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Tuesday, May 17
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.
Tuesday, May 10
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.
Tuesday, May 3
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.
Tuesday, April 26
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.
Tuesday, April 19
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.
Tuesday, April 12
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 exis
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 exis
Tuesday, April 5
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.”
Tuesday, March 29
We are going to have only one discussion group meeting next week. Elijah is on Spring Break so I am taking Monday and Thursday off. The Women's Discussion has been invited to join Tuesday's Men's Discussion. I also have invited the author of the article to join us via Zoom. Although I have not heard back, I am hoping he will join us.
This next week we will switch from talking about international events to something local - homelessness in Manatee County. The Bradenton Times opinion piece suggests a couple of changes that I would like to discuss with you as well as the theological implications of homelessness.
Relaxing Homeless Enforcement Could Invite Unintended Consequences
Dennis “Mitch” Maley, The Bradenton Times, 3.23.22
At Tuesday’s meeting, Manatee County Commissioners wrestled with the issue of how to deal with the homeless setting up tents on public property, noting that law enforcement was not currently policing the matter. This is tricky business, as what can be thought of as an empathetic
approach to people struggling with the rising cost of area rents can quickly lead to a California-style crisis.
Homelessness has been an issue I’ve reported on throughout my journalism career, including a three-part deep-dive series. In summation, after spending many years volunteering my time toward homelessness issues, it became clear to me that homelessness was almost always a
symptom of a deeper issue, more than a root problem itself. The vast majority of people who suffer from homelessness fall into two categories: drug addicts and untreated mental illness, most notably schizophrenia. In nearly all of those cases, a lack of affordable housing options does not play a meaningful role.
The first demographic is most related—from a policy perspective—to the need for accessible and affordable addiction services that rarely work before the addict is self-motivated to stop using. The latter can directly be traced to our defunding of state mental institutions when federal funding was reduced and shifted toward block grants that saw states move quickly toward outpatient services that have proven far less effective.
Instances in which someone falls on hard times and does not have the resources or support network to serve as a bridge are far less common, although COVID, inflation, and skyrocketing rents have certainly increased the percentage of homeless people whose situation was prompted
purely by financial misfortune. That said, when broad policies are enacted (or existing laws ignored) with these folks in mind, it can incite an onslaught of unintended consequences that are incredibly difficult to reverse.
California spent decades attempting to address homelessness in what its citizens and officials felt were the most humane ways possible. City and county ordinances regarding camping in public were relaxed, as were laws and enforcement regarding possession or even public use of hard drugs such as heroin and methamphetamine. As a result, what is commonly referred to as homeless encampments have instead become what author Michael Shellenberger termed "open-air drug markets” in a book about backward homelessness policies in his hometown of San Francisco, titled Sand Fran-sicko. I would strongly recommend the book to our county commissioners, our Sheriff, and county administrator, as well as any of you who’d like to hear an alternative to the singular narrative that’s been presented on the issue by both the media and politicians.
I’ve been to LA many times over the past seven years, and I’ve toured Skid Row, Venice Beach, and Hollywood, all of which are riddled with people living on sidewalks in tents or disabled vehicles. They routinely urinate and defecate on city streets, the gutters of which are commonly
strewn with needles, empty vials, and other drug paraphernalia. The problem has only grown worse, despite billions of dollars thrown into programs ostensibly meant to end homelessness.
And while popular narratives perpetuated by the industry that has grown from providing services to the homeless suggest that LA’s notoriously high cost of living is to blame, in reality, the vast majority of these people did not lose an LA apartment. In most cases, they come from elsewhere (often out of state) drawn by a perfect climate for outdoor living, lax drug laws, and court rulings that made it difficult to impossible for cities to roll back their homeless-friendly policies. Simply put, if you allow people who are not inclined to participate as productive members of society the option to live in a tent, foul the streets, and access public and non-profit services—particularly in a warm-weather climate—you will find your community a magnet for the growing number of such people that exist throughout the country. So, while you may create the occasional situation where an individual or family is able to get through a temporary hard time and rebound, you will,
far more often than not, find yourself managing a growing population of willfully homeless (yes, there is such a thing) who hear about the new utopia for the vagabond lifestyle.
That said, Manatee County desperately needs to address the fact that hard-working citizens who do work and contribute to the local community—particularly in important, low-wage service jobs—are being ruthlessly priced out of the market. One strategy for the county commission might be to work with our delegation in the local legislature to enact laws that would be more favorable to renters in terms of rising rents.
The reason why housing costs are rarely associated with homelessness is that increases tend to happen gradually, allowing people who are priced out of a market a reasonable timeframe in which to move elsewhere. In today’s unprecedented rental market, however, I regularly hear
people complain of getting unexpected rent increases of 50 percent or more at the end of their lease. What's worse, while rent can only be increased at the end of a lease, Florida Statutes provide no requirements of a minimum notice that must be given in terms of rent increase
notifications if such language is not specified in the lease. There are also no limits on how much rent can be increased.
By requiring a reasonable notification period of at least 60 days on an annual lease and perhaps 45 days on a month to month, this would give tenants priced out of their existing rental at least a fighting chance to find a new dwelling or make plans to relocate. A reasonable cap to the
percentage to which rent can increase for the same tenant from one lease to the next would also make a big difference and should be easier for landlords to accept after Florida voters approved a limit of 10 percent increases on non-homesteaded assessments in 2018.
These or similar tools would allow legislators to ensure a more stable housing market meant to address the least common and most manageable category of homelessness: the person who can and wants to contribute to society but falls on hard times without an adequate support system to make it to the other side. But if we relax policies broadly in an effort to help this particular root cause of homelessness, we could be inviting a result that will prove far more difficult to address
This next week we will switch from talking about international events to something local - homelessness in Manatee County. The Bradenton Times opinion piece suggests a couple of changes that I would like to discuss with you as well as the theological implications of homelessness.
Relaxing Homeless Enforcement Could Invite Unintended Consequences
Dennis “Mitch” Maley, The Bradenton Times, 3.23.22
At Tuesday’s meeting, Manatee County Commissioners wrestled with the issue of how to deal with the homeless setting up tents on public property, noting that law enforcement was not currently policing the matter. This is tricky business, as what can be thought of as an empathetic
approach to people struggling with the rising cost of area rents can quickly lead to a California-style crisis.
Homelessness has been an issue I’ve reported on throughout my journalism career, including a three-part deep-dive series. In summation, after spending many years volunteering my time toward homelessness issues, it became clear to me that homelessness was almost always a
symptom of a deeper issue, more than a root problem itself. The vast majority of people who suffer from homelessness fall into two categories: drug addicts and untreated mental illness, most notably schizophrenia. In nearly all of those cases, a lack of affordable housing options does not play a meaningful role.
The first demographic is most related—from a policy perspective—to the need for accessible and affordable addiction services that rarely work before the addict is self-motivated to stop using. The latter can directly be traced to our defunding of state mental institutions when federal funding was reduced and shifted toward block grants that saw states move quickly toward outpatient services that have proven far less effective.
Instances in which someone falls on hard times and does not have the resources or support network to serve as a bridge are far less common, although COVID, inflation, and skyrocketing rents have certainly increased the percentage of homeless people whose situation was prompted
purely by financial misfortune. That said, when broad policies are enacted (or existing laws ignored) with these folks in mind, it can incite an onslaught of unintended consequences that are incredibly difficult to reverse.
California spent decades attempting to address homelessness in what its citizens and officials felt were the most humane ways possible. City and county ordinances regarding camping in public were relaxed, as were laws and enforcement regarding possession or even public use of hard drugs such as heroin and methamphetamine. As a result, what is commonly referred to as homeless encampments have instead become what author Michael Shellenberger termed "open-air drug markets” in a book about backward homelessness policies in his hometown of San Francisco, titled Sand Fran-sicko. I would strongly recommend the book to our county commissioners, our Sheriff, and county administrator, as well as any of you who’d like to hear an alternative to the singular narrative that’s been presented on the issue by both the media and politicians.
I’ve been to LA many times over the past seven years, and I’ve toured Skid Row, Venice Beach, and Hollywood, all of which are riddled with people living on sidewalks in tents or disabled vehicles. They routinely urinate and defecate on city streets, the gutters of which are commonly
strewn with needles, empty vials, and other drug paraphernalia. The problem has only grown worse, despite billions of dollars thrown into programs ostensibly meant to end homelessness.
And while popular narratives perpetuated by the industry that has grown from providing services to the homeless suggest that LA’s notoriously high cost of living is to blame, in reality, the vast majority of these people did not lose an LA apartment. In most cases, they come from elsewhere (often out of state) drawn by a perfect climate for outdoor living, lax drug laws, and court rulings that made it difficult to impossible for cities to roll back their homeless-friendly policies. Simply put, if you allow people who are not inclined to participate as productive members of society the option to live in a tent, foul the streets, and access public and non-profit services—particularly in a warm-weather climate—you will find your community a magnet for the growing number of such people that exist throughout the country. So, while you may create the occasional situation where an individual or family is able to get through a temporary hard time and rebound, you will,
far more often than not, find yourself managing a growing population of willfully homeless (yes, there is such a thing) who hear about the new utopia for the vagabond lifestyle.
That said, Manatee County desperately needs to address the fact that hard-working citizens who do work and contribute to the local community—particularly in important, low-wage service jobs—are being ruthlessly priced out of the market. One strategy for the county commission might be to work with our delegation in the local legislature to enact laws that would be more favorable to renters in terms of rising rents.
The reason why housing costs are rarely associated with homelessness is that increases tend to happen gradually, allowing people who are priced out of a market a reasonable timeframe in which to move elsewhere. In today’s unprecedented rental market, however, I regularly hear
people complain of getting unexpected rent increases of 50 percent or more at the end of their lease. What's worse, while rent can only be increased at the end of a lease, Florida Statutes provide no requirements of a minimum notice that must be given in terms of rent increase
notifications if such language is not specified in the lease. There are also no limits on how much rent can be increased.
By requiring a reasonable notification period of at least 60 days on an annual lease and perhaps 45 days on a month to month, this would give tenants priced out of their existing rental at least a fighting chance to find a new dwelling or make plans to relocate. A reasonable cap to the
percentage to which rent can increase for the same tenant from one lease to the next would also make a big difference and should be easier for landlords to accept after Florida voters approved a limit of 10 percent increases on non-homesteaded assessments in 2018.
These or similar tools would allow legislators to ensure a more stable housing market meant to address the least common and most manageable category of homelessness: the person who can and wants to contribute to society but falls on hard times without an adequate support system to make it to the other side. But if we relax policies broadly in an effort to help this particular root cause of homelessness, we could be inviting a result that will prove far more difficult to address
Tuesday, March 22
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.
Tuesday, March 15
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.
Tuesday, March 8
For the Tuesday meeting, we will discuss The Livestreamed War, an opinion piece from the NY Times. The end of WWII, that Chuck Palmeri will discuss on Wednesday at 2 pm (both in person and on YouTube), was not livestreamed but the impact is certainly being felt today.
The Livestreamed War
Jay Caspian Kang, NY Times 3.3.22
Like most Americans, I have followed the war in Ukraine in the usual, modern way: by consuming cable news, social media videos and rumors, newspapers and a couple of podcasts and YouTube lectures. Many of these have offered useful context — the back story of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, the history of the conflict in the Donbas region and the complex cultural and linguistic relationship between the Russian and Ukrainian people. Still, there’s something both fragmented and innately suspect about today’s form of gathering information. The task at hand is to pull together as many bits of good information as possible, then try to stitch everything together into a coherent narrative.
For the most part, the sparse moments of clarity — in terms of bringing all that splintered information into a clear understanding — have come from videos apparently shot by Ukrainians that show both the horrors of the invasion and the bravery of the resistance. Social media sites like Twitter, Instagram and TikTok are now filled with these images of Ukraine. This footage of ordinary citizens appearing to stand guard in Kyiv or motorists seeming to harass stalled-out Russian tanks or missiles striking targets in cities creates a visual language that fills in the gaps of knowledge about the war and breathes life into our moral outrage.
The information that in previous generations would have come to us as a cohesive television broadcast or a newspaper story now comes in snippets that elicit fits of emotion. Or, to put it a bit more simply, these cellphone videos have become both the evidence of history and the text of history at once. The invasion of Ukraine, of course, is not the first time we’ve seen raw violence streaming through our social media feeds. Fighting that erupted during the Arab Spring more than a decade ago aired via posted cellphone videos. Several years later, phones continued to capture civilian deaths in Syria.
After the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., I watched the first few nights of protests on video that was livestreamed by protesters on the ground. This is how I saw the military vehicles, the police officers in riot gear and the clouds of tear gas hovering over West Florissant Avenue. All these images would have been available on CNN or MSNBC or Fox News, but what the livestreams included were the reactions of the person holding the camera. Watching them felt almost illicit; we were seeing and hearing something we weren’t supposed to.
It became clear to me that this personalized form of reportage would eventually become the ultimate form of storytelling, especially in chaotic conflicts where nobody really could tell what was going on. Not only did it feel more immediate and real, but it also cut out the middleman,
namely me and my colleagues in the media. In 2014, we were already thought of as somewhat untrustworthy by some, but now, in a time of widespread distrust of the legacy media by both the left and the right, we can be seen as full-on antagonists.
There does seem to be something new this time about the speed and credulity with which these videos have traveled around the internet and the emotional response they’ve generated in the West. Perhaps the most accurate thing to say about social media and the invasion of Ukraine is that it’s the first time that millions of people watched a war on their phones and felt almost morally compelled to believe every image of bravery, no matter how implausible. Given the choice between seeing the footage on CNN or through their social media feeds, many now are
choosing the latter because they believe it comes with an aura of authenticity and without the assumed “agendas” of the mainstream media. For the first few days of the conflict, it felt as if the desire to figure out the truth on the ground had evaporated. What replaced it was a fantastical vision that turned a brutal, terrifying and bloody invasion into the Ukrainian version of the film “Braveheart.”
Scraps of footage of blown-up television towers, Russian helicopters coming under what looks like antiaircraft fire, apartment buildings being hit with missiles and the stirring footage of the citizens of Kyiv arming themselves have been seen around the world. Many of these are real, but many more have not been confirmed or verified. We might see what it looks like when an airstrike hits an apartment building, but we do not really know anything else. Where is this building? Who fired upon it? How many people are dead? Is it even in Ukraine?
Predictably enough, some of the more stirring footage out of Ukraine has been debunked or had its veracity brought into serious question. This includes video of the so-called Ghost of Kyiv, the purported fighter pilot who took down six Russian planes, and the reported deaths of the soldiers stationed at Snake Island. Widely circulated video that purportedly showed a young Ukrainian girl confronting a Russian soldier actually showed Ahed Tamimi, a young Palestinian activist who was filmed near her home in the West Bank. The footage was shot in 2012.
We choose which videos we care about and which ones we do not. This seems simple enough. Our relative acceptance and the timbre of our emotional responses, of course, rely on a mixture of previously held beliefs. In this case, our understanding seems right: One should abhor
Vladimir Putin and feel outraged by the invasion of a sovereign nation. As Americans, we should also applaud and feel inspired by the bravery of the Ukrainian people as they defend their homeland from a tyrannic invasion.
But we should be able to hold two thoughts in our heads at once. One: The invasion of Ukraine is a humanitarian catastrophe and a uniquely destabilizing event that will destroy lives both in Ukraine and in Russia. Two: So much of what we’ve seen about Ukraine — the images and
videos that have inspired the public — are not real. Last week, Sophie Pinkham, an expert on Ukraine and Russia, estimated that roughly 75 percent of what’s being said about what’s happening in Ukraine is either unverified or just flat out false.
I can’t help wondering what the response would have been like during the Iraq war in 2003 if we’d been addicted to social media then and our feeds were flooded with livestreamed video from Iraqis when our troops and their allies stormed through the country in search of weapons of mass destruction. Would Americans have cared as much about footage taken by Muslim people?
Would they have been more skeptical about its veracity than they have been about footage from Ukraine? If videos of the invasion of Iraq were being posted today, would they have even been allowed on American platforms, or would they have been tagged as “disinformation” and
suppressed? Or would they have been blocked by some algorithm similar to the one that blocked Palestinian videos coming out of last year’s Sheikh Jarrah conflict?
These questions must be asked and discussed as the world sinks itself into conflicts that may arise from climate change, the extended wreckage of the pandemic and a new Cold War between China and the United States. The emotional power of social media videos and the fact that many people actually assign more credibility to them because they’re so raw and seemingly unfiltered gives them the potential to shape reality and unreality in ways that we cannot resist or control.
The Livestreamed War
Jay Caspian Kang, NY Times 3.3.22
Like most Americans, I have followed the war in Ukraine in the usual, modern way: by consuming cable news, social media videos and rumors, newspapers and a couple of podcasts and YouTube lectures. Many of these have offered useful context — the back story of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, the history of the conflict in the Donbas region and the complex cultural and linguistic relationship between the Russian and Ukrainian people. Still, there’s something both fragmented and innately suspect about today’s form of gathering information. The task at hand is to pull together as many bits of good information as possible, then try to stitch everything together into a coherent narrative.
For the most part, the sparse moments of clarity — in terms of bringing all that splintered information into a clear understanding — have come from videos apparently shot by Ukrainians that show both the horrors of the invasion and the bravery of the resistance. Social media sites like Twitter, Instagram and TikTok are now filled with these images of Ukraine. This footage of ordinary citizens appearing to stand guard in Kyiv or motorists seeming to harass stalled-out Russian tanks or missiles striking targets in cities creates a visual language that fills in the gaps of knowledge about the war and breathes life into our moral outrage.
The information that in previous generations would have come to us as a cohesive television broadcast or a newspaper story now comes in snippets that elicit fits of emotion. Or, to put it a bit more simply, these cellphone videos have become both the evidence of history and the text of history at once. The invasion of Ukraine, of course, is not the first time we’ve seen raw violence streaming through our social media feeds. Fighting that erupted during the Arab Spring more than a decade ago aired via posted cellphone videos. Several years later, phones continued to capture civilian deaths in Syria.
After the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., I watched the first few nights of protests on video that was livestreamed by protesters on the ground. This is how I saw the military vehicles, the police officers in riot gear and the clouds of tear gas hovering over West Florissant Avenue. All these images would have been available on CNN or MSNBC or Fox News, but what the livestreams included were the reactions of the person holding the camera. Watching them felt almost illicit; we were seeing and hearing something we weren’t supposed to.
It became clear to me that this personalized form of reportage would eventually become the ultimate form of storytelling, especially in chaotic conflicts where nobody really could tell what was going on. Not only did it feel more immediate and real, but it also cut out the middleman,
namely me and my colleagues in the media. In 2014, we were already thought of as somewhat untrustworthy by some, but now, in a time of widespread distrust of the legacy media by both the left and the right, we can be seen as full-on antagonists.
There does seem to be something new this time about the speed and credulity with which these videos have traveled around the internet and the emotional response they’ve generated in the West. Perhaps the most accurate thing to say about social media and the invasion of Ukraine is that it’s the first time that millions of people watched a war on their phones and felt almost morally compelled to believe every image of bravery, no matter how implausible. Given the choice between seeing the footage on CNN or through their social media feeds, many now are
choosing the latter because they believe it comes with an aura of authenticity and without the assumed “agendas” of the mainstream media. For the first few days of the conflict, it felt as if the desire to figure out the truth on the ground had evaporated. What replaced it was a fantastical vision that turned a brutal, terrifying and bloody invasion into the Ukrainian version of the film “Braveheart.”
Scraps of footage of blown-up television towers, Russian helicopters coming under what looks like antiaircraft fire, apartment buildings being hit with missiles and the stirring footage of the citizens of Kyiv arming themselves have been seen around the world. Many of these are real, but many more have not been confirmed or verified. We might see what it looks like when an airstrike hits an apartment building, but we do not really know anything else. Where is this building? Who fired upon it? How many people are dead? Is it even in Ukraine?
Predictably enough, some of the more stirring footage out of Ukraine has been debunked or had its veracity brought into serious question. This includes video of the so-called Ghost of Kyiv, the purported fighter pilot who took down six Russian planes, and the reported deaths of the soldiers stationed at Snake Island. Widely circulated video that purportedly showed a young Ukrainian girl confronting a Russian soldier actually showed Ahed Tamimi, a young Palestinian activist who was filmed near her home in the West Bank. The footage was shot in 2012.
We choose which videos we care about and which ones we do not. This seems simple enough. Our relative acceptance and the timbre of our emotional responses, of course, rely on a mixture of previously held beliefs. In this case, our understanding seems right: One should abhor
Vladimir Putin and feel outraged by the invasion of a sovereign nation. As Americans, we should also applaud and feel inspired by the bravery of the Ukrainian people as they defend their homeland from a tyrannic invasion.
But we should be able to hold two thoughts in our heads at once. One: The invasion of Ukraine is a humanitarian catastrophe and a uniquely destabilizing event that will destroy lives both in Ukraine and in Russia. Two: So much of what we’ve seen about Ukraine — the images and
videos that have inspired the public — are not real. Last week, Sophie Pinkham, an expert on Ukraine and Russia, estimated that roughly 75 percent of what’s being said about what’s happening in Ukraine is either unverified or just flat out false.
I can’t help wondering what the response would have been like during the Iraq war in 2003 if we’d been addicted to social media then and our feeds were flooded with livestreamed video from Iraqis when our troops and their allies stormed through the country in search of weapons of mass destruction. Would Americans have cared as much about footage taken by Muslim people?
Would they have been more skeptical about its veracity than they have been about footage from Ukraine? If videos of the invasion of Iraq were being posted today, would they have even been allowed on American platforms, or would they have been tagged as “disinformation” and
suppressed? Or would they have been blocked by some algorithm similar to the one that blocked Palestinian videos coming out of last year’s Sheikh Jarrah conflict?
These questions must be asked and discussed as the world sinks itself into conflicts that may arise from climate change, the extended wreckage of the pandemic and a new Cold War between China and the United States. The emotional power of social media videos and the fact that many people actually assign more credibility to them because they’re so raw and seemingly unfiltered gives them the potential to shape reality and unreality in ways that we cannot resist or control.
Tuesday, March 1
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.
On Tuesday, I have an all-day clergy meeting at DaySpring. Tom Crawford will facilitate the meeting from the Parish Hall in my absence. Linn will have the coffee ready.
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.
On Tuesday, I have an all-day clergy meeting at DaySpring. Tom Crawford will facilitate the meeting from the Parish Hall in my absence. Linn will have the coffee ready.
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.
Tuesday, February 22
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.
