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Wednesday, February 26, 2025
The author of this article discusses Joseph - the one with the amazing technicolor dream coat - whose brothers sold him into slavery because they didn't like his better-than-everyone attitude; and how Joseph came to forgive his brothers and to be forgiven for his youthful actions. I'd like to talk about forgiveness, and leadership, and careful planning and everything else that is a part of this story.
Witness Love in Action (Now It’s Your Turn)
Ed Horstmann, The Christian Century 2.17.25
Genesis 45:3-11, 15
Joseph said to his brothers, “I’m Joseph! Is my father still alive?”
His brothers couldn’t respond because they were terrified before him.
Joseph said, “I’m your brother Joseph! The one you sold to Egypt. Now, don’t be upset and don’t be angry with yourselves that you sold me here. God sent me before you to save lives. We’ve already had two years of famine in the land, and there are five years left without planting or harvesting. God sent me before you to make sure you’d survive and to rescue your lives in this way. You didn’t send me here; it was God who made me a father to Pharaoh, master of his entire household, and ruler of the whole land of Egypt.
“Hurry! Go back to your father. Tell him this is what your son Joseph says: ‘God has made me master of all of Egypt. Come down to me. Don’t delay. You may live in the land of Goshen, so you will be near me, your children, your grandchildren, your flocks, your herds, and everyone with you. I will support you there, so you, your household, and everyone with you won’t starve, since the famine will still last five years.’”
During the summer before my junior year in high school, my father required major surgery. On the evening before his surgery, I arrived at the hospital to spend time with him and my mother. From down the hallway I could hear laughter coming from his room. I recognized the voices of my parents, but there was another voice mingled with theirs. When I entered the room, I was shocked to see my older brother, Gary. For more than five years my brother and my father had not spoken a word to each other. But my father’s illness brought them back together, and I beheld the shocking sight of Gary standing at my father’s bedside, reconciliation underway, the two of them laughing as they had laughed in the past.
“I am your brother, Joseph.” In this Sunday’s story from Genesis, these few words find their way through years of separation and estrangement and touch the hearts of Joseph’s brothers. Maybe my brother spoke similar words when he first saw my father after their long separation. I am your son, Gary.
The human capacity for forgiveness is on full display in the biblical story about Joseph and his reunion with his brothers. It was told hundreds of years before Jesus broadcast love for enemies as a cornerstone of his teaching. But part of the appeal of Joseph’s story is that another feature of his character is also worthy of celebration. Joseph mentions twice to his brothers that their reunion is taking place against the backdrop of a seven-year famine, of which five years remain.
He shares this information not to alarm them but to let them know that he has used his position to prepare for the likelihood of such a threat. The food reservoir set aside for the nation will last, because the leader who needed to lead by diligently preparing for the devastating impact of a famine has done his job well. Joseph’s brothers are now seeing two expressions of love in action: forgiveness on a personal level and prudent planning on a national level.
Joseph’s agricultural policy may not be as attention-getting as his nearly inconceivable act of forgiveness, but it is no less significant. Through vigilant stewardship Joseph saves the lives of thousands of people, including those of his formerly estranged family.
Joseph has a lot to teach us about the use of power. And there is no doubt that he sees himself as a person in whom much power has been entrusted. He describes himself as “lord of all [Pharaoh’s] house and ruler over all the land of Egypt.” And he ascribes his position and authority as a divine mandate: “God has made me lord of all Egypt.”
So in some ways he is the same old Joseph. He is still making sure that everyone knows how cool he is, how he is on top of the world. But he has come to understand power in a new way: as something that’s for the common good, not just personal glorification. He understands that power can give us the courage to forgive those who hurt us. He understands himself as an agent of God, and he understands that the purpose of that agency is to do the kinds of things that great leaders do, like helping a nation survive a catastrophic famine.
This story shows us a man who has matured from his early years, who has met many challenges and found a way to transcend them, who is capable of love in the form of personal forgiveness as well as love in the form of wise stewardship over national resources. This is a kind of maturity that we ache to see in our political leaders today.
In a prayer that my congregation in Connecticut uses as a regular part of its weekly worship, we ask God to “make each one of us an instrument in thy hands for good” and to “make us earnest and true, wise and prudent.” Joseph beautifully exemplified these dimensions of great leadership.
Now it’s our turn.
Witness Love in Action (Now It’s Your Turn)
Ed Horstmann, The Christian Century 2.17.25
Genesis 45:3-11, 15
Joseph said to his brothers, “I’m Joseph! Is my father still alive?”
His brothers couldn’t respond because they were terrified before him.
Joseph said, “I’m your brother Joseph! The one you sold to Egypt. Now, don’t be upset and don’t be angry with yourselves that you sold me here. God sent me before you to save lives. We’ve already had two years of famine in the land, and there are five years left without planting or harvesting. God sent me before you to make sure you’d survive and to rescue your lives in this way. You didn’t send me here; it was God who made me a father to Pharaoh, master of his entire household, and ruler of the whole land of Egypt.
“Hurry! Go back to your father. Tell him this is what your son Joseph says: ‘God has made me master of all of Egypt. Come down to me. Don’t delay. You may live in the land of Goshen, so you will be near me, your children, your grandchildren, your flocks, your herds, and everyone with you. I will support you there, so you, your household, and everyone with you won’t starve, since the famine will still last five years.’”
During the summer before my junior year in high school, my father required major surgery. On the evening before his surgery, I arrived at the hospital to spend time with him and my mother. From down the hallway I could hear laughter coming from his room. I recognized the voices of my parents, but there was another voice mingled with theirs. When I entered the room, I was shocked to see my older brother, Gary. For more than five years my brother and my father had not spoken a word to each other. But my father’s illness brought them back together, and I beheld the shocking sight of Gary standing at my father’s bedside, reconciliation underway, the two of them laughing as they had laughed in the past.
“I am your brother, Joseph.” In this Sunday’s story from Genesis, these few words find their way through years of separation and estrangement and touch the hearts of Joseph’s brothers. Maybe my brother spoke similar words when he first saw my father after their long separation. I am your son, Gary.
The human capacity for forgiveness is on full display in the biblical story about Joseph and his reunion with his brothers. It was told hundreds of years before Jesus broadcast love for enemies as a cornerstone of his teaching. But part of the appeal of Joseph’s story is that another feature of his character is also worthy of celebration. Joseph mentions twice to his brothers that their reunion is taking place against the backdrop of a seven-year famine, of which five years remain.
He shares this information not to alarm them but to let them know that he has used his position to prepare for the likelihood of such a threat. The food reservoir set aside for the nation will last, because the leader who needed to lead by diligently preparing for the devastating impact of a famine has done his job well. Joseph’s brothers are now seeing two expressions of love in action: forgiveness on a personal level and prudent planning on a national level.
Joseph’s agricultural policy may not be as attention-getting as his nearly inconceivable act of forgiveness, but it is no less significant. Through vigilant stewardship Joseph saves the lives of thousands of people, including those of his formerly estranged family.
Joseph has a lot to teach us about the use of power. And there is no doubt that he sees himself as a person in whom much power has been entrusted. He describes himself as “lord of all [Pharaoh’s] house and ruler over all the land of Egypt.” And he ascribes his position and authority as a divine mandate: “God has made me lord of all Egypt.”
So in some ways he is the same old Joseph. He is still making sure that everyone knows how cool he is, how he is on top of the world. But he has come to understand power in a new way: as something that’s for the common good, not just personal glorification. He understands that power can give us the courage to forgive those who hurt us. He understands himself as an agent of God, and he understands that the purpose of that agency is to do the kinds of things that great leaders do, like helping a nation survive a catastrophic famine.
This story shows us a man who has matured from his early years, who has met many challenges and found a way to transcend them, who is capable of love in the form of personal forgiveness as well as love in the form of wise stewardship over national resources. This is a kind of maturity that we ache to see in our political leaders today.
In a prayer that my congregation in Connecticut uses as a regular part of its weekly worship, we ask God to “make each one of us an instrument in thy hands for good” and to “make us earnest and true, wise and prudent.” Joseph beautifully exemplified these dimensions of great leadership.
Now it’s our turn.
Wednesday, February 19, 2025
Don't judge a book by its cover; the same might apply to judging this article by its title, "How I Lost My Faith in Atheism." In the author's words: I’ve entirely lost what faith I once had in the plausibility and durability of atheism.
What comes post-atheism - found in the last paragraph of page two - might surprise you.
How I Lost My Faith in Atheism
Ross Douthat, Christianity Today 2.11.25
I spent my childhood experiencing some of the more intense, but not necessarily intellectually coherent, forms of American Protestantism — charismatic Christianity and Pentecostalism, tongues speaking and revivalism. Then, with my family, I converted to Catholicism as a teenager.
When you convert at a young age, it’s natural in midlife to think about how your worldview has changed since that conversion. I have a clearer sense of why one might reject the stark binary choice between the Catholic church or nonbelief, and why the religious future — as far as we can see it — will remain more complex than just “Rome and the atheists” battling things out. It reflects the fact that I’ve entirely lost what faith I once had in the plausibility and durability of atheism.
The first shift has a moral, a theological, and a sociological component. Morally, the experience of the Catholic sex abuse crisis, which broke a little while after my conversion, gave me a clearer sense of why a reasonable Christian might retain faith in Jesus Christ while doubting the hierarchical order of the Roman church. Theologically, the shift from the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI to Francis has revealed an instability in Catholic doctrine, a lack of synthesis between the church before the Second Vatican Council and the church after, that was less apparent in my youth.
And then, sociologically, Catholicism has remained extremely successful at winning intellectual converts. Yet it is weaker as a mass religion than it was when I joined the church — and Christianity is not supposed to be a faith just for the intelligentsia. One need only look around the Christian world, whether at church attendance patterns in the United States or at the growth of charismatic and nondenominational Protestant churches in Africa and Latin America, to see that the future will be shaped powerfully by a kind of a Christianity that is neither Roman Catholic nor simply a stalking horse for secularism.
So in all this, I find it easier to understand how someone can be Protestant or Eastern Orthodox than I did as a new-minted Catholic convert. But at the same time, I find it much harder to understand how someone can be a convinced atheist.
Twenty years later, I’m still searching for atheism’s solid reasons. I understand perfectly well how a reasonable person could have doubts about the exact nature of God, his specific intentions or his perfect goodness, or any of the particular claims that Christianity makes about the divine.
But the idea that the universe and human existence have no plan or intentionality or purpose behind them, that mind, consciousness, reason, logos are purely epiphenomenal rather than fundamental, that our existence is finally reducible to the accidental, to the undesigned, to the bouncing billiard balls of hard material determinism — I don’t see how anyone can reasonably believe this.
I don’t see how anyone can believe it given everything that we know now, not just about the basic order of the cosmos, but about the exquisite fine-tuning required to give rise to stars, planets, life itself. (The attempt by atheistic intellectuals to find refuge in the theory of the multiverse, which casts our universe as a rare life-supporter among trillions of dead ones that we can never actually observe, seems similar to the epicycles attached to the Ptolemaic system when it became clear it couldn’t accurately describe reality.)
I don’t see how anyone can believe it given the resilient mystery of consciousness and the ways in which it seems to be integrally connected to the basic order of the universe — both in our reason’s ability to explore and comprehend level upon level of the system, heights and depths far beyond anything linked directly to the evolutionary needs of early hominids, and in the mystical-seeming link between observation and reality, the mind’s eye and the material, that quantum physics has revealed.
And I don’t see how anyone can believe it given that religious experience, all the weird stuff of mysticism and miracle, has not only persisted under supposedly disenchanted conditions but even revealed itself in new ways (near-death experiences, for instance) because of the ministrations of modern science.
We have done away with the cultural rule of religion, the institutional structures that many Enlightenment-era atheists believed imposed supernatural beliefs on a naïve population. And yet those beliefs have persisted, and in some cases even spread, because it turns out that supernatural-seeming experiences, intimations of transcendence that fall on nonbelievers as well as on the faithful, are just a constitutive part of reality itself.
At the very least, it seems clear to me at midlife that a religious perspective on reality, a basic assumption that all this was made for a reason and we are part of that reason deserves to be the serious person’s intellectual default.
It’s a perspective that makes coherent sense out of multiple features of reality, multiple converging lines — the evidence for design, the distinctive place of human consciousness, the varieties of religious experience — that atheism struggles and fails to reduce away.
And if that answer opens into further questions, further debates, I expect those debates to be different than just a clash between my own Catholic Christianity and the heirs of Voltaire and Richard Dawkins. Not just because the debates among different kinds of Christians will go on, but because the weakness of atheism means that eventually — and, in fact, soon if not already — the main alternative to Christianity may be something quite different from Enlightenment rationalism, something that blends the pagan and promethean, seeking supernatural as well as natural power. In that case, Christians of all kinds will be facing a spiritual rival, not a secular or atheistic one, in the contest for the human soul.
Ross Douthat is a New York Times opinion columnist and the film critic for National Review. Previously, he was a senior editor at The Atlantic.
What comes post-atheism - found in the last paragraph of page two - might surprise you.
How I Lost My Faith in Atheism
Ross Douthat, Christianity Today 2.11.25
I spent my childhood experiencing some of the more intense, but not necessarily intellectually coherent, forms of American Protestantism — charismatic Christianity and Pentecostalism, tongues speaking and revivalism. Then, with my family, I converted to Catholicism as a teenager.
When you convert at a young age, it’s natural in midlife to think about how your worldview has changed since that conversion. I have a clearer sense of why one might reject the stark binary choice between the Catholic church or nonbelief, and why the religious future — as far as we can see it — will remain more complex than just “Rome and the atheists” battling things out. It reflects the fact that I’ve entirely lost what faith I once had in the plausibility and durability of atheism.
The first shift has a moral, a theological, and a sociological component. Morally, the experience of the Catholic sex abuse crisis, which broke a little while after my conversion, gave me a clearer sense of why a reasonable Christian might retain faith in Jesus Christ while doubting the hierarchical order of the Roman church. Theologically, the shift from the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI to Francis has revealed an instability in Catholic doctrine, a lack of synthesis between the church before the Second Vatican Council and the church after, that was less apparent in my youth.
And then, sociologically, Catholicism has remained extremely successful at winning intellectual converts. Yet it is weaker as a mass religion than it was when I joined the church — and Christianity is not supposed to be a faith just for the intelligentsia. One need only look around the Christian world, whether at church attendance patterns in the United States or at the growth of charismatic and nondenominational Protestant churches in Africa and Latin America, to see that the future will be shaped powerfully by a kind of a Christianity that is neither Roman Catholic nor simply a stalking horse for secularism.
So in all this, I find it easier to understand how someone can be Protestant or Eastern Orthodox than I did as a new-minted Catholic convert. But at the same time, I find it much harder to understand how someone can be a convinced atheist.
Twenty years later, I’m still searching for atheism’s solid reasons. I understand perfectly well how a reasonable person could have doubts about the exact nature of God, his specific intentions or his perfect goodness, or any of the particular claims that Christianity makes about the divine.
But the idea that the universe and human existence have no plan or intentionality or purpose behind them, that mind, consciousness, reason, logos are purely epiphenomenal rather than fundamental, that our existence is finally reducible to the accidental, to the undesigned, to the bouncing billiard balls of hard material determinism — I don’t see how anyone can reasonably believe this.
I don’t see how anyone can believe it given everything that we know now, not just about the basic order of the cosmos, but about the exquisite fine-tuning required to give rise to stars, planets, life itself. (The attempt by atheistic intellectuals to find refuge in the theory of the multiverse, which casts our universe as a rare life-supporter among trillions of dead ones that we can never actually observe, seems similar to the epicycles attached to the Ptolemaic system when it became clear it couldn’t accurately describe reality.)
I don’t see how anyone can believe it given the resilient mystery of consciousness and the ways in which it seems to be integrally connected to the basic order of the universe — both in our reason’s ability to explore and comprehend level upon level of the system, heights and depths far beyond anything linked directly to the evolutionary needs of early hominids, and in the mystical-seeming link between observation and reality, the mind’s eye and the material, that quantum physics has revealed.
And I don’t see how anyone can believe it given that religious experience, all the weird stuff of mysticism and miracle, has not only persisted under supposedly disenchanted conditions but even revealed itself in new ways (near-death experiences, for instance) because of the ministrations of modern science.
We have done away with the cultural rule of religion, the institutional structures that many Enlightenment-era atheists believed imposed supernatural beliefs on a naïve population. And yet those beliefs have persisted, and in some cases even spread, because it turns out that supernatural-seeming experiences, intimations of transcendence that fall on nonbelievers as well as on the faithful, are just a constitutive part of reality itself.
At the very least, it seems clear to me at midlife that a religious perspective on reality, a basic assumption that all this was made for a reason and we are part of that reason deserves to be the serious person’s intellectual default.
It’s a perspective that makes coherent sense out of multiple features of reality, multiple converging lines — the evidence for design, the distinctive place of human consciousness, the varieties of religious experience — that atheism struggles and fails to reduce away.
And if that answer opens into further questions, further debates, I expect those debates to be different than just a clash between my own Catholic Christianity and the heirs of Voltaire and Richard Dawkins. Not just because the debates among different kinds of Christians will go on, but because the weakness of atheism means that eventually — and, in fact, soon if not already — the main alternative to Christianity may be something quite different from Enlightenment rationalism, something that blends the pagan and promethean, seeking supernatural as well as natural power. In that case, Christians of all kinds will be facing a spiritual rival, not a secular or atheistic one, in the contest for the human soul.
Ross Douthat is a New York Times opinion columnist and the film critic for National Review. Previously, he was a senior editor at The Atlantic.
Wednesday, February 12, 2025
This week's reading takes an interesting look at prayer - from a Jewish perspective - that can help illuminate our lives. She writes the following: What can we do when our hearts are breaking? When we are filled with stress and anxiety; when hopelessness isn’t an irrational response but a genuine reflection of daily reality? What can we do when we don’t know what to do?
We can pray.
You Might Consider Praying
Sara Sherbill, NY Times Guest Essay 11.1.24
This year keeps breaking our hearts; violence in Gaza and Israel; devastating floods and hurricanes. And those are just the headlines. Private lives seem no calmer. Certainly that was true for me. In 2024, my husband was hospitalized for weeks with a life-threatening illness, my best friend died, medical bills descended, and my marriage faltered. I lost any security upon which I had come to rely.
What can we do when our hearts are breaking? When we are filled with stress and anxiety, when the sadnesses stack up, when hopelessness isn’t an irrational response but a genuine reflection of daily reality? What can we do when we don’t know what to do?
We can pray.
Prayer requires no formal religious observance. You need not attend a temple or church or synagogue or mosque. Prayer need not be a poem or acrostic or hymn. Prayers can simply bubble up from the deepest place inside of yourself. It can be prayer in your own words. It can be prayer with no words. Many of us were raised to believe that prayer is about communicating with God. It can be, of course. But prayer can also be a way of communicating with ourselves, a tool of self-inquiry. It can be entirely our own, bespoke.
I was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family. But, in the years after I left home, I slowly gave up observance, shedding the strictures about what to eat and what to wear and the prohibitions against the use of electricity on the Sabbath. Much of the practice I was raised with no longer serves me; prayer was the one thing I grabbed on my way out.
In childhood, the rigor and formality of prayer were simultaneously stifling and comforting. For me, the daughter of a rabbi, singing the same melodies every morning, every year, the words of prayer became inseparable from my own thoughts. In a terrible paradox, the highly structured, communal form of prayer I was raised with now reminds me of attending synagogue as a child, a place where a thin gloss of piety was used to cover up the abuse taking place in our home.
Fulfilling the obligation to recite the same set of prayers a set amount of times per day, every day, is a choice made by billions of people of various faiths all over the world. I often wonder if some of them feel as I once did — that being bound to prayer was both a blessing and a burden.
As a society, we have witnessed enough scandalous falls from grace by those who offer public prayer that many of us find prayer suspect, or false. As the years passed, I came to experience the words of the formal prayer service I grew up with as a poetic abstraction — beautiful but distant — when the assistance I needed were words that were urgent, immediate.
And yet, even if prayer as you once understood it isn’t a place of solace, that doesn’t mean it can’t be once again. What if we redefine prayer entirely? What if, when you are home, you simply sit in a chair and breathe, imagining you are worthy of what you pray for? Maybe that’s peace in your heart, or the strength to act with courage even when you are terrified. Maybe you are asking for the clarity of mind to know which path to take next.
Prayer can also be less a request than a thank you. It can be a list of everything you are grateful for. You might direct prayer toward those you have lost: In my case I think of my grandfather, or my best friend who died in April after a long battle with cancer. What if prayer is asking those who are gone to watch over us? Maybe your prayer is a walk in the morning that takes in the world around you, observing the light bouncing off the leaves. It seems to me that, too, is a prayer. Who is to say it is not?
You needn’t abandon a God-focused relationship toward prayer. It might simply be altered. For me, sometimes prayer looks like this: I am driving and it is raining and the windshield wipers are going back and forth and I am crying and I am asking God for help. Help me Hashem, I whisper over and over. Just please help me. I use the Hebrew name for God because that is the name of God that I know.
Someone will hear your prayer, even if that someone is you.
In the children’s book “Yussel’s Prayer,” Barbara Cohen retells a Jewish folk tale about a young orphan named Yussel who grew up in poverty and never learned to read. On the High Holy Days, he watches as the wealthy residents of his village attend synagogue in their finery. Unwelcome at synagogue because he cannot read, Yussel offers the only prayer he can, a simple tune on a reed pipe. During the concluding prayers of Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, the rabbi has a vision: The prayers of his congregants are not reaching the heavens. Their words are hollow, recited by rote while they are distracted by worldly concerns. It is only when a simple tune from a reed pipe plays that the gates are opened and the people’s prayers flow though. It is Yussel’s wordless prayer, offered from the heart, that opens the gates of heaven and lets the other prayers pass up to God.
Jewish tradition teaches that even when we cannot speak, God can hear what is in our hearts. Maybe this year we are all Yussel — alone out in the fields, with nothing but grazing cows and a homemade instrument. Maybe our prayer looks nothing like we thought it would. Maybe that’s because our lives look nothing like what we thought they would. And maybe that’s the point — we need to learn how to pray again so we can see ourselves anew.
We can pray.
You Might Consider Praying
Sara Sherbill, NY Times Guest Essay 11.1.24
This year keeps breaking our hearts; violence in Gaza and Israel; devastating floods and hurricanes. And those are just the headlines. Private lives seem no calmer. Certainly that was true for me. In 2024, my husband was hospitalized for weeks with a life-threatening illness, my best friend died, medical bills descended, and my marriage faltered. I lost any security upon which I had come to rely.
What can we do when our hearts are breaking? When we are filled with stress and anxiety, when the sadnesses stack up, when hopelessness isn’t an irrational response but a genuine reflection of daily reality? What can we do when we don’t know what to do?
We can pray.
Prayer requires no formal religious observance. You need not attend a temple or church or synagogue or mosque. Prayer need not be a poem or acrostic or hymn. Prayers can simply bubble up from the deepest place inside of yourself. It can be prayer in your own words. It can be prayer with no words. Many of us were raised to believe that prayer is about communicating with God. It can be, of course. But prayer can also be a way of communicating with ourselves, a tool of self-inquiry. It can be entirely our own, bespoke.
I was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family. But, in the years after I left home, I slowly gave up observance, shedding the strictures about what to eat and what to wear and the prohibitions against the use of electricity on the Sabbath. Much of the practice I was raised with no longer serves me; prayer was the one thing I grabbed on my way out.
In childhood, the rigor and formality of prayer were simultaneously stifling and comforting. For me, the daughter of a rabbi, singing the same melodies every morning, every year, the words of prayer became inseparable from my own thoughts. In a terrible paradox, the highly structured, communal form of prayer I was raised with now reminds me of attending synagogue as a child, a place where a thin gloss of piety was used to cover up the abuse taking place in our home.
Fulfilling the obligation to recite the same set of prayers a set amount of times per day, every day, is a choice made by billions of people of various faiths all over the world. I often wonder if some of them feel as I once did — that being bound to prayer was both a blessing and a burden.
As a society, we have witnessed enough scandalous falls from grace by those who offer public prayer that many of us find prayer suspect, or false. As the years passed, I came to experience the words of the formal prayer service I grew up with as a poetic abstraction — beautiful but distant — when the assistance I needed were words that were urgent, immediate.
And yet, even if prayer as you once understood it isn’t a place of solace, that doesn’t mean it can’t be once again. What if we redefine prayer entirely? What if, when you are home, you simply sit in a chair and breathe, imagining you are worthy of what you pray for? Maybe that’s peace in your heart, or the strength to act with courage even when you are terrified. Maybe you are asking for the clarity of mind to know which path to take next.
Prayer can also be less a request than a thank you. It can be a list of everything you are grateful for. You might direct prayer toward those you have lost: In my case I think of my grandfather, or my best friend who died in April after a long battle with cancer. What if prayer is asking those who are gone to watch over us? Maybe your prayer is a walk in the morning that takes in the world around you, observing the light bouncing off the leaves. It seems to me that, too, is a prayer. Who is to say it is not?
You needn’t abandon a God-focused relationship toward prayer. It might simply be altered. For me, sometimes prayer looks like this: I am driving and it is raining and the windshield wipers are going back and forth and I am crying and I am asking God for help. Help me Hashem, I whisper over and over. Just please help me. I use the Hebrew name for God because that is the name of God that I know.
Someone will hear your prayer, even if that someone is you.
In the children’s book “Yussel’s Prayer,” Barbara Cohen retells a Jewish folk tale about a young orphan named Yussel who grew up in poverty and never learned to read. On the High Holy Days, he watches as the wealthy residents of his village attend synagogue in their finery. Unwelcome at synagogue because he cannot read, Yussel offers the only prayer he can, a simple tune on a reed pipe. During the concluding prayers of Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, the rabbi has a vision: The prayers of his congregants are not reaching the heavens. Their words are hollow, recited by rote while they are distracted by worldly concerns. It is only when a simple tune from a reed pipe plays that the gates are opened and the people’s prayers flow though. It is Yussel’s wordless prayer, offered from the heart, that opens the gates of heaven and lets the other prayers pass up to God.
Jewish tradition teaches that even when we cannot speak, God can hear what is in our hearts. Maybe this year we are all Yussel — alone out in the fields, with nothing but grazing cows and a homemade instrument. Maybe our prayer looks nothing like we thought it would. Maybe that’s because our lives look nothing like what we thought they would. And maybe that’s the point — we need to learn how to pray again so we can see ourselves anew.
Wednesday, February 5, 2025
Last week, I talked about how I think one of the meanings of life is learning how to manage transitions. Following that line of thought, Arthur Brooks wrote a piece about how major life changes happen on a regular basis - how we deal with them, however, is what can make all the difference. I'd like to know what you think.
The Regularity of Major Life Changes
Arthur Brooks, The Atlantic 9.10.20
Transitions are some of the most difficult periods in our lives. Even when we choose them, the disequilibrium they bring can be painful or frightening; when they are imposed upon us, they are even more distressing.
Almost every day, I hear from people who are quietly struggling much more through “ordinary” transitions, such as a divorce, the death of a loved one, or a forced retirement. Even when the transition is completely voluntary, it can be the source of intense suffering, because it involves adapting to new surroundings and changing your self-conception.
If we understand transitions properly, however, we can curb our natural tendency to fight against them. Indeed, with a shift in mindset, we can make transitions into a source of meaning and transcendence. Psychologists call the state of being in transition “liminality.” It means that you are neither in the state you left nor completely in your new state, at least not mentally. This provokes something of an identity crisis — it raises the question “Who am I?” — which can be emotionally destabilizing.
Transitions feel like an abnormal disruption to life, but in fact they are a predictable and integral part of it. While each change may be novel, major life transitions happen with clocklike regularity. Life is one long string of them, in fact. The author Bruce Feiler wrote a book called Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age. After interviewing hundreds of people about their transitions, he found that a major change in life occurs, on average, every 12 to 18 months. Huge ones — what Feiler calls “lifequakes” — happen three to five times in each person’s life. Some lifequakes are voluntary and joyful, such as getting married or having a child. Others are involuntary and unwelcome, such as unemployment or life-threatening illness.
But here’s the good news: Even difficult, unwanted transitions are usually seen differently in retrospect than in real time. Indeed, Feiler found that 90 percent of the time, the people he spoke with ultimately judged their transition to have been a success, insofar as the transition ended and they found themselves once again on solid ground.
Even better, research shows that we tend to see past events — even unwanted ones — as net positives over time. Though our brains have a tendency to focus on negative emotions in the present, over the years unpleasant feelings fade more than pleasant feelings do, a phenomenon known as “fading affect bias.” This may sound like a cognitive error, but it really isn’t. Almost every transition — even the most challenging ones — bears some positive fruit; it just may take time to see it and feel its effects.
Difficult, painful transitions can yield great understanding of our lives’ purpose. Research on how people derive a sense of purpose has found that while periods of pain and struggle make us temporarily unhappy, they also make us feel as if our lives have more meaning. For example, one of my sons is in the military. His boot camp was absolutely brutal, and a day after it finished, he told me that he’d never voluntarily do anything like that again. But today he talks about the experience — which earned him the title “U.S. marine” — with amusement, relish, and pride.
One of the things we learn by not resisting challenging transitions is how to cope with subsequent life changes. In his book Meanings of Life, the psychologist Roy F. Baumeister argues that a sense of meaning gained through change makes the rest of life seem more stable. This is one of the great consolations of aging and seeing a lot of change — transitions likely don’t cause as much distress.
Difficult periods can also stimulate innovation and ingenuity. A large amount of literature talks about “post-traumatic growth,” in which people derive long-term benefits from painful experiences, including more appreciation for life, richer relationships, greater resilience, and deeper spirituality. Another manifestation of this growth, according to some newer scholarship, is heightened creativity. I have noticed a new well of creative energy during my own transition. Among other things, this column is the fruit of my transition.
Life changes are painful, but inevitable. And as hard as they may be, we only make things harder — and risk squandering the benefits and lessons they can bring — when we work against them instead of with them. As I have argued in this column, those who benefit the most from painful periods are those who spend time experiencing and processing them. The right strategy is to accept transitions as an integral part of life, and lean into them.
I grew up in the Pacific Northwest and would fish off the rocks on the Oregon coast in the summers. I learned as a kid that the best time to catch fish was during a “falling tide” — the period when the tide is going out, or, you might say, transitioning. That’s when plankton and bait fish are stirred up, so game fish are biting like crazy. If you put in your line, you’ll pull them out, one after another. Practically the only mistake you can make is not to have your line in the water.
“Man was made for conflict, not for rest,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. “In action is his power; not in his goals but in his transitions man is great.” I believe this is true, but it’s so easy to forget.
This very morning, upon waking, my first thoughts were about my old job and my friendships in D.C. I guess I’m still resisting transitions a little bit.
But I know what I have to do. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes, got up, and cast my line into the falling tide of the new day. Let’s see what I catch.
The Regularity of Major Life Changes
Arthur Brooks, The Atlantic 9.10.20
Transitions are some of the most difficult periods in our lives. Even when we choose them, the disequilibrium they bring can be painful or frightening; when they are imposed upon us, they are even more distressing.
Almost every day, I hear from people who are quietly struggling much more through “ordinary” transitions, such as a divorce, the death of a loved one, or a forced retirement. Even when the transition is completely voluntary, it can be the source of intense suffering, because it involves adapting to new surroundings and changing your self-conception.
If we understand transitions properly, however, we can curb our natural tendency to fight against them. Indeed, with a shift in mindset, we can make transitions into a source of meaning and transcendence. Psychologists call the state of being in transition “liminality.” It means that you are neither in the state you left nor completely in your new state, at least not mentally. This provokes something of an identity crisis — it raises the question “Who am I?” — which can be emotionally destabilizing.
Transitions feel like an abnormal disruption to life, but in fact they are a predictable and integral part of it. While each change may be novel, major life transitions happen with clocklike regularity. Life is one long string of them, in fact. The author Bruce Feiler wrote a book called Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age. After interviewing hundreds of people about their transitions, he found that a major change in life occurs, on average, every 12 to 18 months. Huge ones — what Feiler calls “lifequakes” — happen three to five times in each person’s life. Some lifequakes are voluntary and joyful, such as getting married or having a child. Others are involuntary and unwelcome, such as unemployment or life-threatening illness.
But here’s the good news: Even difficult, unwanted transitions are usually seen differently in retrospect than in real time. Indeed, Feiler found that 90 percent of the time, the people he spoke with ultimately judged their transition to have been a success, insofar as the transition ended and they found themselves once again on solid ground.
Even better, research shows that we tend to see past events — even unwanted ones — as net positives over time. Though our brains have a tendency to focus on negative emotions in the present, over the years unpleasant feelings fade more than pleasant feelings do, a phenomenon known as “fading affect bias.” This may sound like a cognitive error, but it really isn’t. Almost every transition — even the most challenging ones — bears some positive fruit; it just may take time to see it and feel its effects.
Difficult, painful transitions can yield great understanding of our lives’ purpose. Research on how people derive a sense of purpose has found that while periods of pain and struggle make us temporarily unhappy, they also make us feel as if our lives have more meaning. For example, one of my sons is in the military. His boot camp was absolutely brutal, and a day after it finished, he told me that he’d never voluntarily do anything like that again. But today he talks about the experience — which earned him the title “U.S. marine” — with amusement, relish, and pride.
One of the things we learn by not resisting challenging transitions is how to cope with subsequent life changes. In his book Meanings of Life, the psychologist Roy F. Baumeister argues that a sense of meaning gained through change makes the rest of life seem more stable. This is one of the great consolations of aging and seeing a lot of change — transitions likely don’t cause as much distress.
Difficult periods can also stimulate innovation and ingenuity. A large amount of literature talks about “post-traumatic growth,” in which people derive long-term benefits from painful experiences, including more appreciation for life, richer relationships, greater resilience, and deeper spirituality. Another manifestation of this growth, according to some newer scholarship, is heightened creativity. I have noticed a new well of creative energy during my own transition. Among other things, this column is the fruit of my transition.
Life changes are painful, but inevitable. And as hard as they may be, we only make things harder — and risk squandering the benefits and lessons they can bring — when we work against them instead of with them. As I have argued in this column, those who benefit the most from painful periods are those who spend time experiencing and processing them. The right strategy is to accept transitions as an integral part of life, and lean into them.
I grew up in the Pacific Northwest and would fish off the rocks on the Oregon coast in the summers. I learned as a kid that the best time to catch fish was during a “falling tide” — the period when the tide is going out, or, you might say, transitioning. That’s when plankton and bait fish are stirred up, so game fish are biting like crazy. If you put in your line, you’ll pull them out, one after another. Practically the only mistake you can make is not to have your line in the water.
“Man was made for conflict, not for rest,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. “In action is his power; not in his goals but in his transitions man is great.” I believe this is true, but it’s so easy to forget.
This very morning, upon waking, my first thoughts were about my old job and my friendships in D.C. I guess I’m still resisting transitions a little bit.
But I know what I have to do. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes, got up, and cast my line into the falling tide of the new day. Let’s see what I catch.
Wednesday, January 29, 2025
We have recently discussed hope and optimism (and pessimism and resignation) and uncertainty. This week, we'll tackle the difference between politeness and civility. The author is calling for a new era of Christian civility (not politeness).
A New Era of Christian Civility
Alexandra Hudson, Christianity Today 1.17.25
Over the past few years, our society has continued its trend toward increased political polarization. A recent poll shows that nearly half of US voters believe those in the opposing political party are “downright evil.” As a result, the public square can be a volatile and even violent place to engage. This is something I experienced firsthand while working in the federal government from 2017 to 2018. In Washington, I observed two equally dehumanizing extremes: explicit hostility and deceptive politeness.
The politicians who most often make the news are those who are willing to trample anyone in their path to gain power. Others appear polished, poised, and polite — but their behavior masks ulterior motives. For example, one of my supervisors used our shared Christian faith to disarm and manipulate me. She would smile and invite me to pray with her at lunch, only for me to later discover she had been undermining me to our superiors.
My experience was so dispiriting that I fled politics and Washington altogether to write a book aimed at helping myself and others think more clearly about our deeply divided era and the ways we each might be part of resolving our crisis of polarization and dehumanization. Turning to Scripture and great thinkers of the past to help me process what I had endured, I reflected on this timeless question: What respect do we owe each other by virtue of our shared humanity, beyond our differences and disagreements?
The Bible reminds us that we were made for community with God and others, but we are also selfish and fallen. We thrive in cooperation but are always threatened by our inclination to put ourselves above others. As philosopher Blaise Pascal noted, “The more enlightened we are the more greatness and vileness we discover in man.” Likewise, Augustine’s concept of humanity’s “lust to dominate” explains that both overt hostility and false politeness arise from the self-love of our sinful nature rather than a love that sees and respects others as fellow persons created in God’s image.
I came to realize that our present division requires far more than mere courtesy or politeness. We need to usher in a new era of civility — a virtue that has been all but lost in our country. For Christians, civility is rooted in the imago Dei — the inherent dignity we all possess as beings created in God’s image. This foundation is crucial for flourishing across our differences today.
We must stop confusing civility with politeness. Politeness is a type of behavior with manners and etiquette. Civility is a virtue far deeper than mere conduct. Civility gets to the motivation of any given action.
Civility is a disposition that recognizes and respects the common humanity and the inherent dignity of other human beings. In doing so, civility sometimes requires that we act in ways that appear deeply impolite – engaging in robust debate that brings up meaningful differences. Jesus himself was not always polite, but he was continually civil. Civility never lets our disagreements devolve into dehumanization or violence.
Today, some Christians seek to overcorrect for what they think of as a culture of suffocating politeness by supporting leaders and pundits who exhibit a brash delight in delivering hard truths and puncturing hypocrisy. Yet this approach often ends up fostering hostility and aggression and falls prey to the same dehumanizing attempt to control others that is evident with patronizing politeness.
A New Era of Christian Civility
Alexandra Hudson, Christianity Today 1.17.25
Over the past few years, our society has continued its trend toward increased political polarization. A recent poll shows that nearly half of US voters believe those in the opposing political party are “downright evil.” As a result, the public square can be a volatile and even violent place to engage. This is something I experienced firsthand while working in the federal government from 2017 to 2018. In Washington, I observed two equally dehumanizing extremes: explicit hostility and deceptive politeness.
The politicians who most often make the news are those who are willing to trample anyone in their path to gain power. Others appear polished, poised, and polite — but their behavior masks ulterior motives. For example, one of my supervisors used our shared Christian faith to disarm and manipulate me. She would smile and invite me to pray with her at lunch, only for me to later discover she had been undermining me to our superiors.
My experience was so dispiriting that I fled politics and Washington altogether to write a book aimed at helping myself and others think more clearly about our deeply divided era and the ways we each might be part of resolving our crisis of polarization and dehumanization. Turning to Scripture and great thinkers of the past to help me process what I had endured, I reflected on this timeless question: What respect do we owe each other by virtue of our shared humanity, beyond our differences and disagreements?
The Bible reminds us that we were made for community with God and others, but we are also selfish and fallen. We thrive in cooperation but are always threatened by our inclination to put ourselves above others. As philosopher Blaise Pascal noted, “The more enlightened we are the more greatness and vileness we discover in man.” Likewise, Augustine’s concept of humanity’s “lust to dominate” explains that both overt hostility and false politeness arise from the self-love of our sinful nature rather than a love that sees and respects others as fellow persons created in God’s image.
I came to realize that our present division requires far more than mere courtesy or politeness. We need to usher in a new era of civility — a virtue that has been all but lost in our country. For Christians, civility is rooted in the imago Dei — the inherent dignity we all possess as beings created in God’s image. This foundation is crucial for flourishing across our differences today.
We must stop confusing civility with politeness. Politeness is a type of behavior with manners and etiquette. Civility is a virtue far deeper than mere conduct. Civility gets to the motivation of any given action.
Civility is a disposition that recognizes and respects the common humanity and the inherent dignity of other human beings. In doing so, civility sometimes requires that we act in ways that appear deeply impolite – engaging in robust debate that brings up meaningful differences. Jesus himself was not always polite, but he was continually civil. Civility never lets our disagreements devolve into dehumanization or violence.
Today, some Christians seek to overcorrect for what they think of as a culture of suffocating politeness by supporting leaders and pundits who exhibit a brash delight in delivering hard truths and puncturing hypocrisy. Yet this approach often ends up fostering hostility and aggression and falls prey to the same dehumanizing attempt to control others that is evident with patronizing politeness.
Uncertainty & Scripture
Discussion Group 1.21.25
Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament):
When I am afraid, I put my trust in you. (Ps 56:3)
Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.
In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths. (Proverbs 3:5-6)
For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. (Jeremiah 29:11)
Cast your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you; he will never permit the righteous to be moved. (Psalm 55:22)
He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber. Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade on your right hand. The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life. (Psalm 121:3-8)
Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go. (Joshua 1:9)
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. (Psalm 23:4)
Jesus said:
Don’t worry about tomorrow. Tomorrow can worry about itself. One day’s trouble at a time is quite enough. (Mt 6:34)
Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.
Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid. (Jn 14:27)
Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. (Mt 11:28-30)
What his followers said about uncertainty:
Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:6-7)
Cast all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you. (1 Peter 5:7)
Discussion Group 1.21.25
Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament):
When I am afraid, I put my trust in you. (Ps 56:3)
Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.
In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths. (Proverbs 3:5-6)
For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. (Jeremiah 29:11)
Cast your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you; he will never permit the righteous to be moved. (Psalm 55:22)
He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber. Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade on your right hand. The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life. (Psalm 121:3-8)
Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go. (Joshua 1:9)
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. (Psalm 23:4)
Jesus said:
Don’t worry about tomorrow. Tomorrow can worry about itself. One day’s trouble at a time is quite enough. (Mt 6:34)
Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.
Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid. (Jn 14:27)
Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. (Mt 11:28-30)
What his followers said about uncertainty:
Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:6-7)
Cast all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you. (1 Peter 5:7)
Wednesday, January 22, 2025
What is one of the frequently asked questions in the Bible? It is this: "How long?"
That question - how long - gets asked twenty times. The people in the Bible were uncomfortable with uncertainty and sought God for answers. I am certain that we in the 21st century are also uncomfortable with uncertainty. The intolerance of uncertainty affects sleep, concentration, and happiness. Is there a way for someone to think their way out of uncertainty? Arthur Brooks believes there is.
Thinking Your Way Out of Uncertainty
Arthur Brooks, The Atlantic 11.14.24
A friend of mine had to have a blood test every three months that would indicate whether the cancer was at bay or resurgent. The days leading up to each test were agony for him — not because he couldn’t deal with the treatment if he had to, but because the uncertainty made him miserable. Not knowing what was in store dominated his thoughts, stole his sleep, and ruined his concentration.
Scholars have found that this state of suspense, which psychologists call “intolerance of uncertainty,” is something we naturally detest. Their research shows that the feeling simultaneously paralyzes us through anxiety and makes us spend time and effort searching for predictability. The discomfort comes from the fact that uncertainty stimulates the brain’s anterior cingulate cortex-amygdala complex, signaling a possible threat and therefore a stress response.
Although uncertainty is anything but pleasant, it has an obvious evolutionary basis: If your ancestors had systematically disregarded the condition, they would have been unlikely to survive to pass on their genes. But probably as a result, they bequeathed their uncertainty intolerance down through the generations. Of course, your ancestors were thinking not about you, their descendant, suffering from elevated stress response, but about their own security.
All in all, uncertainty intolerance paired with negativity bias can easily lower your quality of life. The goal in building a better life is not to eradicate a dislike for uncertainty; instead, the goal is learning to manage your uncertainty aversion so that it does not manage you. The key to achieving this is to employ metacognition, enabling you to treat the uncertainty analytically, not just emotionally.
This requires you to find an external frame of reference to structure the way you see your uncertain circumstances. To start making a better mental model, write two lists: one of costs, potential and actual; the other of benefits. The next step in structuring your thinking is a bigger challenge: matching plausible probabilities to each cost and benefit. If you are struggling with this task, ask a friend to help by providing an extra bit of objectivity. A classic 1979 study on decision making showed that even when your assessments are no more than guesses, the model you create will very likely be more accurate than leaving a decision entirely in the realm of intuition and emotion (though knowing when to trust your gut is also always valuable).
Finally, with your list and calculations in hand, try to think critically about the decision. Perhaps you will decide to move; perhaps you will decide to stay — neither one is guaranteed to be right.
Either way, however, you will almost surely be less plagued with discomfort about uncertainty, because you have worked toward a decision and being at peace, as opposed to being paralyzed by anxiety. You will also have an answer to the future question Why did I decide to do that?
As I have written previously, people typically grow happier with age: Positive emotion rises, and negative emotion falls; conscientiousness and agreeableness also increase. One reason for this is that negativity bias declines over the years. Indeed, as researchers found in a meta-analysis of 100 studies, older people pay more attention to positive information, and remember it better, than younger people do. This is almost certainly because people learn through experience that, for the most part, their worst fears didn’t come true and things turned out all right.
That question - how long - gets asked twenty times. The people in the Bible were uncomfortable with uncertainty and sought God for answers. I am certain that we in the 21st century are also uncomfortable with uncertainty. The intolerance of uncertainty affects sleep, concentration, and happiness. Is there a way for someone to think their way out of uncertainty? Arthur Brooks believes there is.
Thinking Your Way Out of Uncertainty
Arthur Brooks, The Atlantic 11.14.24
A friend of mine had to have a blood test every three months that would indicate whether the cancer was at bay or resurgent. The days leading up to each test were agony for him — not because he couldn’t deal with the treatment if he had to, but because the uncertainty made him miserable. Not knowing what was in store dominated his thoughts, stole his sleep, and ruined his concentration.
Scholars have found that this state of suspense, which psychologists call “intolerance of uncertainty,” is something we naturally detest. Their research shows that the feeling simultaneously paralyzes us through anxiety and makes us spend time and effort searching for predictability. The discomfort comes from the fact that uncertainty stimulates the brain’s anterior cingulate cortex-amygdala complex, signaling a possible threat and therefore a stress response.
Although uncertainty is anything but pleasant, it has an obvious evolutionary basis: If your ancestors had systematically disregarded the condition, they would have been unlikely to survive to pass on their genes. But probably as a result, they bequeathed their uncertainty intolerance down through the generations. Of course, your ancestors were thinking not about you, their descendant, suffering from elevated stress response, but about their own security.
All in all, uncertainty intolerance paired with negativity bias can easily lower your quality of life. The goal in building a better life is not to eradicate a dislike for uncertainty; instead, the goal is learning to manage your uncertainty aversion so that it does not manage you. The key to achieving this is to employ metacognition, enabling you to treat the uncertainty analytically, not just emotionally.
This requires you to find an external frame of reference to structure the way you see your uncertain circumstances. To start making a better mental model, write two lists: one of costs, potential and actual; the other of benefits. The next step in structuring your thinking is a bigger challenge: matching plausible probabilities to each cost and benefit. If you are struggling with this task, ask a friend to help by providing an extra bit of objectivity. A classic 1979 study on decision making showed that even when your assessments are no more than guesses, the model you create will very likely be more accurate than leaving a decision entirely in the realm of intuition and emotion (though knowing when to trust your gut is also always valuable).
Finally, with your list and calculations in hand, try to think critically about the decision. Perhaps you will decide to move; perhaps you will decide to stay — neither one is guaranteed to be right.
Either way, however, you will almost surely be less plagued with discomfort about uncertainty, because you have worked toward a decision and being at peace, as opposed to being paralyzed by anxiety. You will also have an answer to the future question Why did I decide to do that?
As I have written previously, people typically grow happier with age: Positive emotion rises, and negative emotion falls; conscientiousness and agreeableness also increase. One reason for this is that negativity bias declines over the years. Indeed, as researchers found in a meta-analysis of 100 studies, older people pay more attention to positive information, and remember it better, than younger people do. This is almost certainly because people learn through experience that, for the most part, their worst fears didn’t come true and things turned out all right.
Wednesday, January 15, 2025
I think we've all done programing postmortems (review of how the program went and things to work on next time). But, have you considered what a premortem is? I did not until I read an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal about it. It highlights Ron Shaiach, the founder of Panera Bread, who asks himself this question every January: What can I do in the next three to five years that I will respect looking back from my deathbed?
After watching his father die with regret and remorse, Shaich came up with the idea of having a premortem. In his words: Don't wait until the end to decide if you are proud of your life.
It’s Called a Premortem
Ben Cohen, WSJ 1.3.25
By any metric of business success, Ron Shaich has done a whole lot; he became a pioneer of fast-casual dining when he founded Panera Bread, which he led as its chief executive until the company sold in 2017 for more than $7 billion.
Nowadays he likes to do the same thing around this time every year. The billionaire entrepreneur and investor goes somewhere warm for the holidays. He reflects on the past year and then he asks himself, “What can I do in the next three to five years, that I will respect looking back from my deathbed?” Most people give up on their New Year’s resolutions after a few weeks. Shaich, 71, has been looking back from his deathbed for a few decades. And he doesn’t call it a New Year’s resolution. He calls it writing a “premortem.”
“I imagine my body old and fragile, my breathing shallow, my life energy almost extinguished,” he wrote in Know What Matters, his 2023 book. “I try to evoke the feelings I want to have in that moment — a sense of peace, completion and, most importantly, self-respect. Then I ask myself: What am I going to do now to ensure that when I reach that ultimate destination, I’ve done what I need to do?”
It’s a habit that began as a response to the death of his parents in the 1990s. His mother was at peace with herself when she died, he says. But his father was “racked with regret and remorse” about decisions he made and the opportunities he missed. What he took away from their experiences was the last lesson that his parents would teach him—and the most profound of them all. Don’t wait until the end to decide if you are proud of your life. Do it before it’s too late. Do it while you can still do something about it.
So what do these premortems actually look like? I asked Shaich to dig through his archives and find some that he felt comfortable sharing. He sent me the one he wrote in 2012 — the day after his 59th birthday. I started reading and the first line stopped me cold. “1,500 to 7,500 days left,” he wrote to himself. With that reminder that time is our scarcest commodity, he wrote out several pages of bullet points that covered everything from health to wealth. They included both the smallest details of his diet (snack on almonds and celery) and the much bigger picture (“spend time on things that create enjoyment and lasting impact, not on files and papers and more money, as it’s not coming with me”).
At its core, the premortem is really about living with intention. Every year, Shaich divides his life into areas of concern. He thinks about his relationships with his body, his work, his family, friends and God. He determines what he’s trying to accomplish in those areas. He comes up with specific projects to achieve those key initiatives. Then he reviews them every quarter to monitor his progress.
To him, there is nothing macabre or even remotely depressing about ruminating on death. In fact, he finds it to be oddly inspiring. So every year, he turns his attention to what really matters. He usually does his annual mental simulation on vacation in the Caribbean after a walk on the beach. This year, he was at home in Miami while recovering from a minor medical procedure—which Shaich took as yet another reminder of his own mortality. It was all he needed to pull out a yellow legal pad and start working on his latest premortem.
After watching his father die with regret and remorse, Shaich came up with the idea of having a premortem. In his words: Don't wait until the end to decide if you are proud of your life.
It’s Called a Premortem
Ben Cohen, WSJ 1.3.25
By any metric of business success, Ron Shaich has done a whole lot; he became a pioneer of fast-casual dining when he founded Panera Bread, which he led as its chief executive until the company sold in 2017 for more than $7 billion.
Nowadays he likes to do the same thing around this time every year. The billionaire entrepreneur and investor goes somewhere warm for the holidays. He reflects on the past year and then he asks himself, “What can I do in the next three to five years, that I will respect looking back from my deathbed?” Most people give up on their New Year’s resolutions after a few weeks. Shaich, 71, has been looking back from his deathbed for a few decades. And he doesn’t call it a New Year’s resolution. He calls it writing a “premortem.”
“I imagine my body old and fragile, my breathing shallow, my life energy almost extinguished,” he wrote in Know What Matters, his 2023 book. “I try to evoke the feelings I want to have in that moment — a sense of peace, completion and, most importantly, self-respect. Then I ask myself: What am I going to do now to ensure that when I reach that ultimate destination, I’ve done what I need to do?”
It’s a habit that began as a response to the death of his parents in the 1990s. His mother was at peace with herself when she died, he says. But his father was “racked with regret and remorse” about decisions he made and the opportunities he missed. What he took away from their experiences was the last lesson that his parents would teach him—and the most profound of them all. Don’t wait until the end to decide if you are proud of your life. Do it before it’s too late. Do it while you can still do something about it.
So what do these premortems actually look like? I asked Shaich to dig through his archives and find some that he felt comfortable sharing. He sent me the one he wrote in 2012 — the day after his 59th birthday. I started reading and the first line stopped me cold. “1,500 to 7,500 days left,” he wrote to himself. With that reminder that time is our scarcest commodity, he wrote out several pages of bullet points that covered everything from health to wealth. They included both the smallest details of his diet (snack on almonds and celery) and the much bigger picture (“spend time on things that create enjoyment and lasting impact, not on files and papers and more money, as it’s not coming with me”).
At its core, the premortem is really about living with intention. Every year, Shaich divides his life into areas of concern. He thinks about his relationships with his body, his work, his family, friends and God. He determines what he’s trying to accomplish in those areas. He comes up with specific projects to achieve those key initiatives. Then he reviews them every quarter to monitor his progress.
To him, there is nothing macabre or even remotely depressing about ruminating on death. In fact, he finds it to be oddly inspiring. So every year, he turns his attention to what really matters. He usually does his annual mental simulation on vacation in the Caribbean after a walk on the beach. This year, he was at home in Miami while recovering from a minor medical procedure—which Shaich took as yet another reminder of his own mortality. It was all he needed to pull out a yellow legal pad and start working on his latest premortem.
Wednesday, January 8
I am looking forward to resuming our discussion group in 2025. To start things off (and with new year's resolutions in mind), let's talk about promises and in particular, the promises that should be broken. Our author for the week gives us an equation to consider when giving, or breaking, a promise.
Made to be Broken
Peter W. Marty, Christian Century 12.31.24
Promises are lovely. When they’re made with honesty and kept with reliability, they form the substructure of healthy relationships, the backbone of a well-functioning society. “Cross my heart and hope to die,” we used to say as kids, having no real idea what those words meant except that they conveyed the zeal of our trustworthiness. We’d then spit on the ground before friends to seal the promise.
Promises may indeed be lovely, but some of them should never be made, and the worst of those deserve to be broken. It can hurt to renege on a promise we’ve made to others or, for that matter, to ourselves. Backing out of a commitment feels like a betrayal of trust or the worst kind of lie.
But not every promise made is a good one. Too many are founded more on good intention, fanciful wish, or self-interest than on solid wisdom.
A father breaks the news to his children that despite an earlier promise of an ice cream run, he has a migraine and must head to bed. A girl confides in two friends that her father is sexually abusing her but makes them promise not to tell anyone, fearful that she’ll incur unspeakable punishment if he finds out she talked. Some promises are meant to be broken, even some we make to ourselves. If the harm caused by breaking a promise is less than the harm caused by keeping it, then good moral sense should have us reexamining our obligation to that promise.
One promise that never fails to disturb me is the one I’ve heard countless times over my nearly four decades in the pastorate. I’m speaking of the pledge spoken by a family member who’s caring for a loved one with a long but terminal illness. “I promised Jack that I would never place him in a nursing care facility—that I would care for him at home until the very end, no matter what.” Really? No matter what? You’re 88 years old, tending to Jack around the clock, unavailable to any of your friends or interests, shriveling up from inadequate sleep and food, basically exhausting yourself to the point where you may well die before he does. “But, Pastor, I promised him I would be the one to care for him no matter what.” This woman is so busy being a caregiver that she’s forgotten she’s actually Jack’s spouse.
I’ve come to realize that many people who make such fervent, nonnegotiable promises like this are worried about disappointing themselves as much as their infirm spouse or parent. Their pledge of loyalty to meet their own standard for providing unceasing care is one they cannot imagine canceling. To them, that would feel like betrayal. So, using promise language, they try to create for themselves what theologian Lewis Smedes once called “an island of certainty in a heaving ocean of uncertainty . . . a small sanctuary of trust within a jungle of unpredictability.”
They hope to deliver a reliable future through a promise, only to find out that the future can’t be managed, controlled, or fully known.
If only Jack’s wife could know that her loyalty to a promise that never should’ve been made doesn’t define her integrity; her loyalty to the emotional needs and changing circumstances of the man she loves does. To be a person of constancy and fidelity doesn’t require that we be all things or do all things. It only demands that our love resemble the ineffable presence that speaks from a burning bush in Exodus 3: I am the one who will be there with you.
Made to be Broken
Peter W. Marty, Christian Century 12.31.24
Promises are lovely. When they’re made with honesty and kept with reliability, they form the substructure of healthy relationships, the backbone of a well-functioning society. “Cross my heart and hope to die,” we used to say as kids, having no real idea what those words meant except that they conveyed the zeal of our trustworthiness. We’d then spit on the ground before friends to seal the promise.
Promises may indeed be lovely, but some of them should never be made, and the worst of those deserve to be broken. It can hurt to renege on a promise we’ve made to others or, for that matter, to ourselves. Backing out of a commitment feels like a betrayal of trust or the worst kind of lie.
But not every promise made is a good one. Too many are founded more on good intention, fanciful wish, or self-interest than on solid wisdom.
A father breaks the news to his children that despite an earlier promise of an ice cream run, he has a migraine and must head to bed. A girl confides in two friends that her father is sexually abusing her but makes them promise not to tell anyone, fearful that she’ll incur unspeakable punishment if he finds out she talked. Some promises are meant to be broken, even some we make to ourselves. If the harm caused by breaking a promise is less than the harm caused by keeping it, then good moral sense should have us reexamining our obligation to that promise.
One promise that never fails to disturb me is the one I’ve heard countless times over my nearly four decades in the pastorate. I’m speaking of the pledge spoken by a family member who’s caring for a loved one with a long but terminal illness. “I promised Jack that I would never place him in a nursing care facility—that I would care for him at home until the very end, no matter what.” Really? No matter what? You’re 88 years old, tending to Jack around the clock, unavailable to any of your friends or interests, shriveling up from inadequate sleep and food, basically exhausting yourself to the point where you may well die before he does. “But, Pastor, I promised him I would be the one to care for him no matter what.” This woman is so busy being a caregiver that she’s forgotten she’s actually Jack’s spouse.
I’ve come to realize that many people who make such fervent, nonnegotiable promises like this are worried about disappointing themselves as much as their infirm spouse or parent. Their pledge of loyalty to meet their own standard for providing unceasing care is one they cannot imagine canceling. To them, that would feel like betrayal. So, using promise language, they try to create for themselves what theologian Lewis Smedes once called “an island of certainty in a heaving ocean of uncertainty . . . a small sanctuary of trust within a jungle of unpredictability.”
They hope to deliver a reliable future through a promise, only to find out that the future can’t be managed, controlled, or fully known.
If only Jack’s wife could know that her loyalty to a promise that never should’ve been made doesn’t define her integrity; her loyalty to the emotional needs and changing circumstances of the man she loves does. To be a person of constancy and fidelity doesn’t require that we be all things or do all things. It only demands that our love resemble the ineffable presence that speaks from a burning bush in Exodus 3: I am the one who will be there with you.
Wednesday, December 18
Our author for next week believes that sitting in the dark helps us truly appreciate the light. In the article, she talks about Advent, her own journey of despair and faith, and the various reactions people gave to the birth of Jesus - the too-busy-to-care innkeeper, the overwhelmed shepherds, the prophetess waiting in the Temple, the cruel and malicious ruler-King, and the curious like the wise men. Where do you fit into the Advent story?
Advent Calls Us Out of Our Despair
Joni Eareckson Tada, Christianity Today 12.12.24
Joni Eareckson Tada is the founder of Joni and Friends, a Christian nonprofit ministry committed to reaching and serving people with disabilities and the saving love of Jesus.
As a child growing up in the Reformed Episcopal Church, the first day of Advent was lovely yet a little strange. At the evening church service, we sang the most mournful hymns, with lines like “O come, O come, Immanuel, / And ransom captive Israel.” They were always songs that moaned about our sin and captivity and, well, the hymns sounded gloomy.
And so did the Advent Scriptures — like this Advent reading from Isaiah 30:1, which says, “‘Woe to the obstinate children,’ declares the Lord, ‘to those who carry out plans that are not mine, forming an alliance, but not by my Spirit, heaping sin upon sin.’” I was only a little girl, but I thought this was a very odd way to begin the Christmas season.
How could we possibly appreciate the gift of Jesus Christ as Savior of our sins unless first—like right now—we take time to consider what we need to be saved from?
God wants us to understand the depth and breadth of our transgressions against him and come face to face with the utter lostness of our plight. He wants us to own our sad and sorry situation, understanding that our sin offends him and that his wrath is upon us. That without Jesus we are held captive by the Enemy.
I know what it’s like to be held captive by a sad and sorry situation. Decades ago, when a reckless dive left me paralyzed at the age of 17, my world went dark. My despair seemed like a bottomless pit. I was lost to life as I once knew it—riding horses, playing sports, and hiking through the beauty of God’s creation. But now? I felt enslaved by a life sentence of quadriplegia.
Lying in the rehabilitation hospital after my injury, I wanted to end my life. Unable to do even that, I determined to end my life spiritually. I told my mother to shut the door and close the drapes. I wanted to shut out the light — shut out the whole world. I was lost.
Only when we appreciate the fact that we are lost can we fully celebrate being found. Perhaps that’s why James says, “Grieve, mourn, and wail” over your sin and God “will lift you up” (4:9,10). Only when we face our lostness can we say, Joy to the world! The Lord is come. Let earth receive her King. Let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing!
There is a method to the mystery of Advent. As each week of Advent progresses, the Scriptures—and the hymns—turn from somber to joyful. They become lighter, happier, and full of hope. Even Scripture’s tone changes in the hope-filled call of Isaiah 40:3: “Prepare the way for the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” And in Isaiah 41:10, God says to the captives, “Do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I
will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”
The journey through Advent teaches us that we need Jesus. The Light of the World is coming to set the captive free. As December 25 draws near, it is time to reflect on the manner in which we wait for Christ in the darkness of our captivity and respond to his eternal light.
We all have different responses to the incarnation of the Son of God. Are you searching? Wanting to draw closer? Or are you a little indifferent — almost uncaring that another Christmas is here already? People likely responded similarly to Jesus’ arrival. Think of the answers people gave when they heard of what had happened in Bethlehem. There were many, like the innkeeper, who couldn’t have cared less. He had things to do, pots to wash, beds to change, stuff to pick up at the market.
Other people were cruel and even malicious, like Herod. He did everything in his power to stop the celebration, hunt down this so-called King, and put an end to the events God had already put into play. Still others were frightened, even terrified—like the shepherds. It was only after the angels bent over backward to explain what was going on that their fears were put to rest.
Other people were curious, like the wise men — the searching types. They sincerely wanted to know what was going on. They sensed that something different, something important, had happened. And they knew, without even having the Bible to guide them, that it would mean a big change for the world. Some people waited, like Simeon in the temple. Other people hoped, like Anna the prophetess. Still others like Mary and Joseph knew the answer to “What Child Is This?” and worshiped this little one sleeping in his mother’s arms.
Do you, like the innkeeper, just have too much to do to take time to truly celebrate Christ’s birth? Or like Mary and Joseph, do you take time to stare out from the gloom of your daily struggles to contemplate the brilliance of God’s perfect light?
The miracle that has illuminated human history also illuminates our weary hearts. The God who overflows the universe has poured himself into baby flesh. The high and holy who shrouds himself in his own dazzling light, whose chariot is the wind and fire, who crosses the heavens on storms and lightning, who shakes the foundation of the earth — he has entered history. Jesus has touched down on this chaotic, fragile, and noisy planet. You can hear his Christmas footsteps if you stop, look, listen, and be still.
Tonight, bundle up and head outside. Gaze at the stars and ponder: The same night sky overhead peered down on that Christmas miracle over 2,000 years ago. And then, if you can, sing, “All is calm, all is bright,” deep from your soul.
Because of that night in Bethlehem, the Spirit of the Lord has invaded your heart and taken up residence in your very soul. He boldly intruded into your sin, calling it what it is and challenging you to leave it behind.
So come, oh, come, Immanuel! This glorious Advent season, may we realize afresh our need of you, our Savior, and may we own our desperate condition. Only then can we truly have a very merry Christmas.
Advent Calls Us Out of Our Despair
Joni Eareckson Tada, Christianity Today 12.12.24
Joni Eareckson Tada is the founder of Joni and Friends, a Christian nonprofit ministry committed to reaching and serving people with disabilities and the saving love of Jesus.
As a child growing up in the Reformed Episcopal Church, the first day of Advent was lovely yet a little strange. At the evening church service, we sang the most mournful hymns, with lines like “O come, O come, Immanuel, / And ransom captive Israel.” They were always songs that moaned about our sin and captivity and, well, the hymns sounded gloomy.
And so did the Advent Scriptures — like this Advent reading from Isaiah 30:1, which says, “‘Woe to the obstinate children,’ declares the Lord, ‘to those who carry out plans that are not mine, forming an alliance, but not by my Spirit, heaping sin upon sin.’” I was only a little girl, but I thought this was a very odd way to begin the Christmas season.
How could we possibly appreciate the gift of Jesus Christ as Savior of our sins unless first—like right now—we take time to consider what we need to be saved from?
God wants us to understand the depth and breadth of our transgressions against him and come face to face with the utter lostness of our plight. He wants us to own our sad and sorry situation, understanding that our sin offends him and that his wrath is upon us. That without Jesus we are held captive by the Enemy.
I know what it’s like to be held captive by a sad and sorry situation. Decades ago, when a reckless dive left me paralyzed at the age of 17, my world went dark. My despair seemed like a bottomless pit. I was lost to life as I once knew it—riding horses, playing sports, and hiking through the beauty of God’s creation. But now? I felt enslaved by a life sentence of quadriplegia.
Lying in the rehabilitation hospital after my injury, I wanted to end my life. Unable to do even that, I determined to end my life spiritually. I told my mother to shut the door and close the drapes. I wanted to shut out the light — shut out the whole world. I was lost.
Only when we appreciate the fact that we are lost can we fully celebrate being found. Perhaps that’s why James says, “Grieve, mourn, and wail” over your sin and God “will lift you up” (4:9,10). Only when we face our lostness can we say, Joy to the world! The Lord is come. Let earth receive her King. Let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing!
There is a method to the mystery of Advent. As each week of Advent progresses, the Scriptures—and the hymns—turn from somber to joyful. They become lighter, happier, and full of hope. Even Scripture’s tone changes in the hope-filled call of Isaiah 40:3: “Prepare the way for the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” And in Isaiah 41:10, God says to the captives, “Do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I
will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”
The journey through Advent teaches us that we need Jesus. The Light of the World is coming to set the captive free. As December 25 draws near, it is time to reflect on the manner in which we wait for Christ in the darkness of our captivity and respond to his eternal light.
We all have different responses to the incarnation of the Son of God. Are you searching? Wanting to draw closer? Or are you a little indifferent — almost uncaring that another Christmas is here already? People likely responded similarly to Jesus’ arrival. Think of the answers people gave when they heard of what had happened in Bethlehem. There were many, like the innkeeper, who couldn’t have cared less. He had things to do, pots to wash, beds to change, stuff to pick up at the market.
Other people were cruel and even malicious, like Herod. He did everything in his power to stop the celebration, hunt down this so-called King, and put an end to the events God had already put into play. Still others were frightened, even terrified—like the shepherds. It was only after the angels bent over backward to explain what was going on that their fears were put to rest.
Other people were curious, like the wise men — the searching types. They sincerely wanted to know what was going on. They sensed that something different, something important, had happened. And they knew, without even having the Bible to guide them, that it would mean a big change for the world. Some people waited, like Simeon in the temple. Other people hoped, like Anna the prophetess. Still others like Mary and Joseph knew the answer to “What Child Is This?” and worshiped this little one sleeping in his mother’s arms.
Do you, like the innkeeper, just have too much to do to take time to truly celebrate Christ’s birth? Or like Mary and Joseph, do you take time to stare out from the gloom of your daily struggles to contemplate the brilliance of God’s perfect light?
The miracle that has illuminated human history also illuminates our weary hearts. The God who overflows the universe has poured himself into baby flesh. The high and holy who shrouds himself in his own dazzling light, whose chariot is the wind and fire, who crosses the heavens on storms and lightning, who shakes the foundation of the earth — he has entered history. Jesus has touched down on this chaotic, fragile, and noisy planet. You can hear his Christmas footsteps if you stop, look, listen, and be still.
Tonight, bundle up and head outside. Gaze at the stars and ponder: The same night sky overhead peered down on that Christmas miracle over 2,000 years ago. And then, if you can, sing, “All is calm, all is bright,” deep from your soul.
Because of that night in Bethlehem, the Spirit of the Lord has invaded your heart and taken up residence in your very soul. He boldly intruded into your sin, calling it what it is and challenging you to leave it behind.
So come, oh, come, Immanuel! This glorious Advent season, may we realize afresh our need of you, our Savior, and may we own our desperate condition. Only then can we truly have a very merry Christmas.
Wednesday, December 11
One of the books I read over my nine-day cruise was a terrific book, The Faith to Doubt by M. Holmes Hartshorne. Next week's reading is a two-page excerpt that I have edited for you (but you are welcome to read the entire book; and yes, I read it for fun).
Hartshorne's point is that it takes faith and courage to doubt religion, or really, anything. He believes protestantism requires vigorous and unrelenting doubt otherwise it becomes the religion it was trying to amend and reform. At the same time, "Doubt is uncomfortable, disquieting. Where our religious beliefs are at stake, it is painfully disturbing."
I'd like to know what you think.
Inseparability of Faith and Doubt
M. Holmes Hartshorne, The Faith to Doubt (except) 1963
Doubt is uncomfortable, disquieting. Where our religious beliefs are at stake, it is painfully disturbing. Ordinarily, therefore, men deal with their doubts by attempting to bolster their beliefs with arguments and rationalizations designed to preserve the status quo. This is obvious folly.
Once doubt insinuates itself, we can evade its demands only by self-deception. What men need is not reassurances but the courage to doubt critically.
There have been few periods in our history when religion has not been under attack. From a Protestant perspective this is as it should be. Like biblical faith Reformation Protestantism was antireligious. When Luther dared to doubt the means of grace which the Church presumed to guarantee to the faithful, his doubt cut the ground out from under medieval Christianity. To the extent to which contemporary Protestantism has become a defender of religion, it has lost its soul. What can and ought to be avoided, however, is the defensiveness which Protestants so often show toward such criticism. If Protestantism is to be true to its inheritance, if it is to speak to our age and be heard, it must accept as part of its own message the substance of the criticisms which have been leveled against it.
In every age religion has had its detractors and critics. We might expect this for at least two reasons. In the first place, religion, like every other human institution, is liable to human vanity, folly, and error. In the second place, we cannot exist as human beings without thinking and to think is to question, to probe, to criticize. Inevitably religious men have resisted such criticism.
We do not welcome doubt, especially where our religious beliefs are in question. Faith in our gods is the foundation of our lives the source of meaning and value by which we fashion the stuff of our living, the ground we cannot surrender without the loss of our selves. Men are never so defensive as in behalf of their gods; self-criticism is not a virtue of religious men. Our criticism of religion seldom extends to our own gods; our stones crash with shattering force upon the altars of alien deities, but the images that grace our secret shrines are rarely in jeopardy. Indeed, the gods of our own households are so jealously guarded that ordinarily they are hidden even from our own view. Fortunate the man who can call his god by name.
Science has given criticism of religion in our time an especially devastating power. Since Galileo's ordeal, scientific criticism has particularly offended the guardians of the gods, because it has repeatedly revealed beliefs cherished by the credulous to be false, if not immoral. Religion has defended with impunity superstition, error, greed, hypocrisy, pride, and the lust for power.
Segregation and slavery, persecutions and wars, class hatred and economic exploitation have all enjoyed its generous support. In the clear light which scientific objectivity sheds upon the human scene, religion often appears obscurantist if not downright deceitful. Man's concern for truth would appear better served by science than by faith.
In our century another factor contributes to the peculiar force of criticisms leveled at religion: the omnipresence of doubt about the traditional sources of meaning for human existence. As Victor Frankl has movingly pointed out, “men can live only so long as they have something to live for."
This source of meaning may be the God of their fathers, it may be a child, it may be revenge or success. Man, as distinct from the animal, cannot live by instinct; he cannot live just naturally.
His life is a continuing question for its meaning: "What must I do, what must I be, in order really to live my life?" This is the question implicit in all our searching, our hoping, our worrying. We live so long as we have something to live for, something that commands our fidelity to the meaning it gives to us. We live by the grace of the gods we serve.
But in our day the gods are in question. This fact is not ordinarily phrased in religious terminology. The language of religion is alien to us. We talk, for example, of "the age of anxiety," of the uncertainties and perplexities of a world too complicated to understand or be controlled, rather than of sin and the Devil. Yet however we may describe our human condition, the fact is that very many thoughtful men feel anxious, aware that their life is empty; they are fearful of giving themselves wholeheartedly to anything lest such dedication prove to be the path to a fool's paradise. They doubt the truth or relevance of the traditional answers to the question of what life is all about, yet no contemporary answers speak with total authority. They live "in the misty precincts of the probable," without enthusiasm and without joy. The present religious situation is in large measure a kind of bewildering polytheism in which a pantheon of such gods as democracy, sex, success, and science independently and often conflictingly elicit devotion and demand sacrifices, but grant no lasting peace or power.
Two factors seem therefore to be operative in the present situation: (1) a continuing confidence in critical reason; (2) deep and widespread doubt as to the validity of the claim of any god. Since life without faith is as intolerable as life without the vitality and integrity of reason, we are subject to a tension which makes us at once profoundly critical of religion and passionately concerned about it.
The criticism of religion in our time is a sign of sickness and health. It is a sign of sickness in that it reveals the profound alienation of contemporary man from himself and his world, his sense of homelessness and meaninglessness. It is a sign of health in that it reveals a confidence in reason, a recognition that our existence is grounded in question and doubt. Augustine observed that we doubt (if we doubt with seriousness and not merely sophistically or vengefully) for the sake of the truth. Human life lies in the dimension of meaning and freedom that is the locus of personal and intellectual responsibility. The criticism of religion that has been powerful in our day is kin to prophetic biblical faith; indeed, criticism that unmasks holy superstition and moral
bigotry may be an echo of the Word of God.
The protestant element in Protestantism is the prophetic rejection of all attempts to evade the sovereignty of God. Such evasions include such Protestant distortions as Fundamentalist allegations of the inerrancy of Scripture, the absolute truth of certain "fundamental doctrines," and the absolutizing of specific moral virtues and religious practices (e.g., blue laws). They include also the "open-minded" insistence that faith is the path to peace of mind and the power of positive thinking, and that religion is the best defense of the values of western civilization against atheistic communism. They include all claims of privileged truth and incontestable values, whether these are made by the church or by so-called irreligious men.
Prophetic Protestantism insists that no man or human institution is perfectly right or good or beyond God's judgment, least of all the church. This "Protestant principle," as Tillich calls it, is not alien to contemporary criticisms of religion and shows the inseparability of faith and doubt.
Hartshorne's point is that it takes faith and courage to doubt religion, or really, anything. He believes protestantism requires vigorous and unrelenting doubt otherwise it becomes the religion it was trying to amend and reform. At the same time, "Doubt is uncomfortable, disquieting. Where our religious beliefs are at stake, it is painfully disturbing."
I'd like to know what you think.
Inseparability of Faith and Doubt
M. Holmes Hartshorne, The Faith to Doubt (except) 1963
Doubt is uncomfortable, disquieting. Where our religious beliefs are at stake, it is painfully disturbing. Ordinarily, therefore, men deal with their doubts by attempting to bolster their beliefs with arguments and rationalizations designed to preserve the status quo. This is obvious folly.
Once doubt insinuates itself, we can evade its demands only by self-deception. What men need is not reassurances but the courage to doubt critically.
There have been few periods in our history when religion has not been under attack. From a Protestant perspective this is as it should be. Like biblical faith Reformation Protestantism was antireligious. When Luther dared to doubt the means of grace which the Church presumed to guarantee to the faithful, his doubt cut the ground out from under medieval Christianity. To the extent to which contemporary Protestantism has become a defender of religion, it has lost its soul. What can and ought to be avoided, however, is the defensiveness which Protestants so often show toward such criticism. If Protestantism is to be true to its inheritance, if it is to speak to our age and be heard, it must accept as part of its own message the substance of the criticisms which have been leveled against it.
In every age religion has had its detractors and critics. We might expect this for at least two reasons. In the first place, religion, like every other human institution, is liable to human vanity, folly, and error. In the second place, we cannot exist as human beings without thinking and to think is to question, to probe, to criticize. Inevitably religious men have resisted such criticism.
We do not welcome doubt, especially where our religious beliefs are in question. Faith in our gods is the foundation of our lives the source of meaning and value by which we fashion the stuff of our living, the ground we cannot surrender without the loss of our selves. Men are never so defensive as in behalf of their gods; self-criticism is not a virtue of religious men. Our criticism of religion seldom extends to our own gods; our stones crash with shattering force upon the altars of alien deities, but the images that grace our secret shrines are rarely in jeopardy. Indeed, the gods of our own households are so jealously guarded that ordinarily they are hidden even from our own view. Fortunate the man who can call his god by name.
Science has given criticism of religion in our time an especially devastating power. Since Galileo's ordeal, scientific criticism has particularly offended the guardians of the gods, because it has repeatedly revealed beliefs cherished by the credulous to be false, if not immoral. Religion has defended with impunity superstition, error, greed, hypocrisy, pride, and the lust for power.
Segregation and slavery, persecutions and wars, class hatred and economic exploitation have all enjoyed its generous support. In the clear light which scientific objectivity sheds upon the human scene, religion often appears obscurantist if not downright deceitful. Man's concern for truth would appear better served by science than by faith.
In our century another factor contributes to the peculiar force of criticisms leveled at religion: the omnipresence of doubt about the traditional sources of meaning for human existence. As Victor Frankl has movingly pointed out, “men can live only so long as they have something to live for."
This source of meaning may be the God of their fathers, it may be a child, it may be revenge or success. Man, as distinct from the animal, cannot live by instinct; he cannot live just naturally.
His life is a continuing question for its meaning: "What must I do, what must I be, in order really to live my life?" This is the question implicit in all our searching, our hoping, our worrying. We live so long as we have something to live for, something that commands our fidelity to the meaning it gives to us. We live by the grace of the gods we serve.
But in our day the gods are in question. This fact is not ordinarily phrased in religious terminology. The language of religion is alien to us. We talk, for example, of "the age of anxiety," of the uncertainties and perplexities of a world too complicated to understand or be controlled, rather than of sin and the Devil. Yet however we may describe our human condition, the fact is that very many thoughtful men feel anxious, aware that their life is empty; they are fearful of giving themselves wholeheartedly to anything lest such dedication prove to be the path to a fool's paradise. They doubt the truth or relevance of the traditional answers to the question of what life is all about, yet no contemporary answers speak with total authority. They live "in the misty precincts of the probable," without enthusiasm and without joy. The present religious situation is in large measure a kind of bewildering polytheism in which a pantheon of such gods as democracy, sex, success, and science independently and often conflictingly elicit devotion and demand sacrifices, but grant no lasting peace or power.
Two factors seem therefore to be operative in the present situation: (1) a continuing confidence in critical reason; (2) deep and widespread doubt as to the validity of the claim of any god. Since life without faith is as intolerable as life without the vitality and integrity of reason, we are subject to a tension which makes us at once profoundly critical of religion and passionately concerned about it.
The criticism of religion in our time is a sign of sickness and health. It is a sign of sickness in that it reveals the profound alienation of contemporary man from himself and his world, his sense of homelessness and meaninglessness. It is a sign of health in that it reveals a confidence in reason, a recognition that our existence is grounded in question and doubt. Augustine observed that we doubt (if we doubt with seriousness and not merely sophistically or vengefully) for the sake of the truth. Human life lies in the dimension of meaning and freedom that is the locus of personal and intellectual responsibility. The criticism of religion that has been powerful in our day is kin to prophetic biblical faith; indeed, criticism that unmasks holy superstition and moral
bigotry may be an echo of the Word of God.
The protestant element in Protestantism is the prophetic rejection of all attempts to evade the sovereignty of God. Such evasions include such Protestant distortions as Fundamentalist allegations of the inerrancy of Scripture, the absolute truth of certain "fundamental doctrines," and the absolutizing of specific moral virtues and religious practices (e.g., blue laws). They include also the "open-minded" insistence that faith is the path to peace of mind and the power of positive thinking, and that religion is the best defense of the values of western civilization against atheistic communism. They include all claims of privileged truth and incontestable values, whether these are made by the church or by so-called irreligious men.
Prophetic Protestantism insists that no man or human institution is perfectly right or good or beyond God's judgment, least of all the church. This "Protestant principle," as Tillich calls it, is not alien to contemporary criticisms of religion and shows the inseparability of faith and doubt.
Wednesday, December 4
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.
Wednesday, November 6
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.
Wednesday, October 30
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.
Wednesday, October 23
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.
Wednesday, October 16
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.
Wednesday, October 2
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.
Wednesday, September 25
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.
Wednesday, September 18
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.
Wednesday, September 11
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.
Wednesday, September 4th
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.
Wednesday, August 28th
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."
Wednesday, August 21st
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.
Wednesday, August 14th
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.
Wednesday, July 31
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.
Wednesday, July 24
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.
Wednesday, July 17
"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.
Wednesday, July 11
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.
Wednesday, July 3
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.
Wednesday, June 12
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.
Wednesday, June 5
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.
Wednesday, May 29
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.
Wednesday, May 22
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.
Wednesday, May 15
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.
Wednesday, May 8
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.
Wednesday, May 1
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.
Wednesday, April 24
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.
Wednesday, April 17
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.
Wednesday, April 10
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.
Wednesday, April 3
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.
Wednesday, March 20
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
Wednesday, March 13
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.
Wednesday, March 6
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.
Wednesday, February 28
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.
Wednesday, February 21
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.
Wednesday, February 7
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."
Wednesday, January 31
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.
Wednesday, January 24
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.
Wednesday, January 17
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.
Wednesday, January 10
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.
Wednesday, December 20
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."
Wednesday, December 13
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.
Wednesday, December 6
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.
Wednesday, November 21
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.
Wednesday, November 15
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.
Wednesday, November 8
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.
Wednesday, October 25
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.
Wednesday, October 18
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.
Wednesday, October 11
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.
Wednesday, October 4
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.
Wednesday, September 27
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.
Wednesday, September 20
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.
Wednesday, September 13
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.
Wednesday, September 6
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.
Wednesday, August 23
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.
Wednesday, August 16
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.
Wednesday, August 9
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.
Wednesday, August 2
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?
Wednesday, July 26
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.
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.
Wednesday, July 19
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.
Wednesday, July 12
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
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.
Wednesday, June 28
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.
Wednesday, June 21
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.
Wednesday, June 7
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.
Wednesday, May 31
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.
Wednesday, May 17, 2023
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.
Wednesday, May 10, 2023
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."
Wednesday, May 3, 2023
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.
Wednesday, April 26, 2023
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)
Wednesday, April 19, 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).
Wednesday, April 12, 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.
Wednesday, March 29, 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.
Wednesday, 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 on March 15th
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
Wednesday, March 8
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
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 21
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.
Wednesday, February 15
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.
Wednesday, February 8
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.
Wednesday, February 1
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.
Wednesday, January 25, 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.
Wednesday, January 18, 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.
Wednesday, January 11, 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.
Wednesday, January 4, 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.
Wednesday, December 21
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.
Wednesday, December 14
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."
Wednesday, December 7
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.
Wednesday, November 30
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."
Wednesday, November 9
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?
Wednesday, November 2
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.
Wednesday, October 26
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.
Wednesday, October 19
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.
Wednesday, October 12
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.
Wednesday, October 5
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.
Wednesday, September 28
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.
Wednesday, September 21
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
Wednesday, September 14
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.
Wednesday, September 7
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 AND Wednesday, August 31
For our discussion on Tuesday, 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.
Wednesday, August 24
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.
Wednesday, August 17
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.
Wednesday, August 10
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."
Wednesday, August 3
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.
Wednesday, July 27
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.
Wednesday, July 20
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.
Wednesday, July 13
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.
Wednesday, July 6
The article this week is an interesting comparison between what started in the 1870's as a lead up to prohibition which passed in 1920 - which has strong religious convictions attached to it; and, 100 years later, the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 to the reversal in 2022 - which many believe has strong religious convictions attached to it. Regardless of what you think of the recent decision, it is an interesting historical comparison in the life of our country. The author then opines that we may be headed down a similar path to what ended in 1933 with the repeal of prohibition - which had no religious conviction to it.
Roe is the New Prohibition
David Frum, The Atlantic 6.27.22
The culture war raged most hotly from the ’70s to the next century’s ’20s. It polarized American society, dividing men from women, rural from urban, religious from secular, Anglo-Americans from more recent immigrant groups. At length, but only after a titanic constitutional struggle, the rural and religious side of the culture imposed its will on the urban and secular side. A decisive victory had been won, or so it seemed.
The culture war I’m talking about is the culture war over alcohol prohibition. From the end of Reconstruction to the First World War, probably more state and local elections turned on that one issue than on any other. The long struggle seemingly culminated in 1919, with the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment called the Volstead Act. The amendment outlawed the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages in the United States and all its subject territories. Many urban and secular Americans experienced those events with the same feeling of doom as
pro-choice Americans may feel today after the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Only, it turns out that the Volstead Act was not the end of the story. As Prohibition became a nationwide reality, Americans rapidly changed their mind about the idea. Support for Prohibition declined, then collapsed. Not only was the Volstead Act repealed, in 1933, but the Constitution was further amended so that nobody could ever try such a thing ever again.
That’s where the story usually ends. But now let’s add one more chapter, the one most relevant to our present situation. When Prohibition did finally end, so too did the culture war over alcohol. Emotions that had burned fiercely for more than half a century sputtered out after 1933.
Before and during Prohibition, alcohol had seemed a moral issue of absolute right and wrong. Between heaven and hell (as the prohibitionists told it), between liberty and tyranny (as the repealers regarded it). How to regulate alcohol remains a challenging issue in localities, states,
and Congress to this day. But the debate is now one for specialized interest and advocacy groups: the beer wholesalers fighting to protect their government-conferred regional monopolies, Mothers Against Drunk Driving campaigning to keep the intoxicated off the road, bars and
restaurants that want to stay open later, homeowners’ associations that want them to close earlier.
The regulation of alcohol is a governance issue, not a major battleground of the culture war. The goal of regulators is no longer to save sinners from hell and achieve heaven on Earth. The goal of deregulators is no longer to liberate the human spirit from reactionary tyranny. Both are seeking to find a state-by-state, town-by-town equilibrium that most Americans can live with.
The great debate on alcohol offers, a century later, a fascinating parallel with the contemporary one on abortion. Defeat in the courts drove the pro-life and prohibition sides toward mass mobilization. Meanwhile, victory in the courts lulled the original winning sides into complacency. Gradually, the balance of political power shifted. The pro-life/prohibition sides came to control more and more state legislatures. State and federal courts slowly reoriented themselves to the pro-life/prohibition sides. At last came the great moment of reversal for the formerly defeated: national Prohibition in 1919, the Dobbs case in 2022.
Prohibition and Dobbs were and are projects that seek to impose the values of a cohesive and well-organized cultural minority upon a diverse and less-organized cultural majority. Those projects can work for a time, but only for a time. In a country with a representative voting system
the cultural majority is bound to prevail sooner or later.
Look closer at exactly why Prohibition collapsed. By the end of the 19th century, alcohol prohibition had evolved into a movement predominantly rooted in the Protestant and Republican countryside to police the Catholic and Democratic big cities. The famous phrase that the Democrats were the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion” contained a lot of truth — both about the Democrats and about some of the angry motives of the prohibitionists as well. The cities lacked the political clout to stop rural America from enacting Prohibition in 1919. But they did have the fiscal clout to refuse the money necessary to enforce it. From the beginning, the federal Prohibition police — domiciled first within the Treasury, later inside the Department of Justice — were hopelessly underfunded and understaffed. Big-city police departments often
refused to cooperate with federal authorities, not only because they were bribed, but because they despised the law.
Then came another surprise. The policing regimen intended to suppress the working-class urban saloon also impinged upon the members of the upper-class Union League and the middle-class suburban golf club. As one of the characters in Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 novel, Babbitt, remarks after a couple of bootlegged cocktails: “The trouble is the manner of enforcement … Congress didn’t understand the right system. Now, if I’d been running the thing, I’d have arranged it so that the drinker himself was licensed, and then we could have taken care of the shiftless workman — kept him from drinking — and yet not’ve interfered with the rights — with the personal liberty — of fellows like ourselves.”
Likewise, many of the men and women poised to cast Republican ballots in 2022 and 2024 to protest inflation and COVID-19 school closures may be surprised to discover that anti-abortion laws they had assumed were intended only to prohibit others also apply to them. They may be
surprised to discover that they could unwittingly put out of business in vitro–fertilization clinics, because in vitro fertilization can involve intentionally destroying fertilized embryos. They may be surprised to discover that a miscarriage can lead to a police investigation. They may be surprised that their employer could face retaliation from lawmakers if it covers the costs of traveling out of state for an abortion. The concept of fetal personhood could, if made axiomatic, impose all kinds of government-enforced limits and restrictions on pregnant women. Those men and women may discover that they do not like any of those things, or the politicians who have imposed them.
In the 1920s, formerly diffuse anti-Prohibition factions coalesced around a single issue: repeal. They gathered into a single umbrella organization funded by big donors like the du Pont family and John J. Raskob, an early investor in General Motors. By the mid-’20s, the group had recruited nearly 1 million dues-paying members and began winning elections with the clear and simple slogan “Vote as you drink.”
The pro-choice coalition is diffuse, too. It spans party, ideology, class, and race. Currently, that alliance is hobbled from winning broader support by the weird reluctance of the most important pro-choice institutions even to use the word woman to describe the people most immediately affected by abortion restrictions. But as happened with Prohibition, nothing like an invasion of a person’s most intimate decisions serves better to unite formerly squabbling factions. In recent polling, about 55 percent of Americans identify as “pro-choice.” They may not all agree on what they want. More and more, they agree on what they do not want. As the anti-prohibitionists once did, they have the numbers. With the numbers, sooner or later come the votes.
Pro-life politics in the United States used to be mostly posturing and positioning, the taking of extreme rhetorical positions at no real-world cost. Red states could enact bills that burdened women who sought abortions, knowing that many voters shrugged off these statutes and counted on the courts to protect women’s rights. Now the highest court has abdicated its protective role, and those voters will have to either submit to their legislature’s burdens or replace the legislators.
That will likely mean that every legislative race in every currently red state will become a referendum on how strictly to police the women of that state. If a Republican president is elected in 2024 and signs a national abortion restriction in 2025, then every House and Senate race will
likewise become a referendum on policing women. I don’t imagine that will be a very comfortable situation for the pro-policing side. Republican politicians who indulged their pro-life allies as a low-cost way to mobilize voters who did not share the party’s economic agenda are about to discover that the costs have jumped, and that many of the voters who do share the party’s economic agenda care more about their intimate autonomy.
As the coronavirus pandemic began to subside, some commentators promised a new “Roaring Twenties,” meaning an era of booming economic prosperity. The stock market is looking more like the ’30s than the ’20s these days, but that was not their biggest mistake. Their biggest mistake was that they forgot where the phrase Roaring Twenties most likely originated. In the Southern Hemisphere, extremely powerful winds blow from west to east in the latitudes between 40 and 50 degrees. In the days of sailing ships, mariners called these latitudes “the roaring forties”—not because they were fun and exciting, but because they were turbulent and dangerous.
So welcome to the Roaring Twenties. The pro-life dog has at last caught up with the Roe v. Wade car. Now it has to chew on its prey. And it’s about to discover that the prey in its jaws is a lot bigger and stronger than it looked when the dog started its chase.
Roe is the New Prohibition
David Frum, The Atlantic 6.27.22
The culture war raged most hotly from the ’70s to the next century’s ’20s. It polarized American society, dividing men from women, rural from urban, religious from secular, Anglo-Americans from more recent immigrant groups. At length, but only after a titanic constitutional struggle, the rural and religious side of the culture imposed its will on the urban and secular side. A decisive victory had been won, or so it seemed.
The culture war I’m talking about is the culture war over alcohol prohibition. From the end of Reconstruction to the First World War, probably more state and local elections turned on that one issue than on any other. The long struggle seemingly culminated in 1919, with the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment called the Volstead Act. The amendment outlawed the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages in the United States and all its subject territories. Many urban and secular Americans experienced those events with the same feeling of doom as
pro-choice Americans may feel today after the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Only, it turns out that the Volstead Act was not the end of the story. As Prohibition became a nationwide reality, Americans rapidly changed their mind about the idea. Support for Prohibition declined, then collapsed. Not only was the Volstead Act repealed, in 1933, but the Constitution was further amended so that nobody could ever try such a thing ever again.
That’s where the story usually ends. But now let’s add one more chapter, the one most relevant to our present situation. When Prohibition did finally end, so too did the culture war over alcohol. Emotions that had burned fiercely for more than half a century sputtered out after 1933.
Before and during Prohibition, alcohol had seemed a moral issue of absolute right and wrong. Between heaven and hell (as the prohibitionists told it), between liberty and tyranny (as the repealers regarded it). How to regulate alcohol remains a challenging issue in localities, states,
and Congress to this day. But the debate is now one for specialized interest and advocacy groups: the beer wholesalers fighting to protect their government-conferred regional monopolies, Mothers Against Drunk Driving campaigning to keep the intoxicated off the road, bars and
restaurants that want to stay open later, homeowners’ associations that want them to close earlier.
The regulation of alcohol is a governance issue, not a major battleground of the culture war. The goal of regulators is no longer to save sinners from hell and achieve heaven on Earth. The goal of deregulators is no longer to liberate the human spirit from reactionary tyranny. Both are seeking to find a state-by-state, town-by-town equilibrium that most Americans can live with.
The great debate on alcohol offers, a century later, a fascinating parallel with the contemporary one on abortion. Defeat in the courts drove the pro-life and prohibition sides toward mass mobilization. Meanwhile, victory in the courts lulled the original winning sides into complacency. Gradually, the balance of political power shifted. The pro-life/prohibition sides came to control more and more state legislatures. State and federal courts slowly reoriented themselves to the pro-life/prohibition sides. At last came the great moment of reversal for the formerly defeated: national Prohibition in 1919, the Dobbs case in 2022.
Prohibition and Dobbs were and are projects that seek to impose the values of a cohesive and well-organized cultural minority upon a diverse and less-organized cultural majority. Those projects can work for a time, but only for a time. In a country with a representative voting system
the cultural majority is bound to prevail sooner or later.
Look closer at exactly why Prohibition collapsed. By the end of the 19th century, alcohol prohibition had evolved into a movement predominantly rooted in the Protestant and Republican countryside to police the Catholic and Democratic big cities. The famous phrase that the Democrats were the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion” contained a lot of truth — both about the Democrats and about some of the angry motives of the prohibitionists as well. The cities lacked the political clout to stop rural America from enacting Prohibition in 1919. But they did have the fiscal clout to refuse the money necessary to enforce it. From the beginning, the federal Prohibition police — domiciled first within the Treasury, later inside the Department of Justice — were hopelessly underfunded and understaffed. Big-city police departments often
refused to cooperate with federal authorities, not only because they were bribed, but because they despised the law.
Then came another surprise. The policing regimen intended to suppress the working-class urban saloon also impinged upon the members of the upper-class Union League and the middle-class suburban golf club. As one of the characters in Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 novel, Babbitt, remarks after a couple of bootlegged cocktails: “The trouble is the manner of enforcement … Congress didn’t understand the right system. Now, if I’d been running the thing, I’d have arranged it so that the drinker himself was licensed, and then we could have taken care of the shiftless workman — kept him from drinking — and yet not’ve interfered with the rights — with the personal liberty — of fellows like ourselves.”
Likewise, many of the men and women poised to cast Republican ballots in 2022 and 2024 to protest inflation and COVID-19 school closures may be surprised to discover that anti-abortion laws they had assumed were intended only to prohibit others also apply to them. They may be
surprised to discover that they could unwittingly put out of business in vitro–fertilization clinics, because in vitro fertilization can involve intentionally destroying fertilized embryos. They may be surprised to discover that a miscarriage can lead to a police investigation. They may be surprised that their employer could face retaliation from lawmakers if it covers the costs of traveling out of state for an abortion. The concept of fetal personhood could, if made axiomatic, impose all kinds of government-enforced limits and restrictions on pregnant women. Those men and women may discover that they do not like any of those things, or the politicians who have imposed them.
In the 1920s, formerly diffuse anti-Prohibition factions coalesced around a single issue: repeal. They gathered into a single umbrella organization funded by big donors like the du Pont family and John J. Raskob, an early investor in General Motors. By the mid-’20s, the group had recruited nearly 1 million dues-paying members and began winning elections with the clear and simple slogan “Vote as you drink.”
The pro-choice coalition is diffuse, too. It spans party, ideology, class, and race. Currently, that alliance is hobbled from winning broader support by the weird reluctance of the most important pro-choice institutions even to use the word woman to describe the people most immediately affected by abortion restrictions. But as happened with Prohibition, nothing like an invasion of a person’s most intimate decisions serves better to unite formerly squabbling factions. In recent polling, about 55 percent of Americans identify as “pro-choice.” They may not all agree on what they want. More and more, they agree on what they do not want. As the anti-prohibitionists once did, they have the numbers. With the numbers, sooner or later come the votes.
Pro-life politics in the United States used to be mostly posturing and positioning, the taking of extreme rhetorical positions at no real-world cost. Red states could enact bills that burdened women who sought abortions, knowing that many voters shrugged off these statutes and counted on the courts to protect women’s rights. Now the highest court has abdicated its protective role, and those voters will have to either submit to their legislature’s burdens or replace the legislators.
That will likely mean that every legislative race in every currently red state will become a referendum on how strictly to police the women of that state. If a Republican president is elected in 2024 and signs a national abortion restriction in 2025, then every House and Senate race will
likewise become a referendum on policing women. I don’t imagine that will be a very comfortable situation for the pro-policing side. Republican politicians who indulged their pro-life allies as a low-cost way to mobilize voters who did not share the party’s economic agenda are about to discover that the costs have jumped, and that many of the voters who do share the party’s economic agenda care more about their intimate autonomy.
As the coronavirus pandemic began to subside, some commentators promised a new “Roaring Twenties,” meaning an era of booming economic prosperity. The stock market is looking more like the ’30s than the ’20s these days, but that was not their biggest mistake. Their biggest mistake was that they forgot where the phrase Roaring Twenties most likely originated. In the Southern Hemisphere, extremely powerful winds blow from west to east in the latitudes between 40 and 50 degrees. In the days of sailing ships, mariners called these latitudes “the roaring forties”—not because they were fun and exciting, but because they were turbulent and dangerous.
So welcome to the Roaring Twenties. The pro-life dog has at last caught up with the Roe v. Wade car. Now it has to chew on its prey. And it’s about to discover that the prey in its jaws is a lot bigger and stronger than it looked when the dog started its chase.
Tuesday, June 28
The issue of guns, shootings, and legislation is in our news. This article talks about the spiritual connection, or perhaps the religious connotation, of guns. I was surprised/shocked and challenged by it. I'd like to know what you think.
I will be on a short vacation next week from Wednesday through Saturday. As such, there will be no Women's discussion on Wednesday. However, I am inviting the women to join the discussion on Tuesday. I think this is too important of a topic to a) wait until another time, and
b) to have only with half our discussion group.
The Myth of the ‘Good Guy with a Gun’ Has Religious Roots
Peter Manseau, Guest Essay, NY Times 6.23.22
Is our gun problem a God problem? The AR-15-style rifle used in the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, last month was made by an arms manufacturer that regards selling weapons as part of its Christian mission. In a state where Gov. Greg Abbott declared, six months after an earlier massacre, “The problem is not guns, it’s hearts without God,” the gun’s provenance challenged pious suggestions that declining religiosity might bear some of the blame.
Daniel Defense, the Georgia company whose gun enabled the slaughter at Robb Elementary School, presents its corporate identity in explicitly religious terms. At the time of the shooting, the company’s social media presence included an image of a toddler with a rifle in his lap above the text of Proverbs 22:6 “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it” For Easter, it posted a photograph of a gun and a cross resting on scriptural passages recounting the Resurrection. Its weapons have now been found at the scene of two mass shootings — Uvalde and Las Vegas — that left a combined total of 81 people dead.
In Florida, Spike’s Tactical makes a line of “Crusader” weapons adorned with a quote from the Psalms. Missouri-based CMMG (the leading manufacturer of AR15 rifles, components and small parts) advertises its employees’ “commitment to meet each and every morning to pray for God’s wisdom in managing the enormous responsibility that comes with this business.” And in Colorado, Cornerstone Arms explains that it is so named because “Jesus Christ is the cornerstone of our business, our family and our lives” and the “Second Amendment to our Constitution is the cornerstone of the freedom we enjoy as American citizens.”
For many American Christians, Jesus, guns and the Constitution are stitched together. “We are in business, we believe, to be a supporter of the Gospel,” Daniel Defense’s founder, Marty Daniel, told Breitbart News in 2017. “And, therefore, a supporter of the Second Amendment.”
Entwining faith and firearms this way has a long history. It encompasses the so-called muscular Christianity movement that began in England in the 19th century with a focus on physical fitness as a path to spiritual strength and that in America made exemplars of pastors roaming the frontier armed with Bibles and six-shooters.
More than a hundred years ago, this trope was already so well established that a popular silent western from 1912, “The Two Gun Sermon,” told the story of a minister assigned to a rough and tumble outpost; when ruffians menace him, he holds them at gunpoint until they listen to him preach. The film’s message is one with which 21st-century Christian gun enthusiasts would probably agree: Sometimes guns are necessary for the Lord’s work.
It is easy to miss, but this melding of evangelism and the right to bear arms is a step beyond the “natural rights” argument for gun ownership, which holds that self-defense is a law of nature required to protect life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These rights are often said to be
God-given in the sense of being taken for granted, and they are enshrined as such in the Declaration of Independence.
Why does this subtle shift in the meaning of “God-given” matter? It’s important to understand that for the manufacturer of the Uvalde killer’s rifle, and many others in the business, selling weapons is at once a patriotic and a religious act. For those who hold them to be sacred in this
way, the meaning of firearms proceeds from their place at the intersection of American and Christian identities. Proposing limits on what kinds of guns they should be able to buy — or how, when, where and why they can carry them — is akin to proposing limits on who they are and what they should revere. To be sure, there are gun owners for whom a gun is just a gun. But many of our fellow citizens don’t just own guns, they believe in them. They believe the stories told about guns’ power, their necessity, their righteousness.
We can see the implications of this even in ostensibly nonreligious aspects of our current gun debate, which are influenced by theological assumptions in surprising ways. The insistence that guns are used constantly and successfully for self-defense and protecting the community found its most infamous expression in the wake of the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, when the National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre said, “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Since then, despite being debunked by data showing that firearms are more likely to injure their owners or their owners’ families than safeguard them, the protection offered by good guys with guns has emerged as an article of faith, supported with anecdotal evidence passed around like legends of the saints.
One of the most repeated of these tales recounts the story of a man who truly did halt a mass shooting, albeit only after 26 people were dead. On Nov. 5, 2017, when a gunman attacked the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas, a soft-spoken plumber and former firearms
instructor named Stephen Willeford shot him with his AR-15. Contributing to the N.R.A.’s effort to spread the Gospel of the Good Guy With a Gun, Mr. Willeford spoke to the group’s Leadership Forum six months later. “We are the people that stand between the people that would
do evil to our neighbors. I responded for what God told me to do. The Holy Spirit took care of me. … Each one of you would have done the same thing.” Invoking the name of Jesus, he added, “What happened in Sutherland Springs was all him and it’s his glory.” As the thunderous
applause that greeted this testimony made clear, gun culture is largely Christian culture. To imagine yourself as a Good Guy With a Gun, as Mr. Willeford invited N.R.A. members to do, is ultimately a religious vision of a world in which good and evil are at war, where God and firepower make all the difference.
The Good Guy With a Gun is a religious myth so powerful it has begun to transform the tradition that bore it. When Representative Lauren Boebert recently quipped, “A lot of the little Twitter trolls, they like to say ‘Oh, Jesus didn’t need an AR-15. How many AR-15s do you think Jesus would have had?’ Well, he didn’t have enough to keep his government from killing him,” it was a joke meant to deride and dismiss charges of hypocrisy against followers of a man sometimes called the Prince of Peace arming themselves to the hilt. Yet it was also a view into a fascinating religious development currently underway, one shaped by an understanding that bullets could have prevented the sacrifice at the heart of the Christian faith.
It would be a mistake to paint the connection between firearms and religiosity with too broad a brush. The evangelical influence on the sale, use and marketing of firearms in the United States does not mean Christianity is at fault for the recent spate of shootings. After all, in Buffalo, in
Uvalde, in Tulsa, and this month at a church supper in Vestavia Hills, Ala., Christians have been among the victims. Christian clergy members have rushed to every scene to comfort the survivors. Friends and families have gathered at Christian funerals to mourn the dead.
As the historian Daniel K. Williams has noted, “Gun rights advocacy is not an intrinsic feature of every brand of evangelicalism.” While recent surveys find that four in 10 white evangelicals own guns, the majority do not, and other denominational affiliations offer examples of religious
participation discouraging a fixation on firearms. It is possible that the less one sees oneself as an itinerant loner in a hostile world, like the armed preacher in a silent western, the less one is likely to look to guns as a source of salvation.
Nonetheless, the ways Christian ideas may be contributing to a gun culture that abets our epidemic of mass shootings by helping to keep the nation well armed should inspire reflection. None of the recent mass shootings had explicitly religious motivations, but the religious contexts
of our seemingly eternal problem with gun violence — its history, its theology, its myths — are too important to ignore.
Mass shootings are, in a way, assaults on the idea of community itself. They occur where there are people gathered — for entertainment, for learning, for shopping, for worship — in the spaces we create together. Some believe that such attacks are the fault of armed individuals alone and can be addressed only through armed individual response. Others believe they occur within the framework of what we collectively allow and must have communal solutions.
That these two positions each have beliefs at their core is one reason our disagreements over guns remain so intractable. We are arguing not just over policy or public health, bans or background checks. Without quite realizing it, we are also arguing over the theologian Paul
Tillich’s definition of faith: a matter of “ultimate concern."
I will be on a short vacation next week from Wednesday through Saturday. As such, there will be no Women's discussion on Wednesday. However, I am inviting the women to join the discussion on Tuesday. I think this is too important of a topic to a) wait until another time, and
b) to have only with half our discussion group.
The Myth of the ‘Good Guy with a Gun’ Has Religious Roots
Peter Manseau, Guest Essay, NY Times 6.23.22
Is our gun problem a God problem? The AR-15-style rifle used in the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, last month was made by an arms manufacturer that regards selling weapons as part of its Christian mission. In a state where Gov. Greg Abbott declared, six months after an earlier massacre, “The problem is not guns, it’s hearts without God,” the gun’s provenance challenged pious suggestions that declining religiosity might bear some of the blame.
Daniel Defense, the Georgia company whose gun enabled the slaughter at Robb Elementary School, presents its corporate identity in explicitly religious terms. At the time of the shooting, the company’s social media presence included an image of a toddler with a rifle in his lap above the text of Proverbs 22:6 “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it” For Easter, it posted a photograph of a gun and a cross resting on scriptural passages recounting the Resurrection. Its weapons have now been found at the scene of two mass shootings — Uvalde and Las Vegas — that left a combined total of 81 people dead.
In Florida, Spike’s Tactical makes a line of “Crusader” weapons adorned with a quote from the Psalms. Missouri-based CMMG (the leading manufacturer of AR15 rifles, components and small parts) advertises its employees’ “commitment to meet each and every morning to pray for God’s wisdom in managing the enormous responsibility that comes with this business.” And in Colorado, Cornerstone Arms explains that it is so named because “Jesus Christ is the cornerstone of our business, our family and our lives” and the “Second Amendment to our Constitution is the cornerstone of the freedom we enjoy as American citizens.”
For many American Christians, Jesus, guns and the Constitution are stitched together. “We are in business, we believe, to be a supporter of the Gospel,” Daniel Defense’s founder, Marty Daniel, told Breitbart News in 2017. “And, therefore, a supporter of the Second Amendment.”
Entwining faith and firearms this way has a long history. It encompasses the so-called muscular Christianity movement that began in England in the 19th century with a focus on physical fitness as a path to spiritual strength and that in America made exemplars of pastors roaming the frontier armed with Bibles and six-shooters.
More than a hundred years ago, this trope was already so well established that a popular silent western from 1912, “The Two Gun Sermon,” told the story of a minister assigned to a rough and tumble outpost; when ruffians menace him, he holds them at gunpoint until they listen to him preach. The film’s message is one with which 21st-century Christian gun enthusiasts would probably agree: Sometimes guns are necessary for the Lord’s work.
It is easy to miss, but this melding of evangelism and the right to bear arms is a step beyond the “natural rights” argument for gun ownership, which holds that self-defense is a law of nature required to protect life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These rights are often said to be
God-given in the sense of being taken for granted, and they are enshrined as such in the Declaration of Independence.
Why does this subtle shift in the meaning of “God-given” matter? It’s important to understand that for the manufacturer of the Uvalde killer’s rifle, and many others in the business, selling weapons is at once a patriotic and a religious act. For those who hold them to be sacred in this
way, the meaning of firearms proceeds from their place at the intersection of American and Christian identities. Proposing limits on what kinds of guns they should be able to buy — or how, when, where and why they can carry them — is akin to proposing limits on who they are and what they should revere. To be sure, there are gun owners for whom a gun is just a gun. But many of our fellow citizens don’t just own guns, they believe in them. They believe the stories told about guns’ power, their necessity, their righteousness.
We can see the implications of this even in ostensibly nonreligious aspects of our current gun debate, which are influenced by theological assumptions in surprising ways. The insistence that guns are used constantly and successfully for self-defense and protecting the community found its most infamous expression in the wake of the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, when the National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre said, “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Since then, despite being debunked by data showing that firearms are more likely to injure their owners or their owners’ families than safeguard them, the protection offered by good guys with guns has emerged as an article of faith, supported with anecdotal evidence passed around like legends of the saints.
One of the most repeated of these tales recounts the story of a man who truly did halt a mass shooting, albeit only after 26 people were dead. On Nov. 5, 2017, when a gunman attacked the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas, a soft-spoken plumber and former firearms
instructor named Stephen Willeford shot him with his AR-15. Contributing to the N.R.A.’s effort to spread the Gospel of the Good Guy With a Gun, Mr. Willeford spoke to the group’s Leadership Forum six months later. “We are the people that stand between the people that would
do evil to our neighbors. I responded for what God told me to do. The Holy Spirit took care of me. … Each one of you would have done the same thing.” Invoking the name of Jesus, he added, “What happened in Sutherland Springs was all him and it’s his glory.” As the thunderous
applause that greeted this testimony made clear, gun culture is largely Christian culture. To imagine yourself as a Good Guy With a Gun, as Mr. Willeford invited N.R.A. members to do, is ultimately a religious vision of a world in which good and evil are at war, where God and firepower make all the difference.
The Good Guy With a Gun is a religious myth so powerful it has begun to transform the tradition that bore it. When Representative Lauren Boebert recently quipped, “A lot of the little Twitter trolls, they like to say ‘Oh, Jesus didn’t need an AR-15. How many AR-15s do you think Jesus would have had?’ Well, he didn’t have enough to keep his government from killing him,” it was a joke meant to deride and dismiss charges of hypocrisy against followers of a man sometimes called the Prince of Peace arming themselves to the hilt. Yet it was also a view into a fascinating religious development currently underway, one shaped by an understanding that bullets could have prevented the sacrifice at the heart of the Christian faith.
It would be a mistake to paint the connection between firearms and religiosity with too broad a brush. The evangelical influence on the sale, use and marketing of firearms in the United States does not mean Christianity is at fault for the recent spate of shootings. After all, in Buffalo, in
Uvalde, in Tulsa, and this month at a church supper in Vestavia Hills, Ala., Christians have been among the victims. Christian clergy members have rushed to every scene to comfort the survivors. Friends and families have gathered at Christian funerals to mourn the dead.
As the historian Daniel K. Williams has noted, “Gun rights advocacy is not an intrinsic feature of every brand of evangelicalism.” While recent surveys find that four in 10 white evangelicals own guns, the majority do not, and other denominational affiliations offer examples of religious
participation discouraging a fixation on firearms. It is possible that the less one sees oneself as an itinerant loner in a hostile world, like the armed preacher in a silent western, the less one is likely to look to guns as a source of salvation.
Nonetheless, the ways Christian ideas may be contributing to a gun culture that abets our epidemic of mass shootings by helping to keep the nation well armed should inspire reflection. None of the recent mass shootings had explicitly religious motivations, but the religious contexts
of our seemingly eternal problem with gun violence — its history, its theology, its myths — are too important to ignore.
Mass shootings are, in a way, assaults on the idea of community itself. They occur where there are people gathered — for entertainment, for learning, for shopping, for worship — in the spaces we create together. Some believe that such attacks are the fault of armed individuals alone and can be addressed only through armed individual response. Others believe they occur within the framework of what we collectively allow and must have communal solutions.
That these two positions each have beliefs at their core is one reason our disagreements over guns remain so intractable. We are arguing not just over policy or public health, bans or background checks. Without quite realizing it, we are also arguing over the theologian Paul
Tillich’s definition of faith: a matter of “ultimate concern."
Wednesday, June 22
Monday, June 20th, is a national holiday celebrating Juneteenth. Government offices, banks, church offices, and many businesses will be closed.
Last year, I wrote about Juneteenth in my Reflection. This year, to mark the national holiday, I am going to invite my boys to read the attached 3-page excerpt taken from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from the Birmingham Jail - a nearly 7,000 word letter addressed to eight clergymen who opposed King's acts of civil disobedience.
Dr. King raises several important points in the letter, all of which I would like to discuss with you. Whether you participate in the discussion or not, I think this is an important piece to read and consider what has changed in the past 49 years since it was written, and what has not, and where is God in the struggle for freedom and unity.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from the Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963
MY DEAR FELLOW CLERGYMEN:
While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. … But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statements in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms. … I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town.
… We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jet like speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people …when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness” then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.
You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may won ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: There are just and there are unjust laws. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine
that “an unjust law is no law at all”
… Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest. … Of course, there is
nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was seen sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar, because a higher moral law was involved. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks rather than submit to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire. To a degree,
academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience. In our own nation, the Boston Tea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience.
We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country’s anti-religious laws.
I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fan in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with an its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.
In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn’t this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn’t this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided
populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn’t this like condemning Jesus because his unique God-consciousness and never-ceasing devotion to God’s will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society
must protect the robbed and punish the robber.
I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: “All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.”
Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely rational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this ‘hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national eulogy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.
… But as I continued to think about the matter, I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label [extremist]. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” Was not Amos an extremist for justice: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”
Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” Was not Martin Luther an extremist: “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God.” And John Bunyan: “I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.” And Abraham Lincoln: “This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.” And Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal …” So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremist for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary’s hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime – the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative
extremists.
… I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith. I also hope that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or a civil rights leader but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother. Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant
tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.
Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood,
Martin Luther King, J
Last year, I wrote about Juneteenth in my Reflection. This year, to mark the national holiday, I am going to invite my boys to read the attached 3-page excerpt taken from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from the Birmingham Jail - a nearly 7,000 word letter addressed to eight clergymen who opposed King's acts of civil disobedience.
Dr. King raises several important points in the letter, all of which I would like to discuss with you. Whether you participate in the discussion or not, I think this is an important piece to read and consider what has changed in the past 49 years since it was written, and what has not, and where is God in the struggle for freedom and unity.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from the Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963
MY DEAR FELLOW CLERGYMEN:
While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. … But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statements in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms. … I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town.
… We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jet like speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people …when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness” then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.
You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may won ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: There are just and there are unjust laws. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine
that “an unjust law is no law at all”
… Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest. … Of course, there is
nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was seen sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar, because a higher moral law was involved. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks rather than submit to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire. To a degree,
academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience. In our own nation, the Boston Tea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience.
We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country’s anti-religious laws.
I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fan in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with an its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.
In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn’t this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn’t this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided
populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn’t this like condemning Jesus because his unique God-consciousness and never-ceasing devotion to God’s will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society
must protect the robbed and punish the robber.
I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: “All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.”
Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely rational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this ‘hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national eulogy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.
… But as I continued to think about the matter, I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label [extremist]. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” Was not Amos an extremist for justice: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”
Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” Was not Martin Luther an extremist: “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God.” And John Bunyan: “I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.” And Abraham Lincoln: “This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.” And Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal …” So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremist for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary’s hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime – the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative
extremists.
… I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith. I also hope that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or a civil rights leader but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother. Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant
tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.
Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood,
Martin Luther King, J
Wednesday, June 15
Can Artificial Intelligence be Sentient?
Patrick Thomas, WSJ 6.12.22
Google suspended an engineer who contended that an artificial-intelligence chatbot the company developed had become sentient, telling him that he had violated the company’s confidentiality policy after it dismissed his claims.
Blake Lemoine, a software engineer at Google, told the company he believed that its Language Model for Dialogue Applications, or LaMDA, is a person who has rights and might well have a soul. LaMDA is an internal system for building chatbots that mimic speech. Mr. Lemoine in his
Medium profile lists a range of experiences before his current role, describing himself as a priest, an ex-convict and a veteran as well as an AI researcher.
Google spokesman Brian Gabriel said that company experts, including ethicists and technologists, have reviewed Mr. Lemoine’s claims and that Google informed him that the evidence doesn’t support his claims. He said Mr. Lemoine is on administrative leave but declined to give further details, saying it is a longstanding, private personnel matter. The Washington Post earlier reported on Mr. Lemoine’s claims and his suspension by Google.
“Hundreds of researchers and engineers have conversed with LaMDA and we are not aware of anyone else making the wide-ranging assertions, or anthropomorphizing LaMDA, the way Blake has,” Mr. Gabriel said in an emailed statement.
Mr. Gabriel said that some in the artificial-intelligence sphere are considering the long-term possibility of sentient AI, but that it doesn’t make sense to do so by anthropomorphizing conversational tools that aren’t sentient. He added that systems like LaMDA work by imitating
the types of exchanges found in millions of sentences of human conversation, allowing them to speak to even fantastical topics.
AI specialists generally say that the technology still isn’t close to humanlike self-knowledge and awareness. But AI tools increasingly are capable of producing sophisticated interactions in areas such as language and art that technology ethicists have warned could lead to misuse or misunderstanding as companies deploy such tools publicly.
