talk of heaven implausible, but in moments of need, it finds the hope of heaven irresistible.
All the more welcome, then, amidst these conflicting impulses, to have theologian Christopher Morse's superb and profound new monograph, The Difference Heaven Makes: Rehearing the Gospel as News. Morse combs meticulously through the biblical evidence, observing that in the Gospels heaven is mainly "not about blue skies or life only after death." Rather, heaven is the life that is now coming toward us from God, the life "of the world to come," a life that overcomes our present age. The opposite of heaven is not hell, but instead the "world that is passing away."
In Acts, when Jesus is "taken up to heaven," this is not a spatial claim, but an announcement that Jesus has been taken up "into the very life that is now forthcoming toward us." Heaven is God's unbounded love breaking in to every situation, stronger than any loss, even death. We don't go to heaven; heaven comes to us. "In sum," Morse writes, "we are called to be on hand for that which is at hand but not in hand, an unprecedented glory of not being left orphaned but of being loved in a community of new creation beyond all that we can ask or imagine."
Some day when Colton Burpo rereads his father's book with adult and perhaps skeptical eyes, I hope he will know that even if he did not go to heaven as a three-year-old, heaven comes to him every day and enfolds him in unfathomable love.
Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church Hell
Discussion Group Quote Sheet: Hell
Also attached are the two documents I shared this week - a quote sheet and the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church description of hell. Lastly, if you are interested in the book I referenced, here is the link (but don't read it at night): www.amazon.com/23 Minutes in Hell
Heaven Comes to Us
Thomas G. Long, Christian Century 5.3.11
For many thoughtful Christians, meaningful language about heaven has fallen steadily from their grasp. In a scientific age, "heaven" as a place where God reigns and people go when they die has gradually slipped the moorings of plausibility. In 1941, Rudolf Bultmann, his sledgehammer poised against the foundations of the three-story cosmos, confidently said, "There is no longer any heaven in the traditional sense." The official 1930s hymnbook in my denomination included over a dozen hymns on heaven. The current hymnal's index doesn't even list the category.
Good riddance—at least according to an increasing chorus of voices. N. T. Wright recently argued that any thought that Christian hope is about "going to heaven" is biblically unsupported, theologically bankrupt and ethically corrosive. Jesus scholar Marcus Borg once told an audience,
"If I were to make a list of Christianity's ten worst contributions to religion, on that list would be popular Christianity's emphasis on the afterlife."
More recently, media-savvy pastor Rob Bell published Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, in which he dismisses traditional evangelical notions of heaven and hell, calling them "misguided and toxic." When advance word leaked about Bell's new book, outraged conservatives pummeled him with what the New York Times called "a biblical hailstorm of Twitter messages and blog posts."
Yet the hope of heaven dies hard in the popular imagination. Polls show that nine out of ten Americans believe in heaven, regardless of religious affiliation, and 85 percent are persuaded that they "will personally go there."
Even more impressive is the astonishing success of Todd Burpo's Heaven Is for Real, which has topped the New York Times best-seller lists for several months. Burpo, pastor of a small Nebraska church, tells of how he and his wife nearly lost their three-year-old son Colton because of misdiagnosed appendicitis. The couple experienced the fear, rage and anxiety any parents would feel as their child came perilously close to death—and all of the relief and renewed faith when his life seemed to be miraculously spared.
Burpo then describes how Colton began to tell a mind-boggling story of having been transported from the operating table into heaven. He described his great-grandfather "Pop," dead for more than 30 years, and a sister who died in a miscarriage that Colton had never been told about. He also encountered John the Baptist and saw God and Jesus sitting on enormous thrones. Heaven, he said, is "for real."
The fact that Colton's heaven has all of the trappings of a fundamentalist vision, including pearly gates and a blue-eyed Jesus, raises a skeptical eyebrow. The fact that the book was ghostwritten by Lynn Vincent, who penned Sarah Palin's Going Rogue, raises the other eyebrow. Colton, now 11, seems like a sweet kid, but I came away from this book thinking that either he was carried in an out-of-body experience to a biblical wax museum in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, or he's been channeling images from his father's sermons back to his credulous parents. Cathal Kelly of the Toronto Star scoffs that the book is for "the sort of people who see angels in chicken salad. [Colton has] written a book that will be shelved under 'non-fiction' south of the Mason-Dixon Line."
But charity should prevail. The book's unexpected popularity tells us something. In sober moments of reflection, our culture may find talk of heaven implausible, but in moments of need, it finds the hope of heaven irresistible.
All the more welcome, then, amidst these conflicting impulses, to have theologian Christopher Morse's superb and profound new monograph, The Difference Heaven Makes: Rehearing the Gospel as News. Morse combs meticulously through the biblical evidence, observing that in the Gospels heaven is mainly "not about blue skies or life only after death." Rather, heaven is the life that is now coming toward us from God, the life "of the world to come," a life that overcomes our present age. The opposite of heaven is not hell, but instead the "world that is passing away."
In Acts, when Jesus is "taken up to heaven," this is not a spatial claim, but an announcement that Jesus has been taken up "into the very life that is now forthcoming toward us." Heaven is God's unbounded love breaking in to every situation, stronger than any loss, even death. We don't go to heaven; heaven comes to us. "In sum," Morse writes, "we are called to be on hand for that which is at hand but not in hand, an unprecedented glory of not being left orphaned but of being loved in a community of new creation beyond all that we can ask or imagine."
Some day when Colton Burpo rereads his father's book with adult and perhaps skeptical eyes, I hope he will know that even if he did not go to heaven as a three-year-old, heaven comes to him every day and enfolds him in unfathomable love.
Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church Hell
Discussion Group Quote Sheet: Hell
Tuesday, March 12
I can't believe we're going to talk about it but there was an interesting opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal about hell. My thinking is this: if the WSJ can talk about it, why can't we.
As is our Lenten tradition, I'll be offering a short Scripture reading to meditate on. Also, as is our tradition, I expect to have a lively, deep and uplifting conversation (about what is most likely the darkest of subjects).
How We Think About Hell
Lance Morrow, Wall Street Journal 3.7.24
Pope Francis was asked earlier this year what he thinks about hell. “It’s difficult to imagine it,” he replied. “What I would say is not a dogma of faith, but my personal thought: I like to think hell is empty. I hope it is.”
It was a pastoral pleasantry, kindly meant but theologically sloppy. It raised interesting questions: Has the traditional hell—fire and brimstone through all eternity—gone out of business, either because, as the pope hopes, there are no longer enough customers, or because hell has become an atavism: medieval, lurid, and not credible to the 21st-century mind? Is the eternal fire a metaphor? If so, what does it mean? Is hell a physical place or a state of mind? Is there such a thing as eternal life—and if God’s verdict goes against you, does that mean a life of everlasting torment? Is it possible to believe in hell if you don’t believe in God, or is hell the terrible solitude of living without God?
Pope Francis himself has defined hell as “eternal solitude.” By contrast, Jean-Paul Sartre, the pontiff of existentialism, wrote that “hell is other people.” Which is it?
Evelyn Waugh proposed a darkly witty version of hell in his novel “A Handful of Dust.” It ends with the hero, an English gentleman lost in the Amazonian rain forest, held prisoner by an illiterate mixed-race Guianan who happens to own a complete set of Dickens and forces his captive to read it aloud, over and over again, without hope of release.
Hell expanded centuries ago from theology into literature. Great writers have had a crack at it. Dante set the standard. Milton’s “Paradise Lost” is magnificent, although, as Samuel Johnson remarked, “no one wished it longer.” Milton’s fallen Lucifer sounds unexpectedly modern when he cries, “Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.” Is it the case that we make our own hell?
I experienced a shock of recognition when I first read James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”: The Jesuit retreat master’s hair-raising sermon therein resembled, almost word for word, one I’d heard during a retreat at the Jesuits’ Gonzaga College High School in Washington around 1957. If hell is the unspeakable, those priests managed to give it elaborate articulation: the stench of rotting corpses, the boiling blood and brains of sinners. And “remember, boys, the fire of hell gives off no light.”
Joyce’s novel was published in 1916, the year of the Great War’s Battle of the Somme, a slaughter that killed some 300,000 soldiers and wounded hundreds of thousands more. Around this time notions about hell began to migrate from eternity into history and, simultaneously, from
meaning into meaninglessness.
The old story of hell had been filled with meaning—which emerged from a detailed theological formality, a system of sin and condign punishment worked out almost as precisely as Newton’s laws of motion. World War I’s trenches reduced war to meaningless horror. The 20th century proceeded along those lines, through a sequence of world-historical hells: the genocidal Ukrainian famine inflicted by Stalin in the early 1930s; Hitler’s Final Solution, which killed six million Jews in Auschwitz, Treblinka and other death camps; the urbicidal bombings of World War II; the Cambodians’ hellish mass murder under Pol Pot. On and on.
Hell presents itself in the 21st century, in the events of Oct. 7 in southern Israel and in Israel’s subsequent leveling of Gaza. Many feel premonitions of a more general hell on Earth, in climate change, as if the weather were groping toward fulfillment of the Robert Frost poem: “Some say the world will end in fire / Some say in ice.” Is it sinful to use plastic bags? To fly in a private jet? Will people who do those things be sent to hell?
In our time, the sense of sin—sin being the reason hell is necessary—has been diminished by the notion that human behavior and even an individual’s fate are predetermined, written in the genes. This is Calvinism without Calvinism’s saving paradox—that you must act as if. But if a man’s behavior is out of his hands, he won’t be capable of sinning. Wouldn’t it be an injustice to sentence him to eternal damnation?
The man’s life would resemble nothing so much as the driverless car Elon Musk and the tech priesthood have labored to perfect. If a person isn’t in command of the accelerator, brakes and steering wheel, how can he be punished if his car’s computers fail and it runs over somebody?
That line of reasoning makes hell seem less plausible, less just, merely contingent.
What will artificial intelligence make of the notion of hell? Will the robots laugh?
Plenty of people, of course, still believe in such a place—literally or metaphorically or in some vague, ingenious fusion of the two: an intuition that, despite its reductive crudity, harbors a basic truth about human nature and its sense of justice.
As is our Lenten tradition, I'll be offering a short Scripture reading to meditate on. Also, as is our tradition, I expect to have a lively, deep and uplifting conversation (about what is most likely the darkest of subjects).
How We Think About Hell
Lance Morrow, Wall Street Journal 3.7.24
Pope Francis was asked earlier this year what he thinks about hell. “It’s difficult to imagine it,” he replied. “What I would say is not a dogma of faith, but my personal thought: I like to think hell is empty. I hope it is.”
It was a pastoral pleasantry, kindly meant but theologically sloppy. It raised interesting questions: Has the traditional hell—fire and brimstone through all eternity—gone out of business, either because, as the pope hopes, there are no longer enough customers, or because hell has become an atavism: medieval, lurid, and not credible to the 21st-century mind? Is the eternal fire a metaphor? If so, what does it mean? Is hell a physical place or a state of mind? Is there such a thing as eternal life—and if God’s verdict goes against you, does that mean a life of everlasting torment? Is it possible to believe in hell if you don’t believe in God, or is hell the terrible solitude of living without God?
Pope Francis himself has defined hell as “eternal solitude.” By contrast, Jean-Paul Sartre, the pontiff of existentialism, wrote that “hell is other people.” Which is it?
Evelyn Waugh proposed a darkly witty version of hell in his novel “A Handful of Dust.” It ends with the hero, an English gentleman lost in the Amazonian rain forest, held prisoner by an illiterate mixed-race Guianan who happens to own a complete set of Dickens and forces his captive to read it aloud, over and over again, without hope of release.
Hell expanded centuries ago from theology into literature. Great writers have had a crack at it. Dante set the standard. Milton’s “Paradise Lost” is magnificent, although, as Samuel Johnson remarked, “no one wished it longer.” Milton’s fallen Lucifer sounds unexpectedly modern when he cries, “Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.” Is it the case that we make our own hell?
I experienced a shock of recognition when I first read James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”: The Jesuit retreat master’s hair-raising sermon therein resembled, almost word for word, one I’d heard during a retreat at the Jesuits’ Gonzaga College High School in Washington around 1957. If hell is the unspeakable, those priests managed to give it elaborate articulation: the stench of rotting corpses, the boiling blood and brains of sinners. And “remember, boys, the fire of hell gives off no light.”
Joyce’s novel was published in 1916, the year of the Great War’s Battle of the Somme, a slaughter that killed some 300,000 soldiers and wounded hundreds of thousands more. Around this time notions about hell began to migrate from eternity into history and, simultaneously, from
meaning into meaninglessness.
The old story of hell had been filled with meaning—which emerged from a detailed theological formality, a system of sin and condign punishment worked out almost as precisely as Newton’s laws of motion. World War I’s trenches reduced war to meaningless horror. The 20th century proceeded along those lines, through a sequence of world-historical hells: the genocidal Ukrainian famine inflicted by Stalin in the early 1930s; Hitler’s Final Solution, which killed six million Jews in Auschwitz, Treblinka and other death camps; the urbicidal bombings of World War II; the Cambodians’ hellish mass murder under Pol Pot. On and on.
Hell presents itself in the 21st century, in the events of Oct. 7 in southern Israel and in Israel’s subsequent leveling of Gaza. Many feel premonitions of a more general hell on Earth, in climate change, as if the weather were groping toward fulfillment of the Robert Frost poem: “Some say the world will end in fire / Some say in ice.” Is it sinful to use plastic bags? To fly in a private jet? Will people who do those things be sent to hell?
In our time, the sense of sin—sin being the reason hell is necessary—has been diminished by the notion that human behavior and even an individual’s fate are predetermined, written in the genes. This is Calvinism without Calvinism’s saving paradox—that you must act as if. But if a man’s behavior is out of his hands, he won’t be capable of sinning. Wouldn’t it be an injustice to sentence him to eternal damnation?
The man’s life would resemble nothing so much as the driverless car Elon Musk and the tech priesthood have labored to perfect. If a person isn’t in command of the accelerator, brakes and steering wheel, how can he be punished if his car’s computers fail and it runs over somebody?
That line of reasoning makes hell seem less plausible, less just, merely contingent.
What will artificial intelligence make of the notion of hell? Will the robots laugh?
Plenty of people, of course, still believe in such a place—literally or metaphorically or in some vague, ingenious fusion of the two: an intuition that, despite its reductive crudity, harbors a basic truth about human nature and its sense of justice.
Tuesday, March 5
Continuing with our Lenten theme of talking about a societal issue and meditating on Scripture, we have an article about how politics had become a false religion and how science and Christianity (and Presiding Bishop Michael Curry) saved her.
Also included is the Scripture sheet I created and showed you last week - it has two stories about Moses and the prophet Jonah and suicide. It also has passages that for centuries (millennia) have helped lift people from the depths of despair. And, as always, if you would like to talk about this individually, please let me know.
The 2016 Election Sent Me Searching for Answers
Carrie Sheffield, Christianity Today 12.22.23
Carrie Sheffield is a policy analyst in Washington, DC. This essay is adapted from her book, Motorhome Prophecies: A Journey of Healing and Forgiveness.
People laugh when I admit this, but my conversion to Christianity resulted from two powerful forces: science and presidential politics. But before that journey began, I needed distance from extreme religious trauma. I grew up within an offshoot Mormon cult, living with seven biological siblings in various motor homes, tents, houses, and sheds. Besides time spent in homeschooling, I attended 17 different public schools. When I took my ACT test, we lived in a shed with no running water in the Ozarks.
My father believed he was a Mormon prophet destined to become president. The LDS Church eventually excommunicated him for heresy. As a child, he was raped by a Mormon babysitter and witnessed the sudden death of a best friend. His children inherited the trauma. I’ve been hospitalized nine times for depression, fibromyalgia, suicidal ideation, and PTSD.
For years, I assumed I’d never return to belief in God or organized religion. My heart remained closed for over a decade because of the evil things I’d seen done in God’s name. To fill the void, I threw myself into work, schooling, dating, friends, and travel as ultimate sources of meaning. I studied business policy at Harvard and worked as an analyst for major Wall Street firms, earning unthinkable sums for a girl from a motor home. I launched a career in political journalism at outlets like Politico, The Hill, and the Washington Times. Materially, I was well off. But spiritually, I felt poorer than ever. I couldn’t help comparing myself to people who appeared more successful. Over time, I discovered my earthly gifts and accomplishments didn’t offer real fulfillment.
I turned to ancient Stoic philosophy to bring me peace and stability, and in many respects it did. But it wasn’t enough. During the 2016 election, when I felt an existential crisis. I realized that I had allowed politics to become a substitute religion. I’d built my career toward working on aRepublican campaign or in the White House. It would be a crowning success. I felt ready. I knew the economy after managing billions of dollars in credit risk on Wall Street. I’d appeared on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Fox Business, and other networks, even sparring on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher.
But I couldn’t endorse what Trump said about women, and I couldn’t abide his lack of public-service experience. I wrote in the then senator Ben Sasse, a Republican from Nebraska, as my protest candidate. During this crisis of meaning, I felt distraught and adrift. So I turned to church, first to Redeemer Presbyterian, founded by the late Tim Keller, and also to Saint Thomas Episcopal on Fifth Avenue.
Each week, I generally attended either a Sunday service or a Bible study. There, I encountered Scripture’s answer to career and political idolatry in passages like Mark 8:36–37, which asks, “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?” And I gradually discovered why Christianity supplanted Stoicism (and other ancient philosophies).
Like Buddhism, Stoicism teaches detachment to help relieve human suffering. We are in pain, the Stoics say, because we irrationally attach ourselves to things, and true liberation comes from refusing to let them control our peace. There is truth in those sentiments, but Stoicism didn’t offer sustaining community, and it didn’t help me comprehend either human depravity or the possibility of redemption.
I enjoyed Keller’s intellectual approach. His church welcomed skeptics, atheists, and agnostics like me. He provided a solid answer to my anger at organized religion. I resonated with his response in The Prodigal God to Karl Marx’s charge that religion is the “opiate of the masses.”
As Keller observed: Christianity teaches that God hates the suffering and oppression of this material world so much, he was willing to get involved in it and to fight against it. Properly understood, Christianity is by no means the opiate of the people. It’s more like the smelling salts.
As I studied theology, I also began studying science and metaphysics, discovering abundant evidence for a divine creator that blew away any last vestiges of agnosticism. I embraced a ministry called Science + God created by former Harvard physics professor Michael Guillen. An atheist when he entered Cornell University, he left as a Christian, graduating with three PhDs —mathematics, astronomy, and physics — before teaching at Harvard and joining ABC News as chief science correspondent.
The more I studied science, history, anthropology, and other disciplines, the more my faith in God and my confidence in Christianity grew. In Mormonism, further study had produced further disillusionment. Studying Christianity felt like uncovering buried treasure discarded by intellectuals who had discounted its scientific and philosophical heft.
I joined the Episcopal Church, having been influenced by Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, the preacher from the royal wedding of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. More than two billion people watched his sermon on the power of love. But I already knew the power of this small, bespectacled, energetic man. One of his chief advisors, Chuck Robertson, became a spiritual mentor to me after we met in Manhattan.
Reverend Chuck gave me the bishop’s book Crazy Christians. It’s about love’s power to heal racial, socioeconomic, and all other divisions. As an African American, Curry grew up amid segregation, and his father brought his family to the Episcopal Church because it served the same Communion cup to parishioners of all races. Curry saw the truth of Galatians 3:28, that “you are all one in Christ Jesus.” His words touched my heart and encouraged my faith journey.
My baptism day — December 3, 2017 — was the happiest of my life. A group of about 30 family and friends watched me vow to “serve Christ in all persons, loving my neighbor as myself” and “strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.” More than six years since my baptism, I enjoy a healthier relationship to politics.
I still have strong convictions, which I don’t hesitate to share in columns, speeches, or TV appearances, but I know God is far bigger than any manmade system.
As I returned to a walk with God, I felt enveloped with a sense of peace that surpassed understanding. The mission of Christ to unify and heal breathed new life and joy into my bruised heart. I recovered a sense of confidence, not in myself but in my identity as a child of God.
Depression and the Bible
Numbers 11:10-16
Moses heard the people crying throughout their clans, each at his tent’s entrance. The LORD was outraged, and Moses was upset. Moses said to the LORD, “Why have you treated your servant so badly? And why haven’t I found favor in your eyes, for you have placed the burden of all these people on me? Did I conceive all these people? Did I give birth to them, that you would say to me, ‘Carry them at the breast, as a nurse carries an unweaned child,’ to the fertile land that you promised their ancestors? Where am I to get meat for all these people? They are crying before me and saying, ‘Give us meat, so we can eat.’ I can’t bear this people on my own. They’re too heavy for me. If you’re going to treat me like this, please kill me. If I’ve found favor in your
eyes, then don’t let me endure this wretched situation.”
The LORD said to Moses, “Gather before me seventy men from Israel’s elders, whom you know as elders and officers of the people.
Jonah 4:1-4
But Jonah thought [God saving the people of Nineveh] was utterly wrong, and he became angry. He prayed to the LORD, “Come on, LORD! Wasn’t this precisely my point when I was back in my own land? This is why I fled to Tarshish earlier! I know that you are a merciful and compassionate God, very patient, full of faithful love, and willing not to destroy. At this point, LORD, you may as well take my life from me, because it would be better for me to die than to live.”
The LORD responded, “Is your anger a good thing?”
Psalm 40:1-2
I put all my hope in the Lord. He leaned down to me; he listened to my cry for help. He lifted me out of the pit of death, out of the mud and filth, and set my feet on solid rock. He steadied my legs.
2 Corinthians 4:18
We don’t focus on the things that can be seen but on the things that can’t be seen. The things that can be seen don’t last, but the things that can’t be seen are eternal.
Matthew 11:28-30
“Come to me, all you who are struggling hard and carrying heavy loads, and I will give you rest. Put on my yoke, and learn from me. I’m gentle and humble. And you will find rest for yourselves. My yoke is easy to bear, and my burden is light.”
Romans 8:38-39
I’m convinced that nothing can separate us from God’s love in Christ Jesus our Lord: not death or life, not angels or rulers, not present things or future things, not powers or height or depth, or any other thing that is created.
Also included is the Scripture sheet I created and showed you last week - it has two stories about Moses and the prophet Jonah and suicide. It also has passages that for centuries (millennia) have helped lift people from the depths of despair. And, as always, if you would like to talk about this individually, please let me know.
The 2016 Election Sent Me Searching for Answers
Carrie Sheffield, Christianity Today 12.22.23
Carrie Sheffield is a policy analyst in Washington, DC. This essay is adapted from her book, Motorhome Prophecies: A Journey of Healing and Forgiveness.
People laugh when I admit this, but my conversion to Christianity resulted from two powerful forces: science and presidential politics. But before that journey began, I needed distance from extreme religious trauma. I grew up within an offshoot Mormon cult, living with seven biological siblings in various motor homes, tents, houses, and sheds. Besides time spent in homeschooling, I attended 17 different public schools. When I took my ACT test, we lived in a shed with no running water in the Ozarks.
My father believed he was a Mormon prophet destined to become president. The LDS Church eventually excommunicated him for heresy. As a child, he was raped by a Mormon babysitter and witnessed the sudden death of a best friend. His children inherited the trauma. I’ve been hospitalized nine times for depression, fibromyalgia, suicidal ideation, and PTSD.
For years, I assumed I’d never return to belief in God or organized religion. My heart remained closed for over a decade because of the evil things I’d seen done in God’s name. To fill the void, I threw myself into work, schooling, dating, friends, and travel as ultimate sources of meaning. I studied business policy at Harvard and worked as an analyst for major Wall Street firms, earning unthinkable sums for a girl from a motor home. I launched a career in political journalism at outlets like Politico, The Hill, and the Washington Times. Materially, I was well off. But spiritually, I felt poorer than ever. I couldn’t help comparing myself to people who appeared more successful. Over time, I discovered my earthly gifts and accomplishments didn’t offer real fulfillment.
I turned to ancient Stoic philosophy to bring me peace and stability, and in many respects it did. But it wasn’t enough. During the 2016 election, when I felt an existential crisis. I realized that I had allowed politics to become a substitute religion. I’d built my career toward working on aRepublican campaign or in the White House. It would be a crowning success. I felt ready. I knew the economy after managing billions of dollars in credit risk on Wall Street. I’d appeared on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Fox Business, and other networks, even sparring on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher.
But I couldn’t endorse what Trump said about women, and I couldn’t abide his lack of public-service experience. I wrote in the then senator Ben Sasse, a Republican from Nebraska, as my protest candidate. During this crisis of meaning, I felt distraught and adrift. So I turned to church, first to Redeemer Presbyterian, founded by the late Tim Keller, and also to Saint Thomas Episcopal on Fifth Avenue.
Each week, I generally attended either a Sunday service or a Bible study. There, I encountered Scripture’s answer to career and political idolatry in passages like Mark 8:36–37, which asks, “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?” And I gradually discovered why Christianity supplanted Stoicism (and other ancient philosophies).
Like Buddhism, Stoicism teaches detachment to help relieve human suffering. We are in pain, the Stoics say, because we irrationally attach ourselves to things, and true liberation comes from refusing to let them control our peace. There is truth in those sentiments, but Stoicism didn’t offer sustaining community, and it didn’t help me comprehend either human depravity or the possibility of redemption.
I enjoyed Keller’s intellectual approach. His church welcomed skeptics, atheists, and agnostics like me. He provided a solid answer to my anger at organized religion. I resonated with his response in The Prodigal God to Karl Marx’s charge that religion is the “opiate of the masses.”
As Keller observed: Christianity teaches that God hates the suffering and oppression of this material world so much, he was willing to get involved in it and to fight against it. Properly understood, Christianity is by no means the opiate of the people. It’s more like the smelling salts.
As I studied theology, I also began studying science and metaphysics, discovering abundant evidence for a divine creator that blew away any last vestiges of agnosticism. I embraced a ministry called Science + God created by former Harvard physics professor Michael Guillen. An atheist when he entered Cornell University, he left as a Christian, graduating with three PhDs —mathematics, astronomy, and physics — before teaching at Harvard and joining ABC News as chief science correspondent.
The more I studied science, history, anthropology, and other disciplines, the more my faith in God and my confidence in Christianity grew. In Mormonism, further study had produced further disillusionment. Studying Christianity felt like uncovering buried treasure discarded by intellectuals who had discounted its scientific and philosophical heft.
I joined the Episcopal Church, having been influenced by Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, the preacher from the royal wedding of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. More than two billion people watched his sermon on the power of love. But I already knew the power of this small, bespectacled, energetic man. One of his chief advisors, Chuck Robertson, became a spiritual mentor to me after we met in Manhattan.
Reverend Chuck gave me the bishop’s book Crazy Christians. It’s about love’s power to heal racial, socioeconomic, and all other divisions. As an African American, Curry grew up amid segregation, and his father brought his family to the Episcopal Church because it served the same Communion cup to parishioners of all races. Curry saw the truth of Galatians 3:28, that “you are all one in Christ Jesus.” His words touched my heart and encouraged my faith journey.
My baptism day — December 3, 2017 — was the happiest of my life. A group of about 30 family and friends watched me vow to “serve Christ in all persons, loving my neighbor as myself” and “strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.” More than six years since my baptism, I enjoy a healthier relationship to politics.
I still have strong convictions, which I don’t hesitate to share in columns, speeches, or TV appearances, but I know God is far bigger than any manmade system.
As I returned to a walk with God, I felt enveloped with a sense of peace that surpassed understanding. The mission of Christ to unify and heal breathed new life and joy into my bruised heart. I recovered a sense of confidence, not in myself but in my identity as a child of God.
Depression and the Bible
Numbers 11:10-16
Moses heard the people crying throughout their clans, each at his tent’s entrance. The LORD was outraged, and Moses was upset. Moses said to the LORD, “Why have you treated your servant so badly? And why haven’t I found favor in your eyes, for you have placed the burden of all these people on me? Did I conceive all these people? Did I give birth to them, that you would say to me, ‘Carry them at the breast, as a nurse carries an unweaned child,’ to the fertile land that you promised their ancestors? Where am I to get meat for all these people? They are crying before me and saying, ‘Give us meat, so we can eat.’ I can’t bear this people on my own. They’re too heavy for me. If you’re going to treat me like this, please kill me. If I’ve found favor in your
eyes, then don’t let me endure this wretched situation.”
The LORD said to Moses, “Gather before me seventy men from Israel’s elders, whom you know as elders and officers of the people.
Jonah 4:1-4
But Jonah thought [God saving the people of Nineveh] was utterly wrong, and he became angry. He prayed to the LORD, “Come on, LORD! Wasn’t this precisely my point when I was back in my own land? This is why I fled to Tarshish earlier! I know that you are a merciful and compassionate God, very patient, full of faithful love, and willing not to destroy. At this point, LORD, you may as well take my life from me, because it would be better for me to die than to live.”
The LORD responded, “Is your anger a good thing?”
Psalm 40:1-2
I put all my hope in the Lord. He leaned down to me; he listened to my cry for help. He lifted me out of the pit of death, out of the mud and filth, and set my feet on solid rock. He steadied my legs.
2 Corinthians 4:18
We don’t focus on the things that can be seen but on the things that can’t be seen. The things that can be seen don’t last, but the things that can’t be seen are eternal.
Matthew 11:28-30
“Come to me, all you who are struggling hard and carrying heavy loads, and I will give you rest. Put on my yoke, and learn from me. I’m gentle and humble. And you will find rest for yourselves. My yoke is easy to bear, and my burden is light.”
Romans 8:38-39
I’m convinced that nothing can separate us from God’s love in Christ Jesus our Lord: not death or life, not angels or rulers, not present things or future things, not powers or height or depth, or any other thing that is created.
Tuesday, February 27
For the Lenten season, we are going to talk about faith and relate it to an event in society. This week, we are going to talk about the rise of suicide. Since there is not one single article that covers this, I took on the role of editor and have combined three stories - from the NY Times, The Christian Century, and Crosswalk (an evangelical publication) which address different aspects of suicide. In particular, the rise in teen suicide and what the Church, and specifically grandparents, can do.
I am available at any time to talk with you about this confidentially and one-on-one. If you are interested in talking about it in a safe group environment, I look forward to seeing you on Tuesday or Wednesday in person or online. And yes, as always, I'll have the coffee ready.
Putting Up and Removing Barriers: A Discussion About Suicide
The Rev. David J. Marshall, Editor, All Angels by the Sea, 2.22.24
Ellen Barry, Mental Health Reporter, NY Times:
“The bridge is sealed up.” Last month, with those words, the general manager of the Golden Gate Bridge announced the completion of a suicide barrier — stainless steel netting that extends about 20 feet out from the walkway for the length of the bridge, making a jump into the water below extraordinarily difficult. For decades, friends and family members of people who had jumped pleaded for a barrier. And for decades, my colleague John Branch recently reported, officials found reasons — the cost, the aesthetics — not to build one.
But something is changing in the United States, where the suicide rate has risen by about 35 percent over two decades, with deaths approaching 50,000 annually. The U.S. is a glaring exception among wealthy countries; globally, the suicide rate has been dropping steeply and steadily.
Research has demonstrated that suicide is most often an impulsive act, with a period of acute risk that passes in hours, or even minutes. Contrary to what many assume, people who survive suicide attempts often go on to do well: Nine out of 10 of them do not die by suicide.
For generations, psychiatrists believed that, in the words of the British researcher Norman Kreitman, “anyone bent on self-destruction must eventually succeed.” Then something strange and wonderful happened: Midway through the 1960s, the annual number of suicides in Britain began dropping — by 35 percent in the following years — even as tolls crept up in other parts of Europe. No one could say why. Were antidepressant medications bringing down levels of despair? Had life in Britain just gotten better? The real explanation, Kreitman discovered, was none of these. The drop in suicides had come about almost by accident: As the United Kingdom phased out coal gas from its supply to household stoves, levels of carbon monoxide decreased.
Suicide by gas accounted for almost half of the suicides in 1960. It turns out that blocking access to a single lethal means — if it is the right one — can make a huge difference. The strategy that arose from this realization is known as “means restriction” or “means safety,” and vast natural experiments have borne it out.
More than half of U.S. suicides are carried out with firearms. Twenty-one states have passed red flag laws, which allow the authorities to remove firearms temporarily from individuals identified as dangerous to themselves or others. A follow-up study found that firearm suicides dropped 7.5 percent in Indiana in the decade after the law’s passage; Connecticut saw a 13.7 percent drop over eight years as the state began to enforce the law in earnest. Even brief counseling sessions can change a gun owner’s habits, trials show. A researcher recalled one subject who was particularly dismissive of the counselor’s advice but returned six months later with a different outlook. “Since I was last here, I broke up with my fiancé and I let my brother hold my guns. If I hadn’t done that, I’m pretty sure I’d be dead,” the subject told researchers.
Our Teens Are Not Okay
Editors of The Christian Century, 4.10.23.
A recent CDC report identifies a sharp increase in depression among teen girls. Boys are not doing well either, but girls are faring worse across nearly all measures. The reasons are unclear.
In his newsletter, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt points to the “rewiring of childhood” in the 2010s with the widespread use of mobile devices and social media. Girls report experiencing more online bullying and harassment than boys, and Haidt observes that even those who aren’t chronically online may suffer. When all your peers are posting, you can feel isolated, lonely, and depressed if you aren’t joining them.
Another study, in the journal SSM-Mental Health, confirms that teen girls are the most depressed — and adds that teens who self-identify as liberal are even more depressed than their conservative peers. Perhaps liberal teens have a greater awareness of systemic injustice, while conservatives are more likely to view inequality as a personal failure — and therefore to feel a greater sense of personal agency and hope.
Whatever the causes, the study indicates that the views through which teens process world events matter to their mental health, that teens are increasingly likely to root their personal identity in their political beliefs. “Young people are experiencing a level of distress that calls on us to act with urgency and compassion,” said the CDC’s Kathleen Ethier in a press release. She has urged schools and health-care professionals to take evidence-based steps to improve teen mental health.
Churches can do this, too. Religious practice has proven to be neuroprotective for teens and adults, with higher levels of spirituality and religion associated with lower rates of depressive symptoms and suicidality. (The SSM study controlled for religiosity for this reason.)
Psychologist Lisa Miller’s research suggests that the teen years are marked by an increased capacity and desire for connection with others and with God. The development of healthy adolescent spirituality makes kids happier and can contribute to their lifelong mental health.
We don’t know why girls are doing worse than boys (and it’s possible that boys are underreporting their depressive symptoms). But churches can make a difference in teens’ lives by helping them cultivate healthy spiritual practices and a sense of belonging. The CDC says teens need a safe, trusted community that cares about them and their well-being—but the church can also be a place that cares about what they care about. Churches can be places where they learn how to come together to work for justice, rather than scrolling through it alone.
Habits to Talk to Your Grandchildren About Faith,
Annie Yorty, Crosswalk Contributing Writer, June 12, 2023.
Demonstrate your spiritual life with God.
Allow your grandchildren to see you practice your faith – whether it is reflection, in prayer, or in Bible study. Invite them to pray with you. At mealtimes, pause to pray, even if no one else joins you.
Talk about God in your daily life.
Try using “Here’s what I believe” statements such as these:
Sunday is the best day because I get to go to church and feel better about my week.
When I talk to God, He gives me peace in my heart.
When I have a problem, I read my Bible and talk to church friends to find answers.
Communicate everyday biblical principles without preaching.
Show them patience and kindness. Teach your children about generosity in daily living. And, give them your undivided attention the way that God pays attention to us.
Reinforce the importance of righteousness in every area of life.
When playing games together, say, “We want to do the right thing by following the rules.” At the same time, help them to see the wisdom of putting others first.
Watch for signs of spiritual readiness.
Sooner or later, your grandkids will display a need to know more about God. Ask God to help you perceive their heart needs and be ready with thoughtful questions to lead to opportunities to share truth.
Demonstrate the love of God through carefully chosen gifts.
If their non-believing parents do not allow you to give an overtly Christian gift, give the gift of time with you because it adds an even better purpose for relationship building. For example, give your grandkids a game that promotes open-ended conversation. Then play it with them. Or take them to a classic play or movie with Christian themes and then talk with them about it.
Offer interesting books that pique spiritual interest.
Perhaps even read them aloud together. Many non-religious preteens enjoy The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis which contains a Christian theme of love and sacrifice that makes for deep conversations.
Endure scoffing with grace.
Your non-believing children, or even your grandkids, may tease or challenge you because of your faith. Take on the humility of Christ (Philippians 2:5) rather than taking offense. Forgive and love rather than defending and arguing. God may use your meekness to prick their conscience.
Love and encourage your non-believing children.
Build them up by praising their strengths and avoiding criticism. They will not only experience the love of God through you, but you will also be maintaining open communication and access to your grandkids.
Lastly, (and perhaps most importantly), ask God to lead you to step out in faith that passes on a rich spiritual inheritance to your grandchildren. Our faithful God may even surprise you by bringing their unbelieving parents along with your grandkids.
I am available at any time to talk with you about this confidentially and one-on-one. If you are interested in talking about it in a safe group environment, I look forward to seeing you on Tuesday or Wednesday in person or online. And yes, as always, I'll have the coffee ready.
Putting Up and Removing Barriers: A Discussion About Suicide
The Rev. David J. Marshall, Editor, All Angels by the Sea, 2.22.24
Ellen Barry, Mental Health Reporter, NY Times:
“The bridge is sealed up.” Last month, with those words, the general manager of the Golden Gate Bridge announced the completion of a suicide barrier — stainless steel netting that extends about 20 feet out from the walkway for the length of the bridge, making a jump into the water below extraordinarily difficult. For decades, friends and family members of people who had jumped pleaded for a barrier. And for decades, my colleague John Branch recently reported, officials found reasons — the cost, the aesthetics — not to build one.
But something is changing in the United States, where the suicide rate has risen by about 35 percent over two decades, with deaths approaching 50,000 annually. The U.S. is a glaring exception among wealthy countries; globally, the suicide rate has been dropping steeply and steadily.
Research has demonstrated that suicide is most often an impulsive act, with a period of acute risk that passes in hours, or even minutes. Contrary to what many assume, people who survive suicide attempts often go on to do well: Nine out of 10 of them do not die by suicide.
For generations, psychiatrists believed that, in the words of the British researcher Norman Kreitman, “anyone bent on self-destruction must eventually succeed.” Then something strange and wonderful happened: Midway through the 1960s, the annual number of suicides in Britain began dropping — by 35 percent in the following years — even as tolls crept up in other parts of Europe. No one could say why. Were antidepressant medications bringing down levels of despair? Had life in Britain just gotten better? The real explanation, Kreitman discovered, was none of these. The drop in suicides had come about almost by accident: As the United Kingdom phased out coal gas from its supply to household stoves, levels of carbon monoxide decreased.
Suicide by gas accounted for almost half of the suicides in 1960. It turns out that blocking access to a single lethal means — if it is the right one — can make a huge difference. The strategy that arose from this realization is known as “means restriction” or “means safety,” and vast natural experiments have borne it out.
More than half of U.S. suicides are carried out with firearms. Twenty-one states have passed red flag laws, which allow the authorities to remove firearms temporarily from individuals identified as dangerous to themselves or others. A follow-up study found that firearm suicides dropped 7.5 percent in Indiana in the decade after the law’s passage; Connecticut saw a 13.7 percent drop over eight years as the state began to enforce the law in earnest. Even brief counseling sessions can change a gun owner’s habits, trials show. A researcher recalled one subject who was particularly dismissive of the counselor’s advice but returned six months later with a different outlook. “Since I was last here, I broke up with my fiancé and I let my brother hold my guns. If I hadn’t done that, I’m pretty sure I’d be dead,” the subject told researchers.
Our Teens Are Not Okay
Editors of The Christian Century, 4.10.23.
A recent CDC report identifies a sharp increase in depression among teen girls. Boys are not doing well either, but girls are faring worse across nearly all measures. The reasons are unclear.
In his newsletter, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt points to the “rewiring of childhood” in the 2010s with the widespread use of mobile devices and social media. Girls report experiencing more online bullying and harassment than boys, and Haidt observes that even those who aren’t chronically online may suffer. When all your peers are posting, you can feel isolated, lonely, and depressed if you aren’t joining them.
Another study, in the journal SSM-Mental Health, confirms that teen girls are the most depressed — and adds that teens who self-identify as liberal are even more depressed than their conservative peers. Perhaps liberal teens have a greater awareness of systemic injustice, while conservatives are more likely to view inequality as a personal failure — and therefore to feel a greater sense of personal agency and hope.
Whatever the causes, the study indicates that the views through which teens process world events matter to their mental health, that teens are increasingly likely to root their personal identity in their political beliefs. “Young people are experiencing a level of distress that calls on us to act with urgency and compassion,” said the CDC’s Kathleen Ethier in a press release. She has urged schools and health-care professionals to take evidence-based steps to improve teen mental health.
Churches can do this, too. Religious practice has proven to be neuroprotective for teens and adults, with higher levels of spirituality and religion associated with lower rates of depressive symptoms and suicidality. (The SSM study controlled for religiosity for this reason.)
Psychologist Lisa Miller’s research suggests that the teen years are marked by an increased capacity and desire for connection with others and with God. The development of healthy adolescent spirituality makes kids happier and can contribute to their lifelong mental health.
We don’t know why girls are doing worse than boys (and it’s possible that boys are underreporting their depressive symptoms). But churches can make a difference in teens’ lives by helping them cultivate healthy spiritual practices and a sense of belonging. The CDC says teens need a safe, trusted community that cares about them and their well-being—but the church can also be a place that cares about what they care about. Churches can be places where they learn how to come together to work for justice, rather than scrolling through it alone.
Habits to Talk to Your Grandchildren About Faith,
Annie Yorty, Crosswalk Contributing Writer, June 12, 2023.
Demonstrate your spiritual life with God.
Allow your grandchildren to see you practice your faith – whether it is reflection, in prayer, or in Bible study. Invite them to pray with you. At mealtimes, pause to pray, even if no one else joins you.
Talk about God in your daily life.
Try using “Here’s what I believe” statements such as these:
Sunday is the best day because I get to go to church and feel better about my week.
When I talk to God, He gives me peace in my heart.
When I have a problem, I read my Bible and talk to church friends to find answers.
Communicate everyday biblical principles without preaching.
Show them patience and kindness. Teach your children about generosity in daily living. And, give them your undivided attention the way that God pays attention to us.
Reinforce the importance of righteousness in every area of life.
When playing games together, say, “We want to do the right thing by following the rules.” At the same time, help them to see the wisdom of putting others first.
Watch for signs of spiritual readiness.
Sooner or later, your grandkids will display a need to know more about God. Ask God to help you perceive their heart needs and be ready with thoughtful questions to lead to opportunities to share truth.
Demonstrate the love of God through carefully chosen gifts.
If their non-believing parents do not allow you to give an overtly Christian gift, give the gift of time with you because it adds an even better purpose for relationship building. For example, give your grandkids a game that promotes open-ended conversation. Then play it with them. Or take them to a classic play or movie with Christian themes and then talk with them about it.
Offer interesting books that pique spiritual interest.
Perhaps even read them aloud together. Many non-religious preteens enjoy The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis which contains a Christian theme of love and sacrifice that makes for deep conversations.
Endure scoffing with grace.
Your non-believing children, or even your grandkids, may tease or challenge you because of your faith. Take on the humility of Christ (Philippians 2:5) rather than taking offense. Forgive and love rather than defending and arguing. God may use your meekness to prick their conscience.
Love and encourage your non-believing children.
Build them up by praising their strengths and avoiding criticism. They will not only experience the love of God through you, but you will also be maintaining open communication and access to your grandkids.
Lastly, (and perhaps most importantly), ask God to lead you to step out in faith that passes on a rich spiritual inheritance to your grandchildren. Our faithful God may even surprise you by bringing their unbelieving parents along with your grandkids.
Tuesday, February 20
Welcome to Lent - a church season where we take time to do a number of things including meditating on God's holy Word. For the next six weeks, we are going to meditate, and discuss, an aspect of Biblical writing in light of current events. As it happened, the Super Bowl gave us something to talk about. Did you see the He Gets Us ad? Apparently not everyone agreed with it. In our article this week from David French, he asks these questions:
Like Jesus, are you willing to risk shame and isolation for loving those on the other side of the political and religious aisle? Are you willing to love others even if they haven’t repented of what you believe to be grievous sins?
He Gets Us. Do We Get Him?
David French, The NY Times, 2.15.24
During Super Bowl Sunday, a 60-second ad aired about Jesus Christ, and no one seemed angrier about it than Christians. The ad depicts a series of images of one person washing another person’s feet. Each pairing seems unlikely. An oil rig worker washes the feet of a climate activist. A cop washes the feet of a young Black man. An older woman washes the feet of a young woman outside an apparent abortion clinic, while anti-abortion protesters look on. A priest washes the feet of a young L.G.B.T.Q. man. As the commercial ends, words appear on the screen: “Jesus didn’t teach hate. He washed feet.”
The ad came from a group called He Gets Us that is running a multimillion-dollar ad campaign with the aim of essentially reintroducing America to Jesus. The constant theme of the group’s ads is that Jesus knows you and loves you. But not everyone loves the ads. First, there’s the entirely fair question of whether it’s appropriate for Christians to spend large sums of money on an ad campaign when it could be spent instead on, for instance, providing food or shelter to those in need. I’ve had questions about that myself.
He Gets Us has also come under fire from the left. Some people have critiqued the funders (which include a founder of Hobby Lobby), noting that they’ve also funded conservative Christian legal causes. Americans United for Separation of Church and State goes so far as to call the ads “a front for Christian nationalism.” Yet if that’s true, someone forgot to tell the religious right. The most radically right-wing cohort of Christians were furious at the ad, and
they’ve stayed furious for days. The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh called the ads “heretical [expletive]” and said, “Putting out an ad that invites narcissistic, prideful, unrepentant sinners to come and get their feet washed is bad, actually.” The critiques kept rolling in, and many were not gentle. A Christian writer named Samuel Sey highlighted the segment of the ad that depicts foot washing outside an abortion clinic. The “Christ-like thing to do at an abortion centre isn’t to wash an abortion-minded girl’s feet while ignoring their murderous intentions,” Sey wrote. “The Christ-like thing to do is to call them to repentance.”
But all the right-wing anger at the ad may offer a hint as to its true target. Far from making a stealth case for Christian nationalism, the ads are making a rather blatant case to Christians that perhaps Jesus would not play the culture-warrior role they imagine. This is especially true of the Super Bowl ad, which refers to a story known primarily to Christians. In John 13, Jesus humbled himself, washed his disciples’ feet and then instructed them, “you also should wash one another’s feet,” an admonition that many Christians take quite literally. Foot washing as a humbling act is a staple in countless churches.
The best explanation I’ve heard for the ad came from Kaitlyn Schiess, a Christian writer and speaker and frequent guest on the Holy Post podcast. She argued that the ad asks, “Are you willing to be shamed for your associations?” In other words, are you willing to risk shame and isolation for loving those on the other side of the political and religious aisle? Are you, like Jesus, willing to love others even if it causes people to hate you? Are you willing to love others even if they haven’t repented of what you believe to be grievous sins?
I grew up in a fundamentalist religious tradition. My church placed an enormous emphasis on the “boldly declaring” model – our fundamental job is to preach Christ to the lost. When I left my fundamentalist church and joined an evangelical fellowship in law school, I learned a different approach. This model says that there is a difference between declaring your faith and demonstrating your faith, and that declarations without demonstrations are worthless.
It’s one thing to possess the courage to say what you believe, but it takes immeasurably more courage to truly love people you’re often told to hate — even and especially if they don’t love you back. There is nothing distinctive about boldly declaring your beliefs. Many people do that. But how many people love their enemies? The Super Bowl ad is communicating something radical and valuable: I can love you and serve you even when I disagree with you.
In fact, while Jesus was obviously a preacher and a teacher, scripture is clear that when people were suffering or in peril, time and again Jesus moved to relieve their suffering before he asked them to follow him. He immediately demonstrated love and compassion when people were under duress. Kindness was not conditioned on first accepting his teaching.
The older I get, the more I reject the “bold declaration” model of Christian engagement in favor of prioritizing courageous demonstration. I’m so weary of Christian scandals that I’m now instantly wary in the presence of excessive “God talk.” Whenever a person leads with their religiosity, I’m cautious. I’d rather know a person’s faith by their virtues. And we know from scripture which virtues demonstrate the presence of the Holy Spirit in a person’s life: “love, joy,
peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” Yes, there were Christians who were offended by the ad. But there are millions of others, like me, who watched the ad and felt challenged. We asked ourselves if we were adequately loving and serving our neighbors.
I was reminded of a story that made an indelible impact on me. When I was a young law student, an evangelist and professor named Tony Campolo came to speak to our Christian fellowship. The story he told helped reframe my life. Campolo was eating out very late in an all-night diner when a group of women who were obviously prostitutes came inside. One of the women, named Agnes, said her birthday was the next day and observed that she’d never had a birthday party in her life. Campolo overheard the conversation. The next night, Campolo brought some simple decorations, hung them up and threw Agnes a surprise party in that diner. She cried tears of joy and ended up taking the cake home, untouched. It was the first birthday cake she had ever received. After she left, Campolo prayed with the people who remained in the diner, and one of the employees asked him what kind of church he belonged to. Campolo’s answer was perfect: He said he belonged to the kind of church that gives a party for a prostitute at 3:30 a.m. Not, obviously, because he approved of prostitution. But because he cared for Agnes. He threw that party for her before he knew how she’d respond, before he knew whether she’d leave the streets and before he’d had a chance to say anything at all to her about Jesus. The party itself spoke to her more loudly than any words could have.
I still don’t know how I feel about spending so much money on a Super Bowl ad about Jesus. But I do know that its message is vitally important. Instead of telling our nation, “He Gets Us,” it essentially asks American Christians, do we get him?
Like Jesus, are you willing to risk shame and isolation for loving those on the other side of the political and religious aisle? Are you willing to love others even if they haven’t repented of what you believe to be grievous sins?
He Gets Us. Do We Get Him?
David French, The NY Times, 2.15.24
During Super Bowl Sunday, a 60-second ad aired about Jesus Christ, and no one seemed angrier about it than Christians. The ad depicts a series of images of one person washing another person’s feet. Each pairing seems unlikely. An oil rig worker washes the feet of a climate activist. A cop washes the feet of a young Black man. An older woman washes the feet of a young woman outside an apparent abortion clinic, while anti-abortion protesters look on. A priest washes the feet of a young L.G.B.T.Q. man. As the commercial ends, words appear on the screen: “Jesus didn’t teach hate. He washed feet.”
The ad came from a group called He Gets Us that is running a multimillion-dollar ad campaign with the aim of essentially reintroducing America to Jesus. The constant theme of the group’s ads is that Jesus knows you and loves you. But not everyone loves the ads. First, there’s the entirely fair question of whether it’s appropriate for Christians to spend large sums of money on an ad campaign when it could be spent instead on, for instance, providing food or shelter to those in need. I’ve had questions about that myself.
He Gets Us has also come under fire from the left. Some people have critiqued the funders (which include a founder of Hobby Lobby), noting that they’ve also funded conservative Christian legal causes. Americans United for Separation of Church and State goes so far as to call the ads “a front for Christian nationalism.” Yet if that’s true, someone forgot to tell the religious right. The most radically right-wing cohort of Christians were furious at the ad, and
they’ve stayed furious for days. The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh called the ads “heretical [expletive]” and said, “Putting out an ad that invites narcissistic, prideful, unrepentant sinners to come and get their feet washed is bad, actually.” The critiques kept rolling in, and many were not gentle. A Christian writer named Samuel Sey highlighted the segment of the ad that depicts foot washing outside an abortion clinic. The “Christ-like thing to do at an abortion centre isn’t to wash an abortion-minded girl’s feet while ignoring their murderous intentions,” Sey wrote. “The Christ-like thing to do is to call them to repentance.”
But all the right-wing anger at the ad may offer a hint as to its true target. Far from making a stealth case for Christian nationalism, the ads are making a rather blatant case to Christians that perhaps Jesus would not play the culture-warrior role they imagine. This is especially true of the Super Bowl ad, which refers to a story known primarily to Christians. In John 13, Jesus humbled himself, washed his disciples’ feet and then instructed them, “you also should wash one another’s feet,” an admonition that many Christians take quite literally. Foot washing as a humbling act is a staple in countless churches.
The best explanation I’ve heard for the ad came from Kaitlyn Schiess, a Christian writer and speaker and frequent guest on the Holy Post podcast. She argued that the ad asks, “Are you willing to be shamed for your associations?” In other words, are you willing to risk shame and isolation for loving those on the other side of the political and religious aisle? Are you, like Jesus, willing to love others even if it causes people to hate you? Are you willing to love others even if they haven’t repented of what you believe to be grievous sins?
I grew up in a fundamentalist religious tradition. My church placed an enormous emphasis on the “boldly declaring” model – our fundamental job is to preach Christ to the lost. When I left my fundamentalist church and joined an evangelical fellowship in law school, I learned a different approach. This model says that there is a difference between declaring your faith and demonstrating your faith, and that declarations without demonstrations are worthless.
It’s one thing to possess the courage to say what you believe, but it takes immeasurably more courage to truly love people you’re often told to hate — even and especially if they don’t love you back. There is nothing distinctive about boldly declaring your beliefs. Many people do that. But how many people love their enemies? The Super Bowl ad is communicating something radical and valuable: I can love you and serve you even when I disagree with you.
In fact, while Jesus was obviously a preacher and a teacher, scripture is clear that when people were suffering or in peril, time and again Jesus moved to relieve their suffering before he asked them to follow him. He immediately demonstrated love and compassion when people were under duress. Kindness was not conditioned on first accepting his teaching.
The older I get, the more I reject the “bold declaration” model of Christian engagement in favor of prioritizing courageous demonstration. I’m so weary of Christian scandals that I’m now instantly wary in the presence of excessive “God talk.” Whenever a person leads with their religiosity, I’m cautious. I’d rather know a person’s faith by their virtues. And we know from scripture which virtues demonstrate the presence of the Holy Spirit in a person’s life: “love, joy,
peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” Yes, there were Christians who were offended by the ad. But there are millions of others, like me, who watched the ad and felt challenged. We asked ourselves if we were adequately loving and serving our neighbors.
I was reminded of a story that made an indelible impact on me. When I was a young law student, an evangelist and professor named Tony Campolo came to speak to our Christian fellowship. The story he told helped reframe my life. Campolo was eating out very late in an all-night diner when a group of women who were obviously prostitutes came inside. One of the women, named Agnes, said her birthday was the next day and observed that she’d never had a birthday party in her life. Campolo overheard the conversation. The next night, Campolo brought some simple decorations, hung them up and threw Agnes a surprise party in that diner. She cried tears of joy and ended up taking the cake home, untouched. It was the first birthday cake she had ever received. After she left, Campolo prayed with the people who remained in the diner, and one of the employees asked him what kind of church he belonged to. Campolo’s answer was perfect: He said he belonged to the kind of church that gives a party for a prostitute at 3:30 a.m. Not, obviously, because he approved of prostitution. But because he cared for Agnes. He threw that party for her before he knew how she’d respond, before he knew whether she’d leave the streets and before he’d had a chance to say anything at all to her about Jesus. The party itself spoke to her more loudly than any words could have.
I still don’t know how I feel about spending so much money on a Super Bowl ad about Jesus. But I do know that its message is vitally important. Instead of telling our nation, “He Gets Us,” it essentially asks American Christians, do we get him?
Tuesday, February 13 - Combined Discussion Group
The topic is about an ancient Jewish practice from the Mishnah - the power of just showing up. Rabbi Brous writes the following:
Showing up for one another doesn’t require heroic gestures. It means picking up the phone and calling our friend or colleague. It means going to the funeral. It also means going to the birthday dinner. Err on the side of presence. Small, tender gestures remind us that we are not helpless, even in the face of grave human suffering.
On the second page, she talks about the downfall of tribalism:
Our tribes can order our lives, give them meaning and purpose, direction and pride. But the tribal instinct can also be perilous. The more closely we identify with our tribe, the more likely we are to dismiss or even feel hostility toward those outside it.
I'd like to know what you think about this.
The Amen Effect
Sharon Brous, The New York Times 1.24.24
Rabbi Brous is the senior rabbi of Ikar, a Jewish community based in LA, and the author of “The Amen Effect.”
A somewhat obscure text, about 2,000 years old, has been my unlikely teacher and guide for the past many years, and my north star these last several months, as so many of us have felt as if we’ve been drowning in an ocean of sorrow and helplessness.
Buried deep within the Mishnah, a Jewish legal compendium from around the third century, is an ancient practice reflecting a deep understanding of the human psyche and spirit: When your heart is broken, when the specter of death visits your family, when you feel lost and alone and inclined to retreat, you show up. You entrust your pain to the community.
The text, Middot 2:2, describes a pilgrimage ritual from the time of the Second Temple. Several times each year, hundreds of thousands of Jews would ascend to Jerusalem, the center of Jewish religious and political life. They would climb the steps of the Temple Mount and enter its enormous plaza, turning to the right en masse, circling counterclockwise.
Meanwhile, the brokenhearted, the mourners (and here I would also include the lonely and the sick), would make this same ritual walk but they would turn to the left and circle in the opposite direction: every step against the current.
And each person who encountered someone in pain would look into that person’s eyes and inquire: “What happened to you? Why does your heart ache?”
“My father died,” a person might say. “There are so many things I never got to say to him.” Or perhaps: “My partner left. I was completely blindsided.” Or: “My child is sick. We’re awaiting the test results.”
Those who walked from the right would offer a blessing: “May the Holy One comfort you,” they would say. “You are not alone.” And then they would continue to walk until the next person approached.
This timeless wisdom speaks to what it means to be human in a world of pain. This year, you walk the path of the anguished. Perhaps next year, it will be me. I hold your broken heart knowing that one day you will hold mine.
I read in this text many profound lessons, two particularly pertinent in our time, when so many of us feel that we are breaking. First, do not take your broken heart and go home. Don’t isolate.
Step toward those whom you know will hold you tenderly.
And on your good days — the days when you can breathe — show up then, too. Because the very fact of seeing those who are walking against the current, people who can barely hold on, and asking, with an open heart, “Tell me about your sorrow,” may be the deepest affirmation of our humanity, even in terribly inhumane times.
It is an expression of both love and sacred responsibility to turn to another person in her moment of deepest anguish and say: “Your sorrow may scare me, it may unsettle me. But I will not abandon you. I will meet your grief with relentless love.”
We cannot magically fix one another’s broken hearts. But we can find each other in our most vulnerable moments and wrap each other up in a circle of care. We can humbly promise each other, “I can’t take your pain away, but I can promise you won’t have to hold it alone.”
Showing up for one another doesn’t require heroic gestures. It means training ourselves to approach, even when our instinct tells us to withdraw. It means picking up the phone and calling our friend or colleague who is suffering. It means going to the funeral and to the house of mourning. It also means going to the wedding and to the birthday dinner. Reach out in your strength, step forward in your vulnerability. Err on the side of presence.
Small, tender gestures remind us that we are not helpless, even in the face of grave human suffering. We maintain the ability, even in the dark of night, to find our way to one another. We need this, especially now.
Here’s the second lesson from that ancient text. Humans naturally incline toward the known. Our tribes can uplift us, order our lives, give them meaning and purpose, direction and pride. But the tribal instinct can also be perilous. The more closely we identify with our tribe, the more likely we are to dismiss or even feel hostility toward those outside it.
One of the great casualties of tribalism is curiosity. And when we are no longer curious, when we don’t try to imagine or understand what another person is thinking or feeling or where her pain comes from, our hearts begin to narrow. We become less compassionate and more entrenched in our own worldviews. Trauma exacerbates this trend. It reinforces an instinct to turn away from one another, rather than make ourselves even more vulnerable.
The ancient rabbis ask us to imagine a society in which no person is disposable. Even those who have hurt us, even those with views antithetical to ours must be seen in their humanity and held with curiosity and care.
We desperately need a spiritual rewiring in our time. Imagine a society in which we learn to see one another in our pain, to ask one another, “What happened to you?” Imagine that we hear one another’s stories, say amen to one another’s pain, and even pray for one another’s healing. I call this the amen effect: sincere, tender encounters that help us forge new spiritual and neural pathways by reminding us that our lives and our destinies are entwined. Because, ultimately, it is only by finding our way to one another that we will begin to heal.
Showing up for one another doesn’t require heroic gestures. It means picking up the phone and calling our friend or colleague. It means going to the funeral. It also means going to the birthday dinner. Err on the side of presence. Small, tender gestures remind us that we are not helpless, even in the face of grave human suffering.
On the second page, she talks about the downfall of tribalism:
Our tribes can order our lives, give them meaning and purpose, direction and pride. But the tribal instinct can also be perilous. The more closely we identify with our tribe, the more likely we are to dismiss or even feel hostility toward those outside it.
I'd like to know what you think about this.
The Amen Effect
Sharon Brous, The New York Times 1.24.24
Rabbi Brous is the senior rabbi of Ikar, a Jewish community based in LA, and the author of “The Amen Effect.”
A somewhat obscure text, about 2,000 years old, has been my unlikely teacher and guide for the past many years, and my north star these last several months, as so many of us have felt as if we’ve been drowning in an ocean of sorrow and helplessness.
Buried deep within the Mishnah, a Jewish legal compendium from around the third century, is an ancient practice reflecting a deep understanding of the human psyche and spirit: When your heart is broken, when the specter of death visits your family, when you feel lost and alone and inclined to retreat, you show up. You entrust your pain to the community.
The text, Middot 2:2, describes a pilgrimage ritual from the time of the Second Temple. Several times each year, hundreds of thousands of Jews would ascend to Jerusalem, the center of Jewish religious and political life. They would climb the steps of the Temple Mount and enter its enormous plaza, turning to the right en masse, circling counterclockwise.
Meanwhile, the brokenhearted, the mourners (and here I would also include the lonely and the sick), would make this same ritual walk but they would turn to the left and circle in the opposite direction: every step against the current.
And each person who encountered someone in pain would look into that person’s eyes and inquire: “What happened to you? Why does your heart ache?”
“My father died,” a person might say. “There are so many things I never got to say to him.” Or perhaps: “My partner left. I was completely blindsided.” Or: “My child is sick. We’re awaiting the test results.”
Those who walked from the right would offer a blessing: “May the Holy One comfort you,” they would say. “You are not alone.” And then they would continue to walk until the next person approached.
This timeless wisdom speaks to what it means to be human in a world of pain. This year, you walk the path of the anguished. Perhaps next year, it will be me. I hold your broken heart knowing that one day you will hold mine.
I read in this text many profound lessons, two particularly pertinent in our time, when so many of us feel that we are breaking. First, do not take your broken heart and go home. Don’t isolate.
Step toward those whom you know will hold you tenderly.
And on your good days — the days when you can breathe — show up then, too. Because the very fact of seeing those who are walking against the current, people who can barely hold on, and asking, with an open heart, “Tell me about your sorrow,” may be the deepest affirmation of our humanity, even in terribly inhumane times.
It is an expression of both love and sacred responsibility to turn to another person in her moment of deepest anguish and say: “Your sorrow may scare me, it may unsettle me. But I will not abandon you. I will meet your grief with relentless love.”
We cannot magically fix one another’s broken hearts. But we can find each other in our most vulnerable moments and wrap each other up in a circle of care. We can humbly promise each other, “I can’t take your pain away, but I can promise you won’t have to hold it alone.”
Showing up for one another doesn’t require heroic gestures. It means training ourselves to approach, even when our instinct tells us to withdraw. It means picking up the phone and calling our friend or colleague who is suffering. It means going to the funeral and to the house of mourning. It also means going to the wedding and to the birthday dinner. Reach out in your strength, step forward in your vulnerability. Err on the side of presence.
Small, tender gestures remind us that we are not helpless, even in the face of grave human suffering. We maintain the ability, even in the dark of night, to find our way to one another. We need this, especially now.
Here’s the second lesson from that ancient text. Humans naturally incline toward the known. Our tribes can uplift us, order our lives, give them meaning and purpose, direction and pride. But the tribal instinct can also be perilous. The more closely we identify with our tribe, the more likely we are to dismiss or even feel hostility toward those outside it.
One of the great casualties of tribalism is curiosity. And when we are no longer curious, when we don’t try to imagine or understand what another person is thinking or feeling or where her pain comes from, our hearts begin to narrow. We become less compassionate and more entrenched in our own worldviews. Trauma exacerbates this trend. It reinforces an instinct to turn away from one another, rather than make ourselves even more vulnerable.
The ancient rabbis ask us to imagine a society in which no person is disposable. Even those who have hurt us, even those with views antithetical to ours must be seen in their humanity and held with curiosity and care.
We desperately need a spiritual rewiring in our time. Imagine a society in which we learn to see one another in our pain, to ask one another, “What happened to you?” Imagine that we hear one another’s stories, say amen to one another’s pain, and even pray for one another’s healing. I call this the amen effect: sincere, tender encounters that help us forge new spiritual and neural pathways by reminding us that our lives and our destinies are entwined. Because, ultimately, it is only by finding our way to one another that we will begin to heal.
Tuesday, February 6
This week, we had a great discussion about faith. The opposite of faith, to me, is not un-faith but belief in flukes. For instance, the belief that what occured to make all of living creation is a fluke - a random occurrence. Our author for next week is an expert on flukes. He wrote the following:
When you lose at roulette, you don’t kick yourself for being a failure, you accept the arbitrary outcome and move on. Recognising that often meaningless, accidental outcomes emerge from an intertwined, complex world is empowering and liberating. We should all take a bit less credit for our triumphs and a bit less blame for our failures.
But what about faith - not in the roulette wheel, but in a greater, grander design for our life both individually and corporately. I'd like to know what you think.
What If Every Little Thing You Do Changes History?
Brian Klaas, The Guardian, 1.29.24
Brian Klaas is associate professor in global politics at University College London and the author of Fluke.
When we contemplate travelling back in time, we’re always given the same warning: be sure not to touch anything. Even one squished bug could irrevocably change the future. Why, then, don’t we think like that about the present? If every tiny change from the past creates our present, then
every aspect of our present creates our future, too.
Chaos theory is a definitively established scientific truth about how complex systems are sensitive to tiny changes – that small flukes can have enormous effects. It’s not really a theory; it’s been proved over and over again. It’s why we can’t predict the weather more than a week in advance. If our calculations are off by even a tiny amount, all bets are off.
Those dynamics are simply ignored when we consider humans instead of physical matter. There’s no good reason for it – we’re subject to the same laws of physics as everything else – but we just pretend it isn’t true. Perhaps it’s because what might happen to our future selves if we squished the wrong bug are so overwhelming that it’s easier to pretend the world works differently. But it doesn’t.
That’s why history is often made by seemingly insignificant moments that don’t always make sense. The atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima rather than Kyoto because a US government official holidayed in Kyoto 19 years earlier; Trump may have decided to run for president in 2016 after Obama publicly humiliated him with one joke in 2011; the Arab spring was sparked by a vegetable vendor in central Tunisia who decided to set himself on fire. We’re told to focus on big, obvious variables – the “signal” – while ignoring “the noise”. But the noise – the buzz of the complexity of society – often profoundly alters our world.
In a broader sense, our species only exists because of a series of flukes. Two billion years ago –and never again – a single bacterium bumped into a prokaryotic cell and ended up inside it. It evolved into a mitochondrion, making complex life possible, from grass and trees to snails and humans. One hundred million years ago, a shrew-like creature got infected with a retrovirus, eventually leading to the placenta and, by extension, the reason why we don’t lay eggs. Sixty-six million years ago, a tiny oscillation in the Oort cloud flung an asteroid towards Earth, wiping out the dinosaurs, allowing mammals to flourish. If the asteroid had been slightly delayed, humans wouldn’t exist. Everything we’ve achieved would be gone, but for a distant oscillation and a
giant space rock. The story of our existence is often written in the margins.
But those are just the examples we can observe. The more profound and bewildering reality is that we’re living in “sliding doors” moments constantly, totally unaware of how our paths through life – and the trajectory of our societies – are constantly branching, infinitely, as a result of tiny, accidental shifts. We ignore these invisible pivots, the moments we will never realise were consequential, the near misses and near hits that are unknown to us because we have never seen, and will never see, our alternative possible lives. And yet, because our brains have evolved to detect patterns (a useful trick for keeping us alive long enough to reproduce), we ignore a mystifying fact: that our world and our lives are swayed considerably by chance, contingency and chaos.
Science, especially the field of complex systems, knows this is how the world works. Social science mostly ignores it. Instead of facing reality head-on, we’ve invented a fake conception of our world that writes out all the wrinkles of life because they’re hard to model. A misleading image is reflected back at us from these models, from economics to public health to politics. In models – always wrong, but sometimes useful – every cause has a straightforward effect. Every big event has a big cause, never a tiny bit of “noise”.
But when we live according to models that reduce the complexity of our chaotic existence into a neat and tidy version of it, we start to believe that we have more control than we actually do. Because if it is swayed by a few key variables we can manipulate, then we have control. But if the world is swayed by squished bugs and presidents can emerge from a single joke, well, then we’re bewilderingly out of control.
It follows that our big decisions are but one factor in the trajectory of our lives. That is a profoundly uplifting idea. When you lose at roulette, you don’t kick yourself for being a failure, you accept the arbitrary outcome and move on. Recognising that often meaningless, accidental outcomes emerge from an intertwined, complex world is empowering and liberating. We should all take a bit less credit for our triumphs and a bit less blame for our failures.
And yet, we continue to worship at the Altar of Progress in the Church of Control. We try to tame an untameable world, our lives an idealistic quest for ever more efficiency. But when we try to distil every waking effort into a struggle for control and ratcheting optimisation, it’s the essence of being human that’s dissolved away. That’s why it feels, to many of us, like we are living “a checklist existence”.
The paradox, then, is that we control nothing, but we influence everything. As chaos theory proves, in an intertwined system, every action has an unforeseen ripple effect. Nothing is meaningless. And that yields a profound truth: that everything we do matters.
You are the contingent culmination of the entirety of cosmic history. Everything had to be exactly as it was for you to exist, just as you are, in this precise moment, in this exact world. That leads us to a simple, wondrous idea: that we all are the living manifestation of 13.7bn years of flukes.
We will never be able to fully understand our own existence. Nonetheless, Kurt Vonnegut gave us good advice on how to live fully within that uncertainty: “A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved."
When you lose at roulette, you don’t kick yourself for being a failure, you accept the arbitrary outcome and move on. Recognising that often meaningless, accidental outcomes emerge from an intertwined, complex world is empowering and liberating. We should all take a bit less credit for our triumphs and a bit less blame for our failures.
But what about faith - not in the roulette wheel, but in a greater, grander design for our life both individually and corporately. I'd like to know what you think.
What If Every Little Thing You Do Changes History?
Brian Klaas, The Guardian, 1.29.24
Brian Klaas is associate professor in global politics at University College London and the author of Fluke.
When we contemplate travelling back in time, we’re always given the same warning: be sure not to touch anything. Even one squished bug could irrevocably change the future. Why, then, don’t we think like that about the present? If every tiny change from the past creates our present, then
every aspect of our present creates our future, too.
Chaos theory is a definitively established scientific truth about how complex systems are sensitive to tiny changes – that small flukes can have enormous effects. It’s not really a theory; it’s been proved over and over again. It’s why we can’t predict the weather more than a week in advance. If our calculations are off by even a tiny amount, all bets are off.
Those dynamics are simply ignored when we consider humans instead of physical matter. There’s no good reason for it – we’re subject to the same laws of physics as everything else – but we just pretend it isn’t true. Perhaps it’s because what might happen to our future selves if we squished the wrong bug are so overwhelming that it’s easier to pretend the world works differently. But it doesn’t.
That’s why history is often made by seemingly insignificant moments that don’t always make sense. The atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima rather than Kyoto because a US government official holidayed in Kyoto 19 years earlier; Trump may have decided to run for president in 2016 after Obama publicly humiliated him with one joke in 2011; the Arab spring was sparked by a vegetable vendor in central Tunisia who decided to set himself on fire. We’re told to focus on big, obvious variables – the “signal” – while ignoring “the noise”. But the noise – the buzz of the complexity of society – often profoundly alters our world.
In a broader sense, our species only exists because of a series of flukes. Two billion years ago –and never again – a single bacterium bumped into a prokaryotic cell and ended up inside it. It evolved into a mitochondrion, making complex life possible, from grass and trees to snails and humans. One hundred million years ago, a shrew-like creature got infected with a retrovirus, eventually leading to the placenta and, by extension, the reason why we don’t lay eggs. Sixty-six million years ago, a tiny oscillation in the Oort cloud flung an asteroid towards Earth, wiping out the dinosaurs, allowing mammals to flourish. If the asteroid had been slightly delayed, humans wouldn’t exist. Everything we’ve achieved would be gone, but for a distant oscillation and a
giant space rock. The story of our existence is often written in the margins.
But those are just the examples we can observe. The more profound and bewildering reality is that we’re living in “sliding doors” moments constantly, totally unaware of how our paths through life – and the trajectory of our societies – are constantly branching, infinitely, as a result of tiny, accidental shifts. We ignore these invisible pivots, the moments we will never realise were consequential, the near misses and near hits that are unknown to us because we have never seen, and will never see, our alternative possible lives. And yet, because our brains have evolved to detect patterns (a useful trick for keeping us alive long enough to reproduce), we ignore a mystifying fact: that our world and our lives are swayed considerably by chance, contingency and chaos.
Science, especially the field of complex systems, knows this is how the world works. Social science mostly ignores it. Instead of facing reality head-on, we’ve invented a fake conception of our world that writes out all the wrinkles of life because they’re hard to model. A misleading image is reflected back at us from these models, from economics to public health to politics. In models – always wrong, but sometimes useful – every cause has a straightforward effect. Every big event has a big cause, never a tiny bit of “noise”.
But when we live according to models that reduce the complexity of our chaotic existence into a neat and tidy version of it, we start to believe that we have more control than we actually do. Because if it is swayed by a few key variables we can manipulate, then we have control. But if the world is swayed by squished bugs and presidents can emerge from a single joke, well, then we’re bewilderingly out of control.
It follows that our big decisions are but one factor in the trajectory of our lives. That is a profoundly uplifting idea. When you lose at roulette, you don’t kick yourself for being a failure, you accept the arbitrary outcome and move on. Recognising that often meaningless, accidental outcomes emerge from an intertwined, complex world is empowering and liberating. We should all take a bit less credit for our triumphs and a bit less blame for our failures.
And yet, we continue to worship at the Altar of Progress in the Church of Control. We try to tame an untameable world, our lives an idealistic quest for ever more efficiency. But when we try to distil every waking effort into a struggle for control and ratcheting optimisation, it’s the essence of being human that’s dissolved away. That’s why it feels, to many of us, like we are living “a checklist existence”.
The paradox, then, is that we control nothing, but we influence everything. As chaos theory proves, in an intertwined system, every action has an unforeseen ripple effect. Nothing is meaningless. And that yields a profound truth: that everything we do matters.
You are the contingent culmination of the entirety of cosmic history. Everything had to be exactly as it was for you to exist, just as you are, in this precise moment, in this exact world. That leads us to a simple, wondrous idea: that we all are the living manifestation of 13.7bn years of flukes.
We will never be able to fully understand our own existence. Nonetheless, Kurt Vonnegut gave us good advice on how to live fully within that uncertainty: “A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved."
Tuesday, January 30
What do you believe? How did you come to believe it? Did it accumulate over time or did you have a sudden awareness or understanding?
Next week, let's talk about the nuts and bolts of faith. Our author, one of the foremost Lutheran pastors in the country, writes the following about an encounter he had recently in the I.C.U. with a 44-year-old adult who had no faith and was watching his mother die.
To someone of unbelief sitting beside you in a hospital waiting room, how do you describe the power of faith, the significance of hope, or the meaning of life? How do you realistically acquaint them with the riches or comfort of faith during a 20-minute sit-down?
The answer: You can’t.
I wonder if that is true. Something that I know to be true is that no matter where you are in faith and your spiritual journey, you have a voice and opinion at our discussion table.
Accumulated Faith
Peter W. Marty, The Christian Century 1.16.24
Peter W. Marty is editor of the Century and senior pastor of St. Paul Lutheran Church in Davenport, Iowa.
Jason and I retreated to the ICU waiting room to talk about his mother’s precipitous decline. Moments earlier the attending physician had spoken of her imminent death.
“Six to 12 hours—maybe,” he said.
I wanted to chat with Jason. Marie, Jason’s mother, is very familiar to me from our congregation; her son far less so. A well-employed 44-year-old techie, he doesn’t take to religion. Best I can tell, it feels superfluous to his larger contentment in life.
Because he looked uncomfortable with what was going on that day, I asked him if he was in fact
uncomfortable. “Yeah, I am. I don’t wanna be here.” He replied.
“Why’s that?” I asked. “Are you uncomfortable because we’re in a hospital, or is it the struggle to let Mom go?”
“Both,” he said. “I’ve never been in a hospital, believe it or not, and I don’t like it here. And, yeah, I don’t have any idea what to do with her death. It’s gonna be a huge . . . I don’t know what.” His voice trailed off.
As I looked into Jason’s eyes, it felt like I was peering into a lost soul: a grown man with no idea of where to turn next or what to do with the death of the one who brought him into this world. The widely divergent trajectories of our two lives suddenly struck me. To someone of unbelief sitting beside you in a hospital waiting room, how do you describe the power of faith, the significance of hope, or the meaning of life? How do you realistically acquaint them with the riches or comfort of faith during a 20-minute sit-down?
You can’t. Faith is a deeply ingrained condition formed through steady habits, disciplined practices, and reliable instincts that take shape over long stretches of time. It’s a way of life that acquires its layers and contours incrementally, developing ever so gradually and often imperceptibly. Somewhat like the parent who doesn’t notice her infant’s changing appearance until she comes home from a weeklong trip and can’t believe how much her child has matured in her absence. The Christian life doesn’t emerge overnight any more than friendship does. The internal dispositions that form our character establish themselves often unselfconsciously and over the course of many uneventful days.
There have been times in my life when I’ve found it a valuable exercise to imagine myself held captive in deplorable conditions abroad. A damp and windowless cell. Foul air. Meager food. No companionship. Poor sanitation. Days indistinguishable from nights. Zero connection with the
outside world. What might spare me from total despair or insanity?
My hope is that God’s grace would buoy the faith accumulated within me. The countless hymn texts, song lyrics, and musical tunes I know by heart; the numerous Bible stories and passages I’ve absorbed and committed to memory over a lifetime; the human experiences of a faith community that remind me of all of this — I know of nothing that comes close to this sustenance of the heart. It’s vast and deep. Encyclopedic. I’d have to retrieve it quite deliberately, of course, but it’s all in there.
Jason appears to me to lead a contented and happy life, at least on days when his mother isn’t dying. But does he live a good life — by which I mean one with transcendent meaning and purpose? To be clear, it’s not that what I think of as a good life requires one to be Christian, or that it magically fashions a person into a good Christian, whatever that is.
I’m just convinced that what Hans Küng wrote decades ago remains true: that “being a Christian is a particularly good thing.” However gradually and unceremoniously faith may evolve within us, it provides a life that can hold and carry us through all kinds of circumstances.
Next week, let's talk about the nuts and bolts of faith. Our author, one of the foremost Lutheran pastors in the country, writes the following about an encounter he had recently in the I.C.U. with a 44-year-old adult who had no faith and was watching his mother die.
To someone of unbelief sitting beside you in a hospital waiting room, how do you describe the power of faith, the significance of hope, or the meaning of life? How do you realistically acquaint them with the riches or comfort of faith during a 20-minute sit-down?
The answer: You can’t.
I wonder if that is true. Something that I know to be true is that no matter where you are in faith and your spiritual journey, you have a voice and opinion at our discussion table.
Accumulated Faith
Peter W. Marty, The Christian Century 1.16.24
Peter W. Marty is editor of the Century and senior pastor of St. Paul Lutheran Church in Davenport, Iowa.
Jason and I retreated to the ICU waiting room to talk about his mother’s precipitous decline. Moments earlier the attending physician had spoken of her imminent death.
“Six to 12 hours—maybe,” he said.
I wanted to chat with Jason. Marie, Jason’s mother, is very familiar to me from our congregation; her son far less so. A well-employed 44-year-old techie, he doesn’t take to religion. Best I can tell, it feels superfluous to his larger contentment in life.
Because he looked uncomfortable with what was going on that day, I asked him if he was in fact
uncomfortable. “Yeah, I am. I don’t wanna be here.” He replied.
“Why’s that?” I asked. “Are you uncomfortable because we’re in a hospital, or is it the struggle to let Mom go?”
“Both,” he said. “I’ve never been in a hospital, believe it or not, and I don’t like it here. And, yeah, I don’t have any idea what to do with her death. It’s gonna be a huge . . . I don’t know what.” His voice trailed off.
As I looked into Jason’s eyes, it felt like I was peering into a lost soul: a grown man with no idea of where to turn next or what to do with the death of the one who brought him into this world. The widely divergent trajectories of our two lives suddenly struck me. To someone of unbelief sitting beside you in a hospital waiting room, how do you describe the power of faith, the significance of hope, or the meaning of life? How do you realistically acquaint them with the riches or comfort of faith during a 20-minute sit-down?
You can’t. Faith is a deeply ingrained condition formed through steady habits, disciplined practices, and reliable instincts that take shape over long stretches of time. It’s a way of life that acquires its layers and contours incrementally, developing ever so gradually and often imperceptibly. Somewhat like the parent who doesn’t notice her infant’s changing appearance until she comes home from a weeklong trip and can’t believe how much her child has matured in her absence. The Christian life doesn’t emerge overnight any more than friendship does. The internal dispositions that form our character establish themselves often unselfconsciously and over the course of many uneventful days.
There have been times in my life when I’ve found it a valuable exercise to imagine myself held captive in deplorable conditions abroad. A damp and windowless cell. Foul air. Meager food. No companionship. Poor sanitation. Days indistinguishable from nights. Zero connection with the
outside world. What might spare me from total despair or insanity?
My hope is that God’s grace would buoy the faith accumulated within me. The countless hymn texts, song lyrics, and musical tunes I know by heart; the numerous Bible stories and passages I’ve absorbed and committed to memory over a lifetime; the human experiences of a faith community that remind me of all of this — I know of nothing that comes close to this sustenance of the heart. It’s vast and deep. Encyclopedic. I’d have to retrieve it quite deliberately, of course, but it’s all in there.
Jason appears to me to lead a contented and happy life, at least on days when his mother isn’t dying. But does he live a good life — by which I mean one with transcendent meaning and purpose? To be clear, it’s not that what I think of as a good life requires one to be Christian, or that it magically fashions a person into a good Christian, whatever that is.
I’m just convinced that what Hans Küng wrote decades ago remains true: that “being a Christian is a particularly good thing.” However gradually and unceremoniously faith may evolve within us, it provides a life that can hold and carry us through all kinds of circumstances.
Tuesday, January 23
The title of this week's readings says it all: Harmful People with Helpful Ideas.
Harkening back to cancel culture, and tearing down statues of Jefferson and Columbus, the Mennonite minister and author asks if people who have done harm can have good ideas. The author writes:
[Rejecting an artist - like J.S. Bach - because of what he or she did] This is in stark opposition to the 20th-century critical school that emphasized the “death of the author,” maintaining that knowledge of an author’s life and intention was irrelevant to the meaning of a text.
Harmful People with Helpful Ideas
Isaac s. Villegas, The Christian Century 1.8.24
Isaac S. Villegas is an ordained minister in Mennonite Church USA and a PhD student in religion at Duke University.
In a scene early in Todd Field’s 2022 film Tár, eminent composer Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) is teaching a master class at Juilliard. After extolling the compositions of J. S. Bach, Tár provokes Max, a nervous student, to respond with their musical inspirations.
“I’m not really into Bach,” Max answers.
She prods Max with smug condescension, insisting that they must say something more to defend what she considers to be an absurd opinion.
“I’d say Bach’s misogynistic life makes it kind of impossible for me to take his music seriously,” Max replies. “Didn’t he sire like 20 kids?”
That someone would link Bach’s sexual life to his brilliant work offends Tár, who snaps back at Max in front of the class:
“I’m unclear as to what his prodigious skills in the marital bed have to do with B minor.”
In her review of the film for the New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith highlights this back-and-forth between Tár and Max as representative of our current debates about the connections between a person’s life and work, between personal ethics and creative achievement. “Can an A-minor chord be misogynistic?” Smith asks. She lets her question linger unanswered. Probably because there are no answers — no schema for untangling the threads of influence in a work of art, no solvent to dissolve the contradictions that compose a person’s life.
What seems clear is that we, according to our cultural mores, assume that an artist’s or a writer’s life is present — even if the markings are faint — in their work. The ethical or unethical aspects of their lives press into what they produce. Their identities and choices are somehow legible to us on the page or canvas. These kinds of ad hominem associations have become culturally relevant to our appreciation, enjoyment, and respect. This is in stark opposition to the 20thcentury critical school that emphasized the “death of the author,” maintaining that knowledge of an author’s life and intention was irrelevant to the meaning of a text.
I don’t think a particular chord can be misogynistic, but that might have more to do with my lack of musical sophistication than anything else. I’d be at a loss if, while listening to a piece of music, I was asked to pick out the indicted chord. But I do share something of Max’s concerns when I think about my indebtedness to theologies and philosophies that come from the lives of people who’ve hurt others. I still read Martin Luther, despite his vile attacks on Judaism and his defense of killing Anabaptists. I still think with John Calvin, despite his active involvement in the execution of Michael Servetus. I’m troubled by the revelations of Simone de Beauvoir’s sexually abusive relationships with students, but I can’t imagine my own development as a
feminist without what I’ve learned from The Second Sex.
The ideas of people who’ve enacted harm populate my thinking, my theologizing. This situation — our indebtedness to people who’ve violated the lives of others — didn’t seem to trouble Augustine, who in On Christian Teaching encourages his community of learners to glean knowledge from whomever, regardless of the taint of evil. Because, he argues, “wherever [the Christian] may find truth, it is the Lord’s.” We are like the Hebrews in the story of Exodus,
Augustine explains, who took with them the silver and gold of Pharaoh’s regime upon their liberation. We plunder the good from wherever we discover it “for the just use of teaching the gospel.”
In 2013, the delegate assembly of my denomination, Mennonite Church USA, appointed me to our national governing body. Our first order of business, I soon discovered, was to commission a thorough investigation into John Howard Yoder’s sexual abuse. In the mid-1980s, the theologian was removed from his seminary position and banned from campus events. A few years later his ministerial ordination was suspended; he soon relinquished it in order to preempt its termination by the disciplinary committee.
Despite the alert sounded within Mennonite institutions about Yoder’s behavior, he was welcomed as a professor at Notre Dame and a founding fellow at the university’s peace institute. After his death in 1997, a cloud of vagueness regarding his abusive behavior settled on his legacy — a haze that allowed many of us to shrug off those untoward stories as rumors, mere allegations, a sideshow to the main event: his landmark contribution to peace theology.
After our denominational investigation made Yoder’s abuse indisputable, I had to rethink my automatic deference to the Augustinian position I outlined above. The notion that we can make use of knowledge wherever we find it, regardless of the oppressions bound to the production of that knowledge, doesn’t seem to work for Yoder’s peace theology, at least for me, because of the links we can now see that connect his life to his writing, his body to his mind, his deeds to his words. Not only how, in places, he developed arguments that justified his behavior. But also how his peace theology never took into consideration any sustained account of violence against women. Quite convenient for him, and tragic for the women he abused — as well as for the
communities that, guided by his work, didn’t think to worry about intimate partner violence and abusive relationships in church communities because they were taught instead to focus on the ethics of warfare and just policing.
My point is not that we should only ever learn from people who align with our moral vision. Again, I still read and think with Luther, Calvin, and de Beauvoir. Besides, none of us is without sin. But I do think it’s worthwhile to notice, especially when we’re thinking about Christian ethics, if someone’s harmful patterns of behavior have taken up residence in their ideas — to notice whether a theologian’s destructive inclinations have come along with their arguments like a stowaway. To listen for things we hadn’t heard before: a note, an argument, an idea that now sounds harmful.
Harkening back to cancel culture, and tearing down statues of Jefferson and Columbus, the Mennonite minister and author asks if people who have done harm can have good ideas. The author writes:
[Rejecting an artist - like J.S. Bach - because of what he or she did] This is in stark opposition to the 20th-century critical school that emphasized the “death of the author,” maintaining that knowledge of an author’s life and intention was irrelevant to the meaning of a text.
Harmful People with Helpful Ideas
Isaac s. Villegas, The Christian Century 1.8.24
Isaac S. Villegas is an ordained minister in Mennonite Church USA and a PhD student in religion at Duke University.
In a scene early in Todd Field’s 2022 film Tár, eminent composer Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) is teaching a master class at Juilliard. After extolling the compositions of J. S. Bach, Tár provokes Max, a nervous student, to respond with their musical inspirations.
“I’m not really into Bach,” Max answers.
She prods Max with smug condescension, insisting that they must say something more to defend what she considers to be an absurd opinion.
“I’d say Bach’s misogynistic life makes it kind of impossible for me to take his music seriously,” Max replies. “Didn’t he sire like 20 kids?”
That someone would link Bach’s sexual life to his brilliant work offends Tár, who snaps back at Max in front of the class:
“I’m unclear as to what his prodigious skills in the marital bed have to do with B minor.”
In her review of the film for the New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith highlights this back-and-forth between Tár and Max as representative of our current debates about the connections between a person’s life and work, between personal ethics and creative achievement. “Can an A-minor chord be misogynistic?” Smith asks. She lets her question linger unanswered. Probably because there are no answers — no schema for untangling the threads of influence in a work of art, no solvent to dissolve the contradictions that compose a person’s life.
What seems clear is that we, according to our cultural mores, assume that an artist’s or a writer’s life is present — even if the markings are faint — in their work. The ethical or unethical aspects of their lives press into what they produce. Their identities and choices are somehow legible to us on the page or canvas. These kinds of ad hominem associations have become culturally relevant to our appreciation, enjoyment, and respect. This is in stark opposition to the 20thcentury critical school that emphasized the “death of the author,” maintaining that knowledge of an author’s life and intention was irrelevant to the meaning of a text.
I don’t think a particular chord can be misogynistic, but that might have more to do with my lack of musical sophistication than anything else. I’d be at a loss if, while listening to a piece of music, I was asked to pick out the indicted chord. But I do share something of Max’s concerns when I think about my indebtedness to theologies and philosophies that come from the lives of people who’ve hurt others. I still read Martin Luther, despite his vile attacks on Judaism and his defense of killing Anabaptists. I still think with John Calvin, despite his active involvement in the execution of Michael Servetus. I’m troubled by the revelations of Simone de Beauvoir’s sexually abusive relationships with students, but I can’t imagine my own development as a
feminist without what I’ve learned from The Second Sex.
The ideas of people who’ve enacted harm populate my thinking, my theologizing. This situation — our indebtedness to people who’ve violated the lives of others — didn’t seem to trouble Augustine, who in On Christian Teaching encourages his community of learners to glean knowledge from whomever, regardless of the taint of evil. Because, he argues, “wherever [the Christian] may find truth, it is the Lord’s.” We are like the Hebrews in the story of Exodus,
Augustine explains, who took with them the silver and gold of Pharaoh’s regime upon their liberation. We plunder the good from wherever we discover it “for the just use of teaching the gospel.”
In 2013, the delegate assembly of my denomination, Mennonite Church USA, appointed me to our national governing body. Our first order of business, I soon discovered, was to commission a thorough investigation into John Howard Yoder’s sexual abuse. In the mid-1980s, the theologian was removed from his seminary position and banned from campus events. A few years later his ministerial ordination was suspended; he soon relinquished it in order to preempt its termination by the disciplinary committee.
Despite the alert sounded within Mennonite institutions about Yoder’s behavior, he was welcomed as a professor at Notre Dame and a founding fellow at the university’s peace institute. After his death in 1997, a cloud of vagueness regarding his abusive behavior settled on his legacy — a haze that allowed many of us to shrug off those untoward stories as rumors, mere allegations, a sideshow to the main event: his landmark contribution to peace theology.
After our denominational investigation made Yoder’s abuse indisputable, I had to rethink my automatic deference to the Augustinian position I outlined above. The notion that we can make use of knowledge wherever we find it, regardless of the oppressions bound to the production of that knowledge, doesn’t seem to work for Yoder’s peace theology, at least for me, because of the links we can now see that connect his life to his writing, his body to his mind, his deeds to his words. Not only how, in places, he developed arguments that justified his behavior. But also how his peace theology never took into consideration any sustained account of violence against women. Quite convenient for him, and tragic for the women he abused — as well as for the
communities that, guided by his work, didn’t think to worry about intimate partner violence and abusive relationships in church communities because they were taught instead to focus on the ethics of warfare and just policing.
My point is not that we should only ever learn from people who align with our moral vision. Again, I still read and think with Luther, Calvin, and de Beauvoir. Besides, none of us is without sin. But I do think it’s worthwhile to notice, especially when we’re thinking about Christian ethics, if someone’s harmful patterns of behavior have taken up residence in their ideas — to notice whether a theologian’s destructive inclinations have come along with their arguments like a stowaway. To listen for things we hadn’t heard before: a note, an argument, an idea that now sounds harmful.
Tuesday, January 16
I have been asked that we talk about climate change, hope, loneliness, and tolerance in 2024. To do so, I thought we should tackle vision and our limits. In Rachel Hoskins' article, she draws a distinct parallel between seeing as God does - with charity, kindness, and beauty - and seeing only as humans do.
Driven by status and consumption, organizing for efficiency, and distracted by technology, pleasure, profit, and power, we often choose not what is moral but rather what is right in front of us. Unable to grasp the repercussions of our actions and lifestyles on the planet and its people, we regard the world as an object for our purposes.
Using a healing story from Mark's Gospel, she lays out an interesting argument for how to vision with morals and with our own material instincts. I'd like to know what you think.
My Double Vision
Rachel Hoskins, The Christian Century 1.11.24
Jesus and his followers came to Bethsaida. Some people brought a blind man to him and begged him to touch the man. So Jesus held the blind man’s hand and led him out of the village. Then he spit on the man’s eyes. He laid his hands on him and asked, “Can you see now?” The man looked up and said, “Yes, I see people. They look like trees walking around.” Again Jesus laid his hands on the man’s eyes, and the man opened them wide. His eyes were healed, and he was able to see everything clearly. Jesus told him to go home. Mark 8:22-26
“Her left eye is too strong,” a doctor told my parents when I was four years old. “It’s blinding her right. To correct it required surgery. After surgery, I wore a patch like a pirate and my vision blurred for days. When it cleared, instead of a world split in two, I saw one.
Vision is a highly complex sense. The mechanical and neurological components of the eyes and brain work together to produce sight in a delicate dance of light absorption and translation from rods and cones. When the eyes do not align, the brain may prefer data from one eye over the other. Usually, favor goes to the “clear eye,” the one without deviation, and my case was no exception. If left unchecked, my visual cortex would eventually ignore information from my other eye altogether, in a sense blinding it. Blinding it by ignoring its sight.
All this may be why my favorite healing act of Jesus involves the restoration of vision. In other healing stories, Jesus speaks regeneration into being, but in this passage he physically intervenes, like an ancient medical doctor. First, he applies saliva. Then, he covers the man’s eyes with his hands. Then he asks, “Can you see anything?” “I can see people, but they look like trees, walking”, the man says. So, Jesus places his hands over the man’s eyes a second time.
Many readers have been fascinated by this tale of healing in two acts. Some suggest that Jesus engages in something like a first round of partial restoration that requires a second round of miraculous power. Others suggest that when Jesus first removes his hands, the man’s visual cortex lacks the ability to translate images harvested from light. Or as Immanuel Kant might put it, he has perception but no concepts to make sense of what he perceives; he is merely seeing abstractions. Either interpretation may be right. But I like to think that Jesus is up to something else. Rather than partial healing or abstracted perception, I like to think Jesus gives the man vision of another kind: to see past the limits of human sight.
The second time I saw double, I was 12 years old. In church, staring at the pulpit, I saw our pastor split. He duplicated like film exposed twice, layered and skewed. This time, the fragmentation stunned me. Rationalizing with my middle school understanding of biology, I reasoned: Two eyes, two images, right? Calmed, I experimented with this newfound ability. Shifting my gaze, tilting my head, I sought maximum division, the most double of double views.
But seeing clearly, integrating images into one, required a different kind of adjustment. Back in the ophthalmologist’s office, the doctor said the severed muscle had grown back. My vision had regenerated.
My double vision had seemed like a gift, like accessing another sublime plane, where maybe people did move like trees walking. For Kant and most of us after him, there is no other reality. There is the real as we perceive it — the phenomenal — and there is the “real reality” behind it, the noumenal. They are both essentially the same mundane place, but the noumenal, for the most part, is beyond our reach, because the world as we perceive it is interpreted through the self. It’s as if we are wearing human-tinted glasses. Just as we cannot transcend the self to access “real reality,” Kant argues in Critique of Practical Reason, so also we cannot access God. There are limits to human understanding.
But that does not mean we cannot conceive of an infinitude or limitlessness beyond us. We can. Confronted by cascading mountains, immeasurable stars, and even the immensity of mathematical equations, we may find ourselves overpowered by their vastness. Our vision to conceive of infinity awes us. We humans are free to reason, and reason greatly. Additionally, that freedom gives us the ability to make moral choices. But we are still hemmed in by the self. We see, but our vision is limited.
Driven by status and consumption, organizing for efficiency, and distracted by technology, pleasure, profit, and power, we often choose not what is moral or reasonable but rather what is right in front of us. Unable to grasp the repercussions of our actions and lifestyles on the planet and its people, we regard the world as an object for our purposes. When we see in this way, we reduce reality to its material pieces and parts. We merely harvest light with rods and cones. As one eye becomes stronger, the other eye, so to speak—our spiritual vision—becomes weaker.
Like the man from Bethsaida who meets Jesus for the first time and sees people like trees walking, you will not be able to make sense of it. But it will make sense of you and your place in this world, and that feeling will free you and raise you altogether above a self-limiting view. You “will see miracles everywhere,” Schleiermacher writes, not just in cascading mountains and starry skies, but in every humble and overlooked speck of sand, drop of water, and blade of grass.
Seeing in this way abounds with ethical implications for our planet and ourselves. Instead of valuing a forest as, say, a place for outdoor adventure, a crop of two-by-fours, or a future business park, we value it for what it is: a home to flora and fauna, a grace-filled sacrament. No longer reduced to its material pieces and parts, the universe is revealed as a sanctum that is, in the language of Genesis, “very good”. Cascading mountains, immeasurable stars, and even the infinitude of mathematical equations point not to the glories of our own reasoning capacities or to our mastery and domination of the world but rather to the glory of God, as does every humble and overlooked speck of sand, drop of water, and blade of grass.
Yet, there is another danger here. Focusing on the spiritual becomes problematic if we ignore the material. Living in perpetual divine heights ignores the other eye. It too limits our view. We need both spiritual and material vision, not one ignored for the other, or a split and doubled view. We need integration.
And even if it were possible to live on such a transcendent spiritual plane, who could do so continuously? Who could unendingly see with the eyes of God, as it were, and not become unmoored? Without Kant’s human-shaded glasses, reality would shift from the spectrum of human understanding to something like ultraviolet light. Nothing would make sense. Among the banalities of eating, sleeping, playing, working, and even caring for others, who could function as a material creature while the immaterial heavens tore open around them? It would disorient us, I think, like having vision with no vision.
If this is the gift Jesus gives the man from Bethsaida on his first round of healing that day, it is one he soon corrects. He does not leave the man to such an ongoing fate, no matter how profound and revelatory the view. Instead, Jesus places his hands over the man’s eyes a second time, and when he removes them, the man’s sight is restored. “He saw everything clearly,” says Mark.
The gospel writer tells us that after restoring his sight, Jesus sends him home. While Mark does not tell us more, I like to imagine the man spends his days marveling at each prismatic drop of water, veined leaf, and starry sky as though infused with infinity and set on fire. But I wonder if sometimes he still dreams of people like trees walking and ponders a gift that once was his.
If that is the case, then I can relate to this man from Bethsaida who has his plain sight restored. That day in church when my vision split, not only did the pastor double but the entire sanctuary fractured. Pews, curtains, crosses, choir, baptismal, and altar reproduced. Light fragmented in a million sparks of refracted lumens as movement headed into the aisles. People grew long limbs, sprouted and ruptured, swept along by graceful and jagged currents. And I joined too. Down I went toward those staggering figures, those points of light. The room filled. My heart and retinas swung open, as the ceiling released and that which I knew not and yet knew as plainly as I knew myself descended. And for a moment I saw clearly a world valued as good, as very good. For a moment I saw past the limits of human sight.
Driven by status and consumption, organizing for efficiency, and distracted by technology, pleasure, profit, and power, we often choose not what is moral but rather what is right in front of us. Unable to grasp the repercussions of our actions and lifestyles on the planet and its people, we regard the world as an object for our purposes.
Using a healing story from Mark's Gospel, she lays out an interesting argument for how to vision with morals and with our own material instincts. I'd like to know what you think.
My Double Vision
Rachel Hoskins, The Christian Century 1.11.24
Jesus and his followers came to Bethsaida. Some people brought a blind man to him and begged him to touch the man. So Jesus held the blind man’s hand and led him out of the village. Then he spit on the man’s eyes. He laid his hands on him and asked, “Can you see now?” The man looked up and said, “Yes, I see people. They look like trees walking around.” Again Jesus laid his hands on the man’s eyes, and the man opened them wide. His eyes were healed, and he was able to see everything clearly. Jesus told him to go home. Mark 8:22-26
“Her left eye is too strong,” a doctor told my parents when I was four years old. “It’s blinding her right. To correct it required surgery. After surgery, I wore a patch like a pirate and my vision blurred for days. When it cleared, instead of a world split in two, I saw one.
Vision is a highly complex sense. The mechanical and neurological components of the eyes and brain work together to produce sight in a delicate dance of light absorption and translation from rods and cones. When the eyes do not align, the brain may prefer data from one eye over the other. Usually, favor goes to the “clear eye,” the one without deviation, and my case was no exception. If left unchecked, my visual cortex would eventually ignore information from my other eye altogether, in a sense blinding it. Blinding it by ignoring its sight.
All this may be why my favorite healing act of Jesus involves the restoration of vision. In other healing stories, Jesus speaks regeneration into being, but in this passage he physically intervenes, like an ancient medical doctor. First, he applies saliva. Then, he covers the man’s eyes with his hands. Then he asks, “Can you see anything?” “I can see people, but they look like trees, walking”, the man says. So, Jesus places his hands over the man’s eyes a second time.
Many readers have been fascinated by this tale of healing in two acts. Some suggest that Jesus engages in something like a first round of partial restoration that requires a second round of miraculous power. Others suggest that when Jesus first removes his hands, the man’s visual cortex lacks the ability to translate images harvested from light. Or as Immanuel Kant might put it, he has perception but no concepts to make sense of what he perceives; he is merely seeing abstractions. Either interpretation may be right. But I like to think that Jesus is up to something else. Rather than partial healing or abstracted perception, I like to think Jesus gives the man vision of another kind: to see past the limits of human sight.
The second time I saw double, I was 12 years old. In church, staring at the pulpit, I saw our pastor split. He duplicated like film exposed twice, layered and skewed. This time, the fragmentation stunned me. Rationalizing with my middle school understanding of biology, I reasoned: Two eyes, two images, right? Calmed, I experimented with this newfound ability. Shifting my gaze, tilting my head, I sought maximum division, the most double of double views.
But seeing clearly, integrating images into one, required a different kind of adjustment. Back in the ophthalmologist’s office, the doctor said the severed muscle had grown back. My vision had regenerated.
My double vision had seemed like a gift, like accessing another sublime plane, where maybe people did move like trees walking. For Kant and most of us after him, there is no other reality. There is the real as we perceive it — the phenomenal — and there is the “real reality” behind it, the noumenal. They are both essentially the same mundane place, but the noumenal, for the most part, is beyond our reach, because the world as we perceive it is interpreted through the self. It’s as if we are wearing human-tinted glasses. Just as we cannot transcend the self to access “real reality,” Kant argues in Critique of Practical Reason, so also we cannot access God. There are limits to human understanding.
But that does not mean we cannot conceive of an infinitude or limitlessness beyond us. We can. Confronted by cascading mountains, immeasurable stars, and even the immensity of mathematical equations, we may find ourselves overpowered by their vastness. Our vision to conceive of infinity awes us. We humans are free to reason, and reason greatly. Additionally, that freedom gives us the ability to make moral choices. But we are still hemmed in by the self. We see, but our vision is limited.
Driven by status and consumption, organizing for efficiency, and distracted by technology, pleasure, profit, and power, we often choose not what is moral or reasonable but rather what is right in front of us. Unable to grasp the repercussions of our actions and lifestyles on the planet and its people, we regard the world as an object for our purposes. When we see in this way, we reduce reality to its material pieces and parts. We merely harvest light with rods and cones. As one eye becomes stronger, the other eye, so to speak—our spiritual vision—becomes weaker.
Like the man from Bethsaida who meets Jesus for the first time and sees people like trees walking, you will not be able to make sense of it. But it will make sense of you and your place in this world, and that feeling will free you and raise you altogether above a self-limiting view. You “will see miracles everywhere,” Schleiermacher writes, not just in cascading mountains and starry skies, but in every humble and overlooked speck of sand, drop of water, and blade of grass.
Seeing in this way abounds with ethical implications for our planet and ourselves. Instead of valuing a forest as, say, a place for outdoor adventure, a crop of two-by-fours, or a future business park, we value it for what it is: a home to flora and fauna, a grace-filled sacrament. No longer reduced to its material pieces and parts, the universe is revealed as a sanctum that is, in the language of Genesis, “very good”. Cascading mountains, immeasurable stars, and even the infinitude of mathematical equations point not to the glories of our own reasoning capacities or to our mastery and domination of the world but rather to the glory of God, as does every humble and overlooked speck of sand, drop of water, and blade of grass.
Yet, there is another danger here. Focusing on the spiritual becomes problematic if we ignore the material. Living in perpetual divine heights ignores the other eye. It too limits our view. We need both spiritual and material vision, not one ignored for the other, or a split and doubled view. We need integration.
And even if it were possible to live on such a transcendent spiritual plane, who could do so continuously? Who could unendingly see with the eyes of God, as it were, and not become unmoored? Without Kant’s human-shaded glasses, reality would shift from the spectrum of human understanding to something like ultraviolet light. Nothing would make sense. Among the banalities of eating, sleeping, playing, working, and even caring for others, who could function as a material creature while the immaterial heavens tore open around them? It would disorient us, I think, like having vision with no vision.
If this is the gift Jesus gives the man from Bethsaida on his first round of healing that day, it is one he soon corrects. He does not leave the man to such an ongoing fate, no matter how profound and revelatory the view. Instead, Jesus places his hands over the man’s eyes a second time, and when he removes them, the man’s sight is restored. “He saw everything clearly,” says Mark.
The gospel writer tells us that after restoring his sight, Jesus sends him home. While Mark does not tell us more, I like to imagine the man spends his days marveling at each prismatic drop of water, veined leaf, and starry sky as though infused with infinity and set on fire. But I wonder if sometimes he still dreams of people like trees walking and ponders a gift that once was his.
If that is the case, then I can relate to this man from Bethsaida who has his plain sight restored. That day in church when my vision split, not only did the pastor double but the entire sanctuary fractured. Pews, curtains, crosses, choir, baptismal, and altar reproduced. Light fragmented in a million sparks of refracted lumens as movement headed into the aisles. People grew long limbs, sprouted and ruptured, swept along by graceful and jagged currents. And I joined too. Down I went toward those staggering figures, those points of light. The room filled. My heart and retinas swung open, as the ceiling released and that which I knew not and yet knew as plainly as I knew myself descended. And for a moment I saw clearly a world valued as good, as very good. For a moment I saw past the limits of human sight.
Tuesday, January 9
I'd like to start this year off with talking about how to bring light into a darkened world. Here is a snippet from this week's article by Catherine Price:
What might happen if we committed to a delight practice? How would it affect our happiness and health? And what might it do to the country’s political climate if we paid less attention to the things that divide us and more to the things that spark delight? It’s possible to disagree with people, to acknowledge life’s challenges, to debate, to sit with sadness, grief and fear while marveling at and seeking out simple joys.
I'd like to hear what delights you and what you savor from life. I'd also like to hear what distracts you from delighting and savoring life.
When the World Feels Dark, Seek Out Delight
Catherine Price, NY Times 1.1.24
Ms. Price is the author of the How to Feel Alive newsletter. Her latest book is “The Power of Fun.”
Here’s an idea for the new year: Let’s make 2024 the year of delight. Does that sound ridiculous, given the state of the world right now? Hear me out.
The basic premise of a delight practice (which I learned about in the essay collection “The Book of Delights” by Ross Gay) is simple: You make a point to notice things in your everyday life that delight you. This could be anything — a pretty flower, a smile you share with a stranger, the sight of a person playing a trumpet while riding a unicycle down a major Philadelphia thoroughfare (true story). Nothing is too small or absurd. Then whenever you notice something that delights you, you lift your arm, raise your index finger in the air and say, out loud and with enthusiasm, “Delight!” (Yes, even if you’re alone.) Ideally, you share your delights with another person.
The concept of prioritizing delight may sound silly or almost irresponsible, given the heaviness of current events, feelings of burnout and the upcoming U.S. presidential election, in which it seems democracy itself could be at stake. But this is exactly why it is so important. Far from being a frivolous practice, making a point to notice and share things we find delightful can improve our moods, outlooks, relationships and even physical health.
How? Noticing delights requires us to pay attention, something that is required for our happiness and satisfaction but can be difficult in our increasingly distracted world. Essentially, this is a form of a gratitude practice — i.e., cultivating the habit of noticing and appreciating the things for which you’re thankful.
Gratitude practices are popular for good reason; if you make one a habit, the associated mental and physical benefits include reduced symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress and (probably relatedly) improved biomarkers for heart health.
But if you keep up a gratitude practice long enough, you may find yourself expressing your appreciation for the same things over and over, almost out of a sense of obligation. You are grateful for your friends and family. You are grateful that you have enough food. You are grateful for having a place to live. Eventually, the practice can begin to feel less nourishing and more like a chore.
In contrast, a delight practice taps into the deep power of gratitude without the risk of becoming trite. That’s because the things that delight us are often novel — I doubt I’ll see another trumpeting unicyclist any time soon.
Noticing and sharing delight is also a form of what psychologists call savoring, the practice of deliberately appreciating positive life experiences. Savoring has been shown to boost people’s moods as well as counterbalance our brains’ natural tendency to focus on the things that stoke anxiety and fear. (Being attuned to potentially threatening stressors is helpful from an evolutionary perspective; it takes work to focus our brains on the positive.)
What’s more, the effects of savoring are stronger if you make a point not just to notice positive things but also to label them and share them. (This is why it’s important to say “Delight!” out loud and put a finger in the air, even if it at first feels silly.)
And that’s perhaps my favorite part of the practice: sharing delights with other people. Start a meeting or a class by inviting people to share one thing that delighted them that day. Use delight sharing as an icebreaker or as a ritual before family meals. I have multiple delight group chats, and every new message boosts my mood, makes me feel more connected to others and inspires me to notice and share more delights.
For example, a friend once sent me a photo of frost crystals on his windshield with the caption “Delight!” Not only did this make me feel closer to him, but it also made me resolve to try to find delight in situations (such as having to scrape frost off my car) that might otherwise be annoying.
These moments of connection are good for our physical health. As Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s recent advisory about the nation’s loneliness epidemic noted, a lack of social ties is associated with increased risks for high blood pressure, heart disease, cognitive impairment, depression, anxiety, Type 2 diabetes and susceptibility to infectious disease. In fact, one well-regarded meta-analysis concluded that the health risks of loneliness and isolation are comparable with those of smoking up to 15 cigarettes per day.