Tuesday, February 15
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.
Tuesday, February 8
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.
Tuesday, February 1
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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 24
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.
Tuesday, January 18
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."
Tuesday, January 11
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.
Tuesday, January 4
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.
Tuesday, December 21
One discussion group this week- Tuesday 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.
Tuesday, December 14
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.
Tuesday, December 7
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:
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
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
Tuesday, November 30
Tuesday, Nov 30, Men's Group - The Cost of Men's Loneliness
Must watch this short video clip to go with the reading:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XOt2Vh0T8w
The Cost of Men’s Loneliness
Abigail Fagan, Psychology Today, 11.21.21
Saturday Night Live recently aired a brilliant sketch titled “Man Park.” In the sketch, a young man waits anxiously for his partner to return from work. He has few if any friends, and has had little social interaction all day. She listens, barely managing to feign interest in his data dump
about the series of banal events of his day. As is often the case in heterosexual relationships, she reverts to the role of mommy, exhorting her partner to go outside and play with his friends. When he protests that he has no friends, she takes him by the hand as she would a little boy, and walks him to the “Man Park” to play with the other men. The men approach each other awkwardly, unsure of how to make a friend, while the women patronizingly urge them on.
The seemingly unending pandemic has raised awareness of the physical and emotional consequences of isolation. Men tend to struggle with isolation and loneliness more than women. Thomas Joiner in his ground-breaking book Lonely at the Top (2011) says that men have made a
Dorian Gray-like trade of success in the external world for a deep sense of loneliness, emptiness, and disconnection. Boys start out feeling just as connected in their close friendships as girls do, but they tend to neglect their personal relationships to pursue external success. When men lose the protective social structures provided in high school and college, they often find themselves interpersonally adrift, unsure how to establish or maintain close relationships with other men or women.
In heterosexual couples, women tend to handle all the social relationships for the couple and the children. This may fall to women because they are aware that their male partners do not have substantial relationships outside of the family as they do. The women may pull their partners into socializing with other couples so that the women can have more time socializing with each other without that becoming an issue in the marriage. They may even arrange “play dates” with their friends’ partners so that their partner will be more interested in socializing as a couple.
Women can do this so seamlessly that their partners often remain blissfully unaware of all the work their partners are doing to manage the social relationships in the family. Men are often happy to have their partners take care of this because they are socialized not to value social
relationships very highly, and on some level, they may also recognize that they are not very good at it themselves. It is typically only when they are divorced or widowed those men realize how few relationships they actually have that have not been arranged or managed by their partner, and how vulnerable they have been in depending entirely on their partners for all of the connection in their lives.
A reporter for the Boston Globe was initially offended when his editor asked him to write an article about “how middle-aged men have no friends:”
"Excuse me? I have plenty of friends. Are you calling me a loser? You are . . . I quickly took stock of my life to try to prove to myself that I was not, in fact, perfect for this story.
"First of all, there was my buddy Mark. We went to high school together, and I still talk to him all the time, and we hang out all the . . . Wait, how often do we actually hang out? Maybe four or five times a year? And then there was my other best friend from high school, Rory, and . . . I
genuinely could not remember the last time I’d seen him. Had it already been a year? Entirely possible.
"There were all those other good friends who feel as if they’re still in my lives (sic) because we keep tabs on one another on social media, but as I ran down the list of those, I’d consider real, true, lifelong friends, I realized that it had been years since I’d seen many of them, even decades for a few (Baker, 2017)."
Loneliness is not only an unpleasant feeling; it is an interpersonal impairment that causes significant harm in the lives of men. Research suggests that a focus on the accumulation of wealth and material goods results in less overall happiness in life and less satisfaction in intimate
relationships (Baker, 2017). The Harvard Study of Adult Development (Harvard, 2017) followed a group of men for eight decades. Throughout the study, at different points in their lives, the men were asked, “Who would you call in the middle of the night if you were sick or afraid?” Those men who had someone to turn to were happier in their lives and their marriages, and also physically healthier over time.
The danger here is not only the emotional cost of loneliness, although that is substantial. Close relationships with other people have more of an impact on our physical health and longevity than even our genes do (Mineo, 2017, Vadantam, 2018).
A satisfying relationship life can extend longevity by up to 22 percent. Loneliness is a risk factor comparable to smoking, obesity, and high blood pressure (Holt-Lunstad, et al., 2010, Hawkley, et al, 2010, House, et al., 1988, Murphy, et al., 2017).
Loneliness in men is correlated with cardiovascular disease and stroke; 80 percent of successful suicides are men, and one of the leading contributing factors is loneliness (Murphy, et al., 2017).
While many physicians ask questions about risk factors such as smoking and alcoholconsumption during an annual physical, the research suggests they should also be asking about how satisfying their patient’s closest relationships are.
This post was excerpted in part from Hidden in Plain Sight: How Men’s Fears of Women Shape Their Intimate Relationships (Weiss, 2021).
Must watch this short video clip to go with the reading:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XOt2Vh0T8w
The Cost of Men’s Loneliness
Abigail Fagan, Psychology Today, 11.21.21
Saturday Night Live recently aired a brilliant sketch titled “Man Park.” In the sketch, a young man waits anxiously for his partner to return from work. He has few if any friends, and has had little social interaction all day. She listens, barely managing to feign interest in his data dump
about the series of banal events of his day. As is often the case in heterosexual relationships, she reverts to the role of mommy, exhorting her partner to go outside and play with his friends. When he protests that he has no friends, she takes him by the hand as she would a little boy, and walks him to the “Man Park” to play with the other men. The men approach each other awkwardly, unsure of how to make a friend, while the women patronizingly urge them on.
The seemingly unending pandemic has raised awareness of the physical and emotional consequences of isolation. Men tend to struggle with isolation and loneliness more than women. Thomas Joiner in his ground-breaking book Lonely at the Top (2011) says that men have made a
Dorian Gray-like trade of success in the external world for a deep sense of loneliness, emptiness, and disconnection. Boys start out feeling just as connected in their close friendships as girls do, but they tend to neglect their personal relationships to pursue external success. When men lose the protective social structures provided in high school and college, they often find themselves interpersonally adrift, unsure how to establish or maintain close relationships with other men or women.
In heterosexual couples, women tend to handle all the social relationships for the couple and the children. This may fall to women because they are aware that their male partners do not have substantial relationships outside of the family as they do. The women may pull their partners into socializing with other couples so that the women can have more time socializing with each other without that becoming an issue in the marriage. They may even arrange “play dates” with their friends’ partners so that their partner will be more interested in socializing as a couple.
Women can do this so seamlessly that their partners often remain blissfully unaware of all the work their partners are doing to manage the social relationships in the family. Men are often happy to have their partners take care of this because they are socialized not to value social
relationships very highly, and on some level, they may also recognize that they are not very good at it themselves. It is typically only when they are divorced or widowed those men realize how few relationships they actually have that have not been arranged or managed by their partner, and how vulnerable they have been in depending entirely on their partners for all of the connection in their lives.
A reporter for the Boston Globe was initially offended when his editor asked him to write an article about “how middle-aged men have no friends:”
"Excuse me? I have plenty of friends. Are you calling me a loser? You are . . . I quickly took stock of my life to try to prove to myself that I was not, in fact, perfect for this story.
"First of all, there was my buddy Mark. We went to high school together, and I still talk to him all the time, and we hang out all the . . . Wait, how often do we actually hang out? Maybe four or five times a year? And then there was my other best friend from high school, Rory, and . . . I
genuinely could not remember the last time I’d seen him. Had it already been a year? Entirely possible.
"There were all those other good friends who feel as if they’re still in my lives (sic) because we keep tabs on one another on social media, but as I ran down the list of those, I’d consider real, true, lifelong friends, I realized that it had been years since I’d seen many of them, even decades for a few (Baker, 2017)."
Loneliness is not only an unpleasant feeling; it is an interpersonal impairment that causes significant harm in the lives of men. Research suggests that a focus on the accumulation of wealth and material goods results in less overall happiness in life and less satisfaction in intimate
relationships (Baker, 2017). The Harvard Study of Adult Development (Harvard, 2017) followed a group of men for eight decades. Throughout the study, at different points in their lives, the men were asked, “Who would you call in the middle of the night if you were sick or afraid?” Those men who had someone to turn to were happier in their lives and their marriages, and also physically healthier over time.
The danger here is not only the emotional cost of loneliness, although that is substantial. Close relationships with other people have more of an impact on our physical health and longevity than even our genes do (Mineo, 2017, Vadantam, 2018).
A satisfying relationship life can extend longevity by up to 22 percent. Loneliness is a risk factor comparable to smoking, obesity, and high blood pressure (Holt-Lunstad, et al., 2010, Hawkley, et al, 2010, House, et al., 1988, Murphy, et al., 2017).
Loneliness in men is correlated with cardiovascular disease and stroke; 80 percent of successful suicides are men, and one of the leading contributing factors is loneliness (Murphy, et al., 2017).
While many physicians ask questions about risk factors such as smoking and alcoholconsumption during an annual physical, the research suggests they should also be asking about how satisfying their patient’s closest relationships are.
This post was excerpted in part from Hidden in Plain Sight: How Men’s Fears of Women Shape Their Intimate Relationships (Weiss, 2021).
Tuesday, November 23
Thanksgiving next week is throwing off our schedule a bit.
There are two readings coming up - Roman Catholic Bishops and who should/should not receive communion and the other is about gender bias in medicine. For the communion reading, I'd like to discuss what is at the core of Eucharist, who is invited, and what it means, as an Anglican perspective in contrast to the Roman perspective.
Gender bias in medicine is troubling. The article provides some solutions; but, are they enough, is there more we can do?
Here is the schedule:
Tuesday, Nov 23, Men's Group - Roman Catholic Bishops reading (below)
Tuesday, Nov 30, Men's Group - reading to be determined
Tuesday, Dec 7, Men's Group - Gender Bias in Medicine
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.
There are two readings coming up - Roman Catholic Bishops and who should/should not receive communion and the other is about gender bias in medicine. For the communion reading, I'd like to discuss what is at the core of Eucharist, who is invited, and what it means, as an Anglican perspective in contrast to the Roman perspective.
Gender bias in medicine is troubling. The article provides some solutions; but, are they enough, is there more we can do?
Here is the schedule:
Tuesday, Nov 23, Men's Group - Roman Catholic Bishops reading (below)
Tuesday, Nov 30, Men's Group - reading to be determined
Tuesday, Dec 7, Men's Group - Gender Bias in Medicine
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.
Tuesday, November 16
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.
Tuesday, November 9
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."
Tuesday, November 2
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.
Tuesday, October 26
Our topic is an article from the Atlantic that talks about the 6 Covid rules that will define our winter. In particular, I am intrigued with the rule about how it spreads, or doesn't spread, in clusters. How does that particular rule apply to you and who you go out to eat with, travel with, or who you are planning on visiting over the holidays?
I threw in a bonus article from the WSJ about in-person and on-line meetings. I'd like to use it as a check-in to make sure it is a good discussion experience for those who are on Zoom and those who are in person.
Blessings to you,
-Fr. Dave
Six Rules That Will Define Our Second Pandemic Winter
Katherine J. Wu, Ed Yong, and Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic 9.21.21
For nearly two years now, Americans have lived with Covid-19. We know that it can set off both acute and chronic illness, that it spreads best indoors, that masks help block it, that our vaccines are powerful against it. We know that we can live with it—that we’re going to have to live with it. Still, this virus has the capacity to surprise us, especially if we’re not paying attention. In a matter of weeks, the Delta variant upended the relative peace of America’s early summer and ushered in a new set of calculations about risk, masking, and testing. The pandemic’s endgame shifted. Here are six principles that are helping us make sense of the pandemic now:
The role of vaccines has changed (again)
The COVID-19 vaccines were originally meant to prevent severe infections. They do so very well. Unexpectedly spectacular clinical-trial results from Pfizer and Moderna raised hopes that these vaccines could protect against almost all symptomatic infections and might even be as
good as the vaccines against polio and measles.
But, from the very beginning, vaccine experts warned that respiratory diseases are especially tricky to immunize against. The coronavirus first takes hold in the nose, and injections in the arm are just not very good at stimulating immunity in the nose. (They are still good, however, at
raising immunity deep in the lungs to protect against severe disease.) Flu shots, for example, tend to be only 10 to 60 percent effective at keeping people out of the doctor’s office. If COVID-19 vaccines end up somewhere similar, they would prevent hospitalizations and death, but the coronavirus would still circulate. So, we need to adjust our expectations, again.
Vaccines work more like dimmer switches than on/off buttons, and as their protection fades out, there are three thresholds that we care about: protection against infection, against symptoms, and against severe disease. Protection against infection is always the first to erode—either because of new variants or because of waning immune responses over time. Protection against symptoms goes next, but protection against severe disease is the most durable.
The proportion of vaccinated people matters,
but who they are and how they cluster also matters
Delta caused a new wave of cases in even the most vaccinated countries in the world, but the wave of hospitalizations that followed there have generally been much more modest. In the U.K., for example, where 66 percent of people are fully vaccinated, cases reached 80 percent of their winter peak this summer. But hospitalizations rose less than 25 percent. As U.K. health officials have declared, vaccines are “breaking the link” between infections and hospitalizations. Again, this means the vaccines are working. The United States seems to paint a different picture.
Overwhelmed hospitals are turning patients away. They’re once again cramming beds into conferences rooms and cafeterias. 54 percent of Americans are fully vaccinated. The difference between the U.K. and the U.S. isn’t just that fewer Americans are vaccinated. It’s that fewer of
the most vulnerable Americans are vaccinated, and they tend to cluster together.
Risk of death and hospitalizations from COVID-19 rises sharply with age, and in the U.K. nearly everyone over 65 is vaccinated. A New York Times analysis found very few areas in the U.K. where more than 2 percent of residents are 65 and not fully vaccinated. In contrast, that number is above 10 percent in many counties in the American South and Mountain West. Even small differences in these rates can determine the level of crisis: A community where 10 percent of residents are unvaccinated seniors has essentially five times as many people who might need an ICU bed than a community where that number is only 2 percent.
Vaccine coverage also varies dramatically from county to county in the U.S. The more unvaccinated people are concentrated, the more easily the virus can find its next victim. Imagine three out of four people in every household are vaccinated; the unvaccinated person is unlikely to
spread the virus very much at home. Now imagine three out of every four households are completely vaccinated; the virus will spread through the unvaccinated households. The overall vaccination rate is the same, but the results are very different.
This unevenness also means that …
The people at greatest risk from the virus will keep changing
Since the pandemic’s early days, vaccines have shifted the risk the virus poses to us, at a community level. Older people and health-care workers were among the first in line for the shots—a practical move to protect the people whose underlying conditions or jobs ranked them
among the most vulnerable. But younger members of the community had to contend with a slower schedule, and vaccine makers are still figuring out the correct dosages for the youngest among us. That’s all shifted the virus’s burden down to uninoculated children. At the same time, the virus has been evolving into speedier and speedier forms; by the time Delta slammed the world this spring, many of its most viable hosts were at risk not because of their age or circumstances, but in spite of it.
As vaccination increases, a higher proportion of cases will appear in vaccinated people--
and that’s what should happen
In July, after a COVID-19 outbreak in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a Washington Post headline noted that three-quarters of the people infected were vaccinated. Throughout the summer, many stories have reported similar figures, always with the same alarming
undercurrent: If vaccines are working, how could vaccinated people make up such a large proportion of an outbreak? The answer is simple: They can if they make up a large proportion of a population. Even though vaccinated people have much lower odds of getting sick than
unvaccinated people, they’ll make up a sizable fraction of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths if there are more of them around.
Let’s work through some numbers. Assume, first, that vaccines are 60 percent effective at preventing symptomatic infections. Vaccinated people are still less likely to get infected, but as their proportion of the community rises, so does the percentage of infections occurring among them. That is why this particular statistic—the proportion of vaccinated people in a given outbreak—is so deeply misleading.
Note percentage. In July, an NBC News article stated that “At Least 125,000 Fully Vaccinated Americans Have Tested Positive” for the coronavirus. In isolation, that’s an alarming number. But it represented just 0.08 percent of the 165 million people who were fully vaccinated at the time. The denominators in these calculations also change, dragging the numerators higher along with them. As surges grow, so too will the number of infected people, which means the number of breakthrough infections will also grow.
Even if the percentage of breakthroughs stays steady, though, vaccines will feel less effective if the pandemic is allowed to rage out of control, because …
Rare events are common at scale
Throughout the past year and a half, commentators have downplayed a variety of pandemic-related risks because they were “rare”—deaths, long COVID (which isn’t actually rare), infections and multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, and more. But infectious
diseases spread, and if they do so widely enough, events that are relatively rare can rack up large numbers: A one-in-a-thousand event will still occur 40,000 times when 40 million people are infected. Such events can’t be written off, especially when they involve decades of lost health or life.
As outbreaks spread, more types of rare events become noticeable as well. A wider pandemic is also a weirder pandemic. Many aspects of COVID-19’s mystique—the range of symptoms and affected organs, the possibility of persistent illness, reinfections—are common to other viral
illnesses, but go unnoticed because most illnesses don’t sweep the world in a short span of time.
Similarly, as this current post-vaccine surge continues, breakthrough infections will feel more common, newspapers will have more stories to run about them, and more people will know someone who had one. Our reaction to such events must account for both the denominator and
the numerator—both how relatively common they are and how much they cost each affected individual. And that assessment will change as the pandemic waxes and wanes, and as the virus itself continues to mutate.
There is no single “worst” version of the coronavirus
Right now, Delta, a super-transmissible variant that hops into human airways is especially well poised to rip through the world’s mostly unvaccinated, mostly immune-naive population—which is exactly what it’s doing. Laxness around masking, distancing, and other infection-prevention measures, in the United States especially, has given Delta plenty of opportunities to hop from human to human, further fueling its rise. (There is, by the way, little incentive for the virus to get deadlier along the way. Viruses want to spread, not kill.)
All variants, though, will have some common weakness: They can be stopped through the combined measures of vaccines, masks, distancing, and other measures that cut the conduits they need to travel. When viruses spread faster, they can be tougher to control. But they can’t persist
without us, and our behavior matters too.
Here Comes Hybrid Zoom-meetings
Te-Ping Chen, WSJ 10.31.21
Stephen Fleming sat stiffly on one end of a conference table, blinking at a laptop sitting a few feet away. Two colleagues were squished beside him, chair arms touching, trying to ensure they would all be captured in the viewfinder of the computer’s camera.
“We were close enough to rub noses,” says Mr. Fleming, an administrator at the University of Arizona, who kept his eyes studiously ahead, not wanting to risk turning his head and breathing too closely on his colleagues. Instead, he stared at a large screen affixed to the far wall, where
four other co-workers participating remotely were visible, and tried to look attentive. “I didn’t want them to feel left out,” he explains. “Meetings are about the little subtleties.”
During the pandemic, companies across the U.S. grew accustomed to meeting exclusively on video calls. But with more workers returning to their offices part-time, often on schedules with minimal overlap, many are finding themselves increasingly thrown into meetings that mix in-person and remote attendees.
For co-workers, that means navigating new, delicate social dances, and the accompanying hiccups, as workplaces experiment with different ways to ensure everyone can be seen and heard.
At a recent meeting in Kansas City, Mo., business development manager Ashley Pate was startled when she began to speak and found a camera sitting on a nearby ledge suddenly zooming in on her. The AI-equipped device had detected her voice and wanted to highlight her face for the benefit of remote colleagues dialing in on video. Startled, she let out a laugh and tried to seem unfazed.
When Yunyao Li, a senior research manager at IBM in Almaden, Calif., took part in a recent hybrid meeting, colleagues participating from home were displayed on large screens on two different walls, which she says helped create the feeling they were spread around the room.
“They were slightly bigger than us,” she says of the sizes of their heads on the screens. “I think it helped to really feel their presence.”
While all-remote meetings had pitfalls—people failing to mute or unmute, pet-and-kid cameos—organizers say hybrid meetings compound them, with even less room for error. On a recent day, Texas A&M University biomedical writing professor Yasha Hartberg dialed into a faculty
meeting, with five people in person and five online. Ten minutes in, the overhead camera connecting the room to remote participants stopped working. “Those of us Zooming in were left to stare at the coordinator’s face on her laptop,” Mr. Hartberg says. “Occasionally she’d turn it
around for us to all look and see what was going on” in the rest of the room, he adds, but the effect was alienating and the sound poor. After 25 minutes, he left.
Given the friction of trying to mix virtual and in-person participants, hybrid meetings are mostly useful for status report-style updates, rather than robust discussions, says Josh Gordon, president of Full Spectrum Marketing in Akron, Ohio. They are also a useful corrective to a person’s
vanity, he says. At his company, the screen used to display remote participants is 85 inches: “It’s like, please brush your teeth and trim your nose hair, people, because everything is magnified.”
Alejandra Tejeda said people on the screen at a recent hybrid meeting were too tiny to see clearly. The funhouse mirror effect goes both ways. In Boston, union organizer Alejandra Tejeda co-led a recent meeting on Zoom of around 40 people, split between in-person and remote
attendees. As Ms. Tejeda peered at the screen of her 13-inch Mac, to her amusement and dismay, she realized the Zoom box containing a video feed of in-person attendees was far too small to see anyone properly. “It was a bunch of tiny people. Their heads were probably the size of pencil heads,” she says. Making matters worse, the microphone in-person attendees were using also malfunctioned, so that the “tiny pencil people” could be seen but not heard. “You have to laugh, really,” she says.
Many say they appreciate how mixed-format gatherings make it easier to increase attendance. In Scottsbluff, Neb., for example, pastor April Fiet says she is grateful that older parishioners who are at more of a health risk are able to Zoom into weekly Bible study meetings, while younger ones can attend in-person. Still, it has been a bumpy adjustment. Some in-person parishioners have tended to slowly edge their chairs farther away from the camera to avoid being seen.
Internet delays mean people accidentally cut each other off, leading to apologies and false starts. “The hardest part is psychological,” she says, adding that as the group’s leader, she often doesn’t know where to look, and worries about alienating people, both present and remote.
No matter how good the technology is, some stumbles are inevitable, says Mike Tremblay, a transit agency planning director in Portland, Maine. In particular, he says, when videoconferencing into meetings with in-person colleagues, “everyone’s masking, so it’s hard to tell who’s talking sometimes.” And as a remote participant, he says, it can be awkward when he hears side chatter happening in the conference room, but isn’t able to smoothly jump in. Still, he says, hybrid meetings do benefit from greater efficiency than many in-person meetings during
the before times. Given how stilted they can feel, in his experience, Mr. Tremblay says, they tend to wrap up more swiftly: “We just want to get it done.