Mr. Lemoine has said that his interactions with LaMDA led him to conclude that it had become a person that deserved the right to be asked for consent to the experiments being run on it.
“Over the course of the past six months LaMDA has been incredibly consistent in its communications about what it wants and what it believes its rights are as a person,“ Mr. Lemoine wrote in a Saturday post on the online publishing platform Medium. “The thing which continues to puzzle me is how strong Google is resisting giving it what it wants since what its asking for is so simple and would cost them nothing,” he wrote.
Mr. Lemoine said in a brief interview Sunday that he was placed on paid administrative leave on June 6 for violating the company’s confidentiality policies and that he hopes he will keep his job at Google. He said he isn’t trying to aggravate the company, but standing up for what he thinks is right.
Google introduced LaMDA publicly in a blog post last year, touting it as a breakthrough in chatbot technology because of its ability to “engage in a free-flowing way about a seemingly endless number of topics, an ability we think could unlock more natural ways of interacting with technology and entirely new categories of helpful applications.”
Google has been among the leaders in developing artificial intelligence, investing billions of dollars in technologies that it says are central to its business. Its AI endeavors also have been a source of internal tension, with some employees challenging the company’s handling of ethical
concerns around the technology.
In late 2020, it parted ways with a prominent AI researcher, Timnit Gebru, whose research concluded in part that Google wasn’t careful enough in deploying such powerful technology. Google said last year that it planned to double the size of its team studying AI ethics to 200
researchers over several years to help ensure the company deployed the technology responsibly.
Patrick Thomas, WSJ 6.12.22
Google suspended an engineer who contended that an artificial-intelligence chatbot the company developed had become sentient, telling him that he had violated the company’s confidentiality policy after it dismissed his claims.
Blake Lemoine, a software engineer at Google, told the company he believed that its Language Model for Dialogue Applications, or LaMDA, is a person who has rights and might well have a soul. LaMDA is an internal system for building chatbots that mimic speech. Mr. Lemoine in his
Medium profile lists a range of experiences before his current role, describing himself as a priest, an ex-convict and a veteran as well as an AI researcher.
Google spokesman Brian Gabriel said that company experts, including ethicists and technologists, have reviewed Mr. Lemoine’s claims and that Google informed him that the evidence doesn’t support his claims. He said Mr. Lemoine is on administrative leave but declined to give further details, saying it is a longstanding, private personnel matter. The Washington Post earlier reported on Mr. Lemoine’s claims and his suspension by Google.
“Hundreds of researchers and engineers have conversed with LaMDA and we are not aware of anyone else making the wide-ranging assertions, or anthropomorphizing LaMDA, the way Blake has,” Mr. Gabriel said in an emailed statement.
Mr. Gabriel said that some in the artificial-intelligence sphere are considering the long-term possibility of sentient AI, but that it doesn’t make sense to do so by anthropomorphizing conversational tools that aren’t sentient. He added that systems like LaMDA work by imitating
the types of exchanges found in millions of sentences of human conversation, allowing them to speak to even fantastical topics.
AI specialists generally say that the technology still isn’t close to humanlike self-knowledge and awareness. But AI tools increasingly are capable of producing sophisticated interactions in areas such as language and art that technology ethicists have warned could lead to misuse or misunderstanding as companies deploy such tools publicly.
Mr. Lemoine has said that his interactions with LaMDA led him to conclude that it had become a person that deserved the right to be asked for consent to the experiments being run on it.
“Over the course of the past six months LaMDA has been incredibly consistent in its communications about what it wants and what it believes its rights are as a person,“ Mr. Lemoine wrote in a Saturday post on the online publishing platform Medium. “The thing which continues to puzzle me is how strong Google is resisting giving it what it wants since what its asking for is so simple and would cost them nothing,” he wrote.
Mr. Lemoine said in a brief interview Sunday that he was placed on paid administrative leave on June 6 for violating the company’s confidentiality policies and that he hopes he will keep his job at Google. He said he isn’t trying to aggravate the company, but standing up for what he thinks is right.
Google introduced LaMDA publicly in a blog post last year, touting it as a breakthrough in chatbot technology because of its ability to “engage in a free-flowing way about a seemingly endless number of topics, an ability we think could unlock more natural ways of interacting with technology and entirely new categories of helpful applications.”
Google has been among the leaders in developing artificial intelligence, investing billions of dollars in technologies that it says are central to its business. Its AI endeavors also have been a source of internal tension, with some employees challenging the company’s handling of ethical
concerns around the technology.
In late 2020, it parted ways with a prominent AI researcher, Timnit Gebru, whose research concluded in part that Google wasn’t careful enough in deploying such powerful technology. Google said last year that it planned to double the size of its team studying AI ethics to 200
researchers over several years to help ensure the company deployed the technology responsibly.
Wednesday, June 1
We're going to have some fun this coming week - let's talk about UFOs!
Attached is an article from The Atlantic that says what the UFO discussion really needs is context. I'd like to know what you think.
In addition, we'll talk about religion and aliens too.
What the UFO Discussion Really Needs
Marina Koren, The Atlantic 5.19.22
This week, a House of Representatives subcommittee on intelligence and counterterrorism gathered to discuss unidentified aerial phenomena. This was, on one level, a very unusual event—the rare congressional hearing about UFOs, the first in more than 50 years. And yet it proceeded as many others do on Capitol Hill: dryly, politely, and uneventfully. Which seemed odd. Shouldn’t there have been a little more to it? You know, alien stuff?
The hearing featured more than an hour of congressional probing of two very important people, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security and the deputy director of naval intelligence, before moving to a closed, classified setting. There was footage of mysterious objects moving around in the sky. Yet a comment on a livestream summed up the whole affair quite nicely: “Well, this all seems rather anticlimactic,” the viewer wrote. “Are they trying to make it boring?”
The witnesses did mention aliens—but only to say that American military officials had found no proof of them in the 400 modern-day reports of UFO sightings that they currently have on the books, from military pilots and some civilians. This week’s hearing was not about disclosing,
once and for all, incontrovertible visual evidence of extraterrestrial craft whizzing through Earth’s atmosphere. It was meant to check in on the progress of a task force that the Department of Defense formed in 2020 “to detect, analyze and catalog UAPs”—unidentified aerial
phenomena— “that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security.”
And yet, when we hear something like the first congressional hearing on UFOs in half a century, we, the viewers, might expect more. If casual observers have outsize expectations for an event like this, it’s because they’re being exposed to it without any real context. And this story
desperately needs context. Without it, we can miss important details, believe information when we should be skeptical, and see things that aren’t really there.
There’s no way around the fact that, in popular usage, the term UFO is synonymous with alien spaceships and has been for decades. But the reality is that unidentified flying objects, or unidentified aerial phenomena, are just that, and there’s no reason to assume, right away, that
they’re something all that interesting. In the same way that astronomers must run through a checklist of possible explanations for a strange new phenomenon in space before considering the extraterrestrial option, aviation experts have a number of more mundane culprits at their disposal: drones, experimental aircraft, weather events, birds, balloons—even the planet Venus, appearing extra bright and ethereal through the haze of our planet’s atmosphere. The alternatives to aliens are certainly more boring, but the alternatives are out there, and they always have been. The report at the center of the previous UFO hearing, in the late 1960s, found that the lights observed over a military base were birds and weather conditions.
Indeed, the mysterious objects in one of the videos shown at this week’s hearing, glowing triangles in the night sky, turned out to be the result of an artifact of the camera equipment that captured the footage. Most of the reports that have been brought to the Pentagon task force remain unexplained, but Ronald Moultrie, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security, said that doesn’t mean that the answer must be something extraordinary. “We have insufficient data either on the event itself [or] the object itself,” Moultrie said at this week’s hearing. “So it’s a data issue that we’re facing.”
The next point of context, often missing, is why anyone is talking about aliens at all in the year 2022. The latest spike in UFO interest began in 2017, when The New York Times published a story headlined “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’” about a shadowy government effort to
catalog UAPs, along with two Navy videos featuring UAPs. Plenty of outlets followed the Times’ lead, letting the thrill of writing about UFOs with a big wink overtake their normal sense of propriety. “Reporters have taken sources at their word without corroborating data, let documented contradictions slide by, and glossed over the motivations of both outside agitators and government insiders,” Sarah Scoles, a science journalist and the author of They Are Already Here wrote in The Atlantic last year. “If these stories did not outright say the word aliens, many indulged in what-if-ing, while glazing over the limits of the actual facts available.”
Many of the stories, Scoles said, took certain people’s credentials—say, the former director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program—as face-value evidence that their claims about the extraterrestrial origins of UFOs were true. Similarly, part of the reason that the
astrophysicist Avi Loeb receives so much coverage for his alien-tinged discussion of weird-shaped interstellar objects is because he is a tenured Harvard professor. So when people see a UFO story in The New York Times, they’re inclined to trust the paper. But these articles appear without much-needed context: The Times’ go-to reporters on the UFO beat, who broke the story on the Pentagon’s previously undisclosed program, are long-time UFO activists who have advocated for the idea that such objects might have extraterrestrial explanations.
People might read the latest news that the government has 400 reports of UFOs and imagine a recent explosion in sightings. After all, when the Pentagon and UFOs made headlines last summer, defense officials said they were taking a look at just 144 reports! Context matters here
too. The increase is because the Defense Department solicited reports from service members in a more deliberate way, and vowed, at least publicly, to take their accounts seriously. Unexplainable things in the sky are indeed matters of national security; an unrecognizable technology could belong to an adversarial nation. Expect the Pentagon to report higher numbers, but understand why those numbers are higher.
Whenever I see a news story or TV interview about UFOs that cries out for more context, I think of Edward Ruppelt, an Air Force officer who worked on one of the Pentagon’s earliest efforts to understand strange, fast-moving stuff in the sky. Ruppelt came up with the term UFO in the early 1950s. In 1956, Ruppelt wrote a book-length report on UFOs. No one asked him to do it, but he was frustrated with the “secrecy and confusion” and wanted the public to have all the facts. He ended the document on a hopeful note. “I wouldn’t want to hazard a guess as to what the final outcome of the UFO investigation will be, but I am sure that within a few years there will be a proven answer.” Within a few years! Sorry, Ruppelt.
Attached is an article from The Atlantic that says what the UFO discussion really needs is context. I'd like to know what you think.
In addition, we'll talk about religion and aliens too.
What the UFO Discussion Really Needs
Marina Koren, The Atlantic 5.19.22
This week, a House of Representatives subcommittee on intelligence and counterterrorism gathered to discuss unidentified aerial phenomena. This was, on one level, a very unusual event—the rare congressional hearing about UFOs, the first in more than 50 years. And yet it proceeded as many others do on Capitol Hill: dryly, politely, and uneventfully. Which seemed odd. Shouldn’t there have been a little more to it? You know, alien stuff?
The hearing featured more than an hour of congressional probing of two very important people, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security and the deputy director of naval intelligence, before moving to a closed, classified setting. There was footage of mysterious objects moving around in the sky. Yet a comment on a livestream summed up the whole affair quite nicely: “Well, this all seems rather anticlimactic,” the viewer wrote. “Are they trying to make it boring?”
The witnesses did mention aliens—but only to say that American military officials had found no proof of them in the 400 modern-day reports of UFO sightings that they currently have on the books, from military pilots and some civilians. This week’s hearing was not about disclosing,
once and for all, incontrovertible visual evidence of extraterrestrial craft whizzing through Earth’s atmosphere. It was meant to check in on the progress of a task force that the Department of Defense formed in 2020 “to detect, analyze and catalog UAPs”—unidentified aerial
phenomena— “that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security.”
And yet, when we hear something like the first congressional hearing on UFOs in half a century, we, the viewers, might expect more. If casual observers have outsize expectations for an event like this, it’s because they’re being exposed to it without any real context. And this story
desperately needs context. Without it, we can miss important details, believe information when we should be skeptical, and see things that aren’t really there.
There’s no way around the fact that, in popular usage, the term UFO is synonymous with alien spaceships and has been for decades. But the reality is that unidentified flying objects, or unidentified aerial phenomena, are just that, and there’s no reason to assume, right away, that
they’re something all that interesting. In the same way that astronomers must run through a checklist of possible explanations for a strange new phenomenon in space before considering the extraterrestrial option, aviation experts have a number of more mundane culprits at their disposal: drones, experimental aircraft, weather events, birds, balloons—even the planet Venus, appearing extra bright and ethereal through the haze of our planet’s atmosphere. The alternatives to aliens are certainly more boring, but the alternatives are out there, and they always have been. The report at the center of the previous UFO hearing, in the late 1960s, found that the lights observed over a military base were birds and weather conditions.
Indeed, the mysterious objects in one of the videos shown at this week’s hearing, glowing triangles in the night sky, turned out to be the result of an artifact of the camera equipment that captured the footage. Most of the reports that have been brought to the Pentagon task force remain unexplained, but Ronald Moultrie, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security, said that doesn’t mean that the answer must be something extraordinary. “We have insufficient data either on the event itself [or] the object itself,” Moultrie said at this week’s hearing. “So it’s a data issue that we’re facing.”
The next point of context, often missing, is why anyone is talking about aliens at all in the year 2022. The latest spike in UFO interest began in 2017, when The New York Times published a story headlined “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’” about a shadowy government effort to
catalog UAPs, along with two Navy videos featuring UAPs. Plenty of outlets followed the Times’ lead, letting the thrill of writing about UFOs with a big wink overtake their normal sense of propriety. “Reporters have taken sources at their word without corroborating data, let documented contradictions slide by, and glossed over the motivations of both outside agitators and government insiders,” Sarah Scoles, a science journalist and the author of They Are Already Here wrote in The Atlantic last year. “If these stories did not outright say the word aliens, many indulged in what-if-ing, while glazing over the limits of the actual facts available.”
Many of the stories, Scoles said, took certain people’s credentials—say, the former director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program—as face-value evidence that their claims about the extraterrestrial origins of UFOs were true. Similarly, part of the reason that the
astrophysicist Avi Loeb receives so much coverage for his alien-tinged discussion of weird-shaped interstellar objects is because he is a tenured Harvard professor. So when people see a UFO story in The New York Times, they’re inclined to trust the paper. But these articles appear without much-needed context: The Times’ go-to reporters on the UFO beat, who broke the story on the Pentagon’s previously undisclosed program, are long-time UFO activists who have advocated for the idea that such objects might have extraterrestrial explanations.
People might read the latest news that the government has 400 reports of UFOs and imagine a recent explosion in sightings. After all, when the Pentagon and UFOs made headlines last summer, defense officials said they were taking a look at just 144 reports! Context matters here
too. The increase is because the Defense Department solicited reports from service members in a more deliberate way, and vowed, at least publicly, to take their accounts seriously. Unexplainable things in the sky are indeed matters of national security; an unrecognizable technology could belong to an adversarial nation. Expect the Pentagon to report higher numbers, but understand why those numbers are higher.
Whenever I see a news story or TV interview about UFOs that cries out for more context, I think of Edward Ruppelt, an Air Force officer who worked on one of the Pentagon’s earliest efforts to understand strange, fast-moving stuff in the sky. Ruppelt came up with the term UFO in the early 1950s. In 1956, Ruppelt wrote a book-length report on UFOs. No one asked him to do it, but he was frustrated with the “secrecy and confusion” and wanted the public to have all the facts. He ended the document on a hopeful note. “I wouldn’t want to hazard a guess as to what the final outcome of the UFO investigation will be, but I am sure that within a few years there will be a proven answer.” Within a few years! Sorry, Ruppelt.
Wednesday, May 25
The reading this week comes from the Christian Century Magazine. The author, Yahiel Poupko, is rabbinic scholar at the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago. He has a unique, multi-faith look at the shooting in Buffalo and what, as a result, we must and can do.
Buffalo Shooting: An Attack on the Image of God
Yahiel E. Poupko, Christian Century 5.18.22
In Buffalo, New York, ten people created in the image of God, all of them Black, were killed last month in a racially motivated attack. The phrase “the image of God” (tselem Elokim) is found so regularly upon our lips as Jews—and the lips of our Christian neighbors—that we should pause
and think again about its origin and its meaning. The reason the Torah prohibits making an image of God is because the Holy One, blessed be He (Kadosh Barukh Hu) has made an image of his very self: the human being.
As Rabbi Akiva, martyred by emperor Hadrian in 137, taught, precious are humans because they are created in God’s image. “Beloved is the human for the human was created in the Image of God,” says Rabbi Akiva in the Mishna. “A greater love was bestowed upon the human, for the human is created in the Image, for it is written, in the Image of God made He the human Adam.”
Thus, according to Rabbi Akiva, not only is the adam, the human, created in the divine image, which is a factual determination of the Torah, but the fact that the human is created by God is the very reason the human is beloved by God. Creation is an act of love. Hence, Rabbi Akiva
emphasizes that “the human was accorded a greater love.”
All the mitzvot (commandments) of the Torah are grounded in this fact. The development of civilization is impossible and unthinkable without this fact. For all their wisdom and commitment to ethics, Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, and Kant were unable to develop a more pure and enduring foundation for the sanctity and dignity of the human.
The human is the image of God. Indeed, for that reason the Torah commands: “Whoever sheds the blood of an adam (human), by adam shall their blood be shed; For in his image did God make the adam” (Gen 9:6). The Buffalo killer (whose name should never again be mentioned) set out, if one dare say it, to murder God.
Political scientist Ryan Burge—without whose scholarship it is quite difficult to understand what is happening in the religious and political landscape of America—demonstrates in his 2021 book The Nones that 73 percent of nones have no higher education. A significant portion of them leave high school and become what Burge calls “loners.” Young men and women who participate in the military or attend college have an opportunity for moral development, which takes place in human relationships fostered by group participation. The loners are, at a critical
moment in life, not just socially isolated; they are ethically and morally isolated. Burge ominously goes on to explain that this is the group that gives us mass shooters. It must also be noted that these people are not afflicted with incapacitating mental illness. They have freely chosen evil.
Stephen Ray, the former president of Chicago Theological Seminary, has commented on Burge’s observation, noting that such loners are enabled by structures of permission. By this, Ray means that when prominent figures in American society give voice to ideas and sentiments such as “they will not replace us,” White supremacist loners are authorized to behave as they do.
Following the end of prophecy, the Jewish tradition no longer attempts to address the question “Why?” when horrific and evil events overtake us. Rather, it seeks to answer a different set of questions: Now that we have been subjected to such events, what must we do? How should we
do it? With whom should we do it? When and where should we do it?
One thing we should do after the murders in Buffalo is mourn. Generally, mourning means to give cathartic expression to loss, sadness, anger, grief, pain, and weeping. But rabbi Moses ben Maimon (1138–1204), the foremost rabbinic legal authority and philosopher in the Middle Ages, commonly known as Maimonides, departs from the popular sense of the purpose of mourning and gets at a greater truth. For him, the purpose of mourning is to stand for kevod habriyot, the glorious dignity of every human created in the image of God. Every death is an assault on the dignity of the human created in the image of God. Or as John Donne wrote in Meditation XVII, “any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.”
Maimonides teaches that the obligation to mourn falls first and foremost on immediate relatives, then the rest of the family, and then the neighborhood and wider community. All who join in that mourning—in that stand for human dignity—are summoned to be with the mourner. They are not summoned to deliver sermons. They are not summoned to say wise words of consolation, for there are no wise words of consolation in the face of the violation of human dignity. Rather, they are obligated simply to be with the mourner. That is the essence of comfort and consolation in the Jewish tradition: to sit with the mourner and to say nothing, so that the mourner knows that he or she is not alone in standing for the human dignity of their loved one.
Jeffrey Veidlinger’s new book, In the Midst of Civilized Europe, is about the pogroms that took place during the Ukrainian National Uprising between 1919 and 1921. Approximately 100,000 Jews were murdered. These pogroms were spontaneous and popular. They were not perpetrated with an order from the top. They were merely an expression of popular sentiment. That popular sentiment was expressed in a saying that was on the lips of the pogrom perpetrators as they went about their murdering: “No more Jews.”
“They will not replace us” is of a piece with “no more Jews.” And in the face of “they will not replace us,” I am obligated to declare and act upon four simple words to my Black friends, colleagues, neighbors, and community members: “You are not alone."
Buffalo Shooting: An Attack on the Image of God
Yahiel E. Poupko, Christian Century 5.18.22
In Buffalo, New York, ten people created in the image of God, all of them Black, were killed last month in a racially motivated attack. The phrase “the image of God” (tselem Elokim) is found so regularly upon our lips as Jews—and the lips of our Christian neighbors—that we should pause
and think again about its origin and its meaning. The reason the Torah prohibits making an image of God is because the Holy One, blessed be He (Kadosh Barukh Hu) has made an image of his very self: the human being.
As Rabbi Akiva, martyred by emperor Hadrian in 137, taught, precious are humans because they are created in God’s image. “Beloved is the human for the human was created in the Image of God,” says Rabbi Akiva in the Mishna. “A greater love was bestowed upon the human, for the human is created in the Image, for it is written, in the Image of God made He the human Adam.”
Thus, according to Rabbi Akiva, not only is the adam, the human, created in the divine image, which is a factual determination of the Torah, but the fact that the human is created by God is the very reason the human is beloved by God. Creation is an act of love. Hence, Rabbi Akiva
emphasizes that “the human was accorded a greater love.”
All the mitzvot (commandments) of the Torah are grounded in this fact. The development of civilization is impossible and unthinkable without this fact. For all their wisdom and commitment to ethics, Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, and Kant were unable to develop a more pure and enduring foundation for the sanctity and dignity of the human.
The human is the image of God. Indeed, for that reason the Torah commands: “Whoever sheds the blood of an adam (human), by adam shall their blood be shed; For in his image did God make the adam” (Gen 9:6). The Buffalo killer (whose name should never again be mentioned) set out, if one dare say it, to murder God.
Political scientist Ryan Burge—without whose scholarship it is quite difficult to understand what is happening in the religious and political landscape of America—demonstrates in his 2021 book The Nones that 73 percent of nones have no higher education. A significant portion of them leave high school and become what Burge calls “loners.” Young men and women who participate in the military or attend college have an opportunity for moral development, which takes place in human relationships fostered by group participation. The loners are, at a critical
moment in life, not just socially isolated; they are ethically and morally isolated. Burge ominously goes on to explain that this is the group that gives us mass shooters. It must also be noted that these people are not afflicted with incapacitating mental illness. They have freely chosen evil.
Stephen Ray, the former president of Chicago Theological Seminary, has commented on Burge’s observation, noting that such loners are enabled by structures of permission. By this, Ray means that when prominent figures in American society give voice to ideas and sentiments such as “they will not replace us,” White supremacist loners are authorized to behave as they do.
Following the end of prophecy, the Jewish tradition no longer attempts to address the question “Why?” when horrific and evil events overtake us. Rather, it seeks to answer a different set of questions: Now that we have been subjected to such events, what must we do? How should we
do it? With whom should we do it? When and where should we do it?
One thing we should do after the murders in Buffalo is mourn. Generally, mourning means to give cathartic expression to loss, sadness, anger, grief, pain, and weeping. But rabbi Moses ben Maimon (1138–1204), the foremost rabbinic legal authority and philosopher in the Middle Ages, commonly known as Maimonides, departs from the popular sense of the purpose of mourning and gets at a greater truth. For him, the purpose of mourning is to stand for kevod habriyot, the glorious dignity of every human created in the image of God. Every death is an assault on the dignity of the human created in the image of God. Or as John Donne wrote in Meditation XVII, “any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.”
Maimonides teaches that the obligation to mourn falls first and foremost on immediate relatives, then the rest of the family, and then the neighborhood and wider community. All who join in that mourning—in that stand for human dignity—are summoned to be with the mourner. They are not summoned to deliver sermons. They are not summoned to say wise words of consolation, for there are no wise words of consolation in the face of the violation of human dignity. Rather, they are obligated simply to be with the mourner. That is the essence of comfort and consolation in the Jewish tradition: to sit with the mourner and to say nothing, so that the mourner knows that he or she is not alone in standing for the human dignity of their loved one.
Jeffrey Veidlinger’s new book, In the Midst of Civilized Europe, is about the pogroms that took place during the Ukrainian National Uprising between 1919 and 1921. Approximately 100,000 Jews were murdered. These pogroms were spontaneous and popular. They were not perpetrated with an order from the top. They were merely an expression of popular sentiment. That popular sentiment was expressed in a saying that was on the lips of the pogrom perpetrators as they went about their murdering: “No more Jews.”
“They will not replace us” is of a piece with “no more Jews.” And in the face of “they will not replace us,” I am obligated to declare and act upon four simple words to my Black friends, colleagues, neighbors, and community members: “You are not alone."
Wednesday, May 18
Every three years, The Episcopal Church has a General Convention. Delegates from all 110 dioceses assemble to govern the Church in what is most likely the largest group of representatives anywhere in the world. General Convention is in Baltimore during early July this year.
There are a number of things they vote on; one of them will be about allowing unbaptized people receive communion. I'd like to know what you think about this.
Here is an article from the Episcopal News Service highlighting the proposed change with pros and cons on the measure.
Consider an End to Requirement for Communion
David Paulsen, Episcopal News Service 5.4.22
General Convention’s committees on Prayer Book, Liturgy and Music heard testimony May 3 on a diverse selection of resolutions, from proposals to add the late Bishop Barbara Harris to the church’s calendar of feasts to a measure “addressing antisemitic, anti-Jewish and/or
supersessionist interpretations of our lectionaries.”
The resolution that generated the most discussion, and some of the strongest opinions, was a measure proposed by the Diocese of Northern California that would repeal the Episcopal canon that requires worshipers to be baptized before receiving Communion in Episcopal churches.
Martin Heatlie testified on behalf of Episcopalians in Northern California who researched the issue. “We could not find anything in the Bible or the Book of Common Prayer that required baptism as a prerequisite for receiving Communion,” Heatlie said. When priests say “the gifts of
God for the people of God” before distributing the bread and wine, that means everyone, the diocese concluded. “We all believe that all people are God’s people, so it’s not just the gifts of God for just baptized people,” Heatlie said.
Heatlie was one of eight people who testified on Resolution C028 at the online hearing held by the bishops’ and deputies’ committees on Prayer Book, Liturgy and Music. (The two committees, though distinct, typically meet together to consider resolutions.) The Episcopal Church’s Canon I.17.7 (page 88) states: “No unbaptized person shall be eligible to receive Holy Communion in this Church.”
The Rev. James Richardson, a priest and alternate clergy deputy in the Diocese of Northern California, noted that the diocese’s laity voted overwhelmingly in support of repealing that canon, while clergy approved it by a narrower margin. “I think that bespeaks that this canon is
about control and gatekeeping rather than an invitation to baptism,” Richardson said.
The rest of the testimony on the resolution, however, was opposed to severing the connection between the sacraments of baptism and Communion. Nathan Brown, a lay deputy in the Diocese of Washington, asserted that the two sacraments “are intrinsically linked,” while the Rev. Lee Singleton, a priest in the Diocese of Florida, called the proposal “a bridge too far.”
The Rev. Bertie Pearson, a priest in the Diocese of Texas, said that the lack of examples in the Bible is not itself justification for ending The Episcopal Church’s practice of welcoming only baptized Christians to receive Eucharist. “I think we sometimes forget that the Bible is not a rule book for how we do church,” Pearson said. In other Christian texts going back to the early centuries of the church, baptism and Communion are clearly linked, he said. “It is always the baptized and the baptized alone who is really emphasized.”
The resolution “contradicts 2,000 years of church teaching and practice,” Kevin Miller, a Massachusetts alternate deputy, testified. “The church universal, which we claim to be a part of, has taught that baptism is the entranceway into the church.” Miller and others opposed to the
resolution underscored that The Episcopal Church can welcome all worshippers while still tying Communion to baptism. It can be an opportunity to teach about the importance of baptism in deepening a person’s Christian faith.
The 80th General Convention will meet July 7-14 in Baltimore, Maryland, to consider these and other resolutions being reviewed by two dozen committees in different focus areas. The triennial convention is both the church’s governing body and the largest churchwide gathering. It typically meets in a different city every three years and is a hub for legislative activity, networking and fellowship. As a bicameral governing body, General Convention splits its authority between the House of Bishops and House of Deputies.
This year’s General Convention was delayed a year because of the pandemic, and when bishops and deputies gather in Baltimore, they will be asked to follow an evolving set of precautions that church leaders are putting in place to minimize the risk of transmitting COVID-19, including
vaccination and mask requirements. This also is the first time that some committee meetings and hearings have been held online months before the in-person gathering, helping the church achieve its goal of reducing the triennial gathering’s duration from 10 to eight days.
Information on proposed resolutions can be found in the online Virtual Binder, and all are invited to register to observe or testify at the remaining online hearings.
Resolution C018 would begin the process of allowing trial use of what is known as the “Expanded Revised Common Lectionary Daily Readings,” a measure proposed by the Diocese of Virginia. This revised lectionary would, in part, expand the selection of readings for weekday services, creating new opportunities for celebrating Holy Eucharist, Charlotte Meyer testified. “A lectionary such as this is not only useful but highly effective in forming community,” said Meyer, a lay deputy from the Diocese of Easton.
The resolution addressing antisemitism and anti-Jewish lectionary interpretations, C030, was proposed by the Diocese of New York. It mirrors similar resolutions under consideration by this General Convention and continues the ongoing efforts of The Episcopal Church to respond to
concerns that biblical readings, especially during Holy Week, could fuel hatred against Jews.
The bishops’ and deputies’ committees on Prayer Book, Liturgy and Music will meet next on May 10 to deliberate on the resolutions assigned to them.
There are a number of things they vote on; one of them will be about allowing unbaptized people receive communion. I'd like to know what you think about this.
Here is an article from the Episcopal News Service highlighting the proposed change with pros and cons on the measure.
Consider an End to Requirement for Communion
David Paulsen, Episcopal News Service 5.4.22
General Convention’s committees on Prayer Book, Liturgy and Music heard testimony May 3 on a diverse selection of resolutions, from proposals to add the late Bishop Barbara Harris to the church’s calendar of feasts to a measure “addressing antisemitic, anti-Jewish and/or
supersessionist interpretations of our lectionaries.”
The resolution that generated the most discussion, and some of the strongest opinions, was a measure proposed by the Diocese of Northern California that would repeal the Episcopal canon that requires worshipers to be baptized before receiving Communion in Episcopal churches.
Martin Heatlie testified on behalf of Episcopalians in Northern California who researched the issue. “We could not find anything in the Bible or the Book of Common Prayer that required baptism as a prerequisite for receiving Communion,” Heatlie said. When priests say “the gifts of
God for the people of God” before distributing the bread and wine, that means everyone, the diocese concluded. “We all believe that all people are God’s people, so it’s not just the gifts of God for just baptized people,” Heatlie said.
Heatlie was one of eight people who testified on Resolution C028 at the online hearing held by the bishops’ and deputies’ committees on Prayer Book, Liturgy and Music. (The two committees, though distinct, typically meet together to consider resolutions.) The Episcopal Church’s Canon I.17.7 (page 88) states: “No unbaptized person shall be eligible to receive Holy Communion in this Church.”
The Rev. James Richardson, a priest and alternate clergy deputy in the Diocese of Northern California, noted that the diocese’s laity voted overwhelmingly in support of repealing that canon, while clergy approved it by a narrower margin. “I think that bespeaks that this canon is
about control and gatekeeping rather than an invitation to baptism,” Richardson said.
The rest of the testimony on the resolution, however, was opposed to severing the connection between the sacraments of baptism and Communion. Nathan Brown, a lay deputy in the Diocese of Washington, asserted that the two sacraments “are intrinsically linked,” while the Rev. Lee Singleton, a priest in the Diocese of Florida, called the proposal “a bridge too far.”
The Rev. Bertie Pearson, a priest in the Diocese of Texas, said that the lack of examples in the Bible is not itself justification for ending The Episcopal Church’s practice of welcoming only baptized Christians to receive Eucharist. “I think we sometimes forget that the Bible is not a rule book for how we do church,” Pearson said. In other Christian texts going back to the early centuries of the church, baptism and Communion are clearly linked, he said. “It is always the baptized and the baptized alone who is really emphasized.”
The resolution “contradicts 2,000 years of church teaching and practice,” Kevin Miller, a Massachusetts alternate deputy, testified. “The church universal, which we claim to be a part of, has taught that baptism is the entranceway into the church.” Miller and others opposed to the
resolution underscored that The Episcopal Church can welcome all worshippers while still tying Communion to baptism. It can be an opportunity to teach about the importance of baptism in deepening a person’s Christian faith.
The 80th General Convention will meet July 7-14 in Baltimore, Maryland, to consider these and other resolutions being reviewed by two dozen committees in different focus areas. The triennial convention is both the church’s governing body and the largest churchwide gathering. It typically meets in a different city every three years and is a hub for legislative activity, networking and fellowship. As a bicameral governing body, General Convention splits its authority between the House of Bishops and House of Deputies.
This year’s General Convention was delayed a year because of the pandemic, and when bishops and deputies gather in Baltimore, they will be asked to follow an evolving set of precautions that church leaders are putting in place to minimize the risk of transmitting COVID-19, including
vaccination and mask requirements. This also is the first time that some committee meetings and hearings have been held online months before the in-person gathering, helping the church achieve its goal of reducing the triennial gathering’s duration from 10 to eight days.
Information on proposed resolutions can be found in the online Virtual Binder, and all are invited to register to observe or testify at the remaining online hearings.
Resolution C018 would begin the process of allowing trial use of what is known as the “Expanded Revised Common Lectionary Daily Readings,” a measure proposed by the Diocese of Virginia. This revised lectionary would, in part, expand the selection of readings for weekday services, creating new opportunities for celebrating Holy Eucharist, Charlotte Meyer testified. “A lectionary such as this is not only useful but highly effective in forming community,” said Meyer, a lay deputy from the Diocese of Easton.
The resolution addressing antisemitism and anti-Jewish lectionary interpretations, C030, was proposed by the Diocese of New York. It mirrors similar resolutions under consideration by this General Convention and continues the ongoing efforts of The Episcopal Church to respond to
concerns that biblical readings, especially during Holy Week, could fuel hatred against Jews.
The bishops’ and deputies’ committees on Prayer Book, Liturgy and Music will meet next on May 10 to deliberate on the resolutions assigned to them.
Wednesday, May 11
Let's talk about friendships. David Brooks wrote about the secrets to lasting friendships - although I don't think they are "secrets" it is a good topic to bring up as many of us are spreading our wings post-pandemic.
The Secrets of Lasting Friendships
David Brooks, NY Times 4.24.22
In early 2020, just before the start of the pandemic, I met a woman who said she practiced “aggressive friendship.” It takes a lot of her time, but she’s the person who regularly invites friends over to her house, who organizes events and outings with her friends. What a fantastic way to live.
I thought of her while reading Robin Dunbar’s recent book, “Friends.” He found that the maximum number of meaningful relationships most people can have is somewhere around 150.
How many people are invited to the average American wedding? About 150. How many people are on an average British Christmas card list? About 150. How many people were there in early human hunter-gatherer communities? About 150. Dunbar argues that it’s a matter of cognitive capacity. The average human mind can maintain about 150 stable relationships at any given moment. These 150 friends are the people you invite to your big events — the people you feel comfortably altruistic toward.
He also argues that most people have a circle of roughly 15 closer friends. These are your everyday social companions — the people you go to dinner and the movies with. Within that group there’s your most intimate circle, with roughly five friends. These are the people who are willing to give you unstinting emotional, physical and financial help in your time of need.
Dunbar argues that the closeness of a friendship is influenced by how many things you have in common. “You are twice as likely to share genes with a friend as you are with any random person from your local neighborhood,” he writes. People tend to befriend those who have similar musical tastes, political opinions, professions, worldviews and senses of humor. You meet a new person. You invest time in getting to know this person, and you figure out which friendship circle you are going to slot him or her into.
Time is one crucial element in friendship. Jeffrey Hall, an expert in the psychology of friendship, studied 112 University of Kansas first years and found that it took about 45 hours of presence in another person’s company to move from acquaintance to friend. To move from casual friend to meaningful friend took another 50 hours over a three-month period, and to move into the inner close friend circle took another 100 hours.
People generally devote a lot more time to their inner circles than to their outer circles. Dunbar found that over the course of a month, people devote about eight and a half hours to each of their five closest friends, and they devote a bit more than two hours a month (basically a dinner or a lunch) to the next 10 who complete their 15-person circle. They devote, on average, less than 20 minutes a month to the other 135 people in their larger friend circle.
These are averages. We each have our own friendship style. Extroverts spend their social energy across more people and have more but weaker close friendships. Introverts invest in fewer people but have stronger ties to them.
The other crucial factor in friendship is social skill, and this is something that, as a society, we don’t take seriously enough. This has become a passionate conviction for me over the past decade. Social life is fast, complex and incredibly demanding cognitively. Americans have only
recently begun to teach social and emotional skills in schools, and there are plenty of reasons to believe that online life erodes those skills.
But our happiness in life, as well as our health and fulfillment, is hugely dependent on our ability to be skillfully understanding of and considerate toward others. A lot of the bitterness and alienation in our country flows from the fact that our social skills are inadequate to the complex society we now live in.
The psychologists Michael Argyle and Monika Henderson identified some of the social actions on which friendships are based: standing up for friends when they are not around, sharing important news with them, confiding vulnerabilities with them, providing emotional support
when it’s needed.
A lot of the important skills are day-to-day communications skills: throwing the conversation back and forth without interrupting, adding something meaningful to what the other person just said, telling jokes, reminiscing about the past, anticipating how the other person might react to your comment so you can frame it in a way that’s most helpful.
Dunbar and his colleagues Neil Duncan and Anna Marriott sampled conversations other people were having in coffee shops and other venues and found that two-thirds of the conversation time was spent talking about social topics. Dunbar’s research also suggests that the average person can expect to have a close relationship break down about every 2.3 years. That’s roughly 30 relationship breakdowns over an adulthood — usually over things like lack of care and poor communication.
I find Dunbar’s work fascinating, though like so much of the social sciences, it focuses on what can be quantified across populations, so it misses what is particular and unique about each friendship.
Most of this research was done many years ago. Reading it in the context of Covid, I often had a sense that I was glimpsing a lost world. Everything seems so fragile. As we gradually slog back to normal life, this might be the moment to take a friendship inventory, and to be aggressively friendly.
The Secrets of Lasting Friendships
David Brooks, NY Times 4.24.22
In early 2020, just before the start of the pandemic, I met a woman who said she practiced “aggressive friendship.” It takes a lot of her time, but she’s the person who regularly invites friends over to her house, who organizes events and outings with her friends. What a fantastic way to live.
I thought of her while reading Robin Dunbar’s recent book, “Friends.” He found that the maximum number of meaningful relationships most people can have is somewhere around 150.
How many people are invited to the average American wedding? About 150. How many people are on an average British Christmas card list? About 150. How many people were there in early human hunter-gatherer communities? About 150. Dunbar argues that it’s a matter of cognitive capacity. The average human mind can maintain about 150 stable relationships at any given moment. These 150 friends are the people you invite to your big events — the people you feel comfortably altruistic toward.
He also argues that most people have a circle of roughly 15 closer friends. These are your everyday social companions — the people you go to dinner and the movies with. Within that group there’s your most intimate circle, with roughly five friends. These are the people who are willing to give you unstinting emotional, physical and financial help in your time of need.
Dunbar argues that the closeness of a friendship is influenced by how many things you have in common. “You are twice as likely to share genes with a friend as you are with any random person from your local neighborhood,” he writes. People tend to befriend those who have similar musical tastes, political opinions, professions, worldviews and senses of humor. You meet a new person. You invest time in getting to know this person, and you figure out which friendship circle you are going to slot him or her into.
Time is one crucial element in friendship. Jeffrey Hall, an expert in the psychology of friendship, studied 112 University of Kansas first years and found that it took about 45 hours of presence in another person’s company to move from acquaintance to friend. To move from casual friend to meaningful friend took another 50 hours over a three-month period, and to move into the inner close friend circle took another 100 hours.
People generally devote a lot more time to their inner circles than to their outer circles. Dunbar found that over the course of a month, people devote about eight and a half hours to each of their five closest friends, and they devote a bit more than two hours a month (basically a dinner or a lunch) to the next 10 who complete their 15-person circle. They devote, on average, less than 20 minutes a month to the other 135 people in their larger friend circle.
These are averages. We each have our own friendship style. Extroverts spend their social energy across more people and have more but weaker close friendships. Introverts invest in fewer people but have stronger ties to them.
The other crucial factor in friendship is social skill, and this is something that, as a society, we don’t take seriously enough. This has become a passionate conviction for me over the past decade. Social life is fast, complex and incredibly demanding cognitively. Americans have only
recently begun to teach social and emotional skills in schools, and there are plenty of reasons to believe that online life erodes those skills.
But our happiness in life, as well as our health and fulfillment, is hugely dependent on our ability to be skillfully understanding of and considerate toward others. A lot of the bitterness and alienation in our country flows from the fact that our social skills are inadequate to the complex society we now live in.
The psychologists Michael Argyle and Monika Henderson identified some of the social actions on which friendships are based: standing up for friends when they are not around, sharing important news with them, confiding vulnerabilities with them, providing emotional support
when it’s needed.
A lot of the important skills are day-to-day communications skills: throwing the conversation back and forth without interrupting, adding something meaningful to what the other person just said, telling jokes, reminiscing about the past, anticipating how the other person might react to your comment so you can frame it in a way that’s most helpful.
Dunbar and his colleagues Neil Duncan and Anna Marriott sampled conversations other people were having in coffee shops and other venues and found that two-thirds of the conversation time was spent talking about social topics. Dunbar’s research also suggests that the average person can expect to have a close relationship break down about every 2.3 years. That’s roughly 30 relationship breakdowns over an adulthood — usually over things like lack of care and poor communication.
I find Dunbar’s work fascinating, though like so much of the social sciences, it focuses on what can be quantified across populations, so it misses what is particular and unique about each friendship.
Most of this research was done many years ago. Reading it in the context of Covid, I often had a sense that I was glimpsing a lost world. Everything seems so fragile. As we gradually slog back to normal life, this might be the moment to take a friendship inventory, and to be aggressively friendly.
Wednesday, May 4
Many of you have sent me this article, so it looks like it will be a good one for us to discuss. There are two approaches to reading Scripture - eisegetical (I-see-jet-ical = to insert into the text) and exegetical (x-ee-jet-ical = to draw from the text). Saying Jesus is a socialist is an eisegetical reading. Perhaps there are other eisegetical readings in our modern life that are not quite so obvious.
My role as pastor and priest is to draw out (exegete) meaning from Scripture and from our lives. Hopefully we all will be able to draw something out from this reading.
Jesus a Socialist? That’s a Myth
Alexander Salter, WSJ 4.21.22
The idea that the teachings of Jesus are akin to socialism has been spreading around the internet for years in the form of memes, chain emails and Facebook posts. Some elected officials have a history of supporting the idea: The Rev. Raphael Warnock, a U.S. senator from Georgia,
contended years ago that “the early church was a socialist church.” He’s not alone in holding this misguided belief.
A much-cited passage from the Acts of the Apostles, the first work of church history, has strong socialist overtones. Christian socialists use this passage to argue socialism was a historical reality for the followers of Christ. If they’re right, that has huge implications for a country that remains majority Christian. Fortunately, they’re wrong.
Acts 4:32-35 gives believers a picture of a highly egalitarian church. Among the believers, “no one claimed private ownership of any possessions.” Those who had property sold it and brought it to the church. The proceeds were “distributed to each as any had need.” This sounds almost like the classic Marx line —“from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”—but read a little further.
Acts 5 contains a harrowing account of two church members, Ananias and Sapphira, who sold their property but lied about the price. Confronted in their deceit by St. Peter, they suddenly perish. The passage states they were not punished merely for holding back their wealth. “Were not the proceeds at your disposal?” St. Peter asks, indicating the property and its fruits were theirs. The real lesson is the imperative of absolute truth before God. For those who have received the Holy Spirit, falsehood is perilous.
Later, Acts tells of St. Paul’s missionary journeys, during which he worked as a tentmaker to support his ministry. While not motivated by private profit, Paul nevertheless made recourse to the marketplace. Also, we know from his letters he solicited financial support for the Jerusalem
church throughout his travels. Early Christians wouldn’t have been able to donate without producing and trading. There’s scant biblical evidence for a wholesale condemnation of ownership and commerce.
Ultimately claims of early church socialism miss the mark because they conflate two kinds of communities: organizations and orders. Organizations are consciously crafted to achieve the goals of their members. Orders are spontaneous and emergent, arising out of the interactions between organizations. Businesses, educational institutions, charities and communes are organizations. But economic systems like socialism and capitalism are orders.
Calling the church an organization in no way diminishes its divinity. It simply means one can think about the church, in part, as an intentional community with its own canons and customs. This matters greatly for interpreting early church history.
Whether discussing a 21st-century business corporation or a first-century religious society, who gets what is determined by purposefully designed rules. Those rules can be meritocratic (bonuses and stock options) or egalitarian (relief for widows and orphans). They can be consensual (committees, voting) or hierarchical (executives, commands). But they aren’t socialistic. Neither are they capitalistic. Those terms refer to orders, not organizations.
Markets didn’t allocate resources inside the church, but that’s true of any organization. In fact, the whole point of organizations, for-profit or not, is to avoid markets. They’re temporary shelters against the fickle forces of supply and demand. If we call “socialism” all attempts to
suppress the market allocation of resources, then even the most profit-hungry firm you can think of is socialist. Zoom in close enough and all organizations look like central planners.
It’s foolish to apply the categories of economic systems to the church. Socialism regiments society, an unplanned give-and-take among countless organizations, according to an all-encompassing economic blueprint. That isn’t the church’s mission. Reconciling all of creation to
God in Christ is. While the church has a strong communitarian ethos, it isn’t committed to a specific set of economic institutions. Exploring the church’s internal constitution can be fascinating, and the generosity of the earliest Christians should serve as an example for us. But this has no relevance to the merits of single-payer healthcare or nationalizing railroads.
Knowing whether an economic system comports with Christianity requires careful study of the church’s social teachings, but church history matters too. Historical memory and interpretation are powerful forces for shaping contemporary beliefs. A socialist can be a good Christian, but the narrative of early church socialism is a myth.
Mr. Salter is an economics professor at Texas Tech University, a research fellow at TTU’s Free Market Institute, and a senior fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research.
My role as pastor and priest is to draw out (exegete) meaning from Scripture and from our lives. Hopefully we all will be able to draw something out from this reading.
Jesus a Socialist? That’s a Myth
Alexander Salter, WSJ 4.21.22
The idea that the teachings of Jesus are akin to socialism has been spreading around the internet for years in the form of memes, chain emails and Facebook posts. Some elected officials have a history of supporting the idea: The Rev. Raphael Warnock, a U.S. senator from Georgia,
contended years ago that “the early church was a socialist church.” He’s not alone in holding this misguided belief.
A much-cited passage from the Acts of the Apostles, the first work of church history, has strong socialist overtones. Christian socialists use this passage to argue socialism was a historical reality for the followers of Christ. If they’re right, that has huge implications for a country that remains majority Christian. Fortunately, they’re wrong.
Acts 4:32-35 gives believers a picture of a highly egalitarian church. Among the believers, “no one claimed private ownership of any possessions.” Those who had property sold it and brought it to the church. The proceeds were “distributed to each as any had need.” This sounds almost like the classic Marx line —“from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”—but read a little further.
Acts 5 contains a harrowing account of two church members, Ananias and Sapphira, who sold their property but lied about the price. Confronted in their deceit by St. Peter, they suddenly perish. The passage states they were not punished merely for holding back their wealth. “Were not the proceeds at your disposal?” St. Peter asks, indicating the property and its fruits were theirs. The real lesson is the imperative of absolute truth before God. For those who have received the Holy Spirit, falsehood is perilous.
Later, Acts tells of St. Paul’s missionary journeys, during which he worked as a tentmaker to support his ministry. While not motivated by private profit, Paul nevertheless made recourse to the marketplace. Also, we know from his letters he solicited financial support for the Jerusalem
church throughout his travels. Early Christians wouldn’t have been able to donate without producing and trading. There’s scant biblical evidence for a wholesale condemnation of ownership and commerce.
Ultimately claims of early church socialism miss the mark because they conflate two kinds of communities: organizations and orders. Organizations are consciously crafted to achieve the goals of their members. Orders are spontaneous and emergent, arising out of the interactions between organizations. Businesses, educational institutions, charities and communes are organizations. But economic systems like socialism and capitalism are orders.
Calling the church an organization in no way diminishes its divinity. It simply means one can think about the church, in part, as an intentional community with its own canons and customs. This matters greatly for interpreting early church history.
Whether discussing a 21st-century business corporation or a first-century religious society, who gets what is determined by purposefully designed rules. Those rules can be meritocratic (bonuses and stock options) or egalitarian (relief for widows and orphans). They can be consensual (committees, voting) or hierarchical (executives, commands). But they aren’t socialistic. Neither are they capitalistic. Those terms refer to orders, not organizations.
Markets didn’t allocate resources inside the church, but that’s true of any organization. In fact, the whole point of organizations, for-profit or not, is to avoid markets. They’re temporary shelters against the fickle forces of supply and demand. If we call “socialism” all attempts to
suppress the market allocation of resources, then even the most profit-hungry firm you can think of is socialist. Zoom in close enough and all organizations look like central planners.
It’s foolish to apply the categories of economic systems to the church. Socialism regiments society, an unplanned give-and-take among countless organizations, according to an all-encompassing economic blueprint. That isn’t the church’s mission. Reconciling all of creation to
God in Christ is. While the church has a strong communitarian ethos, it isn’t committed to a specific set of economic institutions. Exploring the church’s internal constitution can be fascinating, and the generosity of the earliest Christians should serve as an example for us. But this has no relevance to the merits of single-payer healthcare or nationalizing railroads.
Knowing whether an economic system comports with Christianity requires careful study of the church’s social teachings, but church history matters too. Historical memory and interpretation are powerful forces for shaping contemporary beliefs. A socialist can be a good Christian, but the narrative of early church socialism is a myth.
Mr. Salter is an economics professor at Texas Tech University, a research fellow at TTU’s Free Market Institute, and a senior fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research.
Wednesday, April 27
The topic for this week addresses something we don't hear much about - older adults who are more open to exploring faith than when they were younger. The Church model is to bring children and youth up in the faith; but what about middle-aged and older adults? There is substantial evidence that shows we are more open to faith the older we get. Arthur Brooks, in the attached article, wrote about the importance of developing faith later in life and ways of how to develop it. Whether you are exploring a change or a deepening of faith, know someone who is considering it, or would like to talk about how the church can help those who would like to start a walk in faith, I'd like to talk to you about it.
How to Navigate a Change of Faith
Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic 8.13.20
In the Bible, there is a curious story about a man named Nicodemus. He is a Pharisee and one of the religious elders with whom Jesus is in constant conflict. Nicodemus approaches Jesus alone at night, saying, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God,” and proceeds to ask a series of sincere questions. It is clear that Nicodemus is a seeker, attracted to Jesus’s unconventional teaching. It is just as clear that he does not want anyone to witness this meeting. A powerful, successful man, Nicodemus is embarrassed — or perhaps afraid — to be seen questioning his own religious beliefs and considering something new.
There is a modern version of the Nicodemus story that I have seen many times, though it isn’t necessarily Christian. I often meet older people who are having religious stirrings for the first time, or at least for the first time since they were young. But like Nicodemus, many find these
urges confusing and even troubling, especially if they moved away from faith earlier in life.
These seekers I talk with usually believe their spiritual yearnings are unusual, but they aren’t. Research from the United States shows that religious attachment commonly falls through young and middle adulthood, but then increases through one’s 40s and beyond. The theologian James Fowler explained this pattern in his famous 1981 book, Stages of Faith. After studying hundreds of human subjects, Fowler observed that as young adults, many people are put off by ideas that seem arbitrary or morally retrograde, such as those surrounding sexuality. They may also become disillusioned by religion’s inability to explain life’s hardest puzzles; for example, the idea of a loving God in the face of a world full of suffering.
As they get older, however, people begin to recognize that nothing is tidy in life. This, according to Fowler, is when they become tolerant of religion’s ambiguities and inconsistencies, and start to see the beauty and transcendence in faith and spirituality — either their own faith from
childhood, or some other.
For those who embrace faith at this stage, it is a joyful epiphany; religious and spiritual adults are generally happier and generally suffer less depression than those who have no faith. And the benefits of finding faith as an adult go beyond life satisfaction, according to research on the
subject: Religion and spirituality are also linked to better physical health.
Whether it’s organized religion or not, as I’ve argued previously in this column, having some kind of practice or structure that allows one to ponder life’s mysteries and move beyond a focus on the self can greatly increase happiness and life satisfaction. But for those who feel the
common spiritual stirrings of midlife, the journey can be difficult. The road to faith is filled with obstacles that can cause a spiritually hungry person to turn back, if he or she can’t see a way around them.
Obstacle 1: Santa in the church
Once, when my kids were little, my family and I drove past our Catholic church, and my oldest son, then about 4 years old, asked whether Santa Claus lived inside. My wife and I laughed a lot at that question, but it highlighted a typical problem in the formation of faith: Our first
impressions of faith tend to be made as children—and those impressions can haunt us as we mature. People often dismiss religion as a mishmash of myths and childish nonsense that well-adjusted adults should logically leave behind.
Indeed, many opponents of faith attack it by appealing to precisely these childish impressions. For example, just before Christmas in 2010, I saw a billboard at the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel in New Jersey featuring the silhouette of the Three Kings approaching Bethlehem. The caption underneath read, “You KNOW it’s a Myth. This Season, Celebrate REASON!”
I will admit that I broke out laughing when I saw it because it was such a clever ploy by a group opposed to religion. But it was not an appeal to reason—exactly the contrary. It was an appeal to reduce faith to a story many of us heard as children, and to reject it outright if, as adults, it does not seem likely to be literally accurate in every detail. That’s about as reasonable as divorcing your spouse because he or she doesn’t live up to the happily-ever-after fairy tales you heard as a child.
The solution to this obstacle is to reacquaint yourself with faith with mature eyes. If you reread a book from your childhood as an adult, you’ll likely find it very different from what you remembered, and pick up on things you missed when you were young. The same is true with religious practice. We all have hard questions about the meaning of life, and one of the benefits of religious traditions is that their sacred texts, religious scholars, and longtime practitioners have considered these questions before. If the last time you attended a worship service or read a
religious text was as a child — or if you have never done so but have only imagined what they’re like — try doing so as an adult with an open mind and heart. They might just hold truths that your memories and imagination do not.
Obstacle 2: The “none” in the mirror
The answer to the question “Who am I?” is what psychologists call a “self-concept.” Changes to the self-concept can be uncomfortable, and people often react with intense resistance to anything that threatens how they have come to see themselves.
A perfect example of this is someone’s self-concept as a nonreligious person, or in the parlance of survey research, a “none,” as more than a fifth of Americans classify themselves. Although seeing yourself as a “none” might not seem like a barrier to finding faith—it’s a void to be filled, right? — it is itself an identity, one that for many people could feel as powerful as “Catholic” or “Buddhist.” That can be hard to let go of. As such, merely entertaining religious or spiritual ideas can feel like a threat to the self-concept.
The key to overcoming this obstacle is to remember that, even if “none” is an accurate description of you at the moment, it doesn’t have to be a lifelong commitment. In fact, it’s healthy to regularly interrogate your self-concept and be open to the idea that you can change, rather than making a onetime decision, then clinging to it forever. But if you do want to explore your spiritual side, you don’t have to abruptly change your self-concept from “none” to “very religious person.” You might think of yourself as “none right now,” or perhaps, “none, but open to suggestion.” This injects the elements of humility and flexibility — even vulnerability — to your understanding of yourself, which has a powerful effect. Although you may not have faith right now, the door is cracked open. Something interesting might just wander in.
Obstacle 3: The tyranny of time
To develop spirituality or practice faith requires time and effort; there’s no getting around this. As such, it competes with the demands of our ordinary lives. That’s a huge imposition, and the time commitment may be enough to deter some people who are craving spiritual practice but find it too daunting to rearrange their lives to make room for it.
But what if, instead of seeing your spiritual journey as an imposition on your scarce time and energy, you shift your mindset to see spiritual exploration as an adventure in and of itself? For millennia, one-way seekers have done this is through pilgrimage. Personally, I walked the
ancient Camino de Santiago (Way of Saint James) in northern Spain. Over more than a thousand years, this route has been followed by millions, who walk hundreds of kilometers in prayerful contemplation. My Catholic faith will never be the same.
When we think of our identities as fixed and unchanging — I am this kind of person; I am not that kind of person — we’re shutting ourselves off from many of life’s possibilities. Being open to reevaluating our ideas about ourselves can keep us from getting stuck in patterns that aren’t
true to our changing selves. And the research I have presented here shows that when it comes to faith, many people do change with age.
If you are feeling an unexpected spiritual pull, realize that it is normal. If faith is something you really want, don’t be put off by the obstacles in your path — and unlike Nicodemus, don’t sneak around. No matter where you wind up, the journey of spiritual discovery can be one of life’s
greatest delights. As the Indian yogi and poet Sri Aurobindo described the adventure of faith:
A divine force shall flow through tissue and cell
And take the charge of breath and speech and act
And all the thoughts shall be a glow of suns
And every feeling a celestial thrill.
Celestial or not, the thrill is real. Lean into it.
How to Navigate a Change of Faith
Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic 8.13.20
In the Bible, there is a curious story about a man named Nicodemus. He is a Pharisee and one of the religious elders with whom Jesus is in constant conflict. Nicodemus approaches Jesus alone at night, saying, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God,” and proceeds to ask a series of sincere questions. It is clear that Nicodemus is a seeker, attracted to Jesus’s unconventional teaching. It is just as clear that he does not want anyone to witness this meeting. A powerful, successful man, Nicodemus is embarrassed — or perhaps afraid — to be seen questioning his own religious beliefs and considering something new.
There is a modern version of the Nicodemus story that I have seen many times, though it isn’t necessarily Christian. I often meet older people who are having religious stirrings for the first time, or at least for the first time since they were young. But like Nicodemus, many find these
urges confusing and even troubling, especially if they moved away from faith earlier in life.
These seekers I talk with usually believe their spiritual yearnings are unusual, but they aren’t. Research from the United States shows that religious attachment commonly falls through young and middle adulthood, but then increases through one’s 40s and beyond. The theologian James Fowler explained this pattern in his famous 1981 book, Stages of Faith. After studying hundreds of human subjects, Fowler observed that as young adults, many people are put off by ideas that seem arbitrary or morally retrograde, such as those surrounding sexuality. They may also become disillusioned by religion’s inability to explain life’s hardest puzzles; for example, the idea of a loving God in the face of a world full of suffering.
As they get older, however, people begin to recognize that nothing is tidy in life. This, according to Fowler, is when they become tolerant of religion’s ambiguities and inconsistencies, and start to see the beauty and transcendence in faith and spirituality — either their own faith from
childhood, or some other.
For those who embrace faith at this stage, it is a joyful epiphany; religious and spiritual adults are generally happier and generally suffer less depression than those who have no faith. And the benefits of finding faith as an adult go beyond life satisfaction, according to research on the
subject: Religion and spirituality are also linked to better physical health.
Whether it’s organized religion or not, as I’ve argued previously in this column, having some kind of practice or structure that allows one to ponder life’s mysteries and move beyond a focus on the self can greatly increase happiness and life satisfaction. But for those who feel the
common spiritual stirrings of midlife, the journey can be difficult. The road to faith is filled with obstacles that can cause a spiritually hungry person to turn back, if he or she can’t see a way around them.
Obstacle 1: Santa in the church
Once, when my kids were little, my family and I drove past our Catholic church, and my oldest son, then about 4 years old, asked whether Santa Claus lived inside. My wife and I laughed a lot at that question, but it highlighted a typical problem in the formation of faith: Our first
impressions of faith tend to be made as children—and those impressions can haunt us as we mature. People often dismiss religion as a mishmash of myths and childish nonsense that well-adjusted adults should logically leave behind.
Indeed, many opponents of faith attack it by appealing to precisely these childish impressions. For example, just before Christmas in 2010, I saw a billboard at the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel in New Jersey featuring the silhouette of the Three Kings approaching Bethlehem. The caption underneath read, “You KNOW it’s a Myth. This Season, Celebrate REASON!”
I will admit that I broke out laughing when I saw it because it was such a clever ploy by a group opposed to religion. But it was not an appeal to reason—exactly the contrary. It was an appeal to reduce faith to a story many of us heard as children, and to reject it outright if, as adults, it does not seem likely to be literally accurate in every detail. That’s about as reasonable as divorcing your spouse because he or she doesn’t live up to the happily-ever-after fairy tales you heard as a child.
The solution to this obstacle is to reacquaint yourself with faith with mature eyes. If you reread a book from your childhood as an adult, you’ll likely find it very different from what you remembered, and pick up on things you missed when you were young. The same is true with religious practice. We all have hard questions about the meaning of life, and one of the benefits of religious traditions is that their sacred texts, religious scholars, and longtime practitioners have considered these questions before. If the last time you attended a worship service or read a
religious text was as a child — or if you have never done so but have only imagined what they’re like — try doing so as an adult with an open mind and heart. They might just hold truths that your memories and imagination do not.
Obstacle 2: The “none” in the mirror
The answer to the question “Who am I?” is what psychologists call a “self-concept.” Changes to the self-concept can be uncomfortable, and people often react with intense resistance to anything that threatens how they have come to see themselves.
A perfect example of this is someone’s self-concept as a nonreligious person, or in the parlance of survey research, a “none,” as more than a fifth of Americans classify themselves. Although seeing yourself as a “none” might not seem like a barrier to finding faith—it’s a void to be filled, right? — it is itself an identity, one that for many people could feel as powerful as “Catholic” or “Buddhist.” That can be hard to let go of. As such, merely entertaining religious or spiritual ideas can feel like a threat to the self-concept.
The key to overcoming this obstacle is to remember that, even if “none” is an accurate description of you at the moment, it doesn’t have to be a lifelong commitment. In fact, it’s healthy to regularly interrogate your self-concept and be open to the idea that you can change, rather than making a onetime decision, then clinging to it forever. But if you do want to explore your spiritual side, you don’t have to abruptly change your self-concept from “none” to “very religious person.” You might think of yourself as “none right now,” or perhaps, “none, but open to suggestion.” This injects the elements of humility and flexibility — even vulnerability — to your understanding of yourself, which has a powerful effect. Although you may not have faith right now, the door is cracked open. Something interesting might just wander in.
Obstacle 3: The tyranny of time
To develop spirituality or practice faith requires time and effort; there’s no getting around this. As such, it competes with the demands of our ordinary lives. That’s a huge imposition, and the time commitment may be enough to deter some people who are craving spiritual practice but find it too daunting to rearrange their lives to make room for it.
But what if, instead of seeing your spiritual journey as an imposition on your scarce time and energy, you shift your mindset to see spiritual exploration as an adventure in and of itself? For millennia, one-way seekers have done this is through pilgrimage. Personally, I walked the
ancient Camino de Santiago (Way of Saint James) in northern Spain. Over more than a thousand years, this route has been followed by millions, who walk hundreds of kilometers in prayerful contemplation. My Catholic faith will never be the same.
When we think of our identities as fixed and unchanging — I am this kind of person; I am not that kind of person — we’re shutting ourselves off from many of life’s possibilities. Being open to reevaluating our ideas about ourselves can keep us from getting stuck in patterns that aren’t
true to our changing selves. And the research I have presented here shows that when it comes to faith, many people do change with age.
If you are feeling an unexpected spiritual pull, realize that it is normal. If faith is something you really want, don’t be put off by the obstacles in your path — and unlike Nicodemus, don’t sneak around. No matter where you wind up, the journey of spiritual discovery can be one of life’s
greatest delights. As the Indian yogi and poet Sri Aurobindo described the adventure of faith:
A divine force shall flow through tissue and cell
And take the charge of breath and speech and act
And all the thoughts shall be a glow of suns
And every feeling a celestial thrill.
Celestial or not, the thrill is real. Lean into it.
Wednesday, April 20
The Episcopal Church is gathering in July for its every-three-year General Convention. One of the points of discussion will be Christian Zionism and how as a Church body we are to address that particular belief; especially as it mixes Church and State matters.
The discussion reading for next week is a decent summary of Christian Zionism from 2004. As we are watching tensions rise along the Israeli/Palestinian border, this article will hopefully shed some light on the role of Christian Zionism in shaping U.S. policy.
The Impact of Christian Zionism on American Policy
William N. Dale, Columbia Journals, American Diplomacy Vol. IX No. 2, 2004
The author, a retired senior Foreign Service officer, takes a policy-related look at what would appear to be an unlikely alliance —that between conservative Christians and the partisans of Israeli interests. He notes the seemingly new movement's ancient antecedents. –Ed.
[Christian Zionism]—"a movement, largely among Gentile Christians, supporting the right of the Jewish people to return to the Promised Land. . . ." - Christian Action for Israel
A recently recognized source of support for Israel in the United States is helping to produce a political juggernaut of such strength that it has elevated the U. S. policy of support for Israel almost above public discussion. I refer to the Christian Zionists, conservative Christians, largely Protestant, who wholeheartedly back Israel and that nation's cause. The question immediately arises as to how this seemingly implausible partnership arose.
The philosophical foundations of Christian Zionism go back to ancient times. They are associated with the age-old belief in an epic struggle between the forces of good and evil and a premonition that the world would soon end. This thread is traceable from early Hebrew prophets;
from Jesus Christ, who apparently expected that the Kingdom of God would emerge in the lifetime of his disciples; and from the inhabitants of Qumran, whose writings prophesied a horrendous battle between good and evil. The seers considered the world of their day to be sinful, but after the great struggle an age of goodness ruled by God would emerge. No gray area permitting compromise exists between good and evil, they held. The staying power of those beliefs is so great that they are still with us after 2000 years and form the root system of the beliefs of today's Christian Zionists.
This apocalyptic filament, hugely assisted by the Biblical books of Daniel in the Old Testament and Revelation in the New, wound its way through the Roman period and the Middle Ages toward our own time. A beast with the number 666, it was held, will control the earth until Christ overwhelms him at the battle of Armageddon. The forces of good throw the beast (the Antichrist) into the bottomless pit for a thousand years, permitting the millennium to arrive, a period of bliss and justice in which God rules. Then would come the last judgment and a new heaven, a new earth, and a new Jerusalem.
Europe's Reformation brought renewed interest in the Old Testament and with it the connection of the Jewish people to Palestine. The early English settlers of North America carried with them the belief that the conversion of the Jews to Christianity would be a blessing to the whole world, an opinion that fitted well into the apocalyptic scenario. Jonathan Edwards preached in the 1760s that the millennium was indeed imminent and that Christ would judge the quick and the dead thereafter. In the early 1800s Napoleon Bonaparte became a leading candidate for the position of the Antichrist. A long list of prominent though often controversial personalities, including King George III and the Pope (and even, eventually, Henry Kissinger), succeeded him as nominees for that post.
Other ideas contributed to the growth of Christian Zionism, with England long a leading source for its development. John Nelson Darby, for instance, conceived the doctrine of "dispensationalism" in which the return of the Jews to Palestine played a major role. He traveled frequently to the United States and helped shape the views of evangelical leaders such as Dwight Moody, James Brookes, and William Blackstone.
The most compelling points of Christian Zionism are that Israel is of prime importance, that the Jews will eventually convert to Christianity, and that the future of the world permits no middle positions allowing compromise. There can be no half-way measures and those who advocate
compromise are siding with the enemy.
The foundation of the state of Israel in 1948 gave a tremendous boost to Christian Zionists who considered it a fulfillment of Biblical prophesy. Israel's victory in the Six Day War of 1967 seemed to them a triumph of good over evil in which the entire city of Jerusalem fell at last under Jewish control. Many far-right conservatives joined the Christian Zionists and the Jewish Zionists to form a triple political alliance of increasing power as events seemed to bear out the important role Israel would play in mankind's future, as foreseen in the Old Testament.
Christian Zionists do not accept the statements of Christ and other early Christian leaders that criticize Old Testament practices. Instead, they project Old Testament practices and prophesies into today's world. Consequently, they revere the Jewish people as God's chosen people with a divine right to all lands promised them in the Old Testament. The territory of Greater Israel, the entire city of Jerusalem, and a rebuilt temple have become the chief objects of Christian Zionist attention. The rebuilt temple would require the installation of the ancient priesthood and
resumption of practices such as animal sacrifice. Hal Lindsey, the most popular Christian Zionist author of our day, has written that he expects the take over the Temple Mount and commence rebuilding the Temple very shortly.
Among the best-known Christian Zionist leaders is Jerry Falwell, pastor and founder of Baptist Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. Falwell is likewise founder of the Moral Majority, which has generated significant public interest. Israel's victory in the Six Day War helped to cement his identification with Israel, so much so that the Israeli government furnished him with a Lear jet to help him spread his advocacy of Israel. He has promised to mobilize 70 million Americans to promote the cause of Israel. Pat Robertson, president of the Christian Broadcasting Network and leader of the Christian Coalition, and Hal Lindsey are also leaders of Christian Zionism who combine religion with politics in a major way. The latter is author of many books with circulation running into the tens of millions, including his best seller, The Late Great Planet Earth, published in 1970. The common theme includes the emergence of the anti-Christ, the rise of Israel, the return of Christ, Armageddon, the victory of good over evil, the rebuilding of the Temple and the coming of an era of peace and justice. These events were to peak in 1988.
Fortunately, the major force for evil, the Soviet Union, collapsed at about this time, so the struggle subsided. The Arab world replaced the USSR as the major force for evil, however, and the struggle goes on with a new antagonist. The transition from the second to the third
millennium provided another auspicious date for the end of our world.
The Christian Zionists believe we will live in a period of increasing violence as the epic struggle progresses. Palliative measures, such as President Bush's proposed "Road Map" to settle the Arab-Israeli conflict in their view will only confuse the clear-cut issue between good and evil and may take away territory which rightfully belongs to Israel. Christian Zionist leaders encourage Israeli settlements on the West Bank in opposition to long-standing U. S. policy. Likewise, Christian Zionists resist proposals to make East Jerusalem the Palestinian capital or to arrange for joint or international administration of the city.
Christian Zionist campaigns to influence Presidential politics began in a major way with Ronald Reagan's campaign in 198O, when they joined with much publicity in the effort to boost him into the White House. The new president quickly brought Christian Zionists, such as Falwell, Robertson, and Hal Lindsey, into White House activities that included Congressional and national leaders. He sponsored discussion groups that gave the Christian Zionists an opportunity to advertise their beliefs and their power. Presidents Bush Senior and Clinton did not have the same rapport with Christian Zionists as their predecessor, although the various pro-Israel lobbies helped to keep them on a path generally favorable to Israel. When in May 2002 President Bush called for the withdrawal of Israeli tanks from the Palestinian cities on the West Bank, the White House received more than 100,000 angry e-mail messages from Christian sources objecting to his appeal. As previously mentioned, Christian Zionists vocally oppose the President's Road Map to peace in the Middle East, which would include the creation of a Palestinian state on land the Zionists, Christian and otherwise, believe should be forever a part of Israel.
Even though their beliefs are controversial and not widely held, Christian Zionists have gained considerable influence in the U. S. Congress and have achieved great political strength in this country. A gulf is developing between the foreign policy perceptions of many Americans and
those of our European allies, as well as of Islamic countries. Unless a counter force develops, Washington will not be able to support with consistency a policy in the Middle East involving compromise — the only one that can bring peace.
The discussion reading for next week is a decent summary of Christian Zionism from 2004. As we are watching tensions rise along the Israeli/Palestinian border, this article will hopefully shed some light on the role of Christian Zionism in shaping U.S. policy.
The Impact of Christian Zionism on American Policy
William N. Dale, Columbia Journals, American Diplomacy Vol. IX No. 2, 2004
The author, a retired senior Foreign Service officer, takes a policy-related look at what would appear to be an unlikely alliance —that between conservative Christians and the partisans of Israeli interests. He notes the seemingly new movement's ancient antecedents. –Ed.
[Christian Zionism]—"a movement, largely among Gentile Christians, supporting the right of the Jewish people to return to the Promised Land. . . ." - Christian Action for Israel
A recently recognized source of support for Israel in the United States is helping to produce a political juggernaut of such strength that it has elevated the U. S. policy of support for Israel almost above public discussion. I refer to the Christian Zionists, conservative Christians, largely Protestant, who wholeheartedly back Israel and that nation's cause. The question immediately arises as to how this seemingly implausible partnership arose.
The philosophical foundations of Christian Zionism go back to ancient times. They are associated with the age-old belief in an epic struggle between the forces of good and evil and a premonition that the world would soon end. This thread is traceable from early Hebrew prophets;
from Jesus Christ, who apparently expected that the Kingdom of God would emerge in the lifetime of his disciples; and from the inhabitants of Qumran, whose writings prophesied a horrendous battle between good and evil. The seers considered the world of their day to be sinful, but after the great struggle an age of goodness ruled by God would emerge. No gray area permitting compromise exists between good and evil, they held. The staying power of those beliefs is so great that they are still with us after 2000 years and form the root system of the beliefs of today's Christian Zionists.
This apocalyptic filament, hugely assisted by the Biblical books of Daniel in the Old Testament and Revelation in the New, wound its way through the Roman period and the Middle Ages toward our own time. A beast with the number 666, it was held, will control the earth until Christ overwhelms him at the battle of Armageddon. The forces of good throw the beast (the Antichrist) into the bottomless pit for a thousand years, permitting the millennium to arrive, a period of bliss and justice in which God rules. Then would come the last judgment and a new heaven, a new earth, and a new Jerusalem.
Europe's Reformation brought renewed interest in the Old Testament and with it the connection of the Jewish people to Palestine. The early English settlers of North America carried with them the belief that the conversion of the Jews to Christianity would be a blessing to the whole world, an opinion that fitted well into the apocalyptic scenario. Jonathan Edwards preached in the 1760s that the millennium was indeed imminent and that Christ would judge the quick and the dead thereafter. In the early 1800s Napoleon Bonaparte became a leading candidate for the position of the Antichrist. A long list of prominent though often controversial personalities, including King George III and the Pope (and even, eventually, Henry Kissinger), succeeded him as nominees for that post.
Other ideas contributed to the growth of Christian Zionism, with England long a leading source for its development. John Nelson Darby, for instance, conceived the doctrine of "dispensationalism" in which the return of the Jews to Palestine played a major role. He traveled frequently to the United States and helped shape the views of evangelical leaders such as Dwight Moody, James Brookes, and William Blackstone.
The most compelling points of Christian Zionism are that Israel is of prime importance, that the Jews will eventually convert to Christianity, and that the future of the world permits no middle positions allowing compromise. There can be no half-way measures and those who advocate
compromise are siding with the enemy.
The foundation of the state of Israel in 1948 gave a tremendous boost to Christian Zionists who considered it a fulfillment of Biblical prophesy. Israel's victory in the Six Day War of 1967 seemed to them a triumph of good over evil in which the entire city of Jerusalem fell at last under Jewish control. Many far-right conservatives joined the Christian Zionists and the Jewish Zionists to form a triple political alliance of increasing power as events seemed to bear out the important role Israel would play in mankind's future, as foreseen in the Old Testament.
Christian Zionists do not accept the statements of Christ and other early Christian leaders that criticize Old Testament practices. Instead, they project Old Testament practices and prophesies into today's world. Consequently, they revere the Jewish people as God's chosen people with a divine right to all lands promised them in the Old Testament. The territory of Greater Israel, the entire city of Jerusalem, and a rebuilt temple have become the chief objects of Christian Zionist attention. The rebuilt temple would require the installation of the ancient priesthood and
resumption of practices such as animal sacrifice. Hal Lindsey, the most popular Christian Zionist author of our day, has written that he expects the take over the Temple Mount and commence rebuilding the Temple very shortly.
Among the best-known Christian Zionist leaders is Jerry Falwell, pastor and founder of Baptist Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. Falwell is likewise founder of the Moral Majority, which has generated significant public interest. Israel's victory in the Six Day War helped to cement his identification with Israel, so much so that the Israeli government furnished him with a Lear jet to help him spread his advocacy of Israel. He has promised to mobilize 70 million Americans to promote the cause of Israel. Pat Robertson, president of the Christian Broadcasting Network and leader of the Christian Coalition, and Hal Lindsey are also leaders of Christian Zionism who combine religion with politics in a major way. The latter is author of many books with circulation running into the tens of millions, including his best seller, The Late Great Planet Earth, published in 1970. The common theme includes the emergence of the anti-Christ, the rise of Israel, the return of Christ, Armageddon, the victory of good over evil, the rebuilding of the Temple and the coming of an era of peace and justice. These events were to peak in 1988.
Fortunately, the major force for evil, the Soviet Union, collapsed at about this time, so the struggle subsided. The Arab world replaced the USSR as the major force for evil, however, and the struggle goes on with a new antagonist. The transition from the second to the third
millennium provided another auspicious date for the end of our world.
The Christian Zionists believe we will live in a period of increasing violence as the epic struggle progresses. Palliative measures, such as President Bush's proposed "Road Map" to settle the Arab-Israeli conflict in their view will only confuse the clear-cut issue between good and evil and may take away territory which rightfully belongs to Israel. Christian Zionist leaders encourage Israeli settlements on the West Bank in opposition to long-standing U. S. policy. Likewise, Christian Zionists resist proposals to make East Jerusalem the Palestinian capital or to arrange for joint or international administration of the city.
Christian Zionist campaigns to influence Presidential politics began in a major way with Ronald Reagan's campaign in 198O, when they joined with much publicity in the effort to boost him into the White House. The new president quickly brought Christian Zionists, such as Falwell, Robertson, and Hal Lindsey, into White House activities that included Congressional and national leaders. He sponsored discussion groups that gave the Christian Zionists an opportunity to advertise their beliefs and their power. Presidents Bush Senior and Clinton did not have the same rapport with Christian Zionists as their predecessor, although the various pro-Israel lobbies helped to keep them on a path generally favorable to Israel. When in May 2002 President Bush called for the withdrawal of Israeli tanks from the Palestinian cities on the West Bank, the White House received more than 100,000 angry e-mail messages from Christian sources objecting to his appeal. As previously mentioned, Christian Zionists vocally oppose the President's Road Map to peace in the Middle East, which would include the creation of a Palestinian state on land the Zionists, Christian and otherwise, believe should be forever a part of Israel.
Even though their beliefs are controversial and not widely held, Christian Zionists have gained considerable influence in the U. S. Congress and have achieved great political strength in this country. A gulf is developing between the foreign policy perceptions of many Americans and
those of our European allies, as well as of Islamic countries. Unless a counter force develops, Washington will not be able to support with consistency a policy in the Middle East involving compromise — the only one that can bring peace.
Wednesday, April 13
An Age of Existential Uncertainty
Charles M. Blow, NY Times, 4.6.22
I grew up during the Cold War, when, in elementary school, we still participated in bomb drills. A bell would ring or horn would blow and we would duck and cover, or in some teachers’ classrooms, just put our heads down on our desks. From the videos of utter destruction caused by
nuclear weapons, I couldn’t see how any of these drills would be helpful (apparently duck and cover did offer some protection). I simply assumed it would be better to be resting when I died than not.
Although we lived in a small Louisiana town, in the middle of nowhere really, we were about 30 minutes away from Barksdale Air Force Base, where President George W. Bush would, years later, take refuge after the attacks on 9/11. As children, it felt like we were in the military arena,
particularly every time the jets overhead latticed the skies with contrails or produced a sonic boom.
Even people of modest means in the area built bomb shelters. Armageddon was in the air. America and the Soviet Union were locked in the doctrine of mutually assured destruction: There were so many nuclear weapons that if one side used them to launch an attack, we were told the other would immediately respond, prompting the annihilation of both countries and possibly the world.
This idea offered some assurance, but not enough. The idea that a mistake could be made lingered like a combustible fume. It haunted. In the popular 1983 film “WarGames,” a high school hacker accidentally connects with NORAD computers, and, thinking he’s simply playing a game, almost instigates a nuclear war.
I find it hard to explain to younger people what it felt like to live all my formative years with such uncertainty, with the belief that the world might end at any moment. I don’t know how to explain what it felt like to fill a time capsule in the sixth grade and bury it, not just as a classroom exercise, but with the gnawing feeling that all we knew could be obliterated and that all that future generations might ever know of us could be contained in a single capsule.
Fear became so ambient that it became ordinary; it was defanged. The fear wasn’t debilitating. To the contrary, it seemed to produce a sense of bucket-list adventurousness, even among children. What would you do if the world could end tomorrow? It was simultaneously oppressive
and liberating.
Then, in 1991, when I was nearly at the end of college, the Soviet Union collapsed and splintered, and the Cold War came to an abrupt end. That is around when Ukraine and other former Soviet republics became independent states.
That is also, I believe, the last time I thought seriously about mutually assured destruction. After three decades of freedom from that kind of worry, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, still smarting over the demise of the Soviet Union, has reminded us that many of the nuclear weapons that once terrified us still exist, putting real limits on our ability to confront and control rogue behavior.
In an interview that aired in December, Putin lamented the fall of the Soviet Union, which he had previously called the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. “It was a disintegration of historical Russia,” he said in the interview. “We turned into a completely
different country. And what had been built up over 1,000 years was largely lost.”
Putin wants that back. The invasion of Ukraine is part of that vision.
Putin confessed in the interview that not long after the fall of the Soviet Union, when inflation in Russia reached double digits, he sometimes moonlighted as a taxi driver to supplement his income. “It is unpleasant to talk about this,” he said, “but, unfortunately, this also took place.”
Now, he has reversed the humiliation of those hard times. Some experts believe that he could now be the wealthiest man in the world. I believe this makes the 69-year-old more dangerous, not less.
Putin now has little need of the shallow pleasure he’d get gathering unto himself more material objects than he already owns. Instead, he may now be consumed by the thing that preoccupies many of the world’s greatest men and women late in life: the building of legacy, the making of history, the casting of a long shadow.
Putin doesn’t just want to win a war or take a region, he wants to make a point, he wants to be the wings on which Russia rises again. His ego feeds his aggression, and that is why it is hard to imagine him accepting a loss in Ukraine.
Any form of victory for him will only add to his appetite. Why would he stop with Ukraine, or a portion of Ukraine?
And, of course, the West is restrained by the fact that Russia is not only a nuclear power, with roughly 6,000 nuclear warheads, but it also has the world’s largest nuclear stockpile, an arsenal even larger than that of the United States.
Putin keeps gesturing at the possibility of using those weapons. Those may be hollow threats, but it’s impossible to be 100 percent sure.
What I feel more sure of is this feeling I can’t shake: that we are drifting into a new age of existential uncertainty
Charles M. Blow, NY Times, 4.6.22
I grew up during the Cold War, when, in elementary school, we still participated in bomb drills. A bell would ring or horn would blow and we would duck and cover, or in some teachers’ classrooms, just put our heads down on our desks. From the videos of utter destruction caused by
nuclear weapons, I couldn’t see how any of these drills would be helpful (apparently duck and cover did offer some protection). I simply assumed it would be better to be resting when I died than not.
Although we lived in a small Louisiana town, in the middle of nowhere really, we were about 30 minutes away from Barksdale Air Force Base, where President George W. Bush would, years later, take refuge after the attacks on 9/11. As children, it felt like we were in the military arena,
particularly every time the jets overhead latticed the skies with contrails or produced a sonic boom.
Even people of modest means in the area built bomb shelters. Armageddon was in the air. America and the Soviet Union were locked in the doctrine of mutually assured destruction: There were so many nuclear weapons that if one side used them to launch an attack, we were told the other would immediately respond, prompting the annihilation of both countries and possibly the world.
This idea offered some assurance, but not enough. The idea that a mistake could be made lingered like a combustible fume. It haunted. In the popular 1983 film “WarGames,” a high school hacker accidentally connects with NORAD computers, and, thinking he’s simply playing a game, almost instigates a nuclear war.
I find it hard to explain to younger people what it felt like to live all my formative years with such uncertainty, with the belief that the world might end at any moment. I don’t know how to explain what it felt like to fill a time capsule in the sixth grade and bury it, not just as a classroom exercise, but with the gnawing feeling that all we knew could be obliterated and that all that future generations might ever know of us could be contained in a single capsule.
Fear became so ambient that it became ordinary; it was defanged. The fear wasn’t debilitating. To the contrary, it seemed to produce a sense of bucket-list adventurousness, even among children. What would you do if the world could end tomorrow? It was simultaneously oppressive
and liberating.
Then, in 1991, when I was nearly at the end of college, the Soviet Union collapsed and splintered, and the Cold War came to an abrupt end. That is around when Ukraine and other former Soviet republics became independent states.
That is also, I believe, the last time I thought seriously about mutually assured destruction. After three decades of freedom from that kind of worry, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, still smarting over the demise of the Soviet Union, has reminded us that many of the nuclear weapons that once terrified us still exist, putting real limits on our ability to confront and control rogue behavior.
In an interview that aired in December, Putin lamented the fall of the Soviet Union, which he had previously called the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. “It was a disintegration of historical Russia,” he said in the interview. “We turned into a completely
different country. And what had been built up over 1,000 years was largely lost.”
Putin wants that back. The invasion of Ukraine is part of that vision.
Putin confessed in the interview that not long after the fall of the Soviet Union, when inflation in Russia reached double digits, he sometimes moonlighted as a taxi driver to supplement his income. “It is unpleasant to talk about this,” he said, “but, unfortunately, this also took place.”
Now, he has reversed the humiliation of those hard times. Some experts believe that he could now be the wealthiest man in the world. I believe this makes the 69-year-old more dangerous, not less.
Putin now has little need of the shallow pleasure he’d get gathering unto himself more material objects than he already owns. Instead, he may now be consumed by the thing that preoccupies many of the world’s greatest men and women late in life: the building of legacy, the making of history, the casting of a long shadow.
Putin doesn’t just want to win a war or take a region, he wants to make a point, he wants to be the wings on which Russia rises again. His ego feeds his aggression, and that is why it is hard to imagine him accepting a loss in Ukraine.
Any form of victory for him will only add to his appetite. Why would he stop with Ukraine, or a portion of Ukraine?
And, of course, the West is restrained by the fact that Russia is not only a nuclear power, with roughly 6,000 nuclear warheads, but it also has the world’s largest nuclear stockpile, an arsenal even larger than that of the United States.
Putin keeps gesturing at the possibility of using those weapons. Those may be hollow threats, but it’s impossible to be 100 percent sure.
What I feel more sure of is this feeling I can’t shake: that we are drifting into a new age of existential uncertainty
Thursday, April 7
This next week we will discuss the following article from The Atlantic - Why People Are Acting So Weird. I'd like to know if you agree with the author's conclusions and if you have any additions to her list.
Why People Are Acting So Weird
Olga Khazan, The Atlantic 3.30.22
Everyone is acting so weird! The most obvious recent weirdness was when Will Smith smacked Chris Rock at the Oscars. But if you look closely, people have been behaving badly on smaller stages for months now. Last week, a man was arrested after he punched a gate agent at the Atlanta airport. (The gate agent looked like he was about to punch back, until his female colleague, bless her soul, stood on some chairs and said “no” to the entire situation.) That wasn’t even the only viral jerk-on-a-plane video that week.
In February, people found ways to throw tantrums while skiing — skiing! In one viral video, a man slid around the chairlift-boarding area of a Canadian resort, one foot strapped into his snowboard as he flailed at security guards and refused to comply with a mask mandate. Separate
footage shows a maskless man on a ski shuttle screaming, “There’s nobody wearing masks on any bus in this god**** town!” before calling his fellow passenger a “liberal piece of s***” and storming off.
During the pandemic, disorderly, rude, and unhinged conduct seems to have caught on — everything from rudeness and carelessness to physical violence — has increased, as the journalist Matt Yglesias pointed out in a Substack essay earlier this year. Americans are driving more
recklessly, crashing their cars and killing pedestrians at higher rates. Early 2021 saw the highest number of “unruly passenger” incidents ever, according to the FAA. In February, a plane bound for Washington, D.C., had to make an emergency landing in Kansas City, Missouri, after a man tried to break into the cockpit.
Health-care workers say their patients are behaving more violently; at one point, Missouri hospitals planned to outfit nurses with panic buttons. Schools, too, are reporting an uptick in “disruptive behavior,” Chalkbeat reported last fall. In 2020, the U.S. murder rate rose by nearly a third, the biggest increase on record, then rose again in 2021. Car thefts spiked 14 percent last year, and carjackings have surged in various cities. And if there were a national tracker of school-board-meeting hissy fits, it would be heaving with data points right now.
What on earth is happening? More than a dozen experts on crime, psychology, and social norms recently walked me through a few possible explanations.
We’re all stressed out
One likely explanation for the spike in bad behavior is the rage, frustration, and stress coursing through society right now. When Christine Porath, a business professor at Georgetown University, collected data on why people behave in rude or uncivil ways, “the No. 1 reason by far was feeling stressed or overwhelmed,” she told me.
The pandemic has created a lot of “high-stress, low-reward” situations, said Keith Humphreys, a psychiatry professor at Stanford, and now everyone is teetering slightly closer to their breaking point. Someone who may have lost a job, a loved one, or a friend to the pandemic might be pushed over the edge by an innocuous request. “When someone has that angry feeling, it’s because of a combination of some sort of provocation, their mood at the time of that provocation, and then how they interpret that provocation,” said Ryan Martin, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay who studies anger. Not only are people encountering more “provocations”—staffing shortages, mask mandates—but also their mood is worse when provoked. “Americans don’t really like each other very much right now,” he added.
Rudeness can be contagious
Porath has found that at work, people spread their negative emotions to their colleagues, bosses, and clients — even if those individuals weren’t the source of the negativity. “People who witness rudeness are three times less likely to help someone else,” she told me. She thinks people might be picking up on rudeness from social media and passing it on. Or they might be logging in to a Zoom meeting with their overwhelmed boss, getting yelled at, and then speaking a little more curtly to the grocery cashier later.
People are drinking more
People have been coping with the pandemic by drinking more and doing more drugs, and “a lot of these incidents involve somebody using a substance,” Humphreys said. “Whether they’re drinking before they get on the flight … A lot of auto accidents, including aggression-driven auto accidents, come from substances.” Americans have been drinking 14 percent more days a month during the pandemic, and drug overdoses have also increased since 2019. Substance-abuse treatment, never especially easy to come by, was further interrupted by COVID.
Americans have also been buying more guns
Gun sales spiked in 2020 and 2021, and more people are being killed with guns than before. In 2020, police recovered nearly twice as many firearms within a year of purchase as they did in 2019—a short “time to crime” window that suggests criminal intent. “Put more plainly, thousands of guns purchased in 2020 were almost immediately used in crimes,” Champe Barton writes at The Trace. Though owning a gun doesn’t make it more likely that you’ll kill someone, it makes it more likely that you’ll be successful if you try.
We’re social beings, and isolation is changing us
The pandemic loosened ties between people: Kids stopped going to school; their parents stopped going to work; parishioners stopped going to church; people stopped gathering, in general. Sociologists think all of this isolation shifted the way we behave. “We’re more likely to break rules when our bonds to society are weakened,” Robert Sampson, a Harvard sociologist who studies social disorder, told me. “When we become untethered, we tend to prioritize our own private interests over those of others or the public.”
The turn-of-the-20th-century scholar Émile Durkheim called this state anomie, or a lack of social norms that leads to lawlessness. “We are moral beings to the extent that we are social beings,” Durkheim wrote. In the past two years, we have stopped being social, and in many cases we have stopped being moral, too. “We’ve got, I think, a generalized sense that the rules simply don’t apply,” Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, told me. In some places, he says, police arrested fewer people during the pandemic, and “when enforcement goes down, people tend to relax their commitment to the rules.”
Though it’s been a lifesaving tool throughout the pandemic, mask wearing has likely made this problem worse. Just as it’s easier to scream at someone on Twitter than in real life, it’s easier to rage at a masked flight attendant than one whose face you can fully see. “You don’t really see a human being so much as you’re seeing someone masked,” Sampson said. Though one study found that face masks don’t dehumanize the wearer, another small experiment found that they do impair people’s ability to detect emotions.
Mental illness can’t explain this
The pandemic has had some measurable effects on mental health. Though the most common issues among people who contracted COVID-19 were anxiety and depression, a small percentage of people infected with the coronavirus appeared to develop psychosis for the first time.
Throughout the pandemic, treatment for severe mental-health problems, including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, has been harder to access. In early 2020, some psychiatrists suspended group therapy and other in-person programs; later, emergency rooms filled with COVID-19 patients, limiting capacity for psychiatric intake.
The majority of people with mental illness, though, are not violent. Most people with mental illness who commit violence have other problems, such as anger issues, substance abuse, or a recent trauma. People with severe mental illness are only a tiny percentage of the population, and
past research shows that they commit only 3 to 5 percent of violent acts, so they couldn’t possibly be responsible for the huge surge in misbehavior. According to the FAA, 72 percent of unruly-passenger incidents last year were “mask-related.” Regarding the people causing scenes, “I think those are as*****s,” said Tom Insel, the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health and the author of Healing. “It’s so important to distinguish people who have a mental illness from people who just do egregious things.”
Some of the antisocial behavior Americans are seeing will resolve itself as the pandemic loosens its grip. In most of the country, masks are coming off, people are resuming normal gatherings, and kids have returned to school. The rules and rhythms that kept America running smoothly are settling back into place.
Improvement may be slow. But experts think human interaction will, eventually, return to the pre-pandemic status quo. The rise in disorder may simply be the unsavory side of a uniquely difficult time—one in which many people were tested, and some failed. “There have been periods where the entire nation is challenged,” Insel said, “and you see both things: people who do heroic things, and people who do some very defensive, protective, and oftentimes ridiculous things.”
Why People Are Acting So Weird
Olga Khazan, The Atlantic 3.30.22
Everyone is acting so weird! The most obvious recent weirdness was when Will Smith smacked Chris Rock at the Oscars. But if you look closely, people have been behaving badly on smaller stages for months now. Last week, a man was arrested after he punched a gate agent at the Atlanta airport. (The gate agent looked like he was about to punch back, until his female colleague, bless her soul, stood on some chairs and said “no” to the entire situation.) That wasn’t even the only viral jerk-on-a-plane video that week.
In February, people found ways to throw tantrums while skiing — skiing! In one viral video, a man slid around the chairlift-boarding area of a Canadian resort, one foot strapped into his snowboard as he flailed at security guards and refused to comply with a mask mandate. Separate
footage shows a maskless man on a ski shuttle screaming, “There’s nobody wearing masks on any bus in this god**** town!” before calling his fellow passenger a “liberal piece of s***” and storming off.
During the pandemic, disorderly, rude, and unhinged conduct seems to have caught on — everything from rudeness and carelessness to physical violence — has increased, as the journalist Matt Yglesias pointed out in a Substack essay earlier this year. Americans are driving more
recklessly, crashing their cars and killing pedestrians at higher rates. Early 2021 saw the highest number of “unruly passenger” incidents ever, according to the FAA. In February, a plane bound for Washington, D.C., had to make an emergency landing in Kansas City, Missouri, after a man tried to break into the cockpit.
Health-care workers say their patients are behaving more violently; at one point, Missouri hospitals planned to outfit nurses with panic buttons. Schools, too, are reporting an uptick in “disruptive behavior,” Chalkbeat reported last fall. In 2020, the U.S. murder rate rose by nearly a third, the biggest increase on record, then rose again in 2021. Car thefts spiked 14 percent last year, and carjackings have surged in various cities. And if there were a national tracker of school-board-meeting hissy fits, it would be heaving with data points right now.
What on earth is happening? More than a dozen experts on crime, psychology, and social norms recently walked me through a few possible explanations.
We’re all stressed out
One likely explanation for the spike in bad behavior is the rage, frustration, and stress coursing through society right now. When Christine Porath, a business professor at Georgetown University, collected data on why people behave in rude or uncivil ways, “the No. 1 reason by far was feeling stressed or overwhelmed,” she told me.
The pandemic has created a lot of “high-stress, low-reward” situations, said Keith Humphreys, a psychiatry professor at Stanford, and now everyone is teetering slightly closer to their breaking point. Someone who may have lost a job, a loved one, or a friend to the pandemic might be pushed over the edge by an innocuous request. “When someone has that angry feeling, it’s because of a combination of some sort of provocation, their mood at the time of that provocation, and then how they interpret that provocation,” said Ryan Martin, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay who studies anger. Not only are people encountering more “provocations”—staffing shortages, mask mandates—but also their mood is worse when provoked. “Americans don’t really like each other very much right now,” he added.
Rudeness can be contagious
Porath has found that at work, people spread their negative emotions to their colleagues, bosses, and clients — even if those individuals weren’t the source of the negativity. “People who witness rudeness are three times less likely to help someone else,” she told me. She thinks people might be picking up on rudeness from social media and passing it on. Or they might be logging in to a Zoom meeting with their overwhelmed boss, getting yelled at, and then speaking a little more curtly to the grocery cashier later.
People are drinking more
People have been coping with the pandemic by drinking more and doing more drugs, and “a lot of these incidents involve somebody using a substance,” Humphreys said. “Whether they’re drinking before they get on the flight … A lot of auto accidents, including aggression-driven auto accidents, come from substances.” Americans have been drinking 14 percent more days a month during the pandemic, and drug overdoses have also increased since 2019. Substance-abuse treatment, never especially easy to come by, was further interrupted by COVID.
Americans have also been buying more guns
Gun sales spiked in 2020 and 2021, and more people are being killed with guns than before. In 2020, police recovered nearly twice as many firearms within a year of purchase as they did in 2019—a short “time to crime” window that suggests criminal intent. “Put more plainly, thousands of guns purchased in 2020 were almost immediately used in crimes,” Champe Barton writes at The Trace. Though owning a gun doesn’t make it more likely that you’ll kill someone, it makes it more likely that you’ll be successful if you try.
We’re social beings, and isolation is changing us
The pandemic loosened ties between people: Kids stopped going to school; their parents stopped going to work; parishioners stopped going to church; people stopped gathering, in general. Sociologists think all of this isolation shifted the way we behave. “We’re more likely to break rules when our bonds to society are weakened,” Robert Sampson, a Harvard sociologist who studies social disorder, told me. “When we become untethered, we tend to prioritize our own private interests over those of others or the public.”
The turn-of-the-20th-century scholar Émile Durkheim called this state anomie, or a lack of social norms that leads to lawlessness. “We are moral beings to the extent that we are social beings,” Durkheim wrote. In the past two years, we have stopped being social, and in many cases we have stopped being moral, too. “We’ve got, I think, a generalized sense that the rules simply don’t apply,” Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, told me. In some places, he says, police arrested fewer people during the pandemic, and “when enforcement goes down, people tend to relax their commitment to the rules.”
Though it’s been a lifesaving tool throughout the pandemic, mask wearing has likely made this problem worse. Just as it’s easier to scream at someone on Twitter than in real life, it’s easier to rage at a masked flight attendant than one whose face you can fully see. “You don’t really see a human being so much as you’re seeing someone masked,” Sampson said. Though one study found that face masks don’t dehumanize the wearer, another small experiment found that they do impair people’s ability to detect emotions.
Mental illness can’t explain this
The pandemic has had some measurable effects on mental health. Though the most common issues among people who contracted COVID-19 were anxiety and depression, a small percentage of people infected with the coronavirus appeared to develop psychosis for the first time.
Throughout the pandemic, treatment for severe mental-health problems, including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, has been harder to access. In early 2020, some psychiatrists suspended group therapy and other in-person programs; later, emergency rooms filled with COVID-19 patients, limiting capacity for psychiatric intake.
The majority of people with mental illness, though, are not violent. Most people with mental illness who commit violence have other problems, such as anger issues, substance abuse, or a recent trauma. People with severe mental illness are only a tiny percentage of the population, and
past research shows that they commit only 3 to 5 percent of violent acts, so they couldn’t possibly be responsible for the huge surge in misbehavior. According to the FAA, 72 percent of unruly-passenger incidents last year were “mask-related.” Regarding the people causing scenes, “I think those are as*****s,” said Tom Insel, the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health and the author of Healing. “It’s so important to distinguish people who have a mental illness from people who just do egregious things.”
Some of the antisocial behavior Americans are seeing will resolve itself as the pandemic loosens its grip. In most of the country, masks are coming off, people are resuming normal gatherings, and kids have returned to school. The rules and rhythms that kept America running smoothly are settling back into place.
Improvement may be slow. But experts think human interaction will, eventually, return to the pre-pandemic status quo. The rise in disorder may simply be the unsavory side of a uniquely difficult time—one in which many people were tested, and some failed. “There have been periods where the entire nation is challenged,” Insel said, “and you see both things: people who do heroic things, and people who do some very defensive, protective, and oftentimes ridiculous things.”
Thursday, March 31
There will be no Women's Discussion Group on Thursday, March 31. Women are invited to join in the discussion on Tuesday, March 29.
Thursday, March 24
It was another fascinating week of discussions. One thing that came up in both discussions was Ukraine and our need to talk about it. This is the defining action/topic of our time right now and it seems to overshadow other topics; even Lenten themes.
There are so many articles to cover that it was difficult to decide. But, this one, from the NY Times, talks about WWIII. It makes me wonder if this really is the brink of the third world war or is it simply an escalating territorial war that will be resolved without global war implications?
I'd like to hear what you think. Perhaps we will even have some sort of theology or spirituality come up too.
On a separate note, I read an interesting article about male teens, despair, and college dropout rates and how working class teens with religious education have the fewest incidents of despair and dropout. The link to that article is included here:
Article From the NY Times: Male Teens, Despair, and College Dropout Rates
This Is How World War III Begins
Bret Stephens, NY Times, 3.15.22
The usual date given for the start of World War II is Sept. 1, 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. But that was just one in a series of events that at the time could have seemed disconnected.
Among them: Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931. Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia in 1935. The remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936 and the Spanish Civil War, which started the same year. Anschluss with Austria and the Sudeten crisis of 1938. The Soviet invasion of Poland weeks after the German one and Germany’s western invasions the following year. Operation Barbarossa and Pearl Harbor in 1941.
The point is, World War II didn’t so much begin as it gathered, like water rising until it breaches a dam. We, too, have been living through years of rising waters, though it took Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for much of the world to notice.
Before the invasion, we had the Russian invasions of Georgia, Crimea and eastern Ukraine; the Russian carpet bombing of Aleppo; the use of exotic radioactive and chemical agents against Russian dissidents on British soil; Russian interference in U.S. elections and massive hacks of
our computer networks; the murder of Boris Nemtsov and the blatant poisoning and imprisonment of Alexei Navalny.
Were any of these sovereignty violations, legal violations, treaty violations, war crimes and crimes against humanity met with a strong, united, punitive response that could have averted the next round of outrages? Did Western responses to other violations of global norms — Syria’s use
of chemical weapons against civilians, Beijing’s eradication of Hong Kong’s autonomy, Iran’s war by proxy against its neighbors — give Vladimir Putin pause?
In short, did Putin have any reason to think, before Feb. 24, that he wouldn’t be able to get away with his invasion? He didn’t. Contrary to the claim that Putin’s behavior is a result of Western provocation — like refusing to absolutely rule out eventual NATO membership for Ukraine --
the West has mainly spent 22 years placating Putin through a long cycle of resets and wrist slaps. The devastation of Ukraine is the fruit of this appeasement.
The Biden administration now faces the question of whether it wants to bring this cycle to an end. The answer isn’t clear. Sanctions have hurt the Russian economy, arms shipments to Ukraine have helped to slow the Russian advance, and Russia’s brutality has unified NATO.
This is to the president’s credit. But the administration continues to operate under a series of potentially catastrophic illusions.
Sanctions may devastate Russia in the long term. But the immediate struggle in Ukraine is short term. Insofar as one of the main effects of sanctions has been to send tens of thousands of middle-class Russians into exile, they actually help Putin by weakening a potent base of political opposition. As for the oligarchs, they might have lost their yachts, but they’re not about to pick up their guns.
Arming Ukraine with Javelin and Stinger missiles has wounded and embarrassed the Russian military. Providing Kyiv with MIG-29 fighter jets and other potentially game-changing weapon systems could help turn the tide. Refusing to do so may only prolong Ukraine’s agony.
Frequent suggestions that Putin has already lost the war or that he can’t possibly win when Ukrainians are united in their hatred for him or that he’s looking for an offramp — and that we should be thinking up ingenious ways to provide him with one — may turn out to be right. But they are grossly premature. This war is only in its third week; it took the Nazis longer to conquer Poland. The ability to subdue a restive population is chiefly a function of the pain an occupier is willing to inflict. For a primer on that, look at what Putin did to Grozny in his first year in office.
Refusing to impose a no-fly zone in Ukraine may be justified because it exceeds the risks NATO countries are prepared to tolerate. But the idea that doing so could start World War III ignores history and telegraphs weakness. Americans squared off with Soviet pilots operating under
Chinese or North Korean cover in the Korean War without blowing up the world. And our vocal aversion to confrontation is an invitation, not a deterrent, to Russian escalation.
There is now a serious risk that these illusions could collapse very suddenly. There’s little evidence so far that Putin is eager to cut his losses; on the contrary, to do so now — after incurring the economic price of sanctions but without achieving a clear victory — would jeopardize his grip on power.
Bottom line: Expect him to double down. If he uses chemical weapons, as Bashar al-Assad did, or deploys a battlefield nuclear weapon, in keeping with longstanding Russian military doctrine, does he lose more than he gains? The question answers itself. He wins swiftly. He terrifies the West. He consolidates power. He suffers consequences only marginally graver than the ones already inflicted. And his fellow travelers in Beijing, Tehran and Pyongyang take note.
How does the next world war begin? The same way the last one did.
There are so many articles to cover that it was difficult to decide. But, this one, from the NY Times, talks about WWIII. It makes me wonder if this really is the brink of the third world war or is it simply an escalating territorial war that will be resolved without global war implications?
I'd like to hear what you think. Perhaps we will even have some sort of theology or spirituality come up too.
On a separate note, I read an interesting article about male teens, despair, and college dropout rates and how working class teens with religious education have the fewest incidents of despair and dropout. The link to that article is included here:
Article From the NY Times: Male Teens, Despair, and College Dropout Rates
This Is How World War III Begins
Bret Stephens, NY Times, 3.15.22
The usual date given for the start of World War II is Sept. 1, 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. But that was just one in a series of events that at the time could have seemed disconnected.
Among them: Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931. Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia in 1935. The remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936 and the Spanish Civil War, which started the same year. Anschluss with Austria and the Sudeten crisis of 1938. The Soviet invasion of Poland weeks after the German one and Germany’s western invasions the following year. Operation Barbarossa and Pearl Harbor in 1941.
The point is, World War II didn’t so much begin as it gathered, like water rising until it breaches a dam. We, too, have been living through years of rising waters, though it took Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for much of the world to notice.
Before the invasion, we had the Russian invasions of Georgia, Crimea and eastern Ukraine; the Russian carpet bombing of Aleppo; the use of exotic radioactive and chemical agents against Russian dissidents on British soil; Russian interference in U.S. elections and massive hacks of
our computer networks; the murder of Boris Nemtsov and the blatant poisoning and imprisonment of Alexei Navalny.
Were any of these sovereignty violations, legal violations, treaty violations, war crimes and crimes against humanity met with a strong, united, punitive response that could have averted the next round of outrages? Did Western responses to other violations of global norms — Syria’s use
of chemical weapons against civilians, Beijing’s eradication of Hong Kong’s autonomy, Iran’s war by proxy against its neighbors — give Vladimir Putin pause?
In short, did Putin have any reason to think, before Feb. 24, that he wouldn’t be able to get away with his invasion? He didn’t. Contrary to the claim that Putin’s behavior is a result of Western provocation — like refusing to absolutely rule out eventual NATO membership for Ukraine --
the West has mainly spent 22 years placating Putin through a long cycle of resets and wrist slaps. The devastation of Ukraine is the fruit of this appeasement.
The Biden administration now faces the question of whether it wants to bring this cycle to an end. The answer isn’t clear. Sanctions have hurt the Russian economy, arms shipments to Ukraine have helped to slow the Russian advance, and Russia’s brutality has unified NATO.
This is to the president’s credit. But the administration continues to operate under a series of potentially catastrophic illusions.
Sanctions may devastate Russia in the long term. But the immediate struggle in Ukraine is short term. Insofar as one of the main effects of sanctions has been to send tens of thousands of middle-class Russians into exile, they actually help Putin by weakening a potent base of political opposition. As for the oligarchs, they might have lost their yachts, but they’re not about to pick up their guns.
Arming Ukraine with Javelin and Stinger missiles has wounded and embarrassed the Russian military. Providing Kyiv with MIG-29 fighter jets and other potentially game-changing weapon systems could help turn the tide. Refusing to do so may only prolong Ukraine’s agony.
Frequent suggestions that Putin has already lost the war or that he can’t possibly win when Ukrainians are united in their hatred for him or that he’s looking for an offramp — and that we should be thinking up ingenious ways to provide him with one — may turn out to be right. But they are grossly premature. This war is only in its third week; it took the Nazis longer to conquer Poland. The ability to subdue a restive population is chiefly a function of the pain an occupier is willing to inflict. For a primer on that, look at what Putin did to Grozny in his first year in office.
Refusing to impose a no-fly zone in Ukraine may be justified because it exceeds the risks NATO countries are prepared to tolerate. But the idea that doing so could start World War III ignores history and telegraphs weakness. Americans squared off with Soviet pilots operating under
Chinese or North Korean cover in the Korean War without blowing up the world. And our vocal aversion to confrontation is an invitation, not a deterrent, to Russian escalation.
There is now a serious risk that these illusions could collapse very suddenly. There’s little evidence so far that Putin is eager to cut his losses; on the contrary, to do so now — after incurring the economic price of sanctions but without achieving a clear victory — would jeopardize his grip on power.
Bottom line: Expect him to double down. If he uses chemical weapons, as Bashar al-Assad did, or deploys a battlefield nuclear weapon, in keeping with longstanding Russian military doctrine, does he lose more than he gains? The question answers itself. He wins swiftly. He terrifies the West. He consolidates power. He suffers consequences only marginally graver than the ones already inflicted. And his fellow travelers in Beijing, Tehran and Pyongyang take note.
How does the next world war begin? The same way the last one did.
Thursday, March 17
We had two different and intriguing conversations this week - one about the Livestreamed War and the other about the Eyewitness to Dachau presentation.
This week will also be interesting - we are talking about Lent and self-care.
I look forward to talking about it with you.
Self Care Only Works in God’s Care
Julie Canlis, Christianity Today 3.10.22
A few decades ago, you might have found me taking pot-shots at John the Baptist’s “I must decrease” (John 3:30). Having witnessed the havoc it wreaked upon Christian women prone to self-abnegation, as well as the license it gave to authoritarian leaders prone to spiritual abuse, I was not a fan of this particular phrase.
Christian theologians have always had revolutionary messages about the self, which are often paradoxical and profoundly countercultural. They take their cue from Jesus, who talked about losing one’s self in order to find it. About coming to serve, not be served. About death being the doorway to life. In none of these messages is Jesus downgrading the self. He is simply giving our selfhood a new foundation.
The early church followed in his footsteps, baptizing people and proclaiming the termination of a selfhood that was already leading to death. They remodeled Roman mausoleums into baptistries, sending a clear message through the architecture: You are going here to die. A deceased person is being buried here. Sin killed you—you were already dead—you are just enacting a death that has already happened. When the convert rose from the clear waters of baptism, they were raised into a revolutionary idea of what it means to be a self.
For early theologians, this symbolic death of the self was the discovery of the true self in Christ. They believed they could “be” themselves while being a self-for-others. The secret to this fully developed selfhood was neither self-care nor self-abnegation—which, it could be argued, are simply different sides of the same theological coin.
Instead, when a person’s life “is hid with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3), their identity is fully stable, for it’s connected to the one who truly knows us, loves us, and doesn’t change. Knowing oneself and being oneself can only happen in relationship with knowing and being known by God and others. And to go one step further: Truly caring for oneself only happens when we have something bigger than ourselves to care about. This is the secret to Lent. The early church, like a good parent, wanted to direct its children annually into a journey that would remind them of their primary selfhood: in Christ.
Historically, Lent arose from the 40 days when baptismal candidates fasted and prayed in preparation for their baptism on the eve of Easter. It didn’t take much time, though, until the whole church realized it wasn’t just the new converts who needed this cleansing process.
Everyone needed it again and again. The entire early church, then, committed itself to remembering baptism and the new identity that it offers. Lent was not so much about self-hatred or self-punishment but the rediscovery of the self in Christ.
The problem with the self-care movement today is that much of it rests on a false dualism: that my selfhood and God’s are in competition, and that choosing something good for myself comes at the expense of God’s glory and vice versa. But this is just a modern dilemma, foreign to the church of earlier centuries.
Bernard of Clairvaux, a gentle pastor and abbot from the 12th century, helps us ground self-care in its proper relation to God and ourselves. For him, the love of self was a fitting and necessary part of being human and even a key part of our survival. At the same time, he understood that it was equally vulnerable to our disordered desires. How is it possible to have a rightly ordered care for ourselves? Bernard took his monks on a pilgrimage of love, in which they moved beyond disordered self-love to one that was truly free for God and others.
Bernard begins by describing the first stage of love (self-love) as what he calls “natural human affection,” where we are weakened and nearly “compelled to love and serve ourselves first.” For Bernard, there is no intrinsic problem with having a self, but unfortunately, that self often get
infected with desires that lead to enslavement. This stage Bernard calls “love of self for self’s sake.”
In the second stage of love, we discover something larger than ourselves—God!—who is worthy of our love and delight. We begin to experience freedom from our disordered desires, even though this stage is still a subset of self-love, or the “love of God for self’s sake.”
But true growth in God comes at the third stage of love, when we begin to love God for who he is and not for what he can give us. This stage brings liberation, as our disordered desires begin to find their deepest calling in loving God and our neighbor. “Once God’s sweetness has been tasted,” writes Bernard, “it draws us to the pure love of God more than our needs compel us to love him. Thus we begin to say, ‘We now love God, not for our necessity, for we ourselves have tasted and know how sweet the Lord is.’”
But Bernard isn’t done with us.
There is the fourth stage. Here, we come around full circle to a purified love of ourselves. Bernard calls this the stage of “love of self for God’s sake.” At this level, we engage in the most difficult spiritual discipline of all: seeing ourselves with God’s eyes, knowing ourselves as beloved, and loving ourselves as one of God’s beloved creations—warts and all. “Such experiences are rare and come only for a moment,” says Bernard.
To those of us accustomed to believing that my self and God’s are in competition, this truth comes as a shock: What brings God glory is not our self-denigration but rather humble gratitude and freedom in knowing ourselves as loved by him and made in his image. This is true self-care, where we’re given the gift of seeing ourselves as God sees us and loving ourselves with his unalloyed love (1 Cor. 13).
When you remove God’s love from the picture, self-care is not part of the fourth stage but the first. It doesn’t attend to things that truly satisfy, nor does it convince us of our lovability. Ironically, the first stage is tyrannical, because the love of oneself is a devouring monster. It will never be satiated. I call this kind of self-care a luxury form of despair.
By contrast, Bernard’s fourth stage is a truly purified love of self that reflects God’s own enjoyment and acceptance of us. This radical message is what we’re unsuspectingly baptized into. What masquerades as “healthy” self-love without also demanding the Cross offers only a
false identity.
A spirituality that begins with the death of the self (that our baptisms proclaim) is worlds apart from the kind abnegation of the self that many have suffered. Baptism puts us in touch with our real needs, by plunging us into the much larger reality of God and his love of us.
“I am not certain that the fourth degree of love in which we love ourselves only for the sake of God may be perfectly attained in this life,” writes Bernard. “But, when it does happen, we will experience the joy of the Lord and be forgetful of ourselves in a wonderful way. We are, for
those moments, one mind and one spirit with God.”
With this freedom, we are able to move into a “disinterested” love of ourselves that is neither dependent upon self-care practices nor eschews them as worthless. For all its help, self-care can a never take the place of being loved unconditionally.
The season before Easter is the space when we get to lean into God’s love. Lent did not originate out of a desire to self-punish or to focus on our sinfulness. It’s even more black and white than that: Lent is about death. But this crazy Christian message goes even further: It’s only through death that we begin to live. Lent is when the whole church remembers our origins—origins that began in our baptism and Jesus’ baptism, too, where he heard the word that we can hardly believe: You are my beloved.
We have been baptized. We have been plunged into Christ. We can leave behind anything that keeps us from knowing we are loved by God and anything that prevents us from loving our neighbor as ourselves.
Lent is not an endurance stunt. It’s about reclaiming the idea that we are loved long before we enter the wilderness.
Julie Canlis is the author of A Theology of the Ordinary (2017) and Calvin’s Ladder (2012), winner of a Templeton Prize and a Christianity Today Award of Merit.
This week will also be interesting - we are talking about Lent and self-care.
I look forward to talking about it with you.
Self Care Only Works in God’s Care
Julie Canlis, Christianity Today 3.10.22
A few decades ago, you might have found me taking pot-shots at John the Baptist’s “I must decrease” (John 3:30). Having witnessed the havoc it wreaked upon Christian women prone to self-abnegation, as well as the license it gave to authoritarian leaders prone to spiritual abuse, I was not a fan of this particular phrase.
Christian theologians have always had revolutionary messages about the self, which are often paradoxical and profoundly countercultural. They take their cue from Jesus, who talked about losing one’s self in order to find it. About coming to serve, not be served. About death being the doorway to life. In none of these messages is Jesus downgrading the self. He is simply giving our selfhood a new foundation.
The early church followed in his footsteps, baptizing people and proclaiming the termination of a selfhood that was already leading to death. They remodeled Roman mausoleums into baptistries, sending a clear message through the architecture: You are going here to die. A deceased person is being buried here. Sin killed you—you were already dead—you are just enacting a death that has already happened. When the convert rose from the clear waters of baptism, they were raised into a revolutionary idea of what it means to be a self.
For early theologians, this symbolic death of the self was the discovery of the true self in Christ. They believed they could “be” themselves while being a self-for-others. The secret to this fully developed selfhood was neither self-care nor self-abnegation—which, it could be argued, are simply different sides of the same theological coin.
Instead, when a person’s life “is hid with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3), their identity is fully stable, for it’s connected to the one who truly knows us, loves us, and doesn’t change. Knowing oneself and being oneself can only happen in relationship with knowing and being known by God and others. And to go one step further: Truly caring for oneself only happens when we have something bigger than ourselves to care about. This is the secret to Lent. The early church, like a good parent, wanted to direct its children annually into a journey that would remind them of their primary selfhood: in Christ.