It makes me wonder: What might happen if we, as individuals and as communities, committed to a delight practice? How would it affect our happiness and health? And what might it do to the country’s political climate if we paid less attention to the things that divide us and more to the things that spark delight? It’s possible to disagree with people, to acknowledge life’s challenges, to debate, to sit with sadness, grief and fear while marveling at and seeking out simple joys.
You may be amazed by how much there is to marvel at. As Mr. Gay writes, “It didn’t take me long to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study.”
This year, like all of them, will be filled with conflict and tragedy. But it will also be filled with delights. Resolve to notice them.
What might happen if we committed to a delight practice? How would it affect our happiness and health? And what might it do to the country’s political climate if we paid less attention to the things that divide us and more to the things that spark delight? It’s possible to disagree with people, to acknowledge life’s challenges, to debate, to sit with sadness, grief and fear while marveling at and seeking out simple joys.
I'd like to hear what delights you and what you savor from life. I'd also like to hear what distracts you from delighting and savoring life.
When the World Feels Dark, Seek Out Delight
Catherine Price, NY Times 1.1.24
Ms. Price is the author of the How to Feel Alive newsletter. Her latest book is “The Power of Fun.”
Here’s an idea for the new year: Let’s make 2024 the year of delight. Does that sound ridiculous, given the state of the world right now? Hear me out.
The basic premise of a delight practice (which I learned about in the essay collection “The Book of Delights” by Ross Gay) is simple: You make a point to notice things in your everyday life that delight you. This could be anything — a pretty flower, a smile you share with a stranger, the sight of a person playing a trumpet while riding a unicycle down a major Philadelphia thoroughfare (true story). Nothing is too small or absurd. Then whenever you notice something that delights you, you lift your arm, raise your index finger in the air and say, out loud and with enthusiasm, “Delight!” (Yes, even if you’re alone.) Ideally, you share your delights with another person.
The concept of prioritizing delight may sound silly or almost irresponsible, given the heaviness of current events, feelings of burnout and the upcoming U.S. presidential election, in which it seems democracy itself could be at stake. But this is exactly why it is so important. Far from being a frivolous practice, making a point to notice and share things we find delightful can improve our moods, outlooks, relationships and even physical health.
How? Noticing delights requires us to pay attention, something that is required for our happiness and satisfaction but can be difficult in our increasingly distracted world. Essentially, this is a form of a gratitude practice — i.e., cultivating the habit of noticing and appreciating the things for which you’re thankful.
Gratitude practices are popular for good reason; if you make one a habit, the associated mental and physical benefits include reduced symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress and (probably relatedly) improved biomarkers for heart health.
But if you keep up a gratitude practice long enough, you may find yourself expressing your appreciation for the same things over and over, almost out of a sense of obligation. You are grateful for your friends and family. You are grateful that you have enough food. You are grateful for having a place to live. Eventually, the practice can begin to feel less nourishing and more like a chore.
In contrast, a delight practice taps into the deep power of gratitude without the risk of becoming trite. That’s because the things that delight us are often novel — I doubt I’ll see another trumpeting unicyclist any time soon.
Noticing and sharing delight is also a form of what psychologists call savoring, the practice of deliberately appreciating positive life experiences. Savoring has been shown to boost people’s moods as well as counterbalance our brains’ natural tendency to focus on the things that stoke anxiety and fear. (Being attuned to potentially threatening stressors is helpful from an evolutionary perspective; it takes work to focus our brains on the positive.)
What’s more, the effects of savoring are stronger if you make a point not just to notice positive things but also to label them and share them. (This is why it’s important to say “Delight!” out loud and put a finger in the air, even if it at first feels silly.)
And that’s perhaps my favorite part of the practice: sharing delights with other people. Start a meeting or a class by inviting people to share one thing that delighted them that day. Use delight sharing as an icebreaker or as a ritual before family meals. I have multiple delight group chats, and every new message boosts my mood, makes me feel more connected to others and inspires me to notice and share more delights.
For example, a friend once sent me a photo of frost crystals on his windshield with the caption “Delight!” Not only did this make me feel closer to him, but it also made me resolve to try to find delight in situations (such as having to scrape frost off my car) that might otherwise be annoying.
These moments of connection are good for our physical health. As Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s recent advisory about the nation’s loneliness epidemic noted, a lack of social ties is associated with increased risks for high blood pressure, heart disease, cognitive impairment, depression, anxiety, Type 2 diabetes and susceptibility to infectious disease. In fact, one well-regarded meta-analysis concluded that the health risks of loneliness and isolation are comparable with those of smoking up to 15 cigarettes per day.
It makes me wonder: What might happen if we, as individuals and as communities, committed to a delight practice? How would it affect our happiness and health? And what might it do to the country’s political climate if we paid less attention to the things that divide us and more to the things that spark delight? It’s possible to disagree with people, to acknowledge life’s challenges, to debate, to sit with sadness, grief and fear while marveling at and seeking out simple joys.
You may be amazed by how much there is to marvel at. As Mr. Gay writes, “It didn’t take me long to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study.”
This year, like all of them, will be filled with conflict and tragedy. But it will also be filled with delights. Resolve to notice them.
Tuesday, December 19
This week is our last discussion group of 2023. We will resume in the second week of January.
I pondered what the topic should be for the end-of-the-year. What came up was this: mental health.
Where do you go when feeling anxious or stressed? Many go online. Unfortunately, anxiety has become an online commodity which (ironically) can make us feel more anxious, which causes us to read more, which causes us to feel more depressed. Our author states the following about mental health:
The best thing we can do for ourselves when we’re anxious or depressed is to fight our instinct to avoid and ruminate. The best thing one can do when they’re depressed is to reject the instinct to stay in bed basking in the glow of a phone, and to instead step outside, engage with a friend, or do something else that provides more opportunities for validation and reward.
Some of those opportunities are found within the Church and small groups. I'd like to know what you think.
How Anxiety Became Content
Derek Thompson, The Atlantic 12.13.23
Anxiety has become its own genre of popular content. According to Listen Notes, a podcast search engine, more than 5,500 podcasts have the word trauma in their title. Celebrity media are awash with mental-health testimonials, and summaries of those testimonials, including “39 Celebrities Who Have Opened Up About Mental Health,” “What 22 Celebrities Have Said About Having Depression,” and “12 Times Famous Men Got Real About Mental Health.”
As anxiety has become content, it’s also become a part of more daily conversations. I’ve spoken with many parents about my work on America’s mental-health crisis in the past few years, and several have noted that their kids share their symptoms and diagnoses in group chats, rattling off the acronyms OCD, GAD, and PTSD with a casualness once reserved for high-school gossip.
What’s wrong with this? One might think that nothing at all is. Surely the rising volume of anxiety content partly reflects the rising volume of actual anxiety; the share of teens today who say that they are persistently sad has never been higher. What’s more, the destigmatization of distress can clearly be beneficial. We are finally talking openly about emotional crises that, in the past, were buried in silence and substance abuse.
But in the past few years, I’ve become more convinced that the way we commonly discuss mental-health issues, especially on the internet, isn’t helping us. Watching and listening to so much anxiety content, which transforms a medical diagnosis into a kind of popular media category, might be contributing to our national anxiety crisis.
The way we talk about the world shapes our experience of the world. In 2022, the researchers Lucy Foulkes and Jack L. Andrews coined the term prevalence inflation to describe the way that some people, especially young people, consume so much information about anxiety disorders that they begin to process normal problems of living as signs of a decline in mental health. “If people are repeatedly told that mental health problems are common and that they might experience them … they might start to interpret any negative thoughts and feelings through this lens,” Foulkes and Andrews write. This can trigger a self-fulfilling spiral: Some individuals who become hyperaware of the prevalence of anxiety disorders may start to process low levels of anxiety as signs of their own disorder, which leads them to recoil from social activities and practice other forms of behavioral avoidance, which exacerbates their anxiety.
Darby Saxbe, a clinical psychologist at the University of Southern California and a mother to a high schooler, told me she has come to think that, for many young people, claiming an anxiety crisis or post-traumatic stress disorder has become like a status symbol. “I worry that for some people, it’s become an identity marker that makes people feel special and unique,” Saxbe said. “That’s a big problem because this modern idea that anxiety is an identity gives people a fixed mindset, telling them this is who they are and will be in the future.”
On the contrary, she said, therapy works best when patients come into sessions believing that they can get better. That means believing that anxiety is treatable, modifiable, and malleable—all the things a fixed identity is not.
When I asked Saxbe whether internet conversations about anxiety might be partly driving the anxiety crisis, she readily agreed. Marshall McLuhan’s observation that “the medium is the message” has been on her mind as she notes the way that social media takes people out of the physical world. “We all, and young people in particular, too often use our phones to withdraw and avoid,” she said. “So even if we’re getting insightful therapeutic content, we’re often getting it while we’re in bed and on our phones.” Of course, she acknowledged, some online conversations can feel cathartic and even help people put into words their undeveloped feelings.
But alone on couches and in beds, thin lines separate active reflection (which can be healthy), rumination (less healthy), and outright wallowing (not healthy). “It’s not so different from listening to sad songs when you’re sad,” she said. “Of course, I would tell a patient that it can be cathartic. But if it’s all you do to cope? That’s bad.”
More deeply, she added, the algorithmic architecture of social media isn’t doing us any favors.
The “If you liked that, you might like this” organization of information on social media means that our engagement with certain kinds of content—politics, lifestyle, or mental health—can burrow us deeper into that genre. Rather than allow us to work through our negative feelings and move on, it can trap us in algorithmic whirlpools of outrage, doubt, and anger. (Anybody who has doomscrolled through a particularly gruesome news cycle can surely empathize.)
There is also an enormous difference between critiquing therapy itself and critiquing the poppy online version. “I teach clinical psychology, I am a therapist, and I’m very pro-therapy,” Saxbe said. But we may have overcorrected from an era when mental health was shameful to talk about to an era when some vulnerable people surround themselves with conversations and media about anxiety and depression, which makes them more vigilant about symptoms and problems, which makes them more likely to problematize normal daily stress, which makes them move toward a deficit model of psychopathology where they think there is always something wrong with them that needs their attention, which causes them to pull back from social engagement, which causes even more distress and anxiety.
The solution begins with the principle of opposite action. Saxbe said the best thing we can do for ourselves when we’re anxious or depressed is to fight our instinct to avoid and ruminate, rather than get sucked into algorithmic wormholes of avoidance and rumination. The best thing one can do when they’re depressed is to reject the instinct to stay in bed basking in the glow of a phone, and to instead step outside, engage with a friend, or do something else that provides more opportunities for validation and reward. “I would tell people to do what’s uncomfortable, to run toward danger,” Saxbe said. “You are not your anxiety. You’re so much more."
I pondered what the topic should be for the end-of-the-year. What came up was this: mental health.
Where do you go when feeling anxious or stressed? Many go online. Unfortunately, anxiety has become an online commodity which (ironically) can make us feel more anxious, which causes us to read more, which causes us to feel more depressed. Our author states the following about mental health:
The best thing we can do for ourselves when we’re anxious or depressed is to fight our instinct to avoid and ruminate. The best thing one can do when they’re depressed is to reject the instinct to stay in bed basking in the glow of a phone, and to instead step outside, engage with a friend, or do something else that provides more opportunities for validation and reward.
Some of those opportunities are found within the Church and small groups. I'd like to know what you think.
How Anxiety Became Content
Derek Thompson, The Atlantic 12.13.23
Anxiety has become its own genre of popular content. According to Listen Notes, a podcast search engine, more than 5,500 podcasts have the word trauma in their title. Celebrity media are awash with mental-health testimonials, and summaries of those testimonials, including “39 Celebrities Who Have Opened Up About Mental Health,” “What 22 Celebrities Have Said About Having Depression,” and “12 Times Famous Men Got Real About Mental Health.”
As anxiety has become content, it’s also become a part of more daily conversations. I’ve spoken with many parents about my work on America’s mental-health crisis in the past few years, and several have noted that their kids share their symptoms and diagnoses in group chats, rattling off the acronyms OCD, GAD, and PTSD with a casualness once reserved for high-school gossip.
What’s wrong with this? One might think that nothing at all is. Surely the rising volume of anxiety content partly reflects the rising volume of actual anxiety; the share of teens today who say that they are persistently sad has never been higher. What’s more, the destigmatization of distress can clearly be beneficial. We are finally talking openly about emotional crises that, in the past, were buried in silence and substance abuse.
But in the past few years, I’ve become more convinced that the way we commonly discuss mental-health issues, especially on the internet, isn’t helping us. Watching and listening to so much anxiety content, which transforms a medical diagnosis into a kind of popular media category, might be contributing to our national anxiety crisis.
The way we talk about the world shapes our experience of the world. In 2022, the researchers Lucy Foulkes and Jack L. Andrews coined the term prevalence inflation to describe the way that some people, especially young people, consume so much information about anxiety disorders that they begin to process normal problems of living as signs of a decline in mental health. “If people are repeatedly told that mental health problems are common and that they might experience them … they might start to interpret any negative thoughts and feelings through this lens,” Foulkes and Andrews write. This can trigger a self-fulfilling spiral: Some individuals who become hyperaware of the prevalence of anxiety disorders may start to process low levels of anxiety as signs of their own disorder, which leads them to recoil from social activities and practice other forms of behavioral avoidance, which exacerbates their anxiety.
Darby Saxbe, a clinical psychologist at the University of Southern California and a mother to a high schooler, told me she has come to think that, for many young people, claiming an anxiety crisis or post-traumatic stress disorder has become like a status symbol. “I worry that for some people, it’s become an identity marker that makes people feel special and unique,” Saxbe said. “That’s a big problem because this modern idea that anxiety is an identity gives people a fixed mindset, telling them this is who they are and will be in the future.”
On the contrary, she said, therapy works best when patients come into sessions believing that they can get better. That means believing that anxiety is treatable, modifiable, and malleable—all the things a fixed identity is not.
When I asked Saxbe whether internet conversations about anxiety might be partly driving the anxiety crisis, she readily agreed. Marshall McLuhan’s observation that “the medium is the message” has been on her mind as she notes the way that social media takes people out of the physical world. “We all, and young people in particular, too often use our phones to withdraw and avoid,” she said. “So even if we’re getting insightful therapeutic content, we’re often getting it while we’re in bed and on our phones.” Of course, she acknowledged, some online conversations can feel cathartic and even help people put into words their undeveloped feelings.
But alone on couches and in beds, thin lines separate active reflection (which can be healthy), rumination (less healthy), and outright wallowing (not healthy). “It’s not so different from listening to sad songs when you’re sad,” she said. “Of course, I would tell a patient that it can be cathartic. But if it’s all you do to cope? That’s bad.”
More deeply, she added, the algorithmic architecture of social media isn’t doing us any favors.
The “If you liked that, you might like this” organization of information on social media means that our engagement with certain kinds of content—politics, lifestyle, or mental health—can burrow us deeper into that genre. Rather than allow us to work through our negative feelings and move on, it can trap us in algorithmic whirlpools of outrage, doubt, and anger. (Anybody who has doomscrolled through a particularly gruesome news cycle can surely empathize.)
There is also an enormous difference between critiquing therapy itself and critiquing the poppy online version. “I teach clinical psychology, I am a therapist, and I’m very pro-therapy,” Saxbe said. But we may have overcorrected from an era when mental health was shameful to talk about to an era when some vulnerable people surround themselves with conversations and media about anxiety and depression, which makes them more vigilant about symptoms and problems, which makes them more likely to problematize normal daily stress, which makes them move toward a deficit model of psychopathology where they think there is always something wrong with them that needs their attention, which causes them to pull back from social engagement, which causes even more distress and anxiety.
The solution begins with the principle of opposite action. Saxbe said the best thing we can do for ourselves when we’re anxious or depressed is to fight our instinct to avoid and ruminate, rather than get sucked into algorithmic wormholes of avoidance and rumination. The best thing one can do when they’re depressed is to reject the instinct to stay in bed basking in the glow of a phone, and to instead step outside, engage with a friend, or do something else that provides more opportunities for validation and reward. “I would tell people to do what’s uncomfortable, to run toward danger,” Saxbe said. “You are not your anxiety. You’re so much more."
Tuesday, December 12
We are a group of different (and sometimes unique) views and perspectives. One secular thing that we all share in common, however, is how college has shaped us.
You've seen in the news this week about the presidents of three major universities testified on Capitol Hill about free speech (and what is the line between protected speech and hate and violent speech). There are many news articles about this; but, for us, I'd like to focus on two opinion pieces in the Wall Street Journal written by college professors about the state of higher education. The first, from a professor at UC Santa Cruz, is about how higher education has become a threat to America. The second page is from a professor at UC Berkeley which asked students, who were protesting about Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, to identify Palestine and Israel on a map. You have to read it to believe it (and then you may still not believe it).
One last thing: University of California, Santa Cruz, has a reputation for being the most liberal, or open-minded universities; UC Berkeley is one of the most competitive - academically speaking - universities to get into.
I'd like to know what you think about these two opinion pieces and when do you think free speech becomes unprotected hate or violence-inspiring speech.
Higher Ed Has Become a Threat to America
John Ellis, Wall Street Journal 12.4.23
Mr. Ellis is a professor emeritus of German literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz and author of “The Breakdown of Higher Education.”
America faces a formidable range of calamities: crime out of control, borders in chaos by design, unconstitutional censorship, and a press that does government PR rather than oversight. To these has been added an outbreak of virulent antisemitism. Every one of these degradations can be traced wholly or in large part to a single source: the corruption of higher education by radical political activists.
Children’s test scores have plummeted because college education departments train teachers to prioritize “social justice” over education. Censorship started with one-party campuses shutting down conservative voices. The drive to separate children from their parents begins in longstanding campus contempt for the suburban home and nuclear family. Open borders reflect pro-globalism and anti-nation state sentiment among radical professors. Campus antisemitism grew out of ideologies like “anticolonialism,” “anticapitalism” and “intersectionality.”
Academia has a monopoly on training for the most influential professions. The destructive influence of campus schools of education and journalism already noted is matched in the law, medicine, social work, etc. Academia’s suppression of the Constitution causes still more damage.
Hostility to the Constitution leads to banana-republic shenanigans: suppression of antigovernment speech, the press’s acting as mouthpiece for government, law enforcement used to harass opponents of the government.
An advanced society can’t tolerate the capture of its educational system by a fringe political sect that despises its Constitution and way of life. We have no choice: We must take back control of higher education from cultural vandals who have learned nothing from the disastrous history of societies that have implemented their ideas.
How can this be done? Not by the colleges themselves, which like things as they are. Not by governing boards, which ought to safeguard academia but have never had the backbone to do it. Not by superficial reforms. Effective reform means only one thing: getting those political
activists out of the classrooms and replacing them with academic thinkers and teachers. (No, that isn’t the same as replacing left with right.) Nothing less will do.
But the only real solution is for more Americans to grasp the depth of the problem and change their behavior accordingly. Most parents and students seem to be on autopilot: Young Jack is 18, so it’s time for college. His family still assumes that students will be taught by professors who are smart, well-informed and with broad sympathies. No longer. If enough parents and students gave serious thought to the question whether this ridiculous version of a college education is still worth four years of a young person’s life and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, corrupt institutions of higher education would collapse, creating the space for better ones to arise.
The biggest threat to our future isn’t climate change, China or the national debt. It is the tyrannical grip that a hopelessly corrupt higher education now has on our national life. If we don’t stop it now, it will eventually destroy the most successful society in world history.
From Which River to Which Sea?
Ron E. Hassner, Wall Street Journal 12.5.23
Mr. Hassner is a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley.
When college students who sympathize with Palestinians chant “From the river to the sea,” do they know what they’re talking about? I hired a survey firm to poll 250 students from a variety of backgrounds across the U.S. Most said they supported the chant, some enthusiastically so (32.8%) and others to a lesser extent (53.2%).
But only 47% of the students who embrace the slogan were able to name the river and the sea.
Some of the alternative answers were the Nile and the Euphrates, the Caribbean, the Dead Sea (which is a lake) and the Atlantic. Less than a quarter of these students knew who Yasser Arafat was (12 of them, or more than 10%, thought he was the first prime minister of Israel). Asked in what decade Israelis and Palestinians had signed the Oslo Accords, more than a quarter of the chant’s supporters claimed that no such peace agreements had ever been signed. There’s no shame in being ignorant, unless one is screaming for the extermination of millions.
Would learning basic political facts about the conflict moderate students’ opinions? A Latino engineering student from a southern university reported “definitely” supporting “from the river to the sea” because “Palestinians and Israelis should live in two separate countries, side by side.”
Shown on a map of the region that a Palestinian state would stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, leaving no room for Israel, he downgraded his enthusiasm for the mantra to “probably not.” Of the 80 students who saw the map, 75% similarly changed their view.
An art student from a liberal arts college in New England “probably” supported the slogan because “Palestinians and Israelis should live together in one state.” But when informed of recent polls in which most Palestinians and Israelis rejected the one-state solution, this student lost his enthusiasm. So did 41% of students in that group.
A third group of students claimed the chant called for a Palestine to replace Israel. Sixty percent of those students reduced their support for the slogan when they learned it would entail the subjugation, expulsion or annihilation of seven million Jewish and two million Arab Israelis. Yet another 14% of students reconsidered their stance when they read that many American Jews considered the chant to be threatening, even racist.
In all, after learning a handful of basic facts about the Middle East, 67.8% of students went from supporting “from the river to sea” to rejecting the mantra. These students had never seen a map of the Mideast and knew little about the region’s geography, history or demography. Those who hope to encourage extremism depend on the political ignorance of their audiences. It is time for good teachers to join the fray and combat bias with education.
You've seen in the news this week about the presidents of three major universities testified on Capitol Hill about free speech (and what is the line between protected speech and hate and violent speech). There are many news articles about this; but, for us, I'd like to focus on two opinion pieces in the Wall Street Journal written by college professors about the state of higher education. The first, from a professor at UC Santa Cruz, is about how higher education has become a threat to America. The second page is from a professor at UC Berkeley which asked students, who were protesting about Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, to identify Palestine and Israel on a map. You have to read it to believe it (and then you may still not believe it).
One last thing: University of California, Santa Cruz, has a reputation for being the most liberal, or open-minded universities; UC Berkeley is one of the most competitive - academically speaking - universities to get into.
I'd like to know what you think about these two opinion pieces and when do you think free speech becomes unprotected hate or violence-inspiring speech.
Higher Ed Has Become a Threat to America
John Ellis, Wall Street Journal 12.4.23
Mr. Ellis is a professor emeritus of German literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz and author of “The Breakdown of Higher Education.”
America faces a formidable range of calamities: crime out of control, borders in chaos by design, unconstitutional censorship, and a press that does government PR rather than oversight. To these has been added an outbreak of virulent antisemitism. Every one of these degradations can be traced wholly or in large part to a single source: the corruption of higher education by radical political activists.
Children’s test scores have plummeted because college education departments train teachers to prioritize “social justice” over education. Censorship started with one-party campuses shutting down conservative voices. The drive to separate children from their parents begins in longstanding campus contempt for the suburban home and nuclear family. Open borders reflect pro-globalism and anti-nation state sentiment among radical professors. Campus antisemitism grew out of ideologies like “anticolonialism,” “anticapitalism” and “intersectionality.”
Academia has a monopoly on training for the most influential professions. The destructive influence of campus schools of education and journalism already noted is matched in the law, medicine, social work, etc. Academia’s suppression of the Constitution causes still more damage.
Hostility to the Constitution leads to banana-republic shenanigans: suppression of antigovernment speech, the press’s acting as mouthpiece for government, law enforcement used to harass opponents of the government.
An advanced society can’t tolerate the capture of its educational system by a fringe political sect that despises its Constitution and way of life. We have no choice: We must take back control of higher education from cultural vandals who have learned nothing from the disastrous history of societies that have implemented their ideas.
How can this be done? Not by the colleges themselves, which like things as they are. Not by governing boards, which ought to safeguard academia but have never had the backbone to do it. Not by superficial reforms. Effective reform means only one thing: getting those political
activists out of the classrooms and replacing them with academic thinkers and teachers. (No, that isn’t the same as replacing left with right.) Nothing less will do.
But the only real solution is for more Americans to grasp the depth of the problem and change their behavior accordingly. Most parents and students seem to be on autopilot: Young Jack is 18, so it’s time for college. His family still assumes that students will be taught by professors who are smart, well-informed and with broad sympathies. No longer. If enough parents and students gave serious thought to the question whether this ridiculous version of a college education is still worth four years of a young person’s life and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, corrupt institutions of higher education would collapse, creating the space for better ones to arise.
The biggest threat to our future isn’t climate change, China or the national debt. It is the tyrannical grip that a hopelessly corrupt higher education now has on our national life. If we don’t stop it now, it will eventually destroy the most successful society in world history.
From Which River to Which Sea?
Ron E. Hassner, Wall Street Journal 12.5.23
Mr. Hassner is a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley.
When college students who sympathize with Palestinians chant “From the river to the sea,” do they know what they’re talking about? I hired a survey firm to poll 250 students from a variety of backgrounds across the U.S. Most said they supported the chant, some enthusiastically so (32.8%) and others to a lesser extent (53.2%).
But only 47% of the students who embrace the slogan were able to name the river and the sea.
Some of the alternative answers were the Nile and the Euphrates, the Caribbean, the Dead Sea (which is a lake) and the Atlantic. Less than a quarter of these students knew who Yasser Arafat was (12 of them, or more than 10%, thought he was the first prime minister of Israel). Asked in what decade Israelis and Palestinians had signed the Oslo Accords, more than a quarter of the chant’s supporters claimed that no such peace agreements had ever been signed. There’s no shame in being ignorant, unless one is screaming for the extermination of millions.
Would learning basic political facts about the conflict moderate students’ opinions? A Latino engineering student from a southern university reported “definitely” supporting “from the river to the sea” because “Palestinians and Israelis should live in two separate countries, side by side.”
Shown on a map of the region that a Palestinian state would stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, leaving no room for Israel, he downgraded his enthusiasm for the mantra to “probably not.” Of the 80 students who saw the map, 75% similarly changed their view.
An art student from a liberal arts college in New England “probably” supported the slogan because “Palestinians and Israelis should live together in one state.” But when informed of recent polls in which most Palestinians and Israelis rejected the one-state solution, this student lost his enthusiasm. So did 41% of students in that group.
A third group of students claimed the chant called for a Palestine to replace Israel. Sixty percent of those students reduced their support for the slogan when they learned it would entail the subjugation, expulsion or annihilation of seven million Jewish and two million Arab Israelis. Yet another 14% of students reconsidered their stance when they read that many American Jews considered the chant to be threatening, even racist.
In all, after learning a handful of basic facts about the Middle East, 67.8% of students went from supporting “from the river to sea” to rejecting the mantra. These students had never seen a map of the Mideast and knew little about the region’s geography, history or demography. Those who hope to encourage extremism depend on the political ignorance of their audiences. It is time for good teachers to join the fray and combat bias with education.
Tuesday, December 5
The author for this week's article is one of my favorite spiritual/religious writers - Anne Lamott. She is the one who I have quoted many times with this: there are only three categories of prayer we offer to God - Thanks, Wow, Help.
The author is now 69 years old and has a different perspective on life - there is power in the unknown and there is light from above that illuminates the unknown. Using the illustration of Albert Bierstadt’s Western paintings (attached in the reading), she illuminates aspects of aging that are life-giving and beautiful.
At 33, I knew everything. At 69, I know something much more important.
Anne Lamott, The Washington Post 11.20.23
Anne Lamott is an American novelist and nonfiction writer.
Today I woke up old and awful in every way. I simultaneously cannot bear the news and cannot turn it off: It’s cobra hypnosis — Gaza, Israel, the shootings in Maine. The world is as dark as a scarab. I have two memorial services on my calendar this week. A dear friend is in the hospital waiting for a liver, dying. She keeps assuring me, “I ain’t in no ways tired,” and I say, “Oh, stop with that or I’m not going to visit again.” I’m exhausted just driving 90 minutes to and from San Francisco to see her.
My body hurt quite a lot when I got out of bed this morning, and I limped around like Granny Clampett for the first hour, until it unseized. Worse, my mind hurt, my heart hurt and I hated almost everyone, except my husband, my grandson and one of the dogs.
I don’t think I could have borne up under all this 20 years ago when I thought I knew so much about life. That was not nearly as much as I knew at 33, which is when we know more than we ever will again. But age has given me the ability to hang out without predicting how things will sort out this time (mostly — depending on how I’ve slept).
In many of Albert Bierstadt’s Western paintings, there is a darkness on one side, maybe a mountain or its shadow. Then toward the middle, animals graze or drink from a lake or stream. And then at the far right or in the sky, splashes of light lie like shawls across the shoulders of the mountains. The great
darkness says to me what I often say to heartbroken friends — “I don’t know.”
Is there meaning in the Maine shootings? I don’t know. Not yet.
My white-haired husband said on our first date seven years ago that “I don’t know” is the portal to the richness inside us. This insight was one reason I agreed to a second date (along with his beautiful hands). It was a game-changer. Twenty years earlier, when my brothers and I were trying to take care of our mother in her apartment when she first had Alzheimer’s, we cried out to her gerontology nurse, “We don’t know if she can stay here, how to help her take her meds, how to get her to eat better since she forgets.” And the nurse said gently, “How could you know?”
This literally had not crossed our minds. We just thought we were incompetent. In the shadow of the mountain of our mother’s decline, we hardly knew where to begin. So we started where we were, in the not knowing.
In the center of many Bierstadt paintings, you sometimes see animals grazing or drinking. They’re fine, they’re animals; they are just doing animals. But they are not the point — the point is the light. No matter how low you are, the light can reach you. It falls on animals, including us. This is positively biblical. The animals never seem to have anywhere to go. I used to have lots of places I had to get to. I had to go out for this or that, and it was an emergency — graph paper! I suddenly, urgently, needed to drive to town for graph paper. Also, in the old days when there was something to celebrate, I’d go out to a nice restaurant with friends. To celebrate now, I might exuberantly skip flossing for a night, and maybe if the news is good enough, the hip exercises. Wild times.
In my younger days when the news was too awful, I sought meaning in it. Now, not so much.
The meaning is that we have come through so much, and we take care of each other and, against all odds, heal, imperfectly. We still dance, but in certain weather, it hurts. (Okay, always.)
The portals of age also lead to the profound (indeed earthshaking) understanding that people are going to do what people are going to do: They do not want my always-good ideas on how to have easier lives and possibly become slightly less annoying. Now there is some acceptance (partly born of tiredness) that I can’t rescue or fix anyone, not even me. Sometimes this affords me a kind of plonky peace, fascination and even wonder at people and life as they tromp on by.
The price of aging is high: constant aches, real pain and barely survivable losses. But each time my hip unseizes, it reminds me that this life is not going to go on forever, and that is what makes it so frigging precious.
Sometimes at the right or the top center of Bierstadt paintings is a trippy splash of light, often a mystical, jagged slash that breaks through dirty-looking or white-fire clouds. There might be bright reflections, or long, slanted fingers of sun shining down with religious airs, organ music playing softly in the background. Puffy rainclouds glow. All say, “Yes, there is the deep dark, but we have some light as well.”
Will my brothers or I inherit our mother’s Alzheimer’s? I don’t know. I do know that I recently parked in front of my house and sort of forgot to turn off the engine. Three hours later, a formerly standoffish young neighbor knocked on my door to tell me this, and I pretended to have known. I said the battery had been low and so I was letting it recharge. “Ah,” she said.
Now she is sweet when she sees me. We wave to each other when we pass in our cars, reflecting a new affection. Reflections say, “In the dark, there’s still some light around. So don’t ever think things are too dark. We’re not going to give you the entire reserve, but we just want you to know it is there. And more may be on its way."
The author is now 69 years old and has a different perspective on life - there is power in the unknown and there is light from above that illuminates the unknown. Using the illustration of Albert Bierstadt’s Western paintings (attached in the reading), she illuminates aspects of aging that are life-giving and beautiful.
At 33, I knew everything. At 69, I know something much more important.
Anne Lamott, The Washington Post 11.20.23
Anne Lamott is an American novelist and nonfiction writer.
Today I woke up old and awful in every way. I simultaneously cannot bear the news and cannot turn it off: It’s cobra hypnosis — Gaza, Israel, the shootings in Maine. The world is as dark as a scarab. I have two memorial services on my calendar this week. A dear friend is in the hospital waiting for a liver, dying. She keeps assuring me, “I ain’t in no ways tired,” and I say, “Oh, stop with that or I’m not going to visit again.” I’m exhausted just driving 90 minutes to and from San Francisco to see her.
My body hurt quite a lot when I got out of bed this morning, and I limped around like Granny Clampett for the first hour, until it unseized. Worse, my mind hurt, my heart hurt and I hated almost everyone, except my husband, my grandson and one of the dogs.
I don’t think I could have borne up under all this 20 years ago when I thought I knew so much about life. That was not nearly as much as I knew at 33, which is when we know more than we ever will again. But age has given me the ability to hang out without predicting how things will sort out this time (mostly — depending on how I’ve slept).
In many of Albert Bierstadt’s Western paintings, there is a darkness on one side, maybe a mountain or its shadow. Then toward the middle, animals graze or drink from a lake or stream. And then at the far right or in the sky, splashes of light lie like shawls across the shoulders of the mountains. The great
darkness says to me what I often say to heartbroken friends — “I don’t know.”
Is there meaning in the Maine shootings? I don’t know. Not yet.
My white-haired husband said on our first date seven years ago that “I don’t know” is the portal to the richness inside us. This insight was one reason I agreed to a second date (along with his beautiful hands). It was a game-changer. Twenty years earlier, when my brothers and I were trying to take care of our mother in her apartment when she first had Alzheimer’s, we cried out to her gerontology nurse, “We don’t know if she can stay here, how to help her take her meds, how to get her to eat better since she forgets.” And the nurse said gently, “How could you know?”
This literally had not crossed our minds. We just thought we were incompetent. In the shadow of the mountain of our mother’s decline, we hardly knew where to begin. So we started where we were, in the not knowing.
In the center of many Bierstadt paintings, you sometimes see animals grazing or drinking. They’re fine, they’re animals; they are just doing animals. But they are not the point — the point is the light. No matter how low you are, the light can reach you. It falls on animals, including us. This is positively biblical. The animals never seem to have anywhere to go. I used to have lots of places I had to get to. I had to go out for this or that, and it was an emergency — graph paper! I suddenly, urgently, needed to drive to town for graph paper. Also, in the old days when there was something to celebrate, I’d go out to a nice restaurant with friends. To celebrate now, I might exuberantly skip flossing for a night, and maybe if the news is good enough, the hip exercises. Wild times.
In my younger days when the news was too awful, I sought meaning in it. Now, not so much.
The meaning is that we have come through so much, and we take care of each other and, against all odds, heal, imperfectly. We still dance, but in certain weather, it hurts. (Okay, always.)
The portals of age also lead to the profound (indeed earthshaking) understanding that people are going to do what people are going to do: They do not want my always-good ideas on how to have easier lives and possibly become slightly less annoying. Now there is some acceptance (partly born of tiredness) that I can’t rescue or fix anyone, not even me. Sometimes this affords me a kind of plonky peace, fascination and even wonder at people and life as they tromp on by.
The price of aging is high: constant aches, real pain and barely survivable losses. But each time my hip unseizes, it reminds me that this life is not going to go on forever, and that is what makes it so frigging precious.
Sometimes at the right or the top center of Bierstadt paintings is a trippy splash of light, often a mystical, jagged slash that breaks through dirty-looking or white-fire clouds. There might be bright reflections, or long, slanted fingers of sun shining down with religious airs, organ music playing softly in the background. Puffy rainclouds glow. All say, “Yes, there is the deep dark, but we have some light as well.”
Will my brothers or I inherit our mother’s Alzheimer’s? I don’t know. I do know that I recently parked in front of my house and sort of forgot to turn off the engine. Three hours later, a formerly standoffish young neighbor knocked on my door to tell me this, and I pretended to have known. I said the battery had been low and so I was letting it recharge. “Ah,” she said.
Now she is sweet when she sees me. We wave to each other when we pass in our cars, reflecting a new affection. Reflections say, “In the dark, there’s still some light around. So don’t ever think things are too dark. We’re not going to give you the entire reserve, but we just want you to know it is there. And more may be on its way."
Tuesday, November 28: Combined Men's and Women's Discussion Group
We're going to discuss a reading about the Hamas/Israel war. In the article, the author, who is an Anglican priest (and Vicar of St. Martin-in-the-fields, London), suggests that the emotion of rage keeps us from having peace. He opines that we should focus instead on anger. In his words:
Anger can be a constructive emotion, stirring us from distraction or self-absorption to an acute awareness of wrongdoing, leading us to a process of restitution or reparation. But rage is something different. Rage names the moment we lose all rational faculties. The red mist descends. We find ourselves incandescent, untrammeled by any restraint. We lose sight of the original wrong done in our rampaging quest for destruction and vengeance. In our rage we tell ourselves we can and should destroy all in our path, for only then can justice be restored and fury satisfied.
The Emotion Standing in the Way of Peace
Samuel Wells, The Christian Century 11.21.23
Samuel Wells is the vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London.
The war between Hamas and Israel, with its carnage and hostage taking, has evoked profound, even primal feelings. We could call it accelerated action: a rapid journey from discovery to reaction, from shock to horror, from judgment to anger, from fury to rage.
There’s a liminal moment between anger and rage. Anger can be a constructive emotion, stirring us from distraction or self-absorption to an acute awareness of wrongdoing, leading us to a process of restitution or reparation. When directed away from our own pride and toward another’s well-being, anger can be a means to a healthy end, like a ladder we can kick away once we’re truly engaged in seeking the good.
But rage is something different. Rage names the moment we lose all rational faculties. The red mist descends. We find ourselves incandescent, untrammeled by any restraint. We lose sight of the original wrong done in our rampaging quest for destruction and vengeance. In our rage we tell ourselves we can and should destroy all in our path, for only then can justice be restored and fury satisfied.
There can be something exhilarating about rage. Our culture prizes both visceral experience and impregnable righteousness; rage offers a combination of the two, an intoxication of indignant fervor. To be so right that you’re justified in whatever damage you wreak is almost a peak experience of a society that valorizes both intense passion and moral superiority.
Many people, perhaps most, of us are perennially inhibited by vulnerability, hurt, and fear. Our thoughts are weighed down and our actions limited by our acute awareness of the other, by anxiety that we may be rejected, humiliated, derided, scorned. To be engulfed by rage is to transcend these negativities and reach a plane of unconquerable passion, like Samson with his hair grown back, destroying more in his death than he did in his life. Which is why rage is so attractive, even addictive, because it so thoroughly dispels, at least for a moment, those restraints of civility and inhibition.
When Jesus says, “I come not to bring peace, but a sword” (Matt. 10:34), I understand that to mean, Don’t seek a sentimental peace, but one with sharp edges. It sometimes sounds facile to pray for peace amid the rage of war. But it depends on what you mean by peace. The peace of still waters and quiet rest is certainly a fantasy in the midst of widespread horror. But maybe peace is more like the sword that divides rage from anger. Rage inflames and inflates; anger can pinpoint a problem and isolate it, with the precision of a sword.
The way to dispel rage is not to oppose it with alternative rage. The conflict in the Holy Land, in that sense, amplifies many contemporary disputes, wherein both parties can become so overwhelmed by wrongs inflicted on them, and so convinced that these wrongs justify a response of limitless violence, that each side’s rage only amplifies that of their opponents, in an inferno that eventually consumes all their children. Rage is an expression of powerlessness of emotions, words, and actions. The only thing that can dismantle it is the infusion of words and actions that can better channel the overflowing emotion.
But it’s sheer denial to imagine that appropriate procedural actions and carefully modified words can on their own suffice to dissipate rage. Which is why there’s a place for the curation of healthy anger—an emotion that can’t walk past injustice and affront but that has strategies in place to avoid that transgression evoking explosive fury. Healthy anger doesn’t assume all fault lies with the other party, is still open to re-narrating a story so that not all wrong lies on a single side, and can energize conflicting parties to say now is the moment to realize we’re all on a path to mutually assured destruction and we must all take steps to turn our rage back into gesture and words that are open to rational engagement. Healthy anger is thus almost a prerequisite for true peace—a peace that doesn’t pretend fury will simply burn itself out, nor presume enmity can be ignored or suppressed.
It’s rage, not peace, that’s based on fantasy. Rage assumes a story by which I obliterate you and all is resolved. But it’s not resolved: it’s just stoking up further rage for another explosion sometime later. By contrast anger can stir us to action, such as the brokering of cease-fire, the measured and evenhanded witness of the wider community, the careful identification of and holding to account for wrongs done, the patient hearing out of resentments and fears, the finding of a path through to mutual security, dignity, understanding, respect, and hope.
That requires everyone involved to de-escalate back through the red mist of rage to the heightened awareness of anger, to set aside the urge to obliterate the other, and to begin to allow trusted outsiders to modulate the temperature of dispute. Anger can lead toward reason and eventually justice; rage cannot.
Anger can be a constructive emotion, stirring us from distraction or self-absorption to an acute awareness of wrongdoing, leading us to a process of restitution or reparation. But rage is something different. Rage names the moment we lose all rational faculties. The red mist descends. We find ourselves incandescent, untrammeled by any restraint. We lose sight of the original wrong done in our rampaging quest for destruction and vengeance. In our rage we tell ourselves we can and should destroy all in our path, for only then can justice be restored and fury satisfied.
The Emotion Standing in the Way of Peace
Samuel Wells, The Christian Century 11.21.23
Samuel Wells is the vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London.
The war between Hamas and Israel, with its carnage and hostage taking, has evoked profound, even primal feelings. We could call it accelerated action: a rapid journey from discovery to reaction, from shock to horror, from judgment to anger, from fury to rage.
There’s a liminal moment between anger and rage. Anger can be a constructive emotion, stirring us from distraction or self-absorption to an acute awareness of wrongdoing, leading us to a process of restitution or reparation. When directed away from our own pride and toward another’s well-being, anger can be a means to a healthy end, like a ladder we can kick away once we’re truly engaged in seeking the good.
But rage is something different. Rage names the moment we lose all rational faculties. The red mist descends. We find ourselves incandescent, untrammeled by any restraint. We lose sight of the original wrong done in our rampaging quest for destruction and vengeance. In our rage we tell ourselves we can and should destroy all in our path, for only then can justice be restored and fury satisfied.
There can be something exhilarating about rage. Our culture prizes both visceral experience and impregnable righteousness; rage offers a combination of the two, an intoxication of indignant fervor. To be so right that you’re justified in whatever damage you wreak is almost a peak experience of a society that valorizes both intense passion and moral superiority.
Many people, perhaps most, of us are perennially inhibited by vulnerability, hurt, and fear. Our thoughts are weighed down and our actions limited by our acute awareness of the other, by anxiety that we may be rejected, humiliated, derided, scorned. To be engulfed by rage is to transcend these negativities and reach a plane of unconquerable passion, like Samson with his hair grown back, destroying more in his death than he did in his life. Which is why rage is so attractive, even addictive, because it so thoroughly dispels, at least for a moment, those restraints of civility and inhibition.
When Jesus says, “I come not to bring peace, but a sword” (Matt. 10:34), I understand that to mean, Don’t seek a sentimental peace, but one with sharp edges. It sometimes sounds facile to pray for peace amid the rage of war. But it depends on what you mean by peace. The peace of still waters and quiet rest is certainly a fantasy in the midst of widespread horror. But maybe peace is more like the sword that divides rage from anger. Rage inflames and inflates; anger can pinpoint a problem and isolate it, with the precision of a sword.
The way to dispel rage is not to oppose it with alternative rage. The conflict in the Holy Land, in that sense, amplifies many contemporary disputes, wherein both parties can become so overwhelmed by wrongs inflicted on them, and so convinced that these wrongs justify a response of limitless violence, that each side’s rage only amplifies that of their opponents, in an inferno that eventually consumes all their children. Rage is an expression of powerlessness of emotions, words, and actions. The only thing that can dismantle it is the infusion of words and actions that can better channel the overflowing emotion.
But it’s sheer denial to imagine that appropriate procedural actions and carefully modified words can on their own suffice to dissipate rage. Which is why there’s a place for the curation of healthy anger—an emotion that can’t walk past injustice and affront but that has strategies in place to avoid that transgression evoking explosive fury. Healthy anger doesn’t assume all fault lies with the other party, is still open to re-narrating a story so that not all wrong lies on a single side, and can energize conflicting parties to say now is the moment to realize we’re all on a path to mutually assured destruction and we must all take steps to turn our rage back into gesture and words that are open to rational engagement. Healthy anger is thus almost a prerequisite for true peace—a peace that doesn’t pretend fury will simply burn itself out, nor presume enmity can be ignored or suppressed.
It’s rage, not peace, that’s based on fantasy. Rage assumes a story by which I obliterate you and all is resolved. But it’s not resolved: it’s just stoking up further rage for another explosion sometime later. By contrast anger can stir us to action, such as the brokering of cease-fire, the measured and evenhanded witness of the wider community, the careful identification of and holding to account for wrongs done, the patient hearing out of resentments and fears, the finding of a path through to mutual security, dignity, understanding, respect, and hope.
That requires everyone involved to de-escalate back through the red mist of rage to the heightened awareness of anger, to set aside the urge to obliterate the other, and to begin to allow trusted outsiders to modulate the temperature of dispute. Anger can lead toward reason and eventually justice; rage cannot.
Tuesday, November 20
The question for this week: what is worship for? In my recent sermon I mentioned that humans have three distinctive qualities - we are made in God's image; we have free will; we are created to worship something. We are encouraged to worship God (but God is not going to make us do it).
In this article, the author also raises the point that we are wired to worship something. In her own words: We’re wired to ascribe greatness to people, places, ideas, and objects outside ourselves.
We do this with athletes and movie stars, political candidates and pundits. We do it at football games and rock concerts, at car dealerships and open houses. Increasingly, we do it with the little gadgets we hold in our hands and manipulate with our thumbs, allowing these compact miracles of technology to capture our attention for hours each day.
I am wondering what you think about this; about the rise of Christian nationalism in an increasingly secular society; and what (and who) is worship for?
What is Worship For?
Debie Thomas, The Christian Century 10.11.23
About the Author: Debie Thomas is an author and columnist for The Christian Century. She serves as the Minister of Lifelong Formation at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Palo Alto, California.
Those of us steeped in church life often take churchy things for granted. For me, one of those things is worship. Growing up, it never occurred to me to ask why I had to worship God; worship was simply a fact of life, as normal and unexceptional as breathing. Many of my childhood memories are memories of worship. Of standing next to my mother on Sunday mornings, singing hymns to gorgeous organ accompaniment. Of listening to my father praise God with his hands raised in the air during family devotions. Of gathering around campfires at summer Bible camps, testifying to God’s miraculous work while eating gooey s’mores.
There is no ambivalence in these memories. No sense of weirdness or even curiosity. I was a Christian, Christians were supposed to worship, and so I did. It’s only now, as I spend a lot of time thinking about what my religious practice looks like from the outside, that thorny questions emerge: Why do we Christians worship God? Why does God want us to and even command us to? Why is scripture filled with exhortations to give God honor, glory, praise, and adulation?
I suppose the real question here is about God’s character and personality. Does God need our worship? Is there something missing in God that we human beings supply with our regular contributions of praise? A more cynical reframing of the question might be: Is God a megalomaniac? Someone who requires the constant ego reinforcement of our adoration? After all, we humans tend to recoil from people who insist on receiving steady streams of
compliments. We call them narcissists. We grow weary in their company. Why and how is God different?
I have a lot of sympathy for these questions. I understand why people who don’t practice Christianity find Christian worship odd. But I don’t think that God’s desire for human worship stems from any kind of divine brokenness. In fact, I think that God’s goodness and graciousness toward us flow from God’s utter wholeness and self-sufficiency. God is free to love us precisely because God is not needy as we are. In the perfect communion of the Trinity, God has everything God needs.
Perhaps, then, we are the ones who need to worship God, won’t be whole unless we give God thanks and praise. Why?
Because worship is far more than expressive; it is formational. It makes us. It focuses our attention. It orders our priorities. It teaches us what’s important and what isn’t. As Richard Rohr puts it, we have to be careful, because we will always become the God we worship. Our prayer, our devotion, our praise—these rewire us. They enable us to see, hear, and think in new ways.
What we worship makes us who we are.
It’s taken me a while to realize that I’m always worshiping something, whether I notice it or not. If worship is the act of giving honor, reverence, devotion, or admiration to something or someone, then worship truly is as natural as breathing. We’re wired to do it: to flock to objects of devotion, to pay exquisite and adoring attention to things that draw our gaze and elicit our respect, to put pretty things on pedestals. We’re wired to ascribe greatness to people, places, ideas, and objects outside ourselves.
We do this with athletes and movie stars, political candidates and pundits. We do it at football games and rock concerts, at car dealerships and open houses. Increasingly, we do it with the little gadgets we hold in our hands and manipulate with our thumbs, allowing these compact miracles
of technology to capture our attention for hours each day.
What draws my gaze? What holds me captive? What keeps me coming back for more? I am a devotee to these things. A worshiper. These are the things—for better or for worse—that keep me on my knees.
I believe this is why we’re commanded to worship God. This is why the ancient psalmist invites his congregants to “worship the Lord in holy splendor” (Ps. 96:9) and tremble before him. Why Jesus reminds his first- century listeners to “worship the Lord your God, and serve only him” (Luke 4:8). Why, in the book that draws our scriptures to a close, St. John of Patmos (author of the Book of Revelation) describes heavenly worship at glorious scale: “You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created” (Rev. 4:11).
If I’m wired and destined to worship, if my worship has the power to make or unmake my heart, then these scriptures make all the sense in the world. They’re reminding me to focus my attention on the only one who is truly good, truly worthy, and truly just. They’re inviting me to align my loves with the divine love. To walk in the way that is the Way and to live in close and intimate company with the one who is the Life.
To be clear, this God we’re commanded to worship is a servant God, one who grew up a peasant under empire, washed the feet of his disciples, rode a donkey into Jerusalem, and wept at his beloved friend’s graveside. This is a God who “emptied himself,” “humbled himself,” and “became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:7–8).
This is no narcissist. This is a God who commands my worship so that my heart can be softened into servanthood, gentleness, humility, and love. This is a God who offers me the practice of worship as a gift. Not for God’s benefit, but for mine.
In this article, the author also raises the point that we are wired to worship something. In her own words: We’re wired to ascribe greatness to people, places, ideas, and objects outside ourselves.
We do this with athletes and movie stars, political candidates and pundits. We do it at football games and rock concerts, at car dealerships and open houses. Increasingly, we do it with the little gadgets we hold in our hands and manipulate with our thumbs, allowing these compact miracles of technology to capture our attention for hours each day.
I am wondering what you think about this; about the rise of Christian nationalism in an increasingly secular society; and what (and who) is worship for?
What is Worship For?
Debie Thomas, The Christian Century 10.11.23
About the Author: Debie Thomas is an author and columnist for The Christian Century. She serves as the Minister of Lifelong Formation at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Palo Alto, California.
Those of us steeped in church life often take churchy things for granted. For me, one of those things is worship. Growing up, it never occurred to me to ask why I had to worship God; worship was simply a fact of life, as normal and unexceptional as breathing. Many of my childhood memories are memories of worship. Of standing next to my mother on Sunday mornings, singing hymns to gorgeous organ accompaniment. Of listening to my father praise God with his hands raised in the air during family devotions. Of gathering around campfires at summer Bible camps, testifying to God’s miraculous work while eating gooey s’mores.
There is no ambivalence in these memories. No sense of weirdness or even curiosity. I was a Christian, Christians were supposed to worship, and so I did. It’s only now, as I spend a lot of time thinking about what my religious practice looks like from the outside, that thorny questions emerge: Why do we Christians worship God? Why does God want us to and even command us to? Why is scripture filled with exhortations to give God honor, glory, praise, and adulation?
I suppose the real question here is about God’s character and personality. Does God need our worship? Is there something missing in God that we human beings supply with our regular contributions of praise? A more cynical reframing of the question might be: Is God a megalomaniac? Someone who requires the constant ego reinforcement of our adoration? After all, we humans tend to recoil from people who insist on receiving steady streams of
compliments. We call them narcissists. We grow weary in their company. Why and how is God different?
I have a lot of sympathy for these questions. I understand why people who don’t practice Christianity find Christian worship odd. But I don’t think that God’s desire for human worship stems from any kind of divine brokenness. In fact, I think that God’s goodness and graciousness toward us flow from God’s utter wholeness and self-sufficiency. God is free to love us precisely because God is not needy as we are. In the perfect communion of the Trinity, God has everything God needs.
Perhaps, then, we are the ones who need to worship God, won’t be whole unless we give God thanks and praise. Why?
Because worship is far more than expressive; it is formational. It makes us. It focuses our attention. It orders our priorities. It teaches us what’s important and what isn’t. As Richard Rohr puts it, we have to be careful, because we will always become the God we worship. Our prayer, our devotion, our praise—these rewire us. They enable us to see, hear, and think in new ways.
What we worship makes us who we are.
It’s taken me a while to realize that I’m always worshiping something, whether I notice it or not. If worship is the act of giving honor, reverence, devotion, or admiration to something or someone, then worship truly is as natural as breathing. We’re wired to do it: to flock to objects of devotion, to pay exquisite and adoring attention to things that draw our gaze and elicit our respect, to put pretty things on pedestals. We’re wired to ascribe greatness to people, places, ideas, and objects outside ourselves.
We do this with athletes and movie stars, political candidates and pundits. We do it at football games and rock concerts, at car dealerships and open houses. Increasingly, we do it with the little gadgets we hold in our hands and manipulate with our thumbs, allowing these compact miracles
of technology to capture our attention for hours each day.
What draws my gaze? What holds me captive? What keeps me coming back for more? I am a devotee to these things. A worshiper. These are the things—for better or for worse—that keep me on my knees.
I believe this is why we’re commanded to worship God. This is why the ancient psalmist invites his congregants to “worship the Lord in holy splendor” (Ps. 96:9) and tremble before him. Why Jesus reminds his first- century listeners to “worship the Lord your God, and serve only him” (Luke 4:8). Why, in the book that draws our scriptures to a close, St. John of Patmos (author of the Book of Revelation) describes heavenly worship at glorious scale: “You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created” (Rev. 4:11).
If I’m wired and destined to worship, if my worship has the power to make or unmake my heart, then these scriptures make all the sense in the world. They’re reminding me to focus my attention on the only one who is truly good, truly worthy, and truly just. They’re inviting me to align my loves with the divine love. To walk in the way that is the Way and to live in close and intimate company with the one who is the Life.
To be clear, this God we’re commanded to worship is a servant God, one who grew up a peasant under empire, washed the feet of his disciples, rode a donkey into Jerusalem, and wept at his beloved friend’s graveside. This is a God who “emptied himself,” “humbled himself,” and “became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:7–8).
This is no narcissist. This is a God who commands my worship so that my heart can be softened into servanthood, gentleness, humility, and love. This is a God who offers me the practice of worship as a gift. Not for God’s benefit, but for mine.
Tuesday, November 14
The reading for this week is about the uncomfortable intersection of church and state that we seem to find ourselves in. The author, a self-identified evangelical Christian conservative, calls into question a statement made by Mike Johnson, the new Speaker of the House, that government policy decisions are based on his worldview from the Bible. Where is the separation of Church and State? Can the Bible inform us on policy decisions? Does faith direct our personal lives but leaves politics and business out of it? Or, is the separation of faith and politics a fallacy?
Our Broken Christian Politics
David French, The New York Times 11.5.23
There are two moments from Mike Johnson’s early days as speaker of the House that almost perfectly encapsulate the broken way that so many evangelicals approach politics. The first occurred just after the House elected Johnson. ABC’s Rachel Scott started to ask Johnson about his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. But before she could finish, Johnson’s Republican colleagues started to shout her down. Johnson simply shook his head. “Next question,” he said, as if the query wasn’t worth his time.
The second moment came in his first extended interview as speaker, when Johnson shared the basis of his political philosophy with Sean Hannity of Fox News: “Someone asked me today in the media, they said, ‘It’s curious, people are curious. What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, ‘Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it.’ That’s my worldview.”
That quote is less illuminating than many people think. The Bible says a great deal about a great number of subjects, but it is open to interpretation on many and silent on many more. (It says nothing, for example, about the proper level of funding for the I.R.S., Johnson’s first substantive foray into policy as speaker.) I know Republicans and Democrats who root their political philosophy in the Bible. I, too, look to Scripture to guide my mind and heart.
Johnson and I have such similar religious convictions that we once worked together at the same Christian law firm. We worked in different states and different practice groups (I focused on academic freedom), but we both defended religious liberty, and we’d most likely both say much the same things about, say, the inerrancy of Scripture. Yet we’ve taken very different political paths.
It turns out that the Bible isn’t actually a clear guide to “any issue under the sun.” You can read it from cover to cover, believe every word you read and still not know the “Christian” policy on a vast majority of contested issues. Even when evangelical Christians broadly agree on certain moral principles, such as the idea that marriage is a lifelong covenant between a man and a woman, there is widespread disagreement on the extent to which civil law should reflect those evangelical moral beliefs.
Though the Bible isn’t a clear guide for American foreign policy, American economic policy or American constitutional law, it is a much clearer guide for Christian virtue. Here’s one such virtue, for example: honesty.
Which brings us back to Johnson’s refusal to answer a question about the effort to overturn the 2020 election. There is a reason that effort is called the Big Lie. It was one of the most comprehensively and transparently dishonest political movements in American history. And Johnson was in the middle of it. He helped mobilize support for Texas’ utterly frivolous lawsuit to overturn the Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin elections.
He said there was “a lot of merit” to completely false claims about voting machines being “rigged with this software by Dominion.” Like most House Republicans, he voted against certifying the election. In the same interview in which Johnson called out Dominion, he said that the Georgia election was “set up for the Biden team to win” through “massive fraud and error and irregularity.” By whom? The Republican governor and the Republican secretary of state?
Johnson is a very nice person, and he makes his points with a quite reasonable tone of voice. But pleasant-sounding lies are still lies. I know Johnson to be a smart man and a good lawyer, which is why I was gobsmacked to see him promote the same theories as some of the most corrupt and incompetent lawyers in American legal life. Former Representative Liz Cheney said that Johnson “was acting in ways that he knew to be wrong.”
Three days after the House elected Johnson speaker, Mike Pence dropped out of the Republican presidential primary. The most recent Republican vice president had become a polling afterthought, and the reason isn’t hard to discern. He’s every bit as faith-forward as Johnson, he was every bit as loyal to the Trump Administration policy agenda as Johnson, and yet — when push came to shove — he could not participate in the Big Lie. He paid an immediate and permanent price for his honesty, with his approval among G.O.P. voters plunging after the attack on the Capitol.
This should not be.
The Bible that sits on Johnson’s shelf, the one that tells him what to think about “any issue under the sun,” may not tell us how to formulate immigration policy or how much money to send to Ukraine. But it does condemn dishonesty, it does condemn cruelty, and if there is a clear theme that echoes throughout its pages, it’s one that Mike Johnson and his legion of evangelical supporters should take to heart: The ends do not justify the means.
Our Broken Christian Politics
David French, The New York Times 11.5.23
There are two moments from Mike Johnson’s early days as speaker of the House that almost perfectly encapsulate the broken way that so many evangelicals approach politics. The first occurred just after the House elected Johnson. ABC’s Rachel Scott started to ask Johnson about his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. But before she could finish, Johnson’s Republican colleagues started to shout her down. Johnson simply shook his head. “Next question,” he said, as if the query wasn’t worth his time.
The second moment came in his first extended interview as speaker, when Johnson shared the basis of his political philosophy with Sean Hannity of Fox News: “Someone asked me today in the media, they said, ‘It’s curious, people are curious. What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, ‘Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it.’ That’s my worldview.”
That quote is less illuminating than many people think. The Bible says a great deal about a great number of subjects, but it is open to interpretation on many and silent on many more. (It says nothing, for example, about the proper level of funding for the I.R.S., Johnson’s first substantive foray into policy as speaker.) I know Republicans and Democrats who root their political philosophy in the Bible. I, too, look to Scripture to guide my mind and heart.
Johnson and I have such similar religious convictions that we once worked together at the same Christian law firm. We worked in different states and different practice groups (I focused on academic freedom), but we both defended religious liberty, and we’d most likely both say much the same things about, say, the inerrancy of Scripture. Yet we’ve taken very different political paths.
It turns out that the Bible isn’t actually a clear guide to “any issue under the sun.” You can read it from cover to cover, believe every word you read and still not know the “Christian” policy on a vast majority of contested issues. Even when evangelical Christians broadly agree on certain moral principles, such as the idea that marriage is a lifelong covenant between a man and a woman, there is widespread disagreement on the extent to which civil law should reflect those evangelical moral beliefs.
Though the Bible isn’t a clear guide for American foreign policy, American economic policy or American constitutional law, it is a much clearer guide for Christian virtue. Here’s one such virtue, for example: honesty.
Which brings us back to Johnson’s refusal to answer a question about the effort to overturn the 2020 election. There is a reason that effort is called the Big Lie. It was one of the most comprehensively and transparently dishonest political movements in American history. And Johnson was in the middle of it. He helped mobilize support for Texas’ utterly frivolous lawsuit to overturn the Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin elections.
He said there was “a lot of merit” to completely false claims about voting machines being “rigged with this software by Dominion.” Like most House Republicans, he voted against certifying the election. In the same interview in which Johnson called out Dominion, he said that the Georgia election was “set up for the Biden team to win” through “massive fraud and error and irregularity.” By whom? The Republican governor and the Republican secretary of state?
Johnson is a very nice person, and he makes his points with a quite reasonable tone of voice. But pleasant-sounding lies are still lies. I know Johnson to be a smart man and a good lawyer, which is why I was gobsmacked to see him promote the same theories as some of the most corrupt and incompetent lawyers in American legal life. Former Representative Liz Cheney said that Johnson “was acting in ways that he knew to be wrong.”
Three days after the House elected Johnson speaker, Mike Pence dropped out of the Republican presidential primary. The most recent Republican vice president had become a polling afterthought, and the reason isn’t hard to discern. He’s every bit as faith-forward as Johnson, he was every bit as loyal to the Trump Administration policy agenda as Johnson, and yet — when push came to shove — he could not participate in the Big Lie. He paid an immediate and permanent price for his honesty, with his approval among G.O.P. voters plunging after the attack on the Capitol.
This should not be.
The Bible that sits on Johnson’s shelf, the one that tells him what to think about “any issue under the sun,” may not tell us how to formulate immigration policy or how much money to send to Ukraine. But it does condemn dishonesty, it does condemn cruelty, and if there is a clear theme that echoes throughout its pages, it’s one that Mike Johnson and his legion of evangelical supporters should take to heart: The ends do not justify the means.
Tuesday, November 7
No Discussion Group
No Discussion Group on October 7th.
Here are some links to articles regarding last week's discussion:
During our combined discussion this past Tuesday, Rick brought up the concept of "moral injury". He sent me a link to share with you about it.
Moral Injury: An Increasingly Recognized and Widespread Syndrome
Likewise, Kevin Madden sent me a link that showed the MAID increase in Canada.
Euthanasia Deaths in Canada since 2022
Here are some links to articles regarding last week's discussion:
During our combined discussion this past Tuesday, Rick brought up the concept of "moral injury". He sent me a link to share with you about it.
Moral Injury: An Increasingly Recognized and Widespread Syndrome
Likewise, Kevin Madden sent me a link that showed the MAID increase in Canada.
Euthanasia Deaths in Canada since 2022
Tuesday, October 31
Combined Men's and Women's Discussion Group
The topic for Tuesday is about what the author calls medical assisted death. This is a heavy topic. The discussion will be a little longer this time because of the topic and the combined groups.
Medical Assistance in Dying is Not Medicine
Alexander Raikin, The National Review 9.14.23
‘Next question is from Debbie,” the moderator of a discussion on medical decision-making capacity said to her fellow physicians. “How would folks interpret someone who has lost capacity with a waiver in place and is now delirious, shouting, pulling their arm away as one tries to insert the IV to provide MAID?”
Preceding this panel, a training seminar for the Canadian Association of MAID Assessors and Providers (CAMAP) had informed participants that the criminal law on medical assistance in dying (MAID) is strict. How strict? On the same day that a patient enters into an optional written agreement with only one of his or her two MAID assessors — even if it is unsigned, without any witnesses, and with no family members having been informed — the clinician can administer the lethal injection without asking for the final consent of the patient.
The asterisk in the law is that the agreement is in place only as long as the patient “does not demonstrate, by words, sounds or gestures, refusal,” or “resistance to its administration.” If this demonstration is “involuntary” and “made in response to contact,” the death of the patient may still proceed. But consent is a spectrum, and patients with delirium can flicker between having capacity and not; patients can also change their minds about dying at the hands of their physician or nurse.
The hypothetical question posed to the panel was, in effect, whether there is a loophole to get around the criminal law. The moderator, Ellen Wiebe, is one of Canada’s most prolific “MAID providers” and a leader in the MAID community. On request, she has hastened the deaths of at least 400 people, including some cases that other assessors believed were illegal. She offered an answer: “I’m guessing I would bring in one of their other providers, you know, palliative care or, or whatever, and get them sedated. But what would you say?”
First to speak was Jim MacLean, who claims that he has performed more than 75 “provisions” since MAID expanded to include non-dying patients. “I don’t think I have any great thoughts on this one.” Wiebe laughed. “Everyone’s different. I mean, you try to deal with the situation. Calm the room down. See what you can achieve through conversation and calmness.”
Chantal Perrot is the co-chairman of a clinician advisory council for Canada’s largest pro-MAID lobby group. She described herself to a parliamentary committee as someone who has “cared for hundreds of patients . . . as they navigated the MAID process.” Responding to Wiebe, she said, “That’s a question. If they’re sedated, then have we sedated them into being accepting of MAID? You know, that’s a whole other question.”
Then comes the ethicist’s turn to speak. Kevin Reel, a senior ethicist at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto and former president of the Canadian Bioethics Society, answers in part with another question: “If what we’re doing by trying to honor the waiver is reducing distress for the patient and also for maybe even the family around them, would it be acceptable to do something similarly covert to keep them from reacting in that way?”
Reel continues, “That might be a way around it, but — ” before being interrupted by MacLean, whose new answer takes the question from the hypothetical to the actual and clarifies what he meant by “conversation and calmness”: “One waiver I did use, the patient was a little agitated.
So we did give her some subcutaneous hydromorphone” — an opiate ordinarily used for acute-pain control instead of sedation — “before I did the MAID, did the provision. So we did, we did use it in that situation and it was very helpful.”
“Good,” the moderator says, before moving on to the next question. No one in the panel or audience objects. The training seminar, recorded in October 2021, marks a milestone in Canada: a documented case of physicians describing the sedation of a patient to obtain her consent to her death. CAMAP, the self-styled “clinical subject-matter experts on MAID in CANADA,” is in the process of releasing the nationwide training curriculum, funded by the federal government in the amount of $3.3 million, for all MAID clinicians. The first rule of medicine is to do no harm. The second rule in countries that have legalized death care is that the first rule doesn’t matter anymore.
The introduction of death care — in each state of Australia; in Canada, Belgium, and the Netherlands; recently in Spain and soon in France; and in ten states and counting across the United States — was meant to provide another treatment option in end-of-life care, another tool for use by physicians and their patients. At the core of death care is the presumption that safeguards work and that consent, the most important safeguard, prevents death care from slipping into rampant homicide or suicide contagion. Instead, it is turning into the end of medicine.
In Belgium last year, after a lethal injection failed to kill a 36-year-old woman with terminal cancer, the presiding physician smothered her with a pillow. In New Zealand and Canada, suicidal patients seeking medical care for suicide prevention were prompted to consider assisted suicide instead.
In the Netherlands, a similar story of a physician sedating her patient into accepting euthanasia led to the first criminal trial of a euthanasia physician. She was acquitted. The judges said, “We believe that given the deeply demented condition of the patient the doctor did not need to verify her wish for euthanasia,” even though the patient repeatedly attempted to fight off her physician.
I have written previously about how a failed suicide attempt in Canada was completed through euthanasia, despite concerns of illegality by physicians involved with CAMAP, an organization that has held internal seminars on patients requesting euthanasia because of poverty, lack of medical care, homelessness, and credit-card debt.
Across jurisdictions that legalized death care, often what started as a choice is now the first or even the only option left. “We’re now no longer dealing with an exceptional treatment, but a treatment that is very frequent,” Michel Bureau told the Canadian Press news agency this summer.
Elsewhere, in every jurisdiction, the number of deaths at the hands of physicians or nurses is ballooning as safeguards are rescinded. Nearly a decade ago, the rapid increase of hastened deaths led a Dutch regulator in charge of oversight to plead for other countries to drop their plans for legalization. Too few listened. In California, the number of assisted suicides last year increased by more than 63 percent. In Canada, the number of deaths by euthanasia is on track to increase more than 13-fold in just the first seven years of the practice’s legalization. Belgium has seen a more than twelvefold increase since 2003. In Switzerland, which legalized assisted suicide in 1941, the number of such suicides has doubled every five years since 1999.
Patients with medical conditions that politicians and policy-makers in health care never considered to be valid reasons to die are now being helped by physicians willing to hasten their deaths. A sibling found out that his brother’s MAID paperwork in British Columbia listed only “hearing loss” as his qualifying condition. In the Netherlands, dozens of patients qualified for euthanasia only because of autism. In Canada, “advanced age” helps qualify patients to die, even though Quebec cautions that to rely on it as the sole criterion is illegal. Young patients have died through euthanasia in Belgium for a range of reasons, including a botched sex change, sexual exploitation by a psychiatrist, unresolved post-traumatic stress disorder after a terrorist attack,
and again, this time in twins, hearing loss.
The patients I spoke with are equally unsure of their future, whether they will live or die in a medicalized world that asks them — and only them because of their illnesses or disabilities — to consider their lives not worth living. None of them has a terminal illness. They tell me that they want to live, but they feel they might not get the chance. One person I interviewed, who recently applied for MAID, said in a social-media post, “If I don’t make it, be sure to say I was murdered, because I didn’t give up, I was pushed.”
[Australia is taking over religious hospitals] Let me begin with Father Tony Percy. “I have been running the charge against the government,” he told me, by way of introducing himself. What happened, he says, is “a smash-and-grab.” Over the summer, the government forcibly nationalized a Catholic hospital. On Sunday morning, at Mass time, workers entered the hospital to remove all Christian iconography before the “government . . . could trash them,” he said. The statue of Mary, staff memorial stones, the iconic blue cross on top of the façade, and every crucifix left in the building were taken down. The local archbishop decried these actions as “totalitarian,” but international media largely ignored him. This scene was not in China, not in a dictatorship. Rather, it was at Calvary Public Hospital in Canberra.
The reason for this move, as given by the left-leaning government of the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), was to improve “ambiguities in clinical governance.” That flatly makes no sense. The secular public hospital that replaced Calvary is one of the most dysfunctional hospitals in Australia, with rampant complaints of bullying and allegations of misconduct. The ACT government moved at breakneck speed to take over the hospital. In a matter of weeks, ACT legislators overwrote their own legislation to let them break the hospital’s contract, which had 76 years remaining. Two former prime ministers, Tony Abbott and John Howard, condemned the ACT’s actions.
CAMAP’s strategy has already succeeded. In 2017, Vancouver Island used to have a Catholic hospital and four hospice beds. But as a consequence of a public campaign by death-care advocates, there are no remaining “MAID-free” spaces on the island. Now it has the world’s highest rate of euthanasia: Over 7.5 percent of all deaths are from MAID — and that number is rising.
Without spaces to practice medicine free from death care, physicians have no adequate protections to follow their conscience and their faith. “I know I actually can’t kill someone,” Helen Lord, one of the nine palliative specialists in Tasmania, told me. “I can’t do it.” Once death care was legalized in her state, she decided to retire early. “I said I’m not going to have any part of this. It’s not medicine. It’s just not what we do. . . . Half of the people who came into [my] palliative care were scared that they were going to be euthanized.”
When Lord became outspoken against euthanasia, she was demonized as a “right-wing Evangelical.” She’s not. She’s Anglican — and closer to the left. But because she thinks that “life is precious” and equally that “time is precious,” especially for the dying, she was a frequent target of the media. After a complaint that she claims was false was lodged against her, she knew her time was up.
In the first story that I wrote about death care, “No Other Options,” published in the New Atlantis, I wrote about Rosina Kamis, a 41-year-old Toronto woman with fibromyalgia. She chose to die from MAID in part because of her inability to access proper medical care. Before she died, she entrusted her friend James, a former neighbor, to represent her as her power of medical attorney; since her physicians weren’t listening to her, she wanted to see if someone else who has fibromyalgia, as James does, could get her the medical care that she needed. Despite his efforts, James couldn’t help her — and now, after her death, he can’t get the help that he needs. He messaged me months after our first conversation to tell me that he now sees his own future in what happened to Rosina.
James told me that he is living with the specter of an imminent administered death, like Rosina’s. He could decide to stop fighting for the care he needs, too. It seems inevitable. “I’m going to take it one day. That’s how it feels to me. I don’t like that, but to me, the way things are going, this society is really sending us disabled people a message,” James said. “We got that message even before MAID. But now it’s codified into law and there’s these processes and resources to expedite it.”
“I have diagnosed mental-health conditions and I can’t get treatment. I need therapy. My doctor asked me the other day, What do I need? I need therapy. I need a long-term relationship with someone. And she told me, she said, That’s impossible.” Instead, he was sent YouTube videos on how to do stretches. He chuckles. “I need actual health care,” James said. Eventually, he tells me, he’ll get death care instead.
Medical Assistance in Dying is Not Medicine
Alexander Raikin, The National Review 9.14.23
‘Next question is from Debbie,” the moderator of a discussion on medical decision-making capacity said to her fellow physicians. “How would folks interpret someone who has lost capacity with a waiver in place and is now delirious, shouting, pulling their arm away as one tries to insert the IV to provide MAID?”
Preceding this panel, a training seminar for the Canadian Association of MAID Assessors and Providers (CAMAP) had informed participants that the criminal law on medical assistance in dying (MAID) is strict. How strict? On the same day that a patient enters into an optional written agreement with only one of his or her two MAID assessors — even if it is unsigned, without any witnesses, and with no family members having been informed — the clinician can administer the lethal injection without asking for the final consent of the patient.
The asterisk in the law is that the agreement is in place only as long as the patient “does not demonstrate, by words, sounds or gestures, refusal,” or “resistance to its administration.” If this demonstration is “involuntary” and “made in response to contact,” the death of the patient may still proceed. But consent is a spectrum, and patients with delirium can flicker between having capacity and not; patients can also change their minds about dying at the hands of their physician or nurse.
The hypothetical question posed to the panel was, in effect, whether there is a loophole to get around the criminal law. The moderator, Ellen Wiebe, is one of Canada’s most prolific “MAID providers” and a leader in the MAID community. On request, she has hastened the deaths of at least 400 people, including some cases that other assessors believed were illegal. She offered an answer: “I’m guessing I would bring in one of their other providers, you know, palliative care or, or whatever, and get them sedated. But what would you say?”
First to speak was Jim MacLean, who claims that he has performed more than 75 “provisions” since MAID expanded to include non-dying patients. “I don’t think I have any great thoughts on this one.” Wiebe laughed. “Everyone’s different. I mean, you try to deal with the situation. Calm the room down. See what you can achieve through conversation and calmness.”
Chantal Perrot is the co-chairman of a clinician advisory council for Canada’s largest pro-MAID lobby group. She described herself to a parliamentary committee as someone who has “cared for hundreds of patients . . . as they navigated the MAID process.” Responding to Wiebe, she said, “That’s a question. If they’re sedated, then have we sedated them into being accepting of MAID? You know, that’s a whole other question.”
Then comes the ethicist’s turn to speak. Kevin Reel, a senior ethicist at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto and former president of the Canadian Bioethics Society, answers in part with another question: “If what we’re doing by trying to honor the waiver is reducing distress for the patient and also for maybe even the family around them, would it be acceptable to do something similarly covert to keep them from reacting in that way?”
Reel continues, “That might be a way around it, but — ” before being interrupted by MacLean, whose new answer takes the question from the hypothetical to the actual and clarifies what he meant by “conversation and calmness”: “One waiver I did use, the patient was a little agitated.
So we did give her some subcutaneous hydromorphone” — an opiate ordinarily used for acute-pain control instead of sedation — “before I did the MAID, did the provision. So we did, we did use it in that situation and it was very helpful.”
“Good,” the moderator says, before moving on to the next question. No one in the panel or audience objects. The training seminar, recorded in October 2021, marks a milestone in Canada: a documented case of physicians describing the sedation of a patient to obtain her consent to her death. CAMAP, the self-styled “clinical subject-matter experts on MAID in CANADA,” is in the process of releasing the nationwide training curriculum, funded by the federal government in the amount of $3.3 million, for all MAID clinicians. The first rule of medicine is to do no harm. The second rule in countries that have legalized death care is that the first rule doesn’t matter anymore.
The introduction of death care — in each state of Australia; in Canada, Belgium, and the Netherlands; recently in Spain and soon in France; and in ten states and counting across the United States — was meant to provide another treatment option in end-of-life care, another tool for use by physicians and their patients. At the core of death care is the presumption that safeguards work and that consent, the most important safeguard, prevents death care from slipping into rampant homicide or suicide contagion. Instead, it is turning into the end of medicine.
In Belgium last year, after a lethal injection failed to kill a 36-year-old woman with terminal cancer, the presiding physician smothered her with a pillow. In New Zealand and Canada, suicidal patients seeking medical care for suicide prevention were prompted to consider assisted suicide instead.
In the Netherlands, a similar story of a physician sedating her patient into accepting euthanasia led to the first criminal trial of a euthanasia physician. She was acquitted. The judges said, “We believe that given the deeply demented condition of the patient the doctor did not need to verify her wish for euthanasia,” even though the patient repeatedly attempted to fight off her physician.
I have written previously about how a failed suicide attempt in Canada was completed through euthanasia, despite concerns of illegality by physicians involved with CAMAP, an organization that has held internal seminars on patients requesting euthanasia because of poverty, lack of medical care, homelessness, and credit-card debt.
Across jurisdictions that legalized death care, often what started as a choice is now the first or even the only option left. “We’re now no longer dealing with an exceptional treatment, but a treatment that is very frequent,” Michel Bureau told the Canadian Press news agency this summer.
Elsewhere, in every jurisdiction, the number of deaths at the hands of physicians or nurses is ballooning as safeguards are rescinded. Nearly a decade ago, the rapid increase of hastened deaths led a Dutch regulator in charge of oversight to plead for other countries to drop their plans for legalization. Too few listened. In California, the number of assisted suicides last year increased by more than 63 percent. In Canada, the number of deaths by euthanasia is on track to increase more than 13-fold in just the first seven years of the practice’s legalization. Belgium has seen a more than twelvefold increase since 2003. In Switzerland, which legalized assisted suicide in 1941, the number of such suicides has doubled every five years since 1999.
Patients with medical conditions that politicians and policy-makers in health care never considered to be valid reasons to die are now being helped by physicians willing to hasten their deaths. A sibling found out that his brother’s MAID paperwork in British Columbia listed only “hearing loss” as his qualifying condition. In the Netherlands, dozens of patients qualified for euthanasia only because of autism. In Canada, “advanced age” helps qualify patients to die, even though Quebec cautions that to rely on it as the sole criterion is illegal. Young patients have died through euthanasia in Belgium for a range of reasons, including a botched sex change, sexual exploitation by a psychiatrist, unresolved post-traumatic stress disorder after a terrorist attack,
and again, this time in twins, hearing loss.
The patients I spoke with are equally unsure of their future, whether they will live or die in a medicalized world that asks them — and only them because of their illnesses or disabilities — to consider their lives not worth living. None of them has a terminal illness. They tell me that they want to live, but they feel they might not get the chance. One person I interviewed, who recently applied for MAID, said in a social-media post, “If I don’t make it, be sure to say I was murdered, because I didn’t give up, I was pushed.”
[Australia is taking over religious hospitals] Let me begin with Father Tony Percy. “I have been running the charge against the government,” he told me, by way of introducing himself. What happened, he says, is “a smash-and-grab.” Over the summer, the government forcibly nationalized a Catholic hospital. On Sunday morning, at Mass time, workers entered the hospital to remove all Christian iconography before the “government . . . could trash them,” he said. The statue of Mary, staff memorial stones, the iconic blue cross on top of the façade, and every crucifix left in the building were taken down. The local archbishop decried these actions as “totalitarian,” but international media largely ignored him. This scene was not in China, not in a dictatorship. Rather, it was at Calvary Public Hospital in Canberra.
The reason for this move, as given by the left-leaning government of the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), was to improve “ambiguities in clinical governance.” That flatly makes no sense. The secular public hospital that replaced Calvary is one of the most dysfunctional hospitals in Australia, with rampant complaints of bullying and allegations of misconduct. The ACT government moved at breakneck speed to take over the hospital. In a matter of weeks, ACT legislators overwrote their own legislation to let them break the hospital’s contract, which had 76 years remaining. Two former prime ministers, Tony Abbott and John Howard, condemned the ACT’s actions.
CAMAP’s strategy has already succeeded. In 2017, Vancouver Island used to have a Catholic hospital and four hospice beds. But as a consequence of a public campaign by death-care advocates, there are no remaining “MAID-free” spaces on the island. Now it has the world’s highest rate of euthanasia: Over 7.5 percent of all deaths are from MAID — and that number is rising.
Without spaces to practice medicine free from death care, physicians have no adequate protections to follow their conscience and their faith. “I know I actually can’t kill someone,” Helen Lord, one of the nine palliative specialists in Tasmania, told me. “I can’t do it.” Once death care was legalized in her state, she decided to retire early. “I said I’m not going to have any part of this. It’s not medicine. It’s just not what we do. . . . Half of the people who came into [my] palliative care were scared that they were going to be euthanized.”
When Lord became outspoken against euthanasia, she was demonized as a “right-wing Evangelical.” She’s not. She’s Anglican — and closer to the left. But because she thinks that “life is precious” and equally that “time is precious,” especially for the dying, she was a frequent target of the media. After a complaint that she claims was false was lodged against her, she knew her time was up.
In the first story that I wrote about death care, “No Other Options,” published in the New Atlantis, I wrote about Rosina Kamis, a 41-year-old Toronto woman with fibromyalgia. She chose to die from MAID in part because of her inability to access proper medical care. Before she died, she entrusted her friend James, a former neighbor, to represent her as her power of medical attorney; since her physicians weren’t listening to her, she wanted to see if someone else who has fibromyalgia, as James does, could get her the medical care that she needed. Despite his efforts, James couldn’t help her — and now, after her death, he can’t get the help that he needs. He messaged me months after our first conversation to tell me that he now sees his own future in what happened to Rosina.
James told me that he is living with the specter of an imminent administered death, like Rosina’s. He could decide to stop fighting for the care he needs, too. It seems inevitable. “I’m going to take it one day. That’s how it feels to me. I don’t like that, but to me, the way things are going, this society is really sending us disabled people a message,” James said. “We got that message even before MAID. But now it’s codified into law and there’s these processes and resources to expedite it.”
“I have diagnosed mental-health conditions and I can’t get treatment. I need therapy. My doctor asked me the other day, What do I need? I need therapy. I need a long-term relationship with someone. And she told me, she said, That’s impossible.” Instead, he was sent YouTube videos on how to do stretches. He chuckles. “I need actual health care,” James said. Eventually, he tells me, he’ll get death care instead.
Tuesday, October 24
This is a short article, but do not judge it by its length. The author asks that we examine closely what it means that Jesus did not have a Roman coin and had to ask to see one (to which he said, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's). Is it a simple category - what belongs to the State and what belongs to God? Or, is it messier than that? What does it mean to live faithfully in our present day governmental, economic and social system and try to follow God? Can it be done? Or, should we, like Jesus, carry no secular identity on ourselves. (Or, is it as simple as the Franciscan's would point out that Jesus lived a life of poverty so of course he didn't have a coin). I'd like to know what you think.
The Absence of a Coin in Jesus’ Hand
Kerry Hasler-Brooks, The Christian Century 10.16.23
Kerry Hasler-Brooks is associate professor of English at Messiah University in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. She attends a Mennonite church. Here is how the Mennonite tradition understands their commitment to following the way of Jesus Christ: Following Jesus in daily life is a central value. It is possible to follow Jesus as Lord above nationalism, racism or materialism and as a peacemaker. They believe one can follow the way of Jesus’ reconciling love in human conflicts and warfare without having to strike out in fear.
The Pharisees said to Jesus, “Does the Law allow people to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” Jesus replied, “Show me the coin used to pay the tax.” And they brought him a denarion. Jesus asked, “Whose image and inscription is this?” “Caesar’s,” they replied. Then he said, “Give to Caesar what
belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.” (based on Matthew 22:15-22)
In my journey as a follower of Jesus, I have moved through and been shaped by very different Christian communities. These differences have been theological, geographical, socioeconomic, racial, and cultural. I was raised in a small Presbyterian church in New Hampshire; I was educated at a Baptist high school and a Brethren in Christ college; as a young adult, I matured in a Christian Reformed Church in North Philadelphia; and I am now an active member in a 300-year-old Mennonite faith community.
My reading of scripture today is informed by each of these communities and their theological convictions, even those that I no longer hold or never held myself. I read scripture mindful of the very different ways people of faith engage, understand, interpret, and live out the sacred text. There is tension and disagreement in these differences, but there is also, for me, a keen sense of the need to read in community, to read with an openness to the fullness of possible meanings, a humility about our own understanding, a wisdom about the cultural biases or blind spots that we all have, and a commitment to the truth. Matthew 22 is precisely this kind of passage. It contains some of Jesus’ most well-known, quoted, and debated words: “Give back to Caesar what is
Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”
I recall long-ago sermons on this passage, if not the precise language, then at least the way they felt to me. While seemingly about taxes, something I understood little and cared about even less, I understood Jesus’ words to offer a broad framework to navigate the material and the eternal, the sociopolitical and the spiritual, the nation and the church. This passage is linked, for me, with the morning liturgy in my childhood school, an affiliate of the Baptist church in town. Each morning students and staff recited three allegiances: to the American flag, the Christian flag, and the Bible. These symbols and my allegiances to them were both distinct and compatible. Like Jesus’ words, they were ordered into a tidy parallel structure of God on one side and nation or empire on the other, and I could navigate between them justly, living fully as loyal American and loyal Christian.
I now attend a flagless Mennonite church, and the simple parallel divide between God and empire has not held up in my intellectual logic, personal ethics, or lived practice of faith. As David Cramer writes, “We cannot simply line up two columns and make a checklist of things to give Caesar and things to give God. Our task is to discern together how to be faithful citizens in the culture and society in which we reside.” The task of discernment begins, I think, with the way we read the passage itself. How we read here — both Jesus’ words and his actions — determines how we live in response.
In the passage, Jesus stymies the Pharisees, cutting through the trap that has been set — “Is it right to pay the imperial tax to Caesar or not?”—with a seemingly diplomatic decree. But before coming to this conclusion, an apparently moderate in-between of an answer, Jesus makes a simple but telling request: “Show me the coin used for paying the tax.” Jesus himself does not seem to have a Roman coin on hand. As Stanley Hauerwas writes, “He does not carry the coin, quite possibly because the coin carries the image of Caesar.” Hauerwas and Cramer suggest that Jesus lived outside the economics of the empire even as those around him accepted it. So he has to ask someone for a coin to use as a prop.
When I read Matthew 22, a chorus of radically different voices are in my head. I have come to understand Jesus as a loud protester against unjust systems of power, a divine voice for lived peace and material justice making, a radical lover of people. I take seriously the absence of a denarius in Jesus’ own hand.
And yet, I also understand that many people read this passage very differently than I do. Some read it as a call into godly relationship with nation and empire, others as a call to speak and live against the corruptions of nation and empire. I am concerned with what is right and true about this passage, of course, but I am also concerned about the people who come to this passage. I think the important thing is to read this passage in community, open to the possibility of different meanings, humble about our own understanding and misunderstanding, and committed to do justice and love mercy as we follow both the words and the life of Jesus.
The Absence of a Coin in Jesus’ Hand
Kerry Hasler-Brooks, The Christian Century 10.16.23
Kerry Hasler-Brooks is associate professor of English at Messiah University in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. She attends a Mennonite church. Here is how the Mennonite tradition understands their commitment to following the way of Jesus Christ: Following Jesus in daily life is a central value. It is possible to follow Jesus as Lord above nationalism, racism or materialism and as a peacemaker. They believe one can follow the way of Jesus’ reconciling love in human conflicts and warfare without having to strike out in fear.
The Pharisees said to Jesus, “Does the Law allow people to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” Jesus replied, “Show me the coin used to pay the tax.” And they brought him a denarion. Jesus asked, “Whose image and inscription is this?” “Caesar’s,” they replied. Then he said, “Give to Caesar what
belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.” (based on Matthew 22:15-22)
In my journey as a follower of Jesus, I have moved through and been shaped by very different Christian communities. These differences have been theological, geographical, socioeconomic, racial, and cultural. I was raised in a small Presbyterian church in New Hampshire; I was educated at a Baptist high school and a Brethren in Christ college; as a young adult, I matured in a Christian Reformed Church in North Philadelphia; and I am now an active member in a 300-year-old Mennonite faith community.
My reading of scripture today is informed by each of these communities and their theological convictions, even those that I no longer hold or never held myself. I read scripture mindful of the very different ways people of faith engage, understand, interpret, and live out the sacred text. There is tension and disagreement in these differences, but there is also, for me, a keen sense of the need to read in community, to read with an openness to the fullness of possible meanings, a humility about our own understanding, a wisdom about the cultural biases or blind spots that we all have, and a commitment to the truth. Matthew 22 is precisely this kind of passage. It contains some of Jesus’ most well-known, quoted, and debated words: “Give back to Caesar what is
Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”
I recall long-ago sermons on this passage, if not the precise language, then at least the way they felt to me. While seemingly about taxes, something I understood little and cared about even less, I understood Jesus’ words to offer a broad framework to navigate the material and the eternal, the sociopolitical and the spiritual, the nation and the church. This passage is linked, for me, with the morning liturgy in my childhood school, an affiliate of the Baptist church in town. Each morning students and staff recited three allegiances: to the American flag, the Christian flag, and the Bible. These symbols and my allegiances to them were both distinct and compatible. Like Jesus’ words, they were ordered into a tidy parallel structure of God on one side and nation or empire on the other, and I could navigate between them justly, living fully as loyal American and loyal Christian.
I now attend a flagless Mennonite church, and the simple parallel divide between God and empire has not held up in my intellectual logic, personal ethics, or lived practice of faith. As David Cramer writes, “We cannot simply line up two columns and make a checklist of things to give Caesar and things to give God. Our task is to discern together how to be faithful citizens in the culture and society in which we reside.” The task of discernment begins, I think, with the way we read the passage itself. How we read here — both Jesus’ words and his actions — determines how we live in response.
In the passage, Jesus stymies the Pharisees, cutting through the trap that has been set — “Is it right to pay the imperial tax to Caesar or not?”—with a seemingly diplomatic decree. But before coming to this conclusion, an apparently moderate in-between of an answer, Jesus makes a simple but telling request: “Show me the coin used for paying the tax.” Jesus himself does not seem to have a Roman coin on hand. As Stanley Hauerwas writes, “He does not carry the coin, quite possibly because the coin carries the image of Caesar.” Hauerwas and Cramer suggest that Jesus lived outside the economics of the empire even as those around him accepted it. So he has to ask someone for a coin to use as a prop.
When I read Matthew 22, a chorus of radically different voices are in my head. I have come to understand Jesus as a loud protester against unjust systems of power, a divine voice for lived peace and material justice making, a radical lover of people. I take seriously the absence of a denarius in Jesus’ own hand.
And yet, I also understand that many people read this passage very differently than I do. Some read it as a call into godly relationship with nation and empire, others as a call to speak and live against the corruptions of nation and empire. I am concerned with what is right and true about this passage, of course, but I am also concerned about the people who come to this passage. I think the important thing is to read this passage in community, open to the possibility of different meanings, humble about our own understanding and misunderstanding, and committed to do justice and love mercy as we follow both the words and the life of Jesus.
Tuesday, October 17
Next week's reading is about the supposed ending of the Long Peace that existed after WWII when the U.S. was the only superpower in the world. We enjoyed a long period of peace that some historians feel may have now ended. One of those historians - Noah Smith - is our discussion group author for the week. Normally our articles come from mainstream sources; this one comes from Substack which is basically a newspaper of blog posts. However, it was quoted at length by an article in the NY Times. This article is more thought provoking than the Times article so we are going with it. I'd like to know what you think of the author's assertion and his analysis of where America is in standing with other nations of the world. Is it really "a new jungle out there where you'd better learn to grow new claws" or is it something we've all seen before?
The Death of Pax Americana
Noah Smith, Noahpinion on Substack 10.7.23
Noah Smith is an American journalist, and commentator on economics and current events. Smith obtained his doctorate in Economics from the University of Michigan in 2012 and was an assistant professor of Behavioral Finance at Stony Brook University.
Yesterday, Hamas launched a massive surprise attack on Israel, crossing the border from Gaza and seizing or assaulting towns nearby after a huge rocket bombardment. Scenes of Hamas soldiers taking Israeli captives into Gaza have proliferated across the internet. Israel has responded by declaring a state of war, and the fighting between the two sides promises to be more destructive and vicious than anything in recent memory.
As many have pointed out already, this attack is probably an attempt to disrupt the possibility of an Israel-Saudi peace deal, which the U.S. has been trying to facilitate. If Hamas succeeds in scuttling an Israel-Saudi deal, it will be a blow to U.S. prestige and to U.S. claims to be a stabilizing, peacemaking influence. But even if an Israel-Saudi deal eventually goes through, this attack is a demonstration of America’s decreasing ability to deter conflict throughout the world.
In recent weeks, Azerbaijan has moved to fully reclaim the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, sending 120,000 ethnic Armenians fleeing for their lives — a massive episode of ethnic cleansing. With Russian power waning, Armenia has tried to rapidly pivot to the U.S., but this was not sufficient to prevent Azerbaijan’s ethnic cleansing. Meanwhile, Serbia is building up troops on its border with Kosovo, whose independence has been in dispute since the U.S.
intervened against Serbia in the 1990s. The U.S. and some of its allies recognize Kosovo as independent from Serbia, but Serbia, Russia, China, and a few other European countries don’t.
These are just a few signs of an unraveling global order. Pax Americana is in an advanced state of decay, if not already fully dead. A fully multipolar world has emerged, and people are belatedly realizing that multipolarity involves quite a bit of chaos.
What was Pax Americana? After the end of the Cold War, deaths from interstate conflicts —countries going to war with each other, imperial conquest, and countries intervening in civil wars — declined dramatically. Civil wars without substantial foreign intervention are very common, but except for the occasional monster civil war in China or Russia, they don’t tend to kill many people; it’s when countries send their armies to fight beyond their borders that the big waves of destruction usually happen. And for almost 70 years after the end of World War 2, this happened less and less. Historians call this the Long Peace. The lowest level of interstate conflict came from 1989 through 2011, after the collapse of the USSR, when the U.S. became the world’s sole
superpower.
Political scientists and historians have many theories for why the Long Peace happened. Democratic peace theory says that countries fought less because their people brought their leaders under tighter control. Capitalist peace theory says that the spread of global trade and financial links made war less attractive economically; it’s also possible that rich countries are more materially satisfied and thus less likely to fight. The UN and other international
organizations may have also tamped down conflict.
But the simplest explanation for the Long Peace is that American power kept the peace. If countries sent their armies into other countries, there was always the looming possibility that America and its allies could intervene to stop them — as they did in the Korean War in 1950, the Gulf War of 1991, Bosnia in 1992 in Bosnia, Kosovo in 1999, and so on. Of course, it’s difficult to draw the line between interventions that prevent conflict and interventions that stir it up. Was the Vietnam War a U.S. attempt to halt a North Vietnamese takeover of South Vietnam, or was it the U.S. intervening in an internal South Vietnamese civil war? The answer depends on your point of view. But note that even the possibility of an intervention that ultimately makes a conflict worse can still serve as a deterrent.
The outbreak of interstate conflict in the late 60s and early 70s fits the Pax Americana theory quite well. The U.S. was absorbed with the war in Vietnam during those years, and thus had far fewer resources and attention available to intervene in other conflicts. The U.S. thus functioned as a global policeman. As long as the U.S. and its alliances were sitting there waiting to throw their weight into any interstate conflict, there was inherent risk involved in any sort of extraterritorial intervention.
Pax Americana died in stages over the last two decades; people have been writing about its death for a while now, and there were a number of factors that killed it. First there was the Iraq War, which was a clear-cut case of the U.S. starting a major international conflict rather than interceding to stop one. Saddam Hussein was brutal, but after his 1991 defeat he was only brutal within his borders. Yet he was attacked anyway; the U.S. behaved like a revisionist power at a time when it should have been guarding the status quo.
At the same time, the U.S. was becoming militarily weaker. The War on Terror reoriented the U.S. military toward counterinsurgency and away from defeating enemy armies. The defense-industrial base was allowed to wither — in 1995, the U.S. could produce about 30 times as many artillery shells as it can now, and China can produce about 200 times as many ships as the U.S.
This is a catastrophic loss of hard power, and it means that even a modest diversion of U.S. military resources (like the Ukraine War) can largely remove the threat of U.S. intervention elsewhere.
Finally, a new great-power coalition arose that was capable of matching or exceeding U.S. power. China’s massive growth has given it a manufacturing capacity as great as the entire West combined, meaning that even if we could fix the problems with our defense-industrial base, we’d be outmatched in a protracted one-on-one fight.
Real or potential conflict with this New Axis, as I’ve been calling it, now basically absorbs all the military attention of the U.S. and its allies. The Ukraine War is tying down almost all of Europe’s military potential and diverting some U.S. resources as well. The threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is so huge and catastrophic that it will absorb all of the American military attention and resources that aren’t going to Ukraine — and even that may not be enough to win.
Thus, it’s little surprise that the threat of interstate conflict is starting to reemerge in Europe and the surrounding regions. The world is a more ungoverned, lawless place than it was 20, or even 10 years ago. I think Zheng Yongnian of the Chinese University of Hong Kong put it best last year: “The old order is swiftly disintegrating, and strongman politics is again ascendant among the world’s great powers. Countries are brimming with ambition, like tigers eyeing their prey, keen to find every opportunity among the ruins of the old order.”
Like tigers eyeing their prey. The world is starting to revert into a jungle, where the strong prey upon the weak, and where there is an associated requirement that every country build up its own strength; if your neighbor is a tiger, you should probably grow some claws of your own. Old scores that had to wait can now be settled. Disputed bits of territory can now be retaken. Natural resources can now be seized. There are many reasons for countries to fight each other, and now one of the biggest reasons not to fight – Pax Americana – has been removed. (This doesn’t mean I’m predicting a return to the levels of interstate conflict that prevailed before 1945; democratic peace, capitalist peace, low fertility rates, and other factors will still presumably get a say. But one of the major barriers is now gone.)
Right now, Europe, the Middle East, and the Russian periphery are the locus of conflict. But the biggest danger may be in Asia, which is engaging in an unprecedented arms race. Despite Putin’s aggression, it’s in Asia where the rise of China has disrupted the existing balance of power the most severely. Anyone who is under the illusion that Asia is inherently a more peaceful place than Europe or the Middle East should read some history from before 1980.
Pax Americana always had an expiration date. If the U.S. had avoided the Iraq War and maintained its defense-industrial base, it could have prolonged
its hegemony by about a decade, but ultimately the rising power of China would have ensured the return of the multipolarity that existed before
World War 2. In any case, it’s over now, and until and unless a new dominant global coalition of nation-states can be forged — either a Chinese-led global order or some kind of expanded democratic hegemony that includes India and large other developing nations —we’re going to have to re-learn how to live in the jungle.
Over the past two decades it had become fashionable to lambast American supremacy, to speak derisively of “American exceptionalism”, to ridicule America’s self-arrogated function of “world police”, and to yearn for a multipolar world. Well, congratulations, now we have that world. See if you like
it better.
The Death of Pax Americana
Noah Smith, Noahpinion on Substack 10.7.23
Noah Smith is an American journalist, and commentator on economics and current events. Smith obtained his doctorate in Economics from the University of Michigan in 2012 and was an assistant professor of Behavioral Finance at Stony Brook University.
Yesterday, Hamas launched a massive surprise attack on Israel, crossing the border from Gaza and seizing or assaulting towns nearby after a huge rocket bombardment. Scenes of Hamas soldiers taking Israeli captives into Gaza have proliferated across the internet. Israel has responded by declaring a state of war, and the fighting between the two sides promises to be more destructive and vicious than anything in recent memory.
As many have pointed out already, this attack is probably an attempt to disrupt the possibility of an Israel-Saudi peace deal, which the U.S. has been trying to facilitate. If Hamas succeeds in scuttling an Israel-Saudi deal, it will be a blow to U.S. prestige and to U.S. claims to be a stabilizing, peacemaking influence. But even if an Israel-Saudi deal eventually goes through, this attack is a demonstration of America’s decreasing ability to deter conflict throughout the world.
In recent weeks, Azerbaijan has moved to fully reclaim the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, sending 120,000 ethnic Armenians fleeing for their lives — a massive episode of ethnic cleansing. With Russian power waning, Armenia has tried to rapidly pivot to the U.S., but this was not sufficient to prevent Azerbaijan’s ethnic cleansing. Meanwhile, Serbia is building up troops on its border with Kosovo, whose independence has been in dispute since the U.S.
intervened against Serbia in the 1990s. The U.S. and some of its allies recognize Kosovo as independent from Serbia, but Serbia, Russia, China, and a few other European countries don’t.
These are just a few signs of an unraveling global order. Pax Americana is in an advanced state of decay, if not already fully dead. A fully multipolar world has emerged, and people are belatedly realizing that multipolarity involves quite a bit of chaos.
What was Pax Americana? After the end of the Cold War, deaths from interstate conflicts —countries going to war with each other, imperial conquest, and countries intervening in civil wars — declined dramatically. Civil wars without substantial foreign intervention are very common, but except for the occasional monster civil war in China or Russia, they don’t tend to kill many people; it’s when countries send their armies to fight beyond their borders that the big waves of destruction usually happen. And for almost 70 years after the end of World War 2, this happened less and less. Historians call this the Long Peace. The lowest level of interstate conflict came from 1989 through 2011, after the collapse of the USSR, when the U.S. became the world’s sole
superpower.
Political scientists and historians have many theories for why the Long Peace happened. Democratic peace theory says that countries fought less because their people brought their leaders under tighter control. Capitalist peace theory says that the spread of global trade and financial links made war less attractive economically; it’s also possible that rich countries are more materially satisfied and thus less likely to fight. The UN and other international
organizations may have also tamped down conflict.
But the simplest explanation for the Long Peace is that American power kept the peace. If countries sent their armies into other countries, there was always the looming possibility that America and its allies could intervene to stop them — as they did in the Korean War in 1950, the Gulf War of 1991, Bosnia in 1992 in Bosnia, Kosovo in 1999, and so on. Of course, it’s difficult to draw the line between interventions that prevent conflict and interventions that stir it up. Was the Vietnam War a U.S. attempt to halt a North Vietnamese takeover of South Vietnam, or was it the U.S. intervening in an internal South Vietnamese civil war? The answer depends on your point of view. But note that even the possibility of an intervention that ultimately makes a conflict worse can still serve as a deterrent.
The outbreak of interstate conflict in the late 60s and early 70s fits the Pax Americana theory quite well. The U.S. was absorbed with the war in Vietnam during those years, and thus had far fewer resources and attention available to intervene in other conflicts. The U.S. thus functioned as a global policeman. As long as the U.S. and its alliances were sitting there waiting to throw their weight into any interstate conflict, there was inherent risk involved in any sort of extraterritorial intervention.
Pax Americana died in stages over the last two decades; people have been writing about its death for a while now, and there were a number of factors that killed it. First there was the Iraq War, which was a clear-cut case of the U.S. starting a major international conflict rather than interceding to stop one. Saddam Hussein was brutal, but after his 1991 defeat he was only brutal within his borders. Yet he was attacked anyway; the U.S. behaved like a revisionist power at a time when it should have been guarding the status quo.
At the same time, the U.S. was becoming militarily weaker. The War on Terror reoriented the U.S. military toward counterinsurgency and away from defeating enemy armies. The defense-industrial base was allowed to wither — in 1995, the U.S. could produce about 30 times as many artillery shells as it can now, and China can produce about 200 times as many ships as the U.S.
This is a catastrophic loss of hard power, and it means that even a modest diversion of U.S. military resources (like the Ukraine War) can largely remove the threat of U.S. intervention elsewhere.
Finally, a new great-power coalition arose that was capable of matching or exceeding U.S. power. China’s massive growth has given it a manufacturing capacity as great as the entire West combined, meaning that even if we could fix the problems with our defense-industrial base, we’d be outmatched in a protracted one-on-one fight.
Real or potential conflict with this New Axis, as I’ve been calling it, now basically absorbs all the military attention of the U.S. and its allies. The Ukraine War is tying down almost all of Europe’s military potential and diverting some U.S. resources as well. The threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is so huge and catastrophic that it will absorb all of the American military attention and resources that aren’t going to Ukraine — and even that may not be enough to win.
Thus, it’s little surprise that the threat of interstate conflict is starting to reemerge in Europe and the surrounding regions. The world is a more ungoverned, lawless place than it was 20, or even 10 years ago. I think Zheng Yongnian of the Chinese University of Hong Kong put it best last year: “The old order is swiftly disintegrating, and strongman politics is again ascendant among the world’s great powers. Countries are brimming with ambition, like tigers eyeing their prey, keen to find every opportunity among the ruins of the old order.”
Like tigers eyeing their prey. The world is starting to revert into a jungle, where the strong prey upon the weak, and where there is an associated requirement that every country build up its own strength; if your neighbor is a tiger, you should probably grow some claws of your own. Old scores that had to wait can now be settled. Disputed bits of territory can now be retaken. Natural resources can now be seized. There are many reasons for countries to fight each other, and now one of the biggest reasons not to fight – Pax Americana – has been removed. (This doesn’t mean I’m predicting a return to the levels of interstate conflict that prevailed before 1945; democratic peace, capitalist peace, low fertility rates, and other factors will still presumably get a say. But one of the major barriers is now gone.)
Right now, Europe, the Middle East, and the Russian periphery are the locus of conflict. But the biggest danger may be in Asia, which is engaging in an unprecedented arms race. Despite Putin’s aggression, it’s in Asia where the rise of China has disrupted the existing balance of power the most severely. Anyone who is under the illusion that Asia is inherently a more peaceful place than Europe or the Middle East should read some history from before 1980.
Pax Americana always had an expiration date. If the U.S. had avoided the Iraq War and maintained its defense-industrial base, it could have prolonged
its hegemony by about a decade, but ultimately the rising power of China would have ensured the return of the multipolarity that existed before
World War 2. In any case, it’s over now, and until and unless a new dominant global coalition of nation-states can be forged — either a Chinese-led global order or some kind of expanded democratic hegemony that includes India and large other developing nations —we’re going to have to re-learn how to live in the jungle.
Over the past two decades it had become fashionable to lambast American supremacy, to speak derisively of “American exceptionalism”, to ridicule America’s self-arrogated function of “world police”, and to yearn for a multipolar world. Well, congratulations, now we have that world. See if you like
it better.
Tuesday, October 10
The reading this week - Of One Mind - highlights the Biblical emphasis of healthy relationships in community despite disagreements. The second page consists of three undiscussed points - fear, guilt and public opinion. What often holds us back from achieving healthy relationships has to do with our internalized errors that have to do with what we think others think about us, our own grief and fear. Do you agree with this, or disagree? I'd like to know what you think.
Of the Same Mind
Liz Cooledge Jenkins, Christian Century 9.23.23
In chapter 2 of the Letter to the Philippians, Paul takes an early church hymn extolling Christ and repurposes it as a set of instructions for healthy relationships in community. Paul urges his hearers toward an intense, intimate kind of unity: Make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind.
The Greek phrase rendered be of one mind could be translated more literally as think the same thing. Be like-minded. Be one in spirit. These are strong-sounding words — especially to those of us who are wary of authoritarian leadership, leery of what might sound like a push toward conformity. Are there healthy ways of being of the same mind?
The First Nations Version seems to have this meaning in mind when it renders 2:1–2 like this: As you walk the road with the Chosen One, have you gained from him courage for the journey? Have you found comfort in his love? Do you share together in his Spirit? Has his tenderness and mercy captured your heart? If so, then have the same kind of thoughts. Love with one heart. Join together in one Spirit. And walk side by side on one path. This will make my heart leap for joy.
The First Nations Version imagines Paul encouraging the Philippians believers not to conform to one particular way of seeing the world but rather to walk side by side. As they journey together, they are to have the same kinds of thoughts, perhaps, as Christ has: thoughts of courage, comfort, sharing. Thoughts of tenderness and mercy. Thoughts of love, connection, joy. Not the exact same beliefs about everything, but an unshakeable sense of shared life together along the way.
Researcher and storyteller Brené Brown, as she researched the idea of belonging, found that many people are experiencing a sense of spiritual disconnection — a diminishing sense of shared humanity. According to Brown, people deeply desire to be a part of something and to experience real connection with others but not at the cost of their authenticity, freedom, or power. Brown laments the loss of a spirit of saying, Yes, we are different in many ways, but under it all we’re deeply connected.
I think this is the kind of spirit Paul writes in. It’s a spirit that acknowledges all our many differences and does not downplay or deny them — and yet still wants us to think of one another with care and base our interactions on a deep sense of interconnectedness. In a community like this we are safe to reveal ourselves, secure to humble ourselves, inspired to consider others’ needs and not just our own. We are invited to pursue a kind of unity that does not require us to conform but draws out our uniqueness. We are grounded in Christ’s love and fellowship, rooted
in Christ’s example of how we might live.
Fear, Guilt, and Public Opinion from 8 Ways to Banish Misery
Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic 9.28.23
Error 5: Coping with fear
Clinical anxiety is one of the most common mental disorders today; according to the National Institute of Mental Health, nearly one-fifth of U.S. adults experienced an anxiety disorder in the past year. Russell believed that anxiety is rooted in fear of some danger which we are unwilling to face. Our understanding of the disorder today tends to be more biological than this; research shows that anxiety is associated with involuntary physical stress symptoms such as hyperarousal.
Whether we emphasize the biological or the psychological aspects of anxiety, Russell’s cure for it is that we name our fear and think about it rationally and calmly, but with great concentration, until it has been completely familiar. If we can succeed in doing this, then in the end familiarity will blunt its terrors. Another way of expressing this would be to recommend exposure therapy, which coaches patients to confront the source of their fears openly so that they start to feel less threatened.
Error 6: Senseless guilt
Russell was an avowed atheist who rarely missed a chance to point out what he saw as religion’s weaknesses — principal among them the sense of sin and unworthiness, arguing that this mislabeling of normal behaviors leads to unhappiness.
Whether or not you agree that religion is to blame (personally, I don’t), the more general point about guilt is a good one: It’s something we tend to experience when we feel undue privilege compared with others — a sort of inverse envy, you might say. One version of this is “survivor’s guilt,” which people experience when a misfortune that befalls others passes them by.
Implicitly, Russell urges us to set aside the stigma of unnecessary guilt. A good remedy for that is simple gratitude. Study after study has shown that gratitude can be practiced even when not felt, and reliably chases away the blues.
Error 8: Fear of public opinion
A senior citizen I know recently told me that she was much happier since getting older, for one big reason: She finally didn’t care what others thought of her. Russell put it another way: One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways. Easier said than done, of course — research shows that our pain over social exclusion affects us physically. For example, an episode of social rejection can stimulate the anterior cingulate cortex in much the same way that stubbing your toe does.