I threw in a bonus article from the WSJ about in-person and on-line meetings. I'd like to use it as a check-in to make sure it is a good discussion experience for those who are on Zoom and those who are in person.
Blessings to you,
-Fr. Dave
Six Rules That Will Define Our Second Pandemic Winter
Katherine J. Wu, Ed Yong, and Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic 9.21.21
For nearly two years now, Americans have lived with Covid-19. We know that it can set off both acute and chronic illness, that it spreads best indoors, that masks help block it, that our vaccines are powerful against it. We know that we can live with it—that we’re going to have to live with it. Still, this virus has the capacity to surprise us, especially if we’re not paying attention. In a matter of weeks, the Delta variant upended the relative peace of America’s early summer and ushered in a new set of calculations about risk, masking, and testing. The pandemic’s endgame shifted. Here are six principles that are helping us make sense of the pandemic now:
The role of vaccines has changed (again)
The COVID-19 vaccines were originally meant to prevent severe infections. They do so very well. Unexpectedly spectacular clinical-trial results from Pfizer and Moderna raised hopes that these vaccines could protect against almost all symptomatic infections and might even be as
good as the vaccines against polio and measles.
But, from the very beginning, vaccine experts warned that respiratory diseases are especially tricky to immunize against. The coronavirus first takes hold in the nose, and injections in the arm are just not very good at stimulating immunity in the nose. (They are still good, however, at
raising immunity deep in the lungs to protect against severe disease.) Flu shots, for example, tend to be only 10 to 60 percent effective at keeping people out of the doctor’s office. If COVID-19 vaccines end up somewhere similar, they would prevent hospitalizations and death, but the coronavirus would still circulate. So, we need to adjust our expectations, again.
Vaccines work more like dimmer switches than on/off buttons, and as their protection fades out, there are three thresholds that we care about: protection against infection, against symptoms, and against severe disease. Protection against infection is always the first to erode—either because of new variants or because of waning immune responses over time. Protection against symptoms goes next, but protection against severe disease is the most durable.
The proportion of vaccinated people matters,
but who they are and how they cluster also matters
Delta caused a new wave of cases in even the most vaccinated countries in the world, but the wave of hospitalizations that followed there have generally been much more modest. In the U.K., for example, where 66 percent of people are fully vaccinated, cases reached 80 percent of their winter peak this summer. But hospitalizations rose less than 25 percent. As U.K. health officials have declared, vaccines are “breaking the link” between infections and hospitalizations. Again, this means the vaccines are working. The United States seems to paint a different picture.
Overwhelmed hospitals are turning patients away. They’re once again cramming beds into conferences rooms and cafeterias. 54 percent of Americans are fully vaccinated. The difference between the U.K. and the U.S. isn’t just that fewer Americans are vaccinated. It’s that fewer of
the most vulnerable Americans are vaccinated, and they tend to cluster together.
Risk of death and hospitalizations from COVID-19 rises sharply with age, and in the U.K. nearly everyone over 65 is vaccinated. A New York Times analysis found very few areas in the U.K. where more than 2 percent of residents are 65 and not fully vaccinated. In contrast, that number is above 10 percent in many counties in the American South and Mountain West. Even small differences in these rates can determine the level of crisis: A community where 10 percent of residents are unvaccinated seniors has essentially five times as many people who might need an ICU bed than a community where that number is only 2 percent.
Vaccine coverage also varies dramatically from county to county in the U.S. The more unvaccinated people are concentrated, the more easily the virus can find its next victim. Imagine three out of four people in every household are vaccinated; the unvaccinated person is unlikely to
spread the virus very much at home. Now imagine three out of every four households are completely vaccinated; the virus will spread through the unvaccinated households. The overall vaccination rate is the same, but the results are very different.
This unevenness also means that …
The people at greatest risk from the virus will keep changing
Since the pandemic’s early days, vaccines have shifted the risk the virus poses to us, at a community level. Older people and health-care workers were among the first in line for the shots—a practical move to protect the people whose underlying conditions or jobs ranked them
among the most vulnerable. But younger members of the community had to contend with a slower schedule, and vaccine makers are still figuring out the correct dosages for the youngest among us. That’s all shifted the virus’s burden down to uninoculated children. At the same time, the virus has been evolving into speedier and speedier forms; by the time Delta slammed the world this spring, many of its most viable hosts were at risk not because of their age or circumstances, but in spite of it.
As vaccination increases, a higher proportion of cases will appear in vaccinated people--
and that’s what should happen
In July, after a COVID-19 outbreak in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a Washington Post headline noted that three-quarters of the people infected were vaccinated. Throughout the summer, many stories have reported similar figures, always with the same alarming
undercurrent: If vaccines are working, how could vaccinated people make up such a large proportion of an outbreak? The answer is simple: They can if they make up a large proportion of a population. Even though vaccinated people have much lower odds of getting sick than
unvaccinated people, they’ll make up a sizable fraction of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths if there are more of them around.
Let’s work through some numbers. Assume, first, that vaccines are 60 percent effective at preventing symptomatic infections. Vaccinated people are still less likely to get infected, but as their proportion of the community rises, so does the percentage of infections occurring among them. That is why this particular statistic—the proportion of vaccinated people in a given outbreak—is so deeply misleading.
Note percentage. In July, an NBC News article stated that “At Least 125,000 Fully Vaccinated Americans Have Tested Positive” for the coronavirus. In isolation, that’s an alarming number. But it represented just 0.08 percent of the 165 million people who were fully vaccinated at the time. The denominators in these calculations also change, dragging the numerators higher along with them. As surges grow, so too will the number of infected people, which means the number of breakthrough infections will also grow.
Even if the percentage of breakthroughs stays steady, though, vaccines will feel less effective if the pandemic is allowed to rage out of control, because …
Rare events are common at scale
Throughout the past year and a half, commentators have downplayed a variety of pandemic-related risks because they were “rare”—deaths, long COVID (which isn’t actually rare), infections and multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, and more. But infectious
diseases spread, and if they do so widely enough, events that are relatively rare can rack up large numbers: A one-in-a-thousand event will still occur 40,000 times when 40 million people are infected. Such events can’t be written off, especially when they involve decades of lost health or life.
As outbreaks spread, more types of rare events become noticeable as well. A wider pandemic is also a weirder pandemic. Many aspects of COVID-19’s mystique—the range of symptoms and affected organs, the possibility of persistent illness, reinfections—are common to other viral
illnesses, but go unnoticed because most illnesses don’t sweep the world in a short span of time.
Similarly, as this current post-vaccine surge continues, breakthrough infections will feel more common, newspapers will have more stories to run about them, and more people will know someone who had one. Our reaction to such events must account for both the denominator and
the numerator—both how relatively common they are and how much they cost each affected individual. And that assessment will change as the pandemic waxes and wanes, and as the virus itself continues to mutate.
There is no single “worst” version of the coronavirus
Right now, Delta, a super-transmissible variant that hops into human airways is especially well poised to rip through the world’s mostly unvaccinated, mostly immune-naive population—which is exactly what it’s doing. Laxness around masking, distancing, and other infection-prevention measures, in the United States especially, has given Delta plenty of opportunities to hop from human to human, further fueling its rise. (There is, by the way, little incentive for the virus to get deadlier along the way. Viruses want to spread, not kill.)
All variants, though, will have some common weakness: They can be stopped through the combined measures of vaccines, masks, distancing, and other measures that cut the conduits they need to travel. When viruses spread faster, they can be tougher to control. But they can’t persist
without us, and our behavior matters too.
Here Comes Hybrid Zoom-meetings
Te-Ping Chen, WSJ 10.31.21
Stephen Fleming sat stiffly on one end of a conference table, blinking at a laptop sitting a few feet away. Two colleagues were squished beside him, chair arms touching, trying to ensure they would all be captured in the viewfinder of the computer’s camera.
“We were close enough to rub noses,” says Mr. Fleming, an administrator at the University of Arizona, who kept his eyes studiously ahead, not wanting to risk turning his head and breathing too closely on his colleagues. Instead, he stared at a large screen affixed to the far wall, where
four other co-workers participating remotely were visible, and tried to look attentive. “I didn’t want them to feel left out,” he explains. “Meetings are about the little subtleties.”
During the pandemic, companies across the U.S. grew accustomed to meeting exclusively on video calls. But with more workers returning to their offices part-time, often on schedules with minimal overlap, many are finding themselves increasingly thrown into meetings that mix in-person and remote attendees.
For co-workers, that means navigating new, delicate social dances, and the accompanying hiccups, as workplaces experiment with different ways to ensure everyone can be seen and heard.
At a recent meeting in Kansas City, Mo., business development manager Ashley Pate was startled when she began to speak and found a camera sitting on a nearby ledge suddenly zooming in on her. The AI-equipped device had detected her voice and wanted to highlight her face for the benefit of remote colleagues dialing in on video. Startled, she let out a laugh and tried to seem unfazed.
When Yunyao Li, a senior research manager at IBM in Almaden, Calif., took part in a recent hybrid meeting, colleagues participating from home were displayed on large screens on two different walls, which she says helped create the feeling they were spread around the room.
“They were slightly bigger than us,” she says of the sizes of their heads on the screens. “I think it helped to really feel their presence.”
While all-remote meetings had pitfalls—people failing to mute or unmute, pet-and-kid cameos—organizers say hybrid meetings compound them, with even less room for error. On a recent day, Texas A&M University biomedical writing professor Yasha Hartberg dialed into a faculty
meeting, with five people in person and five online. Ten minutes in, the overhead camera connecting the room to remote participants stopped working. “Those of us Zooming in were left to stare at the coordinator’s face on her laptop,” Mr. Hartberg says. “Occasionally she’d turn it
around for us to all look and see what was going on” in the rest of the room, he adds, but the effect was alienating and the sound poor. After 25 minutes, he left.
Given the friction of trying to mix virtual and in-person participants, hybrid meetings are mostly useful for status report-style updates, rather than robust discussions, says Josh Gordon, president of Full Spectrum Marketing in Akron, Ohio. They are also a useful corrective to a person’s
vanity, he says. At his company, the screen used to display remote participants is 85 inches: “It’s like, please brush your teeth and trim your nose hair, people, because everything is magnified.”
Alejandra Tejeda said people on the screen at a recent hybrid meeting were too tiny to see clearly. The funhouse mirror effect goes both ways. In Boston, union organizer Alejandra Tejeda co-led a recent meeting on Zoom of around 40 people, split between in-person and remote
attendees. As Ms. Tejeda peered at the screen of her 13-inch Mac, to her amusement and dismay, she realized the Zoom box containing a video feed of in-person attendees was far too small to see anyone properly. “It was a bunch of tiny people. Their heads were probably the size of pencil heads,” she says. Making matters worse, the microphone in-person attendees were using also malfunctioned, so that the “tiny pencil people” could be seen but not heard. “You have to laugh, really,” she says.
Many say they appreciate how mixed-format gatherings make it easier to increase attendance. In Scottsbluff, Neb., for example, pastor April Fiet says she is grateful that older parishioners who are at more of a health risk are able to Zoom into weekly Bible study meetings, while younger ones can attend in-person. Still, it has been a bumpy adjustment. Some in-person parishioners have tended to slowly edge their chairs farther away from the camera to avoid being seen.
Internet delays mean people accidentally cut each other off, leading to apologies and false starts. “The hardest part is psychological,” she says, adding that as the group’s leader, she often doesn’t know where to look, and worries about alienating people, both present and remote.
No matter how good the technology is, some stumbles are inevitable, says Mike Tremblay, a transit agency planning director in Portland, Maine. In particular, he says, when videoconferencing into meetings with in-person colleagues, “everyone’s masking, so it’s hard to tell who’s talking sometimes.” And as a remote participant, he says, it can be awkward when he hears side chatter happening in the conference room, but isn’t able to smoothly jump in. Still, he says, hybrid meetings do benefit from greater efficiency than many in-person meetings during
the before times. Given how stilted they can feel, in his experience, Mr. Tremblay says, they tend to wrap up more swiftly: “We just want to get it done.
Tuesday, October 19
I will be in Seattle on Tuesday. Phillip Deming will host the meeting both in-person and on-line on Tuesday. Linn will make sure the coffee is ready.
The topic this Tuesday is about Steve Jobs and if he made us sicker or healthier with his Apple products. You might wonder what spirituality or religion has to do with this topic - the article is from the Christian Century and takes a rather harsh look at Jobs' apparent disdain for Christianity and how he made have made a new sort of religion... that has made us sicker.
Phillip and I are wondering what you think of that supposition. Since I talked about how we can become emotionally attached to inanimate objects, this article takes a serious look at our phones and related devices and asks, again, are we healthier or sicker as a result.
Blessings to you this week. I will miss our discussion but know you are in good hands.
-Fr. Dave
Have Steve Jobs and His Gadgets Made Us Less Human?
A. Trevor Sutton, Christian Century 10.1.21
Steve Jobs died ten years ago this month. At the corporate memorial held on Apple’s campus, a previously unreleased version of the 1997 “Think Different” Apple commercial was played. In this version, Jobs himself performed the voice-over, so everyone at the memorial heard him speak one final exhortation to the world: “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” Jobs was certain of many things: Apple products should be closed systems that exclude other products in order to maximize user experience. On-off switches are ugly. And the work that he was doing with Apple was changing the world for the better.
In 1982, when Apple was a budding computer company, Jobs gave a speech to the Academy of Achievement. In this speech, he described how supposedly ordinary things such as going to college or believing in God inhibited innovation and stifled change. He told the audience that if they could move beyond the ordinary, they could have the capacity to change the world.
One of the things that I had in my mind growing up was that the world was something that happened just outside your peepers, and you didn’t really try to change it. You just tried to find your place in it and have the best life you could, and it would all just go on out there—and there were some pretty bright people running it. As you start to interact with some of these people, you find they’re not a lot different than you. . . . And, once you realize that, you start to feel you have a responsibility to do something about it, because the world’s in pretty bad shape right now.
Jobs continued his speech by saying that the most ecstatic thing a person can do in life is “put something back into that pool”—into civilization. Jobs advocated changing the world by contributing something new and meaningful to it. Human beings, according to Jobs, have a responsibility to be guardians of the earth for future generations, to pay attention to problems and do something about them.
In 1983, Jobs recruited John Sculley, then president of Pepsi-Co, to become chief executive officer of Apple by asking him a provocative question: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?” Though he was certain of this calling, Jobs was less certain where it came from. He had a persistent uncertainty when it came to God. According to his biographer Walter Isaacson, near the time of his death, Jobs said, “I’m about fifty-fifty on believing in God. For most of my life, I’ve felt that there must be more to our existence than meets the eye.” Waffling on God, however, did not mean that Jobs entirely rejected religion. He had a keen interest in Hinduism and Zen Buddhism. Zen in particular influenced Jobs’s penchant for minimalism and his appreciation for intuition, both of which are apparent in his product design.
Jobs had strong, largely negative thoughts about Christianity, which he saw as having crystallized in an unhealthy form. According to Jobs, “the juice goes out of Christianity when it becomes too based on faith rather than on living like Jesus or seeing the world as Jesus saw it.”
For Jobs, dogma and doctrine were religious ossifications stifling innovation and different ways of thinking. His incredulity toward the Christian faith began at a young age. According to Isaacson, Jobs was deeply troubled by a Life magazine cover showing two starving children in
Biafra. This prompted him to ask his pastor why God permits such suffering, and he was not satisfied by the pastor’s response. This led him to the conclusion that Christianity was unable to ameliorate the problems of this world. While only a teenager, Jobs vowed that he was done with
both the God of Christianity and the church. Instead of Christianity or even religion more broadly, Jobs saw technology and his work with Apple as having the potential to create a better future for the world. He applied himself fully to this end. This raises a simple question: Did it
work? Was Jobs right to dismiss Christianity and its supposedly ordinary belief in God that inhibits innovation? Did his intuition serve him well when he set out on the path to change the world by giving us the iPhone, iPad, and MacBook?
The answer depends on what metric one uses. From a purely economic perspective, Jobs was very successful. At various times in its corporate history, Apple has had more cash on hand than the US Treasury. From a design or user-experience perspective, Jobs liberated the world from
clunky interfaces and unusable technologies. From an ecological perspective, however, the 12th iteration of the iPhone and the hurried pace of planned obsolescence have been an environmental tragedy. According to a 2019 United Nations report, the world produces 50 million tons of electronic waste per year, and only 20 percent of this e-waste is recycled. By 2050, global e-waste could reach 120 million tons per year. The demand for phone and laptop batteries has fueled frenetic cobalt mining in African countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
While concern for Africa led Jobs to depart from the Christian faith and the church, his inventions have led to dangerous mining practices and child labor in Africa.
Beyond ecology and international development, contemporary philosophy raises its own concerns about the legacy of Steve Jobs. Modern scholars of nihilism and technology such as Arthur Kroker and Nolen Gertz have argued that modern gadgetry and technological devices
have harmed humanity. Drawing on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and his philosophy of nihilism, these scholars suggest that tech innovators like Jobs have helped make the sick sicker by bringing about something worse than religion.
What do they mean? Isaacson suggests that Nietzsche and Jobs share much in common. Both were brash, unapologetic, and independent thinkers. Both died young—Nietzsche at 55 and Jobs at 56—yet they crammed enough accomplishments into a short lifetime to be remembered by history. Both had an interest in Eastern religion, and both were formed by Christianity and ultimately took issue with it. Nietzsche and Jobs both possessed indomitable wills. Jobs is known for his “reality distortion field,” his unique ability to bend both reality and the will of others to accord with his own. Jobs’s reality-distortion-field resembles Nietzsche’s central idea of the will to power: power is good, weakness is bad, and happiness is the increase of power and overcoming resistance.
Nevertheless, despite all that these two held in common, Nietzsche would have detested the world that Jobs helped to create. Had Nietzsche been around to assess the legacy of Jobs, he would likely have made a brash pronouncement upon it: He made the sick sicker.
In Nihilism and Technology, Gertz describes how Nietzsche understood the Christian moral world to be “a sick world, a world where we are sick of being mortal, sick of being human, and sick of being ourselves.” Nietzsche held that the religious ideals of Christianity were life
destroying and world destroying because they encouraged individuals to be will-less, passively waiting to be defined by someone else’s values. According to Gertz, Nietzsche disdained the “ascetic priests” because they “sought to soothe rather than cure our suffering.”
According to Gertz, the problem is that Jobs took up the work of Nietzsche’s ascetic priests: he supplied people with wants, values, and remedies. Rejecting the idea that customers know what they want or need, Jobs preferred to create a desire within consumers. “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.” Jobs worked to create products—remedies, cures, or medications—so compelling that consumers simply had to have them. The devices and gadgets that Jobs helped create encourage users to be will-less, to allow someone else to impose their values on them. This is, according to Nietzsche, a way to avoid being human.
The problems that Nietzsche identified in the Christian faith are being reproduced by the tech companies of today. Kroker puts this in a radical way: “Perhaps the will to Christianity and digitality were always flip sides of the same historical movement, that Christianity was always a
sustained period of moral preparation for the coming to be of the digital nerve? Today, the mask of Christianity is removed, only to reveal the triumph of the digital gods.”
Apple Watches, iPhones, and other devices reshape our values, invite us to take things for granted, and effortlessly consume the medications prescribed by tech companies. The Apple Watch even tells you when to do biological tasks such as breathing or walking. iPhones and iPads, with their responsive touch screens and dazzling pixels, provide us with all that we need for self-hypnosis. These devices are an effortless means of mechanically consuming digital content in what Gertz calls “orgies of clicking.” Apple’s Siri was the first digital assistant waiting at our beck and call to dispense answers, tell us what to do, and help us avoid the essential human chore of having to think.
If it’s true that technological devices have made the sick sicker, then how might the sick be made well? In this world of gadgets, is there hope for healing and living again as humans? In Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, Albert Borgmann argues that technology
has shaped contemporary life around its peculiar pattern. Borgmann claims that the peculiar pattern of modern technology is fatally debilitating for human flourishing. He suggests that the pattern of technology becomes particularly harmful when there are no means by which one can “prune back the excesses of technology and restrict it to a supporting role.” The pruning is found, according to Borgmann, in “focal things.” A focal thing is a locus for physical engagement, social relations, and experiences that happen in and around this thing. Examples of focal things are violins and fly-fishing rods. While iPhones make no demand on our skills or strength, violins and fly rods do. A focal thing is a concrete, tangible, and engaging thing that requires a practice to prosper within: “It sponsors discipline and skill which are exercised in a unity of achievement and enjoyment, of mind, body, and the world, of myself and others, and in a social union.”
Borgmann proposes that the Christian faith can be a fulcrum of change for reforming technology and contemporary life. For example, Borgmann sees the Eucharist as being a focal thing: participating in it is a tangible and engaging practice that requires knowledge, practice, attention, and social unity. Like a family gathering around the dinner table without their iPhones, the church’s gathering around the Lord’s table is a sacred practice that is regularly reenacted. Borgmann argues that this focal practice has the power to be a centering and orienting force within a technological society. The Lord’s Supper helps us live as humans in a world of gadgets and devices.
Christianity can further challenge modern technology by making room for communal celebration. “We must make a clearing for the celebration of the Word of God,” says Borgmann. “Christians must meet the rule of technology with a deliberate and regular counter practice.” By taking up things like violins and fly rods or partaking of the Lord’s Supper and the communal celebration of worship, healing can come to those who are sick, distracted, and in a state of perpetual techno-hypnosis.
In his famous 2005 Stanford commencement address, Jobs said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So, you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny,
life, karma, whatever.”
When 2031 arrives and it is time to mark the 20th anniversary of Jobs’s death, there will be more dots to connect. The passage of time will enable us to make even better sense of the technological world that Jobs helped make. Perhaps it will become clearer that he helped to make
the sick sicker. Perhaps it will become clear that he helped make the world—and us—better. Or perhaps there will be some new thinker crazy enough to set out to change the world
The topic this Tuesday is about Steve Jobs and if he made us sicker or healthier with his Apple products. You might wonder what spirituality or religion has to do with this topic - the article is from the Christian Century and takes a rather harsh look at Jobs' apparent disdain for Christianity and how he made have made a new sort of religion... that has made us sicker.
Phillip and I are wondering what you think of that supposition. Since I talked about how we can become emotionally attached to inanimate objects, this article takes a serious look at our phones and related devices and asks, again, are we healthier or sicker as a result.