Historically, Lent arose from the 40 days when baptismal candidates fasted and prayed in preparation for their baptism on the eve of Easter. It didn’t take much time, though, until the whole church realized it wasn’t just the new converts who needed this cleansing process.
Everyone needed it again and again. The entire early church, then, committed itself to remembering baptism and the new identity that it offers. Lent was not so much about self-hatred or self-punishment but the rediscovery of the self in Christ.
The problem with the self-care movement today is that much of it rests on a false dualism: that my selfhood and God’s are in competition, and that choosing something good for myself comes at the expense of God’s glory and vice versa. But this is just a modern dilemma, foreign to the church of earlier centuries.
Bernard of Clairvaux, a gentle pastor and abbot from the 12th century, helps us ground self-care in its proper relation to God and ourselves. For him, the love of self was a fitting and necessary part of being human and even a key part of our survival. At the same time, he understood that it was equally vulnerable to our disordered desires. How is it possible to have a rightly ordered care for ourselves? Bernard took his monks on a pilgrimage of love, in which they moved beyond disordered self-love to one that was truly free for God and others.
Bernard begins by describing the first stage of love (self-love) as what he calls “natural human affection,” where we are weakened and nearly “compelled to love and serve ourselves first.” For Bernard, there is no intrinsic problem with having a self, but unfortunately, that self often get
infected with desires that lead to enslavement. This stage Bernard calls “love of self for self’s sake.”
In the second stage of love, we discover something larger than ourselves—God!—who is worthy of our love and delight. We begin to experience freedom from our disordered desires, even though this stage is still a subset of self-love, or the “love of God for self’s sake.”
But true growth in God comes at the third stage of love, when we begin to love God for who he is and not for what he can give us. This stage brings liberation, as our disordered desires begin to find their deepest calling in loving God and our neighbor. “Once God’s sweetness has been tasted,” writes Bernard, “it draws us to the pure love of God more than our needs compel us to love him. Thus we begin to say, ‘We now love God, not for our necessity, for we ourselves have tasted and know how sweet the Lord is.’”
But Bernard isn’t done with us.
There is the fourth stage. Here, we come around full circle to a purified love of ourselves. Bernard calls this the stage of “love of self for God’s sake.” At this level, we engage in the most difficult spiritual discipline of all: seeing ourselves with God’s eyes, knowing ourselves as beloved, and loving ourselves as one of God’s beloved creations—warts and all. “Such experiences are rare and come only for a moment,” says Bernard.
To those of us accustomed to believing that my self and God’s are in competition, this truth comes as a shock: What brings God glory is not our self-denigration but rather humble gratitude and freedom in knowing ourselves as loved by him and made in his image. This is true self-care, where we’re given the gift of seeing ourselves as God sees us and loving ourselves with his unalloyed love (1 Cor. 13).
When you remove God’s love from the picture, self-care is not part of the fourth stage but the first. It doesn’t attend to things that truly satisfy, nor does it convince us of our lovability. Ironically, the first stage is tyrannical, because the love of oneself is a devouring monster. It will never be satiated. I call this kind of self-care a luxury form of despair.
By contrast, Bernard’s fourth stage is a truly purified love of self that reflects God’s own enjoyment and acceptance of us. This radical message is what we’re unsuspectingly baptized into. What masquerades as “healthy” self-love without also demanding the Cross offers only a
false identity.
A spirituality that begins with the death of the self (that our baptisms proclaim) is worlds apart from the kind abnegation of the self that many have suffered. Baptism puts us in touch with our real needs, by plunging us into the much larger reality of God and his love of us.
“I am not certain that the fourth degree of love in which we love ourselves only for the sake of God may be perfectly attained in this life,” writes Bernard. “But, when it does happen, we will experience the joy of the Lord and be forgetful of ourselves in a wonderful way. We are, for
those moments, one mind and one spirit with God.”
With this freedom, we are able to move into a “disinterested” love of ourselves that is neither dependent upon self-care practices nor eschews them as worthless. For all its help, self-care can a never take the place of being loved unconditionally.
The season before Easter is the space when we get to lean into God’s love. Lent did not originate out of a desire to self-punish or to focus on our sinfulness. It’s even more black and white than that: Lent is about death. But this crazy Christian message goes even further: It’s only through death that we begin to live. Lent is when the whole church remembers our origins—origins that began in our baptism and Jesus’ baptism, too, where he heard the word that we can hardly believe: You are my beloved.
We have been baptized. We have been plunged into Christ. We can leave behind anything that keeps us from knowing we are loved by God and anything that prevents us from loving our neighbor as ourselves.
Lent is not an endurance stunt. It’s about reclaiming the idea that we are loved long before we enter the wilderness.
Julie Canlis is the author of A Theology of the Ordinary (2017) and Calvin’s Ladder (2012), winner of a Templeton Prize and a Christianity Today Award of Merit.
Thursday, March 10
The Women's Discussion Group on Thursday at 10 a.m. is open to both men and women for a follow up discussion on the Eyewitness to Dachau presentation on Wednesday at 2 pm.
Thursday, March 3
A story came up during a discussion group this week in which I received permission to share. Here it is. While we were discussing the decision from the Roman Church to invalidate baptisms, one of our members said that it's like Russia and Ukraine - the conflict is between governments and not the people. He went to a wedding in a Roman Catholic Church. When it came for communion, he went up with all the others and kneeled at the rail. While he was feeling foolish for not knowing what to do with his hands, the priest came by and said, "You're not a catholic are you. Well, let's hope you will be one someday. Put your hands like this and I'll place the bread on your hands and then you say 'Amen'."
That story restored my hope.
The topic for next week is an opinion piece from the NY Times about how it seems like people in America today have rights but no responsibilities.
America 2022: Where Everyone Has Rights
And No One Has Responsibilities
Thomas Friedman, NY Times 2.8.22
The conflict between Neil Young and Joe Rogan over the anti-vaccine propaganda Rogan spreads through his podcast triggered a heated debate over the boundaries of free speech on platforms like Spotify and whether one entertainer — Young — had the right to tell Spotify to
drop another — Rogan — or he’d leave himself. But this clash was about something more than free speech.
As a journalist who relies on freedom of speech, I would never advocate tossing Rogan off Spotify. But as a citizen, I sure appreciated Young calling him out over the deeper issue: How is it that we have morphed into a country where people claim endless “rights” while fewer and
fewer believe they have any “responsibilities”?
That was really Young’s message for Rogan and Spotify: Sure, you have the right to spread anti-vaccine misinformation, but where’s your sense of responsibility to your fellow citizens, and especially to the nurses and doctors who have to deal with the fallout for your words? This pervasive claim that “I have my rights” but “I don’t have responsibilities” is unraveling our country today.
“We are losing what could be called our societal immunity,” argued Dov Seidman, founder of the How Institute for Society. “Societal immunity is the capacity for people to come together, do hard things and look out for one another in the face of existential threats, like a pandemic, or
serious challenges to the cornerstones of their political and economic systems, like the legitimacy of elections or peaceful transfer of power.”
But societal immunity “is a function of trust,” added Seidman. “When trust in institutions, leaders and each other is high, people — in a crisis — are more willing to sublimate their cherished rights and demonstrate their sense of shared responsibilities toward others, even others
they disagree with on important issues and even if it means making sacrifices.”
When our trust in each other erodes, though, as is happening in America today, fewer people think they have responsibilities to the other — only rights that protect them from being told by the other what to do. When Rogan exercised his right to spread misinformation about vaccines, and when Spotify stood behind its biggest star, they were doing nothing illegal. They were just doing something shameful.
Because the Rogan podcast episode that set off the controversy, an interview with Dr. Robert Malone, who has gained fame with discredited claims, completely ignored the four most important statistical facts about Covid-19 today that highlight our responsibilities — to our fellow citizens and, even more so, to the nurses and doctors risking their lives to take care of us in a pandemic.
The first three statistics are from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest surveys.
First, unvaccinated adults 18 years and older are 16 times more likely to be hospitalized for Covid than fully vaccinated adults. Second: Adults 65 and older who are not vaccinated are around 50 times more likely to be hospitalized for Covid than those who have received a full vaccine course and a booster. Third: Unvaccinated people are 20 times more likely to die of Covid than people who are vaccinated and boosted.
The fourth statistic is from a survey from the staffing firm Cross Country Healthcare and Florida Atlantic University’s College of Nursing, released in December. It found that the emotional toll and other work conditions brought on by the pandemic contributed to some two-thirds of nurses giving thought to leaving the profession.
A McKinsey study last month about the stress on nurses quoted Gretchen Berlin, a registered nurse and McKinsey partner, as saying: “Many patients, especially at the start of this, had only the nurses with them for those final moments, and I’m not sure that we’ve provided the
decompression space for what that does to an individual who has to see that and support people through that over and over again. … The level of stress that individuals are dealing with is going to have massive implications on everyone’s well-being.”
My friend Dr. Steven Packer, president and C.E.O. of Montage Health and Community Hospital in Monterey, Calif., told me that many hospitals today are experiencing an unprecedented 20 percent annual turnover rate of nurses — more than double the historical baseline. The more
nurses leave, the more those left behind have had to work overtime.
“We have hard-working frontline staff in critical care settings stretched thin caring for critically ill Covid patients — with the overwhelming majority of those patients having a potentially avoidable illness had they only been vaccinated,” explained Packer. “It is disheartening and
distressing.” Especially when so many dying unvaccinated patients tell their nurses, “I wish I had gotten vaccinated,” according to the American Hospital Association.
But as Wired magazine columnist Steve Levy wrote last week in a critique of Rogan’s three-hour Spotify interview with Malone, none of these statistics were mentioned during that podcast.“ You can listen to the entire 186-minute lovefest between Rogan and Malone and have no idea
that our hospitals are overloaded with Covid cases,” wrote Levy, “and that on the day their conversation transpired, 7,559 people worldwide died of Covid, 1,410 of which were in the United States. The vast majority of them were unvaccinated.”
Instead, “the entirety of the podcast makes it clear that Rogan and Malone are on the same team,” Levy added. “When Malone uncorks questionable allegations about disastrous vaccine effects and the global cabal of politicians and drugmakers pulling strings, Rogan responds with uh-huhs and wows.” There is no mention of the numerous studies that “unvaccinated people are many, many times more likely to be hospitalized or die.”
That was Rogan’s right. That was Spotify C.E.O. Daniel Ek’s right. But who was looking out for the doctors and nurses on the pandemic front lines whose only ask is that the politicians and media influencers who are privileged enough to have public platforms — especially one like
Rogan with an average of 11 million listeners per episode — use them to reinforce our responsibilities to one another, not just our rights. I’ll tell you who was defending them: Neil Young.
Listen to the last line of Young’s statement when he pulled out of Spotify: “I am happy and proud to stand in solidarity with the frontline health care workers who risk their lives every day to help others.”
Rogan has vowed to do better at counterbalancing controversial guests. He could start by offering his listeners a 186-minute episode with intensive care nurses and doctors about what this pandemic of the unvaccinated has done to them.
That would be a teaching moment, not only about Covid, but also about putting our responsibilities to one another — and especially to those who care for us — at least on a par with our right to be as dumb and selfish as we want to be.
That story restored my hope.
The topic for next week is an opinion piece from the NY Times about how it seems like people in America today have rights but no responsibilities.
America 2022: Where Everyone Has Rights
And No One Has Responsibilities
Thomas Friedman, NY Times 2.8.22
The conflict between Neil Young and Joe Rogan over the anti-vaccine propaganda Rogan spreads through his podcast triggered a heated debate over the boundaries of free speech on platforms like Spotify and whether one entertainer — Young — had the right to tell Spotify to
drop another — Rogan — or he’d leave himself. But this clash was about something more than free speech.
As a journalist who relies on freedom of speech, I would never advocate tossing Rogan off Spotify. But as a citizen, I sure appreciated Young calling him out over the deeper issue: How is it that we have morphed into a country where people claim endless “rights” while fewer and
fewer believe they have any “responsibilities”?
That was really Young’s message for Rogan and Spotify: Sure, you have the right to spread anti-vaccine misinformation, but where’s your sense of responsibility to your fellow citizens, and especially to the nurses and doctors who have to deal with the fallout for your words? This pervasive claim that “I have my rights” but “I don’t have responsibilities” is unraveling our country today.
“We are losing what could be called our societal immunity,” argued Dov Seidman, founder of the How Institute for Society. “Societal immunity is the capacity for people to come together, do hard things and look out for one another in the face of existential threats, like a pandemic, or
serious challenges to the cornerstones of their political and economic systems, like the legitimacy of elections or peaceful transfer of power.”
But societal immunity “is a function of trust,” added Seidman. “When trust in institutions, leaders and each other is high, people — in a crisis — are more willing to sublimate their cherished rights and demonstrate their sense of shared responsibilities toward others, even others
they disagree with on important issues and even if it means making sacrifices.”
When our trust in each other erodes, though, as is happening in America today, fewer people think they have responsibilities to the other — only rights that protect them from being told by the other what to do. When Rogan exercised his right to spread misinformation about vaccines, and when Spotify stood behind its biggest star, they were doing nothing illegal. They were just doing something shameful.
Because the Rogan podcast episode that set off the controversy, an interview with Dr. Robert Malone, who has gained fame with discredited claims, completely ignored the four most important statistical facts about Covid-19 today that highlight our responsibilities — to our fellow citizens and, even more so, to the nurses and doctors risking their lives to take care of us in a pandemic.
The first three statistics are from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest surveys.
First, unvaccinated adults 18 years and older are 16 times more likely to be hospitalized for Covid than fully vaccinated adults. Second: Adults 65 and older who are not vaccinated are around 50 times more likely to be hospitalized for Covid than those who have received a full vaccine course and a booster. Third: Unvaccinated people are 20 times more likely to die of Covid than people who are vaccinated and boosted.
The fourth statistic is from a survey from the staffing firm Cross Country Healthcare and Florida Atlantic University’s College of Nursing, released in December. It found that the emotional toll and other work conditions brought on by the pandemic contributed to some two-thirds of nurses giving thought to leaving the profession.
A McKinsey study last month about the stress on nurses quoted Gretchen Berlin, a registered nurse and McKinsey partner, as saying: “Many patients, especially at the start of this, had only the nurses with them for those final moments, and I’m not sure that we’ve provided the
decompression space for what that does to an individual who has to see that and support people through that over and over again. … The level of stress that individuals are dealing with is going to have massive implications on everyone’s well-being.”
My friend Dr. Steven Packer, president and C.E.O. of Montage Health and Community Hospital in Monterey, Calif., told me that many hospitals today are experiencing an unprecedented 20 percent annual turnover rate of nurses — more than double the historical baseline. The more
nurses leave, the more those left behind have had to work overtime.
“We have hard-working frontline staff in critical care settings stretched thin caring for critically ill Covid patients — with the overwhelming majority of those patients having a potentially avoidable illness had they only been vaccinated,” explained Packer. “It is disheartening and
distressing.” Especially when so many dying unvaccinated patients tell their nurses, “I wish I had gotten vaccinated,” according to the American Hospital Association.
But as Wired magazine columnist Steve Levy wrote last week in a critique of Rogan’s three-hour Spotify interview with Malone, none of these statistics were mentioned during that podcast.“ You can listen to the entire 186-minute lovefest between Rogan and Malone and have no idea
that our hospitals are overloaded with Covid cases,” wrote Levy, “and that on the day their conversation transpired, 7,559 people worldwide died of Covid, 1,410 of which were in the United States. The vast majority of them were unvaccinated.”
Instead, “the entirety of the podcast makes it clear that Rogan and Malone are on the same team,” Levy added. “When Malone uncorks questionable allegations about disastrous vaccine effects and the global cabal of politicians and drugmakers pulling strings, Rogan responds with uh-huhs and wows.” There is no mention of the numerous studies that “unvaccinated people are many, many times more likely to be hospitalized or die.”
That was Rogan’s right. That was Spotify C.E.O. Daniel Ek’s right. But who was looking out for the doctors and nurses on the pandemic front lines whose only ask is that the politicians and media influencers who are privileged enough to have public platforms — especially one like
Rogan with an average of 11 million listeners per episode — use them to reinforce our responsibilities to one another, not just our rights. I’ll tell you who was defending them: Neil Young.
Listen to the last line of Young’s statement when he pulled out of Spotify: “I am happy and proud to stand in solidarity with the frontline health care workers who risk their lives every day to help others.”
Rogan has vowed to do better at counterbalancing controversial guests. He could start by offering his listeners a 186-minute episode with intensive care nurses and doctors about what this pandemic of the unvaccinated has done to them.
That would be a teaching moment, not only about Covid, but also about putting our responsibilities to one another — and especially to those who care for us — at least on a par with our right to be as dumb and selfish as we want to be.
Thursday, February 23
Andrew Littauer gave me a handwritten quote from Jonathan Swift. It reads as follows:
Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.
I thought that was a particularly valuable quote for next week's reading which centers on the Roman Catholic Church's invalidation of around 2,000 baptisms. We believe that the sacraments are a visible sign of the inward/invisible spiritual grace given by Christ.
There are a number of discussion points here - the two that stand out for me are jurisdiction and jurisprudence. In other words, which is bigger (and eternal), God's Grace or the Roman Church? When one deals with God's (invisible) Grace, can they do what they just did?
On the second page of the article, I included an interesting story I found in the NY Times from 1969 about a Roman change in baptismal language. Lastly, I included the Catechism of the Episcopal Church governing what we know, believe, and understand about baptism.
[Roman] Catholic Church Invalidates Baptisms
Rachel Treisman, NPR 2.15.22
The Catholic Diocese of Phoenix announced on its website that it determined after careful study that the Rev. Andres Arango had used the wrong wording in baptisms performed up until June 17, 2021. He had been off by a single word. During baptisms in both English and Spanish, Arango used the phrase "we baptize you in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." He should have said "I baptize," the diocese explained. "It is not the community that baptizes a person and incorporates them into the Church of Christ; rather, it is Christ, and Christ alone, who presides at all sacraments; therefore, it is Christ who baptizes," it said. "If you were baptized using the wrong words, that means your baptism is invalid, and you are not baptized." Diocese spokesperson Katie Burke told NPR over email that Arango is believed to have used the incorrect word since the beginning of his priesthood in 1995. "I do not have an exact number of people affected, but I believe they number in the thousands," she added.
Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted said in a statement that the error was first reported to him and confirmed after an investigation by diocesan officials in consultation with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome. He noted that the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith affirmed in 2020 that baptisms conferred with the phrase "We baptize you" are not valid.
Similar discoveries were made in 2020 in Detroit and Oklahoma City, Burke said. She added that Arango's error "was brought to the attention of the diocese by lay faithful who were aware of it happening in other places and of the Vatican's response, and who knew it to be incorrect when they heard it happen here in Phoenix," which she estimates must have been around June 2021.
As far as the diocese is aware, all of the other sacraments that Arango conferred are valid. But because baptism is the "sacrament that grants access to all the others," a botched baptism could invalidate any subsequent sacraments, including confirmation, marriage and holy orders. "What this means for you is, if your baptism was invalid and you've received other sacraments, you may need to repeat some or all of those sacraments after you are validly baptized as well," the diocese said.
Arango — who first joined St. Gregory Parish in 2015 after decades of religious service in Brazil, California and Arizona — apologized for the inconvenience his actions had caused and told the community that he resigned as pastor effective Feb. 1. He said he would devote his energy and full-time ministry "to help remedy this and heal those affected." He remains a priest in good standing, according to the diocese.
"I do not believe Fr. Andres had any intentions to harm the faithful or deprive them of the grace of baptism and the sacraments," Olmsted wrote. "On behalf of our local Church, I too am sincerely sorry that this error has resulted in disruption to the sacramental lives of a number of
the faithful. This is why I pledge to take every step necessary to remedy the situation for everyone impacted."
The diocese said that while the situation may seem legalistic, the words, materials and actions are crucial aspects of every sacrament — and changing any of them makes them invalid. "For example, if a priest uses milk instead of wine during the Consecration of the Eucharist, the
sacrament is not valid," it said. "The milk would not become the Blood of Jesus Christ."
** From June 20, 1969, NY Times: Catholic Baptisms Drop Questioning of Infants.
New rites for baptism in the Roman Catholic Church, published today, no longer include asking the infant whether he renounces Satan and all his works “as though he should or could comply.” The change followed the instruction of the Ecumenical Council Vatican II to adapt the baptismal service “to the circumstance that those to be baptized are, in fact, infants.” The ritual questions will now be addressed to parents or godparents who, in fact, have always made the renunciation on the infant’s behalf.
** From the Book of Common Prayer, 1979, Catechism, page 858
Holy Baptism
Q. What is Holy Baptism?
A. Holy Baptism is the sacrament by which God adopts us as his children and makes us
members of Christ's Body, the Church, and inheritors of the kingdom of God.
Q. What is the outward and visible sign in Baptism?
A. The outward and visible sign in Baptism is water, in which the person is baptized in the
Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Q. What is the inward and spiritual grace in Baptism?
A. The inward and spiritual grace in Baptism is union with Christ in his death and
resurrection, birth into God's family the Church, forgiveness of sins, and new life in
the Holy Spirit.
Q. What is required of us at Baptism?
A. It is required that we renounce Satan, repent of our sins, and accept Jesus as our Lord and
Savior.
Q. Why then are infants baptized?
A. Infants are baptized so that they can share citizenship in the Covenant, membership in
Christ, and redemption by God.
Q. How are the promises for infants made and carried out?
A. Promises are made for them by their parents and sponsors, who guarantee that the infants
will be brought up within the Church, to know Christ and be able to follow him.
Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.
I thought that was a particularly valuable quote for next week's reading which centers on the Roman Catholic Church's invalidation of around 2,000 baptisms. We believe that the sacraments are a visible sign of the inward/invisible spiritual grace given by Christ.
There are a number of discussion points here - the two that stand out for me are jurisdiction and jurisprudence. In other words, which is bigger (and eternal), God's Grace or the Roman Church? When one deals with God's (invisible) Grace, can they do what they just did?
On the second page of the article, I included an interesting story I found in the NY Times from 1969 about a Roman change in baptismal language. Lastly, I included the Catechism of the Episcopal Church governing what we know, believe, and understand about baptism.
[Roman] Catholic Church Invalidates Baptisms
Rachel Treisman, NPR 2.15.22
The Catholic Diocese of Phoenix announced on its website that it determined after careful study that the Rev. Andres Arango had used the wrong wording in baptisms performed up until June 17, 2021. He had been off by a single word. During baptisms in both English and Spanish, Arango used the phrase "we baptize you in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." He should have said "I baptize," the diocese explained. "It is not the community that baptizes a person and incorporates them into the Church of Christ; rather, it is Christ, and Christ alone, who presides at all sacraments; therefore, it is Christ who baptizes," it said. "If you were baptized using the wrong words, that means your baptism is invalid, and you are not baptized." Diocese spokesperson Katie Burke told NPR over email that Arango is believed to have used the incorrect word since the beginning of his priesthood in 1995. "I do not have an exact number of people affected, but I believe they number in the thousands," she added.
Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted said in a statement that the error was first reported to him and confirmed after an investigation by diocesan officials in consultation with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome. He noted that the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith affirmed in 2020 that baptisms conferred with the phrase "We baptize you" are not valid.
Similar discoveries were made in 2020 in Detroit and Oklahoma City, Burke said. She added that Arango's error "was brought to the attention of the diocese by lay faithful who were aware of it happening in other places and of the Vatican's response, and who knew it to be incorrect when they heard it happen here in Phoenix," which she estimates must have been around June 2021.
As far as the diocese is aware, all of the other sacraments that Arango conferred are valid. But because baptism is the "sacrament that grants access to all the others," a botched baptism could invalidate any subsequent sacraments, including confirmation, marriage and holy orders. "What this means for you is, if your baptism was invalid and you've received other sacraments, you may need to repeat some or all of those sacraments after you are validly baptized as well," the diocese said.
Arango — who first joined St. Gregory Parish in 2015 after decades of religious service in Brazil, California and Arizona — apologized for the inconvenience his actions had caused and told the community that he resigned as pastor effective Feb. 1. He said he would devote his energy and full-time ministry "to help remedy this and heal those affected." He remains a priest in good standing, according to the diocese.
"I do not believe Fr. Andres had any intentions to harm the faithful or deprive them of the grace of baptism and the sacraments," Olmsted wrote. "On behalf of our local Church, I too am sincerely sorry that this error has resulted in disruption to the sacramental lives of a number of
the faithful. This is why I pledge to take every step necessary to remedy the situation for everyone impacted."
The diocese said that while the situation may seem legalistic, the words, materials and actions are crucial aspects of every sacrament — and changing any of them makes them invalid. "For example, if a priest uses milk instead of wine during the Consecration of the Eucharist, the
sacrament is not valid," it said. "The milk would not become the Blood of Jesus Christ."
** From June 20, 1969, NY Times: Catholic Baptisms Drop Questioning of Infants.
New rites for baptism in the Roman Catholic Church, published today, no longer include asking the infant whether he renounces Satan and all his works “as though he should or could comply.” The change followed the instruction of the Ecumenical Council Vatican II to adapt the baptismal service “to the circumstance that those to be baptized are, in fact, infants.” The ritual questions will now be addressed to parents or godparents who, in fact, have always made the renunciation on the infant’s behalf.
** From the Book of Common Prayer, 1979, Catechism, page 858
Holy Baptism
Q. What is Holy Baptism?
A. Holy Baptism is the sacrament by which God adopts us as his children and makes us
members of Christ's Body, the Church, and inheritors of the kingdom of God.
Q. What is the outward and visible sign in Baptism?
A. The outward and visible sign in Baptism is water, in which the person is baptized in the
Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Q. What is the inward and spiritual grace in Baptism?
A. The inward and spiritual grace in Baptism is union with Christ in his death and
resurrection, birth into God's family the Church, forgiveness of sins, and new life in
the Holy Spirit.
Q. What is required of us at Baptism?
A. It is required that we renounce Satan, repent of our sins, and accept Jesus as our Lord and
Savior.
Q. Why then are infants baptized?
A. Infants are baptized so that they can share citizenship in the Covenant, membership in
Christ, and redemption by God.
Q. How are the promises for infants made and carried out?
A. Promises are made for them by their parents and sponsors, who guarantee that the infants
will be brought up within the Church, to know Christ and be able to follow him.
Thursday, February 17
Thank you for a good week of discussion about on-line and in-person meetings; and, what is Church and how do we go about it.
For next week, I have taken Arthur Brooks' latest article and edited it from 11 pages down to 4. He writes about how to want less. Join me for an interesting discussion on this and what our Christian tradition has to say about it.
How to Want Less
Arthur Brooks, The Atlantic 2.8.22
I glanced into my teenage daughter’s bedroom one spring afternoon last year. I found the septuagenarian rock star Mick Jagger, in a fairly recent concert, croaking out the Rolling Stones’ megahit “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”. An audience of tens of thousands of what looked to be
mostly Baby Boomers and Gen Xers sang along rapturously. “Is this serious?” she asked. “Do people your age actually like this?” I took umbrage, but had to admit it was a legitimate question.
“Kind of,” I answered, because to my mind, the longevity of that particular song has a lot to do with a deep truth it speaks.
As we wind our way through life, I explained, satisfaction—the joy from fulfillment of our wishes or expectations—is momentary. No matter what we achieve, see, acquire, or do, it seems to slip from our grasp. Satisfaction, I told my daughter, is the greatest paradox of human life. We crave it, we believe we can get it, we glimpse it and maybe even experience it for a brief moment, and then it vanishes. But we never give up on our quest to get and hold on to it. “I try, and I try, and I try, and I try,” Jagger sings. How? Through sex and consumerism, according to the song. By building a life that is ever more baroque, expensive, and laden with crap. “You’ll see,” I told her. My daughter’s mirth now utterly extinguished, “So life is just a rat race, and we’re doomed to an existence of dissatisfaction?” she asked. “That sucks.”
“It does suck,” I said. “But we’re not doomed.” I told her we can beat this affliction if we work to truly understand it—and if we’re willing to make some difficult changes to the way we live.
Even the most successful people suffer from the dissatisfaction problem. I remember once seeing LeBron James—the world’s greatest basketball player—with a look of abject despair on his face after his Cleveland Cavaliers lost the NBA championship. All of the world’s wealth and accolades were like straw in that moment of loss. Abd al-Rahman III, the emir and caliph of Córdoba in 10th-century Spain, summed up a life of worldly success at about age 70: “I have now reigned above 50 years in victory or peace; beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my
enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call.” And the payoff? “I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot,” he wrote. “They amount to 14.”
As an observer, I understand the problem. I write a column about human happiness for The Atlantic and teach classes on the subject at Harvard. I know that satisfaction is one of the core “macronutrients” of happiness (the other two being enjoyment and meaning), and that its
slippery nature is one of the reasons happiness is often so elusive as well. Yet time and again, I have fallen into the trap of believing that success and its accompaniments would fulfill me. On my 40th birthday I made a bucket list of things I hoped to do or achieve. They were mainly writing books and columns about serious subjects, teaching at a top school, traveling to give lectures and speeches, maybe even leading a university or think tank. Whether these were good and noble goals or not, they were my goals, and I imagined that if I hit them, I would be satisfied.
I found that list nine years ago, when I was 48, and realized that I had achieved every item on it. But none of that had brought me the lasting joy I’d envisioned. Each accomplishment thrilled me for a day or a week—maybe a month, never more—and then I reached for the next rung on the ladder. I’d devoted my life to climbing those rungs.
And what about you? Your goals are probably different from mine, and perhaps your lifestyle is too. But the trap is the same. Everyone has dreams, and they beckon with promises of sweet, lasting satisfaction if you achieve them. But dreams are liars. When they come true, it’s … fine, for a while. And then a new dream appears. Mick jagger’s satisfaction dilemma—and ours—starts with a rudimentary formula: Satisfaction = getting what you want.
The term homeostasis was introduced in 1926 by a physiologist named Walter B. Cannon, who showed in his book The Wisdom of the Body that we have built-in mechanisms to regulate our temperature, as well as our levels of oxygen, water, salt, sugar, protein, fat, and calcium. But the concept applies much more broadly than that: To survive, all living systems tend to maintain stable conditions as best they can.
Homeostasis keeps us alive and healthy. But it also explains why drugs and alcohol work as they do, as opposed to how we wish they would. While that first dose of a new recreational substance might give you great pleasure, your previously naive brain quickly learns to sense an assault on its equilibrium and fights back by neutralizing the effect of the entering drug, making it impossible to get the first feeling back.
The same set of principles works on our emotions. When you get an emotional shock—good or
bad—your brain wants to re-equilibrate, making it hard to stay on the high or low for very long.
This is especially true when it comes to positive emotions. It’s why, when you achieve conventional, acquisitive success, you can never get enough. If you base your sense of self-worth on success—money, power, prestige—you will run from victory to victory, initially to keep
feeling good, and then to avoid feeling awful.
So I did have some practical suggestions for my daughter on how to beat the dissatisfaction curse— three habits I have developed for my own life that are grounded in philosophy and social-science research.
I. GO FROM PRINCE TO SAGE
One scholar who did propose real solutions to life’s problems was Thomas Aquinas. He didn’t just explain the satisfaction conundrum; he offered an answer and lived it himself. As the youngest son of a noble family, he was expected to one day become the abbot of the monastery, a post of enormous social prestige. But Thomas had no interest in this worldly glory. He pursued the work of a scholar and teacher, producing dense philosophical treatises that are still profoundly influential today. He is known as the greatest philosopher of his age. But this legacy was never his aim. On the contrary, he considered his work to be nothing more than an expression of his love for God and a desire to help his fellow human beings.
I am no Saint Thomas. And my current post at Harvard hardly qualifies as a repudiation of the world’s rewards. Even so, I’ve tried to take a lesson from their lives—that satisfaction lies not in attaining high status and holding on to it for dear life, but in helping other people—including by sharing whatever knowledge and wisdom I’ve acquired.
II. MAKE A REVERSE BUCKET LIST
I’ve begun to compile a “reverse bucket list”. Each year on my birthday, I list my wants and attachments — the stuff that fits under Thomas Aquinas’s categories of money, power, pleasure, and honor. I try to be completely honest. I don’t list stuff I would actually hate and never choose, like a sailboat or a vacation house. Rather, I go to my weaknesses, most of which—I’m embarrassed to admit—involve the admiration of others for my work. Then I imagine myself in five years. I am happy and at peace, living a life of purpose and meaning. I make another list of
the forces that would bring me this happiness: my faith, my family, my friendships, the work I am doing that is inherently satisfying and meaningful and that serves others.
Inevitably, these sources of happiness are “intrinsic”—they come from within and revolve around love, relationships, and deep purpose. They have little to do with the admiration of strangers. I contrast them with the things on the first list, which are generally “extrinsic”—the outside rewards associated with Thomas’s list of idols. Most research has shown that intrinsic rewards lead to far more enduring happiness than extrinsic rewards.
Given my itch for admiration, I have made a point of trying to pay less attention to how others perceive me, by turning away these thoughts when they emerge. I have let many relationships go that were really only about professional advancement. I work somewhat less than I did in years past. It takes conscious effort to avoid backsliding—the treadmill beckons often, and little spritzes of dopamine tempt me to return to my old ways. But my changes in behavior have mostly been permanent, and I’ve been happier as a result.
Work that feels more like a mission provides purpose; travel can be inherently valuable and enjoyable; learning a skill or meeting a challenge can bring intrinsic satisfaction; meaningful activities pursued with friends or loved ones can deepen relationships. But ask yourself whether
the attraction of your bucket-list items, be they professional or experiential, derives mostly from how much they will make others admire or envy you. These motivations will never lead to deep satisfaction.
III. GET SMALLER
Lately, there has been an explosion of books on minimalism, which all recommend downsizing your life to get happier. But it’s not just about having less stuff to weigh you down. We can, in fact, find immense fullness when we pay attention to smaller and smaller things.
The prince will always skip the small satisfactions of life, forgoing a flower at dusk for money, power, or prestige. But the sage never makes this mistake, and I try not to either. Each day, I have an item on my to-do list that involves being truly present for an ordinary occurrence. A lot
of this revolves around my religious practice as a Catholic, including daily Mass with my wife and meditative prayer. It also includes walks with no devices, listening only to the world outside. These are truly satisfying things.
My daughter went off to college a few months after our talk about the science of satisfaction. After the isolation and lockdowns of COVID-19, and the sad joke that was her senior year of high school, she made a run for the border, enrolling at a university in Spain. I am bereaved. We
do send each other several messages every day, though. They are almost never about work or school. Instead, we share small moments: a photo of a rainy street, a silly joke, the number of push-ups she just did.
I don’t know whether this is giving her a head start on freeing herself from the paradox of dissatisfaction, but it is like medicine for me. Each message is like the evening of the flower—a brief glimpse of the beatific vision of heaven, perhaps—bringing quiet satisfaction.
Each of us can ride the waves of attachments and urges, hoping futilely that someday, somehow, we will get and keep that satisfaction we crave. Or we can take a shot at free will and self-mastery. It’s a lifelong battle against our inner caveman. Often, he wins. But with determination and practice, we can find respite from that chronic dissatisfaction and experience the joy that is true human freedom.
For next week, I have taken Arthur Brooks' latest article and edited it from 11 pages down to 4. He writes about how to want less. Join me for an interesting discussion on this and what our Christian tradition has to say about it.
How to Want Less
Arthur Brooks, The Atlantic 2.8.22
I glanced into my teenage daughter’s bedroom one spring afternoon last year. I found the septuagenarian rock star Mick Jagger, in a fairly recent concert, croaking out the Rolling Stones’ megahit “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”. An audience of tens of thousands of what looked to be
mostly Baby Boomers and Gen Xers sang along rapturously. “Is this serious?” she asked. “Do people your age actually like this?” I took umbrage, but had to admit it was a legitimate question.
“Kind of,” I answered, because to my mind, the longevity of that particular song has a lot to do with a deep truth it speaks.
As we wind our way through life, I explained, satisfaction—the joy from fulfillment of our wishes or expectations—is momentary. No matter what we achieve, see, acquire, or do, it seems to slip from our grasp. Satisfaction, I told my daughter, is the greatest paradox of human life. We crave it, we believe we can get it, we glimpse it and maybe even experience it for a brief moment, and then it vanishes. But we never give up on our quest to get and hold on to it. “I try, and I try, and I try, and I try,” Jagger sings. How? Through sex and consumerism, according to the song. By building a life that is ever more baroque, expensive, and laden with crap. “You’ll see,” I told her. My daughter’s mirth now utterly extinguished, “So life is just a rat race, and we’re doomed to an existence of dissatisfaction?” she asked. “That sucks.”
“It does suck,” I said. “But we’re not doomed.” I told her we can beat this affliction if we work to truly understand it—and if we’re willing to make some difficult changes to the way we live.
Even the most successful people suffer from the dissatisfaction problem. I remember once seeing LeBron James—the world’s greatest basketball player—with a look of abject despair on his face after his Cleveland Cavaliers lost the NBA championship. All of the world’s wealth and accolades were like straw in that moment of loss. Abd al-Rahman III, the emir and caliph of Córdoba in 10th-century Spain, summed up a life of worldly success at about age 70: “I have now reigned above 50 years in victory or peace; beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my
enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call.” And the payoff? “I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot,” he wrote. “They amount to 14.”
As an observer, I understand the problem. I write a column about human happiness for The Atlantic and teach classes on the subject at Harvard. I know that satisfaction is one of the core “macronutrients” of happiness (the other two being enjoyment and meaning), and that its
slippery nature is one of the reasons happiness is often so elusive as well. Yet time and again, I have fallen into the trap of believing that success and its accompaniments would fulfill me. On my 40th birthday I made a bucket list of things I hoped to do or achieve. They were mainly writing books and columns about serious subjects, teaching at a top school, traveling to give lectures and speeches, maybe even leading a university or think tank. Whether these were good and noble goals or not, they were my goals, and I imagined that if I hit them, I would be satisfied.
I found that list nine years ago, when I was 48, and realized that I had achieved every item on it. But none of that had brought me the lasting joy I’d envisioned. Each accomplishment thrilled me for a day or a week—maybe a month, never more—and then I reached for the next rung on the ladder. I’d devoted my life to climbing those rungs.
And what about you? Your goals are probably different from mine, and perhaps your lifestyle is too. But the trap is the same. Everyone has dreams, and they beckon with promises of sweet, lasting satisfaction if you achieve them. But dreams are liars. When they come true, it’s … fine, for a while. And then a new dream appears. Mick jagger’s satisfaction dilemma—and ours—starts with a rudimentary formula: Satisfaction = getting what you want.
The term homeostasis was introduced in 1926 by a physiologist named Walter B. Cannon, who showed in his book The Wisdom of the Body that we have built-in mechanisms to regulate our temperature, as well as our levels of oxygen, water, salt, sugar, protein, fat, and calcium. But the concept applies much more broadly than that: To survive, all living systems tend to maintain stable conditions as best they can.
Homeostasis keeps us alive and healthy. But it also explains why drugs and alcohol work as they do, as opposed to how we wish they would. While that first dose of a new recreational substance might give you great pleasure, your previously naive brain quickly learns to sense an assault on its equilibrium and fights back by neutralizing the effect of the entering drug, making it impossible to get the first feeling back.
The same set of principles works on our emotions. When you get an emotional shock—good or
bad—your brain wants to re-equilibrate, making it hard to stay on the high or low for very long.
This is especially true when it comes to positive emotions. It’s why, when you achieve conventional, acquisitive success, you can never get enough. If you base your sense of self-worth on success—money, power, prestige—you will run from victory to victory, initially to keep
feeling good, and then to avoid feeling awful.
So I did have some practical suggestions for my daughter on how to beat the dissatisfaction curse— three habits I have developed for my own life that are grounded in philosophy and social-science research.
I. GO FROM PRINCE TO SAGE
One scholar who did propose real solutions to life’s problems was Thomas Aquinas. He didn’t just explain the satisfaction conundrum; he offered an answer and lived it himself. As the youngest son of a noble family, he was expected to one day become the abbot of the monastery, a post of enormous social prestige. But Thomas had no interest in this worldly glory. He pursued the work of a scholar and teacher, producing dense philosophical treatises that are still profoundly influential today. He is known as the greatest philosopher of his age. But this legacy was never his aim. On the contrary, he considered his work to be nothing more than an expression of his love for God and a desire to help his fellow human beings.
I am no Saint Thomas. And my current post at Harvard hardly qualifies as a repudiation of the world’s rewards. Even so, I’ve tried to take a lesson from their lives—that satisfaction lies not in attaining high status and holding on to it for dear life, but in helping other people—including by sharing whatever knowledge and wisdom I’ve acquired.
II. MAKE A REVERSE BUCKET LIST
I’ve begun to compile a “reverse bucket list”. Each year on my birthday, I list my wants and attachments — the stuff that fits under Thomas Aquinas’s categories of money, power, pleasure, and honor. I try to be completely honest. I don’t list stuff I would actually hate and never choose, like a sailboat or a vacation house. Rather, I go to my weaknesses, most of which—I’m embarrassed to admit—involve the admiration of others for my work. Then I imagine myself in five years. I am happy and at peace, living a life of purpose and meaning. I make another list of
the forces that would bring me this happiness: my faith, my family, my friendships, the work I am doing that is inherently satisfying and meaningful and that serves others.
Inevitably, these sources of happiness are “intrinsic”—they come from within and revolve around love, relationships, and deep purpose. They have little to do with the admiration of strangers. I contrast them with the things on the first list, which are generally “extrinsic”—the outside rewards associated with Thomas’s list of idols. Most research has shown that intrinsic rewards lead to far more enduring happiness than extrinsic rewards.
Given my itch for admiration, I have made a point of trying to pay less attention to how others perceive me, by turning away these thoughts when they emerge. I have let many relationships go that were really only about professional advancement. I work somewhat less than I did in years past. It takes conscious effort to avoid backsliding—the treadmill beckons often, and little spritzes of dopamine tempt me to return to my old ways. But my changes in behavior have mostly been permanent, and I’ve been happier as a result.
Work that feels more like a mission provides purpose; travel can be inherently valuable and enjoyable; learning a skill or meeting a challenge can bring intrinsic satisfaction; meaningful activities pursued with friends or loved ones can deepen relationships. But ask yourself whether
the attraction of your bucket-list items, be they professional or experiential, derives mostly from how much they will make others admire or envy you. These motivations will never lead to deep satisfaction.
III. GET SMALLER
Lately, there has been an explosion of books on minimalism, which all recommend downsizing your life to get happier. But it’s not just about having less stuff to weigh you down. We can, in fact, find immense fullness when we pay attention to smaller and smaller things.
The prince will always skip the small satisfactions of life, forgoing a flower at dusk for money, power, or prestige. But the sage never makes this mistake, and I try not to either. Each day, I have an item on my to-do list that involves being truly present for an ordinary occurrence. A lot
of this revolves around my religious practice as a Catholic, including daily Mass with my wife and meditative prayer. It also includes walks with no devices, listening only to the world outside. These are truly satisfying things.
My daughter went off to college a few months after our talk about the science of satisfaction. After the isolation and lockdowns of COVID-19, and the sad joke that was her senior year of high school, she made a run for the border, enrolling at a university in Spain. I am bereaved. We
do send each other several messages every day, though. They are almost never about work or school. Instead, we share small moments: a photo of a rainy street, a silly joke, the number of push-ups she just did.
I don’t know whether this is giving her a head start on freeing herself from the paradox of dissatisfaction, but it is like medicine for me. Each message is like the evening of the flower—a brief glimpse of the beatific vision of heaven, perhaps—bringing quiet satisfaction.
Each of us can ride the waves of attachments and urges, hoping futilely that someday, somehow, we will get and keep that satisfaction we crave. Or we can take a shot at free will and self-mastery. It’s a lifelong battle against our inner caveman. Often, he wins. But with determination and practice, we can find respite from that chronic dissatisfaction and experience the joy that is true human freedom.
Thursday, February 10
Here is the discussion reading for next week. I disagree with the author; please do not think I am floating this article to see what others think and then to make a decision. Nevertheless, I think it is interesting - especially when it gets into the nitty gritty of why meet in person at all.
I'd like to know what you think. And, I'll have the coffee ready for those in-person.
Why Churches Should Drop Their Online Services
The Rev. Tish Harrison Warren, NY Times 1.30.22
Over the past two years a refrain has become common in churches and other religious communities: “Join us in person or online.” I was a big proponent of that “or online” part. In March of 2020, we knew little about the new disease spreading rapidly around the world but we knew it was deadly, especially for the elderly. My church was one of the first in our city to forgo meeting in person and switch to an online format, and I encouraged other churches to do the same.
Since then Sunday mornings have varied. Our church met online; then met indoors with limited attendance; then met outdoors; indoors again. Precautions rose and fell according to our city’s threat level. But even as most churches now offer in-person services, the “or online” option has
remained. I think this is good, given how unusual the past two years have been. Now I think it’s time to drop the virtual option. And I think this for the same reason I believed churches should go online back in March 2020: This is the way to love God and our neighbors.
For all of us — even those who aren’t churchgoers — bodies, with all the risk, danger, limits, mortality and vulnerability that they bring, are part of our deepest humanity, not obstacles to be transcended through digitization. They are humble (and humbling) gifts to be embraced. Online
church, while it was necessary for a season, diminishes worship and us as people. We seek to worship wholly — with heart, soul, mind and strength — and embodiment is an irreducible part of that wholeness.
We are not in 2020 anymore. Even for vulnerable groups such as those over age 65, Covid has a roughly similar risk of death as the flu for those who are fully vaccinated, and the Omicron variant seems to pose even less risk than the flu. A recent C.D.C. study found those who are fully vaccinated are 90 percent less likely to be hospitalized because of Covid-19 than those who are not. Certainly, the Omicron variant brought a surge in cases and hospitalization that has threatened to overwhelm hospitals in certain regions, but it appears that Omicron is waning.
There is still risk, of course, but the goal was never — and ought never be — to eliminate all risk of illness or death. Throughout the past two years, we have sought to balance the risk of disease with the good of being present, in person, with one another. And the cost of being apart from one another is steep. People need physical touch and interaction. We need to connect with other human beings through our bodies, through the ordinary vulnerability of looking into their eyes, hearing their voice, sharing their space, their smells, their presence.
Whether or not one attends religious services, people need embodied community. We find it in book clubs or having friends over for dinner. But embodiment is a particularly important part of Christian spirituality and theology. We believe God became flesh, lived in a human body and remains mysteriously in a human body. Our worship is centered not on simply thinking about certain ideas, but on eating and drinking bread and wine during communion.
“Christians need to hear the babies crying in church. They need to see the reddened eyes of a friend across the aisle,” Collin Hansen wrote in his Times essay about online church. “They need to chat with the recovering drug addict who shows up early but still sits in the back row. They
need to taste the bread and wine. They need to feel the choir crescendo toward the assurance of hope in what our senses can’t yet perceive.” These are not mere accessories to a certain kind of worship experience. These moments form and shape who we are and what we believe.
One might ask, why not have both? Why not meet in person but also continue to offer the option of a live-streamed service? Because offering church online implicitly makes embodiment elective. It presents in-person gatherings as something we can opt in or out of with little consequence. It assumes that embodiment is more of a consumer preference, like whether or not you buy hardwood floors, than a necessity, like whether or not you have shelter.
Throughout the pandemic, everyone has had to evaluate what is and isn’t essential. We as a society have had to ask whether in-person church attendance is more like going to a restaurant or more like elementary school education — whether it’s something that is a nice perk in life or
something that is indispensable. There was a time, of course, at the beginning of the pandemic, when, like churches, schools went entirely online. But around the globe, experts believe that the costs of school closures currently outweigh the risks of Covid-19. In Christian theology and practice, physically gathering as a church should be seen as similarly essential and irreplaceable.
There are some brass-tack realities of phasing out an online meeting option. First, church leaders should conform to local government protocols and strongly encourage members to be fully vaccinated. Second, no longer offering a streaming option will mean that those who are homebound or sick will not be able to participate in a service. This, however, is not a new problem for the church. For centuries, churches have handled this by visiting these people at home in person.
Last, many church leaders will need to face our real fear of appearing to not take Covid seriously enough. I still think the biggest religion story of 2020 was how across the nation, religious communities of all faiths and ideologies pivoted almost overnight to move church online in an
effort to love those around us. By April of 2020, the Protestant research group Lifeway found that only 1 percent of churches with more than 200 members met in person. Still, what dominated the headlines during this time seemed to be every conservative, Covid-denying pastor
who insisted on holding superspreader events.
For those of us religious folks who have taken the pandemic seriously, there is residual shame around this. It was embarrassing for people to use the language of God to endanger lives. We don’t want to appear to be one of these kinds of religious people, so we can be hesitant about phasing out any precaution. But this ought not lead churches to, as The Times’s David Leonhardt wrote regarding Covid and childhood education, try “to minimize the spread of Covid — a worthy goal absent other factors — rather than minimizing the damage that Covid does to
society.” It’s time to begin to relinquish our online habits and the isolation they produce.
Throughout history, the mere fact of meeting together in person to sit, sing and talk to others was never all that countercultural. Being physically present to others was the default mode of existence. But for these digital natives, the stubborn analog wonders of skin, handshakes, hugs, bread and wine, faces, names and spontaneous conversation is part of what intrigued them and kept them going to church. A chief thing that the church has to offer the world now is to remind us all how to be human creatures, with all the embodiment and physical limits that implies. We need to embrace that countercultural call.
I'd like to know what you think. And, I'll have the coffee ready for those in-person.
Why Churches Should Drop Their Online Services
The Rev. Tish Harrison Warren, NY Times 1.30.22
Over the past two years a refrain has become common in churches and other religious communities: “Join us in person or online.” I was a big proponent of that “or online” part. In March of 2020, we knew little about the new disease spreading rapidly around the world but we knew it was deadly, especially for the elderly. My church was one of the first in our city to forgo meeting in person and switch to an online format, and I encouraged other churches to do the same.
Since then Sunday mornings have varied. Our church met online; then met indoors with limited attendance; then met outdoors; indoors again. Precautions rose and fell according to our city’s threat level. But even as most churches now offer in-person services, the “or online” option has
remained. I think this is good, given how unusual the past two years have been. Now I think it’s time to drop the virtual option. And I think this for the same reason I believed churches should go online back in March 2020: This is the way to love God and our neighbors.
For all of us — even those who aren’t churchgoers — bodies, with all the risk, danger, limits, mortality and vulnerability that they bring, are part of our deepest humanity, not obstacles to be transcended through digitization. They are humble (and humbling) gifts to be embraced. Online
church, while it was necessary for a season, diminishes worship and us as people. We seek to worship wholly — with heart, soul, mind and strength — and embodiment is an irreducible part of that wholeness.
We are not in 2020 anymore. Even for vulnerable groups such as those over age 65, Covid has a roughly similar risk of death as the flu for those who are fully vaccinated, and the Omicron variant seems to pose even less risk than the flu. A recent C.D.C. study found those who are fully vaccinated are 90 percent less likely to be hospitalized because of Covid-19 than those who are not. Certainly, the Omicron variant brought a surge in cases and hospitalization that has threatened to overwhelm hospitals in certain regions, but it appears that Omicron is waning.
There is still risk, of course, but the goal was never — and ought never be — to eliminate all risk of illness or death. Throughout the past two years, we have sought to balance the risk of disease with the good of being present, in person, with one another. And the cost of being apart from one another is steep. People need physical touch and interaction. We need to connect with other human beings through our bodies, through the ordinary vulnerability of looking into their eyes, hearing their voice, sharing their space, their smells, their presence.
Whether or not one attends religious services, people need embodied community. We find it in book clubs or having friends over for dinner. But embodiment is a particularly important part of Christian spirituality and theology. We believe God became flesh, lived in a human body and remains mysteriously in a human body. Our worship is centered not on simply thinking about certain ideas, but on eating and drinking bread and wine during communion.
“Christians need to hear the babies crying in church. They need to see the reddened eyes of a friend across the aisle,” Collin Hansen wrote in his Times essay about online church. “They need to chat with the recovering drug addict who shows up early but still sits in the back row. They
need to taste the bread and wine. They need to feel the choir crescendo toward the assurance of hope in what our senses can’t yet perceive.” These are not mere accessories to a certain kind of worship experience. These moments form and shape who we are and what we believe.
One might ask, why not have both? Why not meet in person but also continue to offer the option of a live-streamed service? Because offering church online implicitly makes embodiment elective. It presents in-person gatherings as something we can opt in or out of with little consequence. It assumes that embodiment is more of a consumer preference, like whether or not you buy hardwood floors, than a necessity, like whether or not you have shelter.
Throughout the pandemic, everyone has had to evaluate what is and isn’t essential. We as a society have had to ask whether in-person church attendance is more like going to a restaurant or more like elementary school education — whether it’s something that is a nice perk in life or
something that is indispensable. There was a time, of course, at the beginning of the pandemic, when, like churches, schools went entirely online. But around the globe, experts believe that the costs of school closures currently outweigh the risks of Covid-19. In Christian theology and practice, physically gathering as a church should be seen as similarly essential and irreplaceable.
There are some brass-tack realities of phasing out an online meeting option. First, church leaders should conform to local government protocols and strongly encourage members to be fully vaccinated. Second, no longer offering a streaming option will mean that those who are homebound or sick will not be able to participate in a service. This, however, is not a new problem for the church. For centuries, churches have handled this by visiting these people at home in person.
Last, many church leaders will need to face our real fear of appearing to not take Covid seriously enough. I still think the biggest religion story of 2020 was how across the nation, religious communities of all faiths and ideologies pivoted almost overnight to move church online in an
effort to love those around us. By April of 2020, the Protestant research group Lifeway found that only 1 percent of churches with more than 200 members met in person. Still, what dominated the headlines during this time seemed to be every conservative, Covid-denying pastor
who insisted on holding superspreader events.
For those of us religious folks who have taken the pandemic seriously, there is residual shame around this. It was embarrassing for people to use the language of God to endanger lives. We don’t want to appear to be one of these kinds of religious people, so we can be hesitant about phasing out any precaution. But this ought not lead churches to, as The Times’s David Leonhardt wrote regarding Covid and childhood education, try “to minimize the spread of Covid — a worthy goal absent other factors — rather than minimizing the damage that Covid does to
society.” It’s time to begin to relinquish our online habits and the isolation they produce.
Throughout history, the mere fact of meeting together in person to sit, sing and talk to others was never all that countercultural. Being physically present to others was the default mode of existence. But for these digital natives, the stubborn analog wonders of skin, handshakes, hugs, bread and wine, faces, names and spontaneous conversation is part of what intrigued them and kept them going to church. A chief thing that the church has to offer the world now is to remind us all how to be human creatures, with all the embodiment and physical limits that implies. We need to embrace that countercultural call.
Thursday, February 3
Here is a surprising article that talks about why holding a grudge is so satisfying. The Bible and our spiritual practices have something to say about grudges and resentments. I'd like to know what you think about it.
I'll have the coffee ready for those in person.
For the Thursday Women's Discussion Group, we will have a guest facilitator, Juli Sobecki. I will be on a plane heading back to Sarasota
so Juli will take the reins. Thanks Juli!
Why Holding a Grudge is so Satisfying
Alex McElroy, NY Times Magazine 1.18.22
During a fourth-grade sleepover, I awoke in the night frothed over by Barbasol. The other kids were tucked in their sleeping bags, snoring. I woke them to see if they, too, had been creamed; they hadn’t been but seemed surprised and angry on my behalf and offered to help find the culprit. I wanted to go back to sleep, but they insisted we keep searching. And then they could no longer maintain the charade — who else could it have been? — and their laughter emerged, thunderous and harsh. I returned to my sleeping bag, pretending I wasn’t embarrassed. By
morning, I was praising the ingenuity of their prank.
Years after the shaving-cream incident, my paternal grandfather stopped speaking to me because I told him to not be a jerk to a waitress; I eventually wrote a deferential letter of reconciliation, unwilling to let our shared grievances fester. By then it had become a habit: I sidestepped grudges like a superstitious child skipping over cracks in the sidewalk.
But at some point, I began to find enjoyment, even solace, in holding a grudge. I have a grudge against an author who subtweeted me after I requested a blurb; I have a grudge against Vince Carter for forcing his way off the Toronto Raptors; I have a grudge against the shelf that keeps bonking me in the head. A month ago, Uber Eats emailed me a coupon code that didn’t work. When I brought this to their attention,
I was told they couldn’t refund my money. Years ago, I would have taken my loss and kept ordering. This time, I boycotted the service for a month, and it felt excellent.
Grudges are small, persistent and powerful, like an ant hauling a twig.
No one is too good for a grudge. In the “Iliad,” Apollo inflicts a plague on the Achaeans because they disrespected his priest. King Henry VIII upended his country’s relationship with Catholicism, one could argue, over a beef with the pope. Every Taylor Swift album is a series of
grudges set to music.
Let me be clear about terms: A grudge is not a resentment. Sure, they’re made of the same material — poison — but while resentment is concentrated, a grudge is watered down, drinkable and refreshingly effervescent, the low-calorie lager to resentment’s bootleg grain alcohol.
Resentments are best suited for major mistreatment: the best friend who ran away with your wife, the parents who pressured you into a career you told them you hated, the ex who emptied your checking account. Grudges, however, work best in response to small and singular harms
and annoyances: the neighbor who parked in front of your driveway, the cashier who charged you for a drink you never ordered. Did someone truly, existentially wrong you? Don’t waste your time growing a grudge — save it for something pettier.
Which is to say: The best grudges are small, persistent and powerful, like an ant hauling a twig. And they thrive with the aid of distance and time. In 10th grade, my chemistry teacher offered extra credit to anyone who wrote and performed a song about the periodic table. I wrote the song; I performed it for class; she decided against giving me the extra points. Only recently did I accept that what I feel for that teacher is not anger or resentment or shame — it’s a grudge. If it sounds as if I’m withholding critical details, of course I’m withholding critical details!
Decontextualized stories are such stuff as grudges are made on. The point is I have no evidence that my chemistry teacher sees the wrongness of her position all those years ago — and in that expanse is where my grudge continues to squat.
There was, for me, an inciting incident. Two years ago I came out as nonbinary and started using they/them pronouns. I was initially a font of forgiveness for everyone who misgendered me: the roommate who remarked on my “masculine energy,” the cis friend who questioned whether I really was trans.
But when a year passed and it kept happening, I started to think of the immense effort it took for me to come out, and of how the misgenderers seemed to be acting as if it hadn’t even happened. I didn’t want to cut people out of my life for one-off comments; most often they were honest mistakes, born of ignorance or confusion. Glib jokes weren’t worth my bitterness. That’s how I discovered my capacity for holding grudges. By expecting people to treat me how I want to be treated, and remembering when they do not — a simple little grudge, nothing as serious as a resentment — I reaffirm my identity and protect my self-worth from those who misgender me.
Last spring, a woman exiting a taxi cab doored me off my bike, and I flipped headfirst into the street. When I stood up, little lights flickered in front of my face. I tried to roll my bike, but my front wheel wobbled. I know what you’re thinking: Oh boy, here comes a grudge.
Not so fast. The woman and I talked it out. She was exceptionally sorry, and soon I felt bad for being angry with her. She had just gotten home from a job interview; she rarely took cabs. She paid me $60 to replace my wheel. I don’t begrudge her. She apologized; she paid retribution. At urgent care, a few hours later, the doctor gave me a clean bill of health. “It’s a shame you can’t sue the woman who hit you,” she said. I thought, Does she really peg me as the type of person who sues? Right away, I felt a grudge beginning to form. I haven’t returned to that urgent care since.
I'll have the coffee ready for those in person.
For the Thursday Women's Discussion Group, we will have a guest facilitator, Juli Sobecki. I will be on a plane heading back to Sarasota
so Juli will take the reins. Thanks Juli!
Why Holding a Grudge is so Satisfying
Alex McElroy, NY Times Magazine 1.18.22
During a fourth-grade sleepover, I awoke in the night frothed over by Barbasol. The other kids were tucked in their sleeping bags, snoring. I woke them to see if they, too, had been creamed; they hadn’t been but seemed surprised and angry on my behalf and offered to help find the culprit. I wanted to go back to sleep, but they insisted we keep searching. And then they could no longer maintain the charade — who else could it have been? — and their laughter emerged, thunderous and harsh. I returned to my sleeping bag, pretending I wasn’t embarrassed. By
morning, I was praising the ingenuity of their prank.
Years after the shaving-cream incident, my paternal grandfather stopped speaking to me because I told him to not be a jerk to a waitress; I eventually wrote a deferential letter of reconciliation, unwilling to let our shared grievances fester. By then it had become a habit: I sidestepped grudges like a superstitious child skipping over cracks in the sidewalk.
But at some point, I began to find enjoyment, even solace, in holding a grudge. I have a grudge against an author who subtweeted me after I requested a blurb; I have a grudge against Vince Carter for forcing his way off the Toronto Raptors; I have a grudge against the shelf that keeps bonking me in the head. A month ago, Uber Eats emailed me a coupon code that didn’t work. When I brought this to their attention,
I was told they couldn’t refund my money. Years ago, I would have taken my loss and kept ordering. This time, I boycotted the service for a month, and it felt excellent.
Grudges are small, persistent and powerful, like an ant hauling a twig.
No one is too good for a grudge. In the “Iliad,” Apollo inflicts a plague on the Achaeans because they disrespected his priest. King Henry VIII upended his country’s relationship with Catholicism, one could argue, over a beef with the pope. Every Taylor Swift album is a series of
grudges set to music.
Let me be clear about terms: A grudge is not a resentment. Sure, they’re made of the same material — poison — but while resentment is concentrated, a grudge is watered down, drinkable and refreshingly effervescent, the low-calorie lager to resentment’s bootleg grain alcohol.
Resentments are best suited for major mistreatment: the best friend who ran away with your wife, the parents who pressured you into a career you told them you hated, the ex who emptied your checking account. Grudges, however, work best in response to small and singular harms
and annoyances: the neighbor who parked in front of your driveway, the cashier who charged you for a drink you never ordered. Did someone truly, existentially wrong you? Don’t waste your time growing a grudge — save it for something pettier.
Which is to say: The best grudges are small, persistent and powerful, like an ant hauling a twig. And they thrive with the aid of distance and time. In 10th grade, my chemistry teacher offered extra credit to anyone who wrote and performed a song about the periodic table. I wrote the song; I performed it for class; she decided against giving me the extra points. Only recently did I accept that what I feel for that teacher is not anger or resentment or shame — it’s a grudge. If it sounds as if I’m withholding critical details, of course I’m withholding critical details!
Decontextualized stories are such stuff as grudges are made on. The point is I have no evidence that my chemistry teacher sees the wrongness of her position all those years ago — and in that expanse is where my grudge continues to squat.
There was, for me, an inciting incident. Two years ago I came out as nonbinary and started using they/them pronouns. I was initially a font of forgiveness for everyone who misgendered me: the roommate who remarked on my “masculine energy,” the cis friend who questioned whether I really was trans.
But when a year passed and it kept happening, I started to think of the immense effort it took for me to come out, and of how the misgenderers seemed to be acting as if it hadn’t even happened. I didn’t want to cut people out of my life for one-off comments; most often they were honest mistakes, born of ignorance or confusion. Glib jokes weren’t worth my bitterness. That’s how I discovered my capacity for holding grudges. By expecting people to treat me how I want to be treated, and remembering when they do not — a simple little grudge, nothing as serious as a resentment — I reaffirm my identity and protect my self-worth from those who misgender me.
Last spring, a woman exiting a taxi cab doored me off my bike, and I flipped headfirst into the street. When I stood up, little lights flickered in front of my face. I tried to roll my bike, but my front wheel wobbled. I know what you’re thinking: Oh boy, here comes a grudge.
Not so fast. The woman and I talked it out. She was exceptionally sorry, and soon I felt bad for being angry with her. She had just gotten home from a job interview; she rarely took cabs. She paid me $60 to replace my wheel. I don’t begrudge her. She apologized; she paid retribution. At urgent care, a few hours later, the doctor gave me a clean bill of health. “It’s a shame you can’t sue the woman who hit you,” she said. I thought, Does she really peg me as the type of person who sues? Right away, I felt a grudge beginning to form. I haven’t returned to that urgent care since.
Thursday, January 27
Thank you for a great week of discussions. You will probably see more articles from The Ethicist later this year.
For next week, Arthur Brooks is being cynical about being a modern cynic and suggests we act instead like the ancient cynics. There is a spiritual dimension to all of this too, but, you'll have to tune in to hear what it is.
For those in person, I'll have the coffee ready and for those on-line, I look forward to interacting with you virtually. ... but you'll have to make your own java.
Live Like the Ancient Cynics
Arthur Brooks, The Atlantic 1.20.22
THERE ARE A growing number of Marxists today. By which I mean followers of Groucho, not Karl. “Whatever it is, I’m against it,” Marx sang in his 1932 film, Horse Feathers. “I don’t know what they have to say / It makes no difference anyway.”
What was satire then is ideology today: Cynicism—the belief that people are generally morally bankrupt and behave treacherously in order to maximize self-interest—dominates American culture. Since 1964, the percentage of Americans who say they trust the government to do what
is right “just about always” or “most of the time” has fallen 53 points, from 77 to 24 percent. Sentiments about other institutions in society follow similar patterns.
Whether cynicism is more warranted now than ever is yours to decide. But it won’t change the fact that the modern cynical outlook on life is terrible for your well-being. It makes you less healthy, less happy, less successful, and less respected by others.
The problem isn’t cynicism per se; it’s that modern people have lost the original meaning of cynicism. Instead of assuming that everyone and everything sucks, we should all live like the ancient Greek cynics, who rebelled against convention in a search for truth and enlightenment.
THE ORIGINAL CYNICISM was a philosophical movement likely founded by Antisthenes, a student of Socrates, and popularized by Diogenes of Sinope around the fifth century B.C. It was based on a refusal to accept the assumptions and habits that discourage people from questioning conventional dogmas, and thus hold us back from the search for deep wisdom and happiness.
Whereas a modern cynic might say, for instance, that the president is an idiot and thus his policies aren’t worth considering, the ancient cynic would examine each policy impartially.
The modern cynic rejects things out of hand (“This is stupid”), while the ancient cynic simply withholds judgment (“This may be right or wrong”). “Modern cynicism [has] come to describe something antithetical to its previous meanings, a psychological state hardened against both moral reflection and intellectual persuasion,” the University of Houston’s David Mazella wrote in The Making of Modern Cynicism.
There were no happiness surveys in Antisthenes’s times, so we can’t compare the ancient cynics’ life satisfaction with that of those around them who did not share their philosophy. We can most definitely conclude, however, that modern cynicism is detrimental. In one 2009 study, researchers examining negative cynical attitudes found that people who scored high in this characteristic on a personality test were roughly five times more likely to suffer from depression later in life. In other words, that smirking 25-year-old is at elevated risk of turning into a
depressed 44-year-old.
Modern cynics also suffer poorer health than others. In 1991, researchers studying middle-aged men found that a cynical outlook significantly increased the odds of death from both cancer and heart disease—possibly because the cynics consumed more alcohol and tobacco than the non-cynics. In one 2017 study on middle-aged Finnish men, high cynicism also predicted premature mortality. (Although both of these studies involved only men, nothing suggests that the results are gender-specific.)
Adding insult to injury, people tend not to respect cynics. Writing in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General in 2020, psychologists found that cynical attitudes lead to being treated disrespectfully—possibly because cynics tend to show disrespect to others, leading to a vicious cycle. You won’t be surprised to hear, then, that cynical people also earn less than others. Scholars writing in 2015 found that, even after correcting for gender, education, and age, the least cynical people saw an average monthly increase in income of about $300 over nine years. The most cynical saw no significant income increase at all. The authors explain this pattern by noting that cynics “are more likely to forgo valuable opportunities for cooperation and consequently less likely to reap the benefits of joint efforts and mutual help.” In other words,
being a misanthrope is costly.
TO IMPROVE YOUR well-being, you shouldn’t merely try to avoid cynicism in all its forms. Instead, work to become a true cynic, in its original sense.
The ancient cynics strove to live by a set of principles characterized by mindfulness, detachment from worldly cravings, the radical equality of all people, and healthy living. If this sounds like Christianity or even Buddhism, it should: Greek philosophers, including skeptics, who were contemporaries of the cynics, were probably influenced by Indian traditions when they visited the subcontinent with Alexander the Great, and in the following centuries, the ideas of cynicism and its offshoot stoicism heavily influenced early Christian thought.
To pivot from the modern to the ancient, I recommend focusing each day on several original cynical concepts, none of which condemns the world but all of which lead us to question, and in many cases reject, worldly conventions and practices.
1. Eudaimonia (“satisfaction”)
The ancient cynics knew that lasting satisfaction cannot be derived from a constant struggle for possessions, pleasures, power, or prestige. Happiness can come only from detaching ourselves from the world’s false promises. Make a list of worldly rewards that are pulling at you—such as a luxury item or the admiration of others—and say out loud, “I will not be subjugated by this desire.”
2. Askesis (“discipline”)
We cannot clear our mind of confusion and obfuscation until we stop anesthetizing ourselves, whether it be with drugs and alcohol or idle distractions from real life. Each day, forgo a detrimental substance or habit. Instead of watching television after dinner, go for a walk. Instead
of a cocktail, have a glass of water, and consider the refreshment you get from every sip. This discipline promises to strengthen your will and help you adopt routines that improve your happiness.
3. Autarkeia (“self-sufficiency”)
Relying on the world—especially on getting approval from the world—makes equanimity and true freedom impossible. Refuse to accept your craving for the high opinions of others. Think of a way that you habitually seek validation, be it for your looks, your cleverness in school, or your material prosperity. Make a plan to ignore this need completely. Note that this is not a modern-cynical practice of rejecting everything about the world; rather, you will simply be refusing to accept its conventional standards.
4. Kosmopolites (“cosmopolitanism”)
Seeing ourselves as better or worse than others sets us against one another and makes love and friendship difficult, which is self-destructive. This can be as obvious as thinking, I am better than someone else because I was born in this country, or as subtle as feeling slightly superior to a colleague because of my academic affiliation. Start each day by reminding yourself that the world belongs equally to everyone, and resolve not to treat anyone differently because of her status. Act exactly the same with your boss and your barista.
THE MODERN CYNIC is miserable because he is enchained to the outside world, which oppresses him because it is corrupt. The ancient cynic, by contrast, is happy—not because she thinks the outside world is perfect (it obviously is not) but because she chooses to focus on the
integrity of her interior world, over which she has control.
One famous (and perhaps apocryphal) story summarizes the power of this latter way of living. Diogenes, the philosopher who popularized cynicism, was known for showing no bias toward any party or clique, and was thus not well liked by those in power, who could have given him a comfortable life. One day, a philosopher named Aristippus, who was much favored by the royalty, found Diogenes in the task of washing vegetables, a low and disdained food for the ancient Greeks. Far from being ashamed of his paltry diet, Diogenes reminded Aristippus, “If
you had learned to eat these vegetables, you would not have been a slave in the palace of a tyrant.”
If you want to be a good cynic and a happier person, learn to eat your vegetables. They may not seem like a sumptuous feast to the people around you, but you’ll find that they nourish you far more than the empty calories of social conformity.
For next week, Arthur Brooks is being cynical about being a modern cynic and suggests we act instead like the ancient cynics. There is a spiritual dimension to all of this too, but, you'll have to tune in to hear what it is.
For those in person, I'll have the coffee ready and for those on-line, I look forward to interacting with you virtually. ... but you'll have to make your own java.
Live Like the Ancient Cynics
Arthur Brooks, The Atlantic 1.20.22
THERE ARE A growing number of Marxists today. By which I mean followers of Groucho, not Karl. “Whatever it is, I’m against it,” Marx sang in his 1932 film, Horse Feathers. “I don’t know what they have to say / It makes no difference anyway.”
What was satire then is ideology today: Cynicism—the belief that people are generally morally bankrupt and behave treacherously in order to maximize self-interest—dominates American culture. Since 1964, the percentage of Americans who say they trust the government to do what
is right “just about always” or “most of the time” has fallen 53 points, from 77 to 24 percent. Sentiments about other institutions in society follow similar patterns.
Whether cynicism is more warranted now than ever is yours to decide. But it won’t change the fact that the modern cynical outlook on life is terrible for your well-being. It makes you less healthy, less happy, less successful, and less respected by others.
The problem isn’t cynicism per se; it’s that modern people have lost the original meaning of cynicism. Instead of assuming that everyone and everything sucks, we should all live like the ancient Greek cynics, who rebelled against convention in a search for truth and enlightenment.
THE ORIGINAL CYNICISM was a philosophical movement likely founded by Antisthenes, a student of Socrates, and popularized by Diogenes of Sinope around the fifth century B.C. It was based on a refusal to accept the assumptions and habits that discourage people from questioning conventional dogmas, and thus hold us back from the search for deep wisdom and happiness.
Whereas a modern cynic might say, for instance, that the president is an idiot and thus his policies aren’t worth considering, the ancient cynic would examine each policy impartially.
The modern cynic rejects things out of hand (“This is stupid”), while the ancient cynic simply withholds judgment (“This may be right or wrong”). “Modern cynicism [has] come to describe something antithetical to its previous meanings, a psychological state hardened against both moral reflection and intellectual persuasion,” the University of Houston’s David Mazella wrote in The Making of Modern Cynicism.
There were no happiness surveys in Antisthenes’s times, so we can’t compare the ancient cynics’ life satisfaction with that of those around them who did not share their philosophy. We can most definitely conclude, however, that modern cynicism is detrimental. In one 2009 study, researchers examining negative cynical attitudes found that people who scored high in this characteristic on a personality test were roughly five times more likely to suffer from depression later in life. In other words, that smirking 25-year-old is at elevated risk of turning into a
depressed 44-year-old.
Modern cynics also suffer poorer health than others. In 1991, researchers studying middle-aged men found that a cynical outlook significantly increased the odds of death from both cancer and heart disease—possibly because the cynics consumed more alcohol and tobacco than the non-cynics. In one 2017 study on middle-aged Finnish men, high cynicism also predicted premature mortality. (Although both of these studies involved only men, nothing suggests that the results are gender-specific.)
Adding insult to injury, people tend not to respect cynics. Writing in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General in 2020, psychologists found that cynical attitudes lead to being treated disrespectfully—possibly because cynics tend to show disrespect to others, leading to a vicious cycle. You won’t be surprised to hear, then, that cynical people also earn less than others. Scholars writing in 2015 found that, even after correcting for gender, education, and age, the least cynical people saw an average monthly increase in income of about $300 over nine years. The most cynical saw no significant income increase at all. The authors explain this pattern by noting that cynics “are more likely to forgo valuable opportunities for cooperation and consequently less likely to reap the benefits of joint efforts and mutual help.” In other words,
being a misanthrope is costly.
TO IMPROVE YOUR well-being, you shouldn’t merely try to avoid cynicism in all its forms. Instead, work to become a true cynic, in its original sense.
The ancient cynics strove to live by a set of principles characterized by mindfulness, detachment from worldly cravings, the radical equality of all people, and healthy living. If this sounds like Christianity or even Buddhism, it should: Greek philosophers, including skeptics, who were contemporaries of the cynics, were probably influenced by Indian traditions when they visited the subcontinent with Alexander the Great, and in the following centuries, the ideas of cynicism and its offshoot stoicism heavily influenced early Christian thought.
To pivot from the modern to the ancient, I recommend focusing each day on several original cynical concepts, none of which condemns the world but all of which lead us to question, and in many cases reject, worldly conventions and practices.
1. Eudaimonia (“satisfaction”)
The ancient cynics knew that lasting satisfaction cannot be derived from a constant struggle for possessions, pleasures, power, or prestige. Happiness can come only from detaching ourselves from the world’s false promises. Make a list of worldly rewards that are pulling at you—such as a luxury item or the admiration of others—and say out loud, “I will not be subjugated by this desire.”
2. Askesis (“discipline”)
We cannot clear our mind of confusion and obfuscation until we stop anesthetizing ourselves, whether it be with drugs and alcohol or idle distractions from real life. Each day, forgo a detrimental substance or habit. Instead of watching television after dinner, go for a walk. Instead
of a cocktail, have a glass of water, and consider the refreshment you get from every sip. This discipline promises to strengthen your will and help you adopt routines that improve your happiness.
3. Autarkeia (“self-sufficiency”)
Relying on the world—especially on getting approval from the world—makes equanimity and true freedom impossible. Refuse to accept your craving for the high opinions of others. Think of a way that you habitually seek validation, be it for your looks, your cleverness in school, or your material prosperity. Make a plan to ignore this need completely. Note that this is not a modern-cynical practice of rejecting everything about the world; rather, you will simply be refusing to accept its conventional standards.
4. Kosmopolites (“cosmopolitanism”)
Seeing ourselves as better or worse than others sets us against one another and makes love and friendship difficult, which is self-destructive. This can be as obvious as thinking, I am better than someone else because I was born in this country, or as subtle as feeling slightly superior to a colleague because of my academic affiliation. Start each day by reminding yourself that the world belongs equally to everyone, and resolve not to treat anyone differently because of her status. Act exactly the same with your boss and your barista.
THE MODERN CYNIC is miserable because he is enchained to the outside world, which oppresses him because it is corrupt. The ancient cynic, by contrast, is happy—not because she thinks the outside world is perfect (it obviously is not) but because she chooses to focus on the
integrity of her interior world, over which she has control.
One famous (and perhaps apocryphal) story summarizes the power of this latter way of living. Diogenes, the philosopher who popularized cynicism, was known for showing no bias toward any party or clique, and was thus not well liked by those in power, who could have given him a comfortable life. One day, a philosopher named Aristippus, who was much favored by the royalty, found Diogenes in the task of washing vegetables, a low and disdained food for the ancient Greeks. Far from being ashamed of his paltry diet, Diogenes reminded Aristippus, “If
you had learned to eat these vegetables, you would not have been a slave in the palace of a tyrant.”
If you want to be a good cynic and a happier person, learn to eat your vegetables. They may not seem like a sumptuous feast to the people around you, but you’ll find that they nourish you far more than the empty calories of social conformity.
Thursday, January 20, 2022
The New York Times Magazine has a column where readers send in questions to the resident ethicist, Kwame Anthony Appiah. Two questions posed to Appiah are our discussion starting point for next week - Must I Donate a Kidney to My Awful Brother and What Should I do with my Schizophrenic Brother When I Retire.
These questions raise consideration to the Greatest Commandment,
part II, to love one's neighbor as oneself. Does that include difficult family members, and, if so, how does one go about loving them in a Christian sense.
I look forward to talking with you about this.
For those in person, I'll have the coffee ready and for those on-line,
I look forward to interacting with you virtually. ... but you'll have to make your own java.
Must I Donate a Kidney to my Awful Brother
Kwame Anthony Appiah, NY Times Magazine 1.11.22
My only sibling, an older brother, is facing kidney issues and may need a donor. I dread receiving a call asking me to fill that role. When we were quite young, he regularly beat me up, switching to emotional bullying when I was about 11. My parents never thought to intervene. As we got older, distance helped us eventually get along. But in our 50s, when I announced I was marrying, he bullied our mom into rewriting her will to ensure, should I predecease him, that my future stepson would not inherit any of the estate: He would get it all. When settling the estate some years later, he went after more than was justified and showed a marked lack of trust in me. I really don’t think any of his behavior was intentionally malicious — just what he felt he deserved or needed for his own safety. At that point I had enough and stopped interacting with him, except for birthday cards. I’ve politely laid out my feelings in a letter; he eventually acknowledged he may have made “some errors.” But that’s about it.
What’s my ethical responsibility? If it were one of my close cousins needing a kidney, I would most likely be fine with it. But for someone who has never been able to provide, undoubtedly because of his own childhood trauma(s), a “normal” brotherly relationship, I think this would
raise old feelings of being his victim. Name Withheld
Every year, thousands of people in our country donate a kidney, and we rightly honor them for that act of generosity. The procedure itself involves some discomfort (a small percentage of people will have long-term pain in the affected region), and it typically takes a few weeks to
recover fully. There’s some evidence that donors have an elevated, albeit still low, lifetime risk of kidney failure. Still, the overall medical risks to donors are small, while the benefits to the recipients are typically huge — their lives can be extended by many years. Because of your genetic proximity to your brother, there’s a good chance that your tissues will be well matched, and a well-matched donation will significantly increase the chance of long-term success.
In the light of these facts, some people will see an easy choice here. For them, the key fact is that, if you prove to be histocompatible, your brother can have a longer, better life at little cost to you. Given that you two are brothers, in fact, they may believe that you have even more reason to do it; they may say it rises to the level of a duty.
Oddly, though, utilitarians, who think that morality is a matter of maximizing the good consequences of your acts, are unlikely to agree — because you could probably increase the good done in donating your kidney by looking for a recipient who’s younger than your brother.
(And maybe someone who’s nicer, too — extending the life of nicer people contributes not just to their welfare but to the welfare of those they interact with.)
You wouldn’t have written, however, if you thought that all you needed to do was to measure the consequences of this donation. You’re troubled because your brother is… well, he’s your brother. And you think — rightly, in my view — that this relationship is relevant to what you
should do. Morality doesn’t just permit you to give special consideration to the needs of those with whom you have certain relationships; it requires that you do so.
Most people would agree that your brother has a special claim on you. To be sure, kidney donation is not ordinarily a duty. Even if you were on the warmest of terms with your brother, that fraternal claim wouldn’t mean you had a duty to give him your kidney. The donation would
still be an act of “supererogation,” something above and beyond what was required.
If being on warm terms doesn’t convert this fraternal claim into a duty, the question arises of how to weight this special claim if you’re on lousy terms. When a responsibility arises from our relationships, does it derive from the fact that we value them?
That condition doesn’t hold here: You don’t much value the relationship.
Some have argued that we have obligations to our kin simply because they are our kin. But then is it the bare fact of biological relatedness that matters, or is it the fact of being connected through family relationships, so that the duties extend to adopted members of our family? And,
if the latter, do we have no obligations to biological kin who were adopted into other families? It’s easy to get lost in this thicket of issues.
In your case, I find myself moved by two thoughts. One is that you’re not the selfish type — you would probably be willing to donate a kidney for a close cousin. Your reluctance here arises from the fact that your brother has been a jerk to you over the years. And whatever your duties
are to your brother, there is something ethically troublesome about refusing to help him because it would, as you put it, “raise old feelings
of being his victim.” Let’s grant that he has treated you very badly and never apologized adequately for doing so. You have been, in that sense, his victim. But why shouldn’t an act of generosity to someone who has mistreated you make you feel magnanimous instead? The question isn’t so much what you owe to your brother as what you owe to yourself. Choosing to deny him a life-extending opportunity because he has
been rotten to you would be understandable. It would also be ungenerous enough that you shouldn’t want to be the kind of person who would do it.
I am in my 60s and have been married for decades. One of my brothers is moderately schizophrenic; he does well on his medication but is increasingly unable to live alone. He and I are not close and are very different people, but when our mother went into a nursing home several years ago, he came to live with my wife and me. Several other siblings living close declined to take him in. My brother can’t live alone for a number of reasons, including forgetting to take his meds and not being able to take care of himself or his living quarters. Otherwise, he is
a good person, a brilliant artist (that was his career path) and tries hard to be considerate. Schizophrenia is a terrible thief of independence.
My wife and I are now retiring. We conscientiously put money away for retirement and to support our shared goal of traveling extensively. We have friends and family around the world with standing invitations for long visits. In addition, my wife simply does not want to live with my
brother during retirement. I admire her compassion for agreeing to take him in years ago, but he does require care and patience. Also, his moderately sexist attitudes have led to a number of conflicts over time. I cannot fault my wife for wanting and expecting to continue with our plans, but I am completely torn.
We must find some other arrangement for my brother. My wife speaks relatively lightly of putting him in assisted living. Doing so will decrease his quality of life drastically. Our income has allowed us to help him extensively with everything from dentures to art supplies. He has little
except his monthly Social Security check.
Ethically, how responsible am I for my brother? How do I justify making arrangements for him to go into assisted living so I can enjoy the retirement we planned on, knowing that his quality of life will diminish? How do I set aside this strong sense of disappointment in myself? Name Withheld
There are three kinds of demands in play here, which reflect the pull of three kinds of “partiality.” There is your special concern, as a thoughtful sibling, for your brother. There is your special concern, as a loving spouse, for your wife. And then there’s your special concern for your own projects, such as travel, because human beings are partial to (and entitled to be partial to) themselves. It’s a mistake to think that giving special weight to your own interests and concerns is egoism; egoism is giving them more weight than they merit. You have a legitimate interest in
living a well-lived life; you’re not obliged to devote yourself totally to the well-being of others. It’s worth bearing in mind that ethics, as Aristotle originally conceived it, was precisely an inquiry into what it meant to live well.
And as you recognize, the decisions you face are not yours alone. Your wife has already been putting up with the strain of living with a difficult housemate, who, it seems clear, doesn’t always treat her with the respect she is due. (We can debate how much to hold your brother responsible for his attitudes and behavior, but she can avoid taking offense only by treating him as a patient and not as a person.) Further, it would seem that she’s asking you to recognize your own right to the extensive plans you shared as well as hers. If you refused to give your and your wife’s interests their proper weight, you’d have greater reason to be disappointed in yourself.
Notice that you’re contrasting the life he has now with the disadvantages of life in assisted housing. To weigh that comparison, you need a realistic sense of what life will be like for the foreseeable future in both cases. Might you be exaggerating the quality of life he would enjoy if
he continued staying with you? If you and your wife are forced to jettison your retirement plans, you’d have to be saints not to resent it. Although you’re not close to this brother, part of the benefit to him of living with you must come from the relationship that you have; his awareness of his hosts’ resentment, accordingly, would probably diminish the quality of his life.
If his staying with you could be worse than you imagine, life in assisted living might be better. Of course, it will be a difficult transition, but you can put some of your moral energy into securing an assisted-living situation that’s as good as you can find. Only when you have actual options to consider can you assess what sort of quality of life he can have outside your direct care. And you should certainly try to involve him in thinking about these options. (It would be wise to discuss all the options with a psychiatrist or social worker who understands the specifics
of your brother’s diagnosis.)
Let me remind you too that the responsibilities you have to him are shared with other family members. If they won’t do their part, you’re not obliged to take up their moral slack. But you can at least ask them for help in covering the costs of getting him a decent living situation. You can also spend time with him when you aren’t on the road and urge your other siblings to do the same.
A final point. As with your mother, you may eventually be incapable of independent existence: making the transition with care now may be better for all involved than making sudden big changes later, amid whatever frailties age may bring you. Of course, even if you recognize that
your feelings of self-reproach are unwarranted, they will not thereby be entirely dispelled. That there are no costless choices here, though, reflects the usual human condition. You may find yourself concurring with an avowal of the poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky: “Life — the way it really is — is a battle not between Bad and Good, but between Bad and Worse."
These questions raise consideration to the Greatest Commandment,
part II, to love one's neighbor as oneself. Does that include difficult family members, and, if so, how does one go about loving them in a Christian sense.
I look forward to talking with you about this.
For those in person, I'll have the coffee ready and for those on-line,
I look forward to interacting with you virtually. ... but you'll have to make your own java.
Must I Donate a Kidney to my Awful Brother
Kwame Anthony Appiah, NY Times Magazine 1.11.22
My only sibling, an older brother, is facing kidney issues and may need a donor. I dread receiving a call asking me to fill that role. When we were quite young, he regularly beat me up, switching to emotional bullying when I was about 11. My parents never thought to intervene. As we got older, distance helped us eventually get along. But in our 50s, when I announced I was marrying, he bullied our mom into rewriting her will to ensure, should I predecease him, that my future stepson would not inherit any of the estate: He would get it all. When settling the estate some years later, he went after more than was justified and showed a marked lack of trust in me. I really don’t think any of his behavior was intentionally malicious — just what he felt he deserved or needed for his own safety. At that point I had enough and stopped interacting with him, except for birthday cards. I’ve politely laid out my feelings in a letter; he eventually acknowledged he may have made “some errors.” But that’s about it.
What’s my ethical responsibility? If it were one of my close cousins needing a kidney, I would most likely be fine with it. But for someone who has never been able to provide, undoubtedly because of his own childhood trauma(s), a “normal” brotherly relationship, I think this would
raise old feelings of being his victim. Name Withheld
Every year, thousands of people in our country donate a kidney, and we rightly honor them for that act of generosity. The procedure itself involves some discomfort (a small percentage of people will have long-term pain in the affected region), and it typically takes a few weeks to
recover fully. There’s some evidence that donors have an elevated, albeit still low, lifetime risk of kidney failure. Still, the overall medical risks to donors are small, while the benefits to the recipients are typically huge — their lives can be extended by many years. Because of your genetic proximity to your brother, there’s a good chance that your tissues will be well matched, and a well-matched donation will significantly increase the chance of long-term success.
In the light of these facts, some people will see an easy choice here. For them, the key fact is that, if you prove to be histocompatible, your brother can have a longer, better life at little cost to you. Given that you two are brothers, in fact, they may believe that you have even more reason to do it; they may say it rises to the level of a duty.
Oddly, though, utilitarians, who think that morality is a matter of maximizing the good consequences of your acts, are unlikely to agree — because you could probably increase the good done in donating your kidney by looking for a recipient who’s younger than your brother.
(And maybe someone who’s nicer, too — extending the life of nicer people contributes not just to their welfare but to the welfare of those they interact with.)
You wouldn’t have written, however, if you thought that all you needed to do was to measure the consequences of this donation. You’re troubled because your brother is… well, he’s your brother. And you think — rightly, in my view — that this relationship is relevant to what you
should do. Morality doesn’t just permit you to give special consideration to the needs of those with whom you have certain relationships; it requires that you do so.
Most people would agree that your brother has a special claim on you. To be sure, kidney donation is not ordinarily a duty. Even if you were on the warmest of terms with your brother, that fraternal claim wouldn’t mean you had a duty to give him your kidney. The donation would
still be an act of “supererogation,” something above and beyond what was required.
If being on warm terms doesn’t convert this fraternal claim into a duty, the question arises of how to weight this special claim if you’re on lousy terms. When a responsibility arises from our relationships, does it derive from the fact that we value them?
That condition doesn’t hold here: You don’t much value the relationship.
Some have argued that we have obligations to our kin simply because they are our kin. But then is it the bare fact of biological relatedness that matters, or is it the fact of being connected through family relationships, so that the duties extend to adopted members of our family? And,
if the latter, do we have no obligations to biological kin who were adopted into other families? It’s easy to get lost in this thicket of issues.
In your case, I find myself moved by two thoughts. One is that you’re not the selfish type — you would probably be willing to donate a kidney for a close cousin. Your reluctance here arises from the fact that your brother has been a jerk to you over the years. And whatever your duties
are to your brother, there is something ethically troublesome about refusing to help him because it would, as you put it, “raise old feelings
of being his victim.” Let’s grant that he has treated you very badly and never apologized adequately for doing so. You have been, in that sense, his victim. But why shouldn’t an act of generosity to someone who has mistreated you make you feel magnanimous instead? The question isn’t so much what you owe to your brother as what you owe to yourself. Choosing to deny him a life-extending opportunity because he has
been rotten to you would be understandable. It would also be ungenerous enough that you shouldn’t want to be the kind of person who would do it.
I am in my 60s and have been married for decades. One of my brothers is moderately schizophrenic; he does well on his medication but is increasingly unable to live alone. He and I are not close and are very different people, but when our mother went into a nursing home several years ago, he came to live with my wife and me. Several other siblings living close declined to take him in. My brother can’t live alone for a number of reasons, including forgetting to take his meds and not being able to take care of himself or his living quarters. Otherwise, he is
a good person, a brilliant artist (that was his career path) and tries hard to be considerate. Schizophrenia is a terrible thief of independence.
My wife and I are now retiring. We conscientiously put money away for retirement and to support our shared goal of traveling extensively. We have friends and family around the world with standing invitations for long visits. In addition, my wife simply does not want to live with my
brother during retirement. I admire her compassion for agreeing to take him in years ago, but he does require care and patience. Also, his moderately sexist attitudes have led to a number of conflicts over time. I cannot fault my wife for wanting and expecting to continue with our plans, but I am completely torn.
We must find some other arrangement for my brother. My wife speaks relatively lightly of putting him in assisted living. Doing so will decrease his quality of life drastically. Our income has allowed us to help him extensively with everything from dentures to art supplies. He has little
except his monthly Social Security check.
Ethically, how responsible am I for my brother? How do I justify making arrangements for him to go into assisted living so I can enjoy the retirement we planned on, knowing that his quality of life will diminish? How do I set aside this strong sense of disappointment in myself? Name Withheld
There are three kinds of demands in play here, which reflect the pull of three kinds of “partiality.” There is your special concern, as a thoughtful sibling, for your brother. There is your special concern, as a loving spouse, for your wife. And then there’s your special concern for your own projects, such as travel, because human beings are partial to (and entitled to be partial to) themselves. It’s a mistake to think that giving special weight to your own interests and concerns is egoism; egoism is giving them more weight than they merit. You have a legitimate interest in
living a well-lived life; you’re not obliged to devote yourself totally to the well-being of others. It’s worth bearing in mind that ethics, as Aristotle originally conceived it, was precisely an inquiry into what it meant to live well.
And as you recognize, the decisions you face are not yours alone. Your wife has already been putting up with the strain of living with a difficult housemate, who, it seems clear, doesn’t always treat her with the respect she is due. (We can debate how much to hold your brother responsible for his attitudes and behavior, but she can avoid taking offense only by treating him as a patient and not as a person.) Further, it would seem that she’s asking you to recognize your own right to the extensive plans you shared as well as hers. If you refused to give your and your wife’s interests their proper weight, you’d have greater reason to be disappointed in yourself.
Notice that you’re contrasting the life he has now with the disadvantages of life in assisted housing. To weigh that comparison, you need a realistic sense of what life will be like for the foreseeable future in both cases. Might you be exaggerating the quality of life he would enjoy if
he continued staying with you? If you and your wife are forced to jettison your retirement plans, you’d have to be saints not to resent it. Although you’re not close to this brother, part of the benefit to him of living with you must come from the relationship that you have; his awareness of his hosts’ resentment, accordingly, would probably diminish the quality of his life.
If his staying with you could be worse than you imagine, life in assisted living might be better. Of course, it will be a difficult transition, but you can put some of your moral energy into securing an assisted-living situation that’s as good as you can find. Only when you have actual options to consider can you assess what sort of quality of life he can have outside your direct care. And you should certainly try to involve him in thinking about these options. (It would be wise to discuss all the options with a psychiatrist or social worker who understands the specifics
of your brother’s diagnosis.)
Let me remind you too that the responsibilities you have to him are shared with other family members. If they won’t do their part, you’re not obliged to take up their moral slack. But you can at least ask them for help in covering the costs of getting him a decent living situation. You can also spend time with him when you aren’t on the road and urge your other siblings to do the same.
A final point. As with your mother, you may eventually be incapable of independent existence: making the transition with care now may be better for all involved than making sudden big changes later, amid whatever frailties age may bring you. Of course, even if you recognize that
your feelings of self-reproach are unwarranted, they will not thereby be entirely dispelled. That there are no costless choices here, though, reflects the usual human condition. You may find yourself concurring with an avowal of the poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky: “Life — the way it really is — is a battle not between Bad and Good, but between Bad and Worse."
Thursday, January 13, 2022
Epiphany is a season of new understanding and light. Next week's article may do just that when it comes to our understanding of how other faith traditions view death.
There will be coffee ready for those gathering in-person.
What I Learned About Death From 7 Religious Scholars, 1 Atheist and My Father
George Yancy, New York Times 1.2.22
(Dr. Yancy is a professor of philosophy at Emory University and the author and editor of many books on race, society and religious faith.)
Just a few days before my father died in 2014, I asked him a question some might find insensitive or inappropriate:
“So, what are your thoughts now about dying?”
We were in the hospital. My father had not spoken much at all that day. He was under the influence of painkillers and had begun the active stage of dying.
He mustered all of his energy to give me his answer. “It’s too complex,” he said.
They were his final spoken words to me before he died. I had anticipated something more pensive, something more drawn-out. But they were consistent with our mutual grappling with the meaning of death. Until the very end, he spoke with honesty, courage and wisdom.
I have known many who have taken the mystery out of death through a kind of sociological matter-of-factness: “We all will die at some point. Tell me something I don’t know.” I suspect that many of these same people have also taken the mystery out of being alive, out of the fact
that we exist: “But of course I exist; I’m right here, aren’t I?”
Confronting the reality of death and trying to understand its uncanny nature is part of what I do as a philosopher and as a human being. My father, while not a professional philosopher, loved wisdom and had the gift of gab. Our many conversations over the years touched on the existence of God, the meaning of love and, yes, the fact of death.
In retrospect, my father and I refused to allow death to have the final word without first, metaphorically, staring it in the face. We were both rebelling against the ways in which so many hide from facing the fact that consciousness, as we know it, will stop — poof!
We know the fact of death is inescapable, and it has been especially so for the nearly two-year pandemic. As we begin another year, I am astonished again and again to realize that more than 800,000 irreplaceable people have died from Covid-19 in the United States; worldwide, the number is over five million. When we hear about those numbers, it is important that we become attuned to actual deaths, the cessation of millions of consciousnesses, stopped just like that. This is not just about how people have died but also that they have died.
My father and I, like the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, came to view death as “by no means something in general.” We understood that death is about me, him and you. But what we in fact were learning about was dying, not death. Dying is a process; we get to count the days, but for me to die, there is no conscious self who recognizes that I’m gone or that I was even here. So, yes, death, as my father put it, is too complex.
It was in February of 2020 that I wrote the introduction to a series of interviews that I would subsequently conduct for The Times’s philosophy series The Stone, called Conversations on Death, with religious scholars from a variety of faiths. While my initial aim had little to do with grappling with the deaths caused by Covid-19 (like most, I had no idea just how devastating the disease would be), it soon became hard to ignore. As the interviews appeared, I heard from readers who said that reading them helped them cope with their losses during the pandemic. I would like to think that it was partly the probing of the meaning of death, the refusal to look away, that was helpful. What had begun as a philosophical inquiry became a balm for some.
While each scholar articulated a different interpretation of what happens after we die, it was not long before our conversations on death turned to matters of life, on the importance of what we do on this side of the grave. Death is loss, each scholar seemed to say, but it also illuminates and transforms life and serves as a guide for the living.
The Buddhist scholar Dadul Namgyal stressed the importance of letting go of habits of self-obsession and attitudes of self-importance. Moulie Vidas, a scholar of Judaism, placed more emphasis on Judaism’s intellectual and spiritual energy. Karen Teel, a Roman Catholic, highlighted her interest in working toward making our world more just. The Jainism scholar Pankaj Jain underscored that it is on this side of the veil of death that one attempts to completely purify the soul through absolute nonviolence.
Brook Ziporyn, a scholar of Taoism, stressed the importance of embracing this life as constant change, being able to let go, of allowing, as he says, every new situation to “deliver to us its own new form as a new good.” Leor Halevi, a historian of Islam, told me that an imam would stress
the importance of paying debts, giving to charity and prayer.
And Jacob Kehinde Olupona, a scholar of the Yoruba religion, explained that “humans are enjoined to do well in life so that when death eventually comes, one can be remembered for one’s good deeds.” The atheist philosopher Todd May placed importance on seeking to live our lives along two paths simultaneously — both looking forward and living fully in the present.
The sheer variety of these insights raised the possibility that there are no absolute answers — the questions are “too complex” — and that life, as William Shakespeare’s Macbeth says, is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Yet there is so much to learn,
paradoxically, about what is unknowable.
Perhaps we should think of death in terms of the parable of the blind men and the elephant. Just as the blind men who come to know the elephant by touching only certain parts of it, our views of death, religious or not, are limited, marked by context, culture, explicit and implicit
metaphysical sensibilities, values and vocabularies. The elephant evades full description. But with death, there doesn’t seem to be anything to touch. There is just the fact that we die.
Yet as human beings, we yearn to make sense of that about which we may not be able to capture in full. In this case, perhaps each religious worldview touches something or is touched by something beyond the grave, something that is beyond our descriptive limits.
Perhaps, for me, it is just too hard to let go, and so I refuse to accept that there is nothing after death. This attachment, which can function as a form of refusal, is familiar to all of us. The recent death of my dear friend bell hooks painfully demonstrates this. Why would I want to let go of our wonderful and caring relationship and our stimulating and witty conversations? I’m reminded, though, that my father’s last words regarding the meaning of death being too complex leave me facing a beautiful question mark.
My father was also a lover of Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet.” He would quote sections from it verbatim. I wasn’t there when my father stopped breathing, but I wish that I could have spoken these lines by Gibran as he left us: “And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from
its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?”
In this past year of profound loss and grief, it is hard to find comfort. No matter how many philosophers or theologians seek the answers, the meaning of death remains a mystery. And yet silence in the face of this mystery is not an option for me, as it wasn’t for my father, perhaps because we know that, while we may find solace in our rituals, it is also in the seeking that we must persist.
There will be coffee ready for those gathering in-person.
What I Learned About Death From 7 Religious Scholars, 1 Atheist and My Father
George Yancy, New York Times 1.2.22
(Dr. Yancy is a professor of philosophy at Emory University and the author and editor of many books on race, society and religious faith.)
Just a few days before my father died in 2014, I asked him a question some might find insensitive or inappropriate:
“So, what are your thoughts now about dying?”
We were in the hospital. My father had not spoken much at all that day. He was under the influence of painkillers and had begun the active stage of dying.
He mustered all of his energy to give me his answer. “It’s too complex,” he said.
They were his final spoken words to me before he died. I had anticipated something more pensive, something more drawn-out. But they were consistent with our mutual grappling with the meaning of death. Until the very end, he spoke with honesty, courage and wisdom.
I have known many who have taken the mystery out of death through a kind of sociological matter-of-factness: “We all will die at some point. Tell me something I don’t know.” I suspect that many of these same people have also taken the mystery out of being alive, out of the fact
that we exist: “But of course I exist; I’m right here, aren’t I?”
Confronting the reality of death and trying to understand its uncanny nature is part of what I do as a philosopher and as a human being. My father, while not a professional philosopher, loved wisdom and had the gift of gab. Our many conversations over the years touched on the existence of God, the meaning of love and, yes, the fact of death.
In retrospect, my father and I refused to allow death to have the final word without first, metaphorically, staring it in the face. We were both rebelling against the ways in which so many hide from facing the fact that consciousness, as we know it, will stop — poof!
We know the fact of death is inescapable, and it has been especially so for the nearly two-year pandemic. As we begin another year, I am astonished again and again to realize that more than 800,000 irreplaceable people have died from Covid-19 in the United States; worldwide, the number is over five million. When we hear about those numbers, it is important that we become attuned to actual deaths, the cessation of millions of consciousnesses, stopped just like that. This is not just about how people have died but also that they have died.
My father and I, like the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, came to view death as “by no means something in general.” We understood that death is about me, him and you. But what we in fact were learning about was dying, not death. Dying is a process; we get to count the days, but for me to die, there is no conscious self who recognizes that I’m gone or that I was even here. So, yes, death, as my father put it, is too complex.
It was in February of 2020 that I wrote the introduction to a series of interviews that I would subsequently conduct for The Times’s philosophy series The Stone, called Conversations on Death, with religious scholars from a variety of faiths. While my initial aim had little to do with grappling with the deaths caused by Covid-19 (like most, I had no idea just how devastating the disease would be), it soon became hard to ignore. As the interviews appeared, I heard from readers who said that reading them helped them cope with their losses during the pandemic. I would like to think that it was partly the probing of the meaning of death, the refusal to look away, that was helpful. What had begun as a philosophical inquiry became a balm for some.
While each scholar articulated a different interpretation of what happens after we die, it was not long before our conversations on death turned to matters of life, on the importance of what we do on this side of the grave. Death is loss, each scholar seemed to say, but it also illuminates and transforms life and serves as a guide for the living.
The Buddhist scholar Dadul Namgyal stressed the importance of letting go of habits of self-obsession and attitudes of self-importance. Moulie Vidas, a scholar of Judaism, placed more emphasis on Judaism’s intellectual and spiritual energy. Karen Teel, a Roman Catholic, highlighted her interest in working toward making our world more just. The Jainism scholar Pankaj Jain underscored that it is on this side of the veil of death that one attempts to completely purify the soul through absolute nonviolence.
Brook Ziporyn, a scholar of Taoism, stressed the importance of embracing this life as constant change, being able to let go, of allowing, as he says, every new situation to “deliver to us its own new form as a new good.” Leor Halevi, a historian of Islam, told me that an imam would stress
the importance of paying debts, giving to charity and prayer.
And Jacob Kehinde Olupona, a scholar of the Yoruba religion, explained that “humans are enjoined to do well in life so that when death eventually comes, one can be remembered for one’s good deeds.” The atheist philosopher Todd May placed importance on seeking to live our lives along two paths simultaneously — both looking forward and living fully in the present.
The sheer variety of these insights raised the possibility that there are no absolute answers — the questions are “too complex” — and that life, as William Shakespeare’s Macbeth says, is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Yet there is so much to learn,
paradoxically, about what is unknowable.
Perhaps we should think of death in terms of the parable of the blind men and the elephant. Just as the blind men who come to know the elephant by touching only certain parts of it, our views of death, religious or not, are limited, marked by context, culture, explicit and implicit
metaphysical sensibilities, values and vocabularies. The elephant evades full description. But with death, there doesn’t seem to be anything to touch. There is just the fact that we die.
Yet as human beings, we yearn to make sense of that about which we may not be able to capture in full. In this case, perhaps each religious worldview touches something or is touched by something beyond the grave, something that is beyond our descriptive limits.
Perhaps, for me, it is just too hard to let go, and so I refuse to accept that there is nothing after death. This attachment, which can function as a form of refusal, is familiar to all of us. The recent death of my dear friend bell hooks painfully demonstrates this. Why would I want to let go of our wonderful and caring relationship and our stimulating and witty conversations? I’m reminded, though, that my father’s last words regarding the meaning of death being too complex leave me facing a beautiful question mark.
My father was also a lover of Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet.” He would quote sections from it verbatim. I wasn’t there when my father stopped breathing, but I wish that I could have spoken these lines by Gibran as he left us: “And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from
its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?”
In this past year of profound loss and grief, it is hard to find comfort. No matter how many philosophers or theologians seek the answers, the meaning of death remains a mystery. And yet silence in the face of this mystery is not an option for me, as it wasn’t for my father, perhaps because we know that, while we may find solace in our rituals, it is also in the seeking that we must persist.
Thursday, January 6, 2022
Men's Discussion Group resumes on Tuesday, January 4th with this article for discussion:
How to Live When You are in Pain
Arthur Brooks and BJ Miller, MD, The Atlantic 11.9.21
Arthur C. Brooks sits down with BJ Miller, a palliative-care physician, to uncover why we should accept our natural limitations as human beings, and how to make peace with the ebb and flow of joy and suffering in human life.
Arthur C. Brooks: When you teach happiness, like I do, one of the biggest questions that people have initially: What is it? I mean, we all think we know what happiness is until you think about it. A lot of people, they assume that happiness is a feeling. A better definition of happiness is:
happiness is a feast with three macronutrients, and they are: enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose.
BJ Miller: You know, I’m all for happiness. It’s a beautiful thing. But first of all, it’s not always accessible. Second of all, it is deeply related to pain and other trouble. I don’t think happiness is the absence of trouble or absence of problems or the absence of pain. I think happiness and pain
are really close bedfellows.
Brooks: BJ Miller is a hospice and palliative-care physician and the co-founder of the online palliative-care company Mettle Health. Dr. Miller’s professional field of palliative care deals directly with the healing of suffering rather than of disease itself—from physical pain to emotional struggles. Why is he interested in suffering and death himself? He had a near-death accident in his college years. He dealt with incredible pain and was forced to confront mortality head-on. BJ’s wisdom on pain and suffering, through his professional work and personal experience, helps us come to grips with the inevitable struggles of being human, which means sometimes being in pain and in every life, sooner or later, coming to an end. Why? So that we can be alive today in a more meaningful way.
Miller: We humans are sort of relatively oriented, so we know joy because we’ve known pain. And we need foils. We need points of contrast. And so death can provide us this point of contrast so that things like beauty and joy pop; they have something to push against and to relate to. So that idea of having a foil in life to understand what joy feels like because we know what its absence feels like. Happiness is not so much just the pursuit of pleasure. It’s somehow the pursuit of being okay with reality. And reality happens to include things like pain and death. Death gives us this context for our life, this reason that time becomes a precious thing and where we place ourselves becomes important because it’s not unlimited. It also gives us this grand excuse that we know in a full life, we’re never going to get to everything. That’s not a failure. That’s just the truth of life being much larger than any one of us.
So death has a lot to teach us, and I would just say, you know, I’m neither for or against death. It just happens to insist upon itself. It exists. So therefore I need to deal with it. Happiness, I think, has something to do too, without it not being at odds with oneself. And one of the things we do—any, every, all selves do is die. So that’s just part of the package.
Brooks: Why would you go through your life never actually being alive until you die, because you’ve been denying the existence of death? It’s a weird psychological conundrum that you put yourself into under the circumstances, don’t you think? Why are you interested in this topic?
What got you interested in the topic of death?
Miller: Well, because I finally came to realize that it exists, like I said it was, it’s like part of reality and that it was part of life, not the antithesis or the poacher of life, but part of life—that it’s in us. And so my pursuit of knowing myself and knowing life led me to trying to at least accept death. I don’t know if we can know death—I’m not sure—but I guess you could say, Arthur, my interest in life led me to my interest in death because they are deeply related. And then more specifically, too, I mean, I came close to death myself when I was in college. I had an electrical accident that really bumped me up against my mortality as not an abstraction but as very much a reality that could happen any moment. And so that kind of forced me to look.
You can start decentralizing your ego; you can start seeing life outside of yourself and feeling your connection to it and appreciation for it and your responsibility to it. So in my field, we talk about the end of life—like that’s the phrase, end of life—but it’s such a problematic phrase. Now life, life will keep going. Your life is going to end; my life’s going to end. This life will end. So it’s not the end of life. Life does not end, as far as we can tell it. It keeps on going. We—you or I—do not. So it’s the end of my life. Once you get over yourself, there is a sort of immortality happening, too, all around us.
Brooks: So when your patients come to you, I mean, there aren’t—I mean, your patients come to you because they’re facing the end of life—obviously, you’re doing hospice and palliative care. And my guess is that many of them come to you and they’re not very happy. Is it fear or regret or something else that’s actually leading people who are nearing the end of life who are unhappy to experience this unhappiness?
Miller: Palliative care really is the sort of clinical—it’s the science or a philosophy or an approach to care that deals with suffering versus deals with a disease. The problem, if you will, the thing we’re looking at, is suffering. And so a lot of people who I see in palliative care aren’t at the end of life. They are just struggling. They’re suffering. They’re trying to make sense of a world to them that does no longer makes sense, trying to incorporate a diagnosis into their sense of self. A lot of the clients or patients I’ve seen over the years are nowhere near death. So one
thing to appreciate is for listeners that palliative care is the sort of clinical pursuit of quality of life in the face of suffering. And we grew out of hospice, which is a subset of palliative care that is devoted to the end of life. So, just to say, you don’t have to be dying anytime soon to benefit from palliative care.
Now, having said that, the way I kind of work in my practice is in this sort of existential framework. Any time, whether or not we’re talking about death explicitly, it’s always in the air. And then my approach is to work kind of almost backwards, to sort of find a way to rope death and loss into the picture and then build from there. Sort of like: Life begins when you realize that you die. Not only do we have to die; we have to know we die in advance of our death, and that is a real mind bender.
So in some ways, my job in palliative care is to make them hate their life less or make them hurt less. But you start doing that even if that’s your goal. You start realizing that part of the antidote is finding meaning. Part of the antidote to pain of any kind is making sense of it or working with it, or somehow accepting it. So it’s always in the mix.
Brooks: I like it. I like it nonetheless. And I will quote, you know, from your latest book where you say in the introduction, “There is nothing wrong with you for dying.” And it’s funny that we have to say that. But let’s take in context why we think that, with our medical-care system and
how you’re very different than doctors I ordinarily talk to. Doctors are in the business of keeping us alive, and therefore they set themselves up as enemies of death. And you’re saying, “Look, that’s wrong! That’s all wrong. You can’t be an enemy of something that’s a natural part of life
and an inevitability, and something that if you keep running away from, it will ruin your quality of life.” And so what you’re saying here—I mean, look, I want everybody in the audience to apprehend how incredibly subversive BJ Miller actually is to the entire medical establishment. You’re saying that our approach to suffering and death is actually hurting us. Is that correct?
Miller: Yes, you are correct. I absolutely agree with that statement. Yes. The medical model sort of pathologizes everything. But the problem with that is, you end up pathologizing normal states, like, it is normal to get sick; it is normal to die. We shouldn’t call that “pathological” because it’s like a judgment call. This is where you end up feeling like a loser or ashamed to be sick. You know, that’s deeply problematic.
So one of the things I’m trying to do is de-pathologize these states to unburden us of the shame of being sick. You know, this idea of: Not only do I have to feel bad, whether it’s pain or depression or whatever—you have to feel bad for feeling bad, you know, ashamed of yourself or
feeling for suffering. That’s it. That’s man-made stuff that we foist on each other. It needs to be kind of undone. And look, I mean, there’s a time for fighting, and there’s a time—there’s a “war on cancer,” and I get it. You know, that’s a way to mobilize a bunch of energy. And sometimes
in a disease course, something may actually be fixable, correctable, and you may be able to forestall death and live a little bit longer. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But let’s not fool ourselves. Death is still an inevitability, and it’s not this thing that happens to us. It’s not this
foreign invader. It’s in us. Our cells are programmed to do this. So you cannot go to war with illness or war with death for very long before you are, in fact, at war with yourself. That’s just a true statement.
Brooks: You make this incredibly compelling case that to enjoy our life, we need to declare peace on death. That doesn’t mean we need to embrace death. It doesn’t mean we need to rush toward death, but we need to be at peace with the fact that it is part of life. So should we also
declare peace on suffering, which is also inevitable?
Miller: Great question, Arthur. I do believe we need to declare peace or perhaps a truce on death, and that is importantly different than loving it or ushering it in. And in fact, there are data to support that if you can find your way to accepting the fact that you die—i.e., accepting reality--
that you might even live longer. When I was trained, the convention was, “Well you can go for a quality of life or quantity of life,” and then somehow you had to choose between the two. What we are increasingly finding is that that’s a false distinction. So part of the answer is to break up these false dichotomies.
In terms of declaring peace on suffering, well, for me, I still find it useful to split suffering into a couple of different kinds. So one is, we might call “necessary suffering”; it’s just the suffering that comes from being alive. Loss is just part of the deal. It will happen and, you know, and it’s
going to hurt. So natural phenomena. One of the first things we do when we are born into this world is we wail. You might even consider the birthing process something of a trauma, coming out of the safety of the womb and all the certainty of it, into this world. And it is stunning that
the very first thing a healthy child does is cry, is wail. I don’t think that’s a mistake or coincidence. So it does seem to be just an element of the human experience. That’s necessary suffering. You could try to change it, but good luck, you know?
And then there’s this other batch that you might call “unnecessary suffering” or “gratuitous suffering.” I’m all for coming to peace with the necessary suffering, but the unnecessary stuff that we casually—the pain we casually cause each other with our thoughts or our words. We say
mean things. We disregard each other. We pressure each other to be something that we’re not. We steal from each other. We do all sorts of gnarly things. And that’s a very different kind of suffering.
I think we need to use our discernment to tease out the two. And no, I’m all for rooting out the unnecessary suffering. The health-care system has so many problems. It’s amazing, but it’s also dramatically dysfunctional. And as an invented thing, it’s inexcusable to me that the health-care system causes as much suffering as it does. It is—because it’s made up and because we know better, we should be able to design a better health-care system. And I am upset that we haven’t found our way to do that, and I will continue to be upset and I will continue to try to change that. I’m not at peace with that.
The point is this: If you don’t want to be managed by your fear, you have to manage your fear. You have to own your fear. Own your pain. Look at it directly. Your fear will decline and you’ll start to see the transcendent purpose in the worst things and the best things and everything in between, because that’s part of a full life. What it was you were trying to avoid, you’ll embrace, and in so doing, you’ll start to enjoy the life that you’re living today.
How to Live When You are in Pain
Arthur Brooks and BJ Miller, MD, The Atlantic 11.9.21
Arthur C. Brooks sits down with BJ Miller, a palliative-care physician, to uncover why we should accept our natural limitations as human beings, and how to make peace with the ebb and flow of joy and suffering in human life.
Arthur C. Brooks: When you teach happiness, like I do, one of the biggest questions that people have initially: What is it? I mean, we all think we know what happiness is until you think about it. A lot of people, they assume that happiness is a feeling. A better definition of happiness is:
happiness is a feast with three macronutrients, and they are: enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose.
BJ Miller: You know, I’m all for happiness. It’s a beautiful thing. But first of all, it’s not always accessible. Second of all, it is deeply related to pain and other trouble. I don’t think happiness is the absence of trouble or absence of problems or the absence of pain. I think happiness and pain
are really close bedfellows.
Brooks: BJ Miller is a hospice and palliative-care physician and the co-founder of the online palliative-care company Mettle Health. Dr. Miller’s professional field of palliative care deals directly with the healing of suffering rather than of disease itself—from physical pain to emotional struggles. Why is he interested in suffering and death himself? He had a near-death accident in his college years. He dealt with incredible pain and was forced to confront mortality head-on. BJ’s wisdom on pain and suffering, through his professional work and personal experience, helps us come to grips with the inevitable struggles of being human, which means sometimes being in pain and in every life, sooner or later, coming to an end. Why? So that we can be alive today in a more meaningful way.
Miller: We humans are sort of relatively oriented, so we know joy because we’ve known pain. And we need foils. We need points of contrast. And so death can provide us this point of contrast so that things like beauty and joy pop; they have something to push against and to relate to. So that idea of having a foil in life to understand what joy feels like because we know what its absence feels like. Happiness is not so much just the pursuit of pleasure. It’s somehow the pursuit of being okay with reality. And reality happens to include things like pain and death. Death gives us this context for our life, this reason that time becomes a precious thing and where we place ourselves becomes important because it’s not unlimited. It also gives us this grand excuse that we know in a full life, we’re never going to get to everything. That’s not a failure. That’s just the truth of life being much larger than any one of us.
So death has a lot to teach us, and I would just say, you know, I’m neither for or against death. It just happens to insist upon itself. It exists. So therefore I need to deal with it. Happiness, I think, has something to do too, without it not being at odds with oneself. And one of the things we do—any, every, all selves do is die. So that’s just part of the package.
Brooks: Why would you go through your life never actually being alive until you die, because you’ve been denying the existence of death? It’s a weird psychological conundrum that you put yourself into under the circumstances, don’t you think? Why are you interested in this topic?
What got you interested in the topic of death?