Russell’s implication that using reason is the right way to correct the problem now has research to back it up. That same study showed that the right ventral prefrontal cortex — a brain region used in conscious reasoning — also becomes active when social pain is encountered, and moderates our distress. Just as you can reason with yourself that a stubbed toe won’t kill you, you can also decide to disregard what others think.
Of the Same Mind
Liz Cooledge Jenkins, Christian Century 9.23.23
In chapter 2 of the Letter to the Philippians, Paul takes an early church hymn extolling Christ and repurposes it as a set of instructions for healthy relationships in community. Paul urges his hearers toward an intense, intimate kind of unity: Make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind.
The Greek phrase rendered be of one mind could be translated more literally as think the same thing. Be like-minded. Be one in spirit. These are strong-sounding words — especially to those of us who are wary of authoritarian leadership, leery of what might sound like a push toward conformity. Are there healthy ways of being of the same mind?
The First Nations Version seems to have this meaning in mind when it renders 2:1–2 like this: As you walk the road with the Chosen One, have you gained from him courage for the journey? Have you found comfort in his love? Do you share together in his Spirit? Has his tenderness and mercy captured your heart? If so, then have the same kind of thoughts. Love with one heart. Join together in one Spirit. And walk side by side on one path. This will make my heart leap for joy.
The First Nations Version imagines Paul encouraging the Philippians believers not to conform to one particular way of seeing the world but rather to walk side by side. As they journey together, they are to have the same kinds of thoughts, perhaps, as Christ has: thoughts of courage, comfort, sharing. Thoughts of tenderness and mercy. Thoughts of love, connection, joy. Not the exact same beliefs about everything, but an unshakeable sense of shared life together along the way.
Researcher and storyteller Brené Brown, as she researched the idea of belonging, found that many people are experiencing a sense of spiritual disconnection — a diminishing sense of shared humanity. According to Brown, people deeply desire to be a part of something and to experience real connection with others but not at the cost of their authenticity, freedom, or power. Brown laments the loss of a spirit of saying, Yes, we are different in many ways, but under it all we’re deeply connected.
I think this is the kind of spirit Paul writes in. It’s a spirit that acknowledges all our many differences and does not downplay or deny them — and yet still wants us to think of one another with care and base our interactions on a deep sense of interconnectedness. In a community like this we are safe to reveal ourselves, secure to humble ourselves, inspired to consider others’ needs and not just our own. We are invited to pursue a kind of unity that does not require us to conform but draws out our uniqueness. We are grounded in Christ’s love and fellowship, rooted
in Christ’s example of how we might live.
Fear, Guilt, and Public Opinion from 8 Ways to Banish Misery
Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic 9.28.23
Error 5: Coping with fear
Clinical anxiety is one of the most common mental disorders today; according to the National Institute of Mental Health, nearly one-fifth of U.S. adults experienced an anxiety disorder in the past year. Russell believed that anxiety is rooted in fear of some danger which we are unwilling to face. Our understanding of the disorder today tends to be more biological than this; research shows that anxiety is associated with involuntary physical stress symptoms such as hyperarousal.
Whether we emphasize the biological or the psychological aspects of anxiety, Russell’s cure for it is that we name our fear and think about it rationally and calmly, but with great concentration, until it has been completely familiar. If we can succeed in doing this, then in the end familiarity will blunt its terrors. Another way of expressing this would be to recommend exposure therapy, which coaches patients to confront the source of their fears openly so that they start to feel less threatened.
Error 6: Senseless guilt
Russell was an avowed atheist who rarely missed a chance to point out what he saw as religion’s weaknesses — principal among them the sense of sin and unworthiness, arguing that this mislabeling of normal behaviors leads to unhappiness.
Whether or not you agree that religion is to blame (personally, I don’t), the more general point about guilt is a good one: It’s something we tend to experience when we feel undue privilege compared with others — a sort of inverse envy, you might say. One version of this is “survivor’s guilt,” which people experience when a misfortune that befalls others passes them by.
Implicitly, Russell urges us to set aside the stigma of unnecessary guilt. A good remedy for that is simple gratitude. Study after study has shown that gratitude can be practiced even when not felt, and reliably chases away the blues.
Error 8: Fear of public opinion
A senior citizen I know recently told me that she was much happier since getting older, for one big reason: She finally didn’t care what others thought of her. Russell put it another way: One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways. Easier said than done, of course — research shows that our pain over social exclusion affects us physically. For example, an episode of social rejection can stimulate the anterior cingulate cortex in much the same way that stubbing your toe does.
Russell’s implication that using reason is the right way to correct the problem now has research to back it up. That same study showed that the right ventral prefrontal cortex — a brain region used in conscious reasoning — also becomes active when social pain is encountered, and moderates our distress. Just as you can reason with yourself that a stubbed toe won’t kill you, you can also decide to disregard what others think.
Tuesday, October 3
Is it better to banish misery or strive to be happy? Arthur Brooks tackles this subject (banishing misery/increasing happiness) in the attached article that concludes with a daily affirmation that may help you to do both.
As you can imagine, there is a spiritual aspect to this, especially banishing misery. I look forward to discussing it with you.
Eight Ways to Banish Misery
Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic 9.28.23
To achieve greater well-being, you have two tasks. The first is to increase your level of happiness; the second is to manage your unhappiness. You might have a pretty good idea of whether happiness or unhappiness presents the greater challenge in your life. One person who certainly did was the eminent 20th-century British thinker Bertrand Russell, who was not only a philosopher, mathematician, and logician but also a Nobel laureate in literature. “Throughout my childhood,” he wrote in his 1960s autobiography, “I had an increasing sense of loneliness, and of despair of ever meeting anyone with whom I could talk.” Russell’s misery proved to be the mother of invention, though: His greatest accomplishment was to help found the field of analytic
philosophy, by which he intended to take the discipline beyond academic chin-scratching and into the practical realm of solving life problems by breaking them down into manageable pieces.
Russell’s self-cure for unhappiness started with a very strong hypothesis, written in his aptly titled The Conquest of Happiness: Our misery comes from errors. “I believe unhappiness to be very largely due to mistaken views of the world, mistaken ethics, mistaken habits of life,” he wrote. From there, he broke down the problem into eight categories of common errors. The solution to unnecessary unhappiness, he proposed, was rectifying each one.
Error 1: Fashionable pessimism
Russell believed that people who considered themselves enlightened tended to be negative and pessimistic, and were actually proud of it. They were very focused on all that was wrong in the world, and believed “that there is nothing left to live for.” Russell mocks this pose as a pathetic conceit that should be abandoned. In case you worry that this means abandoning realism about the truth, researchers have shown that pessimism can distort one’s perception of reality.
Error 2: Social comparison
Russell rails against competition, noting that what most people fear is not falling into destitution but “that they will fail to outshine their neighbors.” The problem here is not that we are competitive per se, but that we assess our worth on the basis of what others have and do. As the old expression (sometimes attributed to Theodore Roosevelt) goes, “Comparison is the thief of joy.” Russell implies a solution: Instead of looking at what your neighbor has and feeling resentful, focus on what you have and feel grateful. Failure to do so leads to the next error.
Error 3: Envy
Envy describes the condition of being unhappy not because you have little but because someone else has more. Envy is entirely human but, left unchecked, is associated with depression, hostility, and shame. It is also ridiculous, especially when it is directed toward those whose achievements we admire. And therein lies Russell’s remedy: “Whoever wishes to increase human happiness must wish to increase admiration.” In other words, look for people who excel in ways you would like to, and crowd out resentment with frank appreciation.
Error 4: Evading boredom
“We are less bored than our ancestors were,” Russell wrote, “but we are more afraid of boredom,” which leads us to pursue more and more sources of distraction. If he lived in our time, of course, he might also note that researchers have found a significant increase in boredom among adolescents from 2008 to 2017—during the explosion of devices and social-media use. The solution we can infer from Russell lies not in more distraction but in less. We need to stop fearing boredom and be comfortable with what is going on around us, whether it’s exciting or not. This is an argument made eloquently by my colleague Ellen Langer, who defines mindfulness as the practice of actively noticing new things. You can do that only when you are not distracting yourself.
Error 5: Coping with fear
Clinical anxiety is one of the most common mental disorders today; according to the National Institute of Mental Health, nearly one-fifth of U.S. adults experienced an anxiety disorder in the past year. Russell believed that anxiety is rooted in fear of “some danger which we are unwilling to face.” Our understanding of the disorder today tends to be more biological than this; research shows that anxiety is associated with involuntary physical stress symptoms such as hyperarousal. Russell’s cure for it is that we name our fear and “think about it rationally and calmly, but with great concentration, until it has been completely familiar.” If we can succeed in doing this, then “in the end familiarity will blunt its terrors.”
Error 6: Senseless guilt
Russell was an avowed atheist who rarely missed a chance to point out what he saw as religion’s weaknesses—principal among them the sense of sin and unworthiness. Whether or not you agree that religion is to blame (personally, I don’t), the more general point about guilt is a good one: It’s something we tend to experience when we feel undue privilege compared with others—a sort of inverse envy, you might say. One version of this is “survivor’s guilt,” which people experience when a misfortune that befalls others passes them by. A good remedy for that is simple gratitude. Study after study has shown that gratitude can be practiced even when not felt, and reliably chases away the blues. This is also an effective response to the next error.
Error 7: Virtuous victimhood
Russell was critical of what he called “persecution mania,” in which one is “perpetually the victim of ingratitude, unkindness, and treachery.” One version of this is what some researchers have called “virtuous victimhood,” which they describe as claims of unjust treatment paired with assertions of moral standing. The point is not to deny that some people truly are the victims of abuse, but to suggest the risk of internalizing that harm in a defining way: When victimhood is fundamentally how you see yourself, Russell argues, that compounds unhappiness. To recognize injustice is right and proper, but resisting self-identifying for too long as a victim can be healthy.
Error 8: Fear of public opinion
A senior citizen I know recently told me that she was much happier since getting older, for one big reason: She finally didn’t care what others thought of her. Russell put it another way: “One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways.” Russell’s implication that using reason is the right way to correct the problem now has research to back it up. Just as you can reason with yourself that a stubbed toe won’t kill you, you can also decide to disregard what others think.
One way to apply his eight insights into common mistaken conceptions is to turn them into a set
of affirmations to start the day.
One of the most valuable aspects of Bertrand Russell’s logic is that he doesn’t suggest misery is in itself bad. No doubt he would have acknowledged that unhappiness is an appropriate response to many situations in life. As regular readers of this column will have heard from me before, negative feelings keep us alive and safe, and even enable us to learn and grow. What Russell is saying is that by correcting errors in our thinking, we can avoid unnecessary suffering.
As you can imagine, there is a spiritual aspect to this, especially banishing misery. I look forward to discussing it with you.
Eight Ways to Banish Misery
Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic 9.28.23
To achieve greater well-being, you have two tasks. The first is to increase your level of happiness; the second is to manage your unhappiness. You might have a pretty good idea of whether happiness or unhappiness presents the greater challenge in your life. One person who certainly did was the eminent 20th-century British thinker Bertrand Russell, who was not only a philosopher, mathematician, and logician but also a Nobel laureate in literature. “Throughout my childhood,” he wrote in his 1960s autobiography, “I had an increasing sense of loneliness, and of despair of ever meeting anyone with whom I could talk.” Russell’s misery proved to be the mother of invention, though: His greatest accomplishment was to help found the field of analytic
philosophy, by which he intended to take the discipline beyond academic chin-scratching and into the practical realm of solving life problems by breaking them down into manageable pieces.
Russell’s self-cure for unhappiness started with a very strong hypothesis, written in his aptly titled The Conquest of Happiness: Our misery comes from errors. “I believe unhappiness to be very largely due to mistaken views of the world, mistaken ethics, mistaken habits of life,” he wrote. From there, he broke down the problem into eight categories of common errors. The solution to unnecessary unhappiness, he proposed, was rectifying each one.
Error 1: Fashionable pessimism
Russell believed that people who considered themselves enlightened tended to be negative and pessimistic, and were actually proud of it. They were very focused on all that was wrong in the world, and believed “that there is nothing left to live for.” Russell mocks this pose as a pathetic conceit that should be abandoned. In case you worry that this means abandoning realism about the truth, researchers have shown that pessimism can distort one’s perception of reality.
Error 2: Social comparison
Russell rails against competition, noting that what most people fear is not falling into destitution but “that they will fail to outshine their neighbors.” The problem here is not that we are competitive per se, but that we assess our worth on the basis of what others have and do. As the old expression (sometimes attributed to Theodore Roosevelt) goes, “Comparison is the thief of joy.” Russell implies a solution: Instead of looking at what your neighbor has and feeling resentful, focus on what you have and feel grateful. Failure to do so leads to the next error.
Error 3: Envy
Envy describes the condition of being unhappy not because you have little but because someone else has more. Envy is entirely human but, left unchecked, is associated with depression, hostility, and shame. It is also ridiculous, especially when it is directed toward those whose achievements we admire. And therein lies Russell’s remedy: “Whoever wishes to increase human happiness must wish to increase admiration.” In other words, look for people who excel in ways you would like to, and crowd out resentment with frank appreciation.
Error 4: Evading boredom
“We are less bored than our ancestors were,” Russell wrote, “but we are more afraid of boredom,” which leads us to pursue more and more sources of distraction. If he lived in our time, of course, he might also note that researchers have found a significant increase in boredom among adolescents from 2008 to 2017—during the explosion of devices and social-media use. The solution we can infer from Russell lies not in more distraction but in less. We need to stop fearing boredom and be comfortable with what is going on around us, whether it’s exciting or not. This is an argument made eloquently by my colleague Ellen Langer, who defines mindfulness as the practice of actively noticing new things. You can do that only when you are not distracting yourself.
Error 5: Coping with fear
Clinical anxiety is one of the most common mental disorders today; according to the National Institute of Mental Health, nearly one-fifth of U.S. adults experienced an anxiety disorder in the past year. Russell believed that anxiety is rooted in fear of “some danger which we are unwilling to face.” Our understanding of the disorder today tends to be more biological than this; research shows that anxiety is associated with involuntary physical stress symptoms such as hyperarousal. Russell’s cure for it is that we name our fear and “think about it rationally and calmly, but with great concentration, until it has been completely familiar.” If we can succeed in doing this, then “in the end familiarity will blunt its terrors.”
Error 6: Senseless guilt
Russell was an avowed atheist who rarely missed a chance to point out what he saw as religion’s weaknesses—principal among them the sense of sin and unworthiness. Whether or not you agree that religion is to blame (personally, I don’t), the more general point about guilt is a good one: It’s something we tend to experience when we feel undue privilege compared with others—a sort of inverse envy, you might say. One version of this is “survivor’s guilt,” which people experience when a misfortune that befalls others passes them by. A good remedy for that is simple gratitude. Study after study has shown that gratitude can be practiced even when not felt, and reliably chases away the blues. This is also an effective response to the next error.
Error 7: Virtuous victimhood
Russell was critical of what he called “persecution mania,” in which one is “perpetually the victim of ingratitude, unkindness, and treachery.” One version of this is what some researchers have called “virtuous victimhood,” which they describe as claims of unjust treatment paired with assertions of moral standing. The point is not to deny that some people truly are the victims of abuse, but to suggest the risk of internalizing that harm in a defining way: When victimhood is fundamentally how you see yourself, Russell argues, that compounds unhappiness. To recognize injustice is right and proper, but resisting self-identifying for too long as a victim can be healthy.
Error 8: Fear of public opinion
A senior citizen I know recently told me that she was much happier since getting older, for one big reason: She finally didn’t care what others thought of her. Russell put it another way: “One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways.” Russell’s implication that using reason is the right way to correct the problem now has research to back it up. Just as you can reason with yourself that a stubbed toe won’t kill you, you can also decide to disregard what others think.
One way to apply his eight insights into common mistaken conceptions is to turn them into a set
of affirmations to start the day.
- Pessimism won’t make me cool or smart—just wrong and unhappy. I choose to be an optimistic realist.
- My self-worth cannot and will not be measured by what others have.
- I will look for people to admire, and my admiration will overcome my envy.
- Boredom is nothing to fear. I will not distract myself with mindless diversions from the business of living.
- I will name my fears. I will face them with courage and resolve.
- When good things happen, I won’t feel guilty. I will enjoy them and be grateful.
- Injustice is inevitable, but I will reject a permanent identity of the victim and resist grievance.
- The opinions of others—especially those of strangers, and especially about me—are meaningless, and I will disregard them.
One of the most valuable aspects of Bertrand Russell’s logic is that he doesn’t suggest misery is in itself bad. No doubt he would have acknowledged that unhappiness is an appropriate response to many situations in life. As regular readers of this column will have heard from me before, negative feelings keep us alive and safe, and even enable us to learn and grow. What Russell is saying is that by correcting errors in our thinking, we can avoid unnecessary suffering.
Tuesday, September 26
I'd like to introduce a word to you: "retcon". It is short for retroactive continuity. The television and movie series, Star Trek, has used "retcon" to rewrite the storyline of Captain James T. Kirk so that they could make new movies. Could retcon, however, be rewriting our own history? The author of the attached one-page editorial thinks so and warns us of it. I'd like to know what you think.
The second page of the article includes responses to the article.
Lastly, I'd like to talk about Scripture and if it has ever gone through retcon (and why I don't think it has).
America in the Age of Retcon
Lance Morrow, Wall Street Journal, 9.20.23
It was only two years ago that the term “retcon,” short for “retroactive continuity,” made it into the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Odd that it took so long: Retcon for some time has been the 21st century’s way of life. According to the dictionary, the word refers to “a literary device in which the form or content of a previously established narrative is changed.” It will help if you think of the 21st century as a comic book. Retcon retrofits the past plot to suit present purposes.
Retcon, in short, is an instrument for editing history to escape its inconvenient implications. It enables a “general disregard for reality,” allowing the writers to get rid of a plot line that has gotten boring or to bring back a character from the dead. Merriam-Webster cites an early example: Though Sherlock Holmes died at the Reichenbach Falls, the author, Arthur Conan Doyle, retroactively declared that his death had been staged.
Every presidential race involves a certain amount of this vaudeville. But retcon has come to have much broader application. It’s as if the 21st century itself came equipped with an enormous delete key, which, when you hit it, causes the former world to disappear. You may then fill up the empty screen with your own alternative reality.
The old binaries were, so to speak, Newtonian. The new categories have all the nuance and unknowability of quantum mechanics. The southern border is secure! It isn’t shoplifting, it’s social justice! America itself was formerly a good thing, more or less. “The last, best hope,” as Abraham Lincoln said. That was in the old dispensation. Retcon turns the narrative upside down.
Retcon is pretty sure that Lincoln was a racist and that the U.S. is, if not evil, then at the very least wicked to the core. American retcon in one of its moods is paranoid, or infested with nihilistic gloom. The old America was an evil dad and must be murdered. Thomas Jefferson is Darth Vader. The docents at Monticello now speak of him with distaste.
Soviets in the old days practiced brutal retcon. They purged their history books, causing ideologically inconvenient characters to disappear from the record. The ineffable Charles de Gaulle exercised his mystic retcon when he persuaded the French that they had been the heroes of their own liberation from German occupation. People need the consolation of their myths.
Such revision, quick as the click of a mouse, is the indispensable tool in politics, government, media, popular culture and historiography: a metaphysics of lies and half-truths, or, conversely, of bright new possibilities. Retcon is a reset artist. Whether it’s good or bad depends on your politics. Retcon is a monster and sometimes a creative genius.
Retcon asserts “my truth” and rejects, as necessary, natural law. When out of control, it results in a Tower of Babel — a dynamic of madhouse democracy, as the Founders feared. A fish rots from the head first, and so does a country. Under a regime of pervasive untruth, the leaders become worse than their followers. We’re getting there.
Responses to the article:
William Watson
I remember when the debate in historiography was between recognizing the acts of "great men" and focusing on broad economic and social forces. Now it seems the debate has shifted to whether historical figures should be judged by what they were or what they did. It seems likely that by a reasonable modern definition of racist, Lincoln was a racist, as were almost every white person in the US at the time. He was also a racist who organized winning the Civil War and personally took the first significant step toward the abolition of slavery in the US. Which is more important?
Donald Swanton
History, as someone put it, is the projection of the politics of the present onto the events of the past.
Raymond Unger
The retcon people forget one thing. Even in Russia, the people know the truth. We all know the that retcon is just BS. Those elite college professors think they're fooling us, but they're wrong. My grandchildren attended public schools and had to hear their trash and, to get a good grade, they pretended to accept it. But once they graduated, they said their teachers were just idiots. Youth has a way of recognizing baloney and discards it like last week's mildewed pizza.
Dennis Berg
Retcon is just a variation on presentism. These are both lies to influence the general population to a false narrative that fits an agenda.
Charles Goodwin
This op-ed is a nice illustration of the difference between being clever and being smart. Pivoting on "retcon" is a clever device but the analogy is misplaced and ultimately misleading. Transforming the foundational generation and the framers from humans to gods -- as we have from time to time -- would have horrified those men. They sought to create a government of laws and not of men, themselves included. They understood they were flawed humans, neither angels, nor prophets, nor demons.
Howard Sears
I'm 75. Happily only a few more years to witness this ongoing tragedy. I cry for my daughters and grandchildren.
Greg Felicetti
The "history" taught in my well-regarded HS and college was highly incomplete. Some might call it "whitewashed". "History" is often in the eyes of the beholders - it's often revised by someone else who weighs the evidence a bit differently, considers different sources, etc. Read some and decide for one's self.
The second page of the article includes responses to the article.
Lastly, I'd like to talk about Scripture and if it has ever gone through retcon (and why I don't think it has).
America in the Age of Retcon
Lance Morrow, Wall Street Journal, 9.20.23
It was only two years ago that the term “retcon,” short for “retroactive continuity,” made it into the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Odd that it took so long: Retcon for some time has been the 21st century’s way of life. According to the dictionary, the word refers to “a literary device in which the form or content of a previously established narrative is changed.” It will help if you think of the 21st century as a comic book. Retcon retrofits the past plot to suit present purposes.
Retcon, in short, is an instrument for editing history to escape its inconvenient implications. It enables a “general disregard for reality,” allowing the writers to get rid of a plot line that has gotten boring or to bring back a character from the dead. Merriam-Webster cites an early example: Though Sherlock Holmes died at the Reichenbach Falls, the author, Arthur Conan Doyle, retroactively declared that his death had been staged.
Every presidential race involves a certain amount of this vaudeville. But retcon has come to have much broader application. It’s as if the 21st century itself came equipped with an enormous delete key, which, when you hit it, causes the former world to disappear. You may then fill up the empty screen with your own alternative reality.
The old binaries were, so to speak, Newtonian. The new categories have all the nuance and unknowability of quantum mechanics. The southern border is secure! It isn’t shoplifting, it’s social justice! America itself was formerly a good thing, more or less. “The last, best hope,” as Abraham Lincoln said. That was in the old dispensation. Retcon turns the narrative upside down.
Retcon is pretty sure that Lincoln was a racist and that the U.S. is, if not evil, then at the very least wicked to the core. American retcon in one of its moods is paranoid, or infested with nihilistic gloom. The old America was an evil dad and must be murdered. Thomas Jefferson is Darth Vader. The docents at Monticello now speak of him with distaste.
Soviets in the old days practiced brutal retcon. They purged their history books, causing ideologically inconvenient characters to disappear from the record. The ineffable Charles de Gaulle exercised his mystic retcon when he persuaded the French that they had been the heroes of their own liberation from German occupation. People need the consolation of their myths.
Such revision, quick as the click of a mouse, is the indispensable tool in politics, government, media, popular culture and historiography: a metaphysics of lies and half-truths, or, conversely, of bright new possibilities. Retcon is a reset artist. Whether it’s good or bad depends on your politics. Retcon is a monster and sometimes a creative genius.
Retcon asserts “my truth” and rejects, as necessary, natural law. When out of control, it results in a Tower of Babel — a dynamic of madhouse democracy, as the Founders feared. A fish rots from the head first, and so does a country. Under a regime of pervasive untruth, the leaders become worse than their followers. We’re getting there.
Responses to the article:
William Watson
I remember when the debate in historiography was between recognizing the acts of "great men" and focusing on broad economic and social forces. Now it seems the debate has shifted to whether historical figures should be judged by what they were or what they did. It seems likely that by a reasonable modern definition of racist, Lincoln was a racist, as were almost every white person in the US at the time. He was also a racist who organized winning the Civil War and personally took the first significant step toward the abolition of slavery in the US. Which is more important?
Donald Swanton
History, as someone put it, is the projection of the politics of the present onto the events of the past.
Raymond Unger
The retcon people forget one thing. Even in Russia, the people know the truth. We all know the that retcon is just BS. Those elite college professors think they're fooling us, but they're wrong. My grandchildren attended public schools and had to hear their trash and, to get a good grade, they pretended to accept it. But once they graduated, they said their teachers were just idiots. Youth has a way of recognizing baloney and discards it like last week's mildewed pizza.
Dennis Berg
Retcon is just a variation on presentism. These are both lies to influence the general population to a false narrative that fits an agenda.
Charles Goodwin
This op-ed is a nice illustration of the difference between being clever and being smart. Pivoting on "retcon" is a clever device but the analogy is misplaced and ultimately misleading. Transforming the foundational generation and the framers from humans to gods -- as we have from time to time -- would have horrified those men. They sought to create a government of laws and not of men, themselves included. They understood they were flawed humans, neither angels, nor prophets, nor demons.
Howard Sears
I'm 75. Happily only a few more years to witness this ongoing tragedy. I cry for my daughters and grandchildren.
Greg Felicetti
The "history" taught in my well-regarded HS and college was highly incomplete. Some might call it "whitewashed". "History" is often in the eyes of the beholders - it's often revised by someone else who weighs the evidence a bit differently, considers different sources, etc. Read some and decide for one's self.
Tuesday, September 19
This week, let's talk about how Rosh Hashana can change your life, even if you're not Jewish.
Rosh Hashana Can Change Your Life (Even if You’re Not Jewish)
David DeSteno, NY Times 9.13.23
Guest essayist Dr. DeSteno is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University and the host of the podcast “How God Works: The Science Behind Spirituality.”
Celebrating a new year — as Jews the world over will do this week, when Rosh Hashana begins on Friday at sunset — is all about making changes. It’s a time for new beginnings, for wiping the slate clean and starting over from scratch. In that spirit, on Rosh Hashana Jews say prayers and listen to readings that celebrate the creation of the world and of human life.
But Rosh Hashana also strikes a different, seemingly discordant note. Unlike so many other New Year’s traditions, the Jewish holiday asks those who observe it to contemplate death. The liturgy includes the recitation of a poem, the Unetaneh Tokef, part of which is meant to remind Jews that their lives might not last as long as they’d hope or expect. “Who will live and who will die?” the poem asks. “Who will live out their allotted time and who will depart before their time?”
And we’re not talking about a gentle death at the end of a reasonably long life; we’re talking about misfortunes and tragedies that can cut any of our lives short. “Who shall perish by water and who by fire,” the poem continues, “Who by sword and who by wild beast / Who by famine and who by thirst / Who by earthquake and who by plague?”
This focus on death might seem misplaced, bringing gloom to the party. But as a research scientist who studies the psychological effects of spiritual practices, I believe there is a good reason for it: Contemplating death helps people make decisions about their future that bring them more happiness. This is an insight about human nature that the rites of Rosh Hashana capture especially well, but it’s one that people of any faith (or no faith at all) can benefit from.
When planning for the future, people typically focus on things that they think will make them happy. But there’s a problem: Most people don’t usually know what will truly make them happy — at least not until they are older. Across the globe, research shows, people’s happiness tends to
follow a U-shaped pattern through life: Happiness starts decreasing in one’s 20s, hits its nadir around age 50 and then slowly rises through one’s 70s and 80s, until and unless significant health issues set in.
Why the turnaround at 50? That’s when people typically start to feel their mortality. Bones and joints begin to creak. Skin starts to sag. And visits to the doctor become more frequent and pressing. Death, hopefully, is still a good ways off, but it’s visible on the horizon.
You might think this morbid prospect would further decrease contentment, but it ends up having the opposite effect. Why? Because it forces us to focus on the things in life that actually bring us more happiness. Research by the Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen has shown that as we age, we move from caring most about our careers, status and material possessions to caring most about connecting with those we love, finding meaning in life and performing service to others.
That’s a wise move. When people in the Western world want to be happier, research shows, they tend to focus on individual pursuits. But that same research confirms that this strategy doesn’t work well: Pursuing happiness through social connection and service to others is a more reliable route.
Of course, you don’t have to be old to confront death. During the SARS outbreak and the Covid pandemic, younger adults changed what they valued, research showed. When death suddenly seemed possible for anyone, even those in the prime of their lives, younger people’s opinions about how best to live suddenly began to look like those of seniors: They turned toward family and friends, finding purpose in social connection and helping others.
You don’t even need to face something as drastic as a pandemic to experience some version of these changes. Research shows that simply asking people to imagine that they have less time left, as congregants do on Rosh Hashana, is sufficient.
Rosh Hashana hardly has a monopoly on this insight. Christian thinkers such as Thomas à Kempis and St. Ignatius of Loyola urged people to contemplate death before making important choices. Stoics like Marcus Aurelius argued that meditating on mortality helped people find more joy in daily life.
But the particular brilliance of Rosh Hashana is that it combines thoughts of death with a new year’s focus on a fresh start. As work by the behavioral scientist Katy Milkman and her colleagues has shown, temporal landmarks like New Year’s Day offer an effective opportunity for a psychological reset. They allow us to separate ourselves from past failures and imperfections — a break that not only prods us to consider new directions in life but also helps
us make any changes more effectively.
There is a lesson and an opportunity here for everyone. Contemplate death next Jan. 1 (or whenever you celebrate the start of a new year). Any brief moments of unease will be well worth the payoff.
Rosh Hashana Can Change Your Life (Even if You’re Not Jewish)
David DeSteno, NY Times 9.13.23
Guest essayist Dr. DeSteno is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University and the host of the podcast “How God Works: The Science Behind Spirituality.”
Celebrating a new year — as Jews the world over will do this week, when Rosh Hashana begins on Friday at sunset — is all about making changes. It’s a time for new beginnings, for wiping the slate clean and starting over from scratch. In that spirit, on Rosh Hashana Jews say prayers and listen to readings that celebrate the creation of the world and of human life.
But Rosh Hashana also strikes a different, seemingly discordant note. Unlike so many other New Year’s traditions, the Jewish holiday asks those who observe it to contemplate death. The liturgy includes the recitation of a poem, the Unetaneh Tokef, part of which is meant to remind Jews that their lives might not last as long as they’d hope or expect. “Who will live and who will die?” the poem asks. “Who will live out their allotted time and who will depart before their time?”
And we’re not talking about a gentle death at the end of a reasonably long life; we’re talking about misfortunes and tragedies that can cut any of our lives short. “Who shall perish by water and who by fire,” the poem continues, “Who by sword and who by wild beast / Who by famine and who by thirst / Who by earthquake and who by plague?”
This focus on death might seem misplaced, bringing gloom to the party. But as a research scientist who studies the psychological effects of spiritual practices, I believe there is a good reason for it: Contemplating death helps people make decisions about their future that bring them more happiness. This is an insight about human nature that the rites of Rosh Hashana capture especially well, but it’s one that people of any faith (or no faith at all) can benefit from.
When planning for the future, people typically focus on things that they think will make them happy. But there’s a problem: Most people don’t usually know what will truly make them happy — at least not until they are older. Across the globe, research shows, people’s happiness tends to
follow a U-shaped pattern through life: Happiness starts decreasing in one’s 20s, hits its nadir around age 50 and then slowly rises through one’s 70s and 80s, until and unless significant health issues set in.
Why the turnaround at 50? That’s when people typically start to feel their mortality. Bones and joints begin to creak. Skin starts to sag. And visits to the doctor become more frequent and pressing. Death, hopefully, is still a good ways off, but it’s visible on the horizon.
You might think this morbid prospect would further decrease contentment, but it ends up having the opposite effect. Why? Because it forces us to focus on the things in life that actually bring us more happiness. Research by the Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen has shown that as we age, we move from caring most about our careers, status and material possessions to caring most about connecting with those we love, finding meaning in life and performing service to others.
That’s a wise move. When people in the Western world want to be happier, research shows, they tend to focus on individual pursuits. But that same research confirms that this strategy doesn’t work well: Pursuing happiness through social connection and service to others is a more reliable route.
Of course, you don’t have to be old to confront death. During the SARS outbreak and the Covid pandemic, younger adults changed what they valued, research showed. When death suddenly seemed possible for anyone, even those in the prime of their lives, younger people’s opinions about how best to live suddenly began to look like those of seniors: They turned toward family and friends, finding purpose in social connection and helping others.
You don’t even need to face something as drastic as a pandemic to experience some version of these changes. Research shows that simply asking people to imagine that they have less time left, as congregants do on Rosh Hashana, is sufficient.
Rosh Hashana hardly has a monopoly on this insight. Christian thinkers such as Thomas à Kempis and St. Ignatius of Loyola urged people to contemplate death before making important choices. Stoics like Marcus Aurelius argued that meditating on mortality helped people find more joy in daily life.
But the particular brilliance of Rosh Hashana is that it combines thoughts of death with a new year’s focus on a fresh start. As work by the behavioral scientist Katy Milkman and her colleagues has shown, temporal landmarks like New Year’s Day offer an effective opportunity for a psychological reset. They allow us to separate ourselves from past failures and imperfections — a break that not only prods us to consider new directions in life but also helps
us make any changes more effectively.
There is a lesson and an opportunity here for everyone. Contemplate death next Jan. 1 (or whenever you celebrate the start of a new year). Any brief moments of unease will be well worth the payoff.
Tuesday, September 12
The reading topic for next week is pretty heavy, but important. It is a critique, by David Brooks, of the MAID (assisted-suicide) program in Canada. In the much longer article in the Atlantic, Brooks is against this program and it may have something to do with his religious beliefs. Nevertheless, he steeps his argument in looking at two different value systems. I'd like to know what you think.
How Canada’s Assisted-Suicide Law Went Wrong
David Brooks, The Atlantic 5.4.23
[Edited from the longer print version of the article in the Atlantic]
When people who were suffering applied to the Canadian MAID (assisted-suicide) program and said, “I choose to die,” Canadian society apparently had no shared set of morals that would justify saying no. If individual autonomy is the highest value, then when somebody comes to you and declares, “It’s my body. I can do what I want with it,” whether they are near death or not, painfully ill or not, doesn’t really matter. Autonomy rules. Within just a few years, the number of Canadians dying by physician-assisted suicide ballooned. In 2021, that figure was more than 10,000, one in 30 of all Canadian deaths; only 4 percent of those who filed written applications were deemed ineligible.
I don’t mean to pick on Canada, the land of my birth. Lord knows that, in many ways, Canada has a much healthier social and political culture than the United States does. I’m using the devolution of the MAID program to illustrate a key feature of modern liberalism — namely, that it comes in different flavors. The flavor that is embedded in the MAID program, and is prevalent across Western societies, is what you might call autonomy-based liberalism.
Families have traditionally been built around mutual burdens. As children, we are burdens on our families; in adulthood, especially in hard times, we can be burdens on one another; and in old age we may be burdens once again. When these bonds have become attenuated or broken in Western cultures, many people re-create webs of obligation in chosen families. There, too, it is the burdening that makes the bonds secure.
You did not create your deepest bonds. You didn’t choose the family you were born into, the ethnic heritage you were born into, the culture you were born into, the nation you were born into.
As you age, you have more choices over how you engage with these things, and many people forge chosen families to supplant their biological ones. But you never fully escape the way these unchosen bonds have formed you, and you remain defined through life by the obligations they impose upon you.
Autonomy-based liberals see society as a series of social contracts — arrangements people make for their mutual benefit. But a mother’s love for her infant daughter is not a contract. Gifts-based liberals see society as resting on a bedrock of covenants. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks once captured the difference this way: “A contract is a transaction. A covenant is a relationship. Or to put it slightly differently: a contract is about interests. A covenant is about identity. It is about you and me coming together to form an ‘us.’”
Autonomy-based liberalism imposes unrealistic expectations. Each individual is supposed to define their own values, their own choices. Each individual, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, is left to come up with their own “concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, of the mystery of human life.” If your name is Aristotle, maybe you can do that; most of us can’t. Most of us are left in a moral vacuum, a world in which the meaning of life is unclear, unconnected to any moral horizon outside the self.
Autonomy-based liberalism cuts people off from all the forces that formed them, stretching back centuries, and from all the centuries stretching into the future. Autonomy-based liberalism leaves people alone. Its emphasis on individual sovereignty inevitably erodes the bonds between people.
Autonomy-based liberalism induces even progressives to live out the sentence notoriously associated with Margaret Thatcher: “There is no such thing as society.” Nearly 200 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville feared that this state of affairs not only makes men forget their ancestors, but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries. Each man is forever thrown back upon himself alone and there is a danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.
As Émile Durkheim pointed out in 1897, this is pretty much a perfect recipe for suicide. We now live in societies in which more and more people are deciding that death is better than life. In short, autonomy-based liberalism produces the kind of isolated, adrift people who are prone to suicide — and then provides them with a state-assisted solution to the problem it created in the first place.
Gifts-based liberalism, by contrast, gives you membership in a procession that stretches back to your ancestors. It connects you to those who migrated to this place or that, married this person or that, raised their children in this way or that. What you are is an expression of history.
This long procession, though filled with struggles and hardship, has made life sweeter for us. Human beings once lived in societies in which slavery was a foundational fact of life, beheadings and animal torture were popular entertainments, raping and pillaging were routine. But gradually, with many setbacks, we’ve built a culture in which people are more likely to abhor cruelty, a culture that has as an ideal the notion that all people deserve fair treatment.
This is progress. Thanks to this procession, each generation doesn’t have to make the big decisions of life standing on naked ground. We have been bequeathed sets of values, institutions, cultural traditions that embody the accumulated wisdom of our kind. The purpose of life, in a gifts-based world, is to participate in this procession, to keep the march of progress going along its fitful course. We may give with our creativity, with our talents, with our care, but many of the gifts people transmit derive from deeper sources.
Sometimes the old and the infirm, those who have been wounded by life and whose choices have been constrained, reveal what is most important in life. Sometimes those whose choices have been limited can demonstrate that, by focusing on others and not on oneself, life is defined not by the options available to us but by the strength of our commitments.
I recently had a conversation with a Canadian friend who told me that he and his three siblings had not been particularly close as adults. Then their aging dad grew gravely ill. His care became a burden they all shared, and that shared burden brought them closer. Their father died but their closeness remains. Their father bestowed many gifts upon his children, but the final one was the gift of being a burden on his family.
If autonomy-based liberals believe that society works best when it opens up individual options, gifts-based liberals believe that society works best when it creates ecologies of care that help people address difficulties all along the path of life. Autonomy-based liberalism is entrenching an apparatus that ends life. Gifts-based liberalism believes in providing varieties of palliative care to those near death and buttressing doctors as they forge trusting relationships with their patients. These support structures sometimes inhibit choices by declaring certain actions beyond the pale. Doctors are there for healing, at all times and under all pressures. Patients can trust the doctor because they know the doctor serves life. Doctors can know that, exhausted and confused
though they might be while attending to a patient, their default orientation will be to continue the struggle to save life and not to end life.
John Stuart and Harriet Taylor Mill believed in individual autonomy. But they also believed that a just society has a vision not only of freedom but also of goodness, of right and wrong. Humans, John Stuart Mill wrote, “are under a moral obligation to seek the improvement of our moral character.” He continued, “The test of what is right in politics is not the will of the people, but the good of the people.” He understood that the moral obligations we take on in life — to family, friends, and nation, to the past and the future — properly put a brake on individual freedom of action. And he believed that they point us toward the fulfillment of our nature.
The good of humanity is not some abstraction — it’s grounded in the succession of intimates and institutions that we inherit, and that we reform, improve, and pass on. When a fellow member of the procession is in despair, is suffering, is thinking about ending their life, we don’t provide a syringe. We say: The world has not stopped asking things of you. You still have gifts to give, merely by living among us. Your life still sends ripples outward, in ways you do and do not see. Don’t go. We know you need us. We still need you.
How Canada’s Assisted-Suicide Law Went Wrong
David Brooks, The Atlantic 5.4.23
[Edited from the longer print version of the article in the Atlantic]
When people who were suffering applied to the Canadian MAID (assisted-suicide) program and said, “I choose to die,” Canadian society apparently had no shared set of morals that would justify saying no. If individual autonomy is the highest value, then when somebody comes to you and declares, “It’s my body. I can do what I want with it,” whether they are near death or not, painfully ill or not, doesn’t really matter. Autonomy rules. Within just a few years, the number of Canadians dying by physician-assisted suicide ballooned. In 2021, that figure was more than 10,000, one in 30 of all Canadian deaths; only 4 percent of those who filed written applications were deemed ineligible.
I don’t mean to pick on Canada, the land of my birth. Lord knows that, in many ways, Canada has a much healthier social and political culture than the United States does. I’m using the devolution of the MAID program to illustrate a key feature of modern liberalism — namely, that it comes in different flavors. The flavor that is embedded in the MAID program, and is prevalent across Western societies, is what you might call autonomy-based liberalism.
Families have traditionally been built around mutual burdens. As children, we are burdens on our families; in adulthood, especially in hard times, we can be burdens on one another; and in old age we may be burdens once again. When these bonds have become attenuated or broken in Western cultures, many people re-create webs of obligation in chosen families. There, too, it is the burdening that makes the bonds secure.
You did not create your deepest bonds. You didn’t choose the family you were born into, the ethnic heritage you were born into, the culture you were born into, the nation you were born into.
As you age, you have more choices over how you engage with these things, and many people forge chosen families to supplant their biological ones. But you never fully escape the way these unchosen bonds have formed you, and you remain defined through life by the obligations they impose upon you.
Autonomy-based liberals see society as a series of social contracts — arrangements people make for their mutual benefit. But a mother’s love for her infant daughter is not a contract. Gifts-based liberals see society as resting on a bedrock of covenants. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks once captured the difference this way: “A contract is a transaction. A covenant is a relationship. Or to put it slightly differently: a contract is about interests. A covenant is about identity. It is about you and me coming together to form an ‘us.’”
Autonomy-based liberalism imposes unrealistic expectations. Each individual is supposed to define their own values, their own choices. Each individual, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, is left to come up with their own “concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, of the mystery of human life.” If your name is Aristotle, maybe you can do that; most of us can’t. Most of us are left in a moral vacuum, a world in which the meaning of life is unclear, unconnected to any moral horizon outside the self.
Autonomy-based liberalism cuts people off from all the forces that formed them, stretching back centuries, and from all the centuries stretching into the future. Autonomy-based liberalism leaves people alone. Its emphasis on individual sovereignty inevitably erodes the bonds between people.
Autonomy-based liberalism induces even progressives to live out the sentence notoriously associated with Margaret Thatcher: “There is no such thing as society.” Nearly 200 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville feared that this state of affairs not only makes men forget their ancestors, but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries. Each man is forever thrown back upon himself alone and there is a danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.
As Émile Durkheim pointed out in 1897, this is pretty much a perfect recipe for suicide. We now live in societies in which more and more people are deciding that death is better than life. In short, autonomy-based liberalism produces the kind of isolated, adrift people who are prone to suicide — and then provides them with a state-assisted solution to the problem it created in the first place.
Gifts-based liberalism, by contrast, gives you membership in a procession that stretches back to your ancestors. It connects you to those who migrated to this place or that, married this person or that, raised their children in this way or that. What you are is an expression of history.
This long procession, though filled with struggles and hardship, has made life sweeter for us. Human beings once lived in societies in which slavery was a foundational fact of life, beheadings and animal torture were popular entertainments, raping and pillaging were routine. But gradually, with many setbacks, we’ve built a culture in which people are more likely to abhor cruelty, a culture that has as an ideal the notion that all people deserve fair treatment.
This is progress. Thanks to this procession, each generation doesn’t have to make the big decisions of life standing on naked ground. We have been bequeathed sets of values, institutions, cultural traditions that embody the accumulated wisdom of our kind. The purpose of life, in a gifts-based world, is to participate in this procession, to keep the march of progress going along its fitful course. We may give with our creativity, with our talents, with our care, but many of the gifts people transmit derive from deeper sources.
Sometimes the old and the infirm, those who have been wounded by life and whose choices have been constrained, reveal what is most important in life. Sometimes those whose choices have been limited can demonstrate that, by focusing on others and not on oneself, life is defined not by the options available to us but by the strength of our commitments.
I recently had a conversation with a Canadian friend who told me that he and his three siblings had not been particularly close as adults. Then their aging dad grew gravely ill. His care became a burden they all shared, and that shared burden brought them closer. Their father died but their closeness remains. Their father bestowed many gifts upon his children, but the final one was the gift of being a burden on his family.
If autonomy-based liberals believe that society works best when it opens up individual options, gifts-based liberals believe that society works best when it creates ecologies of care that help people address difficulties all along the path of life. Autonomy-based liberalism is entrenching an apparatus that ends life. Gifts-based liberalism believes in providing varieties of palliative care to those near death and buttressing doctors as they forge trusting relationships with their patients. These support structures sometimes inhibit choices by declaring certain actions beyond the pale. Doctors are there for healing, at all times and under all pressures. Patients can trust the doctor because they know the doctor serves life. Doctors can know that, exhausted and confused
though they might be while attending to a patient, their default orientation will be to continue the struggle to save life and not to end life.
John Stuart and Harriet Taylor Mill believed in individual autonomy. But they also believed that a just society has a vision not only of freedom but also of goodness, of right and wrong. Humans, John Stuart Mill wrote, “are under a moral obligation to seek the improvement of our moral character.” He continued, “The test of what is right in politics is not the will of the people, but the good of the people.” He understood that the moral obligations we take on in life — to family, friends, and nation, to the past and the future — properly put a brake on individual freedom of action. And he believed that they point us toward the fulfillment of our nature.
The good of humanity is not some abstraction — it’s grounded in the succession of intimates and institutions that we inherit, and that we reform, improve, and pass on. When a fellow member of the procession is in despair, is suffering, is thinking about ending their life, we don’t provide a syringe. We say: The world has not stopped asking things of you. You still have gifts to give, merely by living among us. Your life still sends ripples outward, in ways you do and do not see. Don’t go. We know you need us. We still need you.
Tuesday, September 5
Continuing our summer discussion about spirituality and different faith traditions, let's take a look at Roman Catholicism, religion/spirituality and U.S. politics. The pope stated that there is a faction in the U.S. House of Bishops that is taking the church "backwards". The House of Bishops, when talking about the pope, have even used the "s" word (schism).
I'd like to know what you think - in particular the role faith, the Church, and spirituality has (or does not have) in politics. Maybe we'll even talk about the difference between influence and power.
Pope Says a U.S. Faction Offers a Narrow View of the Church
Jason Horowitz and Ruth Graham, NY Times 8.30.23
Pope Francis has expressed in unusually sharp terms his dismay at “a very strong, organized, reactionary attitude” opposing him within the U.S. Roman Catholic Church, one that fixates on social issues like abortion and sexuality to the exclusion of caring for the poor and the environment.
The pope lamented the “backwardness” of some American conservatives who he said insist on a narrow, outdated and unchanging vision. “I would like to remind these people that backwardness is useless. Doing this, you lose the true tradition and you turn to ideologies to have support. In
other words, ideologies replace faith.”
His comments were an unusually explicit statement of the pope’s longstanding lament that the ideological bent of some leading American Catholics has turned them into culture warriors rather than pastors, offering the faithful a warped view of Church doctrine rather than a healthy, well-rounded faith. It has become a major theme of his papacy that he sees himself as bringing the church forward while his misguided conservative critics try to hold it back.
In 2018, Francis explicitly wrote that caring for migrants and the poor is as holy a pursuit as opposing abortion. “Our defense of the innocent unborn, for example, needs to be clear, firm and passionate,” he wrote. “Equally sacred, however, are the lives of the poor, those already born, the destitute, the abandoned.” He has urged priests to welcome and minister to people who are gay, divorced and remarried, and he has called on the whole world to tackle climate change, calling it a moral issue.
For nearly a decade, Francis’ conservative critics have accused him of leading the church astray and of diluting the faith with a fuzzy pastoral emphasis that blurred the Church’s traditions and central tenets. Some U.S. bishops have issued public warnings about the Vatican’s direction, with varying degrees of alarm, and clashed with the pope over everything from liturgy and worship styles, to the centrality of abortion opposition in the Catholic faith, to American politics.
In the preface of a book published this month, Cardinal Raymond Burke, an American former archbishop and Vatican official who is considered a leader of Catholic conservatives, wrote that Francis risked driving the church into a schism, a definitive rupture. The danger, he wrote, was an upcoming synod of bishops in October, convened by Francis to promote inclusivity, transparency and accountability, which will include lay people, including some women.
Bishop Joseph Strickland, who heads a small diocese in East Texas and has become one of the pope’s loudest critics, has accused the pope of undermining the Catholic faith and has invited Francis to fire him. In a public letter released last week, Bishop Strickland warned that many “basic truths” of Catholic teaching would be challenged at the synod, and hinted ominously at an irrevocable break. Those who would “propose changes to that which cannot be changed,” he warned, “are the true schismatics.”
Conservative bishops have at times directly confronted American politicians, particularly Catholic Democrats. In 2021, they pushed to issue guidance that would deny the sacrament of Communion to Catholic politicians who publicly support and advance abortion rights, like President Biden — a regular churchgoer and the first Catholic president since the 1960s — and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops backed away from a direct conflict on that issue, after the Vatican warned against using the Eucharist as a political weapon. Francis has preached that communion “is not the reward of saints, but the bread of sinners.” But some individual bishops have persisted. Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone of San Francisco, an outspoken critic of the pope, said last year that Ms. Pelosi would not be permitted to receive communion in his archdiocese unless she was willing to “publicly repudiate” her stance on abortion.
Clashes between the Vatican and conservative American bishops are often amplified and encouraged by conservative media outlets. Popular radio hosts and podcasters regularly question the pope’s leadership and raise questions about his legitimacy. Combative independent websites like Church Militant and LifeSite News cover Francis’ perceived missteps closely, and skewer church institutions they depict as corrupt and profane.
Many of today’s conservative leaders were promoted in the more doctrinaire church of Saint John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. They have accused Francis, an Argentine, of being anti-American and anticapitalist, and leading the church away from its core teachings.
But he has consistently argued in his decade as pope that the church was part of history, and not a fortress from it, and that it needed to open up and be amid the people to reflect and respond to their challenges. Speaking to the Portuguese priests this month, he noted that over the centuries the church had changed its positions on issues like slavery and capital punishment. “The vision of the doctrine of the church as a monolith is wrong,” he said. “When you go backward, you make something closed off, disconnected from the roots of the church,” eroding morality.
His comments were in response to a question from a Jesuit who said he was taken aback, when he spent a year in the United States, by harsh criticism of the pope from some Catholics, including bishops.
To some people, “the situation of migrants, for example, is a lesser issue,” the pope said. “Some Catholics consider it a secondary issue compared to the ‘grave’ bioethical questions.” But focusing on issues of sexual morality and downgrading issues of social justice, he said, clashes with his vision of the true church. “That a politician looking for votes might say such a thing is understandable,” he added. “But not a Christian.”
Francis has steadily thinned out and isolated the most vocal, and in some cases aggressive, American conservative clergy, declining to promote some archbishops to cardinals and so denying them voting rights in the conclave that chooses the pope. In other cases he has simply waited them out and accepted their resignations when they reached mandatory retirement age. But the American bishops’ conference remains a redoubt of Catholic conservatism, much more conservative than Francis and many of the other national churches.
On a flight to Africa in 2019, Francis seemed to acknowledge a well-financed and media-backed American effort to undermine his pontificate, saying it was an “an honor that the Americans attack me” when asked about the American conservative-media complex.
On the return flight, he was asked about the sustained opposition from Catholic conservatives in the United States who had accused him of driving traditionalists to break with the church. Francis said he hoped it didn’t come to that, but wasn’t necessarily terrified at the prospect either. “I pray there are no schisms,” Francis said at the time. “But I’m not scared."
I'd like to know what you think - in particular the role faith, the Church, and spirituality has (or does not have) in politics. Maybe we'll even talk about the difference between influence and power.
Pope Says a U.S. Faction Offers a Narrow View of the Church
Jason Horowitz and Ruth Graham, NY Times 8.30.23
Pope Francis has expressed in unusually sharp terms his dismay at “a very strong, organized, reactionary attitude” opposing him within the U.S. Roman Catholic Church, one that fixates on social issues like abortion and sexuality to the exclusion of caring for the poor and the environment.
The pope lamented the “backwardness” of some American conservatives who he said insist on a narrow, outdated and unchanging vision. “I would like to remind these people that backwardness is useless. Doing this, you lose the true tradition and you turn to ideologies to have support. In
other words, ideologies replace faith.”
His comments were an unusually explicit statement of the pope’s longstanding lament that the ideological bent of some leading American Catholics has turned them into culture warriors rather than pastors, offering the faithful a warped view of Church doctrine rather than a healthy, well-rounded faith. It has become a major theme of his papacy that he sees himself as bringing the church forward while his misguided conservative critics try to hold it back.
In 2018, Francis explicitly wrote that caring for migrants and the poor is as holy a pursuit as opposing abortion. “Our defense of the innocent unborn, for example, needs to be clear, firm and passionate,” he wrote. “Equally sacred, however, are the lives of the poor, those already born, the destitute, the abandoned.” He has urged priests to welcome and minister to people who are gay, divorced and remarried, and he has called on the whole world to tackle climate change, calling it a moral issue.
For nearly a decade, Francis’ conservative critics have accused him of leading the church astray and of diluting the faith with a fuzzy pastoral emphasis that blurred the Church’s traditions and central tenets. Some U.S. bishops have issued public warnings about the Vatican’s direction, with varying degrees of alarm, and clashed with the pope over everything from liturgy and worship styles, to the centrality of abortion opposition in the Catholic faith, to American politics.
In the preface of a book published this month, Cardinal Raymond Burke, an American former archbishop and Vatican official who is considered a leader of Catholic conservatives, wrote that Francis risked driving the church into a schism, a definitive rupture. The danger, he wrote, was an upcoming synod of bishops in October, convened by Francis to promote inclusivity, transparency and accountability, which will include lay people, including some women.
Bishop Joseph Strickland, who heads a small diocese in East Texas and has become one of the pope’s loudest critics, has accused the pope of undermining the Catholic faith and has invited Francis to fire him. In a public letter released last week, Bishop Strickland warned that many “basic truths” of Catholic teaching would be challenged at the synod, and hinted ominously at an irrevocable break. Those who would “propose changes to that which cannot be changed,” he warned, “are the true schismatics.”
Conservative bishops have at times directly confronted American politicians, particularly Catholic Democrats. In 2021, they pushed to issue guidance that would deny the sacrament of Communion to Catholic politicians who publicly support and advance abortion rights, like President Biden — a regular churchgoer and the first Catholic president since the 1960s — and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops backed away from a direct conflict on that issue, after the Vatican warned against using the Eucharist as a political weapon. Francis has preached that communion “is not the reward of saints, but the bread of sinners.” But some individual bishops have persisted. Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone of San Francisco, an outspoken critic of the pope, said last year that Ms. Pelosi would not be permitted to receive communion in his archdiocese unless she was willing to “publicly repudiate” her stance on abortion.
Clashes between the Vatican and conservative American bishops are often amplified and encouraged by conservative media outlets. Popular radio hosts and podcasters regularly question the pope’s leadership and raise questions about his legitimacy. Combative independent websites like Church Militant and LifeSite News cover Francis’ perceived missteps closely, and skewer church institutions they depict as corrupt and profane.
Many of today’s conservative leaders were promoted in the more doctrinaire church of Saint John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. They have accused Francis, an Argentine, of being anti-American and anticapitalist, and leading the church away from its core teachings.
But he has consistently argued in his decade as pope that the church was part of history, and not a fortress from it, and that it needed to open up and be amid the people to reflect and respond to their challenges. Speaking to the Portuguese priests this month, he noted that over the centuries the church had changed its positions on issues like slavery and capital punishment. “The vision of the doctrine of the church as a monolith is wrong,” he said. “When you go backward, you make something closed off, disconnected from the roots of the church,” eroding morality.
His comments were in response to a question from a Jesuit who said he was taken aback, when he spent a year in the United States, by harsh criticism of the pope from some Catholics, including bishops.
To some people, “the situation of migrants, for example, is a lesser issue,” the pope said. “Some Catholics consider it a secondary issue compared to the ‘grave’ bioethical questions.” But focusing on issues of sexual morality and downgrading issues of social justice, he said, clashes with his vision of the true church. “That a politician looking for votes might say such a thing is understandable,” he added. “But not a Christian.”
Francis has steadily thinned out and isolated the most vocal, and in some cases aggressive, American conservative clergy, declining to promote some archbishops to cardinals and so denying them voting rights in the conclave that chooses the pope. In other cases he has simply waited them out and accepted their resignations when they reached mandatory retirement age. But the American bishops’ conference remains a redoubt of Catholic conservatism, much more conservative than Francis and many of the other national churches.
On a flight to Africa in 2019, Francis seemed to acknowledge a well-financed and media-backed American effort to undermine his pontificate, saying it was an “an honor that the Americans attack me” when asked about the American conservative-media complex.
On the return flight, he was asked about the sustained opposition from Catholic conservatives in the United States who had accused him of driving traditionalists to break with the church. Francis said he hoped it didn’t come to that, but wasn’t necessarily terrified at the prospect either. “I pray there are no schisms,” Francis said at the time. “But I’m not scared."
Tuesday, August 28
Combined Men & Women's Discussion Group at 10 a.m.
This summer we have been discussing various religions of the world. Next week, let's discuss the spirituality of Judaism. Unlike our other studies, this spirituality will sound quite familiar. The upcoming program year will feature some events with our neighbors at Temple Beth Israel. The first one will be a blessing of the animals event open to people and pets of all faiths. Prior to our first shared event, I think it is important and neighborly that we learn more about the spirituality of the Jewish faith.
What is Jewish Spirituality
Jay Michaelson, My Jewish Learning
Rabbi Dr. Jay Michaelson is the author of nine books. He holds a Ph.D in Jewish Thought from Hebrew University and a J.D. from Yale Law School, and is currently a senior editor for the Ten Percent Happier meditation platform and a columnist for New York Magazine.
The French philosopher Michel Foucault defined spirituality as “the search, the practice, the experience by which the subject operates on himself the transformations which are necessary to access the truth.” What I love about this definition is that it accommodates a very wide range of spiritual orientations, Jewish and otherwise, while maintaining some core features of the phenomenon.
Spirituality is subjective, insofar as spiritual experiences are largely internal and thus different for everyone. It is focused on practice and experience — rather than, say, text, dogma, or law. You can no more understand spirituality by reading about it than you can taste a recipe by reading a cookbook. And that means spirituality is pragmatic. Spirituality asks not whether an action is commanded, or connected to one’s family, or part of an objective moral order. It asks: What does it do? And does it work?
Finally, when taken seriously, spirituality (Jewish or otherwise) focuses not on narcissistic moments of feeling good, but on transformation and truth. The best way to check the validity of a spiritual experience is to see what’s changed afterward. Am I kinder? Am I more aware of wonder? Am I more open to empathy?
If there’s one asterisk I’d place next to Foucault’s definition, it is to note that Jewish spiritual practice, in particular, can often be social, communal, relational. From congregational prayer to marching for social justice (“praying with my feet” as Abraham Joshua Heschel once called it) to rectifying one’s ethical conduct, both the context and the “truth” of Jewish spirituality are often relational in nature.
Of course, given the subjectivity inherent in spiritual practice, what that “truth” is varies from person to person. This doesn’t entail relativism, certainly not in terms of ethical conduct. Only that the contextual frame, content, and meaning of spiritual experience will vary from person to person. For example, many people define the truth of spiritual practice in theistic terms.
Someone might say they feel close to God when they light Shabbat candles, or meditate, or hear the blowing of the shofar. For others, the truth may be non-theistic. For this sort of non-theistic practitioner, Shabbat candles may arouse feelings of compassion or wonder, meditation a sense of gratitude, and the shofar a sense of connectivity to the primal rituals of the Jewish people. “God” may not be part of the experience.
Having worked in the field of spirituality for about 20 years, my sense is that, in fact, these different practitioners – theistic and non-theistic – are reporting similar things. Their worldviews may shape the character of the experiences, and they definitely shape their interpretations. But one of the fascinating paradoxes of spirituality is that while it’s intrinsically subjective, so much is held in common.
What then makes Jewish spirituality Jewish spirituality? Here are three answers.
First, and most obviously, it utilizes Jewish tools and topics for spiritual practice. One could have a lovely spiritual experience lighting candles on Thursday night, but lighting them on Friday night grounds the experience in Jewish folkways, Jewish community, and the Jewish calendar. For me personally, that deepens the experience. My grandmother did this, probably her grandmother too, and so do many of my friends and fellow community members. We may have different ideas about what we’re doing, but there is a sweet bond in this shared ground of practice.
Second, Jewish spirituality has some distinctive characteristics. Unlike some popular forms of meditation, for example, it tends to affirm and incorporate a wide range of emotional experience. The Buddha sits in calmness; the Hasid dances with the ups and downs of life. And unlike monastic asceticism (the removal of all of life’s sensual pleasures), which has only rarely occurred in Jewish communities, most Jewish spirituality embraces the sensual world of eating, dancing, having sex, and so on.
Finally, Jewish spirituality is inevitably tied to ethics and social life. Even when, as noted earlier, the spiritual experience is personal, what comes afterward is social. Judaism is a householder religion, tied to family, community, and society.
It’s notable that perhaps the classic mystical experience in the Bible, Moses ascending Mount Sinai and communicating directly with God, is barely narrated in the text. We get almost nothing of Moses’s spiritual experience. What we get are the Ten Commandments and all the laws that follow – the fruits of the spiritual experience, not the experience itself.
This “coming down the mountain” is a critical metaphor, and it reappears in different forms in the mystical experiences of Ezekiel, Elijah, Isaiah, and others. Mystics have their experiences, but what matters is what they learn from them, whether it’s law or prophecy or ethical warnings to Israel.
Ultimately, Jewish spirituality comes down from the mountaintop, back from the experience of the sublime. As Heschel described so eloquently, that is where Judaism begins.
What is Jewish Spirituality
Jay Michaelson, My Jewish Learning
Rabbi Dr. Jay Michaelson is the author of nine books. He holds a Ph.D in Jewish Thought from Hebrew University and a J.D. from Yale Law School, and is currently a senior editor for the Ten Percent Happier meditation platform and a columnist for New York Magazine.
The French philosopher Michel Foucault defined spirituality as “the search, the practice, the experience by which the subject operates on himself the transformations which are necessary to access the truth.” What I love about this definition is that it accommodates a very wide range of spiritual orientations, Jewish and otherwise, while maintaining some core features of the phenomenon.
Spirituality is subjective, insofar as spiritual experiences are largely internal and thus different for everyone. It is focused on practice and experience — rather than, say, text, dogma, or law. You can no more understand spirituality by reading about it than you can taste a recipe by reading a cookbook. And that means spirituality is pragmatic. Spirituality asks not whether an action is commanded, or connected to one’s family, or part of an objective moral order. It asks: What does it do? And does it work?
Finally, when taken seriously, spirituality (Jewish or otherwise) focuses not on narcissistic moments of feeling good, but on transformation and truth. The best way to check the validity of a spiritual experience is to see what’s changed afterward. Am I kinder? Am I more aware of wonder? Am I more open to empathy?
If there’s one asterisk I’d place next to Foucault’s definition, it is to note that Jewish spiritual practice, in particular, can often be social, communal, relational. From congregational prayer to marching for social justice (“praying with my feet” as Abraham Joshua Heschel once called it) to rectifying one’s ethical conduct, both the context and the “truth” of Jewish spirituality are often relational in nature.
Of course, given the subjectivity inherent in spiritual practice, what that “truth” is varies from person to person. This doesn’t entail relativism, certainly not in terms of ethical conduct. Only that the contextual frame, content, and meaning of spiritual experience will vary from person to person. For example, many people define the truth of spiritual practice in theistic terms.
Someone might say they feel close to God when they light Shabbat candles, or meditate, or hear the blowing of the shofar. For others, the truth may be non-theistic. For this sort of non-theistic practitioner, Shabbat candles may arouse feelings of compassion or wonder, meditation a sense of gratitude, and the shofar a sense of connectivity to the primal rituals of the Jewish people. “God” may not be part of the experience.
Having worked in the field of spirituality for about 20 years, my sense is that, in fact, these different practitioners – theistic and non-theistic – are reporting similar things. Their worldviews may shape the character of the experiences, and they definitely shape their interpretations. But one of the fascinating paradoxes of spirituality is that while it’s intrinsically subjective, so much is held in common.
What then makes Jewish spirituality Jewish spirituality? Here are three answers.
First, and most obviously, it utilizes Jewish tools and topics for spiritual practice. One could have a lovely spiritual experience lighting candles on Thursday night, but lighting them on Friday night grounds the experience in Jewish folkways, Jewish community, and the Jewish calendar. For me personally, that deepens the experience. My grandmother did this, probably her grandmother too, and so do many of my friends and fellow community members. We may have different ideas about what we’re doing, but there is a sweet bond in this shared ground of practice.
Second, Jewish spirituality has some distinctive characteristics. Unlike some popular forms of meditation, for example, it tends to affirm and incorporate a wide range of emotional experience. The Buddha sits in calmness; the Hasid dances with the ups and downs of life. And unlike monastic asceticism (the removal of all of life’s sensual pleasures), which has only rarely occurred in Jewish communities, most Jewish spirituality embraces the sensual world of eating, dancing, having sex, and so on.
Finally, Jewish spirituality is inevitably tied to ethics and social life. Even when, as noted earlier, the spiritual experience is personal, what comes afterward is social. Judaism is a householder religion, tied to family, community, and society.
It’s notable that perhaps the classic mystical experience in the Bible, Moses ascending Mount Sinai and communicating directly with God, is barely narrated in the text. We get almost nothing of Moses’s spiritual experience. What we get are the Ten Commandments and all the laws that follow – the fruits of the spiritual experience, not the experience itself.
This “coming down the mountain” is a critical metaphor, and it reappears in different forms in the mystical experiences of Ezekiel, Elijah, Isaiah, and others. Mystics have their experiences, but what matters is what they learn from them, whether it’s law or prophecy or ethical warnings to Israel.
Ultimately, Jewish spirituality comes down from the mountaintop, back from the experience of the sublime. As Heschel described so eloquently, that is where Judaism begins.
Tuesday, August 22
Going back to our discussion group roots, let's take a look at David Brooks' article, How America Got Mean, and discuss 1) what is his argument, 2) is it supported, 3) what part of it do you agree with and/or not agree with, 4) how does this affect your life.
According to Brooks, there is a spiritual aspect to this because the Church is an antidote for society that tends to gravitate towards being mean. Secondly, he asserts that America has lost the ability to hear one another and have meaningful discussions. If Brooks attended any of our discussion groups, he would see that the people at All Angels have not lost the ability to listen, to agree and disagree respectfully, and be enlightened by each other's experiences and beliefs. I look forward to what you have to say.
To start the discussion, here are some thoughts from John Binney, in the U.K.
Whilst I appreciate and understand why the title is referring to America, I do not see America as the sole perpetrator, if that is the case! I would say that most of our 'Western society' is in the same position. It may be that parts of this have particular reference in America, but the discord between various sections of society is similar. Take participation in many 'traditional' groups. Religious groups, Rotary, Lions, Kiwanis, Masonic etc. All are suffering from maintaining membership and finding new additions. We did vaguely include this in a recent discussion. What do we need, to ignite a new wave of action or people willing to help others and by doing so, help themselves? How much of the new generation understands how much we all need, and rely on each other, in the end?
Who could we point to, to be an example for 'others' to follow?
How America Got Mean
David Brooks, The Atlantic 8.14.23
Over the past eight years or so, I’ve been obsessed with two questions. The first is: Why have Americans become so sad? The rising rates of depression have been well publicized, as have the rising deaths of despair from drugs, alcohol, and suicide. But other statistics are similarly troubling. The percentage of people who say they don’t have close friends has increased fourfold since 1990. The share of Americans ages 25 to 54 who weren’t married or living with a romantic partner went up to 38 percent in 2019, from 29 percent in 1990. A record-high 25 percent of 40-year-old Americans have never married. More than half of all Americans say that no one knows them well. The percentage of high-school students who report “persistent feelings of sadness or
hopelessness” shot up from 26 percent in 2009 to 44 percent in 2021.
My second, related question is: Why have Americans become so mean? I was recently talking with a restaurant owner who said that he has to eject a customer from his restaurant for rude or cruel behavior once a week—something that never used to happen. A head nurse at a hospital told me that many on her staff are leaving the profession because patients have become so abusive. At the far extreme of meanness, hate crimes rose in 2020 to their highest level in 12 years. Murder rates have been surging, at least until recently. We’re enmeshed in some sort of emotional, relational, and spiritual crisis, and it undergirds our political dysfunction and the general crisis of our democracy. What is going on?
The most important story about why Americans have become sad and alienated and rude, I believe, is also the simplest: We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration. The story I’m going to tell is about morals. In a healthy society, a web of institutions — families, schools, religious groups, community organizations, and workplaces — helps form people into kind and responsible citizens, the sort of people who show up for one another. We live in a society that’s terrible at moral formation.
Moral formation, as I will use that stuffy-sounding term here, comprises three things.
First, helping people learn to restrain their selfishness. How do we keep our evolutionarily conferred egotism under control?
Second, teaching basic social and ethical skills. How do you welcome a neighbor into your community? How do you disagree with someone constructively?
And third, helping people find a purpose in life. Morally formative institutions hold up a set of ideals. They provide practical pathways toward a meaningful existence: Here’s how you can dedicate your life to serving the poor, or protecting the nation, or loving your neighbor.
For a large part of its history, America was awash in morally formative institutions. Its Founding Fathers had a low view of human nature, and designed the Constitution to mitigate it. If such flawed, self-centered creatures were going to govern themselves and be decent neighbors to one another, they were going to need some training. For roughly 150 years after the founding, Americans were obsessed with moral education. Beyond the classroom lay a host of other groups: the YMCA; the Sunday-school movement; the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts; professional organizations, which enforced ethical codes; unions and workplace associations. And of course, by the late 19th century, many Americans were members of churches or other religious
communities. Mere religious faith doesn’t always make people morally good, but living in a community, orienting your heart toward some transcendent love, basing your value system on concern for the underserved — those things tend to.
The crucial pivot happened just after World War II. Schools began to abandon moral formation in the 1940s and ’50s, as the education historian B. Edward McClellan chronicles in Moral Education in America: “By the 1960s deliberate moral education was in full-scale retreat” as educators “paid more attention to the SAT scores of their students, and middle-class parents scrambled to find schools that would give their children the best chances to qualify for colleges and universities.”
Over the course of the 20th century, words relating to morality appeared less and less frequently in the nation’s books: According to a 2012 paper, usage of a cluster of words related to being virtuous also declined significantly. Among them were bravery (which dropped by 65 percent), gratitude (58 percent), and humbleness (55 percent). For decades, researchers have asked incoming college students about their goals in life. In 1967, about 85 percent said they were strongly motivated to develop “a meaningful philosophy of life”; by 2000, only 42 percent said that. Being financially well off became the leading life goal; by 2015, 82 percent of students said wealth was their aim.
Sadness, loneliness, and self-harm turn into bitterness. Social pain is ultimately a response to a sense of rejection — of being invisible, unheard, disrespected, victimized. When people feel that their identity is unrecognized, the experience registers as an injustice — because it is. People who have been treated unjustly often lash out and seek ways to humiliate those who they believe have humiliated them. If you put people in a moral vacuum, they will seek to fill it with the closest thing at hand. Over the past several years, people have sought to fill the moral vacuum with politics and tribalism. American society has become hyper-politicized.
Politics also provides an easy way to feel a sense of purpose. You don’t have to feed the hungry or sit with the widow to be moral; you just have to experience the right emotion. You delude yourself that you are participating in civic life by feeling properly enraged at the other side. That righteous fury rising in your gut lets you know that you are engaged in caring about this country. The culture war is a struggle that gives life meaning.
But, even in dark times, sparks of renewal appear. In 2018, a documentary about Mister Rogers called Won’t You Be My Neighbor? was released. The film showed Fred Rogers in all his simple goodness — his small acts of generosity; his displays of vulnerability; his respect, even reverence, for each child he encountered. People cried openly while watching it in theaters. In an age of conflict and threat, the sight of radical goodness was so moving.
Healthy moral ecologies don’t just happen. They have to be seeded and tended. So, the questions before us are pretty simple: How can we build morally formative institutions that are right for the 21st century? What do we need to do to build a culture that helps people become the best versions of themselves?
The logic of service: You have to give to receive. You have to lose yourself in a common cause to find yourself. The deepest human relationships are gift relationships, based on mutual care. An obvious model for at least some aspects of this is the culture of the U.S. military, which similarly emphasizes honor, service, selflessness, and character in support of a purpose greater than oneself, throwing together Americans of different ages and backgrounds who forge strong social bonds.
Moral organizations. Most organizations serve two sets of goals—moral goals and instrumental goals. Hospitals heal the sick and also seek to make money. Newspapers and magazines inform the public and also try to generate clicks. Law firms defend clients and also try to maximize billable hours. Nonprofits aim to serve the public good and also raise money.
Early in my career, as a TV pundit at PBS NewsHour, I worked with its host, Jim Lehrer. Every day, with a series of small gestures, he signaled what kind of behavior was valued there and what kind of behavior was unacceptable. In this subtle way, he established a set of norms and practices that still lives on. He and others built a thick and coherent moral ecology, and its way of being was internalized by most of the people who have worked there.
Look, I understand why people don’t want to get all moralistic in public. Many of those who do are self-righteous prigs, or rank hypocrites. And all of this is only a start. But healthy moral ecologies don’t just happen. They have to be seeded and tended by people who think and talk in moral terms, who try to model and inculcate moral behavior, who understand that we have to build moral communities because on our own, we are all selfish and flawed. Moral formation is best when it’s humble. It means giving people the skills and habits that will help them be considerate to others in the complex situations of life. It means helping people behave in ways that make other people feel included, seen, and respected. That’s very different from how we treat people now — in ways that make them feel sad and lonely, and that make them grow unkind.
According to Brooks, there is a spiritual aspect to this because the Church is an antidote for society that tends to gravitate towards being mean. Secondly, he asserts that America has lost the ability to hear one another and have meaningful discussions. If Brooks attended any of our discussion groups, he would see that the people at All Angels have not lost the ability to listen, to agree and disagree respectfully, and be enlightened by each other's experiences and beliefs. I look forward to what you have to say.
To start the discussion, here are some thoughts from John Binney, in the U.K.
Whilst I appreciate and understand why the title is referring to America, I do not see America as the sole perpetrator, if that is the case! I would say that most of our 'Western society' is in the same position. It may be that parts of this have particular reference in America, but the discord between various sections of society is similar. Take participation in many 'traditional' groups. Religious groups, Rotary, Lions, Kiwanis, Masonic etc. All are suffering from maintaining membership and finding new additions. We did vaguely include this in a recent discussion. What do we need, to ignite a new wave of action or people willing to help others and by doing so, help themselves? How much of the new generation understands how much we all need, and rely on each other, in the end?
Who could we point to, to be an example for 'others' to follow?
How America Got Mean
David Brooks, The Atlantic 8.14.23
Over the past eight years or so, I’ve been obsessed with two questions. The first is: Why have Americans become so sad? The rising rates of depression have been well publicized, as have the rising deaths of despair from drugs, alcohol, and suicide. But other statistics are similarly troubling. The percentage of people who say they don’t have close friends has increased fourfold since 1990. The share of Americans ages 25 to 54 who weren’t married or living with a romantic partner went up to 38 percent in 2019, from 29 percent in 1990. A record-high 25 percent of 40-year-old Americans have never married. More than half of all Americans say that no one knows them well. The percentage of high-school students who report “persistent feelings of sadness or
hopelessness” shot up from 26 percent in 2009 to 44 percent in 2021.
My second, related question is: Why have Americans become so mean? I was recently talking with a restaurant owner who said that he has to eject a customer from his restaurant for rude or cruel behavior once a week—something that never used to happen. A head nurse at a hospital told me that many on her staff are leaving the profession because patients have become so abusive. At the far extreme of meanness, hate crimes rose in 2020 to their highest level in 12 years. Murder rates have been surging, at least until recently. We’re enmeshed in some sort of emotional, relational, and spiritual crisis, and it undergirds our political dysfunction and the general crisis of our democracy. What is going on?
The most important story about why Americans have become sad and alienated and rude, I believe, is also the simplest: We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration. The story I’m going to tell is about morals. In a healthy society, a web of institutions — families, schools, religious groups, community organizations, and workplaces — helps form people into kind and responsible citizens, the sort of people who show up for one another. We live in a society that’s terrible at moral formation.
Moral formation, as I will use that stuffy-sounding term here, comprises three things.
First, helping people learn to restrain their selfishness. How do we keep our evolutionarily conferred egotism under control?
Second, teaching basic social and ethical skills. How do you welcome a neighbor into your community? How do you disagree with someone constructively?
And third, helping people find a purpose in life. Morally formative institutions hold up a set of ideals. They provide practical pathways toward a meaningful existence: Here’s how you can dedicate your life to serving the poor, or protecting the nation, or loving your neighbor.
For a large part of its history, America was awash in morally formative institutions. Its Founding Fathers had a low view of human nature, and designed the Constitution to mitigate it. If such flawed, self-centered creatures were going to govern themselves and be decent neighbors to one another, they were going to need some training. For roughly 150 years after the founding, Americans were obsessed with moral education. Beyond the classroom lay a host of other groups: the YMCA; the Sunday-school movement; the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts; professional organizations, which enforced ethical codes; unions and workplace associations. And of course, by the late 19th century, many Americans were members of churches or other religious
communities. Mere religious faith doesn’t always make people morally good, but living in a community, orienting your heart toward some transcendent love, basing your value system on concern for the underserved — those things tend to.
The crucial pivot happened just after World War II. Schools began to abandon moral formation in the 1940s and ’50s, as the education historian B. Edward McClellan chronicles in Moral Education in America: “By the 1960s deliberate moral education was in full-scale retreat” as educators “paid more attention to the SAT scores of their students, and middle-class parents scrambled to find schools that would give their children the best chances to qualify for colleges and universities.”
Over the course of the 20th century, words relating to morality appeared less and less frequently in the nation’s books: According to a 2012 paper, usage of a cluster of words related to being virtuous also declined significantly. Among them were bravery (which dropped by 65 percent), gratitude (58 percent), and humbleness (55 percent). For decades, researchers have asked incoming college students about their goals in life. In 1967, about 85 percent said they were strongly motivated to develop “a meaningful philosophy of life”; by 2000, only 42 percent said that. Being financially well off became the leading life goal; by 2015, 82 percent of students said wealth was their aim.
Sadness, loneliness, and self-harm turn into bitterness. Social pain is ultimately a response to a sense of rejection — of being invisible, unheard, disrespected, victimized. When people feel that their identity is unrecognized, the experience registers as an injustice — because it is. People who have been treated unjustly often lash out and seek ways to humiliate those who they believe have humiliated them. If you put people in a moral vacuum, they will seek to fill it with the closest thing at hand. Over the past several years, people have sought to fill the moral vacuum with politics and tribalism. American society has become hyper-politicized.
Politics also provides an easy way to feel a sense of purpose. You don’t have to feed the hungry or sit with the widow to be moral; you just have to experience the right emotion. You delude yourself that you are participating in civic life by feeling properly enraged at the other side. That righteous fury rising in your gut lets you know that you are engaged in caring about this country. The culture war is a struggle that gives life meaning.
But, even in dark times, sparks of renewal appear. In 2018, a documentary about Mister Rogers called Won’t You Be My Neighbor? was released. The film showed Fred Rogers in all his simple goodness — his small acts of generosity; his displays of vulnerability; his respect, even reverence, for each child he encountered. People cried openly while watching it in theaters. In an age of conflict and threat, the sight of radical goodness was so moving.
Healthy moral ecologies don’t just happen. They have to be seeded and tended. So, the questions before us are pretty simple: How can we build morally formative institutions that are right for the 21st century? What do we need to do to build a culture that helps people become the best versions of themselves?
The logic of service: You have to give to receive. You have to lose yourself in a common cause to find yourself. The deepest human relationships are gift relationships, based on mutual care. An obvious model for at least some aspects of this is the culture of the U.S. military, which similarly emphasizes honor, service, selflessness, and character in support of a purpose greater than oneself, throwing together Americans of different ages and backgrounds who forge strong social bonds.
Moral organizations. Most organizations serve two sets of goals—moral goals and instrumental goals. Hospitals heal the sick and also seek to make money. Newspapers and magazines inform the public and also try to generate clicks. Law firms defend clients and also try to maximize billable hours. Nonprofits aim to serve the public good and also raise money.
Early in my career, as a TV pundit at PBS NewsHour, I worked with its host, Jim Lehrer. Every day, with a series of small gestures, he signaled what kind of behavior was valued there and what kind of behavior was unacceptable. In this subtle way, he established a set of norms and practices that still lives on. He and others built a thick and coherent moral ecology, and its way of being was internalized by most of the people who have worked there.
Look, I understand why people don’t want to get all moralistic in public. Many of those who do are self-righteous prigs, or rank hypocrites. And all of this is only a start. But healthy moral ecologies don’t just happen. They have to be seeded and tended by people who think and talk in moral terms, who try to model and inculcate moral behavior, who understand that we have to build moral communities because on our own, we are all selfish and flawed. Moral formation is best when it’s humble. It means giving people the skills and habits that will help them be considerate to others in the complex situations of life. It means helping people behave in ways that make other people feel included, seen, and respected. That’s very different from how we treat people now — in ways that make them feel sad and lonely, and that make them grow unkind.
Tuesday, August 15
This week's reading is the last one we will read from (the Rev.) Tish Harrison Warren in the NY Times because it is her last article with that publication. She questions discourse in America and highlights the importance of churches in order to foster conversation. In particular, she discusses how dealing with the Church on the outside can empty a person. But, having spiritual insights, conversations, encounters, and prayer - encountering the Church on the inside - fulfills us and also helps our Republic. I'd like to know what you think and what you have experienced with regards to dealing with the proverbial outside and inside of the Church.
My Hope for American Discourse
Tish Harrison Warren, NY Times, 8.6.23
With this final newsletter at The Times, I want to say thank you and goodbye. And yes, OK, this may be a little self-indulgent but I feel it is worth sharing in part because some of my reasons for leaving, while personal, touch on larger themes of faith in private life and public discourse that have featured in this newsletter and that all of us experience in one way or another.
There is a stereotype among some conservative religious people that in media or other public-facing institutions, voices of people of faith are marginalized and unwelcome. I think that this has some truth to it and have even experienced that in certain settings over the years. I have not, however, experienced this at The Times.
Amid a culture that often embraces hyperpolarization and self-righteous scorn for our political and ideological enemies, it takes courage for public-facing institutions to allow for a true diversity of ideas, especially when it comes to matters of faith and identity. It gives me hope for American discourse that in a single year of my tenure at this company, Tressie McMillan Cottom and David French were brought on as columnists — two talented writers who make me think, but who have quite different perspectives on the world. It encourages me that there are institutions in America that, however imperfectly, still seek to embody a commitment to pluralism and old-school, big-tent liberalism, that allow a wide range of voices at the table, so long as those voices are open to listening to others as well.
Writing publicly about God each week can do a number on one’s soul. Thomas Wingfold, a character in a novel by the Scottish minister George MacDonald, said, “Nothing is so deadening to the divine as a habitual dealing with the outsides of holy things.” Holy things, sacred topics, spiritual ideas, I believe, have power. Dealing with them is a privilege and a joy, but habitually dealing with the outside of them is inherently dangerous.
The “outsides” of holy things, to me, describes the difference between speaking about divine or sacred things and encountering the divine or the sacred directly. We need more and better religious discourse in America. I believe that religion and, more broadly, the biggest questions in life are the driving forces behind much that is beautiful, divisive, unifying, controversial and perplexing about our culture and society.
Yet there is danger in becoming a pundit, particularly on matters of faith and spirituality. It can be deadening. For any person of faith, public engagement must be balanced with times of withdrawal, of silence, prayer, questioning and wonder beyond the reach of words. Otherwise, faith with all its strange and startling topology becomes a flat and sterile thing, something to be dissected, instead of embraced. And typically, once something is fit only for dissection, it is dead.
I bring this up because being a pundit is a temptation for all of us now. Digital technology has made us all pundits. We are faced with a constant choice: Every experience, belief, feeling and thought we have can be shared publicly or not. In a single day, we can take in more information and ideas than was ever possible, yet at the end of the day we can still lack wisdom.
Constant connectivity empties us out, as individuals and as a society, making us shallower thinkers and more impatient with others. When it comes to faith, it can yield a habitual dealing with the outsides of holy things, fostering an avoidance of those internal parts of life that are most difficult, things like prayer, uncertainty, humility and the nakedness of who we most truly are amid this confusing, heartbreaking and incandescently beautiful world.
Public debate and dialogue are the crux of our democracy and an important way to seek truth. It is good to speak up and be heard. But speaking up and being heard can be as addictive as a drug. And in our breathless, noisy and contentious society, this addiction must be actively resisted.
There is also a tendency in our moment to prioritize the distant over the proximate and the big over the small. We can seek to have all the right political opinions and still not really love our actual neighbors, those right around us, in our homes, in our workplaces or on our blocks.
We become like Linus in the old “Peanuts” cartoons who famously said: “I love mankind. It’s people I can’t stand.” True community, however, is made of real people with names, of friends with true faults. Don’t get me wrong: Global and national news is important and I will continue to read news and opinion pieces nearly every day. But for me, as for most of us, the places we meet God are not primarily in abstract debates about culture wars or the role of religion in society, but in worship on a Sunday morning or in dropping off soup for a grieving friend, in a vulnerable conversation, in celebration with a neighbor, or in the drowsy prayers uttered while rocking a feverish toddler in the middle of the night.
The way to battle abstraction in our time is to embrace the material, the incarnation of our lives, the fleshy, complicated, touchable realities right around us in our neighborhoods, churches, friends and families. And this enfleshed, incarnational part of my life and work deserves some extra attention now, at least for a little while.
So, finally, if you’d indulge me a little more, in Anglican liturgy, we wind up our worship service each week with a departure ritual: a closing benediction. So, I want to say to my readers, to those who’ve written and told me about your lives, to those who’ve enthusiastically encouraged me or shared my work with others, to those who’ve disagreed with me respectfully, to those who have disagreed with me less respectfully, to those who are struggling and those who are rejoicing, to those who are afraid or those who are encouraged, to those full of faith and those full of doubt and those full of both at the same time: God bless and keep you. You have been a gift to me and I am grateful for each of you.
My Hope for American Discourse
Tish Harrison Warren, NY Times, 8.6.23
With this final newsletter at The Times, I want to say thank you and goodbye. And yes, OK, this may be a little self-indulgent but I feel it is worth sharing in part because some of my reasons for leaving, while personal, touch on larger themes of faith in private life and public discourse that have featured in this newsletter and that all of us experience in one way or another.
There is a stereotype among some conservative religious people that in media or other public-facing institutions, voices of people of faith are marginalized and unwelcome. I think that this has some truth to it and have even experienced that in certain settings over the years. I have not, however, experienced this at The Times.
Amid a culture that often embraces hyperpolarization and self-righteous scorn for our political and ideological enemies, it takes courage for public-facing institutions to allow for a true diversity of ideas, especially when it comes to matters of faith and identity. It gives me hope for American discourse that in a single year of my tenure at this company, Tressie McMillan Cottom and David French were brought on as columnists — two talented writers who make me think, but who have quite different perspectives on the world. It encourages me that there are institutions in America that, however imperfectly, still seek to embody a commitment to pluralism and old-school, big-tent liberalism, that allow a wide range of voices at the table, so long as those voices are open to listening to others as well.
Writing publicly about God each week can do a number on one’s soul. Thomas Wingfold, a character in a novel by the Scottish minister George MacDonald, said, “Nothing is so deadening to the divine as a habitual dealing with the outsides of holy things.” Holy things, sacred topics, spiritual ideas, I believe, have power. Dealing with them is a privilege and a joy, but habitually dealing with the outside of them is inherently dangerous.
The “outsides” of holy things, to me, describes the difference between speaking about divine or sacred things and encountering the divine or the sacred directly. We need more and better religious discourse in America. I believe that religion and, more broadly, the biggest questions in life are the driving forces behind much that is beautiful, divisive, unifying, controversial and perplexing about our culture and society.
Yet there is danger in becoming a pundit, particularly on matters of faith and spirituality. It can be deadening. For any person of faith, public engagement must be balanced with times of withdrawal, of silence, prayer, questioning and wonder beyond the reach of words. Otherwise, faith with all its strange and startling topology becomes a flat and sterile thing, something to be dissected, instead of embraced. And typically, once something is fit only for dissection, it is dead.
I bring this up because being a pundit is a temptation for all of us now. Digital technology has made us all pundits. We are faced with a constant choice: Every experience, belief, feeling and thought we have can be shared publicly or not. In a single day, we can take in more information and ideas than was ever possible, yet at the end of the day we can still lack wisdom.
Constant connectivity empties us out, as individuals and as a society, making us shallower thinkers and more impatient with others. When it comes to faith, it can yield a habitual dealing with the outsides of holy things, fostering an avoidance of those internal parts of life that are most difficult, things like prayer, uncertainty, humility and the nakedness of who we most truly are amid this confusing, heartbreaking and incandescently beautiful world.
Public debate and dialogue are the crux of our democracy and an important way to seek truth. It is good to speak up and be heard. But speaking up and being heard can be as addictive as a drug. And in our breathless, noisy and contentious society, this addiction must be actively resisted.
There is also a tendency in our moment to prioritize the distant over the proximate and the big over the small. We can seek to have all the right political opinions and still not really love our actual neighbors, those right around us, in our homes, in our workplaces or on our blocks.
We become like Linus in the old “Peanuts” cartoons who famously said: “I love mankind. It’s people I can’t stand.” True community, however, is made of real people with names, of friends with true faults. Don’t get me wrong: Global and national news is important and I will continue to read news and opinion pieces nearly every day. But for me, as for most of us, the places we meet God are not primarily in abstract debates about culture wars or the role of religion in society, but in worship on a Sunday morning or in dropping off soup for a grieving friend, in a vulnerable conversation, in celebration with a neighbor, or in the drowsy prayers uttered while rocking a feverish toddler in the middle of the night.
The way to battle abstraction in our time is to embrace the material, the incarnation of our lives, the fleshy, complicated, touchable realities right around us in our neighborhoods, churches, friends and families. And this enfleshed, incarnational part of my life and work deserves some extra attention now, at least for a little while.
So, finally, if you’d indulge me a little more, in Anglican liturgy, we wind up our worship service each week with a departure ritual: a closing benediction. So, I want to say to my readers, to those who’ve written and told me about your lives, to those who’ve enthusiastically encouraged me or shared my work with others, to those who’ve disagreed with me respectfully, to those who have disagreed with me less respectfully, to those who are struggling and those who are rejoicing, to those who are afraid or those who are encouraged, to those full of faith and those full of doubt and those full of both at the same time: God bless and keep you. You have been a gift to me and I am grateful for each of you.
Tuesday, August 8
By popular request we are going to discuss the Atlantic article, The Misunderstood Reason Millions of Americans Stopped Going to Church. I am always interested in hearing what you think on our articles and topics. For this next week, if you were one of the many who sent it to me, I am especially interested in what you read in it. For me, there are some holes in the author's argument. And, as far as why people stopped going to church, I think it's for an entirely different reason (which is felt most especially in the Baptist tradition; the Episcopal Church could boast that we are losing the least amount of people, but, well that's not much to boast about).
The Misunderstood Reason Millions of Americans Stopped Going to Church
Jake Meador, The Atlantic 7.29.23
Forty million Americans have stopped attending church in the past 25 years. It represents the largest concentrated change in church attendance in American history. As a Christian, I feel this shift acutely. My wife and I wonder whether the institutions and communities that have helped preserve us in our own faith will still exist for our children, let alone whatever grandkids we might one day have.
This change is also bad news for America as a whole: Participation in a religious community generally correlates with better health outcomes and longer life, higher financial generosity, and more stable families—all of which are desperately needed in a nation with rising rates of loneliness, mental illness, and alcohol and drug dependency.
A new book, written by Jim Davis, a pastor at an evangelical church in Orlando, and Michael Graham, a writer with the Gospel Coalition, draws on surveys of more than 7,000 Americans by the political scientists Ryan Burge and Paul Djupe, attempting to explain why people have left churches—or “dechurched,” in the book’s lingo—and what, if anything, can be done to get some people to come back. The book raises an intriguing possibility: What if the problem isn’t that churches are asking too much of their members, but that they aren’t asking nearly enough?
The Great Dechurching finds that religious abuse and more general moral corruption in churches have driven people away. But Davis and Graham also find that a much larger share of those who have left church have done so for more banal reasons. The book suggests that the defining problem driving out most people who leave is that Contemporary America simply isn’t set up to promote mutuality, care, or common life. Rather, it is designed to maximize individual accomplishment as defined by professional and financial success. Such a system leaves precious little time or energy for forms of community that don’t contribute to one’s own professional life.
Workism reigns in America, and because of it, community in America, religious community included, is a math problem that doesn’t add up. Consider one of the composite characters that Graham and Davis use in the book to describe a typical evangelical dechurcher: a 30-something woman who grew up in a suburban megachurch, was heavily invested in a campus ministry while in college, then after graduating moved into a full-time job and began attending a young-adults group in a local church. In her 20s, she meets a guy who is less religiously engaged, they get married, and, at some point early in their marriage, after their first or second child is born, they stop going to church. Maybe the baby isn’t sleeping well and when Sunday morning comes around, it is simply easier to stay home and catch whatever sleep is available as the baby (finally) falls asleep.
In other cases, a person might be entering mid-career, working a high-stress job requiring a 60-or 70-hour workweek. Add to that 15 hours of commute time, and suddenly something like two-thirds of their waking hours in the week are already accounted for. And so when a friend invites them to a Sunday-morning brunch, they probably want to go to church, but they also want to see that friend, because they haven’t been able to see them for months. The friend wins out.
After a few weeks of either scenario, the thought of going to church on Sunday carries a certain mental burden with it. Soon it actually sounds like it’d be harder to attend than to skip, even if some part of you still wants to go. The underlying challenge for many is that their lives are stretched like a rubber band about to snap — and church attendance ends up feeling like an item on a checklist that’s already too long.
What can churches do in such a context? In theory, the Christian Church could be an antidote to all that. What is needed in our time is a community marked by sincere love, sharing what they have, eating together, generously serving neighbors, and living lives of quiet virtue and prayer. A healthy church can remind people that their identity is not in their job or how much money they make; they are children of God, loved and protected and infinitely valuable.
But a vibrant, life-giving church requires more, not less, time and energy from its members. It asks people to prioritize one another over our career, to prioritize prayer and time reading scripture over accomplishment. This may seem like a tough sell in an era of dechurching. The problem in front of us is not that we have a healthy, sustainable society that doesn’t have room for church. The problem is that many Americans have adopted a way of life that has left us lonely, anxious, and uncertain of how to live in community with other people.
The tragedy of American churches is that they have been so caught up in this same world that we now find they have nothing to offer these suffering people that can’t be more easily found somewhere else. The difficulty is that many of the wounds and aches provoked by our current order aren’t of a sort that can be managed or life-hacked away. They are resolved only by changing one’s life, by becoming a radically different sort of person belonging to a radically different sort of community.
In the Gospels, Jesus tells his first disciples to leave their old way of life behind, going so far as abandoning their plow or fishing nets where they are and, if necessary, even leaving behind their parents. A church that doesn’t expect at least this much from one another isn’t really a church in the way Jesus spoke about it.
The great dechurching could be the beginning of a new moment for churches, a moment marked less by aspiration to respectability and success, with less focus on individuals aligning themselves with American values and assumptions. We could be a witness to another way of life outside conventionally American measures of success. Churches could model better, truer sorts of communities, ones in which the hungry are fed, the weak are lifted up, and the proud are cast down. Such communities might not have the money, success, and influence that many American churches have so often pursued in recent years. But if such communities look less like those churches, they might also look more like the sorts of communities Jesus expected his followers
to create.
The Misunderstood Reason Millions of Americans Stopped Going to Church
Jake Meador, The Atlantic 7.29.23
Forty million Americans have stopped attending church in the past 25 years. It represents the largest concentrated change in church attendance in American history. As a Christian, I feel this shift acutely. My wife and I wonder whether the institutions and communities that have helped preserve us in our own faith will still exist for our children, let alone whatever grandkids we might one day have.
This change is also bad news for America as a whole: Participation in a religious community generally correlates with better health outcomes and longer life, higher financial generosity, and more stable families—all of which are desperately needed in a nation with rising rates of loneliness, mental illness, and alcohol and drug dependency.
A new book, written by Jim Davis, a pastor at an evangelical church in Orlando, and Michael Graham, a writer with the Gospel Coalition, draws on surveys of more than 7,000 Americans by the political scientists Ryan Burge and Paul Djupe, attempting to explain why people have left churches—or “dechurched,” in the book’s lingo—and what, if anything, can be done to get some people to come back. The book raises an intriguing possibility: What if the problem isn’t that churches are asking too much of their members, but that they aren’t asking nearly enough?
The Great Dechurching finds that religious abuse and more general moral corruption in churches have driven people away. But Davis and Graham also find that a much larger share of those who have left church have done so for more banal reasons. The book suggests that the defining problem driving out most people who leave is that Contemporary America simply isn’t set up to promote mutuality, care, or common life. Rather, it is designed to maximize individual accomplishment as defined by professional and financial success. Such a system leaves precious little time or energy for forms of community that don’t contribute to one’s own professional life.
Workism reigns in America, and because of it, community in America, religious community included, is a math problem that doesn’t add up. Consider one of the composite characters that Graham and Davis use in the book to describe a typical evangelical dechurcher: a 30-something woman who grew up in a suburban megachurch, was heavily invested in a campus ministry while in college, then after graduating moved into a full-time job and began attending a young-adults group in a local church. In her 20s, she meets a guy who is less religiously engaged, they get married, and, at some point early in their marriage, after their first or second child is born, they stop going to church. Maybe the baby isn’t sleeping well and when Sunday morning comes around, it is simply easier to stay home and catch whatever sleep is available as the baby (finally) falls asleep.
In other cases, a person might be entering mid-career, working a high-stress job requiring a 60-or 70-hour workweek. Add to that 15 hours of commute time, and suddenly something like two-thirds of their waking hours in the week are already accounted for. And so when a friend invites them to a Sunday-morning brunch, they probably want to go to church, but they also want to see that friend, because they haven’t been able to see them for months. The friend wins out.
After a few weeks of either scenario, the thought of going to church on Sunday carries a certain mental burden with it. Soon it actually sounds like it’d be harder to attend than to skip, even if some part of you still wants to go. The underlying challenge for many is that their lives are stretched like a rubber band about to snap — and church attendance ends up feeling like an item on a checklist that’s already too long.
What can churches do in such a context? In theory, the Christian Church could be an antidote to all that. What is needed in our time is a community marked by sincere love, sharing what they have, eating together, generously serving neighbors, and living lives of quiet virtue and prayer. A healthy church can remind people that their identity is not in their job or how much money they make; they are children of God, loved and protected and infinitely valuable.
But a vibrant, life-giving church requires more, not less, time and energy from its members. It asks people to prioritize one another over our career, to prioritize prayer and time reading scripture over accomplishment. This may seem like a tough sell in an era of dechurching. The problem in front of us is not that we have a healthy, sustainable society that doesn’t have room for church. The problem is that many Americans have adopted a way of life that has left us lonely, anxious, and uncertain of how to live in community with other people.
The tragedy of American churches is that they have been so caught up in this same world that we now find they have nothing to offer these suffering people that can’t be more easily found somewhere else. The difficulty is that many of the wounds and aches provoked by our current order aren’t of a sort that can be managed or life-hacked away. They are resolved only by changing one’s life, by becoming a radically different sort of person belonging to a radically different sort of community.
In the Gospels, Jesus tells his first disciples to leave their old way of life behind, going so far as abandoning their plow or fishing nets where they are and, if necessary, even leaving behind their parents. A church that doesn’t expect at least this much from one another isn’t really a church in the way Jesus spoke about it.
The great dechurching could be the beginning of a new moment for churches, a moment marked less by aspiration to respectability and success, with less focus on individuals aligning themselves with American values and assumptions. We could be a witness to another way of life outside conventionally American measures of success. Churches could model better, truer sorts of communities, ones in which the hungry are fed, the weak are lifted up, and the proud are cast down. Such communities might not have the money, success, and influence that many American churches have so often pursued in recent years. But if such communities look less like those churches, they might also look more like the sorts of communities Jesus expected his followers
to create.
Tuesday, August 1
We had a good week of discussions around the divine spirit in each of us according to the Sikh religion. For many, that particular way of believing didn't have a satisfactory reason or basis for what we see as evil being carried out by humans in the world.
This week, we are going to look at two other belief systems regarding the problem of evil - atheistic neuroscientists and Christian Science. This means there are two readings (sorry!) but I think these two articles will make for interesting conversation partners. Perhaps you will be filled by them or perhaps you will feel, like I do, that their arguments end up a little empty. Regardless, your views and thoughts are welcome at the discussion table.
Where Does Evil Come From?
Sandy Sandberg, Christian Science Monitor 11.19.20
By way of answering the headline’s question let’s look at an analogy. When we enter a room that is dark, we don’t try to figure out why it’s dark. We find the light switch and turn on the light. Nor do we concern ourselves with where the darkness went, because we understand that it didn’t “go” anywhere. It was merely the absence of light.
This analogy works pretty well as a starting point for addressing the question of how Christian Science explains the nature of evil. Instead of trying to figure out where evil came from, Christian Science focuses on understanding the nature of the source of all that is, which is God.
Because God is solely good, goodness has a source, but its opposite, evil, lacks a true source or substance – just like the darkness. As we’re receptive to that light, we realize that evil doesn’t have any basis in spiritual reality. We come to understand the nature of Truth as supremely powerful, omnipresent, and entirely good. Therefore, its opposite is without legitimacy, without intelligence – a lie. This is captured in one of the ways Jesus described the devil, or evil. He said, “There is no truth in him ... he is a liar, and the father of it” (John 8:44).
It is through spiritual sense that we are able to see and understand the spiritual reality, where all is held in the infinite allness and goodness of God’s being. Referring to God, the Bible puts it this way: “You are of purer eyes than to behold evil, and cannot look on wickedness” (Habakkuk 1:13). Here the absolute purity of God’s nature as conscious of good and good alone is revealed. God, Truth, alone is ever present.
Christ Jesus lived to present this wonderful light of Truth. He once said: “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life” (John 8:12). Indeed, throughout his ministry those who were sick were healed, many entangled in sin were reformed, several people who had died were restored to life, and multitudes who were ignorant of God’s ever-present goodness had the gospel – the good news of God’s allness –preached to them.
Today, too, each of us can glimpse the spiritual fact of evil’s unreality, whether in the form of sickness or other obstacles to harmony, and experience healing. In this way we are demonstrating what Jesus showed us we could do – we can prove the ever presence and all-power of Truth, whose light is forever shining, dispelling the darkness of evil.
The End of Evil?
Ron Rosenbaum, Slate Magazine 9.30.11
Is evil over? Has science finally driven a stake through its dark heart? Yes, according to many neuroscientists, who are emerging as the new high priests of the secrets of the psyche, explainers of human behavior in general. A phenomenon attested to by a recent torrent of pop-sci brain books with titles like Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. Not secret in most of these works is the disdain for metaphysical evil, which is regarded as an antiquated concept that’s done more harm than good. They argue that the time has come to replace such metaphysical terms with physical explanations – malfunctions or malformations in the brain.
Of course, people still commit innumerable bad actions, but the idea that people make conscious decisions to hurt or harm is no longer sustainable, say the new brain scientists. For one thing, there is no such thing as “free will” with which to decide to commit evil. Autonomous, conscious decision-making itself may well be an illusion. And thus, intentional evil is impossible.
Have the new neuroscientists brandishing their fMRIs, the ghostly illuminated etchings of the interior structures of the skull, succeeded? Have they pinpointed the hidden anomalies in the amygdala, the dysfunctions in the prefrontal lobes, the electrochemical source of impulses that lead Jared Loughner, or Anders Breivik, to commit their murderous acts?
And in reducing evil to a purely neurological glitch or malformation in the wiring of the physical brain, in eliminating the element of freely willed conscious choice, have neuroscientists eliminated as well “moral agency,” personal responsibility? Does this “neuromitigation” excuse— “my brain made me do it,” as critics of the tendency have called it — mean that no human being really wants to do ill to another? That we are all innocent beings, some afflicted with defects — “brain bugs” as one new pop-neuroscience book calls them — that cause the behavior formerly known as evil?
The new neuroscience represents the latest attempt by science to reduce evil to malfunction or dysfunction rather than malevolence. It’s a quest I examined in Explaining Hitler: the way the varieties of 20th-century psychological “science” sought to find some physiological, developmental, sexual, or psychoanalytic cause for Hitler’s crimes. It would be consolatory if not comforting if we could prove that what made Hitler “Hitler” was a malfunction in human nature, a glitch in the circuitry. This somewhat Pollyannaish quest to explain the man’s crimes remains counterintuitive to many. I recall the late British historian and biographer of Hitler, Alan Bullock, reacting to the claims of scientism by exclaiming to me vociferously: “If he isn’t evil, then who is? … If he isn’t evil the word has no meaning.”
Indeed, recent developments demonstrate that evil remains a stubborn concept in our culture. To read the mainstream media commentary on the Breivik case, for instance, is to come upon, time after time, the word “evil.” Not just that the acts were evil, but that he, Breivik was, as a Wall Street Journal columnist put it, “evil incarnate.” But what exactly does that mean? The incarnation of what? The word “incarnation” implies, metaphorically at least, the embedding of a metaphysical force in a physical body. One can understand the scientific aversion to this as a description of reality. But evil as a numinous force abides.
Even if it was not surprising for the Pope to name evil, it was surprising to see a devout atheist such as my colleague Christopher Hitchens invoke “evil” in his “obituary” for Osama bin Laden. Hitchens admits wishing he could avoid using “that simplistic (but somehow indispensable) word.” But he feels compelled to call whatever motivated bin Laden a “force” that “absolutely deserves to be called evil.” But what is this “force,” which sounds suspiciously supernatural for an atheist to believe in? Where is it located: in the material or nonmaterial world?
That is the real “problem of evil”. We tend to believe it exists: Popular culture has no problem with it. But even religious thinkers continue to debate what it is and why a just and loving God permits evil and the hideous suffering it entails. If they shift the blame to us (because God gave man free will to sin) why God couldn’t have created a human nature that would not so readily choose genocide and torture. (For the record, I’m an agnostic.)
One person whose work on these matters has received considerable attention lately is the British Professor of Psychopathology, Simon Baron-Cohen. He’s the author of The Science of Evil, which seeks to dispose of the problem of evil in part at least by changing its name. “My main goal,” says Baron-Cohen, “is replacing the unscientific term ‘evil’ with the scientific term ‘empathy.’” What he means is that instead of calling someone evil we should say they have no
empathy. Baron-Cohen goes to great lengths to posit an “empathy circuit” in the brain whose varying “degrees” of strength constitute a spectrum, ranging from total, 100 percent empathy to “zero degrees of empathy.” A healthy empathy circuit allows us to feel others’ pain and transcend single-minded focus on our own.
One troubling aspect of Baron-Cohen’s grand substitution of a lack of empathy for evil is the mechanistic way he describes it. He characterizes those who lack empathy as having “a chip in their neural computer missing.” The big problem here is that by reducing evil to a mechanical malfunction in the empathy circuit, Baron-Cohen also reduces, or even abolishes, good. No one in this deterministic conceptual system chooses to be good, courageous, or heroic. They just have a well-developed empathy circuit that compels them act empathetically — there’s no choice or honor in the matter.
Despite all the astonishing advances in neuroscience, however, we still know woefully little about how the brain enables the mind and especially about how consciousness and intentionality can arise from the complicated hunk of matter that is the brain. We may know the 13 regions that light up on an fMRI when we feel “empathy” (or fail to light up when we choose evil) but that doesn’t explain whether this lit-up state indicates they are causing empathy or just reflecting it. The problem of evil — and moral responsibility — is thus inseparable from what is known in the philosophical trade as “the hard problem of consciousness.” How does the brain, that electrified piece of meat, create the mind and the music of Mozart?
As for evil itself, the new neuroscience is unlikely to end the debate, but it may cause us to be more attentive to the phenomenon. Perhaps evil will always be like the famous Supreme Court pronouncement on pornography. You know it when you see it. I don’t like its imprecision, but I will concede I don’t have a better answer. Just that we can do better than the mechanistic, deterministic, denial of personal responsibility the neuroscientists are offering to “replace” evil with.
I recall an exchange in my conversation with one of the original neuroskeptics, Daniel S. Reich, now head of a research division on nerve diseases at the National Institutes of Health. Toward the end of our conversation I asked Reich if he believed in evil. He was silent for a bit and then started talking about Norway. About degrees of evil. About the difference between the typical suicide bomber and the Oslo killer. How the former has only to press a button to accomplish his murderous goal and never has to see the consequences. But on that summer camp island in Oslo, Reich said, Breivik was stalking victims for hours. He’d shoot one or more and, according to survivors, not register anything, just continue trudging forward, looking for more.
“He saw the consequences, the blood, heard the screams. He just kept going.” Some will try to say this is sociopathy or psychopathy or zero degrees of empathy and other exculpatory cop-outs. But fueled by his evil ideas Breivik kept going; if we can’t call him evil who can we?
This week, we are going to look at two other belief systems regarding the problem of evil - atheistic neuroscientists and Christian Science. This means there are two readings (sorry!) but I think these two articles will make for interesting conversation partners. Perhaps you will be filled by them or perhaps you will feel, like I do, that their arguments end up a little empty. Regardless, your views and thoughts are welcome at the discussion table.
Where Does Evil Come From?
Sandy Sandberg, Christian Science Monitor 11.19.20
By way of answering the headline’s question let’s look at an analogy. When we enter a room that is dark, we don’t try to figure out why it’s dark. We find the light switch and turn on the light. Nor do we concern ourselves with where the darkness went, because we understand that it didn’t “go” anywhere. It was merely the absence of light.
This analogy works pretty well as a starting point for addressing the question of how Christian Science explains the nature of evil. Instead of trying to figure out where evil came from, Christian Science focuses on understanding the nature of the source of all that is, which is God.
Because God is solely good, goodness has a source, but its opposite, evil, lacks a true source or substance – just like the darkness. As we’re receptive to that light, we realize that evil doesn’t have any basis in spiritual reality. We come to understand the nature of Truth as supremely powerful, omnipresent, and entirely good. Therefore, its opposite is without legitimacy, without intelligence – a lie. This is captured in one of the ways Jesus described the devil, or evil. He said, “There is no truth in him ... he is a liar, and the father of it” (John 8:44).
It is through spiritual sense that we are able to see and understand the spiritual reality, where all is held in the infinite allness and goodness of God’s being. Referring to God, the Bible puts it this way: “You are of purer eyes than to behold evil, and cannot look on wickedness” (Habakkuk 1:13). Here the absolute purity of God’s nature as conscious of good and good alone is revealed. God, Truth, alone is ever present.