Blessings to you this week. I will miss our discussion but know you are in good hands.
-Fr. Dave
Have Steve Jobs and His Gadgets Made Us Less Human?
A. Trevor Sutton, Christian Century 10.1.21
Steve Jobs died ten years ago this month. At the corporate memorial held on Apple’s campus, a previously unreleased version of the 1997 “Think Different” Apple commercial was played. In this version, Jobs himself performed the voice-over, so everyone at the memorial heard him speak one final exhortation to the world: “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” Jobs was certain of many things: Apple products should be closed systems that exclude other products in order to maximize user experience. On-off switches are ugly. And the work that he was doing with Apple was changing the world for the better.
In 1982, when Apple was a budding computer company, Jobs gave a speech to the Academy of Achievement. In this speech, he described how supposedly ordinary things such as going to college or believing in God inhibited innovation and stifled change. He told the audience that if they could move beyond the ordinary, they could have the capacity to change the world.
One of the things that I had in my mind growing up was that the world was something that happened just outside your peepers, and you didn’t really try to change it. You just tried to find your place in it and have the best life you could, and it would all just go on out there—and there were some pretty bright people running it. As you start to interact with some of these people, you find they’re not a lot different than you. . . . And, once you realize that, you start to feel you have a responsibility to do something about it, because the world’s in pretty bad shape right now.
Jobs continued his speech by saying that the most ecstatic thing a person can do in life is “put something back into that pool”—into civilization. Jobs advocated changing the world by contributing something new and meaningful to it. Human beings, according to Jobs, have a responsibility to be guardians of the earth for future generations, to pay attention to problems and do something about them.
In 1983, Jobs recruited John Sculley, then president of Pepsi-Co, to become chief executive officer of Apple by asking him a provocative question: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?” Though he was certain of this calling, Jobs was less certain where it came from. He had a persistent uncertainty when it came to God. According to his biographer Walter Isaacson, near the time of his death, Jobs said, “I’m about fifty-fifty on believing in God. For most of my life, I’ve felt that there must be more to our existence than meets the eye.” Waffling on God, however, did not mean that Jobs entirely rejected religion. He had a keen interest in Hinduism and Zen Buddhism. Zen in particular influenced Jobs’s penchant for minimalism and his appreciation for intuition, both of which are apparent in his product design.
Jobs had strong, largely negative thoughts about Christianity, which he saw as having crystallized in an unhealthy form. According to Jobs, “the juice goes out of Christianity when it becomes too based on faith rather than on living like Jesus or seeing the world as Jesus saw it.”
For Jobs, dogma and doctrine were religious ossifications stifling innovation and different ways of thinking. His incredulity toward the Christian faith began at a young age. According to Isaacson, Jobs was deeply troubled by a Life magazine cover showing two starving children in
Biafra. This prompted him to ask his pastor why God permits such suffering, and he was not satisfied by the pastor’s response. This led him to the conclusion that Christianity was unable to ameliorate the problems of this world. While only a teenager, Jobs vowed that he was done with
both the God of Christianity and the church. Instead of Christianity or even religion more broadly, Jobs saw technology and his work with Apple as having the potential to create a better future for the world. He applied himself fully to this end. This raises a simple question: Did it
work? Was Jobs right to dismiss Christianity and its supposedly ordinary belief in God that inhibits innovation? Did his intuition serve him well when he set out on the path to change the world by giving us the iPhone, iPad, and MacBook?
The answer depends on what metric one uses. From a purely economic perspective, Jobs was very successful. At various times in its corporate history, Apple has had more cash on hand than the US Treasury. From a design or user-experience perspective, Jobs liberated the world from
clunky interfaces and unusable technologies. From an ecological perspective, however, the 12th iteration of the iPhone and the hurried pace of planned obsolescence have been an environmental tragedy. According to a 2019 United Nations report, the world produces 50 million tons of electronic waste per year, and only 20 percent of this e-waste is recycled. By 2050, global e-waste could reach 120 million tons per year. The demand for phone and laptop batteries has fueled frenetic cobalt mining in African countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
While concern for Africa led Jobs to depart from the Christian faith and the church, his inventions have led to dangerous mining practices and child labor in Africa.
Beyond ecology and international development, contemporary philosophy raises its own concerns about the legacy of Steve Jobs. Modern scholars of nihilism and technology such as Arthur Kroker and Nolen Gertz have argued that modern gadgetry and technological devices
have harmed humanity. Drawing on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and his philosophy of nihilism, these scholars suggest that tech innovators like Jobs have helped make the sick sicker by bringing about something worse than religion.
What do they mean? Isaacson suggests that Nietzsche and Jobs share much in common. Both were brash, unapologetic, and independent thinkers. Both died young—Nietzsche at 55 and Jobs at 56—yet they crammed enough accomplishments into a short lifetime to be remembered by history. Both had an interest in Eastern religion, and both were formed by Christianity and ultimately took issue with it. Nietzsche and Jobs both possessed indomitable wills. Jobs is known for his “reality distortion field,” his unique ability to bend both reality and the will of others to accord with his own. Jobs’s reality-distortion-field resembles Nietzsche’s central idea of the will to power: power is good, weakness is bad, and happiness is the increase of power and overcoming resistance.
Nevertheless, despite all that these two held in common, Nietzsche would have detested the world that Jobs helped to create. Had Nietzsche been around to assess the legacy of Jobs, he would likely have made a brash pronouncement upon it: He made the sick sicker.
In Nihilism and Technology, Gertz describes how Nietzsche understood the Christian moral world to be “a sick world, a world where we are sick of being mortal, sick of being human, and sick of being ourselves.” Nietzsche held that the religious ideals of Christianity were life
destroying and world destroying because they encouraged individuals to be will-less, passively waiting to be defined by someone else’s values. According to Gertz, Nietzsche disdained the “ascetic priests” because they “sought to soothe rather than cure our suffering.”
According to Gertz, the problem is that Jobs took up the work of Nietzsche’s ascetic priests: he supplied people with wants, values, and remedies. Rejecting the idea that customers know what they want or need, Jobs preferred to create a desire within consumers. “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.” Jobs worked to create products—remedies, cures, or medications—so compelling that consumers simply had to have them. The devices and gadgets that Jobs helped create encourage users to be will-less, to allow someone else to impose their values on them. This is, according to Nietzsche, a way to avoid being human.
The problems that Nietzsche identified in the Christian faith are being reproduced by the tech companies of today. Kroker puts this in a radical way: “Perhaps the will to Christianity and digitality were always flip sides of the same historical movement, that Christianity was always a
sustained period of moral preparation for the coming to be of the digital nerve? Today, the mask of Christianity is removed, only to reveal the triumph of the digital gods.”
Apple Watches, iPhones, and other devices reshape our values, invite us to take things for granted, and effortlessly consume the medications prescribed by tech companies. The Apple Watch even tells you when to do biological tasks such as breathing or walking. iPhones and iPads, with their responsive touch screens and dazzling pixels, provide us with all that we need for self-hypnosis. These devices are an effortless means of mechanically consuming digital content in what Gertz calls “orgies of clicking.” Apple’s Siri was the first digital assistant waiting at our beck and call to dispense answers, tell us what to do, and help us avoid the essential human chore of having to think.
If it’s true that technological devices have made the sick sicker, then how might the sick be made well? In this world of gadgets, is there hope for healing and living again as humans? In Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, Albert Borgmann argues that technology
has shaped contemporary life around its peculiar pattern. Borgmann claims that the peculiar pattern of modern technology is fatally debilitating for human flourishing. He suggests that the pattern of technology becomes particularly harmful when there are no means by which one can “prune back the excesses of technology and restrict it to a supporting role.” The pruning is found, according to Borgmann, in “focal things.” A focal thing is a locus for physical engagement, social relations, and experiences that happen in and around this thing. Examples of focal things are violins and fly-fishing rods. While iPhones make no demand on our skills or strength, violins and fly rods do. A focal thing is a concrete, tangible, and engaging thing that requires a practice to prosper within: “It sponsors discipline and skill which are exercised in a unity of achievement and enjoyment, of mind, body, and the world, of myself and others, and in a social union.”
Borgmann proposes that the Christian faith can be a fulcrum of change for reforming technology and contemporary life. For example, Borgmann sees the Eucharist as being a focal thing: participating in it is a tangible and engaging practice that requires knowledge, practice, attention, and social unity. Like a family gathering around the dinner table without their iPhones, the church’s gathering around the Lord’s table is a sacred practice that is regularly reenacted. Borgmann argues that this focal practice has the power to be a centering and orienting force within a technological society. The Lord’s Supper helps us live as humans in a world of gadgets and devices.
Christianity can further challenge modern technology by making room for communal celebration. “We must make a clearing for the celebration of the Word of God,” says Borgmann. “Christians must meet the rule of technology with a deliberate and regular counter practice.” By taking up things like violins and fly rods or partaking of the Lord’s Supper and the communal celebration of worship, healing can come to those who are sick, distracted, and in a state of perpetual techno-hypnosis.
In his famous 2005 Stanford commencement address, Jobs said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So, you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny,
life, karma, whatever.”
When 2031 arrives and it is time to mark the 20th anniversary of Jobs’s death, there will be more dots to connect. The passage of time will enable us to make even better sense of the technological world that Jobs helped make. Perhaps it will become clearer that he helped to make
the sick sicker. Perhaps it will become clear that he helped make the world—and us—better. Or perhaps there will be some new thinker crazy enough to set out to change the world
Tuesday, October 12
What is the difference between hope and optimism? Arthur Brooks writes about the difference and, in his opinion, which one is better. I'm wondering if you think Christianity is full of hope or is it full of optimism? Is the Church optimistic about the coming reign of Christ, or, is that simply hope?
I look forward to talking with you about it.
For those that are able to meet in person, I'll have the coffee ready. Or, join us on Zoom.
The Difference Between Hope and Optimism
Arthur Brooks, The Atlantic 9.23.21
During the Vietnam war, a U.S. Navy vice admiral who was held for more than seven years in a North Vietnamese prison noticed a surprising trend among his fellow inmates. Some of them survived the appalling conditions; others didn’t. Those who didn’t tended to be the most
optimistic of the group. As the vice admiral, James Stockdale, later told the business author Jim Collins, “They were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go … And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And
then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”
Among my circle of acquaintances, I have noticed a less dire version of this pattern over the past year and a half, as COVID-19 has slowly transformed from a temporary inconvenience into a new way of life. Those who have struggled the most have been the optimists always predicting a return to normality, only to be disappointed as the pandemic drags on. Some of the people who have done the best have been downright pessimistic about the outside world, but they’ve paid less attention to external circumstances and focused more on what they could do to persevere.
There’s a word for believing you can make things better without distorting reality: not optimism, but hope. Just as Stockdale found—and I’ve found in a less dramatic way during the pandemic—optimism often isn’t the best way to improve your well-being. The research shows that hope is a far more potent force. We can all get better at it as we work toward recovering from the pandemic, and benefit from our improved skill for the rest of our lives.
People tend to use hope and optimism as synonyms, but that isn’t accurate. In one 2004 paper in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, two psychologists used survey data to parse the two concepts. They determined that “hope focuses more directly on the personal attainment of specific goals, whereas optimism focuses more broadly on the expected quality of future outcomes in general.” In other words, optimism is the belief that things will turn out all right; hope makes no such assumption but is a conviction that one can act to make things better in some way.
Hope and optimism can go together, but they don’t have to. You can be a hopeless optimist who feels personally helpless but assumes that everything will turn out all right. You can be a hopeful pessimist who makes negative predictions about the future but has confidence that you can improve things in your life and others’.
Much of the research that has linked optimism and human thriving collapses the distinctions between optimism and hope. But netting out the two concepts tends to show different levels of benefit. One study in the journal Psychological Reports showed that although both optimism and hope drive down the likelihood of illness, hope has more power than optimism in doing so.
Given that hope involves personal agency, its links to individual success shouldn’t come as a surprise. In a report in The Journal of Positive Psychology in 2013, researchers defining hope as “having the will and finding the way” found that high-hope employees are 28 percent more
likely to be successful at work and 44 percent more likely to enjoy good health and well-being. A multiyear study of students from two universities in the United Kingdom found that hope, measured in response to self-rated measures such as “I energetically pursue my goals,” predicted academic achievement better than intelligence, personality, or even prior achievement.
Hope is more than a “nice to have” for well-being; lacking it is disastrous. In a 2001 study of older Mexican and European Americans who took a survey between 1992 and 1996, 29 percent of those whom researchers classified as “hopeless” based on their survey answers had died by
1999, versus 11 percent of those who were hopeful—even after correcting for age and self-rated health status.
Some might argue that having hope is mostly a matter of luck—you are born with it. This might be partially true for optimism: One study finds it is 36 percent genetic. Whether hope has a genetic link or not (I have not seen any measure of this), most philosophical and religious
traditions regard it as an active choice, and even a commandment. Indeed, it is a theological virtue in Christianity: It implies voluntary action, not just happy prediction.
The Catholic nun and mystic Teresa of Avila believed that hope comes from will and commitment. As she poetically wrote in the 16th century, “Hope, O my soul, hope … the more you struggle, the more you prove the love that you bear your God, and the more you will rejoice one day with your Beloved, in a happiness and rapture that can never end.” Religious or not, we can all learn from Teresa’s assessment and commit to increasing our hope for a better life and future by taking the following steps.
1. Imagine a better future, and detail what makes it so.
When you feel a bit hopeless, start changing your outlook. Say, for example, that the city you live in and love is struggling with the problem of homelessness, and more and more of your neighbors are finding themselves without shelter. You could easily conclude that the situation is
hopeless, but you can do more for your neighbors’ happiness—and your own—if you instead imagine a city where fewer people are resorting to living on the street and everyone has a better quality of life.
Rather than basking in the glow of a fictitious city and leaving it at that, make a list of the specific elements that will have improved; for example, more affordable housing, better public policy and regulation, or more attention to substance abuse and mental-health needs.
2. Envision yourself taking action.
If you leave things at Step 1 and thus convince yourself that better times lie ahead, you will have engaged in optimism, but not yet hope. Envisioning a better future will not, on its own, make it so. But it can help the world when it changes our personal behavior from complaint to action. Thus, the second step in this exercise is to imagine yourself helping in some plausible way to bring about a better future, albeit at the micro level.
Continuing with the example above, envision yourself volunteering at a soup kitchen one day a week, advocating for better policies in your city’s government, or making the plight of people experiencing homelessness more visible in your community. Avoid illusions of being the
invincible savior; instead, imagine helping one real person, convincing one policy maker, or increasing the compassion of one fellow citizen.
Now, armed with hope, you can move on to the most important step of all.
3. Act.
Take your grand vision of improvement and humble ambition to be part of it in a specific way and execute accordingly. Follow through on your ideas to help at the person-to-person level. I recommend trying two or three, because your first idea could likely prove unworkable or
unrealistic.
Your specific action might feel like an exercise in futility, because it is so small. This is the voice of hopelessness inside your head. Combat it with the words of Thérèse of Lisieux, the young 19th-century French nun who advocated the “Little Way.” She emphasized that the magnitude of an act was not only its worldly impact but the love with which you undertake it. Your little way will change your heart and perhaps infect the hearts of others, especially when they see the effect that practicing hope and love has on you.
While I am quoting nuns named Teresa, perhaps Mother Teresa summarizes it best: “Don’t look for big things, just do small things with great love.”
In 1891, Emily Dickinson wrote that hope is something unearned that we can always count on:
“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers — / That perches in the soul — / And sings the tune without the words — / And never stops — at all —”
Dickinson’s sentiment is beautiful, but not quite accurate. For some lucky souls, optimism shows up uninvited and makes a nest. But hope requires that we make a nest for it, and put out some tasty birdseed too. If we work for it and it indeed alights in our hearts, there’s no sweeter song in a dissonant world
I look forward to talking with you about it.
For those that are able to meet in person, I'll have the coffee ready. Or, join us on Zoom.
The Difference Between Hope and Optimism
Arthur Brooks, The Atlantic 9.23.21
During the Vietnam war, a U.S. Navy vice admiral who was held for more than seven years in a North Vietnamese prison noticed a surprising trend among his fellow inmates. Some of them survived the appalling conditions; others didn’t. Those who didn’t tended to be the most
optimistic of the group. As the vice admiral, James Stockdale, later told the business author Jim Collins, “They were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go … And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And
then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”
Among my circle of acquaintances, I have noticed a less dire version of this pattern over the past year and a half, as COVID-19 has slowly transformed from a temporary inconvenience into a new way of life. Those who have struggled the most have been the optimists always predicting a return to normality, only to be disappointed as the pandemic drags on. Some of the people who have done the best have been downright pessimistic about the outside world, but they’ve paid less attention to external circumstances and focused more on what they could do to persevere.
There’s a word for believing you can make things better without distorting reality: not optimism, but hope. Just as Stockdale found—and I’ve found in a less dramatic way during the pandemic—optimism often isn’t the best way to improve your well-being. The research shows that hope is a far more potent force. We can all get better at it as we work toward recovering from the pandemic, and benefit from our improved skill for the rest of our lives.
People tend to use hope and optimism as synonyms, but that isn’t accurate. In one 2004 paper in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, two psychologists used survey data to parse the two concepts. They determined that “hope focuses more directly on the personal attainment of specific goals, whereas optimism focuses more broadly on the expected quality of future outcomes in general.” In other words, optimism is the belief that things will turn out all right; hope makes no such assumption but is a conviction that one can act to make things better in some way.
Hope and optimism can go together, but they don’t have to. You can be a hopeless optimist who feels personally helpless but assumes that everything will turn out all right. You can be a hopeful pessimist who makes negative predictions about the future but has confidence that you can improve things in your life and others’.
Much of the research that has linked optimism and human thriving collapses the distinctions between optimism and hope. But netting out the two concepts tends to show different levels of benefit. One study in the journal Psychological Reports showed that although both optimism and hope drive down the likelihood of illness, hope has more power than optimism in doing so.
Given that hope involves personal agency, its links to individual success shouldn’t come as a surprise. In a report in The Journal of Positive Psychology in 2013, researchers defining hope as “having the will and finding the way” found that high-hope employees are 28 percent more
likely to be successful at work and 44 percent more likely to enjoy good health and well-being. A multiyear study of students from two universities in the United Kingdom found that hope, measured in response to self-rated measures such as “I energetically pursue my goals,” predicted academic achievement better than intelligence, personality, or even prior achievement.
Hope is more than a “nice to have” for well-being; lacking it is disastrous. In a 2001 study of older Mexican and European Americans who took a survey between 1992 and 1996, 29 percent of those whom researchers classified as “hopeless” based on their survey answers had died by
1999, versus 11 percent of those who were hopeful—even after correcting for age and self-rated health status.
Some might argue that having hope is mostly a matter of luck—you are born with it. This might be partially true for optimism: One study finds it is 36 percent genetic. Whether hope has a genetic link or not (I have not seen any measure of this), most philosophical and religious
traditions regard it as an active choice, and even a commandment. Indeed, it is a theological virtue in Christianity: It implies voluntary action, not just happy prediction.
The Catholic nun and mystic Teresa of Avila believed that hope comes from will and commitment. As she poetically wrote in the 16th century, “Hope, O my soul, hope … the more you struggle, the more you prove the love that you bear your God, and the more you will rejoice one day with your Beloved, in a happiness and rapture that can never end.” Religious or not, we can all learn from Teresa’s assessment and commit to increasing our hope for a better life and future by taking the following steps.
1. Imagine a better future, and detail what makes it so.
When you feel a bit hopeless, start changing your outlook. Say, for example, that the city you live in and love is struggling with the problem of homelessness, and more and more of your neighbors are finding themselves without shelter. You could easily conclude that the situation is
hopeless, but you can do more for your neighbors’ happiness—and your own—if you instead imagine a city where fewer people are resorting to living on the street and everyone has a better quality of life.
Rather than basking in the glow of a fictitious city and leaving it at that, make a list of the specific elements that will have improved; for example, more affordable housing, better public policy and regulation, or more attention to substance abuse and mental-health needs.
2. Envision yourself taking action.
If you leave things at Step 1 and thus convince yourself that better times lie ahead, you will have engaged in optimism, but not yet hope. Envisioning a better future will not, on its own, make it so. But it can help the world when it changes our personal behavior from complaint to action. Thus, the second step in this exercise is to imagine yourself helping in some plausible way to bring about a better future, albeit at the micro level.
Continuing with the example above, envision yourself volunteering at a soup kitchen one day a week, advocating for better policies in your city’s government, or making the plight of people experiencing homelessness more visible in your community. Avoid illusions of being the
invincible savior; instead, imagine helping one real person, convincing one policy maker, or increasing the compassion of one fellow citizen.
Now, armed with hope, you can move on to the most important step of all.
3. Act.
Take your grand vision of improvement and humble ambition to be part of it in a specific way and execute accordingly. Follow through on your ideas to help at the person-to-person level. I recommend trying two or three, because your first idea could likely prove unworkable or
unrealistic.
Your specific action might feel like an exercise in futility, because it is so small. This is the voice of hopelessness inside your head. Combat it with the words of Thérèse of Lisieux, the young 19th-century French nun who advocated the “Little Way.” She emphasized that the magnitude of an act was not only its worldly impact but the love with which you undertake it. Your little way will change your heart and perhaps infect the hearts of others, especially when they see the effect that practicing hope and love has on you.
While I am quoting nuns named Teresa, perhaps Mother Teresa summarizes it best: “Don’t look for big things, just do small things with great love.”
In 1891, Emily Dickinson wrote that hope is something unearned that we can always count on:
“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers — / That perches in the soul — / And sings the tune without the words — / And never stops — at all —”
Dickinson’s sentiment is beautiful, but not quite accurate. For some lucky souls, optimism shows up uninvited and makes a nest. But hope requires that we make a nest for it, and put out some tasty birdseed too. If we work for it and it indeed alights in our hearts, there’s no sweeter song in a dissonant world
Tuesday, October 5
This Tuesday we have two articles to discuss and perhaps compare and contrast. One article from the WSJ - Want to Lock Down for the Climate? - takes a particularly cynical view of carbon emissions and concludes moving from fossil fuels to renewables is not realistic. The other article from The Atlantic - The Green Vortex - takes the point of view that we have already entered into a process of free enterprise and government regulation (the green vortex) so that it is more or less inevitable that we will reduce carbon emissions over the next decade.
What do you think?
