WOMEN'S DISCUSSION GROUP
WEDNESDAYS AT 10:00 AM
In-person and on Zoom:
https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
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
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