Christ Jesus lived to present this wonderful light of Truth. He once said: “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life” (John 8:12). Indeed, throughout his ministry those who were sick were healed, many entangled in sin were reformed, several people who had died were restored to life, and multitudes who were ignorant of God’s ever-present goodness had the gospel – the good news of God’s allness –preached to them.
Today, too, each of us can glimpse the spiritual fact of evil’s unreality, whether in the form of sickness or other obstacles to harmony, and experience healing. In this way we are demonstrating what Jesus showed us we could do – we can prove the ever presence and all-power of Truth, whose light is forever shining, dispelling the darkness of evil.
The End of Evil?
Ron Rosenbaum, Slate Magazine 9.30.11
Is evil over? Has science finally driven a stake through its dark heart? Yes, according to many neuroscientists, who are emerging as the new high priests of the secrets of the psyche, explainers of human behavior in general. A phenomenon attested to by a recent torrent of pop-sci brain books with titles like Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. Not secret in most of these works is the disdain for metaphysical evil, which is regarded as an antiquated concept that’s done more harm than good. They argue that the time has come to replace such metaphysical terms with physical explanations – malfunctions or malformations in the brain.
Of course, people still commit innumerable bad actions, but the idea that people make conscious decisions to hurt or harm is no longer sustainable, say the new brain scientists. For one thing, there is no such thing as “free will” with which to decide to commit evil. Autonomous, conscious decision-making itself may well be an illusion. And thus, intentional evil is impossible.
Have the new neuroscientists brandishing their fMRIs, the ghostly illuminated etchings of the interior structures of the skull, succeeded? Have they pinpointed the hidden anomalies in the amygdala, the dysfunctions in the prefrontal lobes, the electrochemical source of impulses that lead Jared Loughner, or Anders Breivik, to commit their murderous acts?
And in reducing evil to a purely neurological glitch or malformation in the wiring of the physical brain, in eliminating the element of freely willed conscious choice, have neuroscientists eliminated as well “moral agency,” personal responsibility? Does this “neuromitigation” excuse— “my brain made me do it,” as critics of the tendency have called it — mean that no human being really wants to do ill to another? That we are all innocent beings, some afflicted with defects — “brain bugs” as one new pop-neuroscience book calls them — that cause the behavior formerly known as evil?
The new neuroscience represents the latest attempt by science to reduce evil to malfunction or dysfunction rather than malevolence. It’s a quest I examined in Explaining Hitler: the way the varieties of 20th-century psychological “science” sought to find some physiological, developmental, sexual, or psychoanalytic cause for Hitler’s crimes. It would be consolatory if not comforting if we could prove that what made Hitler “Hitler” was a malfunction in human nature, a glitch in the circuitry. This somewhat Pollyannaish quest to explain the man’s crimes remains counterintuitive to many. I recall the late British historian and biographer of Hitler, Alan Bullock, reacting to the claims of scientism by exclaiming to me vociferously: “If he isn’t evil, then who is? … If he isn’t evil the word has no meaning.”
Indeed, recent developments demonstrate that evil remains a stubborn concept in our culture. To read the mainstream media commentary on the Breivik case, for instance, is to come upon, time after time, the word “evil.” Not just that the acts were evil, but that he, Breivik was, as a Wall Street Journal columnist put it, “evil incarnate.” But what exactly does that mean? The incarnation of what? The word “incarnation” implies, metaphorically at least, the embedding of a metaphysical force in a physical body. One can understand the scientific aversion to this as a description of reality. But evil as a numinous force abides.
Even if it was not surprising for the Pope to name evil, it was surprising to see a devout atheist such as my colleague Christopher Hitchens invoke “evil” in his “obituary” for Osama bin Laden. Hitchens admits wishing he could avoid using “that simplistic (but somehow indispensable) word.” But he feels compelled to call whatever motivated bin Laden a “force” that “absolutely deserves to be called evil.” But what is this “force,” which sounds suspiciously supernatural for an atheist to believe in? Where is it located: in the material or nonmaterial world?
That is the real “problem of evil”. We tend to believe it exists: Popular culture has no problem with it. But even religious thinkers continue to debate what it is and why a just and loving God permits evil and the hideous suffering it entails. If they shift the blame to us (because God gave man free will to sin) why God couldn’t have created a human nature that would not so readily choose genocide and torture. (For the record, I’m an agnostic.)
One person whose work on these matters has received considerable attention lately is the British Professor of Psychopathology, Simon Baron-Cohen. He’s the author of The Science of Evil, which seeks to dispose of the problem of evil in part at least by changing its name. “My main goal,” says Baron-Cohen, “is replacing the unscientific term ‘evil’ with the scientific term ‘empathy.’” What he means is that instead of calling someone evil we should say they have no
empathy. Baron-Cohen goes to great lengths to posit an “empathy circuit” in the brain whose varying “degrees” of strength constitute a spectrum, ranging from total, 100 percent empathy to “zero degrees of empathy.” A healthy empathy circuit allows us to feel others’ pain and transcend single-minded focus on our own.
One troubling aspect of Baron-Cohen’s grand substitution of a lack of empathy for evil is the mechanistic way he describes it. He characterizes those who lack empathy as having “a chip in their neural computer missing.” The big problem here is that by reducing evil to a mechanical malfunction in the empathy circuit, Baron-Cohen also reduces, or even abolishes, good. No one in this deterministic conceptual system chooses to be good, courageous, or heroic. They just have a well-developed empathy circuit that compels them act empathetically — there’s no choice or honor in the matter.
Despite all the astonishing advances in neuroscience, however, we still know woefully little about how the brain enables the mind and especially about how consciousness and intentionality can arise from the complicated hunk of matter that is the brain. We may know the 13 regions that light up on an fMRI when we feel “empathy” (or fail to light up when we choose evil) but that doesn’t explain whether this lit-up state indicates they are causing empathy or just reflecting it. The problem of evil — and moral responsibility — is thus inseparable from what is known in the philosophical trade as “the hard problem of consciousness.” How does the brain, that electrified piece of meat, create the mind and the music of Mozart?
As for evil itself, the new neuroscience is unlikely to end the debate, but it may cause us to be more attentive to the phenomenon. Perhaps evil will always be like the famous Supreme Court pronouncement on pornography. You know it when you see it. I don’t like its imprecision, but I will concede I don’t have a better answer. Just that we can do better than the mechanistic, deterministic, denial of personal responsibility the neuroscientists are offering to “replace” evil with.
I recall an exchange in my conversation with one of the original neuroskeptics, Daniel S. Reich, now head of a research division on nerve diseases at the National Institutes of Health. Toward the end of our conversation I asked Reich if he believed in evil. He was silent for a bit and then started talking about Norway. About degrees of evil. About the difference between the typical suicide bomber and the Oslo killer. How the former has only to press a button to accomplish his murderous goal and never has to see the consequences. But on that summer camp island in Oslo, Reich said, Breivik was stalking victims for hours. He’d shoot one or more and, according to survivors, not register anything, just continue trudging forward, looking for more.
“He saw the consequences, the blood, heard the screams. He just kept going.” Some will try to say this is sociopathy or psychopathy or zero degrees of empathy and other exculpatory cop-outs. But fueled by his evil ideas Breivik kept going; if we can’t call him evil who can we?
Tuesday, July 25
This past week, both groups talked about the doctrine of Original Sin which states that we are fallen, sinful humans who basically cannot help ourselves. Some agreed with it; others did not.
Interestingly enough, we have a good summer read this coming week - a book review of The Light We Give by Simran Jeet Singh. This book introduces the reader to Sikh wisdom (an often misunderstood and certainly under-represented world faith tradition in mainstream religious circles).
Sikh wisdom asserts that no one is evil. Period. Putting that belief to the test, he recalls the murder of seven Sikhs in Wisconsin as they worshipped in 2012. The author encourages readers to combat hate with love and empathy rather than perpetuating patterns of disengagement and polarization. Could this be a helpful read for our day; or, is it unrealistic thinking (or both). I'd like to know what you think.
Can People be Evil?
Alexis Vaughan, The Christian Century 7.6.23
A book review by Alexis Vaughan, a Disciples of Christ minister, who serves as director of racial equity initiatives at Interfaith America.
Educator and activist Simran Jeet Singh begins his memoir, The Light We Give, by recalling the racism he experienced as a “turban-wearing, brown-skinned, beard-loving Sikh” growing up in South Texas. He recalls distressing interactions with classmates and community members who discriminated against him based on his appearance, and he walks readers through the choices he made to navigate complicated feelings of anger, sadness, and fear. These choices led him to embrace positivity over negativity and to practice his Sikh faith more intentionally. Singh points to three major components of Sikhi that have shaped his outlook:
chardi kala, a teaching that imbues life with optimism and gratitude even amid pain and suffering;
ik oankar, the concept that all people are created with a light of divinity within them, making everyone equal and worthy of respect; and
seva, the practice of expressing love in all things, especially through service.
He calls on readers to seek lives of active empathy, seeing each person — even those who are hurtful — as valuable and worthy of kindness and love. “When we identify our core values and commitments, and when we begin to put these into practice consistently, then we have set ourselves up to engage with the world around us in a way that is rooted not in our emotions and attachments, but in our principles and convictions.”
Singh describes as his greatest test of faith the aftermath of the massacre of seven Sikhs as they worshiped together in their gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, in 2012. While grappling with his personal anger and sadness following the massacre amid his responsibilities as a public figure, he felt the need to speak to diverse audiences about the Sikh faith and the implications of hate for American society.
One of the most compelling sections of the book follows Singh as he travels to a summer camp to speak to Sikh children immediately after the massacre. When he asks the children if they know what happened there, a young girl responds, “A bad, bad man came and killed a bunch of us. He was evil.” Singh wrestles with how to respond because he finds something unsettling about naming Wade Michael Page, the shooter, as evil. He explains:
On the one hand, I preferred this framing because it helped make sense of a seemingly senseless massacre. But on the other hand, hearing a child say these words out loud revealed a truth that upset me. I took comfort in seeing him as evil. But I don’t believe in evil as a reality of our world, and I certainly don’t believe that people are evil. Damaged and destructive, yes. But evil, no.
Singh goes on to explain that Sikhi “teaches us to see every human being as equally divine and to reject the good-evil binary,” suggesting “that we are all inherently good and embodiments of God.” While it would be “emotionally easier” to respond to the children’s anger and sadness by dismissing Page as evil, Singh writes, doing so would dehumanize Page in a way that is ultimately unwarranted.
Singh’s reflections remind me of a theology I’ve often encountered in faith-based activism: the affirmation that every person enters this world created in God’s perfect image, and the bad things that we impose on each other after we’re born are betrayals of that image. Negative emotions —such as shame, anger, grief, and loneliness — are symptoms of those betrayals. These emotions, especially when combined with the idea of evil, have often been used to uphold the power structures that exploit the most vulnerable people in our communities.
In my experience, however, it’s hard to combat oppression without the spiritual resources to name where things have gone wrong and process our emotions about it. We all have the capacity and sometimes the impulse to do terrible things in the world — things that I, as a Christian, would call evil. Practicing our faith or ethical commitments on a daily basis is one way we can work on resisting those impulses. This is something that even children can learn from other people’s egregious acts.
My disagreement with Singh is, at its heart, a disagreement about what it means to be human. Singh desires to escape the good/evil binary because he believes that labeling Page as evil would be an act of “dehumanizing someone who had dehumanized us.” But I believe that our actions in the world reveal something real about who we are, and the full scope of our humanity includes our capacity to commit heinous acts. Naming that is just as important as recognizing our capacity to overcome those impulses and do good. When Singh reasons Page out of being labeled “evil” by the child at the camp, it feels to my Christian sensibilities like an act of dehumanization.
Singh’s conclusion that we all need to integrate ethical living into our public lives is admirable. He encourages readers to combat hate with love and empathy rather than perpetuating unhelpful patterns of disengagement and polarization. For those who are inspired to take on positive change but don’t know where to begin or how to articulate the impact of their faith on their worldview, Singh’s work is an excellent model. The Light We Give is not only an accessible introduction to Sikh wisdom, it’s a guide for all people who want to be better and do better.
Tuesday, July 18
We had an interesting and lively discussion about A.I. and medicine and religion. In both groups, we talked about Sunday's 60 Minutes segment about A.I. For those who did not see it, here is the YouTube link to that fascinating 27 minute piece.
www.youtube.com/watch
This week, we are going to discuss David French's opinion piece in the NY Times - Who Truly Threatens the Church. He believes Church leaders are no longer looking to be protected from government but rather they are seeking governmental authority. And, in short, he believes that is the greatest threat to the church. I'd like to know what you think.
Who Truly Threatens the Church?
David French, NY Times 7.9.23
According to legend, in the early 1900s, The Times of London sent an inquiry to a number of writers asking the question, “What’s wrong with the world today?” The Christian apologist G.K. Chesterton responded succinctly and profoundly: “Dear Sirs, I am.” The real story is just as profound, but less succinct. In 1905 Chesterton wrote a much longer letter to London’s Daily News, and that letter included this: “The answer to the question ‘What is Wrong?’ should be, ‘I am wrong.’ Until a man can give that answer his idealism is only a hobby.”
I’ve thought about that Chesterton quote often as I’ve seen the “new” Christian right re-embrace the authoritarianism of previous American political eras. At the exact time when religious liberty is enjoying a historic winning streak at the Supreme Court, a cohort of Christians has increasingly decided that liberty isn’t enough. To restore the culture and protect our children, it’s necessary to exercise power to shape our national environment.
And so the conservative movement is changing. When I was a younger lawyer, conservatives fought speech codes that often inhibited religious and conservative discourse on campus. Now, red state legislatures are writing their own speech codes, hoping to limit discussion of the ideas they disfavor. When I was starting my career, my conservative colleagues and I rolled our eyes at the right-wing book purges of old, when angry parents tried to yank “dangerous” books off school library shelves. Well, now the purges are back, as parents are squaring off in school districts across the nation, arguing over the words children should be allowed to read.
Years ago, I laughed at claims that Christian conservatives were dominionists in disguise, that we didn’t just want religious freedom, we wanted religious authority. Yet now, such claims are hardly laughable. Arguments for a “Christian nationalism” are increasingly prominent, with factions ranging from Catholic integralists to reformed Protestants to prophetic Pentecostals all seeking a new American social compact, one that explicitly puts Christians in charge.
The motivating force behind this transformation is a powerful sense of threat — the idea that the left is “coming after” you and your family. This mind-set sees the Christian use of power as inherently protective, and the desire to censor as an attempt to save children from dangerous ideas. The threat to the goodness of the church and the virtue of its members, in other words, comes primarily from outside its walls, from a culture and a world that is seen as worse in virtually every way.
But there’s a contrary view, one that emanates from the idea of original sin, which Chesterton argued was “the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.” The doctrine of original sin rejects the idea that we are intrinsically good and are corrupted only by the outside world. Instead, we enter life with our own profound and inherent flaws. We are all, in a word, fallen. To quote Jesus in the book of Mark, “There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.” All manner of sin and evil comes “from within, out of the heart of man.”
Under this understanding of Scripture, we are all our own greatest enemy. We do not, either as individuals or as a religious movement, possess an inherent virtue that should entitle any of us to rule. We shun the will to power because we rightly fear our own sin, and we protect the liberty of others because we do not possess all wisdom and we need to hear their ideas.
One of the best recent books about the American founding is “We the Fallen People: The Founders and American Democracy” by the Wheaton College professor Robert Tracy McKenzie. In it, he details at length the founders’ own reservations about human nature. As James Madison famously wrote in Federalist No. 51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”
This proper skepticism about human virtue pervades the Constitution. At every turn, the power of government is hemmed in. Each branch checks the other. The people check the government, and the government checks the people. The Bill of Rights attempts to safeguard our most fundamental human rights from government overreach or the tyranny of the mob. No faction can be trusted with unchecked authority.
But, as Professor McKenzie argues, this understanding faced an early and serious challenge in a political movement that we’d recognize today — Jacksonian populism, the idea that “the people” were, in fact, righteous enough to rule. The very concept was, and is, destructive to its core. The
sense of virtue creates a sense of righteous entitlement. In Christian America, the belief that “we” are good leads to the conviction that the churches will suffer, our nation will suffer and our families will suffer unless “we” run things. It closes our hearts and minds to contrary voices and opposing ideas.
But one doesn’t have to look to national politics to see that threats can emanate from within the church as well as without. One of the most terrifying and poignant parts of the hit Amazon Prime documentary series “Shiny Happy People” was the story of Josh Duggar, a young man who was raised in a deeply religious family. He was protected from the corruption of the “outside world” in almost every way that could be devised. He was home-schooled and grew up in a house without a cable television and with limited access to media. And yet he was depraved enough to molest his own sisters.
My wife and I both grew up in a fundamentalist community that tried hard to protect the church from the world. Yet it turned out that my wife needed protection from the church. She’s a victim of child sex abuse. The perpetrator taught vacation Bible school.
This recent legacy of scandal and abuse should be more than enough evidence of the need for humility in any Christian political theology. This is not moral relativism. We still possess core convictions. But existential humility acknowledges the limits of our own wisdom and virtue.
Existential humility renders liberty a necessity, not merely to safeguard our own beliefs but also to safeguard our access to other ideas and arguments that might help expose our own mistakes and shortcomings.
Who is wrong? I am wrong. We are wrong. Until the church can give that answer, its political idealism will meet a tragic and destructive end. The attempt to control others will not preserve our virtue, and it risks inflicting our own failures on the nation we seek to save.
www.youtube.com/watch
This week, we are going to discuss David French's opinion piece in the NY Times - Who Truly Threatens the Church. He believes Church leaders are no longer looking to be protected from government but rather they are seeking governmental authority. And, in short, he believes that is the greatest threat to the church. I'd like to know what you think.
Who Truly Threatens the Church?
David French, NY Times 7.9.23
According to legend, in the early 1900s, The Times of London sent an inquiry to a number of writers asking the question, “What’s wrong with the world today?” The Christian apologist G.K. Chesterton responded succinctly and profoundly: “Dear Sirs, I am.” The real story is just as profound, but less succinct. In 1905 Chesterton wrote a much longer letter to London’s Daily News, and that letter included this: “The answer to the question ‘What is Wrong?’ should be, ‘I am wrong.’ Until a man can give that answer his idealism is only a hobby.”
I’ve thought about that Chesterton quote often as I’ve seen the “new” Christian right re-embrace the authoritarianism of previous American political eras. At the exact time when religious liberty is enjoying a historic winning streak at the Supreme Court, a cohort of Christians has increasingly decided that liberty isn’t enough. To restore the culture and protect our children, it’s necessary to exercise power to shape our national environment.
And so the conservative movement is changing. When I was a younger lawyer, conservatives fought speech codes that often inhibited religious and conservative discourse on campus. Now, red state legislatures are writing their own speech codes, hoping to limit discussion of the ideas they disfavor. When I was starting my career, my conservative colleagues and I rolled our eyes at the right-wing book purges of old, when angry parents tried to yank “dangerous” books off school library shelves. Well, now the purges are back, as parents are squaring off in school districts across the nation, arguing over the words children should be allowed to read.
Years ago, I laughed at claims that Christian conservatives were dominionists in disguise, that we didn’t just want religious freedom, we wanted religious authority. Yet now, such claims are hardly laughable. Arguments for a “Christian nationalism” are increasingly prominent, with factions ranging from Catholic integralists to reformed Protestants to prophetic Pentecostals all seeking a new American social compact, one that explicitly puts Christians in charge.
The motivating force behind this transformation is a powerful sense of threat — the idea that the left is “coming after” you and your family. This mind-set sees the Christian use of power as inherently protective, and the desire to censor as an attempt to save children from dangerous ideas. The threat to the goodness of the church and the virtue of its members, in other words, comes primarily from outside its walls, from a culture and a world that is seen as worse in virtually every way.
But there’s a contrary view, one that emanates from the idea of original sin, which Chesterton argued was “the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.” The doctrine of original sin rejects the idea that we are intrinsically good and are corrupted only by the outside world. Instead, we enter life with our own profound and inherent flaws. We are all, in a word, fallen. To quote Jesus in the book of Mark, “There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.” All manner of sin and evil comes “from within, out of the heart of man.”
Under this understanding of Scripture, we are all our own greatest enemy. We do not, either as individuals or as a religious movement, possess an inherent virtue that should entitle any of us to rule. We shun the will to power because we rightly fear our own sin, and we protect the liberty of others because we do not possess all wisdom and we need to hear their ideas.
One of the best recent books about the American founding is “We the Fallen People: The Founders and American Democracy” by the Wheaton College professor Robert Tracy McKenzie. In it, he details at length the founders’ own reservations about human nature. As James Madison famously wrote in Federalist No. 51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”
This proper skepticism about human virtue pervades the Constitution. At every turn, the power of government is hemmed in. Each branch checks the other. The people check the government, and the government checks the people. The Bill of Rights attempts to safeguard our most fundamental human rights from government overreach or the tyranny of the mob. No faction can be trusted with unchecked authority.
But, as Professor McKenzie argues, this understanding faced an early and serious challenge in a political movement that we’d recognize today — Jacksonian populism, the idea that “the people” were, in fact, righteous enough to rule. The very concept was, and is, destructive to its core. The
sense of virtue creates a sense of righteous entitlement. In Christian America, the belief that “we” are good leads to the conviction that the churches will suffer, our nation will suffer and our families will suffer unless “we” run things. It closes our hearts and minds to contrary voices and opposing ideas.
But one doesn’t have to look to national politics to see that threats can emanate from within the church as well as without. One of the most terrifying and poignant parts of the hit Amazon Prime documentary series “Shiny Happy People” was the story of Josh Duggar, a young man who was raised in a deeply religious family. He was protected from the corruption of the “outside world” in almost every way that could be devised. He was home-schooled and grew up in a house without a cable television and with limited access to media. And yet he was depraved enough to molest his own sisters.
My wife and I both grew up in a fundamentalist community that tried hard to protect the church from the world. Yet it turned out that my wife needed protection from the church. She’s a victim of child sex abuse. The perpetrator taught vacation Bible school.
This recent legacy of scandal and abuse should be more than enough evidence of the need for humility in any Christian political theology. This is not moral relativism. We still possess core convictions. But existential humility acknowledges the limits of our own wisdom and virtue.
Existential humility renders liberty a necessity, not merely to safeguard our own beliefs but also to safeguard our access to other ideas and arguments that might help expose our own mistakes and shortcomings.
Who is wrong? I am wrong. We are wrong. Until the church can give that answer, its political idealism will meet a tragic and destructive end. The attempt to control others will not preserve our virtue, and it risks inflicting our own failures on the nation we seek to save.
Tuesday, July 11
This week, let's talk about health - physical and spiritual. A.I. is affecting how medicine is practiced and, perhaps, it impacts our spiritual health as well. The main article is my Reflection for this week, Calling Dr. A.I. The supplemental article is what I referenced in that piece - Dr. Daniela Lamas' guest essay in the NY Times. I'm looking forward to talking about health and technology.
A.I. Will Change Medicine but Not What It Means to Be a Doctor
Daniela J. Lamas, M.D. NY Times 7.6.23
When faced with a particularly tough question on rounds during my intern year, I would run straight to the bathroom. There, I would flip through the medical reference book I carried in my pocket, find the answer and return to the group, ready to respond. At the time, I believed that my job was to memorize, to know the most arcane of medical eponyms by heart. Surely an excellent clinician would not need to consult a book or a computer to diagnose a patient. Or so I thought then.
Not even two decades later, we find ourselves at the dawn of what many believe to be a new era in medicine, one in which artificial intelligence promises to write our notes, to communicate with patients, to offer diagnoses. The potential is dazzling. But as these systems improve and are integrated into our practice in the coming years, we will face complicated questions: Where does specialized expertise live? If the thought process to arrive at a diagnosis can be done by a computer “co-pilot,” how does that change the practice of medicine, for doctors and for patients?
Though medicine is a field where breakthrough innovation saves lives, doctors are — ironically — relatively slow to adopt new technology. We still use the fax machine to send and receive information from other hospitals. When the electronic medical record warns me that my patient’s combination of vital signs and lab abnormalities could point to an infection, I find the input to be intrusive rather than helpful. A part of this hesitation is the need for any technology to be tested before it can be trusted. But there is also the romanticized notion of the diagnostician whose mind contains more than any textbook.
Still, the idea of a computer diagnostician has long been compelling. Doctors have tried to make machines that can “think” like a doctor and diagnose patients for decades, like a Dr. House-style program that can take in a set of disparate symptoms and suggest a unifying diagnosis. But early models were time-consuming to employ and ultimately not particularly useful in practice. They were limited in their utility until advances in natural language processing made generative A.I. — in which a computer can actually create new content in the style of a human — a reality. This is not the same as looking up a set of symptoms on Google; instead, these programs have the ability to synthesize data and “think” much like an expert.
To date, we have not integrated generative A.I. into our work in the intensive care unit. But it seems clear that we inevitably will. One of the easiest ways to imagine using A.I. is when it comes to work that requires pattern recognition, such as reading X-rays. Even the best doctor may be less adept than a machine when it comes to recognizing complex patterns without bias.
There is also a good deal of excitement about the possibility for A.I. programs to write our daily patient notes for us as a sort of electronic scribe, saving considerable time. As Dr. Eric Topol, a cardiologist who has written about the promise of A.I. in medicine, says, this technology could foster the relationship between patients and doctors. “We’ve got a path to restore the humanity in medicine,” he told me.
Beyond saving us time, the intelligence in A.I. — if used well — could make us better at our jobs. Dr. Francisco Lopez-Jimenez, the co-director of A.I. in cardiology at the Mayo Clinic, has been studying the use of A.I. to read electrocardiograms, or ECGs, which are a simple recording of the heart’s electrical activity. An expert cardiologist can glean all sorts of information from an ECG, but a computer can glean more, including an assessment of how well the heart is functioning — which could help determine who would benefit from further testing.
Even more remarkably, Dr. Lopez-Jimenez and his team found that when asked to predict age based on an ECG, the A.I. program would from time to time give an entirely incorrect response.
At first, the researchers thought the machine simply wasn’t great at age prediction based on the ECG — until they realized that the machine was offering the “biological” rather than chronological age, explained Dr. Lopez-Jimenez. Based on the patterns of the ECG alone, the A.I. program knew more about a patient’s aging than a clinician ever could.
And this is just the start. Some studies are using A.I. to try to diagnose a patient’s condition based on voice alone. Researchers promote the possibility of A.I. to speed drug discovery. But as an intensive care unit doctor, I find that what is most compelling is the ability of generative A.I. programs to diagnose a patient. Imagine it: a pocket expert on rounds with the ability to plumb the depth of existing knowledge in seconds.
What proof do we need to use any of this? The bar is higher for diagnostic programs than it is for programs that write our notes. But the way we typically test advances in medicine — a rigorously designed randomized clinical trial that takes years — won’t work here. After all, by the time the trial were complete, the technology would have changed. Besides, the reality is that these technologies are going to find their way into our daily practice whether they are tested or not.
Dr. Adam Rodman, an internist at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston and a historian, found that the majority of his medical students are using Chat GPT already, to help them on rounds or even to help predict test questions. Curious about how A.I. would perform on tough medical cases, Dr. Rodman gave the notoriously challenging New England Journal of Medicine weekly case — and found that the program offered the correct diagnosis in a list of possible diagnoses just over 60 percent of the time. This performance is most likely better than any individual could accomplish.
How those abilities translate to the real world remains to be seen. But even as he prepares to embrace new technology, Dr. Rodman wonders if something will be lost. After all, the training of doctors has long followed a clear process — we see patients, we struggle with their care in a supervised environment and we do it over again until we finish our training. But with A.I., there is the real possibility that doctors in training could lean on these programs to do the hard work of generating a diagnosis, rather than learn to do it themselves. If you have never sorted through the mess of seemingly unrelated symptoms to arrive at a potential diagnosis, but instead relied on a computer, how do you learn the thought processes required for excellence as a doctor?
“In the very near future, we’re looking at a time where the new generation coming up are not going to be developing these skills in the same way we did,” Dr. Rodman said. Even when it comes to A.I. writing our notes for us, Dr. Rodman sees a trade-off. After all, notes are not simply drudgery; they also represent a time to take stock, to review the data and reflect on what comes next for our patients. If we offload that work, we surely gain time, but maybe we lose something too.
But there is a balance here. Maybe the diagnoses offered by A.I. will become an adjunct to our own thought processes, not replacing us but allowing us all the tools to become better.
Particularly for those working in settings with limited specialists for consultation, A.I. could bring everyone up to the same standard. At the same time, patients will be using these technologies, asking questions and coming to us with potential answers. This democratizing of information is already happening and will only increase.
Perhaps being an expert doesn’t mean being a fount of information but synthesizing and communicating and using judgment to make hard decisions. A.I. can be part of that process, just one more tool that we use, but it will never replace a hand at the bedside, eye contact, understanding — what it is to be a doctor.
A few weeks ago, I downloaded the Chat GPT app. I’ve asked it all sorts of questions, from the medical to the personal. And when I am next working in the intensive care unit, when faced with a question on rounds, I just might open the app and see what A.I. has to say.
A.I. Will Change Medicine but Not What It Means to Be a Doctor
Daniela J. Lamas, M.D. NY Times 7.6.23
When faced with a particularly tough question on rounds during my intern year, I would run straight to the bathroom. There, I would flip through the medical reference book I carried in my pocket, find the answer and return to the group, ready to respond. At the time, I believed that my job was to memorize, to know the most arcane of medical eponyms by heart. Surely an excellent clinician would not need to consult a book or a computer to diagnose a patient. Or so I thought then.
Not even two decades later, we find ourselves at the dawn of what many believe to be a new era in medicine, one in which artificial intelligence promises to write our notes, to communicate with patients, to offer diagnoses. The potential is dazzling. But as these systems improve and are integrated into our practice in the coming years, we will face complicated questions: Where does specialized expertise live? If the thought process to arrive at a diagnosis can be done by a computer “co-pilot,” how does that change the practice of medicine, for doctors and for patients?
Though medicine is a field where breakthrough innovation saves lives, doctors are — ironically — relatively slow to adopt new technology. We still use the fax machine to send and receive information from other hospitals. When the electronic medical record warns me that my patient’s combination of vital signs and lab abnormalities could point to an infection, I find the input to be intrusive rather than helpful. A part of this hesitation is the need for any technology to be tested before it can be trusted. But there is also the romanticized notion of the diagnostician whose mind contains more than any textbook.
Still, the idea of a computer diagnostician has long been compelling. Doctors have tried to make machines that can “think” like a doctor and diagnose patients for decades, like a Dr. House-style program that can take in a set of disparate symptoms and suggest a unifying diagnosis. But early models were time-consuming to employ and ultimately not particularly useful in practice. They were limited in their utility until advances in natural language processing made generative A.I. — in which a computer can actually create new content in the style of a human — a reality. This is not the same as looking up a set of symptoms on Google; instead, these programs have the ability to synthesize data and “think” much like an expert.
To date, we have not integrated generative A.I. into our work in the intensive care unit. But it seems clear that we inevitably will. One of the easiest ways to imagine using A.I. is when it comes to work that requires pattern recognition, such as reading X-rays. Even the best doctor may be less adept than a machine when it comes to recognizing complex patterns without bias.
There is also a good deal of excitement about the possibility for A.I. programs to write our daily patient notes for us as a sort of electronic scribe, saving considerable time. As Dr. Eric Topol, a cardiologist who has written about the promise of A.I. in medicine, says, this technology could foster the relationship between patients and doctors. “We’ve got a path to restore the humanity in medicine,” he told me.
Beyond saving us time, the intelligence in A.I. — if used well — could make us better at our jobs. Dr. Francisco Lopez-Jimenez, the co-director of A.I. in cardiology at the Mayo Clinic, has been studying the use of A.I. to read electrocardiograms, or ECGs, which are a simple recording of the heart’s electrical activity. An expert cardiologist can glean all sorts of information from an ECG, but a computer can glean more, including an assessment of how well the heart is functioning — which could help determine who would benefit from further testing.
Even more remarkably, Dr. Lopez-Jimenez and his team found that when asked to predict age based on an ECG, the A.I. program would from time to time give an entirely incorrect response.
At first, the researchers thought the machine simply wasn’t great at age prediction based on the ECG — until they realized that the machine was offering the “biological” rather than chronological age, explained Dr. Lopez-Jimenez. Based on the patterns of the ECG alone, the A.I. program knew more about a patient’s aging than a clinician ever could.
And this is just the start. Some studies are using A.I. to try to diagnose a patient’s condition based on voice alone. Researchers promote the possibility of A.I. to speed drug discovery. But as an intensive care unit doctor, I find that what is most compelling is the ability of generative A.I. programs to diagnose a patient. Imagine it: a pocket expert on rounds with the ability to plumb the depth of existing knowledge in seconds.
What proof do we need to use any of this? The bar is higher for diagnostic programs than it is for programs that write our notes. But the way we typically test advances in medicine — a rigorously designed randomized clinical trial that takes years — won’t work here. After all, by the time the trial were complete, the technology would have changed. Besides, the reality is that these technologies are going to find their way into our daily practice whether they are tested or not.
Dr. Adam Rodman, an internist at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston and a historian, found that the majority of his medical students are using Chat GPT already, to help them on rounds or even to help predict test questions. Curious about how A.I. would perform on tough medical cases, Dr. Rodman gave the notoriously challenging New England Journal of Medicine weekly case — and found that the program offered the correct diagnosis in a list of possible diagnoses just over 60 percent of the time. This performance is most likely better than any individual could accomplish.
How those abilities translate to the real world remains to be seen. But even as he prepares to embrace new technology, Dr. Rodman wonders if something will be lost. After all, the training of doctors has long followed a clear process — we see patients, we struggle with their care in a supervised environment and we do it over again until we finish our training. But with A.I., there is the real possibility that doctors in training could lean on these programs to do the hard work of generating a diagnosis, rather than learn to do it themselves. If you have never sorted through the mess of seemingly unrelated symptoms to arrive at a potential diagnosis, but instead relied on a computer, how do you learn the thought processes required for excellence as a doctor?
“In the very near future, we’re looking at a time where the new generation coming up are not going to be developing these skills in the same way we did,” Dr. Rodman said. Even when it comes to A.I. writing our notes for us, Dr. Rodman sees a trade-off. After all, notes are not simply drudgery; they also represent a time to take stock, to review the data and reflect on what comes next for our patients. If we offload that work, we surely gain time, but maybe we lose something too.
But there is a balance here. Maybe the diagnoses offered by A.I. will become an adjunct to our own thought processes, not replacing us but allowing us all the tools to become better.
Particularly for those working in settings with limited specialists for consultation, A.I. could bring everyone up to the same standard. At the same time, patients will be using these technologies, asking questions and coming to us with potential answers. This democratizing of information is already happening and will only increase.
Perhaps being an expert doesn’t mean being a fount of information but synthesizing and communicating and using judgment to make hard decisions. A.I. can be part of that process, just one more tool that we use, but it will never replace a hand at the bedside, eye contact, understanding — what it is to be a doctor.
A few weeks ago, I downloaded the Chat GPT app. I’ve asked it all sorts of questions, from the medical to the personal. And when I am next working in the intensive care unit, when faced with a question on rounds, I just might open the app and see what A.I. has to say.
Wednesday, July 5
Combined Discussion Group at 10:00am
Our discussion reading is a fascinating piece about blessings and curses: individual behavior and external societal forces, about being made for joy but choosing despair, and the choice to live with gratitude and trust or live with anxiety and dread (there is no middle ground).
Here is a sample: When we don’t live in joy and gratitude, when we become stingy and mean, the goodness of God becomes blocked and distorted. From the simple failure to heed joy comes deprivation.
Blessings and Curses
Amy Frykholm, The Christian Century 6.28.23
My friend Joanne, who is 88 and the author of more than 20 novels; a former EMT, firefighter, and college professor, she is a master of English and a student of Hebrew; has been translating Deuteronomy word for word. She and I meet monthly in a group of writers — a mix of Jews and Episcopalians. I don’t think I had given Deuteronomy any thought since high school when I tried reading the Bible cover to cover. By the time I got to Deuteronomy, I’m sure I was skimming and looking for the good parts. All of that changed in a glance at Deuteronomy 28: the blessings and the curses. I fell in love.
The blessings last only 15 verses, but the curses rant for 52. On the surface, the chapter feels like
a tiny carrot attached to a great big stick wielded by a God ready to rain blows on our heads at
any moment. This is in fact how fellow group member Marilyn read it. “This chapter is my
father on steroids,” she said. Every imagined imperfection is punished. All love is conditional.
“This is the God I’ve been trying to escape all of my adult life.”
The whole of Deuteronomy is a set of three songs or speeches of Moses before his death, and the blessings and the curses come at the end of the second song. I began to feel drawn at verse 5. “Blessed be your basket and your kneading bowl.” Why, I wondered, start with the basket and the kneading bowl? What place does the bread basket have in intertribal hostilities or in a covenant between God and God’s people? I didn’t have an answer right away, but I was drawn to the image. I felt like I could smell the slight oiliness of the kneading bowl and feel its textures —a combination of rough and smooth. I could imagine the yeasty nature of the rising bread and feel the roughness of the handmade basket into which baked bread was laid. It was the essence of hearth and home. Humans took the elements of earth and added water and then fire. This alchemy was the beginning of the first human culture. So, if your blessings start with bread and the implements of bread, then you are very close to the essence of your civilization. Every act of kneading, forming, and baking loaves is a blessing, and one that accumulates over time.
It makes sense to me then that this blessing is, in particular, a blessing for women. Women prepared these loaves for their families, gave these loaves to their neighbors, spread these blessings across an entire people. Every aspect of this blessing involves human hands, most often female ones — not only the bread but also the kneading bowl and the basket themselves. These are foundational domestic arts.
“If we are going to survive,” I hear this part of Moses’ song saying, “we are going to need blessings on every aspect of our lives.” Such a blessing draws our attention to the mundane, to the basic work of survival within the human family. Daily actions and daily choices have consequences far beyond their seeming simplicity.
If the family doesn’t thrive, so goes the ancient formula, blame the woman at the hearth. Blame her kneading bowl and her basket. The God who is interested in the details of everyday life can just as easily be a petty tyrant as a loving creator, who punishes every small infraction and who would just as readily destroy a people as save one. There is no doubt that humans have very often used this image of God to control, abuse, and belittle one another.
But if we take the blame out of it for just an instant and imagine that this blessing was spoken through love and for the purpose of love, then we have the same words and images with a different inflection. “Our lives matter,” this blessing says, right down to their very details. This covenant that the people were making with God was not a covenant with a distant, foreign power. This covenant enters into the most fundamental aspects of human existence and the rhythms of everyday life. It starts, as does so much of human life, in the kitchen. But as with blessings so with curses; they start at the essence of things. Once the basket and the kneading bowl are cursed in verse 17, the curses proliferate.
I admit, I fell in love with the curses too, in part because they struck me as funny and tender. “He shall be the head and you shall be the tail,” reads one. Not all of the curses are funny. Some of the curses felt all too familiar after multiple years of global pandemic, in the midst of climate change. Some of them seemed to find a precise language for what we have experienced: the plagues, the loneliness, the sorrow, the emptiness. Barren fields, the dust, the lack of rain, the storms and their consequences that seem greater than they used to be.
Throughout this chapter runs a tension between collective responsibility and individual responsibility — the inner person and their relationship to the outer world. They’ve already experienced plague, exile, loss, and destruction. It’s not theoretical.
Put into the whole context of the Jewish people, Susan Niditch says, we can understand blessings and curses theology as comments on and evaluations of society: How does a society treat its widows and orphans? How prevalent is violence, how much honesty can be anticipated, and is leadership fair or tyrannical? How aligned is our society to the will of God? How do we celebrate joy and offer gratitude to God?
With this in mind, we can return to the kneading bowl and the basket and wonder if we fail to appreciate the simple abundance of our lives, the most basic relationship to the earth and to other people. We don’t give thanks because we owe God our thanks; it isn’t another box to check. It’s because when we live in and through abundance, in alignment with the will of God, the goodness of God flows through us and out into all creation.
When we don’t live in joy and gratitude, when we become stingy and mean, the goodness of God becomes blocked and distorted. From the simple failure to heed joy comes deprivation. The slavery from which you were delivered, the text says, will return to you along with all that came with it: the labor, the plagues, the suffering.
But once again, the end of the chapter holds a surprise. You would think that after being destroyed by every sickness and every plague, the chapter would end with a landscape of collective despair. But it doesn’t. Instead it returns to an intimate place, the internal reality of the human being instead of the external one. Inside the mind and heart of the human being, Deuteronomy says, dread replaces joy. We are meant to live in joy. We are meant for joy. And yet we accept dread. I know morning dread and evening dread. I know it can be caused by something as simple as a conversation I don’t want to have or the fact that I’ve indulged in my anxiety all day and night. This anxiety is rooted exactly in the place the text identifies it: lack of trust in God’s covenant with us, which is a little like saying the failure to delight in the ordinariness of days, of bread baskets and kneading bowls.
Here is a sample: When we don’t live in joy and gratitude, when we become stingy and mean, the goodness of God becomes blocked and distorted. From the simple failure to heed joy comes deprivation.
Blessings and Curses
Amy Frykholm, The Christian Century 6.28.23
My friend Joanne, who is 88 and the author of more than 20 novels; a former EMT, firefighter, and college professor, she is a master of English and a student of Hebrew; has been translating Deuteronomy word for word. She and I meet monthly in a group of writers — a mix of Jews and Episcopalians. I don’t think I had given Deuteronomy any thought since high school when I tried reading the Bible cover to cover. By the time I got to Deuteronomy, I’m sure I was skimming and looking for the good parts. All of that changed in a glance at Deuteronomy 28: the blessings and the curses. I fell in love.
The blessings last only 15 verses, but the curses rant for 52. On the surface, the chapter feels like
a tiny carrot attached to a great big stick wielded by a God ready to rain blows on our heads at
any moment. This is in fact how fellow group member Marilyn read it. “This chapter is my
father on steroids,” she said. Every imagined imperfection is punished. All love is conditional.
“This is the God I’ve been trying to escape all of my adult life.”
The whole of Deuteronomy is a set of three songs or speeches of Moses before his death, and the blessings and the curses come at the end of the second song. I began to feel drawn at verse 5. “Blessed be your basket and your kneading bowl.” Why, I wondered, start with the basket and the kneading bowl? What place does the bread basket have in intertribal hostilities or in a covenant between God and God’s people? I didn’t have an answer right away, but I was drawn to the image. I felt like I could smell the slight oiliness of the kneading bowl and feel its textures —a combination of rough and smooth. I could imagine the yeasty nature of the rising bread and feel the roughness of the handmade basket into which baked bread was laid. It was the essence of hearth and home. Humans took the elements of earth and added water and then fire. This alchemy was the beginning of the first human culture. So, if your blessings start with bread and the implements of bread, then you are very close to the essence of your civilization. Every act of kneading, forming, and baking loaves is a blessing, and one that accumulates over time.
It makes sense to me then that this blessing is, in particular, a blessing for women. Women prepared these loaves for their families, gave these loaves to their neighbors, spread these blessings across an entire people. Every aspect of this blessing involves human hands, most often female ones — not only the bread but also the kneading bowl and the basket themselves. These are foundational domestic arts.
“If we are going to survive,” I hear this part of Moses’ song saying, “we are going to need blessings on every aspect of our lives.” Such a blessing draws our attention to the mundane, to the basic work of survival within the human family. Daily actions and daily choices have consequences far beyond their seeming simplicity.
If the family doesn’t thrive, so goes the ancient formula, blame the woman at the hearth. Blame her kneading bowl and her basket. The God who is interested in the details of everyday life can just as easily be a petty tyrant as a loving creator, who punishes every small infraction and who would just as readily destroy a people as save one. There is no doubt that humans have very often used this image of God to control, abuse, and belittle one another.
But if we take the blame out of it for just an instant and imagine that this blessing was spoken through love and for the purpose of love, then we have the same words and images with a different inflection. “Our lives matter,” this blessing says, right down to their very details. This covenant that the people were making with God was not a covenant with a distant, foreign power. This covenant enters into the most fundamental aspects of human existence and the rhythms of everyday life. It starts, as does so much of human life, in the kitchen. But as with blessings so with curses; they start at the essence of things. Once the basket and the kneading bowl are cursed in verse 17, the curses proliferate.
I admit, I fell in love with the curses too, in part because they struck me as funny and tender. “He shall be the head and you shall be the tail,” reads one. Not all of the curses are funny. Some of the curses felt all too familiar after multiple years of global pandemic, in the midst of climate change. Some of them seemed to find a precise language for what we have experienced: the plagues, the loneliness, the sorrow, the emptiness. Barren fields, the dust, the lack of rain, the storms and their consequences that seem greater than they used to be.
Throughout this chapter runs a tension between collective responsibility and individual responsibility — the inner person and their relationship to the outer world. They’ve already experienced plague, exile, loss, and destruction. It’s not theoretical.
Put into the whole context of the Jewish people, Susan Niditch says, we can understand blessings and curses theology as comments on and evaluations of society: How does a society treat its widows and orphans? How prevalent is violence, how much honesty can be anticipated, and is leadership fair or tyrannical? How aligned is our society to the will of God? How do we celebrate joy and offer gratitude to God?
With this in mind, we can return to the kneading bowl and the basket and wonder if we fail to appreciate the simple abundance of our lives, the most basic relationship to the earth and to other people. We don’t give thanks because we owe God our thanks; it isn’t another box to check. It’s because when we live in and through abundance, in alignment with the will of God, the goodness of God flows through us and out into all creation.
When we don’t live in joy and gratitude, when we become stingy and mean, the goodness of God becomes blocked and distorted. From the simple failure to heed joy comes deprivation. The slavery from which you were delivered, the text says, will return to you along with all that came with it: the labor, the plagues, the suffering.
But once again, the end of the chapter holds a surprise. You would think that after being destroyed by every sickness and every plague, the chapter would end with a landscape of collective despair. But it doesn’t. Instead it returns to an intimate place, the internal reality of the human being instead of the external one. Inside the mind and heart of the human being, Deuteronomy says, dread replaces joy. We are meant to live in joy. We are meant for joy. And yet we accept dread. I know morning dread and evening dread. I know it can be caused by something as simple as a conversation I don’t want to have or the fact that I’ve indulged in my anxiety all day and night. This anxiety is rooted exactly in the place the text identifies it: lack of trust in God’s covenant with us, which is a little like saying the failure to delight in the ordinariness of days, of bread baskets and kneading bowls.
Tuesday, June 27
There were two articles I was particularly interested in this week - one was how ultra-processed foods trick us into eating them. The other article is how our brains are tricked into thinking everything is getting worse. I went with the latter; but, just know, Nestle is out to get us addicted to food. ... too bad, I am already there.
Do you think things are worse now in America, or the world, than when you were born? If so, you are not alone. But, is that thought - that things are worse now - accurate? Take a read and let me know what you think.
Your Brain Has Tricked You Into Thinking Everything is Worse
Adam Mastroianni, NY Times 6.20.23
Guest essayist, Dr. Mastroianni, is an experimental psychologist and the author of the science blog Experimental History.
Perhaps no political promise is more potent or universal than the vow to restore a golden age. From Caesar Augustus to Adolf Hitler, from President Xi Jinping of China and President Marcos of the Philippines to Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” and Joe Biden’s “America Is Back,” leaders have gained power by vowing a return to the good old days.
What these political myths have in common is an understanding that the golden age is definitely not right now. Maybe we’ve been changing from angels into demons for centuries, and people have only now noticed the horns sprouting on their neighbors’ foreheads.
But I believe there’s a bug — a set of cognitive biases — in people’s brains that causes them to perceive a fall from grace even when it hasn’t happened. I and my colleague Daniel Gilbert at Harvard have found evidence for that bug, which we recently published in the journal Nature. While previous researchers have theorized about why people might believe things have gotten worse, we are the first to investigate this belief all over the world, to test its veracity and to explain where it comes from.
We first collected 235 surveys with over 574,000 responses total and found that, overwhelmingly, people believe that humans are less kind, honest, ethical and moral today than they were in the past. People have believed in this moral decline at least since pollsters started asking about it in 1949, they believe it in every single country that has ever been surveyed (59 and counting), they believe that it’s been happening their whole lives and they believe it’s still
happening today. Respondents of all sorts — young and old, liberal and conservative, white and Black — consistently agreed: The golden age of human kindness is long gone.
We also found strong evidence that people are wrong about this decline. We assembled every survey that asked people about the current state of morality: “Were you treated with respect all day yesterday?” “Within the past 12 months, have you volunteered your time to a charitable cause?”, “How often do you encounter incivility at work?” Across 140 surveys and nearly 12 million responses, participants’ answers did not change meaningfully over time. When asked to rate the current state of morality in the United States, for example, people gave almost identical answers between 2002 and 2020, but they also reported a decline in morality every year.
Other researchers’ data have even shown moral improvement. Social scientists have been measuring cooperation rates between strangers in lab-based economic games for decades, and a recent meta-analysis found — contrary to the authors’ expectations — that cooperation has increased 8 percentage points over the last 61 years. When we asked participants to estimate that change, they mistakenly thought cooperation rates had decreased by 9 percentage points. Others have documented the increasing rarity of the most heinous forms of human immorality, like
genocide and child abuse.
Two well-established psychological phenomena could combine to produce this illusion of moral decline. First, there’s biased exposure: People predominantly encounter and pay attention to negative information about others — mischief and misdeeds make the news and dominate our
conversations.
Second, there’s biased memory: The negativity of negative information fades faster than the positivity of positive information. Getting dumped, for instance, hurts in the moment, but as you rationalize, reframe and distance yourself from the memory, the sting fades. The memory of meeting your current spouse, on the other hand, probably still makes you smile.
When you put these two cognitive mechanisms together, you can create an illusion of decline. Thanks to biased exposure, things look bad every day. But thanks to biased memory, when you think back to yesterday, you don’t remember things being so bad. When you’re standing in a wasteland but remember a wonderland, the only reasonable conclusion is that things have gotten worse.
That explanation fits well with two more of our surprising findings. First, people exempt their own social circles from decline; in fact, they think the people they know are nicer than ever. This might be because people primarily encounter positive information about people they know, which our model predicts can create an illusion of improvement.
Second, people believe that moral decline began only after they arrived on Earth; they see humanity as stably virtuous in the decades before their birth. This especially suggests that biased memory plays a role in producing the illusion.
If these cognitive biases are working in tandem, our susceptibility to golden age myths makes a lot more sense. Our biased attention means we’ll always feel we’re living in dark times, and our biased memory means we’ll always think the past was brighter.
Seventy-six percent of Americans believe, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center poll, that “addressing the moral breakdown of the country” should be one of the government’s priorities. The good news is that the breakdown hasn’t happened. The bad news is that people believe it has.
As long as we believe in this illusion, we are susceptible to the promises of aspiring autocrats who claim they can return us to a golden age that exists in the only place a golden age has ever existed: our imaginations.
Do you think things are worse now in America, or the world, than when you were born? If so, you are not alone. But, is that thought - that things are worse now - accurate? Take a read and let me know what you think.
Your Brain Has Tricked You Into Thinking Everything is Worse
Adam Mastroianni, NY Times 6.20.23
Guest essayist, Dr. Mastroianni, is an experimental psychologist and the author of the science blog Experimental History.
Perhaps no political promise is more potent or universal than the vow to restore a golden age. From Caesar Augustus to Adolf Hitler, from President Xi Jinping of China and President Marcos of the Philippines to Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” and Joe Biden’s “America Is Back,” leaders have gained power by vowing a return to the good old days.
What these political myths have in common is an understanding that the golden age is definitely not right now. Maybe we’ve been changing from angels into demons for centuries, and people have only now noticed the horns sprouting on their neighbors’ foreheads.
But I believe there’s a bug — a set of cognitive biases — in people’s brains that causes them to perceive a fall from grace even when it hasn’t happened. I and my colleague Daniel Gilbert at Harvard have found evidence for that bug, which we recently published in the journal Nature. While previous researchers have theorized about why people might believe things have gotten worse, we are the first to investigate this belief all over the world, to test its veracity and to explain where it comes from.
We first collected 235 surveys with over 574,000 responses total and found that, overwhelmingly, people believe that humans are less kind, honest, ethical and moral today than they were in the past. People have believed in this moral decline at least since pollsters started asking about it in 1949, they believe it in every single country that has ever been surveyed (59 and counting), they believe that it’s been happening their whole lives and they believe it’s still
happening today. Respondents of all sorts — young and old, liberal and conservative, white and Black — consistently agreed: The golden age of human kindness is long gone.
We also found strong evidence that people are wrong about this decline. We assembled every survey that asked people about the current state of morality: “Were you treated with respect all day yesterday?” “Within the past 12 months, have you volunteered your time to a charitable cause?”, “How often do you encounter incivility at work?” Across 140 surveys and nearly 12 million responses, participants’ answers did not change meaningfully over time. When asked to rate the current state of morality in the United States, for example, people gave almost identical answers between 2002 and 2020, but they also reported a decline in morality every year.
Other researchers’ data have even shown moral improvement. Social scientists have been measuring cooperation rates between strangers in lab-based economic games for decades, and a recent meta-analysis found — contrary to the authors’ expectations — that cooperation has increased 8 percentage points over the last 61 years. When we asked participants to estimate that change, they mistakenly thought cooperation rates had decreased by 9 percentage points. Others have documented the increasing rarity of the most heinous forms of human immorality, like
genocide and child abuse.
Two well-established psychological phenomena could combine to produce this illusion of moral decline. First, there’s biased exposure: People predominantly encounter and pay attention to negative information about others — mischief and misdeeds make the news and dominate our
conversations.
Second, there’s biased memory: The negativity of negative information fades faster than the positivity of positive information. Getting dumped, for instance, hurts in the moment, but as you rationalize, reframe and distance yourself from the memory, the sting fades. The memory of meeting your current spouse, on the other hand, probably still makes you smile.
When you put these two cognitive mechanisms together, you can create an illusion of decline. Thanks to biased exposure, things look bad every day. But thanks to biased memory, when you think back to yesterday, you don’t remember things being so bad. When you’re standing in a wasteland but remember a wonderland, the only reasonable conclusion is that things have gotten worse.
That explanation fits well with two more of our surprising findings. First, people exempt their own social circles from decline; in fact, they think the people they know are nicer than ever. This might be because people primarily encounter positive information about people they know, which our model predicts can create an illusion of improvement.
Second, people believe that moral decline began only after they arrived on Earth; they see humanity as stably virtuous in the decades before their birth. This especially suggests that biased memory plays a role in producing the illusion.
If these cognitive biases are working in tandem, our susceptibility to golden age myths makes a lot more sense. Our biased attention means we’ll always feel we’re living in dark times, and our biased memory means we’ll always think the past was brighter.
Seventy-six percent of Americans believe, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center poll, that “addressing the moral breakdown of the country” should be one of the government’s priorities. The good news is that the breakdown hasn’t happened. The bad news is that people believe it has.
As long as we believe in this illusion, we are susceptible to the promises of aspiring autocrats who claim they can return us to a golden age that exists in the only place a golden age has ever existed: our imaginations.
Tuesday, June 20
My friend Alex (The Very Rev. Alexander Andujar) and I have a weekly podcast where we discuss the upcoming Gospel lesson. There are going to be a number of miracles coming up in the lectionary and we're wondering how to treat them in today's scientifically minded audience. It makes me wonder, what do you think about miracles?
The article for this week is about that very topic. The author, Debie Thomas, is someone who we have discussed before. She shares her thoughts on miracles; I'd like to hear what you think.
Blessings to you!
Why and How I Believe in Miracles
Debie Thomas, The Christian Century 6.9.23
Debie Thomas is minister of lifelong formation at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Palo Alto, California, and author of Into the Mess and Other Jesus Stories.
Do you believe in miracles?
I’ve been asked this question many times since leaving the charismatic evangelical faith tradition of my childhood. I have yet to answer it in a way that feels honest and complete. This is partly because the question isn’t a straightforward one; it contains a host of questions within it: Do you believe that Jesus literally walked on water and turned water into wine and cured the sick and raised the dead? Do you believe that miracles happen now? Do you pray for them? Have you ever experienced one?
The charismatic evangelical communities that raised me would have answered each with an emphatic and unswerving yes. In fact, they would have insisted that a Christianity stripped of the miraculous isn’t Christianity at all. I agree. But my “yes” is much quieter these days, more tender and searching.
This isn’t because I have trouble believing in things I can’t explain or understand. I know that even my most sophisticated theologies won’t contain or exhaust God’s actions in the world. In fact, part of what drew me toward a more progressive and liturgical (Episcopal) expression of faith was my desire to honor mystery, to relate to God with my whole self and not just my intellect. I want to live in an enchanted world — a world shimmering with God’s presence, one I can’t possibly flatten with my doubt and cynicism.
I’d rather believe that miracles are always possible — perhaps even imminent — than live in a universe devoid of such mystical richness. I’d rather believe, in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s words, that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.”
I respect the challenge of affirming the miraculous in our 21st-century context. I know that Christians can encounter serious credibility issues when we try to make a case for miracles. And I know that there’s something frightening about a world we can’t control or quantify, a world that’s truly open, organic, and strange rather than closed, unvarying, and mechanistic.
On the other hand, to approach the Creator of our unspeakably vast, wild, and elegant cosmos with anything other than deep epistemic humility strikes me as foolish. C. S. Lewis puts it this way in Miracles: “It is a profound mistake to imagine that Christianity ever intended to dissipate the bewilderment and even the terror, the sense of our own nothingness, which come upon us when we think about the nature of things. It comes to intensify them. Without such sensations there is no religion.”
So my struggle with the Gospels’ cures, exorcisms, angelic visitations, and resurrections isn’t with their plausibility. It’s with their consequences. “The problem with miracles,” writes Barbara Brown Taylor in Bread of Angels, “is that it is hard to witness them without wanting one of your own.”
Will Gafney makes the point with greater urgency, suggesting that we can’t talk about God’s supernatural intervention in our world without remembering those who desperately needed a miracle and didn’t get it. Otherwise we “make mockery of their suffering and death as we try to make meaning of the miraculous stories that are our scriptural heritage. Because, if it is not good news — salvation and liberation — for the least of these then, it’s not good news.”
As much as I love and trust the miracle stories in scripture, I’m afraid of the harm we do when we read them glibly. I’m wary of reducing them to something formulaic or predictable — or of assuming that we’re entitled to them or capable of peddling them. Most of all, I’m wary of appropriating and idolizing them to create dangerous caricatures of God — God as Santa Claus, as a giant gumball machine in the sky.
There is a way of believing in miracles that wounds the brokenhearted. That promotes a toxic positivity which leaves no room for holy lament. That encourages passivity and apathy. There is a way of believing in miracles that is fraudulent and cruel.
I think we’re on far more solid ground when we respond to miracles as our biblical ancestors did: with awe, silence, and wonder. With the reverent bewilderment of Mary: “How can this be?”
With the penitent humility of Peter: “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” With the honest curiosity of the storm-shocked disciples: “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” With the adoration of Thomas: “My Lord and my God!”
I’m also learning to approach miracles not as ends in themselves but as opportunities to discern the heart and character of God. What kind of God multiplies loaves and fishes for the poorest of the poor? What matters most to a God who stops in his tracks to heal a woman ravaged by a hemorrhage? What kind of joyous, celebratory laughter resides in a God who makes the wine flow at a wedding? What kind of tender heart beats in the chest of a God who raises a dead son and restores him to his widowed mother?
If I’m called as a Christian to walk in the footsteps of this loving, liberating, healing, resurrecting God, then how should I live? If Jesus’ miracles are about rupture and resistance, if they are subversive acts of defiance against the world’s sin, suffering, and brokenness, then what will my resistance look like? How will my belief in such miracles translate into Christlike action?
In the Christian tradition, belief is more about trust than intellectual assent. So yes, I believe in miracles. Which is to say, I surrender in trust to a God who will stop at nothing to bring about our salvation. A God who is intimately close, present, and involved. A God who is in all things, interacting with all things, restoring all things in the name of love.
The article for this week is about that very topic. The author, Debie Thomas, is someone who we have discussed before. She shares her thoughts on miracles; I'd like to hear what you think.
Blessings to you!
Why and How I Believe in Miracles
Debie Thomas, The Christian Century 6.9.23
Debie Thomas is minister of lifelong formation at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Palo Alto, California, and author of Into the Mess and Other Jesus Stories.
Do you believe in miracles?
I’ve been asked this question many times since leaving the charismatic evangelical faith tradition of my childhood. I have yet to answer it in a way that feels honest and complete. This is partly because the question isn’t a straightforward one; it contains a host of questions within it: Do you believe that Jesus literally walked on water and turned water into wine and cured the sick and raised the dead? Do you believe that miracles happen now? Do you pray for them? Have you ever experienced one?
The charismatic evangelical communities that raised me would have answered each with an emphatic and unswerving yes. In fact, they would have insisted that a Christianity stripped of the miraculous isn’t Christianity at all. I agree. But my “yes” is much quieter these days, more tender and searching.
This isn’t because I have trouble believing in things I can’t explain or understand. I know that even my most sophisticated theologies won’t contain or exhaust God’s actions in the world. In fact, part of what drew me toward a more progressive and liturgical (Episcopal) expression of faith was my desire to honor mystery, to relate to God with my whole self and not just my intellect. I want to live in an enchanted world — a world shimmering with God’s presence, one I can’t possibly flatten with my doubt and cynicism.
I’d rather believe that miracles are always possible — perhaps even imminent — than live in a universe devoid of such mystical richness. I’d rather believe, in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s words, that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.”
I respect the challenge of affirming the miraculous in our 21st-century context. I know that Christians can encounter serious credibility issues when we try to make a case for miracles. And I know that there’s something frightening about a world we can’t control or quantify, a world that’s truly open, organic, and strange rather than closed, unvarying, and mechanistic.
On the other hand, to approach the Creator of our unspeakably vast, wild, and elegant cosmos with anything other than deep epistemic humility strikes me as foolish. C. S. Lewis puts it this way in Miracles: “It is a profound mistake to imagine that Christianity ever intended to dissipate the bewilderment and even the terror, the sense of our own nothingness, which come upon us when we think about the nature of things. It comes to intensify them. Without such sensations there is no religion.”
So my struggle with the Gospels’ cures, exorcisms, angelic visitations, and resurrections isn’t with their plausibility. It’s with their consequences. “The problem with miracles,” writes Barbara Brown Taylor in Bread of Angels, “is that it is hard to witness them without wanting one of your own.”
Will Gafney makes the point with greater urgency, suggesting that we can’t talk about God’s supernatural intervention in our world without remembering those who desperately needed a miracle and didn’t get it. Otherwise we “make mockery of their suffering and death as we try to make meaning of the miraculous stories that are our scriptural heritage. Because, if it is not good news — salvation and liberation — for the least of these then, it’s not good news.”
As much as I love and trust the miracle stories in scripture, I’m afraid of the harm we do when we read them glibly. I’m wary of reducing them to something formulaic or predictable — or of assuming that we’re entitled to them or capable of peddling them. Most of all, I’m wary of appropriating and idolizing them to create dangerous caricatures of God — God as Santa Claus, as a giant gumball machine in the sky.
There is a way of believing in miracles that wounds the brokenhearted. That promotes a toxic positivity which leaves no room for holy lament. That encourages passivity and apathy. There is a way of believing in miracles that is fraudulent and cruel.
I think we’re on far more solid ground when we respond to miracles as our biblical ancestors did: with awe, silence, and wonder. With the reverent bewilderment of Mary: “How can this be?”
With the penitent humility of Peter: “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” With the honest curiosity of the storm-shocked disciples: “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” With the adoration of Thomas: “My Lord and my God!”
I’m also learning to approach miracles not as ends in themselves but as opportunities to discern the heart and character of God. What kind of God multiplies loaves and fishes for the poorest of the poor? What matters most to a God who stops in his tracks to heal a woman ravaged by a hemorrhage? What kind of joyous, celebratory laughter resides in a God who makes the wine flow at a wedding? What kind of tender heart beats in the chest of a God who raises a dead son and restores him to his widowed mother?
If I’m called as a Christian to walk in the footsteps of this loving, liberating, healing, resurrecting God, then how should I live? If Jesus’ miracles are about rupture and resistance, if they are subversive acts of defiance against the world’s sin, suffering, and brokenness, then what will my resistance look like? How will my belief in such miracles translate into Christlike action?
In the Christian tradition, belief is more about trust than intellectual assent. So yes, I believe in miracles. Which is to say, I surrender in trust to a God who will stop at nothing to bring about our salvation. A God who is intimately close, present, and involved. A God who is in all things, interacting with all things, restoring all things in the name of love.
Tuesday, June 6
The reading from next week is thematic to Sunday's Scripture reading from Genesis 1 - In the beginning... God said, "Let there be light" and there was.
The author of the attached article argues that God is transcendent - not us; different than us; way beyond us - and he chooses to trust this transcendent God.
Trusting God’s Transcendence
Ron Ruthruff, Christian Century 5.29.23
Ron Ruthruff is associate professor of theology at the Seattle School of Theology & Psychology.
The book of Genesis is a wide, sweeping narrative. In it we see the origin of all things, God creating the universe. The origin of a people, God calling Abraham. Genesis concludes with the story of Joseph’s rise to power in Egypt. What man intends for evil God uses for good.
Sunday’s texts reflect the power of the Divine and its purpose for humankind.
[In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.]
The creation story in Genesis explores the meaning of the created order — and introduces the transcendent nature of God.
Transcendence is a theological term, a 25-cent word that simply means the existence beyond what is perceived as normal or human. God is other, and this idea of transcendence is a major theme in our Genesis text. The Divine is different from us humans. God says, “Let there be light,” and there is light — God’s word is creative action. God has the ability to produce light, life, land, and sea with nothing but word. My words do not make things happen—I tell my kids
to pick up their socks, and nothing happens. I am a limited human being.
This concept of transcendence or otherness is challenging for those of us who grew up in the shadow of the Enlightenment and the corresponding advances in scientific discovery. We are thinkers, shaped by René Descartes and his contemporaries. [I think, therefore I am.]
Thinking, knowing, and certainty were the cornerstones of Western thought that made sense of the world. We can know, and knowing reflects our identity.
Transcendence sits in contrast to this kind of knowing.
Enlightenment thought tells us what we know, which is a very good thing, but it says little about what we do not know. I don’t think we can get to the heart of this Genesis text through definitive doctrines or proof-filled apologetics; both are too invested in modernity. In the end, they construct a concept of God that, as Karl Barth said, is nothing more than man speaking loudly.
So how do we hear this story today, without so easily submitting to literal interpretations that fit God into a comprehensible box? The composition of this text predates any of the modern categories people try to use to understand it as a literal retelling of the creation of the world. How do we, in the world that you and I live in, embrace the mystery of this story that God is other, not like us? How do we read it in a way that builds our faith and helps us avoid the way of thinking that seeks certainty and control?
If we are to step into the mystery of transcendence, we need the wisdom of the Serenity Prayer. [God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference]
Reinhold Niebuhr wrote this famous prayer as part of a 1926 sermon; years later it was adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous. Acceptance and serenity
sit in deep contrast to knowing and certainty. Acceptance and serenity embrace the limitations of being human and rely on the otherness of God.
Transcendence simply means God is other. Can we suspend our need for control long enough to trust in that mystery? Can we believe that God is other than us but also “other” for our sake?
This is the journey of faith beyond certainty. It means believing in a divine power greater than ourselves that, from the very beginning, has created with good intentions. God orchestrates a world where God holds what humans cannot.
I trust in this mystery that reminds me that I am more than what I think, but I am not God. I can’t control it or contain it, but I choose to trust it.
The author of the attached article argues that God is transcendent - not us; different than us; way beyond us - and he chooses to trust this transcendent God.
Trusting God’s Transcendence
Ron Ruthruff, Christian Century 5.29.23
Ron Ruthruff is associate professor of theology at the Seattle School of Theology & Psychology.
The book of Genesis is a wide, sweeping narrative. In it we see the origin of all things, God creating the universe. The origin of a people, God calling Abraham. Genesis concludes with the story of Joseph’s rise to power in Egypt. What man intends for evil God uses for good.
Sunday’s texts reflect the power of the Divine and its purpose for humankind.
[In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.]
The creation story in Genesis explores the meaning of the created order — and introduces the transcendent nature of God.
Transcendence is a theological term, a 25-cent word that simply means the existence beyond what is perceived as normal or human. God is other, and this idea of transcendence is a major theme in our Genesis text. The Divine is different from us humans. God says, “Let there be light,” and there is light — God’s word is creative action. God has the ability to produce light, life, land, and sea with nothing but word. My words do not make things happen—I tell my kids
to pick up their socks, and nothing happens. I am a limited human being.
This concept of transcendence or otherness is challenging for those of us who grew up in the shadow of the Enlightenment and the corresponding advances in scientific discovery. We are thinkers, shaped by René Descartes and his contemporaries. [I think, therefore I am.]
Thinking, knowing, and certainty were the cornerstones of Western thought that made sense of the world. We can know, and knowing reflects our identity.
Transcendence sits in contrast to this kind of knowing.
Enlightenment thought tells us what we know, which is a very good thing, but it says little about what we do not know. I don’t think we can get to the heart of this Genesis text through definitive doctrines or proof-filled apologetics; both are too invested in modernity. In the end, they construct a concept of God that, as Karl Barth said, is nothing more than man speaking loudly.
So how do we hear this story today, without so easily submitting to literal interpretations that fit God into a comprehensible box? The composition of this text predates any of the modern categories people try to use to understand it as a literal retelling of the creation of the world. How do we, in the world that you and I live in, embrace the mystery of this story that God is other, not like us? How do we read it in a way that builds our faith and helps us avoid the way of thinking that seeks certainty and control?
If we are to step into the mystery of transcendence, we need the wisdom of the Serenity Prayer. [God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference]
Reinhold Niebuhr wrote this famous prayer as part of a 1926 sermon; years later it was adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous. Acceptance and serenity
sit in deep contrast to knowing and certainty. Acceptance and serenity embrace the limitations of being human and rely on the otherness of God.
Transcendence simply means God is other. Can we suspend our need for control long enough to trust in that mystery? Can we believe that God is other than us but also “other” for our sake?
This is the journey of faith beyond certainty. It means believing in a divine power greater than ourselves that, from the very beginning, has created with good intentions. God orchestrates a world where God holds what humans cannot.
I trust in this mystery that reminds me that I am more than what I think, but I am not God. I can’t control it or contain it, but I choose to trust it.
Tuesday, May 30
I am back from a wonderful week-long vacation that included a 4-day cruise. On day two of the cruise, I started to pull up the NY Times app to catch up on the news. Christi said, "What are you doing? We're on vacation."
Thankfully, we invested our attention to each other, to the beautiful Bahamas, to having someone else make our food and clean up afterwards, and to the on-going ocean vista from our cabin's deck.
The article for this week is about attention. In it, the author states that, "If we find a way to focus on what matters, we may be spared the need to admit to the generations that follow: We didn't mean for it all to happen. We just weren't paying attention."
So what's the right balance? Going on a cruise - metaphorically speaking - and not paying attention to the news, or getting so caught up in it that we lose our attention to what really matters. I have some thoughts about this and how attention fits into our spirituality. And, I'd like to hear what you think.
The Great Fracturing of American Attention
Megan Garber, The Atlantic 3.5.22
Last month, as Delta Flight 1580 made its way from Utah to Oregon, Michael Demarre approached one of the plane’s emergency-exit doors. He tugged at the handle that would release its hatch. A nearby flight attendant, realizing what he was doing, stopped him. Fellow passengers spent the rest of the flight watching him to ensure that he remained in his seat. After the plane landed, investigators asked him the obvious question: Why? His goal, he said, had been to make enough of a scene that people would begin filming him. He’d wanted their screens to publicize his feelings.
I did it for the attention: As explanations go, it’s an American classic.
The grim irony of Demarre’s gambit is that it paid off. He made headlines. He got the publicity he wanted. I’m giving him even more now, I know. But I mention him because his exploit serves as a useful corollary. Recent years have seen the rise of a new mini-genre of literature: works arguing that one of the many emergencies Americans are living through right now is a widespread crisis of attention. The books vary widely in focus and tone, but share, at their foundations, an essential line of argument: Attention, that atomic unit of democracy, will shape our fate.
Demarre’s stunt helps to make these books’ case, not necessarily because of a direct threat it posed, but because it is a bleak reminder that in the attention wars, anyone can be insurgent. Americans tend to talk about attention as a matter of control — as something we give, or withhold, at will. We pay attention; it is our most obvious and intimate currency.
“My experience is what I agree to attend to,” the pioneering psychologist William James wrote in the late 19th century. His observations about the mind, both detailed and sweeping, laid the groundwork for the ways Americans talk about attention today: attention as an outgrowth of interest and, crucially, of choice. James, obviously, did not have access to the internet. Today’s news moves as a maelstrom, swirling at every moment with information at once trifling and historic, petty and grave, cajoling, demanding, funny, horrifying, uplifting, embarrassing, fleeting, loud — so much of it, at so many scales, that the idea of choice in the midst of it all takes on a certain absurdity. James’s definition, at this point, is true but not enough.
Jenny Odell proposes a recalibration in 2019’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. American culture has moved so far from the Jamesian mode of attention — so far from the simple dignity of choice — that our lexicon itself can be misleading. Attention, Odell argues, has become bound up in the same apparatus that remade hobbies into “productive leisure” and that values people’s time only insofar as it proves economically viable. The essential problem is not simply the internet; instead the villain “is the invasive logic of commercial social media and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction.”
But there is a stark difference between being open to distraction and being driven to it. Doing nothing, in Odell’s analysis, is not the absence of action; it is an act of reclamation. It is an attempt to make free time free again. The challenge is to wander mindfully.
Tim Wu argues in The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads, attention is ours, yes, but it is theirs too — a commodity fought over by corporations that seek ever thicker slices of our psyches. Wu’s targets are Facebook, Google, and the many other businesses that reduce humans to sets of “eyeballs” and treat the mind as an extractive resource.
The digital industrialists engage in what Wu calls, in full dystopian dudgeon, “attention harvesting” — the reaping of people’s time and care, for profit. Wu published The Attention Merchants in 2016. It has earned in the meantime one of the best distinctions a book can hope for: It has grown only more relevant. Wu’s ultimate theme, like Odell’s, is resistance. Distraction, Wu notes, tends to empower the industrialists and demean everyone else. If people are to avoid life lived at their mercy, he writes, “we must first acknowledge the preciousness of our attention and resolve not to part with it as cheaply or
unthinkingly as we so often have. And then we must act, individually and collectively, to make our attention our own again, and so reclaim ownership of the very experience of living.”
But attention, in these frameworks, is also political. In the aggregate, attention is a collective good. A distracted democracy is an endangered one. The authors make liberal use of the collective we, and the choice functions not as a glib imposition of commonality on a fractured world, but instead as a simple recognition: In a shared polity and a shared planet, our fates are bound together. Considered communally, a sense of common destiny might orient our attention to questions both ancient and newly urgent: What kind of country do we want? What kind of people do we want to be?
If we find a way to focus on what matters, we may be spared the need to admit, to the generations that follow: We didn’t mean for it all to happen. But we weren’t paying attention.
Thankfully, we invested our attention to each other, to the beautiful Bahamas, to having someone else make our food and clean up afterwards, and to the on-going ocean vista from our cabin's deck.
The article for this week is about attention. In it, the author states that, "If we find a way to focus on what matters, we may be spared the need to admit to the generations that follow: We didn't mean for it all to happen. We just weren't paying attention."
So what's the right balance? Going on a cruise - metaphorically speaking - and not paying attention to the news, or getting so caught up in it that we lose our attention to what really matters. I have some thoughts about this and how attention fits into our spirituality. And, I'd like to hear what you think.
The Great Fracturing of American Attention
Megan Garber, The Atlantic 3.5.22
Last month, as Delta Flight 1580 made its way from Utah to Oregon, Michael Demarre approached one of the plane’s emergency-exit doors. He tugged at the handle that would release its hatch. A nearby flight attendant, realizing what he was doing, stopped him. Fellow passengers spent the rest of the flight watching him to ensure that he remained in his seat. After the plane landed, investigators asked him the obvious question: Why? His goal, he said, had been to make enough of a scene that people would begin filming him. He’d wanted their screens to publicize his feelings.
I did it for the attention: As explanations go, it’s an American classic.
The grim irony of Demarre’s gambit is that it paid off. He made headlines. He got the publicity he wanted. I’m giving him even more now, I know. But I mention him because his exploit serves as a useful corollary. Recent years have seen the rise of a new mini-genre of literature: works arguing that one of the many emergencies Americans are living through right now is a widespread crisis of attention. The books vary widely in focus and tone, but share, at their foundations, an essential line of argument: Attention, that atomic unit of democracy, will shape our fate.
Demarre’s stunt helps to make these books’ case, not necessarily because of a direct threat it posed, but because it is a bleak reminder that in the attention wars, anyone can be insurgent. Americans tend to talk about attention as a matter of control — as something we give, or withhold, at will. We pay attention; it is our most obvious and intimate currency.
“My experience is what I agree to attend to,” the pioneering psychologist William James wrote in the late 19th century. His observations about the mind, both detailed and sweeping, laid the groundwork for the ways Americans talk about attention today: attention as an outgrowth of interest and, crucially, of choice. James, obviously, did not have access to the internet. Today’s news moves as a maelstrom, swirling at every moment with information at once trifling and historic, petty and grave, cajoling, demanding, funny, horrifying, uplifting, embarrassing, fleeting, loud — so much of it, at so many scales, that the idea of choice in the midst of it all takes on a certain absurdity. James’s definition, at this point, is true but not enough.
Jenny Odell proposes a recalibration in 2019’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. American culture has moved so far from the Jamesian mode of attention — so far from the simple dignity of choice — that our lexicon itself can be misleading. Attention, Odell argues, has become bound up in the same apparatus that remade hobbies into “productive leisure” and that values people’s time only insofar as it proves economically viable. The essential problem is not simply the internet; instead the villain “is the invasive logic of commercial social media and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction.”
But there is a stark difference between being open to distraction and being driven to it. Doing nothing, in Odell’s analysis, is not the absence of action; it is an act of reclamation. It is an attempt to make free time free again. The challenge is to wander mindfully.
Tim Wu argues in The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads, attention is ours, yes, but it is theirs too — a commodity fought over by corporations that seek ever thicker slices of our psyches. Wu’s targets are Facebook, Google, and the many other businesses that reduce humans to sets of “eyeballs” and treat the mind as an extractive resource.
The digital industrialists engage in what Wu calls, in full dystopian dudgeon, “attention harvesting” — the reaping of people’s time and care, for profit. Wu published The Attention Merchants in 2016. It has earned in the meantime one of the best distinctions a book can hope for: It has grown only more relevant. Wu’s ultimate theme, like Odell’s, is resistance. Distraction, Wu notes, tends to empower the industrialists and demean everyone else. If people are to avoid life lived at their mercy, he writes, “we must first acknowledge the preciousness of our attention and resolve not to part with it as cheaply or
unthinkingly as we so often have. And then we must act, individually and collectively, to make our attention our own again, and so reclaim ownership of the very experience of living.”
But attention, in these frameworks, is also political. In the aggregate, attention is a collective good. A distracted democracy is an endangered one. The authors make liberal use of the collective we, and the choice functions not as a glib imposition of commonality on a fractured world, but instead as a simple recognition: In a shared polity and a shared planet, our fates are bound together. Considered communally, a sense of common destiny might orient our attention to questions both ancient and newly urgent: What kind of country do we want? What kind of people do we want to be?
If we find a way to focus on what matters, we may be spared the need to admit, to the generations that follow: We didn’t mean for it all to happen. But we weren’t paying attention.
Tuesday, May 16
There has been a running question through several of our discussions: what is the efficacy of prayer? Author CS Lewis took a shot at that very question. Thanks to some (heavy) editing by your pastor, it's in an attached two-page article.
You may be surprised by his conclusion. But, he's a fantastic author so I suppose it's in his writing nature. Most importantly, I'd like to know what you think. What is your experience with prayer? Can we determine its efficacy without destroying its nature? Or, is prayer simply a matter of faith; which is believing in things we cannot see (or prove).
The Efficacy of Prayer
C. S. Lewis, The World's Last Night and Other Essays
Some years ago, I got up one morning intending to have my hair cut in preparation for a visit to London, which was put off. So, I decided to put the haircut off too. But then there began the most unaccountable little nagging in my mind, almost like a voice saying: Get it cut all the same. Go and get it cut. In the end I could stand it no longer. I went. Now my barber at that time was a fellow Christian. The moment I opened his shop door he said, “Oh, I was praying you might come today.” And in fact, if I had come a day or so later I should have been of no use to him. It awed me; it awes me still.
But of course, one cannot rigorously prove a causal connection between the barber’s prayers and my visit. It might be telepathy. It might be accident. I have stood by the bedside of a woman whose thighbone was eaten through with cancer and who had thriving colonies of the disease in many other bones, as well. It took three people to move her in bed. The doctors predicted a few months of life; the nurses, a few weeks. A good man: laid his hands on her and prayed. A year later the patient was walking (uphill, too, through rough woodland) and the man who took the last X-ray photos was saying, “These bones are as solid as rock. It's miraculous.”
But once again there is no rigorous proof. Medicine, as all true doctors admit, is not an exact science. We need not invoke the supernatural to explain the falsification of its prophecies. You need not, unless you choose, believe in a causal connection between the prayers and the recovery. The question then arises, “What sort of evidence would prove the efficacy of prayer?”
The thing we pray for may happen, but how can you ever know it was not going to happen anyway? Even if the thing were indisputably miraculous it would not follow that the miracle had occurred because of your prayers. The answer surely is that a compulsive empirical proof such as we have in the sciences can never be attained.
Some things are proved by the unbroken uniformity of our experiences. The law of gravitation is established by the fact that, in our experience, all bodies without exception obey it. Now even if all the things that people prayed for happened, which they do not, this would not prove what Christians mean by the efficacy of prayer. For prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted. And if an infinitely wise Being listens to the requests of finite and foolish creatures, of course He will sometimes grant and sometimes refuse them. Invariable “success” in prayer would not prove the Christian doctrine at all. It would prove something much more like magic — a power in certain human beings to control, or compel, the course of nature.
I have seen it suggested that a team of people — the more the better — should agree to pray as hard as they knew how, over a period of six weeks, for all the patients in Hospital A and none of those in Hospital B. Then you would tot up the results and see if A had more cures and fewer deaths. And I suppose you would repeat the experiment at various times and places so as to eliminate the influence of irrelevant factors. The trouble is that I do not see how any real prayer could go on under such conditions. “Words without thoughts never to heaven go,” says the King in Hamlet. Simply to say prayers is not to pray; otherwise a team of properly trained parrots would serve as well as men for our experiment.
You cannot pray for the recovery of the sick unless the end you have in view is their recovery. But you can have no motive for desiring the recovery of all the patients in one hospital and none of those in another. You are not doing it in order that suffering should be relieved; you are doing it to find out what happens. The real purpose and the nominal purpose of your prayers are at variance. In other words, whatever your tongue and teeth and knees may do, you are not praying.
The experiment demands an impossibility. Empirical proof and disproof are, then, unobtainable. But this conclusion will seem less depressing if we remember that prayer is request and compare it with other specimens of the same thing.
Our assurance—if we reach an assurance—that God always hears and sometimes grants our prayers, and that apparent grantings are not merely fortuitous, can only come in the same sort of way. There can be no question of tabulating successes and failures and trying to decide whether the successes are too numerous to be accounted for by chance. Those who best know a man best know whether, when he did what they asked, he did it because they asked. I think those who best know God will best know whether He sent me to the barberʼs shop because the barber prayed.
For up till now we have been tackling the whole question in the wrong way and on the wrong level. The very question “Does prayer work?” puts us in the wrong frame of mind from the outset. “Work”: as if it were magic, or a machine — something that functions automatically.
Prayer is either a sheer illusion or a personal contact between embryonic, incomplete persons (ourselves) and the utterly concrete Person. Prayer in the sense of petition, asking for things, is a small part of it; confession and penitence are its threshold, adoration its sanctuary, the presence and vision and enjoyment of God its bread and wine. In it, God shows Himself to us. That He answers prayers is a corollary — not necessarily the most important one — from that revelation. What He does is learned from what He is.
Prayer is not a machine. It is not magic. It is not advice offered to God. Our act, when we pray, must not, any more than all our other acts, be separated from the continuous act of God Himself, in which alone all finite causes operate.
It would be even worse to think of those who get what they pray for as a sort of court favorites, people who have influence with the throne. The refused prayer of Christ in Gethsemane is answer enough to that.
And I dare not leave out the hard saying which I once heard from an experienced Christian: “I have seen many striking answers to prayer and more than one that I thought miraculous. But they usually come at the beginning: before conversion, or soon after it. As the Christian life proceeds, they tend to be rarer. The refusals, too, are not only more frequent; they become more unmistakable, more emphatic.”
Does God then forsake just those who serve Him best?
Meanwhile, little people like you and me, if our prayers are sometimes granted, beyond all hope and probability, had better not draw hasty conclusions to our own advantage. If we were stronger, we might be less tenderly treated. If we were braver, we might be sent, with far less help, to defend far more desperate posts in the great battle.
You may be surprised by his conclusion. But, he's a fantastic author so I suppose it's in his writing nature. Most importantly, I'd like to know what you think. What is your experience with prayer? Can we determine its efficacy without destroying its nature? Or, is prayer simply a matter of faith; which is believing in things we cannot see (or prove).
The Efficacy of Prayer
C. S. Lewis, The World's Last Night and Other Essays
Some years ago, I got up one morning intending to have my hair cut in preparation for a visit to London, which was put off. So, I decided to put the haircut off too. But then there began the most unaccountable little nagging in my mind, almost like a voice saying: Get it cut all the same. Go and get it cut. In the end I could stand it no longer. I went. Now my barber at that time was a fellow Christian. The moment I opened his shop door he said, “Oh, I was praying you might come today.” And in fact, if I had come a day or so later I should have been of no use to him. It awed me; it awes me still.
But of course, one cannot rigorously prove a causal connection between the barber’s prayers and my visit. It might be telepathy. It might be accident. I have stood by the bedside of a woman whose thighbone was eaten through with cancer and who had thriving colonies of the disease in many other bones, as well. It took three people to move her in bed. The doctors predicted a few months of life; the nurses, a few weeks. A good man: laid his hands on her and prayed. A year later the patient was walking (uphill, too, through rough woodland) and the man who took the last X-ray photos was saying, “These bones are as solid as rock. It's miraculous.”
But once again there is no rigorous proof. Medicine, as all true doctors admit, is not an exact science. We need not invoke the supernatural to explain the falsification of its prophecies. You need not, unless you choose, believe in a causal connection between the prayers and the recovery. The question then arises, “What sort of evidence would prove the efficacy of prayer?”
The thing we pray for may happen, but how can you ever know it was not going to happen anyway? Even if the thing were indisputably miraculous it would not follow that the miracle had occurred because of your prayers. The answer surely is that a compulsive empirical proof such as we have in the sciences can never be attained.
Some things are proved by the unbroken uniformity of our experiences. The law of gravitation is established by the fact that, in our experience, all bodies without exception obey it. Now even if all the things that people prayed for happened, which they do not, this would not prove what Christians mean by the efficacy of prayer. For prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted. And if an infinitely wise Being listens to the requests of finite and foolish creatures, of course He will sometimes grant and sometimes refuse them. Invariable “success” in prayer would not prove the Christian doctrine at all. It would prove something much more like magic — a power in certain human beings to control, or compel, the course of nature.
I have seen it suggested that a team of people — the more the better — should agree to pray as hard as they knew how, over a period of six weeks, for all the patients in Hospital A and none of those in Hospital B. Then you would tot up the results and see if A had more cures and fewer deaths. And I suppose you would repeat the experiment at various times and places so as to eliminate the influence of irrelevant factors. The trouble is that I do not see how any real prayer could go on under such conditions. “Words without thoughts never to heaven go,” says the King in Hamlet. Simply to say prayers is not to pray; otherwise a team of properly trained parrots would serve as well as men for our experiment.
You cannot pray for the recovery of the sick unless the end you have in view is their recovery. But you can have no motive for desiring the recovery of all the patients in one hospital and none of those in another. You are not doing it in order that suffering should be relieved; you are doing it to find out what happens. The real purpose and the nominal purpose of your prayers are at variance. In other words, whatever your tongue and teeth and knees may do, you are not praying.
The experiment demands an impossibility. Empirical proof and disproof are, then, unobtainable. But this conclusion will seem less depressing if we remember that prayer is request and compare it with other specimens of the same thing.
Our assurance—if we reach an assurance—that God always hears and sometimes grants our prayers, and that apparent grantings are not merely fortuitous, can only come in the same sort of way. There can be no question of tabulating successes and failures and trying to decide whether the successes are too numerous to be accounted for by chance. Those who best know a man best know whether, when he did what they asked, he did it because they asked. I think those who best know God will best know whether He sent me to the barberʼs shop because the barber prayed.
For up till now we have been tackling the whole question in the wrong way and on the wrong level. The very question “Does prayer work?” puts us in the wrong frame of mind from the outset. “Work”: as if it were magic, or a machine — something that functions automatically.
Prayer is either a sheer illusion or a personal contact between embryonic, incomplete persons (ourselves) and the utterly concrete Person. Prayer in the sense of petition, asking for things, is a small part of it; confession and penitence are its threshold, adoration its sanctuary, the presence and vision and enjoyment of God its bread and wine. In it, God shows Himself to us. That He answers prayers is a corollary — not necessarily the most important one — from that revelation. What He does is learned from what He is.
Prayer is not a machine. It is not magic. It is not advice offered to God. Our act, when we pray, must not, any more than all our other acts, be separated from the continuous act of God Himself, in which alone all finite causes operate.
It would be even worse to think of those who get what they pray for as a sort of court favorites, people who have influence with the throne. The refused prayer of Christ in Gethsemane is answer enough to that.
And I dare not leave out the hard saying which I once heard from an experienced Christian: “I have seen many striking answers to prayer and more than one that I thought miraculous. But they usually come at the beginning: before conversion, or soon after it. As the Christian life proceeds, they tend to be rarer. The refusals, too, are not only more frequent; they become more unmistakable, more emphatic.”
Does God then forsake just those who serve Him best?
Meanwhile, little people like you and me, if our prayers are sometimes granted, beyond all hope and probability, had better not draw hasty conclusions to our own advantage. If we were stronger, we might be less tenderly treated. If we were braver, we might be sent, with far less help, to defend far more desperate posts in the great battle.
Tuesday, May 9
For this week, here are two competing articles; they are on the same document. The first one, America's Intimacy Problem, talks about isolation and loneliness in America and postulates it is on the rise. The second article, They Know Your Face (Maybe Not Your Name) discusses the importance of how peripheral ties to people - classmates, cashiers, gym members, coworkers, etc - are vital to positive moods especially as we age. Such relationships, post-Covid, are on the rise. Can both tenants be correct?
Here is a bonus article that is interesting but has nothing to do with the discussion topic of peripheral friendship and social isolation and will not be a part of the discussion group: The Religion of King Charles III
America’s Intimacy Problem
Isabel Fattal, The Atlantic 4.28.23
When my colleague Faith Hill recently interviewed Michael Hilgers, a therapist with more than 20 years of experience, he painted a worrying picture of intimacy in America: “It’s painful to watch just how disconnected people are,” he said. Even when Hilgers can sense that clients do want to pursue deep social connections, “there’s a lot of confusion and fear in terms of how to get there,” he noted. One might say that America is in its insecure-attachment era.
Let’s back up a little: Insecure attachment is a term used to describe three of the four basic human “attachment styles” that researchers have identified. Faith lays out the four styles in her recent article:
People with a secure style feel that they can depend on others and that others can depend on them too. Those with a dismissing style—more commonly known as “avoidant”—are overly committed to independence and don’t feel that they need much deep emotional connection.
People with a preoccupied (or “anxious”) style badly want intimacy but, fearing rejection, cling or search for validation. And people with fearful (or “disorganized”) attachment crave intimacy, too—but like those with the dismissing style, they distrust people and end up pushing them away.
Over the past few decades, researchers have noticed a decline in secure attachment and an increase in the dismissing and fearful styles. These two insecure styles are “associated with lack of trust and self-isolation,” Faith explains. She notes that American distrust in institutions has also been on the rise for years — it’s well known that more and more Americans are feeling skeptical of the government, organized religion, the media, corporations, and police. But recent research and anecdotal evidence suggest that Americans are growing more wary not only of “hypothetical, nameless Americans,” but of their own colleagues, neighbors, friends, partners, and parents.
The root causes of America’s trust issues are impossible to diagnose with certainty, but they could well be a reflection of Americans’ worries about societal problems. One psychologist who did research into Americans’ insecure-attachment trend “rattled off a list of fears that people may be wrestling with,” Faith writes: “war in Europe, A.I. threatening to transform jobs, constant school shootings in the news,” as well as financial precarity. As Faith puts it: “When society feels scary, that fear can seep into your closest relationships.”
Some researchers argue for other likely suspects, such as smartphone use or the fact that more Americans than ever are living alone. The decline in emotional intimacy is also happening against the backdrop of a decline in physical intimacy. Our senior editor Kate Julian explored this “sex recession,” particularly among young adults, in her 2018 magazine cover story.
All in all, as Faith writes, “we can’t determine why people are putting up walls, growing further and further away from one another. We just know it’s happening.” The good news is that if humans have the capacity to lose trust in one another, they can also work to build it back up.
“The experts I spoke with were surprisingly hopeful,” Faith concludes: Hilgers [the therapist] knows firsthand that it’s possible for people with attachment issues to change—he’s helped many of them do it. Our culture puts a lot of value on trusting your gut, he told me, but that’s not always the right move if your intuition tells you that it’s a mistake to let people in. So he gently guides them to override that instinct; when people make connections and
nothing bad happens, their gut feeling slowly starts to change.
As Faith argued in an earlier article, attachment styles are not destiny, despite what the internet might lead you to believe. “Your attachment style is not so much a fixed category you fall into, like an astrology sign, but rather a tendency that can vary among different relationships and, in turn, is continuously shaped by those relationships,” she wrote. “Perhaps most important, you can take steps to change it”—and connect with others better as a result.
They Know Your Face, Maybe Not Your Name
Paula Span, NY Times 4.22.23
Victoria Tirondola and Lam Gong first struck up a conversation last spring at the dog run in Brookdale Park in Bloomfield, N.J., when they realized that each owned a dog named Abby. They chatted about dogs at first. Then they learned that they both cooked, so “we talked about food and restaurants.”
Psychologists and sociologists call these sorts of connections “weak ties” or “peripheral ties,” in contrast to close ties to family members and intimate friends. Some researchers investigating weak ties include in that category classmates, co-workers, neighbors and fellow religious congregants. Others look into interactions with near-strangers at coffee shops or on transit routes.
People who cross paths at the dog run, for instance, may recognize other regulars without knowing their names (though they probably know their dogs’ names) or anything much about them. Nevertheless, impromptu chats about pets or the weather often arise, and they’re important.
Such seemingly trivial interactions have been shown to boost people’s positive moods and reduce their odds of depressed moods. “Weak ties matter, not just for our moods but our health,” said Gillian Sandstrom, a psychologist at the University of Sussex in England who has researched their impact. “If I asked who you confided in, you wouldn’t mention them,” she said. Yet the resulting sense of belonging that weak ties confer is “essential to thriving, feeling connected to other people” — even among introverts, which is how Dr. Sandstrom defines herself.
In her early studies, hand-held clickers were distributed to groups of undergraduate students and people over 25 to track how many classmates or others they interacted with, however minimally, over several days. Those who interacted with more weak ties reported greater happiness, and a greater sense of well-being and belonging, than those with fewer interactions.
The researchers found “within-person differences,” too, showing that the effects were not a result of personalities. The same individuals reported being happier on days they had more interactions. One study, published in 2020, followed an older sample of more than 800 adults in metropolitan Detroit over 23 years. The researchers asked subjects (average age at the start: 62) to draw three concentric circles, with “you” in the center, and to arrange people in their lives by degree of closeness. Those in the innermost circle of close ties were almost always family, said Toni Antonucci, a psychologist at the University of Michigan and senior author of the study. The weak ties in the outermost circle included friends, co-workers and neighbors.
Over time, the number of weak ties more strongly predicted well-being than the number of close ties. Weak ties “provide you with a low-demand opportunity for interaction,” Dr. Antonucci said. “It’s cognitively stimulating. It’s engaging.” The Covid pandemic, striking when social scientists were already raising alarms about the health risks of loneliness and isolation for older adults, suspended many of these everyday exchanges.
Seniors often kept in touch with their families, one way or another, but where were the waiters who knew their breakfast orders, the bank tellers, crossing guards and dog walkers? “I hope it made people realize how much weak ties matter,” Dr. Sandstrom said. Though they can’t replace close ones, “we missed the novelty and the spontaneity,” she said. At older ages, when social networks tend to shrink, people may have to work at expanding them. “Make the effort,” Dr. Antonucci advised. “You can’t create new children at 70, but you can create new weak ties.”
Weak ties, including those developed online, don’t necessarily turn into close ones and don’t have to. Close relationships, after all, can involve conflicts, demands for reciprocity and other complications. But sometimes, weak ties do evolve.
The Brookdale Park dog owners, for instance, have become real friends. They go out to dinner together and see movies and comedy shows. In bad weather, they walk in a local mall. A bit hesitant at first to exchange phone numbers, “we took a giant step,” Ms. Geanoules said, pausing to pat and coo at one of the Abbys. “You can change a lifetime by talking to someone for 10 minutes."
Here is a bonus article that is interesting but has nothing to do with the discussion topic of peripheral friendship and social isolation and will not be a part of the discussion group: The Religion of King Charles III
America’s Intimacy Problem
Isabel Fattal, The Atlantic 4.28.23
When my colleague Faith Hill recently interviewed Michael Hilgers, a therapist with more than 20 years of experience, he painted a worrying picture of intimacy in America: “It’s painful to watch just how disconnected people are,” he said. Even when Hilgers can sense that clients do want to pursue deep social connections, “there’s a lot of confusion and fear in terms of how to get there,” he noted. One might say that America is in its insecure-attachment era.
Let’s back up a little: Insecure attachment is a term used to describe three of the four basic human “attachment styles” that researchers have identified. Faith lays out the four styles in her recent article:
People with a secure style feel that they can depend on others and that others can depend on them too. Those with a dismissing style—more commonly known as “avoidant”—are overly committed to independence and don’t feel that they need much deep emotional connection.
People with a preoccupied (or “anxious”) style badly want intimacy but, fearing rejection, cling or search for validation. And people with fearful (or “disorganized”) attachment crave intimacy, too—but like those with the dismissing style, they distrust people and end up pushing them away.
Over the past few decades, researchers have noticed a decline in secure attachment and an increase in the dismissing and fearful styles. These two insecure styles are “associated with lack of trust and self-isolation,” Faith explains. She notes that American distrust in institutions has also been on the rise for years — it’s well known that more and more Americans are feeling skeptical of the government, organized religion, the media, corporations, and police. But recent research and anecdotal evidence suggest that Americans are growing more wary not only of “hypothetical, nameless Americans,” but of their own colleagues, neighbors, friends, partners, and parents.
The root causes of America’s trust issues are impossible to diagnose with certainty, but they could well be a reflection of Americans’ worries about societal problems. One psychologist who did research into Americans’ insecure-attachment trend “rattled off a list of fears that people may be wrestling with,” Faith writes: “war in Europe, A.I. threatening to transform jobs, constant school shootings in the news,” as well as financial precarity. As Faith puts it: “When society feels scary, that fear can seep into your closest relationships.”
Some researchers argue for other likely suspects, such as smartphone use or the fact that more Americans than ever are living alone. The decline in emotional intimacy is also happening against the backdrop of a decline in physical intimacy. Our senior editor Kate Julian explored this “sex recession,” particularly among young adults, in her 2018 magazine cover story.
All in all, as Faith writes, “we can’t determine why people are putting up walls, growing further and further away from one another. We just know it’s happening.” The good news is that if humans have the capacity to lose trust in one another, they can also work to build it back up.
“The experts I spoke with were surprisingly hopeful,” Faith concludes: Hilgers [the therapist] knows firsthand that it’s possible for people with attachment issues to change—he’s helped many of them do it. Our culture puts a lot of value on trusting your gut, he told me, but that’s not always the right move if your intuition tells you that it’s a mistake to let people in. So he gently guides them to override that instinct; when people make connections and
nothing bad happens, their gut feeling slowly starts to change.
As Faith argued in an earlier article, attachment styles are not destiny, despite what the internet might lead you to believe. “Your attachment style is not so much a fixed category you fall into, like an astrology sign, but rather a tendency that can vary among different relationships and, in turn, is continuously shaped by those relationships,” she wrote. “Perhaps most important, you can take steps to change it”—and connect with others better as a result.
They Know Your Face, Maybe Not Your Name
Paula Span, NY Times 4.22.23
Victoria Tirondola and Lam Gong first struck up a conversation last spring at the dog run in Brookdale Park in Bloomfield, N.J., when they realized that each owned a dog named Abby. They chatted about dogs at first. Then they learned that they both cooked, so “we talked about food and restaurants.”
Psychologists and sociologists call these sorts of connections “weak ties” or “peripheral ties,” in contrast to close ties to family members and intimate friends. Some researchers investigating weak ties include in that category classmates, co-workers, neighbors and fellow religious congregants. Others look into interactions with near-strangers at coffee shops or on transit routes.
People who cross paths at the dog run, for instance, may recognize other regulars without knowing their names (though they probably know their dogs’ names) or anything much about them. Nevertheless, impromptu chats about pets or the weather often arise, and they’re important.
Such seemingly trivial interactions have been shown to boost people’s positive moods and reduce their odds of depressed moods. “Weak ties matter, not just for our moods but our health,” said Gillian Sandstrom, a psychologist at the University of Sussex in England who has researched their impact. “If I asked who you confided in, you wouldn’t mention them,” she said. Yet the resulting sense of belonging that weak ties confer is “essential to thriving, feeling connected to other people” — even among introverts, which is how Dr. Sandstrom defines herself.
In her early studies, hand-held clickers were distributed to groups of undergraduate students and people over 25 to track how many classmates or others they interacted with, however minimally, over several days. Those who interacted with more weak ties reported greater happiness, and a greater sense of well-being and belonging, than those with fewer interactions.
The researchers found “within-person differences,” too, showing that the effects were not a result of personalities. The same individuals reported being happier on days they had more interactions. One study, published in 2020, followed an older sample of more than 800 adults in metropolitan Detroit over 23 years. The researchers asked subjects (average age at the start: 62) to draw three concentric circles, with “you” in the center, and to arrange people in their lives by degree of closeness. Those in the innermost circle of close ties were almost always family, said Toni Antonucci, a psychologist at the University of Michigan and senior author of the study. The weak ties in the outermost circle included friends, co-workers and neighbors.
Over time, the number of weak ties more strongly predicted well-being than the number of close ties. Weak ties “provide you with a low-demand opportunity for interaction,” Dr. Antonucci said. “It’s cognitively stimulating. It’s engaging.” The Covid pandemic, striking when social scientists were already raising alarms about the health risks of loneliness and isolation for older adults, suspended many of these everyday exchanges.
Seniors often kept in touch with their families, one way or another, but where were the waiters who knew their breakfast orders, the bank tellers, crossing guards and dog walkers? “I hope it made people realize how much weak ties matter,” Dr. Sandstrom said. Though they can’t replace close ones, “we missed the novelty and the spontaneity,” she said. At older ages, when social networks tend to shrink, people may have to work at expanding them. “Make the effort,” Dr. Antonucci advised. “You can’t create new children at 70, but you can create new weak ties.”
Weak ties, including those developed online, don’t necessarily turn into close ones and don’t have to. Close relationships, after all, can involve conflicts, demands for reciprocity and other complications. But sometimes, weak ties do evolve.
The Brookdale Park dog owners, for instance, have become real friends. They go out to dinner together and see movies and comedy shows. In bad weather, they walk in a local mall. A bit hesitant at first to exchange phone numbers, “we took a giant step,” Ms. Geanoules said, pausing to pat and coo at one of the Abbys. “You can change a lifetime by talking to someone for 10 minutes."
Tuesday, May 2
The topic of AI has come up the past couple of weeks. There's really nothing we can do to change AI except for how we respond to it. This week's article, written by NYU business professor, Suzy Welch, compares the grief she feels with technology with the grief she feels about the death of her husband (Jack Welsh). You may find her parallels interesting as well as her response to AI.
How to Deal with AI Grief
Suzy Welch, WSJ 4.26.23
Ms. Welch is a professor of management practice at NYU’s Stern School of Business and a senior adviser at the Brunswick Group.
Isn’t it fun to go out with friends to a buzzy bar in the coolest part of town, order some drinks and pizza, and end up talking about how artificial intelligence is going to make everything faster and easier but also destroy all that we hold dear? Yes, I love doing that too. I did it the other night. Good times.
A new era is upon us. The quiet mourning for the death of a world we were barely holding on to by our fingernails anyway.
I’m not talking about AI only with other people my age who only recently figured out how to share documents on Zoom and have made peace with the prospect of never talking to their children with a phone against their ear again. The angst is generational. Many of my Gen Z students at New York University’s Stern School of Business tell me they are in an angsty love-hate relationship with AI. It does their homework but leaves them wondering if their expensively educated brains are special after all. It plans their trips to Europe after graduation, but it also is creating an economy that makes their future employers so nervous that job start dates are being delayed. Their professors—myself included—encourage them to be excited about the opportunities AI will bring someday. Except that the time between now and “someday” feels like a yawning chasm of chaos and uncertainty. It reminds them, they confess, of the pandemic all over again. Even if you generally find yourself annoyed with the Zoomers, you have to admit they are on to something here.
Because my business-school class is about helping students plan their life journeys, I have found myself in an unlikely corner lately, offering advice on how to process “AI grief,” for lack of a better term. I’ve tried it out on my own boomer friends and colleagues—as I did at that buzzy bar. On these occasions, too, the conversation brought a bit of relief. If you’re grappling with your own small or large dose of “farewell to all that,” some thoughts:
One of the hardest things we ever learn in life is that forever is a long time. With AI, that lesson is upon us. After my husband, Jack, died, another widow I knew called to express her condolences. Six months had passed, and my grief was still very raw. I asked her when it would get easier. She laughed, sadly: “You think the first year is bad? The second year is when you realize how long forever is.”
So much in our life passes, but we can make sense of it, or even replace it with something better. We lose a job; we get another. We lose our hair and find it never really mattered. But when something, or someone, is gone permanently, the grief is dizzying on another level. It feels too big, unprocessable.
That, I say, is the weird feeling AI is stirring in your chest. There is no antidote. What saves you—and will eventually tamp down your anxiety—is that knowing that forever stealing things from us without end makes us better at living and loving in the present. That’s a hard-won gift, but a gift nonetheless.
The second piece of advice I offer is more context than advice. I remind the mourners that evolutionary psychologists have been telling us for years that we don’t live in the world our brains were designed for. We’ve adapted, but research, originally presented by Oxford University’s Robin Dunbar suggests that people function optimally in communities of around 60 to 100 — roughly the size, not surprisingly, of the first tribes on the African plains. That’s about
all the input and output we can take, in terms of talking, listening, gossiping, nurturing, managing, predicting and leading. Think for a moment about the number of people in your life who pour images, ideas, requests, demands, feelings and noise into your head daily. It’s not 60; it’s probably closer to a multiple of 100.
Where does this context leave us? Maybe simply with a sense of relief that our AI discomfort is, well, human. Technology will change the world in ways that take us even further away from our brain’s design. No wonder it feels so overwhelming — and maybe it should prompt us to find small communities that offer the “natural” peace the world doesn’t. A church, a neighborhood, a club, a volunteer organization. They aren’t the cure for what ails us but a comfort and treatment.
My ersatz grief counseling ends with a small admonishment, which someone had the audacity to use on me when, two years after my husband died, I said no to yet another invitation to join friends at an event. “The problem with a pity party,” she said, “is that no one comes but you.” I can assure you my reaction to this comment wasn’t, “Wow, you’re so right, I feel better already.”
But as the weeks went on and I found my persistent sadness isolating me more than ever, I realized if I wanted to move beyond mourning, I had to will it.
AI grief is like that. You might always carry your angst in your heart, but you also have to decide to embrace the future.
Forever is indeed a long time, and we are all living in a world that demands more of our brains than they can reasonably take. But don’t become the person who lets AI ruin a good night out with friends. To mourn is human — and to make sense of our mourning and move on is more human still.
How to Deal with AI Grief
Suzy Welch, WSJ 4.26.23
Ms. Welch is a professor of management practice at NYU’s Stern School of Business and a senior adviser at the Brunswick Group.
Isn’t it fun to go out with friends to a buzzy bar in the coolest part of town, order some drinks and pizza, and end up talking about how artificial intelligence is going to make everything faster and easier but also destroy all that we hold dear? Yes, I love doing that too. I did it the other night. Good times.
A new era is upon us. The quiet mourning for the death of a world we were barely holding on to by our fingernails anyway.
I’m not talking about AI only with other people my age who only recently figured out how to share documents on Zoom and have made peace with the prospect of never talking to their children with a phone against their ear again. The angst is generational. Many of my Gen Z students at New York University’s Stern School of Business tell me they are in an angsty love-hate relationship with AI. It does their homework but leaves them wondering if their expensively educated brains are special after all. It plans their trips to Europe after graduation, but it also is creating an economy that makes their future employers so nervous that job start dates are being delayed. Their professors—myself included—encourage them to be excited about the opportunities AI will bring someday. Except that the time between now and “someday” feels like a yawning chasm of chaos and uncertainty. It reminds them, they confess, of the pandemic all over again. Even if you generally find yourself annoyed with the Zoomers, you have to admit they are on to something here.
Because my business-school class is about helping students plan their life journeys, I have found myself in an unlikely corner lately, offering advice on how to process “AI grief,” for lack of a better term. I’ve tried it out on my own boomer friends and colleagues—as I did at that buzzy bar. On these occasions, too, the conversation brought a bit of relief. If you’re grappling with your own small or large dose of “farewell to all that,” some thoughts:
One of the hardest things we ever learn in life is that forever is a long time. With AI, that lesson is upon us. After my husband, Jack, died, another widow I knew called to express her condolences. Six months had passed, and my grief was still very raw. I asked her when it would get easier. She laughed, sadly: “You think the first year is bad? The second year is when you realize how long forever is.”
So much in our life passes, but we can make sense of it, or even replace it with something better. We lose a job; we get another. We lose our hair and find it never really mattered. But when something, or someone, is gone permanently, the grief is dizzying on another level. It feels too big, unprocessable.
That, I say, is the weird feeling AI is stirring in your chest. There is no antidote. What saves you—and will eventually tamp down your anxiety—is that knowing that forever stealing things from us without end makes us better at living and loving in the present. That’s a hard-won gift, but a gift nonetheless.
The second piece of advice I offer is more context than advice. I remind the mourners that evolutionary psychologists have been telling us for years that we don’t live in the world our brains were designed for. We’ve adapted, but research, originally presented by Oxford University’s Robin Dunbar suggests that people function optimally in communities of around 60 to 100 — roughly the size, not surprisingly, of the first tribes on the African plains. That’s about
all the input and output we can take, in terms of talking, listening, gossiping, nurturing, managing, predicting and leading. Think for a moment about the number of people in your life who pour images, ideas, requests, demands, feelings and noise into your head daily. It’s not 60; it’s probably closer to a multiple of 100.
Where does this context leave us? Maybe simply with a sense of relief that our AI discomfort is, well, human. Technology will change the world in ways that take us even further away from our brain’s design. No wonder it feels so overwhelming — and maybe it should prompt us to find small communities that offer the “natural” peace the world doesn’t. A church, a neighborhood, a club, a volunteer organization. They aren’t the cure for what ails us but a comfort and treatment.