In the Episcopal Church, a part of our weekly prayers is for the conservation of our natural resources. It is a Christian mandate to be stewards of creation. These articles make me wonder if we are on a path of conservation, or, are we being unrealistic. I'd like to know what you think.
You can join in on Zoom or in-person, I'll have the coffee ready.
Want to Lock Down for the Climate?
Bjorn Lomborg, WSJ 9.30.21
From the news to late-night shows, much of the media makes it sound as if renewables are on the verge of taking over. But that’s far from reality. In 2019, the latest complete year of data, 81% of the world’s energy supply came from fossil fuels, according to the International Energy Agency. Even if all nations were to fulfill their current climate promises, the IEA estimates that fossil-fuel use would still make up 73% by 2040.
How can this be possible when headlines constantly trumpet the future of solar and wind? Partly, it’s that renewables produce mostly electricity, which is only 19% of all the energy the world consumes. The rest is used for things like heating, transportation and the production of goods like steel and fertilizer. Even if all electricity turned green, most of the world would still run on fossil fuels.
And most electricity isn’t green—almost two-thirds is still generated by fossil fuels, with nuclear and hydro supplying another quarter. The solar and wind favored by environmentalists generate only 8%. Though renewables are often touted as the cheapest energy source, it’s only true when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. If it’s a still night you need backup power, typically from fossil fuels—which makes electricity costlier because you need to pay for both the solar panel and the gas turbine. The European Union, which gets 17% of its electricity from solar and wind—the highest percentage in the world—also has some of the highest consumer electricity costs.
In fossil-fuel use, the greenest continent is Africa. Nearly half of its energy comes from renewables, mostly wood, dung, and cardboard burned for cooking and heating—which kills about 700,000 people a year in sub-Saharan Africa with indoor air pollution. More than half a billion Africans lack access to electricity. Economic development can move them out of this unenviable position, but it’ll also mean Africans will use significantly more fossil fuels than they do today. To give a sense of how much it could grow: California uses more electricity on its pools and hot tubs than all 44 million inhabitants of Uganda consume in total.
Cutting fossil fuels as quickly as some environmentalists want will be tremendously difficult. In 2020 pandemic lockdowns forced the world to cut carbon emissions significantly. But to fulfill the Paris climate accords completely, the United Nations says that global emissions would have
to plunge even further every year for the rest of the decade. In 2021 emissions would have to drop by more than double the lockdown-induced decline. By the end of 2030, they’d have to have fallen by 11 times what they did in 2020. Not exactly realistic.
Mr. Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.
The Green Vortex
Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic 6.16.21
Here, at least, is the standard story: The past decade has been abysmal for climate-change policy in the United States. In 2009, a new president took office pledging to pass a comprehensive climate bill in Congress. He did not. The Environmental Protection Agency sought to
meaningfully reduce carbon pollution from power plants. It did not. The United States joined the Paris Agreement. Then we elected President Donald Trump, and we left.
Yes—and here, the narrator always inserts a gale-force sigh—America knows what it needs to do: Pass a carbon fee or tax, some kind of policy that nudges people to reduce their use of fossil fuels. Yet America refuses. And so the 2010s, once greeted as a “new era” for climate action,
now seem unexceptional, the third decade in a row that the United States understood the dangers of climate change but failed to act. Meanwhile the seas rose, wildfires raged, and the Earth saw its hottest 10 years on record. You have probably heard this tale before; it is a popular and undeniably accurate read of recent history. It has just one flaw: America is decarbonizing anyway.
That 2009 climate bill, the one that President Barack Obama couldn’t pass? It required the U.S. to cut greenhouse-gas emissions 17 percent by 2020 as compared with their all-time high. Yet last year, our emissions were down 21 percent. The same bill said that the U.S. had to generate
20 percent of its electricity from renewables by 2020. Last year, we met that target. We will surpass it in 2021.
These numbers are not a mere fluke. Last year was a singular, awful moment in economic history, but even accounting for the effects of the COVID-19 recession, America’s real-world emissions last decade outperformed the Obama bill’s targets. From 2012 to 2020, real-world
U.S. emissions were more than 1 billion tons below what the bill would have required, according to my analysis of data from Rhodium Group, an energy-research firm. (Of course, had the bill passed, the U.S. might have done even better.) Meanwhile, across the economy, companies are learning how to decarbonize. Ford is already producing more electric Mustang Mach-Es than gas-powered Mustangs; General Motors, Honda, Volvo, and Jaguar have promised to stop selling gas cars altogether by 2040. Royal Dutch Shell was court-ordered last month to cut its
emissions, and shareholders just forced Exxon to replace a quarter of its board with climate-concerned activist investors. Most important of all, the costs of solar and batteries have declined in the United States by a factor of 10 over the past decade, and the cost of wind has fallen 70
percent. Ten years ago, virtually no analyst thought they would fall so low. The International Energy Agency made headlines this year when it called solar “the cheapest electricity in history,” but the entire apparatus of renewable energy has seen cost declines.
What gives? America is supposed to be doing nothing right. Yet we’re making progress anyway. How? Why?
A group of scholars, engineers, and economists may have an answer. Over the past few years, this group has puzzled together a powerful thesis that explains why America and the world are decarbonizing—and how they can get better at it. Decarbonization isn’t best accomplished by fiat, they argue, but by feedback loop; it proceeds by a self-accelerating process that I have called “the green vortex.” The green vortex describes how policy, technology, business, and politics can all work together, lowering the cost of zero-carbon energy, building pro-climate coalitions, and speeding up humanity’s ability to decarbonize. It has also already gotten results. The green vortex is what drove down the cost of wind and solar, what overturned Exxon’s board, and what the Biden administration is banking on in its infrastructure plan.
“Policy makers have been dithering about climate change since 1988, and in the background you have this steady progression of technologies,” Greg Nemet, a public-affairs professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. Foreign industrial policy has driven that progression, he said, although American tax rebates—and California’s economic planning—have also played a part. Those policies have allowed the entire world to decarbonize and led companies to support ever more aggressive carbon cuts. That, in essence, is the green vortex.
In coining green vortex, I’ve borrowed from the work of Nina Kelsey, an international-affairs professor at George Washington University, who has argued that combining financial incentives and technological change into a “green spiral” can drive decarbonization. “There’s so much
energy spent on trying to convince people what we should do about climate change,” she told me. “I think it’s gone about as far as we can go.” What will fix climate change now, she says, is making it profitable for companies to fight climate change.
We should hope this thesis is correct. Under America’s new Paris Agreement pledge, announced by President Joe Biden in April, the country will need to double the pace of its emissions decline over the next decade. Whatever we’re doing right, we’re soon going to have to do it twice as fast.
The idea that drives the green vortex is: Practice makes improvement. The more that we do something, whether baking a cake or manufacturing electric vehicles, the better we get at it. (Economists call this “learning by doing.”) This idea might seem intuitive, but it is often ignored in policy conversations. Over the past half-decade, learning by doing has driven down the cost of semiconductors, solar panels, and electric vehicles.
The green vortex leverages this idea to describe a positive feedback loop. Policy can speed up the pace of technology development. As technologies develop, they get cheaper. As they get cheaper, more companies adopt them. As more companies adopt them, their leaders grow more comfortable with climate policy generally—and more supportive of pro-technology policy in particular. As more corporate leaders support climate policy, coalitions change, governments can pass more aggressive measures, and the cycle expands and begins again.
The core mechanism here is that subsidies speed up learning by doing. Any industry would, eventually, figure out how to make a product more cheaply; subsidies move that learning forward in time, so that the unsubsidized price starts looking attractive more quickly. “You’re
trying to grab the lever that accelerates the pace of cost declines,” Jenkins said. “That’s where the policy has teeth.” In the American economy, she told me, two such industries tower above the rest: automakers and electric utilities. Both sell a product that contributes to climate change
today but does not need to. Ninety-eight percent of light-duty vehicles sold in the United States in 2020 burned gasoline, but automakers could—with some capital investment and reorganizing—sell electric cars instead.
This focus on domestic production, on American-made cars and steel, runs against 40 years of textbook economics, which has prized efficiency above all. Herbert Stein, President Richard Nixon’s chief economist, once declared that “if the most efficient way for the U.S. to get steel is to produce tapes of [the TV show] Dallas and sell them to the Japanese, then producing tapes of Dallas is our basic industry.” And it’s true that fostering a domestic carbon-capture industry might suck up dollars that could go toward decarbonization elsewhere. But if you’re trying to accelerate a vortex, it makes sense: Biden is betting that a strong domestic EV industry will build political demand for more decarbonization down the road.
Could a dynamic like the one these policy wonks and academics describe really save the world? According to Kelsey, it already has—just not for climate change. The green vortex helped fix the fraying ozone layer in the 1980s, she argues, when it allowed for the global phaseout of ozone-depleting chemicals, called chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs. “The most important thing, the underreported thing, is that the same companies that made the polluting CFCs also made the substitute for CFCs,” she said. In the past decade, it has become clear that although HFCs do not deplete the ozone layer, they do ravage the climate, trapping heat thousands of times more effectively than carbon dioxide. (Humanity, you might say, leapt from the atmospheric frying pan into the climatological deep-fat fryer.)
Yet again, the U.S. has moved swiftly to address this problem. Last year, bipartisan majorities in Congress voted to keep phasing out the chemicals over the next 15 years, which will prevent the equivalent of 900 million tons of carbon dioxide, more than Germany’s annual emissions.
President Trump signed the phaseout, one of the most substantial pieces of climate policy in American history, into law on December 27. Why did Trump approve the measure? Perhaps because it created another new market for those same chemical companies to sell a new type of
replacement. In the next decade, we’ll find out if that feedback loop can work the same for decarbonization more broadly—and whether American policy makers can learn not just to live in the green vortex, but to manipulate it.
Robinson Meyer is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of the newsletter The Weekly Planet, and a co-founder of the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic.
What do you think?
In the Episcopal Church, a part of our weekly prayers is for the conservation of our natural resources. It is a Christian mandate to be stewards of creation. These articles make me wonder if we are on a path of conservation, or, are we being unrealistic. I'd like to know what you think.
You can join in on Zoom or in-person, I'll have the coffee ready.
Want to Lock Down for the Climate?
Bjorn Lomborg, WSJ 9.30.21
From the news to late-night shows, much of the media makes it sound as if renewables are on the verge of taking over. But that’s far from reality. In 2019, the latest complete year of data, 81% of the world’s energy supply came from fossil fuels, according to the International Energy Agency. Even if all nations were to fulfill their current climate promises, the IEA estimates that fossil-fuel use would still make up 73% by 2040.
How can this be possible when headlines constantly trumpet the future of solar and wind? Partly, it’s that renewables produce mostly electricity, which is only 19% of all the energy the world consumes. The rest is used for things like heating, transportation and the production of goods like steel and fertilizer. Even if all electricity turned green, most of the world would still run on fossil fuels.
And most electricity isn’t green—almost two-thirds is still generated by fossil fuels, with nuclear and hydro supplying another quarter. The solar and wind favored by environmentalists generate only 8%. Though renewables are often touted as the cheapest energy source, it’s only true when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. If it’s a still night you need backup power, typically from fossil fuels—which makes electricity costlier because you need to pay for both the solar panel and the gas turbine. The European Union, which gets 17% of its electricity from solar and wind—the highest percentage in the world—also has some of the highest consumer electricity costs.
In fossil-fuel use, the greenest continent is Africa. Nearly half of its energy comes from renewables, mostly wood, dung, and cardboard burned for cooking and heating—which kills about 700,000 people a year in sub-Saharan Africa with indoor air pollution. More than half a billion Africans lack access to electricity. Economic development can move them out of this unenviable position, but it’ll also mean Africans will use significantly more fossil fuels than they do today. To give a sense of how much it could grow: California uses more electricity on its pools and hot tubs than all 44 million inhabitants of Uganda consume in total.
Cutting fossil fuels as quickly as some environmentalists want will be tremendously difficult. In 2020 pandemic lockdowns forced the world to cut carbon emissions significantly. But to fulfill the Paris climate accords completely, the United Nations says that global emissions would have
to plunge even further every year for the rest of the decade. In 2021 emissions would have to drop by more than double the lockdown-induced decline. By the end of 2030, they’d have to have fallen by 11 times what they did in 2020. Not exactly realistic.
Mr. Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.
The Green Vortex
Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic 6.16.21
Here, at least, is the standard story: The past decade has been abysmal for climate-change policy in the United States. In 2009, a new president took office pledging to pass a comprehensive climate bill in Congress. He did not. The Environmental Protection Agency sought to
meaningfully reduce carbon pollution from power plants. It did not. The United States joined the Paris Agreement. Then we elected President Donald Trump, and we left.
Yes—and here, the narrator always inserts a gale-force sigh—America knows what it needs to do: Pass a carbon fee or tax, some kind of policy that nudges people to reduce their use of fossil fuels. Yet America refuses. And so the 2010s, once greeted as a “new era” for climate action,
now seem unexceptional, the third decade in a row that the United States understood the dangers of climate change but failed to act. Meanwhile the seas rose, wildfires raged, and the Earth saw its hottest 10 years on record. You have probably heard this tale before; it is a popular and undeniably accurate read of recent history. It has just one flaw: America is decarbonizing anyway.
That 2009 climate bill, the one that President Barack Obama couldn’t pass? It required the U.S. to cut greenhouse-gas emissions 17 percent by 2020 as compared with their all-time high. Yet last year, our emissions were down 21 percent. The same bill said that the U.S. had to generate
20 percent of its electricity from renewables by 2020. Last year, we met that target. We will surpass it in 2021.
These numbers are not a mere fluke. Last year was a singular, awful moment in economic history, but even accounting for the effects of the COVID-19 recession, America’s real-world emissions last decade outperformed the Obama bill’s targets. From 2012 to 2020, real-world
U.S. emissions were more than 1 billion tons below what the bill would have required, according to my analysis of data from Rhodium Group, an energy-research firm. (Of course, had the bill passed, the U.S. might have done even better.) Meanwhile, across the economy, companies are learning how to decarbonize. Ford is already producing more electric Mustang Mach-Es than gas-powered Mustangs; General Motors, Honda, Volvo, and Jaguar have promised to stop selling gas cars altogether by 2040. Royal Dutch Shell was court-ordered last month to cut its
emissions, and shareholders just forced Exxon to replace a quarter of its board with climate-concerned activist investors. Most important of all, the costs of solar and batteries have declined in the United States by a factor of 10 over the past decade, and the cost of wind has fallen 70
percent. Ten years ago, virtually no analyst thought they would fall so low. The International Energy Agency made headlines this year when it called solar “the cheapest electricity in history,” but the entire apparatus of renewable energy has seen cost declines.
What gives? America is supposed to be doing nothing right. Yet we’re making progress anyway. How? Why?
A group of scholars, engineers, and economists may have an answer. Over the past few years, this group has puzzled together a powerful thesis that explains why America and the world are decarbonizing—and how they can get better at it. Decarbonization isn’t best accomplished by fiat, they argue, but by feedback loop; it proceeds by a self-accelerating process that I have called “the green vortex.” The green vortex describes how policy, technology, business, and politics can all work together, lowering the cost of zero-carbon energy, building pro-climate coalitions, and speeding up humanity’s ability to decarbonize. It has also already gotten results. The green vortex is what drove down the cost of wind and solar, what overturned Exxon’s board, and what the Biden administration is banking on in its infrastructure plan.
“Policy makers have been dithering about climate change since 1988, and in the background you have this steady progression of technologies,” Greg Nemet, a public-affairs professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. Foreign industrial policy has driven that progression, he said, although American tax rebates—and California’s economic planning—have also played a part. Those policies have allowed the entire world to decarbonize and led companies to support ever more aggressive carbon cuts. That, in essence, is the green vortex.
In coining green vortex, I’ve borrowed from the work of Nina Kelsey, an international-affairs professor at George Washington University, who has argued that combining financial incentives and technological change into a “green spiral” can drive decarbonization. “There’s so much
energy spent on trying to convince people what we should do about climate change,” she told me. “I think it’s gone about as far as we can go.” What will fix climate change now, she says, is making it profitable for companies to fight climate change.
We should hope this thesis is correct. Under America’s new Paris Agreement pledge, announced by President Joe Biden in April, the country will need to double the pace of its emissions decline over the next decade. Whatever we’re doing right, we’re soon going to have to do it twice as fast.
The idea that drives the green vortex is: Practice makes improvement. The more that we do something, whether baking a cake or manufacturing electric vehicles, the better we get at it. (Economists call this “learning by doing.”) This idea might seem intuitive, but it is often ignored in policy conversations. Over the past half-decade, learning by doing has driven down the cost of semiconductors, solar panels, and electric vehicles.
The green vortex leverages this idea to describe a positive feedback loop. Policy can speed up the pace of technology development. As technologies develop, they get cheaper. As they get cheaper, more companies adopt them. As more companies adopt them, their leaders grow more comfortable with climate policy generally—and more supportive of pro-technology policy in particular. As more corporate leaders support climate policy, coalitions change, governments can pass more aggressive measures, and the cycle expands and begins again.
The core mechanism here is that subsidies speed up learning by doing. Any industry would, eventually, figure out how to make a product more cheaply; subsidies move that learning forward in time, so that the unsubsidized price starts looking attractive more quickly. “You’re
trying to grab the lever that accelerates the pace of cost declines,” Jenkins said. “That’s where the policy has teeth.” In the American economy, she told me, two such industries tower above the rest: automakers and electric utilities. Both sell a product that contributes to climate change
today but does not need to. Ninety-eight percent of light-duty vehicles sold in the United States in 2020 burned gasoline, but automakers could—with some capital investment and reorganizing—sell electric cars instead.
This focus on domestic production, on American-made cars and steel, runs against 40 years of textbook economics, which has prized efficiency above all. Herbert Stein, President Richard Nixon’s chief economist, once declared that “if the most efficient way for the U.S. to get steel is to produce tapes of [the TV show] Dallas and sell them to the Japanese, then producing tapes of Dallas is our basic industry.” And it’s true that fostering a domestic carbon-capture industry might suck up dollars that could go toward decarbonization elsewhere. But if you’re trying to accelerate a vortex, it makes sense: Biden is betting that a strong domestic EV industry will build political demand for more decarbonization down the road.
Could a dynamic like the one these policy wonks and academics describe really save the world? According to Kelsey, it already has—just not for climate change. The green vortex helped fix the fraying ozone layer in the 1980s, she argues, when it allowed for the global phaseout of ozone-depleting chemicals, called chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs. “The most important thing, the underreported thing, is that the same companies that made the polluting CFCs also made the substitute for CFCs,” she said. In the past decade, it has become clear that although HFCs do not deplete the ozone layer, they do ravage the climate, trapping heat thousands of times more effectively than carbon dioxide. (Humanity, you might say, leapt from the atmospheric frying pan into the climatological deep-fat fryer.)
Yet again, the U.S. has moved swiftly to address this problem. Last year, bipartisan majorities in Congress voted to keep phasing out the chemicals over the next 15 years, which will prevent the equivalent of 900 million tons of carbon dioxide, more than Germany’s annual emissions.
President Trump signed the phaseout, one of the most substantial pieces of climate policy in American history, into law on December 27. Why did Trump approve the measure? Perhaps because it created another new market for those same chemical companies to sell a new type of
replacement. In the next decade, we’ll find out if that feedback loop can work the same for decarbonization more broadly—and whether American policy makers can learn not just to live in the green vortex, but to manipulate it.
Robinson Meyer is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of the newsletter The Weekly Planet, and a co-founder of the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic.
Tuesday, September 28 *On-Line Only*
We've probably all seen the videos of the border crisis in Texas and the living conditions under the bridge. This will be our discussion topic this week, and, in particular, what would Jesus say about it.
Attached are three articles - the WSJ editorial board's take on it and the other document are two short local articles about faith-based communities and their response to the crisis. Where do you see Jesus in all this?
The Del Rio Migrant Mess
Editorial Board, WSJ 9.19.21
The massing of thousands of Haitians under a bridge near Del Rio, Texas, in recent days is the latest example of government failure and perverse incentives that are producing chaos at the border.
The scenes from the area couldn’t have been scripted better by immigration restrictionists: Thousands of migrants crossing the Rio Grande en masse in the expectation that they’ll be able to claim asylum in the U.S. The thousands of Haitians fleeing desperate poverty somehow made
it to Mexico, then traveled to the border, probably with the help of the cartels that control the human traffic.
U.S. border agents have closed the legal Del Rio Port of Entry, so normal cross-border traffic essential for commerce is shut down. Some 15,000 Haitians and others are trapped in awful conditions around the Del Rio International Bridge, without basic necessities. The migrants may be carrying Covid-19, and border agents are overwhelmed.
So are local communities in Texas. Del Rio Mayor Bruno Lozano is pleading on national TV for the feds to control the border. The Department of Homeland Security says it is surging 400 agents to the area and is vowing to deport the Haitians who have arrived illegally and is insisting
that “our borders are not open.” But clearly the migrants don’t believe it. The massing of Haitians symbolizes how the migrants are now coming from across the Americas, and in many cases the world.
The problem is the incentives of American policy. U.S. law, at least as interpreted by the courts, allows migrants to claim asylum even if they are coming solely for economic reasons. They can then be released into the U.S. to work until their asylum claims are heard by overwhelmed
immigration judges. Once here they know they have access to healthcare, education for their children, and in some states Covid checks (up to $15,600 in New York).
The Biden Administration has deported many migrants under a Covid emergency rule that the Trump Administration used. But a federal judge last week said the Administration can’t use the policy to deport migrant families, while delaying the injunction for 14 days. The predictable
result of all this has been the biggest migrant surge in some 20 years. Border apprehensions in August were nearly 209,000, and the hot summer is supposed to be the slow season. Apprehensions so far in 2021 have been 1.32 million.
The Biden Administration keeps saying the border is closed, though that won’t matter if it doesn’t work to change U.S. law. This is politically unsustainable, as it creates hardship for migrants and border communities. It will also make the public less likely to trust politicians on
sensible immigration reform that would allow more legal migration in exchange for tighter border security
Local Haitian Pastors Helping Migrants Get from Texas to San Diego
Priya Sridhar, 7 NBC San Diego 9.22.21
Pastors from Haitian churches in San Diego are working around the clock to bring Haitian migrants who crossed the border in Texas to San Diego. Pastor Johny Oxeda from the First Haitian Baptist Church Ebenezer of San Diego said in the last week he has helped approximately
50 Haitian get from Del Rio, Texas, to San Diego. He said he has 15 people sleeping in his own home.
The newest migrants will add to San Diego's large Haitian community. Just last year, approximately 1,500 refugees resettled in San Diego County and more than 1,000 of them were from Haiti. "I feel like, myself, also I’m an immigrant, I came here 10 years ago seeking asylum
... and after that I promised that I’m going to be using myself to help anyone who maybe needs something like that," Pastor Oxeda said.