Miller: Well, because I finally came to realize that it exists, like I said it was, it’s like part of reality and that it was part of life, not the antithesis or the poacher of life, but part of life—that it’s in us. And so my pursuit of knowing myself and knowing life led me to trying to at least accept death. I don’t know if we can know death—I’m not sure—but I guess you could say, Arthur, my interest in life led me to my interest in death because they are deeply related. And then more specifically, too, I mean, I came close to death myself when I was in college. I had an electrical accident that really bumped me up against my mortality as not an abstraction but as very much a reality that could happen any moment. And so that kind of forced me to look.
You can start decentralizing your ego; you can start seeing life outside of yourself and feeling your connection to it and appreciation for it and your responsibility to it. So in my field, we talk about the end of life—like that’s the phrase, end of life—but it’s such a problematic phrase. Now life, life will keep going. Your life is going to end; my life’s going to end. This life will end. So it’s not the end of life. Life does not end, as far as we can tell it. It keeps on going. We—you or I—do not. So it’s the end of my life. Once you get over yourself, there is a sort of immortality happening, too, all around us.
Brooks: So when your patients come to you, I mean, there aren’t—I mean, your patients come to you because they’re facing the end of life—obviously, you’re doing hospice and palliative care. And my guess is that many of them come to you and they’re not very happy. Is it fear or regret or something else that’s actually leading people who are nearing the end of life who are unhappy to experience this unhappiness?
Miller: Palliative care really is the sort of clinical—it’s the science or a philosophy or an approach to care that deals with suffering versus deals with a disease. The problem, if you will, the thing we’re looking at, is suffering. And so a lot of people who I see in palliative care aren’t at the end of life. They are just struggling. They’re suffering. They’re trying to make sense of a world to them that does no longer makes sense, trying to incorporate a diagnosis into their sense of self. A lot of the clients or patients I’ve seen over the years are nowhere near death. So one
thing to appreciate is for listeners that palliative care is the sort of clinical pursuit of quality of life in the face of suffering. And we grew out of hospice, which is a subset of palliative care that is devoted to the end of life. So, just to say, you don’t have to be dying anytime soon to benefit from palliative care.
Now, having said that, the way I kind of work in my practice is in this sort of existential framework. Any time, whether or not we’re talking about death explicitly, it’s always in the air. And then my approach is to work kind of almost backwards, to sort of find a way to rope death and loss into the picture and then build from there. Sort of like: Life begins when you realize that you die. Not only do we have to die; we have to know we die in advance of our death, and that is a real mind bender.
So in some ways, my job in palliative care is to make them hate their life less or make them hurt less. But you start doing that even if that’s your goal. You start realizing that part of the antidote is finding meaning. Part of the antidote to pain of any kind is making sense of it or working with it, or somehow accepting it. So it’s always in the mix.
Brooks: I like it. I like it nonetheless. And I will quote, you know, from your latest book where you say in the introduction, “There is nothing wrong with you for dying.” And it’s funny that we have to say that. But let’s take in context why we think that, with our medical-care system and
how you’re very different than doctors I ordinarily talk to. Doctors are in the business of keeping us alive, and therefore they set themselves up as enemies of death. And you’re saying, “Look, that’s wrong! That’s all wrong. You can’t be an enemy of something that’s a natural part of life
and an inevitability, and something that if you keep running away from, it will ruin your quality of life.” And so what you’re saying here—I mean, look, I want everybody in the audience to apprehend how incredibly subversive BJ Miller actually is to the entire medical establishment. You’re saying that our approach to suffering and death is actually hurting us. Is that correct?
Miller: Yes, you are correct. I absolutely agree with that statement. Yes. The medical model sort of pathologizes everything. But the problem with that is, you end up pathologizing normal states, like, it is normal to get sick; it is normal to die. We shouldn’t call that “pathological” because it’s like a judgment call. This is where you end up feeling like a loser or ashamed to be sick. You know, that’s deeply problematic.
So one of the things I’m trying to do is de-pathologize these states to unburden us of the shame of being sick. You know, this idea of: Not only do I have to feel bad, whether it’s pain or depression or whatever—you have to feel bad for feeling bad, you know, ashamed of yourself or
feeling for suffering. That’s it. That’s man-made stuff that we foist on each other. It needs to be kind of undone. And look, I mean, there’s a time for fighting, and there’s a time—there’s a “war on cancer,” and I get it. You know, that’s a way to mobilize a bunch of energy. And sometimes
in a disease course, something may actually be fixable, correctable, and you may be able to forestall death and live a little bit longer. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But let’s not fool ourselves. Death is still an inevitability, and it’s not this thing that happens to us. It’s not this
foreign invader. It’s in us. Our cells are programmed to do this. So you cannot go to war with illness or war with death for very long before you are, in fact, at war with yourself. That’s just a true statement.
Brooks: You make this incredibly compelling case that to enjoy our life, we need to declare peace on death. That doesn’t mean we need to embrace death. It doesn’t mean we need to rush toward death, but we need to be at peace with the fact that it is part of life. So should we also
declare peace on suffering, which is also inevitable?
Miller: Great question, Arthur. I do believe we need to declare peace or perhaps a truce on death, and that is importantly different than loving it or ushering it in. And in fact, there are data to support that if you can find your way to accepting the fact that you die—i.e., accepting reality--
that you might even live longer. When I was trained, the convention was, “Well you can go for a quality of life or quantity of life,” and then somehow you had to choose between the two. What we are increasingly finding is that that’s a false distinction. So part of the answer is to break up these false dichotomies.
In terms of declaring peace on suffering, well, for me, I still find it useful to split suffering into a couple of different kinds. So one is, we might call “necessary suffering”; it’s just the suffering that comes from being alive. Loss is just part of the deal. It will happen and, you know, and it’s
going to hurt. So natural phenomena. One of the first things we do when we are born into this world is we wail. You might even consider the birthing process something of a trauma, coming out of the safety of the womb and all the certainty of it, into this world. And it is stunning that
the very first thing a healthy child does is cry, is wail. I don’t think that’s a mistake or coincidence. So it does seem to be just an element of the human experience. That’s necessary suffering. You could try to change it, but good luck, you know?
And then there’s this other batch that you might call “unnecessary suffering” or “gratuitous suffering.” I’m all for coming to peace with the necessary suffering, but the unnecessary stuff that we casually—the pain we casually cause each other with our thoughts or our words. We say
mean things. We disregard each other. We pressure each other to be something that we’re not. We steal from each other. We do all sorts of gnarly things. And that’s a very different kind of suffering.
I think we need to use our discernment to tease out the two. And no, I’m all for rooting out the unnecessary suffering. The health-care system has so many problems. It’s amazing, but it’s also dramatically dysfunctional. And as an invented thing, it’s inexcusable to me that the health-care system causes as much suffering as it does. It is—because it’s made up and because we know better, we should be able to design a better health-care system. And I am upset that we haven’t found our way to do that, and I will continue to be upset and I will continue to try to change that. I’m not at peace with that.
The point is this: If you don’t want to be managed by your fear, you have to manage your fear. You have to own your fear. Own your pain. Look at it directly. Your fear will decline and you’ll start to see the transcendent purpose in the worst things and the best things and everything in between, because that’s part of a full life. What it was you were trying to avoid, you’ll embrace, and in so doing, you’ll start to enjoy the life that you’re living today.
Combined Discussion Group: Tuesday, December 21
One discussion group this week- Tuesday, December 21 at 10 a.m.
This is our last discussion group until the first week of January. All are invited to attend in person or online. Below is an interesting article from Episcopalian, and renowned author, Marcus Borg, about the real war on Christmas. We will gather at 10 am on Tuesday in the Parish Hall and on Zoom.
Blessings to you as we prepare to celebrate the Nativity of our Lord.
The Real War on Christmas
Marcus Borg, Patheos.com, 12.23.13
There is a lot of silliness in the contemporary (and now perennial) complaint that there is a "war on Christmas." Often cited as evidence is the common replacement of "Merry Christmas" with "Happy Holidays" and the use of "Xmas" instead of "Christmas."
The former is a recognition that Christmas has become more than a Christian holiday in increasingly pluralistic and secular Western societies. The latter should not bother Christians: "X" has been a Christian abbreviation for Christ from at least the third and fourth centuries (see
Ben Corey's blog, "Keeping the X in Xmas").
More seriously, today's lamentation about the war on Christmas misses the real war on Christmas. Its subversive and revolutionary meanings have been co-opted for many centuries by the Christian emphasis on sin and our need for a savior who will pay for our sins. More recently,
it has been co-opted by commercialization.
To begin with the latter: for many people, including many Christians, Christmas and the weeks leading up to it (Advent, for Christians) have become the most frantic and harried and busy time of the year.
Consider the two most common contemporary Christmas customs: sending Christmas cards and buying Christmas gifts. So it was in my family until about fifteen years ago when my wife and I decided to cease sending cards and shopping for Christmas gifts. But until then, the weeks before Christmas were dominated by the need to get our Christmas cards sent (often with a Christmas letter) and to figure out what to purchase for those on our gift list. The decision to stop giving gifts was made easier by the fact that our children had become adults. If they had still been children, we would have continued buying gifts for them.
Both of these customs are recent innovations. The first commercially-produced Christmas cards appeared in 1873. So also buying Christmas gifts is a product of the late 1800s and took awhile to become widespread. Until then, Christmas gifts were simple and largely homemade. Imagine for a moment the weeks before Christmas without the need to send cards and buy gifts.
Perhaps the most glaring example of the co-optation of Christmas by commercial culture is "Black Friday," which has now invaded Thanksgiving. People lining up to get bargains. Even violence among shoppers. And consider: for the most part, it is relatively poor people competing with each other, but all driven by the cultural convention and compulsion to buy Christmas gifts.
To continue with the former: the co-optation of Advent and Christmas by Christianity itself. For many centuries - now almost a thousand years - the most common forms of Western Christianity have emphasized that Jesus's primary significance is that he died to pay for our sins. This notion affects the meaning of Christmas: Christmas is the birth of the one who will save us from our sins so that we can go to heaven. It results in a radical domestication and individualization of the story of Jesus and Christmas.
To say the obvious: Christmas matters for Christians because Jesus matters for Christians. And what was Jesus about? His message, his passion, was about the coming of the Kingdom of God. It was about the transformation of this world into a different kind of world. It was about the downfall of domination systems and the birth of a world of justice and peace. Of course, the Kingdom of God is also about our individual transformation through loving the Lord our God with all our heart and mind and strength. It is about our transformation and the transformation of the world.
The muting of this message by common Christianity and by the commercialization of Christmas is the real war on Christmas. Imagine that Christians were once again to realize that Christmas -the birth of Jesus and the coming of the Kingdom of God - are pervasively subversive and revolutionary. Christmas and Jesus are about God's passion, God's dream, for a different kind of world here below, here and now.
This is our last discussion group until the first week of January. All are invited to attend in person or online. Below is an interesting article from Episcopalian, and renowned author, Marcus Borg, about the real war on Christmas. We will gather at 10 am on Tuesday in the Parish Hall and on Zoom.
Blessings to you as we prepare to celebrate the Nativity of our Lord.
The Real War on Christmas
Marcus Borg, Patheos.com, 12.23.13
There is a lot of silliness in the contemporary (and now perennial) complaint that there is a "war on Christmas." Often cited as evidence is the common replacement of "Merry Christmas" with "Happy Holidays" and the use of "Xmas" instead of "Christmas."
The former is a recognition that Christmas has become more than a Christian holiday in increasingly pluralistic and secular Western societies. The latter should not bother Christians: "X" has been a Christian abbreviation for Christ from at least the third and fourth centuries (see
Ben Corey's blog, "Keeping the X in Xmas").
More seriously, today's lamentation about the war on Christmas misses the real war on Christmas. Its subversive and revolutionary meanings have been co-opted for many centuries by the Christian emphasis on sin and our need for a savior who will pay for our sins. More recently,
it has been co-opted by commercialization.
To begin with the latter: for many people, including many Christians, Christmas and the weeks leading up to it (Advent, for Christians) have become the most frantic and harried and busy time of the year.
Consider the two most common contemporary Christmas customs: sending Christmas cards and buying Christmas gifts. So it was in my family until about fifteen years ago when my wife and I decided to cease sending cards and shopping for Christmas gifts. But until then, the weeks before Christmas were dominated by the need to get our Christmas cards sent (often with a Christmas letter) and to figure out what to purchase for those on our gift list. The decision to stop giving gifts was made easier by the fact that our children had become adults. If they had still been children, we would have continued buying gifts for them.
Both of these customs are recent innovations. The first commercially-produced Christmas cards appeared in 1873. So also buying Christmas gifts is a product of the late 1800s and took awhile to become widespread. Until then, Christmas gifts were simple and largely homemade. Imagine for a moment the weeks before Christmas without the need to send cards and buy gifts.
Perhaps the most glaring example of the co-optation of Christmas by commercial culture is "Black Friday," which has now invaded Thanksgiving. People lining up to get bargains. Even violence among shoppers. And consider: for the most part, it is relatively poor people competing with each other, but all driven by the cultural convention and compulsion to buy Christmas gifts.
To continue with the former: the co-optation of Advent and Christmas by Christianity itself. For many centuries - now almost a thousand years - the most common forms of Western Christianity have emphasized that Jesus's primary significance is that he died to pay for our sins. This notion affects the meaning of Christmas: Christmas is the birth of the one who will save us from our sins so that we can go to heaven. It results in a radical domestication and individualization of the story of Jesus and Christmas.
To say the obvious: Christmas matters for Christians because Jesus matters for Christians. And what was Jesus about? His message, his passion, was about the coming of the Kingdom of God. It was about the transformation of this world into a different kind of world. It was about the downfall of domination systems and the birth of a world of justice and peace. Of course, the Kingdom of God is also about our individual transformation through loving the Lord our God with all our heart and mind and strength. It is about our transformation and the transformation of the world.
The muting of this message by common Christianity and by the commercialization of Christmas is the real war on Christmas. Imagine that Christians were once again to realize that Christmas -the birth of Jesus and the coming of the Kingdom of God - are pervasively subversive and revolutionary. Christmas and Jesus are about God's passion, God's dream, for a different kind of world here below, here and now.
Thursday, December 16
You've probably seen the signs - Jesus is the reason for the season. This week's article will give us a unique look at what it means to have a messiah born as a child. Remembering that Advent is a mini-lent where we engage in a level of self-examination and repentance, this article invites us to look at how we can fall into the trap of becoming our own messiah. I look forward to talking with you about it.
Reckoning with Our Own Messiah Complexes
Peter Marty, The Christian Century 12.9.21
A New Yorker cartoon depicts a couple of men in first-century garb beside a pack mule. “Right now, I’m his apostle,” one says to the other, “but my dream is to someday be my own Messiah.” The idea of a messiah complex has reached the bumper sticker world as well: “Honk if you are Jesus.” The term itself isn’t clinical in nature as much as it’s a category of religious delusion that can show up in individuals suffering perceptions of grandeur.
Sixty-two years ago, three male patients with paranoid schizophrenia and delusional disorder at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Michigan were intensively studied for their own messiah complexes. Each believed that he was the physical reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Their mistaken perception of reality would have presented little problem had it not been for a social psychologist named Milton Rokeach who, for the better part of two years, manipulated their lives through a study with questionable ethics.
Using various methods of entrapment and deception, Rokeach sought to pit these three men against each other, in hopes that they might cure one another of their delusion. They were assigned adjacent beds, seats next to each other in the cafeteria, and jobs in the laundry room at
the same time. Fights and rants regularly broke out amid daylong arguments. One of the men would claim, “I’m the Messiah, the Son of God. I am on a mission. I was sent here to save the earth.” “How do you know?” Rokeach would ask. “God told me.” That’s when another one of the patients would pipe up: “I never told you any such thing.”
Joseph, Clyde, and Leon never stopped believing they were each the Christ. But despite the study’s psychological torment, they became friends, learned to empathize with one another, and gave each other the chance to keep their own belief.
In 1964, Rokeach summarized his findings in The Three Christs of Ypsilanti. It would be another 20 years, however, before he acknowledged his ethical lapses. In the afterword of a later edition, he writes, “While I had failed to cure the three Christs of their delusions, they had succeeded in curing me of mine — of my God-like delusion that I could change them by omnipotently . . . rearranging their daily lives. . . I really had no right, even in the name of science, to play God and interfere around-the-clock with their daily lives.”
One need not be a social scientist or a person suffering grandiose delusions in order to play God. As it turns out, any of us is capable of that distortion. In fact, the more comfortable we become with our financial security, the more competent we are in our workplaces, and the more
confidently we rely on our own charm and ingenuity, the easier it becomes to embrace a kind of omnipotence. Some days, we ought to pity God for having to try to wrestle any humility out of us.
But God is wiser than we know. Once God hits on the idea of putting the vulnerability of a newborn up against our own invulnerability, our inclination to play God suffers a permanent reckoning. The incarnation was a brilliant move. For what infant holds any delusion about its
own omnipotence? We’ve been trying to learn from that peculiar gift of vulnerability ever since, which is why we need Christmas all over again.
Peter W. Marty is editor/publisher of the Century and senior pastor of St. Paul Lutheran Church in Davenport, Iowa.
Reckoning with Our Own Messiah Complexes
Peter Marty, The Christian Century 12.9.21
A New Yorker cartoon depicts a couple of men in first-century garb beside a pack mule. “Right now, I’m his apostle,” one says to the other, “but my dream is to someday be my own Messiah.” The idea of a messiah complex has reached the bumper sticker world as well: “Honk if you are Jesus.” The term itself isn’t clinical in nature as much as it’s a category of religious delusion that can show up in individuals suffering perceptions of grandeur.
Sixty-two years ago, three male patients with paranoid schizophrenia and delusional disorder at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Michigan were intensively studied for their own messiah complexes. Each believed that he was the physical reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Their mistaken perception of reality would have presented little problem had it not been for a social psychologist named Milton Rokeach who, for the better part of two years, manipulated their lives through a study with questionable ethics.
Using various methods of entrapment and deception, Rokeach sought to pit these three men against each other, in hopes that they might cure one another of their delusion. They were assigned adjacent beds, seats next to each other in the cafeteria, and jobs in the laundry room at
the same time. Fights and rants regularly broke out amid daylong arguments. One of the men would claim, “I’m the Messiah, the Son of God. I am on a mission. I was sent here to save the earth.” “How do you know?” Rokeach would ask. “God told me.” That’s when another one of the patients would pipe up: “I never told you any such thing.”
Joseph, Clyde, and Leon never stopped believing they were each the Christ. But despite the study’s psychological torment, they became friends, learned to empathize with one another, and gave each other the chance to keep their own belief.
In 1964, Rokeach summarized his findings in The Three Christs of Ypsilanti. It would be another 20 years, however, before he acknowledged his ethical lapses. In the afterword of a later edition, he writes, “While I had failed to cure the three Christs of their delusions, they had succeeded in curing me of mine — of my God-like delusion that I could change them by omnipotently . . . rearranging their daily lives. . . I really had no right, even in the name of science, to play God and interfere around-the-clock with their daily lives.”
One need not be a social scientist or a person suffering grandiose delusions in order to play God. As it turns out, any of us is capable of that distortion. In fact, the more comfortable we become with our financial security, the more competent we are in our workplaces, and the more
confidently we rely on our own charm and ingenuity, the easier it becomes to embrace a kind of omnipotence. Some days, we ought to pity God for having to try to wrestle any humility out of us.
But God is wiser than we know. Once God hits on the idea of putting the vulnerability of a newborn up against our own invulnerability, our inclination to play God suffers a permanent reckoning. The incarnation was a brilliant move. For what infant holds any delusion about its
own omnipotence? We’ve been trying to learn from that peculiar gift of vulnerability ever since, which is why we need Christmas all over again.
Peter W. Marty is editor/publisher of the Century and senior pastor of St. Paul Lutheran Church in Davenport, Iowa.
Thursday, December 9
Roman Catholic Bishops Drop Effort to Ban Communion for Politicians
Ian Lovett and Francis Rocca, WSJ 11.17.21
The Catholic bishops of the U.S. ended a nearly yearlong debate Wednesday over whether to bar politicians who support abortion rights from receiving the Eucharist, passing new guidance on Communion that doesn’t address the issue. The measure passed by a vote of 222-8 and was
followed by applause at a gathering here of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The vote was the culmination of a debate that has taken most of the year and exposed deep ideological divisions in the church—particularly between U.S. bishops and Rome.
Conservatives in the U.S. had pushed to issue guidelines that would clearly advise clergy not to offer Communion to politicians who support abortion rights, a category that includes President Biden. But the Vatican warned that such a policy could be divisive, and Pope Francis said the bishops shouldn’t politicize the reception of Communion. Last month, after the two men met at the Vatican, Mr. Biden told reporters that Pope Francis had called him a good Catholic and told him to continue receiving Communion.
Regardless of any guidance from the USCCB, individual bishops ultimately have the power under church law to deny Communion. Cardinal Wilton Gregory, who as archbishop of Washington, D.C., is the president’s pastor, has said that he wouldn’t refuse him Communion.
Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco, who has said that the president shouldn’t take Communion, has criticized House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Catholic whose home district is in his archdiocese, for her support of abortion rights. In an interview Wednesday, he said he
didn’t expect Mrs. Pelosi would present herself for Communion in San Francisco, but wouldn’t offer it to her if she did.
At a June conference, bishops voted 168 to 55, with six abstentions, to prepare a document on the Eucharist that would address the conditions under which Catholics can receive Communion, including potentially how that would be affected by politicians’ position on abortion rights.
Ultimately, the bishops acquiesced to the pontiff, approving a document that celebrates the Eucharist and offers general guidance on its reception but doesn’t mention abortion or elected officials in regard to eligibility for the sacrament.
During debate on the floor Wednesday, one bishop after another spoke in favor of the document—a stark departure from their June meeting, when conservatives and liberals fought over what sort of guidance was appropriate. The bishops met repeatedly in private sessions this
week, an unusual step that allowed them to reach an agreement out of the public eye. “This has been a complex work,” Joseph Naumann, archbishop of Kansas City and head of the USCCB’s pro-life committee, said during the public session on Wednesday.
He voted in favor of Wednesday’s guidance. In an interview, Archbishop Naumann said it included “pretty much what I was hoping for.” Noting that it is up to individual bishops to make decisions about offering Communion, he added, “What we can do is say something to encourage
and empower bishops to have these difficult conversations with legislators.” When prominent Catholics don’t follow church teaching, he said, it can lead people into error.
Bishop John Stowe, of Lexington, Ky., who earlier this year tried to stop efforts to issue any document with new guidance related to the Eucharist, said he was grateful the final product “doesn’t name politicians and doesn’t get into a whole list of who may and who may not”
receive Communion. “You have to follow Pope Francis’ line,” he said. If the president or Mrs. Pelosi sought to receive Communion in his diocese, he said, he would offer it.
Pope Francis has often reaffirmed the church’s condemnation of abortion, but has taken a friendly approach to the president. His envoy to the U.S., Archbishop Christophe Pierre, said Tuesday that polarization in society was echoing through the church and called for a more conciliatory approach. “There is a temptation to treat the Eucharist as something to be offered to the privileged few,” Archbishop Pierre said, “rather than to seek to walk with those whose theology or discipleship is falling short.”
Though the church must be “unapologetically pro-life,” the archbishop said, it was important to understand and address the social problems that lead women to seek abortions. A document advising against giving the sacrament to politicians who support abortion rights would have been a public rebuke for Mr. Biden, who has made his faith a major part of his public persona. A Pew Research Center study this year found 55% of Catholics believe abortion should be legal in most or all cases, compared with 59% of Americans overall. A Pew report released last year said 67% of Catholics who attend Mass weekly believe abortion should be illegal in most or all cases.
Ian Lovett and Francis Rocca, WSJ 11.17.21
The Catholic bishops of the U.S. ended a nearly yearlong debate Wednesday over whether to bar politicians who support abortion rights from receiving the Eucharist, passing new guidance on Communion that doesn’t address the issue. The measure passed by a vote of 222-8 and was
followed by applause at a gathering here of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The vote was the culmination of a debate that has taken most of the year and exposed deep ideological divisions in the church—particularly between U.S. bishops and Rome.
Conservatives in the U.S. had pushed to issue guidelines that would clearly advise clergy not to offer Communion to politicians who support abortion rights, a category that includes President Biden. But the Vatican warned that such a policy could be divisive, and Pope Francis said the bishops shouldn’t politicize the reception of Communion. Last month, after the two men met at the Vatican, Mr. Biden told reporters that Pope Francis had called him a good Catholic and told him to continue receiving Communion.
Regardless of any guidance from the USCCB, individual bishops ultimately have the power under church law to deny Communion. Cardinal Wilton Gregory, who as archbishop of Washington, D.C., is the president’s pastor, has said that he wouldn’t refuse him Communion.
Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco, who has said that the president shouldn’t take Communion, has criticized House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Catholic whose home district is in his archdiocese, for her support of abortion rights. In an interview Wednesday, he said he
didn’t expect Mrs. Pelosi would present herself for Communion in San Francisco, but wouldn’t offer it to her if she did.
At a June conference, bishops voted 168 to 55, with six abstentions, to prepare a document on the Eucharist that would address the conditions under which Catholics can receive Communion, including potentially how that would be affected by politicians’ position on abortion rights.
Ultimately, the bishops acquiesced to the pontiff, approving a document that celebrates the Eucharist and offers general guidance on its reception but doesn’t mention abortion or elected officials in regard to eligibility for the sacrament.
During debate on the floor Wednesday, one bishop after another spoke in favor of the document—a stark departure from their June meeting, when conservatives and liberals fought over what sort of guidance was appropriate. The bishops met repeatedly in private sessions this
week, an unusual step that allowed them to reach an agreement out of the public eye. “This has been a complex work,” Joseph Naumann, archbishop of Kansas City and head of the USCCB’s pro-life committee, said during the public session on Wednesday.
He voted in favor of Wednesday’s guidance. In an interview, Archbishop Naumann said it included “pretty much what I was hoping for.” Noting that it is up to individual bishops to make decisions about offering Communion, he added, “What we can do is say something to encourage
and empower bishops to have these difficult conversations with legislators.” When prominent Catholics don’t follow church teaching, he said, it can lead people into error.
Bishop John Stowe, of Lexington, Ky., who earlier this year tried to stop efforts to issue any document with new guidance related to the Eucharist, said he was grateful the final product “doesn’t name politicians and doesn’t get into a whole list of who may and who may not”
receive Communion. “You have to follow Pope Francis’ line,” he said. If the president or Mrs. Pelosi sought to receive Communion in his diocese, he said, he would offer it.
Pope Francis has often reaffirmed the church’s condemnation of abortion, but has taken a friendly approach to the president. His envoy to the U.S., Archbishop Christophe Pierre, said Tuesday that polarization in society was echoing through the church and called for a more conciliatory approach. “There is a temptation to treat the Eucharist as something to be offered to the privileged few,” Archbishop Pierre said, “rather than to seek to walk with those whose theology or discipleship is falling short.”
Though the church must be “unapologetically pro-life,” the archbishop said, it was important to understand and address the social problems that lead women to seek abortions. A document advising against giving the sacrament to politicians who support abortion rights would have been a public rebuke for Mr. Biden, who has made his faith a major part of his public persona. A Pew Research Center study this year found 55% of Catholics believe abortion should be legal in most or all cases, compared with 59% of Americans overall. A Pew report released last year said 67% of Catholics who attend Mass weekly believe abortion should be illegal in most or all cases.
Thursday, December 2
Thursday, Dec 2, Women's Group - Gender Bias in Medicine
What to know about gender bias in healthcare
Medical News Today October 25, 2021
Gender bias in healthcare is widespread. Patients, doctors, researchers, and administrators can all hold biased views about gender. These views affect how the healthcare system works and have a serious impact on health outcomes.
What is gender bias?
Gender bias is a preference for one gender over another. This preference is often based on false beliefs or generalizations that make one gender seem better or worse than others.
Worldwide, the most common form is bias against women. In 2020, a United Nations global report found that close to 90% of all people have some form of gender bias against women. In this article, we look at gender bias in healthcare, including examples, its impact, and some
ways to tackle it.
Almost everyone has some form of gender bias, whether or not they are aware of it. This is because bias can be conscious or unconscious. Bias that a person recognizes is “explicit,” while bias that a person is unaware of is “implicit.” Implicit bias comes from the messages that people
unknowingly absorb about gender throughout their lives. Both explicit and implicit biases influence behavior, which leads to discrimination and reinforces inequity.
Because most cultures place a higher value on men and masculinity, gender bias affects women and girls most severely. Gender bias can also affect others whom people perceive as feminine, such as trans and nonbinary people. In addition, this bias can impact boys and men who feel
pressure to conform to rigid gender norms.
Examples of gender bias in healthcare
Gender bias is present throughout the healthcare system, from the interactions between patients and doctors to the medical research and policies that govern it. Some examples include:
Disbelief in symptoms
Stereotypes about gender affect how doctors treat illnesses and approach their patients. For example, a 2018 study found that doctors often view men with chronic pain as “brave” or “stoic,” but view women with chronic pain as “emotional” or “hysterical.” The study also found
that doctors were more likely to treat women’s pain as a product of a mental health condition, rather than a physical condition. A 2018 survey of physicians and dentists arrived at similar conclusions: Many of these healthcare professionals believed that women exaggerate their pain.
This was true even though 40% of the participants were women.
Workplace harassment, bullying, and discrimination
Gender bias also leads to discrimination against health workers. A 2020 study of older women doctors found that age- and gender-based harassment, discrimination, and salary inequity persisted throughout their careers. While these problems diminished over time, the participants’ levels of seniority and professional experience did not put a stop to them
Gaps in medical research
Inequity in medical research reinforces gender bias. In the past, many scientists believed that males made the best test subjects because they do not have menstrual cycles and cannot become pregnant. This meant that a vast amount of research only involved male participants. However, the important biological differences between the sexes can influence how diseases, drugs, and other therapies affect people. As a result, many studies from before the 1990s are flawed.
The lack of inclusivity in studies has left doctors with a more limited understanding of the health of female and intersex people. Meanwhile, a lack of awareness about this disparity may fuel gender bias because it can contribute to misunderstanding between doctors and patients.
What are the consequences of gender bias in healthcare?
The overall consequence of gender bias in healthcare is that people receive worse care than they should, which increases health inequity.
Gender bias causes:
Knowledge gaps: A lack of inclusivity in medical research has led to gaps in knowledge. This means that doctors know less about female, intersex, and trans health than male health. In one example, a report from the National LGBTQ Task Force found that 50% of respondents have had to teach their doctors about caring for trans people.
Lack of women in leadership: A 2019 study found that in academic medicine, many people view men as naturally better leaders than women. This may explain why the number of women in leadership positions is disproportionately low.
Delayed diagnoses: When doctors do not take a patient’s symptoms seriously, it can keep the person from receiving a correct diagnosis for many years. A 2019 analysis in Denmark, for example, found that in 72% of cases, women waited longer on average for a diagnosis than men.
Inadequate symptom management: Doctors not believing patients also prevents people from getting help with symptom relief. For example, doctors who dismiss the severity of chronic pain may not provide women with pain medication.
Avoidance of medical care: People who no longer trust medical professionals or organizations due to negative experiences may avoid getting necessary care. This may be a factor in vaccine hesitancy. A Harvard survey found that only 47% of nonpregnant women who did not trust
public health agencies planned to get the COVID-19 vaccine.
Abuse, neglect, and death: Gender bias can lead to actions that increase the risk of patients dying. For example, the idea that heart attacks mainly occur in males — and a lack of awareness about how they affect females — contributes to the higher rates of females dying from heart
attacks.
Ending gender bias in medicine
Everyone has a role to play in ending gender bias, but institutions have the most power to create widespread change. Here are some ways that institutions and organizations can end gender bias in medicine.
Education and awareness
It is important for healthcare professionals and the people they serve to understand what gender bias is, that everyone has these biases, and how they affect healthcare. People and organizations can only stop reinforcing inequity by recognizing their biases and taking action to unlearn them.
Some studies suggest that implicit bias training can help. Not all studies support the effectiveness of this approach, though. It is also worth noting that people addressing their own biases is only a first step.
Sex and gender diversity in research
Women now make up around half of the participants in clinical research supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). However, this does not cover all studies, and it does not account for the decades of research that only involved males. Health organizations and
researchers must commit to sex and gender diversity in all relevant studies and fund research to fill in the gaps in knowledge.
Equitable treatment guidelines
As a 2017 review notes, many studies have found gender-based variations in how doctors diagnose and treat patients. Some found that doctors asked women fewer questions about their symptoms or prescribed women less medication. Having standardized, equitable, and evidence-based rules for treatment may reduce the risk of implicit bias affecting healthcare.
Equitable workplace policies
Similarly, clear policies about how institutions should address systemic inequity are essential. This may include rules that correct imbalances, such as unequal pay or career advancement opportunities. It may also include policies that support women who are new parents or
caregivers. In addition, standard procedures for how organizations should respond to gender discrimination, harassment, and abuse are crucial.
Self-advocacy
If a person believes that they are receiving inadequate care due to gender bias, there are steps they can take. Try:
- seeking second or third opinions from other doctors
- speaking with a specialist
- getting doctor recommendations from others who have faced similar situations
- Bring an ally to an appointment for support and to act as a witness.
- Ask why a doctor is not pursuing tests or treatments.
- Ask a doctor to memorialize their decisions, and the reasons for them, in their records.
- Report bias or discrimination that is obvious or severe.
Summary
Gender bias in healthcare is a critical, well-documented problem that endangers people’s lives and well-being. It is a component of sexism, which is a major cause of inequity worldwide, including health inequity.
Gender bias affects diagnosis, treatment, and health outcomes, reducing the quality and effectiveness of healthcare. In order to stop it, organizations and institutions need to commit to changing their policies and practices
Thursday, November 18
What is your family history? How much of it do you know?
The attached piece from the NY Times raises that question to the whole human family. New work has been done to retrace humanity's steps through history and it is showing a rather peaceful picture for millennia. So what in the world happened? And, can anything save us from ourselves?
If you are looking for something with hope, and only want to read one page, go right to the last page. I'm wondering if you agree with the authors' findings?
Ancient History Shows We Can Create a More Equal World
David Graeber and David Wengrow, NY Times, 11.7.21
Most of human history is irreparably lost to us. Our species, Homo sapiens, has existed for at least 200,000 years, but we have next to no idea what was happening for the majority of that time. In northern Spain, for instance, at the cave of Altamira, paintings and engravings were
created over a period of at least 10,000 years, between around 25,000 and 15,000 B.C. Presumably, a lot of dramatic events occurred during that period. We have no way of knowing what most of them were. This is of little consequence to most people, since most people rarely think about the broad sweep of human history anyway. They don’t have much reason to. Insofar as the question comes up at all, it’s usually when reflecting on why the world seems to be in such a mess and why human beings so often treat each other badly — the reasons for war, greed,
exploitation and indifference to others’ suffering. Were we always like that, or did something, at some point, go terribly wrong?
One of the first people to ask this question in the modern era was the Swiss-French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in an essay on the origins of social inequality that he submitted to a competition in 1754. Once upon a time, he wrote, we were hunter-gatherers, living in a state of childlike innocence, as equals. These bands of foragers could be egalitarian because they were isolated from one another, and their material needs were simple. According to Rousseau, it was only after the agricultural revolution and the rise of cities that this happy condition came to an end. Urban living meant the appearance of written literature, science and philosophy, but at the same time, almost everything bad in human life: patriarchy, standing armies, mass executions and annoying bureaucrats demanding that we spend much of our lives filling out forms.
Rousseau lost the essay competition, but the story he told went on to become a dominant narrative of human history, laying the foundations upon which contemporary “big history” writers — such as Jared Diamond, Francis Fukuyama and Yuval Noah Harari — built their accounts of how our societies evolved. These writers often talk about inequality as the natural result of living in larger groups with a surplus of resources. For example, Mr. Harari writes in “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” that, after the advent of agriculture, rulers and elites sprang up “everywhere … living off the peasants’ surplus food and leaving them with only a bare subsistence.”
For a long time, the archaeological evidence — from Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, Mesoamerica and elsewhere — did appear to confirm this. If you put enough people in one place, the evidence seemed to show, they would start dividing themselves into social classes. You could see
inequality emerge in the archaeological record with the appearance of temples and palaces, presided over by rulers and their elite kinsmen, and storehouses and workshops, run by administrators and overseers. Civilization seemed to come as a package: It meant misery and
suffering for those who would inevitably be reduced to serfs, slaves or debtors, but it also allowed for the possibility of art, technology, and science.
That makes wistful pessimism about the human condition seem like common sense: Yes, living in a truly egalitarian society might be possible if you’re a Pygmy or a Kalahari Bushman. But if you want to live in a city like New York, London or Shanghai — if you want all the good things
that come with concentrations of people and resources — then you have to accept the bad things, too. For generations, such assumptions have formed part of our origin story. The history we learn in school has made us more willing to tolerate a world in which some can turn their wealth into power over others, while others are told their needs are not important and their lives have no intrinsic worth. As a result, we are more likely to believe that inequality is just an inescapable consequence of living in large, complex, urban, technologically sophisticated societies.
We want to offer an entirely different account of human history. We believe that much of what has been discovered in the last few decades, by archaeologists and others in kindred disciplines, cuts against the conventional wisdom propounded by modern “big history” writers. What this new evidence shows is that a surprising number of the world’s earliest cities were organized along robustly egalitarian lines. In some regions, we now know, urban populations governed themselves for centuries without any indication of the temples and palaces that would later emerge; in others, temples and palaces never emerged at all, and there is simply no evidence of a class of administrators or any other sort of ruling stratum. It would seem that the mere fact of urban life does not, necessarily, imply any particular form of political organization, and never did. Far from resigning us to inequality, the new picture that is now emerging of humanity’s deep past may open our eyes to egalitarian possibilities we otherwise would have never considered.
Wherever cities emerged, they defined a new phase of world history. Settlements inhabited by tens of thousands of people made their first appearance around 6,000 years ago. The conventional story goes that cities developed largely because of advances in technology: They
were a result of the agricultural revolution, which set off a chain of developments that made it possible to support large numbers of people living in one place. But in fact, one of the most populous early cities appeared not in Eurasia — with its many technical and logistical
advantages — but in Mesoamerica, which had no wheeled vehicles or sailing ships, no animal-powered transport and much less in the way of metallurgy or literate bureaucracy. In short, it’s easy to overstate the importance of new technologies in setting the overall direction of change.
Almost everywhere, in these early cities, we find grand, self-conscious statements of civic unity, the arrangement of built spaces in harmonious and often beautiful patterns, clearly reflecting some kind of planning at the municipal scale. Where we do have written sources (ancient
Mesopotamia, for example), we find large groups of citizens referring to themselves simply as “the people” of a given city (or often its “sons”), united by devotion to its founding ancestors, its gods or heroes, its civic infrastructure and ritual calendar. In China’s Shandong Province, urban settlements were present over a thousand years before the earliest known royal dynasties, and similar findings have emerged from the Maya lowlands, where ceremonial centers of truly enormous size — so far, presenting no evidence of monarchy or stratification — can now be
dated back as far as 1000 B.C., long before the rise of Classic Maya kings and dynasties.
What held these early experiments in urbanization together, if not kings, soldiers, and bureaucrats? For answers, we might turn to some other surprising discoveries on the interior grasslands of eastern Europe, north of the Black Sea, where archaeologists have found cities, just as large and ancient as those of Mesopotamia. The earliest date back to around 4100 B.C. While Mesopotamian cities, in what are now the lands of Syria and Iraq, took form initially around temples, and later also royal palaces, the prehistoric cities of Ukraine and Moldova were startling
experiments in decentralized urbanization. These sites were planned on the image of a great circle — or series of circles — of houses, with nobody first, nobody last, divided into districts with assembly buildings for public meetings.
If it all sounds a little drab or “simple,” we should bear in mind the ecology of these early Ukrainian cities. Living at the frontier of forest and steppe, the residents were not just cereal farmers and livestock-keepers, but also hunted deer and wild boar, imported salt, flint and copper, and kept gardens within the bounds of the city, consuming apples, pears, cherries, acorns, hazelnuts and apricots — all served on painted ceramics, which are considered among the finest aesthetic creations of the prehistoric world.
Researchers are far from unanimous about what sort of social arrangements all this required, but most would agree the logistical challenges were daunting. Residents definitely produced a surplus, and with it came ample opportunity for some of them to seize control of the stocks and supplies, to lord it over the others or fight for the spoils, but over eight centuries we find little evidence of warfare or the rise of social elites. The true complexity of these early cities lay in the political strategies they adopted to prevent such things. Careful analysis by archaeologists shows how the social freedoms of the Ukrainian city dwellers were maintained through processes of local decision-making, in households and neighborhood assemblies, without any need for centralized control or top-down administration.
Yet, even now, these Ukrainian sites almost never come up in scholarship. When they do, academics tend to call them “mega-sites” rather than cities, a kind of euphemism that signals to a wider audience that they should not be thought of as proper cities but as villages that for some
reason had expanded inordinately in size. Some even refer to them outright as “overgrown villages.” How do we account for this reluctance to welcome the Ukrainian mega-sites into the charmed circle of urban origins?
But the point remains: Why do we assume that people who have figured out a way for a large population to govern and support itself without temples, palaces and military fortifications --that is, without overt displays of arrogance and cruelty — are somehow less complex than those
who have not? Why would we hesitate to dignify such a place with the name of “city”? The mega-sites of Ukraine and adjoining regions were inhabited from roughly 4100 to 3300 B.C., which is a considerably longer period of time than most subsequent urban settlements.
Eventually, they were abandoned. We still don’t know why. What they offer us, in the meantime, is significant: further proof that a highly egalitarian society has been possible on an urban scale.
*Last Page:
Why should these findings from the dim and distant past matter to us today? Since the Great Recession of 2008, the question of inequality — and with it, the long-term history of inequality — has become a major topic for debate. Something of a consensus has emerged among intellectuals and even, to some degree, the political classes, that levels of social inequality have gotten out of hand, and that most of the world’s problems result, in one way or another, from an ever-widening gulf between the haves and the have-nots. A very small percentage of the population controls the fates of almost everyone else, and they are doing it in an increasingly disastrous fashion. Cities have become emblematic of our predicament. Whether in Cape Town or San Francisco, we are no longer shocked or even that surprised by the sight of ever-expanding slums — sidewalks crammed with makeshift tents or shelters overflowing with the homeless and destitute.
To begin reversing this trajectory is an immense task. But there is historical precedent for that, too. Around the start of the common era, thousands of people came together in the Valley of Mexico to found a city we know today as Teotihuacan. Within a few centuries it became the largest settlement in Mesoamerica. In a colossal feat of civil engineering, its inhabitants diverted the San Juan River to flow through the heart of their new metropolis. Pyramids went up in the central district, associated with ritual killing. What we might expect to see next is the rise of luxurious palaces for warrior-rulers, but the citizens of Teotihuacan chose a different path.
Around A.D. 300, the people of Teotihuacan changed course, redirecting their efforts away from the construction of grand monuments and devoting resources instead to the provision of high-quality housing for the majority of residents, who numbered around 100,000.
Of course, the past cannot provide instant solutions for the crises and challenges of the present. The obstacles are daunting, but what our research shows is that we can no longer count the forces of history and evolution among them. This has all sorts of important implications: For one thing, it suggests that we should be much less pessimistic about our future, since the mere fact that much of the world’s population now lives in cities may not determine how we live, to anything like the extent we might have assumed.
What we need today is another urban revolution to create more just and sustainable ways of living. The technology to support less centralized and greener urban environments — appropriate to modern demographic realities — already exists. Predecessors to our modern cities include not just the proto-megalopolis, but also the proto-garden-city, the proto-superblock, and a cornucopia of other urban forms, waiting for us to reclaim them. In the face of inequality and climate catastrophe, they offer the only viable future for the world’s cities, and so for our planet. All we are lacking now is the political imagination to make it happen. But as history teaches us, the brave new world we seek to create has existed before, and could exist again.
The attached piece from the NY Times raises that question to the whole human family. New work has been done to retrace humanity's steps through history and it is showing a rather peaceful picture for millennia. So what in the world happened? And, can anything save us from ourselves?
If you are looking for something with hope, and only want to read one page, go right to the last page. I'm wondering if you agree with the authors' findings?
Ancient History Shows We Can Create a More Equal World
David Graeber and David Wengrow, NY Times, 11.7.21
Most of human history is irreparably lost to us. Our species, Homo sapiens, has existed for at least 200,000 years, but we have next to no idea what was happening for the majority of that time. In northern Spain, for instance, at the cave of Altamira, paintings and engravings were
created over a period of at least 10,000 years, between around 25,000 and 15,000 B.C. Presumably, a lot of dramatic events occurred during that period. We have no way of knowing what most of them were. This is of little consequence to most people, since most people rarely think about the broad sweep of human history anyway. They don’t have much reason to. Insofar as the question comes up at all, it’s usually when reflecting on why the world seems to be in such a mess and why human beings so often treat each other badly — the reasons for war, greed,
exploitation and indifference to others’ suffering. Were we always like that, or did something, at some point, go terribly wrong?
One of the first people to ask this question in the modern era was the Swiss-French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in an essay on the origins of social inequality that he submitted to a competition in 1754. Once upon a time, he wrote, we were hunter-gatherers, living in a state of childlike innocence, as equals. These bands of foragers could be egalitarian because they were isolated from one another, and their material needs were simple. According to Rousseau, it was only after the agricultural revolution and the rise of cities that this happy condition came to an end. Urban living meant the appearance of written literature, science and philosophy, but at the same time, almost everything bad in human life: patriarchy, standing armies, mass executions and annoying bureaucrats demanding that we spend much of our lives filling out forms.
Rousseau lost the essay competition, but the story he told went on to become a dominant narrative of human history, laying the foundations upon which contemporary “big history” writers — such as Jared Diamond, Francis Fukuyama and Yuval Noah Harari — built their accounts of how our societies evolved. These writers often talk about inequality as the natural result of living in larger groups with a surplus of resources. For example, Mr. Harari writes in “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” that, after the advent of agriculture, rulers and elites sprang up “everywhere … living off the peasants’ surplus food and leaving them with only a bare subsistence.”
For a long time, the archaeological evidence — from Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, Mesoamerica and elsewhere — did appear to confirm this. If you put enough people in one place, the evidence seemed to show, they would start dividing themselves into social classes. You could see
inequality emerge in the archaeological record with the appearance of temples and palaces, presided over by rulers and their elite kinsmen, and storehouses and workshops, run by administrators and overseers. Civilization seemed to come as a package: It meant misery and
suffering for those who would inevitably be reduced to serfs, slaves or debtors, but it also allowed for the possibility of art, technology, and science.
That makes wistful pessimism about the human condition seem like common sense: Yes, living in a truly egalitarian society might be possible if you’re a Pygmy or a Kalahari Bushman. But if you want to live in a city like New York, London or Shanghai — if you want all the good things
that come with concentrations of people and resources — then you have to accept the bad things, too. For generations, such assumptions have formed part of our origin story. The history we learn in school has made us more willing to tolerate a world in which some can turn their wealth into power over others, while others are told their needs are not important and their lives have no intrinsic worth. As a result, we are more likely to believe that inequality is just an inescapable consequence of living in large, complex, urban, technologically sophisticated societies.
We want to offer an entirely different account of human history. We believe that much of what has been discovered in the last few decades, by archaeologists and others in kindred disciplines, cuts against the conventional wisdom propounded by modern “big history” writers. What this new evidence shows is that a surprising number of the world’s earliest cities were organized along robustly egalitarian lines. In some regions, we now know, urban populations governed themselves for centuries without any indication of the temples and palaces that would later emerge; in others, temples and palaces never emerged at all, and there is simply no evidence of a class of administrators or any other sort of ruling stratum. It would seem that the mere fact of urban life does not, necessarily, imply any particular form of political organization, and never did. Far from resigning us to inequality, the new picture that is now emerging of humanity’s deep past may open our eyes to egalitarian possibilities we otherwise would have never considered.
Wherever cities emerged, they defined a new phase of world history. Settlements inhabited by tens of thousands of people made their first appearance around 6,000 years ago. The conventional story goes that cities developed largely because of advances in technology: They
were a result of the agricultural revolution, which set off a chain of developments that made it possible to support large numbers of people living in one place. But in fact, one of the most populous early cities appeared not in Eurasia — with its many technical and logistical
advantages — but in Mesoamerica, which had no wheeled vehicles or sailing ships, no animal-powered transport and much less in the way of metallurgy or literate bureaucracy. In short, it’s easy to overstate the importance of new technologies in setting the overall direction of change.
Almost everywhere, in these early cities, we find grand, self-conscious statements of civic unity, the arrangement of built spaces in harmonious and often beautiful patterns, clearly reflecting some kind of planning at the municipal scale. Where we do have written sources (ancient
Mesopotamia, for example), we find large groups of citizens referring to themselves simply as “the people” of a given city (or often its “sons”), united by devotion to its founding ancestors, its gods or heroes, its civic infrastructure and ritual calendar. In China’s Shandong Province, urban settlements were present over a thousand years before the earliest known royal dynasties, and similar findings have emerged from the Maya lowlands, where ceremonial centers of truly enormous size — so far, presenting no evidence of monarchy or stratification — can now be
dated back as far as 1000 B.C., long before the rise of Classic Maya kings and dynasties.
What held these early experiments in urbanization together, if not kings, soldiers, and bureaucrats? For answers, we might turn to some other surprising discoveries on the interior grasslands of eastern Europe, north of the Black Sea, where archaeologists have found cities, just as large and ancient as those of Mesopotamia. The earliest date back to around 4100 B.C. While Mesopotamian cities, in what are now the lands of Syria and Iraq, took form initially around temples, and later also royal palaces, the prehistoric cities of Ukraine and Moldova were startling
experiments in decentralized urbanization. These sites were planned on the image of a great circle — or series of circles — of houses, with nobody first, nobody last, divided into districts with assembly buildings for public meetings.
If it all sounds a little drab or “simple,” we should bear in mind the ecology of these early Ukrainian cities. Living at the frontier of forest and steppe, the residents were not just cereal farmers and livestock-keepers, but also hunted deer and wild boar, imported salt, flint and copper, and kept gardens within the bounds of the city, consuming apples, pears, cherries, acorns, hazelnuts and apricots — all served on painted ceramics, which are considered among the finest aesthetic creations of the prehistoric world.
Researchers are far from unanimous about what sort of social arrangements all this required, but most would agree the logistical challenges were daunting. Residents definitely produced a surplus, and with it came ample opportunity for some of them to seize control of the stocks and supplies, to lord it over the others or fight for the spoils, but over eight centuries we find little evidence of warfare or the rise of social elites. The true complexity of these early cities lay in the political strategies they adopted to prevent such things. Careful analysis by archaeologists shows how the social freedoms of the Ukrainian city dwellers were maintained through processes of local decision-making, in households and neighborhood assemblies, without any need for centralized control or top-down administration.
Yet, even now, these Ukrainian sites almost never come up in scholarship. When they do, academics tend to call them “mega-sites” rather than cities, a kind of euphemism that signals to a wider audience that they should not be thought of as proper cities but as villages that for some
reason had expanded inordinately in size. Some even refer to them outright as “overgrown villages.” How do we account for this reluctance to welcome the Ukrainian mega-sites into the charmed circle of urban origins?
But the point remains: Why do we assume that people who have figured out a way for a large population to govern and support itself without temples, palaces and military fortifications --that is, without overt displays of arrogance and cruelty — are somehow less complex than those
who have not? Why would we hesitate to dignify such a place with the name of “city”? The mega-sites of Ukraine and adjoining regions were inhabited from roughly 4100 to 3300 B.C., which is a considerably longer period of time than most subsequent urban settlements.
Eventually, they were abandoned. We still don’t know why. What they offer us, in the meantime, is significant: further proof that a highly egalitarian society has been possible on an urban scale.
*Last Page:
Why should these findings from the dim and distant past matter to us today? Since the Great Recession of 2008, the question of inequality — and with it, the long-term history of inequality — has become a major topic for debate. Something of a consensus has emerged among intellectuals and even, to some degree, the political classes, that levels of social inequality have gotten out of hand, and that most of the world’s problems result, in one way or another, from an ever-widening gulf between the haves and the have-nots. A very small percentage of the population controls the fates of almost everyone else, and they are doing it in an increasingly disastrous fashion. Cities have become emblematic of our predicament. Whether in Cape Town or San Francisco, we are no longer shocked or even that surprised by the sight of ever-expanding slums — sidewalks crammed with makeshift tents or shelters overflowing with the homeless and destitute.
To begin reversing this trajectory is an immense task. But there is historical precedent for that, too. Around the start of the common era, thousands of people came together in the Valley of Mexico to found a city we know today as Teotihuacan. Within a few centuries it became the largest settlement in Mesoamerica. In a colossal feat of civil engineering, its inhabitants diverted the San Juan River to flow through the heart of their new metropolis. Pyramids went up in the central district, associated with ritual killing. What we might expect to see next is the rise of luxurious palaces for warrior-rulers, but the citizens of Teotihuacan chose a different path.
Around A.D. 300, the people of Teotihuacan changed course, redirecting their efforts away from the construction of grand monuments and devoting resources instead to the provision of high-quality housing for the majority of residents, who numbered around 100,000.
Of course, the past cannot provide instant solutions for the crises and challenges of the present. The obstacles are daunting, but what our research shows is that we can no longer count the forces of history and evolution among them. This has all sorts of important implications: For one thing, it suggests that we should be much less pessimistic about our future, since the mere fact that much of the world’s population now lives in cities may not determine how we live, to anything like the extent we might have assumed.
What we need today is another urban revolution to create more just and sustainable ways of living. The technology to support less centralized and greener urban environments — appropriate to modern demographic realities — already exists. Predecessors to our modern cities include not just the proto-megalopolis, but also the proto-garden-city, the proto-superblock, and a cornucopia of other urban forms, waiting for us to reclaim them. In the face of inequality and climate catastrophe, they offer the only viable future for the world’s cities, and so for our planet. All we are lacking now is the political imagination to make it happen. But as history teaches us, the brave new world we seek to create has existed before, and could exist again.
Thursday, November 11
We had two good discussions about why we fear others. As a follow up to that conversation, this next week we have an article that suggests we should talk to strangers to improve our happiness and mental health.
As I write this, we have over 30 people in the Angel Fountain Courtyard talking with our artist of the month. I'd have to say there is a lot of good mental health going on out there!
I look forward to talking with you about the conflict between stranger danger and the happiness that talking to a stranger can bring.
Men's discussion on Tuesday at 10 am and the Women's discussion on Thursday at 10 am; both in person and on-line. I'll have the coffee ready.
Why We Should Talk to Strangers
Joe Keohane, The Atlantic 8.4.21
So many of us have been raised to see strangers as dangerous and scary. What would happen if we instead saw them as potential sources of comfort and belonging?
Nic spent most of her childhood avoiding people. She was raised by a volatile father and a mother who transferred much of the trauma she’d experienced onto her daughter. The combination left Nic fearful and isolated. “My primitive brain was programmed to be afraid of
everybody, because everybody’s evil and they’re gonna hurt you,” she told me.
Nic’s fear isn’t uncommon in a country where valid lessons about “stranger danger” can cast all people you don’t know as threats to be feared, but she recognized it was unhealthy, so she took steps to engage with the world. As she grew older, she began to travel to seek new people out. At 17, Nic visited Europe for 10 days with her high-school classmates and noticed that people began starting conversations with her. “If people in Europe randomly talked to me, then maybe I’m not so bad,” she figured. “Maybe I’m not gonna die if I randomly talk to them.” So she took more trips and connected with more people. She was anxious about these encounters, wired for fear and expecting the worst, but they always went well. She found that, contrary to what she’d been raised to believe, these strangers weren’t dangerous or scary. They were actually sources of comfort and belonging. They expanded her world.
Today, Nic has a name for these types of conversations: “Greyhound Therapy.” As she uses it, the term literally refers to talking with your seatmate on a long-haul bus but can apply to talking with strangers anywhere—at a restaurant, at a bus stop, in a grocery store. This form of
connection changed her life. When times got hard, she found herself turning to strangers for comfort and “to stave off the loneliness,” she told me. “And it worked?” I asked. “Oh God, yes,” she said. “I would go home with some amazing stories—granted, nobody to share them with—but I still had the stories. They were mine.”
Nic’s experience is telling. A hefty body of research has found that an overwhelmingly strong predictor of happiness and well-being is the quality of a person’s social relationships. But most of those studies have looked at only close ties: family, friends, co-workers. In the past decade and a half, professors have begun to wonder if interacting with strangers could be good for us too: not as a replacement for close relationships, but as a complement to them. The results of that research have been striking. Again and again, studies have shown that talking with strangers can make us happier, more connected to our communities, mentally sharper, healthier, less lonely, and more trustful and optimistic. Yet, like Nic, many of us are wary of those interactions, especially after the coronavirus pandemic limited our social lives so severely.
These days, Nic is a successful nurse with an uncanny gift for connecting with her patients, and is happily married to a kind and sociable man. She still loves to travel, and on her trips, she’ll size up her seatmate, or someone sitting alone at a table or the bar. If they have headphones on or appear uninterested, she’ll leave them alone. But if they seem receptive, she’ll say, “Hi, I’m Nic,” and see where it goes. She’s not reckless or naive, and she knows how to read people and detect trouble. But the conversations tend to go well, reassuring her that there is goodness in the world, and the possibility of belonging. She tells me that these experiences have taught her something invaluable: “Never underestimate the power of even the most minute positive connection.”
In psychology, the sorts of exchanges Nic is talking about are known as “minimal social interactions.” The psychologist Gillian Sandstrom had a similar epiphany about them about a decade ago. She was raised in Canada by extroverts who loved talking with strangers. One day,
Sandstrom, who had always considered herself an introvert, realized that she always looked down when she walked along the street. “I thought, Well, that’s dumb,” she says. So she started holding eye contact with people and found that it actually felt pretty good. Before long, she was talking with strangers too. She was surprised at how easy and fun it was. Once, on the subway, she saw a woman holding a box of elaborately decorated cupcakes and asked about them. “I don’t know how the conversation got there, but she taught me that humans can ride ostriches,” Sandstrom says. “I was sold. That was just a delightful conversation. I wanted to do it again.”
Later, during a stressful period in grad school, Sandstrom took solace in an even smaller routine interaction: waving and smiling at a woman running a hot-dog cart, whom she passed every day. “I realized that when I saw her, and when she acknowledged me, it made me feel good. I felt like, Yeah, I belong here.”
Sandstrom decided to study this phenomenon. She and her Ph.D. supervisor at the University of British Columbia asked a group of adults to chat with the barista when they got their morning coffee. They had the idea that by not engaging with counter workers—by essentially treating them as insensate service modules and not, say, actual humans—we may be denying ourselves a potential “hidden source of belonging and happiness.” As it turns out, they were right. The participants who talked with their barista reported feeling a stronger sense of community and an improved mood, as well as greater satisfaction with their overall coffee-buying experience.
By now, skeptics among us are thinking the same thing I was when I first read these studies: Sure, talking with strangers might be enjoyable if you’re the one who started the conversation. But is the other person enjoying it? After all, every one of us has at one time or another been
trapped in an enclosed space by a talker who proved agonizingly impervious to social cues that you’re not in the mood. So to test whether both parties were enjoying these interactions, Epley and Schroeder created another experiment. Between tasks unrelated to the research at hand, participants took breaks in a waiting room. Some of these subjects were told to talk with the other person in the room and others were told not to talk; the people they were with were given no instructions. The ones who talked—both the people who started the conversation and the people they talked with—reported having a significantly better experience than those who did not.
If talking with strangers is so pleasant—and so good for us—why don’t people do it more often? That’s a big question, informed by issues of race, class and gender, culture, population density, and decades of (sometimes valid) “stranger danger” messaging. But the core answer seems to be twofold: We don’t expect strangers to like us, and we don’t expect to like them either.
In a study by Epley and Schroeder, participants who were asked to talk with strangers during their commutes worried that the strangers wouldn’t enjoy the conversations. They predicted, on average, that less than half of the people they approached would talk with them. They expected that starting the conversation would be hard. But people were interested in talking with them, and not a single one was rejected.
A similar phenomenon has shown up in Sandstrom’s work with another group of psychologists, led by Erica Boothby, called the “liking gap.” Their research has found that experiment participants (especially the shiest ones) believed that they liked the stranger more than the
stranger liked them. This misperception deters people from seeking out these interactions, and in turn deprives them of not only short-term boosts of happiness and belonging but also more lasting benefits, such as meeting new friends, romantic partners, or business contacts.
But a deeper force is at play here too. Participants in these studies expected very little from the conversations themselves. When Epley and Schroeder asked commuters to imagine how they would feel if they talked with a new person versus remaining solitary, those who imagined talking with a stranger predicted that their commutes would be significantly worse. That prediction is telling. Why did it come as such a surprise that a stranger could be approachable, cordial, and interesting?
Part of the inspiration behind the subway experiments, Schroeder told me, was the idea that “it’s fundamentally dehumanizing to be surrounded by people and then never interact and engage with them.” It’s dehumanizing to me because I lose an opportunity to be a social being—which is my nature—and it’s dehumanizing to the stranger because I never experience more than a superficial glimpse of their full humanity. In cities especially, people tend to treat strangers as obstacles, Schroeder said, so we don’t talk with them; because we don’t talk with them, it never fully occurs to us that they are, in fact, really people.
This is the “lesser minds problem,” so dubbed by Epley and the psychologist Adam Waytz in 2010. The theory is this: Because we can’t see what’s happening in other people’s heads, we have “what appears to be a universal tendency to assume that others’ minds are less sophisticated and more superficial than one’s own,” Epley writes in his 2014 book, Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want. Perhaps this is why we expect interactions with strangers to go poorly: because we subconsciously believe they just don’t have much to offer.
In collaboration with the now-defunct London group called Talk to Me, Sandstrom ran a series of events that aimed to show people how enjoyable talking with strangers could be—and to learn more about why people were so hesitant to do it. She has since developed some techniques to help allay these fears. For instance, she tells people to follow their curiosity—notice something, compliment a person, or ask them a question. Generally, though, she just lets people figure it out themselves. Once they get over the initial hump, they find it comes to them quite naturally. “You can’t shut them up,” she says. “By the end they don’t want to stop talking. It’s fascinating. I love it.”
While Sandstrom has found success in these isolated events, she’s run into a more insidious obstacle in her pursuit of lasting change: a social norm against talking with strangers—a belief that this is simply not done. In her experiments, participants would unfailingly have positive experiences, but “when you ask people about the next conversation, they’re really worried again,” she says. So she tried to engineer a situation in which talking with strangers, through sheer repetition, would become natural enough to people that they would simply begin to do it out of habit, free of all the usual fears. The trick, she believed, was “to get people to have a lot of conversations.”
Using an app called GooseChase, Sandstrom created a scavenger hunt with a list of types of people with whom to strike up conversations: people who were smiley, people who looked “artsy,” people trying to carry a lot of things, people who looked sad, people who seemed nice or fashionable or who were tattooed or wearing a “striking tie.” The results, again, were undeniable.
Participants found it was much easier to start and maintain a conversation with a stranger, and the conversations lasted three times longer than they predicted. About 80 percent said that they learned something new. Forty-one percent said that they exchanged contact information with someone. Some participants made friends, went on dates, got coffee. And true to Sandstrom’s prediction, their pessimism about the prospect of talking with strangers was eased. A week after completing the scavenger hunt, participants were more confident of their conversational abilities and less afraid of rejection. And the way they thought about other people changed as well. As one student wrote in their survey response: “Strangers are generally friendly and helpful.”
As I read through the other responses from Sandstrom’s study, I kept coming upon what seemed like a subtle undertone of relief—which I recognized, having wondered myself Why do I feel a sense of relief after a pleasant exchange with a stranger? When I asked Sandstrom about this, she said something that took me back to the story of Nic, her fearful childhood, and her experience with Greyhound Therapy. “I think that relief might just be the feeling that we’re sold this message that the world is a scary place,” Sandstrom said, “and then you have a chat with someone, some random person, and it goes well, and it’s sorta like, Maybe the world isn’t so bad after all."
As I write this, we have over 30 people in the Angel Fountain Courtyard talking with our artist of the month. I'd have to say there is a lot of good mental health going on out there!
I look forward to talking with you about the conflict between stranger danger and the happiness that talking to a stranger can bring.
Men's discussion on Tuesday at 10 am and the Women's discussion on Thursday at 10 am; both in person and on-line. I'll have the coffee ready.
Why We Should Talk to Strangers
Joe Keohane, The Atlantic 8.4.21
So many of us have been raised to see strangers as dangerous and scary. What would happen if we instead saw them as potential sources of comfort and belonging?
Nic spent most of her childhood avoiding people. She was raised by a volatile father and a mother who transferred much of the trauma she’d experienced onto her daughter. The combination left Nic fearful and isolated. “My primitive brain was programmed to be afraid of
everybody, because everybody’s evil and they’re gonna hurt you,” she told me.
Nic’s fear isn’t uncommon in a country where valid lessons about “stranger danger” can cast all people you don’t know as threats to be feared, but she recognized it was unhealthy, so she took steps to engage with the world. As she grew older, she began to travel to seek new people out. At 17, Nic visited Europe for 10 days with her high-school classmates and noticed that people began starting conversations with her. “If people in Europe randomly talked to me, then maybe I’m not so bad,” she figured. “Maybe I’m not gonna die if I randomly talk to them.” So she took more trips and connected with more people. She was anxious about these encounters, wired for fear and expecting the worst, but they always went well. She found that, contrary to what she’d been raised to believe, these strangers weren’t dangerous or scary. They were actually sources of comfort and belonging. They expanded her world.
Today, Nic has a name for these types of conversations: “Greyhound Therapy.” As she uses it, the term literally refers to talking with your seatmate on a long-haul bus but can apply to talking with strangers anywhere—at a restaurant, at a bus stop, in a grocery store. This form of
connection changed her life. When times got hard, she found herself turning to strangers for comfort and “to stave off the loneliness,” she told me. “And it worked?” I asked. “Oh God, yes,” she said. “I would go home with some amazing stories—granted, nobody to share them with—but I still had the stories. They were mine.”
Nic’s experience is telling. A hefty body of research has found that an overwhelmingly strong predictor of happiness and well-being is the quality of a person’s social relationships. But most of those studies have looked at only close ties: family, friends, co-workers. In the past decade and a half, professors have begun to wonder if interacting with strangers could be good for us too: not as a replacement for close relationships, but as a complement to them. The results of that research have been striking. Again and again, studies have shown that talking with strangers can make us happier, more connected to our communities, mentally sharper, healthier, less lonely, and more trustful and optimistic. Yet, like Nic, many of us are wary of those interactions, especially after the coronavirus pandemic limited our social lives so severely.
These days, Nic is a successful nurse with an uncanny gift for connecting with her patients, and is happily married to a kind and sociable man. She still loves to travel, and on her trips, she’ll size up her seatmate, or someone sitting alone at a table or the bar. If they have headphones on or appear uninterested, she’ll leave them alone. But if they seem receptive, she’ll say, “Hi, I’m Nic,” and see where it goes. She’s not reckless or naive, and she knows how to read people and detect trouble. But the conversations tend to go well, reassuring her that there is goodness in the world, and the possibility of belonging. She tells me that these experiences have taught her something invaluable: “Never underestimate the power of even the most minute positive connection.”
In psychology, the sorts of exchanges Nic is talking about are known as “minimal social interactions.” The psychologist Gillian Sandstrom had a similar epiphany about them about a decade ago. She was raised in Canada by extroverts who loved talking with strangers. One day,
Sandstrom, who had always considered herself an introvert, realized that she always looked down when she walked along the street. “I thought, Well, that’s dumb,” she says. So she started holding eye contact with people and found that it actually felt pretty good. Before long, she was talking with strangers too. She was surprised at how easy and fun it was. Once, on the subway, she saw a woman holding a box of elaborately decorated cupcakes and asked about them. “I don’t know how the conversation got there, but she taught me that humans can ride ostriches,” Sandstrom says. “I was sold. That was just a delightful conversation. I wanted to do it again.”
Later, during a stressful period in grad school, Sandstrom took solace in an even smaller routine interaction: waving and smiling at a woman running a hot-dog cart, whom she passed every day. “I realized that when I saw her, and when she acknowledged me, it made me feel good. I felt like, Yeah, I belong here.”
Sandstrom decided to study this phenomenon. She and her Ph.D. supervisor at the University of British Columbia asked a group of adults to chat with the barista when they got their morning coffee. They had the idea that by not engaging with counter workers—by essentially treating them as insensate service modules and not, say, actual humans—we may be denying ourselves a potential “hidden source of belonging and happiness.” As it turns out, they were right. The participants who talked with their barista reported feeling a stronger sense of community and an improved mood, as well as greater satisfaction with their overall coffee-buying experience.
By now, skeptics among us are thinking the same thing I was when I first read these studies: Sure, talking with strangers might be enjoyable if you’re the one who started the conversation. But is the other person enjoying it? After all, every one of us has at one time or another been
trapped in an enclosed space by a talker who proved agonizingly impervious to social cues that you’re not in the mood. So to test whether both parties were enjoying these interactions, Epley and Schroeder created another experiment. Between tasks unrelated to the research at hand, participants took breaks in a waiting room. Some of these subjects were told to talk with the other person in the room and others were told not to talk; the people they were with were given no instructions. The ones who talked—both the people who started the conversation and the people they talked with—reported having a significantly better experience than those who did not.
If talking with strangers is so pleasant—and so good for us—why don’t people do it more often? That’s a big question, informed by issues of race, class and gender, culture, population density, and decades of (sometimes valid) “stranger danger” messaging. But the core answer seems to be twofold: We don’t expect strangers to like us, and we don’t expect to like them either.
In a study by Epley and Schroeder, participants who were asked to talk with strangers during their commutes worried that the strangers wouldn’t enjoy the conversations. They predicted, on average, that less than half of the people they approached would talk with them. They expected that starting the conversation would be hard. But people were interested in talking with them, and not a single one was rejected.
A similar phenomenon has shown up in Sandstrom’s work with another group of psychologists, led by Erica Boothby, called the “liking gap.” Their research has found that experiment participants (especially the shiest ones) believed that they liked the stranger more than the
stranger liked them. This misperception deters people from seeking out these interactions, and in turn deprives them of not only short-term boosts of happiness and belonging but also more lasting benefits, such as meeting new friends, romantic partners, or business contacts.
But a deeper force is at play here too. Participants in these studies expected very little from the conversations themselves. When Epley and Schroeder asked commuters to imagine how they would feel if they talked with a new person versus remaining solitary, those who imagined talking with a stranger predicted that their commutes would be significantly worse. That prediction is telling. Why did it come as such a surprise that a stranger could be approachable, cordial, and interesting?
Part of the inspiration behind the subway experiments, Schroeder told me, was the idea that “it’s fundamentally dehumanizing to be surrounded by people and then never interact and engage with them.” It’s dehumanizing to me because I lose an opportunity to be a social being—which is my nature—and it’s dehumanizing to the stranger because I never experience more than a superficial glimpse of their full humanity. In cities especially, people tend to treat strangers as obstacles, Schroeder said, so we don’t talk with them; because we don’t talk with them, it never fully occurs to us that they are, in fact, really people.
This is the “lesser minds problem,” so dubbed by Epley and the psychologist Adam Waytz in 2010. The theory is this: Because we can’t see what’s happening in other people’s heads, we have “what appears to be a universal tendency to assume that others’ minds are less sophisticated and more superficial than one’s own,” Epley writes in his 2014 book, Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want. Perhaps this is why we expect interactions with strangers to go poorly: because we subconsciously believe they just don’t have much to offer.
In collaboration with the now-defunct London group called Talk to Me, Sandstrom ran a series of events that aimed to show people how enjoyable talking with strangers could be—and to learn more about why people were so hesitant to do it. She has since developed some techniques to help allay these fears. For instance, she tells people to follow their curiosity—notice something, compliment a person, or ask them a question. Generally, though, she just lets people figure it out themselves. Once they get over the initial hump, they find it comes to them quite naturally. “You can’t shut them up,” she says. “By the end they don’t want to stop talking. It’s fascinating. I love it.”
While Sandstrom has found success in these isolated events, she’s run into a more insidious obstacle in her pursuit of lasting change: a social norm against talking with strangers—a belief that this is simply not done. In her experiments, participants would unfailingly have positive experiences, but “when you ask people about the next conversation, they’re really worried again,” she says. So she tried to engineer a situation in which talking with strangers, through sheer repetition, would become natural enough to people that they would simply begin to do it out of habit, free of all the usual fears. The trick, she believed, was “to get people to have a lot of conversations.”
Using an app called GooseChase, Sandstrom created a scavenger hunt with a list of types of people with whom to strike up conversations: people who were smiley, people who looked “artsy,” people trying to carry a lot of things, people who looked sad, people who seemed nice or fashionable or who were tattooed or wearing a “striking tie.” The results, again, were undeniable.
Participants found it was much easier to start and maintain a conversation with a stranger, and the conversations lasted three times longer than they predicted. About 80 percent said that they learned something new. Forty-one percent said that they exchanged contact information with someone. Some participants made friends, went on dates, got coffee. And true to Sandstrom’s prediction, their pessimism about the prospect of talking with strangers was eased. A week after completing the scavenger hunt, participants were more confident of their conversational abilities and less afraid of rejection. And the way they thought about other people changed as well. As one student wrote in their survey response: “Strangers are generally friendly and helpful.”
As I read through the other responses from Sandstrom’s study, I kept coming upon what seemed like a subtle undertone of relief—which I recognized, having wondered myself Why do I feel a sense of relief after a pleasant exchange with a stranger? When I asked Sandstrom about this, she said something that took me back to the story of Nic, her fearful childhood, and her experience with Greyhound Therapy. “I think that relief might just be the feeling that we’re sold this message that the world is a scary place,” Sandstrom said, “and then you have a chat with someone, some random person, and it goes well, and it’s sorta like, Maybe the world isn’t so bad after all."
Thursday, November 4
The car carriers are starting to arrive on Longboat Key. It is the yearly sign that folks are returning to the island. With the influx of people, we have joy and perhaps a little bit of fear - perhaps fear of strangers, known as xenophobia.
The article for this week discusses xenophobia and how it may be the root of many of humankind's worst sins. If we can somehow move past our natural fears of strangers and get to know one another, things might change on this planet.
As you would expect, the Bible might have something to say about this - in particular, to remember that we were once strangers/aliens, and, in the Letter to the Hebrews that when we welcome strangers we may be welcoming angels unawares.
I look forward to talking with you about this. Men's discussion on Tuesday at 10 am and the Women's discussion on Thursday at 10 am; both in person and on-line. I'll have the coffee ready.
Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia
A Review by Adam Kuper, WSJ 10.22.21
Xenophobia: xeno = stranger; phobia = fear of
Author George Makari’s concern with xenophobia goes back to a childhood trauma. In 1974, at the age of 13, he was taken on a family visit to his parents’ native Beirut. Suddenly, the travelers found themselves caught in the midst of what would become a civil war. “To me, it was bizarre,” Dr. Makari recalls in “Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia.” He continues: “All these bewildering sects were far more alike than different. All were Levantines who spoke the same dialect; all loved the same punning humor, devoured the same cuisine, abided by strict rules of hospitality, and approached any purchase as a three-act play: bargain, stage a walk-out, then settle. They were quick with proverbs and went agog when Fairuz sang. And yet, subtle distinctions in their identities now meant life or death.”
Today, Dr. Makari, a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and the director of Weill Cornell’s DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry, sees xenophobia as a threat to social peace, not only in the Middle East but also in Europe and North America, where recent political convulsions have been driven by a bristling hostility toward strangers and outsiders. Dr. Makari is clear that a lot of different impulses are often conflated here: “ethnocentrism, ultranationalism, racism, misogyny, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia, or Islamophobia.” What might they have in common? “Is there any one term specific enough to not be meaningless, while broad enough to allow us to consider whatever common strands exist between these phenomena?” He thinks that there is: xenophobia. And if all these disorders are variants of the same affliction, then perhaps they have the same cause and might be susceptible to the same treatment.
Dr. Makari traces the invention of “xenophobia” to the 1880s, when psychiatrists came up with a variety of “phobias” apparently caused by traumatic experience. There followed a rash of other phobias, from claustrophobia to my personal favorite, phobophobia—the fear of being
frightened. Xenophobia entered a medical dictionary in 1916 as a “morbid dread of meeting strangers.” Like many psychiatric classifications, early definitions of xenophobia covered too much ground. What began as a psychiatric diagnosis would soon be used to describe the fury with which colonized populations often turned on settlers. These settlers, in turn, would be accused of xenophobia by the critics of colonialism, as waves of migrations in the years leading up to World War I provoked fears of a loss of national identity.
In the U.S., three confrontations between different segments of the population proved formative. The first pitted the Puritans, who were themselves refugees from religious persecution, against Native Americans. The second was the forced migration and enslavement of millions of Africans by descendants of the country’s European settlers. The third was provoked by the migrants, first from Europe, then from Asia, who arrived after the Civil War largely for economic reasons.
Dr. Makari’s whirlwind historical survey tells a compelling story of racial and ethnic animosity, but he might have paid more attention to religious conflicts. Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries was torn by bloody wars between Catholics and Protestants, a feud that still festered in 20th-century Ireland. The Partition of India in 1947 was accompanied by violent Hindu-Muslim confrontations and the displacement of more than 10 million people. When communist Yugoslavia fell apart, Orthodox Christians and Muslims waged war in the Balkans. The Middle
East is currently going through another cycle of Shiite-Sunni wars. Are these religious hatreds also to be considered xenophobia?
One idea is that there is something fundamentally human here. Early human groups competed for territory. All intruders were enemies. The more you feared and hated outsiders, the better your chances of survival. So xenophobia bestowed an evolutionary advantage. Even babies are frightened by a strange face. This is a popular one-size-fits-all explanation. But it is problematic. For one thing, anthropologists do not agree that constant strife was the norm during the 95% of human history when small nomadic bands lived by hunting and gathering. The Victorian anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor said that early humans would have had to choose between marrying out or being killed out. When Europeans in the early 19th century made contact with surviving communities of hunter-gatherers, different bands were observed forming marriage alliances and trading partnerships that generally kept feuds from raging out of control.
In the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust, however, a better explanation of mass hatreds was needed. The orthodox theory in American psychology at the time was behaviorism, which explained habitual attitudes and responses as the products of conditioning: Pavlov’s dogs salivated at the sound of a bell because they had been conditioned to recognize this as a cue for food. In the same sort of way, children are warned against strangers and so conditioned to fear others.
Psychoanalytic theories all seek to explain the personal traumas and particular pathologies of individuals. But how do whole populations come to share common anxieties and antipathies? In 1928, the sociologist Emory Bogardus published the landmark study “Immigration and Race
Attitudes.” One of its disconcerting findings was that the most widely disliked people in the U.S. at the time were “Turks.” Though very few Americans had actually encountered a member of that group, they had heard about them. And what they had heard about was the massacre of Armenians in Turkey after World War I, which was presented in the press as a slaughter of Christians at the hands of Muslims.
It was this power of the media to shape popular sentiment that the journalist Walter Lippmann came to dread. An early supporter of American involvement in World War I, Lippmann had joined the Inter-Allied Propaganda Board in London. In 1922 he published “Public Opinion,” his
study of “how public opinion is made.” In it, he borrowed a term from the printing press: stereotype. We all share ready-made ideas that facilitate snap judgments about people and situations. These stereotypes are crude but may be useful in a pinch. They save time and trouble.
But, effective propaganda weaponizes stereotypes. Social media now serves up propaganda on steroids.
Yet surely not everyone is gulled—at least not all the time. How then to explain what is going on when strangers are demonized? Dr. Makari suggests that some combination of these psychological and sociological theories may be cobbled together to guide our thinking. This is
probably the best that we can manage at present. What then can be done to limit the damage? Here Dr. Makari is less helpful. He suggests that all will be well if society becomes more equal, open and informed. He might as well add that social media should be better regulated, and the public better equipped for critical thought. Failing that, we may have to relive these nightmares of collective hatred again and again for a long time to come.
Yet there are grounds for hope. A study released in May this year by the Pew Research Center reported that conceptions of national identity in the U.S. and Western Europe have recently become more inclusive. Compared with 2016, “fewer people now believe that to truly be American, French, German or British, a person must be born in the country, must be a Christian, has to embrace national customs, or has to speak the dominant language.” This may suggest that xenophobia waxes and wanes with recent events, and that politicians can fan or tamp down outbreaks of public fear and fury. Wise and prudent leaders really might spare us a great deal of trouble.
Mr. Kuper, a specialist on the ethnography of Southern Africa, has written widely on the history of anthropology.
The article for this week discusses xenophobia and how it may be the root of many of humankind's worst sins. If we can somehow move past our natural fears of strangers and get to know one another, things might change on this planet.
As you would expect, the Bible might have something to say about this - in particular, to remember that we were once strangers/aliens, and, in the Letter to the Hebrews that when we welcome strangers we may be welcoming angels unawares.
I look forward to talking with you about this. Men's discussion on Tuesday at 10 am and the Women's discussion on Thursday at 10 am; both in person and on-line. I'll have the coffee ready.
Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia
A Review by Adam Kuper, WSJ 10.22.21
Xenophobia: xeno = stranger; phobia = fear of
Author George Makari’s concern with xenophobia goes back to a childhood trauma. In 1974, at the age of 13, he was taken on a family visit to his parents’ native Beirut. Suddenly, the travelers found themselves caught in the midst of what would become a civil war. “To me, it was bizarre,” Dr. Makari recalls in “Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia.” He continues: “All these bewildering sects were far more alike than different. All were Levantines who spoke the same dialect; all loved the same punning humor, devoured the same cuisine, abided by strict rules of hospitality, and approached any purchase as a three-act play: bargain, stage a walk-out, then settle. They were quick with proverbs and went agog when Fairuz sang. And yet, subtle distinctions in their identities now meant life or death.”
Today, Dr. Makari, a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and the director of Weill Cornell’s DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry, sees xenophobia as a threat to social peace, not only in the Middle East but also in Europe and North America, where recent political convulsions have been driven by a bristling hostility toward strangers and outsiders. Dr. Makari is clear that a lot of different impulses are often conflated here: “ethnocentrism, ultranationalism, racism, misogyny, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia, or Islamophobia.” What might they have in common? “Is there any one term specific enough to not be meaningless, while broad enough to allow us to consider whatever common strands exist between these phenomena?” He thinks that there is: xenophobia. And if all these disorders are variants of the same affliction, then perhaps they have the same cause and might be susceptible to the same treatment.
Dr. Makari traces the invention of “xenophobia” to the 1880s, when psychiatrists came up with a variety of “phobias” apparently caused by traumatic experience. There followed a rash of other phobias, from claustrophobia to my personal favorite, phobophobia—the fear of being
frightened. Xenophobia entered a medical dictionary in 1916 as a “morbid dread of meeting strangers.” Like many psychiatric classifications, early definitions of xenophobia covered too much ground. What began as a psychiatric diagnosis would soon be used to describe the fury with which colonized populations often turned on settlers. These settlers, in turn, would be accused of xenophobia by the critics of colonialism, as waves of migrations in the years leading up to World War I provoked fears of a loss of national identity.
In the U.S., three confrontations between different segments of the population proved formative. The first pitted the Puritans, who were themselves refugees from religious persecution, against Native Americans. The second was the forced migration and enslavement of millions of Africans by descendants of the country’s European settlers. The third was provoked by the migrants, first from Europe, then from Asia, who arrived after the Civil War largely for economic reasons.
Dr. Makari’s whirlwind historical survey tells a compelling story of racial and ethnic animosity, but he might have paid more attention to religious conflicts. Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries was torn by bloody wars between Catholics and Protestants, a feud that still festered in 20th-century Ireland. The Partition of India in 1947 was accompanied by violent Hindu-Muslim confrontations and the displacement of more than 10 million people. When communist Yugoslavia fell apart, Orthodox Christians and Muslims waged war in the Balkans. The Middle
East is currently going through another cycle of Shiite-Sunni wars. Are these religious hatreds also to be considered xenophobia?
One idea is that there is something fundamentally human here. Early human groups competed for territory. All intruders were enemies. The more you feared and hated outsiders, the better your chances of survival. So xenophobia bestowed an evolutionary advantage. Even babies are frightened by a strange face. This is a popular one-size-fits-all explanation. But it is problematic. For one thing, anthropologists do not agree that constant strife was the norm during the 95% of human history when small nomadic bands lived by hunting and gathering. The Victorian anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor said that early humans would have had to choose between marrying out or being killed out. When Europeans in the early 19th century made contact with surviving communities of hunter-gatherers, different bands were observed forming marriage alliances and trading partnerships that generally kept feuds from raging out of control.
In the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust, however, a better explanation of mass hatreds was needed. The orthodox theory in American psychology at the time was behaviorism, which explained habitual attitudes and responses as the products of conditioning: Pavlov’s dogs salivated at the sound of a bell because they had been conditioned to recognize this as a cue for food. In the same sort of way, children are warned against strangers and so conditioned to fear others.
Psychoanalytic theories all seek to explain the personal traumas and particular pathologies of individuals. But how do whole populations come to share common anxieties and antipathies? In 1928, the sociologist Emory Bogardus published the landmark study “Immigration and Race
Attitudes.” One of its disconcerting findings was that the most widely disliked people in the U.S. at the time were “Turks.” Though very few Americans had actually encountered a member of that group, they had heard about them. And what they had heard about was the massacre of Armenians in Turkey after World War I, which was presented in the press as a slaughter of Christians at the hands of Muslims.
It was this power of the media to shape popular sentiment that the journalist Walter Lippmann came to dread. An early supporter of American involvement in World War I, Lippmann had joined the Inter-Allied Propaganda Board in London. In 1922 he published “Public Opinion,” his
study of “how public opinion is made.” In it, he borrowed a term from the printing press: stereotype. We all share ready-made ideas that facilitate snap judgments about people and situations. These stereotypes are crude but may be useful in a pinch. They save time and trouble.
But, effective propaganda weaponizes stereotypes. Social media now serves up propaganda on steroids.
Yet surely not everyone is gulled—at least not all the time. How then to explain what is going on when strangers are demonized? Dr. Makari suggests that some combination of these psychological and sociological theories may be cobbled together to guide our thinking. This is
probably the best that we can manage at present. What then can be done to limit the damage? Here Dr. Makari is less helpful. He suggests that all will be well if society becomes more equal, open and informed. He might as well add that social media should be better regulated, and the public better equipped for critical thought. Failing that, we may have to relive these nightmares of collective hatred again and again for a long time to come.
Yet there are grounds for hope. A study released in May this year by the Pew Research Center reported that conceptions of national identity in the U.S. and Western Europe have recently become more inclusive. Compared with 2016, “fewer people now believe that to truly be American, French, German or British, a person must be born in the country, must be a Christian, has to embrace national customs, or has to speak the dominant language.” This may suggest that xenophobia waxes and wanes with recent events, and that politicians can fan or tamp down outbreaks of public fear and fury. Wise and prudent leaders really might spare us a great deal of trouble.
Mr. Kuper, a specialist on the ethnography of Southern Africa, has written widely on the history of anthropology.
Thursday, June 24
We are going to offer in-person discussions as well as on-line. If you are interested in meeting in person, meet in Fr. Dave's office by 10 am on Thursday . Otherwise, please join on Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
Mindfulness
Bruce Lieberman, Knowable Magazine, 1.29.18
“Mindfulness” meditation, a type of meditation that focuses the mind on the present moment, is wildly popular. It has become a billion-dollar business, according to the market research firm IBISWorld.
For all its popularity, however, it’s still unclear exactly what mindfulness meditation does to the human brain, how it influences health and to what extent it helps people suffering from physical and mental challenges. Meditation has been practiced for thousands of years, but psychologists and neuroscientists have studied it for only a few decades.
Some studies suggest that meditation can help people relax, manage chronic stress and even reduce reliance on pain medication. Some of the most impressive studies to date involve a treatment called mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, which combines meditation with
psychotherapy to help patients deal with thoughts that lead to depression. Randomized controlled trials have shown that the approach significantly reduces the risk of depression relapse in individuals who have previously had three or more major depressive episodes.
While questions about the clinical outcomes of meditation persist, other studies have focused on a more fundamental issue: Does meditation physically change the brain? It’s a tough question to answer, but as brain imaging techniques have advanced and meditation interventions have grown more popular, scientists have begun to take a systematic look at what’s going on.
Seeking stillness
Meditation that requires one to sit still and focus on the mere act of breathing can encourage mindfulness, says psychologist David Creswell, who directs the Health and Human Performance Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. But most people spend most or all of
their day being anything but mindful. They skip from one thought to another. They daydream. They ruminate about the past, and they worry about the future. They self-analyze and self-criticize.
In a 2010 study, Harvard researchers asked 2,250 adults about their thoughts and actions at random moments throughout their day via an iPhone app. People’s minds wandered 47 percent of the time and mind wandering often triggered unhappiness, the scientists reported in Science.
“In contrast, the capacity to be mindful is associated with higher well-being in daily life,” Creswell wrote in the 2017 Annual Review of Psychology. He cites a 2003 study by researchers at the University of Rochester showing a correlation between mindfulness and a number of
indicators of well-being.
When people who meditate say they are paying attention to the present moment, they may be focused on their breathing, but maybe also on an emotion that surfaces and then passes, a mental image, inner chatter or a sensation in the body. “Adopting an attitude of openness and acceptance toward one’s experience is critical” to becoming more mindful, Creswell says. The idea is to be view these moments with a detached and non-judgmental curiosity.
Even the simple but challenging act of sitting still for an hour while meditating made a great impact on Creswell. “Having this disconnect between my body feeling in pain but my mind being completely silent and open … these were very powerful insights for me about how a
[meditation] practice could really change people’s lives, or fundamentally change how they relate to suffering in their lives,” he says. “There wasn’t a bolt-of-lightning moment for me, but a lot of these moments of insight in my own retreat experiences that suggested to me that it was worth spending time and effort to do the science.”
People from different religious, cultural and philosophical backgrounds have expounded the benefits of meditation for millennia. Meditation is perhaps most commonly associated with Buddhism, which views it as an instrument for achieving spiritual fulfillment and peace.
Creswell calls the act of meditation “a basic feature of being human.”
But the scientific evidence for its benefits is still lacking. “There is a common misperception in public and government domains that compelling clinical evidence exists for the broad and strong efficacy of mindfulness as a therapeutic intervention,” an interdisciplinary group of 15 scholars write in an article entitled “Mind the Hype” in the January 2018 Perspectives on Psychological Science. The reality is that mindfulness-based therapies have shown “a mixture of only moderate, low or no efficacy, depending on the disorder being treated,” the scholars write, citing a 2014 meta-analysis commissioned by the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.Much more research is needed before scientists can say what mental and physical disorders, in which individuals, can be effectively treated with mindfulness meditation, they conclude.
From the yoga mat to the lab
Alongside clinical work, neuroscientists have wanted to know how, if at all, meditation might change what actually happens inside the brain. Does meditation make certain regions more active than others, or more robustly connect one region to another? Does meditation result in new neurons, actually changing brain structure? Some studies suggest the answer is yes.
Neuroscientists have studied the physical effects of mindfulness meditation using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and other techniques for the last two decades. Progress has followed on the growing recognition that the human brain is capable of physical changes
throughout adulthood, even into old age — forming new connections and growing new neurons when someone learns a new skill, challenges themselves mentally or even just exercises. The emerging view of a brain that can be continually shaped through experience, dubbed
neuroplasticity, replaced the long-held idea that after the first few decades of life, the brain’s physiological trajectory was basically one of decline. A number of brain studies suggest that mindfulness meditation may spark neuroplastic renovations in the brain’s function and structure.
Looking under the hood with MRI, scientists have found that mindfulness meditation activates a network of brain regions that includes the insula (associated with compassion, empathy and self-awareness), the putamen (learning) and portions of the anterior cingulate cortex (regulating blood pressure, heart rate and other autonomic functions) and the prefrontal cortex (the hub of higher-order thinking skills such as planning, decision-making and moderating social behavior).
It’s uncertain, however, whether these changes in brain activity can be sustained when the individual is not actively meditating, and if so how much people need to meditate for that to happen.
When it comes to actual structural changes in the brain, some studies suggest that mindfulness meditation may increase gray matter density in the hippocampus, a brain region essential to memory. Researchers including Britta Hölzel, now at the Technical University of Munich, and
Sara Lazar of Massachusetts General Hospital found evidence for this in a 2011 study.
Though intriguing, these studies are nowhere near the end goal. “We need to understand the benefits that the changes in the brain have on behavior and well-being,” Hölzel says. “‘Changing the brain’ sounds very impressive, but we don’t understand what it actually means.” Lazar agrees. “Most of the data has only looked at changes over the course of two months of [meditation] practice…. Most people feel that [meditation] continues to change and get deeper with extended practice. So we need to conduct studies that follow people for much longer time points.”
Stress tests
Based on their studies of people engaged in meditation, Creswell and his colleagues have proposed that mindfulness acts as a buffer specifically against stress. It does this by increasing activity in regions of the prefrontal cortex that are important for “top-down stress regulation,” while reducing activity and functional connectivity in regions associated with the brain’s fight-or-flight stress response — in particular the amygdala.
Mindfulness meditation “helps people have what the old school psychotherapists call ‘reflective capacity,’” King says. “Instead of automatically responding in certain ways, it allows people to have more nuance in their ability to respond to any type of situation — stressful, fearful or
otherwise — and create some psychological distance.”
Two studies by Creswell and his colleagues, one in 2015 and the other in 2016, offer some initial findings that seem to support their view of mindfulness meditation as a buffer against stress. Both studies focused on the physiological effects of mindfulness mediation training on small groups of unemployed adults experiencing stress.
In the 2016 study, published in Biological Psychiatry, the researchers found that three days of intensive mindfulness meditation training led to increased connectivity between the default mode network, a network of regions engaged when the brain is at rest, and parts of the prefrontal
cortex involved in regulating stress. The study also found that meditation led to reduced levels of interleukin-6, a biomarker in the blood for systemic inflammation that’s elevated in high-stress populations.
Focus on PTSD, anxiety and pain
King and his colleagues showed similarly promising results in 23 combat veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq with post-traumatic stress disorder in 2016 in Depression and Anxiety. Brain scans before and after mindfulness-based group therapy revealed an increase in resting-state connectivity between a network in the brain that allows people to control their attention and other parts of the brain involved in rumination and spontaneous thought. This particular connectivity has been seen in healthy people, as well as people who have meditated for long
periods, says King.
“What’s important about our study … is that people with PTSD can also have this change in brain connectivity patterns when they do mindfulness practice,” King says. The more this connectivity increases as a result of mindfulness training, “the more their symptoms improve,”
he adds, summarizing a key finding of the study.
Studies of other conditions suggest similar improvements, although many involve small numbers of subjects and other limitations that make them far from conclusive. Nevertheless, mindfulness meditation may alleviate symptoms of general anxiety disorder, by increasing connectivity between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex, thereby increasing a patient’s ability to regulate emotions. Meditation may also lessen the perception of pain by reducing pain-related activation of the somatosensory cortex and increasing activation of areas involved in the cognitive regulation of pain.
Work ahead
Fundamentally, mindfulness is an elusive quality to study. It’s an internally generated experience, not a drug that scientists can give to a patient. That creates a question when comparing mindfulness between individuals and especially between distinct studies. What’s more, there is no universally accepted definition of mindfulness or agreement among researchers on the details of what it entails, Lazar and her colleagues note in the Perspectives on Psychological Science article.
In the context of PTSD, King says it’s likely that mindfulness meditation will continue to supplement more conventional psychiatric treatments. “I would never recommend for people to go to a mindfulness class at the YMCA or the local health center and think that that’s going to be
the same as psychotherapy, because it is not. It really is not,” King says. But “I think mindfulness is a useful technique in the context of therapy with somebody who’s trained in PTSD treatment.”
But people like Islas who have faced serious mental illness, and others who use mindfulness meditation to ease daily stress, say they’re convinced the practice improves their lives. One day, scientists hope to be able to link that experience to what’s physically happening in the meditating mind
Mindfulness
Bruce Lieberman, Knowable Magazine, 1.29.18
“Mindfulness” meditation, a type of meditation that focuses the mind on the present moment, is wildly popular. It has become a billion-dollar business, according to the market research firm IBISWorld.
For all its popularity, however, it’s still unclear exactly what mindfulness meditation does to the human brain, how it influences health and to what extent it helps people suffering from physical and mental challenges. Meditation has been practiced for thousands of years, but psychologists and neuroscientists have studied it for only a few decades.
Some studies suggest that meditation can help people relax, manage chronic stress and even reduce reliance on pain medication. Some of the most impressive studies to date involve a treatment called mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, which combines meditation with
psychotherapy to help patients deal with thoughts that lead to depression. Randomized controlled trials have shown that the approach significantly reduces the risk of depression relapse in individuals who have previously had three or more major depressive episodes.
While questions about the clinical outcomes of meditation persist, other studies have focused on a more fundamental issue: Does meditation physically change the brain? It’s a tough question to answer, but as brain imaging techniques have advanced and meditation interventions have grown more popular, scientists have begun to take a systematic look at what’s going on.
Seeking stillness
Meditation that requires one to sit still and focus on the mere act of breathing can encourage mindfulness, says psychologist David Creswell, who directs the Health and Human Performance Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. But most people spend most or all of
their day being anything but mindful. They skip from one thought to another. They daydream. They ruminate about the past, and they worry about the future. They self-analyze and self-criticize.
In a 2010 study, Harvard researchers asked 2,250 adults about their thoughts and actions at random moments throughout their day via an iPhone app. People’s minds wandered 47 percent of the time and mind wandering often triggered unhappiness, the scientists reported in Science.
“In contrast, the capacity to be mindful is associated with higher well-being in daily life,” Creswell wrote in the 2017 Annual Review of Psychology. He cites a 2003 study by researchers at the University of Rochester showing a correlation between mindfulness and a number of
indicators of well-being.
When people who meditate say they are paying attention to the present moment, they may be focused on their breathing, but maybe also on an emotion that surfaces and then passes, a mental image, inner chatter or a sensation in the body. “Adopting an attitude of openness and acceptance toward one’s experience is critical” to becoming more mindful, Creswell says. The idea is to be view these moments with a detached and non-judgmental curiosity.
Even the simple but challenging act of sitting still for an hour while meditating made a great impact on Creswell. “Having this disconnect between my body feeling in pain but my mind being completely silent and open … these were very powerful insights for me about how a
[meditation] practice could really change people’s lives, or fundamentally change how they relate to suffering in their lives,” he says. “There wasn’t a bolt-of-lightning moment for me, but a lot of these moments of insight in my own retreat experiences that suggested to me that it was worth spending time and effort to do the science.”
People from different religious, cultural and philosophical backgrounds have expounded the benefits of meditation for millennia. Meditation is perhaps most commonly associated with Buddhism, which views it as an instrument for achieving spiritual fulfillment and peace.
Creswell calls the act of meditation “a basic feature of being human.”
But the scientific evidence for its benefits is still lacking. “There is a common misperception in public and government domains that compelling clinical evidence exists for the broad and strong efficacy of mindfulness as a therapeutic intervention,” an interdisciplinary group of 15 scholars write in an article entitled “Mind the Hype” in the January 2018 Perspectives on Psychological Science. The reality is that mindfulness-based therapies have shown “a mixture of only moderate, low or no efficacy, depending on the disorder being treated,” the scholars write, citing a 2014 meta-analysis commissioned by the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.Much more research is needed before scientists can say what mental and physical disorders, in which individuals, can be effectively treated with mindfulness meditation, they conclude.
From the yoga mat to the lab
Alongside clinical work, neuroscientists have wanted to know how, if at all, meditation might change what actually happens inside the brain. Does meditation make certain regions more active than others, or more robustly connect one region to another? Does meditation result in new neurons, actually changing brain structure? Some studies suggest the answer is yes.
Neuroscientists have studied the physical effects of mindfulness meditation using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and other techniques for the last two decades. Progress has followed on the growing recognition that the human brain is capable of physical changes
throughout adulthood, even into old age — forming new connections and growing new neurons when someone learns a new skill, challenges themselves mentally or even just exercises. The emerging view of a brain that can be continually shaped through experience, dubbed
neuroplasticity, replaced the long-held idea that after the first few decades of life, the brain’s physiological trajectory was basically one of decline. A number of brain studies suggest that mindfulness meditation may spark neuroplastic renovations in the brain’s function and structure.
Looking under the hood with MRI, scientists have found that mindfulness meditation activates a network of brain regions that includes the insula (associated with compassion, empathy and self-awareness), the putamen (learning) and portions of the anterior cingulate cortex (regulating blood pressure, heart rate and other autonomic functions) and the prefrontal cortex (the hub of higher-order thinking skills such as planning, decision-making and moderating social behavior).
It’s uncertain, however, whether these changes in brain activity can be sustained when the individual is not actively meditating, and if so how much people need to meditate for that to happen.
When it comes to actual structural changes in the brain, some studies suggest that mindfulness meditation may increase gray matter density in the hippocampus, a brain region essential to memory. Researchers including Britta Hölzel, now at the Technical University of Munich, and
Sara Lazar of Massachusetts General Hospital found evidence for this in a 2011 study.
Though intriguing, these studies are nowhere near the end goal. “We need to understand the benefits that the changes in the brain have on behavior and well-being,” Hölzel says. “‘Changing the brain’ sounds very impressive, but we don’t understand what it actually means.” Lazar agrees. “Most of the data has only looked at changes over the course of two months of [meditation] practice…. Most people feel that [meditation] continues to change and get deeper with extended practice. So we need to conduct studies that follow people for much longer time points.”
Stress tests
Based on their studies of people engaged in meditation, Creswell and his colleagues have proposed that mindfulness acts as a buffer specifically against stress. It does this by increasing activity in regions of the prefrontal cortex that are important for “top-down stress regulation,” while reducing activity and functional connectivity in regions associated with the brain’s fight-or-flight stress response — in particular the amygdala.
Mindfulness meditation “helps people have what the old school psychotherapists call ‘reflective capacity,’” King says. “Instead of automatically responding in certain ways, it allows people to have more nuance in their ability to respond to any type of situation — stressful, fearful or
otherwise — and create some psychological distance.”
Two studies by Creswell and his colleagues, one in 2015 and the other in 2016, offer some initial findings that seem to support their view of mindfulness meditation as a buffer against stress. Both studies focused on the physiological effects of mindfulness mediation training on small groups of unemployed adults experiencing stress.
In the 2016 study, published in Biological Psychiatry, the researchers found that three days of intensive mindfulness meditation training led to increased connectivity between the default mode network, a network of regions engaged when the brain is at rest, and parts of the prefrontal
cortex involved in regulating stress. The study also found that meditation led to reduced levels of interleukin-6, a biomarker in the blood for systemic inflammation that’s elevated in high-stress populations.
Focus on PTSD, anxiety and pain
King and his colleagues showed similarly promising results in 23 combat veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq with post-traumatic stress disorder in 2016 in Depression and Anxiety. Brain scans before and after mindfulness-based group therapy revealed an increase in resting-state connectivity between a network in the brain that allows people to control their attention and other parts of the brain involved in rumination and spontaneous thought. This particular connectivity has been seen in healthy people, as well as people who have meditated for long
periods, says King.
“What’s important about our study … is that people with PTSD can also have this change in brain connectivity patterns when they do mindfulness practice,” King says. The more this connectivity increases as a result of mindfulness training, “the more their symptoms improve,”
he adds, summarizing a key finding of the study.
Studies of other conditions suggest similar improvements, although many involve small numbers of subjects and other limitations that make them far from conclusive. Nevertheless, mindfulness meditation may alleviate symptoms of general anxiety disorder, by increasing connectivity between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex, thereby increasing a patient’s ability to regulate emotions. Meditation may also lessen the perception of pain by reducing pain-related activation of the somatosensory cortex and increasing activation of areas involved in the cognitive regulation of pain.
Work ahead
Fundamentally, mindfulness is an elusive quality to study. It’s an internally generated experience, not a drug that scientists can give to a patient. That creates a question when comparing mindfulness between individuals and especially between distinct studies. What’s more, there is no universally accepted definition of mindfulness or agreement among researchers on the details of what it entails, Lazar and her colleagues note in the Perspectives on Psychological Science article.
In the context of PTSD, King says it’s likely that mindfulness meditation will continue to supplement more conventional psychiatric treatments. “I would never recommend for people to go to a mindfulness class at the YMCA or the local health center and think that that’s going to be
the same as psychotherapy, because it is not. It really is not,” King says. But “I think mindfulness is a useful technique in the context of therapy with somebody who’s trained in PTSD treatment.”
But people like Islas who have faced serious mental illness, and others who use mindfulness meditation to ease daily stress, say they’re convinced the practice improves their lives. One day, scientists hope to be able to link that experience to what’s physically happening in the meditating mind
Thursday, June 17
How to Escape the Happiness Guilt Trap
Arthur Brooks, The Atlantic, 6.3.21
Browse your social media, scroll through your Netflix documentary queue, or turn on cable television, and you will be flooded with reasons to be worried and angry about issues large and small. There is plenty wrong in the world, lots of injustice, and too much suffering. The pandemic made that clear to even the most oblivious among us.
That suffering is not uniform, though. And for those who are better off, that might just provoke a bit of guilt. They might conclude that to project cheerfulness and life satisfaction is to be irresponsible and insensitive to the world’s problems. Some might even find themselves acting sad or outraged in order to show they care.
I understand the impulse, but research shows that acting unhappy is a great way to actually become dissatisfied with life. By saying you’re unhappy, you can talk yourself out of joy and right into gloom, which won’t do anything to ease others’ suffering. What will help is striving to
achieve and project happiness even while showing your concerns about wrongs to be righted in the world. In fact, your happiness will make you more effective in making the world a better place.
We are all familiar with what we might call the “laughing on the outside, crying on the inside” phenomenon. It has received some attention from researchers, who generally find that acting happier of one’s own accord leads to more well-being. In contrast, being forced to act happy can have deleterious consequences, from depression to cardiovascular ailments. The implications are fairly clear: Act the way you want to feel, but don’t demand that others act the way you want them to feel.
The opposite phenomenon, “crying on the outside, laughing on the inside,” might have a few limited benefits. There’s some evidence that displaying negative emotions like sadness, anger, and boredom can help us garner more sympathy from others and even make us more attractive. But it almost certainly won’t make us happier.
If you find yourself projecting more sadness than you actually feel, you might suffer from a fear of happiness, an identifiable condition known as cherophobia. According to the research, cherophobia might stem from a belief that being happy will bring misfortune; that expressing or
pursuing happiness is bad for you; or that being happy makes you a bad person. There is evidence that cherophobia is often found in religious communities. (You can assess yourself on the Fear of Happiness Scale to see whether you suffer from this condition.)
A sense that happiness makes you a bad person (or at least a horribly un-empathetic one) might be especially relevant to contemporary political culture. While there have not yet been studies involving cherophobia and political activism, it is easy to imagine that in an environment of protest, you might fear opprobrium for not showing sufficient seriousness about something negative.
There are two big problems with this framing. First, acting unhappy leads to real unhappiness. Researchers have shown that labeling oneself as depressed can lead people—especially young people—to think negatively about themselves (what psychologists call “self-stigma”) and experience depression. Similarly, acting angry can make you angrier. Cherophobia is itself associated with lower scores on surveys of life satisfaction.
Second, your unhappiness, anger, or depression about the world’s ills won’t make the world better. On the contrary, research has long found that our facial expressions and emotions, including the negative ones, are highly contagious. Your cherophobia could be motivated by
sympathy, but it might just compound the misery of those who are already suffering.
Being concerned with the world’s problems should not conflict with our desire to be happy or to radiate that happiness. Here are some tips to balance the two.
1. Examine your unhappiness.
If you find yourself chronically irritated or constantly complaining about the world, you might in fact be unhappy about aspects of your life. If so, work to understand your feelings by sitting with them. If necessary, address them therapeutically, or at least learn more about them, which can yield tremendous benefits.
But you should also ask yourself if you might be playing up the negative aspects of life and downplaying the positives. Is it possible that you’re a little cherophobic? If so, remember that you risk becoming an unhappier person, without that sadness benefiting others. To combat any
aversion to contentment you might be experiencing, consider the next two tips.
2. Think like a missionary.
If you have strong views on a topic, you probably want to change how other people think and act. Ask yourself what is more persuasive: anger and gloom, or joy and warmth? Missionaries understand this principle very well, which is why—no matter how unhappy you are to see them—they’re always smiling when they show up on your porch.
Adopt the spirit of the missionary. Remember that your cause is a gift to others, so present it as such, without hate, contempt, or fear. Even if you have righteous anger about the present, smile as you describe a better future.
3. Call on your inner entrepreneur.
Imagine you came across a huge entrepreneurial opportunity. You’d want to seem as enthusiastic as possible around potential investors; if you acted outraged and bitter because no one had yet taken the opportunity, no one would invest. Or consider one of your long-term goals, like starting a family or building a fun and exciting career. You’ll probably feel excited, and if you describe it to others, your enthusiasm for the goal will show.
If you believe that there is an opportunity to make things better through social change, you’re more likely to achieve it if you’re fired up, like it’s an enterprise or a big life goal. The point is not that you should pretend the status quo is just fine, but rather that optimism about positive
change is the best way to make people want to be part of that change. Instead of thinking of your concern as an unsolvable problem or a source of ongoing misery, make it an exciting project. If it is too daunting, break your end goal into more achievable steps. Let the effort energize you, and let others see that energy.
Paramhansa yogananda, who was one of the first great Hindu gurus to come to the West, gave this advice in his book Autobiography of a Yogi: “Learn to be secretly happy within your heart in spite of all circumstances, and say to yourself: Happiness is the greatest Divine birthright—the
buried treasure of my Soul.” I would take it even further: Share your buried treasure with those around you.
There is no need to keep your happiness secret, suppress it, or bury it under complaints and outrage. Showing the joy in our hearts and sharing it with others will improve our lives. And if the state of the world has you genuinely down in the dumps, remember that finding and
spreading cheer in an imperfect world will make life better for you, and make your efforts at progress that much more effective.
ARTHUR C. BROOKS is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, the William Henry Bloomberg professor of the practice of public leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, a professor of management practice at the Harvard Business School, and host of the podcast The Art of Happiness With Arthur Brooks
Arthur Brooks, The Atlantic, 6.3.21
Browse your social media, scroll through your Netflix documentary queue, or turn on cable television, and you will be flooded with reasons to be worried and angry about issues large and small. There is plenty wrong in the world, lots of injustice, and too much suffering. The pandemic made that clear to even the most oblivious among us.
That suffering is not uniform, though. And for those who are better off, that might just provoke a bit of guilt. They might conclude that to project cheerfulness and life satisfaction is to be irresponsible and insensitive to the world’s problems. Some might even find themselves acting sad or outraged in order to show they care.
I understand the impulse, but research shows that acting unhappy is a great way to actually become dissatisfied with life. By saying you’re unhappy, you can talk yourself out of joy and right into gloom, which won’t do anything to ease others’ suffering. What will help is striving to
achieve and project happiness even while showing your concerns about wrongs to be righted in the world. In fact, your happiness will make you more effective in making the world a better place.
We are all familiar with what we might call the “laughing on the outside, crying on the inside” phenomenon. It has received some attention from researchers, who generally find that acting happier of one’s own accord leads to more well-being. In contrast, being forced to act happy can have deleterious consequences, from depression to cardiovascular ailments. The implications are fairly clear: Act the way you want to feel, but don’t demand that others act the way you want them to feel.
The opposite phenomenon, “crying on the outside, laughing on the inside,” might have a few limited benefits. There’s some evidence that displaying negative emotions like sadness, anger, and boredom can help us garner more sympathy from others and even make us more attractive. But it almost certainly won’t make us happier.
If you find yourself projecting more sadness than you actually feel, you might suffer from a fear of happiness, an identifiable condition known as cherophobia. According to the research, cherophobia might stem from a belief that being happy will bring misfortune; that expressing or
pursuing happiness is bad for you; or that being happy makes you a bad person. There is evidence that cherophobia is often found in religious communities. (You can assess yourself on the Fear of Happiness Scale to see whether you suffer from this condition.)
A sense that happiness makes you a bad person (or at least a horribly un-empathetic one) might be especially relevant to contemporary political culture. While there have not yet been studies involving cherophobia and political activism, it is easy to imagine that in an environment of protest, you might fear opprobrium for not showing sufficient seriousness about something negative.
There are two big problems with this framing. First, acting unhappy leads to real unhappiness. Researchers have shown that labeling oneself as depressed can lead people—especially young people—to think negatively about themselves (what psychologists call “self-stigma”) and experience depression. Similarly, acting angry can make you angrier. Cherophobia is itself associated with lower scores on surveys of life satisfaction.
Second, your unhappiness, anger, or depression about the world’s ills won’t make the world better. On the contrary, research has long found that our facial expressions and emotions, including the negative ones, are highly contagious. Your cherophobia could be motivated by
sympathy, but it might just compound the misery of those who are already suffering.
Being concerned with the world’s problems should not conflict with our desire to be happy or to radiate that happiness. Here are some tips to balance the two.
1. Examine your unhappiness.
If you find yourself chronically irritated or constantly complaining about the world, you might in fact be unhappy about aspects of your life. If so, work to understand your feelings by sitting with them. If necessary, address them therapeutically, or at least learn more about them, which can yield tremendous benefits.
But you should also ask yourself if you might be playing up the negative aspects of life and downplaying the positives. Is it possible that you’re a little cherophobic? If so, remember that you risk becoming an unhappier person, without that sadness benefiting others. To combat any
aversion to contentment you might be experiencing, consider the next two tips.
2. Think like a missionary.
If you have strong views on a topic, you probably want to change how other people think and act. Ask yourself what is more persuasive: anger and gloom, or joy and warmth? Missionaries understand this principle very well, which is why—no matter how unhappy you are to see them—they’re always smiling when they show up on your porch.
Adopt the spirit of the missionary. Remember that your cause is a gift to others, so present it as such, without hate, contempt, or fear. Even if you have righteous anger about the present, smile as you describe a better future.
3. Call on your inner entrepreneur.
Imagine you came across a huge entrepreneurial opportunity. You’d want to seem as enthusiastic as possible around potential investors; if you acted outraged and bitter because no one had yet taken the opportunity, no one would invest. Or consider one of your long-term goals, like starting a family or building a fun and exciting career. You’ll probably feel excited, and if you describe it to others, your enthusiasm for the goal will show.
If you believe that there is an opportunity to make things better through social change, you’re more likely to achieve it if you’re fired up, like it’s an enterprise or a big life goal. The point is not that you should pretend the status quo is just fine, but rather that optimism about positive
change is the best way to make people want to be part of that change. Instead of thinking of your concern as an unsolvable problem or a source of ongoing misery, make it an exciting project. If it is too daunting, break your end goal into more achievable steps. Let the effort energize you, and let others see that energy.
Paramhansa yogananda, who was one of the first great Hindu gurus to come to the West, gave this advice in his book Autobiography of a Yogi: “Learn to be secretly happy within your heart in spite of all circumstances, and say to yourself: Happiness is the greatest Divine birthright—the
buried treasure of my Soul.” I would take it even further: Share your buried treasure with those around you.
There is no need to keep your happiness secret, suppress it, or bury it under complaints and outrage. Showing the joy in our hearts and sharing it with others will improve our lives. And if the state of the world has you genuinely down in the dumps, remember that finding and
spreading cheer in an imperfect world will make life better for you, and make your efforts at progress that much more effective.
ARTHUR C. BROOKS is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, the William Henry Bloomberg professor of the practice of public leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, a professor of management practice at the Harvard Business School, and host of the podcast The Art of Happiness With Arthur Brooks
Thursday, May 27
Judaism, Hospice and Palliative Care
MJHS HEALTH SYSTEM & UJA-FEDERATION OF NEW YORK
This post is part of a series sponsored by and developed in partnership with MJHS Health System and UJA Federation of New York to raise awareness and facilitate conversations about end of life care in a Jewish context.
Hospice is an approach to caring for individuals who are suffering from terminal illnesses and are expected to live for six months or less. Patients are typically referred to hospice care when further medical treatment is not expected to reverse the course of their disease. Patients who choose hospice care opt to forego aggressive medical care aimed at curing them in favor of therapies geared toward reducing pain and sustaining the highest quality of life for as long as possible. The decision to choose hospice care is a personal one, as is the amount in which Jewish tradition informs one’s choices for end of life care. The following is a general overview of contemporary Jewish perspectives on the topic.
Does Judaism require life-prolonging interventions in all cases?
No. While some Jewish authorities are very stringent in these matters, there is ample support in Jewish tradition for ceasing interventions that offer no hope of cure and serve merely to delay death. The Talmud offers support for this idea in the story of the second-century sage Rabbi
Hanina ben Teradion, whom the Romans wrapped him in a Torah scroll and set afire as punishment for teaching Torah. A damp piece of wool was placed on his chest to prolong the agony of his execution. When the executioner asked the rabbi if removing the wool and allowing
the rabbi to die faster would grant the executioner a life in the world to come, the rabbi said yes. At that point, the executioner removed the wool and leaped into the flames. After both of them perished, a divine voice called out that both the rabbi and the executioner had been granted life in the world to come.
A similar idea is conveyed in the ruling of Rabbi Moshe Isserles, known as the Rema, who in his commentary on the Shulchan Aruch writes that while it is strictly forbidden to take any active steps to hasten death, it is permissible to remove obstacles to the soul’s departure. The example
given is of a sound — for example, the noise from a woodchopper — that can be stopped if it is preventing a dying person from departing.
Does Judaism allow a person to turn down medical intervention?
Jewish tradition generally requires that every effort be made to sustain and extend life, but that position is not absolute. In cases where diseases cannot be cured and medical interventions would be risky, painful, of uncertain efficacy or serve merely to prolong a life of unbearable physical or psychic pain, there is support in Jewish law for an individual’s right to reject such treatment.
Within the Conservative and Reform movements, the autonomy of individuals to make decisions concerning their health care, including the right to refuse such care, is given broad standing. Two 1990 Conservative papers allow a patient to refuse treatment if the patient believes they cannot bear it and its efficacy is in doubt. In 2008, the Reform movement’s rabbinic authorities stated that a lung cancer patient was not obligated to undergo treatment that offered only three months of life extension while causing significant pain and suffering. “One is obligated to accept treatment that offers a reasonable prospect of therapeutic effectiveness, the attainment of an accepted medical purpose,” the statement read. “The purchase of an additional three months of life in a pain-filled and dying condition does not, in our judgment, meet that standard.”