My ersatz grief counseling ends with a small admonishment, which someone had the audacity to use on me when, two years after my husband died, I said no to yet another invitation to join friends at an event. “The problem with a pity party,” she said, “is that no one comes but you.” I can assure you my reaction to this comment wasn’t, “Wow, you’re so right, I feel better already.”
But as the weeks went on and I found my persistent sadness isolating me more than ever, I realized if I wanted to move beyond mourning, I had to will it.
AI grief is like that. You might always carry your angst in your heart, but you also have to decide to embrace the future.
Forever is indeed a long time, and we are all living in a world that demands more of our brains than they can reasonably take. But don’t become the person who lets AI ruin a good night out with friends. To mourn is human — and to make sense of our mourning and move on is more human still.
Tuesday, April 25
This week, we're going to talk about a WSJ and NY Times article that shows money is polling up but patriotism and religion are polling down.
At one discussion group, I mentioned an article about AI and policing that arrested the wrong man. There was a WSJ article about 25 questions for AI. Both article links can be found here:
NYT Article
WSJ Article
Money Is Up. Patriotism and Religion Are Down.
Peter Coy, NY Times 3.29.23
“I just want a nice job with a nice amount of money and a nice car and a nice house and stuff like that.” — Nate, 14 years old, in a focus group conducted by The New York Times
Nate, you speak for America. This week, The Wall Street Journal published a survey showing steep declines since 1998 in the shares of Americans who said patriotism and religion were very important to them. There were also big declines in the value placed on having children and being involved in the community. A nice amount of money, though, is something people can get behind. “The only priority The Journal tested that has grown in importance in the past quarter-century is money, which was cited as very important by 43 percent in the new survey, up from 31 percent in 1998,” The Journal reported.
Equal shares of Democrats and Republicans — 45 percent each — said money was a very important value to them. (I wouldn’t call money a “value,” but that’s the language used in the survey, which was conducted for The Journal by NORC at the University of Chicago, a research organization.)
The declines in traditional values are startling.
In 1998, 70 percent of Americans said patriotism was very important to them.
In 2023, 38 percent said so.
In 1998, 62 percent said religion was very important to them.
In 2023, 39 percent said so.
Aaron Zitner, who wrote The Journal’s article about the survey findings, was kind enough to share with me some historical data that didn’t appear in the story. While the declines in the importance of religion, patriotism and having children were biggest among Democrats, they were also conspicuous among Republicans. For example, the share of Republicans who said patriotism was a very important value fell to 59 percent in 2023 from 80 percent in 1998. (For Democrats the share fell to 23 percent from 63 percent.)
I’m struggling with what to make of this survey. One easy take — which I predict will be heard in houses of worship this coming weekend — is that Americans need to return to traditional values and forsake the glorification of mammon.
But berating people for thinking wrong is itself wrong thinking, not to mention unproductive. Plus, it’s hard to see what exactly is wrong with 14-year-old Nate’s vision for his future: nice job, nice amount of money, everything nice.
What’s more productive is to figure out why The Wall Street Journal/NORC survey shows such dramatic changes in values. One factor may be a change in survey methodology, from phone to mostly online polling. People are more willing to express socially undesirable thoughts online than when speaking to another person, as the pollster Patrick Ruffini noted this week (and as my Opinion colleague Ross Douthat also observed). The Wall Street Journal’s article said that polling differences “might account for a small portion of the reported decline in importance of the American values tested.”
But other polls show similar trends, even if not as extreme. Gallup has found declining religiosity, a record low in the share of people who are extremely proud to be Americans, a tail-off in volunteering and an increase in the share of people who say pay is “very important” in a new job (to 64 percent, up from 41 percent in 2015). A January survey by the Pew Research Center found that strengthening the economy — a money issue — was the top priority for voters, far ahead of dealing with climate change or strengthening the military.
Let’s take the questions one at a time: The decline in religiosity is a global phenomenon. The United States is more religious than most other wealthy, industrialized countries, but Americans are also drifting away from religion, especially organized religion. The declining importance placed on having children may also be global, judging from falling birthrates. Americans are just going with the flow.
Patriotism and community involvement have both declined, and they seem closely related since they’re both about participation in something bigger than oneself. Clearly, though, Americans perceive them differently. Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to place importance on patriotism, while Democrats are substantially more likely than Republicans to place importance on community involvement.
Now for money, which I write a lot about in this newsletter. Horwitz said that the survey’s results shouldn’t be taken as evidence that Americans are greedy or care only about money. Sixty percent of the respondents said their cost of living was rising, and it was creating strains. “Economic precarity is driving this,” she said. “People aren’t trying to get rich. They’re just trying to get by.”
The simultaneous descent of religion and ascent of money as values in the Journal survey could leave the impression that religion and capitalism have nothing to do with each another. In fact, religion came before capitalism and has shaped our thinking about it, Benjamin Friedman, a Harvard economist, wrote in a 2021 book, “Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.”
The Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, who wrote “Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism,” say there’s a rift between the third of the adult population who have a bachelor’s degree or more and the two-thirds who don’t and are faring worse. “Their lives are coming apart,” Deaton told me on Tuesday. The rift appears in some but not all of the questions in the Journal survey, according to data Zitner gave me. People with and without bachelor’s degrees have roughly similar views on patriotism, having children and community involvement.
At the same time, people without bachelor’s degrees are seven percentage points more likely to call religion a very important value and eight percentage points more likely to say the same about money.
Quote of the Day
“Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.” — Will and Ariel Durant, “The Lessons of History” (1968)
At one discussion group, I mentioned an article about AI and policing that arrested the wrong man. There was a WSJ article about 25 questions for AI. Both article links can be found here:
NYT Article
WSJ Article
Money Is Up. Patriotism and Religion Are Down.
Peter Coy, NY Times 3.29.23
“I just want a nice job with a nice amount of money and a nice car and a nice house and stuff like that.” — Nate, 14 years old, in a focus group conducted by The New York Times
Nate, you speak for America. This week, The Wall Street Journal published a survey showing steep declines since 1998 in the shares of Americans who said patriotism and religion were very important to them. There were also big declines in the value placed on having children and being involved in the community. A nice amount of money, though, is something people can get behind. “The only priority The Journal tested that has grown in importance in the past quarter-century is money, which was cited as very important by 43 percent in the new survey, up from 31 percent in 1998,” The Journal reported.
Equal shares of Democrats and Republicans — 45 percent each — said money was a very important value to them. (I wouldn’t call money a “value,” but that’s the language used in the survey, which was conducted for The Journal by NORC at the University of Chicago, a research organization.)
The declines in traditional values are startling.
In 1998, 70 percent of Americans said patriotism was very important to them.
In 2023, 38 percent said so.
In 1998, 62 percent said religion was very important to them.
In 2023, 39 percent said so.
Aaron Zitner, who wrote The Journal’s article about the survey findings, was kind enough to share with me some historical data that didn’t appear in the story. While the declines in the importance of religion, patriotism and having children were biggest among Democrats, they were also conspicuous among Republicans. For example, the share of Republicans who said patriotism was a very important value fell to 59 percent in 2023 from 80 percent in 1998. (For Democrats the share fell to 23 percent from 63 percent.)
I’m struggling with what to make of this survey. One easy take — which I predict will be heard in houses of worship this coming weekend — is that Americans need to return to traditional values and forsake the glorification of mammon.
But berating people for thinking wrong is itself wrong thinking, not to mention unproductive. Plus, it’s hard to see what exactly is wrong with 14-year-old Nate’s vision for his future: nice job, nice amount of money, everything nice.
What’s more productive is to figure out why The Wall Street Journal/NORC survey shows such dramatic changes in values. One factor may be a change in survey methodology, from phone to mostly online polling. People are more willing to express socially undesirable thoughts online than when speaking to another person, as the pollster Patrick Ruffini noted this week (and as my Opinion colleague Ross Douthat also observed). The Wall Street Journal’s article said that polling differences “might account for a small portion of the reported decline in importance of the American values tested.”
But other polls show similar trends, even if not as extreme. Gallup has found declining religiosity, a record low in the share of people who are extremely proud to be Americans, a tail-off in volunteering and an increase in the share of people who say pay is “very important” in a new job (to 64 percent, up from 41 percent in 2015). A January survey by the Pew Research Center found that strengthening the economy — a money issue — was the top priority for voters, far ahead of dealing with climate change or strengthening the military.
Let’s take the questions one at a time: The decline in religiosity is a global phenomenon. The United States is more religious than most other wealthy, industrialized countries, but Americans are also drifting away from religion, especially organized religion. The declining importance placed on having children may also be global, judging from falling birthrates. Americans are just going with the flow.
Patriotism and community involvement have both declined, and they seem closely related since they’re both about participation in something bigger than oneself. Clearly, though, Americans perceive them differently. Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to place importance on patriotism, while Democrats are substantially more likely than Republicans to place importance on community involvement.
Now for money, which I write a lot about in this newsletter. Horwitz said that the survey’s results shouldn’t be taken as evidence that Americans are greedy or care only about money. Sixty percent of the respondents said their cost of living was rising, and it was creating strains. “Economic precarity is driving this,” she said. “People aren’t trying to get rich. They’re just trying to get by.”
The simultaneous descent of religion and ascent of money as values in the Journal survey could leave the impression that religion and capitalism have nothing to do with each another. In fact, religion came before capitalism and has shaped our thinking about it, Benjamin Friedman, a Harvard economist, wrote in a 2021 book, “Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.”
The Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, who wrote “Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism,” say there’s a rift between the third of the adult population who have a bachelor’s degree or more and the two-thirds who don’t and are faring worse. “Their lives are coming apart,” Deaton told me on Tuesday. The rift appears in some but not all of the questions in the Journal survey, according to data Zitner gave me. People with and without bachelor’s degrees have roughly similar views on patriotism, having children and community involvement.
At the same time, people without bachelor’s degrees are seven percentage points more likely to call religion a very important value and eight percentage points more likely to say the same about money.
Quote of the Day
“Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.” — Will and Ariel Durant, “The Lessons of History” (1968)
Tuesday, April 18, 2023
I was asked (or tasked) with finding an article that answers this question: Where is God? I currently have 11 tabs open on my browser with articles from the WSJ, The Atlantic, NY Times and the Christian Century answering that question.
Some answers are as follows: God is found in philanthropism, in medical science, in the Eucharist, in Peace, in families, in the heart (and not the mind), in Church, at the gym, in one's own positive mental attitude.
But for you, I thought we should go a little deeper.
The primary article is a one-page piece that quotes letters to God from children. (Dear God, Are you real? Some people don’t believe it. If you are real, you’d better do something quick.) The second article, on pages two and three, discusses a God who hides, intentionally, for God's own reasons and purposes.
I look forward to talking to you about this.
God with Us: Children’s Letters to God
John Buchanan, Christian Century 12.15.09
My favorite Christmas book, which I pull from the shelf every Advent, is Children’s Letters to God, compiled by Stuart Hample and Eric Marshall. A few of my favorites include:
Dear God, Are you invisible or is that just a trick — Lucy
Dear God, Thank you for the baby brother, but what I prayed for was a puppy. — Joyce
Dear God, Maybe Cain and Abel would not kill each other if they had their own room. It works with my brother. — Larry
I discovered Children’s Letters when I heard a superb Advent sermon preached by the late Walter Bouman, professor at Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Columbus, Ohio. Walt, a big bear of a man with a wonderful wit, introduced his sermon on Isaiah 64:1, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,” by quoting from the original Children’s Letters:
Dear God, Are you real? Some people don’t believe it. If you are, you’d better do something quick. — Love, Harriet Anne
It’s the oldest, most authentic prayer in human history and as current as the latest neo-atheist best seller. Are you real? Where are you? Why is this happening to me? Please do something.
Isaiah’s version of the prayer comes from the time of exile when the people of God were wrenched from their homes and lived under house arrest in Babylon, separated from beautiful Jerusalem and the Temple, the heart of their faith and national pride. We remember them waiting for God to come every Advent when we sing, “O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel.”
The actual moment when the prophet prays “if you are real, you’d better do something quick” is when the people do return to Jerusalem and find it devastated, destroyed, the Temple leveled.
That is the situation that prompts the desperate human prayer. Human suffering, and God’s role in it, or God’s absence, is one of the enduring mysteries with which people of faith have struggled. Elie Wiesel’s question “Where is God now?”—uttered while watching a young boy being executed by the Nazis—is asked by every human being who has ever suffered deeply.
After the war, François Mauriac interviewed Wiesel and wrote an introduction to Wiesel’s stunning memoir, Night, about his experience in a concentration camp. Mauriac said: “And I, who believe that God is love, what answer could I give my young questioner . . . Did I speak of that other Israeli, his brother, the Crucified, whose cross has conquered the world? Did I affirm that the stumbling block to his faith was the cornerstone of mine and the conformity between the cross and human suffering was in my eyes the key to that improbable mystery?”
That most human question, “Where is God?” prompts the answer of faith: God is there, as people return to their devastated city, as suffering happens, as innocents die, as disease claims its victims. God comes, God is there, in the midst of it all. And that is what lies beneath all the blessed hoopla of Christmas: an idea so big we simply don’t have words adequate to express it and so, gratefully, we turn to art, poetry, music, the letters of children . . .
“Are you real? If so, you’d better do something quick.” And ancient words, more precious every year: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”
Divine Absence and the Light Inaccessible
Fleming Rutledge Christian Century 8.27.18
The prophet Isaiah wrote, “Truly thou art a God who hidest thyself ” (Isa. 45:15). Throughout Christian history, the question has always been asked: “When terrible things happen, where is God?” This question becomes more urgent and more agonizing when something happens to children; like with the news of the massacre at the Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school, there wasn’t, or shouldn’t have been, a Christian believer in this country who didn’t ask, “Where was God? Why does God permit these atrocities?”
This is the question that Christian faith must ask. It’s a very shallow faith if it does not ask. Many people have been conditioned not to ask these kinds of questions. Some worry that asking such a question is like opening a door to not believing in God at all. But the people of the Bible do ask, directly and bluntly. The wonderful little book of the prophet Habakkuk asks it this way: “Oh Lord, how long shall I cry for help and you will not hear? Why are you silent when the wicked man swallows up the one more righteous than he?” (Hab. 1:2, 13).
Habakkuk’s questions are part of every believer’s struggle for faith. I suspect that many seasoned churchgoers have had occasion to ask why God so often seems to be absent. Anyone who has not asked this question hasn’t been fully tested yet.
The hymn by Walter Chalmers Smith says:
Immortal, invisible God only wise
In light inaccessible hid from our eyes,
Most gracious, most glorious, the ancient of days,
Almighty, victorious, thy great name we praise.
God dwells in inaccessible light—light that we can’t directly look at. It’s uncreated light that emanates from God’s very being. This light was already there before God created the light that we see — “In light inaccessible hid from our eyes.” This also is a basic biblical idea. God isn’t a product of human imagination, a human wish raised to the nth power, or a projection of human hopes and fears. God is outside and beyond our ideas of God, so we can’t see God from a human point of view at all. Put another way: God is invisible not only to our eyes; God is also invisible to our imaginations. But how then do we know who God is? How do we even know if there is a God?
“Truly, thou art a God who hidest thyself.” The name for this idea in Latin is Deus absconditus, the hidden God. But that doesn’t quite get at what Isaiah is saying, because God is not just hidden on general principles. If God is hidden, it is because he hides himself. He means to be hidden. It is God’s nature to be out of the reach of our senses. There is a distance between God and ourselves that cannot be bridged from our side.
There are two different ways of asking “Where is God? Why does God hide himself?”
One way is scornful and hostile like the abuse and mockery hurled at Jesus on the cross: “He trusted in God to deliver him, so let God deliver him!” The people who yelled that insult thought they knew who God was and what God would and would not do (Matt. 27:43; also Ps. 22:8).
But the other way of asking comes from deep faith. It comes from having at least a partial knowledge of God and of the darkness that opposes God. Anyone who has received even a tiny glimpse of the majesty, holiness, and righteousness of God will have an increased sense of the darkness, disorder, and malevolence that’s loose in the world. These forces would swallow us up had not God set in motion his great plan to reclaim his creation.
It was widely noted, and noted with skepticism and even disdain by some, that every one of the funerals for the children of Sandy Hook Elementary School was held in a house of worship. This does not answer the question of why God did not stop the shooter when he opened fire at the school. We do not know why God appeared to be absent. What we do know is that God was present in this way: he was, and is still, present in the coming together of those who grieve with the families, to bring small lights into the blackness of their grief. They were not alone.
Something or Someone drew the bereaved families deeper into the midst of the communities that continue to trust God even when he has hidden himself. Incomprehensible as it may seem, God is alive in the faith of his people wherever they are and in whatever condition.
The fact that God hides himself in the midst of revealing himself is paradoxically a testimony to his reality. Presence-in-absence is the theme of his self-disclosure. God isn’t hidden because we are too stupid to find him, or too lazy, or not “spiritual” enough. He hides himself for his own reasons, and he reveals himself for his own reasons. If that were not so, God would not be God; God would be nothing more than a projection of our own religious ideas and wishes.
The Lord hides himself from us because he is God, and God reveals himself to us because God is love (1 John 4:8). Does that make sense? Probably not—but sometimes Christians must be content with theological paradox. To know God in his Son Jesus Christ is to know that he is unconditionally love. In the cross and resurrection of his Son, God has given us everything that we need to live with alongside the terrors of his seeming absence.
Many churches do not use the phrase “he descended into hell” in the Apostles’ Creed, but for many who have pondered its meaning, it is a central affirmation. In his death on the cross, Jesus descended into the hell of the absence of God. That’s what the cry of dereliction on the cross means. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He experienced the absence of God his Father as no one else ever has, not even in the greatest extremity, because he experienced it for all of us. The Son of God underwent the opposite course: he came out from the light and went into the darkness . . . to be himself the light in our darkness.
Toward the end of World War II, during the liberation of Europe, Allied troops found a crudely written inscription on the walls of a basement in Koln, Germany, by someone who was hiding from the Nazi Gestapo. Here’s what it said:
I believe in the sun even when it is not shining. I believe in love even when feeling it not. I believe in God even when God is silent.
The silence of God descended upon the cross on Good Friday—and on the morning of the third day the sun rose upon the empty tomb. As another writer reminds us: “The secret things belong to the Lord our God; but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever” (Deut. 29:29).
Some answers are as follows: God is found in philanthropism, in medical science, in the Eucharist, in Peace, in families, in the heart (and not the mind), in Church, at the gym, in one's own positive mental attitude.
But for you, I thought we should go a little deeper.
The primary article is a one-page piece that quotes letters to God from children. (Dear God, Are you real? Some people don’t believe it. If you are real, you’d better do something quick.) The second article, on pages two and three, discusses a God who hides, intentionally, for God's own reasons and purposes.
I look forward to talking to you about this.
God with Us: Children’s Letters to God
John Buchanan, Christian Century 12.15.09
My favorite Christmas book, which I pull from the shelf every Advent, is Children’s Letters to God, compiled by Stuart Hample and Eric Marshall. A few of my favorites include:
Dear God, Are you invisible or is that just a trick — Lucy
Dear God, Thank you for the baby brother, but what I prayed for was a puppy. — Joyce
Dear God, Maybe Cain and Abel would not kill each other if they had their own room. It works with my brother. — Larry
I discovered Children’s Letters when I heard a superb Advent sermon preached by the late Walter Bouman, professor at Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Columbus, Ohio. Walt, a big bear of a man with a wonderful wit, introduced his sermon on Isaiah 64:1, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,” by quoting from the original Children’s Letters:
Dear God, Are you real? Some people don’t believe it. If you are, you’d better do something quick. — Love, Harriet Anne
It’s the oldest, most authentic prayer in human history and as current as the latest neo-atheist best seller. Are you real? Where are you? Why is this happening to me? Please do something.
Isaiah’s version of the prayer comes from the time of exile when the people of God were wrenched from their homes and lived under house arrest in Babylon, separated from beautiful Jerusalem and the Temple, the heart of their faith and national pride. We remember them waiting for God to come every Advent when we sing, “O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel.”
The actual moment when the prophet prays “if you are real, you’d better do something quick” is when the people do return to Jerusalem and find it devastated, destroyed, the Temple leveled.
That is the situation that prompts the desperate human prayer. Human suffering, and God’s role in it, or God’s absence, is one of the enduring mysteries with which people of faith have struggled. Elie Wiesel’s question “Where is God now?”—uttered while watching a young boy being executed by the Nazis—is asked by every human being who has ever suffered deeply.
After the war, François Mauriac interviewed Wiesel and wrote an introduction to Wiesel’s stunning memoir, Night, about his experience in a concentration camp. Mauriac said: “And I, who believe that God is love, what answer could I give my young questioner . . . Did I speak of that other Israeli, his brother, the Crucified, whose cross has conquered the world? Did I affirm that the stumbling block to his faith was the cornerstone of mine and the conformity between the cross and human suffering was in my eyes the key to that improbable mystery?”
That most human question, “Where is God?” prompts the answer of faith: God is there, as people return to their devastated city, as suffering happens, as innocents die, as disease claims its victims. God comes, God is there, in the midst of it all. And that is what lies beneath all the blessed hoopla of Christmas: an idea so big we simply don’t have words adequate to express it and so, gratefully, we turn to art, poetry, music, the letters of children . . .
“Are you real? If so, you’d better do something quick.” And ancient words, more precious every year: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”
Divine Absence and the Light Inaccessible
Fleming Rutledge Christian Century 8.27.18
The prophet Isaiah wrote, “Truly thou art a God who hidest thyself ” (Isa. 45:15). Throughout Christian history, the question has always been asked: “When terrible things happen, where is God?” This question becomes more urgent and more agonizing when something happens to children; like with the news of the massacre at the Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school, there wasn’t, or shouldn’t have been, a Christian believer in this country who didn’t ask, “Where was God? Why does God permit these atrocities?”
This is the question that Christian faith must ask. It’s a very shallow faith if it does not ask. Many people have been conditioned not to ask these kinds of questions. Some worry that asking such a question is like opening a door to not believing in God at all. But the people of the Bible do ask, directly and bluntly. The wonderful little book of the prophet Habakkuk asks it this way: “Oh Lord, how long shall I cry for help and you will not hear? Why are you silent when the wicked man swallows up the one more righteous than he?” (Hab. 1:2, 13).
Habakkuk’s questions are part of every believer’s struggle for faith. I suspect that many seasoned churchgoers have had occasion to ask why God so often seems to be absent. Anyone who has not asked this question hasn’t been fully tested yet.
The hymn by Walter Chalmers Smith says:
Immortal, invisible God only wise
In light inaccessible hid from our eyes,
Most gracious, most glorious, the ancient of days,
Almighty, victorious, thy great name we praise.
God dwells in inaccessible light—light that we can’t directly look at. It’s uncreated light that emanates from God’s very being. This light was already there before God created the light that we see — “In light inaccessible hid from our eyes.” This also is a basic biblical idea. God isn’t a product of human imagination, a human wish raised to the nth power, or a projection of human hopes and fears. God is outside and beyond our ideas of God, so we can’t see God from a human point of view at all. Put another way: God is invisible not only to our eyes; God is also invisible to our imaginations. But how then do we know who God is? How do we even know if there is a God?
“Truly, thou art a God who hidest thyself.” The name for this idea in Latin is Deus absconditus, the hidden God. But that doesn’t quite get at what Isaiah is saying, because God is not just hidden on general principles. If God is hidden, it is because he hides himself. He means to be hidden. It is God’s nature to be out of the reach of our senses. There is a distance between God and ourselves that cannot be bridged from our side.
There are two different ways of asking “Where is God? Why does God hide himself?”
One way is scornful and hostile like the abuse and mockery hurled at Jesus on the cross: “He trusted in God to deliver him, so let God deliver him!” The people who yelled that insult thought they knew who God was and what God would and would not do (Matt. 27:43; also Ps. 22:8).
But the other way of asking comes from deep faith. It comes from having at least a partial knowledge of God and of the darkness that opposes God. Anyone who has received even a tiny glimpse of the majesty, holiness, and righteousness of God will have an increased sense of the darkness, disorder, and malevolence that’s loose in the world. These forces would swallow us up had not God set in motion his great plan to reclaim his creation.
It was widely noted, and noted with skepticism and even disdain by some, that every one of the funerals for the children of Sandy Hook Elementary School was held in a house of worship. This does not answer the question of why God did not stop the shooter when he opened fire at the school. We do not know why God appeared to be absent. What we do know is that God was present in this way: he was, and is still, present in the coming together of those who grieve with the families, to bring small lights into the blackness of their grief. They were not alone.
Something or Someone drew the bereaved families deeper into the midst of the communities that continue to trust God even when he has hidden himself. Incomprehensible as it may seem, God is alive in the faith of his people wherever they are and in whatever condition.
The fact that God hides himself in the midst of revealing himself is paradoxically a testimony to his reality. Presence-in-absence is the theme of his self-disclosure. God isn’t hidden because we are too stupid to find him, or too lazy, or not “spiritual” enough. He hides himself for his own reasons, and he reveals himself for his own reasons. If that were not so, God would not be God; God would be nothing more than a projection of our own religious ideas and wishes.
The Lord hides himself from us because he is God, and God reveals himself to us because God is love (1 John 4:8). Does that make sense? Probably not—but sometimes Christians must be content with theological paradox. To know God in his Son Jesus Christ is to know that he is unconditionally love. In the cross and resurrection of his Son, God has given us everything that we need to live with alongside the terrors of his seeming absence.
Many churches do not use the phrase “he descended into hell” in the Apostles’ Creed, but for many who have pondered its meaning, it is a central affirmation. In his death on the cross, Jesus descended into the hell of the absence of God. That’s what the cry of dereliction on the cross means. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He experienced the absence of God his Father as no one else ever has, not even in the greatest extremity, because he experienced it for all of us. The Son of God underwent the opposite course: he came out from the light and went into the darkness . . . to be himself the light in our darkness.
Toward the end of World War II, during the liberation of Europe, Allied troops found a crudely written inscription on the walls of a basement in Koln, Germany, by someone who was hiding from the Nazi Gestapo. Here’s what it said:
I believe in the sun even when it is not shining. I believe in love even when feeling it not. I believe in God even when God is silent.
The silence of God descended upon the cross on Good Friday—and on the morning of the third day the sun rose upon the empty tomb. As another writer reminds us: “The secret things belong to the Lord our God; but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever” (Deut. 29:29).
Tuesday, April 11, 2023
This week we are back to our regular schedule. We will be discussing the article Jesus is the Question. The author, an episcopalian, asks good questions about Jesus and his questions for us. Did you know the first thing Jesus says in the John's Gospel is a question? I'd like to know what you think about this and whatever else enters into the conversation.
Lastly, Tom Crawford alerted me to a fascinating (and depressing) article in the WSJ about the burnout rate for medical doctors. It's not the type of article for us to discuss but I think it is well worth a read. Here is the link to the (hopefully free) article: WSJ Article
Jesus is the Question
Debie Thomas, Christian Century 3.23.23
Debie Thomas is minister of lifelong formation at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Palo Alto, California, and author of Into the Mess and Other Jesus Stories.
I grew up in the era of evangelistic T-shirts. I was too shy to wear any myself, but I had friends who did. “WWJD?” “Cross-trained.” “Made to worship.” “Be still and know.” One of the T-shirt slogans I saw often was “Jesus is the answer.” Kids would sport the slogan in bright, colorful letters, hoping to strike up conversation with peers who weren’t Christians. Their faith was earnest, and I respected it. But every time I read the words “Jesus is the answer,” I wanted to ask, “What’s the question?” What question is Jesus the answer to?
Being a little church nerd, I would head to my Bible to figure it out. I needed to find a one-liner that would make sense of the slogan. Something we might now post on Facebook—pithy and clickable. I never found it. Not because I didn’t look hard, but because the Jesus of the Gospels doesn’t offer much in the way of tweetable platitudes. He seems far more interested in asking questions — hard questions. “Who do you say that I am?” “Why are you so afraid?” “Do you want to get well?” “You don’t want to leave, too, do you?” “Do you love me?” Strange, for a man who’s supposed to be the answer.
Lately I’ve been asking myself the questions Jesus asked and trying to dwell with them one at a time. Most recently, I’ve been sitting with the first question Jesus asks in John’s Gospel. He’s just been baptized and publicly identified as the Lamb of God by his cousin John. When two of John’s own disciples decide to follow Jesus instead, Jesus turns, looks them in the eye, and asks a question that would have stopped me in my tracks: “What are you looking for?” (John 1:38).
So much for small talk; Jesus goes straight for the jugular. What longings keep you up at night? What hopes and hungers are you afraid to name, even to yourself? What fills you with joy? What breaks your heart? What are you looking for?
I wonder if the two who hear the question have any idea how to answer it. Maybe they don’t. Maybe no one has ever asked them a question so inviting or vulnerable-making before. Maybe they’ve never considered the possibility that their own deep wants matter to God and profoundly affect their spiritual well-being and growth.
Maybe that’s why Jesus asks. Because he knows that if they just take in the question, their lives will change. Their wanting will shape their finding. Their hungers will trigger transformation.
So, I turn the question on myself. What am I looking for? Do I know?
I live in a culture that tries so hard to answer the question for me. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been taught to want certain things fiercely. Success. Independence. Recognition. Security. So I’ve strived and strived, often feeling like a failure because I haven’t attained all the things I’m supposed to want.
All the while, deep beneath the surface, Jesus’ question burns hard and bright. What am I looking for? What is causing me to move so frantically through the world, one ambition piled on top of another, no achievement or accolade ever quite enough to calm my anxious heart? What am I looking for when I go to church on Sunday? When I pray? When I engage in ministry?
I know that my foundational calling is to look for God. To want God in my life—more than I want anything else. But I also know how easily habit, doubt, disappointment, weariness, or just plain boredom can dull my wanting. I know how fast I can step back and choose something smaller and safer. Close off my heart, stick a smile on my face, and go through the motions because I’m too depleted or jaded to yearn for more.
When Jesus asks his two would-be disciples what they’re looking for, they dodge the question by answering with a question of their own: “Where are you staying?” As in what does your home look like? Where do you abide? Most importantly, perhaps, what shape will our lives take if we
decide to hang out with you? Jesus’ response is both simple and profound: “Come and see” (John 1:39).
The only way to know where Jesus abides is to follow him all the way home. We can’t know him in the abstract—he won’t fit on a T-shirt. He’s not the type who remains in stasis—he moves. That means we have to move too.
So he invites us to come and see, to walk the path for a while — as pilgrims, not tourists. If the path feels murky, it’ll get clearer as we walk it. If we don’t know what we’re looking for, our patient sitting with the question will reveal what’s hidden. Our wanting will shape our finding.
As I keep asking myself what I want, I realize that the asking itself is at the heart of discipleship. The point is not to rush headlong toward an answer but to undertake a journey in a spirit of holy curiosity and anticipation. To “come and see” over the full arc of my lifetime, cultivating a hunger for God that grows deeper over time.
It’s a generous question, followed by an even more generous invitation. What are you looking for? Come and see. Come and discern what you desire most deeply. Come and cultivate that desire in the gracious company of a God who welcomes your questions, who holds your longings close, who promises to transform you into who you really are.
Maybe Jesus is the answer because Jesus is the question. He’s the beginning and the end of what we’re looking for, but it’s okay with God if we can barely wrap our minds around that. We don’t need to know at the outset. All we need to do is ask the question, to come and see.
Lastly, Tom Crawford alerted me to a fascinating (and depressing) article in the WSJ about the burnout rate for medical doctors. It's not the type of article for us to discuss but I think it is well worth a read. Here is the link to the (hopefully free) article: WSJ Article
Jesus is the Question
Debie Thomas, Christian Century 3.23.23
Debie Thomas is minister of lifelong formation at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Palo Alto, California, and author of Into the Mess and Other Jesus Stories.
I grew up in the era of evangelistic T-shirts. I was too shy to wear any myself, but I had friends who did. “WWJD?” “Cross-trained.” “Made to worship.” “Be still and know.” One of the T-shirt slogans I saw often was “Jesus is the answer.” Kids would sport the slogan in bright, colorful letters, hoping to strike up conversation with peers who weren’t Christians. Their faith was earnest, and I respected it. But every time I read the words “Jesus is the answer,” I wanted to ask, “What’s the question?” What question is Jesus the answer to?
Being a little church nerd, I would head to my Bible to figure it out. I needed to find a one-liner that would make sense of the slogan. Something we might now post on Facebook—pithy and clickable. I never found it. Not because I didn’t look hard, but because the Jesus of the Gospels doesn’t offer much in the way of tweetable platitudes. He seems far more interested in asking questions — hard questions. “Who do you say that I am?” “Why are you so afraid?” “Do you want to get well?” “You don’t want to leave, too, do you?” “Do you love me?” Strange, for a man who’s supposed to be the answer.
Lately I’ve been asking myself the questions Jesus asked and trying to dwell with them one at a time. Most recently, I’ve been sitting with the first question Jesus asks in John’s Gospel. He’s just been baptized and publicly identified as the Lamb of God by his cousin John. When two of John’s own disciples decide to follow Jesus instead, Jesus turns, looks them in the eye, and asks a question that would have stopped me in my tracks: “What are you looking for?” (John 1:38).
So much for small talk; Jesus goes straight for the jugular. What longings keep you up at night? What hopes and hungers are you afraid to name, even to yourself? What fills you with joy? What breaks your heart? What are you looking for?
I wonder if the two who hear the question have any idea how to answer it. Maybe they don’t. Maybe no one has ever asked them a question so inviting or vulnerable-making before. Maybe they’ve never considered the possibility that their own deep wants matter to God and profoundly affect their spiritual well-being and growth.
Maybe that’s why Jesus asks. Because he knows that if they just take in the question, their lives will change. Their wanting will shape their finding. Their hungers will trigger transformation.
So, I turn the question on myself. What am I looking for? Do I know?
I live in a culture that tries so hard to answer the question for me. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been taught to want certain things fiercely. Success. Independence. Recognition. Security. So I’ve strived and strived, often feeling like a failure because I haven’t attained all the things I’m supposed to want.
All the while, deep beneath the surface, Jesus’ question burns hard and bright. What am I looking for? What is causing me to move so frantically through the world, one ambition piled on top of another, no achievement or accolade ever quite enough to calm my anxious heart? What am I looking for when I go to church on Sunday? When I pray? When I engage in ministry?
I know that my foundational calling is to look for God. To want God in my life—more than I want anything else. But I also know how easily habit, doubt, disappointment, weariness, or just plain boredom can dull my wanting. I know how fast I can step back and choose something smaller and safer. Close off my heart, stick a smile on my face, and go through the motions because I’m too depleted or jaded to yearn for more.
When Jesus asks his two would-be disciples what they’re looking for, they dodge the question by answering with a question of their own: “Where are you staying?” As in what does your home look like? Where do you abide? Most importantly, perhaps, what shape will our lives take if we
decide to hang out with you? Jesus’ response is both simple and profound: “Come and see” (John 1:39).
The only way to know where Jesus abides is to follow him all the way home. We can’t know him in the abstract—he won’t fit on a T-shirt. He’s not the type who remains in stasis—he moves. That means we have to move too.
So he invites us to come and see, to walk the path for a while — as pilgrims, not tourists. If the path feels murky, it’ll get clearer as we walk it. If we don’t know what we’re looking for, our patient sitting with the question will reveal what’s hidden. Our wanting will shape our finding.
As I keep asking myself what I want, I realize that the asking itself is at the heart of discipleship. The point is not to rush headlong toward an answer but to undertake a journey in a spirit of holy curiosity and anticipation. To “come and see” over the full arc of my lifetime, cultivating a hunger for God that grows deeper over time.
It’s a generous question, followed by an even more generous invitation. What are you looking for? Come and see. Come and discern what you desire most deeply. Come and cultivate that desire in the gracious company of a God who welcomes your questions, who holds your longings close, who promises to transform you into who you really are.
Maybe Jesus is the answer because Jesus is the question. He’s the beginning and the end of what we’re looking for, but it’s okay with God if we can barely wrap our minds around that. We don’t need to know at the outset. All we need to do is ask the question, to come and see.
One Discussion Group: Wednesday, April 5, 2023
Following our discussion on trust, this week we are going to discuss trust and God. The article, from the Christian Century, is about the gods in which we put our trust (consumerism, the god of the nightly news, the god of the theater of national and local politics) and how those gods fail and betray us. He compares that where Jesus placed his trust as he was marched to Golgatha to be crucified.
The many gods of my own making
Brian Maas, The Christian Century 3.27.23
Brian Maas is vice president of mission and spiritual care at Immanuel, a senior services organization affiliated with the Nebraska Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
If a god is truly that in which you place your trust, as Luther wrote, then the Passion narrative offers a veritable pantheon of gods, repositories of trust for the too fallible and too familiar humans who populate the Passion and show us far more of ourselves than we may be willing to see.
Here are gods that claim their trust throughout the Passion: the god of violence in the garden of Gethsemane (and in the nightly news), the god of political power in the trial before Pilate (and in the theater of national and local politics), the god of rationalization in Pilate’s surrender to the crowd (and in the countless trade-offs of our daily lives). Time and again, trust is placed in gods that fail and betray.
From the opening verses to the last, the familiar gods of this drama claim and then fail the trust that’s placed in them. Meanwhile, in the very actions of these graspings for things in which to trust, there are repeated abandonments of the one in whom such trust could rightly and reliably be placed instead. Again and again these foolish exchanges reveal our own foibles, and in the process this drama draws us from being mere spectators into being participants.
Each year it strikes me how powerfully, pitilessly, and painfully the Passion does this to me, stepping into my life to draw me into participation, into recognition of my own life being portrayed in the action and inaction of others. This year I am especially aware of how the Passion reveals the many fallible entities in which I trust, the many gods of my own making that I worship.
The opening scene of Matthew’s Passion begins with a jolting act of treachery as Judas approaches the chief priests to determine the monetary value of delivering Jesus into their hands. This is not merely a common transaction; it’s an act of worship, a proclamation of trust in the god Mammon.
And what Judas proposes is much more than a mere betrayal. While betray is the word the NRSV uses, a better translation of the verb paradidomi, as New Testament scholar Rick Carlson frequently emphasizes, is “hand over.” That verb appears frequently throughout Matthew’s Passion text, and reading it as “hand over” reveals the significant depth and meaning of each act.
In one sense, betrayal is a matter of stepping back away from, whereas handing over involves a willful act of delivering to. Betrayal seems almost passive and incidental in comparison to the dynamic intentionality of handing over.
Again and again characters of the Passion willfully place their trust in gods of their own making by handing over the one who alone is worthy of their trust. Those of us in Western cultures cannot avoid the recognition of our daily reality in Judas’s action. We would never sell out Jesus for 30 pieces of silver, yet our commitment to live with integrity as his disciples is sold out again and again in our misplaced trust in the illusory security of wealth, possessions, stuff.
And it’s not only Judas and material wealth. All of the disciples, in their “surely not I?” incredulity, and especially Peter in his “even though I must die with you, I will not deny you” brashness, demonstrate a confidence in self-reliance that shatters and scatters in the shadows of Gethsemane and the courtyard of the high priest. What a fallible (if all-American) god this is, the conviction that we are in control, in charge, can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.
I write this in the wake of two simultaneous hospitalizations in our household of three. I have been the one spared, the one to try to fix things that are utterly beyond my control. I’ve been forced to recognize that for all of my decades of preaching faith in God, my own prayers are too often a version of “thanks for everything, Lord; I’ve got it from here.” The experience of the failure of that self-trust has been desperate, its pain real. I’ve gained humility in shifting my trust from myself to God—and a deeper sense of understanding and compassion for Peter in his failure and denial.
As mentioned before, other gods claim their trust throughout the Passion: the god of violence in the garden of Gethsemane (and in the nightly news), the god of political power in the trial before Pilate (and in the theater of national and local politics), the god of rationalization in Pilate’s surrender to the crowd (and in the countless trade-offs of our daily lives). Time and again, trust is placed in gods that fail and betray.
Ultimately, however, the Good News is revealed even in this endless series of disappointing deities. When Pilate commands the guards to make Jesus’ tomb “as secure as you can,” we know that that security is a sham, a god of no worth. No devices, no guards, no efforts, not even confidence in the finality of death can keep that human security from failing.
And here is the Good News of the Passion. All our human-based gods will fail; our trust in them will be disappointed. At the end of the story, only one trust remains: the trust of the one who handed over himself—literally and sacramentally—for us. His trust is in the one who never fails, whose power endures and embraces even beyond the grave. In this God we trust.
The many gods of my own making
Brian Maas, The Christian Century 3.27.23
Brian Maas is vice president of mission and spiritual care at Immanuel, a senior services organization affiliated with the Nebraska Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
If a god is truly that in which you place your trust, as Luther wrote, then the Passion narrative offers a veritable pantheon of gods, repositories of trust for the too fallible and too familiar humans who populate the Passion and show us far more of ourselves than we may be willing to see.
Here are gods that claim their trust throughout the Passion: the god of violence in the garden of Gethsemane (and in the nightly news), the god of political power in the trial before Pilate (and in the theater of national and local politics), the god of rationalization in Pilate’s surrender to the crowd (and in the countless trade-offs of our daily lives). Time and again, trust is placed in gods that fail and betray.
From the opening verses to the last, the familiar gods of this drama claim and then fail the trust that’s placed in them. Meanwhile, in the very actions of these graspings for things in which to trust, there are repeated abandonments of the one in whom such trust could rightly and reliably be placed instead. Again and again these foolish exchanges reveal our own foibles, and in the process this drama draws us from being mere spectators into being participants.
Each year it strikes me how powerfully, pitilessly, and painfully the Passion does this to me, stepping into my life to draw me into participation, into recognition of my own life being portrayed in the action and inaction of others. This year I am especially aware of how the Passion reveals the many fallible entities in which I trust, the many gods of my own making that I worship.
The opening scene of Matthew’s Passion begins with a jolting act of treachery as Judas approaches the chief priests to determine the monetary value of delivering Jesus into their hands. This is not merely a common transaction; it’s an act of worship, a proclamation of trust in the god Mammon.
And what Judas proposes is much more than a mere betrayal. While betray is the word the NRSV uses, a better translation of the verb paradidomi, as New Testament scholar Rick Carlson frequently emphasizes, is “hand over.” That verb appears frequently throughout Matthew’s Passion text, and reading it as “hand over” reveals the significant depth and meaning of each act.
In one sense, betrayal is a matter of stepping back away from, whereas handing over involves a willful act of delivering to. Betrayal seems almost passive and incidental in comparison to the dynamic intentionality of handing over.
Again and again characters of the Passion willfully place their trust in gods of their own making by handing over the one who alone is worthy of their trust. Those of us in Western cultures cannot avoid the recognition of our daily reality in Judas’s action. We would never sell out Jesus for 30 pieces of silver, yet our commitment to live with integrity as his disciples is sold out again and again in our misplaced trust in the illusory security of wealth, possessions, stuff.
And it’s not only Judas and material wealth. All of the disciples, in their “surely not I?” incredulity, and especially Peter in his “even though I must die with you, I will not deny you” brashness, demonstrate a confidence in self-reliance that shatters and scatters in the shadows of Gethsemane and the courtyard of the high priest. What a fallible (if all-American) god this is, the conviction that we are in control, in charge, can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.
I write this in the wake of two simultaneous hospitalizations in our household of three. I have been the one spared, the one to try to fix things that are utterly beyond my control. I’ve been forced to recognize that for all of my decades of preaching faith in God, my own prayers are too often a version of “thanks for everything, Lord; I’ve got it from here.” The experience of the failure of that self-trust has been desperate, its pain real. I’ve gained humility in shifting my trust from myself to God—and a deeper sense of understanding and compassion for Peter in his failure and denial.
As mentioned before, other gods claim their trust throughout the Passion: the god of violence in the garden of Gethsemane (and in the nightly news), the god of political power in the trial before Pilate (and in the theater of national and local politics), the god of rationalization in Pilate’s surrender to the crowd (and in the countless trade-offs of our daily lives). Time and again, trust is placed in gods that fail and betray.
Ultimately, however, the Good News is revealed even in this endless series of disappointing deities. When Pilate commands the guards to make Jesus’ tomb “as secure as you can,” we know that that security is a sham, a god of no worth. No devices, no guards, no efforts, not even confidence in the finality of death can keep that human security from failing.
And here is the Good News of the Passion. All our human-based gods will fail; our trust in them will be disappointed. At the end of the story, only one trust remains: the trust of the one who handed over himself—literally and sacramentally—for us. His trust is in the one who never fails, whose power endures and embraces even beyond the grave. In this God we trust.
Tuesday, March 28, 2023
The major theme coming out of the discussion groups this past week was about trust. When there is an erosion of trust, we, as Americans, seem to warm up to the idea (or are less suspicious) of surveillance.
The author this week, Uri Friedman, argues that trust is collapsing in America. His opinion is based on a report by a marketing firm, Edelman. Bear in mind, this article is five years old. It was written before the SVB (and subsequent banks) collapse, the invasion of Ukraine, and January 6th. I'd like to know what you think of Friedman's assertions and, frankly, where we are five years later.
Below is the reading and a supplement graphic - Trust Barometer - that shows a graph of (declining) trust.
We also will talk about those things in which we do put our trust.
Trust Is Collapsing in America
Uri Friedman, The Atlantic 1.21.18
“In God We Trust,” goes the motto of the United States. In God, and apparently little else. Only a third of Americans now trust their government “to do what is right” — a decline of 14 percentage points from last year [2017], according to a new report by the communications marketing firm Edelman. 42 percent trust the media, relative to 47 percent a year ago. Trust in business and non-governmental organizations, while somewhat higher than trust in government and the media, decreased by 10 and nine percentage points, respectively. Edelman, which for 18 years has been asking people around the world about their level of trust in various institutions, has never before recorded such steep drops in trust in the United States.
“This is the first time that a massive drop in trust has not been linked to a pressing economic issue or catastrophe like [Japan’s 2011] Fukushima nuclear disaster,” Richard Edelman, the head of the firm, noted in announcing the findings. “In fact, it’s the ultimate irony that it’s happening at a time of prosperity, with the stock market and employment rates in the U.S. at record highs.”
“The root cause of this fall,” he added — just days after polling revealed that Americans’ definition of “fake news” depends as much on their politics as the accuracy of the news, and a Republican senator condemned the American president’s Stalinesque attacks on the press and “evidence-based truth,” and a leading think tank warned that America was suffering from “truth decay” as a result of political polarization and social media — is a “lack of objective facts and rational discourse.”
It used to be that what Edelman labels the “informed public” — those aged 25 to 64 who have a college degree, regularly consume news, and are in the top 25 percent of household income for their age group — placed far greater trust in institutions than the U.S. public as a whole. This year, however, the gap all but vanished, with trust in government in particular plummeting 30 percentage points among the informed public. America is now home to the least-trusting informed public of the 28 countries that the firm surveyed, right below South Africa. Distrust is growing most among younger, high-income Americans.
But whereas trust is falling in the United States and a number of other countries with tumultuous politics at the moment, including South Africa, Italy, and Brazil, it’s actually increasing elsewhere, most prominently in China. Eighty-four percent of Chinese respondents said they trusted government — levels the United States hasn’t seen since the early Johnson administration— and 71 percent said they trusted the media. The world’s two most powerful countries, one democratic and the other authoritarian, are moving in opposite directions. In each case, the trajectory is largely being determined by people’s views of government.
Chinese respondents are probably reflecting on the upward mobility and improving quality of life that their political leaders have helped deliver, David Bersoff, the lead researcher for the Edelman report, told me: “I’m looking at my life now and it looks a lot better than it did before, and I can look forward and still see things that would get even better.” When I asked Richard Edelman why survey participants tended to trust technology companies much more than government, he reasoned that it was because those companies “have products that perform for you every day — whether it’s your cell phone or your airline.” Chinese respondents might have been making a similar statement about the government’s performance.
“There’s a lot of chaos and uncertainty in the world, and when there is chaos and uncertainty in the world centralized, authoritative power tends to do better,” Bersoff added. (It’s worth noting that other countries with high trust levels in the report range politically from democratic India to more-or-less democratic Indonesia and Singapore to the undemocratic United Arab Emirates.)
Why, though, is trust eroding in the United States in the absence of an economic crisis or other kind of catastrophe? What’s changed, according to the Edelman report, is that it’s gotten much harder to discern what is and isn’t true—where the boundaries are between fact, opinion, and misinformation.
“The lifeblood of democracy is a common understanding of the facts and information that we can then use as a basis for negotiation and for compromise,” said Bersoff. “When that goes away, the whole foundation of democracy gets shaken.”
“This is a global, not an American issue,” Edelman told me. “And it’s undermining confidence in all the other institutions because if you don’t have an agreed set of facts, then it’s really hard to judge whether the prime minister is good or bad, or a company is good or bad.” A recent Pew Research Center poll, in fact, found across dozens of countries that satisfaction with the news media was typically highest in countries where trust in government and positive views of the economy were highest, though it didn’t investigate how these factors were related to one another.
America actually falls in the middle of surveyed countries in terms of trust in the media, which emerges from the Edelman poll as the least-trusted institution globally of the four under consideration. (In the United States, the firm finds, Donald Trump voters are over two times more likely than Hillary Clinton voters to distrust the media.) Nearly 70 percent of respondents globally were concerned about “fake news” being used as a weapon and 63 percent said they weren’t sure how to tell good journalism from rumor or falsehoods. Most respondents agreed that the media was too focused on attracting large audiences, breaking news, and supporting a particular political ideology rather than informing the public with accurate reporting. While trust in journalism actually increased a bit in Edelman’s survey this year, trust in search and social-media platforms dipped.
In last year’s survey, the perspective that many respondents expressed was “‘I’m not sure about the future of my job because of robots or globalization. I’m not sure about my community anymore because there are a lot of new people coming in. I’m not sure about my economic future; in fact, it looks fairly dim because I’m downwardly mobile,’” Edelman said. These sentiments found expression in the success of populist politicians in the United States and
Europe, who promised a return to past certainties. Now, this year, truth itself seems more uncertain.
“We’re desperately looking for land,” Edelman observed. “We’re flailing, and people can’t quite get a sense of reality.” It’s no way to live, let alone sustain a democracy.
The author this week, Uri Friedman, argues that trust is collapsing in America. His opinion is based on a report by a marketing firm, Edelman. Bear in mind, this article is five years old. It was written before the SVB (and subsequent banks) collapse, the invasion of Ukraine, and January 6th. I'd like to know what you think of Friedman's assertions and, frankly, where we are five years later.
Below is the reading and a supplement graphic - Trust Barometer - that shows a graph of (declining) trust.
We also will talk about those things in which we do put our trust.
Trust Is Collapsing in America
Uri Friedman, The Atlantic 1.21.18
“In God We Trust,” goes the motto of the United States. In God, and apparently little else. Only a third of Americans now trust their government “to do what is right” — a decline of 14 percentage points from last year [2017], according to a new report by the communications marketing firm Edelman. 42 percent trust the media, relative to 47 percent a year ago. Trust in business and non-governmental organizations, while somewhat higher than trust in government and the media, decreased by 10 and nine percentage points, respectively. Edelman, which for 18 years has been asking people around the world about their level of trust in various institutions, has never before recorded such steep drops in trust in the United States.
“This is the first time that a massive drop in trust has not been linked to a pressing economic issue or catastrophe like [Japan’s 2011] Fukushima nuclear disaster,” Richard Edelman, the head of the firm, noted in announcing the findings. “In fact, it’s the ultimate irony that it’s happening at a time of prosperity, with the stock market and employment rates in the U.S. at record highs.”
“The root cause of this fall,” he added — just days after polling revealed that Americans’ definition of “fake news” depends as much on their politics as the accuracy of the news, and a Republican senator condemned the American president’s Stalinesque attacks on the press and “evidence-based truth,” and a leading think tank warned that America was suffering from “truth decay” as a result of political polarization and social media — is a “lack of objective facts and rational discourse.”
It used to be that what Edelman labels the “informed public” — those aged 25 to 64 who have a college degree, regularly consume news, and are in the top 25 percent of household income for their age group — placed far greater trust in institutions than the U.S. public as a whole. This year, however, the gap all but vanished, with trust in government in particular plummeting 30 percentage points among the informed public. America is now home to the least-trusting informed public of the 28 countries that the firm surveyed, right below South Africa. Distrust is growing most among younger, high-income Americans.
But whereas trust is falling in the United States and a number of other countries with tumultuous politics at the moment, including South Africa, Italy, and Brazil, it’s actually increasing elsewhere, most prominently in China. Eighty-four percent of Chinese respondents said they trusted government — levels the United States hasn’t seen since the early Johnson administration— and 71 percent said they trusted the media. The world’s two most powerful countries, one democratic and the other authoritarian, are moving in opposite directions. In each case, the trajectory is largely being determined by people’s views of government.
Chinese respondents are probably reflecting on the upward mobility and improving quality of life that their political leaders have helped deliver, David Bersoff, the lead researcher for the Edelman report, told me: “I’m looking at my life now and it looks a lot better than it did before, and I can look forward and still see things that would get even better.” When I asked Richard Edelman why survey participants tended to trust technology companies much more than government, he reasoned that it was because those companies “have products that perform for you every day — whether it’s your cell phone or your airline.” Chinese respondents might have been making a similar statement about the government’s performance.
“There’s a lot of chaos and uncertainty in the world, and when there is chaos and uncertainty in the world centralized, authoritative power tends to do better,” Bersoff added. (It’s worth noting that other countries with high trust levels in the report range politically from democratic India to more-or-less democratic Indonesia and Singapore to the undemocratic United Arab Emirates.)
Why, though, is trust eroding in the United States in the absence of an economic crisis or other kind of catastrophe? What’s changed, according to the Edelman report, is that it’s gotten much harder to discern what is and isn’t true—where the boundaries are between fact, opinion, and misinformation.
“The lifeblood of democracy is a common understanding of the facts and information that we can then use as a basis for negotiation and for compromise,” said Bersoff. “When that goes away, the whole foundation of democracy gets shaken.”
“This is a global, not an American issue,” Edelman told me. “And it’s undermining confidence in all the other institutions because if you don’t have an agreed set of facts, then it’s really hard to judge whether the prime minister is good or bad, or a company is good or bad.” A recent Pew Research Center poll, in fact, found across dozens of countries that satisfaction with the news media was typically highest in countries where trust in government and positive views of the economy were highest, though it didn’t investigate how these factors were related to one another.
America actually falls in the middle of surveyed countries in terms of trust in the media, which emerges from the Edelman poll as the least-trusted institution globally of the four under consideration. (In the United States, the firm finds, Donald Trump voters are over two times more likely than Hillary Clinton voters to distrust the media.) Nearly 70 percent of respondents globally were concerned about “fake news” being used as a weapon and 63 percent said they weren’t sure how to tell good journalism from rumor or falsehoods. Most respondents agreed that the media was too focused on attracting large audiences, breaking news, and supporting a particular political ideology rather than informing the public with accurate reporting. While trust in journalism actually increased a bit in Edelman’s survey this year, trust in search and social-media platforms dipped.
In last year’s survey, the perspective that many respondents expressed was “‘I’m not sure about the future of my job because of robots or globalization. I’m not sure about my community anymore because there are a lot of new people coming in. I’m not sure about my economic future; in fact, it looks fairly dim because I’m downwardly mobile,’” Edelman said. These sentiments found expression in the success of populist politicians in the United States and
Europe, who promised a return to past certainties. Now, this year, truth itself seems more uncertain.
“We’re desperately looking for land,” Edelman observed. “We’re flailing, and people can’t quite get a sense of reality.” It’s no way to live, let alone sustain a democracy.
Tuesday, March 21, 2023
What is the right balance between freedom and security? How much surveillance is good; when does it infringe on personal liberties? An article from the MIT Technology Review tackles this important topic with a look at unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the City of Chula Vista, near San Diego. The article is too long for our purposes; so, I wrote the following Reflection on it. I'd like to know what you think about where the line is between freedom and security.
His Eye Watches the Nations
The Rev. David J. Marshall, 3.9.23
I was on the Safety Commission of the City of Chula Vista, which is the 15th largest city in California. Sandwiched between the second largest city in California, San Diego, and the largest international border crossing in the world, life in Chula Vista can be pretty exciting.
Traffic and parking issues in Chula Vista were taking up too much time on the City Council’s monthly agenda. They created the Safety Commission to handle speed limits, parking rules, curb painting and other traffic abatement issues. During my commission tenure, we also approved the autonomous driving program which is currently being tested there. It is a program to drive seniors to their various appointments using autonomous vans.
Also, during my tenure, Chula Vista installed traffic lights in the city that reads real-time traffic patterns and autonomously sets themselves for traffic flow. During the traffic light set-up (which involves cameras that see and read both cars and pedestrians), we discovered every Chula Vista patrol car has a front and rear facing camera that records every license plate it "sees". In just one shift of one patrol car they could see a thousand plates; record where and when they saw it too. It was obviously outside of our Commission to comment on that program but it surprised us nonetheless.
MIT Technology Review recently wrote an article about Chula Vista’s unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) program – 29 drones that respond to 911 calls. On average, an officer can respond to an incident anywhere in Chula Vista in four minutes; it only takes the UAV 90 seconds. UAV’s can silently follow a
shoplifting suspect, it can listen and see traffic accidents, fires, and emergencies. In the article, Chula Vista is recognized for having the nation’s longest-running drone program.
Because it is a border town, there are a number of agencies working within Chula Vista – Border Patrol (probably the biggest), FBI, ATF and any number of military branches. If the skies over Chula Vista sound crowded, think about this: San Diego has the largest, single-runway airport in the world, Coronado
North Island (just west of Chula Vista) is one of the largest Naval Aviator bases in the world and hosts the Navy SEAL training program which uses a lot of rotary wing aircraft. 15 miles north is MCAS Miramar – the former Top Gun training facility (which was moved inland). The Army has a rotary wing division with its own airport (about three miles west). Chula Vista has a municipal airport. And, the largest airport on the west coast – LAX, and the second largest airport – Tijuana, can also fly over Chula Vista on approach. Throw a bunch of UAVs up there and it is quite a circus!
Privacy and civil liberty groups are raising the question of what happens when drones are combined with license plate readers, networks of fixed cameras, and new real-time command centers that digest and sort through video evidence. There used to be an unspoken check and balance on law enforcement power: money. Governmental budgets can’t afford to put a police officer on every corner. With these new technologies, I wonder if that check and balance has disappeared.
“God’s eyes keep watch on the nations” is an often-quoted psalm. It brings comfort to know God is watching over all of us. The entire verse reads as follows: God’s eyes keep watch on the nations, let the rebellious not exalt themselves. (Ps 66:7) It is interesting that in our day and time we have eyes in the
skies that can literally watch the rebellious. For me, the civil liberty line is not having UAVs do regular surveillance but rather to assist a patrol officer. As far as 24-hour surveillance goes, I’d just assume we leave that up to God.
Here is the original article: MIT Technology Review
His Eye Watches the Nations
The Rev. David J. Marshall, 3.9.23
I was on the Safety Commission of the City of Chula Vista, which is the 15th largest city in California. Sandwiched between the second largest city in California, San Diego, and the largest international border crossing in the world, life in Chula Vista can be pretty exciting.
Traffic and parking issues in Chula Vista were taking up too much time on the City Council’s monthly agenda. They created the Safety Commission to handle speed limits, parking rules, curb painting and other traffic abatement issues. During my commission tenure, we also approved the autonomous driving program which is currently being tested there. It is a program to drive seniors to their various appointments using autonomous vans.
Also, during my tenure, Chula Vista installed traffic lights in the city that reads real-time traffic patterns and autonomously sets themselves for traffic flow. During the traffic light set-up (which involves cameras that see and read both cars and pedestrians), we discovered every Chula Vista patrol car has a front and rear facing camera that records every license plate it "sees". In just one shift of one patrol car they could see a thousand plates; record where and when they saw it too. It was obviously outside of our Commission to comment on that program but it surprised us nonetheless.
MIT Technology Review recently wrote an article about Chula Vista’s unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) program – 29 drones that respond to 911 calls. On average, an officer can respond to an incident anywhere in Chula Vista in four minutes; it only takes the UAV 90 seconds. UAV’s can silently follow a
shoplifting suspect, it can listen and see traffic accidents, fires, and emergencies. In the article, Chula Vista is recognized for having the nation’s longest-running drone program.
Because it is a border town, there are a number of agencies working within Chula Vista – Border Patrol (probably the biggest), FBI, ATF and any number of military branches. If the skies over Chula Vista sound crowded, think about this: San Diego has the largest, single-runway airport in the world, Coronado
North Island (just west of Chula Vista) is one of the largest Naval Aviator bases in the world and hosts the Navy SEAL training program which uses a lot of rotary wing aircraft. 15 miles north is MCAS Miramar – the former Top Gun training facility (which was moved inland). The Army has a rotary wing division with its own airport (about three miles west). Chula Vista has a municipal airport. And, the largest airport on the west coast – LAX, and the second largest airport – Tijuana, can also fly over Chula Vista on approach. Throw a bunch of UAVs up there and it is quite a circus!
Privacy and civil liberty groups are raising the question of what happens when drones are combined with license plate readers, networks of fixed cameras, and new real-time command centers that digest and sort through video evidence. There used to be an unspoken check and balance on law enforcement power: money. Governmental budgets can’t afford to put a police officer on every corner. With these new technologies, I wonder if that check and balance has disappeared.
“God’s eyes keep watch on the nations” is an often-quoted psalm. It brings comfort to know God is watching over all of us. The entire verse reads as follows: God’s eyes keep watch on the nations, let the rebellious not exalt themselves. (Ps 66:7) It is interesting that in our day and time we have eyes in the
skies that can literally watch the rebellious. For me, the civil liberty line is not having UAVs do regular surveillance but rather to assist a patrol officer. As far as 24-hour surveillance goes, I’d just assume we leave that up to God.
Here is the original article: MIT Technology Review
No Discussion Group March 14th
The Marshall family is taking Spring Break next week from Monday through Friday at Crystal River to swim with the manatees. Although we will not miss a Sunday, there will be no discussion group on March 14 and 15. The following week, we will resume our normal schedule with the Men's Group on the 21st and the Women's Group on the 22nd. On a separate email, I will send you that discussion topic.
For this week, however, I can't let it pass without an article. Here is one from the NY Times about the link between exercise and aging. I ran it by Rick Machemer for his input. The main thing is that one who doesn't exercise shouldn't suddenly start. But, slowly and deliberately, one can exercise on a regular basis as long as there is instruction first and then observation. One of the most important factors is balance which is a combination of core muscle strength and training (or retraining) of the inner ear. Tai Chi and Yoga go a long way in helping with this. If you need a Tai Chi instructor, a member of All Angels - Reuben - teaches it here on Longboat.
Here is the article. I hope you all have a great week!
5 Exercises to Keep an Aging Body Strong and Fit
For this week, however, I can't let it pass without an article. Here is one from the NY Times about the link between exercise and aging. I ran it by Rick Machemer for his input. The main thing is that one who doesn't exercise shouldn't suddenly start. But, slowly and deliberately, one can exercise on a regular basis as long as there is instruction first and then observation. One of the most important factors is balance which is a combination of core muscle strength and training (or retraining) of the inner ear. Tai Chi and Yoga go a long way in helping with this. If you need a Tai Chi instructor, a member of All Angels - Reuben - teaches it here on Longboat.
Here is the article. I hope you all have a great week!
5 Exercises to Keep an Aging Body Strong and Fit
Tuesday, March 7, 2023
Since it is Lent, we are going to read a decidedly theological article that asks this question: Is relating to God a fundamental need?
You can imagine that I'll be asking you that very question as well as other related questions like can we relate to God, to what or to whom can we relate, what about the essence of faith which is believing without seeing (and perhaps relating). Do we have a fundamental need of relating to our parents; or, do our children have the need to relate to us?
We are back to our normal schedule of Tuesday and Wednesday at 10 a.m.
Is Relating to God a Fundamental Need?
Hannah Jones, Book Review Christian Century 2.22.23
Humans need a “second-personal” relationship with God: this is the main claim of God’s Provision, Humanity’s Need by Christa McKirland.
It reminds me of the evangelical emphasis on a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. She argues that unless one relates to God “as a subject, not as a list of facts,” they will experience harm. But McKirland’s aim is not to convince unbelievers that they need Jesus to avoid damnation. Rather, she joins a long tradition of Christian thinkers working through just how it is that humans relate to God. Her inquiry reminds me in some ways of Friedrich Schleiermacher,
who famously described Christian piety as “either the consciousness of being absolutely dependent on God, or, being in relation with God, which is the same thing.”
McKirland’s prolonged engagement with scripture will speak to a biblically engaged Christian audience. Save a single chapter about the theology of Kathryn Tanner, she develops her position by way of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. She provides a robust understanding of divine dependence through a deeply biblical framework, situating herself squarely as a biblical theologian. But the burden of the book is not only to demonstrate that the Bible supports a vision of human life as deeply dependent upon God. She also aims to furnish philosopher Garrett Thomson’s work on “fundamental need” by reading it theologically.
She begins by defining fundamental need in conversation with analytic philosophy. Fundamental needs are ones that are unavoidably necessary in all contexts and without which one cannot flourish. For example, I need clean water to drink, and there is just no avoiding this need.
Further, this need does not derive from anything else. In order to have clean water, I might also need a means to filter the water—but the filter is an instrumental need rather than a fundamental need. Clean water itself is the fundamental need, as I need clean water or I’ll die.
According to McKirland, the same goes for God’s presence:
(1) We have an inescapable interest to flourish.
(2) We fundamentally need a second-personal relation to God to flourish.
(3) When that need is not met, we are therefore harmed.
She does not provide much in the way of constitutive descriptions of harm and flourishing, aside from mentioning that flourishing is characterized by love of God and neighbor. I was left wondering about what harm would look like for those who do not relate second-personally to the Christian God. As this is McKirland’s debut book, I am hoping that she will pursue this question—as well as other unanswered questions regarding interfaith engagement, practical
theology, and ethics—in her future work.
What McKirland does well is provide a sustained engagement with scripture, biblical scholarship, and other biblical theologians to develop her thesis. Whereas in the Hebrew Bible God’s personal presence is displayed through motifs such as temple, tabernacle, bread, and water, in the New Testament Jesus comes to be that presence for the new covenant community.
Yet Jesus depends on the Spirit for communion with the Father, and he offers that communion to the rest of humanity. This communion is the ultimate telos of human beings, and it is deepened as humans develop greater relational dependence on God. In other words, the need for God’s presence goes further than does a physical need like water, for having this second-personal relationship with God is the end towards which humans were created.
McKirland is ultimately developing what she calls a “pneumachristocentric anthropology,” one that explains how it can be that humans are so vitally related to Christ and to the Spirit. She maintains the traditional view of Christ’s two natures—divine and human—while showing that Jesus also depends on God’s presence. The Spirit then allows humans to participate in Jesus’ own dependence on (or union with) the Father.
In short, McKirland provides a thick and robust description of what it means for humans to need God, how scripture witnesses to this fundamental need, and what a deeply Christological and Spirit-attuned picture of theological anthropology looks like. Her extensive turn to scripture to provide the contours of a needs-based, Christologically grounded anthropology will be satisfying, perhaps even edifying, for many Christian readers.
You can imagine that I'll be asking you that very question as well as other related questions like can we relate to God, to what or to whom can we relate, what about the essence of faith which is believing without seeing (and perhaps relating). Do we have a fundamental need of relating to our parents; or, do our children have the need to relate to us?
We are back to our normal schedule of Tuesday and Wednesday at 10 a.m.
Is Relating to God a Fundamental Need?
Hannah Jones, Book Review Christian Century 2.22.23
Humans need a “second-personal” relationship with God: this is the main claim of God’s Provision, Humanity’s Need by Christa McKirland.
It reminds me of the evangelical emphasis on a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. She argues that unless one relates to God “as a subject, not as a list of facts,” they will experience harm. But McKirland’s aim is not to convince unbelievers that they need Jesus to avoid damnation. Rather, she joins a long tradition of Christian thinkers working through just how it is that humans relate to God. Her inquiry reminds me in some ways of Friedrich Schleiermacher,
who famously described Christian piety as “either the consciousness of being absolutely dependent on God, or, being in relation with God, which is the same thing.”
McKirland’s prolonged engagement with scripture will speak to a biblically engaged Christian audience. Save a single chapter about the theology of Kathryn Tanner, she develops her position by way of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. She provides a robust understanding of divine dependence through a deeply biblical framework, situating herself squarely as a biblical theologian. But the burden of the book is not only to demonstrate that the Bible supports a vision of human life as deeply dependent upon God. She also aims to furnish philosopher Garrett Thomson’s work on “fundamental need” by reading it theologically.
She begins by defining fundamental need in conversation with analytic philosophy. Fundamental needs are ones that are unavoidably necessary in all contexts and without which one cannot flourish. For example, I need clean water to drink, and there is just no avoiding this need.
Further, this need does not derive from anything else. In order to have clean water, I might also need a means to filter the water—but the filter is an instrumental need rather than a fundamental need. Clean water itself is the fundamental need, as I need clean water or I’ll die.
According to McKirland, the same goes for God’s presence:
(1) We have an inescapable interest to flourish.
(2) We fundamentally need a second-personal relation to God to flourish.
(3) When that need is not met, we are therefore harmed.
She does not provide much in the way of constitutive descriptions of harm and flourishing, aside from mentioning that flourishing is characterized by love of God and neighbor. I was left wondering about what harm would look like for those who do not relate second-personally to the Christian God. As this is McKirland’s debut book, I am hoping that she will pursue this question—as well as other unanswered questions regarding interfaith engagement, practical
theology, and ethics—in her future work.
What McKirland does well is provide a sustained engagement with scripture, biblical scholarship, and other biblical theologians to develop her thesis. Whereas in the Hebrew Bible God’s personal presence is displayed through motifs such as temple, tabernacle, bread, and water, in the New Testament Jesus comes to be that presence for the new covenant community.
Yet Jesus depends on the Spirit for communion with the Father, and he offers that communion to the rest of humanity. This communion is the ultimate telos of human beings, and it is deepened as humans develop greater relational dependence on God. In other words, the need for God’s presence goes further than does a physical need like water, for having this second-personal relationship with God is the end towards which humans were created.
McKirland is ultimately developing what she calls a “pneumachristocentric anthropology,” one that explains how it can be that humans are so vitally related to Christ and to the Spirit. She maintains the traditional view of Christ’s two natures—divine and human—while showing that Jesus also depends on God’s presence. The Spirit then allows humans to participate in Jesus’ own dependence on (or union with) the Father.
In short, McKirland provides a thick and robust description of what it means for humans to need God, how scripture witnesses to this fundamental need, and what a deeply Christological and Spirit-attuned picture of theological anthropology looks like. Her extensive turn to scripture to provide the contours of a needs-based, Christologically grounded anthropology will be satisfying, perhaps even edifying, for many Christian readers.
Wednesday, March 1, 2023
We will have one combined discussion group meeting on Wednesday, March 1st, and then go to lunch. For those on-line, we are going to work on how to make our in-person voices more readily heard.
For next week, let's talk about happiness and the emptiness of reaching one's goals. That may sound counter intuitive, but, author Arthur Brooks points to the emptiness that achieving goals can bring. Humans, he asserts, are designed for improvement not accomplishment.
To discuss improvement, not accomplishment, seems like a fitting Lenten discourse.
Why Success Can Feel So Bitter
Arthur Brooks, The Atlantic 2.24.23
A few days after she became the first female skater to land a quadruple jump at the Olympics, 15-year-old Kamila Valieva fell in her final program, costing her the individual Olympic gold. She wept as she stepped off the ice. Instead of comforting her, her coach berated her. “Why did you let it go?” she asked the young skater. “Why did you stop fighting?” The skaters who won didn’t seem much happier. After winning the silver medal, Alexandra Trusova was heard screaming that she hated the sport. The gold medalist, Anna Shcherbakova, said that “this has been what I’ve been working toward every day,” but also that she felt “emptiness inside.”
This kind of pressure might seem inconceivable to you; after all, you probably aren’t an Olympic athlete. But have you ever anchored your happiness in some way to a far-off goal that you could attain only at significant personal cost, that you thought would deliver to you the satisfaction you seek or the success you crave? Maybe it’s finishing a degree, publishing a book, or making a certain amount of money. Nothing is wrong with these goals per se, but if you place your happiness in their attainment, you are setting yourself up for your own version of these bitter Olympic moments. Even if you achieve your goal, you are very unlikely to achieve the happiness you’re after. And you just might find yourself less happy than you were before you reached the
mountaintop.
Dreams and goals are important because they give us a metric against which to measure progress; you don’t care if you’re getting closer to Rome unless you are trying to get to Rome. But as I have written before, progress, not meeting a goal, is what brings true happiness.
Researchers have confirmed this time and again. In their 2011 book, The Progress Principle, my colleague Teresa Amabile and the psychologist Steven Kramer analyzed the day-to-day well-being of 238 employees at seven companies and found that satisfaction was brought about not by big, audacious wins, but rather by forward momentum in meaningful work. Other psychologists have found that in life, not just work, progress consistently beats accomplishment when it comes to well-being. Humans are wired, it seems, for improvement.
Goal attainment can even bring problems. Some researchers have argued that when a goal is a true end point for progress, the cessation of forward motion can lead to a feeling of emptiness, exactly what Shcherbakova described in Beijing. Or as a friend of mine and fellow author told me, “I always thought that there would be no better feeling than the day I saw I had a No. 1 New York Times best seller. And when it finally happened, I felt nothing.”
Worse than feeling nothing, you might subject yourself to what the self-improvement writer Stephanie Rose Zoccatelli calls the “post-achievement hangover,” a feeling of restlessness and mild depression in the days after a major milestone, such as graduating from college or getting married. One plausible explanation for this phenomenon has to do with dopamine, a neuromodulator that gives us a sense of pleasurable anticipation of a reward. Dopamine is elevated before you achieve a goal and depleted afterward. This leads to what you might call “anti-anticipation,” or a sense of emptiness. Some scholars have hypothesized that dopamine depletion underlies the terrible dysphoria experienced by drug abusers when they abstain.
To pursue one big goal in the hope of attaining happiness is, ironically, to set yourself up for unhappiness. Buddhists see such goals as just another kind of worldly attachment that creates a cycle of craving and clinging. This principle is at the heart of Buddhism’s first noble truth, that life is suffering. This doesn’t mean that you should abandon all goals, however. You just need to understand and pursue them in a different way. I recommend that you subject your goals to a bit of scrutiny. Ask yourself three questions.
1. Are you enjoying the journey?
A little voice in your head always tells you that your very special dream, whether it’s Olympic gold or winning the presidency, will bring you bliss, so a lot of misery in pursuit of it is worthwhile. But that isn’t true, and the more emphasis you put on the end state, the more emotional trouble you will face. Instead of single-mindedly chasing a goal, focus more on whether you’re getting anything out of your progress right now. For example, about 20 years ago, I set a goal to get in better shape. At first, working out was hard, especially the weight lifting. But within about two months, I found that I enjoyed it, and it became something I looked forward to each morning. I soon lost track of my initial goal—I think it was to bench-press my weight times my age—and two decades later I rarely miss a day in the gym, because I love it.
2. Do you like pie?
Here’s an existential riddle: What’s usually first prize in a pie-eating contest? Answer: More pie. So I hope you like pie.
The point of a good goal is to improve your quality of life by changing your day-to-day for the better, not to limp across the finish line and stop after a terrible ordeal. Working toward a goal is a lot like that pie-eating contest. The reward for quitting the misuse of alcohol is stopping drinking and then continuing to live in a healthy way. The reward for getting your M.B.A. is being qualified to hold a job that you really enjoy. Make sure you’re really in it for the long haul.
3. Can you take one step at a time?
Researchers have found that frequent, small achievements tend to start a cycle of success and happiness much more than infrequent, big ones. Make sure you can break your long-term goals into smaller chunks—even into goals for individual days, if possible. You can have a victory each day and not be dependent on something that might happen years into the future. Point your efforts toward where you want to be in a year, but don’t dwell on that destination. Rather, enjoy the daily and weekly milestones that you know are getting you down your road to success.
Maybe your goals don’t pass this test. Maybe training to climb Mount Everest would be a journey that brings you no joy, or actually working as a lawyer after struggling through law school doesn’t appeal to you. If that is the case, you must then ask yourself one more question: Why is this my goal in the first place? Maybe you internalized your parents’ dream for your future, or you’re still holding on to one that you came up with when you were very immature. If so, it’s time to let the dream go.
For next week, let's talk about happiness and the emptiness of reaching one's goals. That may sound counter intuitive, but, author Arthur Brooks points to the emptiness that achieving goals can bring. Humans, he asserts, are designed for improvement not accomplishment.
To discuss improvement, not accomplishment, seems like a fitting Lenten discourse.
Why Success Can Feel So Bitter
Arthur Brooks, The Atlantic 2.24.23
A few days after she became the first female skater to land a quadruple jump at the Olympics, 15-year-old Kamila Valieva fell in her final program, costing her the individual Olympic gold. She wept as she stepped off the ice. Instead of comforting her, her coach berated her. “Why did you let it go?” she asked the young skater. “Why did you stop fighting?” The skaters who won didn’t seem much happier. After winning the silver medal, Alexandra Trusova was heard screaming that she hated the sport. The gold medalist, Anna Shcherbakova, said that “this has been what I’ve been working toward every day,” but also that she felt “emptiness inside.”
This kind of pressure might seem inconceivable to you; after all, you probably aren’t an Olympic athlete. But have you ever anchored your happiness in some way to a far-off goal that you could attain only at significant personal cost, that you thought would deliver to you the satisfaction you seek or the success you crave? Maybe it’s finishing a degree, publishing a book, or making a certain amount of money. Nothing is wrong with these goals per se, but if you place your happiness in their attainment, you are setting yourself up for your own version of these bitter Olympic moments. Even if you achieve your goal, you are very unlikely to achieve the happiness you’re after. And you just might find yourself less happy than you were before you reached the
mountaintop.
Dreams and goals are important because they give us a metric against which to measure progress; you don’t care if you’re getting closer to Rome unless you are trying to get to Rome. But as I have written before, progress, not meeting a goal, is what brings true happiness.
Researchers have confirmed this time and again. In their 2011 book, The Progress Principle, my colleague Teresa Amabile and the psychologist Steven Kramer analyzed the day-to-day well-being of 238 employees at seven companies and found that satisfaction was brought about not by big, audacious wins, but rather by forward momentum in meaningful work. Other psychologists have found that in life, not just work, progress consistently beats accomplishment when it comes to well-being. Humans are wired, it seems, for improvement.
Goal attainment can even bring problems. Some researchers have argued that when a goal is a true end point for progress, the cessation of forward motion can lead to a feeling of emptiness, exactly what Shcherbakova described in Beijing. Or as a friend of mine and fellow author told me, “I always thought that there would be no better feeling than the day I saw I had a No. 1 New York Times best seller. And when it finally happened, I felt nothing.”
Worse than feeling nothing, you might subject yourself to what the self-improvement writer Stephanie Rose Zoccatelli calls the “post-achievement hangover,” a feeling of restlessness and mild depression in the days after a major milestone, such as graduating from college or getting married. One plausible explanation for this phenomenon has to do with dopamine, a neuromodulator that gives us a sense of pleasurable anticipation of a reward. Dopamine is elevated before you achieve a goal and depleted afterward. This leads to what you might call “anti-anticipation,” or a sense of emptiness. Some scholars have hypothesized that dopamine depletion underlies the terrible dysphoria experienced by drug abusers when they abstain.
To pursue one big goal in the hope of attaining happiness is, ironically, to set yourself up for unhappiness. Buddhists see such goals as just another kind of worldly attachment that creates a cycle of craving and clinging. This principle is at the heart of Buddhism’s first noble truth, that life is suffering. This doesn’t mean that you should abandon all goals, however. You just need to understand and pursue them in a different way. I recommend that you subject your goals to a bit of scrutiny. Ask yourself three questions.
1. Are you enjoying the journey?
A little voice in your head always tells you that your very special dream, whether it’s Olympic gold or winning the presidency, will bring you bliss, so a lot of misery in pursuit of it is worthwhile. But that isn’t true, and the more emphasis you put on the end state, the more emotional trouble you will face. Instead of single-mindedly chasing a goal, focus more on whether you’re getting anything out of your progress right now. For example, about 20 years ago, I set a goal to get in better shape. At first, working out was hard, especially the weight lifting. But within about two months, I found that I enjoyed it, and it became something I looked forward to each morning. I soon lost track of my initial goal—I think it was to bench-press my weight times my age—and two decades later I rarely miss a day in the gym, because I love it.
2. Do you like pie?
Here’s an existential riddle: What’s usually first prize in a pie-eating contest? Answer: More pie. So I hope you like pie.
The point of a good goal is to improve your quality of life by changing your day-to-day for the better, not to limp across the finish line and stop after a terrible ordeal. Working toward a goal is a lot like that pie-eating contest. The reward for quitting the misuse of alcohol is stopping drinking and then continuing to live in a healthy way. The reward for getting your M.B.A. is being qualified to hold a job that you really enjoy. Make sure you’re really in it for the long haul.
3. Can you take one step at a time?
Researchers have found that frequent, small achievements tend to start a cycle of success and happiness much more than infrequent, big ones. Make sure you can break your long-term goals into smaller chunks—even into goals for individual days, if possible. You can have a victory each day and not be dependent on something that might happen years into the future. Point your efforts toward where you want to be in a year, but don’t dwell on that destination. Rather, enjoy the daily and weekly milestones that you know are getting you down your road to success.
Maybe your goals don’t pass this test. Maybe training to climb Mount Everest would be a journey that brings you no joy, or actually working as a lawyer after struggling through law school doesn’t appeal to you. If that is the case, you must then ask yourself one more question: Why is this my goal in the first place? Maybe you internalized your parents’ dream for your future, or you’re still holding on to one that you came up with when you were very immature. If so, it’s time to let the dream go.
Tuesday, February 20, 2023
This week, we'll talk about Peter Murphy's article about the scandal of the anti-intellectual mind and why many Christians are opposed to science and captivated by conspiracy theories. During the season of Epiphany, we have been reading from St. Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. In it, Paul significantly downplays "wisdom" and lifts up "foolishness". Paul was not anti-intellectual; he was trying to make a point.
However, we - the Christian Church in America - may have missed his point and have decided to be persuaded by foolishness instead.
The Scandal of the Anti-intellectual Mind
Why are so many Christians opposed to science and captivated by conspiracy theories?
Peter W. Marty, Christian Century 2.8.23
Peter W. Marty is editor/publisher of the Century and senior pastor of St. Paul Lutheran Church in Davenport, Iowa.
Richard Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book Anti-intellectualism in American Life was published 60 years ago this month. In it, the historian suggests that American culture has recast the role of the intellect as a vice instead of a virtue, diminishing expertise while glorifying the plain sense of the common person. Anti-intellectualism, he writes, is “a resentment … of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition constantly to minimize the value of that life.”
Hofstadter saw political, business, educational, and religious leaders prioritizing practical success over the life of the mind.
Hofstadter distinguished between intelligence and intellect. He described the former as “an excellence of mind that is employed within a fairly narrow, immediate, and predictable range.” It’s a quality that animals and humans can both possess.
Intellect, on the other hand, is that “critical, creative, and contemplative side of mind” that “looks for the meanings of situations as a whole.” It’s a “unique manifestation of human dignity.”
In contemporary life, we easily converge intellect with mere access to unlimited information. Citing facts from the internet can make one sound intelligent. Meanwhile, anti-intellectualism has metastasized across large swaths of American culture. Many Americans today — including many Christians — are decidedly hostile to scientific authority, just as they’re enamored with conspiratorial thinking.
Contempt for experts is on the rise, matched only by a growing willingness to dismiss truth and embrace disinformation. Widespread derision of knowledge is commonplace. Ideologically driven book-banning efforts seek to close the minds of our youngest generation.
Hofstadter saw American evangelicalism as a chief culprit in America’s lack of intellectual rigor. Mark Noll pondered similar issues 30 years later in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Noll explores the history of evangelicalism and why so many adherents fail to sustain a serious intellectual life.
Mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics are hardly exempt from treating the life of the mind lightly in their own pulpits and pieties. But as Noll points out in the preface of a new edition to the book, “white evangelicals appear as the group most easily captive to conspiratorial nonsense, in greatest panic about their political opponents, or as most aggressively anti-intellectual.”
Cultivating the life of the mind has been fundamental to Christian communities for centuries. So why is critical thinking in such short supply among believers today? Why, to borrow John F. Kennedy’s words, do we so “enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought”?
“God gave us brains and we are supposed to use them,” former senator John Danforth said, reflecting on the words, “love the Lord your God with all . . . your mind” in Matthew 22:37.
“Doing God’s work requires more than a big beating heart.” Dianoia, the Greek word Matthew uses for “mind,” can be parsed as dia (side-to-side, evaluating, weighing) and noieo (to use the mind). Thorough reasoning that’s disciplined, analytical, curious, and hungry for truth is indispensable to loving God.
Someone asked me recently what I think Christianity’s biggest challenge is in the coming decades. I told her that thinking Christians have to get to work. We need to reclaim Christianity from the politicized moorings of a mindless caricature of faith that bears little resemblance to the Jesus of the Gospels.
So long as Jesus functions mostly as a hood ornament for many Christians — Russell Moore’s image from his most recent book — we can expect growing disillusionment among those who thought faith meant being transformed by the renewal of our minds, not being conformed to this world.
However, we - the Christian Church in America - may have missed his point and have decided to be persuaded by foolishness instead.
The Scandal of the Anti-intellectual Mind
Why are so many Christians opposed to science and captivated by conspiracy theories?
Peter W. Marty, Christian Century 2.8.23
Peter W. Marty is editor/publisher of the Century and senior pastor of St. Paul Lutheran Church in Davenport, Iowa.
Richard Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book Anti-intellectualism in American Life was published 60 years ago this month. In it, the historian suggests that American culture has recast the role of the intellect as a vice instead of a virtue, diminishing expertise while glorifying the plain sense of the common person. Anti-intellectualism, he writes, is “a resentment … of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition constantly to minimize the value of that life.”
Hofstadter saw political, business, educational, and religious leaders prioritizing practical success over the life of the mind.
Hofstadter distinguished between intelligence and intellect. He described the former as “an excellence of mind that is employed within a fairly narrow, immediate, and predictable range.” It’s a quality that animals and humans can both possess.
Intellect, on the other hand, is that “critical, creative, and contemplative side of mind” that “looks for the meanings of situations as a whole.” It’s a “unique manifestation of human dignity.”
In contemporary life, we easily converge intellect with mere access to unlimited information. Citing facts from the internet can make one sound intelligent. Meanwhile, anti-intellectualism has metastasized across large swaths of American culture. Many Americans today — including many Christians — are decidedly hostile to scientific authority, just as they’re enamored with conspiratorial thinking.
Contempt for experts is on the rise, matched only by a growing willingness to dismiss truth and embrace disinformation. Widespread derision of knowledge is commonplace. Ideologically driven book-banning efforts seek to close the minds of our youngest generation.
Hofstadter saw American evangelicalism as a chief culprit in America’s lack of intellectual rigor. Mark Noll pondered similar issues 30 years later in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Noll explores the history of evangelicalism and why so many adherents fail to sustain a serious intellectual life.
Mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics are hardly exempt from treating the life of the mind lightly in their own pulpits and pieties. But as Noll points out in the preface of a new edition to the book, “white evangelicals appear as the group most easily captive to conspiratorial nonsense, in greatest panic about their political opponents, or as most aggressively anti-intellectual.”
Cultivating the life of the mind has been fundamental to Christian communities for centuries. So why is critical thinking in such short supply among believers today? Why, to borrow John F. Kennedy’s words, do we so “enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought”?
“God gave us brains and we are supposed to use them,” former senator John Danforth said, reflecting on the words, “love the Lord your God with all . . . your mind” in Matthew 22:37.
“Doing God’s work requires more than a big beating heart.” Dianoia, the Greek word Matthew uses for “mind,” can be parsed as dia (side-to-side, evaluating, weighing) and noieo (to use the mind). Thorough reasoning that’s disciplined, analytical, curious, and hungry for truth is indispensable to loving God.
Someone asked me recently what I think Christianity’s biggest challenge is in the coming decades. I told her that thinking Christians have to get to work. We need to reclaim Christianity from the politicized moorings of a mindless caricature of faith that bears little resemblance to the Jesus of the Gospels.
So long as Jesus functions mostly as a hood ornament for many Christians — Russell Moore’s image from his most recent book — we can expect growing disillusionment among those who thought faith meant being transformed by the renewal of our minds, not being conformed to this world.
Tuesday, February 14, 2023
A friend of the family told me the following as I was embarking on my collegiate experience: "There are two ways to be a college student; the smart way and the other way." He went on to say that the smart way is to try something new, to study, to make friends and always remember to make contacts for future employment.
There is a lot of advice for how to do college; but no one tells us how to age. ... until now.
This week, let's discuss the article 3 Steps to Age Exuberantly from the NY Times. If you have a friend who could benefit from this discussion, be sure to invite them along.
3 Steps to Age Exuberantly
Jancee Dunn, NY Times 1.23.23
A new book came across my desk recently, with an irresistible title: “The Swedish Art of Aging Exuberantly: Life Wisdom from Someone Who Will (Probably) Die Before You.” I was already familiar with the astringent humor of the author, Margareta Magnusson, having read her previous book, “The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning” — a surprise international best seller and a call to, as she put it, “not leave a mountain of crap behind for our loved ones to clean up after we die.”
I phoned Magnusson, who was an artist before becoming a published author and is now 86 years old, in Stockholm, to get some of her best advice on how to make life worth living, no matter your age.
Magnusson acknowledged that aging is hard. “You cannot stop the passing of time and how it affects your body, but you can work to keep a clear and positive mind,” she said. “You can be young upstairs in your head even if your joints creak.” Here are her top three tips.
Embrace kärt besvär
This Swedish phrase blends kärt, meaning “dear or cherished,” and besvär, which means “pain.” So, one kärt besvär might be paying your bills — an annoying obligation, but you’re still grateful that you have the money to pay. Or, it could be taking care of someone who is sick, which I’ve been doing this week with my flu-addled daughter. When I’m frazzled by her endless requests for streaming service passwords and mugs of tea, delivered via text message, I remind myself that I’m glad I’m strong enough to take care of her.
As you get older, it’s easy to be frustrated and complain, Magnusson said. But kärt besvär helps her to live with joy. “There seems to be no other choice than to see every nuisance as something that I must find a way to cherish,” she said.
What I think Magnusson’s getting at is the idea that it’s OK to lean into your emotions --whatever they might be. Laura Carstensen, a psychologist at the Stanford Center on Longevity, who has studied the emotional changes that occur with age, said, “We find that older people are more likely to report a kind of mosaic of emotions than younger people do.” While younger people tend to be “all positive or all negative,” she said, older people are more able to experience joy “with a tear in the eye,” she added.
Surround yourself with the young
This is Magnussen’s simple definition of happiness: being around young people. Not only do they supply fresh ideas and perspectives, she said, but hearing about their plans and prospects “is a way to stay in tune with the young person you yourself were at some point.” Spending time with younger people can also benefit your brain, said Vonetta Dotson, a professor of psychology and gerontology at Georgia State University and author of “Keep Your Wits About You: The Science of Brain Maintenance as You Age.” There is research to suggest that as you age, especially if you’re starting to experience some cognitive decline, socializing with younger people who are mentally sharp can provide the type of stimulation that helps boost cognitive functioning, she explained.
Yet this blending of generations often doesn’t happen, Becca Levy, professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health and author of “Breaking The Age Code,” said. “Because, unfortunately, there’s quite a bit of age segregation in our culture.” Break that barrier by keeping your door (and fridge) open for grandchildren, if you have them nearby. Make an 8-minute phone call to a younger relative. Volunteer to read to children at your library, or sign up for an organization like Big Brothers Big Sisters.
And, to keep young people around you, Magnusson writes, “Just ask them questions. Listen to them. Give them food. Don’t tell them about your bad knee again.”
Say “yes” whenever possible
One of the misconceptions about older people, according to Regina Koepp, clinical psychologist and founder of the Center for Mental Health and Aging in Burlington, Vt., is that “they’re rigid and they’ll never change,” she said. “That’s not true. Older people are not more rigid than younger people. Those are personality traits, not age traits.” Yet even older adults have internalized this narrative, Dr. Koepp said, “because they’ve heard it their whole life.”
To age exuberantly, you must actively recognize your “internalized ageism” and fight against it, Dr. Koepp said. Saying “yes” as often as you can, she added, “is in effect saying ‘yes’ to life --being curious and exploratory, being part of community.”
Magnusson told me that the older she gets, the more she can vividly recall the things she has said “yes” to, just when she was on the verge of saying no, and how those experiences have made her life richer. “I’ve found that having a closed mind ages me more quickly than anything else,” she said. Before she refuses something — a dinner, an art show, buying a leather jacket — she asks herself: “Is it that I can’t do it, or I won’t?”
“Give it a try, whatever it is,” she said. “Maybe you’ll go to a party and be the last to leave because you’re having such a good time.” I asked Magnusson when she last shut down a party. “A week ago,” she said.
There is a lot of advice for how to do college; but no one tells us how to age. ... until now.
This week, let's discuss the article 3 Steps to Age Exuberantly from the NY Times. If you have a friend who could benefit from this discussion, be sure to invite them along.
3 Steps to Age Exuberantly
Jancee Dunn, NY Times 1.23.23
A new book came across my desk recently, with an irresistible title: “The Swedish Art of Aging Exuberantly: Life Wisdom from Someone Who Will (Probably) Die Before You.” I was already familiar with the astringent humor of the author, Margareta Magnusson, having read her previous book, “The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning” — a surprise international best seller and a call to, as she put it, “not leave a mountain of crap behind for our loved ones to clean up after we die.”
I phoned Magnusson, who was an artist before becoming a published author and is now 86 years old, in Stockholm, to get some of her best advice on how to make life worth living, no matter your age.
Magnusson acknowledged that aging is hard. “You cannot stop the passing of time and how it affects your body, but you can work to keep a clear and positive mind,” she said. “You can be young upstairs in your head even if your joints creak.” Here are her top three tips.
Embrace kärt besvär
This Swedish phrase blends kärt, meaning “dear or cherished,” and besvär, which means “pain.” So, one kärt besvär might be paying your bills — an annoying obligation, but you’re still grateful that you have the money to pay. Or, it could be taking care of someone who is sick, which I’ve been doing this week with my flu-addled daughter. When I’m frazzled by her endless requests for streaming service passwords and mugs of tea, delivered via text message, I remind myself that I’m glad I’m strong enough to take care of her.
As you get older, it’s easy to be frustrated and complain, Magnusson said. But kärt besvär helps her to live with joy. “There seems to be no other choice than to see every nuisance as something that I must find a way to cherish,” she said.
What I think Magnusson’s getting at is the idea that it’s OK to lean into your emotions --whatever they might be. Laura Carstensen, a psychologist at the Stanford Center on Longevity, who has studied the emotional changes that occur with age, said, “We find that older people are more likely to report a kind of mosaic of emotions than younger people do.” While younger people tend to be “all positive or all negative,” she said, older people are more able to experience joy “with a tear in the eye,” she added.
Surround yourself with the young
This is Magnussen’s simple definition of happiness: being around young people. Not only do they supply fresh ideas and perspectives, she said, but hearing about their plans and prospects “is a way to stay in tune with the young person you yourself were at some point.” Spending time with younger people can also benefit your brain, said Vonetta Dotson, a professor of psychology and gerontology at Georgia State University and author of “Keep Your Wits About You: The Science of Brain Maintenance as You Age.” There is research to suggest that as you age, especially if you’re starting to experience some cognitive decline, socializing with younger people who are mentally sharp can provide the type of stimulation that helps boost cognitive functioning, she explained.
Yet this blending of generations often doesn’t happen, Becca Levy, professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health and author of “Breaking The Age Code,” said. “Because, unfortunately, there’s quite a bit of age segregation in our culture.” Break that barrier by keeping your door (and fridge) open for grandchildren, if you have them nearby. Make an 8-minute phone call to a younger relative. Volunteer to read to children at your library, or sign up for an organization like Big Brothers Big Sisters.
And, to keep young people around you, Magnusson writes, “Just ask them questions. Listen to them. Give them food. Don’t tell them about your bad knee again.”
Say “yes” whenever possible
One of the misconceptions about older people, according to Regina Koepp, clinical psychologist and founder of the Center for Mental Health and Aging in Burlington, Vt., is that “they’re rigid and they’ll never change,” she said. “That’s not true. Older people are not more rigid than younger people. Those are personality traits, not age traits.” Yet even older adults have internalized this narrative, Dr. Koepp said, “because they’ve heard it their whole life.”
To age exuberantly, you must actively recognize your “internalized ageism” and fight against it, Dr. Koepp said. Saying “yes” as often as you can, she added, “is in effect saying ‘yes’ to life --being curious and exploratory, being part of community.”
Magnusson told me that the older she gets, the more she can vividly recall the things she has said “yes” to, just when she was on the verge of saying no, and how those experiences have made her life richer. “I’ve found that having a closed mind ages me more quickly than anything else,” she said. Before she refuses something — a dinner, an art show, buying a leather jacket — she asks herself: “Is it that I can’t do it, or I won’t?”
“Give it a try, whatever it is,” she said. “Maybe you’ll go to a party and be the last to leave because you’re having such a good time.” I asked Magnusson when she last shut down a party. “A week ago,” she said.
Tuesday, February 7, 2023
The WSJ ran a fascinating piece about the engineer who tried to stop the space shuttle Challenger launch. He failed to stop it and 73 seconds into the launch, it exploded killing all seven members aboard.
I think we all remember this tragedy and some may even remember where they were when it happened.
What happened to the engineer is called a "moral injury". He never worked as an engineer again. I'd like to spend some time talking about this article, about moral injuries, and our ability to rehabilitate.
Page three of the article is from a V.A. Hospital chaplain's manual on Building Spiritual Strength after a moral injury. It is not required reading but I think you may find their findings to be enlightening and hopeful; and, perhaps you'd like to talk about it.
The Man Who Tried to Stop the Launch
Rachel M. McCleary, WSJ 1.27.23
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration was preparing the space shuttle Challenger for launch on the morning of Jan. 28, 1986. It was an unusually cold morning for Cape Canaveral, Fla. — too cold, warned the engineers of NASA contractor Morton Thiokol, builder of the shuttle’s solid rocket motors. The engineers knew that the rubber O-rings on the rocket could become brittle in cold weather, causing hot fuel gases to leak and potentially causing an explosion. They were right. Seventy-three seconds after liftoff, the shuttle with seven astronauts on board, including teacher Christa McAuliffe, blew up.
The day before the launch, Thiokol engineers and executives met with NASA officials on a teleconference. Roger Boisjoly, the principal engineer on the Thiokol O-ring task force, and Arnold Thompson were the most knowledgeable experts on O-rings in the U.S. The two engineers argued that an ambient temperature below 53 degrees Fahrenheit could prevent the O-rings from sealing properly. A Thiokol engineer reported the anticipated temperature during the following day’s launch time would be around 26 degrees. Erring on the side of caution, Boisjoly, Thompson and other engineers recommended delaying the launch.
NASA officials pushed back. Lawrence Mulloy, NASA solid-rocket booster manager at Marshall Space Center, was particularly angered by the prospect of postponement, which had already been done three times.
Thiokol executives requested a private caucus. Boisjoly and Thompson repeated their argument for a no-launch decision—to no avail. In what amounted to a “management” decision, engineers were excluded from the final vote. Returning to the teleconference, Thiokol executives informed
NASA that the launch was approved.
On Feb. 3, just under a week after the failed launch, President Ronald Reagan announced the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident to investigate the disaster. Also known as the Rogers Commission for its chairman, William Rogers, the commission concluded that Thiokol engineers had known for months what Nobel physics laureate Richard Feynman, a commission member, demonstrated by famously dropping an O-ring in a glass of cold water: The rubber substance hardens in cold temperatures and can’t properly seal.
Testifying before the commission, Boisjoly said: “I felt I really did all I could to stop the launch.” Boisjoly had done everything in his power to prevent the disaster. “We were talking to the people who had the power to stop that launch,” he told NPR’s Howard Berkes in 1987.
The commission, relying on Boisjoly’s memos and reports, expanded its inquiry beyond technical malfeasance to include management decision-making. Considered disloyal, Boisjoly was removed from Thiokol’s Challenger failure investigation team. Isolated from his colleagues who were redesigning the O-ring, his self-esteem suffered and destroyed his confidence as an engineer. Boisjoly, who understood the potential consequences of an unsafe launch, had acted on his conscience in trying to prevent it. But Thiokol executives didn’t respect him as a valued professional. Six months after the disaster, Boisjoly requested an extended sick leave. He never worked as an engineer again.
Since the Rogers Commission report, an avalanche of published materials has chronicled the technological, management and organizational dimensions of the disaster. Yet little attention has been paid to the psychological suffering of the engineers who rightly opposed the launch. Recent
advances in psychology give us insight into their suffering. Psychiatrist Jonathan Shay has observed that moral injury occurs when a person in authority disregards a subordinate’s judgment on the morally correct course of action, thereby violating the subordinate’s trust and self-esteem. Dr. Shay’s definition applies to the Thiokol engineers who challenged their executives to reconsider the launch. By not succeeding, the engineers paid a high psychological
price.
Two years after the Challenger disaster, Boisjoly found redemption as a lecturer at engineering schools on ethical decision-making and data analysis. He received the American Association for Advancement in Science Prize for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility in 1988 for his contribution to the engineering profession.
When Boisjoly left Thiokol in 1986, the notion of moral injury was a nascent idea in Dr. Shay’s mind. Today, interdisciplinary therapies and treatments are available to veterans, doctors, lawyers, teachers and others who suffer from moral injury. On the anniversary of the Challenger disaster, let us remember Roger Boisjoly along with the seven astronauts whose lives he tried to protect.
Ms. McCleary is a lecturer in economics at Harvard and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. She is writing a book titled “Conscience Explained.”
Intervention Manual. VA System.
Building Spiritual Strength. Section I: Rationale
Introduction
For the vast majority of people, spirituality is an important part of coping with stressful events. Despite this, there is very little research on how people use spirituality to endure, recover, and even grow in the wake of these events, making it difficult for psychotherapists and pastoral counselors to help clients use this powerful tool. Using spirituality in coping is complex. While many people find their faith helpful in recovering, a nearly equal proportion struggle with faith when confronted by negative life events, and respond by disengaging from their faith and
religious community.
One important way that stressful life events disrupt emotional, psychological, and personality processes is by shattering assumptions about safety, power and control, self, and the world. Spiritual assumptions from the previous relationship with a Higher Power are likely to be disrupted; beliefs in a benevolent, omnipotent Higher Power may appear inconsistent with life events, and this often precipitates existential crises. Survivors must redefine their world perceptions at physical, interpersonal, and spiritual levels. Spiritual guidance to restore a disrupted relationship with a Higher Power may be helpful in recovering from negative life events.
People who use prayer for active, rather than avoidant coping, demonstrate lower levels of anxiety and symptoms. Prayer that seeks to find a way to accept traumatic experiences is associated with higher levels of posttraumatic growth.
Religious coping research indicates clinically-useful relationships with mental health outcomes. Religious coping strategies predict church members’ adjustment better than non-religious coping strategies or other aspects of religious beliefs (such as perceptions of Higher Power, religious orientation, and orthodoxy). Perceiving a Higher Power as benevolent and just, experiencing a Higher Power as supportive, involvement in religious rituals, and seeking support through religion predict positive adjustment. Using religion to facilitate avoidance predicts poorer outcomes.
Using prayer to avoid dealing with a stressor predicts increased distress, while using prayer to actively seek help from a Higher Power, focus coping efforts, or increase one’s personal acceptance of stressful situations predicts decreased distress. Other aspects of religious functioning (feeling alienated from a Higher Power, experiencing religious conflicts with others, and higher levels of fear and guilt in religious life) predict poorer adjustment.
This suggests that fostering a positive relationship with a Higher Power, perceiving one’s Higher Power as benevolent and supportive, (not punishing and condemning), and promoting active rather than avoidant modes of interacting with a Higher Power, should maximize recovery from stressful life events, and potentially from traumatic ones as well.
I think we all remember this tragedy and some may even remember where they were when it happened.
What happened to the engineer is called a "moral injury". He never worked as an engineer again. I'd like to spend some time talking about this article, about moral injuries, and our ability to rehabilitate.
Page three of the article is from a V.A. Hospital chaplain's manual on Building Spiritual Strength after a moral injury. It is not required reading but I think you may find their findings to be enlightening and hopeful; and, perhaps you'd like to talk about it.
The Man Who Tried to Stop the Launch
Rachel M. McCleary, WSJ 1.27.23
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration was preparing the space shuttle Challenger for launch on the morning of Jan. 28, 1986. It was an unusually cold morning for Cape Canaveral, Fla. — too cold, warned the engineers of NASA contractor Morton Thiokol, builder of the shuttle’s solid rocket motors. The engineers knew that the rubber O-rings on the rocket could become brittle in cold weather, causing hot fuel gases to leak and potentially causing an explosion. They were right. Seventy-three seconds after liftoff, the shuttle with seven astronauts on board, including teacher Christa McAuliffe, blew up.
The day before the launch, Thiokol engineers and executives met with NASA officials on a teleconference. Roger Boisjoly, the principal engineer on the Thiokol O-ring task force, and Arnold Thompson were the most knowledgeable experts on O-rings in the U.S. The two engineers argued that an ambient temperature below 53 degrees Fahrenheit could prevent the O-rings from sealing properly. A Thiokol engineer reported the anticipated temperature during the following day’s launch time would be around 26 degrees. Erring on the side of caution, Boisjoly, Thompson and other engineers recommended delaying the launch.
NASA officials pushed back. Lawrence Mulloy, NASA solid-rocket booster manager at Marshall Space Center, was particularly angered by the prospect of postponement, which had already been done three times.
Thiokol executives requested a private caucus. Boisjoly and Thompson repeated their argument for a no-launch decision—to no avail. In what amounted to a “management” decision, engineers were excluded from the final vote. Returning to the teleconference, Thiokol executives informed
NASA that the launch was approved.
On Feb. 3, just under a week after the failed launch, President Ronald Reagan announced the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident to investigate the disaster. Also known as the Rogers Commission for its chairman, William Rogers, the commission concluded that Thiokol engineers had known for months what Nobel physics laureate Richard Feynman, a commission member, demonstrated by famously dropping an O-ring in a glass of cold water: The rubber substance hardens in cold temperatures and can’t properly seal.
Testifying before the commission, Boisjoly said: “I felt I really did all I could to stop the launch.” Boisjoly had done everything in his power to prevent the disaster. “We were talking to the people who had the power to stop that launch,” he told NPR’s Howard Berkes in 1987.
The commission, relying on Boisjoly’s memos and reports, expanded its inquiry beyond technical malfeasance to include management decision-making. Considered disloyal, Boisjoly was removed from Thiokol’s Challenger failure investigation team. Isolated from his colleagues who were redesigning the O-ring, his self-esteem suffered and destroyed his confidence as an engineer. Boisjoly, who understood the potential consequences of an unsafe launch, had acted on his conscience in trying to prevent it. But Thiokol executives didn’t respect him as a valued professional. Six months after the disaster, Boisjoly requested an extended sick leave. He never worked as an engineer again.
Since the Rogers Commission report, an avalanche of published materials has chronicled the technological, management and organizational dimensions of the disaster. Yet little attention has been paid to the psychological suffering of the engineers who rightly opposed the launch. Recent
advances in psychology give us insight into their suffering. Psychiatrist Jonathan Shay has observed that moral injury occurs when a person in authority disregards a subordinate’s judgment on the morally correct course of action, thereby violating the subordinate’s trust and self-esteem. Dr. Shay’s definition applies to the Thiokol engineers who challenged their executives to reconsider the launch. By not succeeding, the engineers paid a high psychological
price.
Two years after the Challenger disaster, Boisjoly found redemption as a lecturer at engineering schools on ethical decision-making and data analysis. He received the American Association for Advancement in Science Prize for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility in 1988 for his contribution to the engineering profession.
When Boisjoly left Thiokol in 1986, the notion of moral injury was a nascent idea in Dr. Shay’s mind. Today, interdisciplinary therapies and treatments are available to veterans, doctors, lawyers, teachers and others who suffer from moral injury. On the anniversary of the Challenger disaster, let us remember Roger Boisjoly along with the seven astronauts whose lives he tried to protect.
Ms. McCleary is a lecturer in economics at Harvard and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. She is writing a book titled “Conscience Explained.”
Intervention Manual. VA System.
Building Spiritual Strength. Section I: Rationale
Introduction
For the vast majority of people, spirituality is an important part of coping with stressful events. Despite this, there is very little research on how people use spirituality to endure, recover, and even grow in the wake of these events, making it difficult for psychotherapists and pastoral counselors to help clients use this powerful tool. Using spirituality in coping is complex. While many people find their faith helpful in recovering, a nearly equal proportion struggle with faith when confronted by negative life events, and respond by disengaging from their faith and
religious community.
One important way that stressful life events disrupt emotional, psychological, and personality processes is by shattering assumptions about safety, power and control, self, and the world. Spiritual assumptions from the previous relationship with a Higher Power are likely to be disrupted; beliefs in a benevolent, omnipotent Higher Power may appear inconsistent with life events, and this often precipitates existential crises. Survivors must redefine their world perceptions at physical, interpersonal, and spiritual levels. Spiritual guidance to restore a disrupted relationship with a Higher Power may be helpful in recovering from negative life events.
People who use prayer for active, rather than avoidant coping, demonstrate lower levels of anxiety and symptoms. Prayer that seeks to find a way to accept traumatic experiences is associated with higher levels of posttraumatic growth.
Religious coping research indicates clinically-useful relationships with mental health outcomes. Religious coping strategies predict church members’ adjustment better than non-religious coping strategies or other aspects of religious beliefs (such as perceptions of Higher Power, religious orientation, and orthodoxy). Perceiving a Higher Power as benevolent and just, experiencing a Higher Power as supportive, involvement in religious rituals, and seeking support through religion predict positive adjustment. Using religion to facilitate avoidance predicts poorer outcomes.
Using prayer to avoid dealing with a stressor predicts increased distress, while using prayer to actively seek help from a Higher Power, focus coping efforts, or increase one’s personal acceptance of stressful situations predicts decreased distress. Other aspects of religious functioning (feeling alienated from a Higher Power, experiencing religious conflicts with others, and higher levels of fear and guilt in religious life) predict poorer adjustment.
This suggests that fostering a positive relationship with a Higher Power, perceiving one’s Higher Power as benevolent and supportive, (not punishing and condemning), and promoting active rather than avoidant modes of interacting with a Higher Power, should maximize recovery from stressful life events, and potentially from traumatic ones as well.
Tuesday, January 31, 2023
This week's discussion is about the intersection of public health, constitutional freedoms, and individual choice. ... all in one hour! In particular, two issues (for lack of a better term) have arisen in our national and local life - the unthinkable gun violence we have experienced this year and just this past week and the removal of books from the classrooms of Manatee County Schools. As such, there are two readings for you this week- one short one about Manatee schools and a longer one about guns and America.
To read the full article about guns, click here. The NY Times piece has a lot of graphs and charts that did not make it onto the printed sheet.
Lastly, we also will touch on where faith intersects with public safety and individual rights.
Manatee Teachers Forced to Remove “Unvetted” Books
Staff Report, Bradenton Times 1.25.23
Last Wednesday, the Manatee County School District informed district principals of a new policy regarding books in classroom libraries. Teachers were then told that, in response to a new state law, they were to make such "unvetted" books inaccessible to students, as it could lead to a third-degree felony charge.