Nebienson Martel, Chantal Appollon and their 1-year-old son stood outside Oxeda's church Wednesday and reflected on their three-month journey across 11 countries that led them to Del Rio. Oxeda translated their thoughts from Creole. "We left Haiti because of the way the country is going right now -- insecurity," Appollon said. "When we get to El Paso, to the bridge, the things were very, very difficult. We didn’t have food, we didn't have a drink. My son couldn’t get anything to eat," the couple said.
Oxeda hopes to travel to Del Rio soon to see how he can be of assistance to the migrants there. A pastor from another Haitian church in San Diego has also gone to Texas with an immigration attorney to see how they can help.
Faith-Based Community Helping Haitians
Jessie Degollado, KSAT News 9.20.21
The faith-based community in Del Rio has helped more than its share of immigrants from Mexico and Central America, but the thousands of arrivals from Haiti were a first. “It’s been an eye-opener for me,” said Shon Young, president of the Val Verde Border Humanitarian
Coalition. “It looked like a third world country, maybe even a fourth world country, if there is one.”
Matt Mayberry, the lead pastor of City Church Del Rio, where Young also is pastor, said, “From our perspective, being a pastor, we have a great opportunity to love people who are in desperate need of it.” Even if it’s in the form of much-needed items like water, juice, snacks, sandwiches, baby food and diapers,” Mayberry said. “There’s a lot of people that that just need a welcome.”
They said their volunteers also offer food and refreshments to the U.S. Border Patrol agents and Texas Department of Public Safety troopers who have responded to the emergency in Del Rio. “We’ve been able to bless a whole lot of people, not only refugees,” Mayberry said. “Our church has been able to be an impact in all of their lives.”
If people in San Antonio want to help, Young said the Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalition website has a where donations can be made, as well as an Amazon wish list. Young also said big box stores in San Antonio also has many items in bulk that could be helpful. Mayberry said
donations also can be specified for Haitian relief on the City Church Del Rio website under tithes and offerings. Mayberry and Young pointed out that they do not buy plane tickets for the refugees. They said many already have money they’ve saved for their journey. But if they need
money, Young said, cell phones and free WiFi are available for them to reach their families back home.
Politics aside, Mayberry said, “Whether we are on opposite sides of a political spectrum shouldn’t determine the way that we respond to one another when someone is in need.” Young said many people may have their minds made up until they meet a refugee face-to-face. “It
becomes real. He’s not the headline. He’s not the news story of the day. It’s the actual person that’s sitting right in front of you,” Young said. “That changes a lot of things.
Attached are three articles - the WSJ editorial board's take on it and the other document are two short local articles about faith-based communities and their response to the crisis. Where do you see Jesus in all this?
The Del Rio Migrant Mess
Editorial Board, WSJ 9.19.21
The massing of thousands of Haitians under a bridge near Del Rio, Texas, in recent days is the latest example of government failure and perverse incentives that are producing chaos at the border.
The scenes from the area couldn’t have been scripted better by immigration restrictionists: Thousands of migrants crossing the Rio Grande en masse in the expectation that they’ll be able to claim asylum in the U.S. The thousands of Haitians fleeing desperate poverty somehow made
it to Mexico, then traveled to the border, probably with the help of the cartels that control the human traffic.
U.S. border agents have closed the legal Del Rio Port of Entry, so normal cross-border traffic essential for commerce is shut down. Some 15,000 Haitians and others are trapped in awful conditions around the Del Rio International Bridge, without basic necessities. The migrants may be carrying Covid-19, and border agents are overwhelmed.
So are local communities in Texas. Del Rio Mayor Bruno Lozano is pleading on national TV for the feds to control the border. The Department of Homeland Security says it is surging 400 agents to the area and is vowing to deport the Haitians who have arrived illegally and is insisting
that “our borders are not open.” But clearly the migrants don’t believe it. The massing of Haitians symbolizes how the migrants are now coming from across the Americas, and in many cases the world.
The problem is the incentives of American policy. U.S. law, at least as interpreted by the courts, allows migrants to claim asylum even if they are coming solely for economic reasons. They can then be released into the U.S. to work until their asylum claims are heard by overwhelmed
immigration judges. Once here they know they have access to healthcare, education for their children, and in some states Covid checks (up to $15,600 in New York).
The Biden Administration has deported many migrants under a Covid emergency rule that the Trump Administration used. But a federal judge last week said the Administration can’t use the policy to deport migrant families, while delaying the injunction for 14 days. The predictable
result of all this has been the biggest migrant surge in some 20 years. Border apprehensions in August were nearly 209,000, and the hot summer is supposed to be the slow season. Apprehensions so far in 2021 have been 1.32 million.
The Biden Administration keeps saying the border is closed, though that won’t matter if it doesn’t work to change U.S. law. This is politically unsustainable, as it creates hardship for migrants and border communities. It will also make the public less likely to trust politicians on
sensible immigration reform that would allow more legal migration in exchange for tighter border security
Local Haitian Pastors Helping Migrants Get from Texas to San Diego
Priya Sridhar, 7 NBC San Diego 9.22.21
Pastors from Haitian churches in San Diego are working around the clock to bring Haitian migrants who crossed the border in Texas to San Diego. Pastor Johny Oxeda from the First Haitian Baptist Church Ebenezer of San Diego said in the last week he has helped approximately
50 Haitian get from Del Rio, Texas, to San Diego. He said he has 15 people sleeping in his own home.
The newest migrants will add to San Diego's large Haitian community. Just last year, approximately 1,500 refugees resettled in San Diego County and more than 1,000 of them were from Haiti. "I feel like, myself, also I’m an immigrant, I came here 10 years ago seeking asylum
... and after that I promised that I’m going to be using myself to help anyone who maybe needs something like that," Pastor Oxeda said.
Nebienson Martel, Chantal Appollon and their 1-year-old son stood outside Oxeda's church Wednesday and reflected on their three-month journey across 11 countries that led them to Del Rio. Oxeda translated their thoughts from Creole. "We left Haiti because of the way the country is going right now -- insecurity," Appollon said. "When we get to El Paso, to the bridge, the things were very, very difficult. We didn’t have food, we didn't have a drink. My son couldn’t get anything to eat," the couple said.
Oxeda hopes to travel to Del Rio soon to see how he can be of assistance to the migrants there. A pastor from another Haitian church in San Diego has also gone to Texas with an immigration attorney to see how they can help.
Faith-Based Community Helping Haitians
Jessie Degollado, KSAT News 9.20.21
The faith-based community in Del Rio has helped more than its share of immigrants from Mexico and Central America, but the thousands of arrivals from Haiti were a first. “It’s been an eye-opener for me,” said Shon Young, president of the Val Verde Border Humanitarian
Coalition. “It looked like a third world country, maybe even a fourth world country, if there is one.”
Matt Mayberry, the lead pastor of City Church Del Rio, where Young also is pastor, said, “From our perspective, being a pastor, we have a great opportunity to love people who are in desperate need of it.” Even if it’s in the form of much-needed items like water, juice, snacks, sandwiches, baby food and diapers,” Mayberry said. “There’s a lot of people that that just need a welcome.”
They said their volunteers also offer food and refreshments to the U.S. Border Patrol agents and Texas Department of Public Safety troopers who have responded to the emergency in Del Rio. “We’ve been able to bless a whole lot of people, not only refugees,” Mayberry said. “Our church has been able to be an impact in all of their lives.”
If people in San Antonio want to help, Young said the Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalition website has a where donations can be made, as well as an Amazon wish list. Young also said big box stores in San Antonio also has many items in bulk that could be helpful. Mayberry said
donations also can be specified for Haitian relief on the City Church Del Rio website under tithes and offerings. Mayberry and Young pointed out that they do not buy plane tickets for the refugees. They said many already have money they’ve saved for their journey. But if they need
money, Young said, cell phones and free WiFi are available for them to reach their families back home.
Politics aside, Mayberry said, “Whether we are on opposite sides of a political spectrum shouldn’t determine the way that we respond to one another when someone is in need.” Young said many people may have their minds made up until they meet a refugee face-to-face. “It
becomes real. He’s not the headline. He’s not the news story of the day. It’s the actual person that’s sitting right in front of you,” Young said. “That changes a lot of things.
Tuesday, September 21
One of the hallmarks of Christianity is hope. I like to think of it as a counterbalance to the way of the world. Where does hope come from? Why do some seem to have it and others don't? Can hope be learned or generated? These questions are at the heart of the discussion reading for next week. I'm interested to hear your thoughts on their analysis and where you find hope in your life.
You can join in on Zoom or in-person, I'll have the coffee ready.
We are gathering in person - I'll have the coffee ready - and on Zoom
-Fr. Dave
Hope is the Antidote to Helplessness
Emily Esfahani Smith, Psyche 9.13.21
Several decades ago, two psychologists stumbled upon a phenomenon that revolutionized their field and changed the way we think about adversity. They called it ‘learned helplessness’ – when faced with a difficult situation that feels uncontrollable, some people choose to act helpless and depressed; others have learned skills to cope.
In the wake of a pandemic that has upended life for millions, this idea feels more relevant than ever. But just as the concept of learned helplessness helps to explain many of the emotions we’ve been going through, it has also inspired work that offers positive insights into how people can remain resilient, even in the face of uncontrollable adversities. The key is having hope.
Researchers, Martin Seligman and Steven Maier, replicated the learned helplessness findings first in rodents and, later, in human beings. Moreover, when it came to provoking feelings of helplessness in human volunteers, Seligman noticed something important – after exposing people to non-controllable events, such as unpleasant loud noises or impossible anagrams, they would often begin to exhibit some of the classic symptoms of depression, such as feelings of worthlessness, sadness, loss of interest, poor concentration and fatigue. Ultimately, he concluded that learned helplessness is a subtype of depression.
But there was a crucial caveat – whenever the researchers ran these studies, there was always a proportion of the subjects who were exposed to uncontrollable, aversive events, but did not give up trying to exert control. Even though they learned that nothing they did mattered to stopping an aversive event, they kept trying to make their situation better. Also, some of the subjects who did give up, becoming helpless for a time, bounced back immediately and began to act with agency in later parts of the experiments. The question was – why? Why did uncontrollable adversities render some people helpless while others remained resilient?
Two researchers became increasingly preoccupied with that question – one was Seligman’s graduate student Lyn Abramson, the other was the Oxford psychiatrist John Teasdale. Teasdale and Abramson pointed out that being made to feel helpless is not enough to produce depression. What also matters is how people make sense of their helplessness – the attributions they make. Do they blame themselves or do they blame the experimenter? Do they generalize their helplessness to life in general, or just to the specific situation in the lab? How people interpreted the experience – the story they weaved – was the critical missing ingredient of the theory.
As Seligman would later put it, different people have different ‘explanatory styles’. Some people have a ‘pessimistic explanatory style’, and make negative attributions about aversive events, and they are more vulnerable to depression. Other people have ‘optimistic explanatory styles’ – when bad things happen, they don’t blame themselves but the world, and they see the adversity as temporary, local and specific. Their story about the world and their place in it is much more hopeful, and they are more resilient.
In later work, Abramson and her colleagues reformulated the learned helplessness theory of depression as the ‘hopelessness theory of depression’. Hopelessness depression emerges when people experience a negative life event, such as losing a job, and draw pessimistic conclusions about the causes and consequences of the event, and what the event says about who they are as a person. They might believe they are helpless to change their circumstances and will never find employment, for instance, and that they’re worthless as a result – thoughts that depress and demoralize them.
Over the years, research has confirmed the connection between hopelessness and mental illness. Aaron Beck, the founder of cognitive behavioral therapy, found that a sense of hopelessness is a key driver of suicide. Conversely, having a sense of hope contributes to better overall mental and physical health. For example, people high in hope are able to tolerate pain for longer periods; they report higher levels of wellbeing after someone they love dies; when confronted with a stressful situation, they are able to think more creatively and flexibly about how to overcome it; and, as they move through a difficult period of their life, they’re more likely to identify silver linings. People high in hope also perform better academically, are less prone to loneliness, and – above all – are less likely to succumb to helplessness and despair when adversity strikes.
Hopeful people are not like Pollyanna – they feel in control of their lives and exhibit a sense of agency. All of this points to a powerful insight – that instilling or restoring a sense of hope in people might help them build resilience and alleviate their emotional suffering. The next
question is how? How can people build a sense of hope, especially during hard times?
The work of Seligman and Abramson suggests that changing the stories we tell ourselves about adversity can help instill hope. Rather than blaming yourself for losing a job or feeling sluggish, you can blame the COVID-19 pandemic; rather than focusing on the areas where life feels out of control, such as new strains of the virus, and concluding that life is unpredictable and chaotic, you can focus on those things that you can control, such as your routines, habits and the way you treat other people. You can remind yourself that this adversity, like all adversities, is temporary and will end at some point.
Another way to build hope requires rethinking its ordinary meaning. You might consider hope a form of wishful thinking, a positive and perhaps naive expectation that everything will turn out OK in the end. But according to ‘hope theory’, developed by the late American psychologist Charles Snyder, hope is not blind optimism. It’s about having goals for one’s future, agency or ‘goal-directed energy’ (believing the goals are attainable) and specific ‘pathways’ or plans for how to reach those goals. In other words, hopeful people are not like Pollyanna, rather they feel in control of their lives and exhibit a sense of agency in their pursuits – the opposite of feeling helpless.
Drawing on Snyder’s work, psychologists have developed interventions to instill hope. For example, therapists who practice ‘hope therapy’ help their clients conceptualize clear goals for their future, map out routes to pursue those goals, and reframe obstacles as challenges to be
overcome. Rather than focusing on the client’s past failures, the therapist focuses on their successes, which can serve as models for future goal pursuits. In one study testing an eight-session group-therapy hope intervention, participants who were taught hope-building skills
subsequently reported a greater sense of meaning, agentic thinking and self-esteem, and lower levels of anxiety and depression, as compared with a waitlist control group. They also reported lower levels of anxiety and depression post-treatment.
Even in the bleakest of times, hope – of the kind articulated by Snyder – can make a positive difference. Consider the work of the physician and ethicist Chris Feudtner at the Justin Michael Ingerman Center for Palliative Care at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Working with
parents whose children have life-threatening illnesses, Feudtner has found that, while they all of course wish desperately that their children could be cured, it is those parents high in hope who tend to adjust better to the reality of the situation. In one of his studies, it was actually the more hopeful parents who were more likely to decide to limit medical interventions as their child’s condition worsened, suggesting that having hope allowed them to relinquish a goal that was no longer attainable, and to adopt another focused on alleviating suffering.
Moreover, Feudtner found that a simple question could help kindle hope in parents. After presenting them with the horrible news that their child’s condition was worsening, incurable or terminal, he asked them: ‘Given what you are now up against, what are you hoping for?’ Parents
tended to respond unrealistically at first, such as wishing for a miracle cure or to awaken from a bad dream. But then, when Feudtner gently asked them ‘what else’ they might be hoping for, their responses became more grounded and attainable. ‘The subsequent answers,’ he writes in ‘The Breadth of Hopes’ (2009), ‘tend to be qualitatively different from the initial hopes: they are more oriented to pain or suffering and the hope of relief, to the longing for home and the hope of homecoming, or to surviving not in a physical but in a spiritual sense and the hope of finding meaning and connection.’ It’s a most powerful example of how identifying goals that are attainable, and seeing pathways to them, can restore a healing sense of control, in this case bringing a measure of comfort to parents facing the most terrible adversity.
From that initial research on helplessness in the 1960s have sprung decades of findings with a more uplifting message. Circumstances, no matter how bad, do not have to defeat us. You have the capacity to adopt more hopeful patterns of thinking in the face of adversity, and to adjust and pursue your goals, even amid hardship. If you can maintain hope in these ways, it will help you find the courage, strength and resilience to ride out the inevitable storms that life brings.
You can join in on Zoom or in-person, I'll have the coffee ready.
We are gathering in person - I'll have the coffee ready - and on Zoom
-Fr. Dave
Hope is the Antidote to Helplessness
Emily Esfahani Smith, Psyche 9.13.21
Several decades ago, two psychologists stumbled upon a phenomenon that revolutionized their field and changed the way we think about adversity. They called it ‘learned helplessness’ – when faced with a difficult situation that feels uncontrollable, some people choose to act helpless and depressed; others have learned skills to cope.
In the wake of a pandemic that has upended life for millions, this idea feels more relevant than ever. But just as the concept of learned helplessness helps to explain many of the emotions we’ve been going through, it has also inspired work that offers positive insights into how people can remain resilient, even in the face of uncontrollable adversities. The key is having hope.
Researchers, Martin Seligman and Steven Maier, replicated the learned helplessness findings first in rodents and, later, in human beings. Moreover, when it came to provoking feelings of helplessness in human volunteers, Seligman noticed something important – after exposing people to non-controllable events, such as unpleasant loud noises or impossible anagrams, they would often begin to exhibit some of the classic symptoms of depression, such as feelings of worthlessness, sadness, loss of interest, poor concentration and fatigue. Ultimately, he concluded that learned helplessness is a subtype of depression.
But there was a crucial caveat – whenever the researchers ran these studies, there was always a proportion of the subjects who were exposed to uncontrollable, aversive events, but did not give up trying to exert control. Even though they learned that nothing they did mattered to stopping an aversive event, they kept trying to make their situation better. Also, some of the subjects who did give up, becoming helpless for a time, bounced back immediately and began to act with agency in later parts of the experiments. The question was – why? Why did uncontrollable adversities render some people helpless while others remained resilient?
Two researchers became increasingly preoccupied with that question – one was Seligman’s graduate student Lyn Abramson, the other was the Oxford psychiatrist John Teasdale. Teasdale and Abramson pointed out that being made to feel helpless is not enough to produce depression. What also matters is how people make sense of their helplessness – the attributions they make. Do they blame themselves or do they blame the experimenter? Do they generalize their helplessness to life in general, or just to the specific situation in the lab? How people interpreted the experience – the story they weaved – was the critical missing ingredient of the theory.
As Seligman would later put it, different people have different ‘explanatory styles’. Some people have a ‘pessimistic explanatory style’, and make negative attributions about aversive events, and they are more vulnerable to depression. Other people have ‘optimistic explanatory styles’ – when bad things happen, they don’t blame themselves but the world, and they see the adversity as temporary, local and specific. Their story about the world and their place in it is much more hopeful, and they are more resilient.
In later work, Abramson and her colleagues reformulated the learned helplessness theory of depression as the ‘hopelessness theory of depression’. Hopelessness depression emerges when people experience a negative life event, such as losing a job, and draw pessimistic conclusions about the causes and consequences of the event, and what the event says about who they are as a person. They might believe they are helpless to change their circumstances and will never find employment, for instance, and that they’re worthless as a result – thoughts that depress and demoralize them.
Over the years, research has confirmed the connection between hopelessness and mental illness. Aaron Beck, the founder of cognitive behavioral therapy, found that a sense of hopelessness is a key driver of suicide. Conversely, having a sense of hope contributes to better overall mental and physical health. For example, people high in hope are able to tolerate pain for longer periods; they report higher levels of wellbeing after someone they love dies; when confronted with a stressful situation, they are able to think more creatively and flexibly about how to overcome it; and, as they move through a difficult period of their life, they’re more likely to identify silver linings. People high in hope also perform better academically, are less prone to loneliness, and – above all – are less likely to succumb to helplessness and despair when adversity strikes.
Hopeful people are not like Pollyanna – they feel in control of their lives and exhibit a sense of agency. All of this points to a powerful insight – that instilling or restoring a sense of hope in people might help them build resilience and alleviate their emotional suffering. The next
question is how? How can people build a sense of hope, especially during hard times?
The work of Seligman and Abramson suggests that changing the stories we tell ourselves about adversity can help instill hope. Rather than blaming yourself for losing a job or feeling sluggish, you can blame the COVID-19 pandemic; rather than focusing on the areas where life feels out of control, such as new strains of the virus, and concluding that life is unpredictable and chaotic, you can focus on those things that you can control, such as your routines, habits and the way you treat other people. You can remind yourself that this adversity, like all adversities, is temporary and will end at some point.
Another way to build hope requires rethinking its ordinary meaning. You might consider hope a form of wishful thinking, a positive and perhaps naive expectation that everything will turn out OK in the end. But according to ‘hope theory’, developed by the late American psychologist Charles Snyder, hope is not blind optimism. It’s about having goals for one’s future, agency or ‘goal-directed energy’ (believing the goals are attainable) and specific ‘pathways’ or plans for how to reach those goals. In other words, hopeful people are not like Pollyanna, rather they feel in control of their lives and exhibit a sense of agency in their pursuits – the opposite of feeling helpless.
Drawing on Snyder’s work, psychologists have developed interventions to instill hope. For example, therapists who practice ‘hope therapy’ help their clients conceptualize clear goals for their future, map out routes to pursue those goals, and reframe obstacles as challenges to be
overcome. Rather than focusing on the client’s past failures, the therapist focuses on their successes, which can serve as models for future goal pursuits. In one study testing an eight-session group-therapy hope intervention, participants who were taught hope-building skills
subsequently reported a greater sense of meaning, agentic thinking and self-esteem, and lower levels of anxiety and depression, as compared with a waitlist control group. They also reported lower levels of anxiety and depression post-treatment.
Even in the bleakest of times, hope – of the kind articulated by Snyder – can make a positive difference. Consider the work of the physician and ethicist Chris Feudtner at the Justin Michael Ingerman Center for Palliative Care at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Working with
parents whose children have life-threatening illnesses, Feudtner has found that, while they all of course wish desperately that their children could be cured, it is those parents high in hope who tend to adjust better to the reality of the situation. In one of his studies, it was actually the more hopeful parents who were more likely to decide to limit medical interventions as their child’s condition worsened, suggesting that having hope allowed them to relinquish a goal that was no longer attainable, and to adopt another focused on alleviating suffering.