The 20th-century American Orthodox authority Rabbi Moshe Feinstein ruled that “those individuals whom the physicians recognize cannot be cured . . . but could receive medications to extend their lives, in which they would suffer, should not be given such medications.” The late
Israeli authority Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach issued a similar ruling, stating that “it is reasonable that if the patient experiences great pain and suffering, or even extremely severe psychological pain … it is permissible to withhold medications that cause suffering to the patient
if the patient so demands.” (Most Orthodox authorities do not consider nutrition, hydration and oxygen, even if artificially provided, to be medical treatments and generally do not permit them to be discontinued.)
Does hospice mean I’m giving up?
For many, the term “hospice” connotes resignation in the face of death and seems to run counter to the Jewish imperative to seek life and preserve it. However, various studies suggest that hospice patients often live longer and do better than those who opt for more aggressive
treatment. A 2011 study of lung cancer patients found that hospice patients fared better on average than those who received more aggressive care. A 2007 study found that hospice patients diagnosed with congestive heart failure, lung cancer, pancreatic cancer and marginally
significant colon cancer lived “significantly longer” than counterparts undergoing aggressive medical treatment. A 2010 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that for patients suffering from non-small-cell lung cancer, early palliative care after diagnosis
appeared to prolong their life expectancy even as they received less aggressive end-of-life treatment.
“Any good hospice program is geared to stretch or lengthen or try to manage one’s time based on the limitations,” says Rabbi Charles Rudansky, the director of pastoral care at MJHS Hospice and Palliative Care. “There’s no hospice that’s accredited that is hastening anyone’s demise.”
Is hospice discussed in Jewish texts?
Not explicitly. The modern concept of hospice care has been around only since the 1970s. However, in addition to the passages noted above, several other sources are commonly cited in support of a compassionate approach to palliating pain and allowing for a peaceful death.
Among the most frequently cited is a story recorded in the Talmud about Rabbi Yehuda Hanassi (Judah the Prince), the chief compiler of the Mishnah , who was dying of an apparent stomach ailment. The rabbis were praying for his recovery, but Rabbi Yehuda’s maidservant, noticing her boss’ distress, prayed for his death. Seeing that the prayers of the rabbis were acting as a sort of spiritual life-support keeping Rabbi Yehuda alive the maidservant ascended the roof of the house and threw down a jug — momentarily silencing the prayers and allowing the ailing rabbi to die.
Commenting on this passage, the 14th-century Catalonian Talmud scholar Rabbenu Nissim observed: “There are times when one should pray for the sick to die, such as when the sick one is suffering greatly from his malady and his condition is terminal.”
Another story, recorded in the Yalkut Shimoni, a compilation of Midrash ic commentaries on the Bible, concerns a woman who came before the second-century sage Rabbi Jose ben Halafta and complained that she was old and sick, could no longer taste food and drink, and wished to die. The rabbi asked her which commandment she is grateful to perform each day, and she responded that it is the commandment of going to synagogue. The rabbi instructed her not to go for three days, the woman complied, and on the third day she died.
Is hospice compatible with Judaism?
Jewish tradition regards every moment of human life as infinitely valuable.
Rabbis from the more liberal denominations view hospice as a legitimate Jewish option for those suffering from terminal disease. The Reform movement has long endorsed hospice as a practice consistent with Jewish values. And both of the Conservative movement’s major papers on end-of-life care, adopted in 1990, endorse hospice as a life-affirming and, perhaps, even Jewishly preferable option.
“One may not choose hospice so as to die more quickly, but, rather, only in order to live one’s remaining days in the best way possible,” Rabbi Avram Reisner wrote in one of the Conservative documents. “As such, instructions to the hospice should clearly state that while only palliation is in order for the immediate incurable condition, other unrelated and curable conditions that may arise, such as infections, should be treated in line with standard medical care. Jewish hospice must be an attempt to live one’s best with dignity, not an attempt to speed an escape into death.”
Some authorities hold that hospice is antithetical to Jewish tradition since it entails rejecting aggressive medical interventions to cure terminal disease in favor of a focus on pain reduction and enhanced quality of life. These authorities often cite sources in Jewish law indicating that
efforts to extend human life should be made even in cases where life can be extended only by a few moments. The Shulchan Aruch rules that the Torah mandates healing and that a physician who withholds such treatment is guilty of causing harm.
Many contemporary authorities, however, argue that Jewish tradition allows a focus on comfort and pain reduction and the eschewing of aggressive medical interventions in certain circumstances. Rabbi Moshe Feinstein ruled that a patient may be referred to hospice if he or she
requests it and is experiencing such intense physical or psychological pain that his or her quality of life is severely diminished.
Does hospice raise any other Jewish concerns?
Yes. Jewish law generally mandates that a patient never be deprived of the most elemental forms of human sustenance — food, water and oxygen — even if they are artificially provided. (This position is not universal — some authorities consider feeding tubes and the like to be forms of medical intervention that can be withdrawn or rejected under certain conditions.) For hospice patients concerned about complying with Jewish law, it may be necessary to ensure that hospice care continues to provide intravenous fluids and hydration as religiously required.
Jewish tradition also raises concerns about fully disclosing to a patient the fact that a condition is terminal, lest the patient be deprived of a will to live. Some contemporary religious authorities are emphatic that a patient should never be told explicitly that their condition is hopeless — a
position that clashes with contemporary medical ethics, which considers patient autonomy a cardinal principle. Medical professionals familiar with the requirements of Jewish law in this respect are often able to transition a patient to hospice without fully disclosing the particulars of
their diagnosis.
MJHS HEALTH SYSTEM & UJA-FEDERATION OF NEW YORK
This post is part of a series sponsored by and developed in partnership with MJHS Health System and UJA Federation of New York to raise awareness and facilitate conversations about end of life care in a Jewish context.
Hospice is an approach to caring for individuals who are suffering from terminal illnesses and are expected to live for six months or less. Patients are typically referred to hospice care when further medical treatment is not expected to reverse the course of their disease. Patients who choose hospice care opt to forego aggressive medical care aimed at curing them in favor of therapies geared toward reducing pain and sustaining the highest quality of life for as long as possible. The decision to choose hospice care is a personal one, as is the amount in which Jewish tradition informs one’s choices for end of life care. The following is a general overview of contemporary Jewish perspectives on the topic.
Does Judaism require life-prolonging interventions in all cases?
No. While some Jewish authorities are very stringent in these matters, there is ample support in Jewish tradition for ceasing interventions that offer no hope of cure and serve merely to delay death. The Talmud offers support for this idea in the story of the second-century sage Rabbi
Hanina ben Teradion, whom the Romans wrapped him in a Torah scroll and set afire as punishment for teaching Torah. A damp piece of wool was placed on his chest to prolong the agony of his execution. When the executioner asked the rabbi if removing the wool and allowing
the rabbi to die faster would grant the executioner a life in the world to come, the rabbi said yes. At that point, the executioner removed the wool and leaped into the flames. After both of them perished, a divine voice called out that both the rabbi and the executioner had been granted life in the world to come.
A similar idea is conveyed in the ruling of Rabbi Moshe Isserles, known as the Rema, who in his commentary on the Shulchan Aruch writes that while it is strictly forbidden to take any active steps to hasten death, it is permissible to remove obstacles to the soul’s departure. The example
given is of a sound — for example, the noise from a woodchopper — that can be stopped if it is preventing a dying person from departing.
Does Judaism allow a person to turn down medical intervention?
Jewish tradition generally requires that every effort be made to sustain and extend life, but that position is not absolute. In cases where diseases cannot be cured and medical interventions would be risky, painful, of uncertain efficacy or serve merely to prolong a life of unbearable physical or psychic pain, there is support in Jewish law for an individual’s right to reject such treatment.
Within the Conservative and Reform movements, the autonomy of individuals to make decisions concerning their health care, including the right to refuse such care, is given broad standing. Two 1990 Conservative papers allow a patient to refuse treatment if the patient believes they cannot bear it and its efficacy is in doubt. In 2008, the Reform movement’s rabbinic authorities stated that a lung cancer patient was not obligated to undergo treatment that offered only three months of life extension while causing significant pain and suffering. “One is obligated to accept treatment that offers a reasonable prospect of therapeutic effectiveness, the attainment of an accepted medical purpose,” the statement read. “The purchase of an additional three months of life in a pain-filled and dying condition does not, in our judgment, meet that standard.”
The 20th-century American Orthodox authority Rabbi Moshe Feinstein ruled that “those individuals whom the physicians recognize cannot be cured . . . but could receive medications to extend their lives, in which they would suffer, should not be given such medications.” The late
Israeli authority Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach issued a similar ruling, stating that “it is reasonable that if the patient experiences great pain and suffering, or even extremely severe psychological pain … it is permissible to withhold medications that cause suffering to the patient
if the patient so demands.” (Most Orthodox authorities do not consider nutrition, hydration and oxygen, even if artificially provided, to be medical treatments and generally do not permit them to be discontinued.)
Does hospice mean I’m giving up?
For many, the term “hospice” connotes resignation in the face of death and seems to run counter to the Jewish imperative to seek life and preserve it. However, various studies suggest that hospice patients often live longer and do better than those who opt for more aggressive
treatment. A 2011 study of lung cancer patients found that hospice patients fared better on average than those who received more aggressive care. A 2007 study found that hospice patients diagnosed with congestive heart failure, lung cancer, pancreatic cancer and marginally
significant colon cancer lived “significantly longer” than counterparts undergoing aggressive medical treatment. A 2010 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that for patients suffering from non-small-cell lung cancer, early palliative care after diagnosis
appeared to prolong their life expectancy even as they received less aggressive end-of-life treatment.
“Any good hospice program is geared to stretch or lengthen or try to manage one’s time based on the limitations,” says Rabbi Charles Rudansky, the director of pastoral care at MJHS Hospice and Palliative Care. “There’s no hospice that’s accredited that is hastening anyone’s demise.”
Is hospice discussed in Jewish texts?
Not explicitly. The modern concept of hospice care has been around only since the 1970s. However, in addition to the passages noted above, several other sources are commonly cited in support of a compassionate approach to palliating pain and allowing for a peaceful death.
Among the most frequently cited is a story recorded in the Talmud about Rabbi Yehuda Hanassi (Judah the Prince), the chief compiler of the Mishnah , who was dying of an apparent stomach ailment. The rabbis were praying for his recovery, but Rabbi Yehuda’s maidservant, noticing her boss’ distress, prayed for his death. Seeing that the prayers of the rabbis were acting as a sort of spiritual life-support keeping Rabbi Yehuda alive the maidservant ascended the roof of the house and threw down a jug — momentarily silencing the prayers and allowing the ailing rabbi to die.
Commenting on this passage, the 14th-century Catalonian Talmud scholar Rabbenu Nissim observed: “There are times when one should pray for the sick to die, such as when the sick one is suffering greatly from his malady and his condition is terminal.”
Another story, recorded in the Yalkut Shimoni, a compilation of Midrash ic commentaries on the Bible, concerns a woman who came before the second-century sage Rabbi Jose ben Halafta and complained that she was old and sick, could no longer taste food and drink, and wished to die. The rabbi asked her which commandment she is grateful to perform each day, and she responded that it is the commandment of going to synagogue. The rabbi instructed her not to go for three days, the woman complied, and on the third day she died.
Is hospice compatible with Judaism?
Jewish tradition regards every moment of human life as infinitely valuable.
Rabbis from the more liberal denominations view hospice as a legitimate Jewish option for those suffering from terminal disease. The Reform movement has long endorsed hospice as a practice consistent with Jewish values. And both of the Conservative movement’s major papers on end-of-life care, adopted in 1990, endorse hospice as a life-affirming and, perhaps, even Jewishly preferable option.
“One may not choose hospice so as to die more quickly, but, rather, only in order to live one’s remaining days in the best way possible,” Rabbi Avram Reisner wrote in one of the Conservative documents. “As such, instructions to the hospice should clearly state that while only palliation is in order for the immediate incurable condition, other unrelated and curable conditions that may arise, such as infections, should be treated in line with standard medical care. Jewish hospice must be an attempt to live one’s best with dignity, not an attempt to speed an escape into death.”
Some authorities hold that hospice is antithetical to Jewish tradition since it entails rejecting aggressive medical interventions to cure terminal disease in favor of a focus on pain reduction and enhanced quality of life. These authorities often cite sources in Jewish law indicating that
efforts to extend human life should be made even in cases where life can be extended only by a few moments. The Shulchan Aruch rules that the Torah mandates healing and that a physician who withholds such treatment is guilty of causing harm.
Many contemporary authorities, however, argue that Jewish tradition allows a focus on comfort and pain reduction and the eschewing of aggressive medical interventions in certain circumstances. Rabbi Moshe Feinstein ruled that a patient may be referred to hospice if he or she
requests it and is experiencing such intense physical or psychological pain that his or her quality of life is severely diminished.
Does hospice raise any other Jewish concerns?
Yes. Jewish law generally mandates that a patient never be deprived of the most elemental forms of human sustenance — food, water and oxygen — even if they are artificially provided. (This position is not universal — some authorities consider feeding tubes and the like to be forms of medical intervention that can be withdrawn or rejected under certain conditions.) For hospice patients concerned about complying with Jewish law, it may be necessary to ensure that hospice care continues to provide intravenous fluids and hydration as religiously required.
Jewish tradition also raises concerns about fully disclosing to a patient the fact that a condition is terminal, lest the patient be deprived of a will to live. Some contemporary religious authorities are emphatic that a patient should never be told explicitly that their condition is hopeless — a
position that clashes with contemporary medical ethics, which considers patient autonomy a cardinal principle. Medical professionals familiar with the requirements of Jewish law in this respect are often able to transition a patient to hospice without fully disclosing the particulars of
their diagnosis.
Thursday, May 20
Support of Healthy Grieving
Psychology of Aging, PSY 180, January 2021
Hostos Community College, guides.hostos.cuny.edu
Grief is not depression. Grief and bereavement are not disorders or illnesses. Like stress, grief is a part of everyone’s life and a perfectly normal response to significant loss. Individual experiences of intensity and duration of grief are different. There is no “right” way to grieve.
Grief is a natural response and may come with a loss of any kind.
Kübler-Ross’ Stages of Loss
Kübler-Ross (1965) described five stages of loss experienced by someone who faces the news of their impending death (based on her work and interviews with terminally ill patients). These “stages” are not really stages that a person goes through in order or only once; nor are they stages that occur with the same intensity. Indeed, the process of death is influenced by a person’s life experiences, the timing of their death in relation to life events, the predictability of their death based on health or illness, their belief system, and their assessment of the quality of their own life.
Denial is often the first reaction to overwhelming, unimaginable news. Denial, or disbelief or shock, protects us by allowing such news to enter slowly and to give us time to come to grips with what is taking place.
Anger also provides us with protection in that being angry energizes us to fight against something and gives structure to a situation that may be thrusting us into the unknown. It is much easier to be angry than to be sad or in pain or depressed. It helps us to temporarily believe that
we have a sense of control over our future and to feel that we have at least expressed our rage about how unfair life can be. Anger can be focused on a person, a health care provider, at God, or at the world in general. And it can be expressed over issues that have nothing to do with our death; consequently, being in this stage of loss is not always obvious.
Bargaining involves trying to think of what could be done to turn the situation around. Living better, devoting self to a cause, being a better friend, parent, or spouse, are all agreements one might willingly commit to if doing so would lengthen life. Asking to just live long enough to
witness a family event or finish a task are examples of bargaining.
Depression is sadness and sadness is appropriate for such an event. Feeling the full weight of loss, crying, and losing interest in the outside world is an important part of the process of dying. This depression makes others feel very uncomfortable and family members may try to console their loved one.
Acceptance involves learning how to carry on and to incorporate this aspect of the life span into daily existence. Reaching acceptance does not in any way imply that people who are dying are happy about it or content with it. It means that they are facing it and continuing to make
arrangements and to say what they wish to say to others. Some terminally ill people find that they live life more fully than ever before after they come to this stage.
We no longer think that there is a “right way” to experience grief and loss. People move through a variety of stages with different frequency and in different ways. The theories that have been developed to help explain and understand this complex process have shifted over time to
encompass a wider variety of situations, as well as to present implications for helping and supporting the individual(s) who are going through it. The following strategies have been identified as effective in the support of healthy grieving.
• Talk about the death. This will help the surviving individuals understand what happened and remember the deceased in a positive way. When coping with death, it can be easy to get wrapped up in denial, which can lead to isolation and lack of a solid support system.
• Accept the multitude of feelings. The death of a loved one can, and almost always does, trigger numerous emotions. It is normal for sadness, frustration, and in some cases exhaustion to be experienced.
• Take care of yourself and your family. Remembering to keep one’s own health and the health of their family a priority can help with moving through each day effectively. Making a conscious effort to eat well, exercise regularly, and obtain adequate rest is
important.
• Reach out and help others dealing with the loss. It has long been recognized that helping others can enhance one’s own mood and general mental state. Helping others as they cope with the loss can have this effect, as can sharing stories of the deceased.
• Remember and celebrate the lives of your loved ones. This can be a great way to honor the relationship that was once had with the deceased. Possibilities can include donating to a charity that the deceased supported, framing photos of fun experiences with the deceased, planting a tree or garden in memory of the deceased, or anything else that feels right for the particular situation.
Psychology of Aging, PSY 180, January 2021
Hostos Community College, guides.hostos.cuny.edu
Grief is not depression. Grief and bereavement are not disorders or illnesses. Like stress, grief is a part of everyone’s life and a perfectly normal response to significant loss. Individual experiences of intensity and duration of grief are different. There is no “right” way to grieve.
Grief is a natural response and may come with a loss of any kind.
Kübler-Ross’ Stages of Loss
Kübler-Ross (1965) described five stages of loss experienced by someone who faces the news of their impending death (based on her work and interviews with terminally ill patients). These “stages” are not really stages that a person goes through in order or only once; nor are they stages that occur with the same intensity. Indeed, the process of death is influenced by a person’s life experiences, the timing of their death in relation to life events, the predictability of their death based on health or illness, their belief system, and their assessment of the quality of their own life.
Denial is often the first reaction to overwhelming, unimaginable news. Denial, or disbelief or shock, protects us by allowing such news to enter slowly and to give us time to come to grips with what is taking place.
Anger also provides us with protection in that being angry energizes us to fight against something and gives structure to a situation that may be thrusting us into the unknown. It is much easier to be angry than to be sad or in pain or depressed. It helps us to temporarily believe that
we have a sense of control over our future and to feel that we have at least expressed our rage about how unfair life can be. Anger can be focused on a person, a health care provider, at God, or at the world in general. And it can be expressed over issues that have nothing to do with our death; consequently, being in this stage of loss is not always obvious.
Bargaining involves trying to think of what could be done to turn the situation around. Living better, devoting self to a cause, being a better friend, parent, or spouse, are all agreements one might willingly commit to if doing so would lengthen life. Asking to just live long enough to
witness a family event or finish a task are examples of bargaining.
Depression is sadness and sadness is appropriate for such an event. Feeling the full weight of loss, crying, and losing interest in the outside world is an important part of the process of dying. This depression makes others feel very uncomfortable and family members may try to console their loved one.
Acceptance involves learning how to carry on and to incorporate this aspect of the life span into daily existence. Reaching acceptance does not in any way imply that people who are dying are happy about it or content with it. It means that they are facing it and continuing to make
arrangements and to say what they wish to say to others. Some terminally ill people find that they live life more fully than ever before after they come to this stage.
We no longer think that there is a “right way” to experience grief and loss. People move through a variety of stages with different frequency and in different ways. The theories that have been developed to help explain and understand this complex process have shifted over time to
encompass a wider variety of situations, as well as to present implications for helping and supporting the individual(s) who are going through it. The following strategies have been identified as effective in the support of healthy grieving.
• Talk about the death. This will help the surviving individuals understand what happened and remember the deceased in a positive way. When coping with death, it can be easy to get wrapped up in denial, which can lead to isolation and lack of a solid support system.
• Accept the multitude of feelings. The death of a loved one can, and almost always does, trigger numerous emotions. It is normal for sadness, frustration, and in some cases exhaustion to be experienced.
• Take care of yourself and your family. Remembering to keep one’s own health and the health of their family a priority can help with moving through each day effectively. Making a conscious effort to eat well, exercise regularly, and obtain adequate rest is
important.
• Reach out and help others dealing with the loss. It has long been recognized that helping others can enhance one’s own mood and general mental state. Helping others as they cope with the loss can have this effect, as can sharing stories of the deceased.
• Remember and celebrate the lives of your loved ones. This can be a great way to honor the relationship that was once had with the deceased. Possibilities can include donating to a charity that the deceased supported, framing photos of fun experiences with the deceased, planting a tree or garden in memory of the deceased, or anything else that feels right for the particular situation.
Thursday, May 13
We started something last week that I'd like to continue - talking about successful aging and focusing on what we can control (unlike that which we can't - genetics). After Rick and I searched for a good article and kept coming up with theoretical abstracts and other raw data about the gut brain and the like, I stumbled onto the article below, Want to be a Happier Widow? The author, Kim Murray, who runs a website dedicated to helping widows, wrote about happiness and the steps that one can take in grief to help oneself.
The article could be applied to widowers too and, frankly, anyone going through grief. As such, Thursday's discussion is open to anyone who would like to listen and talk about happiness and grief; in particular, losing a spouse.
Want to be a Happier Widow?
Kim Murray, Widow411.com
It’s almost like the two components, widow and happy, are incompatible. It’s hard to believe one can exist with the other. So, if I told you there is a way to be a happier widow, would you believe me? Because, I’m going to tell you how. You can do with the information as you wish and if you want to continue believing that being a widow and being happy are mutually exclusive, I won’t stop you. But when you’re ready to learn how to be happy when you’re widowed, read on. It requires agreement with some basic life principles. And it also requires that you do the work to believe in your right to be happy. If you want to be a happier and less stressed widow, you can make peace with the following basic
life principles to simplify your life, too.
THE ONLY PERSON WHO CAN MAKE YOU HAPPY IS YOU
You get to decide what you want your life to look like. Even though death has irrevocably changed your life, you get to decide how that change affects your view of happiness. You see, to be a happier widow, you must choose to be a happier widow. I’m not just saying you can twinkle your nose like Samantha on Bewitched and happiness instantly appears. It’s not like that. But what I am saying is that you can choose
to believe that happiness is an option for you. If you don’t believe it, you can’t achieve it, right? So what does it take to believe that happiness is within your reach?
Stop saying “never.” Saying you’ll “never” get over your loss gives your brain the go-ahead to keep showing you how that’s true. Your brain likes to compile data to prove you right. But what happens when you stop saying never? If you say, “I know feeling better takes time,” or “I’m willing to consider a life beyond my loss” your brain will compile data to prove you right in that way too. Either way, your brain will find evidence for your thoughts. Why not make them good thoughts?
Look inside for answers. Nothing outside of you can make you happy. No friend, job, boyfriend, windfall, pill or “thing” can give you what you crave because your thoughts determine your actions and your thoughts are inside you. If you want to change the outcome of any situation, you need to change the way you see it first.
Happiness looks different to everyone. Your version of happiness will differ from mine. That’s why it’s so important to focus on your wants and needs and no one else’s. Please keep in mind that you don’t need to strive for happy thoughts all day every day. I mean, that’s just nuts. No one is happy all the time. You get to feel sad and mad and whatever else you want to feel without sacrificing your happy feelings. They can, and should, co-exist.
Help others. It seems counterintuitive to think about helping others during your own grief, but that’s precisely when it’s the most beneficial. It’s easy to fall into despair when you think about how different your life is from what you expected it to be. And no one really understands the stress of losing a spouse and all the associated secondary losses. So, naturally, your first instinct isn’t to help others when you feel like you need more help yourself. What if the act of giving back helped you as much as someone else? Scientists have widely studied the benefits of helping others, and the data is clear. Helping others helps us in ways we never even thought of such as:
Just put on your volunteer hat and learn how to be a happier widow by watching firsthand how your actions are changing the world.
Make health a priority. How do you feel when you skip meals or sleep all day or don’t work out for days on end? Probably not great. Grief is hard enough on a good day, but when you don’t make your health a priority, you give grief more opportunities to derail you.
I know all the excuses because I’ve used them. I’m too tired. I don’t have time. It’s Tuesday. No one cares anyway. But it’s time to stop making excuses and start taking better care of you.
One surefire way to be a happier widow is to put your mental and physical health front and center. You know excuses will pop up because you’re human and we humans have an extraordinary way of avoiding uncomfortable things. But ironically, the things we think are uncomfortable are the very things that end up making us feel better after we’ve done it. Weird, huh?
So, plan some healthy meals. You’ll feel better and your body will thank you when you’ve made some Broccoli Soup with Cheddar Croutons or some Blueberry Baked Oatmeal. There’s no shortage of meal planning YouTube videos or health and wellness Instagram accounts to help you out. Just search for your jam like, “meals for one” or “vegan dinner planning” or “healthy desserts.”
And then decide on an exercise regimen you can live with. If something is too hard or overwhelming, you won’t stick with it, so choose something sustainable. If you have a limited amount of time, start with a 7-minute workout and increase from there.
When I got back into my exercise regimen, I tried HIIT classes, streaming workout videos, and dance classes, but nothing works as well for me as walking. Instead of trying to find the hardest, fastest, sweatiest workout, I just lace up my shoes and go for a walk. Walking is simple, free and I’ve found for me, being outside is a great stress-reliever.
Once you start exercising and eating well, your body will thank you. You’ll have more energy. Maybe even be more focused. Possibly more well-rested. I guess what I’m trying to say is there are no downsides to taking care of your health. Only plenty of advantages.
If you want to be a happier widow, throw the excuses out the window and start taking better care of your health.
Settle in with uncertainty. Life has a funny way of changing our plans when we least expect it. I’m sure your life’s plan, like mine, included many more years of togetherness with your spouse. But he’s gone, and now you’re faced with an uncertain future and lots of questions. What’s a widow to do: Accept uncertainty as part of your growth.
I’m a planner and a control freak, so settling in with uncertainty has been a real struggle for me. But, I’m working on it. And I’m here to tell you in no uncertain terms, my anxiety and worry diminishes when I trust the process over which I have no control. The good news is you’re already settling in with uncertainty because you don’t have any other choice. Your life was upended and now nothing is certain.
You don’t have everything figured out, and that’s OK. No one said you need to know how to be a widow.
No one knows how to be a widow until they become a widow. It’s a constant process of learning,
evaluating, and accepting the ambiguity that comes from being human.
Uncertainty exists in everyone’s lives. Not just widows. Even before your spouse died, what you thought was clear and safe never was. So now it’s time to cut yourself some slack and forget about controlling the universe. You never did anyway.
One foolproof way to be a happier widow is to focus on what you can control (your money, your health, your core group) and let go of what you can’t. Settling in with uncertainty allows you to let go of expectations of how things should be and embrace what is. No matter how pissed off you are.
Know your worth. If you ask your best friend if you’re worthy, she’d say, “hell yeah!” If you asked your parents or siblings or next-door neighbor they’d say, “well, that’s a silly question. Of course, you’re worthy!” But what happens when you ask yourself?
Now that you’re living solo and figuring out how to deal with this widow gig that you never saw coming, it’s more imperative than ever that you believe in your worth. Why? Why does it matter if you think you’re worthy?
Because that will dictate every single decision you make going forward. Just because you’re a widow doesn’t mean you’re broken, or damaged goods, or unable to care for yourself. It doesn’t mean you’re relegated to a life of misery, financial ruin or failure. It just means you’re living a life without your spouse. When you focus on those “damaged” and “broken” aspects, you decide everything from a place of scarcity or lack. If you don’t believe in your worth, your decision-making focuses on what can go wrong or why you’re not deserving.
On the other hand, when you believe you’re worthy of whatever you choose, your decision-making focuses on honoring your needs and creating valuable outcomes.
Nothing outside of you can make you happy. Because your thoughts determine your actions and your thoughts are inside you. If you want to change the outcome of any situation, you need to change the way you see it first.
And this bears repeating: I’m not advocating that you are a happy, 100% positive Pollyanna ALL THE FREAKING TIME. Not only is that unrealistic, it’s annoying because it’s not genuine. At all. I’m just saying you get to feel all the feelings that come with being human. Including happiness.
Kimberlee Murray is a widow on a quest to make widowhood suck a little less. Offering practical tips and resources for widows managing grief and loss at www.widow411.com
The article could be applied to widowers too and, frankly, anyone going through grief. As such, Thursday's discussion is open to anyone who would like to listen and talk about happiness and grief; in particular, losing a spouse.
Want to be a Happier Widow?
Kim Murray, Widow411.com
It’s almost like the two components, widow and happy, are incompatible. It’s hard to believe one can exist with the other. So, if I told you there is a way to be a happier widow, would you believe me? Because, I’m going to tell you how. You can do with the information as you wish and if you want to continue believing that being a widow and being happy are mutually exclusive, I won’t stop you. But when you’re ready to learn how to be happy when you’re widowed, read on. It requires agreement with some basic life principles. And it also requires that you do the work to believe in your right to be happy. If you want to be a happier and less stressed widow, you can make peace with the following basic
life principles to simplify your life, too.
THE ONLY PERSON WHO CAN MAKE YOU HAPPY IS YOU
You get to decide what you want your life to look like. Even though death has irrevocably changed your life, you get to decide how that change affects your view of happiness. You see, to be a happier widow, you must choose to be a happier widow. I’m not just saying you can twinkle your nose like Samantha on Bewitched and happiness instantly appears. It’s not like that. But what I am saying is that you can choose
to believe that happiness is an option for you. If you don’t believe it, you can’t achieve it, right? So what does it take to believe that happiness is within your reach?
Stop saying “never.” Saying you’ll “never” get over your loss gives your brain the go-ahead to keep showing you how that’s true. Your brain likes to compile data to prove you right. But what happens when you stop saying never? If you say, “I know feeling better takes time,” or “I’m willing to consider a life beyond my loss” your brain will compile data to prove you right in that way too. Either way, your brain will find evidence for your thoughts. Why not make them good thoughts?
Look inside for answers. Nothing outside of you can make you happy. No friend, job, boyfriend, windfall, pill or “thing” can give you what you crave because your thoughts determine your actions and your thoughts are inside you. If you want to change the outcome of any situation, you need to change the way you see it first.
Happiness looks different to everyone. Your version of happiness will differ from mine. That’s why it’s so important to focus on your wants and needs and no one else’s. Please keep in mind that you don’t need to strive for happy thoughts all day every day. I mean, that’s just nuts. No one is happy all the time. You get to feel sad and mad and whatever else you want to feel without sacrificing your happy feelings. They can, and should, co-exist.
Help others. It seems counterintuitive to think about helping others during your own grief, but that’s precisely when it’s the most beneficial. It’s easy to fall into despair when you think about how different your life is from what you expected it to be. And no one really understands the stress of losing a spouse and all the associated secondary losses. So, naturally, your first instinct isn’t to help others when you feel like you need more help yourself. What if the act of giving back helped you as much as someone else? Scientists have widely studied the benefits of helping others, and the data is clear. Helping others helps us in ways we never even thought of such as:
- Reducing the risk of hypertension
- Giving you a sense of purpose
- Preventing dementia
- Counteracting the effects of stress, anxiety and anger
Just put on your volunteer hat and learn how to be a happier widow by watching firsthand how your actions are changing the world.
Make health a priority. How do you feel when you skip meals or sleep all day or don’t work out for days on end? Probably not great. Grief is hard enough on a good day, but when you don’t make your health a priority, you give grief more opportunities to derail you.
I know all the excuses because I’ve used them. I’m too tired. I don’t have time. It’s Tuesday. No one cares anyway. But it’s time to stop making excuses and start taking better care of you.
One surefire way to be a happier widow is to put your mental and physical health front and center. You know excuses will pop up because you’re human and we humans have an extraordinary way of avoiding uncomfortable things. But ironically, the things we think are uncomfortable are the very things that end up making us feel better after we’ve done it. Weird, huh?
So, plan some healthy meals. You’ll feel better and your body will thank you when you’ve made some Broccoli Soup with Cheddar Croutons or some Blueberry Baked Oatmeal. There’s no shortage of meal planning YouTube videos or health and wellness Instagram accounts to help you out. Just search for your jam like, “meals for one” or “vegan dinner planning” or “healthy desserts.”
And then decide on an exercise regimen you can live with. If something is too hard or overwhelming, you won’t stick with it, so choose something sustainable. If you have a limited amount of time, start with a 7-minute workout and increase from there.
When I got back into my exercise regimen, I tried HIIT classes, streaming workout videos, and dance classes, but nothing works as well for me as walking. Instead of trying to find the hardest, fastest, sweatiest workout, I just lace up my shoes and go for a walk. Walking is simple, free and I’ve found for me, being outside is a great stress-reliever.
Once you start exercising and eating well, your body will thank you. You’ll have more energy. Maybe even be more focused. Possibly more well-rested. I guess what I’m trying to say is there are no downsides to taking care of your health. Only plenty of advantages.
If you want to be a happier widow, throw the excuses out the window and start taking better care of your health.
Settle in with uncertainty. Life has a funny way of changing our plans when we least expect it. I’m sure your life’s plan, like mine, included many more years of togetherness with your spouse. But he’s gone, and now you’re faced with an uncertain future and lots of questions. What’s a widow to do: Accept uncertainty as part of your growth.
I’m a planner and a control freak, so settling in with uncertainty has been a real struggle for me. But, I’m working on it. And I’m here to tell you in no uncertain terms, my anxiety and worry diminishes when I trust the process over which I have no control. The good news is you’re already settling in with uncertainty because you don’t have any other choice. Your life was upended and now nothing is certain.
You don’t have everything figured out, and that’s OK. No one said you need to know how to be a widow.
No one knows how to be a widow until they become a widow. It’s a constant process of learning,
evaluating, and accepting the ambiguity that comes from being human.
Uncertainty exists in everyone’s lives. Not just widows. Even before your spouse died, what you thought was clear and safe never was. So now it’s time to cut yourself some slack and forget about controlling the universe. You never did anyway.
One foolproof way to be a happier widow is to focus on what you can control (your money, your health, your core group) and let go of what you can’t. Settling in with uncertainty allows you to let go of expectations of how things should be and embrace what is. No matter how pissed off you are.
Know your worth. If you ask your best friend if you’re worthy, she’d say, “hell yeah!” If you asked your parents or siblings or next-door neighbor they’d say, “well, that’s a silly question. Of course, you’re worthy!” But what happens when you ask yourself?
Now that you’re living solo and figuring out how to deal with this widow gig that you never saw coming, it’s more imperative than ever that you believe in your worth. Why? Why does it matter if you think you’re worthy?
Because that will dictate every single decision you make going forward. Just because you’re a widow doesn’t mean you’re broken, or damaged goods, or unable to care for yourself. It doesn’t mean you’re relegated to a life of misery, financial ruin or failure. It just means you’re living a life without your spouse. When you focus on those “damaged” and “broken” aspects, you decide everything from a place of scarcity or lack. If you don’t believe in your worth, your decision-making focuses on what can go wrong or why you’re not deserving.
On the other hand, when you believe you’re worthy of whatever you choose, your decision-making focuses on honoring your needs and creating valuable outcomes.
- So how do you know or understand your worth?
- Practice self-care
- Commit to yourself first before committing to others
- Say no when something doesn’t serve you
- Stand up for yourself
- Love yourself no matter what
Nothing outside of you can make you happy. Because your thoughts determine your actions and your thoughts are inside you. If you want to change the outcome of any situation, you need to change the way you see it first.
And this bears repeating: I’m not advocating that you are a happy, 100% positive Pollyanna ALL THE FREAKING TIME. Not only is that unrealistic, it’s annoying because it’s not genuine. At all. I’m just saying you get to feel all the feelings that come with being human. Including happiness.
Kimberlee Murray is a widow on a quest to make widowhood suck a little less. Offering practical tips and resources for widows managing grief and loss at www.widow411.com
Thursday, May 6
In the 1990's, I was a big fan of the NBA - that is until the lockout in 1998 that seemed to take the wind out of the sails of the entire organization. And then my Seattle Sonics moved... but that's an entirely different story.
During the '90's, Dennis Rodman of the famed Chicago Bulls started acting out - first with his hair, then piercings, tattoos and, well then his whole demeanor. At one point, he said, "I'm no role model" to which the league commissioner responded, "Oh yes you are; whether you think you are or not, you Dennis, are a role model."
The article for this coming week is one that asks about role models as we age. Someone influenced you on how you view aging - either good or bad or inbetween. The article asserts that as everyone ages, we too may be role models for others; even if we, like Dennis Rodman, think otherwise.
I look forward to talking with you about it.
- Dave
Who Is Your Successful Aging Role Model?
Daniela S. Jopp, Seojung Jung, Amanda Damarin, Sheena Mirpuri, Dario Spini
Institute of Psychology, University of Lausanne, Switzerland November, 2016
With increases in life expectancy, questions about what it means to age successfully and how to do so are vital for both individuals and societies. However, individuals struggle to develop positive perspectives on aging, given the negative views that dominate modern Western
societies. These views are shaped by aging stereotypes or culturally shared beliefs about older adults in general. The detrimental effects of such stereotypes and associated self-referent beliefs range from poorer cognitive performance and emotional disturbance to cardiovascular stress and premature death.
The apparent self-fulfilling prophecy in which negative attitudes undermine the aging process itself prompts questions about how individuals might adopt positive views on aging. However, compared to abundant research on effects of aging stereotypes, few studies address the sources of these views. Investigating how they develop has theoretical and practical value. As people’s views of successful aging are much more elaborate than broad Journals of Gerontology: Social Sciences stereotypes suggest — including basic resources such as health but also psychological factors such as wellbeing and coping skills — identifying their sources will enrich theories of successful aging. From a practical perspective, such studies may suggest interventions to alter views on aging, which could enhance individuals’ aging processes. This article helps close the gap by investigating one potential influence on individuals’ views on aging: role models of successful aging.
Interest in role models of successful aging has been surprisingly limited, given that positive role models could promote critical questioning of negative aging stereotypes. Role models represent exemplary persons to identify with and learn from, providing individuals with motivation and pathways to success. The role model concept has two main sources: theories of role identification and social learning theory.
According to the former, individuals identify with others who seem to have similar motives or features and hold socially attractive positions or have attained desirable goals; this identification helps individuals define their self-concept and identity. According to social learning theory,
observation and imitation of others are central learning mechanisms that inspire and enable individuals to acquire new behaviors and skills and heighten their sense of self-efficacy.
The importance of role models has been acknowledged in various contexts, including educational and occupational settings, and much research has focused on adolescents and young adults. Here, findings suggest that role models positively influence academic motivation and
performance, career choice and confidence, and health outcomes. Little attention has been paid to how role models change across the life course. To understand this, it is useful to draw on the concept of possible selves, which represent positive (hoped-for) and negative (feared) images of one’s future self that motivate current behavior and guide individual development. Based on this background, Gibson (2004) has proposed that role models are active cognitive constructions reflecting changing needs and goals. Also, instead of selecting a “perfect” model, individuals tend to identify multiple role models (Ibarra, 1999) and combine their attributes to create composite visions of ideal “selves” which are adapted over time (Gibson, 2004). Conceptualizing role models as cognitive constructions reflecting needs and goals is particularly useful for understanding how role models differ with age. For example, Lockwood, Chasteen, and Wong (2005) found that younger adults felt motivated to change their health behavior by positive role models, whereas older adults were motivated by both positive and negative role models. This suggests that in advanced age, health promotion orientations are joined by prevention orientations. Examining work role models, Gibson (2003) found that early-career employees were inspired by global “whole package” role models, whereas more established employees chose role models for particular attributes. This suggests that as individuals gain more differentiated concepts of their roles, they seek more precise motivations and thus construct more detailed role models. That detailed role models yield more nuanced guidance and better outcomes is supported by research on the influence of possible selves. For instance, older adults with hoped-for selves (e.g., regarding health and social relationships) were more likely to perform goal-related activities, to make progress on goals, and to have enhanced affect and survival.
These findings suggest that investigating role models in the context of social gerontology may offer new insights into how individuals develop positive concepts and strategies regarding aging. Drawing on the works above and additional papers on the functions of role models in other
domains, we suggest that role models of successful aging may show individuals that successful aging is possible and what it could look like, providing inspiration and motivation. Identification with successful aging role models could lead to acknowledging more positive aspects of aging, which could decrease negative aging views; this in turn could also lead to more positive attitudes toward one’s own aging. Role models could also allow individuals to learn aging-relevant behaviors by observing real-life examples and provide direct communication and support, allowing access to more in-depth insight and concrete advice. In addition, role models may encourage individuals to set and pursue successful aging goals with increased confidence and self-efficacy.
To our knowledge, role models of successful aging have been investigated in just one study to date. As part of qualitative research on older adults’ perceptions of aging, Horton, Baker, Côté, & Deakin (2008) asked 20 individuals aged 60–75 years whether they had role models of
successful aging and about the role models’ characteristics. The finding that most participants did have successful aging role models suggests that at least for older adults, they are salient enough to warrant further investigation. The most common role models were family members,
followed by friends and, more rarely, famous figures; similar to other domains, familiarity seems to guide role model choice. Additionally, older adults’ criteria of successful aging are suggested by participants’ selection of role models who were 10–20 years older than themselves, leading an active and high-quality life. The study provides valuable initial insights into role models of successful aging. However, given its rather small sample, replication in a larger study is needed to further establish role model characteristics. Also, the study focused on older adults, providing no information on whether younger adults have such role models. As stereotypes develop early and are found in all age groups, this may also be true of successful aging role models, though their characteristics may vary with age. Further, Horton and colleagues (2008) focused on characteristics of successful aging role models and do not speak to their usefulness. Thus, the question of whether having successful aging role models is associated with views on aging, as assumed by Levy and Banaji (2004), remains unexamined.
The Present Study
In order to create a basis for the investigation of successful aging role models, the present study examined (a) whether young, middle-aged, and older adults have role models of successful aging; (b) the characteristics of these role models (e.g., family member, age); (c) reasons for
choosing the role models; and (d) associations between role model characteristics, negative general views on aging, and attitudes toward one’s own aging. Based on Horton and colleagues (2008), we expected individuals to have role models of successful aging and that these would be personal contacts, mostly family members. Based on studies in other domains, we tested whether role models varied with participant characteristics, expecting that individuals would choose role models similar to themselves (e.g., same gender).
To better understand the nature and conceptual richness of role models, we analyzed how many reasons for role model choice participants offered, and specific themes. We expected reasons for role model choice to reflect individuals’ successful aging concepts, and that these would include health, activity engagement, social resources, well-being, and psychological aspects, as suggested by lay persons’ perspectives on successful aging. As our prior findings indicated that young, middle-aged, and older individuals’ views on successful aging do not differ strongly, we did not expect age differences in specific reasons. Considering role models as cognitive constructions, we used the number of reasons for role model choice to indicate the elaborateness of the model and the “possible self” it represents. We expected older participants and participants with family role models to mention more reasons due to their in-depth, proximate experience of aging processes. Finally, we examined associations between role model characteristics (e.g., types, number of reasons) and views on aging. Consistent with Levy and Banaji’s (2004) proposal, we expected individuals with role models to have less negative general views on aging and that this would be stronger for personally known role models (e.g., family), as face-to-face interactions reduce prejudice against outgroup members, including the elderly adult. Similarly, based on evidence that considering more information reduces age bias, we expected those who mentioned more reasons for role model choice to have less negative general views on aging. Finally, we tested the mediation hypotheses that family role models would lead to less negative general views on aging and that due to their influence on personal views, these would in turn
result in more positive attitudes toward one’s own aging.
During the '90's, Dennis Rodman of the famed Chicago Bulls started acting out - first with his hair, then piercings, tattoos and, well then his whole demeanor. At one point, he said, "I'm no role model" to which the league commissioner responded, "Oh yes you are; whether you think you are or not, you Dennis, are a role model."
The article for this coming week is one that asks about role models as we age. Someone influenced you on how you view aging - either good or bad or inbetween. The article asserts that as everyone ages, we too may be role models for others; even if we, like Dennis Rodman, think otherwise.
I look forward to talking with you about it.
- Dave
Who Is Your Successful Aging Role Model?
Daniela S. Jopp, Seojung Jung, Amanda Damarin, Sheena Mirpuri, Dario Spini
Institute of Psychology, University of Lausanne, Switzerland November, 2016
With increases in life expectancy, questions about what it means to age successfully and how to do so are vital for both individuals and societies. However, individuals struggle to develop positive perspectives on aging, given the negative views that dominate modern Western
societies. These views are shaped by aging stereotypes or culturally shared beliefs about older adults in general. The detrimental effects of such stereotypes and associated self-referent beliefs range from poorer cognitive performance and emotional disturbance to cardiovascular stress and premature death.
The apparent self-fulfilling prophecy in which negative attitudes undermine the aging process itself prompts questions about how individuals might adopt positive views on aging. However, compared to abundant research on effects of aging stereotypes, few studies address the sources of these views. Investigating how they develop has theoretical and practical value. As people’s views of successful aging are much more elaborate than broad Journals of Gerontology: Social Sciences stereotypes suggest — including basic resources such as health but also psychological factors such as wellbeing and coping skills — identifying their sources will enrich theories of successful aging. From a practical perspective, such studies may suggest interventions to alter views on aging, which could enhance individuals’ aging processes. This article helps close the gap by investigating one potential influence on individuals’ views on aging: role models of successful aging.
Interest in role models of successful aging has been surprisingly limited, given that positive role models could promote critical questioning of negative aging stereotypes. Role models represent exemplary persons to identify with and learn from, providing individuals with motivation and pathways to success. The role model concept has two main sources: theories of role identification and social learning theory.
According to the former, individuals identify with others who seem to have similar motives or features and hold socially attractive positions or have attained desirable goals; this identification helps individuals define their self-concept and identity. According to social learning theory,
observation and imitation of others are central learning mechanisms that inspire and enable individuals to acquire new behaviors and skills and heighten their sense of self-efficacy.
The importance of role models has been acknowledged in various contexts, including educational and occupational settings, and much research has focused on adolescents and young adults. Here, findings suggest that role models positively influence academic motivation and
performance, career choice and confidence, and health outcomes. Little attention has been paid to how role models change across the life course. To understand this, it is useful to draw on the concept of possible selves, which represent positive (hoped-for) and negative (feared) images of one’s future self that motivate current behavior and guide individual development. Based on this background, Gibson (2004) has proposed that role models are active cognitive constructions reflecting changing needs and goals. Also, instead of selecting a “perfect” model, individuals tend to identify multiple role models (Ibarra, 1999) and combine their attributes to create composite visions of ideal “selves” which are adapted over time (Gibson, 2004). Conceptualizing role models as cognitive constructions reflecting needs and goals is particularly useful for understanding how role models differ with age. For example, Lockwood, Chasteen, and Wong (2005) found that younger adults felt motivated to change their health behavior by positive role models, whereas older adults were motivated by both positive and negative role models. This suggests that in advanced age, health promotion orientations are joined by prevention orientations. Examining work role models, Gibson (2003) found that early-career employees were inspired by global “whole package” role models, whereas more established employees chose role models for particular attributes. This suggests that as individuals gain more differentiated concepts of their roles, they seek more precise motivations and thus construct more detailed role models. That detailed role models yield more nuanced guidance and better outcomes is supported by research on the influence of possible selves. For instance, older adults with hoped-for selves (e.g., regarding health and social relationships) were more likely to perform goal-related activities, to make progress on goals, and to have enhanced affect and survival.
These findings suggest that investigating role models in the context of social gerontology may offer new insights into how individuals develop positive concepts and strategies regarding aging. Drawing on the works above and additional papers on the functions of role models in other
domains, we suggest that role models of successful aging may show individuals that successful aging is possible and what it could look like, providing inspiration and motivation. Identification with successful aging role models could lead to acknowledging more positive aspects of aging, which could decrease negative aging views; this in turn could also lead to more positive attitudes toward one’s own aging. Role models could also allow individuals to learn aging-relevant behaviors by observing real-life examples and provide direct communication and support, allowing access to more in-depth insight and concrete advice. In addition, role models may encourage individuals to set and pursue successful aging goals with increased confidence and self-efficacy.
To our knowledge, role models of successful aging have been investigated in just one study to date. As part of qualitative research on older adults’ perceptions of aging, Horton, Baker, Côté, & Deakin (2008) asked 20 individuals aged 60–75 years whether they had role models of
successful aging and about the role models’ characteristics. The finding that most participants did have successful aging role models suggests that at least for older adults, they are salient enough to warrant further investigation. The most common role models were family members,
followed by friends and, more rarely, famous figures; similar to other domains, familiarity seems to guide role model choice. Additionally, older adults’ criteria of successful aging are suggested by participants’ selection of role models who were 10–20 years older than themselves, leading an active and high-quality life. The study provides valuable initial insights into role models of successful aging. However, given its rather small sample, replication in a larger study is needed to further establish role model characteristics. Also, the study focused on older adults, providing no information on whether younger adults have such role models. As stereotypes develop early and are found in all age groups, this may also be true of successful aging role models, though their characteristics may vary with age. Further, Horton and colleagues (2008) focused on characteristics of successful aging role models and do not speak to their usefulness. Thus, the question of whether having successful aging role models is associated with views on aging, as assumed by Levy and Banaji (2004), remains unexamined.
The Present Study
In order to create a basis for the investigation of successful aging role models, the present study examined (a) whether young, middle-aged, and older adults have role models of successful aging; (b) the characteristics of these role models (e.g., family member, age); (c) reasons for
choosing the role models; and (d) associations between role model characteristics, negative general views on aging, and attitudes toward one’s own aging. Based on Horton and colleagues (2008), we expected individuals to have role models of successful aging and that these would be personal contacts, mostly family members. Based on studies in other domains, we tested whether role models varied with participant characteristics, expecting that individuals would choose role models similar to themselves (e.g., same gender).
To better understand the nature and conceptual richness of role models, we analyzed how many reasons for role model choice participants offered, and specific themes. We expected reasons for role model choice to reflect individuals’ successful aging concepts, and that these would include health, activity engagement, social resources, well-being, and psychological aspects, as suggested by lay persons’ perspectives on successful aging. As our prior findings indicated that young, middle-aged, and older individuals’ views on successful aging do not differ strongly, we did not expect age differences in specific reasons. Considering role models as cognitive constructions, we used the number of reasons for role model choice to indicate the elaborateness of the model and the “possible self” it represents. We expected older participants and participants with family role models to mention more reasons due to their in-depth, proximate experience of aging processes. Finally, we examined associations between role model characteristics (e.g., types, number of reasons) and views on aging. Consistent with Levy and Banaji’s (2004) proposal, we expected individuals with role models to have less negative general views on aging and that this would be stronger for personally known role models (e.g., family), as face-to-face interactions reduce prejudice against outgroup members, including the elderly adult. Similarly, based on evidence that considering more information reduces age bias, we expected those who mentioned more reasons for role model choice to have less negative general views on aging. Finally, we tested the mediation hypotheses that family role models would lead to less negative general views on aging and that due to their influence on personal views, these would in turn
result in more positive attitudes toward one’s own aging.
Thursday, April 29
Does happiness simply happen or is it something we need to work toward? Arthur Brooks believes we need to work for it, not wish for it. Here is his latest thought about happiness and our own responsibility for it.
Looking forward to talking with you about it.
Blessings to you this week,
- Dave
Don’t Wish for Happiness. Work for It.
Arthur Brooks, The Atlantic, 4.22.21
IN HIS 1851 WORK American Notebooks, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, “Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained.” This is basically a restatement of the Stoic philosophers’ “paradox of happiness”: To attain happiness, we must not try to attain it.
A number of scholars have set out to test this claim. For example, researchers writing in the journal Emotion in 2011 found that valuing happiness was associated with lower moods, less well-being, and more depressive symptoms under conditions of low life stress. At first, this would seem to support the happiness paradox—that thinking about it makes it harder to get. But there are alternative explanations. For example, unhappy people might say they “value happiness” more than those who already possess it, just as hungry people value
food more than those who are full.
More to the point, wishing you were happier does not mean that you are working to improve your happiness. Think of your friend who complains about her job every day but never tries to find a new one. No doubt she wishes she were happier—but for whatever reason, she doesn’t do the work to improve her circumstances. This is not evidence that she can’t become happier, or that her wishes are bringing her
down.
In truth, happiness requires effort, not just desire. Focusing on your dissatisfaction and wishing things were different in your life is a recipe for unhappiness if you don’t take action to put yourself on a better path. But if you make an effort to understand human happiness, formulate a plan to apply what you learn to your life, execute on it, and share what you learn with others, happiness will almost surely follow.
WHEN IT COMES TO happiness and unhappiness, people often confuse rumination with self-awareness. Psychologists define the former as “recursive self-focused thinking.” It is to dwell on something about yourself, without recourse to new knowledge. Many studies show that rumination can exacerbate bad emotions and deepen depression, because it reinforces your negative emotional status quo.
In contrast, self-awareness—to be attentive to our own thinking processes—leads to new knowledge and breakthroughs. One recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that self-awareness allows us to recognize emotional cues and distractions and to redirect our minds in productive ways. In essence, studying your own mind and pondering ways to improve your happiness takes inchoate anxieties and mental meandering and transforms them into real plans for life improvement.
Rumination is to be stuck; self-reflection is to seek to be unstuck. The trick, of course, is telling the difference. Say you have just experienced a breakup. If you go over the painful circumstances again and again, like watching a looped video for hours and days, this is rumination. To break out of the cycle and begin the process of self-reflection, you’d have to follow the painful memory with insightful questions. For example: “Is this a recurring pattern in my life? If so, why?” “If I could do it over again, what would I do differently?” “What can I read to help inform me more about what I have just experienced and use it constructively?”
Self-reflection moves feelings of unhappiness from our reactive brains to our executive brains, where we can manage them through concrete action. The action itself is crucial. There is an old joke about a man who asks God every day to let him win the lottery. After many years of this prayer, he finally gets an answer from heaven: “Do me a favor,” says God. “Buy a ticket.” If you want happiness, reflecting on why you don’t have it and seeking information on how to attain it is a good start. But if you don’t use that information, you’re not buying a ticket.
Easier said than done, I realize. When we are happy, we are primed for action; unhappiness often makes us want to cocoon. The way to fight this is to do the opposite of what you want to do: When you’re unhappy, don’t curl up and watch a sad movie. Exercise, call a friend in need, and read up on happiness instead. You will be reprogrammed for action.
ONCE YOU’VE REFLECTED (not ruminated), learned, taken action, and reaped the happy rewards, it’s time to make sure the benefits are not temporary—that you don’t fall back into simply wishing. The key is sharing your new knowledge with other people.
Teaching arithmetic problems to others has been shown to improve people’s ability to solve them, and in my experience, the same is true for the study of happiness: Sharing knowledge cements it in your own mind. One of the most important assignments I give my graduate students is for them to talk about the science and art of happiness at every party they go to. This ensures that they have the ideas clear enough in their heads to explain them to others. (It also makes them more popular.)
Further, when we share knowledge about how to become happier, we persuade ourselves every bit as much as we do others. It is a well-known phenomenon in psychology that asking people to argue in favor of something can be a great way to get them to believe it. Sharing the secrets to happiness will also make you happier, because doing so is an act of love. And as we have all learned, love is generative: The more you give it, the more of it you get.
I tremble at the thought of contradicting Hawthorne and the Stoics. But it is not true that pursuing happiness must lead to a “wild-goose chase,” or that thinking about happiness makes it more elusive. Like everything else in life that is worthwhile, pursuing happiness requires intellectual energy and real effort. You simply have to do the work. The good news is that the work will be joyful, and the results quite wonderful.
ARTHUR C. BROOKS is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, the William Henry Bloomberg professor of the practice of public leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, a professor of management practice at the Harvard Business School, and host of the podcast The Art of Happiness With Arthur Brooks
Looking forward to talking with you about it.
Blessings to you this week,
- Dave
Don’t Wish for Happiness. Work for It.
Arthur Brooks, The Atlantic, 4.22.21
IN HIS 1851 WORK American Notebooks, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, “Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained.” This is basically a restatement of the Stoic philosophers’ “paradox of happiness”: To attain happiness, we must not try to attain it.
A number of scholars have set out to test this claim. For example, researchers writing in the journal Emotion in 2011 found that valuing happiness was associated with lower moods, less well-being, and more depressive symptoms under conditions of low life stress. At first, this would seem to support the happiness paradox—that thinking about it makes it harder to get. But there are alternative explanations. For example, unhappy people might say they “value happiness” more than those who already possess it, just as hungry people value
food more than those who are full.
More to the point, wishing you were happier does not mean that you are working to improve your happiness. Think of your friend who complains about her job every day but never tries to find a new one. No doubt she wishes she were happier—but for whatever reason, she doesn’t do the work to improve her circumstances. This is not evidence that she can’t become happier, or that her wishes are bringing her
down.
In truth, happiness requires effort, not just desire. Focusing on your dissatisfaction and wishing things were different in your life is a recipe for unhappiness if you don’t take action to put yourself on a better path. But if you make an effort to understand human happiness, formulate a plan to apply what you learn to your life, execute on it, and share what you learn with others, happiness will almost surely follow.
WHEN IT COMES TO happiness and unhappiness, people often confuse rumination with self-awareness. Psychologists define the former as “recursive self-focused thinking.” It is to dwell on something about yourself, without recourse to new knowledge. Many studies show that rumination can exacerbate bad emotions and deepen depression, because it reinforces your negative emotional status quo.
In contrast, self-awareness—to be attentive to our own thinking processes—leads to new knowledge and breakthroughs. One recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that self-awareness allows us to recognize emotional cues and distractions and to redirect our minds in productive ways. In essence, studying your own mind and pondering ways to improve your happiness takes inchoate anxieties and mental meandering and transforms them into real plans for life improvement.
Rumination is to be stuck; self-reflection is to seek to be unstuck. The trick, of course, is telling the difference. Say you have just experienced a breakup. If you go over the painful circumstances again and again, like watching a looped video for hours and days, this is rumination. To break out of the cycle and begin the process of self-reflection, you’d have to follow the painful memory with insightful questions. For example: “Is this a recurring pattern in my life? If so, why?” “If I could do it over again, what would I do differently?” “What can I read to help inform me more about what I have just experienced and use it constructively?”
Self-reflection moves feelings of unhappiness from our reactive brains to our executive brains, where we can manage them through concrete action. The action itself is crucial. There is an old joke about a man who asks God every day to let him win the lottery. After many years of this prayer, he finally gets an answer from heaven: “Do me a favor,” says God. “Buy a ticket.” If you want happiness, reflecting on why you don’t have it and seeking information on how to attain it is a good start. But if you don’t use that information, you’re not buying a ticket.
Easier said than done, I realize. When we are happy, we are primed for action; unhappiness often makes us want to cocoon. The way to fight this is to do the opposite of what you want to do: When you’re unhappy, don’t curl up and watch a sad movie. Exercise, call a friend in need, and read up on happiness instead. You will be reprogrammed for action.
ONCE YOU’VE REFLECTED (not ruminated), learned, taken action, and reaped the happy rewards, it’s time to make sure the benefits are not temporary—that you don’t fall back into simply wishing. The key is sharing your new knowledge with other people.
Teaching arithmetic problems to others has been shown to improve people’s ability to solve them, and in my experience, the same is true for the study of happiness: Sharing knowledge cements it in your own mind. One of the most important assignments I give my graduate students is for them to talk about the science and art of happiness at every party they go to. This ensures that they have the ideas clear enough in their heads to explain them to others. (It also makes them more popular.)
Further, when we share knowledge about how to become happier, we persuade ourselves every bit as much as we do others. It is a well-known phenomenon in psychology that asking people to argue in favor of something can be a great way to get them to believe it. Sharing the secrets to happiness will also make you happier, because doing so is an act of love. And as we have all learned, love is generative: The more you give it, the more of it you get.
I tremble at the thought of contradicting Hawthorne and the Stoics. But it is not true that pursuing happiness must lead to a “wild-goose chase,” or that thinking about happiness makes it more elusive. Like everything else in life that is worthwhile, pursuing happiness requires intellectual energy and real effort. You simply have to do the work. The good news is that the work will be joyful, and the results quite wonderful.
ARTHUR C. BROOKS is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, the William Henry Bloomberg professor of the practice of public leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, a professor of management practice at the Harvard Business School, and host of the podcast The Art of Happiness With Arthur Brooks
Thursday, April 22
There were two police cars parked in front of Temple Beth-Israel on Good Friday. Historically speaking, Good Friday is one of the days of the year where violence and/or property damage is done against Jewish centers or Jewish people. ... thus two patrol cars.
Mix that situation in with the first lesson on Sunday, April 25th, which has been used for centuries as a reason to due violence to people of the Jewish faith, and I'm troubled.
For this week, I'd like us to read this article, Anti-Semitism 101, and the lesson for April 25th - Acts 4:5-12. As Rector, I have an obligation to call this out. We are called to love our neighbors. I am struggling with having this reading from Acts. Peter who is recorded with having said those words, self-identifies as Jewish. Nevertheless, it has been used, out of context, to do violence. So, what are we to do? That is what I'd like us to talk about.
Blessings to you this week,
- Dave
Anti-Semitism 101
What you need to know about the world's oldest hatred.
My Jewish Learning, April 2021
Anti-Semitism is the term used to refer to prejudice or discrimination directed against Jews. The term was coined in the 19th century and the phenomenon itself reached its apex in the Nazi era, when racially based hatred of Jews, rooted in dark conspiracies about Jewish power, culminated in the murder of six million European Jews. But many believe the roots of anti-Semitism go back to the dawn of Christianity and the charge that Jews were responsible for the killing of Jesus.
In contemporary times, overt expressions of anti-Semitism are not widely tolerated in Western countries. However, classical anti-Semitic stereotypes about Jews persist and occasionally find expression in public discourse. Anti-Jewish violence and acts of vandalism and intimidation remain a global problem, with the number of reported anti-Semitic incidents in the United States and Europe spiking in recent years, according to a number of studies.
Anti-Jewish violence also tends to increase during times of unrest in the Middle East, leading some to believe the nature of anti-Semitism is morphing into hatred of Israel, a development that has been called the “new anti-Semitism.” In this view, excessive criticism of Israel or
challenging its right to exist crosses the line from legitimate criticism into anti-Jewish bigotry. However, others say that opposing Israeli policies or even challenging Israel’s right to exist are legitimate viewpoints and do not necessarily imply hatred of Jews.
Anti-Semitism is sometimes called the world’s oldest hatred. The term itself is commonly attributed to Wilhelm Marr, a 19th-century German journalist who believed that Jews were racially distinct from Germans and could never be assimilated into German culture. Hatred of Jews, however, is much older, dating by some accounts to the early Christian era and the belief that Jews were collectively guilty of killing Jesus — a view that remained Catholic doctrine until 1965. For centuries, anti-Jewish ideas found their way into the writings of some of history’s most
prominent and oft-quoted Christian thinkers, among them Saint Augustine, Martin Luther and Thomas Aquinas.
In Europe during the Middle Ages, edicts barred Jews from citizenship, owning land, marrying Christians, serving in government and joining various professional guilds. A number of stereotypes about Jews emerged in this period, including the myth that Jews have horns and that
they are greedy and money-grubbing, a belief given expression by Shakespeare in the character of Shylock from “The Merchant of Venice.” The myth that Jews engage in ritual murder led to blood libel, the claim that Jews use the blood of Christian children for the making of Passover matzah.
Anti-Jewish stereotypes were often used a pretext for collective punishment of Jews. During the Crusader period, Christian armies en route to liberate the Holy Land from Muslim control swept through Jewish communities, raping and massacring along the way. Beginning in the 13th
century European Jews were forced to convert to Christianity or were expelled from a number of countries, most famously Spain in 1492, uprooting a long established and highly accomplished Jewish community. The belief that Jews were responsible for the Black Death in the 14th century led to the violent annihilation of countless Jewish communities throughout Europe. Jews were also commonly scapegoated for problems as varied as pandemics and crop failures. Anti-Jewish pogroms, or riots, occurred periodically in Europe throughout the late Middle Ages and into the modern period.
Even after the emancipation of Europe’s Jews beginning in the late 18th century, when Jews were no longer restricted to ghettos and were allowed full citizenship rights in many countries, anti-Semitism persisted in Europe. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a forgery that
purported to be minutes of the secret meetings of Jewish leaders bent on world domination, was first published in Russia in 1903 and later translated and disseminated widely. Eastern European pogroms factored into the decisions of millions of Jews to emigrate to the United States beginning in 1880. (The desire for better economic opportunities was also a critical factor.) The prosecution of Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish army officer falsely convicted of treason in 1894, came to be seen as a symbol of the enduring perniciousness of European anti-Semitism.
In the 20th century, anti-Semitism took on a distinctly racial quality. Nazi-era propaganda portrayed Jews as biologically distinct from white Europeans and possessing telltale physical characteristics, including large hooked noses and thick curly hair. Adolf Hitler’s belief that Jews
were racially inferior and posed a threat to the pure blood of Aryans inspired the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which prohibited sex and marriage between Jews and Germans and barred Jews from German citizenship. Eventually it would lead to Germany’s attempt to exterminate the
Jewish people.
As the memory of the Holocaust has receded in the postwar period, some of the taboo against explicit anti-Semitism has weakened and some right-wing European parties have openly embraced Nazi-era symbols and rhetoric. However, several countries have prosecuted individuals for Holocaust denial.
American Jews have never suffered the systematic denial of rights comparable to what their coreligionists endured in Europe. The U.S. Constitution, with its explicit guarantee of freedom of religion, prevented adoption of the explicitly anti-Jewish laws prevalent in Europe over the centuries. But with the arrival of large numbers of Jews in the late 19th century, and their rapid socio-economic advancement in the early 20th, Jews came to face exclusion from various clubs and organizations, tightened admissions quotas at institutions of higher learning, and restrictions from certain resorts and residential areas.
Explicit public anti-Semitism was rare but not unheard of in modern America. In the 1930s, Charles Coughlin, a Michigan priest, began using his radio program to advocate anti-Semitic ideas and marshal support for Adolf Hitler. Henry Ford, the famed American car manufacturer,
published the four-volume “The International Jew” in the 1920s, which was later translated into German and embraced by the Nazis. Aviator Charles Lindbergh, a member of the America First Committee that opposed intervention in World War II, claimed Jews wielded too much influence over American politics and were eager to drag the country toward war.
In the 1960s, anti-Semitism was embraced in certain quarters of the growing black nationalist movement. In 1970, black activist Stokely Carmichael famously called Hitler the greatest white man in history. And Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan has long railed against Jews and their supposed control of the American government. Similar ideas have also found support among American white nationalists, most prominent among them David Duke, a former KKK leader and former member of the Louisiana state legislature.
On the whole, Jews have historically fared far better under Muslim rule than in Christian Europe. Though anti-Jewish stereotypes do exist in Islamic sources, there is nothing to rival the extent of anti-Jewish sentiment that exists in Christian sources, nor is there a history of violence and persecution equal to what Jews faced in Europe. Jews living in Muslim lands were accorded a second-class citizenship that afforded certain protections while reinforcing subordination to full Muslim citizens, forcing Jews to pay higher taxes and wear distinctive badges or clothing.
According to the historian Bernard Lewis, the latter requirement was enforced erratically, and was one of the few instances of Christian Europe adopting a tactic of Jewish segregation from the Muslim world.
As explicit anti-Semitism faded in Europe in the years immediately after the Holocaust, and as the State of Israel, established in 1948, demonstrated its military strength and began drawing criticism for its occupation of lands with Arab populations, some Jews began to argue that opposition to Zionism was a new form of anti-Semitism. This concept gained wider currency in the late 20th and early 21st century, as criticism of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians intensified, prompting international campaigns to isolate Israel politically and boycott it
economically. Proponents of this view argue that while criticism of Israeli policies is valid, certain extreme forms of criticism — such as the rejection of Israel’s right to exist or singling out Israel for severe reprobation while ignoring the human rights abuses of its neighbors — can be
anti-Semitic.
The U.S. State Department in 2007 determined that demonizing Israel, comparing its actions to the Nazis, denying its legitimacy, and singling it out for excessive criticism are all contemporary manifestations of anti-Semitism. Critics of this definition have accused the Jewish community of using that charge to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel. Some Arabs have also contested the use of the term anti-Semitism to refer solely to Jews, arguing that as speakers of a Semitic language, they are “Semites” as well.
In the 21st century, there is ample evidence that anti-Semitism is again on the rise. Acts of violence against Jews and Jewish institutions, the persistence of anti-Semitic beliefs about Jewish power and the rise of political parties that traffic in explicitly anti-Semitic rhetoric and
ideas, particularly in Europe, are all indications of persistent anti-Semitism.
Mostly consigned to the political fringes since the Holocaust, far-right European political parties have made significant electoral gains in recent years. In Hungary, the Jobbik party, whose leader in 2012 said Jews were national security risks who should be registered, is currently the country’s third largest party. Greece’s Golden Dawn party, whose leader uses the Nazi salute and has called the Greek government a “pawn of International Zionism,” is currently the country’s third largest. The National Front party in France, long stigmatized as harboring Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites, is polling stronger than ever in the run-up to the 2017 presidential election. Even in Germany, which has been especially vigilant about right-wing politics since Nazism’s defeat, the Alternative for Germany party only narrowly missed winning seats in parliament in 2013 and has since surged in national polling.
Moreover, surveys show that classically anti-Semitic views remain common. According to the Anti-Defamation League, a majority of adults in Greece, and more than one-third in France, harbor anti-Semitic beliefs, including that Jews have too much power in business and too much
influence over American politics. Over 30 percent of Americans believe Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their home country. In the Middle East, the numbers are dramatically higher, with more than 80 percent of the population of some countries harboring anti-Semitic attitudes,
according to the ADL.
Jews continue to be the targets of violence, sometimes by Muslim extremists in retaliation for Israeli military actions. In 2012, A French Muslim shot and killed four people, including three children, at a Jewish school in Toulouse, France. In 2014, four people died when a French
Algerian man opened fire at the Jewish Museum of Belgium in Brussels. In 2015, two days after the killing of 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine in Paris, an allegiant of the Islamic State killed four people at a kosher supermarket in the French capital.
Meanwhile, anti-Semitic incidents have been on the rise in the United States as well. In 2014, a former white nationalist leader killed three people in a pair of shootings at a Jewish community center and retirement community in Kansas. According to the FBI, Jews were by far the largest target of religiously motivated hate crimes in the United States in 2015, accounting for 52 percent of victims. In 2016, Jonathan Greenblatt, the leader of the Anti-Defamation League, said American Jews have not seen as much anti-Semitism in public discourse since the 1930s. In the past seven years, increasing numbers of American Jewish community centers have received bomb threats, and in February and March of 2017 vandals toppled hundreds of headstones in Jewish cemeteries in Philadelphia and St. Louis.
Mix that situation in with the first lesson on Sunday, April 25th, which has been used for centuries as a reason to due violence to people of the Jewish faith, and I'm troubled.
For this week, I'd like us to read this article, Anti-Semitism 101, and the lesson for April 25th - Acts 4:5-12. As Rector, I have an obligation to call this out. We are called to love our neighbors. I am struggling with having this reading from Acts. Peter who is recorded with having said those words, self-identifies as Jewish. Nevertheless, it has been used, out of context, to do violence. So, what are we to do? That is what I'd like us to talk about.
Blessings to you this week,
- Dave
Anti-Semitism 101
What you need to know about the world's oldest hatred.
My Jewish Learning, April 2021
Anti-Semitism is the term used to refer to prejudice or discrimination directed against Jews. The term was coined in the 19th century and the phenomenon itself reached its apex in the Nazi era, when racially based hatred of Jews, rooted in dark conspiracies about Jewish power, culminated in the murder of six million European Jews. But many believe the roots of anti-Semitism go back to the dawn of Christianity and the charge that Jews were responsible for the killing of Jesus.
In contemporary times, overt expressions of anti-Semitism are not widely tolerated in Western countries. However, classical anti-Semitic stereotypes about Jews persist and occasionally find expression in public discourse. Anti-Jewish violence and acts of vandalism and intimidation remain a global problem, with the number of reported anti-Semitic incidents in the United States and Europe spiking in recent years, according to a number of studies.
Anti-Jewish violence also tends to increase during times of unrest in the Middle East, leading some to believe the nature of anti-Semitism is morphing into hatred of Israel, a development that has been called the “new anti-Semitism.” In this view, excessive criticism of Israel or
challenging its right to exist crosses the line from legitimate criticism into anti-Jewish bigotry. However, others say that opposing Israeli policies or even challenging Israel’s right to exist are legitimate viewpoints and do not necessarily imply hatred of Jews.
Anti-Semitism is sometimes called the world’s oldest hatred. The term itself is commonly attributed to Wilhelm Marr, a 19th-century German journalist who believed that Jews were racially distinct from Germans and could never be assimilated into German culture. Hatred of Jews, however, is much older, dating by some accounts to the early Christian era and the belief that Jews were collectively guilty of killing Jesus — a view that remained Catholic doctrine until 1965. For centuries, anti-Jewish ideas found their way into the writings of some of history’s most
prominent and oft-quoted Christian thinkers, among them Saint Augustine, Martin Luther and Thomas Aquinas.
In Europe during the Middle Ages, edicts barred Jews from citizenship, owning land, marrying Christians, serving in government and joining various professional guilds. A number of stereotypes about Jews emerged in this period, including the myth that Jews have horns and that
they are greedy and money-grubbing, a belief given expression by Shakespeare in the character of Shylock from “The Merchant of Venice.” The myth that Jews engage in ritual murder led to blood libel, the claim that Jews use the blood of Christian children for the making of Passover matzah.
Anti-Jewish stereotypes were often used a pretext for collective punishment of Jews. During the Crusader period, Christian armies en route to liberate the Holy Land from Muslim control swept through Jewish communities, raping and massacring along the way. Beginning in the 13th
century European Jews were forced to convert to Christianity or were expelled from a number of countries, most famously Spain in 1492, uprooting a long established and highly accomplished Jewish community. The belief that Jews were responsible for the Black Death in the 14th century led to the violent annihilation of countless Jewish communities throughout Europe. Jews were also commonly scapegoated for problems as varied as pandemics and crop failures. Anti-Jewish pogroms, or riots, occurred periodically in Europe throughout the late Middle Ages and into the modern period.
Even after the emancipation of Europe’s Jews beginning in the late 18th century, when Jews were no longer restricted to ghettos and were allowed full citizenship rights in many countries, anti-Semitism persisted in Europe. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a forgery that
purported to be minutes of the secret meetings of Jewish leaders bent on world domination, was first published in Russia in 1903 and later translated and disseminated widely. Eastern European pogroms factored into the decisions of millions of Jews to emigrate to the United States beginning in 1880. (The desire for better economic opportunities was also a critical factor.) The prosecution of Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish army officer falsely convicted of treason in 1894, came to be seen as a symbol of the enduring perniciousness of European anti-Semitism.
In the 20th century, anti-Semitism took on a distinctly racial quality. Nazi-era propaganda portrayed Jews as biologically distinct from white Europeans and possessing telltale physical characteristics, including large hooked noses and thick curly hair. Adolf Hitler’s belief that Jews
were racially inferior and posed a threat to the pure blood of Aryans inspired the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which prohibited sex and marriage between Jews and Germans and barred Jews from German citizenship. Eventually it would lead to Germany’s attempt to exterminate the
Jewish people.
As the memory of the Holocaust has receded in the postwar period, some of the taboo against explicit anti-Semitism has weakened and some right-wing European parties have openly embraced Nazi-era symbols and rhetoric. However, several countries have prosecuted individuals for Holocaust denial.
American Jews have never suffered the systematic denial of rights comparable to what their coreligionists endured in Europe. The U.S. Constitution, with its explicit guarantee of freedom of religion, prevented adoption of the explicitly anti-Jewish laws prevalent in Europe over the centuries. But with the arrival of large numbers of Jews in the late 19th century, and their rapid socio-economic advancement in the early 20th, Jews came to face exclusion from various clubs and organizations, tightened admissions quotas at institutions of higher learning, and restrictions from certain resorts and residential areas.
Explicit public anti-Semitism was rare but not unheard of in modern America. In the 1930s, Charles Coughlin, a Michigan priest, began using his radio program to advocate anti-Semitic ideas and marshal support for Adolf Hitler. Henry Ford, the famed American car manufacturer,
published the four-volume “The International Jew” in the 1920s, which was later translated into German and embraced by the Nazis. Aviator Charles Lindbergh, a member of the America First Committee that opposed intervention in World War II, claimed Jews wielded too much influence over American politics and were eager to drag the country toward war.
In the 1960s, anti-Semitism was embraced in certain quarters of the growing black nationalist movement. In 1970, black activist Stokely Carmichael famously called Hitler the greatest white man in history. And Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan has long railed against Jews and their supposed control of the American government. Similar ideas have also found support among American white nationalists, most prominent among them David Duke, a former KKK leader and former member of the Louisiana state legislature.
On the whole, Jews have historically fared far better under Muslim rule than in Christian Europe. Though anti-Jewish stereotypes do exist in Islamic sources, there is nothing to rival the extent of anti-Jewish sentiment that exists in Christian sources, nor is there a history of violence and persecution equal to what Jews faced in Europe. Jews living in Muslim lands were accorded a second-class citizenship that afforded certain protections while reinforcing subordination to full Muslim citizens, forcing Jews to pay higher taxes and wear distinctive badges or clothing.
According to the historian Bernard Lewis, the latter requirement was enforced erratically, and was one of the few instances of Christian Europe adopting a tactic of Jewish segregation from the Muslim world.
As explicit anti-Semitism faded in Europe in the years immediately after the Holocaust, and as the State of Israel, established in 1948, demonstrated its military strength and began drawing criticism for its occupation of lands with Arab populations, some Jews began to argue that opposition to Zionism was a new form of anti-Semitism. This concept gained wider currency in the late 20th and early 21st century, as criticism of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians intensified, prompting international campaigns to isolate Israel politically and boycott it
economically. Proponents of this view argue that while criticism of Israeli policies is valid, certain extreme forms of criticism — such as the rejection of Israel’s right to exist or singling out Israel for severe reprobation while ignoring the human rights abuses of its neighbors — can be
anti-Semitic.
The U.S. State Department in 2007 determined that demonizing Israel, comparing its actions to the Nazis, denying its legitimacy, and singling it out for excessive criticism are all contemporary manifestations of anti-Semitism. Critics of this definition have accused the Jewish community of using that charge to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel. Some Arabs have also contested the use of the term anti-Semitism to refer solely to Jews, arguing that as speakers of a Semitic language, they are “Semites” as well.
In the 21st century, there is ample evidence that anti-Semitism is again on the rise. Acts of violence against Jews and Jewish institutions, the persistence of anti-Semitic beliefs about Jewish power and the rise of political parties that traffic in explicitly anti-Semitic rhetoric and
ideas, particularly in Europe, are all indications of persistent anti-Semitism.
Mostly consigned to the political fringes since the Holocaust, far-right European political parties have made significant electoral gains in recent years. In Hungary, the Jobbik party, whose leader in 2012 said Jews were national security risks who should be registered, is currently the country’s third largest party. Greece’s Golden Dawn party, whose leader uses the Nazi salute and has called the Greek government a “pawn of International Zionism,” is currently the country’s third largest. The National Front party in France, long stigmatized as harboring Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites, is polling stronger than ever in the run-up to the 2017 presidential election. Even in Germany, which has been especially vigilant about right-wing politics since Nazism’s defeat, the Alternative for Germany party only narrowly missed winning seats in parliament in 2013 and has since surged in national polling.
Moreover, surveys show that classically anti-Semitic views remain common. According to the Anti-Defamation League, a majority of adults in Greece, and more than one-third in France, harbor anti-Semitic beliefs, including that Jews have too much power in business and too much
influence over American politics. Over 30 percent of Americans believe Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their home country. In the Middle East, the numbers are dramatically higher, with more than 80 percent of the population of some countries harboring anti-Semitic attitudes,
according to the ADL.
Jews continue to be the targets of violence, sometimes by Muslim extremists in retaliation for Israeli military actions. In 2012, A French Muslim shot and killed four people, including three children, at a Jewish school in Toulouse, France. In 2014, four people died when a French
Algerian man opened fire at the Jewish Museum of Belgium in Brussels. In 2015, two days after the killing of 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine in Paris, an allegiant of the Islamic State killed four people at a kosher supermarket in the French capital.
Meanwhile, anti-Semitic incidents have been on the rise in the United States as well. In 2014, a former white nationalist leader killed three people in a pair of shootings at a Jewish community center and retirement community in Kansas. According to the FBI, Jews were by far the largest target of religiously motivated hate crimes in the United States in 2015, accounting for 52 percent of victims. In 2016, Jonathan Greenblatt, the leader of the Anti-Defamation League, said American Jews have not seen as much anti-Semitism in public discourse since the 1930s. In the past seven years, increasing numbers of American Jewish community centers have received bomb threats, and in February and March of 2017 vandals toppled hundreds of headstones in Jewish cemeteries in Philadelphia and St. Louis.
Thursday, April 15
The discussion group reading for next week is an article by Tamara Mann Tweel about Rabbi Abraham Heschel and his thoughts on aging. He testified, in the 1961 White House council on aging, "We owe the elderly reverence, as outlined in the 5th commandment; but, all they ask for is consideration and not to be discarded. What they deserve is preference but we do not even grant them equality."
He outlined that Social Security and Medicare is not going to fix the way the elderly are viewed and that the US government should do two things: 1) abandon chronological age from all policies and 2) the government should urge private industries - insurance companies, advertising agencies and social service organizations - to abandon the conflation of leisure, retirement, and old age.
I'd like to discuss the Rabbi's assertions as well as look at what the Bible and the Church says about aging and, in Heschel's words, the "trivialization of existence."
Blessings to you this week,
- Dave
Every Moment Is an Opportunity for Greatness
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel; by Tamara Mann Tweel
My Jewish Learning
The great rabbi decried the antipathy for old age and the trivialization of retirement. He urged America to do better.
In 1961, a 54-year-old, Polish-born rabbi stood in the center of American political power in Washington, D.C., to relay an urgent message. The message was not about power or war or even politics. The great Jewish theologian and luminary, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, stood before the White House Conference on Aging and described the plight of the sick and aged in America. “I see them clustered together and alone, clinging to a hope for somebody’s affection that does not come to pass. I hear them pray for the release that comes with death. I see them deprived and forgotten, masters yesterday, outcasts today.”
Looking at his audience, he continued with a reproof: “What we owe the old is reverence, but all they ask for is consideration, attention, not to be discarded and forgotten. What they deserve is preference, yet we do not even grant them equality. One father finds it possible to sustain a dozen children, yet a dozen children find it impossible to sustain one father.”
While Heschel supported Social Security and what would become Medicare, he did not think these worthy programs would solve the problem of old age. The problem, he reiterated throughout the conference, was more than material well-being; it was the agony of psychological and spiritual insecurity, boredom, loneliness, fear and “the sense of being useless to, and rejected by, family and society.”
He believed that the elderly must have the opportunity to be more than healthy and supported, they must have the opportunity to be needed. He explained, “What a person lives by is not only a sense of belonging but also a sense of indebtedness.” To live full lives in old age, Heschel understood, the generations cannot be siloed but must be interconnected, the young must rely on the old and the old must rely on the young.
A year earlier, at the White House Conference on Children and Youth, Heschel had cited the fifth commandment to “revere thy father and mother,” noting that such reverence will not develop automatically — it must be earned. “Unless my child will sense in my personal existence acts and attitudes that evoke reverence — the ability to delay satisfactions, to overcome prejudices, to sense the holy, to strive for the noble — why should she revere me?” he asked. Before fretting over the moral fiber of the young, Heschel insisted that adults, parents, had the obligation to fret over themselves. And yet, the great rabbi said, parents can only do so much because American culture and policy created an unfortunate division between the world of the young and the world of the old.
Age segregation dismantled the opportunities for shared learning, shared joy, and shared wonder. “Our society,” he lectured, “is fostering the segregation of youth, the separation of young and old. The adult has no fellowship with the young. He has little to say to the young, and there is little opportunity for the young to share the wisdom of experience, or the experience of maturity.”
He would reiterate this multigenerational approach the following year at the White House Conference on Aging. There, he urged his audience to focus not only on physical space but also on time. Time posed a specific challenge to the aged, for, “Old age has the vicious tendency of depriving a person of the present.” It does so because the “aged thinks of himself as belonging to the past.” This tendency must be balanced by attitudes and policies that offer the elderly an opportunity to be present, to continue the process of growing. “It is precisely this openness to the present,” Heschel argued, “that he must strive for.”
Even though many of Heschel’s solutions to the crisis afflicting elders required internal work, he offered a number of policy solutions to aid Americans in this conceptual revision. First, the government should abandon chronological age from all policies. Secondly, the government could urge private industries, insurance companies, advertising agencies, and social service organizations to abandon the conflation of leisure, retirement, and old age.
“While we do not officially define old age as a second childhood, some of the programs we devise are highly effective in helping the aged to become children,” he insisted. The emphasis on recreation, he continued, “aggravates rather than enriches a condition it is trying to deal with, namely the trivialization of existence.”
Heschel believed that there should be serious senior universities to foster continued intellectual engagement and skill reeducation for the elderly. This would have the added benefit of giving the middle aged and young the impression that seniors are capable of growth. “The goal,” he contended, “is not to keep the old man busy, but to remind him that every moment is an opportunity for greatness."
He outlined that Social Security and Medicare is not going to fix the way the elderly are viewed and that the US government should do two things: 1) abandon chronological age from all policies and 2) the government should urge private industries - insurance companies, advertising agencies and social service organizations - to abandon the conflation of leisure, retirement, and old age.
I'd like to discuss the Rabbi's assertions as well as look at what the Bible and the Church says about aging and, in Heschel's words, the "trivialization of existence."
Blessings to you this week,
- Dave
Every Moment Is an Opportunity for Greatness
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel; by Tamara Mann Tweel
My Jewish Learning
The great rabbi decried the antipathy for old age and the trivialization of retirement. He urged America to do better.
In 1961, a 54-year-old, Polish-born rabbi stood in the center of American political power in Washington, D.C., to relay an urgent message. The message was not about power or war or even politics. The great Jewish theologian and luminary, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, stood before the White House Conference on Aging and described the plight of the sick and aged in America. “I see them clustered together and alone, clinging to a hope for somebody’s affection that does not come to pass. I hear them pray for the release that comes with death. I see them deprived and forgotten, masters yesterday, outcasts today.”
Looking at his audience, he continued with a reproof: “What we owe the old is reverence, but all they ask for is consideration, attention, not to be discarded and forgotten. What they deserve is preference, yet we do not even grant them equality. One father finds it possible to sustain a dozen children, yet a dozen children find it impossible to sustain one father.”
While Heschel supported Social Security and what would become Medicare, he did not think these worthy programs would solve the problem of old age. The problem, he reiterated throughout the conference, was more than material well-being; it was the agony of psychological and spiritual insecurity, boredom, loneliness, fear and “the sense of being useless to, and rejected by, family and society.”
He believed that the elderly must have the opportunity to be more than healthy and supported, they must have the opportunity to be needed. He explained, “What a person lives by is not only a sense of belonging but also a sense of indebtedness.” To live full lives in old age, Heschel understood, the generations cannot be siloed but must be interconnected, the young must rely on the old and the old must rely on the young.
A year earlier, at the White House Conference on Children and Youth, Heschel had cited the fifth commandment to “revere thy father and mother,” noting that such reverence will not develop automatically — it must be earned. “Unless my child will sense in my personal existence acts and attitudes that evoke reverence — the ability to delay satisfactions, to overcome prejudices, to sense the holy, to strive for the noble — why should she revere me?” he asked. Before fretting over the moral fiber of the young, Heschel insisted that adults, parents, had the obligation to fret over themselves. And yet, the great rabbi said, parents can only do so much because American culture and policy created an unfortunate division between the world of the young and the world of the old.
Age segregation dismantled the opportunities for shared learning, shared joy, and shared wonder. “Our society,” he lectured, “is fostering the segregation of youth, the separation of young and old. The adult has no fellowship with the young. He has little to say to the young, and there is little opportunity for the young to share the wisdom of experience, or the experience of maturity.”
He would reiterate this multigenerational approach the following year at the White House Conference on Aging. There, he urged his audience to focus not only on physical space but also on time. Time posed a specific challenge to the aged, for, “Old age has the vicious tendency of depriving a person of the present.” It does so because the “aged thinks of himself as belonging to the past.” This tendency must be balanced by attitudes and policies that offer the elderly an opportunity to be present, to continue the process of growing. “It is precisely this openness to the present,” Heschel argued, “that he must strive for.”
Even though many of Heschel’s solutions to the crisis afflicting elders required internal work, he offered a number of policy solutions to aid Americans in this conceptual revision. First, the government should abandon chronological age from all policies. Secondly, the government could urge private industries, insurance companies, advertising agencies, and social service organizations to abandon the conflation of leisure, retirement, and old age.
“While we do not officially define old age as a second childhood, some of the programs we devise are highly effective in helping the aged to become children,” he insisted. The emphasis on recreation, he continued, “aggravates rather than enriches a condition it is trying to deal with, namely the trivialization of existence.”
Heschel believed that there should be serious senior universities to foster continued intellectual engagement and skill reeducation for the elderly. This would have the added benefit of giving the middle aged and young the impression that seniors are capable of growth. “The goal,” he contended, “is not to keep the old man busy, but to remind him that every moment is an opportunity for greatness."
Thursday, April 8
Here is the reading for next week. It is a look at what happened on Saturday - in between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. I'd like to take a look at it and think about how that particular event would apply, at all, to our day. Maybe there is a lot there for us to consider as we look forward to the pandemic ending.
Blessings to you all,
- Dave
Saturday
Blessings to you all,
- Dave
Saturday
Thursday, April 1
This next week is Holy Week. Instead of talking about the topics of our day, I thought we should take a look at one thing that happened to Jesus on Tuesday of Holy Week. A surprising number of things happened on that final Tuesday; one of them was a challenge from a group that didn't believe in an afterlife. This week's reading is an excerpt from the book The Last Week by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan. Borg and Crossan dismantle the challenge to Jesus and raise some very interesting; and mostly unanswered questions; about the afterlife. I thought we should pick up on their questions and see what, if anything, we can answer about it. I am interested in hearing your thoughts on some of their questions.
Blessings to you this week,
- Dave
God of the Living
Marcus J. Borg & John Dominic Crossan, The Last Week
Except from “Tuesday”, pages 55, 65-69
Tuesday is a busy day. Mark's narrative of the day's events covers almost three chapters; a total of 115 verses. The next longest days are Thursday (60 verses) and Friday (47 verses). Tuesday is thus the longest day in Mark's story of Jesus's final week.
About two-thirds of Tuesday consists of conflict with temple authorities and their associates. The remaining third (chap. 13) warns of the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple and speaks of the coming of the Son of Man, all in the near future.
GOD OF THE DEAD OR OF THE LIVING?
MARK 12:18-27
Some Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus and asked him a question, saying, "Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies, leaving a wife but no child, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. There were seven brothers; the first married and, when he died, left no children; and the second married her and died, leaving no children; and the third likewise; none of the seven left children. Last of all the woman herself died. In the resurrection whose wife will she be? For the seven had married her."
Jesus said to them, "Is not this the reason you are wrong, that you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God? For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the story about the bush, how God said to him, 'I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob'? He is God not of the dead, but of the living; you are quite wrong."
The Sadducees were part of the aristocracy. Wealthy and powerful, they included high-priestly families as well as lay nobility. As a group, they overlap but are not identical to the "chief priests, elders, and scribes" who have been central to Tuesday's stories thus far. Their religious
convictions differed in two significant ways from those of most of their Jewish contemporaries.
First, they accepted only the "law" ("the five books of Moses," also called the Torah) as sacred scripture, whereas most Jews also saw "the prophets" as sacred. Their non-acceptance of the prophets reflected their position in society, for the books of the prophets emphasize God's justice over against the human injustice of social systems dominated by the wealthy and powerful.
Second, as Mark's story tells us, the Sadducees did not believe in an afterlife. That is, in Jewish terms, they did not believe there would be a resurrection of the dead. Within Judaism, the belief in a life after death was a relatively recent development. It emerged some two centuries earlier with the martyrdom of faithful Jews who resisted the Hellenistic emperor Antiochus Epiphanes IV. Its purpose was to redress human injustice: Jews who were faithful to God were being executed, and Jews who were willing to collaborate with Antiochus were being spared. Thus belief in a resurrection was a way of defending God's justice: the martyrs would receive a blessed afterlife. By the time of Jesus, a majority of Jews (including deeply committed groups like the Pharisees and Essenes) affirmed a life after death. So apparently did Jesus, even though life after death was not the focus of his message.
But the Sadducees did not. Their privileged place in society meant that they had little or no awareness of any serious injustice that needed to be rectified. As one of our graduate school professors put it, "If you're rich and powerful, who needs an afterlife?"
The afterlife is the subject of the question they bring to Jesus. Given that they didn't believe in one, their purpose is obviously not a desire for information about what it will be like. Rather, as with the previous interrogators, their purpose is to discredit Jesus in the presence of the crowd. So they pose a conundrum to which they imagine no intelligent response is possible. They begin by referring to a Jewish practice known as levirate marriage, in which, if a man dies before his wife has a child then the man's brother shall marry the widow and conceive an heir for the brother who died. A child conceived under these conditions is understood to be the offspring of the dead brother. The practice flowed out of the primary purposes of patriarchal marriage: progeny and property. The concern is the transmission of the man's genetic material, name, and property, and the wife is handed on from brother to brother to serve this purpose. Then they tell a story about seven brothers each of whom marries a woman in succession. They want to know whose wife she will be in the afterlife. For those who think of life after death as more or less a continuation or restoration of this life, including the relationships we have in this life, it was (and continues to be) a reasonable question. Does personal identity continue in a life after death, and do our relationships continue? Are families reunited? If so, whose wife will she be?
Jesus's response is threefold. His first response is a broad indictment of the Sadducees. He charges them with a deficient understanding of scripture and God: "You know neither the scriptures nor the power of God" (12:24).
His second response addresses the specific question they have asked about whose wife she will be. Jesus says, "When they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven'' (12:25).
It is unclear to us what to make of this response. Is it intended (by Jesus or Mark) as an informative statement about the after-life-namely, that there will be no marriage there, for we will be "like angels"? If so, what does this mean? What does it mean to be "like angels," and how does this connect to absence of marriage? Is the life of the age to come sexless, perhaps even gender-less? Or does being "like angels" mean that procreation and property - the primary purposes of patriarchal and levirate marriage - are irrelevant there? Or does it mean even more - namely, that conditions in the resurrected life will be radically different from what life is like on earth? And how radical is the discontinuity? Will we still be "us"?
Or is the attempt to discern an informative meaning basically a mistake? Is Jesus's response, as in some of the previous stories, intended primarily as a skillful evasion of a question intended to entrap him? Is it perhaps intended not to inform, but to confound? In his third response, Jesus refers to a passage from the book of Exodus, one of the books the Sadducees did regard as sacred scripture. He quotes the voice of God in the story about Moses's experience of God in the burning bush: "I am the God of Abraham, the God of lsaac, and the God of Jacob" (Exod. 3:6). Then Jesus adds, "God is God not of the dead, but of the living. You are quite wrong." (12:27). As with Jesus's second response, we are puzzled about what to make of this. Is it meant to be a substantial claim about the afterlife - not only that there is one, but that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are still alive? Or, within this series of challenge and riposte stories, are we to hear this statement as another example of brilliant repartee, a provocative "nonresponse"?
Against the first possibility, we note that the story of Moses at the bush was never used within Judaism as an argument for an afterlife, and we cannot imagine that Jesus thought his opponents would be impressed with it. Moreover, if we hear Jesus's words about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as a substantial claim about an afterlife, it would mean that Jesus thought they were already in an afterlife, despite the fact that Jewish belief in the resurrection of the dead saw it as a future happening in time, quite different from Greek notions of immortality in a beyond that is above time.
So we are inclined to see his response as yet another example of Jesus's fending off his opponents' attacks with a debating skill that confounded them even as it delighted the crowd. And perhaps there is a bit more as well. Jesus's concluding words, "God is God not of the dead, but of the living," are tantalizingly evocative. His words suggest that God's concern is the living and not the dead. To think that Jesus's message and passion were about what happens to the dead, and to ask questions about the fate of the dead, is to miss the point. For Jesus, the kingdom of God is not primarily about the dead, but about the living, not primarily about life after death, but about life in this world.
Blessings to you this week,
- Dave
God of the Living
Marcus J. Borg & John Dominic Crossan, The Last Week
Except from “Tuesday”, pages 55, 65-69
Tuesday is a busy day. Mark's narrative of the day's events covers almost three chapters; a total of 115 verses. The next longest days are Thursday (60 verses) and Friday (47 verses). Tuesday is thus the longest day in Mark's story of Jesus's final week.
About two-thirds of Tuesday consists of conflict with temple authorities and their associates. The remaining third (chap. 13) warns of the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple and speaks of the coming of the Son of Man, all in the near future.
GOD OF THE DEAD OR OF THE LIVING?
MARK 12:18-27
Some Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus and asked him a question, saying, "Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies, leaving a wife but no child, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. There were seven brothers; the first married and, when he died, left no children; and the second married her and died, leaving no children; and the third likewise; none of the seven left children. Last of all the woman herself died. In the resurrection whose wife will she be? For the seven had married her."
Jesus said to them, "Is not this the reason you are wrong, that you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God? For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the story about the bush, how God said to him, 'I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob'? He is God not of the dead, but of the living; you are quite wrong."
The Sadducees were part of the aristocracy. Wealthy and powerful, they included high-priestly families as well as lay nobility. As a group, they overlap but are not identical to the "chief priests, elders, and scribes" who have been central to Tuesday's stories thus far. Their religious
convictions differed in two significant ways from those of most of their Jewish contemporaries.
First, they accepted only the "law" ("the five books of Moses," also called the Torah) as sacred scripture, whereas most Jews also saw "the prophets" as sacred. Their non-acceptance of the prophets reflected their position in society, for the books of the prophets emphasize God's justice over against the human injustice of social systems dominated by the wealthy and powerful.
Second, as Mark's story tells us, the Sadducees did not believe in an afterlife. That is, in Jewish terms, they did not believe there would be a resurrection of the dead. Within Judaism, the belief in a life after death was a relatively recent development. It emerged some two centuries earlier with the martyrdom of faithful Jews who resisted the Hellenistic emperor Antiochus Epiphanes IV. Its purpose was to redress human injustice: Jews who were faithful to God were being executed, and Jews who were willing to collaborate with Antiochus were being spared. Thus belief in a resurrection was a way of defending God's justice: the martyrs would receive a blessed afterlife. By the time of Jesus, a majority of Jews (including deeply committed groups like the Pharisees and Essenes) affirmed a life after death. So apparently did Jesus, even though life after death was not the focus of his message.
But the Sadducees did not. Their privileged place in society meant that they had little or no awareness of any serious injustice that needed to be rectified. As one of our graduate school professors put it, "If you're rich and powerful, who needs an afterlife?"
The afterlife is the subject of the question they bring to Jesus. Given that they didn't believe in one, their purpose is obviously not a desire for information about what it will be like. Rather, as with the previous interrogators, their purpose is to discredit Jesus in the presence of the crowd. So they pose a conundrum to which they imagine no intelligent response is possible. They begin by referring to a Jewish practice known as levirate marriage, in which, if a man dies before his wife has a child then the man's brother shall marry the widow and conceive an heir for the brother who died. A child conceived under these conditions is understood to be the offspring of the dead brother. The practice flowed out of the primary purposes of patriarchal marriage: progeny and property. The concern is the transmission of the man's genetic material, name, and property, and the wife is handed on from brother to brother to serve this purpose. Then they tell a story about seven brothers each of whom marries a woman in succession. They want to know whose wife she will be in the afterlife. For those who think of life after death as more or less a continuation or restoration of this life, including the relationships we have in this life, it was (and continues to be) a reasonable question. Does personal identity continue in a life after death, and do our relationships continue? Are families reunited? If so, whose wife will she be?
Jesus's response is threefold. His first response is a broad indictment of the Sadducees. He charges them with a deficient understanding of scripture and God: "You know neither the scriptures nor the power of God" (12:24).
His second response addresses the specific question they have asked about whose wife she will be. Jesus says, "When they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven'' (12:25).
It is unclear to us what to make of this response. Is it intended (by Jesus or Mark) as an informative statement about the after-life-namely, that there will be no marriage there, for we will be "like angels"? If so, what does this mean? What does it mean to be "like angels," and how does this connect to absence of marriage? Is the life of the age to come sexless, perhaps even gender-less? Or does being "like angels" mean that procreation and property - the primary purposes of patriarchal and levirate marriage - are irrelevant there? Or does it mean even more - namely, that conditions in the resurrected life will be radically different from what life is like on earth? And how radical is the discontinuity? Will we still be "us"?
Or is the attempt to discern an informative meaning basically a mistake? Is Jesus's response, as in some of the previous stories, intended primarily as a skillful evasion of a question intended to entrap him? Is it perhaps intended not to inform, but to confound? In his third response, Jesus refers to a passage from the book of Exodus, one of the books the Sadducees did regard as sacred scripture. He quotes the voice of God in the story about Moses's experience of God in the burning bush: "I am the God of Abraham, the God of lsaac, and the God of Jacob" (Exod. 3:6). Then Jesus adds, "God is God not of the dead, but of the living. You are quite wrong." (12:27). As with Jesus's second response, we are puzzled about what to make of this. Is it meant to be a substantial claim about the afterlife - not only that there is one, but that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are still alive? Or, within this series of challenge and riposte stories, are we to hear this statement as another example of brilliant repartee, a provocative "nonresponse"?
Against the first possibility, we note that the story of Moses at the bush was never used within Judaism as an argument for an afterlife, and we cannot imagine that Jesus thought his opponents would be impressed with it. Moreover, if we hear Jesus's words about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as a substantial claim about an afterlife, it would mean that Jesus thought they were already in an afterlife, despite the fact that Jewish belief in the resurrection of the dead saw it as a future happening in time, quite different from Greek notions of immortality in a beyond that is above time.
So we are inclined to see his response as yet another example of Jesus's fending off his opponents' attacks with a debating skill that confounded them even as it delighted the crowd. And perhaps there is a bit more as well. Jesus's concluding words, "God is God not of the dead, but of the living," are tantalizingly evocative. His words suggest that God's concern is the living and not the dead. To think that Jesus's message and passion were about what happens to the dead, and to ask questions about the fate of the dead, is to miss the point. For Jesus, the kingdom of God is not primarily about the dead, but about the living, not primarily about life after death, but about life in this world.
Thursday, March 25
This week's article is from Ed Stetzer, professor and Dean of Wheaton College and executive director of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College. He begins a discussion about race and religion and how it influenced the murder of eight people in Atlanta. It is not an easy discussion to have but I think it is an important one. The article points out that it matters what we think about God, sin and how to deal with it, the Bible, gender and race, and it matters what we say, or don't say about it. As we edge closer to Good Friday, Ed Stetzer raises some points for us to consider in our day and time.
Religion, Race, and the Atlanta Murders
Ed Stetzer, Christianity Today 3.17.21
Tragedy is before us, but so is a time for thoughtful reflection.
A 21-year-old man from Woodstock, Georgia, has shot eight people, including seven women, at Atlanta-area massage parlors. The Atlanta Journal Constitution is reporting that seven of the victims were Asian Americans. As of this writing, authorities are investigating whether to charge him with a hate crime. This space is not a news space, but rather a commentary space. And moments like this can be a challenge.
Some will quickly say, “Nothing to see here. This is not connected to us.” Still others will see this as an indictment of Christians everywhere. I think there is a better way. So, I’m not here to speculate on what we do not know, but I am taking a moment of reflection regarding what we do—and I hope you will join me.
The victims matter. The murderer will not be mentioned here, but here are some of the name of the ones we know have died:
- Delaina Ashley Yaun, 33
- Paul Andre Michels, 54
- Xiaojie Tan, 49
- Daoyou Feng, 44
Yes, they are Asian names. And, yes, they are connected to massage parlors. The murderer claims he had a sex addiction and shockingly said acted to “eliminate” temptation. And, as is now widely reported, he goes to a Southern Baptist church that has been connected with Founders Ministries, now best known for its anti-Critical Race Theory efforts. All of these should factor in our reflections.
It probably needs also to be said that when millions of us heard about murders at an Atlanta massage parlor, the predatory actions of Ravi Zacharaias came to mind. So, let’s be honest: race, sex, and religion are all at work here, and that’s a hard topic to discuss. But here we are.
In this brief article, I hope to help us think about several things. First, the place of religion in this story. Second, I want to talk about the place of racialization and racism in this situation.
Now, I know how it works. Already people are looking for talking points online to show this was not racially motivated, or it was mental illness and not religion, or whatever else. But, people are dead. Women. Asians. All because the man who killed them decided to eliminate temptation. There is a conversation that needs to be had, and it is complex. One short article cannot even address all the issues to
consider, but we can start.
When asked why he wanted to murder eight women, the young man replied that they were a temptation that he wanted to “eliminate.”
To many this language seems odd -- and it should. Yet for many Christians, we know this idea is well worn in our common language and is perhaps drawn from Jesus’s words in the Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew 5, Jesus teaches, “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away.”
For Christians, Jesus' words are an encouragement to take decisive action against sin in our lives. Yet central to Christian faith is the truth that you can never “eliminate” sin by sinning. What this man did was evil, wicked, and filled with sin. It has been said that this man had a history of struggling with sexual addiction. According to his parents in a 2019 police report, he was “not suicidal, did not take any medication, and had no mental illnesses.” From all the information we have on him today, he didn’t see himself as the problem, he saw women as the problem. And he took action to eliminate what he perceived as the problem. And, that’s not just a problem in this situation.
Over the past few years, women theologians, historians, and church leaders have authored books on the intersection of women and North American Protestantism. Disturbingly, most identified common themes were the corrosive elements of Protestant theology of sexuality and gender. While claiming orthodoxy and resisting the tide of the sexual revolution, church leaders remained ignorant of how their rhetoric laid a foundation for misogyny and violence.
In one example, Rachel Joy Welcher outlines how many popular books on sexuality “use wartime imagery to communicate practical strategies Christian men can employ to fight sexual lust…. Depicting purity as an all-encompassing pursuit which involves one’s motivations, mind, and heart.” As Welcher concludes, this constant stream of portraying women as dangerous sources of lust that need to be avoided inevitably shaped the way young Christian men perceived and acted towards women. In trying to guard men against the evil of pornography, church
leaders failed to construct a positive theology of sexuality and gender.
Victim advocate Rachael Denhollander drew attention to this in response to the tragedy:
• The man who murdered women in a massage parlor yesterday says he was "eliminating temptation" because he had a sex addiction.
• He was a baptized member of an SBC [Southern Baptist] church.
• Brothers. Pastors. Seminary heads. How you teach sexuality matters. It can be life and death…
As church leaders, we must reckon with our role in shaping the culture that gave rise to these events.
Evil knows no denomination, but denominations need to look at their fruits. I’m a member of a church affiliated with SBC and I’ve engaged Founder’s Ministries over the years.
I have learned (and am continuing to grow) through conversation, reflection, and listening in those places and beyond. There exists an urgent need for all church leaders to examine how we teach biblical truths about men, women, and the imago dei [image of God]. It is hard work that requires clarity, repentance, and the grace of others.
That such violence against Asian American women comes on the anniversary of COVID-19 shutdowns is a painful reminder to many Asian Americans of the growing hate incidents they’ve been facing this past year. Violence against Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) is on the rise as many still blame them for the pandemic.
As we listen to the cries of so many Asian-Americans today, it would be shameful not to acknowledge their pain and to see this as the racially connected violence that it is. All of the locations have been described in news reports as Asian massage parlors. And, Daniel Yang asked, “[W]ill anyone point out that the Western sexual fetish for Asian women is racist?” So, yes, of course this is connected to race.
Too frequently we brush off the discrimination faced by our Asian American brothers and sisters because it does not fit into our narratives around race. Asian Americans bring a complex and rich tradition and experience to the church that is frequently underrepresented in broader conversations. It is grievous that it takes a tragedy on this scale to wake us up to their concerns or to highlight their voices in our midst.
Conclusion
There are so many threads to this knot that need to be slowly untangled. There are elements related to pornography, sex trafficking, religion, evangelicalism, Southern Baptists, and many others just outside our periphery.
But neither the complexity of this event nor the tribalism of our cultural discourse must not allow us to avoid self-reflection and scrutiny.
We must confront the reality that something is horribly wrong in our midst when a person kills to “eliminate” temptation. As we wait for more information from law enforcement, we must work to care for those who have been hurt and listen to the words of our brothers and sisters in faith regarding their own fears and concerns.
So, let’s pray for the victims' families that the Lord may grant them peace in the midst of such tragedy. Let’s stand up and alongside our Asian brothers and sisters.
And in the coming months, let’s continue the hard and painful work of confronting twisted and unhealthy theology that maligns and distorts the image of God in women (and men).
Ed Stetzer is professor and dean at Wheaton College, where he also serves as executive director of the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center.
Religion, Race, and the Atlanta Murders
Ed Stetzer, Christianity Today 3.17.21
Tragedy is before us, but so is a time for thoughtful reflection.
A 21-year-old man from Woodstock, Georgia, has shot eight people, including seven women, at Atlanta-area massage parlors. The Atlanta Journal Constitution is reporting that seven of the victims were Asian Americans. As of this writing, authorities are investigating whether to charge him with a hate crime. This space is not a news space, but rather a commentary space. And moments like this can be a challenge.
Some will quickly say, “Nothing to see here. This is not connected to us.” Still others will see this as an indictment of Christians everywhere. I think there is a better way. So, I’m not here to speculate on what we do not know, but I am taking a moment of reflection regarding what we do—and I hope you will join me.
The victims matter. The murderer will not be mentioned here, but here are some of the name of the ones we know have died:
- Delaina Ashley Yaun, 33
- Paul Andre Michels, 54
- Xiaojie Tan, 49
- Daoyou Feng, 44
Yes, they are Asian names. And, yes, they are connected to massage parlors. The murderer claims he had a sex addiction and shockingly said acted to “eliminate” temptation. And, as is now widely reported, he goes to a Southern Baptist church that has been connected with Founders Ministries, now best known for its anti-Critical Race Theory efforts. All of these should factor in our reflections.
It probably needs also to be said that when millions of us heard about murders at an Atlanta massage parlor, the predatory actions of Ravi Zacharaias came to mind. So, let’s be honest: race, sex, and religion are all at work here, and that’s a hard topic to discuss. But here we are.
In this brief article, I hope to help us think about several things. First, the place of religion in this story. Second, I want to talk about the place of racialization and racism in this situation.
Now, I know how it works. Already people are looking for talking points online to show this was not racially motivated, or it was mental illness and not religion, or whatever else. But, people are dead. Women. Asians. All because the man who killed them decided to eliminate temptation. There is a conversation that needs to be had, and it is complex. One short article cannot even address all the issues to
consider, but we can start.
When asked why he wanted to murder eight women, the young man replied that they were a temptation that he wanted to “eliminate.”
To many this language seems odd -- and it should. Yet for many Christians, we know this idea is well worn in our common language and is perhaps drawn from Jesus’s words in the Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew 5, Jesus teaches, “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away.”
For Christians, Jesus' words are an encouragement to take decisive action against sin in our lives. Yet central to Christian faith is the truth that you can never “eliminate” sin by sinning. What this man did was evil, wicked, and filled with sin. It has been said that this man had a history of struggling with sexual addiction. According to his parents in a 2019 police report, he was “not suicidal, did not take any medication, and had no mental illnesses.” From all the information we have on him today, he didn’t see himself as the problem, he saw women as the problem. And he took action to eliminate what he perceived as the problem. And, that’s not just a problem in this situation.
Over the past few years, women theologians, historians, and church leaders have authored books on the intersection of women and North American Protestantism. Disturbingly, most identified common themes were the corrosive elements of Protestant theology of sexuality and gender. While claiming orthodoxy and resisting the tide of the sexual revolution, church leaders remained ignorant of how their rhetoric laid a foundation for misogyny and violence.
In one example, Rachel Joy Welcher outlines how many popular books on sexuality “use wartime imagery to communicate practical strategies Christian men can employ to fight sexual lust…. Depicting purity as an all-encompassing pursuit which involves one’s motivations, mind, and heart.” As Welcher concludes, this constant stream of portraying women as dangerous sources of lust that need to be avoided inevitably shaped the way young Christian men perceived and acted towards women. In trying to guard men against the evil of pornography, church
leaders failed to construct a positive theology of sexuality and gender.
Victim advocate Rachael Denhollander drew attention to this in response to the tragedy:
• The man who murdered women in a massage parlor yesterday says he was "eliminating temptation" because he had a sex addiction.
• He was a baptized member of an SBC [Southern Baptist] church.
• Brothers. Pastors. Seminary heads. How you teach sexuality matters. It can be life and death…
As church leaders, we must reckon with our role in shaping the culture that gave rise to these events.
Evil knows no denomination, but denominations need to look at their fruits. I’m a member of a church affiliated with SBC and I’ve engaged Founder’s Ministries over the years.
I have learned (and am continuing to grow) through conversation, reflection, and listening in those places and beyond. There exists an urgent need for all church leaders to examine how we teach biblical truths about men, women, and the imago dei [image of God]. It is hard work that requires clarity, repentance, and the grace of others.
That such violence against Asian American women comes on the anniversary of COVID-19 shutdowns is a painful reminder to many Asian Americans of the growing hate incidents they’ve been facing this past year. Violence against Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) is on the rise as many still blame them for the pandemic.
As we listen to the cries of so many Asian-Americans today, it would be shameful not to acknowledge their pain and to see this as the racially connected violence that it is. All of the locations have been described in news reports as Asian massage parlors. And, Daniel Yang asked, “[W]ill anyone point out that the Western sexual fetish for Asian women is racist?” So, yes, of course this is connected to race.
Too frequently we brush off the discrimination faced by our Asian American brothers and sisters because it does not fit into our narratives around race. Asian Americans bring a complex and rich tradition and experience to the church that is frequently underrepresented in broader conversations. It is grievous that it takes a tragedy on this scale to wake us up to their concerns or to highlight their voices in our midst.
Conclusion
There are so many threads to this knot that need to be slowly untangled. There are elements related to pornography, sex trafficking, religion, evangelicalism, Southern Baptists, and many others just outside our periphery.
But neither the complexity of this event nor the tribalism of our cultural discourse must not allow us to avoid self-reflection and scrutiny.
We must confront the reality that something is horribly wrong in our midst when a person kills to “eliminate” temptation. As we wait for more information from law enforcement, we must work to care for those who have been hurt and listen to the words of our brothers and sisters in faith regarding their own fears and concerns.
So, let’s pray for the victims' families that the Lord may grant them peace in the midst of such tragedy. Let’s stand up and alongside our Asian brothers and sisters.
And in the coming months, let’s continue the hard and painful work of confronting twisted and unhealthy theology that maligns and distorts the image of God in women (and men).
Ed Stetzer is professor and dean at Wheaton College, where he also serves as executive director of the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center.
Thursday, March 18
We are in the middle of Lent in the middle of a pandemic. There is light at the end of the tunnel for both to be over. Nevertheless, taking stock of where we are today, one Lenten practice is that of humility. Sure, it's not popular, but it is a practice. Our author this week, Arthur Brooks, wrote a piece about happiness that was a hit with both discussion groups. Here is his latest tome and, not surprisingly, it is about happiness. The surprising part is that happiness can extend from the willingness (humility) to change one's mind. This isn't part of new age therapy where you are as happy as you think you are; no, this is in response to the way we circle our mind with a moat of opinions and recoil at the thought of having them challenged or disproven. One key to happiness is the humility to listen to other thoughts and ideas and have the flexibility, and willingness, to change our mind from time to time. Maybe a good Lenten practice, in following Jesus, is the practice of humility. I'd like to hear what you think, especially if you disagree.
- Dave
Changing Your Mind Can Make You Less Anxious (and more attractive)
Arthur Brooks, The Atlantic 3.11.21
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the psychologist Henry Murray asked a sample of college sophomores to participate in a seemingly innocuous experiment in which they would write their “personal philosophy of life,” including their core values and guiding principles, and then engage in a civil debate with a young lawyer about the merits of the philosophy. He did not tell the participants that the lawyer had been instructed to interrogate them and rip their philosophy to shreds in a “vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive” way. They used techniques Murray had developed in vetting intelligence agents during World War II.
The results were fairly predictable. Murray found that the students were generally intensely uncomfortable at having their views attacked in this way. Most hated it and remembered the experiment negatively even years later. One of the student participants was Ted Kaczynski, who went on to become the Unabomber. Noting that his revenge fantasies and belief in the evils of society began during his college years, some have linked his philosophy to the Murray experiment. (Others dispute this idea.)
But not all of Murray’s participants recall the experiment as a horrible experience. In his book Think Again, Adam Grant, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, notes that most of the students had a negative experience. But Grant’s research also showed that a few notable
outliers said they liked it—at least one found it fun—likely because they were forced to rethink their beliefs.
This latter group might have been onto something important. Rethinking your opinions—and changing your views when your facts are proved wrong or someone makes a better argument--can make your life better. It can make you more successful, less anxious, and happier.
When it comes to the idea that we are wrong, or that we should change our opinions, we are incredibly adept at resisting. Grant writes that we possess an astonishing array of cognitive biases telling us, You are right—disregard all evidence to the contrary. These include confirmation bias (we focus on and preferentially remember information that reinforces our beliefs); anchoring bias (we over-rely on one key piece of information—usually the first one we received); the illusion of validity (we overestimate the accuracy of our own judgments and perceptions); and many other related tendencies. These biases are like a crocodile-filled moat around the fortress of our beliefs. They turn us into hermit kings, convinced that any counterarguments that break through our walls will bring us misery.
But as Grant argues, being closed off to being proved wrong or to having our beliefs challenged has huge costs. Leaders who surround themselves with yes-men have been shown to make costly—and sometimes catastrophic—mistakes. One classic example is the Bay of Pigs debacle, in which President John F. Kennedy’s insular cabinet failed to challenge his misguided instincts. Or consider the political punditocracy that assumed Donald Trump couldn’t possibly be a serious threat to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, and never revised those assumptions. If your goal is to find the truth, admitting you are wrong and changing your beliefs based on new facts makes you better off in the end. This is a primary feature of what philosophers call “epistemic humility.”
And while it might not feel easy or fun at first, epistemic humility, like all humility, has clear happiness benefits. In one 2016 study in The Journal of Positive Psychology, researchers created a humility score by asking people about their openness to advice, their honesty about their own strengths and weaknesses, and whether they tended to be excited about a friend’s accomplishments. They found that humility was negatively associated with depression and anxiety, and positively associated with happiness and life satisfaction. Furthermore, they found
that humility buffers the negative impact of stressful life events.