House Bill 1467, which went into effect in July, was the impetus for the new policy. Because the law dictates that parents must be able to see what instructional materials are in their child's classroom, the district says it must publish a list of books available in classroom libraries on that school's website, a process that is currently underway, after training as to what is and is not "appropriate" began for "certified media specialists" in January.
A memo sent to schools this month gave guidelines for school and classroom libraries in accordance with the new statute:
Per the new statutory changes to House Bill 1467 - Section 1006.40 (3) (d), F.S. All material in school and classroom libraries or included on a reading list must be:
Therefore, each district in the State of Florida must comply with these new statutory requirements. We are seeking volunteers to assist with vetting and compiling website list so all classroom books can be used by students.
The law is one of several efforts by politicians to combat a range of "woke" ideologies that they claim are being used by teachers to "indoctrinate" and "groom" students.
As teachers became informed of the new policy, social media lit up with laments over having to pack up their classroom libraries, with some teachers opting to cover up their bookshelves. A right-wing group called Community Patriots Manatee is currently recruiting so-called "woke busters" to vet books available in the district and lobby for the removal of ones they deem to be inappropriate. The group recently claimed "victory" when it successfully lobbied to have a temporary display celebrating LGBT milestones removed from the county's Palmetto library branch.
A Smarter Way to Reduce Gun Deaths
Nicholas Kristof, NY Times Jan. 24, 2023
Once again the United States is seared by screams, shots, blood, sirens and politicians’ calls for thoughts and prayers. Two shootings in California since Saturday have claimed at least 18 lives, leaving Americans asking once again: What can be done to break the political stalemate on gun policy so that we can save lives?
Harm reduction for guns would start by acknowledging the blunt reality that we’re not going to eliminate guns any more than we have eliminated vehicles or tobacco, not in a country that already has more guns than people. We are destined to live in a sea of guns. And just as some kids will always sneak cigarettes or people will inevitably drive drunk, some criminals will get firearms — but one lesson learned is that if we can’t eliminate a dangerous product, we can reduce the toll by regulating who gets access to it.
That can make a huge difference. Consider that American women age 50 or older commit fewer than 100 gun homicides in a typical year. In contrast, men 49 or younger typically kill more than 500 people each year just with their fists and feet; with guns, they kill more than 7,000 each year. In effect, firearms are safer with middle-aged women than fists are with young men.
We’re not going to restrict guns to women 50 or older, but we can try to keep firearms from people who are under 21 or who have a record of violent misdemeanors, alcohol abuse, domestic violence or some red flag that they may be a threat to themselves or others.
There is one highly successful example of this harm reduction approach already in place: machine guns. It’s often said that machine guns are banned in the United States, but that’s not exactly right. More than 700,000 of these fully automatic weapons are in the United States outside of the military, entirely legally. Most are owned by federal, state or local agencies, but perhaps several hundred thousand are in private hands. In a typical year, these registered
machine guns are responsible for approximately zero suicides and zero homicides. So let’s begin with a ray of hope: If we can safely keep 700,000 machine guns in America, we should be able to manage handguns.
Keeping Guns Away From Risky People
In many facets of life, we’re accustomed to screening people to make sure that they are trustworthy. For example, how to vote: 1. Have your Social Security number or driver’s license 2. Print and complete six-question voter registration form 3. Mail or hand deliver 4. Do this at least 30 days before Election Day 5. Go to polls 6. Produce a photo ID 7. Vote
How to adopt a dog: 1. Fill out 64-question application 2. If renting, landlord is contacted 3. In-person meeting with entire family 4. Yard fencing and security assessed 5. Sleepover visit with pet 6. Pay $125 adoption fee 7. Adopt the dog
How to buy a gun in Mississippi: 1. Pass a 13-question background check. 2. Buy a gun
Why should it be easier to pick up military-style weapons than to adopt a Chihuahua? To keep ineligible people from buying firearms, we need universal background checks. (One study found that 22 percent of firearms are obtained without a background check.) But the even bigger problem is that there is no comprehensive system to remove guns from people who become ineligible. If someone is convicted of stalking or becomes subject to a domestic violence protection order, that person should be prevented from owning or having access to firearms —but that rarely happens in fact. California has some of the better policies in this area, and its overall smart gun policies may be one reason — despite the recent shootings — its firearms mortality rate is 38 percent below the nation’s overall. A pillar of harm reduction involving motor vehicles is the requirement of a license to drive a car. So why not a license to buy a gun?
Learning to Live With Guns
Harm reduction will feel frustrating and unsatisfying. It means living with a level of guns, and gun deaths, that is extremely high by global standards. But no far-reaching bans on guns will be passed in this Congress or probably any time soon. Meanwhile, just since 2020, an additional 57 million guns have been sold in the United States. So as a practical matter to save lives, let’s focus
on harm reduction.
That’s how we manage alcohol, which each year kills more than 140,000 Americans (often from liver disease), three times as many as guns. Prohibition was not sustainable politically or culturally, so instead of banning alcohol, we chose to regulate access to it instead. We license who can sell liquor, we tax alcohol, we limit who can buy it to age 21 and up, we regulate labels, and we crack down on those who drink and drive. All this is imperfect, but there’s consensus that harm reduction works better than prohibition or passivity.
Likewise, we don’t ban cars, but we impose safety requirements and carefully regulate who can use them. Since 1921, this has reduced the fatality rate per 100 million miles driven by about 95 percent.
Alcohol, tobacco and cars are obviously different from firearms and don’t have constitutional protections — but one of the most important distinctions is that we’ve approached them as public health problems to make progress on incrementally. Historically, cars killed more people each year than firearms in the United States. But because we’ve worked to reduce vehicle deaths and haven’t seriously attempted to curb gun violence, firearms now kill more people than cars. One advantage of the harm reduction model is that done right, it avoids stigmatizing people as gun nuts and makes firearms less a part of a culture war.
I’m writing this essay on the Oregon farm where I grew up. As I write this, my 12-gauge shotgun is a few feet away, and my .22 rifle is in the next room. (Both are safely stored.) These are the kinds of firearms that Americans traditionally kept at home, for hunting, plinking or target practice, and the risks are manageable. Rifles are known to have been used in 364 homicides in 2019, and shotguns in 200 homicides. Both were less common homicide weapons than knives and other cutting objects (1,476 homicides) or even hands and feet (600 homicides).
In contrast to a traditional hunting weapon, here’s an AR-15-style rifle. The military versions of these weapons were designed for troops so that they can efficiently kill many people in a short time, and they can be equipped with large magazines that are rapidly swapped out. They fire a bullet each time the trigger is depressed. In one respect, the civilian version can be more lethal.
American troops are not normally allowed to fire at the enemy with hollow-point bullets, which cause horrific injuries, because these might violate the laws of war. But any civilian can walk into a gun store and buy hollow-point bullets for an AR-15; several mass shootings have involved hollow-point rounds.
Now here’s what in some sense is the most lethal weapon of all: a 9-millimeter handgun. We should reassure gun owners that we’re not going to come after their deer rifles or bird guns. That makes it politically easier to build a consensus on steps to keep dangerous people from lethal weapons like 9-millimeter handguns. There’s also evidence that gun owners with a military or police background strongly believe in safety training and other requirements for people carrying handguns; any coalition for gun safety needs to work with such moderate gun owners.
No single approach is all that effective. But gun safety experts think that a politically plausible harm reduction model could over time reduce gun mortality by perhaps one-third. That would be more than 15,000 lives saved a year.
So let’s learn lessons, for gun violence is at levels that are unconscionable. Just since I graduated from high school in 1977, more Americans appear to have died from guns (more than 1.5 million), including suicides, homicides and accidents, than perished in all the wars in United States history, going back to the Revolutionary War (about 1.4 million). We can do better, and this is not hopeless. North Carolina is not a liberal state, but it requires a license to buy a handgun. If we avoid overheated rhetoric that antagonizes gun owners, some progress is possible, particularly at the state level.
Gun safety regulation can make a difference. Conservatives often think New York is an example of failed gun policy, but New York State has a firearms death rate less than one-quarter that of gun-friendly states like Alaska, Wyoming, Louisiana and Mississippi. Gun safety works, just not as well as we would like.
Harm reduction isn’t glamorous but is the kind of long slog that reduced auto fatalities and smoking deaths. If gun policy can only become boring, that may help defuse the culture war over guns that for decades has paralyzed America from adopting effective firearms policies.
To read the full article about guns, click here. The NY Times piece has a lot of graphs and charts that did not make it onto the printed sheet.
Lastly, we also will touch on where faith intersects with public safety and individual rights.
Manatee Teachers Forced to Remove “Unvetted” Books
Staff Report, Bradenton Times 1.25.23
Last Wednesday, the Manatee County School District informed district principals of a new policy regarding books in classroom libraries. Teachers were then told that, in response to a new state law, they were to make such "unvetted" books inaccessible to students, as it could lead to a third-degree felony charge.
House Bill 1467, which went into effect in July, was the impetus for the new policy. Because the law dictates that parents must be able to see what instructional materials are in their child's classroom, the district says it must publish a list of books available in classroom libraries on that school's website, a process that is currently underway, after training as to what is and is not "appropriate" began for "certified media specialists" in January.
A memo sent to schools this month gave guidelines for school and classroom libraries in accordance with the new statute:
Per the new statutory changes to House Bill 1467 - Section 1006.40 (3) (d), F.S. All material in school and classroom libraries or included on a reading list must be:
- Free of Pornography and material prohibited under S. 847.012, F.S.
- Suited to student needs and their ability to comprehend the material presented.
- Appropriate for the grade level and age group for which the materials are used and made available.
Therefore, each district in the State of Florida must comply with these new statutory requirements. We are seeking volunteers to assist with vetting and compiling website list so all classroom books can be used by students.
The law is one of several efforts by politicians to combat a range of "woke" ideologies that they claim are being used by teachers to "indoctrinate" and "groom" students.
As teachers became informed of the new policy, social media lit up with laments over having to pack up their classroom libraries, with some teachers opting to cover up their bookshelves. A right-wing group called Community Patriots Manatee is currently recruiting so-called "woke busters" to vet books available in the district and lobby for the removal of ones they deem to be inappropriate. The group recently claimed "victory" when it successfully lobbied to have a temporary display celebrating LGBT milestones removed from the county's Palmetto library branch.
A Smarter Way to Reduce Gun Deaths
Nicholas Kristof, NY Times Jan. 24, 2023
Once again the United States is seared by screams, shots, blood, sirens and politicians’ calls for thoughts and prayers. Two shootings in California since Saturday have claimed at least 18 lives, leaving Americans asking once again: What can be done to break the political stalemate on gun policy so that we can save lives?
Harm reduction for guns would start by acknowledging the blunt reality that we’re not going to eliminate guns any more than we have eliminated vehicles or tobacco, not in a country that already has more guns than people. We are destined to live in a sea of guns. And just as some kids will always sneak cigarettes or people will inevitably drive drunk, some criminals will get firearms — but one lesson learned is that if we can’t eliminate a dangerous product, we can reduce the toll by regulating who gets access to it.
That can make a huge difference. Consider that American women age 50 or older commit fewer than 100 gun homicides in a typical year. In contrast, men 49 or younger typically kill more than 500 people each year just with their fists and feet; with guns, they kill more than 7,000 each year. In effect, firearms are safer with middle-aged women than fists are with young men.
We’re not going to restrict guns to women 50 or older, but we can try to keep firearms from people who are under 21 or who have a record of violent misdemeanors, alcohol abuse, domestic violence or some red flag that they may be a threat to themselves or others.
There is one highly successful example of this harm reduction approach already in place: machine guns. It’s often said that machine guns are banned in the United States, but that’s not exactly right. More than 700,000 of these fully automatic weapons are in the United States outside of the military, entirely legally. Most are owned by federal, state or local agencies, but perhaps several hundred thousand are in private hands. In a typical year, these registered
machine guns are responsible for approximately zero suicides and zero homicides. So let’s begin with a ray of hope: If we can safely keep 700,000 machine guns in America, we should be able to manage handguns.
Keeping Guns Away From Risky People
In many facets of life, we’re accustomed to screening people to make sure that they are trustworthy. For example, how to vote: 1. Have your Social Security number or driver’s license 2. Print and complete six-question voter registration form 3. Mail or hand deliver 4. Do this at least 30 days before Election Day 5. Go to polls 6. Produce a photo ID 7. Vote
How to adopt a dog: 1. Fill out 64-question application 2. If renting, landlord is contacted 3. In-person meeting with entire family 4. Yard fencing and security assessed 5. Sleepover visit with pet 6. Pay $125 adoption fee 7. Adopt the dog
How to buy a gun in Mississippi: 1. Pass a 13-question background check. 2. Buy a gun
Why should it be easier to pick up military-style weapons than to adopt a Chihuahua? To keep ineligible people from buying firearms, we need universal background checks. (One study found that 22 percent of firearms are obtained without a background check.) But the even bigger problem is that there is no comprehensive system to remove guns from people who become ineligible. If someone is convicted of stalking or becomes subject to a domestic violence protection order, that person should be prevented from owning or having access to firearms —but that rarely happens in fact. California has some of the better policies in this area, and its overall smart gun policies may be one reason — despite the recent shootings — its firearms mortality rate is 38 percent below the nation’s overall. A pillar of harm reduction involving motor vehicles is the requirement of a license to drive a car. So why not a license to buy a gun?
Learning to Live With Guns
Harm reduction will feel frustrating and unsatisfying. It means living with a level of guns, and gun deaths, that is extremely high by global standards. But no far-reaching bans on guns will be passed in this Congress or probably any time soon. Meanwhile, just since 2020, an additional 57 million guns have been sold in the United States. So as a practical matter to save lives, let’s focus
on harm reduction.
That’s how we manage alcohol, which each year kills more than 140,000 Americans (often from liver disease), three times as many as guns. Prohibition was not sustainable politically or culturally, so instead of banning alcohol, we chose to regulate access to it instead. We license who can sell liquor, we tax alcohol, we limit who can buy it to age 21 and up, we regulate labels, and we crack down on those who drink and drive. All this is imperfect, but there’s consensus that harm reduction works better than prohibition or passivity.
Likewise, we don’t ban cars, but we impose safety requirements and carefully regulate who can use them. Since 1921, this has reduced the fatality rate per 100 million miles driven by about 95 percent.
Alcohol, tobacco and cars are obviously different from firearms and don’t have constitutional protections — but one of the most important distinctions is that we’ve approached them as public health problems to make progress on incrementally. Historically, cars killed more people each year than firearms in the United States. But because we’ve worked to reduce vehicle deaths and haven’t seriously attempted to curb gun violence, firearms now kill more people than cars. One advantage of the harm reduction model is that done right, it avoids stigmatizing people as gun nuts and makes firearms less a part of a culture war.
I’m writing this essay on the Oregon farm where I grew up. As I write this, my 12-gauge shotgun is a few feet away, and my .22 rifle is in the next room. (Both are safely stored.) These are the kinds of firearms that Americans traditionally kept at home, for hunting, plinking or target practice, and the risks are manageable. Rifles are known to have been used in 364 homicides in 2019, and shotguns in 200 homicides. Both were less common homicide weapons than knives and other cutting objects (1,476 homicides) or even hands and feet (600 homicides).
In contrast to a traditional hunting weapon, here’s an AR-15-style rifle. The military versions of these weapons were designed for troops so that they can efficiently kill many people in a short time, and they can be equipped with large magazines that are rapidly swapped out. They fire a bullet each time the trigger is depressed. In one respect, the civilian version can be more lethal.
American troops are not normally allowed to fire at the enemy with hollow-point bullets, which cause horrific injuries, because these might violate the laws of war. But any civilian can walk into a gun store and buy hollow-point bullets for an AR-15; several mass shootings have involved hollow-point rounds.
Now here’s what in some sense is the most lethal weapon of all: a 9-millimeter handgun. We should reassure gun owners that we’re not going to come after their deer rifles or bird guns. That makes it politically easier to build a consensus on steps to keep dangerous people from lethal weapons like 9-millimeter handguns. There’s also evidence that gun owners with a military or police background strongly believe in safety training and other requirements for people carrying handguns; any coalition for gun safety needs to work with such moderate gun owners.
No single approach is all that effective. But gun safety experts think that a politically plausible harm reduction model could over time reduce gun mortality by perhaps one-third. That would be more than 15,000 lives saved a year.
So let’s learn lessons, for gun violence is at levels that are unconscionable. Just since I graduated from high school in 1977, more Americans appear to have died from guns (more than 1.5 million), including suicides, homicides and accidents, than perished in all the wars in United States history, going back to the Revolutionary War (about 1.4 million). We can do better, and this is not hopeless. North Carolina is not a liberal state, but it requires a license to buy a handgun. If we avoid overheated rhetoric that antagonizes gun owners, some progress is possible, particularly at the state level.
Gun safety regulation can make a difference. Conservatives often think New York is an example of failed gun policy, but New York State has a firearms death rate less than one-quarter that of gun-friendly states like Alaska, Wyoming, Louisiana and Mississippi. Gun safety works, just not as well as we would like.
Harm reduction isn’t glamorous but is the kind of long slog that reduced auto fatalities and smoking deaths. If gun policy can only become boring, that may help defuse the culture war over guns that for decades has paralyzed America from adopting effective firearms policies.
Tuesday, January 24, 2023
From reading about "awe" to "kindness", I suppose there was nowhere else to go but to "disappointment". The reading for next week has to do with the inevitable disappointments in life, how important they are, how to deal with them, and how living a life of faith can help with disappointments.
This has been an especially rich week with discussions and also articles. Here are two that we are not covering but that I found interesting. The first is from the Episcopal News Service about what the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles is doing about affordable housing - giving 25% of its church property to build it. Get ready for an uplifting read Presiding Bishop leads King Day 'Power of Love' celebration, call for housing justice.The second is our on-going view on what is happening in China. It's a well written opinion piece in the NY Times about the "undeniable claim" that China's economy is sinking. Here is a free link to the article. Opinion: China Population Decline
Giving Disappointments Its Due
Jonathan Tran, Christian Century 1.18.23
Jonathan Tran teaches theological ethics at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He is author of The Vietnam War and Theologies of Memory and Foucault and Theology.
I once applied for a job I was told was mine to lose. The closer I got to getting it, the more I dreamed—looking at homes to buy and schools for kids to attend, even planning good-bye parties. I imagined a new life. When I didn’t get the job, I was crushed.
The disappointment went on for years. I found myself reliving it over and over, telling anyone who would listen. Bitterness set in, and a list of enemies grew — all the people who’d torpedoed my dream. The disappointment changed the way I related to the life I still had, darkening a dream job already in place and overshadowing blessings long ago bestowed. I began to regret my surroundings and resent a life I now felt stuck in. Disappointment did all this. I could not face the disappointment as disappointment.
Not all disappointments are so devastating or so dramatic. Sometimes it’s less the dream job torpedoed and more the slow boil of a career playing out in disappointing ways. You look around and realize the life you’re living isn’t the one you signed up for. Well-laid plans fizzle out. Relationships you banked on careen off course. Opportunities dry up. Life happens.
It’s the relational disappointments that hurt most. Jobs, after all, can be changed—or at least left behind at the end of each workday. And while you can complain about how much your job stinks, you don’t (or shouldn’t) feel such license when talking about people you love. It’s one thing to feel disappointed about the way life turned out; it’s another to lay that disappointment at the feet of any one person.
I think disappointment stems from three inescapable features of human life. We are timebound creatures, experiencing the world through time. As such, we constantly project ourselves into the future—sometimes forgetting both the present right under our noses and the past not far behind. We can’t help ourselves, leaning into a future sometimes a few steps ahead (the delicious dinner we’ve planned) and sometimes quite far-off (a job that’s “ours to lose”).
Time and projection then meet a third reality: finitude. Some imagined futures work out. We enjoy that delicious dinner or get that dream job. Others do not. Many of our projections meet the buzz saw of finite existence, the harsh reality that not every imagined future gets its way. Much of this is a mercy. No world could survive fulfilling all our dreams. But that’s hardly consolation when life sets us up for disappointment.
We might think, Disappointment’s bad, but it ain’t death. But some philosophers argue that death has everything to do with disappointment. After all, what is death’s sting other than the loss of an imagined future? Time, projection, and fini-tude conspire to punch us in the gut, knocking us off
our feet. Some never get up.
Rarely do people stop to give disappointment its due. Instead, life goes on. Someone else got the job instead of you. The world doesn’t stop because your life came to a screeching halt. No one mourns your loss like you do. Instead of acknowledging your disappointment, most people would rather deflect it or explain it away: “You dodged a bullet” or “It wasn’t in the cards” or even “That wasn’t God’s plan.” Our society lacks resources for acknowledging disappointment. We have rituals for mourning death but not for disappointment.
And no one avoids acknowledging our disappointment as much as we ourselves do. It hurts too much. It’s easier to store up enemies and resentment. Instead of acknowledging disappointment, we deny the inescapable features of our lives as humans. We deny humanness in the attempt to live it. Call this our gnosticism, our most intimate heresy.
The things that disappoint comprise a whole litany of life’s failings. Certainly careers and welllaid plans. But also family and friends. Our bodies disappoint us with their aging, ailing, and addling. Justice disappoints those who give their lives to it only to find freedom forever deferred. And who has not been disappointed by church? To be sure, some of this comes from unrealistic expectations of something the New Testament promises will disappoint. Still, the church keeps giving us more reasons for disappointment.
Scripture thematizes the human life in time—with its projections and buzz-saw disappointments—in terms of faith. And it does not hold back on acknowledging disappointment. Adam and Eve’s catastrophic disappointment over the garden. Cain’s murderous disappointment when God rejects his offering. David’s disappointment when kingdom life turns out less than kingdom-like. Judas’s disappointment with Jesus. In each case, God turns out to be our greatest disappointment. Is it more heretical to say this or to deny it?
The Bible reserves its greatest disappointments for scenes involving children, the embodied future. Children carry our hopes, bearing the weight of our expectations, fating us and them to disappointment. Through our kids we imagine the future and lose it. When their lives go awry the earth comes off its axis. I have known people whose disappointments over children—infertility, miscarriage, illness, death—ended their faith. I have known those disappointments myself.
No wonder God’s faithfulness gets laid on the head of a single question: Will God give Sarah and Abraham children, or not? If God does, they will know God does what God promises, is who God claims. Conversely, no children, no God.
Refusing to explain things away, much less lie about the conditions setting us up for disappointment, God’s word acknowledges it. The Spirit hears our disappointments just as the Son bears them, together entreating the Father’s infinite life. Rather than manage expectations by asking less, God risks everything, beckoning us to faith’s end, knowing full well that disappointment looms over the razor’s edge between hope and despair.
This has been an especially rich week with discussions and also articles. Here are two that we are not covering but that I found interesting. The first is from the Episcopal News Service about what the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles is doing about affordable housing - giving 25% of its church property to build it. Get ready for an uplifting read Presiding Bishop leads King Day 'Power of Love' celebration, call for housing justice.The second is our on-going view on what is happening in China. It's a well written opinion piece in the NY Times about the "undeniable claim" that China's economy is sinking. Here is a free link to the article. Opinion: China Population Decline
Giving Disappointments Its Due
Jonathan Tran, Christian Century 1.18.23
Jonathan Tran teaches theological ethics at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He is author of The Vietnam War and Theologies of Memory and Foucault and Theology.
I once applied for a job I was told was mine to lose. The closer I got to getting it, the more I dreamed—looking at homes to buy and schools for kids to attend, even planning good-bye parties. I imagined a new life. When I didn’t get the job, I was crushed.
The disappointment went on for years. I found myself reliving it over and over, telling anyone who would listen. Bitterness set in, and a list of enemies grew — all the people who’d torpedoed my dream. The disappointment changed the way I related to the life I still had, darkening a dream job already in place and overshadowing blessings long ago bestowed. I began to regret my surroundings and resent a life I now felt stuck in. Disappointment did all this. I could not face the disappointment as disappointment.
Not all disappointments are so devastating or so dramatic. Sometimes it’s less the dream job torpedoed and more the slow boil of a career playing out in disappointing ways. You look around and realize the life you’re living isn’t the one you signed up for. Well-laid plans fizzle out. Relationships you banked on careen off course. Opportunities dry up. Life happens.
It’s the relational disappointments that hurt most. Jobs, after all, can be changed—or at least left behind at the end of each workday. And while you can complain about how much your job stinks, you don’t (or shouldn’t) feel such license when talking about people you love. It’s one thing to feel disappointed about the way life turned out; it’s another to lay that disappointment at the feet of any one person.
I think disappointment stems from three inescapable features of human life. We are timebound creatures, experiencing the world through time. As such, we constantly project ourselves into the future—sometimes forgetting both the present right under our noses and the past not far behind. We can’t help ourselves, leaning into a future sometimes a few steps ahead (the delicious dinner we’ve planned) and sometimes quite far-off (a job that’s “ours to lose”).
Time and projection then meet a third reality: finitude. Some imagined futures work out. We enjoy that delicious dinner or get that dream job. Others do not. Many of our projections meet the buzz saw of finite existence, the harsh reality that not every imagined future gets its way. Much of this is a mercy. No world could survive fulfilling all our dreams. But that’s hardly consolation when life sets us up for disappointment.
We might think, Disappointment’s bad, but it ain’t death. But some philosophers argue that death has everything to do with disappointment. After all, what is death’s sting other than the loss of an imagined future? Time, projection, and fini-tude conspire to punch us in the gut, knocking us off
our feet. Some never get up.
Rarely do people stop to give disappointment its due. Instead, life goes on. Someone else got the job instead of you. The world doesn’t stop because your life came to a screeching halt. No one mourns your loss like you do. Instead of acknowledging your disappointment, most people would rather deflect it or explain it away: “You dodged a bullet” or “It wasn’t in the cards” or even “That wasn’t God’s plan.” Our society lacks resources for acknowledging disappointment. We have rituals for mourning death but not for disappointment.
And no one avoids acknowledging our disappointment as much as we ourselves do. It hurts too much. It’s easier to store up enemies and resentment. Instead of acknowledging disappointment, we deny the inescapable features of our lives as humans. We deny humanness in the attempt to live it. Call this our gnosticism, our most intimate heresy.
The things that disappoint comprise a whole litany of life’s failings. Certainly careers and welllaid plans. But also family and friends. Our bodies disappoint us with their aging, ailing, and addling. Justice disappoints those who give their lives to it only to find freedom forever deferred. And who has not been disappointed by church? To be sure, some of this comes from unrealistic expectations of something the New Testament promises will disappoint. Still, the church keeps giving us more reasons for disappointment.
Scripture thematizes the human life in time—with its projections and buzz-saw disappointments—in terms of faith. And it does not hold back on acknowledging disappointment. Adam and Eve’s catastrophic disappointment over the garden. Cain’s murderous disappointment when God rejects his offering. David’s disappointment when kingdom life turns out less than kingdom-like. Judas’s disappointment with Jesus. In each case, God turns out to be our greatest disappointment. Is it more heretical to say this or to deny it?
The Bible reserves its greatest disappointments for scenes involving children, the embodied future. Children carry our hopes, bearing the weight of our expectations, fating us and them to disappointment. Through our kids we imagine the future and lose it. When their lives go awry the earth comes off its axis. I have known people whose disappointments over children—infertility, miscarriage, illness, death—ended their faith. I have known those disappointments myself.
No wonder God’s faithfulness gets laid on the head of a single question: Will God give Sarah and Abraham children, or not? If God does, they will know God does what God promises, is who God claims. Conversely, no children, no God.
Refusing to explain things away, much less lie about the conditions setting us up for disappointment, God’s word acknowledges it. The Spirit hears our disappointments just as the Son bears them, together entreating the Father’s infinite life. Rather than manage expectations by asking less, God risks everything, beckoning us to faith’s end, knowing full well that disappointment looms over the razor’s edge between hope and despair.
Tuesday, January 17, 2023
The discussion topic for this next week involves kindness and how acts of kindness have the potential to change the world we live in.
We will discuss two stories - the first one about a hairdresser who started the Red Chair project in Minneapolis. The second is an adoptive mom who paid for the adoptions for everyone in her area. Both of these two women were helped by someone who inspired them to help others. Below is the reading. Along with it, I will be showing you the clip (below). The first story begins at 2:30 and the second story begins at 10:00.
You Tube Video - The Gift: Kindness Goes Viral
Additionally, we are going to try a Discussion Group lunch.
On Tuesday, at 11:30, we are going to meet up at La Villa Mexican Restaurant,
5610 GMD Suite #5 (near Harry's).
This does not replace either the Tuesday or Wednesday 10 a.m. discussion. We just thought it would be nice to get out and support a local business.
Offering Free Haircuts to Homeless
Steve Hartman, CBS News 12.30.22
A Minneapolis woman became inspired by a life-changing haircut she got when she was younger, and found a way to help others in her community. Katie Stellar said growing up, her mother would cut her hair since she was one of six children. The home haircuts weren't the most stylish. "My mom was awful at it and I have pictures to prove it. But I never really had any desire to do anything with my hair," she said.
That was until Stellar was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease when she was 11 years old, which took a toll on both her body and her hair. She began losing her hair and eyelashes. "I really didn't realize how important it was to me until I was losing it," she said. Her mother, Julie Stellar, then searched for anything that might make her daughter feel just a little bit better. She decided to get her daughter a real haircut with someone who had their license.
For Stellar, the experience was life-changing. She credited the hair stylist for making her feel comfortable and safe throughout the appointment. "What she did for me was she sat me down in this chair and talked to me as a person, not as an illness," Stellar said. The experience lit a fire for Stellar. She herself became a hair stylist, but one with a mission — to make others feel the way she felt that day. She opened a salon, which led to the start of the Red Chair Project.
Stellar said the idea behind the movement came as she was preparing to open her new salon. She always wanted red chairs in her salon and wasn't willing to compromise, but the opening of the salon was delayed, leaving her with a hoard of equipment in her house.
"I remember looking at the chairs and being, like, 'This is kind of a waste,'" she said. "Like, what if I stuck this in my car and went and offered haircuts." Stellar said she wanted to offer haircuts to anyone who asked, as she's seen people in her community of downtown Minneapolis struggle with homelessness. "I think Red Chair Project definitely kind of stemmed from that feeling of wanting to show up for people who might be struggling or being alone," she said.
Stellar would approach anyone she drove past and offer them a haircut. She said while some people politely turned down the offer, others were more than eager to get a fresh look, including a man called Beetlejuice. "The one thing I crave more than anything after being homeless for so long and not having a significant other… it's just that closeness, just human contact," he said.
Throughout Minneapolis, Stellar's Red Chair Project has inspired more stylists with more chairs to give more free haircuts. She said she's happy seeing other people carrying on the work she started.
For some, that touch of kindness can be life-altering, just as it had been for Stellar years earlier. CBS News tracked down the stylist, whose name is Amy White, to bring the two together for the first time since Stellar got her life-changing haircut. White said she doesn't remember doing anything different during Stellar's visit, but remembered that she was special. Stellar believes that what White gave her that day was a gift.
"It's one of those things I can never repay," she said. "I can put it forward. How can I use my life to alleviate someone else's pain, even just for a moment?"
Adoptive Mom Hatches Plan to Help Others
Steve Hartman, CBS News 12.29.22
After a distant cousin wrote a check to pay for the adoption of a child in Iowa, a woman took it upon herself to help other families seeking to make their family permanent on paper.
Brittany Berrie began watching her adopted daughter, Gracie, when she was just a baby for a relative in a troubled relationship. "When they asked me to watch her for the first time I said, 'absolutely,'" Berrie said. She was only 20 years old when she started caring for infant Gracie.
Soon, the mother began leaving her in Berrie's care for longer periods of time. "It was days at a time and then weeks at a time and then months at a time. And then by the time she was about 7 months old, it was, 'OK, I'm raising her,'" Berrie said. When Gracie was 4 years old, the court granted Berrie legal guardianship. But as time passed, both Berrie and Gracie wanted more. "Because she was my baby," Berrie said of why she sought to adopt Gracie. "I
think that even though I didn't birth her, she still grew in my heart… maybe not in my belly, but she was my baby."
The only thing stopping them was the cost. The process of adopting a child can typically cost in the tens of thousands of dollars, which made it impossible for Berrie. That was until she ran into a distant cousin, Casie Baddome, at a wedding. "I couldn't believe that was the only thing that was keeping them from being able to adopt. I just said, 'Well, I think I can help with that,'" Baddome said. "If that's all I needed to do was, you know, help write a check, I felt like that was the least that I could do because that was security for the whole family and for Gracie." Last year, thanks to Baddome's gift, 11-year-old Gracie's adoption was finalized.
"I did not know how to thank her," Berrie said of Baddome's donation. "I spent months trying to write something down or figure out, do I get her something? Like there's no 'thank you' that expresses what she did."
Berrie figured out a way to pass on the blessing. With an abundance of donations, she turned her garage into the Adopted Closet thrift store and hatched a "secret plan" to use proceeds from the store to pay the kindness forward. "I want to pay for the adoptions on National Adoption Day in Scott County, Iowa. All of the remaining balances," Berrie said. That's exactly what she did —pay all the balances on all adoptions in the county.
"People don't understand how expensive adoption can be," said Jodi Siebler, an adopted child's parent. "We had to wipe out our savings to pay for everything related to this." The one gift of kindness that made Berrie's family whole did the same for nine other families.
Gracie said she couldn't be prouder of her mother. "It's great knowing that other people can feel this happiness and feel safe and have all those mothers out there know that their children are their children," she said.
We will discuss two stories - the first one about a hairdresser who started the Red Chair project in Minneapolis. The second is an adoptive mom who paid for the adoptions for everyone in her area. Both of these two women were helped by someone who inspired them to help others. Below is the reading. Along with it, I will be showing you the clip (below). The first story begins at 2:30 and the second story begins at 10:00.
You Tube Video - The Gift: Kindness Goes Viral
Additionally, we are going to try a Discussion Group lunch.
On Tuesday, at 11:30, we are going to meet up at La Villa Mexican Restaurant,
5610 GMD Suite #5 (near Harry's).
This does not replace either the Tuesday or Wednesday 10 a.m. discussion. We just thought it would be nice to get out and support a local business.
Offering Free Haircuts to Homeless
Steve Hartman, CBS News 12.30.22
A Minneapolis woman became inspired by a life-changing haircut she got when she was younger, and found a way to help others in her community. Katie Stellar said growing up, her mother would cut her hair since she was one of six children. The home haircuts weren't the most stylish. "My mom was awful at it and I have pictures to prove it. But I never really had any desire to do anything with my hair," she said.
That was until Stellar was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease when she was 11 years old, which took a toll on both her body and her hair. She began losing her hair and eyelashes. "I really didn't realize how important it was to me until I was losing it," she said. Her mother, Julie Stellar, then searched for anything that might make her daughter feel just a little bit better. She decided to get her daughter a real haircut with someone who had their license.
For Stellar, the experience was life-changing. She credited the hair stylist for making her feel comfortable and safe throughout the appointment. "What she did for me was she sat me down in this chair and talked to me as a person, not as an illness," Stellar said. The experience lit a fire for Stellar. She herself became a hair stylist, but one with a mission — to make others feel the way she felt that day. She opened a salon, which led to the start of the Red Chair Project.
Stellar said the idea behind the movement came as she was preparing to open her new salon. She always wanted red chairs in her salon and wasn't willing to compromise, but the opening of the salon was delayed, leaving her with a hoard of equipment in her house.
"I remember looking at the chairs and being, like, 'This is kind of a waste,'" she said. "Like, what if I stuck this in my car and went and offered haircuts." Stellar said she wanted to offer haircuts to anyone who asked, as she's seen people in her community of downtown Minneapolis struggle with homelessness. "I think Red Chair Project definitely kind of stemmed from that feeling of wanting to show up for people who might be struggling or being alone," she said.
Stellar would approach anyone she drove past and offer them a haircut. She said while some people politely turned down the offer, others were more than eager to get a fresh look, including a man called Beetlejuice. "The one thing I crave more than anything after being homeless for so long and not having a significant other… it's just that closeness, just human contact," he said.
Throughout Minneapolis, Stellar's Red Chair Project has inspired more stylists with more chairs to give more free haircuts. She said she's happy seeing other people carrying on the work she started.
For some, that touch of kindness can be life-altering, just as it had been for Stellar years earlier. CBS News tracked down the stylist, whose name is Amy White, to bring the two together for the first time since Stellar got her life-changing haircut. White said she doesn't remember doing anything different during Stellar's visit, but remembered that she was special. Stellar believes that what White gave her that day was a gift.
"It's one of those things I can never repay," she said. "I can put it forward. How can I use my life to alleviate someone else's pain, even just for a moment?"
Adoptive Mom Hatches Plan to Help Others
Steve Hartman, CBS News 12.29.22
After a distant cousin wrote a check to pay for the adoption of a child in Iowa, a woman took it upon herself to help other families seeking to make their family permanent on paper.
Brittany Berrie began watching her adopted daughter, Gracie, when she was just a baby for a relative in a troubled relationship. "When they asked me to watch her for the first time I said, 'absolutely,'" Berrie said. She was only 20 years old when she started caring for infant Gracie.
Soon, the mother began leaving her in Berrie's care for longer periods of time. "It was days at a time and then weeks at a time and then months at a time. And then by the time she was about 7 months old, it was, 'OK, I'm raising her,'" Berrie said. When Gracie was 4 years old, the court granted Berrie legal guardianship. But as time passed, both Berrie and Gracie wanted more. "Because she was my baby," Berrie said of why she sought to adopt Gracie. "I
think that even though I didn't birth her, she still grew in my heart… maybe not in my belly, but she was my baby."
The only thing stopping them was the cost. The process of adopting a child can typically cost in the tens of thousands of dollars, which made it impossible for Berrie. That was until she ran into a distant cousin, Casie Baddome, at a wedding. "I couldn't believe that was the only thing that was keeping them from being able to adopt. I just said, 'Well, I think I can help with that,'" Baddome said. "If that's all I needed to do was, you know, help write a check, I felt like that was the least that I could do because that was security for the whole family and for Gracie." Last year, thanks to Baddome's gift, 11-year-old Gracie's adoption was finalized.
"I did not know how to thank her," Berrie said of Baddome's donation. "I spent months trying to write something down or figure out, do I get her something? Like there's no 'thank you' that expresses what she did."
Berrie figured out a way to pass on the blessing. With an abundance of donations, she turned her garage into the Adopted Closet thrift store and hatched a "secret plan" to use proceeds from the store to pay the kindness forward. "I want to pay for the adoptions on National Adoption Day in Scott County, Iowa. All of the remaining balances," Berrie said. That's exactly what she did —pay all the balances on all adoptions in the county.
"People don't understand how expensive adoption can be," said Jodi Siebler, an adopted child's parent. "We had to wipe out our savings to pay for everything related to this." The one gift of kindness that made Berrie's family whole did the same for nine other families.
Gracie said she couldn't be prouder of her mother. "It's great knowing that other people can feel this happiness and feel safe and have all those mothers out there know that their children are their children," she said.
Tuesday, January 10, 2023
All the earth honors the Lord;
all the earth’s inhabitants stand in awe of him. Psalm 33:8
Used 23 times in the psalms, the word "awe" and "awesome" convey... an awesome experience of God. Did you know that there are healthful benefits of feeling in awe? Published in a secular publication, the author and professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, believes that a sense of awe is good for us and can be found in some unlikely places. Often I have a sense of awe in our discussion groups.
The Quiet Profundity of Everyday Awe
Dacher Keltner, The Atlantic 1.5.23
Dacher Keltner is the founding director of the Greater Good Science Center and a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life.
What gives you a sense of awe? That word, awe — the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world — is often associated with the extraordinary. You might imagine standing next to a 350-foot-tall tree or on a wide-open plain with a storm approaching, or hearing an electric guitar fill the space of an arena, or holding the tiny finger of a newborn baby. Awe blows us away: It reminds us that there are forces bigger than ourselves, and it reveals that our current knowledge is not up to the task of making sense of what we have encountered.
But you don’t need remarkable circumstances to encounter awe. When my colleagues and I asked research participants to track experiences of awe in a daily diary, we found, to our surprise, that people felt it a bit more than two times a week on average. And they found it in the ordinary: a friend’s generosity, a tree’s shadow on a sidewalk, a song that transported them back to a first love.
We need that everyday awe, even when it’s discovered in the humblest places. A survey of relevant studies suggests that a brief dose of awe can reduce stress, decrease inflammation, and benefit the cardiovascular system. Luckily, we don’t need to wait until we stumble upon it; we can seek it out. Awe is all around us. We just need to know where to look for it.
In our daily-diary studies, one source of awe was by far the most common: other people. Regular acts of courage—bystanders defusing fights, subordinates standing up to abusive power holders—inspired awe. So did the simple kindness of others: seeing someone give money to a broke friend or assist a stranger on the street. But you don’t need a serendipitous encounter with a Good Samaritan to experience awe. We often find inspiring stories in literature, poetry, film, art, and the news. Reading about moral exemplars, say, protesting racism or protecting the environment was a pervasive source of awe for our participants.
Another common source of awe is just … taking a walk. In her cultural history of walking, Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit theorized that walks can produce an awe-like form of consciousness in which we extend the self into the environment. We can make connections, for example, between our own thoughts and the other human beings we see moving through their day, or patterns in nature—the movements of wind through trees or the shifting clouds in the sky.
Along with Virginia Sturm, a UC San Francisco neuroscientist, I studied the effects of an “awe walk.” One group of subjects took a weekly walk for eight weeks; the other group did the same but with some instructions: Tap into your childlike sense of wonder, imagining you’re seeing everything for the first time. Take a moment during each walk to notice the vastness of things—when looking at a panoramic view, for example, or at the detail of a flower. And go somewhere new, or try to recognize new features of the same old place. All of the participants reported on their happiness, anxiety, and depression and took selfies during their walks.
We found that the awe-walkers felt more awe with each passing week. You might have thought that their capacity for awe would start to decrease: This is known as the law of hedonic adaptation, that certain pleasures or accomplishments—a new job, a bigger apartment—start to lose some of their thrill over time. But the more we practice awe, it seems, the richer it gets.
We also found evidence of Solnit’s idea that the self can extend into the environment. In the awe-walk condition, people’s selfies increasingly included less of the self. Over time, the subjects drifted off to the side, showing more of the outside environment—a street corner in San Francisco, the trees, the rocks around the Pacific Ocean. Over the course of our study, awe-walkers reported feeling less daily distress and more prosocial emotions such as compassion and amusement.
The arts, too, can make us feel connected to something boundless and beyond words. In one diary study, many people wrote that music brought them moments of awe and stirred them to consider their place in the great scheme of life. When we listen to music that moves us, dopaminergic pathways—circuitry in the brain associated with reward and pleasure—are activated, which open the mind to wonder and exploration. In this bodily state of musical awe, we often get the chills—signs, studies have revealed, that we are collectively engaged in making sense of the unknown.
Visual art activates the same dopamine network in the brain—and can have the same transcendent effect. When exposed to paintings, research has found, people demonstrate greater creativity. One study, which involved more than 30,000 participants in the United Kingdom, found that the more people practiced or viewed art, the more those individuals donated money and volunteered two years later.
Nearly three years into a pandemic that’s made many of us feel powerless and small, seeking out the immense and mysterious might not seem appealing. But often, engaging with what’s overwhelming can put things in perspective. Staring up at a starry sky; looking at a sculpture that makes you shudder; listening to a medley of instruments joining into one complex, spine-tingling melody—those experiences remind us that we’re part of something that will exist long after us. We are well served by opening ourselves to awe wherever we can find it, even if only for a moment or two.
all the earth’s inhabitants stand in awe of him. Psalm 33:8
Used 23 times in the psalms, the word "awe" and "awesome" convey... an awesome experience of God. Did you know that there are healthful benefits of feeling in awe? Published in a secular publication, the author and professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, believes that a sense of awe is good for us and can be found in some unlikely places. Often I have a sense of awe in our discussion groups.
The Quiet Profundity of Everyday Awe
Dacher Keltner, The Atlantic 1.5.23
Dacher Keltner is the founding director of the Greater Good Science Center and a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life.
What gives you a sense of awe? That word, awe — the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world — is often associated with the extraordinary. You might imagine standing next to a 350-foot-tall tree or on a wide-open plain with a storm approaching, or hearing an electric guitar fill the space of an arena, or holding the tiny finger of a newborn baby. Awe blows us away: It reminds us that there are forces bigger than ourselves, and it reveals that our current knowledge is not up to the task of making sense of what we have encountered.
But you don’t need remarkable circumstances to encounter awe. When my colleagues and I asked research participants to track experiences of awe in a daily diary, we found, to our surprise, that people felt it a bit more than two times a week on average. And they found it in the ordinary: a friend’s generosity, a tree’s shadow on a sidewalk, a song that transported them back to a first love.
We need that everyday awe, even when it’s discovered in the humblest places. A survey of relevant studies suggests that a brief dose of awe can reduce stress, decrease inflammation, and benefit the cardiovascular system. Luckily, we don’t need to wait until we stumble upon it; we can seek it out. Awe is all around us. We just need to know where to look for it.
In our daily-diary studies, one source of awe was by far the most common: other people. Regular acts of courage—bystanders defusing fights, subordinates standing up to abusive power holders—inspired awe. So did the simple kindness of others: seeing someone give money to a broke friend or assist a stranger on the street. But you don’t need a serendipitous encounter with a Good Samaritan to experience awe. We often find inspiring stories in literature, poetry, film, art, and the news. Reading about moral exemplars, say, protesting racism or protecting the environment was a pervasive source of awe for our participants.
Another common source of awe is just … taking a walk. In her cultural history of walking, Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit theorized that walks can produce an awe-like form of consciousness in which we extend the self into the environment. We can make connections, for example, between our own thoughts and the other human beings we see moving through their day, or patterns in nature—the movements of wind through trees or the shifting clouds in the sky.
Along with Virginia Sturm, a UC San Francisco neuroscientist, I studied the effects of an “awe walk.” One group of subjects took a weekly walk for eight weeks; the other group did the same but with some instructions: Tap into your childlike sense of wonder, imagining you’re seeing everything for the first time. Take a moment during each walk to notice the vastness of things—when looking at a panoramic view, for example, or at the detail of a flower. And go somewhere new, or try to recognize new features of the same old place. All of the participants reported on their happiness, anxiety, and depression and took selfies during their walks.
We found that the awe-walkers felt more awe with each passing week. You might have thought that their capacity for awe would start to decrease: This is known as the law of hedonic adaptation, that certain pleasures or accomplishments—a new job, a bigger apartment—start to lose some of their thrill over time. But the more we practice awe, it seems, the richer it gets.
We also found evidence of Solnit’s idea that the self can extend into the environment. In the awe-walk condition, people’s selfies increasingly included less of the self. Over time, the subjects drifted off to the side, showing more of the outside environment—a street corner in San Francisco, the trees, the rocks around the Pacific Ocean. Over the course of our study, awe-walkers reported feeling less daily distress and more prosocial emotions such as compassion and amusement.
The arts, too, can make us feel connected to something boundless and beyond words. In one diary study, many people wrote that music brought them moments of awe and stirred them to consider their place in the great scheme of life. When we listen to music that moves us, dopaminergic pathways—circuitry in the brain associated with reward and pleasure—are activated, which open the mind to wonder and exploration. In this bodily state of musical awe, we often get the chills—signs, studies have revealed, that we are collectively engaged in making sense of the unknown.
Visual art activates the same dopamine network in the brain—and can have the same transcendent effect. When exposed to paintings, research has found, people demonstrate greater creativity. One study, which involved more than 30,000 participants in the United Kingdom, found that the more people practiced or viewed art, the more those individuals donated money and volunteered two years later.
Nearly three years into a pandemic that’s made many of us feel powerless and small, seeking out the immense and mysterious might not seem appealing. But often, engaging with what’s overwhelming can put things in perspective. Staring up at a starry sky; looking at a sculpture that makes you shudder; listening to a medley of instruments joining into one complex, spine-tingling melody—those experiences remind us that we’re part of something that will exist long after us. We are well served by opening ourselves to awe wherever we can find it, even if only for a moment or two.
Tuesday, January 3, 2023
Merry Christmas! I hope you are enjoying the 12-day season of Christmas. And, I hope you have a Happy New Year and that I'll see you on Sunday to celebrate.
I also hope to see you at our next discussion group gathering which will be on Tuesday and Wednesday, January 3 and 4, next week. The reading is from the Bradenton Herald about a coalition of churches that is making a difference. I'd like to know what you think about it.
STREAM – A Coalition of Churches Making a Difference
Ryan Callihan, Bradenton Herald 12.29.22
With key commitments from local leaders, it’s been a victorious year for a religious group that came together with the goal of resolving systemic issues in Manatee County.
Stronger Together Reaching Equality Across Manatee (STREAM) made its voice known in 2022, rallying several times over the course of the year to push for more affordable housing and better criminal justice policies. The group, which is made up of more than a dozen local churches and their congregations, has brought hundreds of residents together with a common goal.
“You either have money or you have people power. We don’t have lots of money. We’re little churches. We organize people to get justice in the community,” said Glen Graczyk, a pastor at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Palmetto and a co-chair of STREAM.
The coalition’s origin dates back to 2019 when local pastors first began kicking the idea around. STREAM was formed with minimal assistance from the Direct Action & Research Training (DART) Center, a national organization that connects clergy to tackle local issues. However, STREAM’s priorities are a direct result of concerns from each of its 15 church congregations. After a slight delay caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the organization hosted
community meetings throughout 2021 to hear from residents about the issues most important to them. The priority was clear: Churchgoers are struggling to afford places to live and they’re worried about the lasting impact caused by misdemeanor crimes on an arrest record.
Throughout 2022, STREAM pushed for — and won — some of the policy changes that alleviate the systemic issues worrying its members. In the process, the group has caught the attention of Manatee County’s top politicians. “I think they’ll get stuff done,” Manatee County Commissioner George Kruse said earlier this year after attending a STREAM event. “They’ll be a force to be reckoned with.”
WHAT HAS STREAM ACCOMPLISHED?
STREAM hosted a Nehemiah Action Assembly in April to announce ambitious goals. The event, attended by dignitaries including Manatee County commissioners and local law enforcement officials, attracted more than 600 people. Church leaders declared the need for 500 new affordable housing units every year and a pre-arrest diversion program that would keep minor crimes off an arrest record. STREAM applauded local politicians who were willing to pursue those goals, but they also plan to hold them accountable. “At our Nehemiah Action in 2022, STREAM won commitments from our sheriff and state attorney to create a new civil citation program in Manatee to avoid unnecessary arrests for first-time misdemeanors,” wrote in a website update. “Our current work is following up to ensure they follow through on their commitments.”
Speaking with the Bradenton Herald, Pastor Joreatha Capers said it’s difficult to overstate just how powerful it felt to have everyday residents come together to push for change. “When I looked at the people gathered, I saw the kingdom of God on earth. We are concerned about what’s hurting our brothers and sisters,” Capers recalled. “It was a great beginning step. I was torn between wanting to cry and wanting to shout.”
In the months since the Nehemiah Action event, Manatee County officials have announced a policy change that prioritizes affordable housing for lower-income families, and Manatee County Sheriff Rick Wells said he is in the process of training deputies on a pre-arrest diversion program.
‘PERSISTENT’ LEADER BROUGHT STREAM TOGETHER
Capers, a longtime activist in the Bradenton area, is also credited with much of the legwork that brought 15 different churches under one umbrella. Several pastors interviewed by the Bradenton Herald recounted the early stages of STREAM’s formation. Each described Capers as an inspiring, persistent force who they were happy to rally around.
“I would give her the credit,” said Rev. Edward Barthell, of St. Stephen African Methodist Episcopal Church in Bradenton. “She looked right in your eyes, smiling and being so sweet, but she presented the idea with persistence. That’s what you have to have to get any group together.”
“It is very obvious that her soul is inspired to help people from the grassroots, so it’s catchy. It’s an enthusiasm for justice that just does not have an end,” added Pastor Bobbie Blackburn, of Trinity Lutheran Church in Bradenton. “She is persistent, not in an annoying way, but in a ‘I’m not going to give up,’ way. She’s got the fire. That’s all I can say.”
Together with Rev. Lawrence Livingston, founder of Eternity Temple First Born Church in Palmetto, Capers brought clergy leaders together to demand a joint justice ministry. In a matter of months, STREAM had created a diverse coalition of churches from Anna Maria Island to Palmetto to Lakewood Ranch.
WHAT WILL STREAM DO IN 2023?
Earlier this month, the group hosted a Community Action Assembly to determine which issues will be addressed in the new year. More than 100 people at the meeting voted to continue demanding more affordable housing options and the official start of Manatee County’s pre-arrest diversion program, according to STREAM’s website. State Attorney Ed Brodsky has already implemented similar criminal justice reforms in Sarasota County. “We’ll continue to hold their feet to the fire,” Blackburn said.
Once those goals are accomplished, STREAM will return to the drawing board to figure out which issues to tackle next. Based on previous conversations with churchgoers, leaders say pushing for more mental health resources could be a future initiative.
“While some would say Jesus has a proclivity for the poor, I think it’s more than that,” Blackburn continued. “When we follow him, we also face our hearts to those in need, and STREAM is an excellent vehicle for making that happen.”
Visit www.StreamManatee.org for more information about the organization and how to get involved.
I also hope to see you at our next discussion group gathering which will be on Tuesday and Wednesday, January 3 and 4, next week. The reading is from the Bradenton Herald about a coalition of churches that is making a difference. I'd like to know what you think about it.
STREAM – A Coalition of Churches Making a Difference
Ryan Callihan, Bradenton Herald 12.29.22
With key commitments from local leaders, it’s been a victorious year for a religious group that came together with the goal of resolving systemic issues in Manatee County.
Stronger Together Reaching Equality Across Manatee (STREAM) made its voice known in 2022, rallying several times over the course of the year to push for more affordable housing and better criminal justice policies. The group, which is made up of more than a dozen local churches and their congregations, has brought hundreds of residents together with a common goal.
“You either have money or you have people power. We don’t have lots of money. We’re little churches. We organize people to get justice in the community,” said Glen Graczyk, a pastor at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Palmetto and a co-chair of STREAM.
The coalition’s origin dates back to 2019 when local pastors first began kicking the idea around. STREAM was formed with minimal assistance from the Direct Action & Research Training (DART) Center, a national organization that connects clergy to tackle local issues. However, STREAM’s priorities are a direct result of concerns from each of its 15 church congregations. After a slight delay caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the organization hosted
community meetings throughout 2021 to hear from residents about the issues most important to them. The priority was clear: Churchgoers are struggling to afford places to live and they’re worried about the lasting impact caused by misdemeanor crimes on an arrest record.
Throughout 2022, STREAM pushed for — and won — some of the policy changes that alleviate the systemic issues worrying its members. In the process, the group has caught the attention of Manatee County’s top politicians. “I think they’ll get stuff done,” Manatee County Commissioner George Kruse said earlier this year after attending a STREAM event. “They’ll be a force to be reckoned with.”
WHAT HAS STREAM ACCOMPLISHED?
STREAM hosted a Nehemiah Action Assembly in April to announce ambitious goals. The event, attended by dignitaries including Manatee County commissioners and local law enforcement officials, attracted more than 600 people. Church leaders declared the need for 500 new affordable housing units every year and a pre-arrest diversion program that would keep minor crimes off an arrest record. STREAM applauded local politicians who were willing to pursue those goals, but they also plan to hold them accountable. “At our Nehemiah Action in 2022, STREAM won commitments from our sheriff and state attorney to create a new civil citation program in Manatee to avoid unnecessary arrests for first-time misdemeanors,” wrote in a website update. “Our current work is following up to ensure they follow through on their commitments.”
Speaking with the Bradenton Herald, Pastor Joreatha Capers said it’s difficult to overstate just how powerful it felt to have everyday residents come together to push for change. “When I looked at the people gathered, I saw the kingdom of God on earth. We are concerned about what’s hurting our brothers and sisters,” Capers recalled. “It was a great beginning step. I was torn between wanting to cry and wanting to shout.”
In the months since the Nehemiah Action event, Manatee County officials have announced a policy change that prioritizes affordable housing for lower-income families, and Manatee County Sheriff Rick Wells said he is in the process of training deputies on a pre-arrest diversion program.
‘PERSISTENT’ LEADER BROUGHT STREAM TOGETHER
Capers, a longtime activist in the Bradenton area, is also credited with much of the legwork that brought 15 different churches under one umbrella. Several pastors interviewed by the Bradenton Herald recounted the early stages of STREAM’s formation. Each described Capers as an inspiring, persistent force who they were happy to rally around.
“I would give her the credit,” said Rev. Edward Barthell, of St. Stephen African Methodist Episcopal Church in Bradenton. “She looked right in your eyes, smiling and being so sweet, but she presented the idea with persistence. That’s what you have to have to get any group together.”
“It is very obvious that her soul is inspired to help people from the grassroots, so it’s catchy. It’s an enthusiasm for justice that just does not have an end,” added Pastor Bobbie Blackburn, of Trinity Lutheran Church in Bradenton. “She is persistent, not in an annoying way, but in a ‘I’m not going to give up,’ way. She’s got the fire. That’s all I can say.”
Together with Rev. Lawrence Livingston, founder of Eternity Temple First Born Church in Palmetto, Capers brought clergy leaders together to demand a joint justice ministry. In a matter of months, STREAM had created a diverse coalition of churches from Anna Maria Island to Palmetto to Lakewood Ranch.
WHAT WILL STREAM DO IN 2023?
Earlier this month, the group hosted a Community Action Assembly to determine which issues will be addressed in the new year. More than 100 people at the meeting voted to continue demanding more affordable housing options and the official start of Manatee County’s pre-arrest diversion program, according to STREAM’s website. State Attorney Ed Brodsky has already implemented similar criminal justice reforms in Sarasota County. “We’ll continue to hold their feet to the fire,” Blackburn said.
Once those goals are accomplished, STREAM will return to the drawing board to figure out which issues to tackle next. Based on previous conversations with churchgoers, leaders say pushing for more mental health resources could be a future initiative.
“While some would say Jesus has a proclivity for the poor, I think it’s more than that,” Blackburn continued. “When we follow him, we also face our hearts to those in need, and STREAM is an excellent vehicle for making that happen.”
Visit www.StreamManatee.org for more information about the organization and how to get involved.
Tuesday, December 20
This is our last Discussion Group of 2022. I think it is fitting that we discuss the Christmas season. There are two, one-page articles for next week. The first one is the perspective of John the Baptizer who paved the way for Jesus. The author challenges the popular Christmas hymn that suggests the baby Jesus did not cry. The article is tiled, The Crying Messiah. The second article, Joseph's Decision, is viewing Jesus' birth through Joseph's eye and what the law, in his day, would have allowed - to have Mary killed for being pregnant. This, plus everything else associated with Christmas, will be on the table to discuss.
The Crying Messiah
Montague Williams, Christian Century 12.2.22
Montague Williams is professor of church, culture, and society at Point Loma Nazarene University and author of Church in Color.
Soon we will celebrate the arrival of the Christ child. The popular Christmas carol suggests he makes no cries while away and awake in a manger.
The cattle are lowing; The Baby awakes; But little Lord Jesus; No crying He makes
I imagine the writer was focusing on Jesus’ full divinity and was building upon clichés of what it means to be “the perfect child.” But let’s be honest (and theologically sound). Jesus is also fully human, and crying is a part of human life. In fact, it is a good thing to hear babies crying. It gives us a clue that they need something. A vulnerable crying baby in need — that’s the Messiah we are waiting for.
Thinking about Jesus’ arrival as a crying baby becomes even more surprising when considering the words of John the Baptist, as he seeks to prepare people for the arrival of the Messiah. In the Gospel passage in Advent, John warns that Jesus is coming to clear the threshing floor in a whirl of righteous violence. Sometimes a baby’s piercing scream can be quite violent on an eardrum, but that’s a bit different from what John is talking about. He is warning of a Messiah who is coming to take a public place of authority, whip the people of God into shape, and weed out anyone who is not on board.
Even as John rightly points people to Jesus and the kingdom of heaven, he seems to have some misguided expectations about how Jesus will establish authority and live in the world.
Ultimately, John is thinking about the Messiah arriving as an adult, not a baby. And at this point in Matthew’s narrative, he has not encountered any challenge to his assumptions about how the Messiah will bring about righteousness and justice.
However, we present-day readers get to prepare for the Messiah’s arrival with the awareness of Matthew’s whole Gospel narrative. We know that Jesus teaches us to pray in ways that trade violence for forgiveness. We know that as much as Jesus is concerned with living rightly, he embodies a compassionate and wide invitation. Even more, we know that the Messiah arrives into this world in a vulnerable way that reveals insight about how God often works in the world.
So, while it is important to pay attention to what John is saying at the Jordan River there in the wilderness, let’s place it alongside what we know about Jesus. For when the Messiah arrives, the first things he will do is cry and reach out to be held.
Joseph’s Decision
Christine Chakoian, Christian Century 12.12.22
Christine Chakoian is pastor of Westwood Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles.
It is amazing how fast a person’s role, authority, and identity can be upended. In LA there is no shortage of entertainment royalty appearing for the Emmy, Grammy, or Academy Awards. And after each awards show there are myriad A-list parties. Who is recognized and welcomed in speaks volumes about their status. These stories came to mind as I read Matthew’s account of Jesus’ birth. The Gospel opens by certifying the identity of “Jesus, the Messiah, son of David, son of Abraham.” Then it spells out 42 generations of fathers. Yet one person’s choice could erase it all: Joseph’s.
Mary is engaged to Joseph. When she turns out to be pregnant—and not by him—it is a colossal disgrace to him and to his family. He, after all, is among the offspring of Abraham, of the house and lineage of King David.
He has a massive decision to make. He would have every justification to reject Mary in shame. And what a shaming it would be. The entire village would know she was pregnant out of wedlock. She would be returned to her father’s household—if he would take her back—and never be able to have a new life. She could even be executed (see Deut. 22:13–20).
Instead, because Joseph is a righteous man, he chooses the most generous path that the law allows: not to shame Mary publicly but to send her home quietly, not to have her killed but to let her and her child live.
But even this very high bar of righteousness is not enough. Jesus would still have carried the mark of humiliation as Mary’s illegitimate child—instead of being known as the offspring of Abraham and David. And so God intervenes. An angel appears to Joseph in a dream, appealing to him as “son of David” and then revealing that this child is of an even greater heritage.
Righteous man that he is, Joseph chooses to open his heart to the angel. He chooses not to be afraid and not to prioritize his own identity, all the bona fides as a child of Abraham and David. Instead, Joseph does as he is called to do: to take Mary as his wife and to name this child Jesus, which means “he saves.” Joseph chooses to recognize this child’s true identity.
Which gets us back to the beginning. If it is easy for us to dismiss the identity of famous people, how on earth do we recognize the sacred identity of the vulnerable, the invisible, even the disgraced? Real righteousness urges us to see every person as a child of God—and to welcome them into our hearts and homes.
It isn’t easy. It brings to mind a story Kathleen Norris tells in Dakota. An older monk tells a younger monk, “I have finally learned to accept people as they are. Whatever they are in the world, a prostitute, a prime minister, it is all the same to me. But sometimes I see a stranger coming up the road and I say, ‘Oh, Jesus Christ, is it you again?’”
The birth of Jesus was not just one and done. He is still God with us. And he keeps appearing to us over and over again, even if we do not know it.
The Crying Messiah
Montague Williams, Christian Century 12.2.22
Montague Williams is professor of church, culture, and society at Point Loma Nazarene University and author of Church in Color.
Soon we will celebrate the arrival of the Christ child. The popular Christmas carol suggests he makes no cries while away and awake in a manger.
The cattle are lowing; The Baby awakes; But little Lord Jesus; No crying He makes
I imagine the writer was focusing on Jesus’ full divinity and was building upon clichés of what it means to be “the perfect child.” But let’s be honest (and theologically sound). Jesus is also fully human, and crying is a part of human life. In fact, it is a good thing to hear babies crying. It gives us a clue that they need something. A vulnerable crying baby in need — that’s the Messiah we are waiting for.
Thinking about Jesus’ arrival as a crying baby becomes even more surprising when considering the words of John the Baptist, as he seeks to prepare people for the arrival of the Messiah. In the Gospel passage in Advent, John warns that Jesus is coming to clear the threshing floor in a whirl of righteous violence. Sometimes a baby’s piercing scream can be quite violent on an eardrum, but that’s a bit different from what John is talking about. He is warning of a Messiah who is coming to take a public place of authority, whip the people of God into shape, and weed out anyone who is not on board.
Even as John rightly points people to Jesus and the kingdom of heaven, he seems to have some misguided expectations about how Jesus will establish authority and live in the world.
Ultimately, John is thinking about the Messiah arriving as an adult, not a baby. And at this point in Matthew’s narrative, he has not encountered any challenge to his assumptions about how the Messiah will bring about righteousness and justice.
However, we present-day readers get to prepare for the Messiah’s arrival with the awareness of Matthew’s whole Gospel narrative. We know that Jesus teaches us to pray in ways that trade violence for forgiveness. We know that as much as Jesus is concerned with living rightly, he embodies a compassionate and wide invitation. Even more, we know that the Messiah arrives into this world in a vulnerable way that reveals insight about how God often works in the world.
So, while it is important to pay attention to what John is saying at the Jordan River there in the wilderness, let’s place it alongside what we know about Jesus. For when the Messiah arrives, the first things he will do is cry and reach out to be held.
Joseph’s Decision
Christine Chakoian, Christian Century 12.12.22
Christine Chakoian is pastor of Westwood Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles.
It is amazing how fast a person’s role, authority, and identity can be upended. In LA there is no shortage of entertainment royalty appearing for the Emmy, Grammy, or Academy Awards. And after each awards show there are myriad A-list parties. Who is recognized and welcomed in speaks volumes about their status. These stories came to mind as I read Matthew’s account of Jesus’ birth. The Gospel opens by certifying the identity of “Jesus, the Messiah, son of David, son of Abraham.” Then it spells out 42 generations of fathers. Yet one person’s choice could erase it all: Joseph’s.
Mary is engaged to Joseph. When she turns out to be pregnant—and not by him—it is a colossal disgrace to him and to his family. He, after all, is among the offspring of Abraham, of the house and lineage of King David.
He has a massive decision to make. He would have every justification to reject Mary in shame. And what a shaming it would be. The entire village would know she was pregnant out of wedlock. She would be returned to her father’s household—if he would take her back—and never be able to have a new life. She could even be executed (see Deut. 22:13–20).
Instead, because Joseph is a righteous man, he chooses the most generous path that the law allows: not to shame Mary publicly but to send her home quietly, not to have her killed but to let her and her child live.
But even this very high bar of righteousness is not enough. Jesus would still have carried the mark of humiliation as Mary’s illegitimate child—instead of being known as the offspring of Abraham and David. And so God intervenes. An angel appears to Joseph in a dream, appealing to him as “son of David” and then revealing that this child is of an even greater heritage.
Righteous man that he is, Joseph chooses to open his heart to the angel. He chooses not to be afraid and not to prioritize his own identity, all the bona fides as a child of Abraham and David. Instead, Joseph does as he is called to do: to take Mary as his wife and to name this child Jesus, which means “he saves.” Joseph chooses to recognize this child’s true identity.
Which gets us back to the beginning. If it is easy for us to dismiss the identity of famous people, how on earth do we recognize the sacred identity of the vulnerable, the invisible, even the disgraced? Real righteousness urges us to see every person as a child of God—and to welcome them into our hearts and homes.
It isn’t easy. It brings to mind a story Kathleen Norris tells in Dakota. An older monk tells a younger monk, “I have finally learned to accept people as they are. Whatever they are in the world, a prostitute, a prime minister, it is all the same to me. But sometimes I see a stranger coming up the road and I say, ‘Oh, Jesus Christ, is it you again?’”
The birth of Jesus was not just one and done. He is still God with us. And he keeps appearing to us over and over again, even if we do not know it.
Tuesday, December 13
This article is about the fading practice of forgiveness within American culture and the poisonous effects that has on the individual and society. The author, a guest essayist for the NY Times and Presbyterian minister, Dr. Timothy Keller outlines the importance of forgiveness for the individual and for society. He asserts that forgiveness has been seen as letting someone off the hook when, in fact, it is our own selves (and society) that we are freeing.
What Too Little Forgiveness Does to Us
Timothy Keller, NY Times 12.3.22
Guest essayist – Dr. Keller is the founder of the Redeemer Presbyterian churches in New York City.
The State of Virginia is reeling from two mass shootings in less than a month in Chesapeake and Charlottesville. From what we know, the races and politics of the two people accused of the shootings were quite different. But there seem to be common threads: They both seemed to have bitter resentment and unresolved anger toward individuals, groups or even society as a whole. The Chesapeake shooter wrote that his former Walmart colleagues “gave me evil twisted grins, mocked me and celebrated my downfall.” The brother of the man accused of the University of Virginia shooting said he’d been picked on in school and then reached a “breaking point.”
The most common explanations for the root causes of mass shootings — a mental health crisis and overly lax gun laws — have merit. Another factor is the fading of forgiveness in our society. It is no longer valued or promoted as it was in the past. And a society that has lost the ability to extend and receive forgiveness risks being crushed by the weight of recriminations and score settling.
Many people committed to justice value forgiveness, but others worry that it lets oppressors off the hook. Technology also makes a contribution. Social media is a realm in which missteps and wrongful, impulsive posts are never forgiven. Screenshots of every foolish word you have ever said online can be circulated in perpetuity. And our politics is filled with vitriol. In our cultural moment a conciliatory, forgiving voice is nowhere to be heard. Calls for forgiveness and reconciliation sound like both-sidesism, a mealy-mouthed lack of principle and courage.
Yet what is the alternative to forgiveness? In the 1970s, I was a pastor in a small town that had not a single professional therapist or social worker. I ended up counseling dozens of couples with troubled marriages. I discovered that those who learned and embraced forgiveness usually survived and those who did not never did. Without forgiveness, no human relationships or communities can be sustained. Without forgiveness, centuries-long cycles of retaliation, violence and genocide repeat themselves. Without forgiveness, you are more subject to heart disease and heart attacks, strokes and depression. We should forgive because it is profoundly practical. To fail to forgive is to undermine the health and coherence of one’s body, one’s relationships and
the entire human community.
Another reason to forgive is simple fairness. We owe it to others to forgive because we all need forgiveness ourselves. At the end of his parable of the unmerciful servant in Matthew 18, Jesus describes God saying to an unforgiving man, “Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant as I had mercy on you?” Imagine that when Judgment Day comes, you will be evaluated only on the basis of all the times you told others, “You ought to” or “You should.” In other words, imagine you will be judged only on the basis of your own moral standards. Not a person on earth could pass such a test, and we know it.
So if we should forgive, then how can we?
First, there must be the recognition that forgiveness does not contradict the pursuit of justice. Rather, it is its precondition. Forgiving is not excusing. To forgive something, you must name it as the evil it is. The pursuit of justice and the speaking of truth are necessary. But if you don’t internally forgive wrongdoers — if you don’t give up your quest to pay back and to make them suffer as much as you have — you won’t really be seeking justice. You will be seeking vengeance. Vengeance consumes your inward being with anger and hate. If you don’t forgive internally, you won’t confront the wrongdoers for justice’s sake or for future victims’ sake or for God’s sake. You will be doing it for your sake, and the project will go awry. It leaves you infected with the very hardness and evil that was done to you.
Second, there must be a commitment to renounce revenge and bear the cost of forgiveness. Forgiveness is granted before it’s felt. It is a commitment not to constantly bring up the wrongs to the wrongdoers to punish them or to others to ruin their reputations or to yourself, constantly reliving the incident in order to keep the anger going. You will find these disciplines to be hard and even costly. But if you pay that cost, you will gradually find yourself escaping the grip of bitterness. Once forgiveness is granted, it clears the way for justice, possible reconciliation and other forms of restoration.
Finally, forgiveness requires belief in something bigger than ourselves. In October 2006 a gunman took hostages in a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania, shooting 10 children ages 7 to 13, five of whom died, and then committing suicide. Within hours, members of the Amish community visited the killer’s immediate family and his parents, expressing sympathy for their loss. Many in the mainstream press called on others to emulate the Amish and become more forgiving.
Four years later, a group of scholars wrote that our secular culture was losing the ability to forgive the way the Amish did. Americans, they argued, are committed to self-assertion, believing the interests and needs of the individual come before those of the family, the community or God. The Amish, by contrast, have as one of their core values self-renunciation, with forgiveness being one form of it. The authors concluded that our culture of expressive
individualism is one that “nourishes revenge and mocks grace” and will not produce agents of forgiveness and reconciliation.
What is that higher good necessary for forgiveness? It can be many things; probably the most natural one is a willingness to sacrifice one’s interests for the good of the community. Christianity provides a unique resource at this point, unique even in comparison with other religions. At the heart of Christian faith is not primarily a wonderful, wise teacher (though Jesus was that, too) but a man who died for his enemies so that he could secure divine forgiveness for
them. When you embrace the idea that Jesus’ self-sacrifice was done for you, the Crucifixion becomes an act of surpassing beauty that, when brought into the center of your being, gives you both the profound humility and towering happiness, even joy, needed to forgive others.
The Christian church today is not the model of forgiveness that it was at times in the past. God uses kindness to lead people’s hearts to change (Romans 2:4), but taken as a whole, today’s American church does not. Christians like me should repent and renew themselves as members of communities of forgiveness and reconciliation. When Jesus Christ was dying, he said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). If he treats his executioners like that, how can those of us who believe in him be cold, caustic or harsh with anyone?
If forgiveness in small things and large were deeply embedded in our culture, it would transform us politically, ending the demagogy that never admits wrongdoing and that mocks and belittles one’s opponents. It would transform us socially, ending racial stereotyping, discrimination and unwillingness to listen to one another. It would make every movement for justice less likely to burn out, overreach or alienate. It would remake us personally, enabling us to confront frustrations and hurts and work through them rather than turn to drugs or guns or other destructive ways of dealing with our pain.
Few have the ability to honestly confront their own failings, flaws, self-centeredness — in short, their sin — unless they are assured that grace is ready to meet them. C.S. Lewis put it well: “To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you."
What Too Little Forgiveness Does to Us
Timothy Keller, NY Times 12.3.22
Guest essayist – Dr. Keller is the founder of the Redeemer Presbyterian churches in New York City.
The State of Virginia is reeling from two mass shootings in less than a month in Chesapeake and Charlottesville. From what we know, the races and politics of the two people accused of the shootings were quite different. But there seem to be common threads: They both seemed to have bitter resentment and unresolved anger toward individuals, groups or even society as a whole. The Chesapeake shooter wrote that his former Walmart colleagues “gave me evil twisted grins, mocked me and celebrated my downfall.” The brother of the man accused of the University of Virginia shooting said he’d been picked on in school and then reached a “breaking point.”
The most common explanations for the root causes of mass shootings — a mental health crisis and overly lax gun laws — have merit. Another factor is the fading of forgiveness in our society. It is no longer valued or promoted as it was in the past. And a society that has lost the ability to extend and receive forgiveness risks being crushed by the weight of recriminations and score settling.
Many people committed to justice value forgiveness, but others worry that it lets oppressors off the hook. Technology also makes a contribution. Social media is a realm in which missteps and wrongful, impulsive posts are never forgiven. Screenshots of every foolish word you have ever said online can be circulated in perpetuity. And our politics is filled with vitriol. In our cultural moment a conciliatory, forgiving voice is nowhere to be heard. Calls for forgiveness and reconciliation sound like both-sidesism, a mealy-mouthed lack of principle and courage.
Yet what is the alternative to forgiveness? In the 1970s, I was a pastor in a small town that had not a single professional therapist or social worker. I ended up counseling dozens of couples with troubled marriages. I discovered that those who learned and embraced forgiveness usually survived and those who did not never did. Without forgiveness, no human relationships or communities can be sustained. Without forgiveness, centuries-long cycles of retaliation, violence and genocide repeat themselves. Without forgiveness, you are more subject to heart disease and heart attacks, strokes and depression. We should forgive because it is profoundly practical. To fail to forgive is to undermine the health and coherence of one’s body, one’s relationships and
the entire human community.
Another reason to forgive is simple fairness. We owe it to others to forgive because we all need forgiveness ourselves. At the end of his parable of the unmerciful servant in Matthew 18, Jesus describes God saying to an unforgiving man, “Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant as I had mercy on you?” Imagine that when Judgment Day comes, you will be evaluated only on the basis of all the times you told others, “You ought to” or “You should.” In other words, imagine you will be judged only on the basis of your own moral standards. Not a person on earth could pass such a test, and we know it.
So if we should forgive, then how can we?
First, there must be the recognition that forgiveness does not contradict the pursuit of justice. Rather, it is its precondition. Forgiving is not excusing. To forgive something, you must name it as the evil it is. The pursuit of justice and the speaking of truth are necessary. But if you don’t internally forgive wrongdoers — if you don’t give up your quest to pay back and to make them suffer as much as you have — you won’t really be seeking justice. You will be seeking vengeance. Vengeance consumes your inward being with anger and hate. If you don’t forgive internally, you won’t confront the wrongdoers for justice’s sake or for future victims’ sake or for God’s sake. You will be doing it for your sake, and the project will go awry. It leaves you infected with the very hardness and evil that was done to you.
Second, there must be a commitment to renounce revenge and bear the cost of forgiveness. Forgiveness is granted before it’s felt. It is a commitment not to constantly bring up the wrongs to the wrongdoers to punish them or to others to ruin their reputations or to yourself, constantly reliving the incident in order to keep the anger going. You will find these disciplines to be hard and even costly. But if you pay that cost, you will gradually find yourself escaping the grip of bitterness. Once forgiveness is granted, it clears the way for justice, possible reconciliation and other forms of restoration.
Finally, forgiveness requires belief in something bigger than ourselves. In October 2006 a gunman took hostages in a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania, shooting 10 children ages 7 to 13, five of whom died, and then committing suicide. Within hours, members of the Amish community visited the killer’s immediate family and his parents, expressing sympathy for their loss. Many in the mainstream press called on others to emulate the Amish and become more forgiving.
Four years later, a group of scholars wrote that our secular culture was losing the ability to forgive the way the Amish did. Americans, they argued, are committed to self-assertion, believing the interests and needs of the individual come before those of the family, the community or God. The Amish, by contrast, have as one of their core values self-renunciation, with forgiveness being one form of it. The authors concluded that our culture of expressive
individualism is one that “nourishes revenge and mocks grace” and will not produce agents of forgiveness and reconciliation.
What is that higher good necessary for forgiveness? It can be many things; probably the most natural one is a willingness to sacrifice one’s interests for the good of the community. Christianity provides a unique resource at this point, unique even in comparison with other religions. At the heart of Christian faith is not primarily a wonderful, wise teacher (though Jesus was that, too) but a man who died for his enemies so that he could secure divine forgiveness for
them. When you embrace the idea that Jesus’ self-sacrifice was done for you, the Crucifixion becomes an act of surpassing beauty that, when brought into the center of your being, gives you both the profound humility and towering happiness, even joy, needed to forgive others.
The Christian church today is not the model of forgiveness that it was at times in the past. God uses kindness to lead people’s hearts to change (Romans 2:4), but taken as a whole, today’s American church does not. Christians like me should repent and renew themselves as members of communities of forgiveness and reconciliation. When Jesus Christ was dying, he said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). If he treats his executioners like that, how can those of us who believe in him be cold, caustic or harsh with anyone?
If forgiveness in small things and large were deeply embedded in our culture, it would transform us politically, ending the demagogy that never admits wrongdoing and that mocks and belittles one’s opponents. It would transform us socially, ending racial stereotyping, discrimination and unwillingness to listen to one another. It would make every movement for justice less likely to burn out, overreach or alienate. It would remake us personally, enabling us to confront frustrations and hurts and work through them rather than turn to drugs or guns or other destructive ways of dealing with our pain.
Few have the ability to honestly confront their own failings, flaws, self-centeredness — in short, their sin — unless they are assured that grace is ready to meet them. C.S. Lewis put it well: “To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you."
Tuesday, December 6
I have a gut feeling that the invasion of Ukraine will be something that future historians will highlight as a turning point. We are living, albeit remotely, in it so we may not see the full ramifications of what is happening over there. This article brings attention to drone warfare. It is something we need to know about and discuss. What is lacking in this article is a discussion of values or morals when it comes to machine versus machine in the new era of mechanized warfare. Does that change the way the Church views the Just War Theory? I'd like to know what you think.
The Efficient Future of Drone Warfare
Mark Bowden, The Atlantic 11.22.22
Mark Bowden is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of Black Hawk Down and The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden.
On Saturday, October 29, a Russian fleet on the Black Sea near Sevastopol was attacked by 16 drones—nine in the air and seven in the water. Purportedly launched by Ukraine, no one knows how much damage was done, but video shot by the attacking drones showed that the vessels were unable to avoid being hit. In response to that and other successful attacks, Russia has retaliated with scores of missiles and Iranian-built Shahed-136 drones aimed at electrical and water systems throughout Ukraine. Despite daily reports of lands taken or lands liberated in the nine-month war, the conflict has been largely fought in the air, with artillery shells, rockets, cruise missiles, and, increasingly, drones.
Small, cheap, relatively slow-moving, carrying far less of a wallop than a cruise missile or a 500-pound bomb, the Shaheds in particular have bedeviled Ukraine’s otherwise excellent air defenses. Preprogrammed with a target and released in groups of five, the triangular, propeller-driven drones are relatively easy to destroy—if you can find them. They fly low and slow enough to be mistaken on radar for migrating birds. If launched in bunches, as the Russians have been doing, enough are able to evade even the best defenses to do substantial damage. In October, Ukraine estimated that it was shooting down 70 percent or more of the Shaheds, but the ones they missed were enough to debilitate the nation’s electrical grid.
The attacks have continued. Intelligence officials say that Russia has sent 400 Iranian-made attack drones since August. Although that’s a small number relative to the thousands of missiles bombarding the country, intercepting drones flying in bunches can be more difficult. Drones also cost less to manufacture and can be sent in ever-increasing numbers. By early November, Ukraine was already in danger of running out of air-defense missiles to combat them.
Speaking in mid-November, Ukrainian Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said, “In the last two weeks, we have been convinced once again the wars of the future will be about maximum drones and minimal humans.”
What might that future actually look like? For years, military strategists have anticipated the arrival of the so-called drone swarm, a large cluster of small flying machines that will herald a new era of intelligent warfare. Thousands of robotic aircraft no bigger than a starling would be all but invisible when spread out, yet capable of instantly coalescing into a swirling dark cloud, like a murmuration. It would move the way such phenomena move in nature, guided by a kind of group intellect.
“A swarm is an intelligent organism and an intelligent mechanism,” Samuel Bendett, an expert in Russian weapons at the Center for Naval Analyses, told me. “In a swarm—just like in an insect swarm, in a bird swarm, in a school of fish—each drone thinks for itself, communicates with the others, and shares information about its position in a swarm, the environment that the swarm is in, potential threats coming at the swarm, and what to do about it, especially when it comes to changes in direction or changes in swarm composition.” The swarm would be capable of reacting to threats without human intervention—changing course, speed, or altitude, maneuvering around heavily protected air spaces—and could absorb huge losses without stopping. Machines do not get discouraged and turn back. The weapons deployed in Ukraine by both sides are still far from the full nightmare potential.
Such research programs are classified, but many military analysts see them arriving in the near future. A swarm of 103 micro-drones designed by MIT with a wingspan less than a foot long was successfully launched by the U.S. in 2016, a project sponsored by the Department of Defense. The individual drones were so small and flew so fast that a CBS camera crew trying to film the experiment had a hard time capturing an image of the swarm even with high-speed cameras.
When you consider that a drone swarm consisting of many thousands of off-the-shelf drones would cost less than, say, one F-35 fighter or a ballistic missile, you have a weapon that would give rogue states or terrorist groups the means to launch devastating attacks or assassinations anywhere in the world. Since the Korean War, American forces have controlled the skies wherever they have gone into battle. No other nation had the means to compete with it; the cost, the technology, the experience, and the level of training required are beyond the reach of even the most affluent nation-states. Drone swarms could end that domination. An aircraft carrier? A commercial airliner? The White House? The president? Sitting ducks.
Once the technology is within reach, someone, somewhere will build it, and once built, it will follow the rule of Chekhov’s gun—if it appears, it will be used. AI weapons have already been deployed—the Israeli Harpy drone, for instance, which loiters in the air over a contested space and is programmed to acquire and destroy targets. And although the destructive power of the atom bomb has so far prevented its use in all-out war, a drone swarm will be used once developed, because it is not a cataclysmic weapon. Although the explosive punch of small, cheap drones is insignificant compared with that of conventional bombs and missiles, they can be much more accurate. One would be enough to kill a person. Precisely targeted, even a small number
could destroy crucial parts of a modern warship’s defenses. The damage done to, say, an aircraft carrier by a drone swarm might not sink it, but could strip away its sensors and weapons, making it a fat target for larger munitions.
Of course, what all of these nightmares neglect is the notion of countermeasures, the second crucial element in the evolution of warfare. When a new weapon or tactic appears, so will a way to defeat it. Ukraine has been experimenting on the battlefield with a Lithuanian-designed defense called SkyWiper, which thwarts drones in flight by jamming their communications. Lithuania’s defense ministry, according to The New York Times, has sent 50 to Ukraine after the embattled nation named them as “one of the top priorities.”
But the most useful tool for Ukraine’s defenders is far less high-tech: machine guns. The Shahed’s propeller makes enough noise to alert ground troops as it passes overhead, and is vulnerable to coordinated fire. The drones have also been destroyed by fighter planes and air-to-air missiles, but that’s like driving a nail with a Cartier watch. The average Shahed costs about $20,000, whereas even the lowest-cost surface-to-air missile (still under development) will run closer to $150,000, a sum that does not include the multimillion-dollar system required to operate it. When cheap, off-the-shelf drones fly in large numbers, such cost disparity becomes ridiculous and unsustainable.
Last year Congress directed the Pentagon to develop a counterforce for small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), and budgeted almost $750 million for them. The newly created office’s director, Army Major General Sean Gainey, has said that the reliance on drones in Ukraine added urgency to his mission: “I think it’s bringing more to light of what we already know—that when you scale this capability from a small quadcopter all the way up … it really shows the importance of having counter-UAS at scale.”
For its part, the U.S. Army is experimenting with using large airbursts or electromagnetic pulses to guard against the eventual emergence of the drone swarm. The U.S. Navy’s High Energy Laser weapons system, and those under development by major defense contractors—Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and others—use AI to very rapidly target and destroy incoming drones one by one, potentially enough to disable a swarm. Such a weapon would be more useful at sea or over an open battlefield than over cities, where most combat in the modern era takes place. Air traffic over large cities is busy, so pinpointing a relatively small and dangerous intruder without knocking down friendly aircraft is hard. To help this effort, the Army’s Joint Counter Small
Unmanned Aerial System Office is looking at ways to adapt existing air-traffic-control networks to spot anomalous flight patterns.
One of these countermeasures, or one as yet unforeseen, will work, and drone swarms are not likely to wipe out America’s arsenal. They will, however, fundamentally alter the way we fight.
The machine gun did not end war, but it did permanently change it. By World War I, machine guns had driven infantry underground. Armies fought from deep trench networks that spanned the entire European continent. Eventually tanks, armored vehicles, attack aircraft, and big changes in infantry tactics evolved to counter the weapon, but the machine gun is still the mainstay of ground combat. The standard-issue infantry weapon worldwide is a machine gun.
Just as militaries adapted to heavy machinery and the trench, they will find a solution here. One of the most intriguing drone-swarm countermeasures is being tested by D-Fend, an Israeli contractor. It has been able to hack the guidance software of a small-drone swarm and redirect it harmlessly off course. Software is just code, and code is hackable. This illustrates the principle that whatever technology emerges, its use, for better or worse, will be determined by human beings.
The Efficient Future of Drone Warfare
Mark Bowden, The Atlantic 11.22.22
Mark Bowden is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of Black Hawk Down and The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden.
On Saturday, October 29, a Russian fleet on the Black Sea near Sevastopol was attacked by 16 drones—nine in the air and seven in the water. Purportedly launched by Ukraine, no one knows how much damage was done, but video shot by the attacking drones showed that the vessels were unable to avoid being hit. In response to that and other successful attacks, Russia has retaliated with scores of missiles and Iranian-built Shahed-136 drones aimed at electrical and water systems throughout Ukraine. Despite daily reports of lands taken or lands liberated in the nine-month war, the conflict has been largely fought in the air, with artillery shells, rockets, cruise missiles, and, increasingly, drones.
Small, cheap, relatively slow-moving, carrying far less of a wallop than a cruise missile or a 500-pound bomb, the Shaheds in particular have bedeviled Ukraine’s otherwise excellent air defenses. Preprogrammed with a target and released in groups of five, the triangular, propeller-driven drones are relatively easy to destroy—if you can find them. They fly low and slow enough to be mistaken on radar for migrating birds. If launched in bunches, as the Russians have been doing, enough are able to evade even the best defenses to do substantial damage. In October, Ukraine estimated that it was shooting down 70 percent or more of the Shaheds, but the ones they missed were enough to debilitate the nation’s electrical grid.
The attacks have continued. Intelligence officials say that Russia has sent 400 Iranian-made attack drones since August. Although that’s a small number relative to the thousands of missiles bombarding the country, intercepting drones flying in bunches can be more difficult. Drones also cost less to manufacture and can be sent in ever-increasing numbers. By early November, Ukraine was already in danger of running out of air-defense missiles to combat them.
Speaking in mid-November, Ukrainian Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said, “In the last two weeks, we have been convinced once again the wars of the future will be about maximum drones and minimal humans.”
What might that future actually look like? For years, military strategists have anticipated the arrival of the so-called drone swarm, a large cluster of small flying machines that will herald a new era of intelligent warfare. Thousands of robotic aircraft no bigger than a starling would be all but invisible when spread out, yet capable of instantly coalescing into a swirling dark cloud, like a murmuration. It would move the way such phenomena move in nature, guided by a kind of group intellect.
“A swarm is an intelligent organism and an intelligent mechanism,” Samuel Bendett, an expert in Russian weapons at the Center for Naval Analyses, told me. “In a swarm—just like in an insect swarm, in a bird swarm, in a school of fish—each drone thinks for itself, communicates with the others, and shares information about its position in a swarm, the environment that the swarm is in, potential threats coming at the swarm, and what to do about it, especially when it comes to changes in direction or changes in swarm composition.” The swarm would be capable of reacting to threats without human intervention—changing course, speed, or altitude, maneuvering around heavily protected air spaces—and could absorb huge losses without stopping. Machines do not get discouraged and turn back. The weapons deployed in Ukraine by both sides are still far from the full nightmare potential.
Such research programs are classified, but many military analysts see them arriving in the near future. A swarm of 103 micro-drones designed by MIT with a wingspan less than a foot long was successfully launched by the U.S. in 2016, a project sponsored by the Department of Defense. The individual drones were so small and flew so fast that a CBS camera crew trying to film the experiment had a hard time capturing an image of the swarm even with high-speed cameras.
When you consider that a drone swarm consisting of many thousands of off-the-shelf drones would cost less than, say, one F-35 fighter or a ballistic missile, you have a weapon that would give rogue states or terrorist groups the means to launch devastating attacks or assassinations anywhere in the world. Since the Korean War, American forces have controlled the skies wherever they have gone into battle. No other nation had the means to compete with it; the cost, the technology, the experience, and the level of training required are beyond the reach of even the most affluent nation-states. Drone swarms could end that domination. An aircraft carrier? A commercial airliner? The White House? The president? Sitting ducks.
Once the technology is within reach, someone, somewhere will build it, and once built, it will follow the rule of Chekhov’s gun—if it appears, it will be used. AI weapons have already been deployed—the Israeli Harpy drone, for instance, which loiters in the air over a contested space and is programmed to acquire and destroy targets. And although the destructive power of the atom bomb has so far prevented its use in all-out war, a drone swarm will be used once developed, because it is not a cataclysmic weapon. Although the explosive punch of small, cheap drones is insignificant compared with that of conventional bombs and missiles, they can be much more accurate. One would be enough to kill a person. Precisely targeted, even a small number
could destroy crucial parts of a modern warship’s defenses. The damage done to, say, an aircraft carrier by a drone swarm might not sink it, but could strip away its sensors and weapons, making it a fat target for larger munitions.
Of course, what all of these nightmares neglect is the notion of countermeasures, the second crucial element in the evolution of warfare. When a new weapon or tactic appears, so will a way to defeat it. Ukraine has been experimenting on the battlefield with a Lithuanian-designed defense called SkyWiper, which thwarts drones in flight by jamming their communications. Lithuania’s defense ministry, according to The New York Times, has sent 50 to Ukraine after the embattled nation named them as “one of the top priorities.”
But the most useful tool for Ukraine’s defenders is far less high-tech: machine guns. The Shahed’s propeller makes enough noise to alert ground troops as it passes overhead, and is vulnerable to coordinated fire. The drones have also been destroyed by fighter planes and air-to-air missiles, but that’s like driving a nail with a Cartier watch. The average Shahed costs about $20,000, whereas even the lowest-cost surface-to-air missile (still under development) will run closer to $150,000, a sum that does not include the multimillion-dollar system required to operate it. When cheap, off-the-shelf drones fly in large numbers, such cost disparity becomes ridiculous and unsustainable.
Last year Congress directed the Pentagon to develop a counterforce for small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), and budgeted almost $750 million for them. The newly created office’s director, Army Major General Sean Gainey, has said that the reliance on drones in Ukraine added urgency to his mission: “I think it’s bringing more to light of what we already know—that when you scale this capability from a small quadcopter all the way up … it really shows the importance of having counter-UAS at scale.”
For its part, the U.S. Army is experimenting with using large airbursts or electromagnetic pulses to guard against the eventual emergence of the drone swarm. The U.S. Navy’s High Energy Laser weapons system, and those under development by major defense contractors—Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and others—use AI to very rapidly target and destroy incoming drones one by one, potentially enough to disable a swarm. Such a weapon would be more useful at sea or over an open battlefield than over cities, where most combat in the modern era takes place. Air traffic over large cities is busy, so pinpointing a relatively small and dangerous intruder without knocking down friendly aircraft is hard. To help this effort, the Army’s Joint Counter Small
Unmanned Aerial System Office is looking at ways to adapt existing air-traffic-control networks to spot anomalous flight patterns.
One of these countermeasures, or one as yet unforeseen, will work, and drone swarms are not likely to wipe out America’s arsenal. They will, however, fundamentally alter the way we fight.
The machine gun did not end war, but it did permanently change it. By World War I, machine guns had driven infantry underground. Armies fought from deep trench networks that spanned the entire European continent. Eventually tanks, armored vehicles, attack aircraft, and big changes in infantry tactics evolved to counter the weapon, but the machine gun is still the mainstay of ground combat. The standard-issue infantry weapon worldwide is a machine gun.
Just as militaries adapted to heavy machinery and the trench, they will find a solution here. One of the most intriguing drone-swarm countermeasures is being tested by D-Fend, an Israeli contractor. It has been able to hack the guidance software of a small-drone swarm and redirect it harmlessly off course. Software is just code, and code is hackable. This illustrates the principle that whatever technology emerges, its use, for better or worse, will be determined by human beings.
Tuesday, November 29
And we're back...
I'm looking forward to seeing you at our discussion group this week.
A couple of months ago we had a fascinating discussion about the distinction between faith and belief. Attached is the latest article on the topic from the Christian Century. The author, Samuel Wells, takes a different approach - trust. He says we can do without belief but we need trust. I'd like to know what you think.
The Better Part of Faith – It’s possible to stop believing, but we can’t live without trust.
Samuel Wells, The Christian Century 11.18.22
There are two kinds of faith. They sound the same but turn out to be very different. The first is the desire to attain a level of certainty, conviction, and passion that somehow carries us over the chasm of doubt, distress, and despair. It’s like psyching ourselves up before a game, exam, or difficult conversation so that we can be transported into a different realm of consciousness and achieve things beyond our normal powers.
This is what I sense is communicated by the word belief. The notion of belief is that we bind ourselves to certain extraordinary commitments, rituals, and ideas about reality that may seem bizarre to outsiders or locked in an ancient thought world but that give us access to the secret workings of the true power at large in the universe. We can’t expect to know the logic or understand the purposes of that power, but beliefs connect us to it as successfully as is possible in this existence. To keep the magic at work, we surround ourselves with people who hold these convictions more ardently than we do and cultivate experiences that take us to a rarefied form of feeling, so we’re lifted out of our mundane lives where everything feels so fragile and vulnerable.
The interesting thing about this notion of belief is that it seems to be understood in a similar way by adherents and outsiders alike. It’s common for journalists or courts to refer to a person’s beliefs, thereby speaking of something beyond the rational, steeped in obscurity, fiercely held, impossible to argue with, and central to identity. Think of parents refusing medical assistance for their child when doctors are eager to intervene: we’re told it’s because of their beliefs. But it’s also common for a person to defend their own beliefs as profoundly personal and of great comfort, as things that shouldn’t be a reason for discrimination, even if another person finds them offensive.
What these different understandings have in common is the assumption that belief is fundamentally a form of escape. It’s a magic carpet that lifts you out of the ordinariness and jeopardy of your life and transports you to a realm of miracle, mystery, and cosmic purpose. The more you can get yourself into a holy reverie to match this grand drama, the more you can be free of your own limitations and the threats of others and thus find something called salvation.
It would be easy to think that what I’ve described as belief is the only kind of faith there is. But there is another kind, one that isn’t based on escape.
Imagine a man who develops a life-limiting condition. His wrist starts to swell. The next day his knee can’t bend. Within days he’s in the hospital with autoimmune arthritis: his immune system is attacking his joint tissue.
After a month his condition stabilizes, and he starts to build his life again. He needs rehab and physical therapy. He has to learn to walk again. He develops strategies, depends on others, learns to accept help, does a routine of daily exercises. It’s a complete transformation.
His infant daughter is learning to walk at the same time as he is. He thought his job was to teach her, but now she’s teaching him. It’s humiliating but beautiful. He appreciates the tiniest gifts of life. He cherishes the people that care for him. He says, “Thank you for walking with me,” and he means it literally. He’s gradually making progress. But faster than he relearns to walk, he’s becoming a better person.
If there’s one word that sums up the journey I’ve described, it’s trust. Trust doesn’t assume life is about overcoming limitations. It’s about finding truth, beauty, and friendship in the midst of those limitations. Trust doesn’t think that if you wave a magic wand, things will change overnight. It finds companionship among the community of the waiting. Trust doesn’t pretend that if you hold tight to the right things, nothing will ever go wrong. It inhabits the exercises and patience required to rebuild after matters have been strained or broken. Trust doesn’t use people as a means of getting things but places all its energies in making relationships that transcend adverse and depleting circumstances. Trust, rather than belief, is the better part of faith.
And it is possible to eradicate belief from your life. You can say you’re not going to commit to anything that isn’t scientifically provable. But you can’t live without trust. When we’ve been hurt or betrayed, our ability to trust inevitably suffers, but so does the abundance of our life. The question isn’t whether we should trust; it’s who and what to trust. In the face of death, the question is what can we trust that will last forever.
There are two kinds of faith, belief and trust. And here’s the irony: God’s faith in us is belief. It’s irrational, far-fetched, and mysterious. There’s no good reason for it, but everything depends on it. Our faith in God is trust. It’s saying, “There are going to be setbacks, misunderstandings, and patient rebuilding. But I only want to be with you.”
When we think faith is all about belief, we beat ourselves up for not being able to hold together all the mysteries and contradictions and far-fetched ideas. But that’s not what Christianity is really about. The Christian faith is really about trust. It’s not about Jesus the magician whisking us away on a magic carpet of happiness and glory. It’s about facing the unknown and seeing Jesus turn around, offer us his hand, and say, “We’re going to walk across the unknown
together."
I'm looking forward to seeing you at our discussion group this week.
A couple of months ago we had a fascinating discussion about the distinction between faith and belief. Attached is the latest article on the topic from the Christian Century. The author, Samuel Wells, takes a different approach - trust. He says we can do without belief but we need trust. I'd like to know what you think.
The Better Part of Faith – It’s possible to stop believing, but we can’t live without trust.
Samuel Wells, The Christian Century 11.18.22
There are two kinds of faith. They sound the same but turn out to be very different. The first is the desire to attain a level of certainty, conviction, and passion that somehow carries us over the chasm of doubt, distress, and despair. It’s like psyching ourselves up before a game, exam, or difficult conversation so that we can be transported into a different realm of consciousness and achieve things beyond our normal powers.
This is what I sense is communicated by the word belief. The notion of belief is that we bind ourselves to certain extraordinary commitments, rituals, and ideas about reality that may seem bizarre to outsiders or locked in an ancient thought world but that give us access to the secret workings of the true power at large in the universe. We can’t expect to know the logic or understand the purposes of that power, but beliefs connect us to it as successfully as is possible in this existence. To keep the magic at work, we surround ourselves with people who hold these convictions more ardently than we do and cultivate experiences that take us to a rarefied form of feeling, so we’re lifted out of our mundane lives where everything feels so fragile and vulnerable.
The interesting thing about this notion of belief is that it seems to be understood in a similar way by adherents and outsiders alike. It’s common for journalists or courts to refer to a person’s beliefs, thereby speaking of something beyond the rational, steeped in obscurity, fiercely held, impossible to argue with, and central to identity. Think of parents refusing medical assistance for their child when doctors are eager to intervene: we’re told it’s because of their beliefs. But it’s also common for a person to defend their own beliefs as profoundly personal and of great comfort, as things that shouldn’t be a reason for discrimination, even if another person finds them offensive.
What these different understandings have in common is the assumption that belief is fundamentally a form of escape. It’s a magic carpet that lifts you out of the ordinariness and jeopardy of your life and transports you to a realm of miracle, mystery, and cosmic purpose. The more you can get yourself into a holy reverie to match this grand drama, the more you can be free of your own limitations and the threats of others and thus find something called salvation.
It would be easy to think that what I’ve described as belief is the only kind of faith there is. But there is another kind, one that isn’t based on escape.
Imagine a man who develops a life-limiting condition. His wrist starts to swell. The next day his knee can’t bend. Within days he’s in the hospital with autoimmune arthritis: his immune system is attacking his joint tissue.
After a month his condition stabilizes, and he starts to build his life again. He needs rehab and physical therapy. He has to learn to walk again. He develops strategies, depends on others, learns to accept help, does a routine of daily exercises. It’s a complete transformation.
His infant daughter is learning to walk at the same time as he is. He thought his job was to teach her, but now she’s teaching him. It’s humiliating but beautiful. He appreciates the tiniest gifts of life. He cherishes the people that care for him. He says, “Thank you for walking with me,” and he means it literally. He’s gradually making progress. But faster than he relearns to walk, he’s becoming a better person.
If there’s one word that sums up the journey I’ve described, it’s trust. Trust doesn’t assume life is about overcoming limitations. It’s about finding truth, beauty, and friendship in the midst of those limitations. Trust doesn’t think that if you wave a magic wand, things will change overnight. It finds companionship among the community of the waiting. Trust doesn’t pretend that if you hold tight to the right things, nothing will ever go wrong. It inhabits the exercises and patience required to rebuild after matters have been strained or broken. Trust doesn’t use people as a means of getting things but places all its energies in making relationships that transcend adverse and depleting circumstances. Trust, rather than belief, is the better part of faith.
And it is possible to eradicate belief from your life. You can say you’re not going to commit to anything that isn’t scientifically provable. But you can’t live without trust. When we’ve been hurt or betrayed, our ability to trust inevitably suffers, but so does the abundance of our life. The question isn’t whether we should trust; it’s who and what to trust. In the face of death, the question is what can we trust that will last forever.
There are two kinds of faith, belief and trust. And here’s the irony: God’s faith in us is belief. It’s irrational, far-fetched, and mysterious. There’s no good reason for it, but everything depends on it. Our faith in God is trust. It’s saying, “There are going to be setbacks, misunderstandings, and patient rebuilding. But I only want to be with you.”
When we think faith is all about belief, we beat ourselves up for not being able to hold together all the mysteries and contradictions and far-fetched ideas. But that’s not what Christianity is really about. The Christian faith is really about trust. It’s not about Jesus the magician whisking us away on a magic carpet of happiness and glory. It’s about facing the unknown and seeing Jesus turn around, offer us his hand, and say, “We’re going to walk across the unknown
together."
Tuesday, November 7
Friendship is the topic for next week. The author of the article, America the Friendless, believes that friendship is one of the most important aspects of a free society; and it's fun! The Church plays a role in this. Speaking of, this next week, we have a fun way to connect with one another. The Fall Fling is on Wednesday starting at 4:30 pm. Come by for some BBQ and friendship. Another way to make friends is through attending a discussion group. :-)
America the Friendless
Adam Carrington, Law & Liberty 10.28.22
Despite being more interconnected than at any time in our history, America is experiencing a friendship crisis. Americans, especially men, have far fewer friends than in decades past. The number of men who say they have no close friends at all has tripled since the early 1990s. This data comports with a recurrent theme in surveys over the past ten years.
Despite these warnings, we have failed as a political community to consider this problem—much less genuinely address it. We rightly bemoan the downfall of marriages and the broken families they entail, but we must also care about the friendlessness rampant among us because it damages the lives of our people and corrodes our polity. John Adams recognized our political duty to address this problem: He believed “the divine science of politics is the science of social happiness.” Similarly, Cicero observed that “life can never be anything but joyless which is
without the consolation and companionship of friends.”
The present friendlessness has distinctly modern causes. Social media, long work hours, and COVID-19 lockdowns amplify our feelings of isolation. Moreover, we do not understand the core political nature and import of friendship. To recognize this, we can draw on the wisdom of
the Greek philosopher Aristotle, who provides a poignant discussion of friendship in his Nicomachean Ethics.
Aristotle highlights the importance of friendship to the individual. Similar to Cicero, he states, “without friends, no one would choose to live, even if he possessed all other good.” The fact that, for Aristotle, politics is the governing science, the one that orders the other sciences in the
context of political community toward human happiness, makes something this fundamental politically salient. Additionally, Aristotle argues that friendship is important because our citizenship, rightly understood, includes an element of friendship. Thus, politics’ purpose as the
science of social happiness, as well as the issue of citizenship itself, makes friendship an important political matter.
Friendships for Use, For Pleasure, Or For Virtue?
Aristotle helps explain why friends matter so much within his division of friendship. He categorizes friendships based on either use, pleasure, or virtue. Aristotle sees use-based friendship as the lowest kind of friendship. People can attain a level of general civility and basic, mutual aid with this friendship, but it is the form of friendship most susceptible to selfishness and instability—unraveling the second the use no longer attains. It can thereby teach bad habits for friendship and inculcate perpetual, calculating disloyalty. Such a friendship is better than nothing, however, as it at least presents some degree of a hedge against misfortune and poverty, as well as fulfilling some element of our social nature. In addition, the low can give rise to the high, morally speaking; by bringing people together for mutual needs, those same persons can begin to develop better forms of friendship.
Friendships of pleasure present more beneficial opportunities, though this depends on the source of pleasure. For example, pleasure in the basest of objects does little good and much ill. This point proves especially true in our own day, obsessed as we are with pleasure, especially in the use of our and others’ bodies. The extreme sexualization of our culture is the main manifestation of this point. Better options exist for common satisfaction. True beauty can form bonds, with the friends gaining pleasure in mutually appreciating an excellent film, a lovely
painting, or a perfectly executed play in football.
Finally, Aristotle sees friendships based on virtue as the highest kind of friendship. For Aristotle, virtue consists of a disposition toward the good that results in right action. This good disposition and consequent deeds divide into a series of characteristics, such as courage, justice,
prudence, and liberality. Friendships based on virtue accentuate those goods by giving common companionship in them. “Iron sharpens iron,” the Bible says in Proverbs 27:17. So too do virtuous friends encourage and make better each other. In the wider view, virtue-based friendship
benefits nations as a whole; the more friendships based on virtue a country contains, the more likely that the country will produce persons of noble character. Subsequently, these persons will practice the virtues in our communities and for those communities’ good.
Citizenship and Friendship
These categories of friendship have political implications. Aristotle believes that citizenship itself is a form of friendship. He notes that “like-mindedness seems to resemble friendship” because it consists of something two or more people hold in common and from which they either
derive use, pleasure, or in which they see the good. Thus, we need good friendships not just because we need to care about our citizens’ happiness. We need strong friendships because our citizenship makes up one form of those bonds. Our like-mindedness politically involves shared principles, history, geography, language, and other factors. In this sense, as Aristotle observes, “friendship holds cities together.” If anyone wonders why our partisan divides run so deep, the answer partly resides in seeing fellow citizens as foes, not comrades.
A patriotism of “pleasure” might love America for the wrong reasons, taking pleasure in its worst moments or redefining it against its principles. Friendships of virtue, however, avoid all of these problems for patriotism. These friendships will promote the country’s best qualities and not its vices. These friendships will find use and pleasure in America based on her best qualities, such as the manifestations of justice and truth in the country’s founding and throughout its history. They are the friends that can sing of America as in the text that concludes the second verse of “America the Beautiful”:
“God mend thine every flaw / Confirm thy soul in self-control / Thy liberty in law!”
We must encourage the civil associations that Tocqueville celebrated in Americans of the 1830s. Cultivating the mediating “little platoons” found in gatherings of religious groups, book clubs, and hunting associations all can do much good on this project.
Community and Genuine Friendships
Other forms of friendships also present thorny questions for a politics aiming to cultivate this necessary good. In particular, popular governments like America must consider where friendships undermine or aid their principles of equality and liberty. Slavery, for example, bears a resemblance to tyranny. It inculcates the demerits of such a regime in the souls of those who act as masters and as slaves, proving antagonistic to the American regime itself. The relationship between parents and children, on the contrary, appears more like that between monarch and subject. Since they are temporary and pointed toward cultivating free and equal citizens upon maturation, this relationship proves necessary even to a political community founded on equality. Thus, civic education begins in the home and the home should receive adequate protection and support from the laws.
At the private level, this entails a robust re-founding of community. We must encourage the civil associations that Tocqueville celebrated in Americans of the 1830s. Cultivating the mediating “little platoons” found in gatherings of religious groups, book clubs, and hunting associations all can do much good on this project. They can help articulate meaning, worth, and dignity for the individuals involved. Perhaps the way our tax code aids charitable organizations can be expanded to other forms of association, giving a financial incentive to start organizations that will facilitate common bonds.
At the political level, we must rebuild small towns and neighborhoods. They must become hubs of political activity so citizens can see, talk to, and develop relationships with each other. The internet presents a barrier to this needed change. We measure our community too much by the number of Twitter likes and Facebook “friends,” creating for ourselves a desert of true companionship. Instead, we should move away from our keyboards and toward cultivating real interactions with real human beings. Reinvigorating federalism would move us in this direction as well, as we find more concrete ways to exercise citizenship and the bonds it entails locally.
Finally, we must work to aid the quality of friendships. Can our education system move away from its focus on creating workers and cultivating humans and citizens? It should do so not only because true education seeks to elevate the soul, not just give skills for employment. That
emphasis also would form more lasting, healthier grounds for friendship. Such friendships would help us to know ourselves and others in light of what is good, true, and beautiful.
Aristotle’s ancient perspective still applies to our modern context of friendlessness. Accomplishing this goal will be a generational task, but we must urgently work toward it. What country would want to live otherwise?
America the Friendless
Adam Carrington, Law & Liberty 10.28.22
Despite being more interconnected than at any time in our history, America is experiencing a friendship crisis. Americans, especially men, have far fewer friends than in decades past. The number of men who say they have no close friends at all has tripled since the early 1990s. This data comports with a recurrent theme in surveys over the past ten years.