Moreover, Feudtner found that a simple question could help kindle hope in parents. After presenting them with the horrible news that their child’s condition was worsening, incurable or terminal, he asked them: ‘Given what you are now up against, what are you hoping for?’ Parents
tended to respond unrealistically at first, such as wishing for a miracle cure or to awaken from a bad dream. But then, when Feudtner gently asked them ‘what else’ they might be hoping for, their responses became more grounded and attainable. ‘The subsequent answers,’ he writes in ‘The Breadth of Hopes’ (2009), ‘tend to be qualitatively different from the initial hopes: they are more oriented to pain or suffering and the hope of relief, to the longing for home and the hope of homecoming, or to surviving not in a physical but in a spiritual sense and the hope of finding meaning and connection.’ It’s a most powerful example of how identifying goals that are attainable, and seeing pathways to them, can restore a healing sense of control, in this case bringing a measure of comfort to parents facing the most terrible adversity.
From that initial research on helplessness in the 1960s have sprung decades of findings with a more uplifting message. Circumstances, no matter how bad, do not have to defeat us. You have the capacity to adopt more hopeful patterns of thinking in the face of adversity, and to adjust and pursue your goals, even amid hardship. If you can maintain hope in these ways, it will help you find the courage, strength and resilience to ride out the inevitable storms that life brings.
Tuesday, September 14
We are going to talk about religious exemptions and how it may, or probably doesn't, apply to the Covid-19 vaccine. If you are wondering how this affects you, there are a number of businesses and nonprofits in our area; that some on this list depend upon; who may start letting employees go if they do not receive a vaccination. Some of those employees may consider using a religious exemption.
This is obviously in the religious arena but on Tuesday, I'd like to talk a little further about how passages in the Bible are used in this exemption. Also, a religious exemption standard is "sincerity" or a pattern of past religious behavior. St. James wrote in his letter that religion that does not change the way one behaves is irrelevant or dead. Could it be that his words are ringing true today?
I'm looking forward to talking with you about it.
There are two articles. The main one is "Religious Exemptions" from NBC News. The second article - "I Don't Believe" - is an opinion piece from the New York Times. The two articles bring up different perspectives so I thought it would be good to reference both.
We are gathering in person - I'll have the coffee ready - and on Zoom.
Religious Exemptions to Vaccine Mandates
Phil McCausland, NBC News 9.5.21
Religious exemptions could prove to be the latest legal battlefield of the pandemic, as Americans opposed to the coronavirus vaccines try to find ways around employer and government vaccination mandates. Only some federal agencies and states have made vaccinations mandatory for workers, and more private companies are doing or considering the same. But experts anticipate that religious liberty challenges will pick up as more mandates are put in place —especially when there is no national standard. “There are some First Amendment implications here and there’s a patchwork of laws that could potentially be implicated by these mandates,” said James Sonne, a law professor at Stanford Law School and founding director of its Religious Liberty Clinic. “It's certainly something we’ll see getting worked out in the courts.”
The challenge for governments and institutions is balancing American civil liberties with a worsening public health crisis. Experts say that the threshold for religious exemptions could come down to proving whether the person attempting to obtain one has “sincerely held beliefs” against getting vaccinated on religious grounds. They may even have to show a track record of opposition to receive an exemption.
Those challenging employer-created mandates cite Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which requires employers to make reasonable efforts to accommodate employees, while government-created mandates are being challenged under the First Amendment. Both, however, bring up the question of whether a person’s religious beliefs are sincere. Thomas Berg, a self-described “strong supporter of religious exemptions” and a religious liberty advocate who teaches law at the University of St. Thomas, a Catholic institution in St. Paul, Minnesota, said he believes that
there is a strong case to deny many of the religious claims and to test religious sincerity.
“In cases where you’ve got a lot of potential insincere claims — and I think there’s evidence that is what’s happening here in which people are raising religious objections when they’re motivated by fear of the vaccine or political opposition to it — testing sincerity makes sense,” he said. “We have to test sincerity or else we have to accept them all or deny them all, so I think the courts will provide room for testing that.”
One driver for testing sincerity is the fact that no major organized religion objects to the vaccines, and Roman Catholic and other Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders have advised followers to get the shots. Pope Francis went so far as to say that getting vaccinated was “the moral choice because it is about your life but also the lives of others.” Individually held beliefs, however, could provide some protections.
The challenge with religious exemptions
The Christian argument for religious exemptions follows two tracks typically: first, that the vaccine shots at some point in their production used aborted fetal cell lines. The second argument cites a Bible verse that claims that the human body is God’s temple of the Holy Spirit and argues
that for that reason receiving a vaccine would be a sin. Johnson & Johnson did use a replicated fetal cell line in the production of its vaccine, but Pfizer and Moderna did not. They did, however, use replicated fetal cell lines to test the effectiveness of their vaccines. Those cell lines,
however, were isolated from two fetuses in 1973 and 1985 and then replicated numerous times over the ensuing decades. They are commonly used in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries to test and create medications.
Arthur Caplan, a bioethics professor at New York University Langone Medical Center, said that people who oppose the coronavirus on religious grounds should also oppose numerous medications and vaccines developed over the past 30 to 40 years. “There’s a lot more drugs,
vaccines and medicines you should not be taking and protesting if you’re really worried about these fetal cells being used,” Caplan said. “I don’t think most of this is sincere. I think it’s just a way to get out of having to take a vaccine.” But there are many groups that are taking it seriously and giving individuals support and advice on ways to obtain a religious exemption or even challenge a vaccination mandate.
Since the start of the pandemic, Liberty Counsel — an evangelical ministry that provides legal assistance in religious liberty cases — has been dedicated to challenging Covid restrictions at places of worship, as well as mask mandates. It has shared misinformation on its social media
accounts, podcasts and website alleging the vaccines are dangerous. Over the past few months, Liberty Counsel has become one of the groups leading the charge on claiming religious exemptions to the growing number of vaccination mandates. “Just in a few weeks, we’ve
received over 10,000 people contacting us for help,” Mathew Staver, the group’s founder and director said. “It’s more than anything we’ve ever encountered before. We’re getting people calling. Some are very concerned and upset, some break down, because they are being forced on
a very quick time frame to make a decision between getting one of the Covid shots and their jobs.”
How past cases held up
Last week, Liberty Counsel filed a lawsuit against Maine’s vaccination mandate, arguing it violates a worker’s right to object to the vaccines on religious grounds. The suit was filed on behalf of 2,000 unnamed Maine health care workers who objected to Maine's vaccination mandate for health care workers on the grounds that the state did not allow for a religious exemption. "We will vigorously defend the requirement against this lawsuit and we are confident that it will be upheld," Maine Attorney General Aaron M. Frey said in a statement to NBC News.
"For many years the state has required health care workers to be vaccinated against various communicable diseases and, to our knowledge, that requirement has never been challenged. The state has now simply added an additional disease — COVID-19 — to the list of ones for which
health care workers must be vaccinated." The statement added that federal courts have consistently upheld mandatory vaccination requirements. Liberty Counsel has also sent letters to the states of New York and Washington, as well as United Airlines, which required its
employees to be vaccinated. The letters threatened to sue the states and airline if they did not provide greater access to religious exemptions and accommodations.
Experts said some of their challenges have already been tested and pointed to past legal battles over vaccination mandates, such as those states created for children, nursing homes and hospitals. Caplan, who was involved in developing some of the flu vaccination mandates that have become commonplace in hospitals, noted that states such as California, New York, Maine and Connecticut have entirely dropped religious exemptions for children. “When brought to court, that was tested and it held up, so we already have a pattern of arguments,” Caplan said. “So now if your boss says you can’t come to work without a vaccine but you refuse to get one on religious grounds, employers don’t have to keep you on, they don’t have to hire you.”
Backlash to the latest push for religious exemptions could backfire, however. Doug Opel, a bioethics and pediatrics professor at the University of Washington who has written about the challenges of religious exemptions and vaccination mandates, pointed out that arguing against and not allowing religious exemptions might do more harm than good. Though there are certainly people who will attempt to falsely secure an exemption, he said he believed that only a small minority of the American population would likely try to obtain one. It might be better to allow religious exemptions to reduce the perception of coercion and allow the vaccination mandates to stand with fewer challenges, he said. “A policy reason to have exemptions is to allow the very few people who want to opt out to opt out and then allow the mandate itself to stand and be acceptable and sustainable over time,” he said. “Even if a minority opt out, the vast majority will get vaccinated, and the mandate will have served its purpose of reducing transmission and disease.
I Don’t Believe in ‘Religious Exemptions’ to Vaccine Mandates
Curtis Chang, New York Times 9.6.21
Religious exemptions to employer mandates are a precious right in our democracy. This is why it is especially important not to offer such exemptions to coronavirus vaccine mandates. They make a mockery of Christianity and religious liberty. Government agencies, universities and businesses are instituting vaccination requirements. This has prompted a wave of requests from individuals to opt out of such requirements by claiming a religious exemption.
The legal basis of this request is Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which requires American employers to accommodate employees’ religious beliefs. One evangelical church near Sacramento has reportedly issued more than 3,000 letters requesting exemptions, and a pastor in Brooklyn told The New York Daily News that 60 percent of his congregation has asked for them. Given that evangelicals account for a substantial portion of people refusing vaccination, the road to ending the pandemic may very well now run through the religious exemption issue.
According to the Civil Rights Act, these exemptions are meant to apply to people with “sincerely held religious beliefs,” and on both counts — religious belief and sincerity — the exemption demand fails when it comes to coronavirus vaccine mandates for Christians.
First, there is no actual religious basis for exemptions from vaccine mandates in any established stream of Christianity. Within both Catholicism and all the major Protestant denominations, no creed or Scripture in any way prohibits Christians from getting the vaccine. Even the sect of
Christian Scientists, which historically has abstained from medical treatment, has expressed openness to vaccines for the sake of the wider community. The consensus of mainstream Christian leaders — from Pope Francis to Franklin Graham — is that vaccination is consistent
with biblical Christian faith.
Judith Danovitch, a research psychologist, explains why there’s little reason to worry, and why face coverings may even offer unexpected benefits. Biblically based arguments against vaccination have been rebutted. The project Christians and the Vaccine, which I helped to found,
has created numerous explainer videos in an effort to refute attempts by anti-vax Christians to hijack pro-life values, to distort biblical references like the “mark of the beast” and to inflame fears about government control. Christians who request religious exemptions rarely even try to offer substantive biblical and theological reasoning. Rather, the drivers for evangelical resistance are nonreligious and are rooted in deep-seated suspicion of government and vulnerability to misinformation.
My plea to my fellow Christians: If you insist on refusing the vaccine, that is your right. But please do not bring God into it. Doing so is the very definition of violating the Third Commandment, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” A private entity like a hospital can feel confident that it is not infringing on the religious liberty of an evangelical receptionist by insisting that he be vaccinated as part of his job requirement. My religious liberty is actually advanced by the ability of institutions to define job requirements for their employees.
I want my church to be able to hire pastors who share our institution’s beliefs — and to be able to reject candidates who don’t. This means I must also support the right of a secular hospital to make a similar choice. Moral consistency demands it.
Exemption requests also likely fail on the grounds of sincere belief. We naturally look for consistency of a belief as a test of sincerity; it’s common sense. We would doubt the sincerity of a receptionist who demands vegetarian options at a workplace cafeteria when he frequently eats steak at restaurants. Any institution considering religious exemptions should require applicants to demonstrate that they have consistently refused other immunizations for religious reasons.
Vaccine hesitancy has never been a core religious belief of evangelical Christians. The vast majority of evangelicals have historically chosen to be immunized against polio, measles, tetanus and other diseases. As a child, I attended evangelical summer camps that required vaccinations,
and as an adult, I worked for ministries with similar mandates. Some conservative evangelicals just don’t like the political taste of this particular vaccine on the menu. Even if we grant that individual Christians sincerely (though mistakenly) believe that their religious faith prohibits a
coronavirus vaccination, that still does not justify an exemption. “Sincerity” does not justify putting others at risk. I can sincerely (though mistakenly) believe I should sacrifice a burnt offering to God. All the sincerity in my heart does not justify my setting my neighbor’s house on
fire in the process.
There are, however, proper applications for religious exemptions in other cases. For instance, if my employer offered a mindfulness seminar that required me to utter incantations to a New Age deity, I as a Christian should be able to request a religious exemption. The biggest threat to any legitimate right is the illegitimate abuse of that right.
But even with legitimate religious claims sincerely held, the law allows companies to forgo offering exemptions if doing so places an “undue hardship” on the employer. Increasing the risk of bringing an infectious disease into the workplace certainly qualifies. For jobs that involve
exposure to vulnerable populations, minimizing that risk via immunization is clearly an appropriate job requirement. Religious freedom for a teacher who opposes vaccines does not mean having the right to jeopardize children by being unvaccinated. Religious freedom means
that if she doesn’t wish to fulfill her employer’s job requirement, she is free to find another job.
All employers should eliminate any religious exemptions for coronavirus vaccines for Christians, period. New York State has removed its religious exemption option for health care workers, and other institutions should follow suit. Similarly, religious leaders will need to join with secular institutions in opposing exemptions. Pastors are already being inundated with requests for letters supporting exemptions. As a former pastor of an evangelical church, I know it will be difficult to say “no.” But my colleagues should do the right thing and refuse such requests. Refuse to mislead our secular neighbors. Refuse to abuse our precious religious liberty. Refuse to be complicit in putting our neighbors at risk.
We need to keep trying to persuade those hesitant to get a vaccine. But we also need to allow employer vaccine mandates to erect a trustworthy shield that protects staff members, patients, customers, students and others. Religious exemptions risk blowing a hole in that shield, jeopardizing everyone. The vaccine effort has been plagued by falsehoods of all kinds. The religious exemption from vaccine mandates for Christians is the latest. All of us should stand together for the truth.
Curtis Chang is a co-founder of Christians and the Vaccine, a consulting faculty member at Duke Divinity School and the C.E.O. of CWR, a management consultancy serving secular nonprofits and government agencies.
This is obviously in the religious arena but on Tuesday, I'd like to talk a little further about how passages in the Bible are used in this exemption. Also, a religious exemption standard is "sincerity" or a pattern of past religious behavior. St. James wrote in his letter that religion that does not change the way one behaves is irrelevant or dead. Could it be that his words are ringing true today?
I'm looking forward to talking with you about it.
There are two articles. The main one is "Religious Exemptions" from NBC News. The second article - "I Don't Believe" - is an opinion piece from the New York Times. The two articles bring up different perspectives so I thought it would be good to reference both.
We are gathering in person - I'll have the coffee ready - and on Zoom.
Religious Exemptions to Vaccine Mandates
Phil McCausland, NBC News 9.5.21
Religious exemptions could prove to be the latest legal battlefield of the pandemic, as Americans opposed to the coronavirus vaccines try to find ways around employer and government vaccination mandates. Only some federal agencies and states have made vaccinations mandatory for workers, and more private companies are doing or considering the same. But experts anticipate that religious liberty challenges will pick up as more mandates are put in place —especially when there is no national standard. “There are some First Amendment implications here and there’s a patchwork of laws that could potentially be implicated by these mandates,” said James Sonne, a law professor at Stanford Law School and founding director of its Religious Liberty Clinic. “It's certainly something we’ll see getting worked out in the courts.”
The challenge for governments and institutions is balancing American civil liberties with a worsening public health crisis. Experts say that the threshold for religious exemptions could come down to proving whether the person attempting to obtain one has “sincerely held beliefs” against getting vaccinated on religious grounds. They may even have to show a track record of opposition to receive an exemption.
Those challenging employer-created mandates cite Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which requires employers to make reasonable efforts to accommodate employees, while government-created mandates are being challenged under the First Amendment. Both, however, bring up the question of whether a person’s religious beliefs are sincere. Thomas Berg, a self-described “strong supporter of religious exemptions” and a religious liberty advocate who teaches law at the University of St. Thomas, a Catholic institution in St. Paul, Minnesota, said he believes that
there is a strong case to deny many of the religious claims and to test religious sincerity.
“In cases where you’ve got a lot of potential insincere claims — and I think there’s evidence that is what’s happening here in which people are raising religious objections when they’re motivated by fear of the vaccine or political opposition to it — testing sincerity makes sense,” he said. “We have to test sincerity or else we have to accept them all or deny them all, so I think the courts will provide room for testing that.”
One driver for testing sincerity is the fact that no major organized religion objects to the vaccines, and Roman Catholic and other Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders have advised followers to get the shots. Pope Francis went so far as to say that getting vaccinated was “the moral choice because it is about your life but also the lives of others.” Individually held beliefs, however, could provide some protections.
The challenge with religious exemptions
The Christian argument for religious exemptions follows two tracks typically: first, that the vaccine shots at some point in their production used aborted fetal cell lines. The second argument cites a Bible verse that claims that the human body is God’s temple of the Holy Spirit and argues
that for that reason receiving a vaccine would be a sin. Johnson & Johnson did use a replicated fetal cell line in the production of its vaccine, but Pfizer and Moderna did not. They did, however, use replicated fetal cell lines to test the effectiveness of their vaccines. Those cell lines,
however, were isolated from two fetuses in 1973 and 1985 and then replicated numerous times over the ensuing decades. They are commonly used in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries to test and create medications.
Arthur Caplan, a bioethics professor at New York University Langone Medical Center, said that people who oppose the coronavirus on religious grounds should also oppose numerous medications and vaccines developed over the past 30 to 40 years. “There’s a lot more drugs,
vaccines and medicines you should not be taking and protesting if you’re really worried about these fetal cells being used,” Caplan said. “I don’t think most of this is sincere. I think it’s just a way to get out of having to take a vaccine.” But there are many groups that are taking it seriously and giving individuals support and advice on ways to obtain a religious exemption or even challenge a vaccination mandate.
Since the start of the pandemic, Liberty Counsel — an evangelical ministry that provides legal assistance in religious liberty cases — has been dedicated to challenging Covid restrictions at places of worship, as well as mask mandates. It has shared misinformation on its social media
accounts, podcasts and website alleging the vaccines are dangerous. Over the past few months, Liberty Counsel has become one of the groups leading the charge on claiming religious exemptions to the growing number of vaccination mandates. “Just in a few weeks, we’ve
received over 10,000 people contacting us for help,” Mathew Staver, the group’s founder and director said. “It’s more than anything we’ve ever encountered before. We’re getting people calling. Some are very concerned and upset, some break down, because they are being forced on
a very quick time frame to make a decision between getting one of the Covid shots and their jobs.”
How past cases held up
Last week, Liberty Counsel filed a lawsuit against Maine’s vaccination mandate, arguing it violates a worker’s right to object to the vaccines on religious grounds. The suit was filed on behalf of 2,000 unnamed Maine health care workers who objected to Maine's vaccination mandate for health care workers on the grounds that the state did not allow for a religious exemption. "We will vigorously defend the requirement against this lawsuit and we are confident that it will be upheld," Maine Attorney General Aaron M. Frey said in a statement to NBC News.
"For many years the state has required health care workers to be vaccinated against various communicable diseases and, to our knowledge, that requirement has never been challenged. The state has now simply added an additional disease — COVID-19 — to the list of ones for which
health care workers must be vaccinated." The statement added that federal courts have consistently upheld mandatory vaccination requirements. Liberty Counsel has also sent letters to the states of New York and Washington, as well as United Airlines, which required its
employees to be vaccinated. The letters threatened to sue the states and airline if they did not provide greater access to religious exemptions and accommodations.
Experts said some of their challenges have already been tested and pointed to past legal battles over vaccination mandates, such as those states created for children, nursing homes and hospitals. Caplan, who was involved in developing some of the flu vaccination mandates that have become commonplace in hospitals, noted that states such as California, New York, Maine and Connecticut have entirely dropped religious exemptions for children. “When brought to court, that was tested and it held up, so we already have a pattern of arguments,” Caplan said. “So now if your boss says you can’t come to work without a vaccine but you refuse to get one on religious grounds, employers don’t have to keep you on, they don’t have to hire you.”
Backlash to the latest push for religious exemptions could backfire, however. Doug Opel, a bioethics and pediatrics professor at the University of Washington who has written about the challenges of religious exemptions and vaccination mandates, pointed out that arguing against and not allowing religious exemptions might do more harm than good. Though there are certainly people who will attempt to falsely secure an exemption, he said he believed that only a small minority of the American population would likely try to obtain one. It might be better to allow religious exemptions to reduce the perception of coercion and allow the vaccination mandates to stand with fewer challenges, he said. “A policy reason to have exemptions is to allow the very few people who want to opt out to opt out and then allow the mandate itself to stand and be acceptable and sustainable over time,” he said. “Even if a minority opt out, the vast majority will get vaccinated, and the mandate will have served its purpose of reducing transmission and disease.
I Don’t Believe in ‘Religious Exemptions’ to Vaccine Mandates
Curtis Chang, New York Times 9.6.21
Religious exemptions to employer mandates are a precious right in our democracy. This is why it is especially important not to offer such exemptions to coronavirus vaccine mandates. They make a mockery of Christianity and religious liberty. Government agencies, universities and businesses are instituting vaccination requirements. This has prompted a wave of requests from individuals to opt out of such requirements by claiming a religious exemption.
The legal basis of this request is Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which requires American employers to accommodate employees’ religious beliefs. One evangelical church near Sacramento has reportedly issued more than 3,000 letters requesting exemptions, and a pastor in Brooklyn told The New York Daily News that 60 percent of his congregation has asked for them. Given that evangelicals account for a substantial portion of people refusing vaccination, the road to ending the pandemic may very well now run through the religious exemption issue.
According to the Civil Rights Act, these exemptions are meant to apply to people with “sincerely held religious beliefs,” and on both counts — religious belief and sincerity — the exemption demand fails when it comes to coronavirus vaccine mandates for Christians.
First, there is no actual religious basis for exemptions from vaccine mandates in any established stream of Christianity. Within both Catholicism and all the major Protestant denominations, no creed or Scripture in any way prohibits Christians from getting the vaccine. Even the sect of
Christian Scientists, which historically has abstained from medical treatment, has expressed openness to vaccines for the sake of the wider community. The consensus of mainstream Christian leaders — from Pope Francis to Franklin Graham — is that vaccination is consistent
with biblical Christian faith.
Judith Danovitch, a research psychologist, explains why there’s little reason to worry, and why face coverings may even offer unexpected benefits. Biblically based arguments against vaccination have been rebutted. The project Christians and the Vaccine, which I helped to found,
has created numerous explainer videos in an effort to refute attempts by anti-vax Christians to hijack pro-life values, to distort biblical references like the “mark of the beast” and to inflame fears about government control. Christians who request religious exemptions rarely even try to offer substantive biblical and theological reasoning. Rather, the drivers for evangelical resistance are nonreligious and are rooted in deep-seated suspicion of government and vulnerability to misinformation.