As is often the case with social science, the data on humility and happiness reinforce what philosophers have long taught. Around the turn of the fifth century, Saint Augustine gave a student three pieces of life advice: “The first part is humility; the second, humility; the third, humility: and this I would continue to repeat as often as you might ask direction.” About a thousand years earlier, the Buddha taught in the Dutthatthaka Sutta that attachment to one’s views and opinions is a particular source of human suffering. These ancient ideas could not be more relevant to modern life.
The humility to admit when we are wrong and to change our beliefs can lead us to greater success and happiness. But with our defenses arrayed against these virtues, we need a battle plan to alter our way of thinking and acting. Here are four strategies you might want to add to your arsenal:
1. TURN THE HERMIT KING AGAINST HIMSELF.
The hermit king walls himself in against admitting a mistake or changing his mind because he fears that doing so will make him look stupid or incompetent. Thus, left to your limbic tendencies, you will fight to the death for even doomed ideas. But this tendency is itself based on
an error.
In a 2015 study in the scientific journal PLOS One, researchers compared scientists’ reactions to being informed that their findings “don’t replicate”—that is, they are probably not correct—a common problem in academia. It would be no surprise if scientists, like most people, got
defensive when contradicted in this way, or even doubled down on their original results. But the researchers found that this sort of behavior was more harmful to the scientists’ reputation than simply admitting they were wrong. The message for the hermit king is this: If you are wrong, the best way to save face is to admit it.
2. WELCOME CONTRADICTION.
One of the best ways to combat a destructive tendency is to adopt an “opposite signal” strategy. For example, when you are sad, often the last thing you want to do is see others, but this is precisely what you should do. When your ideas are threatened and you feel defensive, actively reject your instinct to defend yourself, and become more open instead. When someone says, “You are wrong,” respond with, “Tell me more.” Make friends who think differently than you and challenge your assumptions—and whose assumptions you challenge. Think of this as building your “team of rivals,” the phrase the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin used to describe Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet, which, unlike Kennedy’s, challenged him relentlessly. If this sounds like torture, it is all the more urgent that you try it.
3. DON’T DOCUMENT ALL YOUR BELIEFS.
Sociopolitical forces today can make humility feel especially dangerous, and even foolish. Social media has stunted our ability to reinvent our thinking, because our ideas are increasingly cumulative: Every opinion we’ve ever posted online is memorialized. With such a well-documented history of beliefs, changing your mind on something important or controversial can feel like weakness and open you up to public criticism.
The solution to this is to take most of your opinions off the electronic grid. Share your views with people you know and trust, but not with strangers on Twitter and Facebook. Sharing your views with total strangers on social media is a weird conceit to begin with—that people you
don’t know should care about your opinions. And realistically, there’s no opinion you can preserve in internet amber right now that will benefit you in five years.
4. START SMALL.
Let’s suppose that you want the benefits of changing your mind. Getting started is hard, especially if the view you want to change is something huge, like your religious beliefs or your political ideology. It’s better to start with smaller ideas such as your fashion choices, or even your sports allegiances. Reconsider the things you have long taken for granted, and assess them as dispassionately as you can. Then, with these low stakes, change.
The point is not to deal in trivialities. Research on goal setting clearly shows that starting small teaches you how to change and break habits. Then, you can scale this self-knowledge up to the bigger areas of your life in which, you secretly suspect, you might just be wrong. At that point, with your new skills in hand, the adventure of finding truth starts.
If you master these techniques, there might be critics who say you are a flip-flopper, or wishy-washy. To deal with this, take a lesson from the great economist Paul Samuelson. In 1948, Samuelson published what might be the most celebrated economics textbook of all time. As the
years went by and he updated the book, he changed his estimate of the inflation level that was tolerable for the health of the macroeconomy: First, he said 5 percent was acceptable; then, in later editions, 3 percent and 2 percent, prompting the Associated Press to run an article titled “Author Should Make Up His Mind.” In a television interview after Samuelson was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1970, he gave his answer to the charge: “When events change, I change my mind. What do you do?”
In pursuit of happiness, you can do this too. When events change, you acquire new information, or someone simply makes a great argument, go ahead and change your mind, and do it openly. It might seem like a tough ask at first. But trust me: It will go from hard to fun. You have nothing to lose but your moat.
ARTHUR C. BROOKS is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, the William Henry Bloomberg professor of the practice of public leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, a professor of management practice at the Harvard Business School, and host of the podcast The Art of Happiness With Arthur Brooks.
- Dave
Changing Your Mind Can Make You Less Anxious (and more attractive)
Arthur Brooks, The Atlantic 3.11.21
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the psychologist Henry Murray asked a sample of college sophomores to participate in a seemingly innocuous experiment in which they would write their “personal philosophy of life,” including their core values and guiding principles, and then engage in a civil debate with a young lawyer about the merits of the philosophy. He did not tell the participants that the lawyer had been instructed to interrogate them and rip their philosophy to shreds in a “vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive” way. They used techniques Murray had developed in vetting intelligence agents during World War II.
The results were fairly predictable. Murray found that the students were generally intensely uncomfortable at having their views attacked in this way. Most hated it and remembered the experiment negatively even years later. One of the student participants was Ted Kaczynski, who went on to become the Unabomber. Noting that his revenge fantasies and belief in the evils of society began during his college years, some have linked his philosophy to the Murray experiment. (Others dispute this idea.)
But not all of Murray’s participants recall the experiment as a horrible experience. In his book Think Again, Adam Grant, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, notes that most of the students had a negative experience. But Grant’s research also showed that a few notable
outliers said they liked it—at least one found it fun—likely because they were forced to rethink their beliefs.
This latter group might have been onto something important. Rethinking your opinions—and changing your views when your facts are proved wrong or someone makes a better argument--can make your life better. It can make you more successful, less anxious, and happier.
When it comes to the idea that we are wrong, or that we should change our opinions, we are incredibly adept at resisting. Grant writes that we possess an astonishing array of cognitive biases telling us, You are right—disregard all evidence to the contrary. These include confirmation bias (we focus on and preferentially remember information that reinforces our beliefs); anchoring bias (we over-rely on one key piece of information—usually the first one we received); the illusion of validity (we overestimate the accuracy of our own judgments and perceptions); and many other related tendencies. These biases are like a crocodile-filled moat around the fortress of our beliefs. They turn us into hermit kings, convinced that any counterarguments that break through our walls will bring us misery.
But as Grant argues, being closed off to being proved wrong or to having our beliefs challenged has huge costs. Leaders who surround themselves with yes-men have been shown to make costly—and sometimes catastrophic—mistakes. One classic example is the Bay of Pigs debacle, in which President John F. Kennedy’s insular cabinet failed to challenge his misguided instincts. Or consider the political punditocracy that assumed Donald Trump couldn’t possibly be a serious threat to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, and never revised those assumptions. If your goal is to find the truth, admitting you are wrong and changing your beliefs based on new facts makes you better off in the end. This is a primary feature of what philosophers call “epistemic humility.”
And while it might not feel easy or fun at first, epistemic humility, like all humility, has clear happiness benefits. In one 2016 study in The Journal of Positive Psychology, researchers created a humility score by asking people about their openness to advice, their honesty about their own strengths and weaknesses, and whether they tended to be excited about a friend’s accomplishments. They found that humility was negatively associated with depression and anxiety, and positively associated with happiness and life satisfaction. Furthermore, they found
that humility buffers the negative impact of stressful life events.
As is often the case with social science, the data on humility and happiness reinforce what philosophers have long taught. Around the turn of the fifth century, Saint Augustine gave a student three pieces of life advice: “The first part is humility; the second, humility; the third, humility: and this I would continue to repeat as often as you might ask direction.” About a thousand years earlier, the Buddha taught in the Dutthatthaka Sutta that attachment to one’s views and opinions is a particular source of human suffering. These ancient ideas could not be more relevant to modern life.
The humility to admit when we are wrong and to change our beliefs can lead us to greater success and happiness. But with our defenses arrayed against these virtues, we need a battle plan to alter our way of thinking and acting. Here are four strategies you might want to add to your arsenal:
1. TURN THE HERMIT KING AGAINST HIMSELF.
The hermit king walls himself in against admitting a mistake or changing his mind because he fears that doing so will make him look stupid or incompetent. Thus, left to your limbic tendencies, you will fight to the death for even doomed ideas. But this tendency is itself based on
an error.
In a 2015 study in the scientific journal PLOS One, researchers compared scientists’ reactions to being informed that their findings “don’t replicate”—that is, they are probably not correct—a common problem in academia. It would be no surprise if scientists, like most people, got
defensive when contradicted in this way, or even doubled down on their original results. But the researchers found that this sort of behavior was more harmful to the scientists’ reputation than simply admitting they were wrong. The message for the hermit king is this: If you are wrong, the best way to save face is to admit it.
2. WELCOME CONTRADICTION.
One of the best ways to combat a destructive tendency is to adopt an “opposite signal” strategy. For example, when you are sad, often the last thing you want to do is see others, but this is precisely what you should do. When your ideas are threatened and you feel defensive, actively reject your instinct to defend yourself, and become more open instead. When someone says, “You are wrong,” respond with, “Tell me more.” Make friends who think differently than you and challenge your assumptions—and whose assumptions you challenge. Think of this as building your “team of rivals,” the phrase the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin used to describe Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet, which, unlike Kennedy’s, challenged him relentlessly. If this sounds like torture, it is all the more urgent that you try it.
3. DON’T DOCUMENT ALL YOUR BELIEFS.
Sociopolitical forces today can make humility feel especially dangerous, and even foolish. Social media has stunted our ability to reinvent our thinking, because our ideas are increasingly cumulative: Every opinion we’ve ever posted online is memorialized. With such a well-documented history of beliefs, changing your mind on something important or controversial can feel like weakness and open you up to public criticism.
The solution to this is to take most of your opinions off the electronic grid. Share your views with people you know and trust, but not with strangers on Twitter and Facebook. Sharing your views with total strangers on social media is a weird conceit to begin with—that people you
don’t know should care about your opinions. And realistically, there’s no opinion you can preserve in internet amber right now that will benefit you in five years.
4. START SMALL.
Let’s suppose that you want the benefits of changing your mind. Getting started is hard, especially if the view you want to change is something huge, like your religious beliefs or your political ideology. It’s better to start with smaller ideas such as your fashion choices, or even your sports allegiances. Reconsider the things you have long taken for granted, and assess them as dispassionately as you can. Then, with these low stakes, change.
The point is not to deal in trivialities. Research on goal setting clearly shows that starting small teaches you how to change and break habits. Then, you can scale this self-knowledge up to the bigger areas of your life in which, you secretly suspect, you might just be wrong. At that point, with your new skills in hand, the adventure of finding truth starts.
If you master these techniques, there might be critics who say you are a flip-flopper, or wishy-washy. To deal with this, take a lesson from the great economist Paul Samuelson. In 1948, Samuelson published what might be the most celebrated economics textbook of all time. As the
years went by and he updated the book, he changed his estimate of the inflation level that was tolerable for the health of the macroeconomy: First, he said 5 percent was acceptable; then, in later editions, 3 percent and 2 percent, prompting the Associated Press to run an article titled “Author Should Make Up His Mind.” In a television interview after Samuelson was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1970, he gave his answer to the charge: “When events change, I change my mind. What do you do?”
In pursuit of happiness, you can do this too. When events change, you acquire new information, or someone simply makes a great argument, go ahead and change your mind, and do it openly. It might seem like a tough ask at first. But trust me: It will go from hard to fun. You have nothing to lose but your moat.
ARTHUR C. BROOKS is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, the William Henry Bloomberg professor of the practice of public leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, a professor of management practice at the Harvard Business School, and host of the podcast The Art of Happiness With Arthur Brooks.
Thursday, March 11
I think you are familiar with the story; Jesus has to carry his cross and falls three times, the third time, Simon of Cyrene steps in to carry the cross for Jesus.
The author of our discussion group reading for this week asks the question - When are we Simon? Did Simon wonder what's the point? Have you pondered if the cross you bear will make a difference at all in the world?
Taking a break from the news of the day, let's talk this week about the futility and the beauty and blessing and obedience of bearing crosses.
- Dave
When We Are Simon of Cyrene
Debie Thomas, Christian Century, 3.3.21
I admire people who take up crosses for the greater good. The surgeon who sacrifices a prestigious career to serve a backwater community. The gutsy journalist who risks her reputation to expose corruption close to home. The ordinary wage earner who donates every spare dollar to a cause he deems urgent.
But not all crosses are so shiny, salvific, and impressive. There are other kinds, too. Kinds we don’t choose, kinds that seemingly get us nowhere. As we move through a second Lenten season under the shadows of COVID-19, I’m thinking about crosses that make zero sense — crosses that baffle us from beginning to end. Simon of Cyrene encounters just such a cross. It’s hard not to ponder his place in the Passion story and ask, “What was the point?”
Simon shows up in the synoptic Gospels at history’s darkest hour. Jesus the Messiah has fallen, and the drama of Good Friday is at a tense standstill. The Roman soldiers whose job it is to execute him have tried forcing him upright, but it’s clear that Jesus can’t take another step on his own.
Enter Simon, a pilgrim from Africa, newly arrived in Jerusalem for the Passover. Simon is in town for devotional purposes; he wants no part in a criminal’s pain and scandal. But once he’s conscripted under Roman law, he has no choice but to obey orders.
It is possible that Simon experiences an epiphany along the path to Calvary. Maybe by the time he and Jesus make it to the top of the hill, Simon is a believer. But we don’t know; the Gospels offer us no platitudinous conversion story. It’s also possible that Simon cringes the entire time he bears the cross, avoids eye contact with Jesus throughout, and flees as soon as the soldiers release him.
The Gospel writers’ silence on the question of Simon’s heart leaves us room to imagine ourselves into the story. As I reflect on his grim encounter with Jesus, I wonder many things. Once the cross was hoisted onto his shoulders, what sort of spirit animated him? Was he consumed by the sheer injustice of his fate? Did the loudness of his Why me? and his How could God let this happen? fill the space
inside his head? Or did he find room for compassion too?
I would love to say that every time I enter into another person’s suffering, I enter out of love. In reality I am often a reluctant cross bearer, motivated by fear, helplessness, or a frantic desire to get the unpleasant task over with as soon as possible.
This is why Simon’s place in the narrative is invaluable. He enters into Jesus’ story to save his own hide, not knowing how his one act—born of nothing particularly honorable—will ricochet over the years of his life or secure him a place in history.
It’s one thing to carry another person’s suffering in order to save them. But to help and not save? That offends my pride, my sense of order, my belief in fairness and justice. Something in me recoils.
Yet this is what we must do to avoid losing our humanity. We make meals for our neighbor whose cancer will definitely kill him. We send checks to our favorite charities, knowing that for every child our money temporarily feeds, there will be tens of thousands it won’t. We linger at the bedsides of loved ones afflicted with dementia, knowing full well that no matter how long we stay, they won’t remember who we are. We pray for an end to systemic injustice, or political corruption, or the crisis of climate change, or the wearying death tolls of the pandemic, and we understand that our prayers might not see fruition for months, years, decades, or centuries.
We do all of these things, and sometimes—maybe often—we’re haunted by the question I’ve ascribed to Simon: What was that for? What difference did it make? It is not given to Simon to rescue the man whose burden he briefly shares. What he receives is a cross, and a cross isn’t something you solve—it’s something you carry. It isn’t even Simon’s privilege to know how the story will end. He has to walk away on that terrible Friday afternoon, totally ignorant of what Sunday might bring.
As I linger over this story, I find comfort in two things. First, Jesus doesn’t mind Simon’s reluctance. He needs help, and he takes what he can get. Simon enters into the appalling mess that is in front of him. He shoulders the weight and walks up the hill. That is enough.
Second, God knows—more agonizingly than we ever will—what it’s like to suffer and not save. It is what God does a billion times a day, offering us companionship without negating our freedom. Simon matters because he stands in useful contrast to Jesus, who willingly walks with us in our suffering. Not for one day or one mile but for the duration.
An easy piety would argue that we have a choice to make: either we’ll allow the strain of our crosses to crack us apart, or we’ll allow suffering to change us for the better. I’m not a fan of easy piety, so I’ll argue this instead: life being the messy thing it is, we will choose both. Or we won’t choose both, but both will happen.
We’ll crack apart, and we’ll be changed. We’ll bear our burdens resentfully, and we’ll bear them in love. The pain that enters into our lives will both deform us and transform us, over and over again. This is the road Simon walked. It’s the road we walk, accompanied by Jesus, until resurrection comes.
Debie Thomas is director of children's and family ministries at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Palo Alto, California. She blogs at Journey with Jesus
The author of our discussion group reading for this week asks the question - When are we Simon? Did Simon wonder what's the point? Have you pondered if the cross you bear will make a difference at all in the world?
Taking a break from the news of the day, let's talk this week about the futility and the beauty and blessing and obedience of bearing crosses.
- Dave
When We Are Simon of Cyrene
Debie Thomas, Christian Century, 3.3.21
I admire people who take up crosses for the greater good. The surgeon who sacrifices a prestigious career to serve a backwater community. The gutsy journalist who risks her reputation to expose corruption close to home. The ordinary wage earner who donates every spare dollar to a cause he deems urgent.
But not all crosses are so shiny, salvific, and impressive. There are other kinds, too. Kinds we don’t choose, kinds that seemingly get us nowhere. As we move through a second Lenten season under the shadows of COVID-19, I’m thinking about crosses that make zero sense — crosses that baffle us from beginning to end. Simon of Cyrene encounters just such a cross. It’s hard not to ponder his place in the Passion story and ask, “What was the point?”
Simon shows up in the synoptic Gospels at history’s darkest hour. Jesus the Messiah has fallen, and the drama of Good Friday is at a tense standstill. The Roman soldiers whose job it is to execute him have tried forcing him upright, but it’s clear that Jesus can’t take another step on his own.
Enter Simon, a pilgrim from Africa, newly arrived in Jerusalem for the Passover. Simon is in town for devotional purposes; he wants no part in a criminal’s pain and scandal. But once he’s conscripted under Roman law, he has no choice but to obey orders.
It is possible that Simon experiences an epiphany along the path to Calvary. Maybe by the time he and Jesus make it to the top of the hill, Simon is a believer. But we don’t know; the Gospels offer us no platitudinous conversion story. It’s also possible that Simon cringes the entire time he bears the cross, avoids eye contact with Jesus throughout, and flees as soon as the soldiers release him.
The Gospel writers’ silence on the question of Simon’s heart leaves us room to imagine ourselves into the story. As I reflect on his grim encounter with Jesus, I wonder many things. Once the cross was hoisted onto his shoulders, what sort of spirit animated him? Was he consumed by the sheer injustice of his fate? Did the loudness of his Why me? and his How could God let this happen? fill the space
inside his head? Or did he find room for compassion too?
I would love to say that every time I enter into another person’s suffering, I enter out of love. In reality I am often a reluctant cross bearer, motivated by fear, helplessness, or a frantic desire to get the unpleasant task over with as soon as possible.
This is why Simon’s place in the narrative is invaluable. He enters into Jesus’ story to save his own hide, not knowing how his one act—born of nothing particularly honorable—will ricochet over the years of his life or secure him a place in history.
It’s one thing to carry another person’s suffering in order to save them. But to help and not save? That offends my pride, my sense of order, my belief in fairness and justice. Something in me recoils.
Yet this is what we must do to avoid losing our humanity. We make meals for our neighbor whose cancer will definitely kill him. We send checks to our favorite charities, knowing that for every child our money temporarily feeds, there will be tens of thousands it won’t. We linger at the bedsides of loved ones afflicted with dementia, knowing full well that no matter how long we stay, they won’t remember who we are. We pray for an end to systemic injustice, or political corruption, or the crisis of climate change, or the wearying death tolls of the pandemic, and we understand that our prayers might not see fruition for months, years, decades, or centuries.
We do all of these things, and sometimes—maybe often—we’re haunted by the question I’ve ascribed to Simon: What was that for? What difference did it make? It is not given to Simon to rescue the man whose burden he briefly shares. What he receives is a cross, and a cross isn’t something you solve—it’s something you carry. It isn’t even Simon’s privilege to know how the story will end. He has to walk away on that terrible Friday afternoon, totally ignorant of what Sunday might bring.
As I linger over this story, I find comfort in two things. First, Jesus doesn’t mind Simon’s reluctance. He needs help, and he takes what he can get. Simon enters into the appalling mess that is in front of him. He shoulders the weight and walks up the hill. That is enough.
Second, God knows—more agonizingly than we ever will—what it’s like to suffer and not save. It is what God does a billion times a day, offering us companionship without negating our freedom. Simon matters because he stands in useful contrast to Jesus, who willingly walks with us in our suffering. Not for one day or one mile but for the duration.
An easy piety would argue that we have a choice to make: either we’ll allow the strain of our crosses to crack us apart, or we’ll allow suffering to change us for the better. I’m not a fan of easy piety, so I’ll argue this instead: life being the messy thing it is, we will choose both. Or we won’t choose both, but both will happen.
We’ll crack apart, and we’ll be changed. We’ll bear our burdens resentfully, and we’ll bear them in love. The pain that enters into our lives will both deform us and transform us, over and over again. This is the road Simon walked. It’s the road we walk, accompanied by Jesus, until resurrection comes.
Debie Thomas is director of children's and family ministries at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Palo Alto, California. She blogs at Journey with Jesus
Thursday, March 4
We got pretty good at learning how to live during a pandemic. The question is, do we know how to come out of it? When will we know it is over and is safe? Unlike a truce at the end of a war that signals an effective end to fighting, it sounds like this pandemic will not have a ceasefire. So when will you know it is safe to come out? What sort of metrics do you have to feel safe traveling again, or seeing family, having fellowship at church, or even going out to dinner and a show?
The reading this week addresses this central question. How well it addresses the question, and what you do with it, well, that will be something to discuss.
When Will We Know the Pandemic Is Over
Alexis C. Madrigal, The Atlantic 2.23.21
The Biden administration put out a comprehensive national strategy in late January for “beating COVID-19.” The 200-page document includes many useful goals, such as “Mount a safe, effective, and comprehensive vaccination campaign.” But nowhere does it give a quantitative threshold for when it will be time to say, “Okay, done—we’ve beaten the pandemic.”
A month later, it’s time to get specific. The facts are undeniable: The seven-day average of new cases in the United States has fallen by 74 percent since their January peak, hospitalizations have gone down by 58 percent, and deaths have dropped by 42 percent. Meanwhile, more than 60 million doses of vaccine have gone into American arms. At some point—maybe even some point relatively soon—the remaining emergency measures that were introduced in March 2020 will come to an end. But when, exactly, should that happen?
The problem is that the “end of the pandemic” means different things in different contexts. The World Health Organization first declared a “public health emergency of international concern” on January 30, 2020, holding off on labeling it a “pandemic” until March 11. The imposition (and rescinding) of these labels is a judgment made by WHO leadership, and one that can reflect murky, tactical considerations. Regardless of what the WHO decides (and when), national governments—and individual states within the U.S.—have to make their own
determinations about when and how to reopen their schools and loosen their restrictions on businesses. I reached out to prominent public-health experts to find out which epidemiological criteria ought to be met before these kinds of steps are taken.
The most obvious interpretation of “beating COVID-19” would be that transmission of the coronavirus has stopped, a scenario some public-health experts have hash-tagged #ZeroCOVID. But the experts I spoke with all agreed that this won’t happen in the U.S. in the foreseeable future. “This would require very high levels of vaccination coverage,” said Celine Gounder, an infectious-disease specialist at NYU who served on Joe Biden’s coronavirus task force during the transition. The U.S. may never reach vaccination rates of 75 to 85 percent, the experts said.
“The question is not when do we eliminate the virus in the country,” said Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center and an expert in virology and immunology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Rather, it’s when do we have the virus sufficiently under control? “We’ll have a much, much lower case count, hospitalization count, death count,” Offit said. “What is that number that people are comfortable with?” In his view, “the doors will open” when the country gets to fewer than 5,000 new cases a day, and fewer than 100 deaths.
That latter threshold, of 100 COVID-19 deaths a day, was repeated by other experts, following the logic that it approximates the nation’s average death toll from influenza. In most recent years, the flu has killed 20,000 to 50,000 Americans annually, which averages out to 55 to 140 deaths a day, said Joseph Eisenberg, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan. “This risk was largely considered acceptable by the public,” Eisenberg said. Monica Gandhi, an infectious-disease specialist at UC San Francisco, made a similar calculation. “The end to the
emergency portion of the pandemic in the United States should be heralded completely by the curtailing of severe illness, hospitalizations, and deaths from COVID-19,” she said. “Fewer than 100 deaths a day—to mirror the typical mortality of influenza in the U.S. over a typical year—is an appropriate goal.”
The “flu test” proposed here is not a perfect apples-to-apples comparison. Deaths attributed to COVID-19 are directly reported to public-health authorities, while the mortality numbers from seasonal flu are CDC estimates based on national surveillance data that have been fed into statistical models. But researchers believe that the straightforward counts of influenza deaths—just 3,448 to 15,620 in recent years—are substantially too low, while direct counts of COVID-19 deaths are likely to be more accurate. One big reason: Far more COVID-19 tests are done in a single day than flu tests in an entire year, and flu tests have a greater tendency to return false negatives.
In any case, we are nowhere near 100 COVID-19 deaths a day. Since last spring, states have not reported fewer than 474 deaths a day, as measured by a rolling seven-day average at the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. Right now, the country as a whole is still reporting close to 2,000 deaths a day, and just two weeks ago that number was more than 3,000. So, if we’re going by the flu test, we still have a very long way to go.
Some experts were even more conservative. Crystal Watson, a health-security scholar at Johns Hopkins University, suggested a threshold of 0.5 newly diagnosed cases per 100,000 people every day, and a test-positivity rate of less than 1 percent.
That would translate to fewer than 2,000 cases a day in the U.S., compared with the current 60,000 or more. We’d also want to log at least one month of normal hospital operations without staff or equipment shortages, she said.
While every proposed threshold remains far below what we’re seeing right now, the researchers I spoke with believe that if vaccine uptake is high enough, those numbers can be reached. Watson suggested a target of 80 percent coverage for populations older than 65, and 70 to 80 percent for everyone else. For the latter, “perhaps 60 percent is more realistic,” she said.
So far, no state has reached those vaccination levels in any population. It is possible, however, that in specific, high-risk subpopulations, targeted efforts could drive vaccination rates to very high levels. Our best example is in long-term-care facilities, which have been linked to 35 percent of total COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. The federal government’s vaccine rollout made residents and staff in these facilities a priority and provided specific funds and operational help to vaccinate these people beginning in December. At the COVID Tracking Project, we’ve seen
the share of deaths attributed to long-term-care facilities drop by more than half over the past six weeks, which suggests the vaccines are working.
The large number of Americans who’ve already been infected will also be crucial for reaching transmission-slowing levels of immunity. The CDC estimates that more than 83 million Americans have been infected with COVID-19, far more than the official, confirmed case total of 28 million. Forty-four million Americans have received at least one dose of a vaccine. Even assuming some overlap between the previously infected and the vaccinated, perhaps 100 to 120 million Americans have some level of immunity. That’s roughly one-third of the population.
It could take months for the size of this group to reach a point where the number of COVID-19 deaths a day falls below 100. Until then, we’ll be confronted with a different sort of risk: that, for some, the pandemic feels like it’s over long before it actually is. Just as the country has never taken a unified approach to battling COVID-19, we may very well end up without a unified approach to deciding when it ends. That’s why public-health experts are desperately urging Americans to hold firm even as the pandemic seems to be receding. “We’re lifting mitigation
measures too soon,” warned Gounder, the infectious-disease specialist at NYU. “We’re taking our foot off the brake before putting the car into park.” If enough people ignore that message and decide the pandemic is over for them, it may very well put off the moment when we can say that the pandemic is over for everyone.
The reading this week addresses this central question. How well it addresses the question, and what you do with it, well, that will be something to discuss.
When Will We Know the Pandemic Is Over
Alexis C. Madrigal, The Atlantic 2.23.21
The Biden administration put out a comprehensive national strategy in late January for “beating COVID-19.” The 200-page document includes many useful goals, such as “Mount a safe, effective, and comprehensive vaccination campaign.” But nowhere does it give a quantitative threshold for when it will be time to say, “Okay, done—we’ve beaten the pandemic.”
A month later, it’s time to get specific. The facts are undeniable: The seven-day average of new cases in the United States has fallen by 74 percent since their January peak, hospitalizations have gone down by 58 percent, and deaths have dropped by 42 percent. Meanwhile, more than 60 million doses of vaccine have gone into American arms. At some point—maybe even some point relatively soon—the remaining emergency measures that were introduced in March 2020 will come to an end. But when, exactly, should that happen?
The problem is that the “end of the pandemic” means different things in different contexts. The World Health Organization first declared a “public health emergency of international concern” on January 30, 2020, holding off on labeling it a “pandemic” until March 11. The imposition (and rescinding) of these labels is a judgment made by WHO leadership, and one that can reflect murky, tactical considerations. Regardless of what the WHO decides (and when), national governments—and individual states within the U.S.—have to make their own
determinations about when and how to reopen their schools and loosen their restrictions on businesses. I reached out to prominent public-health experts to find out which epidemiological criteria ought to be met before these kinds of steps are taken.
The most obvious interpretation of “beating COVID-19” would be that transmission of the coronavirus has stopped, a scenario some public-health experts have hash-tagged #ZeroCOVID. But the experts I spoke with all agreed that this won’t happen in the U.S. in the foreseeable future. “This would require very high levels of vaccination coverage,” said Celine Gounder, an infectious-disease specialist at NYU who served on Joe Biden’s coronavirus task force during the transition. The U.S. may never reach vaccination rates of 75 to 85 percent, the experts said.
“The question is not when do we eliminate the virus in the country,” said Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center and an expert in virology and immunology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Rather, it’s when do we have the virus sufficiently under control? “We’ll have a much, much lower case count, hospitalization count, death count,” Offit said. “What is that number that people are comfortable with?” In his view, “the doors will open” when the country gets to fewer than 5,000 new cases a day, and fewer than 100 deaths.
That latter threshold, of 100 COVID-19 deaths a day, was repeated by other experts, following the logic that it approximates the nation’s average death toll from influenza. In most recent years, the flu has killed 20,000 to 50,000 Americans annually, which averages out to 55 to 140 deaths a day, said Joseph Eisenberg, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan. “This risk was largely considered acceptable by the public,” Eisenberg said. Monica Gandhi, an infectious-disease specialist at UC San Francisco, made a similar calculation. “The end to the
emergency portion of the pandemic in the United States should be heralded completely by the curtailing of severe illness, hospitalizations, and deaths from COVID-19,” she said. “Fewer than 100 deaths a day—to mirror the typical mortality of influenza in the U.S. over a typical year—is an appropriate goal.”
The “flu test” proposed here is not a perfect apples-to-apples comparison. Deaths attributed to COVID-19 are directly reported to public-health authorities, while the mortality numbers from seasonal flu are CDC estimates based on national surveillance data that have been fed into statistical models. But researchers believe that the straightforward counts of influenza deaths—just 3,448 to 15,620 in recent years—are substantially too low, while direct counts of COVID-19 deaths are likely to be more accurate. One big reason: Far more COVID-19 tests are done in a single day than flu tests in an entire year, and flu tests have a greater tendency to return false negatives.
In any case, we are nowhere near 100 COVID-19 deaths a day. Since last spring, states have not reported fewer than 474 deaths a day, as measured by a rolling seven-day average at the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. Right now, the country as a whole is still reporting close to 2,000 deaths a day, and just two weeks ago that number was more than 3,000. So, if we’re going by the flu test, we still have a very long way to go.
Some experts were even more conservative. Crystal Watson, a health-security scholar at Johns Hopkins University, suggested a threshold of 0.5 newly diagnosed cases per 100,000 people every day, and a test-positivity rate of less than 1 percent.
That would translate to fewer than 2,000 cases a day in the U.S., compared with the current 60,000 or more. We’d also want to log at least one month of normal hospital operations without staff or equipment shortages, she said.
While every proposed threshold remains far below what we’re seeing right now, the researchers I spoke with believe that if vaccine uptake is high enough, those numbers can be reached. Watson suggested a target of 80 percent coverage for populations older than 65, and 70 to 80 percent for everyone else. For the latter, “perhaps 60 percent is more realistic,” she said.
So far, no state has reached those vaccination levels in any population. It is possible, however, that in specific, high-risk subpopulations, targeted efforts could drive vaccination rates to very high levels. Our best example is in long-term-care facilities, which have been linked to 35 percent of total COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. The federal government’s vaccine rollout made residents and staff in these facilities a priority and provided specific funds and operational help to vaccinate these people beginning in December. At the COVID Tracking Project, we’ve seen
the share of deaths attributed to long-term-care facilities drop by more than half over the past six weeks, which suggests the vaccines are working.
The large number of Americans who’ve already been infected will also be crucial for reaching transmission-slowing levels of immunity. The CDC estimates that more than 83 million Americans have been infected with COVID-19, far more than the official, confirmed case total of 28 million. Forty-four million Americans have received at least one dose of a vaccine. Even assuming some overlap between the previously infected and the vaccinated, perhaps 100 to 120 million Americans have some level of immunity. That’s roughly one-third of the population.
It could take months for the size of this group to reach a point where the number of COVID-19 deaths a day falls below 100. Until then, we’ll be confronted with a different sort of risk: that, for some, the pandemic feels like it’s over long before it actually is. Just as the country has never taken a unified approach to battling COVID-19, we may very well end up without a unified approach to deciding when it ends. That’s why public-health experts are desperately urging Americans to hold firm even as the pandemic seems to be receding. “We’re lifting mitigation
measures too soon,” warned Gounder, the infectious-disease specialist at NYU. “We’re taking our foot off the brake before putting the car into park.” If enough people ignore that message and decide the pandemic is over for them, it may very well put off the moment when we can say that the pandemic is over for everyone.
Thursday, February 25
Following up this week's topic of how do we know what is true, here is an opinion piece that gives a four-step process in how to read the news. Although it is longer than most articles, I think you will find it interesting.
Don’t Go Down the Rabbit Hole
Charlie Warzel, The New York Times 2.18.21
For an academic, Michael Caulfield has an odd request: Stop overthinking what you see online. Mr. Caulfield, a digital literacy expert at Washington State University Vancouver, knows all too well that at this very moment, more people are fighting for the opportunity to lie to you than at perhaps any other point in human history.
Misinformation rides the greased algorithmic rails of powerful social media platforms and travels at velocities and in volumes that make it nearly impossible to stop. That alone makes information warfare an unfair fight for the average internet user. But Mr. Caulfield argues that the deck is stacked even further against us. That the way we’re taught from a young age to evaluate and think critically about information is fundamentally flawed and out of step with the chaos of the current internet.
“We’re taught that, in order to protect ourselves from bad information, we need to deeply engage with the stuff that washes up in front of us,” Mr. Caulfield told me recently. He suggested that the dominant mode of media literacy (if kids get taught any at all) is that “you’ll get imperfect information and then use reasoning to fix that somehow. But in reality, that strategy can completely backfire.”
It’s often counterproductive to engage directly with content from an unknown source, and people can be led astray by false information. Influenced by the research of Sam Wineburg, a professor at Stanford, and Sarah McGrew, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, Mr. Caulfield argued that the best way to learn about a source of information is to leave it and look elsewhere, a concept called lateral reading. For instance, imagine you were to visit Stormfront, a white supremacist message board, to try to understand racist claims in order to debunk them. “Even if you see through the horrible rhetoric, at the end of the day you gave that place however many minutes of your time,” Mr. Caulfield said. “Even with good intentions, you run the risk of misunderstanding something, because Stormfront users are way better at propaganda than you. You won’t get less racist reading Stormfront critically, but you might be overloaded by information and overwhelmed.” “The goal of disinformation is to capture attention, and critical thinking is deep attention,” he wrote in 2018. People learn to think critically by focusing on something and contemplating it deeply — to follow the information’s logic and the inconsistencies.
That natural human mind-set is a liability in an attention economy. It allows grifters, conspiracy theorists, trolls and savvy attention hijackers to take advantage of us and steal our focus. “Whenever you give your attention to a bad actor, you allow them to steal your attention from better treatments of an issue, and give them the opportunity to warp your perspective,” Mr. Caulfield wrote.
One way to combat this dynamic is to change how we teach media literacy: Internet users need to learn that our attention is a scarce commodity that is to be spent wisely.
In 2016, Mr. Caulfield met Mr. Wineburg, who suggested modeling the process after the way professional fact checkers assess information. Mr. Caulfield refined the practice into four simple principles:
1. Stop.
2. Investigate the source.
3. Find better coverage.
4. Trace claims, quotes and media to the original context.
Otherwise known as SIFT.
Mr. Caulfield walked me through the process using an Instagram post from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent anti-vaccine activist, falsely alleging a link between the human papillomavirus vaccine and cancer. “If this is not a claim where I have a depth of understanding, then I want to stop for a second and, before going further, just investigate the source,” Mr. Caulfield said. He copied Mr. Kennedy’s name in the Instagram post and popped it into Google. “Look how fast this is,” he told me as he counted the seconds out loud. In 15 seconds, he navigated to Wikipedia and scrolled through the introductory section of the page, highlighting with his cursor the last sentence, which reads that Mr. Kennedy is an anti-vaccine activist and a conspiracy theorist. “Is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the best, unbiased source on information about a vaccine? I’d argue no. And that’s good enough to know we should probably just move on,” he said.
He probed deeper into the method to find better coverage by copying the main claim in Mr. Kennedy’s post and pasting that into a Google search. The first two results came from Agence France-Presse’s fact-check website and the National Institutes of Health. His quick searches showed a pattern: Mr. Kennedy’s claims were outside the consensus — a sign they were motivated by something other than science.
The SIFT method and the instructional teaching unit (about six hours of class work) that accompanies it has been picked up by dozens of universities across the country and in some Canadian high schools. What is potentially revolutionary about SIFT is that it focuses on making quick judgments. A SIFT fact check can and should take just 30, 60, 90 seconds to evaluate a piece of content.
The four steps are based on the premise that you often make a better decision with less information than you do with more. Also, spending 15 minutes to determine a single fact in order to decipher a tweet or a piece of news coming from a source you’ve never seen before will often leave you more confused than you were before. “The question we want students asking is: Is this a good source for this purpose, or could I find something better relatively quickly?” Mr. Caulfield said. “I’ve seen in the classroom where a student finds a great answer in three minutes but then keeps going and ends up won over by bad information.”
SIFT has its limits. It’s designed for casual news consumers, not experts or those attempting to do deep research. A reporter working on an investigative story or trying to synthesize complex information will have to go deep. But for someone just trying to figure out a basic fact, it’s helpful not to get bogged down. “We’ve been trained to think that Googling or just checking one resource we trust is almost like cheating,” he said. “But when people search Google, the best results may not always be first, but the good information is usually near the top. Often you see a pattern in the links of a consensus that’s been formed. But deeper into the process, it often gets weirder. It’s important to know when to stop.”
Christina Ladam, an assistant political science professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, has seen the damage firsthand. While teaching an introductory class as a Ph.D. student in 2015, she noticed her students had trouble vetting sources and distinguishing credible news from untrustworthy information. During one research assignment on the 2016 presidential race, multiple students cited a debunked claim from a satirical website claiming that Ben Carson, a candidate that year, had been endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan. “Some of these students had never had somebody even talk to them about checking sources or looking for fake news,” she told me. “It was just uncritical acceptance if it fit with the narrative in their head or complete rejection if it didn’t.”
Ms. Ladam started teaching a SIFT-based media literacy unit in her political science classes because of the method’s practical application. The unit is short, only two weeks long. Her students latched onto quick tricks like how to hover over a Twitter handle and see if the account looks legitimate or is a parody account or impersonation. They learned how to reverse image search using Google to check if a photo had been doctored or if similar photos had been published by trusted news outlets. Students were taught to identify claims in Facebook or Instagram posts and, with a few searches, decide — even if they’re unsure of the veracity — whether the account seems to be a trustworthy guide or if they should look elsewhere.
The goal isn’t to make political judgments or to talk students out of a particular point of view, but to try to get them to understand the context of a source of information and make decisions about its credibility. The course is not precious about overly academic sources, either.
“The students are confused when I tell them to try and trace something down with a quick Wikipedia search, because they’ve been told not to do it,” she said. “Not for research papers, but if you’re trying to find out if a site is legitimate or if somebody has a history as a conspiracy theorist and you show them how to follow the page’s citation, it’s quick and effective, which means it’s more likely to be used.”
As a journalist who can be a bit of a snob about research methods, it makes me anxious to type this advice. Use Wikipedia for quick guidance! Spend less time torturing yourself with complex primary sources! A part of my brain hears this and reflexively worries these methods could be exploited by conspiracy theorists. But listening to Ms. Ladam and Mr. Caulfield describe disinformation dynamics, it seems that snobs like me have it backward.
Think about YouTube conspiracy theorists or many QAnon or anti-vaccine influencers. Their tactic, as Mr. Caulfield noted, is to flatter viewers while overloading them with three-hour videos laced with debunked claims and pseudoscience, as well as legitimate information. “The internet offers this illusion of explanatory depth,” he said. “Until 20 seconds ago, you’d never thought about, say, race and IQ, but now, suddenly, somebody is treating you like an expert. It’s flattering your intellect, and so you engage, but you don’t really stand a chance.”
What he described is a kind of informational hubris we have that is quite difficult to fight. But what SIFT and Mr. Caulfield’s lessons seem to do is flatter their students in a different way: by reminding us our attention is precious.
The goal of SIFT isn’t to be the arbiter of truth but to instill a reflex that asks if something is worth one’s time and attention and to turn away if not. Because the method is less interested in political judgments, Mr. Caulfield and Ms. Ladam noticed, students across the political spectrum are more likely to embrace it. By the end of the two-week course, Ms. Ladam said, students are better at finding primary sources for research papers. In discussions they’re less likely to fall back on motivated reasoning. Students tend to be less defensive when confronted with a piece of information they disagree with. Even if their opinions on a broader issue don’t change, a window is open that makes conversation possible. Perhaps most promising, she has seen her students share the methods with family members who post dubious news stories online. “It sounds so simple, but I think that teaching people how to check their news source by even a quick Wikipedia can have profound effects,” she said. SIFT is not an antidote to misinformation. Poor media literacy is just one component of a broader problem that includes more culpable actors like politicians, platforms and conspiracy peddlers. If powerful, influential people with the ability to command vast quantities of attention use that power to warp reality and platforms don’t intervene, no mnemonic device can stop them. But SIFT may add a bit of friction into the system. Most important, it urges us to take the attention we save with SIFT and apply it to issues that matter to us.
“Right now we are taking the scarcest, most valuable resource we have — our attention — and we’re using it to try to repair the horribly broken information ecosystem,” Mr. Caulfield said. “We’re throwing good money after bad.”
Our focus isn’t free, and yet we’re giving it away with every glance at a screen. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, the economics are in our favor. Demand for our attention is at an all-time high, and we control supply. It’s time we increased our price.
Don’t Go Down the Rabbit Hole
Charlie Warzel, The New York Times 2.18.21
For an academic, Michael Caulfield has an odd request: Stop overthinking what you see online. Mr. Caulfield, a digital literacy expert at Washington State University Vancouver, knows all too well that at this very moment, more people are fighting for the opportunity to lie to you than at perhaps any other point in human history.
Misinformation rides the greased algorithmic rails of powerful social media platforms and travels at velocities and in volumes that make it nearly impossible to stop. That alone makes information warfare an unfair fight for the average internet user. But Mr. Caulfield argues that the deck is stacked even further against us. That the way we’re taught from a young age to evaluate and think critically about information is fundamentally flawed and out of step with the chaos of the current internet.
“We’re taught that, in order to protect ourselves from bad information, we need to deeply engage with the stuff that washes up in front of us,” Mr. Caulfield told me recently. He suggested that the dominant mode of media literacy (if kids get taught any at all) is that “you’ll get imperfect information and then use reasoning to fix that somehow. But in reality, that strategy can completely backfire.”
It’s often counterproductive to engage directly with content from an unknown source, and people can be led astray by false information. Influenced by the research of Sam Wineburg, a professor at Stanford, and Sarah McGrew, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, Mr. Caulfield argued that the best way to learn about a source of information is to leave it and look elsewhere, a concept called lateral reading. For instance, imagine you were to visit Stormfront, a white supremacist message board, to try to understand racist claims in order to debunk them. “Even if you see through the horrible rhetoric, at the end of the day you gave that place however many minutes of your time,” Mr. Caulfield said. “Even with good intentions, you run the risk of misunderstanding something, because Stormfront users are way better at propaganda than you. You won’t get less racist reading Stormfront critically, but you might be overloaded by information and overwhelmed.” “The goal of disinformation is to capture attention, and critical thinking is deep attention,” he wrote in 2018. People learn to think critically by focusing on something and contemplating it deeply — to follow the information’s logic and the inconsistencies.
That natural human mind-set is a liability in an attention economy. It allows grifters, conspiracy theorists, trolls and savvy attention hijackers to take advantage of us and steal our focus. “Whenever you give your attention to a bad actor, you allow them to steal your attention from better treatments of an issue, and give them the opportunity to warp your perspective,” Mr. Caulfield wrote.
One way to combat this dynamic is to change how we teach media literacy: Internet users need to learn that our attention is a scarce commodity that is to be spent wisely.
In 2016, Mr. Caulfield met Mr. Wineburg, who suggested modeling the process after the way professional fact checkers assess information. Mr. Caulfield refined the practice into four simple principles:
1. Stop.
2. Investigate the source.
3. Find better coverage.
4. Trace claims, quotes and media to the original context.
Otherwise known as SIFT.
Mr. Caulfield walked me through the process using an Instagram post from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent anti-vaccine activist, falsely alleging a link between the human papillomavirus vaccine and cancer. “If this is not a claim where I have a depth of understanding, then I want to stop for a second and, before going further, just investigate the source,” Mr. Caulfield said. He copied Mr. Kennedy’s name in the Instagram post and popped it into Google. “Look how fast this is,” he told me as he counted the seconds out loud. In 15 seconds, he navigated to Wikipedia and scrolled through the introductory section of the page, highlighting with his cursor the last sentence, which reads that Mr. Kennedy is an anti-vaccine activist and a conspiracy theorist. “Is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the best, unbiased source on information about a vaccine? I’d argue no. And that’s good enough to know we should probably just move on,” he said.
He probed deeper into the method to find better coverage by copying the main claim in Mr. Kennedy’s post and pasting that into a Google search. The first two results came from Agence France-Presse’s fact-check website and the National Institutes of Health. His quick searches showed a pattern: Mr. Kennedy’s claims were outside the consensus — a sign they were motivated by something other than science.
The SIFT method and the instructional teaching unit (about six hours of class work) that accompanies it has been picked up by dozens of universities across the country and in some Canadian high schools. What is potentially revolutionary about SIFT is that it focuses on making quick judgments. A SIFT fact check can and should take just 30, 60, 90 seconds to evaluate a piece of content.
The four steps are based on the premise that you often make a better decision with less information than you do with more. Also, spending 15 minutes to determine a single fact in order to decipher a tweet or a piece of news coming from a source you’ve never seen before will often leave you more confused than you were before. “The question we want students asking is: Is this a good source for this purpose, or could I find something better relatively quickly?” Mr. Caulfield said. “I’ve seen in the classroom where a student finds a great answer in three minutes but then keeps going and ends up won over by bad information.”
SIFT has its limits. It’s designed for casual news consumers, not experts or those attempting to do deep research. A reporter working on an investigative story or trying to synthesize complex information will have to go deep. But for someone just trying to figure out a basic fact, it’s helpful not to get bogged down. “We’ve been trained to think that Googling or just checking one resource we trust is almost like cheating,” he said. “But when people search Google, the best results may not always be first, but the good information is usually near the top. Often you see a pattern in the links of a consensus that’s been formed. But deeper into the process, it often gets weirder. It’s important to know when to stop.”
Christina Ladam, an assistant political science professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, has seen the damage firsthand. While teaching an introductory class as a Ph.D. student in 2015, she noticed her students had trouble vetting sources and distinguishing credible news from untrustworthy information. During one research assignment on the 2016 presidential race, multiple students cited a debunked claim from a satirical website claiming that Ben Carson, a candidate that year, had been endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan. “Some of these students had never had somebody even talk to them about checking sources or looking for fake news,” she told me. “It was just uncritical acceptance if it fit with the narrative in their head or complete rejection if it didn’t.”
Ms. Ladam started teaching a SIFT-based media literacy unit in her political science classes because of the method’s practical application. The unit is short, only two weeks long. Her students latched onto quick tricks like how to hover over a Twitter handle and see if the account looks legitimate or is a parody account or impersonation. They learned how to reverse image search using Google to check if a photo had been doctored or if similar photos had been published by trusted news outlets. Students were taught to identify claims in Facebook or Instagram posts and, with a few searches, decide — even if they’re unsure of the veracity — whether the account seems to be a trustworthy guide or if they should look elsewhere.
The goal isn’t to make political judgments or to talk students out of a particular point of view, but to try to get them to understand the context of a source of information and make decisions about its credibility. The course is not precious about overly academic sources, either.
“The students are confused when I tell them to try and trace something down with a quick Wikipedia search, because they’ve been told not to do it,” she said. “Not for research papers, but if you’re trying to find out if a site is legitimate or if somebody has a history as a conspiracy theorist and you show them how to follow the page’s citation, it’s quick and effective, which means it’s more likely to be used.”
As a journalist who can be a bit of a snob about research methods, it makes me anxious to type this advice. Use Wikipedia for quick guidance! Spend less time torturing yourself with complex primary sources! A part of my brain hears this and reflexively worries these methods could be exploited by conspiracy theorists. But listening to Ms. Ladam and Mr. Caulfield describe disinformation dynamics, it seems that snobs like me have it backward.
Think about YouTube conspiracy theorists or many QAnon or anti-vaccine influencers. Their tactic, as Mr. Caulfield noted, is to flatter viewers while overloading them with three-hour videos laced with debunked claims and pseudoscience, as well as legitimate information. “The internet offers this illusion of explanatory depth,” he said. “Until 20 seconds ago, you’d never thought about, say, race and IQ, but now, suddenly, somebody is treating you like an expert. It’s flattering your intellect, and so you engage, but you don’t really stand a chance.”
What he described is a kind of informational hubris we have that is quite difficult to fight. But what SIFT and Mr. Caulfield’s lessons seem to do is flatter their students in a different way: by reminding us our attention is precious.
The goal of SIFT isn’t to be the arbiter of truth but to instill a reflex that asks if something is worth one’s time and attention and to turn away if not. Because the method is less interested in political judgments, Mr. Caulfield and Ms. Ladam noticed, students across the political spectrum are more likely to embrace it. By the end of the two-week course, Ms. Ladam said, students are better at finding primary sources for research papers. In discussions they’re less likely to fall back on motivated reasoning. Students tend to be less defensive when confronted with a piece of information they disagree with. Even if their opinions on a broader issue don’t change, a window is open that makes conversation possible. Perhaps most promising, she has seen her students share the methods with family members who post dubious news stories online. “It sounds so simple, but I think that teaching people how to check their news source by even a quick Wikipedia can have profound effects,” she said. SIFT is not an antidote to misinformation. Poor media literacy is just one component of a broader problem that includes more culpable actors like politicians, platforms and conspiracy peddlers. If powerful, influential people with the ability to command vast quantities of attention use that power to warp reality and platforms don’t intervene, no mnemonic device can stop them. But SIFT may add a bit of friction into the system. Most important, it urges us to take the attention we save with SIFT and apply it to issues that matter to us.
“Right now we are taking the scarcest, most valuable resource we have — our attention — and we’re using it to try to repair the horribly broken information ecosystem,” Mr. Caulfield said. “We’re throwing good money after bad.”
Our focus isn’t free, and yet we’re giving it away with every glance at a screen. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, the economics are in our favor. Demand for our attention is at an all-time high, and we control supply. It’s time we increased our price.
Thursday, February 16
Is Authenticity Enough for Christian Apologetics?
Ted Turnau, Christianity Today Book Review 2.5.21
Pastor’s note: for today’s reading, I wanted to give a brief description of two words used in the article – apologetics and authenticity. Apologetics is quite literally defense of the faith; the Greek word apologia means “defense” as a lawyer gives at a trial. Authenticity, in a Christian sense, is what feels true to one on the inside. The opposite end of authenticity is Biblical authority/truth. On one side there is the inner circle of truth – it feels true so it has to be true. The other side is the exterior circle truth of biblical authority – the Bible says it’s true so it has to be true.
Justin Bailey’s Reimagining Apologetics: The Beauty of Faith in a Secular Age highlights a problem that plagues certain forms of Christian persuasion: the failure to take imagination seriously. For some Christians, apologetics is a matter of dry-as-the-desert technical arguments or of intellectually arm-wrestling non-Christians into submission. Add an evangelical ethos hopelessly enamored with perpetual culture-warring, and you have a profound problem in Christian witness.
Bailey begins by noting that, according to philosopher Charles Taylor, we live in a world where everyone assumes that ultimate answers lie within. We follow what resonates with our inner life. Therefore, the wise apologist who wants to reach a non-Christian engages not with what is
(externally, objectively) true, but with what (internally, subjectively) moves him or her emotionally and aesthetically. Not truth, but beauty. Not rationality, but authenticity. The key lies with the imagination. We must provide space, Bailey writes, for non-Christians to “feel their way into faith.”
After providing a brief philosophy and theology of the imagination, Bailey turns to novelists Marilynne Robinson (of Gilead fame) and George MacDonald (who inspired C. S. Lewis) as models of what such engagement would look like. They created imaginary worlds that allowed
non-Christians to see through the eyes of faith. He then applies his findings to apologetical method based on a threefold model of the imagination: sensing, seeing, and shaping.
Sensing prioritizes the aesthetics of belief, emphasizing what non-Christians would find beautiful and believable.
Seeing invites them to try on a Christian vision — a larger, “thicker” view of reality.
Shaping invites them to a “poetic participation” that encourages them to situate their own life-projects within God’s redemption project. By suspending the question of truth to pursue beauty and imaginative resonance, Bailey argues, apologetics will appeal to those alienated from God but seeking authenticity.
Authenticity and Authority
Many conservative Christians, and apologists in particular, have been culturally tone-deaf and have made themselves (ourselves) an obnoxious presence that few non-Christians are interested in engaging. But Bailey’s book is part of a growing movement that emphasizes beauty and imaginative resonance. Sound missiology (the study of religious [typically Christian] missions and their methods and purposes) seeks to contextualize the gospel in ways that make sense to a particular people group. In this case, the target group is those of our own culture alienated from Jesus.
That said, I do have concerns. There is always the risk that contextualization will lead to a compromised message—a gospel paganized in translation. Bailey is well aware of these risks, but I am concerned he never fully reckons with the risks of contextualizing the gospel to the
particular social imaginary that prevails in today’s Western world. Authenticity necessarily places the self first and foremost, judging all beliefs and lifestyles by the standard of “What feels right for me?” As Bailey writes, we all must take “authentic ownership of our lives,” and the job
of apologetics is to help create ample spaces in which non-Christians can create something attuned to the beauty that God has created, in which God is somehow present, beckoning them forward.
If I had to pinpoint a central cause for concern in Reimagining Apologetics, it would be the author’s stance on biblical authority. Though Bailey affirms biblical authority occasionally, it is de facto marginalized in his actual methodology. He never truly allows the Bible to delimit the
imaginative space legitimately available to the non-Christian in his or her exploration. Why? Because when appealing to those seeking authenticity, beauty must be considered as separable from truth in the interest of not disrupting the fragile “feeling into faith” process. In fact, Bailey decries what he calls contemporary apologists’ “fixation on truth.”
This has specific consequences for faith. Both of Bailey’s apologetical role models, MacDonald and Robinson, denied that God would eternally punish anyone who rejected him. They were unable to quite believe in a God who was less generous and gracious than they imagined him to
be. And Bailey never corrects them, as if conforming God to our imaginary image of him is somehow justified. This is treacherously close to inviting non-Christians to violate the first and second commandments (I am the Lord God; take no other gods but me) and presenting that as a
genuine life of faith. Even for the most mature Christians, the way God is portrayed in the Bible won’t always appear beautiful or good. The real journey of faith involves spiritual wrestling to conform our imaginations to the reality of God and God’s character as revealed in Scripture.
Submitting one’s imagination and will to someone else is always a struggle, but Christians simply don’t have the license to do otherwise and call it genuine (“authentic”) faith.
Submitting to another’s authority is anathema to the ethos of authenticity. Again, Bailey understands this, noting that we must orient and “reframe” the non-Christian’s quest within God’s project, but I am unconvinced that he quite squares that circle. In essence, he is using the
textures and channels of authenticity (what resonates with the seeker) to move seekers past and out of authenticity toward the willing, joyful acceptance of an authority and life-direction not of their own. But I remain unsure that Bailey even acknowledges the contradiction, assuming
instead that, at its best, Christian faith dovetails seamlessly with the yearning for authenticity.
Competing Authenticities
Further, we live in a world of multiple competing authenticities. Simply showing the Christian vision’s “thickness” will not suffice. Tara Isabella Burton’s recent book Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World explores a dazzling array of “intuitional” religions that have lured
people away from traditional religions in the age of the internet, with examples ranging from online fan cultures to occult and “wellness” movements to political ideologies left and right. All of these communities are super “thick” in the imaginations of their adherents. They resonate profoundly within the minds and lives of their followers. How are we to differentiate between competing thick imaginative visions?
This is where “presuppositional” apologetics – which advances Christian faith as the basis for all thought – gives important guidance. Bailey dismisses it in one footnote as a form of Scriptural “foundationalism” focused not on rational truthfulness, like classical apologetics, but on biblical truth. This struck me as both unfair and curious, given that his own imaginative apologetics (sensing/seeing/shaping) bears a striking structural resemblance to the presuppositional argument: trying on the non-Christian’s perspective, showing how it falls apart, then inviting the non-Christian to see reality through Christian eyes.
A few years ago, I taught a college student who confessed to me that my class convinced her she wasn’t a Christian. Intrigued, I asked to discuss her revelation over coffee. She told me she used to pray, and she figured this kind of behavior marked her out as a Christian. But that changed when she took my comparative worldviews class, which starts with Christian theism. She learned that God isn’t a vague idea but a person with specific traits and desires. She didn’t like that at all, and so she stopped seeing herself as Christian. We talked, and I tried to persuade her both that God exists and that this was something to celebrate. I’ve always felt strange about that exchange. One the one hand, that outcome seemed inevitable: God is who he is, and I couldn’t have denied that in my teaching. On the other hand, it felt like I was doing the opposite of what I should have done. Had I read Reimagining Apologetics before those conversations, I would have spent more time exploring why she prayed, how it made her feel, and what resonated with her about connecting with God.
Ted Turnau teaches culture, religion, and media studies at Anglo-American University in Prague, Czech Republic. He is a co-author of The Pop Culture Parent: Helping Kids Engage Their World for Christ
Ted Turnau, Christianity Today Book Review 2.5.21
Pastor’s note: for today’s reading, I wanted to give a brief description of two words used in the article – apologetics and authenticity. Apologetics is quite literally defense of the faith; the Greek word apologia means “defense” as a lawyer gives at a trial. Authenticity, in a Christian sense, is what feels true to one on the inside. The opposite end of authenticity is Biblical authority/truth. On one side there is the inner circle of truth – it feels true so it has to be true. The other side is the exterior circle truth of biblical authority – the Bible says it’s true so it has to be true.
Justin Bailey’s Reimagining Apologetics: The Beauty of Faith in a Secular Age highlights a problem that plagues certain forms of Christian persuasion: the failure to take imagination seriously. For some Christians, apologetics is a matter of dry-as-the-desert technical arguments or of intellectually arm-wrestling non-Christians into submission. Add an evangelical ethos hopelessly enamored with perpetual culture-warring, and you have a profound problem in Christian witness.
Bailey begins by noting that, according to philosopher Charles Taylor, we live in a world where everyone assumes that ultimate answers lie within. We follow what resonates with our inner life. Therefore, the wise apologist who wants to reach a non-Christian engages not with what is
(externally, objectively) true, but with what (internally, subjectively) moves him or her emotionally and aesthetically. Not truth, but beauty. Not rationality, but authenticity. The key lies with the imagination. We must provide space, Bailey writes, for non-Christians to “feel their way into faith.”
After providing a brief philosophy and theology of the imagination, Bailey turns to novelists Marilynne Robinson (of Gilead fame) and George MacDonald (who inspired C. S. Lewis) as models of what such engagement would look like. They created imaginary worlds that allowed
non-Christians to see through the eyes of faith. He then applies his findings to apologetical method based on a threefold model of the imagination: sensing, seeing, and shaping.
Sensing prioritizes the aesthetics of belief, emphasizing what non-Christians would find beautiful and believable.
Seeing invites them to try on a Christian vision — a larger, “thicker” view of reality.
Shaping invites them to a “poetic participation” that encourages them to situate their own life-projects within God’s redemption project. By suspending the question of truth to pursue beauty and imaginative resonance, Bailey argues, apologetics will appeal to those alienated from God but seeking authenticity.
Authenticity and Authority
Many conservative Christians, and apologists in particular, have been culturally tone-deaf and have made themselves (ourselves) an obnoxious presence that few non-Christians are interested in engaging. But Bailey’s book is part of a growing movement that emphasizes beauty and imaginative resonance. Sound missiology (the study of religious [typically Christian] missions and their methods and purposes) seeks to contextualize the gospel in ways that make sense to a particular people group. In this case, the target group is those of our own culture alienated from Jesus.
That said, I do have concerns. There is always the risk that contextualization will lead to a compromised message—a gospel paganized in translation. Bailey is well aware of these risks, but I am concerned he never fully reckons with the risks of contextualizing the gospel to the
particular social imaginary that prevails in today’s Western world. Authenticity necessarily places the self first and foremost, judging all beliefs and lifestyles by the standard of “What feels right for me?” As Bailey writes, we all must take “authentic ownership of our lives,” and the job
of apologetics is to help create ample spaces in which non-Christians can create something attuned to the beauty that God has created, in which God is somehow present, beckoning them forward.
If I had to pinpoint a central cause for concern in Reimagining Apologetics, it would be the author’s stance on biblical authority. Though Bailey affirms biblical authority occasionally, it is de facto marginalized in his actual methodology. He never truly allows the Bible to delimit the
imaginative space legitimately available to the non-Christian in his or her exploration. Why? Because when appealing to those seeking authenticity, beauty must be considered as separable from truth in the interest of not disrupting the fragile “feeling into faith” process. In fact, Bailey decries what he calls contemporary apologists’ “fixation on truth.”
This has specific consequences for faith. Both of Bailey’s apologetical role models, MacDonald and Robinson, denied that God would eternally punish anyone who rejected him. They were unable to quite believe in a God who was less generous and gracious than they imagined him to
be. And Bailey never corrects them, as if conforming God to our imaginary image of him is somehow justified. This is treacherously close to inviting non-Christians to violate the first and second commandments (I am the Lord God; take no other gods but me) and presenting that as a
genuine life of faith. Even for the most mature Christians, the way God is portrayed in the Bible won’t always appear beautiful or good. The real journey of faith involves spiritual wrestling to conform our imaginations to the reality of God and God’s character as revealed in Scripture.
Submitting one’s imagination and will to someone else is always a struggle, but Christians simply don’t have the license to do otherwise and call it genuine (“authentic”) faith.
Submitting to another’s authority is anathema to the ethos of authenticity. Again, Bailey understands this, noting that we must orient and “reframe” the non-Christian’s quest within God’s project, but I am unconvinced that he quite squares that circle. In essence, he is using the
textures and channels of authenticity (what resonates with the seeker) to move seekers past and out of authenticity toward the willing, joyful acceptance of an authority and life-direction not of their own. But I remain unsure that Bailey even acknowledges the contradiction, assuming
instead that, at its best, Christian faith dovetails seamlessly with the yearning for authenticity.
Competing Authenticities
Further, we live in a world of multiple competing authenticities. Simply showing the Christian vision’s “thickness” will not suffice. Tara Isabella Burton’s recent book Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World explores a dazzling array of “intuitional” religions that have lured
people away from traditional religions in the age of the internet, with examples ranging from online fan cultures to occult and “wellness” movements to political ideologies left and right. All of these communities are super “thick” in the imaginations of their adherents. They resonate profoundly within the minds and lives of their followers. How are we to differentiate between competing thick imaginative visions?
This is where “presuppositional” apologetics – which advances Christian faith as the basis for all thought – gives important guidance. Bailey dismisses it in one footnote as a form of Scriptural “foundationalism” focused not on rational truthfulness, like classical apologetics, but on biblical truth. This struck me as both unfair and curious, given that his own imaginative apologetics (sensing/seeing/shaping) bears a striking structural resemblance to the presuppositional argument: trying on the non-Christian’s perspective, showing how it falls apart, then inviting the non-Christian to see reality through Christian eyes.
A few years ago, I taught a college student who confessed to me that my class convinced her she wasn’t a Christian. Intrigued, I asked to discuss her revelation over coffee. She told me she used to pray, and she figured this kind of behavior marked her out as a Christian. But that changed when she took my comparative worldviews class, which starts with Christian theism. She learned that God isn’t a vague idea but a person with specific traits and desires. She didn’t like that at all, and so she stopped seeing herself as Christian. We talked, and I tried to persuade her both that God exists and that this was something to celebrate. I’ve always felt strange about that exchange. One the one hand, that outcome seemed inevitable: God is who he is, and I couldn’t have denied that in my teaching. On the other hand, it felt like I was doing the opposite of what I should have done. Had I read Reimagining Apologetics before those conversations, I would have spent more time exploring why she prayed, how it made her feel, and what resonated with her about connecting with God.
Ted Turnau teaches culture, religion, and media studies at Anglo-American University in Prague, Czech Republic. He is a co-author of The Pop Culture Parent: Helping Kids Engage Their World for Christ
Thursday, February 11
Have you been on the receiving end of ageism? It appears that the pandemic, and the roll-out of the vaccinations, have not reduced the incidents of ageism but may have increased it. Our author for next week's reading suggests that ageism depends upon where you live. Incidentally, she didn't mention Florida in her article but the map shows we are in the darkest shaded areas at 45%.
If you have felt the effects of ageism, I'm wondering how you reacted and counteracted it. If you are wondering what the spiritual side of this is, I hope you will join me in next week's discussion.
May God bless you this week,
- Dave
Worried About Ageism?
Clare Ansberry, Wall Street Journal 2.1.21
Are you biased against older people? It may depend, in part, on where you live.
A recent study of data collected from all 50 states found that implicit bias—a subconscious negative attitude—against older people was most prevalent in the country’s southeastern and northeastern states, including New Jersey, the Carolinas and Florida. The findings were based on
responses of 803,000 people ages 15 to 94 who completed a test involving photos of young and old people and words associated with those images.
A second part of the study overlaid age-bias results with each state’s health data, looking at things like diet, smoking and obesity. Those states that ranked high in implicit age bias had a larger percentage of adults with poor health and higher per capita Medicare spending.
“When considering what it is like to grow old in the United States, where people live matters,” writes Hannah Giasson, a research fellow at Stanford University and lead author of the study, which was published in July in the European Journal of Social Psychology.
Subconscious negative attitudes toward older people were more prevalent in southeastern and northeastern states than in other regions, research showed. Montana scored lowest at 39.6% New Jersey scored highest at 47.9%
Researchers didn’t determine why certain states showed more bias. One theory is that in states with a large population of retirees, there may be more tension between young and old over how government dollars are spent on things like housing, medical facilities and support networks, says William Chopik, an assistant professor of psychology at Michigan State University and one of the authors of the study. Popular retirement destinations also often have specific and separate neighborhoods, which may not encourage positive interactions between younger and older people, allowing stereotypes to linger, says co-author Dr. Giasson.
Understanding attitudes toward older adults is especially important during the pandemic, since ageism could affect how elders are treated. A study published in November found that survey respondents, who were more hostile toward older people and considered them to be a drain on the economy and health-care system, washed their hands less frequently and didn’t believe in social distancing.
“The attitude is: ‘I don’t care. I’m not going to change. It’s an older person’s problem,’ ” says Michael Vale, a graduate student at the University of Akron and one of the authors of the study. Survey respondents who fell into the “benevolently ageist” category of being protective but
patronizing tended to be more fearful of the pandemic’s impact, washed their hands and felt strongly about the need to social distance. The study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, examined the results of a survey conducted in April and May of 335 people between the ages of
18 and 80.
Another study, published in November by the Lancet, analyzed Twitter posts about Covid-19 and older adults in the 10 days following the declaration of the pandemic. It found that nearly one-fourth of the tweets played down the importance of the virus because it was deadlier among older individuals.
Concerns about ageism in the coronavirus era are mounting. The American Psychological Association recently posted tips for its own members on avoiding bias, including “being self aware,” about their language, attitudes and assumptions. Previous research has identified hot
spots in the U.S. for Alzheimer’s disease.
“With the pandemic there has been a parallel outbreak of ageism,” wrote a group of social scientists who specialize in aging for a piece in the Journals of Gerontology. They cited references to people over 70 as being uniformly helpless and discussions about chronological age
being used to determine who gets medical care. Furthermore, many older people might internalize negative impressions themselves and believe they are not worth medical care, says Becca Levy, an epidemiologist and social psychologist at Yale University who has been
researching age stereotypes since the 1990s.
In a research paper published in the December Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, she found that people 65 and older who had negative age stereotypes didn’t think older persons who were “extremely sick with Covid-19” should go to the hospital. “It suggests not feeling
worthwhile,” she says.
Another possible factor might be that older people tend to be “generative” and concerned more about their children and grandchildren getting medical care than themselves, she says. “It’s not necessarily the result of ageism and internalized feelings about unworthiness, but about what to give to grandchildren,” she says. “It gets complicated.”
The good news, she says, is that attitudes can change, which in turn can improve health. Older persons with positive age stereotypes were 44% more likely to fully recover from severe disability and had a lower risk of developing dementia than those with negative age stereotypes,
according to her previous research.
Knowing the geography of ageism, as represented in the state study, is important, she says, because it identifies where it needs to be challenged. In the implicit age bias study of the 50 states, researchers looked at test results in which respondents associated photos of young and old people with positive words, like beautiful, or negative words, like nasty. If they were faster to pair a young face with a positive word than an old face, they were considered having an implicit preference for young people.
Colorado scored low in implicit bias, which doesn’t surprise Don Roll, an 82-year-old with four children and six grandchildren who lives outside Denver. Recently, he started using a cane because his vision has deteriorated. In grocery stores, as he taps down the aisles, he says people ask if he needs help finding anything. “It’s not that they are being condescending. They have been really nice about it,” he says. “Maybe they realize that one day, if they make it that far, they will be 82 as well.”
If you have felt the effects of ageism, I'm wondering how you reacted and counteracted it. If you are wondering what the spiritual side of this is, I hope you will join me in next week's discussion.
May God bless you this week,
- Dave
Worried About Ageism?
Clare Ansberry, Wall Street Journal 2.1.21
Are you biased against older people? It may depend, in part, on where you live.
A recent study of data collected from all 50 states found that implicit bias—a subconscious negative attitude—against older people was most prevalent in the country’s southeastern and northeastern states, including New Jersey, the Carolinas and Florida. The findings were based on
responses of 803,000 people ages 15 to 94 who completed a test involving photos of young and old people and words associated with those images.
A second part of the study overlaid age-bias results with each state’s health data, looking at things like diet, smoking and obesity. Those states that ranked high in implicit age bias had a larger percentage of adults with poor health and higher per capita Medicare spending.
“When considering what it is like to grow old in the United States, where people live matters,” writes Hannah Giasson, a research fellow at Stanford University and lead author of the study, which was published in July in the European Journal of Social Psychology.
Subconscious negative attitudes toward older people were more prevalent in southeastern and northeastern states than in other regions, research showed. Montana scored lowest at 39.6% New Jersey scored highest at 47.9%
Researchers didn’t determine why certain states showed more bias. One theory is that in states with a large population of retirees, there may be more tension between young and old over how government dollars are spent on things like housing, medical facilities and support networks, says William Chopik, an assistant professor of psychology at Michigan State University and one of the authors of the study. Popular retirement destinations also often have specific and separate neighborhoods, which may not encourage positive interactions between younger and older people, allowing stereotypes to linger, says co-author Dr. Giasson.
Understanding attitudes toward older adults is especially important during the pandemic, since ageism could affect how elders are treated. A study published in November found that survey respondents, who were more hostile toward older people and considered them to be a drain on the economy and health-care system, washed their hands less frequently and didn’t believe in social distancing.
“The attitude is: ‘I don’t care. I’m not going to change. It’s an older person’s problem,’ ” says Michael Vale, a graduate student at the University of Akron and one of the authors of the study. Survey respondents who fell into the “benevolently ageist” category of being protective but
patronizing tended to be more fearful of the pandemic’s impact, washed their hands and felt strongly about the need to social distance. The study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, examined the results of a survey conducted in April and May of 335 people between the ages of
18 and 80.
Another study, published in November by the Lancet, analyzed Twitter posts about Covid-19 and older adults in the 10 days following the declaration of the pandemic. It found that nearly one-fourth of the tweets played down the importance of the virus because it was deadlier among older individuals.
Concerns about ageism in the coronavirus era are mounting. The American Psychological Association recently posted tips for its own members on avoiding bias, including “being self aware,” about their language, attitudes and assumptions. Previous research has identified hot
spots in the U.S. for Alzheimer’s disease.
“With the pandemic there has been a parallel outbreak of ageism,” wrote a group of social scientists who specialize in aging for a piece in the Journals of Gerontology. They cited references to people over 70 as being uniformly helpless and discussions about chronological age
being used to determine who gets medical care. Furthermore, many older people might internalize negative impressions themselves and believe they are not worth medical care, says Becca Levy, an epidemiologist and social psychologist at Yale University who has been
researching age stereotypes since the 1990s.
In a research paper published in the December Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, she found that people 65 and older who had negative age stereotypes didn’t think older persons who were “extremely sick with Covid-19” should go to the hospital. “It suggests not feeling
worthwhile,” she says.
Another possible factor might be that older people tend to be “generative” and concerned more about their children and grandchildren getting medical care than themselves, she says. “It’s not necessarily the result of ageism and internalized feelings about unworthiness, but about what to give to grandchildren,” she says. “It gets complicated.”
The good news, she says, is that attitudes can change, which in turn can improve health. Older persons with positive age stereotypes were 44% more likely to fully recover from severe disability and had a lower risk of developing dementia than those with negative age stereotypes,
according to her previous research.
Knowing the geography of ageism, as represented in the state study, is important, she says, because it identifies where it needs to be challenged. In the implicit age bias study of the 50 states, researchers looked at test results in which respondents associated photos of young and old people with positive words, like beautiful, or negative words, like nasty. If they were faster to pair a young face with a positive word than an old face, they were considered having an implicit preference for young people.
Colorado scored low in implicit bias, which doesn’t surprise Don Roll, an 82-year-old with four children and six grandchildren who lives outside Denver. Recently, he started using a cane because his vision has deteriorated. In grocery stores, as he taps down the aisles, he says people ask if he needs help finding anything. “It’s not that they are being condescending. They have been really nice about it,” he says. “Maybe they realize that one day, if they make it that far, they will be 82 as well.”
Thursday, February 4
So it appears the pandemic will last longer than we hoped. The discussion for this week will be about happiness and Arthur Brooks' article about the two types of happy people. I'll be interested to see how this fits into social distancing and the like. And, I imagine you will wonder how happiness fits into any sort of spirituality. I look forward to talking with you about this.
- Dave
There Are Two Kinds of Happy People
Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic 1.28.21
THESE DAYS, we are offered a dizzying variety of secrets to happiness. Some are ways of life: Give to others; practice gratitude. Others are minor hacks: Eat kale; play a board game. Some are simply an effort to make a buck.
I have found that most of the serious approaches to happiness can be mapped onto two ancient traditions, promoted by the Greek philosophers Epicurus and Epictetus. In a nutshell, they focus on enjoyment and virtue, respectively. Individuals typically gravitate toward one style or the other, and many major philosophies have followed one path or the other for about two millennia. Understanding where you sit between the two can tell you a lot about yourself—including your happiness weak points—and help you create strategies for a more balanced approach to life.
Epicurus (341–270 B.C.) led an eponymous school of thought—Epicureanism—that believed a happy life requires two things: ataraxia (freedom from mental disturbance) and aponia (the absence of physical pain). His philosophy might be characterized as, “If it is scary or painful,
work to avoid it.” Epicureans see discomfort as generally negative, and thus the elimination of threats and problems as the key to a happier life. Don’t get the impression that I am saying they are lazy or unmotivated—quite the contrary, in many cases. But they don’t see enduring fear and pain as inherently necessary or beneficial, and they focus instead on enjoying life.
Epictetus (c. 50–c. 135 A.D.) was one of the most prominent Stoic philosophers, who believed happiness comes from finding life’s purpose, accepting one’s fate, and behaving morally regardless of the personal cost. His philosophy could be summarized as, “Grow a spine and do
your duty.” People who follow a Stoic style see happiness as something earned through a good deal of sacrifice. Not surprisingly, Stoics are generally hard workers who live for the future and are willing to incur substantial personal cost to meet their life’s purpose (as they see it) without much complaining. They see the key to happiness as working through pain and fear, not actively avoiding them.
Epicureans and Stoics can coexist, and even cohabitate (my wife and I have such a mixed marriage). But in my experience, Stoics and Epicureans tend to look down on one another, and appear to have been doing so for about as long as both philosophies have existed. The 3rd-century biographer Diogenes Laërtius wrote that “Epictetus calls [Epicurus a] preacher of effeminacy and showers abuse on him.” While there’s no historical record of it, I can easily imagine Epicurus responding to Epictetus, “You totally need to chill out.”
For roughly 2,000 years, philosophers have asked which approach leads to greater happiness and a better life. My purpose here is different. Both views have virtues and weaknesses. I want to know what each of us, given our natural tendency toward one of the approaches, can learn and adopt from the other.
FOR EPICURUS, unhappiness came from negative thoughts, including needless guilt, fear of things we can’t control, and a focus on the inevitable unpleasant parts of life. The solution was to banish them from the mind. To this end, he proposed a “four-part cure”: Don’t fear God; don’t worry about death; what is good is easy to get (by lowering our expectations for what we need to be happy); what is terrible is easy to endure (by concentrating on pleasant things even in the midst of suffering). This is made all the easier when we surround ourselves with friendly people in a peaceful environment.
Epicurus promoted hedonia, from which we derive the word hedonism. However, he would not have recognized our current usage of the term. The secret to banishing negative thoughts, according to Epicurus, is not mindless debauchery—despite the baseless rumors that he led wild parties and orgies, he taught that thoughtlessly grabbing easy worldly pleasures is a mistake, because ultimately they don’t satisfy. Instead, reason was Epicurus’s best weapon against the blues. For example, here is the mantra he suggests we tell ourselves when the fear of death strikes: “Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it
does come, we no longer exist.”
In contrast to hedonia, the Stoic approach is known as eudaimonia, which might be defined as a life devoted to our greatest potential in service of our highest ideals. Stoicism is characterized by the principles of naturalism and moralism—changing the things we can to make life better while also accepting the things we can’t change. (The “Serenity Prayer” is very Stoic.) “Don’t demand that things happen as you wish,” Epictetus wrote in The Enchiridion, “but wish that they happen as they do happen, and you will go on well.”
Moralism is the principle that moral virtue is to be defined and followed for its own sake. “Tell yourself, first of all, what kind of man you want to be,” Epictetus wrote in his Discourses, “and then go ahead with what you are doing.” In other words, create a code of virtuous conduct for
yourself and live by it, with no loopholes for convenience.
Epicureans and Stoics are encouraged to focus their attention on different aspects of life—and death. Epicurus’s philosophy suggested that we should think intently about happiness, while for Stoics, the paradox of happiness is that to attain it, we must forget about it; with luck, happiness will come as we pursue life’s purpose. Meanwhile, Epicurus encourages us to disregard death while we are alive, and Epictetus insists that we confront it and ponder it regularly, much like the maranasati meditation in Buddhism, in which monks contemplate their own deaths and stages of decay.
PEOPLE HAVE ARGUED for centuries about which approach is better for happiness, but they largely talk past one another. In truth, each pursues different aspects of happiness: Epicurus’s style brings pleasure and enjoyment; Epictetus’s method delivers meaning and purpose. As
happiness scholars note, a good blend of these things is likeliest to deliver a truly happy life. Too much of one—a life of trivial enjoyment or one of grim determination—will not produce a life well lived, as most of us see it.
The big question is, therefore, how people can manufacture a good blend in their lives between the two approaches. Here are three ideas.
1. KNOW THYSELF.
This expression is one of the Delphic maxims, carved into the pronaos of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in ancient Greece. It acknowledges the fundamental truth that we can’t make forward progress in life if we don’t know where we are situated right now. Answering the question thus starts with an informal but honest answer to this question: When my mood is low, do I naturally look to increase my level of pleasure and enjoyment, or do I focus on meaning and purpose in my life? The former is a sign that you tend toward being an Epicurean, the latter that you are more of a Stoic.
2. BEEF UP THE OTHER SIDE.
The key to blending enjoyment and meaning is not to suppress what you have, but to bolster what you lack. Once you have situated yourself on the spectrum, you can formulate a strategy to strengthen the discipline you are missing (assuming that you’re not in the middle already).
At the end of each day, you might examine the events you experienced, and ask yourself harmonizing questions. For example:
3. BUILD A HAPPINESS PORTFOLIO THAT USES BOTH APPROACHES.
Finally, it is important to pursue life goals in which each happiness approach reinforces the other. That portfolio is simple, and I have written about it before: Make sure your life includes faith, family, friendship, and work in which you earn your success and serve others. Each of
these elements flexes both the Stoic and the Epicurean muscles: All four require that we be fully present in an Epicurean sense and that we also work hard and adhere to strong commitments in a Stoic sense.
So to all you Stoics: Take the night off. And to all you Epicureans: Time to get back to work.
ARTHUR C. BROOKS is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a professor of the practice of public leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, a professor of management practice at the Harvard Business School, and host of the podcast The Art of Happiness With Arthur Brooks.
- Dave
There Are Two Kinds of Happy People
Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic 1.28.21
THESE DAYS, we are offered a dizzying variety of secrets to happiness. Some are ways of life: Give to others; practice gratitude. Others are minor hacks: Eat kale; play a board game. Some are simply an effort to make a buck.
I have found that most of the serious approaches to happiness can be mapped onto two ancient traditions, promoted by the Greek philosophers Epicurus and Epictetus. In a nutshell, they focus on enjoyment and virtue, respectively. Individuals typically gravitate toward one style or the other, and many major philosophies have followed one path or the other for about two millennia. Understanding where you sit between the two can tell you a lot about yourself—including your happiness weak points—and help you create strategies for a more balanced approach to life.
Epicurus (341–270 B.C.) led an eponymous school of thought—Epicureanism—that believed a happy life requires two things: ataraxia (freedom from mental disturbance) and aponia (the absence of physical pain). His philosophy might be characterized as, “If it is scary or painful,
work to avoid it.” Epicureans see discomfort as generally negative, and thus the elimination of threats and problems as the key to a happier life. Don’t get the impression that I am saying they are lazy or unmotivated—quite the contrary, in many cases. But they don’t see enduring fear and pain as inherently necessary or beneficial, and they focus instead on enjoying life.
Epictetus (c. 50–c. 135 A.D.) was one of the most prominent Stoic philosophers, who believed happiness comes from finding life’s purpose, accepting one’s fate, and behaving morally regardless of the personal cost. His philosophy could be summarized as, “Grow a spine and do
your duty.” People who follow a Stoic style see happiness as something earned through a good deal of sacrifice. Not surprisingly, Stoics are generally hard workers who live for the future and are willing to incur substantial personal cost to meet their life’s purpose (as they see it) without much complaining. They see the key to happiness as working through pain and fear, not actively avoiding them.
Epicureans and Stoics can coexist, and even cohabitate (my wife and I have such a mixed marriage). But in my experience, Stoics and Epicureans tend to look down on one another, and appear to have been doing so for about as long as both philosophies have existed. The 3rd-century biographer Diogenes Laërtius wrote that “Epictetus calls [Epicurus a] preacher of effeminacy and showers abuse on him.” While there’s no historical record of it, I can easily imagine Epicurus responding to Epictetus, “You totally need to chill out.”
For roughly 2,000 years, philosophers have asked which approach leads to greater happiness and a better life. My purpose here is different. Both views have virtues and weaknesses. I want to know what each of us, given our natural tendency toward one of the approaches, can learn and adopt from the other.
FOR EPICURUS, unhappiness came from negative thoughts, including needless guilt, fear of things we can’t control, and a focus on the inevitable unpleasant parts of life. The solution was to banish them from the mind. To this end, he proposed a “four-part cure”: Don’t fear God; don’t worry about death; what is good is easy to get (by lowering our expectations for what we need to be happy); what is terrible is easy to endure (by concentrating on pleasant things even in the midst of suffering). This is made all the easier when we surround ourselves with friendly people in a peaceful environment.
Epicurus promoted hedonia, from which we derive the word hedonism. However, he would not have recognized our current usage of the term. The secret to banishing negative thoughts, according to Epicurus, is not mindless debauchery—despite the baseless rumors that he led wild parties and orgies, he taught that thoughtlessly grabbing easy worldly pleasures is a mistake, because ultimately they don’t satisfy. Instead, reason was Epicurus’s best weapon against the blues. For example, here is the mantra he suggests we tell ourselves when the fear of death strikes: “Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it
does come, we no longer exist.”
In contrast to hedonia, the Stoic approach is known as eudaimonia, which might be defined as a life devoted to our greatest potential in service of our highest ideals. Stoicism is characterized by the principles of naturalism and moralism—changing the things we can to make life better while also accepting the things we can’t change. (The “Serenity Prayer” is very Stoic.) “Don’t demand that things happen as you wish,” Epictetus wrote in The Enchiridion, “but wish that they happen as they do happen, and you will go on well.”
Moralism is the principle that moral virtue is to be defined and followed for its own sake. “Tell yourself, first of all, what kind of man you want to be,” Epictetus wrote in his Discourses, “and then go ahead with what you are doing.” In other words, create a code of virtuous conduct for
yourself and live by it, with no loopholes for convenience.
Epicureans and Stoics are encouraged to focus their attention on different aspects of life—and death. Epicurus’s philosophy suggested that we should think intently about happiness, while for Stoics, the paradox of happiness is that to attain it, we must forget about it; with luck, happiness will come as we pursue life’s purpose. Meanwhile, Epicurus encourages us to disregard death while we are alive, and Epictetus insists that we confront it and ponder it regularly, much like the maranasati meditation in Buddhism, in which monks contemplate their own deaths and stages of decay.
PEOPLE HAVE ARGUED for centuries about which approach is better for happiness, but they largely talk past one another. In truth, each pursues different aspects of happiness: Epicurus’s style brings pleasure and enjoyment; Epictetus’s method delivers meaning and purpose. As
happiness scholars note, a good blend of these things is likeliest to deliver a truly happy life. Too much of one—a life of trivial enjoyment or one of grim determination—will not produce a life well lived, as most of us see it.
The big question is, therefore, how people can manufacture a good blend in their lives between the two approaches. Here are three ideas.
1. KNOW THYSELF.
This expression is one of the Delphic maxims, carved into the pronaos of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in ancient Greece. It acknowledges the fundamental truth that we can’t make forward progress in life if we don’t know where we are situated right now. Answering the question thus starts with an informal but honest answer to this question: When my mood is low, do I naturally look to increase my level of pleasure and enjoyment, or do I focus on meaning and purpose in my life? The former is a sign that you tend toward being an Epicurean, the latter that you are more of a Stoic.
2. BEEF UP THE OTHER SIDE.
The key to blending enjoyment and meaning is not to suppress what you have, but to bolster what you lack. Once you have situated yourself on the spectrum, you can formulate a strategy to strengthen the discipline you are missing (assuming that you’re not in the middle already).
At the end of each day, you might examine the events you experienced, and ask yourself harmonizing questions. For example:
- Did this event bring me enjoyment? Did it also bring me meaning?
- Did this make me feel afraid? Did I learn something from this fear that will lead to less fear in the future?
- Did this serve my interests? Did it serve the interest of others?
3. BUILD A HAPPINESS PORTFOLIO THAT USES BOTH APPROACHES.
Finally, it is important to pursue life goals in which each happiness approach reinforces the other. That portfolio is simple, and I have written about it before: Make sure your life includes faith, family, friendship, and work in which you earn your success and serve others. Each of
these elements flexes both the Stoic and the Epicurean muscles: All four require that we be fully present in an Epicurean sense and that we also work hard and adhere to strong commitments in a Stoic sense.
So to all you Stoics: Take the night off. And to all you Epicureans: Time to get back to work.
ARTHUR C. BROOKS is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a professor of the practice of public leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, a professor of management practice at the Harvard Business School, and host of the podcast The Art of Happiness With Arthur Brooks.
Thursday, January 28
Since the beginning of the Jesus movement, we've been trying to figure out how to exist with people we don't agree with. One Old Testament scholar took it a step further when he wrote, "In the beginning, there was an argument."
The reading this week takes a look at how we can deal with people who stormed the capital on January 6th. Her opinion is that we must find a way to coexist.
There are a number of Christian virtues and ideals at play here, primarily Jesus' directive to pray for those who we call enemies. He even said we should love them. One quick note; "love" in this sense is not to condone what they do but instead find a different way. What would that look like today? I think that is something worthy of discussion.
God's peace to you and to our neighbors and especially to those for whom we disagree.
- Dave
Coexistence is the Only Option
Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic 1.19.21
They could be realtors or police officers, bakers or firefighters, veterans of American wars or CEOs of American companies. They might live in Boise or Dallas, College Park or College Station, Sacramento or Delray Beach. Some are wealthy. Some are not. Relatively few of them
were at the United States Capitol on January 6, determined to stop Congress from certifying a legitimate election.
As a group, it’s hard to know what to call them. They are too many to merit the term extremists. There are not enough of them to be secessionists. For want of a better term, I’m calling them seditionists. Republicans are not seditionists, nor is everyone who voted for Trump, nor is every conservative: Nothing about rejecting your country’s political system is conservative. Still, the seditionists are numerous. In December, 34% of Americans said they did not trust the outcome of the 2020 election. More recently, 21% said that they either strongly or somewhat support the storming of the Capitol building.
Even if we assume that only half of those polled are impassioned by politics, and even if we put the number of truly seditious Americans at 10 or 15%, that’s a large number of people. For although Trump will eventually exit political life, the seditionists will not. They will remain, nursing their grievances, feverishly posting on social media. A member of the West Virginia state legislature filmed himself in the mob breaking into the Capitol on January 6: “We’re taking this country back whether you like it or not,” he told his Facebook followers. A New Mexico county commissioner came home from the riots; bragged about his participation; and, according to authorities, told a public meeting that he planned to go back to D.C., but this time carrying firearms.
We could also see more violence. Since the election, the Bridging Divides Initiative, a group that tracks and counters political violence in the U.S., has observed a singularly ominous metric: a sharp uptick in the number of protests outside the homes of politicians and public figures,
including city- and county-level officials, many featuring “armed and unlawful paramilitary actors.” In Idaho, aggressive protesters shut down a public-health meeting; in Northern California, numerous public-health officials have resigned in the face of threats from anti-maskers. Death threats are already shaping U.S. politics at a higher level too.
Outside politics, outside the law, outside the norms—the seditionists have in fact declared their independence from the rest of us. January 6 was indeed their 1776: They declared that they want to live in a different America from the one the rest of us inhabit. And yet they cannot be wished away. We have no choice except to coexist.
But how? Clearly we need regulation of social media, but that’s years away. Of course we need better education, but that doesn’t help us deal with the armed men who were standing outside the Ohio Statehouse this week.
Here’s another idea: Drop the argument and change the subject. That is the advice you will hear from people who have studied Northern Ireland before the 1998 peace deal, or Liberia, or South Africa, or Timor-Leste—countries where political opponents have seen each other as not just wrong, but evil; countries where not all arguments can be solved and not all differences can be bridged. In the years before and after the peace settlement in Northern Ireland, for example, many “peacebuilding” projects did not try to make Catholics and Protestants hold civilized debates about politics, or talk about politics at all. Instead, they built community centers, put up Christmas lights, and organized job training for young people.
This was not accidental. The literature in the fields of peacebuilding and conflict prevention overflows with words such as local and community-based and economic regeneration. It’s built on the idea that people should do something constructive—something that benefits everybody, lessens inequality, and makes people work alongside people they hate. That doesn’t mean they will then get to like one another, just that they are less likely to kill one another on the following day.
Infrastructure investment can produce projects benefiting all of society. So can a cross-community discussion about infrastructure, or even infrastructure security. Get potential protesters of different political views into a room, and ask them, “How are we going to protect our state capitol during demonstrations?” Ask for ideas. Take notes. Make the problem narrow, specific, even boring, not existential or exciting. “Who won the 2020 election?” is, for these purposes, a bad topic. “How do we fix the potholes in our roads?” is, in contrast, superb.
Not that this phenomenon is anything new: In 1930, a white Texan named Jessie Daniel Ames founded an organization called the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, a group that campaigned against anti-Black violence. Ames both intervened directly, even confronting lynch mobs in person, and engaged in education and advocacy. Her group sometimes sat uneasily alongside its northern counterparts—its members opposed federal intervention and denounced lynching, not for universal reasons but on the grounds that it was
contrary to the creed of southern, white, Christian women—but it worked: In areas where the group operated, the violence went down.
Rachel Brown, the founder of an anti-violence group called Over Zero, told me that she sometimes uses that case study when talking to religious leaders, business leaders, and veterans across the country—people who might be heard in the seditious community—when trying to
persuade them to start parallel projects of their own. Clearly the Republican Party is well placed to reach out to members who have rejected democracy, which is why it’s important to support the Adam Kinzingers and the Ben Sasses, and the Mitch McConnells.
Not coincidentally, this is exactly the kind of advice that can be heard from psychologists who specialize in exit counseling for people who have left religious cults. Roderick Dubrow-Marshall, a psychologist who has written about the similarities between cults and extremist
political movements, told me that in both cases, identification with the group comes to dominate people psychologically. “Other interests and ideas become closed off,” he said. “They dismiss anything that pushes back against them.” Remember, the people in the Capitol really believed that they were on a mission to save America, that it was patriotic to smash windows and kill and injure police. Before they can be convinced otherwise, they will have to see some kind of future for themselves in an America run by Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and a Democratic Congress.
I recognize that this is not what everyone wants to hear. Even as I write this, I can hear many readers of this article uttering a collective snort of annoyance. Quite a few, I imagine, feel that, having won the election, they don’t want to pay for a bunch of happy-clappy vaccine volunteers,
or new roads in rural America, or mental-health services and life counseling for the conspiracy infected—let them learn to live with us. I can well imagine that many will resent every penny of public money, every ounce of political time, that is spent on the seditious minority. Some might
even prefer to track down every last Capitol-riot sympathizer and shame them on social media, preferably with enough rigor that they lose their jobs.
I know how they feel, because I often feel that way too. But then I remember: It won’t work. We’ll wake up the next morning, and they’ll still be there.
Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic, a senior fellow of the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism.
The reading this week takes a look at how we can deal with people who stormed the capital on January 6th. Her opinion is that we must find a way to coexist.
There are a number of Christian virtues and ideals at play here, primarily Jesus' directive to pray for those who we call enemies. He even said we should love them. One quick note; "love" in this sense is not to condone what they do but instead find a different way. What would that look like today? I think that is something worthy of discussion.
God's peace to you and to our neighbors and especially to those for whom we disagree.
- Dave
Coexistence is the Only Option
Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic 1.19.21
They could be realtors or police officers, bakers or firefighters, veterans of American wars or CEOs of American companies. They might live in Boise or Dallas, College Park or College Station, Sacramento or Delray Beach. Some are wealthy. Some are not. Relatively few of them
were at the United States Capitol on January 6, determined to stop Congress from certifying a legitimate election.
As a group, it’s hard to know what to call them. They are too many to merit the term extremists. There are not enough of them to be secessionists. For want of a better term, I’m calling them seditionists. Republicans are not seditionists, nor is everyone who voted for Trump, nor is every conservative: Nothing about rejecting your country’s political system is conservative. Still, the seditionists are numerous. In December, 34% of Americans said they did not trust the outcome of the 2020 election. More recently, 21% said that they either strongly or somewhat support the storming of the Capitol building.
Even if we assume that only half of those polled are impassioned by politics, and even if we put the number of truly seditious Americans at 10 or 15%, that’s a large number of people. For although Trump will eventually exit political life, the seditionists will not. They will remain, nursing their grievances, feverishly posting on social media. A member of the West Virginia state legislature filmed himself in the mob breaking into the Capitol on January 6: “We’re taking this country back whether you like it or not,” he told his Facebook followers. A New Mexico county commissioner came home from the riots; bragged about his participation; and, according to authorities, told a public meeting that he planned to go back to D.C., but this time carrying firearms.
We could also see more violence. Since the election, the Bridging Divides Initiative, a group that tracks and counters political violence in the U.S., has observed a singularly ominous metric: a sharp uptick in the number of protests outside the homes of politicians and public figures,
including city- and county-level officials, many featuring “armed and unlawful paramilitary actors.” In Idaho, aggressive protesters shut down a public-health meeting; in Northern California, numerous public-health officials have resigned in the face of threats from anti-maskers. Death threats are already shaping U.S. politics at a higher level too.
Outside politics, outside the law, outside the norms—the seditionists have in fact declared their independence from the rest of us. January 6 was indeed their 1776: They declared that they want to live in a different America from the one the rest of us inhabit. And yet they cannot be wished away. We have no choice except to coexist.
But how? Clearly we need regulation of social media, but that’s years away. Of course we need better education, but that doesn’t help us deal with the armed men who were standing outside the Ohio Statehouse this week.
Here’s another idea: Drop the argument and change the subject. That is the advice you will hear from people who have studied Northern Ireland before the 1998 peace deal, or Liberia, or South Africa, or Timor-Leste—countries where political opponents have seen each other as not just wrong, but evil; countries where not all arguments can be solved and not all differences can be bridged. In the years before and after the peace settlement in Northern Ireland, for example, many “peacebuilding” projects did not try to make Catholics and Protestants hold civilized debates about politics, or talk about politics at all. Instead, they built community centers, put up Christmas lights, and organized job training for young people.
This was not accidental. The literature in the fields of peacebuilding and conflict prevention overflows with words such as local and community-based and economic regeneration. It’s built on the idea that people should do something constructive—something that benefits everybody, lessens inequality, and makes people work alongside people they hate. That doesn’t mean they will then get to like one another, just that they are less likely to kill one another on the following day.
Infrastructure investment can produce projects benefiting all of society. So can a cross-community discussion about infrastructure, or even infrastructure security. Get potential protesters of different political views into a room, and ask them, “How are we going to protect our state capitol during demonstrations?” Ask for ideas. Take notes. Make the problem narrow, specific, even boring, not existential or exciting. “Who won the 2020 election?” is, for these purposes, a bad topic. “How do we fix the potholes in our roads?” is, in contrast, superb.
Not that this phenomenon is anything new: In 1930, a white Texan named Jessie Daniel Ames founded an organization called the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, a group that campaigned against anti-Black violence. Ames both intervened directly, even confronting lynch mobs in person, and engaged in education and advocacy. Her group sometimes sat uneasily alongside its northern counterparts—its members opposed federal intervention and denounced lynching, not for universal reasons but on the grounds that it was
contrary to the creed of southern, white, Christian women—but it worked: In areas where the group operated, the violence went down.
Rachel Brown, the founder of an anti-violence group called Over Zero, told me that she sometimes uses that case study when talking to religious leaders, business leaders, and veterans across the country—people who might be heard in the seditious community—when trying to
persuade them to start parallel projects of their own. Clearly the Republican Party is well placed to reach out to members who have rejected democracy, which is why it’s important to support the Adam Kinzingers and the Ben Sasses, and the Mitch McConnells.
Not coincidentally, this is exactly the kind of advice that can be heard from psychologists who specialize in exit counseling for people who have left religious cults. Roderick Dubrow-Marshall, a psychologist who has written about the similarities between cults and extremist
political movements, told me that in both cases, identification with the group comes to dominate people psychologically. “Other interests and ideas become closed off,” he said. “They dismiss anything that pushes back against them.” Remember, the people in the Capitol really believed that they were on a mission to save America, that it was patriotic to smash windows and kill and injure police. Before they can be convinced otherwise, they will have to see some kind of future for themselves in an America run by Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and a Democratic Congress.
I recognize that this is not what everyone wants to hear. Even as I write this, I can hear many readers of this article uttering a collective snort of annoyance. Quite a few, I imagine, feel that, having won the election, they don’t want to pay for a bunch of happy-clappy vaccine volunteers,
or new roads in rural America, or mental-health services and life counseling for the conspiracy infected—let them learn to live with us. I can well imagine that many will resent every penny of public money, every ounce of political time, that is spent on the seditious minority. Some might
even prefer to track down every last Capitol-riot sympathizer and shame them on social media, preferably with enough rigor that they lose their jobs.
I know how they feel, because I often feel that way too. But then I remember: It won’t work. We’ll wake up the next morning, and they’ll still be there.
Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic, a senior fellow of the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism.
Thursday, January 20
This topic has come up quite a bit so I think it is time for us to talk about it. There are some social difficulties and tensions with who should be vaccinated and when. Some are wondering if following Jesus means to give up one's place in line and let someone else get vaccinated, or, is following Jesus getting a vaccination when it is available for you.
Also, I am concerned about what may happen this weekend in the country in regards to the possibility of violence in our state capitals. In college, I internshipped with folks in and near Washington's capital in Olympia. The capital is shutting down as they have already received threats. I can only imagine this is happening elsewhere. I pray - literally - that we won't need to talk about any of this next week. May God bless you and may God watch over our nation and that the promise of peace come quickly upon all.
- Dave
Vaccination by Age is the Way to Go
Paul E. Peterson, Wall Street Journal 1.12.21
The distribution of Covid vaccines is proceeding slowly even as a new, faster-moving viral variant arrives from London. The number of vaccinations administered last month was less than 25% of the original projections, while Covid hospitalizations and deaths reached new highs across the country. Perhaps inoculations will pick up in the coming weeks, but this has been what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls “Phase A,” when the serum is reserved for two highly accessible, readily identifiable groups: health-care workers and
nursing-home residents.
“Phase B” could be much worse. It is true that the CDC finally said on Tuesday that it would release doses initially held back for second injections and that the shots should be available to anyone over 65 and those with pre-existing conditions. But states still have wide latitude to set priorities. Many are still deliberating, and some have turned the question over to officials at the county or even hospital level. Other states are sorting the elderly between those who have two or more comorbidities and those who don’t.
In many states, essential workers have been assigned priority. They are spreaders, it is said. They encounter the public when policing the streets, stocking shelves at grocery stores, or teaching in schools. The definition of essential worker has at times expanded to include Uber drivers, meatpackers and all those in the retail and manufacturing industries. The head of the Texas Restaurant Association says
prioritization should go to those helping to “feed Texans.”
Each addition and distinction may seem reasonable, but the cost in delay and confusion is high. Covid vaccinations are proving more complicated than the flu shot. Out of an abundance of caution, some hospitals are requiring recipients to be tested for Covid first, and then wait 15 minutes after the vaccination to check for an allergic reaction. Applying the Phase B regulations will add to these delays. How does a person prove employment or a health condition? Must pharmacies turn away applicants who lack supporting documentation? With all these delays, summer could come and go before Phase B ends and the general public can finally be vaccinated.
It is time for simplification. To deliver free vaccines with maximum speed, the health-care system needs to follow a simple rule that applies to everyone. Fortunately, such a rule is readily available: date of birth. The older the person, the higher the priority. One can prove one’s age simply by showing a driver’s license, Medicare or Medicaid card, or another form of identification. For most, that information is already embedded in the files of hospitals, pharmacies and doctors’ offices.
Age is a powerful predictor of vulnerability. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says that in his state more than 80% of Covid victims are over 65. In Massachusetts the average age of death from the virus during roughly the first two weeks of December was 80. Over that short period, 420 octogenarians and older in the state died—a death rate of 143 per 100,000. The death rate for those between 70 and 80 was 33 per 100,000. For those 60 and 70, the rate was less than 10 per 100,000. Rates for those in their prime working years—30 to 50—came to about 1 per
100,000.
Now that the CDC has recommended birth date to be a critical factor used to establish priority after health-care workers and nursing-home residents, the president and the president-elect need to urge states to follow this recommendation, thereby greatly enhancing the chances of distributing the vaccine efficiently.
This isn’t a perfect solution. When Florida announced that everyone over 65 was eligible, it set the limit too low. Thousands of retirees stood in long lines late at night hoping to be inoculated before supplies were exhausted. Better to set a higher age limit at the beginning. It can be relaxed after the very old have been accommodated, supplies increase and systems become more efficient.
The executive director of the Association of Immunization Managers says it doesn’t make much difference which group is served first, “as long as states are putting vaccine doses into arms.” That point is valid insofar as every vaccination brings us one person closer to herd immunity. But if reducing fatalities, extreme illnesses and heavy burdens on the medical system is also important, it makes a lot of difference which age group is first vaccinated.
The need for simplicity and speed is similarly important. Shortening the pandemic by one month would save thousands of lives. This isn’t the right moment for deliberate selection among multiple claimants for protection. Keep it simple. Tempus fugit: Vaccinate the population before autumn leaves begin to fall.
Mr. Peterson is professor of government at Harvard and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Also, I am concerned about what may happen this weekend in the country in regards to the possibility of violence in our state capitals. In college, I internshipped with folks in and near Washington's capital in Olympia. The capital is shutting down as they have already received threats. I can only imagine this is happening elsewhere. I pray - literally - that we won't need to talk about any of this next week. May God bless you and may God watch over our nation and that the promise of peace come quickly upon all.
- Dave
Vaccination by Age is the Way to Go
Paul E. Peterson, Wall Street Journal 1.12.21
The distribution of Covid vaccines is proceeding slowly even as a new, faster-moving viral variant arrives from London. The number of vaccinations administered last month was less than 25% of the original projections, while Covid hospitalizations and deaths reached new highs across the country. Perhaps inoculations will pick up in the coming weeks, but this has been what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls “Phase A,” when the serum is reserved for two highly accessible, readily identifiable groups: health-care workers and
nursing-home residents.
“Phase B” could be much worse. It is true that the CDC finally said on Tuesday that it would release doses initially held back for second injections and that the shots should be available to anyone over 65 and those with pre-existing conditions. But states still have wide latitude to set priorities. Many are still deliberating, and some have turned the question over to officials at the county or even hospital level. Other states are sorting the elderly between those who have two or more comorbidities and those who don’t.
In many states, essential workers have been assigned priority. They are spreaders, it is said. They encounter the public when policing the streets, stocking shelves at grocery stores, or teaching in schools. The definition of essential worker has at times expanded to include Uber drivers, meatpackers and all those in the retail and manufacturing industries. The head of the Texas Restaurant Association says
prioritization should go to those helping to “feed Texans.”
Each addition and distinction may seem reasonable, but the cost in delay and confusion is high. Covid vaccinations are proving more complicated than the flu shot. Out of an abundance of caution, some hospitals are requiring recipients to be tested for Covid first, and then wait 15 minutes after the vaccination to check for an allergic reaction. Applying the Phase B regulations will add to these delays. How does a person prove employment or a health condition? Must pharmacies turn away applicants who lack supporting documentation? With all these delays, summer could come and go before Phase B ends and the general public can finally be vaccinated.
It is time for simplification. To deliver free vaccines with maximum speed, the health-care system needs to follow a simple rule that applies to everyone. Fortunately, such a rule is readily available: date of birth. The older the person, the higher the priority. One can prove one’s age simply by showing a driver’s license, Medicare or Medicaid card, or another form of identification. For most, that information is already embedded in the files of hospitals, pharmacies and doctors’ offices.
Age is a powerful predictor of vulnerability. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says that in his state more than 80% of Covid victims are over 65. In Massachusetts the average age of death from the virus during roughly the first two weeks of December was 80. Over that short period, 420 octogenarians and older in the state died—a death rate of 143 per 100,000. The death rate for those between 70 and 80 was 33 per 100,000. For those 60 and 70, the rate was less than 10 per 100,000. Rates for those in their prime working years—30 to 50—came to about 1 per
100,000.
Now that the CDC has recommended birth date to be a critical factor used to establish priority after health-care workers and nursing-home residents, the president and the president-elect need to urge states to follow this recommendation, thereby greatly enhancing the chances of distributing the vaccine efficiently.
This isn’t a perfect solution. When Florida announced that everyone over 65 was eligible, it set the limit too low. Thousands of retirees stood in long lines late at night hoping to be inoculated before supplies were exhausted. Better to set a higher age limit at the beginning. It can be relaxed after the very old have been accommodated, supplies increase and systems become more efficient.
The executive director of the Association of Immunization Managers says it doesn’t make much difference which group is served first, “as long as states are putting vaccine doses into arms.” That point is valid insofar as every vaccination brings us one person closer to herd immunity. But if reducing fatalities, extreme illnesses and heavy burdens on the medical system is also important, it makes a lot of difference which age group is first vaccinated.
The need for simplicity and speed is similarly important. Shortening the pandemic by one month would save thousands of lives. This isn’t the right moment for deliberate selection among multiple claimants for protection. Keep it simple. Tempus fugit: Vaccinate the population before autumn leaves begin to fall.
Mr. Peterson is professor of government at Harvard and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Thursday, January 14
Here is our reading for this week. It is an opinion piece from the New York Times about the radical side of Jesus. The author raises the belief that Jesus was open to everyone; especially the least desirable; and asks what happened to that movement. He quotes the response from the Church to the AIDS epidemic which still has ramifications today. How did we get so quick to judge and exclude, the author asks. I wonder that too.
During this season of Epiphany, when we recall our baptismal covenant and find ways to be the light to others, I think this article raises some good questions that I'd like to discuss with you.
God's peace to you and our nation.
-Dave
the_forgotten_radicalism_of_jesus_christ.discussion_groups_1.10.21.pdf
During this season of Epiphany, when we recall our baptismal covenant and find ways to be the light to others, I think this article raises some good questions that I'd like to discuss with you.
God's peace to you and our nation.
-Dave
the_forgotten_radicalism_of_jesus_christ.discussion_groups_1.10.21.pdf
Thursday, December 17
How involved should the Church be in international politics?
The video below, from the Wall Street Journal, is about Hong Kong businessman Jimmy Lai and his recent arrest. He is outspoken in his belief that the Church should be involved. I am interested in what you think.
https://www.wsj.com/video/series/main-street-mcgurn/wsj-opinion-the-vaticans-silence-over-jimmy-lai-and-china/D7930342-1A81-4DFE-A2E7-89607BBD151E
The primary source for our discussion will be the video. If you would like something to read, I have attached the accompanying article.
God's peace to you and to all in Hong Kong,
- Dave
The Silence of Pope Francis
William McGurn, WSJ Opinion 12.7.20
Jimmy Lai has embraced his destiny. Last Wednesday the founder of one of Hong Kong’s most popular newspapers, Apple Daily, was arrested on ginned-up fraud charges. On Thursday he was clapped into jail as a national security risk. Thus did a man who started the week a Hong Kong billionaire end it a Chinese dissident.
Mr. Lai’s jailing has provoked condemnation from figures as diverse as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Soviet refusenik Natan Sharansky and New York Rep. Eliot Engel. They have been joined by journalists, activists and politicians such as the Labour Party’s Sarah Champion and other members of Parliament who on Monday raised Mr. Lai’s plight in Britain’s House of Commons.
The silence might be understandable if Pope Francis were in the tradition of pontiffs who hold themselves aloof from worldly affairs. But Pope Francis is a man who readily weighs in on outrages wherever he finds them, whether it be modern air conditioning, American capitalism or Catholic moms who breed “like rabbits.”
But on China . . . silence. It’s the deliberate consequence of the Vatican’s 2018 agreement with Beijing, just recently renewed, that gives the Communist state extraordinary say over the selection of Catholic bishops—and whose terms Rome insists on keeping secret. The Vatican defends the deal as the means for carving out protections for the church’s continued presence in China. Unfortunately, rather than herald a thaw in China’s hostility toward religion, persecution has increased— and not only against Catholics.
“China is one of the world’s worst abusers of religious liberty,” says William Mumma, CEO of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. “What makes China’s repression especially repugnant is the heavy involvement of the highest levels of government. Whether it is Christians, Tibetan Buddhists, Falun Gong or Uighur Muslims, the government attacks religious freedom in pursuit of absolute power. No religious believer, no religious leader, can in good conscience turn their gaze away from this repression.”
But this is precisely what Pope Francis is doing. Hong Kong’s Cardinal Joseph Zen notes it is not a recent development, that Hong Kong hearts have been “broken” by the lack of encouragement from the pope amid the protests and mass arrests that have marked their continuing struggle with Beijing. “It has been 1½ years that we are waiting for a word from Pope Francis,” he says, “but there is none.”
Would it make a difference if the pope were to speak? History suggests it could, by highlighting the lack of moral legitimacy that is any Communist regime’s greatest insecurity. Not to mention the enhanced moral standing of a church that would come from insisting on speaking the truth about such regimes.
In a passing mention in a new book, Pope Francis rightly refers to the Muslim Uighurs in a list of “persecuted peoples.” It is as tepid a criticism as it gets and may well be the only critical thing he has ever said about China. Even so, the Chinese Foreign Ministry apparently felt wounded enough that this single sentence required public repudiation at a press conference.
Alas, Pope Francis not only chooses to see no evil in China, he won’t hear of any, either. In September, Cardinal Zen flew to Rome on his own initiative to talk to Pope Francis about what Beijing was doing to the Catholic faithful in Hong Kong and China. Pope Francis refused to see him. Yet later the pope did find the time to discuss justice and inequality with an NBA players union delegation, which presented him with a Black Lives Matter T-shirt.
I confess I am not unbiased here. Jimmy is my godson. And I love him.
So perhaps I am wrong and Pope Francis is right. Perhaps the Vatican is cleverly playing the long game. Then again, China has a centuries long history of making monkeys out of foreigners who told themselves they had the upper hand.
If the Vatican’s approach is to be justified by cold realpolitik, it ought to have the integrity to not shirk from acknowledging the price. To wit, it now requires Pope Francis to look the other way when China unjustly jails or persecutes those of his own flock.
In Robert Bolt’s play “A Man for All Seasons,” Thomas More remains silent rather than assent to the oath recognizing King Henry VIII’s second marriage. The Duke of Norfolk asks why the king didn’t just leave More to his silence. The chief minister to the king answers, because “this ‘silence’ of his is bellowing up and down Europe!”
Pope Francis’s silence on China and Jimmy Lai likewise bellows up and down the world. But not in an attractive way.
The video below, from the Wall Street Journal, is about Hong Kong businessman Jimmy Lai and his recent arrest. He is outspoken in his belief that the Church should be involved. I am interested in what you think.
https://www.wsj.com/video/series/main-street-mcgurn/wsj-opinion-the-vaticans-silence-over-jimmy-lai-and-china/D7930342-1A81-4DFE-A2E7-89607BBD151E
The primary source for our discussion will be the video. If you would like something to read, I have attached the accompanying article.
God's peace to you and to all in Hong Kong,
- Dave
The Silence of Pope Francis
William McGurn, WSJ Opinion 12.7.20
Jimmy Lai has embraced his destiny. Last Wednesday the founder of one of Hong Kong’s most popular newspapers, Apple Daily, was arrested on ginned-up fraud charges. On Thursday he was clapped into jail as a national security risk. Thus did a man who started the week a Hong Kong billionaire end it a Chinese dissident.
Mr. Lai’s jailing has provoked condemnation from figures as diverse as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Soviet refusenik Natan Sharansky and New York Rep. Eliot Engel. They have been joined by journalists, activists and politicians such as the Labour Party’s Sarah Champion and other members of Parliament who on Monday raised Mr. Lai’s plight in Britain’s House of Commons.
The silence might be understandable if Pope Francis were in the tradition of pontiffs who hold themselves aloof from worldly affairs. But Pope Francis is a man who readily weighs in on outrages wherever he finds them, whether it be modern air conditioning, American capitalism or Catholic moms who breed “like rabbits.”
But on China . . . silence. It’s the deliberate consequence of the Vatican’s 2018 agreement with Beijing, just recently renewed, that gives the Communist state extraordinary say over the selection of Catholic bishops—and whose terms Rome insists on keeping secret. The Vatican defends the deal as the means for carving out protections for the church’s continued presence in China. Unfortunately, rather than herald a thaw in China’s hostility toward religion, persecution has increased— and not only against Catholics.
“China is one of the world’s worst abusers of religious liberty,” says William Mumma, CEO of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. “What makes China’s repression especially repugnant is the heavy involvement of the highest levels of government. Whether it is Christians, Tibetan Buddhists, Falun Gong or Uighur Muslims, the government attacks religious freedom in pursuit of absolute power. No religious believer, no religious leader, can in good conscience turn their gaze away from this repression.”
But this is precisely what Pope Francis is doing. Hong Kong’s Cardinal Joseph Zen notes it is not a recent development, that Hong Kong hearts have been “broken” by the lack of encouragement from the pope amid the protests and mass arrests that have marked their continuing struggle with Beijing. “It has been 1½ years that we are waiting for a word from Pope Francis,” he says, “but there is none.”
Would it make a difference if the pope were to speak? History suggests it could, by highlighting the lack of moral legitimacy that is any Communist regime’s greatest insecurity. Not to mention the enhanced moral standing of a church that would come from insisting on speaking the truth about such regimes.
In a passing mention in a new book, Pope Francis rightly refers to the Muslim Uighurs in a list of “persecuted peoples.” It is as tepid a criticism as it gets and may well be the only critical thing he has ever said about China. Even so, the Chinese Foreign Ministry apparently felt wounded enough that this single sentence required public repudiation at a press conference.
Alas, Pope Francis not only chooses to see no evil in China, he won’t hear of any, either. In September, Cardinal Zen flew to Rome on his own initiative to talk to Pope Francis about what Beijing was doing to the Catholic faithful in Hong Kong and China. Pope Francis refused to see him. Yet later the pope did find the time to discuss justice and inequality with an NBA players union delegation, which presented him with a Black Lives Matter T-shirt.
I confess I am not unbiased here. Jimmy is my godson. And I love him.
So perhaps I am wrong and Pope Francis is right. Perhaps the Vatican is cleverly playing the long game. Then again, China has a centuries long history of making monkeys out of foreigners who told themselves they had the upper hand.