Despite these warnings, we have failed as a political community to consider this problem—much less genuinely address it. We rightly bemoan the downfall of marriages and the broken families they entail, but we must also care about the friendlessness rampant among us because it damages the lives of our people and corrodes our polity. John Adams recognized our political duty to address this problem: He believed “the divine science of politics is the science of social happiness.” Similarly, Cicero observed that “life can never be anything but joyless which is
without the consolation and companionship of friends.”
The present friendlessness has distinctly modern causes. Social media, long work hours, and COVID-19 lockdowns amplify our feelings of isolation. Moreover, we do not understand the core political nature and import of friendship. To recognize this, we can draw on the wisdom of
the Greek philosopher Aristotle, who provides a poignant discussion of friendship in his Nicomachean Ethics.
Aristotle highlights the importance of friendship to the individual. Similar to Cicero, he states, “without friends, no one would choose to live, even if he possessed all other good.” The fact that, for Aristotle, politics is the governing science, the one that orders the other sciences in the
context of political community toward human happiness, makes something this fundamental politically salient. Additionally, Aristotle argues that friendship is important because our citizenship, rightly understood, includes an element of friendship. Thus, politics’ purpose as the
science of social happiness, as well as the issue of citizenship itself, makes friendship an important political matter.
Friendships for Use, For Pleasure, Or For Virtue?
Aristotle helps explain why friends matter so much within his division of friendship. He categorizes friendships based on either use, pleasure, or virtue. Aristotle sees use-based friendship as the lowest kind of friendship. People can attain a level of general civility and basic, mutual aid with this friendship, but it is the form of friendship most susceptible to selfishness and instability—unraveling the second the use no longer attains. It can thereby teach bad habits for friendship and inculcate perpetual, calculating disloyalty. Such a friendship is better than nothing, however, as it at least presents some degree of a hedge against misfortune and poverty, as well as fulfilling some element of our social nature. In addition, the low can give rise to the high, morally speaking; by bringing people together for mutual needs, those same persons can begin to develop better forms of friendship.
Friendships of pleasure present more beneficial opportunities, though this depends on the source of pleasure. For example, pleasure in the basest of objects does little good and much ill. This point proves especially true in our own day, obsessed as we are with pleasure, especially in the use of our and others’ bodies. The extreme sexualization of our culture is the main manifestation of this point. Better options exist for common satisfaction. True beauty can form bonds, with the friends gaining pleasure in mutually appreciating an excellent film, a lovely
painting, or a perfectly executed play in football.
Finally, Aristotle sees friendships based on virtue as the highest kind of friendship. For Aristotle, virtue consists of a disposition toward the good that results in right action. This good disposition and consequent deeds divide into a series of characteristics, such as courage, justice,
prudence, and liberality. Friendships based on virtue accentuate those goods by giving common companionship in them. “Iron sharpens iron,” the Bible says in Proverbs 27:17. So too do virtuous friends encourage and make better each other. In the wider view, virtue-based friendship
benefits nations as a whole; the more friendships based on virtue a country contains, the more likely that the country will produce persons of noble character. Subsequently, these persons will practice the virtues in our communities and for those communities’ good.
Citizenship and Friendship
These categories of friendship have political implications. Aristotle believes that citizenship itself is a form of friendship. He notes that “like-mindedness seems to resemble friendship” because it consists of something two or more people hold in common and from which they either
derive use, pleasure, or in which they see the good. Thus, we need good friendships not just because we need to care about our citizens’ happiness. We need strong friendships because our citizenship makes up one form of those bonds. Our like-mindedness politically involves shared principles, history, geography, language, and other factors. In this sense, as Aristotle observes, “friendship holds cities together.” If anyone wonders why our partisan divides run so deep, the answer partly resides in seeing fellow citizens as foes, not comrades.
A patriotism of “pleasure” might love America for the wrong reasons, taking pleasure in its worst moments or redefining it against its principles. Friendships of virtue, however, avoid all of these problems for patriotism. These friendships will promote the country’s best qualities and not its vices. These friendships will find use and pleasure in America based on her best qualities, such as the manifestations of justice and truth in the country’s founding and throughout its history. They are the friends that can sing of America as in the text that concludes the second verse of “America the Beautiful”:
“God mend thine every flaw / Confirm thy soul in self-control / Thy liberty in law!”
We must encourage the civil associations that Tocqueville celebrated in Americans of the 1830s. Cultivating the mediating “little platoons” found in gatherings of religious groups, book clubs, and hunting associations all can do much good on this project.
Community and Genuine Friendships
Other forms of friendships also present thorny questions for a politics aiming to cultivate this necessary good. In particular, popular governments like America must consider where friendships undermine or aid their principles of equality and liberty. Slavery, for example, bears a resemblance to tyranny. It inculcates the demerits of such a regime in the souls of those who act as masters and as slaves, proving antagonistic to the American regime itself. The relationship between parents and children, on the contrary, appears more like that between monarch and subject. Since they are temporary and pointed toward cultivating free and equal citizens upon maturation, this relationship proves necessary even to a political community founded on equality. Thus, civic education begins in the home and the home should receive adequate protection and support from the laws.
At the private level, this entails a robust re-founding of community. We must encourage the civil associations that Tocqueville celebrated in Americans of the 1830s. Cultivating the mediating “little platoons” found in gatherings of religious groups, book clubs, and hunting associations all can do much good on this project. They can help articulate meaning, worth, and dignity for the individuals involved. Perhaps the way our tax code aids charitable organizations can be expanded to other forms of association, giving a financial incentive to start organizations that will facilitate common bonds.
At the political level, we must rebuild small towns and neighborhoods. They must become hubs of political activity so citizens can see, talk to, and develop relationships with each other. The internet presents a barrier to this needed change. We measure our community too much by the number of Twitter likes and Facebook “friends,” creating for ourselves a desert of true companionship. Instead, we should move away from our keyboards and toward cultivating real interactions with real human beings. Reinvigorating federalism would move us in this direction as well, as we find more concrete ways to exercise citizenship and the bonds it entails locally.
Finally, we must work to aid the quality of friendships. Can our education system move away from its focus on creating workers and cultivating humans and citizens? It should do so not only because true education seeks to elevate the soul, not just give skills for employment. That
emphasis also would form more lasting, healthier grounds for friendship. Such friendships would help us to know ourselves and others in light of what is good, true, and beautiful.
Aristotle’s ancient perspective still applies to our modern context of friendlessness. Accomplishing this goal will be a generational task, but we must urgently work toward it. What country would want to live otherwise?
Tuesday, November 1
My reflection for this week is about having to unlearn and relearn things in order to survive the 21st century. One of the unlearn/relearn aspects has to do with gender identification and labels, words and/or acronyms. We all want to get it right and not offend, but, things seem to be moving quite quickly and without any sort of direction.
In this week's article, the author shared a clip from CBS Sunday Morning of author David Sedaris' commentary on this topic. In it, he asks these questions: why change the word for same-sex orientation? Who decides these things anyway? Here is a link to that clip:
David Sedaris on coming out all over again
Although the article does not bring up religion, there are aspects I'd like to discuss and what better place to do it than the discussion group.
Opinion: Let’s Say Gay
Pamela Paul, NY Times 10.23.22
The word “gay” is increasingly being substituted by “queer” or, more broadly, “L.G.B.T.Q.,” which are about gender as much as — and perhaps more so than — sexual orientation. The word “queer” is climbing in frequency and can be used interchangeably with “gay,” which itself not so
long ago replaced “homosexual.”
The shift has been especially dramatic in certain influential spheres: academia, cultural institutions and the media, from Teen Vogue to The Hollywood Reporter to this newspaper. Only 10 years ago, for example, “queer” appeared a mere 85 times in The New York Times. As of
Friday, it’s been used 632 times in 2022, and the year is not over. In the same periods, use of “gay” has fallen from 2,228 to 1,531 — still more commonly used, but the direction of the evolution is impossible to miss. Meanwhile, the umbrella term “L.G.B.T.Q.” increased from two
mentions to 714.
“It is quite often a generational issue, where younger people — millennials — are more fine with it. Gen Xers like myself are somewhat OK with it. Some you might find in each category,” Jason DeRose, who oversees L.G.B.T.Q. reporting at NPR, said of the news organization’s move
toward queer. “And then older people, maybe, who find it problematic.”
Let’s be clear: Many lesbians and gay people are fine with this shift. They may even prefer umbrella terms like “L.G.B.T.Q.” and “queer” because they include people who identify according to gender expression or identity as well as sexual orientation. But let’s consider those who do not, and why. For one thing, “gay” and “queer” are not synonymous, as they are increasingly treated, particularly among Gen Zers and millennials. Likewise, the term “L.G.B.T.Q.,” which sometimes includes additional symbols and letters, represents so many identities unrelated to sexual orientation that gays and lesbians can feel crowded out.
Last week on “CBS News Sunday Morning,” the writer David Sedaris said he was done “fighting the word ‘queer.’” He went on, “Like the term ‘Latinx,’ ‘queer’ was started by some humanities professor and slowly gathered steam. Then well-meaning radio producers and magazine editors thought, ‘Well, I guess that’s what they want to be called now!’ But I don’t remember any vote being taken.”
This raises a question for me, a language obsessive and someone interested in the ways word choices reflect and drive the culture: Why change the word for same-sex orientation? And to echo Sedaris: Who decides these things anyway?
Let’s start with the basic dictionary-sense differences between the words. “Gay” has a clear, specific meaning that applies to both men and women: “homosexual,” which is the first entry in most dictionaries. “Lesbian,” of course, bears the same meaning, but strictly for women.
Whereas the first definition for “queer,” according to Oxford and Dictionary.com, is “strange, odd.” Another definition refers not only to gay people but also to “a person whose sexual orientation or gender identity falls outside the heterosexual mainstream or the gender binary,”
according to Dictionary.com. That could mean “transgender,” “gender neutral,” “nonbinary,” “agender,” “pangender,” “genderqueer,” “demisexual,” “asexual,” “two spirit,” “third gender” or all, none or some combination of the above. Being queer is, as Bell Hooks once said, not “about who you’re having sex with — that can be a dimension of it — but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and it has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.” [While we’re here, the Q in “L.G.B.T.Q.” currently can stand for both “queer” and “questioning.”]
Confused? You should be! “Queer” can mean almost anything, and that’s the point. Queer theory is about deliberately breaking down normative categories around gender and sex, particularly binary ones like men and women, straight and gay. Saying you’re queer could mean you’re gay; it could mean you’re straight; it could mean you’re undecided about your gender or that you prefer not to say. Saying you’re queer could mean as little as having kissed another girl your sophomore year at college. It could mean you valiantly plowed through the prose of Judith Butler in a course on queerness in the Elizabethan theater. Given the broad spectrum of possibility, it’s no surprise that many people — gay or straight — have no idea what it means when someone self-identifies as queer.
But this is important: Not all gay people see themselves as queer. Many lesbian and gay people define themselves in terms of sexual orientation, not gender. There are gay men, for example, who grew up desperately needing reassurance that they were just as much a boy as any hypermanly heterosexual. They had to push back hard against those who tried to tell them their sexual orientation called their masculinity into question.
“Queer” carries other connotations, not all of them welcome — or welcoming. Whereas homosexuality is a sexual orientation one cannot choose, queerness is something one can, according to James Kirchick, the author of “Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington.” Queerness, he argues, is a fashion and a political statement that not all gay people subscribe to. “Queerness is also self-consciously and purposefully marginal,” he told me.
“Whereas the arc of the gay rights movement, and the individual lives of most gay people, has been a struggle against marginality. We want to be welcomed. We want to have equal rights. We want a place in our institutions.”
Many gay people simply prefer the word “gay.” “Gay” has long been a generally positive term. The second definition for “gay” in most dictionaries is something along the lines of “happy,” “lighthearted” and “carefree.” Whereas “queer” has been, first and foremost, a pejorative. What I hear most often from gay and lesbian friends regarding the word “queer” is something along the lines of what Sedaris pointed out: “Nobody consulted me!” This wasn’t their choice.
So how did it happen? Partly it’s the force of academic and institutional language, which has permeated the influential worlds of the arts, Hollywood, publishing and fashion. Another part is generational: Gen Zers — 21 percent of whom identify as “L.G.B.T.,” according to Gallup, a
percentage that has nearly doubled in just four years — often use social media to frame the conversation. As the linguist Gretchen McCullough explained in her book “Because Internet,” word shifts take hold much faster these days. “Queer” bobbed around the academy in semiotics
and gender studies classes for decades before activists unleashed it with the help of social media in the past decade or so. “Queerness” and “queering” now materialize in all manner of contexts, whether it’s queering John Wesley, queering the tarot or queering quinceañeras.
In recent years, other activist terms have followed light-speed trajectories. The term “Latinx” overtook academic institutions and briefly became fashionable in the media, still prevalent in some influential publications, like The New Yorker, even though only 3 percent of Hispanics (or
Latinos, if you prefer) use it. Similarly, the word “fat.” As Sarai Walker, the author of “Dietland,” has written, “fat activists use the word proudly in an effort to destigmatize not only the word, but by extension, the fat body.” For her, the word represents not merely acceptance but also the promotion of body positivity.
To be clear: There’s nothing wrong with embracing a particular word to describe yourself. The problem arises when a new term is used in ways that misrepresent or mischaracterize some of the very people it’s meant to include. This is especially true when people in the population in
question outright reject the fashionable term. Such is the case, it seems, for overweight people, who, according to a number of studies, rank “fat” among their least desirable descriptors. For many, the word “fat” remains a fourth-grade way to shame someone. Choosing a euphemism like “curvy” need not be denounced as complicity or avoidance. Nor should a medical term like “overweight” be considered verboten, as it is by some activists, because it implies the existence of a normative weight.
Language is always changing — but it shouldn’t become inflexible, especially when new terminologies, in the name of inclusion, sometimes wind up making others feel excluded. In the case of “queer,” it’s especially worrisome and not only because it supersedes widely accepted
and understood terms but also because the gay rights movement’s successes have historically hinged on efforts at inclusion. Gay people, lesbians and bisexuals fought for a long time to be open and clear about who they are. That’s why they call it pride.
In this week's article, the author shared a clip from CBS Sunday Morning of author David Sedaris' commentary on this topic. In it, he asks these questions: why change the word for same-sex orientation? Who decides these things anyway? Here is a link to that clip:
David Sedaris on coming out all over again
Although the article does not bring up religion, there are aspects I'd like to discuss and what better place to do it than the discussion group.
Opinion: Let’s Say Gay
Pamela Paul, NY Times 10.23.22
The word “gay” is increasingly being substituted by “queer” or, more broadly, “L.G.B.T.Q.,” which are about gender as much as — and perhaps more so than — sexual orientation. The word “queer” is climbing in frequency and can be used interchangeably with “gay,” which itself not so
long ago replaced “homosexual.”
The shift has been especially dramatic in certain influential spheres: academia, cultural institutions and the media, from Teen Vogue to The Hollywood Reporter to this newspaper. Only 10 years ago, for example, “queer” appeared a mere 85 times in The New York Times. As of
Friday, it’s been used 632 times in 2022, and the year is not over. In the same periods, use of “gay” has fallen from 2,228 to 1,531 — still more commonly used, but the direction of the evolution is impossible to miss. Meanwhile, the umbrella term “L.G.B.T.Q.” increased from two
mentions to 714.
“It is quite often a generational issue, where younger people — millennials — are more fine with it. Gen Xers like myself are somewhat OK with it. Some you might find in each category,” Jason DeRose, who oversees L.G.B.T.Q. reporting at NPR, said of the news organization’s move
toward queer. “And then older people, maybe, who find it problematic.”
Let’s be clear: Many lesbians and gay people are fine with this shift. They may even prefer umbrella terms like “L.G.B.T.Q.” and “queer” because they include people who identify according to gender expression or identity as well as sexual orientation. But let’s consider those who do not, and why. For one thing, “gay” and “queer” are not synonymous, as they are increasingly treated, particularly among Gen Zers and millennials. Likewise, the term “L.G.B.T.Q.,” which sometimes includes additional symbols and letters, represents so many identities unrelated to sexual orientation that gays and lesbians can feel crowded out.
Last week on “CBS News Sunday Morning,” the writer David Sedaris said he was done “fighting the word ‘queer.’” He went on, “Like the term ‘Latinx,’ ‘queer’ was started by some humanities professor and slowly gathered steam. Then well-meaning radio producers and magazine editors thought, ‘Well, I guess that’s what they want to be called now!’ But I don’t remember any vote being taken.”
This raises a question for me, a language obsessive and someone interested in the ways word choices reflect and drive the culture: Why change the word for same-sex orientation? And to echo Sedaris: Who decides these things anyway?
Let’s start with the basic dictionary-sense differences between the words. “Gay” has a clear, specific meaning that applies to both men and women: “homosexual,” which is the first entry in most dictionaries. “Lesbian,” of course, bears the same meaning, but strictly for women.
Whereas the first definition for “queer,” according to Oxford and Dictionary.com, is “strange, odd.” Another definition refers not only to gay people but also to “a person whose sexual orientation or gender identity falls outside the heterosexual mainstream or the gender binary,”
according to Dictionary.com. That could mean “transgender,” “gender neutral,” “nonbinary,” “agender,” “pangender,” “genderqueer,” “demisexual,” “asexual,” “two spirit,” “third gender” or all, none or some combination of the above. Being queer is, as Bell Hooks once said, not “about who you’re having sex with — that can be a dimension of it — but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and it has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.” [While we’re here, the Q in “L.G.B.T.Q.” currently can stand for both “queer” and “questioning.”]
Confused? You should be! “Queer” can mean almost anything, and that’s the point. Queer theory is about deliberately breaking down normative categories around gender and sex, particularly binary ones like men and women, straight and gay. Saying you’re queer could mean you’re gay; it could mean you’re straight; it could mean you’re undecided about your gender or that you prefer not to say. Saying you’re queer could mean as little as having kissed another girl your sophomore year at college. It could mean you valiantly plowed through the prose of Judith Butler in a course on queerness in the Elizabethan theater. Given the broad spectrum of possibility, it’s no surprise that many people — gay or straight — have no idea what it means when someone self-identifies as queer.
But this is important: Not all gay people see themselves as queer. Many lesbian and gay people define themselves in terms of sexual orientation, not gender. There are gay men, for example, who grew up desperately needing reassurance that they were just as much a boy as any hypermanly heterosexual. They had to push back hard against those who tried to tell them their sexual orientation called their masculinity into question.
“Queer” carries other connotations, not all of them welcome — or welcoming. Whereas homosexuality is a sexual orientation one cannot choose, queerness is something one can, according to James Kirchick, the author of “Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington.” Queerness, he argues, is a fashion and a political statement that not all gay people subscribe to. “Queerness is also self-consciously and purposefully marginal,” he told me.
“Whereas the arc of the gay rights movement, and the individual lives of most gay people, has been a struggle against marginality. We want to be welcomed. We want to have equal rights. We want a place in our institutions.”
Many gay people simply prefer the word “gay.” “Gay” has long been a generally positive term. The second definition for “gay” in most dictionaries is something along the lines of “happy,” “lighthearted” and “carefree.” Whereas “queer” has been, first and foremost, a pejorative. What I hear most often from gay and lesbian friends regarding the word “queer” is something along the lines of what Sedaris pointed out: “Nobody consulted me!” This wasn’t their choice.
So how did it happen? Partly it’s the force of academic and institutional language, which has permeated the influential worlds of the arts, Hollywood, publishing and fashion. Another part is generational: Gen Zers — 21 percent of whom identify as “L.G.B.T.,” according to Gallup, a
percentage that has nearly doubled in just four years — often use social media to frame the conversation. As the linguist Gretchen McCullough explained in her book “Because Internet,” word shifts take hold much faster these days. “Queer” bobbed around the academy in semiotics
and gender studies classes for decades before activists unleashed it with the help of social media in the past decade or so. “Queerness” and “queering” now materialize in all manner of contexts, whether it’s queering John Wesley, queering the tarot or queering quinceañeras.
In recent years, other activist terms have followed light-speed trajectories. The term “Latinx” overtook academic institutions and briefly became fashionable in the media, still prevalent in some influential publications, like The New Yorker, even though only 3 percent of Hispanics (or
Latinos, if you prefer) use it. Similarly, the word “fat.” As Sarai Walker, the author of “Dietland,” has written, “fat activists use the word proudly in an effort to destigmatize not only the word, but by extension, the fat body.” For her, the word represents not merely acceptance but also the promotion of body positivity.
To be clear: There’s nothing wrong with embracing a particular word to describe yourself. The problem arises when a new term is used in ways that misrepresent or mischaracterize some of the very people it’s meant to include. This is especially true when people in the population in
question outright reject the fashionable term. Such is the case, it seems, for overweight people, who, according to a number of studies, rank “fat” among their least desirable descriptors. For many, the word “fat” remains a fourth-grade way to shame someone. Choosing a euphemism like “curvy” need not be denounced as complicity or avoidance. Nor should a medical term like “overweight” be considered verboten, as it is by some activists, because it implies the existence of a normative weight.
Language is always changing — but it shouldn’t become inflexible, especially when new terminologies, in the name of inclusion, sometimes wind up making others feel excluded. In the case of “queer,” it’s especially worrisome and not only because it supersedes widely accepted
and understood terms but also because the gay rights movement’s successes have historically hinged on efforts at inclusion. Gay people, lesbians and bisexuals fought for a long time to be open and clear about who they are. That’s why they call it pride.
Tuesday, October 25
As we draw closer to Halloween, here is a rather scary topic - an AI way to communicate with the dead. If you think this is just science fiction, the MIT Technology Review would like you to take another look. Recently at Ed Asner's memorial service, attendees were able to "communicate" with the actor through this AI technology.
I am wondering what you think of this and what is the next inevitable evolutionary step in technology. ... and is it something we should be doing.
Below is a two-page overview of the technology. To read the longer version, here is the link to MIT Technology Review: www.technologyreview.com
New AI Tools Let You Chat with the Dead
Jennifer A. Kingson, Axios 7.13.22
Creepy or cool? New products that let people keep relatives "alive" via AI are proliferating — offering an interactive conversation with a recently departed dad who took the time to record a video interview before he passed.
Why it matters: As interest in genealogy and ancestry proliferates, these tools let families preserve memories and personal connections through generations — even giving children a sense of the physical presence of a relative who died before they were born.
The tools are also being used to record the memories of noteworthy people: celebrities, Holocaust survivors, etc. One such tool, StoryFile, was notably used at the late actor Ed Asner's memorial service, where mourners were invited to "converse" with the deceased at an interactive
display that featured video and audio he recorded over several days before he died.
"Nothing could prepare me for what I was going to witness when I saw it," Matt Asner, the actor's son, told Axios. The "Lou Grant" actor had used StoryFile to record an oral history; the product then employs AI to enable "conversations" based on subjects' answers to myriad
questions. At Asner's memorial, "many people just stopped by and asked a question or a couple questions," including Jason Alexander of "Seinfeld" fame, said Matt Asner, a TV and movie producer who now runs the Ed Asner Family Center, a nonprofit for people with special needs.
"Actually, you can't just ask one question," Alexander observed. "That's the great thing about it, is it draws you in — because the personality is there." Ed Asner, a former head of the Screen Actors Guild, had "covered everything — his childhood, work history, political history, family
life," his son said. While a few mourners were "a little creeped out by it," the conversational video was "like having him in the room," Matt Asner said. "The great majority of people were just blown away by it."
The big picture: StoryFile is perhaps the most robust of a growing number of tools that help people create interactive digital memories of relatives. Many of them don't require the relative to be alive during setup.
Amazon recently showed off an experimental Alexa feature that can read books aloud in the voice of a late relative, extrapolating from a snippet of that person's recorded voice. MyHeritage, the ancestry-tracing site, now offers "Deep Nostalgia," a tool for animating old-timey
photographs of your relatives. HereAfter AI lets you record stories about yourself and pair them with photographs — so family members can ask you about your life and experiences. Microsoft has obtained a patent to create "chatbots" that mimic individual people (dead or alive) based on their social media posts and text messages, per the Washington Post.
How it works: With StoryFile, a user sits for a video interview and answers a series of questions. The company produces an archive that can be watched sequentially or used in a Q&A format. When a question is asked, the AI technology retrieves relevant video content to create an
answer, picking out clips from the available footage. The company was co-founded by oral historian Stephen Smith, who used to run Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation and specializes in preserving the memories of Holocaust survivors.
"In its most optimal state, the idea of StoryFile is you should be able to speak to anyone, anytime, anywhere that you wouldn’t normally have access to," Smith tells Axios."Maybe you don’t have access to grandma because she’s passed away, but you can still learn her story, feel a sense of connection to her." StoryFile is also building an archive of public figures who have sat for interviews. (Try asking a question of very-much-alive William Shatner.)
Between the lines: These types of programs are already growing familiar through deepfakes, science fiction, and rock concerts that use holograms to bring back dead performers like Buddy Holly. In the Netflix series "Black Mirror," a woman converses with a chatbot version of her late fiancé — and a grieving Canadian man did something similar with his dead girlfriend in real life, the San Fransisco Chronicle reports.
Other examples: Carrie Fisher being brought back to life as Princess Leia; chef Anthony Bourdain's AI voice being used to narrate a posthumous documentary about himself.
What they're saying: "When we learn about some very sophisticated use of AI to copy a real person, such as in the documentary about Anthony Bourdain, we tend to extrapolate from that situation that AI is much better than it really is," said Amit Roy-Chowdhury, who chairs the
robotics department at the University of California, Riverside. "They were only able to do that with Bourdain because there are so many recordings of him in a variety of situations." "In the future, we will probably be able to design AI that responds in a human-like way to new
situations, but we don’t know how long this will take."
The bottom line: These kinds of memory-preservation programs "might change the way we collect history," as Smith put it. "We all have amazing stories to tell, and one of the big discoveries I’ve had in founding this company is how few of us truly understand the importance
of our own story," he said. "We’re quite self-deprecating.
I am wondering what you think of this and what is the next inevitable evolutionary step in technology. ... and is it something we should be doing.
Below is a two-page overview of the technology. To read the longer version, here is the link to MIT Technology Review: www.technologyreview.com
New AI Tools Let You Chat with the Dead
Jennifer A. Kingson, Axios 7.13.22
Creepy or cool? New products that let people keep relatives "alive" via AI are proliferating — offering an interactive conversation with a recently departed dad who took the time to record a video interview before he passed.
Why it matters: As interest in genealogy and ancestry proliferates, these tools let families preserve memories and personal connections through generations — even giving children a sense of the physical presence of a relative who died before they were born.
The tools are also being used to record the memories of noteworthy people: celebrities, Holocaust survivors, etc. One such tool, StoryFile, was notably used at the late actor Ed Asner's memorial service, where mourners were invited to "converse" with the deceased at an interactive
display that featured video and audio he recorded over several days before he died.
"Nothing could prepare me for what I was going to witness when I saw it," Matt Asner, the actor's son, told Axios. The "Lou Grant" actor had used StoryFile to record an oral history; the product then employs AI to enable "conversations" based on subjects' answers to myriad
questions. At Asner's memorial, "many people just stopped by and asked a question or a couple questions," including Jason Alexander of "Seinfeld" fame, said Matt Asner, a TV and movie producer who now runs the Ed Asner Family Center, a nonprofit for people with special needs.
"Actually, you can't just ask one question," Alexander observed. "That's the great thing about it, is it draws you in — because the personality is there." Ed Asner, a former head of the Screen Actors Guild, had "covered everything — his childhood, work history, political history, family
life," his son said. While a few mourners were "a little creeped out by it," the conversational video was "like having him in the room," Matt Asner said. "The great majority of people were just blown away by it."
The big picture: StoryFile is perhaps the most robust of a growing number of tools that help people create interactive digital memories of relatives. Many of them don't require the relative to be alive during setup.
Amazon recently showed off an experimental Alexa feature that can read books aloud in the voice of a late relative, extrapolating from a snippet of that person's recorded voice. MyHeritage, the ancestry-tracing site, now offers "Deep Nostalgia," a tool for animating old-timey
photographs of your relatives. HereAfter AI lets you record stories about yourself and pair them with photographs — so family members can ask you about your life and experiences. Microsoft has obtained a patent to create "chatbots" that mimic individual people (dead or alive) based on their social media posts and text messages, per the Washington Post.
How it works: With StoryFile, a user sits for a video interview and answers a series of questions. The company produces an archive that can be watched sequentially or used in a Q&A format. When a question is asked, the AI technology retrieves relevant video content to create an
answer, picking out clips from the available footage. The company was co-founded by oral historian Stephen Smith, who used to run Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation and specializes in preserving the memories of Holocaust survivors.
"In its most optimal state, the idea of StoryFile is you should be able to speak to anyone, anytime, anywhere that you wouldn’t normally have access to," Smith tells Axios."Maybe you don’t have access to grandma because she’s passed away, but you can still learn her story, feel a sense of connection to her." StoryFile is also building an archive of public figures who have sat for interviews. (Try asking a question of very-much-alive William Shatner.)
Between the lines: These types of programs are already growing familiar through deepfakes, science fiction, and rock concerts that use holograms to bring back dead performers like Buddy Holly. In the Netflix series "Black Mirror," a woman converses with a chatbot version of her late fiancé — and a grieving Canadian man did something similar with his dead girlfriend in real life, the San Fransisco Chronicle reports.
Other examples: Carrie Fisher being brought back to life as Princess Leia; chef Anthony Bourdain's AI voice being used to narrate a posthumous documentary about himself.
What they're saying: "When we learn about some very sophisticated use of AI to copy a real person, such as in the documentary about Anthony Bourdain, we tend to extrapolate from that situation that AI is much better than it really is," said Amit Roy-Chowdhury, who chairs the
robotics department at the University of California, Riverside. "They were only able to do that with Bourdain because there are so many recordings of him in a variety of situations." "In the future, we will probably be able to design AI that responds in a human-like way to new
situations, but we don’t know how long this will take."
The bottom line: These kinds of memory-preservation programs "might change the way we collect history," as Smith put it. "We all have amazing stories to tell, and one of the big discoveries I’ve had in founding this company is how few of us truly understand the importance
of our own story," he said. "We’re quite self-deprecating.
Tuesday, October 18
Ever pause to wonder about the Nicene Creed? What do we actually believe? Our author for this week explores her belief in relation to the creed, starting with these two words: "We believe."
I am interested to hear about what you think and believe.
Believe it or not: My Struggles with the Creed
Amy Frykholm, Christian Century 1.26.15
Long before I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church, I told my priest that I had no problems with the Nicene Creed except for those two little words at the beginning, “We believe.” I loved reciting “God from God, light from light, true God from true God.” I liked saying “one, holy,
catholic, and apostolic church” because that claim seems to fly in the face of all our disagreements and declare an impossible but longed-for unity. I joined the church I did because of its connection to historical Christianity, but also because it was drawn together less by theological doctrine than by the worship tradition of the Book of Common Prayer. I felt the church would challenge and root me, but also offer freedom.
Yet I have struggled to make sense of the words “we believe.” When the congregation reaches the point of reciting the creed, I am reminded of the moment in a dance concert where the dancing stops and the director steps out on the stage to explain what the audience is experiencing. The people may or may not care to have their experience explained.
Many liturgists have argued against reciting the creed during the liturgy for just this reason. Gordon Lathrop quotes a German Lutheran, C. W. Mönnich, who argues that the creed belongs in the celebration of baptism but not in the usual Sunday liturgy, where it too easily becomes “a
sort of shibboleth of stagnant orthodoxy.”
In her book Take This Bread, Sara Miles says she was astonished to discover that most Episcopalians say the creed every Sunday. That wasn’t the practice at her parish, St. Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco. Her friend Paul Fromberg, the priest at St. Gregory, described the creed as a “toxic document” intended to police heresies. Miles found the experience of reciting the creed something like “saying the Pledge of Allegiance in the third grade.”
I have not exactly found the creed toxic, but it does give me pause. The minute the congregation starts reciting the creed, I either start arguing with it in my head, parsing individual phrases and wondering if I do in fact “believe” them, or I zone out and stop listening. In an otherwise full-bodied liturgical experience, the creed is a blank spot for me.
I wondered if Miles had come to any new conclusions about the creed or about the recitation of specific beliefs. “What do you make of belief as a part of the Christian faith?” I asked her. “Belief,” she answered, “is the least interesting part of faith. I can believe all kinds of stuff, whatever I choose—but what I believe isn’t the point. The point is to live in a relationship with God that’s not controlled by my own ideas. Faith is about putting my heart and my trust—my whole life—in God. Christianity is at heart about relationship—and the nature of my faith rests in relationship rather than belief.” That makes sense: belief is just one part, perhaps a small part, of Christianity.
Still, the belief part puzzles me. I keep wondering if other people are doing something when they recite the creed—making some kind of internal movement of consent or aligning their hearts and minds around these words—that I am unable to do.
What exactly is belief, anyway? The more I pondered it, the less I understood it.
Andrew Newberg, a medical doctor, neuroscientist, and author of Why We Believe What We Believe, says that beliefs are connections between different neurons in the brain. Beliefs have many different origins: cognitive, emotional, social. And they are maintained, in part, by repetition.
Newberg defines belief as “any perception, cognition, emotion, or memory that you consciously or unconsciously assume to be true.” Conscious and unconscious beliefs are woven into every word we speak and every action we take. Neurologically speaking, no one can make the choice not to believe. Not to believe anything would land us in a vegetative state in which neurons stop connecting with one another.
The implication for religion is significant, especially for someone raised in a particular religion as I was. “Religions are so effective in instilling certain sorts of beliefs [because of] the repetitive nature of the stories, the repetitive readings and prayers,” says Newberg. “The more you focus on a particular concept, the more you come back to it, the more those neural connections strengthen and form in your brain. And that becomes the way in which you see the world and the way in which you believe the world works.”
Beliefs are formed, according to Newberg, in part through the workings of dopamine, a pleasure chemical in the brain. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter—it helps neurons find other neurons. It makes connections. The more pleasure we have in a particular experience that is accompanied by a certain belief, the more likely we are to develop that set of connections and beliefs.
This explains why changing one’s beliefs can be very difficult. Newberg says, “Neurochemicals and neurons firing in particular ways make it difficult to break beliefs. Whenever someone comes up with information or data that is contrary to our beliefs, the usual first reaction is to
dismiss it either cognitively or emotionally. We gravitate toward information or data that support our beliefs. That’s why conservatives watch Fox News and liberals watch MSNBC.”
Newberg’s account does a much better job explaining belief than explaining my struggle with belief. If Newberg is right, shouldn’t all of these years of repeating the creed in church have reinforced the creed-related neurons and created a believing brain in me? What seems to be
happening instead is that reciting the creed reinforces doubt. I recite the creed and I doubt it at the same moment. The creed asks for conscious assent. When I recite the creed, I am implicitly saying yes to something very specific. And yet I find myself also saying, “no,” “maybe,” and “it depends.” The creed makes a demand, and that conscious demand makes me uncomfortable.
The creeds were written to try to bring order to a diversity of belief and opinion. They were the result of great battles of the meanings and interpretations of experience, scripture, and tradition. They helped to create a church of great beauty, but the makers also created lists of people to anathematize. They delineated heresies, perhaps because it helped them grasp Truth. But they didn’t live in my world, where I go for a jog with a Buddhist-Jew at six o’clock in the morning, have breakfast with my agnostic husband, converse with my Muslim friends over e-mail, talk to a Benedictine spiritual director, and plan a trip to visit a santuario in rural Mexico.
In Christianity After Religion, Diana Butler Bass writes that modern Christians have imagined that belief must come first in Christian identity. First I believe, then I enter a community of faith. She proposes that the reverse of this is more meaningful for contemporary people. First I enter the community, then I engage its practices, finally I come to belief.
But can belief and belonging be teased apart like this? Do not truth claims come together with identity claims? When I believe, I belong. When I belong, I believe. We set out on the risky path of faith together, learning to trust together, learning to find one another amidst the questions.
In this understanding, the emphasis in my recitation is on the “we” of the “we believe.” Even if I can make no sense of the “believe” part, I can claim the “we” and allow the community to believe along with me or even for me. “We believe” is something we do collectively, not individually. I commit to this community and to its worldview, which I gradually understand over time.
For me, the ongoing challenge is to continue in conversation with the creed, to wrestle with both the “we” and the “believe.” Two mistakes seem possible. One is to stop saying the creed, and so forsake the challenge it presents and the claims it makes on me. The other is to let the creed replace my longing for all that it does not and cannot say.
Butler Bass points out that the English word believe comes from belieben, which is from the German word for love. Instead of referring to something like “an opinion one holds to be true,” belieben refers to something treasured or held to be beloved. What one believes is what has been invested with one’s love. If we were to stand up and say, “We be-love God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth,” we might inch closer to an understanding of my own way of believing.
I am interested to hear about what you think and believe.
Believe it or not: My Struggles with the Creed
Amy Frykholm, Christian Century 1.26.15
Long before I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church, I told my priest that I had no problems with the Nicene Creed except for those two little words at the beginning, “We believe.” I loved reciting “God from God, light from light, true God from true God.” I liked saying “one, holy,
catholic, and apostolic church” because that claim seems to fly in the face of all our disagreements and declare an impossible but longed-for unity. I joined the church I did because of its connection to historical Christianity, but also because it was drawn together less by theological doctrine than by the worship tradition of the Book of Common Prayer. I felt the church would challenge and root me, but also offer freedom.
Yet I have struggled to make sense of the words “we believe.” When the congregation reaches the point of reciting the creed, I am reminded of the moment in a dance concert where the dancing stops and the director steps out on the stage to explain what the audience is experiencing. The people may or may not care to have their experience explained.
Many liturgists have argued against reciting the creed during the liturgy for just this reason. Gordon Lathrop quotes a German Lutheran, C. W. Mönnich, who argues that the creed belongs in the celebration of baptism but not in the usual Sunday liturgy, where it too easily becomes “a
sort of shibboleth of stagnant orthodoxy.”
In her book Take This Bread, Sara Miles says she was astonished to discover that most Episcopalians say the creed every Sunday. That wasn’t the practice at her parish, St. Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco. Her friend Paul Fromberg, the priest at St. Gregory, described the creed as a “toxic document” intended to police heresies. Miles found the experience of reciting the creed something like “saying the Pledge of Allegiance in the third grade.”
I have not exactly found the creed toxic, but it does give me pause. The minute the congregation starts reciting the creed, I either start arguing with it in my head, parsing individual phrases and wondering if I do in fact “believe” them, or I zone out and stop listening. In an otherwise full-bodied liturgical experience, the creed is a blank spot for me.
I wondered if Miles had come to any new conclusions about the creed or about the recitation of specific beliefs. “What do you make of belief as a part of the Christian faith?” I asked her. “Belief,” she answered, “is the least interesting part of faith. I can believe all kinds of stuff, whatever I choose—but what I believe isn’t the point. The point is to live in a relationship with God that’s not controlled by my own ideas. Faith is about putting my heart and my trust—my whole life—in God. Christianity is at heart about relationship—and the nature of my faith rests in relationship rather than belief.” That makes sense: belief is just one part, perhaps a small part, of Christianity.
Still, the belief part puzzles me. I keep wondering if other people are doing something when they recite the creed—making some kind of internal movement of consent or aligning their hearts and minds around these words—that I am unable to do.
What exactly is belief, anyway? The more I pondered it, the less I understood it.
Andrew Newberg, a medical doctor, neuroscientist, and author of Why We Believe What We Believe, says that beliefs are connections between different neurons in the brain. Beliefs have many different origins: cognitive, emotional, social. And they are maintained, in part, by repetition.
Newberg defines belief as “any perception, cognition, emotion, or memory that you consciously or unconsciously assume to be true.” Conscious and unconscious beliefs are woven into every word we speak and every action we take. Neurologically speaking, no one can make the choice not to believe. Not to believe anything would land us in a vegetative state in which neurons stop connecting with one another.
The implication for religion is significant, especially for someone raised in a particular religion as I was. “Religions are so effective in instilling certain sorts of beliefs [because of] the repetitive nature of the stories, the repetitive readings and prayers,” says Newberg. “The more you focus on a particular concept, the more you come back to it, the more those neural connections strengthen and form in your brain. And that becomes the way in which you see the world and the way in which you believe the world works.”
Beliefs are formed, according to Newberg, in part through the workings of dopamine, a pleasure chemical in the brain. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter—it helps neurons find other neurons. It makes connections. The more pleasure we have in a particular experience that is accompanied by a certain belief, the more likely we are to develop that set of connections and beliefs.
This explains why changing one’s beliefs can be very difficult. Newberg says, “Neurochemicals and neurons firing in particular ways make it difficult to break beliefs. Whenever someone comes up with information or data that is contrary to our beliefs, the usual first reaction is to
dismiss it either cognitively or emotionally. We gravitate toward information or data that support our beliefs. That’s why conservatives watch Fox News and liberals watch MSNBC.”
Newberg’s account does a much better job explaining belief than explaining my struggle with belief. If Newberg is right, shouldn’t all of these years of repeating the creed in church have reinforced the creed-related neurons and created a believing brain in me? What seems to be
happening instead is that reciting the creed reinforces doubt. I recite the creed and I doubt it at the same moment. The creed asks for conscious assent. When I recite the creed, I am implicitly saying yes to something very specific. And yet I find myself also saying, “no,” “maybe,” and “it depends.” The creed makes a demand, and that conscious demand makes me uncomfortable.
The creeds were written to try to bring order to a diversity of belief and opinion. They were the result of great battles of the meanings and interpretations of experience, scripture, and tradition. They helped to create a church of great beauty, but the makers also created lists of people to anathematize. They delineated heresies, perhaps because it helped them grasp Truth. But they didn’t live in my world, where I go for a jog with a Buddhist-Jew at six o’clock in the morning, have breakfast with my agnostic husband, converse with my Muslim friends over e-mail, talk to a Benedictine spiritual director, and plan a trip to visit a santuario in rural Mexico.
In Christianity After Religion, Diana Butler Bass writes that modern Christians have imagined that belief must come first in Christian identity. First I believe, then I enter a community of faith. She proposes that the reverse of this is more meaningful for contemporary people. First I enter the community, then I engage its practices, finally I come to belief.
But can belief and belonging be teased apart like this? Do not truth claims come together with identity claims? When I believe, I belong. When I belong, I believe. We set out on the risky path of faith together, learning to trust together, learning to find one another amidst the questions.
In this understanding, the emphasis in my recitation is on the “we” of the “we believe.” Even if I can make no sense of the “believe” part, I can claim the “we” and allow the community to believe along with me or even for me. “We believe” is something we do collectively, not individually. I commit to this community and to its worldview, which I gradually understand over time.
For me, the ongoing challenge is to continue in conversation with the creed, to wrestle with both the “we” and the “believe.” Two mistakes seem possible. One is to stop saying the creed, and so forsake the challenge it presents and the claims it makes on me. The other is to let the creed replace my longing for all that it does not and cannot say.
Butler Bass points out that the English word believe comes from belieben, which is from the German word for love. Instead of referring to something like “an opinion one holds to be true,” belieben refers to something treasured or held to be beloved. What one believes is what has been invested with one’s love. If we were to stand up and say, “We be-love God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth,” we might inch closer to an understanding of my own way of believing.
Tuesday, October 11
On the First Sunday after the Hurricane, I took a picture of the sunrise over Jewfish Key on my way to church. Later, I posted it on Facebook. Today (Wednesday after the Hurricane), on the same bridge, in the morning, I thought I should send that photo to Maria to put on the bulletin cover for this Sunday. When I got to church, I pulled up her draft bulletin and there it was - the photo I took last Sunday.
Was that a coincidence? Was it because Maria and I have worked together for ten years? Is it because she is that good at her job? Yes; certainly to the last question and probably to all three.
This week, we are going to talk about the theology of coincidences. There are two, one-page articles discussing the phenomenon. I'm in the camp of thinking that God interacts in our life and, at times, it looks like coincidence. Our two authors this week disagree with me. I'd like to know what you think.
Who’s Responsible for Coincidence?
Peter W. Marty, Christian Century, 9.29.22
Peter W. Marty is editor/publisher of the Century and senior pastor of St. Paul Lutheran Church in Davenport, Iowa.
In a 2018 game between the Chicago Bears and the Detroit Lions, Bears kicker Cody Parkey hit the uprights four separate times in the same game, missing two extra points and two field goals. It was a quirky sequence of events that had never occurred before in the NFL.
A 22-year-old waitress serving drinks in a Westlake, Ohio, bar asked for ID from a customer one day, only to have the 23-year-old patron produce the server’s own driver’s license. The server’s wallet had been stolen in a nearby town weeks earlier. Instead of filling a pitcher of beer, the server called the police, who then arrested the unsuspecting patron.
Minnesota Twins outfielder Denard Span hit a line drive foul ball into the stands in 2010 that struck his mother directly in the chest, momentarily knocking her out and requiring fast medical attention. “What are the odds of that happening?” Twins’ pitching coach Rick Anderson asked at the time. Welcome to the world of coincidence.
Coincidences fascinate us, and we like to assign meaning to them. Something in the human spirit craves events that astonish or surprise. For many who like to connect the dots of random events and see a reason for everything, God plays the lead role. To them, coincidence is a dirty word, the sign of a godless universe — unless, that is, God can be given responsibility for arranging the
circumstances.
But if God had arranged for Cody Parkey to miss those four kicks, what might have been the purpose of that arranging? Did God have it in for Parkey or the Bears? (The Bears won the game.) In the case of the waitress’s stolen license, if God set up the memorable circumstances for the license’s retrieval, why doesn’t God make a more concerted effort to find more stolen wallets? As for that batter’s foul ball, are we to conclude that God was looking for a conspicuous way to deepen the bond between mother and son?
Our minds get suspicious when no one is in control of our every circumstance. That chance and coincidence could be part of the fabric of the universe — and one of the by-products of human freedom — is simply incomprehensible to many. They go searching for a responsible party and, eager to identify someone who might be in charge, find God to be the go-to choice. “If bad things happen,” observes Roberta Bondi, “it is better to have a God we can’t understand and who hurts us, but is at least in charge.”
Our spiritual lives would grow exponentially if we could step beyond the pious but false notion of God arranging our circumstances for the sake of sending good and bad events our way. God doesn’t send events into our lives or arrange circumstances either to please or disappoint us. What seems to interest God far more is the texture of our souls and the composition of our character. How we shape these determines how we navigate the various events we encounter. Instead of elevating coincidence to the status of miracle and trying to assign gospel-level meaning to every chance event, maybe we can learn to trust God’s constancy in our lives enough to help us say more comfortably: Whatever happens, happens.
There Are No Coincidences: This Statement is a Paradox
Bernard Beitman, Psychology Today, 7.6.2016
Bernard Beitman, M.D., is a visiting professor at the University of Virginia. He is the former chair of the University of Missouri-Columbia department of psychiatry.
When uttering the phrase, “there are no coincidences,” the speaker feels fully confident in its truth. But, just like coincidences themselves, the meaning depends on the beliefs of the person involved. Let’s start by looking closely at the word coincidence. Dictionaries usually define it as
two or more events coming together in a surprising, unexpected way without an obvious causal explanation. Embedded in the definition is a hint that there might be an explanation.
This possibility of an explanation creates the opportunity for saying “there are no coincidences." If a cause can be defined, then there is no coincidence. Many believe that Fate or Mystery, or the Universe or God, causes coincidences. Their faith in something Greater provides them with a cause. Since God causes them, the cause is known. Therefore, there are no coincidences.
Statistically-oriented people believe that coincidences can be explained by the Law of Truly Large Numbers, which states that in large populations, any weird event is likely to happen. This is a long way of saying that coincidences are mostly random. Because statisticians “know” that randomness explains them, coincidences are nothing but strange yet expect-able events that we remember because they are surprising to us. They are not coincidences, just random events.
Those who believe in Mystery are more likely to believe that coincidences contain messages for them personally. They may think, “It was meant to be," or “Coincidences are God’s way of remaining anonymous.” Some of those in the random camp can find some coincidences
personally compelling and useful. "Randomness" and "God" Explanations Remove Personal Responsibility.
Each of these two explanations take responsibility for coincidences away from you! Each suggests that you are powerless in the face of inexplicable forces. Randomness says you have nothing to do with creating coincidences—stuff just happens because we live in a random
universe. You think coincidences may have something to do with you, but they don’t. When God is called in to explain coincidences, you are the recipient of divine grace. If you think you had something to do with it, you are deluding yourself.
Randomness and God are extreme positions in a coincidence dance that usually involves you, to varying degrees. Probability plays a necessary role. Some coincidences are more unlikely than others. Mystery plays a role because our minds cannot grasp the multiple stirrings hidden behind the veil of our ignorance. Here lies some of the beauty in the study of coincidences. They make us wonder. How much do we have to do with them, and how much is beyond our current concept of ourselves in the world?
Coincidences exist. Coincidences are real. Saying that there are no coincidences stops inquiry. Challenging the statement forces us to make sense of its ambiguity and explore our potential involvement. You can choose the random perspective and with a wave of a mental hand, dismiss most coincidences as not worth further attention. Or, you can seek out their possible personal implications and make life into an adventure of discovery both about yourself and the world around you. As you explore, you may uncover the latent abilities hidden within you.
Was that a coincidence? Was it because Maria and I have worked together for ten years? Is it because she is that good at her job? Yes; certainly to the last question and probably to all three.
This week, we are going to talk about the theology of coincidences. There are two, one-page articles discussing the phenomenon. I'm in the camp of thinking that God interacts in our life and, at times, it looks like coincidence. Our two authors this week disagree with me. I'd like to know what you think.
Who’s Responsible for Coincidence?
Peter W. Marty, Christian Century, 9.29.22
Peter W. Marty is editor/publisher of the Century and senior pastor of St. Paul Lutheran Church in Davenport, Iowa.
In a 2018 game between the Chicago Bears and the Detroit Lions, Bears kicker Cody Parkey hit the uprights four separate times in the same game, missing two extra points and two field goals. It was a quirky sequence of events that had never occurred before in the NFL.
A 22-year-old waitress serving drinks in a Westlake, Ohio, bar asked for ID from a customer one day, only to have the 23-year-old patron produce the server’s own driver’s license. The server’s wallet had been stolen in a nearby town weeks earlier. Instead of filling a pitcher of beer, the server called the police, who then arrested the unsuspecting patron.
Minnesota Twins outfielder Denard Span hit a line drive foul ball into the stands in 2010 that struck his mother directly in the chest, momentarily knocking her out and requiring fast medical attention. “What are the odds of that happening?” Twins’ pitching coach Rick Anderson asked at the time. Welcome to the world of coincidence.
Coincidences fascinate us, and we like to assign meaning to them. Something in the human spirit craves events that astonish or surprise. For many who like to connect the dots of random events and see a reason for everything, God plays the lead role. To them, coincidence is a dirty word, the sign of a godless universe — unless, that is, God can be given responsibility for arranging the
circumstances.
But if God had arranged for Cody Parkey to miss those four kicks, what might have been the purpose of that arranging? Did God have it in for Parkey or the Bears? (The Bears won the game.) In the case of the waitress’s stolen license, if God set up the memorable circumstances for the license’s retrieval, why doesn’t God make a more concerted effort to find more stolen wallets? As for that batter’s foul ball, are we to conclude that God was looking for a conspicuous way to deepen the bond between mother and son?
Our minds get suspicious when no one is in control of our every circumstance. That chance and coincidence could be part of the fabric of the universe — and one of the by-products of human freedom — is simply incomprehensible to many. They go searching for a responsible party and, eager to identify someone who might be in charge, find God to be the go-to choice. “If bad things happen,” observes Roberta Bondi, “it is better to have a God we can’t understand and who hurts us, but is at least in charge.”
Our spiritual lives would grow exponentially if we could step beyond the pious but false notion of God arranging our circumstances for the sake of sending good and bad events our way. God doesn’t send events into our lives or arrange circumstances either to please or disappoint us. What seems to interest God far more is the texture of our souls and the composition of our character. How we shape these determines how we navigate the various events we encounter. Instead of elevating coincidence to the status of miracle and trying to assign gospel-level meaning to every chance event, maybe we can learn to trust God’s constancy in our lives enough to help us say more comfortably: Whatever happens, happens.
There Are No Coincidences: This Statement is a Paradox
Bernard Beitman, Psychology Today, 7.6.2016
Bernard Beitman, M.D., is a visiting professor at the University of Virginia. He is the former chair of the University of Missouri-Columbia department of psychiatry.
When uttering the phrase, “there are no coincidences,” the speaker feels fully confident in its truth. But, just like coincidences themselves, the meaning depends on the beliefs of the person involved. Let’s start by looking closely at the word coincidence. Dictionaries usually define it as
two or more events coming together in a surprising, unexpected way without an obvious causal explanation. Embedded in the definition is a hint that there might be an explanation.
This possibility of an explanation creates the opportunity for saying “there are no coincidences." If a cause can be defined, then there is no coincidence. Many believe that Fate or Mystery, or the Universe or God, causes coincidences. Their faith in something Greater provides them with a cause. Since God causes them, the cause is known. Therefore, there are no coincidences.
Statistically-oriented people believe that coincidences can be explained by the Law of Truly Large Numbers, which states that in large populations, any weird event is likely to happen. This is a long way of saying that coincidences are mostly random. Because statisticians “know” that randomness explains them, coincidences are nothing but strange yet expect-able events that we remember because they are surprising to us. They are not coincidences, just random events.
Those who believe in Mystery are more likely to believe that coincidences contain messages for them personally. They may think, “It was meant to be," or “Coincidences are God’s way of remaining anonymous.” Some of those in the random camp can find some coincidences
personally compelling and useful. "Randomness" and "God" Explanations Remove Personal Responsibility.
Each of these two explanations take responsibility for coincidences away from you! Each suggests that you are powerless in the face of inexplicable forces. Randomness says you have nothing to do with creating coincidences—stuff just happens because we live in a random
universe. You think coincidences may have something to do with you, but they don’t. When God is called in to explain coincidences, you are the recipient of divine grace. If you think you had something to do with it, you are deluding yourself.
Randomness and God are extreme positions in a coincidence dance that usually involves you, to varying degrees. Probability plays a necessary role. Some coincidences are more unlikely than others. Mystery plays a role because our minds cannot grasp the multiple stirrings hidden behind the veil of our ignorance. Here lies some of the beauty in the study of coincidences. They make us wonder. How much do we have to do with them, and how much is beyond our current concept of ourselves in the world?
Coincidences exist. Coincidences are real. Saying that there are no coincidences stops inquiry. Challenging the statement forces us to make sense of its ambiguity and explore our potential involvement. You can choose the random perspective and with a wave of a mental hand, dismiss most coincidences as not worth further attention. Or, you can seek out their possible personal implications and make life into an adventure of discovery both about yourself and the world around you. As you explore, you may uncover the latent abilities hidden within you.
Tuesday, October 4
Welcome to the Comfort Station! All Angels has converted into a zone-of-comfort for LBK residents seeking hot coffee, air conditioning and a way to recharge their cell phone batteries (literally) and their own batteries, too (figuratively speaking). At the same time, we're going to have our Tuesday and Wednesday discussion groups. At this point, we've had more than ten people through our doors so who knows who is going to show up tomorrow. You might even see one of your neighbors.
The topic of discussion will be Hurricane Ian. We will do a check-in to see where everyone is, we can then talk about the sermon from yesterday - I feel like dancing and crying - and the attached article. Here is the link to Sunday's service:
All Angels Sunday Service, October 2
One major concern of mine is complacency. Since we were spared, or because we were lucky, I am concerned that residents will not take the next hurricane warning and evacuation orders seriously. This article talks frankly about evacuations, what it takes to move 2.5 million people, and who gets left behind.
On page four, I included a short WSJ article for fun. It's called the Waffle House Index and it can, more or less, predict the size and severity of a hurricane by how many Waffle House restaurants are open or closed. We hit the magic number of 21 which means it's a super-bad hurricane. The article also proved what many believe to be true - FEMA uses the Waffle House Index.
Escaping Hurricane Ian
Caroline Mimbs Nyce, The Atlantic, 9.30.22 (The Day After)
This week, Ian slammed into southwestern Florida as a Category 4 (almost 5) hurricane. The state is still very much in the process of assessing the damage: Emergency teams have rescued hundreds of stranded people, while some 1.9 million people remain without power. Officials
have identified as many as 21 dead [it is now 88], and that number may still rise.
Ahead of the storm’s landfall, Florida officials ordered the evacuation of about 2.5 million people. Xilei Zhao, an evacuations researcher, was not one of them. In her role as a professor in the Department of Civil and Coastal Engineering at the University of Florida, she studies and
models people’s behavior during disasters.
I caught up with Zhao by phone to discuss Hurricane Ian and how the science of evacuations is responding to the threat of bigger storms and wildfires.
Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Caroline Mimbs Nyce: For starters, how are things in Gainesville?
Xilei Zhao: To be honest, there’s nothing happening here in Gainesville. We didn’t even get much rain over here. In the beginning, it seemed like the hurricane would go through Tampa, even Tallahassee. Florida State University had already canceled all classes since Tuesday.
However, the hurricane hit Fort Myers and Naples, which are farther south. I think that’s very unfortunate. People in that area were not well prepared, because of the initial forecasting of the hurricane’s trajectory. People in Tampa were the first ordered to evacuate, but the landfall was actually in the Fort Myers region.
Nyce: What was it like for you to see the evacuation orders go out for 2.5 million people?
Zhao: I mean, I think that’s tremendous. The Tampa people had more time. They received the orders earlier. There was definitely a lot of congestion going on. The Florida Department of Transportation actually also opened the shoulder lane from Tampa to Orlando.
Nyce: How much time do people normally need to evacuate?
Zhao: It depends. It depends on how many people are getting on the road within what time frame. When several million people get on the road around the same time, it’s very hard to get all of them out in a timely fashion.
Nyce: Talk to me a little bit about what a successful disaster evacuation looks like.
Zhao: This is a very big and complicated topic. A lot depends on how orders and warnings are issued based on the forecasting of the hurricane trajectory, and the preparedness of the community. In super-prepared communities, as soon as they hear the orders, they will leave
immediately, and everyone will work together.
I read that some people in Tampa were ordered to evacuate but couldn’t afford it, which is very unfortunate. One family thought that if all of them evacuated, they’d need to spend at least $1,000 per day. They just don’t have the money to evacuate.
Nyce: Are there things that we could do to better help communities like that get out in time?
Zhao: Definitely. For example, I saw a lot of shelters were open during evacuation. They are providing the resources needed for those folks that don’t know where to go or can’t afford hotels. Elderly people, especially people who have mobility impairment, may rely on public transit or paratransit assistance during evacuations.
Nyce: Do you think Florida and that southwest region were prepared for a storm like this?
Zhao: I think so. Everyone knows there is a high risk; we are going to get major hurricanes sooner or later. So a lot of cities and counties, they have their evacuation plans, they have their zones, and they also have training, perhaps every year. And they have a lot of protocols in place.
If I remember correctly, Jacksonville has one of the best preparedness plans for things like this. As you know, I’m working on wildfire evacuations. I saw Sonoma County is learning directly from Jacksonville to develop its wildfire-evacuation plan.
Nyce: I know with wildfires, they talk about the time it takes to persuade someone to evacuate and the time of notification. Is it the same with hurricanes, where you have to convince someone that it’s really happening and they need to go now?
Zhao: The research on this area is actually happening first in hurricanes. Because with a hurricane, you don’t see any environmental cues. It’s just people telling you that the hurricane is coming. So some people have doubts. One interesting point that I want to study is about the new
residents. In the past several years, so many people have moved to Florida. Many of them have never experienced hurricanes before. So this would be the first major event that impacts them. They are going to make decisions differently than the residents in the state who have a lot of
experience.
Nyce: If it’s their first time, could they maybe be slower to jump on it?
Zhao: Yeah, I think so. Previous research showed that people who have shorter lengths of residency in Florida—those without prior hurricane experience—have more doubt. So that may delay their decision-making process. But other research also found that more experienced people,
because they have had false alarms in the past, may have more doubt. So it’s hard to say.
One thing I want to add, in terms of the evacuations: Yesterday morning, I saw news channels saying, “It’s too late to evacuate now. Just stay sheltered. Stay safe inside,” or something like that. So it seems like at least some people were trying to evacuate yesterday morning. So there
was definitely some delayed evacuation happening during that time frame. But we just don’t know all that much yet.
Nyce: What’s your biggest worry right now?
Zhao: A lot of senior people live over there in Fort Myers and Naples. Did they get out quickly and successfully? How can they recover from significant damage? Especially those folks who have limited ability or who are disabled. It worries me a lot.
They need medicine. They need mobility assistance. They are relying on, for example, the paratransit system. How can the federal government or state government help them quickly?
We’ve seen so much damage over the years that transit or electricity may not come back quickly.
How can people survive a long recovery period? It’s very worrisome.
Nyce: I know this is one of your specialties: How might we use big data to better prepare for something like Hurricane Ian?
Zhao: In the past, when we were trying to understand people’s evacuation behavior, we usually used surveys. We’d survey people and get a couple hundred responses to build some models. However, there are a lot of things we don’t know with the surveys.
With GPS data generated from apps, cellphones, or smartwatches, we can know how people are making decisions on a highly granular level. We know not only when they make the decision to leave and where they go, but when they come back. We also will be able to analyze people’s activity levels in those regions to essentially help us approximate the economic recovery after a disaster.
Nyce: How have data changed our perception of how people evacuate?
Zhao: I personally haven’t done any GPS-data analysis for hurricanes yet—I mainly work on GPS-data analytics for wildfires. But in the past, we always assumed people take the shortest path to their destination. However, the GPS data suggests that a lot of people are choosing local
roads to try to avoid congestion.
Nyce: That’s huge.
Zhao: We are also seeing something called self-evacuees or shadow evacuees—essentially, the people who are not ordered to evacuate but evacuate anyway. That’s considered bad, especially for hurricane evacuations, because if you are on the road, you are contributing to more
congestion.
Nyce: Is there anything else big-picture you’re thinking about in light of Hurricane Ian?
Zhao: There’s a concept called “digital twin.” Essentially, it’s like a virtual city. It’s like a virtual replica of the real world that we are trying to merge all different types of data, especially real-time data, into in order to assist real-time decision making.
With technologies like 5G, cloud computing, and edge computing in place, we should be able to achieve a digital twin of the physical—at least the physical infrastructure—of the entire state, so that we can make better decisions in emergencies like this.
Nyce: Does it feel like, in general, evacuations are becoming more common because of the way climate change is potentially making hurricanes and fires bigger?
Zhao: A lot of people are arguing that we need to have better zoning policy, because a lot of people are moving south—moving to Florida, for example. More and more people are moving to the floodplain, moving to the coastal cities that have more vulnerability and a higher risk of
getting hit by a hurricane.
It’s similar to the wildfire situation. A lot of people are moving to the wildland-urban interface, which has a higher risk of wildfires. So many people are moving into these vulnerable high-risk areas that evacuation becomes much more challenging. We need more study and more research in this area to help us understand what’s a better way to evacuate, especially while facing more severe storms and more frequent wildfires in the country.
Waffle House Index, Hurricane Ian
Jennifer Calfas, WSJ 9.25.22 (Day of the Storm)
Waffle House closed 21 locations along the Florida coast ahead of Hurricane Ian—an indicator for some of the storm’s severity.
The 24-hour restaurant closed locations along the anticipated path of the hurricane from Bradenton to Naples, said Njeri Boss, vice president of public relations at Waffle House Inc.
Federal emergency officials have warned the storm could cause life-threatening storm surge, heavy rainfall and destructive winds.
“The safety of our employees, their families and our customers remain a high priority as we await Hurricane Ian’s landfall,” Ms. Boss said in a statement. Waffle House has more than 1,900 locations in 25 states including Florida and along the Gulf Coast, which are often affected by
hurricanes.
Some emergency officials have relied on Waffle House closures as an informal indicator for just how destructive a storm could be.
“If you get there and the Waffle House is closed?” Craig Fugate, the former administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has said. “That's really bad. That's where you go to work.”
The Waffle House closures this week join those across Florida schools, airports and Walt Disney World, where officials have temporarily canceled classes, flights and theme-park visits due to the historic storm.
The restaurant chain has historically sought to open quickly after disaster strikes, with plans on how to do so without electricity, for example.
The topic of discussion will be Hurricane Ian. We will do a check-in to see where everyone is, we can then talk about the sermon from yesterday - I feel like dancing and crying - and the attached article. Here is the link to Sunday's service:
All Angels Sunday Service, October 2
One major concern of mine is complacency. Since we were spared, or because we were lucky, I am concerned that residents will not take the next hurricane warning and evacuation orders seriously. This article talks frankly about evacuations, what it takes to move 2.5 million people, and who gets left behind.
On page four, I included a short WSJ article for fun. It's called the Waffle House Index and it can, more or less, predict the size and severity of a hurricane by how many Waffle House restaurants are open or closed. We hit the magic number of 21 which means it's a super-bad hurricane. The article also proved what many believe to be true - FEMA uses the Waffle House Index.
Escaping Hurricane Ian
Caroline Mimbs Nyce, The Atlantic, 9.30.22 (The Day After)
This week, Ian slammed into southwestern Florida as a Category 4 (almost 5) hurricane. The state is still very much in the process of assessing the damage: Emergency teams have rescued hundreds of stranded people, while some 1.9 million people remain without power. Officials
have identified as many as 21 dead [it is now 88], and that number may still rise.
Ahead of the storm’s landfall, Florida officials ordered the evacuation of about 2.5 million people. Xilei Zhao, an evacuations researcher, was not one of them. In her role as a professor in the Department of Civil and Coastal Engineering at the University of Florida, she studies and
models people’s behavior during disasters.
I caught up with Zhao by phone to discuss Hurricane Ian and how the science of evacuations is responding to the threat of bigger storms and wildfires.
Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Caroline Mimbs Nyce: For starters, how are things in Gainesville?
Xilei Zhao: To be honest, there’s nothing happening here in Gainesville. We didn’t even get much rain over here. In the beginning, it seemed like the hurricane would go through Tampa, even Tallahassee. Florida State University had already canceled all classes since Tuesday.
However, the hurricane hit Fort Myers and Naples, which are farther south. I think that’s very unfortunate. People in that area were not well prepared, because of the initial forecasting of the hurricane’s trajectory. People in Tampa were the first ordered to evacuate, but the landfall was actually in the Fort Myers region.
Nyce: What was it like for you to see the evacuation orders go out for 2.5 million people?
Zhao: I mean, I think that’s tremendous. The Tampa people had more time. They received the orders earlier. There was definitely a lot of congestion going on. The Florida Department of Transportation actually also opened the shoulder lane from Tampa to Orlando.
Nyce: How much time do people normally need to evacuate?
Zhao: It depends. It depends on how many people are getting on the road within what time frame. When several million people get on the road around the same time, it’s very hard to get all of them out in a timely fashion.
Nyce: Talk to me a little bit about what a successful disaster evacuation looks like.
Zhao: This is a very big and complicated topic. A lot depends on how orders and warnings are issued based on the forecasting of the hurricane trajectory, and the preparedness of the community. In super-prepared communities, as soon as they hear the orders, they will leave
immediately, and everyone will work together.
I read that some people in Tampa were ordered to evacuate but couldn’t afford it, which is very unfortunate. One family thought that if all of them evacuated, they’d need to spend at least $1,000 per day. They just don’t have the money to evacuate.
Nyce: Are there things that we could do to better help communities like that get out in time?
Zhao: Definitely. For example, I saw a lot of shelters were open during evacuation. They are providing the resources needed for those folks that don’t know where to go or can’t afford hotels. Elderly people, especially people who have mobility impairment, may rely on public transit or paratransit assistance during evacuations.
Nyce: Do you think Florida and that southwest region were prepared for a storm like this?
Zhao: I think so. Everyone knows there is a high risk; we are going to get major hurricanes sooner or later. So a lot of cities and counties, they have their evacuation plans, they have their zones, and they also have training, perhaps every year. And they have a lot of protocols in place.
If I remember correctly, Jacksonville has one of the best preparedness plans for things like this. As you know, I’m working on wildfire evacuations. I saw Sonoma County is learning directly from Jacksonville to develop its wildfire-evacuation plan.
Nyce: I know with wildfires, they talk about the time it takes to persuade someone to evacuate and the time of notification. Is it the same with hurricanes, where you have to convince someone that it’s really happening and they need to go now?
Zhao: The research on this area is actually happening first in hurricanes. Because with a hurricane, you don’t see any environmental cues. It’s just people telling you that the hurricane is coming. So some people have doubts. One interesting point that I want to study is about the new
residents. In the past several years, so many people have moved to Florida. Many of them have never experienced hurricanes before. So this would be the first major event that impacts them. They are going to make decisions differently than the residents in the state who have a lot of
experience.
Nyce: If it’s their first time, could they maybe be slower to jump on it?
Zhao: Yeah, I think so. Previous research showed that people who have shorter lengths of residency in Florida—those without prior hurricane experience—have more doubt. So that may delay their decision-making process. But other research also found that more experienced people,
because they have had false alarms in the past, may have more doubt. So it’s hard to say.
One thing I want to add, in terms of the evacuations: Yesterday morning, I saw news channels saying, “It’s too late to evacuate now. Just stay sheltered. Stay safe inside,” or something like that. So it seems like at least some people were trying to evacuate yesterday morning. So there
was definitely some delayed evacuation happening during that time frame. But we just don’t know all that much yet.
Nyce: What’s your biggest worry right now?
Zhao: A lot of senior people live over there in Fort Myers and Naples. Did they get out quickly and successfully? How can they recover from significant damage? Especially those folks who have limited ability or who are disabled. It worries me a lot.
They need medicine. They need mobility assistance. They are relying on, for example, the paratransit system. How can the federal government or state government help them quickly?
We’ve seen so much damage over the years that transit or electricity may not come back quickly.
How can people survive a long recovery period? It’s very worrisome.
Nyce: I know this is one of your specialties: How might we use big data to better prepare for something like Hurricane Ian?
Zhao: In the past, when we were trying to understand people’s evacuation behavior, we usually used surveys. We’d survey people and get a couple hundred responses to build some models. However, there are a lot of things we don’t know with the surveys.
With GPS data generated from apps, cellphones, or smartwatches, we can know how people are making decisions on a highly granular level. We know not only when they make the decision to leave and where they go, but when they come back. We also will be able to analyze people’s activity levels in those regions to essentially help us approximate the economic recovery after a disaster.
Nyce: How have data changed our perception of how people evacuate?
Zhao: I personally haven’t done any GPS-data analysis for hurricanes yet—I mainly work on GPS-data analytics for wildfires. But in the past, we always assumed people take the shortest path to their destination. However, the GPS data suggests that a lot of people are choosing local
roads to try to avoid congestion.
Nyce: That’s huge.
Zhao: We are also seeing something called self-evacuees or shadow evacuees—essentially, the people who are not ordered to evacuate but evacuate anyway. That’s considered bad, especially for hurricane evacuations, because if you are on the road, you are contributing to more
congestion.
Nyce: Is there anything else big-picture you’re thinking about in light of Hurricane Ian?
Zhao: There’s a concept called “digital twin.” Essentially, it’s like a virtual city. It’s like a virtual replica of the real world that we are trying to merge all different types of data, especially real-time data, into in order to assist real-time decision making.
With technologies like 5G, cloud computing, and edge computing in place, we should be able to achieve a digital twin of the physical—at least the physical infrastructure—of the entire state, so that we can make better decisions in emergencies like this.
Nyce: Does it feel like, in general, evacuations are becoming more common because of the way climate change is potentially making hurricanes and fires bigger?
Zhao: A lot of people are arguing that we need to have better zoning policy, because a lot of people are moving south—moving to Florida, for example. More and more people are moving to the floodplain, moving to the coastal cities that have more vulnerability and a higher risk of
getting hit by a hurricane.
It’s similar to the wildfire situation. A lot of people are moving to the wildland-urban interface, which has a higher risk of wildfires. So many people are moving into these vulnerable high-risk areas that evacuation becomes much more challenging. We need more study and more research in this area to help us understand what’s a better way to evacuate, especially while facing more severe storms and more frequent wildfires in the country.
Waffle House Index, Hurricane Ian
Jennifer Calfas, WSJ 9.25.22 (Day of the Storm)
Waffle House closed 21 locations along the Florida coast ahead of Hurricane Ian—an indicator for some of the storm’s severity.
The 24-hour restaurant closed locations along the anticipated path of the hurricane from Bradenton to Naples, said Njeri Boss, vice president of public relations at Waffle House Inc.
Federal emergency officials have warned the storm could cause life-threatening storm surge, heavy rainfall and destructive winds.
“The safety of our employees, their families and our customers remain a high priority as we await Hurricane Ian’s landfall,” Ms. Boss said in a statement. Waffle House has more than 1,900 locations in 25 states including Florida and along the Gulf Coast, which are often affected by
hurricanes.
Some emergency officials have relied on Waffle House closures as an informal indicator for just how destructive a storm could be.
“If you get there and the Waffle House is closed?” Craig Fugate, the former administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has said. “That's really bad. That's where you go to work.”
The Waffle House closures this week join those across Florida schools, airports and Walt Disney World, where officials have temporarily canceled classes, flights and theme-park visits due to the historic storm.
The restaurant chain has historically sought to open quickly after disaster strikes, with plans on how to do so without electricity, for example.
Tuesday, September 27
It is said that Queen Elizabeth has altered the course and direction of the Commonwealth and the world. Her reign will be talked about in 1,000 years from now as an example on how to lead with virtue.
None of us will be around to see if this comes true, but, virtues are a great topic for us to discuss. The article for next week, from the WSJ, contrasts modern values against the traditional virtues that the Queen Mother exhibited.
I'd like to know if the author successfully made his argument; specifically, if the values of today are as shifting and baseless as he claims and, as such, was Queen Elizabeth's life countercultural? (There is a surprise rebuke against the Church in this piece; which, on its own merit, is enough to discuss).
The Countercultural Queen
Daniel Henninger, WSJ 9.14.22
Within the hour of her death, Queen Elizabeth II was praised by commentators from left to right for representing so many traditional values. Reserve, self-containment, duty, responsibility, modesty of demeanor, graciousness, civility, prudence, fortitude.
For a moment I thought I was back in St. Margaret Mary grade school memorizing the useful virtues from the Baltimore Catechism: “The seven gifts of the Holy Ghost are wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and fear of the Lord.” Counsel, as the young Elizabeth surely learned, is “advice, which guides us in practical matters.”
What is most notable is that this instant outpouring of media praise for the queen’s traditional virtues comes amid a contemporary culture that elevates daily, even hourly, a value system of self-regard, self-promotion, changeability, acting out and anything-goes behavior that is the polar opposite of Queen Elizabeth’s.
The celebration of the queen’s traditional values suggests an unexpected recognition of the extreme artificiality of our now-dominant culture.
“Influencer” is the defining word for our times. An influencer’s success depends one thing: self-promotion accomplished by rising in the hot-air balloons of Instagram, TikTok and other social media. The goal is to marry marketing with fame. Because influencers do it, millions of others, often young women, make preoccupation with themselves the one habit that directs their lives. A culture of self-aggrandizement, though, is only one half of the shift in values revealed by the celebration of the queen’s life.
To say that the queen’s values were traditional means they existed for a very long time. The poised 14-year-old Elizabeth we heard in news clips reading her first public speech to children during the Blitz of World War II had by then been taught personal virtues held in high regard for centuries in the West and arguably longer in the East.
In our time, however, personal virtue has been demoted by social virtue.
The week’s recollections of what made the queen’s life exceptional are an opportunity to compare the merits of virtue earned individually with virtue, or approved behavior, constructed by society.
One effect of giving social responsibility more weight than personal responsibility is that it gives people a pass on their personal behavior. So long as one’s life is “centered” on some larger social good, the conduct of one’s personal life is, well, irrelevant.
Consider this: a difficulty with the theory of decriminalization is that it diminishes almost to nothing responsibility for one’s bad acts, such as shoplifting. Behavior unhinged from norms of any sort is rampant now.
The queen’s habits were a source of personal stability. Modern values are a source of instability. The habits of behavior associated with her are not about mere goodness but about creating a structure of life inside of which one then can perform successfully as a person, hopefully for the good. She did that for her country for 70 years.
One cannot discuss what has happened to the culture in the queen’s lifetime without considering the changed role of the churches. Gaining momentum, I’d say, with their embrace of the nuclear-disarmament movement in the 1980s, the churches turned most of their energies to teaching that the embrace of broad social goals is the first determinant of a moral life. That won’t change, but maybe it’s time they reset the weekly balance between social-justice homilies and a rediscovery of personal virtues like the queen’s, which they once taught so well.
Public schools, where children spend six hours of each of their weekdays, were long considered an invaluable reinforcement of personal self-discipline and character. They also abandoned that role to propagandize instead for politicized values. This shift is one reason so many parents migrated to charters, school-choice programs and home-schooling.
One has to wonder: Is the praise for the queen’s old-school virtues little more than this week’s talking points, or do her media admirers recognize that something about what we promote now— self-regard, social moralizing — has gone badly off the tracks?
Perhaps this will fade with the queen’s funeral Monday.
We’d be better off if a longer reconsideration of what made Queen Elizabeth’s life exemplary became part of the post-pandemic reckoning that is changing so much else about the status quo.
None of us will be around to see if this comes true, but, virtues are a great topic for us to discuss. The article for next week, from the WSJ, contrasts modern values against the traditional virtues that the Queen Mother exhibited.
I'd like to know if the author successfully made his argument; specifically, if the values of today are as shifting and baseless as he claims and, as such, was Queen Elizabeth's life countercultural? (There is a surprise rebuke against the Church in this piece; which, on its own merit, is enough to discuss).
The Countercultural Queen
Daniel Henninger, WSJ 9.14.22
Within the hour of her death, Queen Elizabeth II was praised by commentators from left to right for representing so many traditional values. Reserve, self-containment, duty, responsibility, modesty of demeanor, graciousness, civility, prudence, fortitude.
For a moment I thought I was back in St. Margaret Mary grade school memorizing the useful virtues from the Baltimore Catechism: “The seven gifts of the Holy Ghost are wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and fear of the Lord.” Counsel, as the young Elizabeth surely learned, is “advice, which guides us in practical matters.”
What is most notable is that this instant outpouring of media praise for the queen’s traditional virtues comes amid a contemporary culture that elevates daily, even hourly, a value system of self-regard, self-promotion, changeability, acting out and anything-goes behavior that is the polar opposite of Queen Elizabeth’s.
The celebration of the queen’s traditional values suggests an unexpected recognition of the extreme artificiality of our now-dominant culture.
“Influencer” is the defining word for our times. An influencer’s success depends one thing: self-promotion accomplished by rising in the hot-air balloons of Instagram, TikTok and other social media. The goal is to marry marketing with fame. Because influencers do it, millions of others, often young women, make preoccupation with themselves the one habit that directs their lives. A culture of self-aggrandizement, though, is only one half of the shift in values revealed by the celebration of the queen’s life.
To say that the queen’s values were traditional means they existed for a very long time. The poised 14-year-old Elizabeth we heard in news clips reading her first public speech to children during the Blitz of World War II had by then been taught personal virtues held in high regard for centuries in the West and arguably longer in the East.
In our time, however, personal virtue has been demoted by social virtue.
The week’s recollections of what made the queen’s life exceptional are an opportunity to compare the merits of virtue earned individually with virtue, or approved behavior, constructed by society.
One effect of giving social responsibility more weight than personal responsibility is that it gives people a pass on their personal behavior. So long as one’s life is “centered” on some larger social good, the conduct of one’s personal life is, well, irrelevant.
Consider this: a difficulty with the theory of decriminalization is that it diminishes almost to nothing responsibility for one’s bad acts, such as shoplifting. Behavior unhinged from norms of any sort is rampant now.
The queen’s habits were a source of personal stability. Modern values are a source of instability. The habits of behavior associated with her are not about mere goodness but about creating a structure of life inside of which one then can perform successfully as a person, hopefully for the good. She did that for her country for 70 years.
One cannot discuss what has happened to the culture in the queen’s lifetime without considering the changed role of the churches. Gaining momentum, I’d say, with their embrace of the nuclear-disarmament movement in the 1980s, the churches turned most of their energies to teaching that the embrace of broad social goals is the first determinant of a moral life. That won’t change, but maybe it’s time they reset the weekly balance between social-justice homilies and a rediscovery of personal virtues like the queen’s, which they once taught so well.
Public schools, where children spend six hours of each of their weekdays, were long considered an invaluable reinforcement of personal self-discipline and character. They also abandoned that role to propagandize instead for politicized values. This shift is one reason so many parents migrated to charters, school-choice programs and home-schooling.
One has to wonder: Is the praise for the queen’s old-school virtues little more than this week’s talking points, or do her media admirers recognize that something about what we promote now— self-regard, social moralizing — has gone badly off the tracks?
Perhaps this will fade with the queen’s funeral Monday.
We’d be better off if a longer reconsideration of what made Queen Elizabeth’s life exemplary became part of the post-pandemic reckoning that is changing so much else about the status quo.
Tuesday, September 20
The topic for this week is to discuss what is happening in the greater Church - specifically the evangelical side of the House.
How Politics Poisoned the Evangelical Church
Tim Alberta, The Atlantic 5.10.22
The movement spent 40 years at war with secular America. Now it’s at war with itself.
Having grown up as the son of a senior pastor, I’ve spent my life watching evangelicalism morph from a spiritual disposition into a political identity. It’s heartbreaking. So many people who love the Lord, who give their time and money to the poor and the mourning and the persecuted, have been reduced to a caricature. But I understand why. Evangelicals—including my own father—became compulsively political, allowing specific ethical arguments to snowball into full-blown partisan advocacy, often in ways that distracted from their mission of evangelizing for Christ. To his credit, even when my dad would lean hard into a political debate, he was careful to remind his church of the appropriate Christian perspective. “God doesn’t bite his fingernails over any of this,” he would say around election time. “Neither should you.”
Brighton, Michigan is a small town, and I knew the local evangelical scene like it was a second reporting beat. I knew which pastors were feuding; whose congregations were mired in scandal; which church softball teams had a deacon playing shortstop, and which ones stacked their lineups with non-tithing ringers. But FloodGate Church? I had never heard of FloodGate. And neither had most of the people sitting around me, until recently.
For a decade, Pastor Bolin preached to a crowd of about 100 on a typical Sunday. Then came Easter 2020, when Bolin announced that he would hold indoor worship services in defiance of Michigan’s emergency shutdown orders. As word got around the conservative suburbs of
Detroit, Bolin became a minor celebrity. Local politicians and activists borrowed his pulpit. FloodGate’s attendance soared as members of other congregations defected to the small roadside church. By Easter 2021, FloodGate was hosting 1,500 people every weekend.
Listening to Bolin that morning, I kept thinking about another pastor nearby, one who approached his job very differently: Ken Brown. Brown leads his own ministry, Community Bible Church, in the Detroit suburb of Trenton. I got to know him during the 2020 presidential campaign. Brown wrote to me explaining the combustible dynamics within the evangelical Church and describing his own efforts—as the conservative pastor of a conservative congregation—to keep his members from being radicalized by the lies of media figures.
When we finally met, in the spring of 2021, Brown told me his alarm had only grown. “The crisis for the Church is a crisis of discernment,” he said over lunch. “Discernment” (one’s basic ability to separate truth from untruth) “is a core biblical discipline. And many Christians are not
practicing it.” A stocky man with steely blue eyes and a subdued, matter-of-fact tone, Brown struck me as thoroughly disheartened. The pastor said his concern was not simply for his congregation of 300, but for the millions of American evangelicals who had come to value power
over integrity, the ephemeral over the eternal, moral relativism over bright lines of right and wrong. He made a compelling case.
But in leading their predominantly white, Republican congregations, Brown and Bolin have come to agree on one important thing: Both pastors believe there is a war for the soul of the American Church—and both have decided they cannot stand on the sidelines. They aren’t alone. To many evangelicals today, the enemy is no longer secular America, but their fellow Christians, people who hold the same faith but different beliefs.
How did this happen? For generations, white evangelicals have cultivated a narrative pitting courageous, God-fearing Christians against a wicked society that wants to expunge the Almighty from public life. Having convinced so many evangelicals that the next election could trigger the nation’s demise, Christian leaders effectively turned thousands of churches into loosely organized, hazily defined, existentially urgent movement — the types of places where paranoia and falsehoods flourish and people turn on one another. “Hands down, the biggest challenge facing the Church right now is the misinformation and disinformation coming in from the outside,” Brown said.
Because of this, the pastor told me, he can no longer justify a passive approach from the pulpit. The Church is becoming radicalized—and pastors who don’t address this fact head-on are only contributing to the problem. He understands their reluctance. They would rather keep the peace than risk alienating anyone. The irony, Brown said, is that by pretending that a clash of Christian worldviews isn’t happening, these pastors risk losing credibility with members who can see it unfolding inside their own church.
If this is a tale of two churches, it is also the tale of churches everywhere. It’s the story of millions of American Christians who, after a lifetime spent considering their political affiliations in the context of their faith, are now considering their faith affiliations in the context of their politics.
The first piece of scripture I memorized as a child is from Paul’s second letter to the early Church in Corinth, Greece. As with most of his letters, the apostle was addressing dysfunction and breakage in the community of believers. “We fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is
unseen,” Paul wrote. “Since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” Paul’s admonishment of the early Church contains no real ambiguity. Followers of Jesus are to orient themselves toward his enduring promise of salvation, and away from the fleeting troubles of
humanity.
The nation’s largest denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, is bleeding members because of ferocious infighting over race relations, women serving in leadership, accountability for sexual misconduct, and other issues. The United Methodist Church, America’s second-largest
denomination, is headed toward imminent divorce over irreconcilable social and ideological divisions. Smaller denominations are losing affiliate churches as pastors and congregations break from their leadership over many of the same cultural flash points, choosing independence over associating with those who do not hold their views.
Christianity has traditionally been seen as a stabilizing, even moderating, influence on American life. In 1975, more than two-thirds of Americans expressed “a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the church,” according to Gallup, and as of 1985, “organized religion was the most revered institution” in American life. Today, Gallup reports, just 37 percent of Americans have confidence in the Church. This downward spiral owes principally to two phenomena: the constant stench of scandal, with megachurches and prominent leaders imploding on what seems like a weekly basis; and the growing perception that Christians are embracing extremist views.
Meanwhile, other pastors feel trapped. One stray remark could split their congregation, or even cost them their job. Yet a strictly apolitical approach can be counterproductive; their unwillingness to engage only invites more scrutiny. The whisper campaigns brand conservative
pastors as moderate, and moderate pastors as Marxists. In this environment, a church leader’s stance on biblical inerrancy is less important than whether he is considered “woke.” His command of scripture is less relevant than suspicions about how he voted in the last election.
More than a few times, I’ve heard casual talk of civil war inside places that purport to worship the Prince of Peace. If this all sounds a bit strange—ominous, or even “dangerous,” as one local pastor warned me the night before I visited—well, sure. But strange compared to what? Having spent my entire life in and around the evangelical Church, I had in recent years become desensitized to all the rhetoric of militarism and imminent Armageddon.
In a sense, Christians have always lived a different epistemological existence than nonbelievers. But this is something new. But what is left to hold together? When I visited, Aldersgate church—an elegant structure with room for 500 in the sanctuary—was hosting maybe 150 people total across two Sunday services. Pastor Bingham is proud to say that he hasn’t driven anyone away with his political views. Still, membership has been in decline for years, in part because so many Christians today gravitate toward the places that are outspokenly aligned with their extra-biblical beliefs. For all their talk of keeping Aldersgate unified, the two pastors acknowledged that in a few years’ time, they would belong to different churches. The same went for their members.
When I met with some of the longest-tenured laypeople of the church, almost everyone indicated that when the UMC divorce was finalized, they would follow the church that reflected their political views. It didn’t matter that doing so meant, in some cases, walking away from the
church they’d attended for decades.
“What’s coming is going to be brutal. There’s no way around that,” Bingham told me. “Churches are breaking apart everywhere. My only hope is that, when the time comes, our people can separate without shattering.” Ken Brown knows plenty of pastors like Bingham, who refuse to
talk about the very things tearing their churches apart. He knows they have their reasons. Some don’t know what to say. Others fear that speaking up would only make matters worse. Almost everyone is concerned about job security. Pastors are not immune from anxiety over their mortgage or kids’ college tuitions; many younger clergy members, in particular, worry that they haven’t amassed enough goodwill to get argumentative with their congregation.
Bolin tells me the church has sold the building we’re sitting in—where the congregation has met since the 1970s—and purchased a sprawling complex down the road. The pastor says FloodGate’s revenue has multiplied six-fold since 2020. It is charging ahead into an era of expansion, with ambitions of becoming southeast Michigan’s next megachurch.
Bolin says FloodGate and churches like it have grown in direct proportion to how many Christians “felt betrayed by their pastors.” That trend looks to be holding steady. More people will leave churches that refuse to identify with a tribe and will find pastors who confirm their own partisan views. The erosion of confidence in the institution of American Christianity will accelerate. The caricature of evangelicals will get uglier. And the actual work of evangelizing will get much, much harder.
God isn’t biting his fingernails. But I sure am
How Politics Poisoned the Evangelical Church
Tim Alberta, The Atlantic 5.10.22
The movement spent 40 years at war with secular America. Now it’s at war with itself.
Having grown up as the son of a senior pastor, I’ve spent my life watching evangelicalism morph from a spiritual disposition into a political identity. It’s heartbreaking. So many people who love the Lord, who give their time and money to the poor and the mourning and the persecuted, have been reduced to a caricature. But I understand why. Evangelicals—including my own father—became compulsively political, allowing specific ethical arguments to snowball into full-blown partisan advocacy, often in ways that distracted from their mission of evangelizing for Christ. To his credit, even when my dad would lean hard into a political debate, he was careful to remind his church of the appropriate Christian perspective. “God doesn’t bite his fingernails over any of this,” he would say around election time. “Neither should you.”
Brighton, Michigan is a small town, and I knew the local evangelical scene like it was a second reporting beat. I knew which pastors were feuding; whose congregations were mired in scandal; which church softball teams had a deacon playing shortstop, and which ones stacked their lineups with non-tithing ringers. But FloodGate Church? I had never heard of FloodGate. And neither had most of the people sitting around me, until recently.
For a decade, Pastor Bolin preached to a crowd of about 100 on a typical Sunday. Then came Easter 2020, when Bolin announced that he would hold indoor worship services in defiance of Michigan’s emergency shutdown orders. As word got around the conservative suburbs of
Detroit, Bolin became a minor celebrity. Local politicians and activists borrowed his pulpit. FloodGate’s attendance soared as members of other congregations defected to the small roadside church. By Easter 2021, FloodGate was hosting 1,500 people every weekend.
Listening to Bolin that morning, I kept thinking about another pastor nearby, one who approached his job very differently: Ken Brown. Brown leads his own ministry, Community Bible Church, in the Detroit suburb of Trenton. I got to know him during the 2020 presidential campaign. Brown wrote to me explaining the combustible dynamics within the evangelical Church and describing his own efforts—as the conservative pastor of a conservative congregation—to keep his members from being radicalized by the lies of media figures.
When we finally met, in the spring of 2021, Brown told me his alarm had only grown. “The crisis for the Church is a crisis of discernment,” he said over lunch. “Discernment” (one’s basic ability to separate truth from untruth) “is a core biblical discipline. And many Christians are not
practicing it.” A stocky man with steely blue eyes and a subdued, matter-of-fact tone, Brown struck me as thoroughly disheartened. The pastor said his concern was not simply for his congregation of 300, but for the millions of American evangelicals who had come to value power
over integrity, the ephemeral over the eternal, moral relativism over bright lines of right and wrong. He made a compelling case.
But in leading their predominantly white, Republican congregations, Brown and Bolin have come to agree on one important thing: Both pastors believe there is a war for the soul of the American Church—and both have decided they cannot stand on the sidelines. They aren’t alone. To many evangelicals today, the enemy is no longer secular America, but their fellow Christians, people who hold the same faith but different beliefs.
How did this happen? For generations, white evangelicals have cultivated a narrative pitting courageous, God-fearing Christians against a wicked society that wants to expunge the Almighty from public life. Having convinced so many evangelicals that the next election could trigger the nation’s demise, Christian leaders effectively turned thousands of churches into loosely organized, hazily defined, existentially urgent movement — the types of places where paranoia and falsehoods flourish and people turn on one another. “Hands down, the biggest challenge facing the Church right now is the misinformation and disinformation coming in from the outside,” Brown said.
Because of this, the pastor told me, he can no longer justify a passive approach from the pulpit. The Church is becoming radicalized—and pastors who don’t address this fact head-on are only contributing to the problem. He understands their reluctance. They would rather keep the peace than risk alienating anyone. The irony, Brown said, is that by pretending that a clash of Christian worldviews isn’t happening, these pastors risk losing credibility with members who can see it unfolding inside their own church.
If this is a tale of two churches, it is also the tale of churches everywhere. It’s the story of millions of American Christians who, after a lifetime spent considering their political affiliations in the context of their faith, are now considering their faith affiliations in the context of their politics.
The first piece of scripture I memorized as a child is from Paul’s second letter to the early Church in Corinth, Greece. As with most of his letters, the apostle was addressing dysfunction and breakage in the community of believers. “We fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is
unseen,” Paul wrote. “Since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” Paul’s admonishment of the early Church contains no real ambiguity. Followers of Jesus are to orient themselves toward his enduring promise of salvation, and away from the fleeting troubles of
humanity.
The nation’s largest denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, is bleeding members because of ferocious infighting over race relations, women serving in leadership, accountability for sexual misconduct, and other issues. The United Methodist Church, America’s second-largest
denomination, is headed toward imminent divorce over irreconcilable social and ideological divisions. Smaller denominations are losing affiliate churches as pastors and congregations break from their leadership over many of the same cultural flash points, choosing independence over associating with those who do not hold their views.
Christianity has traditionally been seen as a stabilizing, even moderating, influence on American life. In 1975, more than two-thirds of Americans expressed “a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the church,” according to Gallup, and as of 1985, “organized religion was the most revered institution” in American life. Today, Gallup reports, just 37 percent of Americans have confidence in the Church. This downward spiral owes principally to two phenomena: the constant stench of scandal, with megachurches and prominent leaders imploding on what seems like a weekly basis; and the growing perception that Christians are embracing extremist views.
Meanwhile, other pastors feel trapped. One stray remark could split their congregation, or even cost them their job. Yet a strictly apolitical approach can be counterproductive; their unwillingness to engage only invites more scrutiny. The whisper campaigns brand conservative
pastors as moderate, and moderate pastors as Marxists. In this environment, a church leader’s stance on biblical inerrancy is less important than whether he is considered “woke.” His command of scripture is less relevant than suspicions about how he voted in the last election.
More than a few times, I’ve heard casual talk of civil war inside places that purport to worship the Prince of Peace. If this all sounds a bit strange—ominous, or even “dangerous,” as one local pastor warned me the night before I visited—well, sure. But strange compared to what? Having spent my entire life in and around the evangelical Church, I had in recent years become desensitized to all the rhetoric of militarism and imminent Armageddon.
In a sense, Christians have always lived a different epistemological existence than nonbelievers. But this is something new. But what is left to hold together? When I visited, Aldersgate church—an elegant structure with room for 500 in the sanctuary—was hosting maybe 150 people total across two Sunday services. Pastor Bingham is proud to say that he hasn’t driven anyone away with his political views. Still, membership has been in decline for years, in part because so many Christians today gravitate toward the places that are outspokenly aligned with their extra-biblical beliefs. For all their talk of keeping Aldersgate unified, the two pastors acknowledged that in a few years’ time, they would belong to different churches. The same went for their members.
When I met with some of the longest-tenured laypeople of the church, almost everyone indicated that when the UMC divorce was finalized, they would follow the church that reflected their political views. It didn’t matter that doing so meant, in some cases, walking away from the
church they’d attended for decades.
“What’s coming is going to be brutal. There’s no way around that,” Bingham told me. “Churches are breaking apart everywhere. My only hope is that, when the time comes, our people can separate without shattering.” Ken Brown knows plenty of pastors like Bingham, who refuse to
talk about the very things tearing their churches apart. He knows they have their reasons. Some don’t know what to say. Others fear that speaking up would only make matters worse. Almost everyone is concerned about job security. Pastors are not immune from anxiety over their mortgage or kids’ college tuitions; many younger clergy members, in particular, worry that they haven’t amassed enough goodwill to get argumentative with their congregation.
Bolin tells me the church has sold the building we’re sitting in—where the congregation has met since the 1970s—and purchased a sprawling complex down the road. The pastor says FloodGate’s revenue has multiplied six-fold since 2020. It is charging ahead into an era of expansion, with ambitions of becoming southeast Michigan’s next megachurch.
Bolin says FloodGate and churches like it have grown in direct proportion to how many Christians “felt betrayed by their pastors.” That trend looks to be holding steady. More people will leave churches that refuse to identify with a tribe and will find pastors who confirm their own partisan views. The erosion of confidence in the institution of American Christianity will accelerate. The caricature of evangelicals will get uglier. And the actual work of evangelizing will get much, much harder.
God isn’t biting his fingernails. But I sure am
Tuesday, September 13
Ever wonder why bankruptcy says on one's credit report for seven years? Why not five or nine? There is a Biblical principle of the Year of Jubilee where one's debts are wiped out after 7 years.
The discussion topic for next week ties in debt and shame in an interesting, if not controversial, way. Throw in some Biblical understanding of both and, well, it will be an interesting discussion.
Debtors, Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose but Your Shame
Astra Taylor, NY Times 9.6.22
Conversations about debt are never purely about economics. They are always, also, conversations about power, morality and shame. The debate over President Biden’s student loan relief plan is no exception.
Immediately after the initiative was announced, opponents of debt cancellation began denouncing “slacker baristas,” overeducated Ivy League lawyers and impractical “lesbian dance theory” majors. Immune to accusations of hypocrisy, Republican members of Congress who had received hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars in federal relief castigated student
debtors who might receive $10,000 to $20,000 in aid.
It was a stark reminder that shame, like wealth, is not evenly distributed in our society. For working-class people, insolvency is often seen as a sign of profligacy and personal irresponsibility, while large corporations and the wealthy routinely walk away from their obligations and are celebrated as savvy for doing so. Debts are, first and foremost, financial burdens. But most people in arrears must shoulder a boulder of shame, as well. This is the factor most commentary about Mr. Biden’s student debt relief plan has missed.
The mass cancellation of federal student loans will not only remove a crushing economic weight for tens of millions of people, it will lift a significant emotional one, too. This psychological shift could, in turn, have further political implications, by emboldening those who find their
obligations overwhelming to engage in collective action aimed at winning more relief and changing the policies that make indebtedness so pervasive.
To understand what a pivotal moment this is, we must first appreciate just how profoundly the moral decks are usually stacked against regular debtors. Even the seemingly innocuous phrase “loan forgiveness” implies culpability and blame, when in reality the majority of debtors are
simply struggling to make ends meet — a problem likely to be most acute for Black and brown people, who tend to lack family wealth and access to credit on fair terms.
Why is our society so invested in steeping debtors in shame? The answer lies in debt’s role as a core building block of our economy and unequal social order. Debt is wrapped around every necessity of life: We use credit to make daily purchases and pay for medical care, take out mortgages, finance our cars, and borrow for college; cities and states issue debt to pay for roads and schools. Monthly repayments are often a form of wealth transfer to the affluent investors who hold these debts as assets, fueling inequality.
If debt is a dual source of profit and power, shame is its handmaiden. Shame isolates and divides, making class solidarity more difficult. The kneejerk anger at the idea of student debt cancellation in some circles, while ostensibly about fairness, reflects the common though misguided view that when one persons gains, another loses. Imagining a zero-sum game, some ask why student loans were eliminated and not, say, medical debt — a reasonable question. But medical debt, too, should be erased, as a way to ease the unjust financial hardship that getting hurt or sick often entails. For example, Mr. Biden could, and should, take executive action to cancel all medical debt owed to veterans hospitals.
Meanwhile, the fever pitch of opposition to debt cancellation among conservative and centrist elites reflects a different fear: that debt’s utility as an instrument of social control may be weakening. Consider the reaction of Representative Jim Banks, Republican of Indiana, to Mr.
Biden’s cancellation news: “Student loan forgiveness undermines one of our military’s greatest recruitment tools at a time of dangerously low enlistments.” Student debt, or the fear of it, pushes people into certain careers and limits their life choices.
No wonder soaring student debt became a catalyst for protest, though only after borrowers began to overcome their shame. Under pressure from a growing coalition that traces its origins directly to the Occupy Wall Street movement a decade ago, Mr. Biden was forced to act — an outcome that is all the more remarkable given his previous allegiances. When he was a senator from Delaware, which is home to the nation’s biggest issuers of credit cards, Mr. Biden tended to side with lenders over debtors. He was a driving force behind the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, which made it harder for distressed borrowers to discharge their student loans. Now, Mr. Biden appears to be switching sides in time for the midterm elections.
Tweeting moving stories from people eligible to receive loan cancellation, he seemed as though he were hosting a debtors’ assembly — an Occupy-inspired forum where people share their financial tribulations out loud, thus transforming burdens of shame into bonds of empowerment — in the Oval Office.
The president’s actions are certainly a break with the political status quo, but they are not unprecedented. In his groundbreaking work on debt, my friend, the anthropologist David Graeber, reported on the periodic debt amnesties, or “jubilees,” of the ancient world. Seeking to quell unrest, Sumerian and Babylonian kings periodically wiped away debts and liberated people from peonage, often over the objections of creditors. The Code of Hammurabi, written around 1750 B.C., proclaims that if a “storm wipes out the grain, or the harvest fails, or the grain does not grow for lack of water, in that year he need not give his creditor any grain in payment.” For these leaders, debt relief had little to do with the guilt of individual debtors. Jubilees were a practical way to recover from crises and avert societal collapse. Now, as then, inequality and insolvency imperil economic and political stability. Wiping the slate restores balance.
Many of today’s debtors have more in common with unlucky Mesopotamian farmers, subject to forces beyond their control, than it may initially appear. In a society where the federal minimum wage is stuck at $7.25, public services are paltry, and racial and gender discrimination run
rampant, a majority of Americans have no choice but to borrow to make ends meet. Where student loans are concerned, the steady erosion of state funding for higher education, and the resultant debt-for-degree system, is to blame, not individual borrowers.
Prominent critics of Mr. Biden’s plan have pointed out that granting relief this once will not permanently solve the student debt crisis nor the attendant problem of rising college costs, and here they are correct. The only permanent solution to the problem of runaway student debt is to make public education free for all (a model that was relatively common in the United States a few generations ago, which is why so many older people graduated debt-free). Only then can students who lack wealth avoid indenturing themselves for the chance to learn.
Though I believe Mr. Biden’s plan is inadequate in terms of the monetary relief it offers, his actions have already dealt a blow to debt’s symbolic, shame-inducing power. Everyone now knows federal student loans can be canceled with the flick of a president’s pen. And instead of feeling guilty and unworthy, millions of regular people suddenly feel entitled to relief, an entitlement previously reserved only for society’s elites.
Hundreds of millions of people are not in debt because they are immoral and live beyond their means, but because they are denied the means to live. Debt jubilees are part of righting this wrong, but as Mr. Biden’s student debt relief plan shows, they won’t happen unless debtors rise up and demand them. The first step is abolishing the shame that makes us reluctant to fight for what we deserve.
The discussion topic for next week ties in debt and shame in an interesting, if not controversial, way. Throw in some Biblical understanding of both and, well, it will be an interesting discussion.
Debtors, Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose but Your Shame
Astra Taylor, NY Times 9.6.22
Conversations about debt are never purely about economics. They are always, also, conversations about power, morality and shame. The debate over President Biden’s student loan relief plan is no exception.
Immediately after the initiative was announced, opponents of debt cancellation began denouncing “slacker baristas,” overeducated Ivy League lawyers and impractical “lesbian dance theory” majors. Immune to accusations of hypocrisy, Republican members of Congress who had received hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars in federal relief castigated student
debtors who might receive $10,000 to $20,000 in aid.
It was a stark reminder that shame, like wealth, is not evenly distributed in our society. For working-class people, insolvency is often seen as a sign of profligacy and personal irresponsibility, while large corporations and the wealthy routinely walk away from their obligations and are celebrated as savvy for doing so. Debts are, first and foremost, financial burdens. But most people in arrears must shoulder a boulder of shame, as well. This is the factor most commentary about Mr. Biden’s student debt relief plan has missed.
The mass cancellation of federal student loans will not only remove a crushing economic weight for tens of millions of people, it will lift a significant emotional one, too. This psychological shift could, in turn, have further political implications, by emboldening those who find their
obligations overwhelming to engage in collective action aimed at winning more relief and changing the policies that make indebtedness so pervasive.
To understand what a pivotal moment this is, we must first appreciate just how profoundly the moral decks are usually stacked against regular debtors. Even the seemingly innocuous phrase “loan forgiveness” implies culpability and blame, when in reality the majority of debtors are
simply struggling to make ends meet — a problem likely to be most acute for Black and brown people, who tend to lack family wealth and access to credit on fair terms.
Why is our society so invested in steeping debtors in shame? The answer lies in debt’s role as a core building block of our economy and unequal social order. Debt is wrapped around every necessity of life: We use credit to make daily purchases and pay for medical care, take out mortgages, finance our cars, and borrow for college; cities and states issue debt to pay for roads and schools. Monthly repayments are often a form of wealth transfer to the affluent investors who hold these debts as assets, fueling inequality.
If debt is a dual source of profit and power, shame is its handmaiden. Shame isolates and divides, making class solidarity more difficult. The kneejerk anger at the idea of student debt cancellation in some circles, while ostensibly about fairness, reflects the common though misguided view that when one persons gains, another loses. Imagining a zero-sum game, some ask why student loans were eliminated and not, say, medical debt — a reasonable question. But medical debt, too, should be erased, as a way to ease the unjust financial hardship that getting hurt or sick often entails. For example, Mr. Biden could, and should, take executive action to cancel all medical debt owed to veterans hospitals.
Meanwhile, the fever pitch of opposition to debt cancellation among conservative and centrist elites reflects a different fear: that debt’s utility as an instrument of social control may be weakening. Consider the reaction of Representative Jim Banks, Republican of Indiana, to Mr.
Biden’s cancellation news: “Student loan forgiveness undermines one of our military’s greatest recruitment tools at a time of dangerously low enlistments.” Student debt, or the fear of it, pushes people into certain careers and limits their life choices.
No wonder soaring student debt became a catalyst for protest, though only after borrowers began to overcome their shame. Under pressure from a growing coalition that traces its origins directly to the Occupy Wall Street movement a decade ago, Mr. Biden was forced to act — an outcome that is all the more remarkable given his previous allegiances. When he was a senator from Delaware, which is home to the nation’s biggest issuers of credit cards, Mr. Biden tended to side with lenders over debtors. He was a driving force behind the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, which made it harder for distressed borrowers to discharge their student loans. Now, Mr. Biden appears to be switching sides in time for the midterm elections.
Tweeting moving stories from people eligible to receive loan cancellation, he seemed as though he were hosting a debtors’ assembly — an Occupy-inspired forum where people share their financial tribulations out loud, thus transforming burdens of shame into bonds of empowerment — in the Oval Office.
The president’s actions are certainly a break with the political status quo, but they are not unprecedented. In his groundbreaking work on debt, my friend, the anthropologist David Graeber, reported on the periodic debt amnesties, or “jubilees,” of the ancient world. Seeking to quell unrest, Sumerian and Babylonian kings periodically wiped away debts and liberated people from peonage, often over the objections of creditors. The Code of Hammurabi, written around 1750 B.C., proclaims that if a “storm wipes out the grain, or the harvest fails, or the grain does not grow for lack of water, in that year he need not give his creditor any grain in payment.” For these leaders, debt relief had little to do with the guilt of individual debtors. Jubilees were a practical way to recover from crises and avert societal collapse. Now, as then, inequality and insolvency imperil economic and political stability. Wiping the slate restores balance.
Many of today’s debtors have more in common with unlucky Mesopotamian farmers, subject to forces beyond their control, than it may initially appear. In a society where the federal minimum wage is stuck at $7.25, public services are paltry, and racial and gender discrimination run
rampant, a majority of Americans have no choice but to borrow to make ends meet. Where student loans are concerned, the steady erosion of state funding for higher education, and the resultant debt-for-degree system, is to blame, not individual borrowers.
Prominent critics of Mr. Biden’s plan have pointed out that granting relief this once will not permanently solve the student debt crisis nor the attendant problem of rising college costs, and here they are correct. The only permanent solution to the problem of runaway student debt is to make public education free for all (a model that was relatively common in the United States a few generations ago, which is why so many older people graduated debt-free). Only then can students who lack wealth avoid indenturing themselves for the chance to learn.
Though I believe Mr. Biden’s plan is inadequate in terms of the monetary relief it offers, his actions have already dealt a blow to debt’s symbolic, shame-inducing power. Everyone now knows federal student loans can be canceled with the flick of a president’s pen. And instead of feeling guilty and unworthy, millions of regular people suddenly feel entitled to relief, an entitlement previously reserved only for society’s elites.
Hundreds of millions of people are not in debt because they are immoral and live beyond their means, but because they are denied the means to live. Debt jubilees are part of righting this wrong, but as Mr. Biden’s student debt relief plan shows, they won’t happen unless debtors rise up and demand them. The first step is abolishing the shame that makes us reluctant to fight for what we deserve.
Tuesday, September 6
For this week, we will discuss God and culture wars waged in God's name.
The God I Know is Not a Culture Warrior
Tish Harrison Warren, NY Times 8.14.22
Two Sundays ago, my church had a baptismal service. Baptisms at our church are a mixture of solemnity and unbridled glee, often full of laughter and tears of joy. Those who were being baptized or, in the case of infants, their parents, took vows to put their trust in God’s grace and love and to renounce spiritual darkness, evil and “all sinful desires that draw” us from the love of God. After the baptism, the kids in our service ran forward, giggling, trying to get sprayed with the baptismal water that our priest, Ryan, slung over the congregation as he called us to “remember your baptism.”
On that Sunday, Ryan invited anyone else who wanted to get baptized to let him know. To my surprise, after the service ended and we were all mingling, two more people approached Ryan and asked if they could also get baptized. So after a short conversation with them, he hollered for the congregation to regather and, then and there, two others joined our ranks through baptism. People cheered and applauded as they emerged from the water. I left that service feeling pensive, grateful and in awe of the beauty of God and human lives.
I have thought of that incandescent Sunday a lot the past couple of weeks because there is a perplexing difference between the way we celebrated God that morning and the way I typically hear God discussed online and in our broader cultural discourse.
The God of that baptismal service is one of joy, kindness and peace. The God I often hear about in American politics, in the news and on Twitter is one of cultural division and bickering. The God of that Sunday service seemed powerful and holy, yet gentle and beautiful. The God in our cultural discourse seems impotent and irrelevant, a mostly sociological phenomenon related to political posturing and power plays.
In the news and on social media, God usually shows up when we are fighting about something.
The subject of faith seems most often discussed in conversations about voting patterns and campaigning. God appears in our public discourse when Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, calls for Christian nationalism. Or in Twitter debates about whether a coach should publicly pray on the 50-yard line. Or when the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Kandiss Taylor painted “Jesus, guns, babies” on the side of her campaign bus.
It’s not that I think God has no place in politics or public discussions. Faith touches all areas of life, and issues such as abortion, religious liberty and the relationship between church and state are important. But when we primarily talk about God in the context of political or ideological
debate, believers’ actual experience of God, worship and faith — not to mention spiritual virtues like humility, gratitude and kindness — often gets lost. God becomes merely another pawn in the culture wars, a means to a political end, a meme to own our opponents online or an accessory donned like a power tie.
I mentioned my growing frustrations over how we discuss faith in public to my friend Michael Wear, who worked on faith-based initiatives under President Barack Obama. Drawing from the work of the Yale University professor Stephen Carter, Michael made a helpful distinction
between discussing faith publicly and “taking God’s name in vain” in politics. “It’s the manipulation that matters,” he told me. It’s the “disingenuousness of so much religious discourse in politics” that tends to cheapen our spiritual lives, beliefs and experiences.