If the Vatican’s approach is to be justified by cold realpolitik, it ought to have the integrity to not shirk from acknowledging the price. To wit, it now requires Pope Francis to look the other way when China unjustly jails or persecutes those of his own flock.
In Robert Bolt’s play “A Man for All Seasons,” Thomas More remains silent rather than assent to the oath recognizing King Henry VIII’s second marriage. The Duke of Norfolk asks why the king didn’t just leave More to his silence. The chief minister to the king answers, because “this ‘silence’ of his is bellowing up and down Europe!”
Pope Francis’s silence on China and Jimmy Lai likewise bellows up and down the world. But not in an attractive way.
Thursday, December 10
Here is an interesting article from the New York Times asking an important question - when should federal inmates get vaccinated for Covid-19? It is about general public health as well as an ethical; and spiritual; question. I'd like to hear what you think about it.
God's peace to you,
- Dave
When Should Inmates Get the Vaccine?
By Roni Caryn Rabin, New York Times, 12-2.20
They live in crowded conditions, sharing bathrooms and eating facilities where social distancing is impossible. They have high rates of asthma, diabetes and heart disease. Many struggle with mental illness. A disproportionate number are Black and Hispanic, members of minority
communities that have been hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic. So should prisoners and other detainees be given priority access to one of the new Covid-19 vaccines?
With distribution expected to start as early as this month, public health officials are scrambling to develop guidelines for the equitable allocation of limited vaccine supplies. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will meet on Tuesday to make initial determinations about who gets the first shots.
There is broad consensus that health care workers who treat Covid-19 patients should be first in line. Other high-priority groups include residents and employees of long-term care facilities, essential workers whose jobs keep people fed and society running, and medically vulnerable and older adults — roughly in that order. Prison inmates are not ranked in the top tiers of the federal criteria, even though some of the largest outbreaks have occurred in the nation’s prisons. More than 2,200 inmates were sickened and 28 people died, for example, after an outbreak in the San Quentin State Prison in California over the summer.
Yet the C.D.C. advisory committee has prioritized correctional officers and others who work in jails and prisons for the first phase of immunizations. The federal prison system will set aside its initial allotment for such employees, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. The discrepancy raises a chilling prospect: another prison outbreak that kills scores of inmates after the only preventive was reserved for staff. Officials at the Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Now several groups, including the American Medical Association, are calling for coronavirus vaccines to be given to inmates and employees at prisons, jails and detention centers, citing the unique risks to people in confinement — and the potential for outbreaks to spread from
correctional centers, straining community hospitals. “We aren’t saying that prisoners should be treated any better than anybody else, but they shouldn’t be treated any worse than anybody else who is forced to live in a congregate setting,” said Dr. Eric Toner, co-author of a report on
vaccine allocation published by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. The report lists prisoners as a priority group, Dr. Toner said, though not “at the very tiptop, but at the next tier down.”
Some states, in their own distribution plans, already are moving in that direction. North Carolina, for example, plans to give first priority to health care providers, but also includes people at high risk for severe disease and high risk for exposure to the virus. That list includes people in congregate living settings, such as migrant farm camps, jails and prisons, and homeless shelters, along with other “historically marginalized” populations.
Allocating precious medical resources to people who are serving time may be anathema to much of the public, but it is widely accepted that the nation has an ethical and legal obligation to safeguard the health of incarcerated individuals. There is also a powerful public health argument to be made for prison vaccination: Outbreaks that start in prisons and jails may spread to the surrounding community. “Prisons are incubators of infectious disease,” Dr. Toner said. “It’s a fundamental tenet of public health to try and stop epidemics at their source,” he added.
One approach, under consideration by the National Commission on Covid-19 and Criminal Justice, would be to prioritize vaccination only for prisoners and detainees whose medical conditions or advanced age put them at great risk should they become ill. “This isn’t a criminal
justice recommendation,” said Khalil Cumberbatch, a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan group focused on criminal justice policy. “It’s a public health recommendation. The virus is not in a vacuum if it’s in a state prison.”
The United States holds some 2.3 million individuals in prisons, jails and other detention centers, incarcerating more people per capita than any other nation. That includes nearly 500,000 people who have not been convicted of a crime and are awaiting trials, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. (Some jails have taken steps to reduce overcrowding since the pandemic started.) The figure also includes some 44,000 youngsters who are held in juvenile facilities and an estimated 42,000 in immigration detention centers. People held in confinement are uniquely vulnerable to the virus. Incarcerated individuals are four times more likely to become infected than people in the general population, according to a study by the criminal justice commission. Over all, Covid19 mortality rates among prisoners are higher than in the general population.
So far, at least 200,000 inmates have already been infected with Covid-19, and at least 1,450 inmates and correctional officers have died from the virus, according to a database maintained by The New York Times. Those numbers most likely underestimate the magnitude of the problem, because reporting requirements are spotty and vary from state to state, said Dr. Tom Inglesby, an infectious disease expert at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and another co-author of the vaccine allocation report.
In Connecticut, doctors tested over 10,000 prisoners in state prisons and jails from March to June and found that 13 percent were infected with the coronavirus, according to research published in The New England Journal of Medicine. Inmates who lived in dormitory housing were at the highest risk. Older inmates and Latino inmates also were more likely than others to be infected.
Even before the pandemic, many older inmates had poor health after decades of “hard living,” said Dr. Charles Lee, president-elect of the American College of Correctional Physicians. “From my experience, their physiological age is generally 20 years greater than their chronologic age — from drugs, from fights, from being incarcerated and homeless, and not getting health care,” Dr. Lee said. Up to 40 percent of incarcerated adults are Black, Dr. Lee said, a group with higher rates of chronic diseases, such as diabetes, hypertension and asthma.
Many argue that regardless of public health considerations, society has both legal and ethical responsibilities to protect the health of inmates. “There are truly bad guys in prison, but the vast majority of people in prisons and jails are not what the media makes us think about — they are
not mass murderers,” said Arthur Caplan, director of medical ethics at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine. “Many people are about to get released soon. Many are in for petty crimes.” “The ethical obligation is to protect the lives of prisoners, not just see them as
sources of disease,” Mr. Caplan added.
God's peace to you,
- Dave
When Should Inmates Get the Vaccine?
By Roni Caryn Rabin, New York Times, 12-2.20
They live in crowded conditions, sharing bathrooms and eating facilities where social distancing is impossible. They have high rates of asthma, diabetes and heart disease. Many struggle with mental illness. A disproportionate number are Black and Hispanic, members of minority
communities that have been hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic. So should prisoners and other detainees be given priority access to one of the new Covid-19 vaccines?
With distribution expected to start as early as this month, public health officials are scrambling to develop guidelines for the equitable allocation of limited vaccine supplies. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will meet on Tuesday to make initial determinations about who gets the first shots.
There is broad consensus that health care workers who treat Covid-19 patients should be first in line. Other high-priority groups include residents and employees of long-term care facilities, essential workers whose jobs keep people fed and society running, and medically vulnerable and older adults — roughly in that order. Prison inmates are not ranked in the top tiers of the federal criteria, even though some of the largest outbreaks have occurred in the nation’s prisons. More than 2,200 inmates were sickened and 28 people died, for example, after an outbreak in the San Quentin State Prison in California over the summer.
Yet the C.D.C. advisory committee has prioritized correctional officers and others who work in jails and prisons for the first phase of immunizations. The federal prison system will set aside its initial allotment for such employees, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. The discrepancy raises a chilling prospect: another prison outbreak that kills scores of inmates after the only preventive was reserved for staff. Officials at the Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Now several groups, including the American Medical Association, are calling for coronavirus vaccines to be given to inmates and employees at prisons, jails and detention centers, citing the unique risks to people in confinement — and the potential for outbreaks to spread from
correctional centers, straining community hospitals. “We aren’t saying that prisoners should be treated any better than anybody else, but they shouldn’t be treated any worse than anybody else who is forced to live in a congregate setting,” said Dr. Eric Toner, co-author of a report on
vaccine allocation published by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. The report lists prisoners as a priority group, Dr. Toner said, though not “at the very tiptop, but at the next tier down.”
Some states, in their own distribution plans, already are moving in that direction. North Carolina, for example, plans to give first priority to health care providers, but also includes people at high risk for severe disease and high risk for exposure to the virus. That list includes people in congregate living settings, such as migrant farm camps, jails and prisons, and homeless shelters, along with other “historically marginalized” populations.
Allocating precious medical resources to people who are serving time may be anathema to much of the public, but it is widely accepted that the nation has an ethical and legal obligation to safeguard the health of incarcerated individuals. There is also a powerful public health argument to be made for prison vaccination: Outbreaks that start in prisons and jails may spread to the surrounding community. “Prisons are incubators of infectious disease,” Dr. Toner said. “It’s a fundamental tenet of public health to try and stop epidemics at their source,” he added.
One approach, under consideration by the National Commission on Covid-19 and Criminal Justice, would be to prioritize vaccination only for prisoners and detainees whose medical conditions or advanced age put them at great risk should they become ill. “This isn’t a criminal
justice recommendation,” said Khalil Cumberbatch, a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan group focused on criminal justice policy. “It’s a public health recommendation. The virus is not in a vacuum if it’s in a state prison.”
The United States holds some 2.3 million individuals in prisons, jails and other detention centers, incarcerating more people per capita than any other nation. That includes nearly 500,000 people who have not been convicted of a crime and are awaiting trials, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. (Some jails have taken steps to reduce overcrowding since the pandemic started.) The figure also includes some 44,000 youngsters who are held in juvenile facilities and an estimated 42,000 in immigration detention centers. People held in confinement are uniquely vulnerable to the virus. Incarcerated individuals are four times more likely to become infected than people in the general population, according to a study by the criminal justice commission. Over all, Covid19 mortality rates among prisoners are higher than in the general population.
So far, at least 200,000 inmates have already been infected with Covid-19, and at least 1,450 inmates and correctional officers have died from the virus, according to a database maintained by The New York Times. Those numbers most likely underestimate the magnitude of the problem, because reporting requirements are spotty and vary from state to state, said Dr. Tom Inglesby, an infectious disease expert at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and another co-author of the vaccine allocation report.
In Connecticut, doctors tested over 10,000 prisoners in state prisons and jails from March to June and found that 13 percent were infected with the coronavirus, according to research published in The New England Journal of Medicine. Inmates who lived in dormitory housing were at the highest risk. Older inmates and Latino inmates also were more likely than others to be infected.
Even before the pandemic, many older inmates had poor health after decades of “hard living,” said Dr. Charles Lee, president-elect of the American College of Correctional Physicians. “From my experience, their physiological age is generally 20 years greater than their chronologic age — from drugs, from fights, from being incarcerated and homeless, and not getting health care,” Dr. Lee said. Up to 40 percent of incarcerated adults are Black, Dr. Lee said, a group with higher rates of chronic diseases, such as diabetes, hypertension and asthma.
Many argue that regardless of public health considerations, society has both legal and ethical responsibilities to protect the health of inmates. “There are truly bad guys in prison, but the vast majority of people in prisons and jails are not what the media makes us think about — they are
not mass murderers,” said Arthur Caplan, director of medical ethics at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine. “Many people are about to get released soon. Many are in for petty crimes.” “The ethical obligation is to protect the lives of prisoners, not just see them as
sources of disease,” Mr. Caplan added.
Thursday, December 3
I'd like to know your opinion on this question: The only people concerned about keeping their location data private are people who have something to hide.
This was the primary question raised in an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal; who, incidentally, has been following how the U.S. government tracks our activities through our cell phones and has written a number of articles on it over the years.
This is our discussion topic this week for a number of reasons. First, I think it's good that you know what your phone is collecting and sending. Second, I'd really like to know your thoughts on the topic of privacy and commercial use - say, for instance, that because you bought a Toyota, does that allow the company to track where, and how fast, you drive the vehicle. Third, I'd like to know if you think the government should be involved in this... which relates to the opening question.
In addition to the article, I'd suggest you watch this video on YouTube. It is from the WSJ so I am assuming it is factually based.
https://youtu.be/SXAShotdFZo
Lastly, if you are wondering what the Bible might have to say about something so modern, you might be surprised. Tune in and find out!
God's peace to you,
- Dave
Most Americans Object to Government Tracking of Their Cellphones
Byron Tau, WSJ 11.25.20
A new survey found widespread concern among Americans about government tracking of their whereabouts through their digital devices, with an overwhelming majority saying that a warrant should be required to obtain such data.
A new Harris Poll survey indicated that 55% of American adults are worried that government agencies are tracking them through location data generated from their cellphones and other digital devices. The poll also found that 77% of Americans believe the government should get a warrant to buy the kind of detailed location information that is frequently purchased and sold on the commercial market by data brokers.
The Wall Street Journal has reported that several U.S. law-enforcement agencies are buying geolocation data from brokers for criminal-law enforcement and border-security purposes without any court oversight.
Federal agencies have concluded that they don’t require a warrant because the location data is available for purchase on the open market. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that a warrant is required to compel cellphone carriers to turn over location data to law enforcement, but it hasn’t addressed whether consumers have any expectation of privacy or due process in data generated from apps rather than carriers.
Modern mobile-phone applications like weather forecasts, maps, games and social networks often ask consumers permission to record the phone’s location. That data is then packaged and resold by brokers. Computers, tablets, cars, wearable fitness tech and many other internet-enabled devices also have the potential to generate location information that is collected by companies.
The buying and selling of the location data drawn from modern technology have become a multibillion-dollar business—frequently used by corporations for targeted advertising, personalized marketing and behavioral profiling. Wall Street firms, real-estate developers and many other corporations use such information to guide decisions on investments, developments and planning.
Law enforcement, intelligence agencies, the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. military have also begun buying from the same pool of data for espionage, intelligence, criminal-law enforcement and border security. The Journal reported earlier this year that several agencies of the Department of Homeland Security were buying the mobile-phone location data on Americans through a specialized broker.
The survey by Harris, an American market research and global consulting firm, found that some Americans said they would take steps to avoid such tracking. Forty percent of respondents said they would block such tracking on their phones with software, while 26% said they would change their habits and routines to be less predictable. Another 23% said they would leave their phone at home more, while 32% said they wouldn’t do anything different.
The survey also inquired about views toward location privacy in general. A majority of respondents disagreed with the statement, “The only people concerned about keeping their location data private are people who have something to hide.” The poll found 60% of Americans somewhat or strongly disagreed with that statement, while 39% strongly or somewhat agreed.
Older Americans were less concerned about government surveillance than younger Americans. Of those surveyed between 18 and 34, 65% said they were worried about government location tracking. For respondents 65 and older, only 39% were concerned.
Nonwhite Americans were more likely to be concerned than white Americans about location data surveillance by government agencies. The poll found 65% of Black respondents, 65% of Hispanic respondents and 54% of Asian Americans surveyed said they were somewhat or very concerned, compared with 51% of white respondents.
The poll, which Harris conducted online between Nov. 19 and Nov. 21, surveyed 2,000 American adults. Harris doesn’t provide a margin of error because of its online methodology and weighting. A poll of that sample size typically carries a margin of error of about plus or minus 3%.
Write to Byron Tau at [email protected]
This was the primary question raised in an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal; who, incidentally, has been following how the U.S. government tracks our activities through our cell phones and has written a number of articles on it over the years.
This is our discussion topic this week for a number of reasons. First, I think it's good that you know what your phone is collecting and sending. Second, I'd really like to know your thoughts on the topic of privacy and commercial use - say, for instance, that because you bought a Toyota, does that allow the company to track where, and how fast, you drive the vehicle. Third, I'd like to know if you think the government should be involved in this... which relates to the opening question.
In addition to the article, I'd suggest you watch this video on YouTube. It is from the WSJ so I am assuming it is factually based.
https://youtu.be/SXAShotdFZo
Lastly, if you are wondering what the Bible might have to say about something so modern, you might be surprised. Tune in and find out!
God's peace to you,
- Dave
Most Americans Object to Government Tracking of Their Cellphones
Byron Tau, WSJ 11.25.20
A new survey found widespread concern among Americans about government tracking of their whereabouts through their digital devices, with an overwhelming majority saying that a warrant should be required to obtain such data.
A new Harris Poll survey indicated that 55% of American adults are worried that government agencies are tracking them through location data generated from their cellphones and other digital devices. The poll also found that 77% of Americans believe the government should get a warrant to buy the kind of detailed location information that is frequently purchased and sold on the commercial market by data brokers.
The Wall Street Journal has reported that several U.S. law-enforcement agencies are buying geolocation data from brokers for criminal-law enforcement and border-security purposes without any court oversight.
Federal agencies have concluded that they don’t require a warrant because the location data is available for purchase on the open market. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that a warrant is required to compel cellphone carriers to turn over location data to law enforcement, but it hasn’t addressed whether consumers have any expectation of privacy or due process in data generated from apps rather than carriers.
Modern mobile-phone applications like weather forecasts, maps, games and social networks often ask consumers permission to record the phone’s location. That data is then packaged and resold by brokers. Computers, tablets, cars, wearable fitness tech and many other internet-enabled devices also have the potential to generate location information that is collected by companies.
The buying and selling of the location data drawn from modern technology have become a multibillion-dollar business—frequently used by corporations for targeted advertising, personalized marketing and behavioral profiling. Wall Street firms, real-estate developers and many other corporations use such information to guide decisions on investments, developments and planning.
Law enforcement, intelligence agencies, the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. military have also begun buying from the same pool of data for espionage, intelligence, criminal-law enforcement and border security. The Journal reported earlier this year that several agencies of the Department of Homeland Security were buying the mobile-phone location data on Americans through a specialized broker.
The survey by Harris, an American market research and global consulting firm, found that some Americans said they would take steps to avoid such tracking. Forty percent of respondents said they would block such tracking on their phones with software, while 26% said they would change their habits and routines to be less predictable. Another 23% said they would leave their phone at home more, while 32% said they wouldn’t do anything different.
The survey also inquired about views toward location privacy in general. A majority of respondents disagreed with the statement, “The only people concerned about keeping their location data private are people who have something to hide.” The poll found 60% of Americans somewhat or strongly disagreed with that statement, while 39% strongly or somewhat agreed.
Older Americans were less concerned about government surveillance than younger Americans. Of those surveyed between 18 and 34, 65% said they were worried about government location tracking. For respondents 65 and older, only 39% were concerned.
Nonwhite Americans were more likely to be concerned than white Americans about location data surveillance by government agencies. The poll found 65% of Black respondents, 65% of Hispanic respondents and 54% of Asian Americans surveyed said they were somewhat or very concerned, compared with 51% of white respondents.
The poll, which Harris conducted online between Nov. 19 and Nov. 21, surveyed 2,000 American adults. Harris doesn’t provide a margin of error because of its online methodology and weighting. A poll of that sample size typically carries a margin of error of about plus or minus 3%.
Write to Byron Tau at [email protected]
Thursday, November 19
Hello, thank you for an interesting discussion about homelessness and the hopelessness we can all feel when trying to address their plight. The good news is that there are people making a difference.
For this week, we will talk about an upcoming Supreme Court case involving what many are calling religious liberties. Attached is an article about it from NBC News.
The church at All Angels fared the hurricane very well, thanks be to God. May God bless you and especially those whose lives have been changed because of hurricanes.
- Dave
Supreme Court Takes Up Religious Freedom
Pete Williams, NBC News, November 3, 2020
A legal battle over the reach of religious freedom returns to the Supreme Court on Wednesday, requiring the justices to consider whether the Constitution allows a religious freedom exception to anti-discrimination laws.
The dispute, between the city of Philadelphia and a Catholic charity that refuses to place children in foster care with same sex-couples, is the first of this term's blockbuster cases to be heard with Justice Amy Coney Barrett on the court.
The decision is likely to have a nationwide impact. Since the Supreme Court struck down laws against gay marriage in 2015, lawsuits have sprung up around the nation brought by bakers, florists, photographers and others who say their religious beliefs will not allow them to provide services for same-sex weddings.
In the background is the court's 1990 decision that said religious groups are not exempt from general local, state and federal laws, including those banning discrimination. A decision to overturn that ruling would make it easier for businesses to claim a religious exemption from antidiscrimination laws that cover sexual orientation. But civil liberties groups say it would blunt efforts to fight discrimination.
Two years ago, the court confronted but failed to decide a similar issue in the case of a Colorado man who said baking cakes for same-sex weddings would violate his religious freedom and right of free expression, even though a state law banned discrimination based on sexual orientation.
The current case is an appeal brought by Catholic Social Services, one of about 30 agencies that contract with Philadelphia to find homes for abused and neglected children. After learning in 2018 that the charity would not consider same-sex couples as potential parents for foster children, the city insisted that all its contractors agree not to discriminate.
In its lawsuit, Catholic Social Services said endorsing same-sex couples as foster parents would violate its religious teachings about marriage. Mark Rienzi, the lawyer for the charity, said Philadelphia is demanding that a religious agency act according to the city's beliefs.
"If you don't speak the government's preferred message on marriage, you are excluded from providing foster care," he said.
In response, the city said the charity is free to express and practice its religious views but not to dictate the terms of municipal contracts. Neal Katyal, who represents the city in the case, said the Constitution does not entitle Catholic Social Services to perform child care services "on the city's behalf, with city funds, pursuant to a city contract, in a manner that the city has determined would be harmful to its residents and the thousands of children it has a duty to protect."
Whatever the charity's rights when it is regulated by the government, Katyal said, "it is not entitled to perform services for the government however it sees fit."
The city also said the charity is not being punished for its religious views, noting that it still has city contracts, worth millions of dollars a year, to perform other services for children in foster care.
Lower federal courts said the city acted properly to enforce its nondiscrimination laws. The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that "religious belief will not excuse compliance with general civil rights laws."
Paul Smith, a Washington, D.C., lawyer who has argued gay rights cases in the past, said the justices will likely be looking for a way "to create more space for religious liberty claims." He said last term's ruling that LGBTQ people are covered under existing civil rights laws could make the court more willing to accommodate religious objections.
"I'd be surprised if five justices couldn't find a way to do a narrow-gauge ruling in favor of Catholic Social Services," he said.
The court will hear the case in a telephone conference call and issue a decision by early next summer.
For this week, we will talk about an upcoming Supreme Court case involving what many are calling religious liberties. Attached is an article about it from NBC News.
The church at All Angels fared the hurricane very well, thanks be to God. May God bless you and especially those whose lives have been changed because of hurricanes.
- Dave
Supreme Court Takes Up Religious Freedom
Pete Williams, NBC News, November 3, 2020
A legal battle over the reach of religious freedom returns to the Supreme Court on Wednesday, requiring the justices to consider whether the Constitution allows a religious freedom exception to anti-discrimination laws.
The dispute, between the city of Philadelphia and a Catholic charity that refuses to place children in foster care with same sex-couples, is the first of this term's blockbuster cases to be heard with Justice Amy Coney Barrett on the court.
The decision is likely to have a nationwide impact. Since the Supreme Court struck down laws against gay marriage in 2015, lawsuits have sprung up around the nation brought by bakers, florists, photographers and others who say their religious beliefs will not allow them to provide services for same-sex weddings.
In the background is the court's 1990 decision that said religious groups are not exempt from general local, state and federal laws, including those banning discrimination. A decision to overturn that ruling would make it easier for businesses to claim a religious exemption from antidiscrimination laws that cover sexual orientation. But civil liberties groups say it would blunt efforts to fight discrimination.
Two years ago, the court confronted but failed to decide a similar issue in the case of a Colorado man who said baking cakes for same-sex weddings would violate his religious freedom and right of free expression, even though a state law banned discrimination based on sexual orientation.
The current case is an appeal brought by Catholic Social Services, one of about 30 agencies that contract with Philadelphia to find homes for abused and neglected children. After learning in 2018 that the charity would not consider same-sex couples as potential parents for foster children, the city insisted that all its contractors agree not to discriminate.
In its lawsuit, Catholic Social Services said endorsing same-sex couples as foster parents would violate its religious teachings about marriage. Mark Rienzi, the lawyer for the charity, said Philadelphia is demanding that a religious agency act according to the city's beliefs.
"If you don't speak the government's preferred message on marriage, you are excluded from providing foster care," he said.
In response, the city said the charity is free to express and practice its religious views but not to dictate the terms of municipal contracts. Neal Katyal, who represents the city in the case, said the Constitution does not entitle Catholic Social Services to perform child care services "on the city's behalf, with city funds, pursuant to a city contract, in a manner that the city has determined would be harmful to its residents and the thousands of children it has a duty to protect."
Whatever the charity's rights when it is regulated by the government, Katyal said, "it is not entitled to perform services for the government however it sees fit."
The city also said the charity is not being punished for its religious views, noting that it still has city contracts, worth millions of dollars a year, to perform other services for children in foster care.
Lower federal courts said the city acted properly to enforce its nondiscrimination laws. The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that "religious belief will not excuse compliance with general civil rights laws."
Paul Smith, a Washington, D.C., lawyer who has argued gay rights cases in the past, said the justices will likely be looking for a way "to create more space for religious liberty claims." He said last term's ruling that LGBTQ people are covered under existing civil rights laws could make the court more willing to accommodate religious objections.
"I'd be surprised if five justices couldn't find a way to do a narrow-gauge ruling in favor of Catholic Social Services," he said.
The court will hear the case in a telephone conference call and issue a decision by early next summer.
Thursday, November 12
Can you believe it, a group in British Columbia, Canada gave a lump sum cash payment of $7,500 to homeless people to see what impact it would have on their lives. If you would like to see how it turned out, feel free to read the attached article. If you are interested in talking about it, how this experiment could affect how Sarasota handles its homeless, and even how All Angels could impact the lives of homeless people, you are invited to attend our discussion group this week.
God's peace to you and to our nation,
- Dave
A Canadian study gave $7,500 to homeless people
Sigal Samuel, Vox, October 27, 2020
Ray is a 55-year-old man in Vancouver, Canada. He used to live in an emergency homeless shelter. But over the past year, he’s been able to pay for a place to live and courses to prepare him for his dream job — in part because he participated in a study called the New Leaf Project. The study, conducted by the charity Foundations for Social Change in partnership with the University of British Columbia, was fairly simple. It identified 50 people in the Vancouver area who had become homeless in the past two years. In spring 2018, it gave them each one lump sum of $7,500. And it told them to do whatever they wanted with the cash.
“At first, I thought it was a little far-fetched — too good to be true,” Ray said. “I went with one of the program representatives to a bank and we opened up a bank account for me. Even after the money was there, it took me a week for it to sink in.”
Over the next year, the study followed up with the recipients periodically, asking how they were spending the money and what was happening in their lives. Because they were participating in a randomized controlled trial, their outcomes were compared to those of a control group: 65 homeless people who didn’t receive any cash. Both cash recipients and people in the control group got access to workshops and coaching focused on developing life skills and plans.
The results? The people who received cash transfers moved into stable housing faster and saved enough money to maintain financial security over the year of follow-up. They decreased spending on drugs, tobacco, and alcohol by 39 percent on average, and increased spending on food, clothes, and rent, according to self-reports. “Counter to really harmful stereotypes, we saw that people made wise financial choices,” Claire Williams, the CEO of Foundations for Social Change, told me.
The study, though small, offers a counter to the myths that people who become poor get that way because they’re bad at rational decision-making and self-control, and are thus intrinsically to blame for their situation, and that people getting free money will blow it on frivolous things or addictive substances. Studies have consistently shown that cash transfers don’t increase the consumption of “temptation goods”; they either decrease it or have no effect on it.
“I have been working with people experiencing homelessness as a family physician for 16 years and I am in no way surprised that the people who received this cash used it wisely,” Gary Bloch, a Canadian doctor who prescribes money to low-income patients, told me. “It should be fairly self-evident by now that providing cash to people who are very low-income will have a positive effect,” he added. “We have seen that in other work (conditional cash transfer programs in Latin America, guaranteed annual income studies in Manitoba), and I would expect a similar outcome here.”
What’s more, according to Foundations for Social Change, giving out the cash transfers in the Vancouver area actually saved the broader society money. Enabling 50 people to move into housing faster saved the shelter system $8,100 per person over the year, for a total savings of $405,000. That’s more than the value of the cash transfers, which means the transfers pay for themselves.
“People think that the status quo is cheap, but it’s actually incredibly expensive,” Williams said. “So why don’t we just give people the cash they need to transform their lives?”
Williams developed the idea for the New Leaf Project when her co-founder sent her a link to a 2014 TED talk by the historian Rutger Bregman titled “Why we should give everyone a basic income.” It argued that the most effective way to help people is to simply give them cash.
The general idea behind basic income — that the government should give every citizen a monthly infusion of free money with no strings attached — has gained momentum in the past few years, with several countries running pilot programs to test it.
And the evidence so far shows that getting a basic income tends to boost happiness, health, school attendance, and trust in social institutions, while reducing crime. Recipients generally spend the money on necessities like food, clothes, and utility bills.
But Williams and her collaborators decided that rather than give people monthly payments, they’d give one big lump sum. “The research shows that if you give people a larger sum of cash up front, it triggers long-term thinking,” as opposed to just keeping people in survival mode, Williams explained. “You can’t think about maybe registering for a course to advance your life when you don’t have enough money to put food on the table. The big lump sum at the front end gives people a lot more agency.”
That’s what it did for Ray. In addition to getting housing, he used the cash transfer to take the courses he needed to become a front-line worker serving people with addictions. “Now I can work in any of the shelters and community centers in the area,” he told me, adding that receiving a cash transfer had felt like a vote of confidence. “It gives the person their own self-esteem, that they were trusted.”
Not everyone was eligible for a cash transfer, however. The study only enrolled participants who’d been homeless for under two years, with the idea that early intervention most effectively reduces the risk of people incurring trauma as a result of living without a home. And people with severe mental health or substance use issues were screened out of the initiative. Williams said this was not out of a belief that there are “deserving poor” and “undeserving poor” — a woefully persistent frame on poverty — but out of a desire to avoid creating a risk of harm and to ensure the highest likelihood of success.
“If there was null effect from people receiving the cash, from an investor perspective it could be seen as a ‘waste of money’ because it didn’t actually demonstrate impact in somebody’s life,” Williams said. “We just wanted to start small, and the idea is that with subsequent iterations we’ll start relaxing those parameters.”
She also said it was a difficult decision to include a control group of people who wouldn’t receive any cash, but ultimately, the control group was deemed necessary to prove impact. “We knew that we needed the rigor, because people would be skeptical about giving people cash. We wanted that evidence base that can assuage some of people’s concerns when they want to see the hard facts,” she told me.
Going forward, Foundations for Social Change is trying to raise $10 million to scale up its cash transfer approach to multiple cities across Canada. It plans to give out 200 cash transfers in the next iteration, which will also be run as a randomized controlled trial. Based on feedback from study participants and a Lived Experience Advisory Panel — a group of people who’ve experienced homelessness — the charity will offer a new array of non-cash supports to both the cash recipients and the control group, including a free smartphone.
The charity also hopes to work with other populations, like people exiting prison and people exiting sex work. To Williams, the time feels ripe. “I think the pandemic has really softened people’s attitudes to the need for an emergency cash payment when people fall upon hard times,” she said.
God's peace to you and to our nation,
- Dave
A Canadian study gave $7,500 to homeless people
Sigal Samuel, Vox, October 27, 2020
Ray is a 55-year-old man in Vancouver, Canada. He used to live in an emergency homeless shelter. But over the past year, he’s been able to pay for a place to live and courses to prepare him for his dream job — in part because he participated in a study called the New Leaf Project. The study, conducted by the charity Foundations for Social Change in partnership with the University of British Columbia, was fairly simple. It identified 50 people in the Vancouver area who had become homeless in the past two years. In spring 2018, it gave them each one lump sum of $7,500. And it told them to do whatever they wanted with the cash.
“At first, I thought it was a little far-fetched — too good to be true,” Ray said. “I went with one of the program representatives to a bank and we opened up a bank account for me. Even after the money was there, it took me a week for it to sink in.”
Over the next year, the study followed up with the recipients periodically, asking how they were spending the money and what was happening in their lives. Because they were participating in a randomized controlled trial, their outcomes were compared to those of a control group: 65 homeless people who didn’t receive any cash. Both cash recipients and people in the control group got access to workshops and coaching focused on developing life skills and plans.
The results? The people who received cash transfers moved into stable housing faster and saved enough money to maintain financial security over the year of follow-up. They decreased spending on drugs, tobacco, and alcohol by 39 percent on average, and increased spending on food, clothes, and rent, according to self-reports. “Counter to really harmful stereotypes, we saw that people made wise financial choices,” Claire Williams, the CEO of Foundations for Social Change, told me.
The study, though small, offers a counter to the myths that people who become poor get that way because they’re bad at rational decision-making and self-control, and are thus intrinsically to blame for their situation, and that people getting free money will blow it on frivolous things or addictive substances. Studies have consistently shown that cash transfers don’t increase the consumption of “temptation goods”; they either decrease it or have no effect on it.
“I have been working with people experiencing homelessness as a family physician for 16 years and I am in no way surprised that the people who received this cash used it wisely,” Gary Bloch, a Canadian doctor who prescribes money to low-income patients, told me. “It should be fairly self-evident by now that providing cash to people who are very low-income will have a positive effect,” he added. “We have seen that in other work (conditional cash transfer programs in Latin America, guaranteed annual income studies in Manitoba), and I would expect a similar outcome here.”
What’s more, according to Foundations for Social Change, giving out the cash transfers in the Vancouver area actually saved the broader society money. Enabling 50 people to move into housing faster saved the shelter system $8,100 per person over the year, for a total savings of $405,000. That’s more than the value of the cash transfers, which means the transfers pay for themselves.
“People think that the status quo is cheap, but it’s actually incredibly expensive,” Williams said. “So why don’t we just give people the cash they need to transform their lives?”
Williams developed the idea for the New Leaf Project when her co-founder sent her a link to a 2014 TED talk by the historian Rutger Bregman titled “Why we should give everyone a basic income.” It argued that the most effective way to help people is to simply give them cash.
The general idea behind basic income — that the government should give every citizen a monthly infusion of free money with no strings attached — has gained momentum in the past few years, with several countries running pilot programs to test it.
And the evidence so far shows that getting a basic income tends to boost happiness, health, school attendance, and trust in social institutions, while reducing crime. Recipients generally spend the money on necessities like food, clothes, and utility bills.
But Williams and her collaborators decided that rather than give people monthly payments, they’d give one big lump sum. “The research shows that if you give people a larger sum of cash up front, it triggers long-term thinking,” as opposed to just keeping people in survival mode, Williams explained. “You can’t think about maybe registering for a course to advance your life when you don’t have enough money to put food on the table. The big lump sum at the front end gives people a lot more agency.”
That’s what it did for Ray. In addition to getting housing, he used the cash transfer to take the courses he needed to become a front-line worker serving people with addictions. “Now I can work in any of the shelters and community centers in the area,” he told me, adding that receiving a cash transfer had felt like a vote of confidence. “It gives the person their own self-esteem, that they were trusted.”
Not everyone was eligible for a cash transfer, however. The study only enrolled participants who’d been homeless for under two years, with the idea that early intervention most effectively reduces the risk of people incurring trauma as a result of living without a home. And people with severe mental health or substance use issues were screened out of the initiative. Williams said this was not out of a belief that there are “deserving poor” and “undeserving poor” — a woefully persistent frame on poverty — but out of a desire to avoid creating a risk of harm and to ensure the highest likelihood of success.
“If there was null effect from people receiving the cash, from an investor perspective it could be seen as a ‘waste of money’ because it didn’t actually demonstrate impact in somebody’s life,” Williams said. “We just wanted to start small, and the idea is that with subsequent iterations we’ll start relaxing those parameters.”
She also said it was a difficult decision to include a control group of people who wouldn’t receive any cash, but ultimately, the control group was deemed necessary to prove impact. “We knew that we needed the rigor, because people would be skeptical about giving people cash. We wanted that evidence base that can assuage some of people’s concerns when they want to see the hard facts,” she told me.
Going forward, Foundations for Social Change is trying to raise $10 million to scale up its cash transfer approach to multiple cities across Canada. It plans to give out 200 cash transfers in the next iteration, which will also be run as a randomized controlled trial. Based on feedback from study participants and a Lived Experience Advisory Panel — a group of people who’ve experienced homelessness — the charity will offer a new array of non-cash supports to both the cash recipients and the control group, including a free smartphone.
The charity also hopes to work with other populations, like people exiting prison and people exiting sex work. To Williams, the time feels ripe. “I think the pandemic has really softened people’s attitudes to the need for an emergency cash payment when people fall upon hard times,” she said.
Thursday, November 5
Finding Hope When Everything Feels Hopeless
Elizabeth Bernstein, The Wall Street Journal, October 27, 2020
I’ve got the perfect four-letter word for the moment: Hope.
Yes, it feels increasingly elusive—seven months into a pandemic, during an emotionally exhausting election cycle, as winter bears down. Yet hope is the very best reaction for the moment, psychologists say. It’s crucial to our physical and mental health. It guards against anxiety and despair. And it protects us from stress: Research shows that people with higher levels of hope have better coping skills and bounce back from setbacks faster. They’re better at problem-solving and have lower levels of burnout. They have stronger relationships, because they communicate better and are more trusting. And they’re less-stressed parents— more able to teach their children to set goals and solve problems.
“You can think of hope as a PPE—a Personal Protective Emotion,” says Anthony Scioli, a professor of psychology at Keene State College in Keene, N.H., and coauthor of “Hope in the Age of Anxiety” and “The Power of Hope.”
Most psychologists define hope as a yearning for something possible but not certain—such as a better future—and a belief that you have some power to make it happen. And they believe it has two crucial components: Agency, or the motivation, to achieve the desired goal. And a strategy, or pathway, to do that. This is how it differs from optimism, which is the belief the future will work out no matter what you do.
Think of it like this: If you want to lose 10 pounds, you need a plan—a healthy diet or an exercise program—and the willpower to follow it. Without this, you’ve got no real hope for a fitter body. Just wishful thinking.
The good news: Hope is malleable. You can boost it.
Some people are more hopeful than others, thanks to a combination of nature and nurture. Dr. Scioli believes these people draw on four main resources: Attachment is a sense of continued trust and connection to another person. Mastery, or empowerment, is a feeling of being strong and capable—and of having people you admire and people who validate your strengths. Survival has two features—a belief that you aren’t trapped in a bad situation, and an ability to hold on to positive thoughts and feelings even while processing something negative. Spirituality is a belief in something larger than yourself.
The good news: Hope is malleable. You can boost it. Scientists say it’s important that the area of the brain that activates when we feel hopeful—the rostral anterior cingulate cortex—sits at the intersection of the limbic system, which governs our emotions, and the prefrontal cortex, where thoughts and actions are initiated. This shows we have some influence over feelings of hope (or hopelessness). “Hope is a choice,” says Rick Miller, clinical director of the Center for the Advanced Study and Practice of Hope at Arizona State University.
Of course, it seems harder to choose hope at the moment, when the world seems so bleak and our brains are on high alert, constantly scanning for threat. “Hope is competing with all our other thoughts and emotions for attention right now,” says Mr. Miller, author of “The Soul, Science and Culture of Hope.” “It has to struggle to find its place in our mind.”
Here’s some advice for everyone whose hope could use a boost right now.
Measure it
To increase hope, it helps to know your baseline or starting point—and which areas you need to improve.
In the early 1990s, a psychologist named C.R. Snyder created the Adult Trait Hope Scale, a list of 12 questions that test whether a person has both the agency and the pathway-thinking necessary for hope. And Dr. Scioli has a longer online quiz that explores the four areas he believes hopeful people draw on: attachment, mastery, survival and spirituality. It can measure both your current level of hope and your long-term capacity for it.
Read history
Since the pandemic began, I’ve read books on the Black Death, the Civil War, Winston Churchill’s inner circle during the London Blitz and Miami in 1980 (it was a very bad year). Each one cheered me up. They helped me put 2020 in perspective. They reminded me that bad times do end. And they gave me an intimate peek at how people have held onto hope in the darkest times.
“If you look at how surprising events often come about in unpredictable ways, it can get you out of a fatalist way of thinking,” says Michael Milona, an assistant professor of philosophy at Ryerson University in Toronto and author of a just-published white paper on hope and optimism commissioned by the John Templeton Foundation, a philanthropic institution that funds scientific research. Dr. Milona suggests focusing on the ways history has moved forward positively, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall or Nelson Mandela’s journey from prison to president of South Africa.
Future cast
Imagine yourself happy when life returns to normal. Arizona State’s Mr. Miller recommends visualizing four areas of your life—home and family, career, community and recreation—and to ask yourself how you would like them to look in the future. Picture them in great detail. (Who are you with? What are you doing? How do you look?) Those are your goals. Next, think about what you need to do now to make that vision happen. Now you’ve got agency.
Take a small step
Often, when we’re stressed, we become overwhelmed. Setting one goal for the week—and identifying the steps we need to take to reach it—can give us a sense of control. “Once we begin to experience the success in those steps, we start to see more clearly that the future is possible and we have the power to pursue that goal,” says Chan Hellman, executive director of the Hope Research Center at the University of Oklahoma-Tulsa and co-author of “Hope Rising: How the Science of Hope Can Change Your Life.”
Watch your words
When we despair, we tend to speak in absolutes: “I’ll never catch a break.” “Things will always be like this.” “I’m overwhelmed.” “We’re doomed.” These are hope killers.
Many years ago I interviewed Elie Wiesel, the Nobel laureate, author and Holocaust survivor. Mr. Wiesel told me something I have never forgotten: “Every word we speak or write matters.”
Heed Mr. Wiesel’s advice. Think carefully about your words. Use hopeful language: “I can.” “We will.” “It’s possible.”
Spread hope
Emotions are contagious. And everyone is searching for hope right now. So model it for others. Explain what makes you hopeful. Share your goals. And describe how you plan to reach them. You may garner support. You’ll inspire others, showing what is possible.
Remember: Hope begets hope. “When people around you are energized, that can energize you, as well,” says Dr. Milona.
Elizabeth Bernstein, The Wall Street Journal, October 27, 2020
I’ve got the perfect four-letter word for the moment: Hope.
Yes, it feels increasingly elusive—seven months into a pandemic, during an emotionally exhausting election cycle, as winter bears down. Yet hope is the very best reaction for the moment, psychologists say. It’s crucial to our physical and mental health. It guards against anxiety and despair. And it protects us from stress: Research shows that people with higher levels of hope have better coping skills and bounce back from setbacks faster. They’re better at problem-solving and have lower levels of burnout. They have stronger relationships, because they communicate better and are more trusting. And they’re less-stressed parents— more able to teach their children to set goals and solve problems.
“You can think of hope as a PPE—a Personal Protective Emotion,” says Anthony Scioli, a professor of psychology at Keene State College in Keene, N.H., and coauthor of “Hope in the Age of Anxiety” and “The Power of Hope.”
Most psychologists define hope as a yearning for something possible but not certain—such as a better future—and a belief that you have some power to make it happen. And they believe it has two crucial components: Agency, or the motivation, to achieve the desired goal. And a strategy, or pathway, to do that. This is how it differs from optimism, which is the belief the future will work out no matter what you do.
Think of it like this: If you want to lose 10 pounds, you need a plan—a healthy diet or an exercise program—and the willpower to follow it. Without this, you’ve got no real hope for a fitter body. Just wishful thinking.
The good news: Hope is malleable. You can boost it.
Some people are more hopeful than others, thanks to a combination of nature and nurture. Dr. Scioli believes these people draw on four main resources: Attachment is a sense of continued trust and connection to another person. Mastery, or empowerment, is a feeling of being strong and capable—and of having people you admire and people who validate your strengths. Survival has two features—a belief that you aren’t trapped in a bad situation, and an ability to hold on to positive thoughts and feelings even while processing something negative. Spirituality is a belief in something larger than yourself.
The good news: Hope is malleable. You can boost it. Scientists say it’s important that the area of the brain that activates when we feel hopeful—the rostral anterior cingulate cortex—sits at the intersection of the limbic system, which governs our emotions, and the prefrontal cortex, where thoughts and actions are initiated. This shows we have some influence over feelings of hope (or hopelessness). “Hope is a choice,” says Rick Miller, clinical director of the Center for the Advanced Study and Practice of Hope at Arizona State University.
Of course, it seems harder to choose hope at the moment, when the world seems so bleak and our brains are on high alert, constantly scanning for threat. “Hope is competing with all our other thoughts and emotions for attention right now,” says Mr. Miller, author of “The Soul, Science and Culture of Hope.” “It has to struggle to find its place in our mind.”
Here’s some advice for everyone whose hope could use a boost right now.
Measure it
To increase hope, it helps to know your baseline or starting point—and which areas you need to improve.
In the early 1990s, a psychologist named C.R. Snyder created the Adult Trait Hope Scale, a list of 12 questions that test whether a person has both the agency and the pathway-thinking necessary for hope. And Dr. Scioli has a longer online quiz that explores the four areas he believes hopeful people draw on: attachment, mastery, survival and spirituality. It can measure both your current level of hope and your long-term capacity for it.
Read history
Since the pandemic began, I’ve read books on the Black Death, the Civil War, Winston Churchill’s inner circle during the London Blitz and Miami in 1980 (it was a very bad year). Each one cheered me up. They helped me put 2020 in perspective. They reminded me that bad times do end. And they gave me an intimate peek at how people have held onto hope in the darkest times.
“If you look at how surprising events often come about in unpredictable ways, it can get you out of a fatalist way of thinking,” says Michael Milona, an assistant professor of philosophy at Ryerson University in Toronto and author of a just-published white paper on hope and optimism commissioned by the John Templeton Foundation, a philanthropic institution that funds scientific research. Dr. Milona suggests focusing on the ways history has moved forward positively, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall or Nelson Mandela’s journey from prison to president of South Africa.
Future cast
Imagine yourself happy when life returns to normal. Arizona State’s Mr. Miller recommends visualizing four areas of your life—home and family, career, community and recreation—and to ask yourself how you would like them to look in the future. Picture them in great detail. (Who are you with? What are you doing? How do you look?) Those are your goals. Next, think about what you need to do now to make that vision happen. Now you’ve got agency.
Take a small step
Often, when we’re stressed, we become overwhelmed. Setting one goal for the week—and identifying the steps we need to take to reach it—can give us a sense of control. “Once we begin to experience the success in those steps, we start to see more clearly that the future is possible and we have the power to pursue that goal,” says Chan Hellman, executive director of the Hope Research Center at the University of Oklahoma-Tulsa and co-author of “Hope Rising: How the Science of Hope Can Change Your Life.”
Watch your words
When we despair, we tend to speak in absolutes: “I’ll never catch a break.” “Things will always be like this.” “I’m overwhelmed.” “We’re doomed.” These are hope killers.
Many years ago I interviewed Elie Wiesel, the Nobel laureate, author and Holocaust survivor. Mr. Wiesel told me something I have never forgotten: “Every word we speak or write matters.”
Heed Mr. Wiesel’s advice. Think carefully about your words. Use hopeful language: “I can.” “We will.” “It’s possible.”
Spread hope
Emotions are contagious. And everyone is searching for hope right now. So model it for others. Explain what makes you hopeful. Share your goals. And describe how you plan to reach them. You may garner support. You’ll inspire others, showing what is possible.
Remember: Hope begets hope. “When people around you are energized, that can energize you, as well,” says Dr. Milona.
Thursday, October 29
Hello! Thanks for an interesting week of discussions about altruism and effectiveness. Part of what makes people happy is giving and helping others. But, what about the other side - buying things to make ourselves feel happy. The article for this week says that we can't buy things to make us happy, nor can we elect someone to make us happy, nor can we create a governmental or free market society that will then create happiness. Nope. You'll have to read it to find out where happiness is. One line, however, that I really appreciated is this:
"The world encourages us to love things and use people. But that’s backwards. Put this on your fridge and try to live by it:
Love people; use things."
May God bless you and everyone that you love,
- Dave
Are We Trading Our Happiness for Modern Comforts?
Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic, 10.22.20
One of the greatest paradoxes in American life is that while, on average, existence has gotten more comfortable over time, happiness has fallen. According to the United States Census Bureau, average household income in the U.S., adjusted for inflation, was higher in 2019 than has ever been recorded for every income quintile. And although income inequality has risen, this has not been mirrored by inequality in the consumption of goods and services. For example, from 2008 to 2019, households in the lowest income quintile increased spending on eating out by an average of about 22 percent; the top quintile increased spending on eating out by an average of just under 8 percent. Meanwhile, domestic government services have increased significantly: For example, federal spending on education, training, employment, and social services increased from 2000 to 2019 by about 30 percent in inflation-adjusted terms.
New American homes in 2016 were 1,000 square feet larger than in 1973 and living space per person, on average, has nearly doubled. The number of Americans who use the internet increased from 52 to 90 percent from 2000 to 2019. The percentage who use social media grew from 5 to 72 percent from 2005 to 2019.
But amid these advances in quality of life across the income scale, average happiness is decreasing in the U.S. The General Social Survey, which has been measuring social trends among Americans every one or two years since 1972, shows a long-term, gradual decline in happiness—and rise in unhappiness—from 1988 to the present.
There are several possible explanations for this paradox: It could be that people are uninformed about all of this amazing progress, that we can’t perceive progress very well when it occurs over decades, or that we are measuring the wrong indicators of “quality of life.” I suspect the answer is all three. The last idea, however, is especially important to understand in order to improve our own happiness.
There’s nothing new about the idea that consumption doesn’t lead to happiness—that concept is a mainstay of just about every religion,
and many philosophical traditions as well. Arguably, Karl Marx’s greatest insight came from his theory of alienation, in part defined as a sense of estrangement from the self that comes from being part of a materialistic society in which we are cogs in an enormous market-based machine.
But you don’t have to be religious (or a Marxist) to see how absurd some of the claims that come out of our hyper-consumerist society are. We are promised happiness with the next pay raise, the next new gadget—even the next sip of soda. The Swedish business professor Carl Cederström argues persuasively in his book The Happiness Fantasy that corporations and advertisers have promised satisfaction, but have led people instead into a rat race of joyless production and consumption. Though the material comforts of life in the U.S. have increased for many of its citizens, those things don’t give life meaning.
The answer, as Marx and his modern followers today would have it, is to adopt a different system of economic governance, specifically scientific socialism, which leaves people less exposed to the power of markets. But it’s not at all clear that this is the road to greater well-being. Indeed, many have observed that socialism’s focus on who gets what is every bit as materialistic as a market-based society.
Though government intervention can certainly help meet basic needs—food on the table, money when people are unemployed, health care that doesn’t break the bank—interacting with the government is not a joyful process. Even in our mixed economy, people get caught up in the net of bureaucracy. Scientific socialism—or at least, scientific public administration—reduces citizenship to a series of cold transactions with the government. Empty consumerism and soulless government are the traditional two explanations for our modern alienation. These days, there is a brand-new one: tech. The tech revolution promised us our heart’s desires: everything you want to know at the click of a mouse; the ability to become famous to strangers; anything you want to buy, delivered to your door in days without you having to leave home.
But our happiness has not increased as a result—on the contrary. Mounting evidence shows that media and technology use predict deleterious psychological and physiological outcomes, especially among young people. This is particularly true in the case of social-media use. The psychologist Jean M. Twenge has shown that social media increases depression, especially among girls and young women.
We don’t get happier as our society gets richer, because we chase the wrong things. Consumerocracy, bureaucracy, and technocracy promise us greater satisfaction, but don’t deliver. Consumer purchases promise to make us more attractive and entertained; the government promises protection from life’s vicissitudes; social media promises to keep us connected; but none of these provide the love and purpose that bring deep and enduring satisfaction to life.
This is not an indictment of capitalism, government, or technology. They never satisfy—not because they are malevolent, but rather because they cannot. This poses a real dilemma, not just for society, but for each of us as individuals. But properly informed, we are far from defenseless. Here are three principles to help us keep the forces of modern life from ruining our happiness.
1. DON’T BUY THAT THING. A group of my colleagues at Harvard show in their research that to get happier as we prosper, we need to change the choices we make with our financial resources. In an extensive review of the literature, they analyze the happiness benefits of at least four uses of income: buying consumer items, buying time to pay for help (by, say, hiring people to do tasks you don’t enjoy), buying accompanied experiences (for example, going on vacation with a loved one), and donating charitably or giving to friends and family. The evidence is clear that, although people tend toward the first, much greater happiness comes from the other three.
2. DON’T PUT YOUR FAITH IN PRINCES (OR POLITICIANS). If I complain that government is soulless or that a politician is making me unhappy—which I personally have done many times—I am saying that I think government should have a soul or that politicians can and should bring me happiness. This is naïve at best.
Some of history’s greatest tyrants have promised that a government or political leader could bring joy to life. In 1949, the Soviet government promoted the slogan “Beloved Stalin is the people’s happiness.” Few leaders have delivered more misery and death than Stalin—but looking at this slogan makes me think twice about my own expectations of governments and politicians.
3. DON’T TRADE LOVE FOR ANYTHING. I have referenced in this column before a famous study that followed hundreds of men who graduated from Harvard from 1939 to 1944 throughout their lives, into their 90s. The researchers wanted to know who flourished, who didn’t, and the decisions they had made that contributed to that well-being. The lead scholar on the study for many years was the Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant, who summarized the results in his book Triumphs of Experience. Here is his summary, in its entirety: “Happiness is love. Full stop.”
What this means is that anything that substitutes for close human relationships in your life is a bad trade. But the point goes much deeper. You will sacrifice happiness if you crowd out relationships with work, drugs, politics, or social media. The world encourages us to love things and use people. But that’s backwards. Put this on your fridge and try to live by it: Love people; use things.
I realize that one could easily read this column as a jeremiad against modern life. That isn’t my intention. (Indeed, I am a very public proponent of democratic capitalism with a modern welfare state.) Rather, I mean to appeal to all of us to remember that material prosperity has both benefits and costs. The costs come when we allow our hunger for the fruits of prosperity to blind us to the timeless sources of true human happiness: faith, family, friendship, and work in which we earn our success and serve others. Regardless of how the world might change, those have always been, and will always be, the things that deliver the satisfaction we crave.
ARTHUR C. BROOKS is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a professor of the practice of public leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, a senior fellow at the Harvard Business School, an
"The world encourages us to love things and use people. But that’s backwards. Put this on your fridge and try to live by it:
Love people; use things."
May God bless you and everyone that you love,
- Dave
Are We Trading Our Happiness for Modern Comforts?
Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic, 10.22.20
One of the greatest paradoxes in American life is that while, on average, existence has gotten more comfortable over time, happiness has fallen. According to the United States Census Bureau, average household income in the U.S., adjusted for inflation, was higher in 2019 than has ever been recorded for every income quintile. And although income inequality has risen, this has not been mirrored by inequality in the consumption of goods and services. For example, from 2008 to 2019, households in the lowest income quintile increased spending on eating out by an average of about 22 percent; the top quintile increased spending on eating out by an average of just under 8 percent. Meanwhile, domestic government services have increased significantly: For example, federal spending on education, training, employment, and social services increased from 2000 to 2019 by about 30 percent in inflation-adjusted terms.
New American homes in 2016 were 1,000 square feet larger than in 1973 and living space per person, on average, has nearly doubled. The number of Americans who use the internet increased from 52 to 90 percent from 2000 to 2019. The percentage who use social media grew from 5 to 72 percent from 2005 to 2019.
But amid these advances in quality of life across the income scale, average happiness is decreasing in the U.S. The General Social Survey, which has been measuring social trends among Americans every one or two years since 1972, shows a long-term, gradual decline in happiness—and rise in unhappiness—from 1988 to the present.
There are several possible explanations for this paradox: It could be that people are uninformed about all of this amazing progress, that we can’t perceive progress very well when it occurs over decades, or that we are measuring the wrong indicators of “quality of life.” I suspect the answer is all three. The last idea, however, is especially important to understand in order to improve our own happiness.
There’s nothing new about the idea that consumption doesn’t lead to happiness—that concept is a mainstay of just about every religion,
and many philosophical traditions as well. Arguably, Karl Marx’s greatest insight came from his theory of alienation, in part defined as a sense of estrangement from the self that comes from being part of a materialistic society in which we are cogs in an enormous market-based machine.
But you don’t have to be religious (or a Marxist) to see how absurd some of the claims that come out of our hyper-consumerist society are. We are promised happiness with the next pay raise, the next new gadget—even the next sip of soda. The Swedish business professor Carl Cederström argues persuasively in his book The Happiness Fantasy that corporations and advertisers have promised satisfaction, but have led people instead into a rat race of joyless production and consumption. Though the material comforts of life in the U.S. have increased for many of its citizens, those things don’t give life meaning.
The answer, as Marx and his modern followers today would have it, is to adopt a different system of economic governance, specifically scientific socialism, which leaves people less exposed to the power of markets. But it’s not at all clear that this is the road to greater well-being. Indeed, many have observed that socialism’s focus on who gets what is every bit as materialistic as a market-based society.
Though government intervention can certainly help meet basic needs—food on the table, money when people are unemployed, health care that doesn’t break the bank—interacting with the government is not a joyful process. Even in our mixed economy, people get caught up in the net of bureaucracy. Scientific socialism—or at least, scientific public administration—reduces citizenship to a series of cold transactions with the government. Empty consumerism and soulless government are the traditional two explanations for our modern alienation. These days, there is a brand-new one: tech. The tech revolution promised us our heart’s desires: everything you want to know at the click of a mouse; the ability to become famous to strangers; anything you want to buy, delivered to your door in days without you having to leave home.
But our happiness has not increased as a result—on the contrary. Mounting evidence shows that media and technology use predict deleterious psychological and physiological outcomes, especially among young people. This is particularly true in the case of social-media use. The psychologist Jean M. Twenge has shown that social media increases depression, especially among girls and young women.
We don’t get happier as our society gets richer, because we chase the wrong things. Consumerocracy, bureaucracy, and technocracy promise us greater satisfaction, but don’t deliver. Consumer purchases promise to make us more attractive and entertained; the government promises protection from life’s vicissitudes; social media promises to keep us connected; but none of these provide the love and purpose that bring deep and enduring satisfaction to life.
This is not an indictment of capitalism, government, or technology. They never satisfy—not because they are malevolent, but rather because they cannot. This poses a real dilemma, not just for society, but for each of us as individuals. But properly informed, we are far from defenseless. Here are three principles to help us keep the forces of modern life from ruining our happiness.
1. DON’T BUY THAT THING. A group of my colleagues at Harvard show in their research that to get happier as we prosper, we need to change the choices we make with our financial resources. In an extensive review of the literature, they analyze the happiness benefits of at least four uses of income: buying consumer items, buying time to pay for help (by, say, hiring people to do tasks you don’t enjoy), buying accompanied experiences (for example, going on vacation with a loved one), and donating charitably or giving to friends and family. The evidence is clear that, although people tend toward the first, much greater happiness comes from the other three.
2. DON’T PUT YOUR FAITH IN PRINCES (OR POLITICIANS). If I complain that government is soulless or that a politician is making me unhappy—which I personally have done many times—I am saying that I think government should have a soul or that politicians can and should bring me happiness. This is naïve at best.
Some of history’s greatest tyrants have promised that a government or political leader could bring joy to life. In 1949, the Soviet government promoted the slogan “Beloved Stalin is the people’s happiness.” Few leaders have delivered more misery and death than Stalin—but looking at this slogan makes me think twice about my own expectations of governments and politicians.
3. DON’T TRADE LOVE FOR ANYTHING. I have referenced in this column before a famous study that followed hundreds of men who graduated from Harvard from 1939 to 1944 throughout their lives, into their 90s. The researchers wanted to know who flourished, who didn’t, and the decisions they had made that contributed to that well-being. The lead scholar on the study for many years was the Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant, who summarized the results in his book Triumphs of Experience. Here is his summary, in its entirety: “Happiness is love. Full stop.”
What this means is that anything that substitutes for close human relationships in your life is a bad trade. But the point goes much deeper. You will sacrifice happiness if you crowd out relationships with work, drugs, politics, or social media. The world encourages us to love things and use people. But that’s backwards. Put this on your fridge and try to live by it: Love people; use things.
I realize that one could easily read this column as a jeremiad against modern life. That isn’t my intention. (Indeed, I am a very public proponent of democratic capitalism with a modern welfare state.) Rather, I mean to appeal to all of us to remember that material prosperity has both benefits and costs. The costs come when we allow our hunger for the fruits of prosperity to blind us to the timeless sources of true human happiness: faith, family, friendship, and work in which we earn our success and serve others. Regardless of how the world might change, those have always been, and will always be, the things that deliver the satisfaction we crave.
ARTHUR C. BROOKS is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a professor of the practice of public leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, a senior fellow at the Harvard Business School, an
Thursday, October 22
This was certainly an interesting week of discussions. One thread that came up in each group, including the book study, was altruism. Can one give without getting back? Although there is no clear answer to that, I have an interesting article about effective altruism. It is written in a way that will both inspire and irritate the reader. I'm not sure if that is a good thing, but, it should make for an interesting discussion.
Blessings to you,
- Dave
The Rise of the Rational Do-Gooders
Zachary Pincus-Roth, Washington Post 9.23.20
Brian Ottens wished he could buy his 8-year-old daughter a better iPad. The first-generation one she’d inherited from her great-grandmother didn’t support the game she wanted to play. But Ottens has different priorities. “We just explain it to her: iPads are expensive, and this several hundreds of dollars could go toward helping a lot of animals,” he says. When her school went online during the covid-19 pandemic, Ottens was forced to give in and buy a low-end Chromebook. Still, he says, “if it never showed up, I think she would have continued feeling the same way. I understand why.” Every year, Ottens and his wife donate a large amount to charities, mainly ones that advocate for animals. In 2018, they gave $49,000, which was 27 percent of their combined salary. This year they plan to give $60,000. They vary the amount to maximize their tax benefits, so that they can give more in the long run.
Ottens, 43, is an engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., working on devices that look for signs of life on places like Mars and Saturn’s moon Titan. It’s a stressful job: He needs to keep his team on a strict timetable, and there’s unexpected weekend work. But he seeks out the stress. The more stress he has, the more animals will live. “Once I discovered this access I had for reducing suffering, it motivated me to compete for the highest-stress job I could withstand,” he says, “and it usually came along with higher pay, and that higher pay has meant I could donate a lot more.” His wife is on board with his giving. The couple don’t own a fancy car or take expensive vacations. When planning their finances for the year, nixing donations is just not on the table.
Ottens’s choices are unimaginable for many, but they’re typical of effective altruism, a movement devoted to improving the world in the most logical, evidence-based way possible. Oxford professor William MacAskill, who helped found the movement, estimates that if you’re a one-person U.S. household earning more than $58,000, you’re in the top 1 percent in the world, even accounting for global cost differences. Since a dollar means far more to the less fortunate than to those living in such comfort, effective altruists donate a large percentage of their income. And to further harness that dollar, they seek out causes that most efficiently save lives. They land on ones that many of us haven’t considered before, especially since those lives tend to be on the other side of the world, or nonhuman — or yet to be lived.
It’s no coincidence that the effective altruism movement came about when evidence-based practices — using science and data to make decisions, rather than conventions and intuition — were on the rise in areas such as government and health care; however, EA hasn’t yet gone mainstream.
One question about EA is whether the “E” is harder than the “A.” One EA group ragged on New York Times columnist David Brooks, who in 2013 had written a critique of earning money at a hedge fund in order to donate it to far-away recipients. (“You might become one of those people who loves humanity in general but not the particular humans immediately around.”)
Motivation is a hole in effective altruism’s armor. Isn’t it better if an art-loving rich person gives to a local museum rather than buying a yacht? But an EA might argue that society is paying for that contribution, in the form of a tax deduction. And can’t wealthy nonprofits find other means of making up the difference — like a museum selling a lesser-known work that it doesn’t display anyway? The arguments can go on and on.
Jason Dykstra is a radiologist in Holland, Mich. His family of four lives on around $48,000 annually and has given away about 75 percent of their take-home income for the past seven years. Dykstra often gets pushback from his peers. “To be able to convince them that someone halfway around the world is just as important as their kid or their grandkid or favorite church buddy, that’s the challenge I’ve run into,” he says. He thinks the pandemic could help EA, as it has awakened Americans to the horrors of infectious diseases and economic instability. “It’s helped them to empathize better with problems that the rest of the world faces all the time,” he says.
Think about the moral issues your friends and family have argued about over the past few years. Donald Trump. Race relations. The 2020 campaign. Immigration. Abortion. Trump. Trump. Trump. Effective altruists might personally care about these things, but they are not the causes the movement tends to focus on. “Anything that involves party politics ... EA tries to stay out of those things because it’s so unlikely that we’d be able to make a difference,” says Julia Wise, 35, community liaison at the Center for Effective Altruism. Issues in the news may be galvanizing. But, Wise says, “we’ve been looking for problems that are boring.”
Dylan Matthews, a former Washington Post reporter, is the head writer of Future Perfect, a section of Vox that’s funded by private donors and explores how to do the most good. Matthews identifies as an effective altruist himself; he once donated a kidney to a stranger. At Vox, he grapples with how to communicate the movement’s ideas convincingly. One colleague joked that he should write an article saying that instead of sending toothbrushes to children detained at the Mexico border, people should be spending that money on malaria. But he wouldn’t write something like that, he says, because he wouldn’t want to dismiss anyone’s pain. “EA is not an oppression Olympics,” he says, “and if it becomes an oppression Olympics, a lot of good and smart people will be turned off.”
But as EA has become more flexible, it still faces a daunting force: the human brain. Even for Geistwhite, 33, who hosted the D.C. gathering and works as a statistician for the U.S. Agency for International Development, it’s been a long road to shifting his intuitions. He grew up
in the town of Farmington, N.M., in a conservative family, inheriting a “Fox News perspective,” as he puts it over dinner at NuVegan Cafe
in Northwest Washington. He would volunteer for the Salvation Army, occasionally on programs that gave gifts to kids. But when they
opened their gifts, he recalls, they just seemed confused. He heard about GiveWell while in college at Princeton and eventually started coming around to EA beliefs.
Geistwhite once worked for nine months at a health clinic in Sierra Leone and now keeps a photo of his co-workers there at his desk. One had difficulty concentrating in the afternoon because he would pass up the $1.50 daily lunch to save money to support his family. The photo is a reminder of who needs help. “It’s the suffering that’s important,” Geistwhite says. “It’s not how I feel about it.”
Blessings to you,
- Dave
The Rise of the Rational Do-Gooders
Zachary Pincus-Roth, Washington Post 9.23.20
Brian Ottens wished he could buy his 8-year-old daughter a better iPad. The first-generation one she’d inherited from her great-grandmother didn’t support the game she wanted to play. But Ottens has different priorities. “We just explain it to her: iPads are expensive, and this several hundreds of dollars could go toward helping a lot of animals,” he says. When her school went online during the covid-19 pandemic, Ottens was forced to give in and buy a low-end Chromebook. Still, he says, “if it never showed up, I think she would have continued feeling the same way. I understand why.” Every year, Ottens and his wife donate a large amount to charities, mainly ones that advocate for animals. In 2018, they gave $49,000, which was 27 percent of their combined salary. This year they plan to give $60,000. They vary the amount to maximize their tax benefits, so that they can give more in the long run.
Ottens, 43, is an engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., working on devices that look for signs of life on places like Mars and Saturn’s moon Titan. It’s a stressful job: He needs to keep his team on a strict timetable, and there’s unexpected weekend work. But he seeks out the stress. The more stress he has, the more animals will live. “Once I discovered this access I had for reducing suffering, it motivated me to compete for the highest-stress job I could withstand,” he says, “and it usually came along with higher pay, and that higher pay has meant I could donate a lot more.” His wife is on board with his giving. The couple don’t own a fancy car or take expensive vacations. When planning their finances for the year, nixing donations is just not on the table.
Ottens’s choices are unimaginable for many, but they’re typical of effective altruism, a movement devoted to improving the world in the most logical, evidence-based way possible. Oxford professor William MacAskill, who helped found the movement, estimates that if you’re a one-person U.S. household earning more than $58,000, you’re in the top 1 percent in the world, even accounting for global cost differences. Since a dollar means far more to the less fortunate than to those living in such comfort, effective altruists donate a large percentage of their income. And to further harness that dollar, they seek out causes that most efficiently save lives. They land on ones that many of us haven’t considered before, especially since those lives tend to be on the other side of the world, or nonhuman — or yet to be lived.
It’s no coincidence that the effective altruism movement came about when evidence-based practices — using science and data to make decisions, rather than conventions and intuition — were on the rise in areas such as government and health care; however, EA hasn’t yet gone mainstream.
One question about EA is whether the “E” is harder than the “A.” One EA group ragged on New York Times columnist David Brooks, who in 2013 had written a critique of earning money at a hedge fund in order to donate it to far-away recipients. (“You might become one of those people who loves humanity in general but not the particular humans immediately around.”)
Motivation is a hole in effective altruism’s armor. Isn’t it better if an art-loving rich person gives to a local museum rather than buying a yacht? But an EA might argue that society is paying for that contribution, in the form of a tax deduction. And can’t wealthy nonprofits find other means of making up the difference — like a museum selling a lesser-known work that it doesn’t display anyway? The arguments can go on and on.
Jason Dykstra is a radiologist in Holland, Mich. His family of four lives on around $48,000 annually and has given away about 75 percent of their take-home income for the past seven years. Dykstra often gets pushback from his peers. “To be able to convince them that someone halfway around the world is just as important as their kid or their grandkid or favorite church buddy, that’s the challenge I’ve run into,” he says. He thinks the pandemic could help EA, as it has awakened Americans to the horrors of infectious diseases and economic instability. “It’s helped them to empathize better with problems that the rest of the world faces all the time,” he says.
Think about the moral issues your friends and family have argued about over the past few years. Donald Trump. Race relations. The 2020 campaign. Immigration. Abortion. Trump. Trump. Trump. Effective altruists might personally care about these things, but they are not the causes the movement tends to focus on. “Anything that involves party politics ... EA tries to stay out of those things because it’s so unlikely that we’d be able to make a difference,” says Julia Wise, 35, community liaison at the Center for Effective Altruism. Issues in the news may be galvanizing. But, Wise says, “we’ve been looking for problems that are boring.”
Dylan Matthews, a former Washington Post reporter, is the head writer of Future Perfect, a section of Vox that’s funded by private donors and explores how to do the most good. Matthews identifies as an effective altruist himself; he once donated a kidney to a stranger. At Vox, he grapples with how to communicate the movement’s ideas convincingly. One colleague joked that he should write an article saying that instead of sending toothbrushes to children detained at the Mexico border, people should be spending that money on malaria. But he wouldn’t write something like that, he says, because he wouldn’t want to dismiss anyone’s pain. “EA is not an oppression Olympics,” he says, “and if it becomes an oppression Olympics, a lot of good and smart people will be turned off.”
But as EA has become more flexible, it still faces a daunting force: the human brain. Even for Geistwhite, 33, who hosted the D.C. gathering and works as a statistician for the U.S. Agency for International Development, it’s been a long road to shifting his intuitions. He grew up
in the town of Farmington, N.M., in a conservative family, inheriting a “Fox News perspective,” as he puts it over dinner at NuVegan Cafe
in Northwest Washington. He would volunteer for the Salvation Army, occasionally on programs that gave gifts to kids. But when they
opened their gifts, he recalls, they just seemed confused. He heard about GiveWell while in college at Princeton and eventually started coming around to EA beliefs.
Geistwhite once worked for nine months at a health clinic in Sierra Leone and now keeps a photo of his co-workers there at his desk. One had difficulty concentrating in the afternoon because he would pass up the $1.50 daily lunch to save money to support his family. The photo is a reminder of who needs help. “It’s the suffering that’s important,” Geistwhite says. “It’s not how I feel about it.”
Thursday, October 15
We are going to talk about the science, or lack-thereof, of near-death experiences. Here are two articles talking about the subject. The primary text, Understanding Near-Death Experiences, gets into the neurology behind the phenomenon and brings up the subject in saying it can be simulated, perhaps, by a particular drug. The other article, which is not required reading, is from an MD who had her own experience and believes it is beyond scientific understanding.
There are many more articles about this so, if you are so inclined, feel free to do your own reading and let the group know what you found.
Many blessings to you this week,
- Dave
Near-Death Experiences Are Real, Doctor Says
David Oliver, US News, 10.17.17
In 1987, Barbara Bartolome says she died. And 30 years later, she continues to tell her story. The Santa Barbara, California-based retiree says she went into cardiac arrest after an X-Ray technician tipped an exam table the incorrect way during a Myelogram test, accidentally lowering her head instead of raising it. The test involves injecting an iodine dye into a person's spinal cord to help spot damage to discs. But Bartolome says when the table tipped, the dye injected at the base of her skull flowed into her brain instead of the spinal cord.
"I've been told that the change in pressure there would have caused my brain to malfunction," she says. This "very quickly resulted in confusion, hyperventilation and then cardiac arrest," Bartolome says, but what happened next is something more difficult to explain. Bartolome says she had a near-death experience, a phenomenon in which people report conscious events around them even though they may be clinically dead. Such experiences still have their skeptics, but Bartolome – the founder and director of International Association for Near-Death Studies, Santa Barbara – is certainly not alone.
Near-death experiences are real, "without a doubt," according to Houma, Louisiana-based Dr. Jeffrey Long. He runs the Near Death Experience Research Foundation and has studied more than 4,000 such experiences, in addition to working full-time in radiation oncology. People like Bartolome submit experiences to his foundation and are required to answer a more than 140-question survey to help verify their claims. To vet these people, many of these questions are the same, just asked in a slightly different way to make sure everything adds up.
Long isn't the only one doing research on the subject. Dr. Sam Parnia, an associate professor of medicine at New York University Langone Medical Center, launched a comprehensive study of near-death experiences in 2008. He published research involving 2,060 cardiac arrest patients, called AWARE, in 2014 in Resuscitation. That said, Parnia doesn't think the term "near-death experience" is the one people should be using, since it's "very poorly defined and it's what's led to a lot of controversy and debate," he says.
Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, questioned the claims of Eben Alexander's book "Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife," which details a near-death experience while he underwent a meningitis-induced coma. "The fact that mind and
consciousness are not fully explained by natural forces, however, is not proof of the supernatural," Shermer writes. "In any case, there is a reason they are called near-death experiences: the people who have them are not actually dead."
Parnia says the people studied are those who have objectively died and come back. Biologically, that's referred to as cardiac arrest, where doctors try to intervene after someone's heart stops beating. And Long also has a message for the inevitable skeptics: You can't explain away the consistent lucidity of near-death experiences.
When Bartolome went into cardiac arrest, she says she suddenly found herself up on the ceiling looking down very calmly and peacefully at the scene below her. "If I'm up here and my body's down there and he's calling code blue, I think I might've just died," she remembers thinking. She noticed a presence up there – who she later referred to as a "being" – and told the being she wanted to go back into her life. She was stuck in a difficult marriage, and the being knew that. It asked her, "But if you go back, you'll still be in your marriage. What will you do?" She told the being that she would get strong enough to leave her husband.
Down below, doctors had been trying to figure out what to do to save her life, she says. They ended up performing two precordial thumps (i.e. pounding the center of her chest), the second of which brought her back to life.
After she woke up, she told the staff she was watching their every move from above, leaving them stunned with what she was able to recall.
That's where Parnia comes in: His research focuses on resuscitated people's mental and cognitive experience at that specific moment when they have gone through death. He calls it an actual death experience.
The brain shuts down within two to 20 seconds after the heart stops, Parnia says, so even when doctors try to revive patients, they don't usually get enough blood into brain to get it functioning again. And that's what made the AWARE study turn heads: 39 percent of patients who lived after cardiac arrest could describe a perception of awareness even if they couldn't recall specific memories. These people didn't have an explicit memory of these events, though more granular research in further interviews revealed 9 percent of people who reported this perception of awareness went through what's commonly referred to as a near-death experience, and 2 percent had an "out-of-body experience" – meaning they could hear and see events. In one substantiated case from the AWARE study, "consciousness and awareness appeared to occur during a three minute period when there was no heartbeat."
Parnia is in the midst of working on a follow-up study, called AWARE II, with a public announcement likely in the next six months. It will try to answer questions the first study raised.
For example, is it true that up to 40 percent of people have awareness but just don't recall it?
Parnia says his team has built in tests for visual and auditory awareness for specific moments
during cardiac arrest and CPR where they can test for implicit learning if people can't explicitly
recall memories.
"For instance, in some cases people who appear unconscious are given names of cities and objects," he says. "When they have recovered they have been asked to recall any memories. Even though they have no recall, when asked to 'randomly' think of cities, those who had been exposed to the stimuli are statistically more likely to choose the same cities compared to control subjects. Thus indicating they had heard it."
New Clues Found in Understanding Near-Death Experiences
Robert Martone, Scientific American, 9.10.19
Imagine a dream in which you sense an intense feeling of presence, the truest, most real experience in your life, as you float away from your body and look at your own face. You have a twinge of fear as memories of your life flash by, but then you pass a transcendent threshold and are overcome by a feeling of bliss. Although contemplating death elicits fear for many people, these positive features are reported in some of the near-death experiences (NDEs) undergone by those who reached the brink of death only to recover.
Accounts of NDEs are remarkably consistent in character and content. They include intensely vivid memories involving bodily sensations that give a strong impression of being real, more real even than memories of true events. The content of those experiences famously includes memories of one’s life “flashing before the eyes,” and also the sensation of leaving the body, often seeing one’s own face and body, blissfully traveling through a tunnel toward a light and feeling “at one” with something universal.
Not surprisingly, many have seized on NDEs as evidence of life after death, heaven and the existence of God. The descriptions of leaving the body and blissful unity with the universal seem almost scripted from religious beliefs about souls leaving the body at death and ascending toward heavenly bliss. But these experiences are shared across a broad range of cultures and religions so it’s not likely that they are all reflections of specific religious expectations. Instead, that commonality suggests that NDEs might arise from something more fundamental than religious or cultural expectations. Perhaps NDEs reflect changes in how the brain functions as we approach death.
Many cultures employ drugs as part of religious practice to induce feelings of transcendence that have similarities to near-death experiences. If NDEs are based in brain biology, perhaps the action of those drugs that causes NDE-like experiences can teach us something about the NDE state. Of course, studying NDEs has significant technical hurdles. There is no way of examining the experience in animals, and rescuing a patient at death’s door is far more important than interviewing them about their NDE. Moreover, many of the drugs used to induce religious states are illicit, which would complicate any efforts to study their effects.
Although it’s impossible to directly examine what happens to the brain during NDEs, the stories collected from them provide a rich resource for linguistic analysis. In a fascinating new study, NDE stories were compared linguistically with anecdotes of drug experience in order to identify a drug that causes an experience most like a near-death experience. What is remarkable is how precise a tool this turned out to be. Even though the stories were open-ended subjective accounts often given many years after the fact, the linguistic analysis focused down not only to a specific class of drugs, but also to a specific drug as causing experiences very similar to NDEs.
This new study compared the stories of 625 individuals who reported NDEs with the stories of more than 15,000 individuals who had taken one of 165 different psychoactive drugs. When those stories were linguistically analyzed, similarities were found between recollections of near-death and drug experiences for those who had taken a specific class of drug. One drug in particular, ketamine, led to experiences very similar to NDE. This may mean that the near-death experience may reflect changes in the same chemical system in the brain that is targeted by drugs like ketamine.
The researchers drew on a large collection of NDE stories they had collected over many years. To compare NDEs with drug experiences, the researchers took advantage of a large collection of drug experience anecdotes found in the Erowid Experience Vaults, an open-source collection of accounts describing firsthand experiences with drugs and various substances.
In this study, the recollections of those who experienced NDEs and those who took drugs were compared linguistically. Their stories were broken down into individual words, and the words were sorted according to their meaning and counted. In this way, researchers were able to compare the number of times words having the same meaning were used in each story. They used this numerical analysis of story content to compare the content of drug-related and near-death experiences.
Each of the drugs included in these comparisons could be categorized by their ability to interact with a specific neurochemical system in the brain, and each drug fell into a specific category (antipsychotic, stimulant, psychedelic, depressant or sedative, deliriant, or hallucinogen). Few similarities were found when the accounts of one stimulant drug were compared with another within the same stimulant drug class, and few if any similarities were found between accounts of stimulant drug experience and NDEs. The same was true for depressants. The stories associated with hallucinogens, however, were very similar to one another, as were stories linked to antipsychotics and deliriants. When recollections of drug effects were compared with NDEs, stories about hallucinogens and psychedelics had the greatest similarities to NDEs, and the drug that scored the highest similarity to NDEs was the hallucinogen ketamine. The word most strongly represented in descriptions of both NDEs and ketamine experiences was “reality,” highlighting the sense of presence that accompanies NDEs. High among the list of words common to both experiences were those related to perception (saw, color, voice, vision), the body (face, arm, foot), emotion (fear) and transcendence (universe, understand, consciousness).
The researchers then sorted words into five large principal groups according to their common meaning. Those principal components dealt with perception and consciousness, drug dependency, negative sensations, drug preparation, and also a group that included disease state, religion and ceremony. NDEs reflected three of these components related to perception and consciousness, religion and ceremony, disease state, and drug preparation. The component related to perception and consciousness was labeled “Look/Self” and included terms such as color, vision, pattern, reality and face. The component “Disease/Religion” contained elements such as anxiety, ceremony, consciousness and self, whereas the component related to preparation “Make/Stuff” contained elements such as prepare, boil, smell and ceremony. Again, ketamine had the greatest overlap with NDEs in this type of analysis.
Other drugs that cause similar experiences to NDEs include LSD and N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT). The famous hallucinogen LSD was as similar as ketamine to NDEs when the near-death event was caused by cardiac arrest. DMT is a hallucinogen found in South American plants and used in shamanistic rituals. It caused experiences like NDEs and is also made in the brain, leading to speculation that endogenous DMT may explain NDEs. It is not known, however, whether levels of DMT change in a meaningful way in the human brain near death, so its role in the phenomenon remain controversial.
This study has significant weaknesses because it is based on purely subjective reports—some taken decades after the event. Similarly, there is no way to substantiate the accounts in the Erowid collection as there is no way to prove that any individual took the drug they claimed or believed they were taking. This makes it all the more remarkable that a linguistic analysis of stories derived in this manner could discriminate among different drug classes in their similarities to NDEs.
Linking near-death experiences and the experience of taking ketamine is provocative yet it is far from conclusive that both are because of the same chemical events in the brain. The types of studies needed to demonstrate this hypothesis, such as measuring neurochemical changes in the critically ill, would be both technically and ethically challenging. The authors propose, however, a practical application of this relation. Because near-death experiences (NDEs) can be transformational and have profound and lasting effects on those who experience them, including a sense of fearlessness about death, the authors propose that ketamine could be used therapeutically to induce an NDE-like state in terminally ill patients as a “preview” of what they might experience, so as to relieve their anxieties about death. Those benefits need to be weighed against the risks of potential ketamine side effects, which include feelings of panic or extreme anxiety, effects that could defeat the purpose of the intervention.
More important, this study helps describe the psychological manifestations of dying. That knowledge may ultimately contribute more to alleviating fear of this inevitable transition than a dose of any drug.
Robert Martone is a research scientist with expertise in neurodegeneration. He spends his free time kayaking and translating Renaissance Italian literature.
There are many more articles about this so, if you are so inclined, feel free to do your own reading and let the group know what you found.
Many blessings to you this week,
- Dave
Near-Death Experiences Are Real, Doctor Says
David Oliver, US News, 10.17.17
In 1987, Barbara Bartolome says she died. And 30 years later, she continues to tell her story. The Santa Barbara, California-based retiree says she went into cardiac arrest after an X-Ray technician tipped an exam table the incorrect way during a Myelogram test, accidentally lowering her head instead of raising it. The test involves injecting an iodine dye into a person's spinal cord to help spot damage to discs. But Bartolome says when the table tipped, the dye injected at the base of her skull flowed into her brain instead of the spinal cord.
"I've been told that the change in pressure there would have caused my brain to malfunction," she says. This "very quickly resulted in confusion, hyperventilation and then cardiac arrest," Bartolome says, but what happened next is something more difficult to explain. Bartolome says she had a near-death experience, a phenomenon in which people report conscious events around them even though they may be clinically dead. Such experiences still have their skeptics, but Bartolome – the founder and director of International Association for Near-Death Studies, Santa Barbara – is certainly not alone.
Near-death experiences are real, "without a doubt," according to Houma, Louisiana-based Dr. Jeffrey Long. He runs the Near Death Experience Research Foundation and has studied more than 4,000 such experiences, in addition to working full-time in radiation oncology. People like Bartolome submit experiences to his foundation and are required to answer a more than 140-question survey to help verify their claims. To vet these people, many of these questions are the same, just asked in a slightly different way to make sure everything adds up.
Long isn't the only one doing research on the subject. Dr. Sam Parnia, an associate professor of medicine at New York University Langone Medical Center, launched a comprehensive study of near-death experiences in 2008. He published research involving 2,060 cardiac arrest patients, called AWARE, in 2014 in Resuscitation. That said, Parnia doesn't think the term "near-death experience" is the one people should be using, since it's "very poorly defined and it's what's led to a lot of controversy and debate," he says.
Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, questioned the claims of Eben Alexander's book "Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife," which details a near-death experience while he underwent a meningitis-induced coma. "The fact that mind and
consciousness are not fully explained by natural forces, however, is not proof of the supernatural," Shermer writes. "In any case, there is a reason they are called near-death experiences: the people who have them are not actually dead."
Parnia says the people studied are those who have objectively died and come back. Biologically, that's referred to as cardiac arrest, where doctors try to intervene after someone's heart stops beating. And Long also has a message for the inevitable skeptics: You can't explain away the consistent lucidity of near-death experiences.
When Bartolome went into cardiac arrest, she says she suddenly found herself up on the ceiling looking down very calmly and peacefully at the scene below her. "If I'm up here and my body's down there and he's calling code blue, I think I might've just died," she remembers thinking. She noticed a presence up there – who she later referred to as a "being" – and told the being she wanted to go back into her life. She was stuck in a difficult marriage, and the being knew that. It asked her, "But if you go back, you'll still be in your marriage. What will you do?" She told the being that she would get strong enough to leave her husband.
Down below, doctors had been trying to figure out what to do to save her life, she says. They ended up performing two precordial thumps (i.e. pounding the center of her chest), the second of which brought her back to life.
After she woke up, she told the staff she was watching their every move from above, leaving them stunned with what she was able to recall.
That's where Parnia comes in: His research focuses on resuscitated people's mental and cognitive experience at that specific moment when they have gone through death. He calls it an actual death experience.
The brain shuts down within two to 20 seconds after the heart stops, Parnia says, so even when doctors try to revive patients, they don't usually get enough blood into brain to get it functioning again. And that's what made the AWARE study turn heads: 39 percent of patients who lived after cardiac arrest could describe a perception of awareness even if they couldn't recall specific memories. These people didn't have an explicit memory of these events, though more granular research in further interviews revealed 9 percent of people who reported this perception of awareness went through what's commonly referred to as a near-death experience, and 2 percent had an "out-of-body experience" – meaning they could hear and see events. In one substantiated case from the AWARE study, "consciousness and awareness appeared to occur during a three minute period when there was no heartbeat."
Parnia is in the midst of working on a follow-up study, called AWARE II, with a public announcement likely in the next six months. It will try to answer questions the first study raised.
For example, is it true that up to 40 percent of people have awareness but just don't recall it?
Parnia says his team has built in tests for visual and auditory awareness for specific moments
during cardiac arrest and CPR where they can test for implicit learning if people can't explicitly
recall memories.
"For instance, in some cases people who appear unconscious are given names of cities and objects," he says. "When they have recovered they have been asked to recall any memories. Even though they have no recall, when asked to 'randomly' think of cities, those who had been exposed to the stimuli are statistically more likely to choose the same cities compared to control subjects. Thus indicating they had heard it."
New Clues Found in Understanding Near-Death Experiences
Robert Martone, Scientific American, 9.10.19
Imagine a dream in which you sense an intense feeling of presence, the truest, most real experience in your life, as you float away from your body and look at your own face. You have a twinge of fear as memories of your life flash by, but then you pass a transcendent threshold and are overcome by a feeling of bliss. Although contemplating death elicits fear for many people, these positive features are reported in some of the near-death experiences (NDEs) undergone by those who reached the brink of death only to recover.
Accounts of NDEs are remarkably consistent in character and content. They include intensely vivid memories involving bodily sensations that give a strong impression of being real, more real even than memories of true events. The content of those experiences famously includes memories of one’s life “flashing before the eyes,” and also the sensation of leaving the body, often seeing one’s own face and body, blissfully traveling through a tunnel toward a light and feeling “at one” with something universal.
Not surprisingly, many have seized on NDEs as evidence of life after death, heaven and the existence of God. The descriptions of leaving the body and blissful unity with the universal seem almost scripted from religious beliefs about souls leaving the body at death and ascending toward heavenly bliss. But these experiences are shared across a broad range of cultures and religions so it’s not likely that they are all reflections of specific religious expectations. Instead, that commonality suggests that NDEs might arise from something more fundamental than religious or cultural expectations. Perhaps NDEs reflect changes in how the brain functions as we approach death.
Many cultures employ drugs as part of religious practice to induce feelings of transcendence that have similarities to near-death experiences. If NDEs are based in brain biology, perhaps the action of those drugs that causes NDE-like experiences can teach us something about the NDE state. Of course, studying NDEs has significant technical hurdles. There is no way of examining the experience in animals, and rescuing a patient at death’s door is far more important than interviewing them about their NDE. Moreover, many of the drugs used to induce religious states are illicit, which would complicate any efforts to study their effects.
Although it’s impossible to directly examine what happens to the brain during NDEs, the stories collected from them provide a rich resource for linguistic analysis. In a fascinating new study, NDE stories were compared linguistically with anecdotes of drug experience in order to identify a drug that causes an experience most like a near-death experience. What is remarkable is how precise a tool this turned out to be. Even though the stories were open-ended subjective accounts often given many years after the fact, the linguistic analysis focused down not only to a specific class of drugs, but also to a specific drug as causing experiences very similar to NDEs.
This new study compared the stories of 625 individuals who reported NDEs with the stories of more than 15,000 individuals who had taken one of 165 different psychoactive drugs. When those stories were linguistically analyzed, similarities were found between recollections of near-death and drug experiences for those who had taken a specific class of drug. One drug in particular, ketamine, led to experiences very similar to NDE. This may mean that the near-death experience may reflect changes in the same chemical system in the brain that is targeted by drugs like ketamine.
The researchers drew on a large collection of NDE stories they had collected over many years. To compare NDEs with drug experiences, the researchers took advantage of a large collection of drug experience anecdotes found in the Erowid Experience Vaults, an open-source collection of accounts describing firsthand experiences with drugs and various substances.
In this study, the recollections of those who experienced NDEs and those who took drugs were compared linguistically. Their stories were broken down into individual words, and the words were sorted according to their meaning and counted. In this way, researchers were able to compare the number of times words having the same meaning were used in each story. They used this numerical analysis of story content to compare the content of drug-related and near-death experiences.
Each of the drugs included in these comparisons could be categorized by their ability to interact with a specific neurochemical system in the brain, and each drug fell into a specific category (antipsychotic, stimulant, psychedelic, depressant or sedative, deliriant, or hallucinogen). Few similarities were found when the accounts of one stimulant drug were compared with another within the same stimulant drug class, and few if any similarities were found between accounts of stimulant drug experience and NDEs. The same was true for depressants. The stories associated with hallucinogens, however, were very similar to one another, as were stories linked to antipsychotics and deliriants. When recollections of drug effects were compared with NDEs, stories about hallucinogens and psychedelics had the greatest similarities to NDEs, and the drug that scored the highest similarity to NDEs was the hallucinogen ketamine. The word most strongly represented in descriptions of both NDEs and ketamine experiences was “reality,” highlighting the sense of presence that accompanies NDEs. High among the list of words common to both experiences were those related to perception (saw, color, voice, vision), the body (face, arm, foot), emotion (fear) and transcendence (universe, understand, consciousness).
The researchers then sorted words into five large principal groups according to their common meaning. Those principal components dealt with perception and consciousness, drug dependency, negative sensations, drug preparation, and also a group that included disease state, religion and ceremony. NDEs reflected three of these components related to perception and consciousness, religion and ceremony, disease state, and drug preparation. The component related to perception and consciousness was labeled “Look/Self” and included terms such as color, vision, pattern, reality and face. The component “Disease/Religion” contained elements such as anxiety, ceremony, consciousness and self, whereas the component related to preparation “Make/Stuff” contained elements such as prepare, boil, smell and ceremony. Again, ketamine had the greatest overlap with NDEs in this type of analysis.
Other drugs that cause similar experiences to NDEs include LSD and N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT). The famous hallucinogen LSD was as similar as ketamine to NDEs when the near-death event was caused by cardiac arrest. DMT is a hallucinogen found in South American plants and used in shamanistic rituals. It caused experiences like NDEs and is also made in the brain, leading to speculation that endogenous DMT may explain NDEs. It is not known, however, whether levels of DMT change in a meaningful way in the human brain near death, so its role in the phenomenon remain controversial.
This study has significant weaknesses because it is based on purely subjective reports—some taken decades after the event. Similarly, there is no way to substantiate the accounts in the Erowid collection as there is no way to prove that any individual took the drug they claimed or believed they were taking. This makes it all the more remarkable that a linguistic analysis of stories derived in this manner could discriminate among different drug classes in their similarities to NDEs.
Linking near-death experiences and the experience of taking ketamine is provocative yet it is far from conclusive that both are because of the same chemical events in the brain. The types of studies needed to demonstrate this hypothesis, such as measuring neurochemical changes in the critically ill, would be both technically and ethically challenging. The authors propose, however, a practical application of this relation. Because near-death experiences (NDEs) can be transformational and have profound and lasting effects on those who experience them, including a sense of fearlessness about death, the authors propose that ketamine could be used therapeutically to induce an NDE-like state in terminally ill patients as a “preview” of what they might experience, so as to relieve their anxieties about death. Those benefits need to be weighed against the risks of potential ketamine side effects, which include feelings of panic or extreme anxiety, effects that could defeat the purpose of the intervention.
More important, this study helps describe the psychological manifestations of dying. That knowledge may ultimately contribute more to alleviating fear of this inevitable transition than a dose of any drug.
Robert Martone is a research scientist with expertise in neurodegeneration. He spends his free time kayaking and translating Renaissance Italian literature.
Thursday, October 8
The topic for next week is out of this world - should we go to Mars? It's not if we can but should we? How about the Moon? Should we go there or focus our attention with NASA on our climate and low orbit exercisions?
The decade of space travel starting with John F. Kennedy was also a very tumultuous decade for the United States. The author of this article, Marina Koren, brings up the parallels and the budget tensions that naturally arise when we look to the skies. Similar questions arise - should the U.S. go it alone or should we have a multinational group go; like with the International Space Station.
I look forward to talking with you about this, and, whatever else comes up between now and then.
God's peace to you,
- Dave
Can We Still Go to Mars?
Marina Koren, 10.1.20, The Atlantic
Elsewhere in the solar system, a NASA rover is on its way to Mars. It carries, among other things, several pieces of spacesuit material. Designers want to see how the samples fare in the planet’s dusty, radiation-laden environment—the sturdy fabrics of the suit’s exterior, the cut-resistant fibers of its gloves, the shatterproof plastic of the bubble helmet that might someday reflect the soft light of a Martian sunset. When future astronauts arrive on the surface, the spacesuit designers back on Earth must be sure that they’re appropriately dressed for the occasion. The rover lands in February. Those future Mars explorers—who knows?
Men managed to make it to the moon 50 years ago, and for years now, setting foot on the red planet has felt like the clearest next step. Someday, an astronaut might be hunched over a desk, a wastebasket full of crumpled paper nearby, trying to come up with the right words—something as good as Neil Armstrong’s famous line—before her spaceship lands on Mars. That landing, NASA has said, would come in 2033. An Armstrong moment on Mars has always been far from guaranteed, but now, in this particular year of American history, that future feels further away than ever. The coronavirus pandemic has diminished all sorts of human endeavors, including space exploration, one of our dreamiest ambitions. “No virus is stronger than the human desire to explore,” the NASA administrator declared in April, when coronavirus cases were rising fast and the country’s response was already stumbling. Even in times like these, the leader of the only organization to send humans to another world has to believe that’s still possible, and on some level, he’s right; COVID-19 will not, in the end, stop humankind from someday reaching Mars. On the timelines required for space travel, a year, or more, of slowed activity counts as a small setback. But the exigencies of the pandemic still could influence America’s ambitions in the cosmos: The national impulse to reach for other worlds might be eroding.
Like many workplaces this spring, NASA sent its most of its employees home and hunkered down. While the agency put some projects on hold, it pressed ahead with others. A pair of NASA astronauts flew to the International Space Station and back in a SpaceX capsule. The Mars rover Perseverance launched on its months-long journey into deep space. These efforts, years in the making, were nearing their finish lines as the coronavirus spread across the country, and NASA deemed them “mission essential.”
Both launches, especially the historic flight of Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken—whom NASA affectionately advertised as “space dads”—for a moment drew Americans’ attention from a seemingly ceaseless current of tragedies, including stories of infected Americans dying in ambulances and footage of Black Americans dying at the hands of white police officers. Some people were delighted, grateful for a spot of good news. Others were surprised, even aghast, at the timing. You’re doing this now? Really?
The critique echoed the feelings of many Americans during NASA’s most famous era: the race to the moon. In the late 1960s, the Apollo program unfolded against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, civil-rights demonstrations, and political assassinations. Polling from that time shows that the majority of Americans didn’t think the Apollo program was worth the cost. The exception was a survey conducted on the day of the moon landing, when the mood around the world was euphoric. Even in that moment, though, the problems of our planet firmly grounded the minds of some Americans.
Still, space historians told me, in those halcyon days of human spaceflight, even with all its turmoil, the country functioned on a basic level. In the late 1960s, a different virus known as the “Hong Kong flu” killed roughly 100,000 Americans, but did not destabilize the country the way COVID-19 has. Throughout the decade, the national economy was thriving, and an American passport meant something. Though the Vietnam War roiled American politics, the active front was in a distant country. The war’s toll was heavy—an estimated 47,434 Americans died in battle between 1964 and 1975—but in six months, COVID-19 deaths in the United States outnumbered American casualties in the past five wars combined.
Even before the pandemic paralyzed the country, the prospect of Americans making it to Mars in the 2030s was far-fetched. In February 2019, a year before the first American died from COVID19, an independent research group published a report about NASA’s Mars dreams. At Congress’s request, NASA had asked the group to evaluate whether the agency could launch astronauts to the red planet in 2033, not to land, but to loop around and come back, as the early Apollo missions did. The conclusion was bleak; given NASA’s current plans, an orbital mission would be “infeasible under all budget scenarios and technology development and testing schedules.” The researchers found that astronauts might be able to launch in 2037, without any schedule delays or budget shortfalls, but believed 2039 would be more realistic, which would push a landing to the 2040s.
NASA is not humankind’s only ticket to other worlds. Private companies are developing their own dreams, and their own rockets. As the pandemic set in, NASA paused some work on a rocket designed to send astronauts to the moon, but Elon Musk’s SpaceX continued testing prototypes for its Mars spaceship. SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin have received sizable contracts from NASA to do their work, and Musk often says that SpaceX wouldn’t be what it is today without NASA’s support, financial and otherwise. But his private company could end up leapfrogging the storied space agency on infrastructure that could send people to Mars. (Musk said recently he believes SpaceX could deliver people to the red planet in the 2020s, but the billionaire entrepreneur is, famously and by his own admission, overly optimistic about schedules, so take that with a grain of Mars dust.) SpaceX might not go it alone in the end, deciding to join forces with NASA, but the world’s top space agency would not be at the controls.
In the business of spaceflight, delays are virtually unavoidable, even under the best of circumstances. A pandemic, then, might slow down NASA’s long-term plans—but something would have, no matter what. Donald Rapp, who worked on Mars programs as a chief technologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory before he retired, doesn’t think the effects of the pandemic today will be disruptive enough to scuttle any future mission to Mars. The 2030s, in his view, is an overly optimistic goal, and he doesn’t expect astronauts to reach the red planet until potentially the 2060s.
But the work for a Mars journey in the 2030s must be done in this decade, and for NASA, such an ambitious mission might be a tougher sell now, both to the American public and to lawmakers. Months before the virus struck, the Trump administration was already struggling to persuade Congress to fund its top priority—sending Americans back to the moon in the next four years, with an eye toward Mars after that. To reach that goal, NASA must either make cuts to existing programs or receive billions of dollars in additional funding. “If you try to sell ‘humans to Mars’ this year, next year, or even the next year, I think you’ve got a tough road to travel,” Rapp told me.
But how might the public react to enthusiastic rhetoric about other worlds in 2021, when, for many of us, this world still clearly demands extra attention? If the national unity of the Apollo era is mostly a myth, at some point NASA might have to face down the reality that Americans aren’t so space-happy. The agency runs extensive and often brilliant public-relations campaigns for its missions: recruiting schoolchildren to name space rovers, imbuing spacecraft with lovable personalities, and pitching its astronauts—both space dads and others—as talented yet relatable figures. Even so, Logsdon, the space historian, already sees the national impulse that fueled Apollo, that believed in the idea of America reaching deeper into the cosmos, weakening. “That impulse is certainly less widespread than it was 50 years ago,” he said.
As government agencies go, NASA is looked upon fondly. Although some Americans blanch at spending more than $20 billion on NASA each year, a 2019 poll found that a plurality of participants, when told that the agency’s annual funding accounts for half a percent of the national budget, say that they'd prefer the government spend a greater portion of its resources on NASA. But just 18 percent think going to Mars should be a top priority, the survey found, and even fewer think NASA should focus on sending astronauts back to the moon. Instead, survey participants thought NASA should focus more on climate-change research and the study of asteroids that could strike Earth, two areas that receive far less funding than human spaceflight. “If it was up to the public to set space priorities, the NASA budget would be flipped,” Teasel Muir-Harmony, a historian and a curator of Apollo artifacts at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, told me.
The agency will have a chance to see, in February, how eager Americans are to think about a place that’s not this one. Perseverance will land on Mars and start to dig for evidence of fossilized alien life. Perhaps people will latch on to this distant robot as a distraction from the strain of the pandemic; perhaps the concerns of Mars will seem extra hard to care about. What might the country look like then? How many more Americans will have died?
The swatches of spacesuit material that Perseverance carries are, in a way, an emblem of American optimism. They posit that one day these fabrics might be wrapped around the bodies of astronauts, sheltering them from an environment they weren’t made to survive. These Armstrongs and Aldrins might walk up to Perseverance, its batteries long dead, and see, next to one of its wheels, beneath a blanket of rust-colored dust, a plaque of a snake coiled around a rod. A symbol of medicine, added as a tribute to the brave people who tended to others during the 2020 pandemic, years before—in this future, a di
The decade of space travel starting with John F. Kennedy was also a very tumultuous decade for the United States. The author of this article, Marina Koren, brings up the parallels and the budget tensions that naturally arise when we look to the skies. Similar questions arise - should the U.S. go it alone or should we have a multinational group go; like with the International Space Station.
I look forward to talking with you about this, and, whatever else comes up between now and then.
God's peace to you,
- Dave
Can We Still Go to Mars?
Marina Koren, 10.1.20, The Atlantic
Elsewhere in the solar system, a NASA rover is on its way to Mars. It carries, among other things, several pieces of spacesuit material. Designers want to see how the samples fare in the planet’s dusty, radiation-laden environment—the sturdy fabrics of the suit’s exterior, the cut-resistant fibers of its gloves, the shatterproof plastic of the bubble helmet that might someday reflect the soft light of a Martian sunset. When future astronauts arrive on the surface, the spacesuit designers back on Earth must be sure that they’re appropriately dressed for the occasion. The rover lands in February. Those future Mars explorers—who knows?
Men managed to make it to the moon 50 years ago, and for years now, setting foot on the red planet has felt like the clearest next step. Someday, an astronaut might be hunched over a desk, a wastebasket full of crumpled paper nearby, trying to come up with the right words—something as good as Neil Armstrong’s famous line—before her spaceship lands on Mars. That landing, NASA has said, would come in 2033. An Armstrong moment on Mars has always been far from guaranteed, but now, in this particular year of American history, that future feels further away than ever. The coronavirus pandemic has diminished all sorts of human endeavors, including space exploration, one of our dreamiest ambitions. “No virus is stronger than the human desire to explore,” the NASA administrator declared in April, when coronavirus cases were rising fast and the country’s response was already stumbling. Even in times like these, the leader of the only organization to send humans to another world has to believe that’s still possible, and on some level, he’s right; COVID-19 will not, in the end, stop humankind from someday reaching Mars. On the timelines required for space travel, a year, or more, of slowed activity counts as a small setback. But the exigencies of the pandemic still could influence America’s ambitions in the cosmos: The national impulse to reach for other worlds might be eroding.
Like many workplaces this spring, NASA sent its most of its employees home and hunkered down. While the agency put some projects on hold, it pressed ahead with others. A pair of NASA astronauts flew to the International Space Station and back in a SpaceX capsule. The Mars rover Perseverance launched on its months-long journey into deep space. These efforts, years in the making, were nearing their finish lines as the coronavirus spread across the country, and NASA deemed them “mission essential.”
Both launches, especially the historic flight of Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken—whom NASA affectionately advertised as “space dads”—for a moment drew Americans’ attention from a seemingly ceaseless current of tragedies, including stories of infected Americans dying in ambulances and footage of Black Americans dying at the hands of white police officers. Some people were delighted, grateful for a spot of good news. Others were surprised, even aghast, at the timing. You’re doing this now? Really?
The critique echoed the feelings of many Americans during NASA’s most famous era: the race to the moon. In the late 1960s, the Apollo program unfolded against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, civil-rights demonstrations, and political assassinations. Polling from that time shows that the majority of Americans didn’t think the Apollo program was worth the cost. The exception was a survey conducted on the day of the moon landing, when the mood around the world was euphoric. Even in that moment, though, the problems of our planet firmly grounded the minds of some Americans.
Still, space historians told me, in those halcyon days of human spaceflight, even with all its turmoil, the country functioned on a basic level. In the late 1960s, a different virus known as the “Hong Kong flu” killed roughly 100,000 Americans, but did not destabilize the country the way COVID-19 has. Throughout the decade, the national economy was thriving, and an American passport meant something. Though the Vietnam War roiled American politics, the active front was in a distant country. The war’s toll was heavy—an estimated 47,434 Americans died in battle between 1964 and 1975—but in six months, COVID-19 deaths in the United States outnumbered American casualties in the past five wars combined.
Even before the pandemic paralyzed the country, the prospect of Americans making it to Mars in the 2030s was far-fetched. In February 2019, a year before the first American died from COVID19, an independent research group published a report about NASA’s Mars dreams. At Congress’s request, NASA had asked the group to evaluate whether the agency could launch astronauts to the red planet in 2033, not to land, but to loop around and come back, as the early Apollo missions did. The conclusion was bleak; given NASA’s current plans, an orbital mission would be “infeasible under all budget scenarios and technology development and testing schedules.” The researchers found that astronauts might be able to launch in 2037, without any schedule delays or budget shortfalls, but believed 2039 would be more realistic, which would push a landing to the 2040s.
NASA is not humankind’s only ticket to other worlds. Private companies are developing their own dreams, and their own rockets. As the pandemic set in, NASA paused some work on a rocket designed to send astronauts to the moon, but Elon Musk’s SpaceX continued testing prototypes for its Mars spaceship. SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin have received sizable contracts from NASA to do their work, and Musk often says that SpaceX wouldn’t be what it is today without NASA’s support, financial and otherwise. But his private company could end up leapfrogging the storied space agency on infrastructure that could send people to Mars. (Musk said recently he believes SpaceX could deliver people to the red planet in the 2020s, but the billionaire entrepreneur is, famously and by his own admission, overly optimistic about schedules, so take that with a grain of Mars dust.) SpaceX might not go it alone in the end, deciding to join forces with NASA, but the world’s top space agency would not be at the controls.
In the business of spaceflight, delays are virtually unavoidable, even under the best of circumstances. A pandemic, then, might slow down NASA’s long-term plans—but something would have, no matter what. Donald Rapp, who worked on Mars programs as a chief technologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory before he retired, doesn’t think the effects of the pandemic today will be disruptive enough to scuttle any future mission to Mars. The 2030s, in his view, is an overly optimistic goal, and he doesn’t expect astronauts to reach the red planet until potentially the 2060s.
But the work for a Mars journey in the 2030s must be done in this decade, and for NASA, such an ambitious mission might be a tougher sell now, both to the American public and to lawmakers. Months before the virus struck, the Trump administration was already struggling to persuade Congress to fund its top priority—sending Americans back to the moon in the next four years, with an eye toward Mars after that. To reach that goal, NASA must either make cuts to existing programs or receive billions of dollars in additional funding. “If you try to sell ‘humans to Mars’ this year, next year, or even the next year, I think you’ve got a tough road to travel,” Rapp told me.
But how might the public react to enthusiastic rhetoric about other worlds in 2021, when, for many of us, this world still clearly demands extra attention? If the national unity of the Apollo era is mostly a myth, at some point NASA might have to face down the reality that Americans aren’t so space-happy. The agency runs extensive and often brilliant public-relations campaigns for its missions: recruiting schoolchildren to name space rovers, imbuing spacecraft with lovable personalities, and pitching its astronauts—both space dads and others—as talented yet relatable figures. Even so, Logsdon, the space historian, already sees the national impulse that fueled Apollo, that believed in the idea of America reaching deeper into the cosmos, weakening. “That impulse is certainly less widespread than it was 50 years ago,” he said.
As government agencies go, NASA is looked upon fondly. Although some Americans blanch at spending more than $20 billion on NASA each year, a 2019 poll found that a plurality of participants, when told that the agency’s annual funding accounts for half a percent of the national budget, say that they'd prefer the government spend a greater portion of its resources on NASA. But just 18 percent think going to Mars should be a top priority, the survey found, and even fewer think NASA should focus on sending astronauts back to the moon. Instead, survey participants thought NASA should focus more on climate-change research and the study of asteroids that could strike Earth, two areas that receive far less funding than human spaceflight. “If it was up to the public to set space priorities, the NASA budget would be flipped,” Teasel Muir-Harmony, a historian and a curator of Apollo artifacts at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, told me.
The agency will have a chance to see, in February, how eager Americans are to think about a place that’s not this one. Perseverance will land on Mars and start to dig for evidence of fossilized alien life. Perhaps people will latch on to this distant robot as a distraction from the strain of the pandemic; perhaps the concerns of Mars will seem extra hard to care about. What might the country look like then? How many more Americans will have died?
The swatches of spacesuit material that Perseverance carries are, in a way, an emblem of American optimism. They posit that one day these fabrics might be wrapped around the bodies of astronauts, sheltering them from an environment they weren’t made to survive. These Armstrongs and Aldrins might walk up to Perseverance, its batteries long dead, and see, next to one of its wheels, beneath a blanket of rust-colored dust, a plaque of a snake coiled around a rod. A symbol of medicine, added as a tribute to the brave people who tended to others during the 2020 pandemic, years before—in this future, a di
Thursday, October 1
In today's news there are protests in the street - in fact, I received a text from Bradenton Christian School that they are rerouting school busses to avoid a protest in downtown Bradenton that may affect the bridges - the pandemic has taken over 200,000 lives, there is talk of a potential unpeaceful transfer of power, Supreme Court nominees, voter fraud, corporate espionage; so much to talk about.
But, I'd like us to go into a different direction that may change the way we see higher education. Maybe it's a way of diverting our minds, or it'll give us a break from what we are reading, but I think it will prompt good discussions. One question is how does the potential shift in higher education change the way nonprofits are run?
May the peace of God rest on our hearts and in our communities,
- Dave
Here is the website address for the discussion group:
https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
Free Market Can Deliver Free College
By Daniel Pianko
Wall Street Journal, Sept. 21, 2020
The Covid-19 pandemic forced colleges to shift to online learning, often with disastrous results. Students are no fools and many of them are suing for a discount. They have realized what higher education is loath to admit: Instruction is not what they, their parents and the American taxpayer are paying full price for.
The most common discount on offer appears to be a 10% tuition reduction, but some students are pushing for far more. They claim that nonacademic activities, from school plays and concerts to networking and parties, represent a lot more than 10% of the price tag of college. Such discounts imply that students are still getting 90% of the value of higher education (about $45,000 worth, on average) from their Zoom lectures, but much of the educational content has become widely available for free. Students and parents can’t be faulted for suspecting that an online education should cost next to nothing.
At some institutions, it already does. Primarily online Southern New Hampshire University recently announced a free first year for incoming students in light of the pandemic. California-based National University—which offers an array of online classes—cut tuition by up to 25% for
full-time students and says that new scholarships will make enrollment nearly free for Pell Grant-eligible students.
Can the pandemic finally bring the traditional college pricing model to its knees? Or will these examples remain outliers?
Insight into the future of higher education may come from an unlikely source: the brokerage industry. Like higher ed, stock trading is a highly regulated field with massive barriers to change. Recall the stereotypical stockbrokers of the 1980s: Tom Wolfe’s “Masters of the Universe” or
Merrill Lynch’s “Thundering Herd.” For years, the traditional brokerage industry was considered too difficult to replicate with technology. How could the internet replace a white-shoe adviser who not only took trade orders but also answered the phone, offered personal advice and took part in estate planning and other higher-order wealth-management tasks?
The mighty were felled quicker than expected. Over 30 years, technology reduced the cost of trading a stock from hundreds of dollars to virtually zero.
In 1988, a ragtag group working far from Wall Street began disrupting the brokerage business. It was led by Joe Ricketts, the larger-than-life founder of Ameritrade, who was the first to enable stock trading by touch-tone phone. Ameritrade introduced online stock trading only seven years later.
My first client as a junior investment banker out of college was Ameritrade, and much of my job involved carrying bags for Mr. Ricketts on roadshows. In 1998, when most other firms charged $199 a trade, he revolutionized the brokerage industry by offering to trade unlimited shares for $8 a trade. After days on the road together, I finally worked up the courage to ask him: “How much lower than $8 a trade can stock trading go?”
With a twinkle in his eye, Mr. Ricketts responded, “One day, Ameritrade will pay you to trade.” I thought he had lost his business sense, if not his mind. Who gives away a product that everyone else is charging $200 for?
Yet Mr. Ricketts saw the future: Today, almost no large brokerage firm is charging for stock trades. Firms make money from new revenue sources, like selling order flow to market makers. It’s not unlike the way Gmail is free for users, whose data then helps Google sell targeted
advertising. In the first quarter of 2020, fintech unicorn Robinhood raked in $100 million in order-flow sales alone. Ameritrade’s successor was sold last November for around $26 billion.
Higher ed is where the brokerage business was in the late 1990s: poised for transformation. Even before the pandemic, momentum was building in the education market away from high-cost operators and toward low-cost ones. Southern New Hampshire University and Western
Governors University, nonprofits that charge less than $10,000 a year in tuition, have already become some of the largest and fastest-growing institutions in the country. They each serve more than 100,000 students by using online delivery and competency-based instruction to drive down costs dramatically without sacrificing quality.
These mega-universities will leverage technology to drive tuition revenue to zero over time. Some are already on the way, and the pandemic may accelerate the shift for many others. Rather than collecting tens of thousands of dollars from students up front, colleges might make money by forming partnerships with employers, by charging students a percentage of their post-graduation income, or via government-issued social-impact bonds tied to successful outcomes like graduation rates.
Mr. Ricketts’s lesson should be clear to every college president in America: Technological change affects industries in deep, novel ways that established players ignore at their own peril. New education models are already driving tuition down, but there’s still room for massive, structural price-driven disruption in this industry. In the wake of the pandemic, the winner will be the institution that takes the cost of online learning down to free.
Just as no one 30 years ago could have foreseen what would befall brokerage fees, few now can imagine what will befall colleges in a world without tuition revenue. But that world may be coming. If it is, the debate over free college will become an anachronism. Will you greet it with
disbelief or a twinkle in your eye?
But, I'd like us to go into a different direction that may change the way we see higher education. Maybe it's a way of diverting our minds, or it'll give us a break from what we are reading, but I think it will prompt good discussions. One question is how does the potential shift in higher education change the way nonprofits are run?
May the peace of God rest on our hearts and in our communities,
- Dave
Here is the website address for the discussion group:
https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
Free Market Can Deliver Free College
By Daniel Pianko
Wall Street Journal, Sept. 21, 2020
The Covid-19 pandemic forced colleges to shift to online learning, often with disastrous results. Students are no fools and many of them are suing for a discount. They have realized what higher education is loath to admit: Instruction is not what they, their parents and the American taxpayer are paying full price for.
The most common discount on offer appears to be a 10% tuition reduction, but some students are pushing for far more. They claim that nonacademic activities, from school plays and concerts to networking and parties, represent a lot more than 10% of the price tag of college. Such discounts imply that students are still getting 90% of the value of higher education (about $45,000 worth, on average) from their Zoom lectures, but much of the educational content has become widely available for free. Students and parents can’t be faulted for suspecting that an online education should cost next to nothing.
At some institutions, it already does. Primarily online Southern New Hampshire University recently announced a free first year for incoming students in light of the pandemic. California-based National University—which offers an array of online classes—cut tuition by up to 25% for
full-time students and says that new scholarships will make enrollment nearly free for Pell Grant-eligible students.
Can the pandemic finally bring the traditional college pricing model to its knees? Or will these examples remain outliers?
Insight into the future of higher education may come from an unlikely source: the brokerage industry. Like higher ed, stock trading is a highly regulated field with massive barriers to change. Recall the stereotypical stockbrokers of the 1980s: Tom Wolfe’s “Masters of the Universe” or
Merrill Lynch’s “Thundering Herd.” For years, the traditional brokerage industry was considered too difficult to replicate with technology. How could the internet replace a white-shoe adviser who not only took trade orders but also answered the phone, offered personal advice and took part in estate planning and other higher-order wealth-management tasks?
The mighty were felled quicker than expected. Over 30 years, technology reduced the cost of trading a stock from hundreds of dollars to virtually zero.
In 1988, a ragtag group working far from Wall Street began disrupting the brokerage business. It was led by Joe Ricketts, the larger-than-life founder of Ameritrade, who was the first to enable stock trading by touch-tone phone. Ameritrade introduced online stock trading only seven years later.
My first client as a junior investment banker out of college was Ameritrade, and much of my job involved carrying bags for Mr. Ricketts on roadshows. In 1998, when most other firms charged $199 a trade, he revolutionized the brokerage industry by offering to trade unlimited shares for $8 a trade. After days on the road together, I finally worked up the courage to ask him: “How much lower than $8 a trade can stock trading go?”
With a twinkle in his eye, Mr. Ricketts responded, “One day, Ameritrade will pay you to trade.” I thought he had lost his business sense, if not his mind. Who gives away a product that everyone else is charging $200 for?
Yet Mr. Ricketts saw the future: Today, almost no large brokerage firm is charging for stock trades. Firms make money from new revenue sources, like selling order flow to market makers. It’s not unlike the way Gmail is free for users, whose data then helps Google sell targeted
advertising. In the first quarter of 2020, fintech unicorn Robinhood raked in $100 million in order-flow sales alone. Ameritrade’s successor was sold last November for around $26 billion.
Higher ed is where the brokerage business was in the late 1990s: poised for transformation. Even before the pandemic, momentum was building in the education market away from high-cost operators and toward low-cost ones. Southern New Hampshire University and Western
Governors University, nonprofits that charge less than $10,000 a year in tuition, have already become some of the largest and fastest-growing institutions in the country. They each serve more than 100,000 students by using online delivery and competency-based instruction to drive down costs dramatically without sacrificing quality.
These mega-universities will leverage technology to drive tuition revenue to zero over time. Some are already on the way, and the pandemic may accelerate the shift for many others. Rather than collecting tens of thousands of dollars from students up front, colleges might make money by forming partnerships with employers, by charging students a percentage of their post-graduation income, or via government-issued social-impact bonds tied to successful outcomes like graduation rates.
Mr. Ricketts’s lesson should be clear to every college president in America: Technological change affects industries in deep, novel ways that established players ignore at their own peril. New education models are already driving tuition down, but there’s still room for massive, structural price-driven disruption in this industry. In the wake of the pandemic, the winner will be the institution that takes the cost of online learning down to free.
Just as no one 30 years ago could have foreseen what would befall brokerage fees, few now can imagine what will befall colleges in a world without tuition revenue. But that world may be coming. If it is, the debate over free college will become an anachronism. Will you greet it with
disbelief or a twinkle in your eye?
Thursday, September 24
I am on Barna Research Group's Pastor's Panel. They sent me an article titled, White Christians Have Become Even Less Motivated to Address Racial Injustice. This is not an opinion piece, they are basing it on research. I think it will provide for an interesting discussion.
The article is currently web based so it did not print well. For the easier to read copy, click on this link. https://www.barna.com/research/american-christians-race-problem/
May the peace of the Lord be with you,
- Dave
Here is the website address for the discussion group:
https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
White Christians Have Become Even Less Motivated to Address Racial Injustice -
September 15, 2020
This article is an excerpt from Race Today, a Barna briefing available exclusively on Barna Access.
This year, the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor and the shooting of Jacob Blake have sparked a nationwide conversation about racial justice. Some of the more prominent responses include a series of marches with historic attendance, a players’ strike in the NBA and WNBA and new policies concerning issues such as Confederate symbols on flags and reparations for Black residents. Social media has swirled with resources and hashtags, books on anti-racism have risen to top of the best-seller lists, and leaders in government, business and religious institutions have invited deep and at times public examination of their actions and influence. One might assume that the events of 2020 have increased awareness of racial injustice in the United States and motivation to address it. But the story isn’t so straightforward, new Barna research (conducted in partnership with Dynata) suggests. Yes, there are signs the past year has clarified how Americans think about racial injustice—but that doesn’t mean they see the issue, or their role within it, with greater urgency. In the Church especially, there is a sense that people are doubling down on divides.
Christians Increasingly Acknowledge Past Racial Oppression—But Not Present Problems
As Barna previously reported, data from the summer of 2019 show 46 percent of practicing Christians say the country “definitely” has a race problem, just behind the 51 percent of all U.S. adults who feel this way. Have recent events, including several months of widely covered protests and demonstrations, changed perceptions at all? As of the July 2020 survey, practicing Christians—self-identified Christians who say their faith is very important in their lives and have attended a worship service within the past month—are no more likely to acknowledge racial injustice (43% “definitely”) than they were the previous summer. There is actually a significant increase in the percentage of practicing Christians who say race is “not at all” a problem in the U.S. (19%, up from 11% in 2019). Among self-identified Christians alone, a similar significant increase occurs (10% in 2019, 16% in 2020). Like in 2019, Black adults remain much more likely than their white peers to say the country has a race problem, and this sentiment is even stronger among self-identified Christians (81% vs. 76% of all Black U.S. adults). To best look at the intersection of faith and race / ethnicity, this release will report most on self-identified Christians among a nationally representative sample. Barna is unable to report on Asian Christians due to low sample size. There is, however, a boost in Christians’ willingness to strongly agree that, historically, the U.S. has oppressed minorities—from 19 percent in the 2019 survey to 26 percent in the summer of 2020 (for both self-identified and practicing Christians, respectively). As this increased acknowledgment of past injustice does not correspond with increased acknowledgment of present injustice, it might indicate that either more people are beginning to gain education and understanding of U.S. racial history, or that more people are beginning to regard racial oppression as an issue we’ve moved beyond.
Motivation to Address Racial Injustice Has Declined in the Past Year
When Barna asks “How motivated are you to address racial injustice in our society?”, we see numbers moving out from the middle—toward being less motivated. In 2019, one in five U.S. adults was “unmotivated” (11%) or “not at all motivated” (9%); just a year later, in the summer of 2020, that percentage has increased to 28 percent (12% unmotivated, 16% not at all motivated). Meanwhile, the number of those who are “somewhat motivated” has shrunk and the number of those who are motivated has held fairly steady over the past year, indicating some of those who might have previously been on the fence about addressing racial injustice have become more firmly opposed to engaging. The unmotivated segment has seen growth among both practicing and self-identified Christians. Among self-identified Christians, the unmotivated group has shifted from 19 percent in 2019 (10% unmotivated, 9% not at all motivated) to 30 percent (12% unmotivated, 18% not at all motivated) in 2020. For practicing Christians, those who were unmotivated in 2019 (9% unmotivated, 8% not at all motivated) have also increased to 30 percent (12% unmotivated, 18% not at all motivated) in 2020. In one year, that’s more than a 11 percentage point increase overall in Christians who are uninspired to address racial injustice, including a doubling of those who say they are “not at all motivated” in both the practicing and self-identified groups. Some Christians are willing to admit uncertainty on the topic; one in five is “unsure” about whether they are motivated to address racial injustice (10% in 2019, 9% in 2020). Some minority groups are, naturally, highly motivated to address the racial injustices that may affect them. Among self-identified Christians, Black adults in particular (46% “very motivated”), followed by Hispanic adults (23% “very motivated”), are eager to be involved—something few white self-identified Christians express (10% “very motivated”).
The research for this study surveyed 1,525 U.S. adults online between June 18 and July 6 2020 via a national consumer panel. The survey over-sampled African American, Asians, and Hispanics. Statistical weighting has been applied in order to maximize representation by age, gender, ethnicity, education, and region. The margin of error is plus or minus 1.8 at a 95% confidence interval. Due to low sample size when segmenting practicing Christians by race / ethnicity in the 2020 study, Barna instead chose to report on self-identified Christians—a nationally representative sample—throughout the briefing. Barna is also unable to report on Asian self-identified Christians or U.S. Elders due to low sample size. 2019 Survey Conducted in Partnership with Racial Justice and Unity Center (Michael Emerson, Glenn Bracey, Chad Brennan) The research for this study surveyed 2,889 U.S. adults online between July 19 and August 5, 2019 via a national consumer panel. The survey over-sampled Practicing Christians, African American, Asians, and Hispanics. Statistical weighting has been applied in order to maximize representation by age, gender, ethnicity, education, and region. The margin of error is plus or minus 1.89 at a 95% confidence interval.
The article is currently web based so it did not print well. For the easier to read copy, click on this link. https://www.barna.com/research/american-christians-race-problem/
May the peace of the Lord be with you,
- Dave
Here is the website address for the discussion group:
https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
White Christians Have Become Even Less Motivated to Address Racial Injustice -
September 15, 2020
This article is an excerpt from Race Today, a Barna briefing available exclusively on Barna Access.
This year, the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor and the shooting of Jacob Blake have sparked a nationwide conversation about racial justice. Some of the more prominent responses include a series of marches with historic attendance, a players’ strike in the NBA and WNBA and new policies concerning issues such as Confederate symbols on flags and reparations for Black residents. Social media has swirled with resources and hashtags, books on anti-racism have risen to top of the best-seller lists, and leaders in government, business and religious institutions have invited deep and at times public examination of their actions and influence. One might assume that the events of 2020 have increased awareness of racial injustice in the United States and motivation to address it. But the story isn’t so straightforward, new Barna research (conducted in partnership with Dynata) suggests. Yes, there are signs the past year has clarified how Americans think about racial injustice—but that doesn’t mean they see the issue, or their role within it, with greater urgency. In the Church especially, there is a sense that people are doubling down on divides.
Christians Increasingly Acknowledge Past Racial Oppression—But Not Present Problems
As Barna previously reported, data from the summer of 2019 show 46 percent of practicing Christians say the country “definitely” has a race problem, just behind the 51 percent of all U.S. adults who feel this way. Have recent events, including several months of widely covered protests and demonstrations, changed perceptions at all? As of the July 2020 survey, practicing Christians—self-identified Christians who say their faith is very important in their lives and have attended a worship service within the past month—are no more likely to acknowledge racial injustice (43% “definitely”) than they were the previous summer. There is actually a significant increase in the percentage of practicing Christians who say race is “not at all” a problem in the U.S. (19%, up from 11% in 2019). Among self-identified Christians alone, a similar significant increase occurs (10% in 2019, 16% in 2020). Like in 2019, Black adults remain much more likely than their white peers to say the country has a race problem, and this sentiment is even stronger among self-identified Christians (81% vs. 76% of all Black U.S. adults). To best look at the intersection of faith and race / ethnicity, this release will report most on self-identified Christians among a nationally representative sample. Barna is unable to report on Asian Christians due to low sample size. There is, however, a boost in Christians’ willingness to strongly agree that, historically, the U.S. has oppressed minorities—from 19 percent in the 2019 survey to 26 percent in the summer of 2020 (for both self-identified and practicing Christians, respectively). As this increased acknowledgment of past injustice does not correspond with increased acknowledgment of present injustice, it might indicate that either more people are beginning to gain education and understanding of U.S. racial history, or that more people are beginning to regard racial oppression as an issue we’ve moved beyond.
Motivation to Address Racial Injustice Has Declined in the Past Year
When Barna asks “How motivated are you to address racial injustice in our society?”, we see numbers moving out from the middle—toward being less motivated. In 2019, one in five U.S. adults was “unmotivated” (11%) or “not at all motivated” (9%); just a year later, in the summer of 2020, that percentage has increased to 28 percent (12% unmotivated, 16% not at all motivated). Meanwhile, the number of those who are “somewhat motivated” has shrunk and the number of those who are motivated has held fairly steady over the past year, indicating some of those who might have previously been on the fence about addressing racial injustice have become more firmly opposed to engaging. The unmotivated segment has seen growth among both practicing and self-identified Christians. Among self-identified Christians, the unmotivated group has shifted from 19 percent in 2019 (10% unmotivated, 9% not at all motivated) to 30 percent (12% unmotivated, 18% not at all motivated) in 2020. For practicing Christians, those who were unmotivated in 2019 (9% unmotivated, 8% not at all motivated) have also increased to 30 percent (12% unmotivated, 18% not at all motivated) in 2020. In one year, that’s more than a 11 percentage point increase overall in Christians who are uninspired to address racial injustice, including a doubling of those who say they are “not at all motivated” in both the practicing and self-identified groups. Some Christians are willing to admit uncertainty on the topic; one in five is “unsure” about whether they are motivated to address racial injustice (10% in 2019, 9% in 2020). Some minority groups are, naturally, highly motivated to address the racial injustices that may affect them. Among self-identified Christians, Black adults in particular (46% “very motivated”), followed by Hispanic adults (23% “very motivated”), are eager to be involved—something few white self-identified Christians express (10% “very motivated”).
The research for this study surveyed 1,525 U.S. adults online between June 18 and July 6 2020 via a national consumer panel. The survey over-sampled African American, Asians, and Hispanics. Statistical weighting has been applied in order to maximize representation by age, gender, ethnicity, education, and region. The margin of error is plus or minus 1.8 at a 95% confidence interval. Due to low sample size when segmenting practicing Christians by race / ethnicity in the 2020 study, Barna instead chose to report on self-identified Christians—a nationally representative sample—throughout the briefing. Barna is also unable to report on Asian self-identified Christians or U.S. Elders due to low sample size. 2019 Survey Conducted in Partnership with Racial Justice and Unity Center (Michael Emerson, Glenn Bracey, Chad Brennan) The research for this study surveyed 2,889 U.S. adults online between July 19 and August 5, 2019 via a national consumer panel. The survey over-sampled Practicing Christians, African American, Asians, and Hispanics. Statistical weighting has been applied in order to maximize representation by age, gender, ethnicity, education, and region. The margin of error is plus or minus 1.89 at a 95% confidence interval.
Thursday, September 17
Say what you want about our time, at least we are thinking about our constitution. One of the best documents written in the past 1,000 years,
I think it would be interesting to have a discussion group about it. Attached is an article written by Danielle Allen, a political philosopher and professor at Harvard, which can be found in the upcoming October edition of the Atlantic.
I have edited the article for our group; if you'd like the full edition, I'd be happy to send it to you.
Natural law and God's law were defining elements in the constitution. Professor Allen examines it through the lens of slavery, the 3/5th rule, and the inevitably of freedom for all.
God's peace to you and to our nation,
- Dave
The Flawed Genius of the Constitution
Danielle Allen, The Atlantic, October 2020
The best that can be said about the compromises regarding slavery that also helped the Constitutional Convention achieve unanimity is this: Those who knew enslavement was wrong but nonetheless accepted the compromises believed they were choosing a path that would lead
inexorably, if incrementally, to freedom for all.
We cannot, however, assume with James Wilson and Benjamin Franklin and others like them that incrementalism was the only available path to freedom for all. It is also not clear that the Constitution’s compromises even accelerated the march of freedom, whether for enslaved people
or for people more generally. The U.S. gave the vote to all male citizens regardless of skin color or former condition of servitude only with the Fifteenth Amendment, in 1870. Until that point, African Americans as well as some white men in states that made tax payment a prerequisite had been denied the right to vote. These changes required a bloody civil war, and even they were still partial. Pennsylvania and Rhode Island maintained tax-paying qualifications into the 20th century; women and Native Americans did not yet have suffrage. In both Britain and the United States, true universal suffrage was not adopted until well into the 20th century, and fights for voting rights persist.
In other words, the Constitution did not earn an earlier release from bondage or promote universal suffrage for men much faster than was accomplished under Britain’s constitutional monarchy. Nor much faster than was achieved in Canada, a country we can look to for an answer
to the question of what might have happened had the North American colonies that came to form the United States failed in their bid for freedom.
What did accelerate the march of freedom for all was abolitionism, a social movement that crystallized in both the United States and the United Kingdom in the years immediately following the revolutionary break between the two. Moral leadership made this difference.
Freedom flows from the tireless efforts of those who proclaim and pursue protection of the equal human dignity of all.
So why, then, do I love the Constitution? I love it for its practical leadership. I love it because it is the world’s greatest teaching document for one part of the story of freedom: the question of how free and equal citizens check and channel power both to protect themselves from
domination by one another and to secure their mutual protection from external forces that might seek their domination.
Why do we have three distinct aspects of power—legislative, executive, and judicial—and why is it best to keep them separate and yet intermingled? A typical civics lesson skates over the deep philosophical basis for what we glibly call “separation of powers” and “checks and balances.” Those concepts rest on a profound reckoning with the nature of power.
The exercise of power originates with the expression of a will or an intention. The legislature, the first branch, expresses the will of the people. Only after the will is expressed can there be execution of the desired action. The executive branch, the second branch, is responsible for this.
The judiciary comes third as a necessary mediator for addressing conflicts between the first and second branches. The three elements of power—will, execution, and adjudication—are separated to improve accountability. It is easier to hold officials accountable if they are limited in what they are permitted to do. In addition, the separation of powers provides a mechanism by which those who are responsible for using power are also always engaged in holding one another accountable.
James Madison, in The Federalist Papers, a series of newspaper opinion pieces written by Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay in 1787 and 1788 in support of the proposed Constitution, put it this way:
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. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first
enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is no doubt the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.
To ensure that power could be held accountable, the designers of the Constitution broke power into its component parts. They assigned one power to each of three branches. Then they developed rules and procedures that would make it possible for officers in each branch to not
only exercise their own powers but also, to some extent, check and counterbalance the use of power by others. The point of giving each branch ways of slowing down the other branches was to ensure that no branch would be able to dominate and consolidate complete power.
The rules and procedures they devised can also be called “mechanisms”—procedures that in themselves organize incentives and requirements for officeholders so that power flows in good and fair ways.
The U.S. Constitution is full of mechanisms like this to structure the incentives of officeholders to make sure power operates in fair ways. Here is a smattering of my favorite examples, courtesy of the identification in The Federalist Papers of the highest and best features of the Constitution:
Each branch should have as little agency as possible in the appointment of the members of the other, which means no branch can surreptitiously come to control another by populating its personnel and staff. Each branch should be as little dependent as possible on the others for emoluments annexed to their offices, which means no branch falls under the sway of another by virtue of hoping for a raise.
No double-office holding is permitted, which means that trying to play a role in more than one branch at the same time is strictly off-limits. The executive has a veto over legislation, but it can be overruled by a two-thirds vote of the Senate, which means that an executive decision (on
legislation) emanating from support of a bare majority of the people cannot overrule a view emanating from a supermajority of the country.
The executive can propose the draft of treaties, but ratification requires senatorial advice and consent, which prevents treaties from being struck as personal deals with benefits to the executive and thereby hinders corruption. The Senate must approve Supreme Court appointments made by the president, but the Court has the power of review over laws passed by Congress, which means Congress can be overruled by justices to whose appointment the legislative branch has itself consented.
The Constitution is the law of the land and establishes powers of enforcement, but it can be changed through a carefully articulated amendment process, by the people’s standing legislative representatives or by representatives to conventions especially elected for the purpose—which means the final power always rests with the people.
I delight in the cleverness of these mechanisms. There are many more. Instituting a bicameral legislature—having a Senate and a House of Representatives—is itself a check on monolithic legislative power. I marvel at the Constitution’s insight into the operations of power. I respect the ambition of the people who sought to design institutions and organize the government with the goal of ensuring the safety and happiness of the people. I see its limits, but I love its avowal—by stipulating the process for amendment, to date exercised 27 times—of its own mutability.
Remarkably, the Constitution’s slow, steady change has regularly been in the direction of moral improvement. In that regard, it has served well as a device for securing and stabilizing genuine human progress not only in politics but also in moral understanding. This is what figures like
Franklin and Wilson anticipated (or at least hoped for).
The Constitution is a work of practical genius. It is morally flawed. The story of the expansion of human freedom is one of shining moral ideals besmirched by the ordure of ongoing domination. I muck the stalls. I find a diamond. I clean it off and keep it. I do not abandon it because of
where I found it. Instead, I own it. Because of its mutability and the changes made from generation to generation, none but the living can own the Constitution. Those who wrote the version ratified centuries ago do not own the version we live by today. We do. It’s ours, an adaptable instrument used to define self-government among free and equal citizens—and to secure our ongoing moral education about that most important human endeavor. We are all responsible for our Constitution, and that fact is empowering. That hard-won empowerment is why I love the Constitution. And it shapes my native land, which I love also simply because it is my home. The second love is instinctual. The first comes with open eyes.
This article appears in the October 2020 print edition with the headline “The Constitution Counted My Great-Great-Grandfather as Three-Fifths of a Free Person.”
DANIELLE ALLEN is a political philosopher and the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard. She is the author of Talking to Strangers, Our Declaration, and Cuz
I think it would be interesting to have a discussion group about it. Attached is an article written by Danielle Allen, a political philosopher and professor at Harvard, which can be found in the upcoming October edition of the Atlantic.
I have edited the article for our group; if you'd like the full edition, I'd be happy to send it to you.
Natural law and God's law were defining elements in the constitution. Professor Allen examines it through the lens of slavery, the 3/5th rule, and the inevitably of freedom for all.
God's peace to you and to our nation,
- Dave
The Flawed Genius of the Constitution
Danielle Allen, The Atlantic, October 2020
The best that can be said about the compromises regarding slavery that also helped the Constitutional Convention achieve unanimity is this: Those who knew enslavement was wrong but nonetheless accepted the compromises believed they were choosing a path that would lead
inexorably, if incrementally, to freedom for all.
We cannot, however, assume with James Wilson and Benjamin Franklin and others like them that incrementalism was the only available path to freedom for all. It is also not clear that the Constitution’s compromises even accelerated the march of freedom, whether for enslaved people
or for people more generally. The U.S. gave the vote to all male citizens regardless of skin color or former condition of servitude only with the Fifteenth Amendment, in 1870. Until that point, African Americans as well as some white men in states that made tax payment a prerequisite had been denied the right to vote. These changes required a bloody civil war, and even they were still partial. Pennsylvania and Rhode Island maintained tax-paying qualifications into the 20th century; women and Native Americans did not yet have suffrage. In both Britain and the United States, true universal suffrage was not adopted until well into the 20th century, and fights for voting rights persist.
In other words, the Constitution did not earn an earlier release from bondage or promote universal suffrage for men much faster than was accomplished under Britain’s constitutional monarchy. Nor much faster than was achieved in Canada, a country we can look to for an answer
to the question of what might have happened had the North American colonies that came to form the United States failed in their bid for freedom.
What did accelerate the march of freedom for all was abolitionism, a social movement that crystallized in both the United States and the United Kingdom in the years immediately following the revolutionary break between the two. Moral leadership made this difference.
Freedom flows from the tireless efforts of those who proclaim and pursue protection of the equal human dignity of all.
So why, then, do I love the Constitution? I love it for its practical leadership. I love it because it is the world’s greatest teaching document for one part of the story of freedom: the question of how free and equal citizens check and channel power both to protect themselves from
domination by one another and to secure their mutual protection from external forces that might seek their domination.
Why do we have three distinct aspects of power—legislative, executive, and judicial—and why is it best to keep them separate and yet intermingled? A typical civics lesson skates over the deep philosophical basis for what we glibly call “separation of powers” and “checks and balances.” Those concepts rest on a profound reckoning with the nature of power.
The exercise of power originates with the expression of a will or an intention. The legislature, the first branch, expresses the will of the people. Only after the will is expressed can there be execution of the desired action. The executive branch, the second branch, is responsible for this.
The judiciary comes third as a necessary mediator for addressing conflicts between the first and second branches. The three elements of power—will, execution, and adjudication—are separated to improve accountability. It is easier to hold officials accountable if they are limited in what they are permitted to do. In addition, the separation of powers provides a mechanism by which those who are responsible for using power are also always engaged in holding one another accountable.
James Madison, in The Federalist Papers, a series of newspaper opinion pieces written by Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay in 1787 and 1788 in support of the proposed Constitution, put it this way:
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. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first
enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is no doubt the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.
To ensure that power could be held accountable, the designers of the Constitution broke power into its component parts. They assigned one power to each of three branches. Then they developed rules and procedures that would make it possible for officers in each branch to not
only exercise their own powers but also, to some extent, check and counterbalance the use of power by others. The point of giving each branch ways of slowing down the other branches was to ensure that no branch would be able to dominate and consolidate complete power.
The rules and procedures they devised can also be called “mechanisms”—procedures that in themselves organize incentives and requirements for officeholders so that power flows in good and fair ways.
The U.S. Constitution is full of mechanisms like this to structure the incentives of officeholders to make sure power operates in fair ways. Here is a smattering of my favorite examples, courtesy of the identification in The Federalist Papers of the highest and best features of the Constitution:
Each branch should have as little agency as possible in the appointment of the members of the other, which means no branch can surreptitiously come to control another by populating its personnel and staff. Each branch should be as little dependent as possible on the others for emoluments annexed to their offices, which means no branch falls under the sway of another by virtue of hoping for a raise.
No double-office holding is permitted, which means that trying to play a role in more than one branch at the same time is strictly off-limits. The executive has a veto over legislation, but it can be overruled by a two-thirds vote of the Senate, which means that an executive decision (on
legislation) emanating from support of a bare majority of the people cannot overrule a view emanating from a supermajority of the country.
The executive can propose the draft of treaties, but ratification requires senatorial advice and consent, which prevents treaties from being struck as personal deals with benefits to the executive and thereby hinders corruption. The Senate must approve Supreme Court appointments made by the president, but the Court has the power of review over laws passed by Congress, which means Congress can be overruled by justices to whose appointment the legislative branch has itself consented.
The Constitution is the law of the land and establishes powers of enforcement, but it can be changed through a carefully articulated amendment process, by the people’s standing legislative representatives or by representatives to conventions especially elected for the purpose—which means the final power always rests with the people.
I delight in the cleverness of these mechanisms. There are many more. Instituting a bicameral legislature—having a Senate and a House of Representatives—is itself a check on monolithic legislative power. I marvel at the Constitution’s insight into the operations of power. I respect the ambition of the people who sought to design institutions and organize the government with the goal of ensuring the safety and happiness of the people. I see its limits, but I love its avowal—by stipulating the process for amendment, to date exercised 27 times—of its own mutability.
Remarkably, the Constitution’s slow, steady change has regularly been in the direction of moral improvement. In that regard, it has served well as a device for securing and stabilizing genuine human progress not only in politics but also in moral understanding. This is what figures like
Franklin and Wilson anticipated (or at least hoped for).
The Constitution is a work of practical genius. It is morally flawed. The story of the expansion of human freedom is one of shining moral ideals besmirched by the ordure of ongoing domination. I muck the stalls. I find a diamond. I clean it off and keep it. I do not abandon it because of
where I found it. Instead, I own it. Because of its mutability and the changes made from generation to generation, none but the living can own the Constitution. Those who wrote the version ratified centuries ago do not own the version we live by today. We do. It’s ours, an adaptable instrument used to define self-government among free and equal citizens—and to secure our ongoing moral education about that most important human endeavor. We are all responsible for our Constitution, and that fact is empowering. That hard-won empowerment is why I love the Constitution. And it shapes my native land, which I love also simply because it is my home. The second love is instinctual. The first comes with open eyes.
This article appears in the October 2020 print edition with the headline “The Constitution Counted My Great-Great-Grandfather as Three-Fifths of a Free Person.”
DANIELLE ALLEN is a political philosopher and the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard. She is the author of Talking to Strangers, Our Declaration, and Cuz
Thursday, September 10
One thing we can say about the pandemic is that it is making us reimagine life. Many are seeking what is beneficial and important instead of material gains or societal status. This article from the Wall Street Journal asks the question, what makes for a good life? The editor asked subscribers what does a good life mean to them. It has been an interesting read to hear what others think. Both the article and the responses are included here.
If you are unable to be a part of the discussion this week, I'd like to hear from you. What makes a "good life" to you? Let me know if it is okay to share your response.
May God bless you and our nation,
- Dave
A Good Life Doesn’t Mean an Easy One
For many, ‘psychological richness’ is more valuable than simple happiness
Alison Gopnik, Wall Street Journal Aug. 28, 2020
What makes a good life? Philosophers have offered two classic answers to the question, captured by different Greek words for happiness, hedonia and eudaimonia. A hedonic life is free from pain and full of everyday pleasure—calm, safe and serene. A eudaemonic life is a virtuous and purposeful one, full of meaning.
But in a new study, philosopher Lorraine Besser of Middlebury College and psychologist Shigehiro Oishi of the University of Virginia argue that there is a third important element of a good life, which they call “psychological richness.” And they show that ordinary people around the world think so, too.
According to this view, a good life is one that is interesting, varied and surprising—even if some of those surprises aren’t necessarily pleasant ones. In fact, the things that make a life psychologically rich may actually make it less happy in the ordinary sense.
After all, to put it bluntly, a happy life can also be boring. Adventures, explorations and crises may be painful, but at least they’re interesting. A psychologically rich life may be less eudaemonic, too. Those unexpected turns may lead you to stray from your original purpose and act in ways that are less than virtuous.
Profs. Besser and Oishi make the case for a psychologically rich life in a paper that has just appeared in the journal Philosophical Psychology. But is this a life that most people would actually want, or is it just for the sort of people who write philosophy articles?
To find out, the authors and their colleagues did an extensive study involving more than 3,000 people in nine countries, recently published in the Journal of Affective Science. The researchers gave participants a list of 15 descriptive words such as “pleasant,” “meaningful” and “interesting,” and asked which best described a good life.
When they analyzed the responses, Profs. Besser and Oishi found that people do indeed think that a happy and meaningful life is a good life. But they also think a psychologically rich life is important. In fact, across different cultures, about 10-15% of people said that if they were forced to choose, they would go for a psychologically rich life over a happy or meaningful one.
In a second experiment the researchers posed the question a different way. Instead of asking people what kind of life they would choose, they asked what people regretted about the life they had actually led. Did they regret decisions that made their lives less happy or less meaningful? Or did they regret passing up a chance for interesting and surprising experiences? If they could undo one decision, what would it be? When people thought about their regrets they were even more likely to value psychological richness—about 30% of people, for example, in both the U.S. and South Korea.
The desire for a psychologically rich life may go beyond just avoiding boredom. After all, the unexpected, even the tragic, can have a transformative power that goes beyond the hedonic or eudaemonic. As a great Leonard Cohen song says, it’s the cracks that let the light come in.
In response to our question about what makes a “good life”:
Al Romig, Texas
A spiritual belief. Loving and being loved. Good enough health to enjoy it. A sense of purpose. Continuous learning.
Nancy Irving, Ohio
Here are some key attributes for my husband and me: health, freedom, “enough,” serving others, sharing our blessings.
Barry Zalma, California
A wife who loves me after 52 years of marriage, children who grow into successful adults, and loving grandchildren. Everything else is meaningless.
Stephen RS Martin, Arizona
The first sine qua non to a good life is absolute financial security, which includes the complete absence of debt. True happiness and peace of mind are impossible without it.
Samuel Zimmer, Austria A reasonable proximity to bodies of water, fulfilling pursuits, frequent reading, and bountiful Weißbier [wheat beer] upon the clock’s 5 p.m. strike.
Michele McGovern, Pennsylvania
When I was a kid, I always thought the people in the neighborhood who had a second refrigerator in the garage—affectionately known as the “beer fridge”—had “made it.” They were living the good life. Now that I’m an adult, I think I might have had it right as a kid. The good life—just enough money to buy a second fridge and beverages to put in it, enough friends and family members to join in that you need the fridge, and enough time and inclination to enjoy it with them.
Unknown
A good life is knowing that, despite your parenting, your children have turned out to be good people.
If you are unable to be a part of the discussion this week, I'd like to hear from you. What makes a "good life" to you? Let me know if it is okay to share your response.
May God bless you and our nation,
- Dave
A Good Life Doesn’t Mean an Easy One
For many, ‘psychological richness’ is more valuable than simple happiness
Alison Gopnik, Wall Street Journal Aug. 28, 2020
What makes a good life? Philosophers have offered two classic answers to the question, captured by different Greek words for happiness, hedonia and eudaimonia. A hedonic life is free from pain and full of everyday pleasure—calm, safe and serene. A eudaemonic life is a virtuous and purposeful one, full of meaning.
But in a new study, philosopher Lorraine Besser of Middlebury College and psychologist Shigehiro Oishi of the University of Virginia argue that there is a third important element of a good life, which they call “psychological richness.” And they show that ordinary people around the world think so, too.
According to this view, a good life is one that is interesting, varied and surprising—even if some of those surprises aren’t necessarily pleasant ones. In fact, the things that make a life psychologically rich may actually make it less happy in the ordinary sense.
After all, to put it bluntly, a happy life can also be boring. Adventures, explorations and crises may be painful, but at least they’re interesting. A psychologically rich life may be less eudaemonic, too. Those unexpected turns may lead you to stray from your original purpose and act in ways that are less than virtuous.
Profs. Besser and Oishi make the case for a psychologically rich life in a paper that has just appeared in the journal Philosophical Psychology. But is this a life that most people would actually want, or is it just for the sort of people who write philosophy articles?
To find out, the authors and their colleagues did an extensive study involving more than 3,000 people in nine countries, recently published in the Journal of Affective Science. The researchers gave participants a list of 15 descriptive words such as “pleasant,” “meaningful” and “interesting,” and asked which best described a good life.
When they analyzed the responses, Profs. Besser and Oishi found that people do indeed think that a happy and meaningful life is a good life. But they also think a psychologically rich life is important. In fact, across different cultures, about 10-15% of people said that if they were forced to choose, they would go for a psychologically rich life over a happy or meaningful one.
In a second experiment the researchers posed the question a different way. Instead of asking people what kind of life they would choose, they asked what people regretted about the life they had actually led. Did they regret decisions that made their lives less happy or less meaningful? Or did they regret passing up a chance for interesting and surprising experiences? If they could undo one decision, what would it be? When people thought about their regrets they were even more likely to value psychological richness—about 30% of people, for example, in both the U.S. and South Korea.
The desire for a psychologically rich life may go beyond just avoiding boredom. After all, the unexpected, even the tragic, can have a transformative power that goes beyond the hedonic or eudaemonic. As a great Leonard Cohen song says, it’s the cracks that let the light come in.
In response to our question about what makes a “good life”:
Al Romig, Texas
A spiritual belief. Loving and being loved. Good enough health to enjoy it. A sense of purpose. Continuous learning.
Nancy Irving, Ohio
Here are some key attributes for my husband and me: health, freedom, “enough,” serving others, sharing our blessings.
Barry Zalma, California
A wife who loves me after 52 years of marriage, children who grow into successful adults, and loving grandchildren. Everything else is meaningless.
Stephen RS Martin, Arizona
The first sine qua non to a good life is absolute financial security, which includes the complete absence of debt. True happiness and peace of mind are impossible without it.
Samuel Zimmer, Austria A reasonable proximity to bodies of water, fulfilling pursuits, frequent reading, and bountiful Weißbier [wheat beer] upon the clock’s 5 p.m. strike.
Michele McGovern, Pennsylvania
When I was a kid, I always thought the people in the neighborhood who had a second refrigerator in the garage—affectionately known as the “beer fridge”—had “made it.” They were living the good life. Now that I’m an adult, I think I might have had it right as a kid. The good life—just enough money to buy a second fridge and beverages to put in it, enough friends and family members to join in that you need the fridge, and enough time and inclination to enjoy it with them.
Unknown
A good life is knowing that, despite your parenting, your children have turned out to be good people.
Thursday, September 3
Preparing Your Mind for Uncertain Times
Eric Weiner, The Atlantic August 25, 2020
This is a time of questions without answers. Will I get infected? When will there be a vaccine? Is my job/retirement secure? When will life be normal again? The experts may have guesses, or estimates, for some of these quandaries but there is no certainty, and this drives us nuts. Humans abhor uncertainty, and will do just about anything to avoid it, even choosing a known bad outcome over an unknown but possibly good one. In one British study participants experienced greater stress when they had a 50 percent chance of receiving an electric shock than when they had a 100 percent chance. Intolerance for uncertainty puts people at greater risk for ailments such as depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
We take it as a given that uncertainty is always bad and, conversely, that certitude is always good. Yet ancient philosophy, as well as a growing body of scientific evidence, suggests otherwise. Uncertainty need not hobble us, and “in the right form and in the right amount, it’s actually a great pleasure,” says Daniel Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard.
We engage in certain activities—such as watching thrillers or reading mysteries—precisely because the outcome is uncertain. Or, say you receive a note from a secret admirer. The mystery of who sent it, Gilbert says, yields “the kind of uncertainty you would find delicious and delightful.” Yet we remain largely oblivious to our own love of pleasant—call it benign— uncertainty. Gilbert and his colleagues have found that even though uncertainty about a positive event prolongs people’s pleasure, we’re generally convinced that we’ll be happiest when all uncertainty is eliminated.
What about the darker kind of uncertainty, the kind many of us are facing now? Not only the immediate suffering of illness and job loss caused by the pandemic, but its open-ended nature. We don’t know when it will end. You might have noticed that this kind of uncertainty—let’s call it malign uncertainty—tends to make bad moods worse. But, again, this is only a tendency, not a foregone conclusion. We are not fated to suffer when faced with malign uncertainty. We have a choice.
In my experience, there are two ways to solve the “problem” of the unknown: by decreasing the amount of perceived risk or by increasing our tolerance for uncertainty. Most of us focus almost exclusively on the former. Many philosophers think this is a mistake. Philosophers have wrestled with uncertainty and impermanence since at least the time of the ancient Greeks. Stoicism, a philosophy that flourished in the third century B.C. in Athens, is especially well suited for helping people cope with uncertainty. And for good reason: The Stoics lived during particularly unsettled times. Athens had lost much of its independence as a city-state, and the death of Alexander the Great several years earlier had left a power vacuum in the region. The old order had collapsed and a new one had yet to take its place.
Much of life lies beyond our control, Stoics believe, but we do control what matters most: our opinions, impulses, desires, and aversions. Our mental and emotional states. “Change what you can, accept what you cannot” sums up the Stoic creed. Master this skill, they say, and you will be “invincible.” This isn’t easy, the Stoics concede, but it is possible. Accepting the uncertainty inherent in life—particularly pandemic life—is better than fighting a constant battle against it, one we are bound to lose, the Stoics would say.
There’s a scene in the movie Lawrence of Arabia where Lawrence, played by Peter O’Toole, calmly extinguishes a match between his thumb and his forefinger. A fellow officer tries it himself, and squeals in pain. “Oh! It damn well hurts,” he says. “Certainly it hurts,” Lawrence replies. “Well, what’s the trick, then?” “The trick,” Lawrence says, “is not minding that it hurts.”
Lawrence’s response is pure Stoic. Sure, he felt the pain, yet it remained a sensation, a reflex. It never metastasized into panic. Lawrence didn’t mind the pain, in the literal sense of the word: He didn’t allow his mind to dwell on, and amplify, what his body had felt. Likewise, the pandemic has hijacked the circumstances of our lives—that’s the reality we can’t avoid. But our minds and our reactions are still our own.
To show the power of mindset, Stoics use the metaphor of a cylinder rolling down a hill. Gravity ensures the cylinder will start rolling, but its shape determines how smoothly and quickly it rolls. We can’t control the hill, or gravity, but we can control the shape of our cylinder, the state of our minds.
For instance, let’s say you find yourself, like many parents, working from home while caring for a young child. Those facts represent the hill; they are immovable. What you can move is your attitude. It needn’t be a momentous shift either—we can’t all be Mother Teresa—but a subtle realignment from resistance to, if not total acceptance, at least tolerance.
The ability to tolerate uncertainty can bring great rewards. Uncertainty, after all, drives the quest for knowledge. The best scientists know this intuitively, and are willing to live with unknowns as they explore new frontiers. “I don’t have to know an answer,” the theoretical physicist Richard Feynman said. “I don’t feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose.” Tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity are also linked with greater creative thinking, as several studies have found. The English Romantic poet John Keats introduced the term negative capability to describe a similar phenomenon. Writing to his brothers in 1817, he posited that writers are at their most creative when “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
Japanese philosophers go a step further. Don’t merely tolerate uncertainty and its close cousin impermanence, they counsel; celebrate it. “The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty,” wrote Yoshida Kenkō, a 14th-century Buddhist monk.
Consider the sakura, or cherry blossom. The trees are famously fleeting. They bloom for only a week or two, and then the petals are gone. Other flowers—plum blossoms, for instance—last considerably longer. Why go to such great lengths to cultivate something as fragile as the cherry blossom?
Because “beauty lies in its own vanishing,” says Donald Richie in his book A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics. Life is ephemeral. Everything we know and love will one day cease to exist, ourselves included. That is life’s one certainty. The cherry blossom is lovely not despite its transience but because of it. This has always been the case. The pandemic has driven home our own transience. And while it may be too much to ask to celebrate this truth under such dire circumstances, we can learn to tolerate the unknown, and perhaps even catch glimpses of the beauty underlying life’s uncertainties.
Eric Weiner, The Atlantic August 25, 2020
This is a time of questions without answers. Will I get infected? When will there be a vaccine? Is my job/retirement secure? When will life be normal again? The experts may have guesses, or estimates, for some of these quandaries but there is no certainty, and this drives us nuts. Humans abhor uncertainty, and will do just about anything to avoid it, even choosing a known bad outcome over an unknown but possibly good one. In one British study participants experienced greater stress when they had a 50 percent chance of receiving an electric shock than when they had a 100 percent chance. Intolerance for uncertainty puts people at greater risk for ailments such as depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
We take it as a given that uncertainty is always bad and, conversely, that certitude is always good. Yet ancient philosophy, as well as a growing body of scientific evidence, suggests otherwise. Uncertainty need not hobble us, and “in the right form and in the right amount, it’s actually a great pleasure,” says Daniel Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard.
We engage in certain activities—such as watching thrillers or reading mysteries—precisely because the outcome is uncertain. Or, say you receive a note from a secret admirer. The mystery of who sent it, Gilbert says, yields “the kind of uncertainty you would find delicious and delightful.” Yet we remain largely oblivious to our own love of pleasant—call it benign— uncertainty. Gilbert and his colleagues have found that even though uncertainty about a positive event prolongs people’s pleasure, we’re generally convinced that we’ll be happiest when all uncertainty is eliminated.
What about the darker kind of uncertainty, the kind many of us are facing now? Not only the immediate suffering of illness and job loss caused by the pandemic, but its open-ended nature. We don’t know when it will end. You might have noticed that this kind of uncertainty—let’s call it malign uncertainty—tends to make bad moods worse. But, again, this is only a tendency, not a foregone conclusion. We are not fated to suffer when faced with malign uncertainty. We have a choice.
In my experience, there are two ways to solve the “problem” of the unknown: by decreasing the amount of perceived risk or by increasing our tolerance for uncertainty. Most of us focus almost exclusively on the former. Many philosophers think this is a mistake. Philosophers have wrestled with uncertainty and impermanence since at least the time of the ancient Greeks. Stoicism, a philosophy that flourished in the third century B.C. in Athens, is especially well suited for helping people cope with uncertainty. And for good reason: The Stoics lived during particularly unsettled times. Athens had lost much of its independence as a city-state, and the death of Alexander the Great several years earlier had left a power vacuum in the region. The old order had collapsed and a new one had yet to take its place.
Much of life lies beyond our control, Stoics believe, but we do control what matters most: our opinions, impulses, desires, and aversions. Our mental and emotional states. “Change what you can, accept what you cannot” sums up the Stoic creed. Master this skill, they say, and you will be “invincible.” This isn’t easy, the Stoics concede, but it is possible. Accepting the uncertainty inherent in life—particularly pandemic life—is better than fighting a constant battle against it, one we are bound to lose, the Stoics would say.
There’s a scene in the movie Lawrence of Arabia where Lawrence, played by Peter O’Toole, calmly extinguishes a match between his thumb and his forefinger. A fellow officer tries it himself, and squeals in pain. “Oh! It damn well hurts,” he says. “Certainly it hurts,” Lawrence replies. “Well, what’s the trick, then?” “The trick,” Lawrence says, “is not minding that it hurts.”
Lawrence’s response is pure Stoic. Sure, he felt the pain, yet it remained a sensation, a reflex. It never metastasized into panic. Lawrence didn’t mind the pain, in the literal sense of the word: He didn’t allow his mind to dwell on, and amplify, what his body had felt. Likewise, the pandemic has hijacked the circumstances of our lives—that’s the reality we can’t avoid. But our minds and our reactions are still our own.
To show the power of mindset, Stoics use the metaphor of a cylinder rolling down a hill. Gravity ensures the cylinder will start rolling, but its shape determines how smoothly and quickly it rolls. We can’t control the hill, or gravity, but we can control the shape of our cylinder, the state of our minds.
For instance, let’s say you find yourself, like many parents, working from home while caring for a young child. Those facts represent the hill; they are immovable. What you can move is your attitude. It needn’t be a momentous shift either—we can’t all be Mother Teresa—but a subtle realignment from resistance to, if not total acceptance, at least tolerance.
The ability to tolerate uncertainty can bring great rewards. Uncertainty, after all, drives the quest for knowledge. The best scientists know this intuitively, and are willing to live with unknowns as they explore new frontiers. “I don’t have to know an answer,” the theoretical physicist Richard Feynman said. “I don’t feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose.” Tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity are also linked with greater creative thinking, as several studies have found. The English Romantic poet John Keats introduced the term negative capability to describe a similar phenomenon. Writing to his brothers in 1817, he posited that writers are at their most creative when “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
Japanese philosophers go a step further. Don’t merely tolerate uncertainty and its close cousin impermanence, they counsel; celebrate it. “The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty,” wrote Yoshida Kenkō, a 14th-century Buddhist monk.
Consider the sakura, or cherry blossom. The trees are famously fleeting. They bloom for only a week or two, and then the petals are gone. Other flowers—plum blossoms, for instance—last considerably longer. Why go to such great lengths to cultivate something as fragile as the cherry blossom?
Because “beauty lies in its own vanishing,” says Donald Richie in his book A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics. Life is ephemeral. Everything we know and love will one day cease to exist, ourselves included. That is life’s one certainty. The cherry blossom is lovely not despite its transience but because of it. This has always been the case. The pandemic has driven home our own transience. And while it may be too much to ask to celebrate this truth under such dire circumstances, we can learn to tolerate the unknown, and perhaps even catch glimpses of the beauty underlying life’s uncertainties.
Thursday, August 27
How exciting - the Marshalls might experience their first tropical storm on Tuesday. Depending on the cone of uncertainty, we will have our Men's Group on Tuesday and Women's Discussion Group on Thursday.
One common thread that is coming up in our discussions is that things are a little tense in our communities; tempers seem to be shorter and it seems easier to offend others.
The Wall Street Journal published an article titled, How to Handle a Jerk. As a companion piece to it, I have included an article from Christianity Today that gives a different perspective, To Intervene or Not to Intervene. And, as you can imagine, Jesus gives us a way to handle jerks too. I look forward to talking with you about this next week.
God's peace to you, to our communities, and to our nation.
- Dave
Here is the website address for the discussion group:
https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
How to Handle a Jerk
Elizabeth Bernstein Wall Street Journal, 8.18.20
Dear Bonds,
How do you deal with a jerk? It seems like there are so many out there right now— male and female—whether it’s at the grocery store or online or just walking around the neighborhood. Everyone seems irritated and out for themselves. Today I went to Home Depot to buy some weed killer and some guy blatantly cut in line and then had the nerve to start berating me for calling him out. I’ve had it! —Fed Up
Dear Fed Up,
I agree, lots of people are falling short of their best behavior at the moment. Some days it feels like everyone’s gone nuts. It helps to remember that people are stressed and more than a little freaked out. Errands—and everything else—feel more dangerous, and folks are in a hurry to get back to their own bubbles, where life feels safer. Of course, some people are just plain rude, no matter what’s going on.
I recently wrote about bullies; these are people who use their strength or power to intimidate or harm someone they see as vulnerable. A bully could certainly be described as a jerk. But not all jerks are bullies. Some jerks are just obnoxious, self-absorbed or inconsiderate. Dealing with an everyday jerk is a two-part process. Part one: Do not engage. Once the jerkiness comes out—in your example, when the guy began berating you for pointing out his error—separate yourself from the encounter. Remember: You’re extremely unlikely to change someone else’s bad behavior. And the more you call that person out, the more likely he or she is going to get defensive and double down on it.
Keep calm and remain polite. Remove yourself physically if possible. Take some comfort in the fact that unless the person is a straight-up sociopath, he or she probably feels some sense of shame when left alone acting like an idiot.
(A caveat: This advice is meant for quick encounters with strangers. If you feel unsafe, or if you are under regular attack from someone you know, you need to call an authority, such as the police.)
Now for part two: Be thankful! This keeps you from spiraling into negativity. You can be grateful you’re not a jerk. And you can be thankful that successfully handling the encounter—without acting nastily yourself—makes you stronger. Dealing with someone who is acting poorly in a positive way gives you a chance to affirm your values, to model good behavior for everyone else, and to protect the world from getting uglier.
I know it’s not easy to stay positive when someone’s being nasty. I suggest coming up with a mantra that you can pull up quickly in the moment. Mantras create new neural pathways in your brain and condition you to be calmer and happier. They remind you who you want to be. And they can be just one word: “Peace.” Or a short phrase: “Never be dragged down” or “this too shall pass. (The one I use for jerks is “Just breathe.”)
Feel better? Now go forth and be strong.
To Intervene or Not to Intervene
Marshall Shelley, Christianity Today
A pastor encountered one of life's little dramas playing itself out as he entered the YMCA: A toddler wearing a wet bathing suit was coming out the door from the swimming pool area, and her mother was saying, "You are such a coward!"
The child was shivering, and her cheeks were wet-from tears or the pool? The pastor couldn't tell. She simply stood there shaking as her mother continued, "It's the same every week. You always make your daddy and me ashamed. Sometimes I can't believe you're my daughter." The pastor found himself thinking, I wonder what the penalty is for hitting a woman? "What she was doing was more hurtful, more brutal than a beating," he reflected. "It was emotional child abuse, and if it continues, that toddler will grow up feeling worthless, which will lead to all kinds of destructive behavior."
Most people feel the urge to do something, either immediately or eventually, to help the mother realize what's at stake, to help her be a better parent. Even if she isn't asking for help. When is intervention appropriate? How do you enter a situation uninvited? It's not an easy decision.
Tips for Interveners
Confront with tears.
In any confrontation, the tendency is for the person being confronted to say, "You don't understand. You don't know what I've gone through." Graciousness, tenderness, and empathy are important even when you have to be firm.
A psychologist told me a long time ago, 'When you have to confront, be sure to share how you feel — not just with your words but with your body language, your facial features, your tears. Let them know this isn't easy.' It was good advice. People are much more open if they don't feel you enjoy correcting them."
Confront with strength, not authority.
There's a difference between intervening from a position of strength and a position of authority. Authority means coming down with an imposed order and saying, "You need to stop this because the [police, management, the other people around you] disapproves." Intervening from the position of strength is to point out strongly the natural consequences of the present course. "If this keeps up, here's what's going to happen." And perhaps "Some of those things have happened to me, and they hurt like the blazes. Do you really want to do this?" Very few times will a person turn around by being told he is doing something evil or unacceptable. More often change will happen when a person is confronted with what's in his best interest — "Have you considered this consequence?"
Affirming the Importance of Life
Surprisingly, people tend to underestimate the value of their own lives. One of the duties of a pastor, especially when dealing with those destroying themselves but refusing help, is to remind people of the importance of life — their own included.
When it comes to helping those who don't want help, sometimes they, too, need to realize their own significance. God himself is interested in their decisions.
At times this can be done with indirect confrontation; at other times, however, it requires direct intervention.
One common thread that is coming up in our discussions is that things are a little tense in our communities; tempers seem to be shorter and it seems easier to offend others.
The Wall Street Journal published an article titled, How to Handle a Jerk. As a companion piece to it, I have included an article from Christianity Today that gives a different perspective, To Intervene or Not to Intervene. And, as you can imagine, Jesus gives us a way to handle jerks too. I look forward to talking with you about this next week.
God's peace to you, to our communities, and to our nation.
- Dave
Here is the website address for the discussion group:
https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
How to Handle a Jerk
Elizabeth Bernstein Wall Street Journal, 8.18.20
Dear Bonds,
How do you deal with a jerk? It seems like there are so many out there right now— male and female—whether it’s at the grocery store or online or just walking around the neighborhood. Everyone seems irritated and out for themselves. Today I went to Home Depot to buy some weed killer and some guy blatantly cut in line and then had the nerve to start berating me for calling him out. I’ve had it! —Fed Up
Dear Fed Up,
I agree, lots of people are falling short of their best behavior at the moment. Some days it feels like everyone’s gone nuts. It helps to remember that people are stressed and more than a little freaked out. Errands—and everything else—feel more dangerous, and folks are in a hurry to get back to their own bubbles, where life feels safer. Of course, some people are just plain rude, no matter what’s going on.
I recently wrote about bullies; these are people who use their strength or power to intimidate or harm someone they see as vulnerable. A bully could certainly be described as a jerk. But not all jerks are bullies. Some jerks are just obnoxious, self-absorbed or inconsiderate. Dealing with an everyday jerk is a two-part process. Part one: Do not engage. Once the jerkiness comes out—in your example, when the guy began berating you for pointing out his error—separate yourself from the encounter. Remember: You’re extremely unlikely to change someone else’s bad behavior. And the more you call that person out, the more likely he or she is going to get defensive and double down on it.
Keep calm and remain polite. Remove yourself physically if possible. Take some comfort in the fact that unless the person is a straight-up sociopath, he or she probably feels some sense of shame when left alone acting like an idiot.
(A caveat: This advice is meant for quick encounters with strangers. If you feel unsafe, or if you are under regular attack from someone you know, you need to call an authority, such as the police.)
Now for part two: Be thankful! This keeps you from spiraling into negativity. You can be grateful you’re not a jerk. And you can be thankful that successfully handling the encounter—without acting nastily yourself—makes you stronger. Dealing with someone who is acting poorly in a positive way gives you a chance to affirm your values, to model good behavior for everyone else, and to protect the world from getting uglier.
I know it’s not easy to stay positive when someone’s being nasty. I suggest coming up with a mantra that you can pull up quickly in the moment. Mantras create new neural pathways in your brain and condition you to be calmer and happier. They remind you who you want to be. And they can be just one word: “Peace.” Or a short phrase: “Never be dragged down” or “this too shall pass. (The one I use for jerks is “Just breathe.”)
Feel better? Now go forth and be strong.
To Intervene or Not to Intervene
Marshall Shelley, Christianity Today
A pastor encountered one of life's little dramas playing itself out as he entered the YMCA: A toddler wearing a wet bathing suit was coming out the door from the swimming pool area, and her mother was saying, "You are such a coward!"
The child was shivering, and her cheeks were wet-from tears or the pool? The pastor couldn't tell. She simply stood there shaking as her mother continued, "It's the same every week. You always make your daddy and me ashamed. Sometimes I can't believe you're my daughter." The pastor found himself thinking, I wonder what the penalty is for hitting a woman? "What she was doing was more hurtful, more brutal than a beating," he reflected. "It was emotional child abuse, and if it continues, that toddler will grow up feeling worthless, which will lead to all kinds of destructive behavior."
Most people feel the urge to do something, either immediately or eventually, to help the mother realize what's at stake, to help her be a better parent. Even if she isn't asking for help. When is intervention appropriate? How do you enter a situation uninvited? It's not an easy decision.
Tips for Interveners
Confront with tears.
In any confrontation, the tendency is for the person being confronted to say, "You don't understand. You don't know what I've gone through." Graciousness, tenderness, and empathy are important even when you have to be firm.
A psychologist told me a long time ago, 'When you have to confront, be sure to share how you feel — not just with your words but with your body language, your facial features, your tears. Let them know this isn't easy.' It was good advice. People are much more open if they don't feel you enjoy correcting them."
Confront with strength, not authority.
There's a difference between intervening from a position of strength and a position of authority. Authority means coming down with an imposed order and saying, "You need to stop this because the [police, management, the other people around you] disapproves." Intervening from the position of strength is to point out strongly the natural consequences of the present course. "If this keeps up, here's what's going to happen." And perhaps "Some of those things have happened to me, and they hurt like the blazes. Do you really want to do this?" Very few times will a person turn around by being told he is doing something evil or unacceptable. More often change will happen when a person is confronted with what's in his best interest — "Have you considered this consequence?"
Affirming the Importance of Life
Surprisingly, people tend to underestimate the value of their own lives. One of the duties of a pastor, especially when dealing with those destroying themselves but refusing help, is to remind people of the importance of life — their own included.
When it comes to helping those who don't want help, sometimes they, too, need to realize their own significance. God himself is interested in their decisions.
At times this can be done with indirect confrontation; at other times, however, it requires direct intervention.
Thursday, August 20
Let me ask you a question, do you think there are occasions when public-health concerns outweigh the importance of religious freedom? Or, does religious freedom stand above all other concerns? How far should the freedom go when it comes to the health of others - especially non-believers?
These questions have been raised in microclimates around our country as hospitals address the pandemic. I think it would make for an interesting discussion about the intersection of religious freedom and public health.
At the risk of having something big occurring between now and when we will gather, let's discuss this article. I have included some discussion questions at the end of the piece if you'd like to talk it over with someone else.
God's peace to you and to our nation,
- Dave
Here is the website address for the discussion group:
https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
Hospitals’ Covid-19 Policies Face Religious-Rights Checks
Stephanie Armour, Wall Street Journal 8.10.20
The Trump administration has stepped up interventions in complaints by patients and health workers who say they’ve been victims of discrimination under policies that hospitals and other health organizations have adopted to combat the new coronavirus. One of the interventions involved a medical student who objected on religious grounds that he be required to shave his beard so he could wear a protective mask. Another involved a hospital’s refusal under its no-visitors rule during the pandemic to allow a bedside visit by a priest.
As the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights has intervened in the complaints, it has been negotiating settlements and issuing guidance to remind health organizations, states and local governments about their responsibilities under federal law. Some legal experts say the agency is overstepping its statutory authority. Lawyers who advocate for religious rights disagree and say the actions are legally sound.
The office cites laws it says give it authority to intervene in religious-discrimination claims when health organizations get federal money. They also point to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, which essentially prohibits the federal government from substantially burdening a person or institution’s religious exercise. “This is a time when the safeguards are put under stress,” Roger Severino, head of the Office for Civil Rights, said in an interview. In 2018, Roger Severino announced a new HHS division on Conscience and Religious Freedom. Some legal experts and advocates said the office’s actions in religious discrimination claims involving hospitals stand on shaky legal ground, saying its interpretation of the law is overly broad and is risky during a public-health emergency.
“HHS has no statutory authority to be enforcing its policy choices about religion and how to handle religion in health care,” said Richard Katskee, legal director at Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a litigation and advocacy group. Luke Goodrich, vice president and senior counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that defends religious freedom, said the agency had authority because most large hospitals get federal funding. He added that protecting religious freedoms was critical even during a pandemic—and can be done safely. “You don’t have to put religion and public health against each other,” Mr. Goodrich said.
The Office for Civil Rights intervened after a complaint was filed June 11 on behalf of the medical student who was doing rotations at Staten Island University Hospital, in New York City. The complaint said the hospital required him to shave his beard so that he could wear a protective mask. The student said shaving would violate his religious commitment to not cut his hair. The civil rights office said it communicated with the student and provided technical assistance to the hospital. The office said the hospital then granted the student an accommodation and let him wear an alternative form of protection called a Powered Air Purifying Respirator that he could wear with a beard.
Christian Preston, a hospital spokesman, said, “When he raised concerns over his religious needs, immediate steps were taken to understand and make an accommodation that adhered with his cultural and spiritual beliefs so he could continue his medical studies, safely.” At no point was the student asked to shave his beard, Mr. Preston said, but he was informed about safety guidelines that state a user must be clean shaved to be appropriately fit tested for an N95 mask. He said the student was reassigned to rotations in non-Covid-19 areas until a powered air-purifying respirator could be provided instead of an N95 mask.
In another complaint, Sidney and Susanna Marcus suffered severe injuries in a car accident on Memorial Day and got treatment at Prince George’s Hospital Center, in Maryland. While Mrs. Marcus’s condition improved, her husband’s condition worsened, and he was put on a ventilator because of the accident. Neither of the Marcuses had Covid-19. Mrs. Marcus asked a priest to visit her husband at the hospital to administer the sacrament of anointing the sick, which has been known as last rites. But the hospital system, University of Maryland Medical System, had implemented a policy banning visitors because of the pandemic, according to a June 9 complaint Mrs. Marcus filed with the office. The priest, who had agreed to wear personal protective equipment, wasn’t allowed in, according to the complaint.
“I didn’t know much about his condition, we couldn’t communicate, and I was very fearful for his condition,” Mrs. Marcus said. “We believe in the sacraments, our souls are united in God, and I needed to know he had access to that.”
The Office for Civil Rights provided technical assistance to the hospital, and HHS officials said the hospital system subsequently agreed to change its policy, allowing clergy to see patients. The system didn’t dispute the details of the complaint. Prince George's Hospital Center, where Sidney and Susanna Marcus were both treated following their accident.
“We have since amended our policy, with all individuals visiting a Covid-19 positive patient provided a form acknowledging the risk, and will allow clergy visits with adherence to safety protocols,” said University of Maryland Medical System spokeswoman Jania Matthews.
Legal experts said the agency’s use of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act as the basis for its authority is unusual. Robert Tuttle, a research professor of law and religion at George Washington University’s Law School, said championing religious rights during a pandemic risked endangering others. “It risks the health and safety of others,” Mr. Tuttle said. “What’s happening under the current administration, and HHS is the poster child, is a shift to religious freedoms no matter who suffers collateral damages from it.”
The Office of Civil Rights also became involved in the spring in disputes over rationing decisions involving ventilators to ensure they weren’t discriminatory. In July, it issued reminders against discrimination to health-care providers that get federal funding, including hospitals and state agencies. The guidance included instructions to ensure minorities didn’t face longer wait times for care and weren’t denied access to intensive care.
The office has taken a number of steps to champion religious rights, including a rule that enables health-care providers to refuse to perform, accommodate, or assist with certain health-care services on religious or moral grounds. A federal judge in Manhattan blocked the rule in November, saying it exceeded the agency’s authority. HHS is appealing. The agency has also been applauded by disability-rights advocates for getting involved in cases involving health providers’ actions during the pandemic.
A complaint filed in May focused on state guidance in Connecticut on hospital policies restricting visitors during the pandemic. The policies allowed only narrow exceptions for people to support individuals with disabilities who received particular services from the state. The complaint said the policy effectively denied support to people with disabilities who couldn’t understand medical decisions.
According to the complaint, one hospital broke the law when it didn’t make an exception to the visitor restrictions for a 73-year old patient with aphasia and severe short-term memory loss. The woman, who is mostly nonverbal, was denied in-person support to help with her communication and comprehension during care.
After the office became involved, the state issued a new order amending the restrictions so that people with disabilities can have in-person support.
Discussion Questions:
Do you think there are occasions when public-health concerns outweigh the importance of religious freedom?
Should the public health action be upheld by evidence? If so, should the action reflect the evidence or should there be a more or less boiler plate response?
What about religious preference; should it be upheld by spiritual polity and tradition? Who deems a particular religion to be significant or legitimate?
These questions have been raised in microclimates around our country as hospitals address the pandemic. I think it would make for an interesting discussion about the intersection of religious freedom and public health.
At the risk of having something big occurring between now and when we will gather, let's discuss this article. I have included some discussion questions at the end of the piece if you'd like to talk it over with someone else.
God's peace to you and to our nation,
- Dave
Here is the website address for the discussion group:
https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
Hospitals’ Covid-19 Policies Face Religious-Rights Checks
Stephanie Armour, Wall Street Journal 8.10.20
The Trump administration has stepped up interventions in complaints by patients and health workers who say they’ve been victims of discrimination under policies that hospitals and other health organizations have adopted to combat the new coronavirus. One of the interventions involved a medical student who objected on religious grounds that he be required to shave his beard so he could wear a protective mask. Another involved a hospital’s refusal under its no-visitors rule during the pandemic to allow a bedside visit by a priest.
As the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights has intervened in the complaints, it has been negotiating settlements and issuing guidance to remind health organizations, states and local governments about their responsibilities under federal law. Some legal experts say the agency is overstepping its statutory authority. Lawyers who advocate for religious rights disagree and say the actions are legally sound.
The office cites laws it says give it authority to intervene in religious-discrimination claims when health organizations get federal money. They also point to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, which essentially prohibits the federal government from substantially burdening a person or institution’s religious exercise. “This is a time when the safeguards are put under stress,” Roger Severino, head of the Office for Civil Rights, said in an interview. In 2018, Roger Severino announced a new HHS division on Conscience and Religious Freedom. Some legal experts and advocates said the office’s actions in religious discrimination claims involving hospitals stand on shaky legal ground, saying its interpretation of the law is overly broad and is risky during a public-health emergency.
“HHS has no statutory authority to be enforcing its policy choices about religion and how to handle religion in health care,” said Richard Katskee, legal director at Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a litigation and advocacy group. Luke Goodrich, vice president and senior counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that defends religious freedom, said the agency had authority because most large hospitals get federal funding. He added that protecting religious freedoms was critical even during a pandemic—and can be done safely. “You don’t have to put religion and public health against each other,” Mr. Goodrich said.
The Office for Civil Rights intervened after a complaint was filed June 11 on behalf of the medical student who was doing rotations at Staten Island University Hospital, in New York City. The complaint said the hospital required him to shave his beard so that he could wear a protective mask. The student said shaving would violate his religious commitment to not cut his hair. The civil rights office said it communicated with the student and provided technical assistance to the hospital. The office said the hospital then granted the student an accommodation and let him wear an alternative form of protection called a Powered Air Purifying Respirator that he could wear with a beard.
Christian Preston, a hospital spokesman, said, “When he raised concerns over his religious needs, immediate steps were taken to understand and make an accommodation that adhered with his cultural and spiritual beliefs so he could continue his medical studies, safely.” At no point was the student asked to shave his beard, Mr. Preston said, but he was informed about safety guidelines that state a user must be clean shaved to be appropriately fit tested for an N95 mask. He said the student was reassigned to rotations in non-Covid-19 areas until a powered air-purifying respirator could be provided instead of an N95 mask.
In another complaint, Sidney and Susanna Marcus suffered severe injuries in a car accident on Memorial Day and got treatment at Prince George’s Hospital Center, in Maryland. While Mrs. Marcus’s condition improved, her husband’s condition worsened, and he was put on a ventilator because of the accident. Neither of the Marcuses had Covid-19. Mrs. Marcus asked a priest to visit her husband at the hospital to administer the sacrament of anointing the sick, which has been known as last rites. But the hospital system, University of Maryland Medical System, had implemented a policy banning visitors because of the pandemic, according to a June 9 complaint Mrs. Marcus filed with the office. The priest, who had agreed to wear personal protective equipment, wasn’t allowed in, according to the complaint.
“I didn’t know much about his condition, we couldn’t communicate, and I was very fearful for his condition,” Mrs. Marcus said. “We believe in the sacraments, our souls are united in God, and I needed to know he had access to that.”
The Office for Civil Rights provided technical assistance to the hospital, and HHS officials said the hospital system subsequently agreed to change its policy, allowing clergy to see patients. The system didn’t dispute the details of the complaint. Prince George's Hospital Center, where Sidney and Susanna Marcus were both treated following their accident.
“We have since amended our policy, with all individuals visiting a Covid-19 positive patient provided a form acknowledging the risk, and will allow clergy visits with adherence to safety protocols,” said University of Maryland Medical System spokeswoman Jania Matthews.
Legal experts said the agency’s use of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act as the basis for its authority is unusual. Robert Tuttle, a research professor of law and religion at George Washington University’s Law School, said championing religious rights during a pandemic risked endangering others. “It risks the health and safety of others,” Mr. Tuttle said. “What’s happening under the current administration, and HHS is the poster child, is a shift to religious freedoms no matter who suffers collateral damages from it.”
The Office of Civil Rights also became involved in the spring in disputes over rationing decisions involving ventilators to ensure they weren’t discriminatory. In July, it issued reminders against discrimination to health-care providers that get federal funding, including hospitals and state agencies. The guidance included instructions to ensure minorities didn’t face longer wait times for care and weren’t denied access to intensive care.
The office has taken a number of steps to champion religious rights, including a rule that enables health-care providers to refuse to perform, accommodate, or assist with certain health-care services on religious or moral grounds. A federal judge in Manhattan blocked the rule in November, saying it exceeded the agency’s authority. HHS is appealing. The agency has also been applauded by disability-rights advocates for getting involved in cases involving health providers’ actions during the pandemic.
A complaint filed in May focused on state guidance in Connecticut on hospital policies restricting visitors during the pandemic. The policies allowed only narrow exceptions for people to support individuals with disabilities who received particular services from the state. The complaint said the policy effectively denied support to people with disabilities who couldn’t understand medical decisions.
According to the complaint, one hospital broke the law when it didn’t make an exception to the visitor restrictions for a 73-year old patient with aphasia and severe short-term memory loss. The woman, who is mostly nonverbal, was denied in-person support to help with her communication and comprehension during care.
After the office became involved, the state issued a new order amending the restrictions so that people with disabilities can have in-person support.
Discussion Questions:
Do you think there are occasions when public-health concerns outweigh the importance of religious freedom?
Should the public health action be upheld by evidence? If so, should the action reflect the evidence or should there be a more or less boiler plate response?
What about religious preference; should it be upheld by spiritual polity and tradition? Who deems a particular religion to be significant or legitimate?
Thursday, August 6
Hello! I imagine it is needless to say that I am relieved the hurricane/tropical storm stayed in the Atlantic.
I have been interested in questioning the logic behind what is called the "cancel culture" - which is the popular practice of withdrawing support for (canceling) public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive. This article does a good job addressing it; and, logically follows the problem with boycotting everything means the consumer has no energy to do something politically.
I look forward to talking about this in our discussion groups. The link to the Zoom discussion is here https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
- Dave
Boycotts Can’t Be A Test of Moral Purity
Zephyr Teachout, The Atlantic, 8.3.20
For some people, when they hear about some bad corporate practice, their first reaction is to consider cutting ties to the company. So it is not surprising that each time I discuss the democratic dangers of Facebook, Amazon, or Google, people always bring up personal consumer choice. Instead of policy (antitrust, data rules, outlawing arbitration), the conversation veers quickly into pride or guilt. One woman worries she can’t leave Facebook without leaving her social life. One man sheepishly says he quit Facebook for a few weeks and crept back when he missed his friends. At the heart of this conversation is a thesis: Using a service is an endorsement of its business model. Or more pointedly: If someone is not strong enough to boycott, she lacks standing to object to the behavior of lawmakers and petition them for change.
This belief is wrong, bad strategy, and dangerous for democracy. It is based on a confused idea of our obligations as consumers. This belief does not lead to more boycotts, but radically dampens activism: Guilt gets in the way of protest, and complicated chains of self-justification take the place of simple chains of democratic demand. This consumer model is most problematic when it comes to the biggest monopolies. Most people can’t boycott them, precisely because they are governmental and provide infrastructure services. We don’t ask people to boycott libraries in order to change library rules; we don’t ask people to boycott highways to ask for them to be safer; we don’t demand that you buy only bottled water while protesting water-utility governance.
Of course, a strategic, organized, well-thought-through boycott with political goals can be transformational. And there is nothing wrong with people personally quitting products when they can. However, ethical consumerism has taken too central a role in progressive thinking, and we shouldn’t require people to boycott essential communications infrastructure such as Facebook and Google in order to demand that they be broken up. The railroads were regulated by antimonopoly protesters who depended on the railroads, and the same can be true for the next generation of trust-busters. Boycotts can play a crucial role in political change, but not when they serve only as tests of individual integrity.
Boycotts do have widespread appeal. The Vox columnist Matthew Yglesias has taken a look at why, writing, “Consumer brands are a leverage point for progressive politics because there’s no gerrymandering & marketers care more about young people. Consumer marketing is almost the exact opposite of voting and a younger, more urbanized, and more female demographic carries more weight.”
This logic may lead to a short-term sense of empowerment, but to longer-term disempowerment — the more progressives lean into their consumer power as the key point of leverage, the less they focus on exercising their political power, the less long-term collective power they will amass. In other words, boycotts allow people to import virtuousness into their life without the struggle of organizing and building a coalition.
Today, there are hundreds of boycotts every year, and most do not have any appreciable impact. People lose interest, don’t maintain a public presence around a boycott, and the number of people involved is typically too small to make a market difference. What difference is made typically revolves around “the more modest goal of attracting media attention,” not the loss of income, the University of Pennsylvania professor Maurice Schweitzer says.
The Chick-fil-A boycott, one of the largest in recent memory, came about when the Chick-fil-A CEO made anti-gay marriage comments. Organizers staged kiss-ins, and mayors said Chick-filA was not welcome in their towns. But Chick-fil-A ignored the protests, people forgot the comments after a few years, and little changed. As one commentator put it, “It is hard to stay mad at a ubiquitous and powerful brand.” While, in theory, people did commit to stop eating at Chick-fil-A until it changed its posture on marriage equality, the company outlasted the protest; it still rates a zero on the Human Rights Campaign’s Buyers Guide, and LGBTQ people are not included in its nondiscrimination policy.
Ethical consumerism — and its close relatives corporate accountability and corporate social responsibility — is especially poorly suited to monopolized economies, and a tragic misfit for disciplining companies that play a quasi-governmental role. By accepting big corporations as partners, and not challenging their legitimacy as our rulers, the consumer-boycott model allows for short-term victories that appear to be progressive, while the partner corporation is building sufficient power to become boycott-proof.
If Chick-fil-A was hard to boycott, think about what boycotting Google would mean. First, imagine a one-person boycott, someone angry about, say, Google-enabled job discrimination. He would have to get rid of his Android phone and switch from Gmail. He’d have to stop using Google Search and Google Maps. He’d have to refuse to watch anything on YouTube. He’d have to get rid of Nest. If he owned a business, he’d have to avoid Google ads, which he might rely on to reach customers. He’d have to refuse to use municipal Wi-Fi in cities where Google is behind “free” Wi-Fi. If he had children, he would have to tell them to refuse to use the technology required to interact with their teachers.
And even if he succeeds in doing all these things, Google will not boycott him. If he uses the internet, he will necessarily see Google-served ads, and his responses and nonresponses to those ads will feed into Google’s data bank. Google will still collect information about him when he walks by a LinkNYC kiosk. Google will still collect his tax dollars in subsidies.
Now try imagining an effective organized boycott of Google, large enough to actually dent the company’s profits. There are more than 5 billion Google searches a day. Can we really imagine enough people switching to an alternate search engine or going without asking their question? Google will continue collecting information on those people regardless, and Search is just one part of the Google behemoth. As if that weren’t daunting enough, imagine a sector-based boycott of the data-collection practices of all the big tech companies—Facebook, Google, Amazon—for their shared behaviors.
In 2019, the city of Richmond, California, ended its contract with Vigilant Solutions, a dataanalytics company that does business with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The city of Berkeley, following suit, debated boycotting all companies that provided services to ICE and Customs and Border Protection, including Amazon, because these federal agencies rely on Amazon Web Services. The Berkeley city manager, Dee Williams-Ridley, argued against boycotting Amazon, because it “would have a huge negative impact to the citywide operations.” Amazon helps manage city documents, and hosts housing and mental-health programs, and Amazon servers host many other tech companies that provide services to the city. People unwittingly using the thing they are supposedly boycotting to advertise their boycott can seem funny. But the lack of choice facing all boycotters actually represents a serious narrowing of the window of moral political behavior.
The change in effectiveness can be confusing for people who remember the successful boycotts in the 1980s and ’90s of companies such as Nike, which came under fire for using sweatshops. Companies have reorganized their supply chains in a way that insulates them from liability and protest. Garment manufacturers no longer have direct relationships with big companies, who build systems of deliberate ignorance into their purchasing. According to Professor Richard Locke’s research on Nike, workplace conditions in almost 80 percent of its root suppliers remained either the same or worsened between 2001 and 2005, though the company’s records may appear better on paper. Most important, every part of Nike’s supply chain is monopolized, with just a few major players, so boycotters have nowhere else to go. A serious boycott would involve buying no foreign-manufactured garments, rather than targeting particular companies.
Growing consolidation of power interacts with the rise of social media, leading to more boycotts that are less effective and shorter-lasting. As Tufekci has argued, these actions tend to the ephemeral and episodic, instead of the effective and persistent. The result is a combination of hyperactivity online and decreased power.
There are also strong class and social elements to boycotting something like Facebook. It may not be essential for an upper-middle-class man living in New York, with an existing strong network of friends who appreciate his eccentricities, to use Facebook or Instagram. But a young person looking for work, let alone friendship, might find it hard to check out of all Facebook owned properties, because they are so central to social life, and the web of job connections. The human cost of social isolation is enormous, and while some people may have sturdy offline social networks, many people do not. I met one anti-monopoly activist who guiltily confessed that she stayed on Facebook because she wanted to check on her grandmother’s health.
People feel guilty about not boycotting, and that guilt gets in the way of full-throated political protest. In law, there is a doctrine called “exhaustion of remedies.” It prevents a litigant from seeking a remedy in a new court or jurisdiction until all claims or remedies have been pursued as fully as possible—exhausted—in the original one. In politics, consumer supremacy has led to a kind of exhaustion-of-remedies thinking, through which people adopt a hierarchy of modes of resistance, and feel they must first boycott, and only then ask lawmakers for change. It places consumer obligations over civic ones.
We need to change the current habits of protest in a way that places public, electoral politics at the heart of how we interact with corporate monopolies. If your local pizza parlor starts treating workers badly, sure, boycott it. But when a monopolistic drug company hikes up prices, or a social-media goliath promotes political lies to make more money, the right response is not to beg Google or Facebook for scraps, but to march to Congress and demand that the practices be investigated and the power of these companies be broken up. And if your representative fails to act, don’t boycott her. Replace her.
Zephyr Teachout is an associate professor of law at Fordham Law School. She is the author of Break ’Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom From Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money
I have been interested in questioning the logic behind what is called the "cancel culture" - which is the popular practice of withdrawing support for (canceling) public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive. This article does a good job addressing it; and, logically follows the problem with boycotting everything means the consumer has no energy to do something politically.
I look forward to talking about this in our discussion groups. The link to the Zoom discussion is here https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
- Dave
Boycotts Can’t Be A Test of Moral Purity
Zephyr Teachout, The Atlantic, 8.3.20
For some people, when they hear about some bad corporate practice, their first reaction is to consider cutting ties to the company. So it is not surprising that each time I discuss the democratic dangers of Facebook, Amazon, or Google, people always bring up personal consumer choice. Instead of policy (antitrust, data rules, outlawing arbitration), the conversation veers quickly into pride or guilt. One woman worries she can’t leave Facebook without leaving her social life. One man sheepishly says he quit Facebook for a few weeks and crept back when he missed his friends. At the heart of this conversation is a thesis: Using a service is an endorsement of its business model. Or more pointedly: If someone is not strong enough to boycott, she lacks standing to object to the behavior of lawmakers and petition them for change.
This belief is wrong, bad strategy, and dangerous for democracy. It is based on a confused idea of our obligations as consumers. This belief does not lead to more boycotts, but radically dampens activism: Guilt gets in the way of protest, and complicated chains of self-justification take the place of simple chains of democratic demand. This consumer model is most problematic when it comes to the biggest monopolies. Most people can’t boycott them, precisely because they are governmental and provide infrastructure services. We don’t ask people to boycott libraries in order to change library rules; we don’t ask people to boycott highways to ask for them to be safer; we don’t demand that you buy only bottled water while protesting water-utility governance.
Of course, a strategic, organized, well-thought-through boycott with political goals can be transformational. And there is nothing wrong with people personally quitting products when they can. However, ethical consumerism has taken too central a role in progressive thinking, and we shouldn’t require people to boycott essential communications infrastructure such as Facebook and Google in order to demand that they be broken up. The railroads were regulated by antimonopoly protesters who depended on the railroads, and the same can be true for the next generation of trust-busters. Boycotts can play a crucial role in political change, but not when they serve only as tests of individual integrity.
Boycotts do have widespread appeal. The Vox columnist Matthew Yglesias has taken a look at why, writing, “Consumer brands are a leverage point for progressive politics because there’s no gerrymandering & marketers care more about young people. Consumer marketing is almost the exact opposite of voting and a younger, more urbanized, and more female demographic carries more weight.”
This logic may lead to a short-term sense of empowerment, but to longer-term disempowerment — the more progressives lean into their consumer power as the key point of leverage, the less they focus on exercising their political power, the less long-term collective power they will amass. In other words, boycotts allow people to import virtuousness into their life without the struggle of organizing and building a coalition.
Today, there are hundreds of boycotts every year, and most do not have any appreciable impact. People lose interest, don’t maintain a public presence around a boycott, and the number of people involved is typically too small to make a market difference. What difference is made typically revolves around “the more modest goal of attracting media attention,” not the loss of income, the University of Pennsylvania professor Maurice Schweitzer says.
The Chick-fil-A boycott, one of the largest in recent memory, came about when the Chick-fil-A CEO made anti-gay marriage comments. Organizers staged kiss-ins, and mayors said Chick-filA was not welcome in their towns. But Chick-fil-A ignored the protests, people forgot the comments after a few years, and little changed. As one commentator put it, “It is hard to stay mad at a ubiquitous and powerful brand.” While, in theory, people did commit to stop eating at Chick-fil-A until it changed its posture on marriage equality, the company outlasted the protest; it still rates a zero on the Human Rights Campaign’s Buyers Guide, and LGBTQ people are not included in its nondiscrimination policy.
Ethical consumerism — and its close relatives corporate accountability and corporate social responsibility — is especially poorly suited to monopolized economies, and a tragic misfit for disciplining companies that play a quasi-governmental role. By accepting big corporations as partners, and not challenging their legitimacy as our rulers, the consumer-boycott model allows for short-term victories that appear to be progressive, while the partner corporation is building sufficient power to become boycott-proof.
If Chick-fil-A was hard to boycott, think about what boycotting Google would mean. First, imagine a one-person boycott, someone angry about, say, Google-enabled job discrimination. He would have to get rid of his Android phone and switch from Gmail. He’d have to stop using Google Search and Google Maps. He’d have to refuse to watch anything on YouTube. He’d have to get rid of Nest. If he owned a business, he’d have to avoid Google ads, which he might rely on to reach customers. He’d have to refuse to use municipal Wi-Fi in cities where Google is behind “free” Wi-Fi. If he had children, he would have to tell them to refuse to use the technology required to interact with their teachers.
And even if he succeeds in doing all these things, Google will not boycott him. If he uses the internet, he will necessarily see Google-served ads, and his responses and nonresponses to those ads will feed into Google’s data bank. Google will still collect information about him when he walks by a LinkNYC kiosk. Google will still collect his tax dollars in subsidies.
Now try imagining an effective organized boycott of Google, large enough to actually dent the company’s profits. There are more than 5 billion Google searches a day. Can we really imagine enough people switching to an alternate search engine or going without asking their question? Google will continue collecting information on those people regardless, and Search is just one part of the Google behemoth. As if that weren’t daunting enough, imagine a sector-based boycott of the data-collection practices of all the big tech companies—Facebook, Google, Amazon—for their shared behaviors.
In 2019, the city of Richmond, California, ended its contract with Vigilant Solutions, a dataanalytics company that does business with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The city of Berkeley, following suit, debated boycotting all companies that provided services to ICE and Customs and Border Protection, including Amazon, because these federal agencies rely on Amazon Web Services. The Berkeley city manager, Dee Williams-Ridley, argued against boycotting Amazon, because it “would have a huge negative impact to the citywide operations.” Amazon helps manage city documents, and hosts housing and mental-health programs, and Amazon servers host many other tech companies that provide services to the city. People unwittingly using the thing they are supposedly boycotting to advertise their boycott can seem funny. But the lack of choice facing all boycotters actually represents a serious narrowing of the window of moral political behavior.
The change in effectiveness can be confusing for people who remember the successful boycotts in the 1980s and ’90s of companies such as Nike, which came under fire for using sweatshops. Companies have reorganized their supply chains in a way that insulates them from liability and protest. Garment manufacturers no longer have direct relationships with big companies, who build systems of deliberate ignorance into their purchasing. According to Professor Richard Locke’s research on Nike, workplace conditions in almost 80 percent of its root suppliers remained either the same or worsened between 2001 and 2005, though the company’s records may appear better on paper. Most important, every part of Nike’s supply chain is monopolized, with just a few major players, so boycotters have nowhere else to go. A serious boycott would involve buying no foreign-manufactured garments, rather than targeting particular companies.
Growing consolidation of power interacts with the rise of social media, leading to more boycotts that are less effective and shorter-lasting. As Tufekci has argued, these actions tend to the ephemeral and episodic, instead of the effective and persistent. The result is a combination of hyperactivity online and decreased power.
There are also strong class and social elements to boycotting something like Facebook. It may not be essential for an upper-middle-class man living in New York, with an existing strong network of friends who appreciate his eccentricities, to use Facebook or Instagram. But a young person looking for work, let alone friendship, might find it hard to check out of all Facebook owned properties, because they are so central to social life, and the web of job connections. The human cost of social isolation is enormous, and while some people may have sturdy offline social networks, many people do not. I met one anti-monopoly activist who guiltily confessed that she stayed on Facebook because she wanted to check on her grandmother’s health.
People feel guilty about not boycotting, and that guilt gets in the way of full-throated political protest. In law, there is a doctrine called “exhaustion of remedies.” It prevents a litigant from seeking a remedy in a new court or jurisdiction until all claims or remedies have been pursued as fully as possible—exhausted—in the original one. In politics, consumer supremacy has led to a kind of exhaustion-of-remedies thinking, through which people adopt a hierarchy of modes of resistance, and feel they must first boycott, and only then ask lawmakers for change. It places consumer obligations over civic ones.
We need to change the current habits of protest in a way that places public, electoral politics at the heart of how we interact with corporate monopolies. If your local pizza parlor starts treating workers badly, sure, boycott it. But when a monopolistic drug company hikes up prices, or a social-media goliath promotes political lies to make more money, the right response is not to beg Google or Facebook for scraps, but to march to Congress and demand that the practices be investigated and the power of these companies be broken up. And if your representative fails to act, don’t boycott her. Replace her.
Zephyr Teachout is an associate professor of law at Fordham Law School. She is the author of Break ’Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom From Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money
Thursday, July 30
We are going to take on a rather heavy topic this week - capital punishment. There was an opinion piece in the New York Times, by Jeffrey Rosen, Deputy US Attorney General, outlining his views on justice being served through carrying out the death penalty. The Episcopal Church, since 1958, has stood against capital punishment and reaffirmed that theological belief exactly one year ago. Deputy AG Rosen's piece and the ECUSA statement on Federal executions are attached.
There are more than just these two opinions about the matter but I found them to be rather opposed to each other and thus a good conversation starter.
Here is the link https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
It is a troubling topic in a troubling time; may God's peace be with you, your family, and our nation.
- Dave
Justice is Being Done
Jeffrey A. Rosen, Deputy Attorney General New York Times, July 27, 2020
A top Justice Department official says for many Americans the death penalty is a difficult issue on moral, religious and policy grounds. But as a legal issue, it is straightforward. This month, for the first time in 17 years, the United States resumed carrying out death sentences for federal crimes. On July 14, Daniel Lewis Lee was executed for the 1996 murder of a family to fund a white-supremacist organization. On July 16, Wesley Purkey was executed for the 1998 murder of a teenage girl. The next day, Dustin Honken was executed for five murders committed in 1993. The death penalty is a difficult issue for many Americans on moral, religious and policy grounds. But as a legal issue, it is straightforward. The United States Constitution expressly contemplates “capital” crimes, and Congress has authorized the death penalty for serious federal offenses since President George Washington signed the Crimes Act of 1790. The American people have repeatedly ratified that decision, including through the Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994 signed by President Bill Clinton, the federal execution of Timothy McVeigh under President George W. Bush and the decision by President Barack Obama’s Justice Department to seek the death penalty against the Boston Marathon bomber and Dylann Roof. The recent executions reflect that consensus, as the Justice Department has an obligation to implement the law. The decision to seek the death penalty against Mr. Lee was made by Attorney General Janet Reno (who said she personally opposed the death penalty but was bound by the law) and reaffirmed by then-Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder. Mr. Purkey was prosecuted during the George W. Bush administration, and his conviction and sentence were vigorously defended throughout the Obama administration. The former judge who imposed the death sentence on Mr. Honken, Mark Bennett, said that while he generally opposed the death penalty, he would not lose any sleep over Mr. Honken’s execution. In a New York Times op-ed published on July 17, two of Mr. Lee’s lawyers criticized the execution of their client, which they contend was carried out in a “shameful rush.” That objection overlooks that Mr. Lee was sentenced more than 20 years ago, and his appeals and other permissible challenges failed, up to and including the day of his execution. Mr. Lee’s lawyers seem to endorse a system of endless delays that prevent a death sentence from ever becoming real. But his execution date was announced almost a year ago, and was initially set for last December. After a series of delays, in the final minutes before the execution was to occur, Mr. Lee’s lawyers claimed the execution could not proceed because Mr. Lee still had time to seek further review of an appellate court decision six weeks earlier lifting a prior stay of execution. The Justice Department decided to pause the execution for several hours while the appellate court considered and promptly rejected Mr. Lee’s request. That cautious step, taken to ensure undoubted compliance with court orders, is irreconcilable with the suggestion that the department “rushed” the execution or disregarded any law. Mr. Lee’s lawyers also disregarded the cost to victims’ families of continued delay. Although they note that some members of Mr. Lee’s victims’ families opposed his execution, others did not. Mr. Lee’s lawyers and other death penalty opponents are entitled to disagree with that sentiment. But if the United States is going to allow capital punishment, a white-supremacist triple murderer would seem the textbook example of a justified case. And if death sentences are going to be imposed, they cannot just be hypothetical; they eventually have to be carried out, or the punishment will lose its deterrent and retributive effects. Rather than forthrightly opposing the death penalty and attempting to change the law through democratic means, however, Mr. Lee’s lawyers and others have chosen the legal and public-relations equivalent of guerrilla war. They sought to obstruct by any means the administration of sentences that Congress permitted, juries supported and the Supreme Court approved. And when those tactics failed, they accused the Justice Department of “a grave threat to the rule of law,” even though it operated entirely within the law enacted by Congress and approved by the Supreme Court. The American people can decide for themselves which aspects of that process should be considered “shameful.”
Jeffrey A. Rosen is the deputy attorney general.
Episcopal Church Statement on Federal Executions July 26, 2019
“Jesus told us that the greatest gift we could give is to lay down our own lives for another. Conversely, the taking of another life must be viewed as the greatest sacrilege.” The Most Reverend Edmond L. Browning, XXIV Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church “If it is not about love, it is not about God” The Most Reverend Michael B. Curry, XXVII and Current Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church On July 25th [2019], the Attorney General announced the Trump Administration’s intention to begin carrying out federal executions for the first time since 2003. Since 1958, The Episcopal Church has taught that the sacredness of life requires that no individual or group of individuals have the right to unnecessarily take the life of another person. The taking of a human life can be necessary in self-defense and war, but as retribution for even the most heinous crimes it is not justified. In ages past, prior to the development of modern prison systems, execution was a method to protect the community from future crimes. St. Paul recognized the reality of this necessity to use force to restrain greater evil. Even in this scenario, execution was not the right or prerogative of the state, but a necessity for communal safety that no longer exists. Even if our justice system never wrongly convicted, condemned, and killed an innocent person, even if our justice system was equitable in sentencing, capital punishment would not be justified. The death penalty is not theologically justifiable, in part because it is not necessary for the protection of innocent people and the state cannot morally justify killing for the sake of vengeance. In the Old Testament, animal and human sacrifice was used to reestablish the moral balance that sin destroyed by making an offering of those animals and people to God. Christ’s death atoned for all human sin, past, present, and future, thus reestablishing moral balance for all time. The premeditated and unnecessary killing of a person is unchristian and beyond the legitimate powers of the state. Therefore, The Episcopal Church condemns the decision by the Administration to execute prisoners. We call on the President to reverse this decision and utilize his Constitutional power to commute the sentences of all those condemned to death to life in prison without parole.
There are more than just these two opinions about the matter but I found them to be rather opposed to each other and thus a good conversation starter.
Here is the link https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
It is a troubling topic in a troubling time; may God's peace be with you, your family, and our nation.
- Dave
Justice is Being Done
Jeffrey A. Rosen, Deputy Attorney General New York Times, July 27, 2020
A top Justice Department official says for many Americans the death penalty is a difficult issue on moral, religious and policy grounds. But as a legal issue, it is straightforward. This month, for the first time in 17 years, the United States resumed carrying out death sentences for federal crimes. On July 14, Daniel Lewis Lee was executed for the 1996 murder of a family to fund a white-supremacist organization. On July 16, Wesley Purkey was executed for the 1998 murder of a teenage girl. The next day, Dustin Honken was executed for five murders committed in 1993. The death penalty is a difficult issue for many Americans on moral, religious and policy grounds. But as a legal issue, it is straightforward. The United States Constitution expressly contemplates “capital” crimes, and Congress has authorized the death penalty for serious federal offenses since President George Washington signed the Crimes Act of 1790. The American people have repeatedly ratified that decision, including through the Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994 signed by President Bill Clinton, the federal execution of Timothy McVeigh under President George W. Bush and the decision by President Barack Obama’s Justice Department to seek the death penalty against the Boston Marathon bomber and Dylann Roof. The recent executions reflect that consensus, as the Justice Department has an obligation to implement the law. The decision to seek the death penalty against Mr. Lee was made by Attorney General Janet Reno (who said she personally opposed the death penalty but was bound by the law) and reaffirmed by then-Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder. Mr. Purkey was prosecuted during the George W. Bush administration, and his conviction and sentence were vigorously defended throughout the Obama administration. The former judge who imposed the death sentence on Mr. Honken, Mark Bennett, said that while he generally opposed the death penalty, he would not lose any sleep over Mr. Honken’s execution. In a New York Times op-ed published on July 17, two of Mr. Lee’s lawyers criticized the execution of their client, which they contend was carried out in a “shameful rush.” That objection overlooks that Mr. Lee was sentenced more than 20 years ago, and his appeals and other permissible challenges failed, up to and including the day of his execution. Mr. Lee’s lawyers seem to endorse a system of endless delays that prevent a death sentence from ever becoming real. But his execution date was announced almost a year ago, and was initially set for last December. After a series of delays, in the final minutes before the execution was to occur, Mr. Lee’s lawyers claimed the execution could not proceed because Mr. Lee still had time to seek further review of an appellate court decision six weeks earlier lifting a prior stay of execution. The Justice Department decided to pause the execution for several hours while the appellate court considered and promptly rejected Mr. Lee’s request. That cautious step, taken to ensure undoubted compliance with court orders, is irreconcilable with the suggestion that the department “rushed” the execution or disregarded any law. Mr. Lee’s lawyers also disregarded the cost to victims’ families of continued delay. Although they note that some members of Mr. Lee’s victims’ families opposed his execution, others did not. Mr. Lee’s lawyers and other death penalty opponents are entitled to disagree with that sentiment. But if the United States is going to allow capital punishment, a white-supremacist triple murderer would seem the textbook example of a justified case. And if death sentences are going to be imposed, they cannot just be hypothetical; they eventually have to be carried out, or the punishment will lose its deterrent and retributive effects. Rather than forthrightly opposing the death penalty and attempting to change the law through democratic means, however, Mr. Lee’s lawyers and others have chosen the legal and public-relations equivalent of guerrilla war. They sought to obstruct by any means the administration of sentences that Congress permitted, juries supported and the Supreme Court approved. And when those tactics failed, they accused the Justice Department of “a grave threat to the rule of law,” even though it operated entirely within the law enacted by Congress and approved by the Supreme Court. The American people can decide for themselves which aspects of that process should be considered “shameful.”
Jeffrey A. Rosen is the deputy attorney general.
Episcopal Church Statement on Federal Executions July 26, 2019
“Jesus told us that the greatest gift we could give is to lay down our own lives for another. Conversely, the taking of another life must be viewed as the greatest sacrilege.” The Most Reverend Edmond L. Browning, XXIV Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church “If it is not about love, it is not about God” The Most Reverend Michael B. Curry, XXVII and Current Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church On July 25th [2019], the Attorney General announced the Trump Administration’s intention to begin carrying out federal executions for the first time since 2003. Since 1958, The Episcopal Church has taught that the sacredness of life requires that no individual or group of individuals have the right to unnecessarily take the life of another person. The taking of a human life can be necessary in self-defense and war, but as retribution for even the most heinous crimes it is not justified. In ages past, prior to the development of modern prison systems, execution was a method to protect the community from future crimes. St. Paul recognized the reality of this necessity to use force to restrain greater evil. Even in this scenario, execution was not the right or prerogative of the state, but a necessity for communal safety that no longer exists. Even if our justice system never wrongly convicted, condemned, and killed an innocent person, even if our justice system was equitable in sentencing, capital punishment would not be justified. The death penalty is not theologically justifiable, in part because it is not necessary for the protection of innocent people and the state cannot morally justify killing for the sake of vengeance. In the Old Testament, animal and human sacrifice was used to reestablish the moral balance that sin destroyed by making an offering of those animals and people to God. Christ’s death atoned for all human sin, past, present, and future, thus reestablishing moral balance for all time. The premeditated and unnecessary killing of a person is unchristian and beyond the legitimate powers of the state. Therefore, The Episcopal Church condemns the decision by the Administration to execute prisoners. We call on the President to reverse this decision and utilize his Constitutional power to commute the sentences of all those condemned to death to life in prison without parole.
Thursday, July 23
Hello! If you have ever wanted to read an article that blended spiritual practices with neuroscience, here it is! The article is a book review in Christianity Today that I think you may find interesting. The author of the article asks Why do some people benefit from spiritual disciplines while others seem to flounder? Why do some people embrace them wholeheartedly while others just shrug them off? And why, after these disciplines help us grow for a time, does the fruit sometimes begin to fade? Believe it or not, neuroscience may have something to say about it. I am looking forward to the discussion.
Here is the Zoom link https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
God's peace to you,
- Dave
Stuck in a Spiritual Rut? Neuroscience Might Have the Answer.
Geoff Holsclaw, Christianity Today, book review. July 17, 2020
Read your Bible. Pray. Go to church—twice on Sundays. And don’t sin. Be sure not to sin. This was the extent of my spiritual formation.
Of course, no one talked about spiritual formation when I was growing up. Reading the Bible, fasting, and prayer were part of my devotions, not part of a package of historic “spiritual disciplines.” These were just the things we did to grow our faith—to become holy, as God is holy. And the simplicity of these activities served me well. Until—while in college—they didn’t.
That’s when I encountered various devotional books that led me down God’s ancient paths of transformation. As for so many, discovering this wider tradition of spiritual disciplines—which included practices like meditation, fasting, and Sabbath rest—was a revelation and a relief. I no longer had to cut my own path with God, each day, alone. Now an ancient way stretched before me that I could walk with others.
Jim Wilder’s new book, Renovated: God, Dallas Willard and the Church That Transforms, integrates these ancient pathways with findings from brain science about our neural pathways. Wilder shows how contemporary neuroscience transforms our understanding of spiritual formation. After a couple of years spent zealously practicing spiritual disciplines, two realizations emerged. First, it seemed many of my friends either resisted them or could not engage with them. They were not experiencing transformation like I had. Second, these practices didn’t fix everything in my own life. I still struggled with sin.
I would often go through the motions. And I fell into a new legalism just as my spiritual maturity plateaued. I wondered why my growth had stalled out. I soon found that other church leaders were wondering the same things. Why do some people benefit from spiritual disciplines while others seem to flounder? Why do some people embrace them wholeheartedly while others just shrug them off? And why, after these disciplines help us grow for a time, does the fruit sometimes begin to fade?
Renovated speaks to these very questions. Wilder’s book is for those feeling stuck in a spiritual-formation rut, for those longing to see others grow spiritually, and for those interested in how brain science transforms our understanding of spiritual growth.
Wilder’s book recommends a shift from thinking about God to thinking with God. The author, leaning on what we know about the brain, argues that thinking about God is too slow of a mental process to actively transform our lives. He calls it a “slow-track” mental process that can only focus on one thing at a time. Thoughts that develop on this slower track appear in our minds too late to inform actions in real time.
This slow-track process is great when there is time to pause and reflect on complex problems. It’s less helpful, however, amid the stress, fear, and disappointment of everyday life. As Wilder observes, our slow-track thinking focuses “our attention just in time to see our sinful reactions,” but not in time to follow Jesus at the speed of life. A better alternative, Wilder argues, is thinking with God, which utilizes “fast-track” mental processes that can focus on (and react to) multiple things at once.
Have you ever reacted to a dangerous situation without thinking? Have you ever responded to someone in a way you regret? This is your fast-track brain at work. Wilder explains that our fast-track brain “produces a reaction to our circumstances before we have a chance to consider how we would rather react.” A fast-track mind trained according to God’s will is able to think with God in the midst of real-time interactions. Thinking with God is like how a sports team wordlessly works together to achieve its goal. Or how a jazz band spontaneously flows together. When a team or a band practices together—stopping and starting over again until everything is flowing smoothly—this is like thinking about God (slow-track). The game or the performance is like thinking with God (fast-track).
Another shift Wilder describes is from a form of discipleship that goes from me to we. From our first cries to our final breaths, the necessity of being attached to someone—first to our parents and then to a larger group—means that my sense of “me” is always built upon an established sense of “we.” Our semi-automatic reactions to life are marked indelibly by the people we spend the most time with, the group we identify with. At the most basic level of our brains, we become like the ones we love.
Growing up, we all receive a fast-track pattern (or a “program file,” as Wilder calls it) that tells us how “my people” act in a given situation. And because this program file is buried in our fast-track brain, it is incredibly hard to override when we are tired, stressed, afraid, or angry. Because of this, Wilder argues that true transformation comes through changing our understanding of who “my people” are and how they act. As he writes, transforming our character “depends on becoming attached by love, joy, and peace to a new people.” And this is why discipleship is fundamentally a we, rather than me, activity.
By ourselves, it is nearly impossible to change the assumptions of our fast-track brain and the actions that flow out of them. Instead, our character changes in and through community as a process of trial and error, which involves learning how the people of God act in various situations. We first see how more mature disciples behave in the crucibles of everyday life. Then we imitate their reactions as best we can. And eventually we spontaneously act in a way that witnesses to our identification with a new people—the people of God.
The goal of all spiritual formation is being conformed to the image of Christ (Rom. 8:29), who was fully human as well as fully divine. So it only makes sense that a deep understanding of our humanity—including our brains—should inform that process. Renovated is a gift to the church, to all who long to understand the impact of neuroscience on spiritual maturity, and to all who were blessed by the work of Dallas Willard.
Geoff Holsclaw is a pastor at Vineyard North church in Grand Rapids, Michigan and an affiliate professor of theology at Northern Seminary. He and his wife Cyd are co-authors of Does God Really Like Me?: Discovering the God Who Wants to Be With Us (InterVarsity Press).
Here is the Zoom link https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
God's peace to you,
- Dave
Stuck in a Spiritual Rut? Neuroscience Might Have the Answer.
Geoff Holsclaw, Christianity Today, book review. July 17, 2020
Read your Bible. Pray. Go to church—twice on Sundays. And don’t sin. Be sure not to sin. This was the extent of my spiritual formation.
Of course, no one talked about spiritual formation when I was growing up. Reading the Bible, fasting, and prayer were part of my devotions, not part of a package of historic “spiritual disciplines.” These were just the things we did to grow our faith—to become holy, as God is holy. And the simplicity of these activities served me well. Until—while in college—they didn’t.
That’s when I encountered various devotional books that led me down God’s ancient paths of transformation. As for so many, discovering this wider tradition of spiritual disciplines—which included practices like meditation, fasting, and Sabbath rest—was a revelation and a relief. I no longer had to cut my own path with God, each day, alone. Now an ancient way stretched before me that I could walk with others.
Jim Wilder’s new book, Renovated: God, Dallas Willard and the Church That Transforms, integrates these ancient pathways with findings from brain science about our neural pathways. Wilder shows how contemporary neuroscience transforms our understanding of spiritual formation. After a couple of years spent zealously practicing spiritual disciplines, two realizations emerged. First, it seemed many of my friends either resisted them or could not engage with them. They were not experiencing transformation like I had. Second, these practices didn’t fix everything in my own life. I still struggled with sin.
I would often go through the motions. And I fell into a new legalism just as my spiritual maturity plateaued. I wondered why my growth had stalled out. I soon found that other church leaders were wondering the same things. Why do some people benefit from spiritual disciplines while others seem to flounder? Why do some people embrace them wholeheartedly while others just shrug them off? And why, after these disciplines help us grow for a time, does the fruit sometimes begin to fade?
Renovated speaks to these very questions. Wilder’s book is for those feeling stuck in a spiritual-formation rut, for those longing to see others grow spiritually, and for those interested in how brain science transforms our understanding of spiritual growth.
Wilder’s book recommends a shift from thinking about God to thinking with God. The author, leaning on what we know about the brain, argues that thinking about God is too slow of a mental process to actively transform our lives. He calls it a “slow-track” mental process that can only focus on one thing at a time. Thoughts that develop on this slower track appear in our minds too late to inform actions in real time.
This slow-track process is great when there is time to pause and reflect on complex problems. It’s less helpful, however, amid the stress, fear, and disappointment of everyday life. As Wilder observes, our slow-track thinking focuses “our attention just in time to see our sinful reactions,” but not in time to follow Jesus at the speed of life. A better alternative, Wilder argues, is thinking with God, which utilizes “fast-track” mental processes that can focus on (and react to) multiple things at once.
Have you ever reacted to a dangerous situation without thinking? Have you ever responded to someone in a way you regret? This is your fast-track brain at work. Wilder explains that our fast-track brain “produces a reaction to our circumstances before we have a chance to consider how we would rather react.” A fast-track mind trained according to God’s will is able to think with God in the midst of real-time interactions. Thinking with God is like how a sports team wordlessly works together to achieve its goal. Or how a jazz band spontaneously flows together. When a team or a band practices together—stopping and starting over again until everything is flowing smoothly—this is like thinking about God (slow-track). The game or the performance is like thinking with God (fast-track).
Another shift Wilder describes is from a form of discipleship that goes from me to we. From our first cries to our final breaths, the necessity of being attached to someone—first to our parents and then to a larger group—means that my sense of “me” is always built upon an established sense of “we.” Our semi-automatic reactions to life are marked indelibly by the people we spend the most time with, the group we identify with. At the most basic level of our brains, we become like the ones we love.
Growing up, we all receive a fast-track pattern (or a “program file,” as Wilder calls it) that tells us how “my people” act in a given situation. And because this program file is buried in our fast-track brain, it is incredibly hard to override when we are tired, stressed, afraid, or angry. Because of this, Wilder argues that true transformation comes through changing our understanding of who “my people” are and how they act. As he writes, transforming our character “depends on becoming attached by love, joy, and peace to a new people.” And this is why discipleship is fundamentally a we, rather than me, activity.
By ourselves, it is nearly impossible to change the assumptions of our fast-track brain and the actions that flow out of them. Instead, our character changes in and through community as a process of trial and error, which involves learning how the people of God act in various situations. We first see how more mature disciples behave in the crucibles of everyday life. Then we imitate their reactions as best we can. And eventually we spontaneously act in a way that witnesses to our identification with a new people—the people of God.
The goal of all spiritual formation is being conformed to the image of Christ (Rom. 8:29), who was fully human as well as fully divine. So it only makes sense that a deep understanding of our humanity—including our brains—should inform that process. Renovated is a gift to the church, to all who long to understand the impact of neuroscience on spiritual maturity, and to all who were blessed by the work of Dallas Willard.
Geoff Holsclaw is a pastor at Vineyard North church in Grand Rapids, Michigan and an affiliate professor of theology at Northern Seminary. He and his wife Cyd are co-authors of Does God Really Like Me?: Discovering the God Who Wants to Be With Us (InterVarsity Press).
Thursday, July 16
This week our reading comes from the LA Times. It is a good publication and has a California vibe to it - they cover in depth stories about ecology, technology and entertainment. So, get some guacamole and chips and take a read.
I don't quite understand how limiting posts on social media sites actually encourages free speech, but at least we can have a good conversation about it. That being said, I am encouraged by the actions YouTube has taken to remove incendiary speech from their site. As a church, we publish our services on YouTube and not Facebook. I am disappointed with FB for many reasons, in particular their laissez faire approach to how their site has been used for bullying and misinformation. Am I concerned about the slippery slope and that someday YouTube will remove my channel because they want to stop all references to God? No, but, that may be a part of the discussion too.
God's peace to you, to our cities, and our nation,
- Dave
Kicking Racists Off Social Media Protects Free Speech
Los Angeles Times, Mary McNamara July 7, 2020
For years, people have claimed that the taming of the Internet was nigh. Whether cause for lamentation or celebration, the Wild West of content that stretched, unhampered by natural boundaries of river, mountain or sea, would be increasingly carved up and tied down by capitalism, privacy concerns, and technological reality.
Soon the gold rush of freedom, of instant fame and fortune, would be over — co-opted by corporations, governmental regulation and way too many cosmetic lines.
But not until recently did we consider the basic metaphorical issue. In the last few months, indeed the last few days, the internet has been forced to acknowledge what that “Wild West” label really means: a mythology of individualism, iconoclasm and opportunity that almost always veils — and often encourages — racism, bigotry, deception and abuse.
For many who lived through it, there was nothing romantic about the “taming” of the American West, with its obliteration and “relocation” of Native Americans, its spread of white Christian authority, its reliance on immigrants, including Black Southerners, fleeing oppression only to be met with similar bigotry. The Civil War was fought, in part, to keep Western states from becoming slave states; even so the beauty and possibilities of the “new” land were regularly blighted by the same systems that marred the old. And so it has been with the internet, as a flurry of corrective actions have shown.
In the last week alone:
Individually, each action could be construed as an inevitable, and even in some cases conservative, response to the Black Lives Matter movement which, after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, sent millions protesting across every state of the union and around the world.
Indeed, the most shocking part of the announcement that professional racists like Duke and Spencer were being kicked off YouTube was the revelation that they were still on YouTube — the platform had vowed to ban white supremacists and practitioners of hate speech last June.
But taken as a pattern, it seems the barons of the internet are finally acknowledging that they do not exist in an alternate universe, outside standard rules and regulations.
In many ways, Shane Dawson’s removal and ban may turn out to be the biggest news, with a much broader impact on the YouTube and influencer communities and their young audiences. As Dawson said in his apology, his racism was even more toxic because it was not couched in white supremacy but in humor and drama aimed at young people looking for an alternative to legacy media. Dawson’s use of blackface and racist humor also was, by his own admission, too frequent to be considered “a mistake,” especially to a world grown weary of similar apologies.
And he is not the only one being re-evaluated through the lens of current events. David Dobrik, Liza Koshy and other YouTubers have also recently apologized for racist humor or insensitivity.
Social media has, for many, become a replacement for traditional media, news and entertainment, in part because platforms like Twitter were seen as democratic; accessible by all and gate-kept by none, they were the ultimate expression of free speech.
Indeed, the protests over George Floyd’s death might not have expanded so widely if not for social media, which allowed the video of his terrible final minutes to circulate to millions. Social media has become a very effective tool of social policing, especially of the police. It’s our smartphones that give citizens the capability of documenting everything from Costco Karen to police firing tear gas at clearly peaceful protesters. It’s social media that allows those videos to go viral.
But as the Mueller report revealed, the lack of even basic gate-keeping can backfire and cause serious personal and societal damage. Whatever you believe about the president’s involvement, there is incontrovertible evidence that Russian operatives used Facebook and Twitter in an attempt to manipulate the 2016 election.
Last month, Twitter, bowing to pressure over the spread of misinformation and hate speech, began adding labels to tweets it considered inaccurate or particularly incendiary, including several issued by the president. In response, many Trump supporters are turning to a new platform, Parler, which has no such labels.
Facebook has refused to initiate any similar labels, though it does have a 27-page “community standards” guideline that prohibits the use of hate speech, incitement to violence and the spread of misinformation (although staff members recently protested CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s seeming refusal to apply these to President Trump).
In response to the advertising boycott, the site says many accounts breaking that policy have already been shut down. Zuckerberg has said he will meet with Stop Hate for Profit leaders, but that his opposition to tightening restrictions remains: The advertisers will be back, he has said, and the site will not change because it is not Facebook’s business to fact-check or police its patrons.
It is true that under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, made law 25 years ago, no social media platforms can be held liable for any statements made on the platform, or any subsequent actions taken because of those statements. But the law also allows those platforms to institute their own set of rules.
Social media platforms are all businesses, owned and operated by people who often make quite a bit of money doing so. “Freedom” is something these companies sell; free speech is a guaranteed constitutional right, but Facebook, like Costco, is private property — you can be told to take your speech elsewhere at any time.
And slowly, finally, that is what is beginning to happen. Kicking a few people off YouTube is not going to end racism any more than toppling a few statues will. But re-examining this country’s mythologies, around the Founding Fathers, the Confederacy or the “settling of the West” just might — and applying universal social standards to the social media posts and videos that make many people a great deal of money certainly will.
Free speech only works if everyone is actually free.
Mary McNamara is a culture columnist and critic for the Los Angeles Times. Previously she was assistant managing editor for arts and entertainment following a 12-year stint as television critic and senior culture editor. A Pulitzer Prize winner in 2015 and finalist for criticism in 2013 and 2014, she has won various awards for criticism and feature writing. She is the author of the Hollywood mysteries “Oscar Season” and “The Starlet.” She lives in La Crescenta with her husband, three children and two dogs.
I don't quite understand how limiting posts on social media sites actually encourages free speech, but at least we can have a good conversation about it. That being said, I am encouraged by the actions YouTube has taken to remove incendiary speech from their site. As a church, we publish our services on YouTube and not Facebook. I am disappointed with FB for many reasons, in particular their laissez faire approach to how their site has been used for bullying and misinformation. Am I concerned about the slippery slope and that someday YouTube will remove my channel because they want to stop all references to God? No, but, that may be a part of the discussion too.
God's peace to you, to our cities, and our nation,
- Dave
Kicking Racists Off Social Media Protects Free Speech
Los Angeles Times, Mary McNamara July 7, 2020
For years, people have claimed that the taming of the Internet was nigh. Whether cause for lamentation or celebration, the Wild West of content that stretched, unhampered by natural boundaries of river, mountain or sea, would be increasingly carved up and tied down by capitalism, privacy concerns, and technological reality.
Soon the gold rush of freedom, of instant fame and fortune, would be over — co-opted by corporations, governmental regulation and way too many cosmetic lines.
But not until recently did we consider the basic metaphorical issue. In the last few months, indeed the last few days, the internet has been forced to acknowledge what that “Wild West” label really means: a mythology of individualism, iconoclasm and opportunity that almost always veils — and often encourages — racism, bigotry, deception and abuse.
For many who lived through it, there was nothing romantic about the “taming” of the American West, with its obliteration and “relocation” of Native Americans, its spread of white Christian authority, its reliance on immigrants, including Black Southerners, fleeing oppression only to be met with similar bigotry. The Civil War was fought, in part, to keep Western states from becoming slave states; even so the beauty and possibilities of the “new” land were regularly blighted by the same systems that marred the old. And so it has been with the internet, as a flurry of corrective actions have shown.
In the last week alone:
- The Google-owned platform YouTube finally banned six white supremacist channels, including those belonging to former KKK leader David Duke and Richard Spencer, and demonetized longtime platform star Shane Dawson after he acknowledged that he had often used blackface, racist humor and inappropriate commentary.
- Reddit, which is owned by Condé Nast’s parent company, Advance Publications, banned thousands of communities that violated the company’s hate speech policies, including “The Donald,” a sub-reddit devoted to boosting support for President Trump through a panoply of racism, sexism, manipulated news and conspiracy theories.
- More than 500 companies, including Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Hershey, Adidas, Clorox and Ford, pulled their advertising from Facebook and Instagram as part of the Stop Hate for Profit initiative, demanding that the platforms tighten restrictions on misinformation and bigotry.
Individually, each action could be construed as an inevitable, and even in some cases conservative, response to the Black Lives Matter movement which, after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, sent millions protesting across every state of the union and around the world.
Indeed, the most shocking part of the announcement that professional racists like Duke and Spencer were being kicked off YouTube was the revelation that they were still on YouTube — the platform had vowed to ban white supremacists and practitioners of hate speech last June.
But taken as a pattern, it seems the barons of the internet are finally acknowledging that they do not exist in an alternate universe, outside standard rules and regulations.
In many ways, Shane Dawson’s removal and ban may turn out to be the biggest news, with a much broader impact on the YouTube and influencer communities and their young audiences. As Dawson said in his apology, his racism was even more toxic because it was not couched in white supremacy but in humor and drama aimed at young people looking for an alternative to legacy media. Dawson’s use of blackface and racist humor also was, by his own admission, too frequent to be considered “a mistake,” especially to a world grown weary of similar apologies.
And he is not the only one being re-evaluated through the lens of current events. David Dobrik, Liza Koshy and other YouTubers have also recently apologized for racist humor or insensitivity.
Social media has, for many, become a replacement for traditional media, news and entertainment, in part because platforms like Twitter were seen as democratic; accessible by all and gate-kept by none, they were the ultimate expression of free speech.
Indeed, the protests over George Floyd’s death might not have expanded so widely if not for social media, which allowed the video of his terrible final minutes to circulate to millions. Social media has become a very effective tool of social policing, especially of the police. It’s our smartphones that give citizens the capability of documenting everything from Costco Karen to police firing tear gas at clearly peaceful protesters. It’s social media that allows those videos to go viral.
But as the Mueller report revealed, the lack of even basic gate-keeping can backfire and cause serious personal and societal damage. Whatever you believe about the president’s involvement, there is incontrovertible evidence that Russian operatives used Facebook and Twitter in an attempt to manipulate the 2016 election.
Last month, Twitter, bowing to pressure over the spread of misinformation and hate speech, began adding labels to tweets it considered inaccurate or particularly incendiary, including several issued by the president. In response, many Trump supporters are turning to a new platform, Parler, which has no such labels.
Facebook has refused to initiate any similar labels, though it does have a 27-page “community standards” guideline that prohibits the use of hate speech, incitement to violence and the spread of misinformation (although staff members recently protested CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s seeming refusal to apply these to President Trump).
In response to the advertising boycott, the site says many accounts breaking that policy have already been shut down. Zuckerberg has said he will meet with Stop Hate for Profit leaders, but that his opposition to tightening restrictions remains: The advertisers will be back, he has said, and the site will not change because it is not Facebook’s business to fact-check or police its patrons.
It is true that under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, made law 25 years ago, no social media platforms can be held liable for any statements made on the platform, or any subsequent actions taken because of those statements. But the law also allows those platforms to institute their own set of rules.
Social media platforms are all businesses, owned and operated by people who often make quite a bit of money doing so. “Freedom” is something these companies sell; free speech is a guaranteed constitutional right, but Facebook, like Costco, is private property — you can be told to take your speech elsewhere at any time.
And slowly, finally, that is what is beginning to happen. Kicking a few people off YouTube is not going to end racism any more than toppling a few statues will. But re-examining this country’s mythologies, around the Founding Fathers, the Confederacy or the “settling of the West” just might — and applying universal social standards to the social media posts and videos that make many people a great deal of money certainly will.
Free speech only works if everyone is actually free.
Mary McNamara is a culture columnist and critic for the Los Angeles Times. Previously she was assistant managing editor for arts and entertainment following a 12-year stint as television critic and senior culture editor. A Pulitzer Prize winner in 2015 and finalist for criticism in 2013 and 2014, she has won various awards for criticism and feature writing. She is the author of the Hollywood mysteries “Oscar Season” and “The Starlet.” She lives in La Crescenta with her husband, three children and two dogs.