There are no bright lines here. It’s not always clear when we are honestly explaining how our heartfelt convictions play out in the public square and when we are “taking God’s name in vain.” Still, on the left, on the right and in my own life at times, I’ve witnessed a subtle shift where the
language of God is used to score points or to grandstand. I’ve seen God flattened into an amalgam of hot takes and personal branding, in ways that seem to track with the increasingly performative nature of politics writ large. Algorithms and mediums that reward shallowness,
rage and spectacle inevitably shape how we, as a culture and as individuals, discuss faith. And the ways we habitually hear God discussed inevitably shape who we understand God to be.
But how do we repair the damage done? What would truthful, humble and robust public religious discourse look like?
For starters, we must speak proactively and vulnerably about our faith, instead of only in reaction to the latest hot-button issue. There are questions that haunt every human life: How does one know what is true and false, right or wrong? Is there a God? If there is, can we interact with him, her or it? If so, how? Can God speak to us? Can God say no to us? What are our obligations to God and to other human beings? How can we have joy? How can we live well? How can we be wise?
Whether one thinks of oneself as religious or not, unprovable and value-laden assumptions about truth and meaning drive our lives, including our politics. Yet these often go unacknowledged. Engaging with the presuppositions and beliefs underneath the loudest cultural debates of our moment helps us more fully understand the crux of issues, our true points of disagreement and our common humanity.
Most people’s experience of faith is far more personal, rich, important and meaningful than can be summed up in our political sparring. We must keep this in mind when writing on, debating or discussing religion and spirituality. Part of the purpose of this newsletter is to preserve space to examine not only faith in public life but also how spiritual practices quietly mold us, our communities and our days.
Churches and other religious groups must continually highlight how our traditions address pressing issues that will never trend on Twitter or dominate political debates: problems like loneliness, despair, conflict in families, disappointment, grief, longing, loss and those all-too-human anxieties and insecurities that keep us up at night.
On a more personal note, sometimes I have to retreat from larger media debates over politics and theology to preserve the honest, tender and fragile heart of faith in my own life.
I often quote the fifth-century ascetic Diadochos of Photiki, who seems shockingly contemporary in our time of smartphones and social media. “When the door of the steam baths is continually left open, the heat inside rapidly escapes through it,” he wrote. “Likewise the soul, in its desire to say many things, dissipates its remembrance of God through the door of speech.”
Sometimes, in order to retain a “remembrance of God,” I have to take a break from our societal discourse around faith, which can minimize who I imagine God to be. Practices like gathered worship, silence, reading the Scriptures and prayer remind me that if God is real, there are far more interesting, lasting and confounding things about God than what can be captured in our
public discourse.
The people who showed up to church two weeks ago and those who decided to be baptized that day were after something. They were searching for beauty, for truth, for a reality greater than can be summed up in words — or in voting patterns or in the antics of politicians. And the quest for that greater reality must also inform how we talk about faith in public life.
The God I Know is Not a Culture Warrior
Tish Harrison Warren, NY Times 8.14.22
Two Sundays ago, my church had a baptismal service. Baptisms at our church are a mixture of solemnity and unbridled glee, often full of laughter and tears of joy. Those who were being baptized or, in the case of infants, their parents, took vows to put their trust in God’s grace and love and to renounce spiritual darkness, evil and “all sinful desires that draw” us from the love of God. After the baptism, the kids in our service ran forward, giggling, trying to get sprayed with the baptismal water that our priest, Ryan, slung over the congregation as he called us to “remember your baptism.”
On that Sunday, Ryan invited anyone else who wanted to get baptized to let him know. To my surprise, after the service ended and we were all mingling, two more people approached Ryan and asked if they could also get baptized. So after a short conversation with them, he hollered for the congregation to regather and, then and there, two others joined our ranks through baptism. People cheered and applauded as they emerged from the water. I left that service feeling pensive, grateful and in awe of the beauty of God and human lives.
I have thought of that incandescent Sunday a lot the past couple of weeks because there is a perplexing difference between the way we celebrated God that morning and the way I typically hear God discussed online and in our broader cultural discourse.
The God of that baptismal service is one of joy, kindness and peace. The God I often hear about in American politics, in the news and on Twitter is one of cultural division and bickering. The God of that Sunday service seemed powerful and holy, yet gentle and beautiful. The God in our cultural discourse seems impotent and irrelevant, a mostly sociological phenomenon related to political posturing and power plays.
In the news and on social media, God usually shows up when we are fighting about something.
The subject of faith seems most often discussed in conversations about voting patterns and campaigning. God appears in our public discourse when Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, calls for Christian nationalism. Or in Twitter debates about whether a coach should publicly pray on the 50-yard line. Or when the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Kandiss Taylor painted “Jesus, guns, babies” on the side of her campaign bus.
It’s not that I think God has no place in politics or public discussions. Faith touches all areas of life, and issues such as abortion, religious liberty and the relationship between church and state are important. But when we primarily talk about God in the context of political or ideological
debate, believers’ actual experience of God, worship and faith — not to mention spiritual virtues like humility, gratitude and kindness — often gets lost. God becomes merely another pawn in the culture wars, a means to a political end, a meme to own our opponents online or an accessory donned like a power tie.
I mentioned my growing frustrations over how we discuss faith in public to my friend Michael Wear, who worked on faith-based initiatives under President Barack Obama. Drawing from the work of the Yale University professor Stephen Carter, Michael made a helpful distinction
between discussing faith publicly and “taking God’s name in vain” in politics. “It’s the manipulation that matters,” he told me. It’s the “disingenuousness of so much religious discourse in politics” that tends to cheapen our spiritual lives, beliefs and experiences.
There are no bright lines here. It’s not always clear when we are honestly explaining how our heartfelt convictions play out in the public square and when we are “taking God’s name in vain.” Still, on the left, on the right and in my own life at times, I’ve witnessed a subtle shift where the
language of God is used to score points or to grandstand. I’ve seen God flattened into an amalgam of hot takes and personal branding, in ways that seem to track with the increasingly performative nature of politics writ large. Algorithms and mediums that reward shallowness,
rage and spectacle inevitably shape how we, as a culture and as individuals, discuss faith. And the ways we habitually hear God discussed inevitably shape who we understand God to be.
But how do we repair the damage done? What would truthful, humble and robust public religious discourse look like?
For starters, we must speak proactively and vulnerably about our faith, instead of only in reaction to the latest hot-button issue. There are questions that haunt every human life: How does one know what is true and false, right or wrong? Is there a God? If there is, can we interact with him, her or it? If so, how? Can God speak to us? Can God say no to us? What are our obligations to God and to other human beings? How can we have joy? How can we live well? How can we be wise?
Whether one thinks of oneself as religious or not, unprovable and value-laden assumptions about truth and meaning drive our lives, including our politics. Yet these often go unacknowledged. Engaging with the presuppositions and beliefs underneath the loudest cultural debates of our moment helps us more fully understand the crux of issues, our true points of disagreement and our common humanity.
Most people’s experience of faith is far more personal, rich, important and meaningful than can be summed up in our political sparring. We must keep this in mind when writing on, debating or discussing religion and spirituality. Part of the purpose of this newsletter is to preserve space to examine not only faith in public life but also how spiritual practices quietly mold us, our communities and our days.
Churches and other religious groups must continually highlight how our traditions address pressing issues that will never trend on Twitter or dominate political debates: problems like loneliness, despair, conflict in families, disappointment, grief, longing, loss and those all-too-human anxieties and insecurities that keep us up at night.
On a more personal note, sometimes I have to retreat from larger media debates over politics and theology to preserve the honest, tender and fragile heart of faith in my own life.
I often quote the fifth-century ascetic Diadochos of Photiki, who seems shockingly contemporary in our time of smartphones and social media. “When the door of the steam baths is continually left open, the heat inside rapidly escapes through it,” he wrote. “Likewise the soul, in its desire to say many things, dissipates its remembrance of God through the door of speech.”
Sometimes, in order to retain a “remembrance of God,” I have to take a break from our societal discourse around faith, which can minimize who I imagine God to be. Practices like gathered worship, silence, reading the Scriptures and prayer remind me that if God is real, there are far more interesting, lasting and confounding things about God than what can be captured in our
public discourse.
The people who showed up to church two weeks ago and those who decided to be baptized that day were after something. They were searching for beauty, for truth, for a reality greater than can be summed up in words — or in voting patterns or in the antics of politicians. And the quest for that greater reality must also inform how we talk about faith in public life.
Tuesday, August 30
For our discussion tomorrow, the author of the topic, The Rot at the Core, Dennis "Mitch" Maley, will be joining the conversation via Zoom.
For the Women's Discussion Group - you are all invited Tuesday for this special event. We will still have the Women's Discussion Group on Wednesday; but, I wanted to make sure you had the opportunity to discuss the article with Mitch.
The Rot at the Core
Dennis “Mitch” Maley, The Bradenton Times 8.21.22
For the past couple of months, I’ve been deeply immersed in political race analyses followed by a much-needed vacation, which I spent helping my son drive his car across the country to Los Angeles. Road tripping through lower Americana while receiving regular updates on the state of Manatee County government made for an interesting perspective. As we head into Tuesday’s elections, this seemed like a good time to reflect on all of it.
One of the most disturbing elements of barnstorming across the I-10 corridor was the realization that every state we drove through felt just as broken, divided, and in need of a reboot as home. In fact, the most surprising takeaway may have been that good old Flori-duh, might not be as bat-shxx crazy as I had imagined. Either that, or the entire South had finally caught up. Perhaps it’s the climate. I’ve long held a theory that our brand of madness is largely owed to people of European ancestry putting down roots in a climate not suited for their blood, and the one thing that was constant from coast to coast for the two weeks we were out was that it was blisteringly hot everywhere.
The first stop was New Orleans, our long-time home away from home. In retrospect, it provided the most comfort in terms of familiarity. Governed by a famously corrupt ruling class, the infrastructure is still crumbling, potholes are still large enough to swallow compact cars, and
there are still more dangerous to downright deadly areas per square mile than any city not named Chicago. In other words, it has managed to maintain its downward trajectory, which is more than I can say for most places over the past five to ten years. The jazz music still rings in the air, the food culture is still the best in the United States, and, as long as you don’t get stabbed in the gut for pocket change and your iPhone, you can have a good time at a reasonable expense.
Most of the rest of the long drive across God’s Country seemed to have maintained its balance of old-fashioned (frighteningly) religious conservatism and run-of-the-mill, grease the skids and divide up the pie, good-old-boy GOP politics that are only unique by way of the cowboy dress code and empty idioms that sound more profound through a Texas drawl. Nonetheless, the barbecue and margaritas remain unrivaled and I got to hear Marty Robbins’ El Paso at the one and only Rosa’s Cantina, so I’d be lying if I were to say it wasn’t my favorite trip to the Lone Star State.
On the heels of an epic drought, monsoon rains chased us across Texas all the way to Phoenix, where we did get enough dry weather for an afternoon trip to Tombstone and the OK Corral, where, about a decade back, I’d first had a shot of Old Overholt at a saloon once owned by Doc Holiday. Tombstone is remarkably well preserved and one of the few places where you can forget you are in the Divided States of America, at least until someone brings up politics.
Arizona on the whole, however, is deeply divided, and there were many stretches in which the billboards reminded you that it was a state in which people were urged to choose a side and choose wisely. The best part of the trip was losing cell phone service for the couple of days we
spent camping in Joshua Tree National Park. It’s surprising how much of your sanity can be recovered while unplugged from the machine with little more than some primitive camping gear, a cooler of cold ones, and some of the most stunningly-gorgeous natural scenery anywhere on
this big blue ball of mud.
By the third day, however, we were grateful for a hot shower and a cold pool in Palm Desert, where we stopped for a day before heading into Los Angeles for a week. When I was a young boy, LA was little more than a dream. In eastern Pennsylvania, New York City seemed like a real place. After all, you knew people who’d actually been there, and it was close enough to get to that even desperate circumstances never made it feel as though it were out of reach. Los Angeles, on the other hand, might as well have been Mars.
I can still recall lying in my bed, falling asleep to dreams of seeing the place where all of my favorite reran TV shows had been filmed. When I finally made my way out there in the late ‘90s, California did not fail to impress. I can vividly recall the majesty of the Queen Palms on the
Sunset Strip and the unrivaled views of the city lights from the Hollywood Hills, the spectacular scenes of cliffs abutting the ocean in Malibu, and the way it felt to see the famed Hollywood sign up close.
Sadly, I’ve been visiting for nearly a quarter century, and it’s mostly been a slow decline into the sort of place in which the word hellscape doesn’t seem like hyperbole. On so many streets, there are nearly as many squalid tents and decommissioned RVs that have been converted to homes as there are actual housing units. An enormous population of untreated schizophrenics terrorizes locals, along with the tourists still willing to slog through the filth and excrement for Instagram selfies at iconic landmarks. Parking lots across the city are littered with the shattered glass of automobile break-ins and everything from heroin needles to crack vials can be found in the gutter of just about any neighborhood that isn’t behind a large gate or wall.
The price for all of this bedlam doesn’t end with such intangibles. Gas was still between $5-6 a gallon, hotels were two to three times that of any other stop, and meals for two at even the most modest hamburger and pizza joints routinely topped $60. In other words, getting a close-up look at something akin to the fall of Rome doesn’t come cheap.
I realize that there’s much to be said by partisans on red vs. blue states or cities, but as someone who is sickened by both brands in our Coke and Pepsi political duopoly, I have to say that not much changed from place to place other than it was intensified as you got closer and closer to the best climate on the planet, a place where too many people want to live for our status quo of political graft and bureaucratic ineptitude to keep things tolerable, which leads me back to Manatee County and our great state of Florida.
The trip at large, along with all of the conversations with various locals that two traveling journalists were bound to encounter, made one thing crystal clear: polarizing and largely irrelevant culture war, partisan, and ideological nonsense remains at the forefront of our society, a thin veneer of paralyzing distraction that has rendered us incapable of administering even the most basic and essential elements of bureaucracy that are required of a free society. Some places are further along in the race toward the bottom, but we’ve all veered dangerously off course and our hatred for the opposition has left us all but blind to the thievery and corruption of those we hail as our saviors.
While I was away, our inept leadership gutted even more of what precious little remains in terms of institutional knowledge within our county government. Our can’t-get-out-of-his-own-way county administrator’s ego got him into yet another petty and unproductive squabble, while
accusations of yet another scandal within the Bradenton Police Department surfaced. Meanwhile, our so-called elected leaders put the bulk of their energy into campaigning against their colleagues, hoping they can assist their special interest paymasters in capturing all of the elected
offices so that they can not only get their way but do it without the affront of a dissenting voice at the dais.
On Tuesday, we’ll simply learn how much worse our county commission will get, and, as we head into November, there’s little indication that there will be much (if any) improvement, top to bottom in our state. Like every place I’ve visited over the past two weeks, the future doesn’t look great and the citizens who hold the key to systemic change seem no more up to the task than the politicians. The former are getting robbed and the latter are getting fat, yet it seems like all of those who've been looted are content to root for their thief. From sea to shining sea, we seem to be locked into a hopeless death spiral in which Americans do little more than point, scream, and shxx-post on social media.
If we’re to come back from the brink, I’m afraid it will require much, much more than that. I sincerely hope we prove up to the job, but I have to admit that I see little here or anywhere else to suggest that is the case. Wake up, America. The saviors are not wearing fancy suits and making empty promises from a soap box. No, the saviors are your friends and neighbors, and the fact that they sometimes hold different values and opinions does not make them your enemy.
Quite the opposite, our ideological diversity and ability to listen to a different viewpoint without disqualifying the person expressing it used to be one of our greatest strengths back in the days before they managed to pit us against each other quite so savagely.
For the Women's Discussion Group - you are all invited Tuesday for this special event. We will still have the Women's Discussion Group on Wednesday; but, I wanted to make sure you had the opportunity to discuss the article with Mitch.
The Rot at the Core
Dennis “Mitch” Maley, The Bradenton Times 8.21.22
For the past couple of months, I’ve been deeply immersed in political race analyses followed by a much-needed vacation, which I spent helping my son drive his car across the country to Los Angeles. Road tripping through lower Americana while receiving regular updates on the state of Manatee County government made for an interesting perspective. As we head into Tuesday’s elections, this seemed like a good time to reflect on all of it.
One of the most disturbing elements of barnstorming across the I-10 corridor was the realization that every state we drove through felt just as broken, divided, and in need of a reboot as home. In fact, the most surprising takeaway may have been that good old Flori-duh, might not be as bat-shxx crazy as I had imagined. Either that, or the entire South had finally caught up. Perhaps it’s the climate. I’ve long held a theory that our brand of madness is largely owed to people of European ancestry putting down roots in a climate not suited for their blood, and the one thing that was constant from coast to coast for the two weeks we were out was that it was blisteringly hot everywhere.
The first stop was New Orleans, our long-time home away from home. In retrospect, it provided the most comfort in terms of familiarity. Governed by a famously corrupt ruling class, the infrastructure is still crumbling, potholes are still large enough to swallow compact cars, and
there are still more dangerous to downright deadly areas per square mile than any city not named Chicago. In other words, it has managed to maintain its downward trajectory, which is more than I can say for most places over the past five to ten years. The jazz music still rings in the air, the food culture is still the best in the United States, and, as long as you don’t get stabbed in the gut for pocket change and your iPhone, you can have a good time at a reasonable expense.
Most of the rest of the long drive across God’s Country seemed to have maintained its balance of old-fashioned (frighteningly) religious conservatism and run-of-the-mill, grease the skids and divide up the pie, good-old-boy GOP politics that are only unique by way of the cowboy dress code and empty idioms that sound more profound through a Texas drawl. Nonetheless, the barbecue and margaritas remain unrivaled and I got to hear Marty Robbins’ El Paso at the one and only Rosa’s Cantina, so I’d be lying if I were to say it wasn’t my favorite trip to the Lone Star State.
On the heels of an epic drought, monsoon rains chased us across Texas all the way to Phoenix, where we did get enough dry weather for an afternoon trip to Tombstone and the OK Corral, where, about a decade back, I’d first had a shot of Old Overholt at a saloon once owned by Doc Holiday. Tombstone is remarkably well preserved and one of the few places where you can forget you are in the Divided States of America, at least until someone brings up politics.
Arizona on the whole, however, is deeply divided, and there were many stretches in which the billboards reminded you that it was a state in which people were urged to choose a side and choose wisely. The best part of the trip was losing cell phone service for the couple of days we
spent camping in Joshua Tree National Park. It’s surprising how much of your sanity can be recovered while unplugged from the machine with little more than some primitive camping gear, a cooler of cold ones, and some of the most stunningly-gorgeous natural scenery anywhere on
this big blue ball of mud.
By the third day, however, we were grateful for a hot shower and a cold pool in Palm Desert, where we stopped for a day before heading into Los Angeles for a week. When I was a young boy, LA was little more than a dream. In eastern Pennsylvania, New York City seemed like a real place. After all, you knew people who’d actually been there, and it was close enough to get to that even desperate circumstances never made it feel as though it were out of reach. Los Angeles, on the other hand, might as well have been Mars.
I can still recall lying in my bed, falling asleep to dreams of seeing the place where all of my favorite reran TV shows had been filmed. When I finally made my way out there in the late ‘90s, California did not fail to impress. I can vividly recall the majesty of the Queen Palms on the
Sunset Strip and the unrivaled views of the city lights from the Hollywood Hills, the spectacular scenes of cliffs abutting the ocean in Malibu, and the way it felt to see the famed Hollywood sign up close.
Sadly, I’ve been visiting for nearly a quarter century, and it’s mostly been a slow decline into the sort of place in which the word hellscape doesn’t seem like hyperbole. On so many streets, there are nearly as many squalid tents and decommissioned RVs that have been converted to homes as there are actual housing units. An enormous population of untreated schizophrenics terrorizes locals, along with the tourists still willing to slog through the filth and excrement for Instagram selfies at iconic landmarks. Parking lots across the city are littered with the shattered glass of automobile break-ins and everything from heroin needles to crack vials can be found in the gutter of just about any neighborhood that isn’t behind a large gate or wall.
The price for all of this bedlam doesn’t end with such intangibles. Gas was still between $5-6 a gallon, hotels were two to three times that of any other stop, and meals for two at even the most modest hamburger and pizza joints routinely topped $60. In other words, getting a close-up look at something akin to the fall of Rome doesn’t come cheap.
I realize that there’s much to be said by partisans on red vs. blue states or cities, but as someone who is sickened by both brands in our Coke and Pepsi political duopoly, I have to say that not much changed from place to place other than it was intensified as you got closer and closer to the best climate on the planet, a place where too many people want to live for our status quo of political graft and bureaucratic ineptitude to keep things tolerable, which leads me back to Manatee County and our great state of Florida.
The trip at large, along with all of the conversations with various locals that two traveling journalists were bound to encounter, made one thing crystal clear: polarizing and largely irrelevant culture war, partisan, and ideological nonsense remains at the forefront of our society, a thin veneer of paralyzing distraction that has rendered us incapable of administering even the most basic and essential elements of bureaucracy that are required of a free society. Some places are further along in the race toward the bottom, but we’ve all veered dangerously off course and our hatred for the opposition has left us all but blind to the thievery and corruption of those we hail as our saviors.
While I was away, our inept leadership gutted even more of what precious little remains in terms of institutional knowledge within our county government. Our can’t-get-out-of-his-own-way county administrator’s ego got him into yet another petty and unproductive squabble, while
accusations of yet another scandal within the Bradenton Police Department surfaced. Meanwhile, our so-called elected leaders put the bulk of their energy into campaigning against their colleagues, hoping they can assist their special interest paymasters in capturing all of the elected
offices so that they can not only get their way but do it without the affront of a dissenting voice at the dais.
On Tuesday, we’ll simply learn how much worse our county commission will get, and, as we head into November, there’s little indication that there will be much (if any) improvement, top to bottom in our state. Like every place I’ve visited over the past two weeks, the future doesn’t look great and the citizens who hold the key to systemic change seem no more up to the task than the politicians. The former are getting robbed and the latter are getting fat, yet it seems like all of those who've been looted are content to root for their thief. From sea to shining sea, we seem to be locked into a hopeless death spiral in which Americans do little more than point, scream, and shxx-post on social media.
If we’re to come back from the brink, I’m afraid it will require much, much more than that. I sincerely hope we prove up to the job, but I have to admit that I see little here or anywhere else to suggest that is the case. Wake up, America. The saviors are not wearing fancy suits and making empty promises from a soap box. No, the saviors are your friends and neighbors, and the fact that they sometimes hold different values and opinions does not make them your enemy.
Quite the opposite, our ideological diversity and ability to listen to a different viewpoint without disqualifying the person expressing it used to be one of our greatest strengths back in the days before they managed to pit us against each other quite so savagely.
Tuesday, August 23
How Extremist Gun Culture Is Trying to Co-opt the Rosary
Daniel Panneton, The Atlantic 8.14.22
Just as the AR-15 rifle has become a sacred object for Christian nationalists in general, the rosary has acquired a militaristic meaning for radical-traditional (or “rad trad”) Catholics. On this extremist fringe, rosary beads have been woven into a conspiratorial politics and absolutist gun culture. These armed radical traditionalists have taken up a spiritual notion that the rosary can be a weapon in the fight against evil and turned it into something dangerously literal.
Their social-media pages are saturated with images of rosaries draped over firearms, warriors in prayer, Deus Vult (“God wills it”) crusader memes, and exhortations for men to rise up and become Church Militants. Influencers on platforms such as Instagram share posts referencing
“everyday carry” and “gat check” (gat is slang for “firearm”) that include soldiers’ “battle beads,” handguns, and assault rifles. One artist posts illustrations of his favorite Catholic saints, clergy, and influencers toting AR-15-style rifles labeled sanctum rosarium alongside violently
homophobic screeds that are celebrated by social-media accounts with thousands of followers.
The theologian and historian Massimo Faggioli has described a network of conservative Catholic bloggers and commentary organizations as a “Catholic cyber-militia” that actively campaigns against LGBTQ acceptance in the Church. These rad-trad rosary-as-weapon memes represent a social-media diffusion of such messaging, and they work to integrate ultraconservative Catholicism with other aspects of online far-right culture. The phenomenon might be tempting to dismiss as mere trolling or merchandising, and ironical provocations based on traditionalist
Catholic symbols do exist, but the far right’s constellations of violent, racist, and homophobic online milieus are well documented for providing a pathway to radicalization and real-world terrorist attacks.
The rosary—in these hands—is anything but holy. But for millions of believers, the beads, which provide an aide-mémoire for a sequence of devotional prayers, are a widely recognized symbol of Catholicism and a source of strength. And many take genuine sustenance from Roman
Catholic theology’s concept of the Church Militant and the tradition of regarding the rosary as a weapon against Satan. As Pope Francis said in a 2020 address, “There is no path to holiness … without spiritual combat,” and Francis is only one of many Church officials who have endorsed
the idea of the rosary as an armament in that fight.
In mainstream Catholicism, the rosary-as-weapon is not an intrinsically harmful interpretation of the sacramental, and this symbolism has a long history. In the 1930s and ’40s, the ultramontane Catholic student publication Jeunesse Étudiante Catholique regularly used the concept to rally the faithful. But the modern radical-traditionalist Catholic movement—which generally rejects the Second Vatican Council’s reforms—is far outside the majority opinion in the Roman Catholic Church in America. Many prominent American Catholic bishops advocate for gun control, and after the Uvalde school shooting, Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville, Texas, lamented the way some Americans “sacralize death’s instruments.”
Militia culture, a fetishism of Western civilization, and masculinist anxieties have become mainstays of the far right in the U.S.—and rad-trad Catholics have now taken up residence in this company. Their social-media accounts commonly promote accelerationist and survivalist
content, along with combat-medical and tactical training, as well as memes depicting balaclava-clad gunmen that draw on the “terrorwave” or “warcore” aesthetic that is popular in far-right circles.
Like such networks, radical-traditional Catholics sustain their own cottage industry of goods and services that reinforces the radicalization. Rosaries are common among the merchandise on offer—some made of cartridge casings, and complete with gun-metal-finish crucifixes. One
Catholic online store, which describes itself as “dedicated to offering battle-ready products and manuals to ‘stand firm against the tactics of the devil’” (a New Testament reference), sells replicas of the rosaries issued to American soldiers during the First World War as “combat rosaries.” Discerning consumers can also buy a “concealed carry” permit for their combat rosary and a sacramental storage box resembling an ammunition can. In 2016, the pontifical Swiss Guard accepted a donation of combat rosaries; during a ceremony at the Vatican, their
commander described the gift as “the most powerful weapon that exists on the market.”
The militarism also glorifies a warrior mentality and notions of manliness and male strength. This conflation of the masculine and the military is rooted in wider anxieties about Catholic manhood—the idea that it is in crisis has some currency among senior Church figures and lay
organizations. In 2015, Bishop Thomas Olmsted of Phoenix issued an apostolic exhortation calling for a renewal of traditional conceptions of Catholic masculinity titled “Into the Breach,” which led the Knights of Columbus, an influential fraternal order, to produce a video series
promoting Olmsted’s ideas. But among radical-traditional Catholic men, such concerns take an extremist turn, rooted in fantasies of violently defending one’s family and church from marauders.
The rosary-as-weapon also gives rad-trad Catholic men both a distinctive signifier within Christian nationalism and a sort of membership pass to the movement. As the sociologists Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry note in Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States, Catholics used to be regarded as enemies by Christian nationalists, and anti-Catholic nativism runs deep in American history. Today, Catholics are a growing contingent of Christian nationalism.
Helping unite these former rivals is a quasi-theological doctrine of what Perry and another sociologist, Philip S. Gorski, have called “righteous violence” against political enemies regarded as demonic or satanic, be they secularists, progressives, or Jews. The hostility toward liberalism
and secularism inherent in traditionalist Catholicism is also pronounced within Christian nationalist circles. No longer stigmatized by evangelical nationalists, Catholic imagery now blends freely with staple alt-right memes that romanticize ancient Rome or idealize the
traditional patriarchal family.
Some doctrinal differences and divisions remain. Many radical-traditional Catholic men maintain the hardline position that other forms of Christianity are heretical, and hold that Catholics alone adhere to the one true Church. Christian nationalism’s nativism and its predilection for “Great Replacement” theory alienate some radical-traditional Catholics who are not white or who were not born in the United States, and deep veins of anti-Catholicism persist among far-right Protestants.
Yet the convergence within Christian nationalism is cemented in common causes such as hostility toward abortion-rights advocates. The pro-choice protests that followed the leaked early draft of the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which
overturned Roe v. Wade, led to a profusion of social-media posts on the far-right fantasizing about killing activists, and such forums responded to Pride month this year with extremist homophobic and transphobic “groomer” discourse. Rad-trad networks are also involved in organizing rosary-branded events that involve weapons training.
Catholics are taught to love and forgive their enemies, that to do otherwise is a sin. But the extremist understanding of spiritual warfare overrides that command. To do battle with Satan—whose influence in the world is, according to Catholic demonology, real and menacing—is to
deploy violence for deliverance and redemption. The “battle beads” culture of spiritual warfare permits radical-traditional Catholics literally to demonize their political opponents and regard the use of armed force against them as sanctified. The sacramental rosary isn’t just a spiritual
weapon but one that comes with physical ammunition.
Daniel Panneton, The Atlantic 8.14.22
Just as the AR-15 rifle has become a sacred object for Christian nationalists in general, the rosary has acquired a militaristic meaning for radical-traditional (or “rad trad”) Catholics. On this extremist fringe, rosary beads have been woven into a conspiratorial politics and absolutist gun culture. These armed radical traditionalists have taken up a spiritual notion that the rosary can be a weapon in the fight against evil and turned it into something dangerously literal.
Their social-media pages are saturated with images of rosaries draped over firearms, warriors in prayer, Deus Vult (“God wills it”) crusader memes, and exhortations for men to rise up and become Church Militants. Influencers on platforms such as Instagram share posts referencing
“everyday carry” and “gat check” (gat is slang for “firearm”) that include soldiers’ “battle beads,” handguns, and assault rifles. One artist posts illustrations of his favorite Catholic saints, clergy, and influencers toting AR-15-style rifles labeled sanctum rosarium alongside violently
homophobic screeds that are celebrated by social-media accounts with thousands of followers.
The theologian and historian Massimo Faggioli has described a network of conservative Catholic bloggers and commentary organizations as a “Catholic cyber-militia” that actively campaigns against LGBTQ acceptance in the Church. These rad-trad rosary-as-weapon memes represent a social-media diffusion of such messaging, and they work to integrate ultraconservative Catholicism with other aspects of online far-right culture. The phenomenon might be tempting to dismiss as mere trolling or merchandising, and ironical provocations based on traditionalist
Catholic symbols do exist, but the far right’s constellations of violent, racist, and homophobic online milieus are well documented for providing a pathway to radicalization and real-world terrorist attacks.
The rosary—in these hands—is anything but holy. But for millions of believers, the beads, which provide an aide-mémoire for a sequence of devotional prayers, are a widely recognized symbol of Catholicism and a source of strength. And many take genuine sustenance from Roman
Catholic theology’s concept of the Church Militant and the tradition of regarding the rosary as a weapon against Satan. As Pope Francis said in a 2020 address, “There is no path to holiness … without spiritual combat,” and Francis is only one of many Church officials who have endorsed
the idea of the rosary as an armament in that fight.
In mainstream Catholicism, the rosary-as-weapon is not an intrinsically harmful interpretation of the sacramental, and this symbolism has a long history. In the 1930s and ’40s, the ultramontane Catholic student publication Jeunesse Étudiante Catholique regularly used the concept to rally the faithful. But the modern radical-traditionalist Catholic movement—which generally rejects the Second Vatican Council’s reforms—is far outside the majority opinion in the Roman Catholic Church in America. Many prominent American Catholic bishops advocate for gun control, and after the Uvalde school shooting, Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville, Texas, lamented the way some Americans “sacralize death’s instruments.”
Militia culture, a fetishism of Western civilization, and masculinist anxieties have become mainstays of the far right in the U.S.—and rad-trad Catholics have now taken up residence in this company. Their social-media accounts commonly promote accelerationist and survivalist
content, along with combat-medical and tactical training, as well as memes depicting balaclava-clad gunmen that draw on the “terrorwave” or “warcore” aesthetic that is popular in far-right circles.
Like such networks, radical-traditional Catholics sustain their own cottage industry of goods and services that reinforces the radicalization. Rosaries are common among the merchandise on offer—some made of cartridge casings, and complete with gun-metal-finish crucifixes. One
Catholic online store, which describes itself as “dedicated to offering battle-ready products and manuals to ‘stand firm against the tactics of the devil’” (a New Testament reference), sells replicas of the rosaries issued to American soldiers during the First World War as “combat rosaries.” Discerning consumers can also buy a “concealed carry” permit for their combat rosary and a sacramental storage box resembling an ammunition can. In 2016, the pontifical Swiss Guard accepted a donation of combat rosaries; during a ceremony at the Vatican, their
commander described the gift as “the most powerful weapon that exists on the market.”
The militarism also glorifies a warrior mentality and notions of manliness and male strength. This conflation of the masculine and the military is rooted in wider anxieties about Catholic manhood—the idea that it is in crisis has some currency among senior Church figures and lay
organizations. In 2015, Bishop Thomas Olmsted of Phoenix issued an apostolic exhortation calling for a renewal of traditional conceptions of Catholic masculinity titled “Into the Breach,” which led the Knights of Columbus, an influential fraternal order, to produce a video series
promoting Olmsted’s ideas. But among radical-traditional Catholic men, such concerns take an extremist turn, rooted in fantasies of violently defending one’s family and church from marauders.
The rosary-as-weapon also gives rad-trad Catholic men both a distinctive signifier within Christian nationalism and a sort of membership pass to the movement. As the sociologists Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry note in Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States, Catholics used to be regarded as enemies by Christian nationalists, and anti-Catholic nativism runs deep in American history. Today, Catholics are a growing contingent of Christian nationalism.
Helping unite these former rivals is a quasi-theological doctrine of what Perry and another sociologist, Philip S. Gorski, have called “righteous violence” against political enemies regarded as demonic or satanic, be they secularists, progressives, or Jews. The hostility toward liberalism
and secularism inherent in traditionalist Catholicism is also pronounced within Christian nationalist circles. No longer stigmatized by evangelical nationalists, Catholic imagery now blends freely with staple alt-right memes that romanticize ancient Rome or idealize the
traditional patriarchal family.
Some doctrinal differences and divisions remain. Many radical-traditional Catholic men maintain the hardline position that other forms of Christianity are heretical, and hold that Catholics alone adhere to the one true Church. Christian nationalism’s nativism and its predilection for “Great Replacement” theory alienate some radical-traditional Catholics who are not white or who were not born in the United States, and deep veins of anti-Catholicism persist among far-right Protestants.
Yet the convergence within Christian nationalism is cemented in common causes such as hostility toward abortion-rights advocates. The pro-choice protests that followed the leaked early draft of the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which
overturned Roe v. Wade, led to a profusion of social-media posts on the far-right fantasizing about killing activists, and such forums responded to Pride month this year with extremist homophobic and transphobic “groomer” discourse. Rad-trad networks are also involved in organizing rosary-branded events that involve weapons training.
Catholics are taught to love and forgive their enemies, that to do otherwise is a sin. But the extremist understanding of spiritual warfare overrides that command. To do battle with Satan—whose influence in the world is, according to Catholic demonology, real and menacing—is to
deploy violence for deliverance and redemption. The “battle beads” culture of spiritual warfare permits radical-traditional Catholics literally to demonize their political opponents and regard the use of armed force against them as sanctified. The sacramental rosary isn’t just a spiritual
weapon but one that comes with physical ammunition.
Tuesday, August 16
A Moment of Grace in a Season of Pain
David French, The Atlantic 7.29.22
Earlier this week I witnessed a moment that brought tears to my eyes, exposed the immense amount of hurt that lies just beneath the surface of American life, and demonstrated the necessity of grace. It involved my wife, Nancy. A local Christian college called Williamson College
invited her to speak to students on the topic of “loving your enemies.” The inspiration for the talk was a story she wrote for the Washington Examiner last December.
Nancy was slightly apprehensive before the speech. The last time she’d visited a local Christian college, a man rushed up to her after she had been honored in the college’s chapel, got in her face, and yelled “[Forget] you and your husband. You’re ruining America.” It was unnerving.
But this was supposed to be a feel-good speech about overcoming political differences. I’d urge you to read Nancy’s essay. She is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. A Vacation Bible School teacher molested her when she was 12-years old. It turned out that the man was a serial abuser.
Nancy’s pastor later told her that 15 women in the congregation had complained about him. Yet nothing decisive was done. He was never prosecuted. He left Nancy’s church and later coached girls’ basketball at a Kentucky high school.
My wife came of age politically during Bill Clinton’s administration, and she was repulsed by his sexual scandals. She was disgusted by the Democratic Party’s defense not just of a serial philanderer but of a man who’d faced his own corroborated reports of sexual assault. She’d
thought the Republicans had a moral spine. After all, they’d impeached Clinton. The Southern Baptist Convention had passed a resolution in 1998 highlighting the importance of moral character in public officials.
Then came the 2016 election and the blow-back against conservatives who did not support the president. She stopped following people on Twitter who were cruel. She started following people who were kind. One of them was a woman named Kathy Kattenberg. But when she followed Kathy, she noticed something peculiar. This person who was nice to Nancy went out of her way to constantly heckle me online. She trolled me constantly. She hated my pro-life positions, and she hated my defense of religious liberty. She was relentless.
Early in the pandemic, Kathy was in distress. She tweeted that she was having trouble finding food. It turns out that Kathy is disabled. She lives alone in New York, and she was struggling to get groceries delivered. Markets were out of basic goods. Delivery services were overwhelmed.
So Nancy activated. She worked with a pastor friend named Ray Ortlund and my former National Review colleague Kathryn Jean Lopez to find someone, anyone, who could shop for Kathy and find her groceries. It took time, but within a week, Kathy’s apartment was overflowing with food, and a troll had become a friend. Kathy and Nancy are friends to this day, and I think that maybe (just maybe) Kathy has softened a bit toward me as well.
Nancy told that story Monday night in her speech at Williamson College, and she ended with an exhortation. Civility and tolerance, she said, were milquetoast [mild/weak] compared with actual love. The lack of love is our nation’s real problem. Incivility is a mere symptom. And when you love people who seem to be your enemies, she said, it turns out they might not be enemies at all.
I’m biased, but I thought it was a necessary message that was beautifully delivered. Plus, the crowd seemed to love her. She received sustained, enthusiastic applause. Then the questions came. A young man went first. I had a hard time hearing what he said, but he sounded oddly aggressive. Nancy then leaned into the microphone and spoke directly to the questioner. “Sorry, did you just ask me if I love or merely tolerate the Vacation Bible School teacher who molested me as a kid?”
“Yes,” he responded. That’s exactly what he’d asked.
There was a gasp in the room. A number of women shouted out, “No!” and “You don’t have to answer.” Nancy absorbed the question like a physical blow. I could see her face change. She tried to speak, but words wouldn’t come. Was that student trying to humiliate her?
Nancy tried to move on to the next question, but she couldn’t continue. She handed the mic to her host and left the room. Immediately, three women followed her into the hallway. I left also, but by the time I got outside the room, Nancy and the three women were in the bathroom. I could hear the sound of crying, and it wasn’t just Nancy in tears.
When she came out, she asked for advice. She was embarrassed that she’d left the stage. She told me that the women who were crying with her were also victims of abuse. I told her that if she could, she should return to the stage. At the moment, I told her the student was trying to hurt her, and it was important to not let the pain silence her. I had no idea if that was good advice at the time. But Nancy decided to go back into the room. I knew it took every ounce of courage she had, because she’d just felt humiliated in front of the entire audience.
I didn’t know what she was going to say. Everyone turned when she walked in the door. But before she could speak, the young man asked for the microphone again. The audience was hushed, and they strained to hear what would happen next. However, this time his voice was different. He apologized. He said he hadn’t meant to offend, and his question didn’t come out right.
He paused for a moment. Then he revealed he was a victim of abuse, and he was struggling with how to read scripture that admonished Christians to love their enemies. He wasn’t a troll at all.
He was a hurting kid who had trouble expressing himself. Nancy responded beautifully. She didn’t just forgive him; she honored him. And she turned to the crowd and told them that there weren’t just hurting people in this room; there were hurting people across the Church—victims
of abuse at every level of Christian ministry. A moment that at first seemed profane and tainted by malice and cruelty turned sacred, enriched by love and compassion.
I’m sharing this story for three reasons. First, because it is profoundly sad that in that relatively small crowd, there were multiple women and at least one young man who were survivors of abuse. They are in every crowd. Christians can’t look at abuse as something that happens in other
places to other people. The survivors are all around us.
Second, it was moving to see the immediate bond between Nancy and the women who comforted her and wept with her. As one of the women told me, there is a verse in the 42nd Psalm that says “deep calls to deep.” There is a beautiful and terrible fellowship that comes with suffering.
And third, we’re so primed to see evil in others that we can miss their brokenness. In her Twitter persona, Nancy’s new friend Kathy was an angry troll. In the offline world, she was alone and vulnerable. In his first question, a suffering young man seemed vicious. But he was uncertain. He didn’t know how to ask what he wanted to ask, and the question came out wrong.
If Nancy had left—if she hadn’t come back out on that stage and given the mic back to the person who’d just wounded her—we’d never know that truth. The telling of the story would be entirely different. We’d presume that he was malevolent. But in an act of grace, Nancy gave him
a second chance, and everything changed.
I know there are evil people online. I know there are evil people who are cruel up close and in person. But sometimes what seems like cruelty is really loneliness, or confusion, or heartbreak. We define each other by our worst moments and withhold forgiveness.
But we should forgive. We must forgive. Otherwise this nation of broken people will keep breaking each other. Pain can look a lot like anger, and when we know that to be true, we can take risks. We can give second chances, and when we do, we can sometimes see that an enemy
isn’t an enemy at all, but another struggling person who needs healing and grace.
David French, The Atlantic 7.29.22
Earlier this week I witnessed a moment that brought tears to my eyes, exposed the immense amount of hurt that lies just beneath the surface of American life, and demonstrated the necessity of grace. It involved my wife, Nancy. A local Christian college called Williamson College
invited her to speak to students on the topic of “loving your enemies.” The inspiration for the talk was a story she wrote for the Washington Examiner last December.
Nancy was slightly apprehensive before the speech. The last time she’d visited a local Christian college, a man rushed up to her after she had been honored in the college’s chapel, got in her face, and yelled “[Forget] you and your husband. You’re ruining America.” It was unnerving.
But this was supposed to be a feel-good speech about overcoming political differences. I’d urge you to read Nancy’s essay. She is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. A Vacation Bible School teacher molested her when she was 12-years old. It turned out that the man was a serial abuser.
Nancy’s pastor later told her that 15 women in the congregation had complained about him. Yet nothing decisive was done. He was never prosecuted. He left Nancy’s church and later coached girls’ basketball at a Kentucky high school.
My wife came of age politically during Bill Clinton’s administration, and she was repulsed by his sexual scandals. She was disgusted by the Democratic Party’s defense not just of a serial philanderer but of a man who’d faced his own corroborated reports of sexual assault. She’d
thought the Republicans had a moral spine. After all, they’d impeached Clinton. The Southern Baptist Convention had passed a resolution in 1998 highlighting the importance of moral character in public officials.
Then came the 2016 election and the blow-back against conservatives who did not support the president. She stopped following people on Twitter who were cruel. She started following people who were kind. One of them was a woman named Kathy Kattenberg. But when she followed Kathy, she noticed something peculiar. This person who was nice to Nancy went out of her way to constantly heckle me online. She trolled me constantly. She hated my pro-life positions, and she hated my defense of religious liberty. She was relentless.
Early in the pandemic, Kathy was in distress. She tweeted that she was having trouble finding food. It turns out that Kathy is disabled. She lives alone in New York, and she was struggling to get groceries delivered. Markets were out of basic goods. Delivery services were overwhelmed.
So Nancy activated. She worked with a pastor friend named Ray Ortlund and my former National Review colleague Kathryn Jean Lopez to find someone, anyone, who could shop for Kathy and find her groceries. It took time, but within a week, Kathy’s apartment was overflowing with food, and a troll had become a friend. Kathy and Nancy are friends to this day, and I think that maybe (just maybe) Kathy has softened a bit toward me as well.
Nancy told that story Monday night in her speech at Williamson College, and she ended with an exhortation. Civility and tolerance, she said, were milquetoast [mild/weak] compared with actual love. The lack of love is our nation’s real problem. Incivility is a mere symptom. And when you love people who seem to be your enemies, she said, it turns out they might not be enemies at all.
I’m biased, but I thought it was a necessary message that was beautifully delivered. Plus, the crowd seemed to love her. She received sustained, enthusiastic applause. Then the questions came. A young man went first. I had a hard time hearing what he said, but he sounded oddly aggressive. Nancy then leaned into the microphone and spoke directly to the questioner. “Sorry, did you just ask me if I love or merely tolerate the Vacation Bible School teacher who molested me as a kid?”
“Yes,” he responded. That’s exactly what he’d asked.
There was a gasp in the room. A number of women shouted out, “No!” and “You don’t have to answer.” Nancy absorbed the question like a physical blow. I could see her face change. She tried to speak, but words wouldn’t come. Was that student trying to humiliate her?
Nancy tried to move on to the next question, but she couldn’t continue. She handed the mic to her host and left the room. Immediately, three women followed her into the hallway. I left also, but by the time I got outside the room, Nancy and the three women were in the bathroom. I could hear the sound of crying, and it wasn’t just Nancy in tears.
When she came out, she asked for advice. She was embarrassed that she’d left the stage. She told me that the women who were crying with her were also victims of abuse. I told her that if she could, she should return to the stage. At the moment, I told her the student was trying to hurt her, and it was important to not let the pain silence her. I had no idea if that was good advice at the time. But Nancy decided to go back into the room. I knew it took every ounce of courage she had, because she’d just felt humiliated in front of the entire audience.
I didn’t know what she was going to say. Everyone turned when she walked in the door. But before she could speak, the young man asked for the microphone again. The audience was hushed, and they strained to hear what would happen next. However, this time his voice was different. He apologized. He said he hadn’t meant to offend, and his question didn’t come out right.
He paused for a moment. Then he revealed he was a victim of abuse, and he was struggling with how to read scripture that admonished Christians to love their enemies. He wasn’t a troll at all.
He was a hurting kid who had trouble expressing himself. Nancy responded beautifully. She didn’t just forgive him; she honored him. And she turned to the crowd and told them that there weren’t just hurting people in this room; there were hurting people across the Church—victims
of abuse at every level of Christian ministry. A moment that at first seemed profane and tainted by malice and cruelty turned sacred, enriched by love and compassion.
I’m sharing this story for three reasons. First, because it is profoundly sad that in that relatively small crowd, there were multiple women and at least one young man who were survivors of abuse. They are in every crowd. Christians can’t look at abuse as something that happens in other
places to other people. The survivors are all around us.
Second, it was moving to see the immediate bond between Nancy and the women who comforted her and wept with her. As one of the women told me, there is a verse in the 42nd Psalm that says “deep calls to deep.” There is a beautiful and terrible fellowship that comes with suffering.
And third, we’re so primed to see evil in others that we can miss their brokenness. In her Twitter persona, Nancy’s new friend Kathy was an angry troll. In the offline world, she was alone and vulnerable. In his first question, a suffering young man seemed vicious. But he was uncertain. He didn’t know how to ask what he wanted to ask, and the question came out wrong.
If Nancy had left—if she hadn’t come back out on that stage and given the mic back to the person who’d just wounded her—we’d never know that truth. The telling of the story would be entirely different. We’d presume that he was malevolent. But in an act of grace, Nancy gave him
a second chance, and everything changed.
I know there are evil people online. I know there are evil people who are cruel up close and in person. But sometimes what seems like cruelty is really loneliness, or confusion, or heartbreak. We define each other by our worst moments and withhold forgiveness.
But we should forgive. We must forgive. Otherwise this nation of broken people will keep breaking each other. Pain can look a lot like anger, and when we know that to be true, we can take risks. We can give second chances, and when we do, we can sometimes see that an enemy
isn’t an enemy at all, but another struggling person who needs healing and grace.
Tuesday, August 9
Are you familiar with the term "gaslighting"? It is a slang term that means to manipulate someone by psychological means into questioning their own sanity. Another way to look at gaslighting is when a friend or family member tells you that you don't feel the way that you actually feel or to dismiss something that you think with a phrase like, "It's crazy for you to think that way..." and then they will tell you what to think.
As troubling as that might sound, imagine if that person was your doctor.
The article for next week, from the NY Times, addresses medical gaslighting and what to do about it. Unlike our recent discussions, there is nothing really controversial about this topic, but it is a way for me to tell you that it is happening and to give us some ways to handle it.
Feeling Dismissed? How to Spot ‘Medical Gaslighting’ and What to Do About It.
Christian Caron, The New York Times 7.29.22
Christina, who lives in Portland, Me., said she felt ignored by doctors for years. When she was 50 pounds heavier, her providers sometimes blamed her body size when she discussed her health concerns. One instance occurred weeks after she had fallen off her bike. “My elbow was still hurting,” said Christina, 39, who asked that her last name be withheld when discussing her medical history. “I went to my regular primary care doctor and she just sort of hand-waved it off as ‘Well, you’re overweight and it’s putting stress on your joints.’” Eventually, Christina visited
an urgent care center where providers performed an X-ray and found she had chipped a bone in her arm.
The experience of having one’s concerns dismissed by a medical provider, often referred to as medical gaslighting, can happen to anyone. A recent New York Times article on the topic received more than 2,800 comments: Some recounted misdiagnoses that nearly cost them their
lives or that delayed treatment, leading to unnecessary suffering. Patients with long Covid wrote about how they felt ignored by the doctors they turned to for help.
Lately, the problem has been drawing attention for disproportionately affecting women, people of color, and geriatric patients. For example, studies have found that women are more likely than men to be misdiagnosed with certain conditions — like heart disease and autoimmune disorders — and they often wait longer for a diagnosis. And one group of researchers discovered that doctors were more likely to use negative descriptors like “noncompliant” or “agitated” in Black patients’ health records than in those of white patients — a practice that could lead to health care disparities. “Gaslighting is real; it happens all the time. Patients — and especially women —need to be aware of it,” said Dr. Jennifer H. Mieres, a professor of cardiology at the Zucker School of Medicine. Here are some tips on how to advocate for yourself in a medical setting.
What are the signs of gaslighting?
Gaslighting can be subtle and isn’t always easy to spot. When seeking medical care, experts recommend watching for the following red flags.
What can you do to advocate for yourself?
Keep detailed notes and records. Dr. Mitchell recommended keeping a journal where you log as many details as possible about your symptoms. Her suggested prompts include: “What are your symptoms? When do you feel those symptoms? Do you notice any triggers? If you have pain, what does it feel like? Does it wax and wane, or is it constant? What days do you notice this pain?”
In addition to your notes, keep records of all of your lab results, imaging, medications and family medical history. It is analogous to seeing your accountant at tax time, Dr. Mieres said: “You certainly do not show up without receipts.”
Ask questions. Then ask some more. Prepare a list of questions that you would like to ask ahead of your appointment, and be prepared to ask other questions as new information is presented. If you aren’t sure where to start, Dr. Mitchell recommended asking your doctor this: “If you were me, what questions would you ask right now?”
Bring a support person. Sometimes it can help to have a trusted friend or relative accompany you, particularly when discussing a treatment plan or difficult medical issue. When people are ill, scared or anxious, it can facilitate “brain freeze,” Dr. Mieres said. “We stop thinking, we don’t hear adequately, we don’t process information.” Speak with your support person to clarify their role and discuss your expectations, she added. Do you want them to take notes and be a second set of ears? Or do you primarily need them there for emotional support? Are there times where you might prefer that your friend or relative leave the room so that you can discuss private matters?
Focus on your most pressing issue. Providers are often short on time, and the average primary care exam is only 18 minutes long, according to a study published in 2021. Dr. Mieres recommended taking 10 minutes before your appointment to jot down bullet points that concisely outline the reason for your visit so that you can communicate with your doctor efficiently.
Pin down next steps. Ideally, you should leave your appointment feeling reassured. Tell your provider that you would like to understand three things: the best guess as to what is happening; plans for diagnosing or ruling out different possibilities; and treatment options, depending on
what is found.
If you’re still being ignored, what are your options?
Switch providers. A study using data from 2006 and 2007 estimated that approximately 12 million adults were misdiagnosed in the United States every year and about half of those errors could be harmful. If you are concerned that your symptoms are not being addressed, you are
entitled to seek a second opinion, a third or even a fourth. But in many cases that may be easier said than done. It’s not always quick or simple to find another specialist who takes your insurance and has immediate appointments available. If possible, try to get an in-network referral
from your current doctor. For example, you can say: “Thank you for your time, but I would really like to seek another opinion on this. Could you refer me to another specialist in your area?”
If you don’t feel comfortable asking your doctor for a referral, you can also speak with a patient liaison or nurse manager. Alternatively, you can ask friends and family, or call your insurance company to find someone in-network.
Reframe the conversation. If you decide to stick with your current provider, but that person doesn’t appear to be listening, Dr. Mieres recommended that patients try redirecting the conversation by saying something like: “Let’s hit the pause button here, because we have a
disconnect. You’re not hearing what I’m saying. Let me start again.” Or, alternatively: “I’ve been having these symptoms for three months. Can you help me find what is wrong? What can we do to figure this out together?”
Look to support groups. There are support groups for a multitude of conditions that may provide useful resources and information. Tami Burdick, who was diagnosed in 2017 with granulomatous mastitis, a rare, chronic, inflammatory breast disease, found help from an online
support group for women with the same condition. Initially, she was referred to an infectious disease specialist who dismissed a breast biopsy found to contain bacteria. “I developed horrible, painful abscesses that would open and drain on their own,” Ms. Burdick, 44, said.
In her search for answers she conducted extensive research on the disease. And from the support group she learned of a gene sequencing test that could identify potential pathogens. Ms. Burdick asked her surgical oncologist to order the test and discovered she had been infected with a specific microorganism associated with granulomatous mastitis and recurrent breast abscesses. It took seven months of investigating, but she finally had an answer.
Appeal to a higher authority. If you are being treated in a hospital setting, you can contact the patient advocacy staff, who may be able to assist. You might also address the problem with your doctor’s supervisor.
Finally, if you are dissatisfied with the care that you’re receiving, Dr. Mitchell said, you may consider reporting your experience to the Federation of State Medical Boards. “Any instances of abuse, manipulation, gaslighting, delaying diagnoses — those are reportable events
that providers need to know about,” Dr. Mitchell said. “Doctors need to be held accountable."
As troubling as that might sound, imagine if that person was your doctor.
The article for next week, from the NY Times, addresses medical gaslighting and what to do about it. Unlike our recent discussions, there is nothing really controversial about this topic, but it is a way for me to tell you that it is happening and to give us some ways to handle it.
Feeling Dismissed? How to Spot ‘Medical Gaslighting’ and What to Do About It.
Christian Caron, The New York Times 7.29.22
Christina, who lives in Portland, Me., said she felt ignored by doctors for years. When she was 50 pounds heavier, her providers sometimes blamed her body size when she discussed her health concerns. One instance occurred weeks after she had fallen off her bike. “My elbow was still hurting,” said Christina, 39, who asked that her last name be withheld when discussing her medical history. “I went to my regular primary care doctor and she just sort of hand-waved it off as ‘Well, you’re overweight and it’s putting stress on your joints.’” Eventually, Christina visited
an urgent care center where providers performed an X-ray and found she had chipped a bone in her arm.
The experience of having one’s concerns dismissed by a medical provider, often referred to as medical gaslighting, can happen to anyone. A recent New York Times article on the topic received more than 2,800 comments: Some recounted misdiagnoses that nearly cost them their
lives or that delayed treatment, leading to unnecessary suffering. Patients with long Covid wrote about how they felt ignored by the doctors they turned to for help.
Lately, the problem has been drawing attention for disproportionately affecting women, people of color, and geriatric patients. For example, studies have found that women are more likely than men to be misdiagnosed with certain conditions — like heart disease and autoimmune disorders — and they often wait longer for a diagnosis. And one group of researchers discovered that doctors were more likely to use negative descriptors like “noncompliant” or “agitated” in Black patients’ health records than in those of white patients — a practice that could lead to health care disparities. “Gaslighting is real; it happens all the time. Patients — and especially women —need to be aware of it,” said Dr. Jennifer H. Mieres, a professor of cardiology at the Zucker School of Medicine. Here are some tips on how to advocate for yourself in a medical setting.
What are the signs of gaslighting?
Gaslighting can be subtle and isn’t always easy to spot. When seeking medical care, experts recommend watching for the following red flags.
- Your provider continually interrupts you, doesn’t allow you to elaborate and doesn’t appear to be an engaged listener.
- Your provider minimizes or downplays your symptoms, for example questioning whether you have pain.
- Your provider refuses to discuss your symptoms.
- Your provider will not order key imaging or lab work to rule out or confirm a diagnosis.
- You feel that your provider is being rude, condescending or belittling.
- Your symptoms are blamed on mental illness, but you are not provided with a mental health referral or screened for such illness.
What can you do to advocate for yourself?
Keep detailed notes and records. Dr. Mitchell recommended keeping a journal where you log as many details as possible about your symptoms. Her suggested prompts include: “What are your symptoms? When do you feel those symptoms? Do you notice any triggers? If you have pain, what does it feel like? Does it wax and wane, or is it constant? What days do you notice this pain?”
In addition to your notes, keep records of all of your lab results, imaging, medications and family medical history. It is analogous to seeing your accountant at tax time, Dr. Mieres said: “You certainly do not show up without receipts.”
Ask questions. Then ask some more. Prepare a list of questions that you would like to ask ahead of your appointment, and be prepared to ask other questions as new information is presented. If you aren’t sure where to start, Dr. Mitchell recommended asking your doctor this: “If you were me, what questions would you ask right now?”
Bring a support person. Sometimes it can help to have a trusted friend or relative accompany you, particularly when discussing a treatment plan or difficult medical issue. When people are ill, scared or anxious, it can facilitate “brain freeze,” Dr. Mieres said. “We stop thinking, we don’t hear adequately, we don’t process information.” Speak with your support person to clarify their role and discuss your expectations, she added. Do you want them to take notes and be a second set of ears? Or do you primarily need them there for emotional support? Are there times where you might prefer that your friend or relative leave the room so that you can discuss private matters?
Focus on your most pressing issue. Providers are often short on time, and the average primary care exam is only 18 minutes long, according to a study published in 2021. Dr. Mieres recommended taking 10 minutes before your appointment to jot down bullet points that concisely outline the reason for your visit so that you can communicate with your doctor efficiently.
Pin down next steps. Ideally, you should leave your appointment feeling reassured. Tell your provider that you would like to understand three things: the best guess as to what is happening; plans for diagnosing or ruling out different possibilities; and treatment options, depending on
what is found.
If you’re still being ignored, what are your options?
Switch providers. A study using data from 2006 and 2007 estimated that approximately 12 million adults were misdiagnosed in the United States every year and about half of those errors could be harmful. If you are concerned that your symptoms are not being addressed, you are
entitled to seek a second opinion, a third or even a fourth. But in many cases that may be easier said than done. It’s not always quick or simple to find another specialist who takes your insurance and has immediate appointments available. If possible, try to get an in-network referral
from your current doctor. For example, you can say: “Thank you for your time, but I would really like to seek another opinion on this. Could you refer me to another specialist in your area?”
If you don’t feel comfortable asking your doctor for a referral, you can also speak with a patient liaison or nurse manager. Alternatively, you can ask friends and family, or call your insurance company to find someone in-network.
Reframe the conversation. If you decide to stick with your current provider, but that person doesn’t appear to be listening, Dr. Mieres recommended that patients try redirecting the conversation by saying something like: “Let’s hit the pause button here, because we have a
disconnect. You’re not hearing what I’m saying. Let me start again.” Or, alternatively: “I’ve been having these symptoms for three months. Can you help me find what is wrong? What can we do to figure this out together?”
Look to support groups. There are support groups for a multitude of conditions that may provide useful resources and information. Tami Burdick, who was diagnosed in 2017 with granulomatous mastitis, a rare, chronic, inflammatory breast disease, found help from an online
support group for women with the same condition. Initially, she was referred to an infectious disease specialist who dismissed a breast biopsy found to contain bacteria. “I developed horrible, painful abscesses that would open and drain on their own,” Ms. Burdick, 44, said.
In her search for answers she conducted extensive research on the disease. And from the support group she learned of a gene sequencing test that could identify potential pathogens. Ms. Burdick asked her surgical oncologist to order the test and discovered she had been infected with a specific microorganism associated with granulomatous mastitis and recurrent breast abscesses. It took seven months of investigating, but she finally had an answer.
Appeal to a higher authority. If you are being treated in a hospital setting, you can contact the patient advocacy staff, who may be able to assist. You might also address the problem with your doctor’s supervisor.
Finally, if you are dissatisfied with the care that you’re receiving, Dr. Mitchell said, you may consider reporting your experience to the Federation of State Medical Boards. “Any instances of abuse, manipulation, gaslighting, delaying diagnoses — those are reportable events
that providers need to know about,” Dr. Mitchell said. “Doctors need to be held accountable."
Tuesday, August 2
The discussion about nationalism - so-called "Christian" or otherwise - was excellent and I have been asked to continue it. The interim director of Florida's ACLU wrote a piece for the Tampa Bay Times warning us of what she believes is an erosion of our 1st amendment rights in the state with a number of recent state legislative actions. I'd like to know what you think of her very strong opinion.
Secondly, I don't know when I'll be able to include the second piece as a topic so I thought I'd send it now. From the WSJ, there is an excellent piece about how to have better conversations. The author believes we have forgotten how to conversate - she blames Netflix - so she has some points for us to use.
Trampling on 1st Amendment Rights in Florida
Amy Turkel, Tampa Bay Times 6.24.22
Guest Columnist, Amy Turkel, is the interim executive director of the ACLU of Florida.
The First Amendment guarantees the rights to free speech, a free press, freedom to assemble and protest peacefully, the right to petition the government for change and freedom from the imposition of religious beliefs by government.
Over the past three years, the Florida Legislature has restricted Floridians’ First Amendment rights and repeatedly pushed for laws that violate basic American freedoms.
In the wake of national protests after the 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, State government leaders championed the anti-protest bill, House Bill 1. It dictated that any person participating in a rally or protest could be charged with a felony if three or more other
people at that event engaged in unlawful activity resulting in imminent danger of damage to property or injury to another person. In other words, you could be charged for an offense committed by people who were total strangers to you, even if you were protesting peacefully.
In 2021, U.S. District Court Judge Mark Walker struck down that provision of the law. Walker stated that HB 1 “could effectively criminalize the protected speech of hundreds, if not thousands, of law-abiding Floridians. … This violates the First Amendment.”
In this year’s legislative session, representatives pushed House Bill 7, an educational censorship bill, signed into law in April. That bill prevents content from being taught in schools that illustrates the discrimination, including race and gender discrimination, that has existed for
centuries in our society.
HB 7 even bans private employers from requiring diversity training or other workshops related to race and gender discrimination, which are often used to create inclusive, productive work environments. Worse, the law gives employees the ability to sue an employer for requiring such workshops. HB 7 is a clear attempt to whitewash American history and to ban viewpoints some leaders do not like.
The legislature continued to attack Floridians’ First Amendment rights by targeting LGBTQ+ youth and families with the “don’t say gay” bill (House Bill 1557). This legislation bans teachers from addressing LGBTQ+ topics in grades K-3. It also prohibits such discussions at any grade
level if someone else does not deem them “age-appropriate.”
Any parent who thinks a classroom discussion was inappropriate will be able to sue, a provision of the law that will end up chilling speech and creating chaos.
On Feb. 17, 2022, twenty-five people were banned from the Capitol for a year, and another was unjustly arrested and held in jail overnight. All because a few people were chanting in opposition to the passing of House Bill 5, the 15-week abortion ban. That law is yet another way that a
constitutional right — the right to privacy and bodily autonomy — is under attack in Florida.
In addition, over the past few years, we have witnessed journalists being denied access to official press conferences and briefings — attempts to block coverage of critical public matters, including coronavirus updates and bill signings.
There are elected leaders who are waging a terrifying and unconstitutional assault on Floridians’ First Amendment rights, and all Floridians should be outraged by the attempts to silence us.
Dissent is patriotic; government censorship is undemocratic, unconstitutional and un-American. We will all do better when we have leaders in Florida who use their power to improve our lives and our livelihoods and are dedicated to making the values of liberty and justice a reality for all of us.
Have Better Conversations with Anyone
Elizabeth Bernstein, WSJ 7.26.22
I was driving with my teenage nephew Noah recently when he blurted out: “Can we talk?”
We were on our way to meet friends, chit-chatting about the music on the radio and where to go
for lunch. Absolutely, I told him. What did he want to discuss?
“Oh, I don’t know,” Noah said. “Just something more interesting.”
It’s time to deepen our conversations.
We’ve talked to fewer people about fewer things in the past two years. Now, many of us are craving more meaningful conversations–ones that go beyond sharing recommendations for what to stream on Netflix. Trouble is, we’ve forgotten how to have them.
“Social skills are like muscles,” says Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, who studies how to find motivation and meaning.
“If you don’t exercise them, they start to atrophy.” People who have more substantive conversations are happier, research shows. Deep conversations make us feel more connected to others and help us understand one another. And most of us would like to have more meaningful conversations, psychologists say. When we do have them–even with strangers–we tend to enjoy them more and find them less awkward than expected, according to research published recently in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. With practice, most of us can get better at meaningful conversations, psychologists say. Here’s what they recommend.
Pick a partner.
It’s easiest to start with someone you trust. “If you’ve had good conversations with them in the past, you’re likely to do so again,” says Sean Horan, professor and chair of the communication department at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Conn. But if you want to expand your world,
branch out. Choose someone you’d like to get to know better, such as a new co-worker. Don’t rule out having a deep conversation with someone you just met. You might make a friend or learn something new.
Share first.
“The most straightforward path to having meaningful conversations is to be willing to share something about yourself,” says Gillian Sandstrom, a senior lecturer at the University of Sussex in England, who studies social interactions. Research shows that when one person shares personal details in a conversation, the other person typically responds in kind. Psychologists call this mutual self-disclosure, and studies show it helps people feel closer to one another.
You don’t have to share intimacies. Start by talking about something you’re excited about or a fear or concern. During a turbulent plane ride, I told the woman next to me that I was scared. We ended up having a conversation that was so helpful to both of us that I wrote about it in my
column.
Ask better questions.
Where are you from? What do you do? Managing to stay cool in this heat?
Often, conversation-starters turn out to be dead ends. They can be answered in one word. And we’re not asking about anything the other person wants to talk about. Try deeper questions, suggests Wharton’s Dr. Grant. Instead of asking people what they do, ask them what they love to do. It’s exciting to talk about something you’re passionate about, and that energy can fuel a conversation, Dr. Grant says. His other suggestions: “What’s a goal you’re pursuing right now?” “What’s a challenge you’re facing?” “What’s the best change you’ve made during the
pandemic?”
Try an open-ended statement.
“Tell me about your hometown.” “Say more about your day.” “Explain your work to me.”
Statements such as these typically make people want to elaborate, says Jessica Moore, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Austin, Texas, who studies interpersonal communication. They’re tough to answer with one word. And you can tailor them to the depth of your
relationship. Because these statements are open-ended, they open the door to more interesting conversations. There’s no pressure to talk just about positive things, Dr. Moore says. And on the off chance you solicit a raised eyebrow, Dr. Moore has a response to suggest: “Tell me about that look.”
Become more intimate, slowly.
Years ago, social psychologist and research professor Arthur Aron created a research protocol called “Fast Friends” to help two strangers establish interpersonal closeness in a lab in 45 minutes. It consists of a list of 36 questions that start out slightly personal and gradually become more intimate. Each person answers a question before going on to the next, because any truly deep conversation is reciprocal. Dr. Aron says that we can use the same concept, which he calls “progressive intimacy,” to deepen conversations. We can begin a discussion by talking about relatively mundane information, such as vacation plans. Once the conversation is going well, gradually move toward more intimate topics.
Show appreciation.
The most important part of a substantive conversation is not the topic, it’s your response, psychologists say. Show the other person that you understand and care for them. You can do this by saying some version of: “I’m so glad you shared this with me.” When my nephew Noah asked to talk, I suggested high school as a topic. He’s starting his freshman year next month at a boarding school I also attended. To get the conversation rolling, I asked Noah what classes he’s looking forward to and why. I also shared my favorites. We talked about sports–which ones he’ll play and how it can be intimidating when some of your teammates are bigger than you. And we discussed how it can sometimes get lonesome when you’re away at school and what to do about it. When the conversation was over, I told Noah how happy I was that we’d gotten to have a real talk. “Yeah, that was awesome,” he said.
Secondly, I don't know when I'll be able to include the second piece as a topic so I thought I'd send it now. From the WSJ, there is an excellent piece about how to have better conversations. The author believes we have forgotten how to conversate - she blames Netflix - so she has some points for us to use.
Trampling on 1st Amendment Rights in Florida
Amy Turkel, Tampa Bay Times 6.24.22
Guest Columnist, Amy Turkel, is the interim executive director of the ACLU of Florida.
The First Amendment guarantees the rights to free speech, a free press, freedom to assemble and protest peacefully, the right to petition the government for change and freedom from the imposition of religious beliefs by government.
Over the past three years, the Florida Legislature has restricted Floridians’ First Amendment rights and repeatedly pushed for laws that violate basic American freedoms.
In the wake of national protests after the 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, State government leaders championed the anti-protest bill, House Bill 1. It dictated that any person participating in a rally or protest could be charged with a felony if three or more other
people at that event engaged in unlawful activity resulting in imminent danger of damage to property or injury to another person. In other words, you could be charged for an offense committed by people who were total strangers to you, even if you were protesting peacefully.
In 2021, U.S. District Court Judge Mark Walker struck down that provision of the law. Walker stated that HB 1 “could effectively criminalize the protected speech of hundreds, if not thousands, of law-abiding Floridians. … This violates the First Amendment.”
In this year’s legislative session, representatives pushed House Bill 7, an educational censorship bill, signed into law in April. That bill prevents content from being taught in schools that illustrates the discrimination, including race and gender discrimination, that has existed for
centuries in our society.
HB 7 even bans private employers from requiring diversity training or other workshops related to race and gender discrimination, which are often used to create inclusive, productive work environments. Worse, the law gives employees the ability to sue an employer for requiring such workshops. HB 7 is a clear attempt to whitewash American history and to ban viewpoints some leaders do not like.
The legislature continued to attack Floridians’ First Amendment rights by targeting LGBTQ+ youth and families with the “don’t say gay” bill (House Bill 1557). This legislation bans teachers from addressing LGBTQ+ topics in grades K-3. It also prohibits such discussions at any grade
level if someone else does not deem them “age-appropriate.”
Any parent who thinks a classroom discussion was inappropriate will be able to sue, a provision of the law that will end up chilling speech and creating chaos.
On Feb. 17, 2022, twenty-five people were banned from the Capitol for a year, and another was unjustly arrested and held in jail overnight. All because a few people were chanting in opposition to the passing of House Bill 5, the 15-week abortion ban. That law is yet another way that a
constitutional right — the right to privacy and bodily autonomy — is under attack in Florida.
In addition, over the past few years, we have witnessed journalists being denied access to official press conferences and briefings — attempts to block coverage of critical public matters, including coronavirus updates and bill signings.
There are elected leaders who are waging a terrifying and unconstitutional assault on Floridians’ First Amendment rights, and all Floridians should be outraged by the attempts to silence us.
Dissent is patriotic; government censorship is undemocratic, unconstitutional and un-American. We will all do better when we have leaders in Florida who use their power to improve our lives and our livelihoods and are dedicated to making the values of liberty and justice a reality for all of us.
Have Better Conversations with Anyone
Elizabeth Bernstein, WSJ 7.26.22
I was driving with my teenage nephew Noah recently when he blurted out: “Can we talk?”
We were on our way to meet friends, chit-chatting about the music on the radio and where to go
for lunch. Absolutely, I told him. What did he want to discuss?
“Oh, I don’t know,” Noah said. “Just something more interesting.”
It’s time to deepen our conversations.
We’ve talked to fewer people about fewer things in the past two years. Now, many of us are craving more meaningful conversations–ones that go beyond sharing recommendations for what to stream on Netflix. Trouble is, we’ve forgotten how to have them.
“Social skills are like muscles,” says Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, who studies how to find motivation and meaning.
“If you don’t exercise them, they start to atrophy.” People who have more substantive conversations are happier, research shows. Deep conversations make us feel more connected to others and help us understand one another. And most of us would like to have more meaningful conversations, psychologists say. When we do have them–even with strangers–we tend to enjoy them more and find them less awkward than expected, according to research published recently in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. With practice, most of us can get better at meaningful conversations, psychologists say. Here’s what they recommend.
Pick a partner.
It’s easiest to start with someone you trust. “If you’ve had good conversations with them in the past, you’re likely to do so again,” says Sean Horan, professor and chair of the communication department at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Conn. But if you want to expand your world,
branch out. Choose someone you’d like to get to know better, such as a new co-worker. Don’t rule out having a deep conversation with someone you just met. You might make a friend or learn something new.
Share first.
“The most straightforward path to having meaningful conversations is to be willing to share something about yourself,” says Gillian Sandstrom, a senior lecturer at the University of Sussex in England, who studies social interactions. Research shows that when one person shares personal details in a conversation, the other person typically responds in kind. Psychologists call this mutual self-disclosure, and studies show it helps people feel closer to one another.
You don’t have to share intimacies. Start by talking about something you’re excited about or a fear or concern. During a turbulent plane ride, I told the woman next to me that I was scared. We ended up having a conversation that was so helpful to both of us that I wrote about it in my
column.
Ask better questions.
Where are you from? What do you do? Managing to stay cool in this heat?
Often, conversation-starters turn out to be dead ends. They can be answered in one word. And we’re not asking about anything the other person wants to talk about. Try deeper questions, suggests Wharton’s Dr. Grant. Instead of asking people what they do, ask them what they love to do. It’s exciting to talk about something you’re passionate about, and that energy can fuel a conversation, Dr. Grant says. His other suggestions: “What’s a goal you’re pursuing right now?” “What’s a challenge you’re facing?” “What’s the best change you’ve made during the
pandemic?”
Try an open-ended statement.
“Tell me about your hometown.” “Say more about your day.” “Explain your work to me.”
Statements such as these typically make people want to elaborate, says Jessica Moore, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Austin, Texas, who studies interpersonal communication. They’re tough to answer with one word. And you can tailor them to the depth of your
relationship. Because these statements are open-ended, they open the door to more interesting conversations. There’s no pressure to talk just about positive things, Dr. Moore says. And on the off chance you solicit a raised eyebrow, Dr. Moore has a response to suggest: “Tell me about that look.”
Become more intimate, slowly.
Years ago, social psychologist and research professor Arthur Aron created a research protocol called “Fast Friends” to help two strangers establish interpersonal closeness in a lab in 45 minutes. It consists of a list of 36 questions that start out slightly personal and gradually become more intimate. Each person answers a question before going on to the next, because any truly deep conversation is reciprocal. Dr. Aron says that we can use the same concept, which he calls “progressive intimacy,” to deepen conversations. We can begin a discussion by talking about relatively mundane information, such as vacation plans. Once the conversation is going well, gradually move toward more intimate topics.
Show appreciation.
The most important part of a substantive conversation is not the topic, it’s your response, psychologists say. Show the other person that you understand and care for them. You can do this by saying some version of: “I’m so glad you shared this with me.” When my nephew Noah asked to talk, I suggested high school as a topic. He’s starting his freshman year next month at a boarding school I also attended. To get the conversation rolling, I asked Noah what classes he’s looking forward to and why. I also shared my favorites. We talked about sports–which ones he’ll play and how it can be intimidating when some of your teammates are bigger than you. And we discussed how it can sometimes get lonesome when you’re away at school and what to do about it. When the conversation was over, I told Noah how happy I was that we’d gotten to have a real talk. “Yeah, that was awesome,” he said.
Tuesday, July 25
Christian Nationalists Are Excited About What Comes Next
Katherine Stewart, NY Times 7.5.22
The shape of the Christian nationalist movement in the post-Roe future is coming into view, and it should terrify anyone concerned for the future of constitutional democracy.
The Supreme Court’s decision to rescind the reproductive rights will not lead America’s homegrown religious authoritarians to retire from the culture wars and enjoy a sweet moment of triumph. On the contrary, movement leaders are already preparing for a new and more brutal
phase of their assault on individual rights and democratic self-governance. Breaking American democracy isn’t an unintended side effect of Christian nationalism. It is the point of the project.
A good place to gauge the spirit and intentions of the movement is the annual Road to Majority Policy Conference. At this year’s event, which took place last month in Nashville, three clear trends were in evidence. First, the rhetoric of violence among movement leaders appeared to
have increased significantly from the already alarming levels I had observed in previous years.
Second, the theology of dominionism — that is, the belief that “right-thinking” Christians have a biblically derived mandate to take control of all aspects of government and society — is now explicitly embraced. And third, the movement’s key strategists were giddy about the legal
arsenal that the Supreme Court had laid at their feet as they anticipated the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
They intend to use that arsenal — together with additional weaponry collected in cases like Carson v. Makin, which requires state funding of religious schools if private, secular schools are also being funded; and Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, which licenses religious proselytizing by public school officials — to prosecute a war on individual rights, not merely in so-called red state legislatures but throughout the nation.
Speakers at the conference vied to outdo one another in their denigration of Democrats who they said, are “evil,” “tyrannical” and “the enemy within,” engaged in “a war against the truth.”
“The backlash is coming,” warned Senator Rick Scott of Florida. “Just mount up and ride to the sounds of the guns, and they are all over this country. It is time to take this country back.”
Citing the fight against Nazi Germany during the Battle of the Bulge, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina said, “We find ourselves in a pitched battle to literally save this nation.” Referring to a passage from Ephesians that Christian nationalists often use to signal their militancy, he added, “I don’t know about you, but I got my pack on, I got my boots on, I got my helmet on, I’ve got on the whole armor.”
The intensification of verbal warfare is connected to shifts in the Christian nationalist movement’s messaging and outreach, which were very much in evidence at the Nashville conference.
Seven Mountains Dominionism — the belief that “biblical” Christians should seek to dominate the seven key “mountains” or “molders” of American society, including the government — was once considered a fringe doctrine, even among representatives of the religious right. This year, there were two sessions, and the once arcane language of the Seven Mountains creed was on multiple speakers’ lips.
The hunger for dominion that appears to motivate the leadership of the movement is the essential context for making sense of its strategy and intentions in the post-Roe world. The end of abortion rights is the beginning of a new and much more personal attack on individual rights. At a breakout session called “Life Is on the Line: What Does the Future of the Pro-Life Movement Look Like From Here?” Chelsey Youman, the Texas state director and national legislative adviser to Human Coalition Action, described the connection between vigilantes and abortion
rights. Instead of the state regulating abortion providers, she explained, “you and me as citizens of Texas or this country or wherever we can pass this bill can instead sue the abortion provider.”
Mrs. Youman, as it happens, played a role in promoting the Texas law Senate Bill 8, which passed in May 2021 and allows private citizens to sue abortion providers and anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion. She said, “We have legislation ready to roll out for every single state you
live in to protect life, regardless of the Supreme Court, regardless of your circuit court.” To be sure, Christian nationalists are also pushing for a federal ban. But the struggle for the present will center on state-level enforcement mechanisms.
Movement leaders have also made it clear that the target of their ongoing offensive is not just in-state abortion providers but also what they call abortion trafficking — that is, women crossing state lines to obtain legal abortions, along with people who provide those women with services or support, like cars and taxis. Mrs. Youman hailed the development of a new “long-arm jurisdiction” bill that offers a mechanism for targeting out-of-state abortion providers. “It creates a wrongful death cause of action,” she said, “so we’re excited about that.”
The National Right to Life Committee’s model legislation for the post-Roe era includes broad criminal enforcement as well as civil enforcement mechanisms. “The model law also reaches well beyond the actual performance of an illegal abortion,” according to text on the organization’s website. It also includes “aiding or abetting an illegal abortion,” targeting people who provide “instructions over the telephone, the internet or any other medium of communication.”
Americans who stand outside the movement have consistently underestimated its radicalism. Christian nationalism isn’t a route to the future. Its purpose is to hollow out democracy until nothing is left but a thin cover for rule by a supposedly right-thinking elite, bubble-wrapped in
sanctimony and insulated from any real democratic check on its power.
Katherine Stewart, NY Times 7.5.22
The shape of the Christian nationalist movement in the post-Roe future is coming into view, and it should terrify anyone concerned for the future of constitutional democracy.
The Supreme Court’s decision to rescind the reproductive rights will not lead America’s homegrown religious authoritarians to retire from the culture wars and enjoy a sweet moment of triumph. On the contrary, movement leaders are already preparing for a new and more brutal
phase of their assault on individual rights and democratic self-governance. Breaking American democracy isn’t an unintended side effect of Christian nationalism. It is the point of the project.
A good place to gauge the spirit and intentions of the movement is the annual Road to Majority Policy Conference. At this year’s event, which took place last month in Nashville, three clear trends were in evidence. First, the rhetoric of violence among movement leaders appeared to
have increased significantly from the already alarming levels I had observed in previous years.
Second, the theology of dominionism — that is, the belief that “right-thinking” Christians have a biblically derived mandate to take control of all aspects of government and society — is now explicitly embraced. And third, the movement’s key strategists were giddy about the legal
arsenal that the Supreme Court had laid at their feet as they anticipated the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
They intend to use that arsenal — together with additional weaponry collected in cases like Carson v. Makin, which requires state funding of religious schools if private, secular schools are also being funded; and Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, which licenses religious proselytizing by public school officials — to prosecute a war on individual rights, not merely in so-called red state legislatures but throughout the nation.
Speakers at the conference vied to outdo one another in their denigration of Democrats who they said, are “evil,” “tyrannical” and “the enemy within,” engaged in “a war against the truth.”
“The backlash is coming,” warned Senator Rick Scott of Florida. “Just mount up and ride to the sounds of the guns, and they are all over this country. It is time to take this country back.”
Citing the fight against Nazi Germany during the Battle of the Bulge, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina said, “We find ourselves in a pitched battle to literally save this nation.” Referring to a passage from Ephesians that Christian nationalists often use to signal their militancy, he added, “I don’t know about you, but I got my pack on, I got my boots on, I got my helmet on, I’ve got on the whole armor.”
The intensification of verbal warfare is connected to shifts in the Christian nationalist movement’s messaging and outreach, which were very much in evidence at the Nashville conference.
Seven Mountains Dominionism — the belief that “biblical” Christians should seek to dominate the seven key “mountains” or “molders” of American society, including the government — was once considered a fringe doctrine, even among representatives of the religious right. This year, there were two sessions, and the once arcane language of the Seven Mountains creed was on multiple speakers’ lips.
The hunger for dominion that appears to motivate the leadership of the movement is the essential context for making sense of its strategy and intentions in the post-Roe world. The end of abortion rights is the beginning of a new and much more personal attack on individual rights. At a breakout session called “Life Is on the Line: What Does the Future of the Pro-Life Movement Look Like From Here?” Chelsey Youman, the Texas state director and national legislative adviser to Human Coalition Action, described the connection between vigilantes and abortion
rights. Instead of the state regulating abortion providers, she explained, “you and me as citizens of Texas or this country or wherever we can pass this bill can instead sue the abortion provider.”
Mrs. Youman, as it happens, played a role in promoting the Texas law Senate Bill 8, which passed in May 2021 and allows private citizens to sue abortion providers and anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion. She said, “We have legislation ready to roll out for every single state you
live in to protect life, regardless of the Supreme Court, regardless of your circuit court.” To be sure, Christian nationalists are also pushing for a federal ban. But the struggle for the present will center on state-level enforcement mechanisms.
Movement leaders have also made it clear that the target of their ongoing offensive is not just in-state abortion providers but also what they call abortion trafficking — that is, women crossing state lines to obtain legal abortions, along with people who provide those women with services or support, like cars and taxis. Mrs. Youman hailed the development of a new “long-arm jurisdiction” bill that offers a mechanism for targeting out-of-state abortion providers. “It creates a wrongful death cause of action,” she said, “so we’re excited about that.”
The National Right to Life Committee’s model legislation for the post-Roe era includes broad criminal enforcement as well as civil enforcement mechanisms. “The model law also reaches well beyond the actual performance of an illegal abortion,” according to text on the organization’s website. It also includes “aiding or abetting an illegal abortion,” targeting people who provide “instructions over the telephone, the internet or any other medium of communication.”
Americans who stand outside the movement have consistently underestimated its radicalism. Christian nationalism isn’t a route to the future. Its purpose is to hollow out democracy until nothing is left but a thin cover for rule by a supposedly right-thinking elite, bubble-wrapped in
sanctimony and insulated from any real democratic check on its power.
Tuesday, July 19
Here is an on-line question that is sparking a lot of discussion: when someone asks, "Please turn down the a/c," does that mean to raise or lower the thermostat? For as much fun as it would be to discuss that, I'd like to take a step inward. I'd like to discuss spiritual detachment - letting go of our desires of what we want to happen and being aware of What Is (capitalized to show the presence of God in any moment and situation, including, of course, death).
Our author this week, Steven Petrow, practiced spiritual detachment with the impending death of his dog. However, he found it much more difficult to do that with his sister. Conversely, I have found that some people can let go of their loved ones easier than letting go of their pets. Regardless, spiritual detachment requires awareness, practice, and, well, discussion. I can't imagine a better place to have that discussion than at All Angels. And, if you find the room too warm, we can figure out if that means to turn up or down the a/c.
My Dog’s Death Taught Me Spiritual Detachment
Then My Sister Got Sick
Steven Petrow, NY Times 7.14.22
Shortly after my parents died in 2017, I nearly lost custody of my dog, Zoe, in my divorce. When we were reunited, I remember telling her firmly, “You cannot die now,” even though she had just turned 15. Not long after, the vet told me that new lab work indicated kidney failure. I was quite glad then that Zoe couldn’t talk, at least not in the traditional sense. We had no painful discussions about quality-of-life issues or end-of-life concerns.
I approached her final chapter with intention and indulgence, which is to say I followed her lead. I fed her whatever and whenever she wanted. I let her decide whether we’d go for short walks or longer ones. Before I went to bed, I made sure Zoe had settled into hers. Even as I prepared to lose her, I found myself exulting in our days together. When she died, I consoled myself with the thought that she was never mine to begin with; I was lucky to have known her; we only have anyone we love for a short time.
As it turns out, it’s much easier to practice spiritual detachment from a Jack Russell terrier who is gone than from my younger sister, Julie, who is here, and called later that same year to tell me she had ovarian cancer. It was Stage 4, she said, as bad as it gets. Julie was 55, a lawyer and
executive, a wife, and the mother of two daughters, 17 and 21. People with her diagnosis are only 31 percent as likely as those without cancer to live another five years. A surgeon explained that the median life expectancy for someone with her diagnosis was about five years. Meaning,
half of patients live less than five years, half more. Julie is the baby of our family, five years younger than me and three years younger than our brother, Jay. The three of us are best friends, closer still since Julie got sick, but she and I have our own history.
When I had my own bout with cancer in my 20s, she walked laps through the halls of Memorial with me and promised that the chemo hair loss would not keep me from finding a boyfriend. I was there when she met her wife and when they welcomed their daughters. When my husband
left me five years ago, Julie flew from New York to North Carolina to help me through those first scary days. She kept our favorite old TV shows on, knowing it would make me feel safe and like a kid again, while she scrutinized my investment accounts line by line so she could announce, after too many episodes of “Bewitched,” that I was financially OK. She was and is fierce, an extrovert among extroverts. We once went on a sunset cruise in Florida, and by the time we docked three hours later, she had befriended the entire crew and captain, a complete stranger who told me as we disembarked, “I love your sister’s zeal for life.” And now she would be lucky to make it to 60.
She started treatment immediately and gradually entered what many cancer patients call “the loop” — periods of treatment, remission, and recurrence that then start all over again. It was terrible and manageable.
In the meantime, as with Zoe, I focused on indulgence and intention. Our family rented a beach house in Rhode Island, a shingled cottage reminiscent of the house where we’d spent childhood summers. I traveled from North Carolina. Julie and her family came from New Jersey, and Jay hauled his from Connecticut. After the vacation, which included competitive canoeing, daily cook-offs and a raucous game of Hearts in which Julie was definitely eyeing Jay’s cards, Julie sent an email to the adults. “I sat at the house one night with you all there and imagined the scene with me just faded from the landscape,” she began.
Looking back, I recognize the gift in that email: She was giving us directions, almost a script, for how to go on without her. In the moment, though, I volleyed back a reassuring response — she was always on our minds wherever she was!
Then, after four years, the loop no longer held her. A clinical trial last October offered hope, only to dash it within eight weeks. A new chemo regimen held out the possibility of remission, which didn’t happen. Julie and I planned a trip to Australia and New Zealand for this fall, the five-year mark, but I didn’t count on it. Julie, always a kidder, began to joke about dying, here and there, seeming to invite a set of conversations I did not want to have. It had not been five years yet. I was not ready. But I’d learned during my mother’s bout with lung cancer to follow up on such openings. I remember once Mom asked, “Will it be painful to die?” and I replied, “What would you like for dinner tonight, Mom?”
With Julie, I wanted to do better, so I followed her lead. She, Jay and I began to have a series of talks about finances, medical decisions and what “the end” might be like. She was focused and calm. I hated every minute. But what I really hated was the virulent cancer.
Julie just turned 60, and even beyond the loop, she is very much alive. She is cycling on Long Island with her best friend, still planning trips to locales domestic and foreign, researching a Hail-Mary-clinical-trial. This past May the entire family spent a week at Nags Head, North Carolina, trapped in a creaky old house, while a nor’easter swirled around us. We cooked. We played card games.
But her blood work looks increasingly ominous, she naps more and we are not going to Australia and New Zealand this fall. Instead, I visit as often as I can, to make as many memories as possible. As year four becomes year five, I am preparing, finally, to lose Julie, while exulting in
our days together. Some nights, as she shuffles the cards, I want to grab her hand and say, “You cannot die now.”
But I know better.
Our author this week, Steven Petrow, practiced spiritual detachment with the impending death of his dog. However, he found it much more difficult to do that with his sister. Conversely, I have found that some people can let go of their loved ones easier than letting go of their pets. Regardless, spiritual detachment requires awareness, practice, and, well, discussion. I can't imagine a better place to have that discussion than at All Angels. And, if you find the room too warm, we can figure out if that means to turn up or down the a/c.
My Dog’s Death Taught Me Spiritual Detachment
Then My Sister Got Sick
Steven Petrow, NY Times 7.14.22
Shortly after my parents died in 2017, I nearly lost custody of my dog, Zoe, in my divorce. When we were reunited, I remember telling her firmly, “You cannot die now,” even though she had just turned 15. Not long after, the vet told me that new lab work indicated kidney failure. I was quite glad then that Zoe couldn’t talk, at least not in the traditional sense. We had no painful discussions about quality-of-life issues or end-of-life concerns.
I approached her final chapter with intention and indulgence, which is to say I followed her lead. I fed her whatever and whenever she wanted. I let her decide whether we’d go for short walks or longer ones. Before I went to bed, I made sure Zoe had settled into hers. Even as I prepared to lose her, I found myself exulting in our days together. When she died, I consoled myself with the thought that she was never mine to begin with; I was lucky to have known her; we only have anyone we love for a short time.
As it turns out, it’s much easier to practice spiritual detachment from a Jack Russell terrier who is gone than from my younger sister, Julie, who is here, and called later that same year to tell me she had ovarian cancer. It was Stage 4, she said, as bad as it gets. Julie was 55, a lawyer and
executive, a wife, and the mother of two daughters, 17 and 21. People with her diagnosis are only 31 percent as likely as those without cancer to live another five years. A surgeon explained that the median life expectancy for someone with her diagnosis was about five years. Meaning,
half of patients live less than five years, half more. Julie is the baby of our family, five years younger than me and three years younger than our brother, Jay. The three of us are best friends, closer still since Julie got sick, but she and I have our own history.
When I had my own bout with cancer in my 20s, she walked laps through the halls of Memorial with me and promised that the chemo hair loss would not keep me from finding a boyfriend. I was there when she met her wife and when they welcomed their daughters. When my husband
left me five years ago, Julie flew from New York to North Carolina to help me through those first scary days. She kept our favorite old TV shows on, knowing it would make me feel safe and like a kid again, while she scrutinized my investment accounts line by line so she could announce, after too many episodes of “Bewitched,” that I was financially OK. She was and is fierce, an extrovert among extroverts. We once went on a sunset cruise in Florida, and by the time we docked three hours later, she had befriended the entire crew and captain, a complete stranger who told me as we disembarked, “I love your sister’s zeal for life.” And now she would be lucky to make it to 60.
She started treatment immediately and gradually entered what many cancer patients call “the loop” — periods of treatment, remission, and recurrence that then start all over again. It was terrible and manageable.
In the meantime, as with Zoe, I focused on indulgence and intention. Our family rented a beach house in Rhode Island, a shingled cottage reminiscent of the house where we’d spent childhood summers. I traveled from North Carolina. Julie and her family came from New Jersey, and Jay hauled his from Connecticut. After the vacation, which included competitive canoeing, daily cook-offs and a raucous game of Hearts in which Julie was definitely eyeing Jay’s cards, Julie sent an email to the adults. “I sat at the house one night with you all there and imagined the scene with me just faded from the landscape,” she began.
Looking back, I recognize the gift in that email: She was giving us directions, almost a script, for how to go on without her. In the moment, though, I volleyed back a reassuring response — she was always on our minds wherever she was!
Then, after four years, the loop no longer held her. A clinical trial last October offered hope, only to dash it within eight weeks. A new chemo regimen held out the possibility of remission, which didn’t happen. Julie and I planned a trip to Australia and New Zealand for this fall, the five-year mark, but I didn’t count on it. Julie, always a kidder, began to joke about dying, here and there, seeming to invite a set of conversations I did not want to have. It had not been five years yet. I was not ready. But I’d learned during my mother’s bout with lung cancer to follow up on such openings. I remember once Mom asked, “Will it be painful to die?” and I replied, “What would you like for dinner tonight, Mom?”
With Julie, I wanted to do better, so I followed her lead. She, Jay and I began to have a series of talks about finances, medical decisions and what “the end” might be like. She was focused and calm. I hated every minute. But what I really hated was the virulent cancer.
Julie just turned 60, and even beyond the loop, she is very much alive. She is cycling on Long Island with her best friend, still planning trips to locales domestic and foreign, researching a Hail-Mary-clinical-trial. This past May the entire family spent a week at Nags Head, North Carolina, trapped in a creaky old house, while a nor’easter swirled around us. We cooked. We played card games.
But her blood work looks increasingly ominous, she naps more and we are not going to Australia and New Zealand this fall. Instead, I visit as often as I can, to make as many memories as possible. As year four becomes year five, I am preparing, finally, to lose Julie, while exulting in
our days together. Some nights, as she shuffles the cards, I want to grab her hand and say, “You cannot die now.”
But I know better.
Tuesday, July 12
The topic for this week is the importance of teaching/learning how to be lazy. Anyone remember number three of the ten commandments - take a day off!! Yep, right up there with not worshipping idols and taking other gods. Wait, you might say, doesn't the Bible condemn laziness? Yes and no - it lifts up the value of work and rest. I'd like to know what you do to rest and relax.
There is another reading, Protect the Sanctity of Every Life, that I'd like you to read. The author is our very own Maria Love - who is All Angels' graphic designer, webmaster, and Tidings sender. She had a piece published in the San Diego Union Tribune (the only newspaper in the second largest city in California). It is attached. If you'd like to discuss her thoughts, perhaps I could have her join in the discussion (but I'd have to convince her to wake up early which would go against the theme this week of rest).
Teaching How to be Lazy
Elliot Kukla, New York Times 1.20.22
Elliot Kukla is a rabbi who provides spiritual care to those who are grieving, dying, ill or disabled. He is working on a book about the power of rest in a time of planetary crisis.
“Abba, I have an idea,” says my 3-year-old. “Put on your pajamas and your big mask, turn off the light, and get into bed.”
“That sounds great,” I say, honestly. I strap on my sleep apnea mask, change into soft, worn cotton PJs and crawl under the fluffy white duvet with him. Within seconds, he is lulled to sleep by the familiar gentle wheezing of my breathing machine. He knows the sight and sound of my
sleeping body well; I have lupus, an autoimmune disease that causes chronic fatigue. On a good day, I can get by on 10 hours or so of sleep. When my condition flares, sometimes for weeks on end, I need to sleep for much of the day and night.
Before my child was born, I was afraid that my fatigue would make it impossible for me to be a good parent. And it’s true that I am often juggling parenting needs and exhaustion. What I didn’t anticipate is that prioritizing rest, sleep and dreaming is also something tangible I can offer my child.
He sees me napping every day, and he wants in. We build elaborate nests and gaze out the window together, luxuriously leaning on huge mounds of pillows. Most 3-year-olds I know fight bedtime, but we snuggle under the blankets on cold winter evenings, sighing in synchronized delight.
America in 2022 is an exhausting place to live. Pretty much everyone I know is tired. We’re tired of answering work emails after dinner. We’re tired of caring for senior family members in a crumbling elder care system, of worrying about a mass shooting at our children’s schools. We’re
tired by unprocessed grief and untended-to illness and depression. We’re tired of wildfires becoming a fact of life in the West, of floods and hurricanes hitting the South and East. We’re really tired of this unending pandemic. Most of all, we are exhausted by trying to keep going as
if everything is fine.
Increasing numbers of people are refusing to push through this mounting weariness: There are currently 10 million job openings in the United States, up from 6.4 million before the pandemic.
This trend is being led by young people; millions are planning to leave their jobs in the coming year. Some middle-aged people decry the laziness of today’s youth, but as a chronically sick Gen X parent, and as a rabbi who has spent much of my career tending to dying people as their lives naturally slow, I am cheering young people on in this Great Resignation.
I have seen the limits of the grind. I want my child to learn how to be lazy.
The English word “lazy” is derived from the German “laisch,” meaning weak or feeble, and the Old Norse “lesu,” meaning false or evil. Devon Price, a sociologist who studies laziness, remarks that these two origins capture the doublespeak built into the concept.
When we call people lazy (including ourselves), we are often pointing out that they’re too tired and weak to be productive, while often simultaneously accusing them of faking feebleness to get out of work for malevolent purposes. As Dr. Price puts it, “The idea that lazy people are evil fakers who deserve to suffer has been embedded in the word since the very start.”
Shunning laziness is integral to the American dream. The Puritans who colonized New England believed that laziness led to damnation. They used this theology to justify their enslavement of Black people, whose souls they claimed to have “saved” by turning them into productive
laborers.
This view has endured in American culture. Hundreds of years later, working to the point of self-harm to build the boss’s wealth is still lauded as a “good work ethic” in America, and the word “lazy” is still connected to racism and injustice. It’s poor, unhoused, young, Black, brown,
mentally ill, fat and chronically sick people who are most often accused of sloth. We rarely hear about lazy billionaires, no matter how much of their fortune is inherited.
For decades, I feared being labeled “lazy” because of my chronic fatigue. I pushed myself past my physical limits, all the way to severe illness, to prove my worth. Disabled activism taught me that stigmatizing rest is not just bad for my body, it’s bad for the world. The pandemic has also illustrated how respite is not widely available to most essential workers in this country, with tragic consequences for everybody. The lack of sick leave, family medical leave and the opportunity to work from home in essential, low-wage jobs has thrown kerosene on the viral
fires of the pandemic.
Even as we look with hope toward a post pandemic future, we will still be living on a fragile, warming planet with increasing climate disruptions. It’s urgent that we find ways to work less, travel less and burn less fuel while connecting and caring for one another more. In other words, it’s critical that we un-shame laziness if we want our species to have a future. The world is on fire; rest will help to quench those flames.
Right now, as the Omicron variant spreads wildly, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has factored keeping people at work into their decisions on guidance, at times making it more dangerous for immunocompromised people like me to get health care or leave the house.
As a high-risk person, I am painfully aware of how profits and productivity matter more to those in charge than my survival does. As Sunaura Taylor, a disabled activist, points out, our grinding economic system inevitably leads to treating disabled people as disposable, while trapping able-bodied people in dangerous, exploitative jobs. “The right not to work,” says Ms. Taylor, “is an ideal worthy of the impaired and able-bodied alike.”
Laziness is more than the absence or avoidance of work; it’s also the enjoyment of lazing in the sun, or in another’s arms. I learned through my work in hospice that moments spent enjoying the company of an old friend, savoring the smell of coffee or catching a warm breeze can make even the end of life more pleasurable. As the future becomes more tenuous, I want to teach my child to enjoy the planet right now. I want to teach him how to laze in the grass and watch the clouds without any artificially imposed sense of urgency. Many of the ways I have learned to live well in a chronically ill body — by taking the present moment slowly and gently, letting go of looking for certainty about the future, napping, dreaming, nurturing relationships and loving fiercely —are relevant for everyone living on this chronically ill planet.
To be sure, it is my privilege that allows me to teach my child to be lazy. Many people in this country and elsewhere spend all their time working, some holding multiple jobs. Many still struggle to afford housing and food. For too many, laziness is not an option.
But rest should not be a luxury; our time belongs to us and is not inherently a commodity. Reclaiming our time is an act of sovereignty over our lives, deserved by everyone. “Rest,” says the nap bishop, the Black activist Tricia Hersey, “is a radical vision for a liberated future.”
Today, my child and I are playing a game of hill. We are lying under a giant pile of every blanket in the house, pretending to be a hill studded with soft grasses. His warm breath is on my neck, skinny limbs splayed across my soft belly.
“Shh, Abba,” he says. “Hills don’t move or talk … they just lie still and grow things.”
I am teaching my child to be lazy, and so far, it’s going really well.
Protect Dignity and Sanctity of Every Life
Maria Love, San Diego Union-Tribune, July 1 2002.
If you are someone who is cheering the end of abortion, it’s time to stop cheering and get to work proving that this will make our country better. Prove to young women who are terrified of what this will mean to them that their lives are not ruined.
Here’s how:
If you say you are pro-life, then support life in any way you can, including providing food to families who struggle to find enough, access to medical care and life-saving medications to people who need them, access to housing for people who struggle to put a roof over their child’s
head, access to job training, and support for decent wages so that no child dies from poverty. Don’t forget that environmental issues like clean air and clean water are also pro-life issues, as is gun control.
If you say there’s no reason to have an abortion with all the access people have to free contraception, then work to make sure that is true.
Many women do not have access to contraception, and even if they do, it is not always free or even inexpensive. And with the Supreme Court signaling a possibility of removing any right to contraception, it will be extremely important to show young women that we are working to preserve their right to contraception in order to prevent an unplanned pregnancy. (And if you say, “But wait — contraception is against my religion,” I would remind you that we still have freedom of religion in this country, and absolutely no right to dictate anyone else’s religion or morals.)
If you are someone who says there are plenty of parents who would adopt a baby, then start working on streamlining the process and pairing pregnant women with families who would adopt their child. Make sure it’s not just empty words. And if a single mother decides to keep her baby, let’s do everything in our power to make sure she has all the help she needs to raise a healthy child: access to food, housing, child care, medical care and a job that pays a fair wage.
Pro-life doesn’t end with banning abortion. It begins there. It’s time for pro-life people to show that we are willing to do whatever it takes to protect the dignity and sanctity of every life.
There is another reading, Protect the Sanctity of Every Life, that I'd like you to read. The author is our very own Maria Love - who is All Angels' graphic designer, webmaster, and Tidings sender. She had a piece published in the San Diego Union Tribune (the only newspaper in the second largest city in California). It is attached. If you'd like to discuss her thoughts, perhaps I could have her join in the discussion (but I'd have to convince her to wake up early which would go against the theme this week of rest).
Teaching How to be Lazy
Elliot Kukla, New York Times 1.20.22
Elliot Kukla is a rabbi who provides spiritual care to those who are grieving, dying, ill or disabled. He is working on a book about the power of rest in a time of planetary crisis.
“Abba, I have an idea,” says my 3-year-old. “Put on your pajamas and your big mask, turn off the light, and get into bed.”
“That sounds great,” I say, honestly. I strap on my sleep apnea mask, change into soft, worn cotton PJs and crawl under the fluffy white duvet with him. Within seconds, he is lulled to sleep by the familiar gentle wheezing of my breathing machine. He knows the sight and sound of my
sleeping body well; I have lupus, an autoimmune disease that causes chronic fatigue. On a good day, I can get by on 10 hours or so of sleep. When my condition flares, sometimes for weeks on end, I need to sleep for much of the day and night.
Before my child was born, I was afraid that my fatigue would make it impossible for me to be a good parent. And it’s true that I am often juggling parenting needs and exhaustion. What I didn’t anticipate is that prioritizing rest, sleep and dreaming is also something tangible I can offer my child.
He sees me napping every day, and he wants in. We build elaborate nests and gaze out the window together, luxuriously leaning on huge mounds of pillows. Most 3-year-olds I know fight bedtime, but we snuggle under the blankets on cold winter evenings, sighing in synchronized delight.
America in 2022 is an exhausting place to live. Pretty much everyone I know is tired. We’re tired of answering work emails after dinner. We’re tired of caring for senior family members in a crumbling elder care system, of worrying about a mass shooting at our children’s schools. We’re
tired by unprocessed grief and untended-to illness and depression. We’re tired of wildfires becoming a fact of life in the West, of floods and hurricanes hitting the South and East. We’re really tired of this unending pandemic. Most of all, we are exhausted by trying to keep going as
if everything is fine.
Increasing numbers of people are refusing to push through this mounting weariness: There are currently 10 million job openings in the United States, up from 6.4 million before the pandemic.
This trend is being led by young people; millions are planning to leave their jobs in the coming year. Some middle-aged people decry the laziness of today’s youth, but as a chronically sick Gen X parent, and as a rabbi who has spent much of my career tending to dying people as their lives naturally slow, I am cheering young people on in this Great Resignation.
I have seen the limits of the grind. I want my child to learn how to be lazy.
The English word “lazy” is derived from the German “laisch,” meaning weak or feeble, and the Old Norse “lesu,” meaning false or evil. Devon Price, a sociologist who studies laziness, remarks that these two origins capture the doublespeak built into the concept.
When we call people lazy (including ourselves), we are often pointing out that they’re too tired and weak to be productive, while often simultaneously accusing them of faking feebleness to get out of work for malevolent purposes. As Dr. Price puts it, “The idea that lazy people are evil fakers who deserve to suffer has been embedded in the word since the very start.”
Shunning laziness is integral to the American dream. The Puritans who colonized New England believed that laziness led to damnation. They used this theology to justify their enslavement of Black people, whose souls they claimed to have “saved” by turning them into productive
laborers.
This view has endured in American culture. Hundreds of years later, working to the point of self-harm to build the boss’s wealth is still lauded as a “good work ethic” in America, and the word “lazy” is still connected to racism and injustice. It’s poor, unhoused, young, Black, brown,
mentally ill, fat and chronically sick people who are most often accused of sloth. We rarely hear about lazy billionaires, no matter how much of their fortune is inherited.
For decades, I feared being labeled “lazy” because of my chronic fatigue. I pushed myself past my physical limits, all the way to severe illness, to prove my worth. Disabled activism taught me that stigmatizing rest is not just bad for my body, it’s bad for the world. The pandemic has also illustrated how respite is not widely available to most essential workers in this country, with tragic consequences for everybody. The lack of sick leave, family medical leave and the opportunity to work from home in essential, low-wage jobs has thrown kerosene on the viral
fires of the pandemic.
Even as we look with hope toward a post pandemic future, we will still be living on a fragile, warming planet with increasing climate disruptions. It’s urgent that we find ways to work less, travel less and burn less fuel while connecting and caring for one another more. In other words, it’s critical that we un-shame laziness if we want our species to have a future. The world is on fire; rest will help to quench those flames.
Right now, as the Omicron variant spreads wildly, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has factored keeping people at work into their decisions on guidance, at times making it more dangerous for immunocompromised people like me to get health care or leave the house.
As a high-risk person, I am painfully aware of how profits and productivity matter more to those in charge than my survival does. As Sunaura Taylor, a disabled activist, points out, our grinding economic system inevitably leads to treating disabled people as disposable, while trapping able-bodied people in dangerous, exploitative jobs. “The right not to work,” says Ms. Taylor, “is an ideal worthy of the impaired and able-bodied alike.”
Laziness is more than the absence or avoidance of work; it’s also the enjoyment of lazing in the sun, or in another’s arms. I learned through my work in hospice that moments spent enjoying the company of an old friend, savoring the smell of coffee or catching a warm breeze can make even the end of life more pleasurable. As the future becomes more tenuous, I want to teach my child to enjoy the planet right now. I want to teach him how to laze in the grass and watch the clouds without any artificially imposed sense of urgency. Many of the ways I have learned to live well in a chronically ill body — by taking the present moment slowly and gently, letting go of looking for certainty about the future, napping, dreaming, nurturing relationships and loving fiercely —are relevant for everyone living on this chronically ill planet.
To be sure, it is my privilege that allows me to teach my child to be lazy. Many people in this country and elsewhere spend all their time working, some holding multiple jobs. Many still struggle to afford housing and food. For too many, laziness is not an option.
But rest should not be a luxury; our time belongs to us and is not inherently a commodity. Reclaiming our time is an act of sovereignty over our lives, deserved by everyone. “Rest,” says the nap bishop, the Black activist Tricia Hersey, “is a radical vision for a liberated future.”
Today, my child and I are playing a game of hill. We are lying under a giant pile of every blanket in the house, pretending to be a hill studded with soft grasses. His warm breath is on my neck, skinny limbs splayed across my soft belly.
“Shh, Abba,” he says. “Hills don’t move or talk … they just lie still and grow things.”
I am teaching my child to be lazy, and so far, it’s going really well.
Protect Dignity and Sanctity of Every Life
Maria Love, San Diego Union-Tribune, July 1 2002.
If you are someone who is cheering the end of abortion, it’s time to stop cheering and get to work proving that this will make our country better. Prove to young women who are terrified of what this will mean to them that their lives are not ruined.
Here’s how:
If you say you are pro-life, then support life in any way you can, including providing food to families who struggle to find enough, access to medical care and life-saving medications to people who need them, access to housing for people who struggle to put a roof over their child’s
head, access to job training, and support for decent wages so that no child dies from poverty. Don’t forget that environmental issues like clean air and clean water are also pro-life issues, as is gun control.
If you say there’s no reason to have an abortion with all the access people have to free contraception, then work to make sure that is true.
Many women do not have access to contraception, and even if they do, it is not always free or even inexpensive. And with the Supreme Court signaling a possibility of removing any right to contraception, it will be extremely important to show young women that we are working to preserve their right to contraception in order to prevent an unplanned pregnancy. (And if you say, “But wait — contraception is against my religion,” I would remind you that we still have freedom of religion in this country, and absolutely no right to dictate anyone else’s religion or morals.)
If you are someone who says there are plenty of parents who would adopt a baby, then start working on streamlining the process and pairing pregnant women with families who would adopt their child. Make sure it’s not just empty words. And if a single mother decides to keep her baby, let’s do everything in our power to make sure she has all the help she needs to raise a healthy child: access to food, housing, child care, medical care and a job that pays a fair wage.
Pro-life doesn’t end with banning abortion. It begins there. It’s time for pro-life people to show that we are willing to do whatever it takes to protect the dignity and sanctity of every life.