My plea to my fellow Christians: If you insist on refusing the vaccine, that is your right. But please do not bring God into it. Doing so is the very definition of violating the Third Commandment, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” A private entity like a hospital can feel confident that it is not infringing on the religious liberty of an evangelical receptionist by insisting that he be vaccinated as part of his job requirement. My religious liberty is actually advanced by the ability of institutions to define job requirements for their employees.
I want my church to be able to hire pastors who share our institution’s beliefs — and to be able to reject candidates who don’t. This means I must also support the right of a secular hospital to make a similar choice. Moral consistency demands it.
Exemption requests also likely fail on the grounds of sincere belief. We naturally look for consistency of a belief as a test of sincerity; it’s common sense. We would doubt the sincerity of a receptionist who demands vegetarian options at a workplace cafeteria when he frequently eats steak at restaurants. Any institution considering religious exemptions should require applicants to demonstrate that they have consistently refused other immunizations for religious reasons.
Vaccine hesitancy has never been a core religious belief of evangelical Christians. The vast majority of evangelicals have historically chosen to be immunized against polio, measles, tetanus and other diseases. As a child, I attended evangelical summer camps that required vaccinations,
and as an adult, I worked for ministries with similar mandates. Some conservative evangelicals just don’t like the political taste of this particular vaccine on the menu. Even if we grant that individual Christians sincerely (though mistakenly) believe that their religious faith prohibits a
coronavirus vaccination, that still does not justify an exemption. “Sincerity” does not justify putting others at risk. I can sincerely (though mistakenly) believe I should sacrifice a burnt offering to God. All the sincerity in my heart does not justify my setting my neighbor’s house on
fire in the process.
There are, however, proper applications for religious exemptions in other cases. For instance, if my employer offered a mindfulness seminar that required me to utter incantations to a New Age deity, I as a Christian should be able to request a religious exemption. The biggest threat to any legitimate right is the illegitimate abuse of that right.
But even with legitimate religious claims sincerely held, the law allows companies to forgo offering exemptions if doing so places an “undue hardship” on the employer. Increasing the risk of bringing an infectious disease into the workplace certainly qualifies. For jobs that involve
exposure to vulnerable populations, minimizing that risk via immunization is clearly an appropriate job requirement. Religious freedom for a teacher who opposes vaccines does not mean having the right to jeopardize children by being unvaccinated. Religious freedom means
that if she doesn’t wish to fulfill her employer’s job requirement, she is free to find another job.
All employers should eliminate any religious exemptions for coronavirus vaccines for Christians, period. New York State has removed its religious exemption option for health care workers, and other institutions should follow suit. Similarly, religious leaders will need to join with secular institutions in opposing exemptions. Pastors are already being inundated with requests for letters supporting exemptions. As a former pastor of an evangelical church, I know it will be difficult to say “no.” But my colleagues should do the right thing and refuse such requests. Refuse to mislead our secular neighbors. Refuse to abuse our precious religious liberty. Refuse to be complicit in putting our neighbors at risk.
We need to keep trying to persuade those hesitant to get a vaccine. But we also need to allow employer vaccine mandates to erect a trustworthy shield that protects staff members, patients, customers, students and others. Religious exemptions risk blowing a hole in that shield, jeopardizing everyone. The vaccine effort has been plagued by falsehoods of all kinds. The religious exemption from vaccine mandates for Christians is the latest. All of us should stand together for the truth.
Curtis Chang is a co-founder of Christians and the Vaccine, a consulting faculty member at Duke Divinity School and the C.E.O. of CWR, a management consultancy serving secular nonprofits and government agencies.
Tuesday, September 7
For this Tuesday's discussion group, we have two short and potentially competing articles. One is from the WSJ editorial board that says Hurricane Ida taught us that we need to set funding principles on reinforcing infrastructure instead of trying to reduce greenhouse gasses. The Christian Century magazine's editorial board said that we need to fund reduction in greenhouse gasses. They both cite the same report from the climate commission that reports to the U.N.
I am wondering what you think?
We are gathering in person - I'll have the coffee ready - and on Zoom
US Climate Action At Last?
Editorial Board, Christian Century, 8.23.21
Last month the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report that is devastating, though not surprising. It lays out in no uncertain terms the work we must do to avoid the worst effects of climate change. We’ve heard all of this before. Governments and corporations alike have wrung their collective hands and shrugged their collective shoulders, all to very little effect. Is there anything different this time?
One difference might be the report’s specificity. It demonstrates the impact of climate change on specific regions at 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, 2.0 degrees, and beyond. What has almost always been cast in global terms can now be seen in terms of the losses and dangers to specific communities. Another potential difference is how fiercely the effects of climate change are now being felt worldwide. This is no longer about some abstract future or something happening to someone else. It’s about a current reality, along with a future threat. The wildfires, floods, droughts, and storms are a constant reminder that climate change is catastrophically real.
The United States is the world’s second-largest producer of emissions (after China), and there has been little movement toward putting the nation on track to net zero emissions by 2050—the trajectory necessary to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. Yet we are at last seeing climate change begin to have an impact on US policy. When the UN report was released, Congress was debating two major pieces of legislation: a $1 trillion dollar infrastructure bill and a $3.5 trillion budget resolution. Each could have an impact.
The infrastructure bill, which passed the Senate with a bipartisan supermajority, includes tens of billions of dollars to help communities prepare for climate change. By allocating this money, Republicans and Democrats implicitly agreed that climate change is both real and damaging. This suggests that Congress may be prepared to address climate change’s effects in a bipartisan manner.
Addressing its causes, however, may persist as a one-party project. The budget resolution, which passed the Senate on a party-line vote, creates a framework in which to complete a spending bill and vote on it—all within the budget reconciliation process, a filibuster-proof path the majority takes when no bipartisan path exists. This second bill includes money to address the causes of climate change. It focuses on clean energy, emissions reductions through tax incentives and fines for polluters, and electric vehicles to replace gas vehicles for federal use.
Taken together, these two bills will be the most significant climate change legislation in US history. And they do far too little. Other legislation, like the Green New Deal–oriented THRIVE Act, lays out a clearer road map—one unlikely to be enacted. But a little is better than nothing.
We don’t know yet if this will be a moment to celebrate or a moment to mourn another lost opportunity. The IPCC report makes it clear that we don’t have much time left to tell.
Hurricane Ida’s Climate Resilience Lesson
Editorial Board, WSJ 8.30.21
The pictures of Hurricane Ida’s wreckage across Louisiana are grim, and the storm isn’t over. But the good news is that New Orleans appears to have weathered the tempest as well as could be expected thanks to its post-Katrina flood-protection investments. This is a reminder of how
hardening infrastructure against unpredictable Mother Nature pays off.
Ida slammed into Louisiana’s Port Fourchon on Sunday as a Category 4 storm with wind speeds of 150 miles an hour and one to two inches of rain an hour. Its winds tie it as the fifth strongest storm to hit the U.S. mainland. Such heavy winds and precipitation will inevitably cause flooding and damage buildings. But the bigger worry going into Ida was that a catastrophic storm surge would breach New Orleans’s levees and submerge the city as happened 16 years ago to the day during Hurricane Katrina. Clocking in as a lower-grade Category 3 storm when it made landfall, Katrina killed some 2,000 people and caused an estimated $125 billion in damage.
Yet Louisiana and the feds have since spent $14.5 billion on bolstering flood walls, levees and drainage systems. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reinforced pumping stations to withstand 205 mile-per-hour winds and established redundant power systems to operate them if the electric grid fails, as it did Sunday.
These investments appear to have paid off. Many streets are flooded from the heavy rainfall and some small towns outside of New Orleans’s flood-protection fortress were inundated. But more important, a Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority spokesperson on Monday said there were no levee breaches or problems with pumps in New Orleans.
The biggest failure was the electric grid. Eight transmission lines that serve the city went down and a grid imbalance caused a loss of power generation across the region, cutting off power to nearly one million Louisianans. Essential businesses like hospitals can run on backup generators, but it could take weeks to restore power in some neighborhoods. There’s probably a case for burying some power lines and girding substations to withstand more powerful storms, as Florida Power & Light Company is doing in Florida neighborhoods that have experienced damage to power lines in past storms. Hardening the grid to withstand extreme weather isn’t cheap, but the payoff is likely worth it.
As predictable as the sunrise, the climate lobby is blaming humanity’s fossil-fuel sins for Ida. But even the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report this month notes “there is low confidence in long-term (multi-decadal to centennial) trends in the
frequency of all-category tropical cyclone” (i.e., hurricanes). The report says that it is likely that the global proportion of Category 3 or higher tropical cyclones has increased over the past four decades, but that “data limitations inhibit clear detection of past trends on the global scale.” In short, we don’t really know whether global warming has caused or will cause more intense storms in the future.
But no matter how much the world warms, more extreme weather will happen. Building more resilient infrastructure and better emergency alert systems will do far more good than all of the Biden Administration’s climate policies. Germany has spent hundreds of billions subsidizing
green energy, but nearly 200 of its citizens perished in last month’s floods that local governments failed to prepare for.
Priorities also matter so scarce resources aren’t wasted. Too much of the Senate’s infrastructure bill is devoted to green boondoggles, rather than resilience. California Democrats have prioritized banishing fossil fuels over hardening the grid and clearing deadwood. The result has
been frequent power outages during heavy winds and catastrophic wildfires. PG&E, the California utility, last month said it will spend $20 billion to bury 10,000 miles of power lines, which were found to have instigated several deadly wildfires. It’s about time.
Government can’t command the tides, but it can protect people from them.
I am wondering what you think?
We are gathering in person - I'll have the coffee ready - and on Zoom
US Climate Action At Last?
Editorial Board, Christian Century, 8.23.21
Last month the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report that is devastating, though not surprising. It lays out in no uncertain terms the work we must do to avoid the worst effects of climate change. We’ve heard all of this before. Governments and corporations alike have wrung their collective hands and shrugged their collective shoulders, all to very little effect. Is there anything different this time?
One difference might be the report’s specificity. It demonstrates the impact of climate change on specific regions at 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, 2.0 degrees, and beyond. What has almost always been cast in global terms can now be seen in terms of the losses and dangers to specific communities. Another potential difference is how fiercely the effects of climate change are now being felt worldwide. This is no longer about some abstract future or something happening to someone else. It’s about a current reality, along with a future threat. The wildfires, floods, droughts, and storms are a constant reminder that climate change is catastrophically real.
The United States is the world’s second-largest producer of emissions (after China), and there has been little movement toward putting the nation on track to net zero emissions by 2050—the trajectory necessary to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. Yet we are at last seeing climate change begin to have an impact on US policy. When the UN report was released, Congress was debating two major pieces of legislation: a $1 trillion dollar infrastructure bill and a $3.5 trillion budget resolution. Each could have an impact.
The infrastructure bill, which passed the Senate with a bipartisan supermajority, includes tens of billions of dollars to help communities prepare for climate change. By allocating this money, Republicans and Democrats implicitly agreed that climate change is both real and damaging. This suggests that Congress may be prepared to address climate change’s effects in a bipartisan manner.
Addressing its causes, however, may persist as a one-party project. The budget resolution, which passed the Senate on a party-line vote, creates a framework in which to complete a spending bill and vote on it—all within the budget reconciliation process, a filibuster-proof path the majority takes when no bipartisan path exists. This second bill includes money to address the causes of climate change. It focuses on clean energy, emissions reductions through tax incentives and fines for polluters, and electric vehicles to replace gas vehicles for federal use.
Taken together, these two bills will be the most significant climate change legislation in US history. And they do far too little. Other legislation, like the Green New Deal–oriented THRIVE Act, lays out a clearer road map—one unlikely to be enacted. But a little is better than nothing.
We don’t know yet if this will be a moment to celebrate or a moment to mourn another lost opportunity. The IPCC report makes it clear that we don’t have much time left to tell.
Hurricane Ida’s Climate Resilience Lesson
Editorial Board, WSJ 8.30.21
The pictures of Hurricane Ida’s wreckage across Louisiana are grim, and the storm isn’t over. But the good news is that New Orleans appears to have weathered the tempest as well as could be expected thanks to its post-Katrina flood-protection investments. This is a reminder of how
hardening infrastructure against unpredictable Mother Nature pays off.
Ida slammed into Louisiana’s Port Fourchon on Sunday as a Category 4 storm with wind speeds of 150 miles an hour and one to two inches of rain an hour. Its winds tie it as the fifth strongest storm to hit the U.S. mainland. Such heavy winds and precipitation will inevitably cause flooding and damage buildings. But the bigger worry going into Ida was that a catastrophic storm surge would breach New Orleans’s levees and submerge the city as happened 16 years ago to the day during Hurricane Katrina. Clocking in as a lower-grade Category 3 storm when it made landfall, Katrina killed some 2,000 people and caused an estimated $125 billion in damage.
Yet Louisiana and the feds have since spent $14.5 billion on bolstering flood walls, levees and drainage systems. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reinforced pumping stations to withstand 205 mile-per-hour winds and established redundant power systems to operate them if the electric grid fails, as it did Sunday.
These investments appear to have paid off. Many streets are flooded from the heavy rainfall and some small towns outside of New Orleans’s flood-protection fortress were inundated. But more important, a Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority spokesperson on Monday said there were no levee breaches or problems with pumps in New Orleans.
The biggest failure was the electric grid. Eight transmission lines that serve the city went down and a grid imbalance caused a loss of power generation across the region, cutting off power to nearly one million Louisianans. Essential businesses like hospitals can run on backup generators, but it could take weeks to restore power in some neighborhoods. There’s probably a case for burying some power lines and girding substations to withstand more powerful storms, as Florida Power & Light Company is doing in Florida neighborhoods that have experienced damage to power lines in past storms. Hardening the grid to withstand extreme weather isn’t cheap, but the payoff is likely worth it.
As predictable as the sunrise, the climate lobby is blaming humanity’s fossil-fuel sins for Ida. But even the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report this month notes “there is low confidence in long-term (multi-decadal to centennial) trends in the
frequency of all-category tropical cyclone” (i.e., hurricanes). The report says that it is likely that the global proportion of Category 3 or higher tropical cyclones has increased over the past four decades, but that “data limitations inhibit clear detection of past trends on the global scale.” In short, we don’t really know whether global warming has caused or will cause more intense storms in the future.
But no matter how much the world warms, more extreme weather will happen. Building more resilient infrastructure and better emergency alert systems will do far more good than all of the Biden Administration’s climate policies. Germany has spent hundreds of billions subsidizing
green energy, but nearly 200 of its citizens perished in last month’s floods that local governments failed to prepare for.
Priorities also matter so scarce resources aren’t wasted. Too much of the Senate’s infrastructure bill is devoted to green boondoggles, rather than resilience. California Democrats have prioritized banishing fossil fuels over hardening the grid and clearing deadwood. The result has
been frequent power outages during heavy winds and catastrophic wildfires. PG&E, the California utility, last month said it will spend $20 billion to bury 10,000 miles of power lines, which were found to have instigated several deadly wildfires. It’s about time.
Government can’t command the tides, but it can protect people from them.
Tuesday, August 31
The reading for next week is from Ross Douthat from the New York Times. He says that one can think their way into religious belief - "The universe was created with intent, intelligence and even love... vivid and beautiful and awesome in a way that resembles and yet exceeds human capacity for art. ... Human beings are fashioned as a creature with animal form and yet with consciousness to stand outside of nature." He also asserts that many of what humankind thought of as supernatural 500 years ago have now been given purely material explanations; and yet, there are religious experiences that, like our own consciousness, seem to stand outside of science and rational laws of nature.
As Episcopalians, or at least as people who associate with Episcopalians, we see God revealed in Scripture, nature and reason. Did we "think" our way into believing this or was it something else (the Wisdom of God perhaps) that brought us into the thinking and believing of the Creator God who loves us wholeheartedly?
Lastly, the author brings up modern-day atheism which he postulates as simply believing in the material world alone; or, rejecting outright the idea of non-material truth.
What I am wondering is what you think of this? Do you "think" your way into believing or is it something else? How would this author have us treat our neighbors and those less fortunate than ourselves?
I hope to see you on-line or in-person on Tuesday.
-Fr. Dave
How To Think Your Way Into Religious Belief
Ross Douthat, The New York Times, 8.21.21
A friend said to me some years ago, “If appreciating some of the ideas in St. Augustine’s ‘Confessions’ was enough to make you a Christian, then I’d be a Christian. But a personal God? The miracles? I can’t get there yet.” I get a lot of emails expressing some version of this
sentiment. Sometimes it’s couched in the form of regretful unbelief: I’d happily go back to church, except that we all know there is no God.
So this is an essay with a suggested blueprint for thinking your way into religious belief.
Many highly educated people who hover at the doorway of a church or synagogue relate to religion on a communal or philosophical level. They want to pass on a clear ethical inheritance to their children. They find certain God-inspired writers inspiring. The biblical references of the
civil rights era are more moving than secular defenses of equality. Yet they struggle to make the leap of faith, to reach a state where the supernatural parts become believable and the grace to accept the impossible is bestowed.
The “new atheist” philosopher Daniel Dennett once wrote a book called “Breaking the Spell,” that implies religious faith prevents believers from seeing the world clearly. But what if atheism is actually the prejudice held against the evidence? In that case, Dennett’s book is actually a
good way to describe the materialist defaults in secular culture – materialism is a spell that has been cast over modern minds, and the fastest way to become religious is to break it.
Imagine yourself back in time, to an era — ancient, medieval, pre-Darwin — when you think it made sense for an intelligent person to believe in God. Your historical self might have been religious because religious ideas provide an explanation for the most important features of
reality.
First, the idea that the universe was created with intent, intelligence and even love explained why the world in which you found yourself had the appearance of a created thing: not just orderly, law-bound and filled with complex systems necessary for human life, but also vivid and
beautiful and awesome in a way that resembles and yet exceeds the human capacity for art.
Second, the idea that human beings are fashioned, in some way, in the image of the universe’s creator explained why your own relationship to the world was particularly strange. Your fourth- or 14th-century self was obviously part of nature, an embodied creature with an animal form, and yet your consciousness also seemed to stand outside it, with a peculiar sense of immaterial objectivity, an almost God’s-eye view — constantly analyzing, tinkering, appreciating, passing moral judgment.
Finally, the common religious assumption that humans are material creatures connected to a supernatural plane explained why your world contained so many signs of a higher order of reality, the incredible variety of experiences described as “mystical” or “numinous,” unsettling or
terrifying, or just really, really weird — ranging from baseline feelings of oneness and universal love to strange happenings at the threshold of death to encounters with beings that human beings might label (gods and demons, ghosts and faeries) but never fully understand.
Now consider the possibility that in our own allegedly disenchanted era – after Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin, Einstein — that all of this is still true. I do not mean to claim that 500 years of scientific progress have left the world’s great religions untouched or unchallenged. Many supernatural-seeming events can now be given purely material explanations. And the modern experience of globalization has had an inevitable relativizing effect, downgrading confidence in any one faith’s exclusive claims to truth. But there are also important ways in which the progress of science and the experience of modernity have strengthened the reasons to entertain the idea of God.
The great project of modern physics, for instance, has led to speculation about a multiverse in part because it has repeatedly confirmed the strange fittedness of our universe to human life. If science has discredited certain specific ideas about how God structured the natural world, it has also made the mathematical beauty of physical laws, as well as their seeming calibration for the emergence of life, much clearer to us than they were to people 500 years ago.
Similarly, the remarkable advances of neuroscience have only sharpened the “hard problem” of consciousness: the difficulty of figuring out how physical processes alone could create the lived reality of conscious life, from the simple experience of color to the complexities of reasoned thought. So notable is the failure to discover consciousness in our dissected tissue that certain materialists, like Dennett, have fastened onto the idea that both conscious experience and selfhood must be essentially illusions. This idea, no less than the belief in a multiverse of infinite realities, requires a leap of faith. In fact, the very notion of scientific progress — our long track record of successful efforts to understand the material world — doubles as evidence that our minds have something in common with whatever mind designed the universe. As much as religious believers (and nonbelievers) worry about the confidence with which our modern technologists play God, the fact that humans can play God at all is pretty strange — and a better reason to think of ourselves as made in a divine image than the medieval people ever knew.
The resilience of religious theories is matched by the resilience of religious experience. The disenchantment of the modern world is a myth of the intelligentsia: In reality it never happened.
Instead, through the whole multi-century process of secularization, the decline of religion’s political power and cultural prestige, people kept right on having near-death experiences and demonic visitations and wild divine encounters. They just lost the religious structures through
which those experiences used to be interpreted.
Read the British novelist Paul Kingsnorth’s recent account of his pilgrimage from unbelief through Zen Buddhism and Wicca to Christianity, and you will find a story of mysterious happenings that would fit neatly into the late Roman world in which Christianity first took shape.
Or read Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Living With a Wild God,” a memoir by an inveterate skeptic of organized religion, which describes mystical experiences that came to her unbidden, with a biblical mix of awe, terror and mystery. “It was a furious encounter with a living substance that
was coming at me through all things at once,” Ehrenreich writes. “One reason for the terrible wordlessness of the experience is that you cannot observe fire really closely without becoming part of it.” So the God-experience falls on nonbelievers as well as on believers. The nonbeliever
is just more likely to be baffled by what it all might mean, or more resistant, as Ehrenreich remains, to the claim that it should point toward any particular religion’s idea of God.
Likewise, with experiences that seem like hauntings and possessions, psychic or premonitory events, or brushes with the strange “tricksters” that used to be read as faeries and now get interpreted, in the light of science fiction and the space age, as extraterrestrials. In the 21st
century, as in the 19th or the 14th, they just keep on happening, frequently enough that even the intelligentsia can’t completely ignore them: You can read about ghosts in The London Review of Books and Elle magazine; you can find accounts of bizarre psychic phenomena in the pages of The New Yorker.
You could see this resilience in the 19th century when Protestant belief weakened but séances and mediums came rushing in. You can see it today where institutional Catholicism is weakening but the demand for exorcisms is going up. It’s something the secular mind now concedes and indeed expects. But if your claim is that religious experience is mostly just misinterpretation, it’s a substantial concession to acknowledge that it persists through ages of reason as well as ages of faith, and endures even when cultural and medical and scientific authorities discount or dismiss it.
Of course, religion could be the exception: a desire with no real object, a set of experiences with no correlate outside the mind, sustained by a combination of wishful thinking, the desire of mortal creatures to believe in the imperishable and the inevitability of what debunkers of
supernatural fraud sometimes call “residua,” the slice of strange events that lie outside our current scope of explanation. But today, in secular and educated circles, any natural human eagerness to believe coexists with the opposite sort of pressure, to dismiss supernatural
experiences lest you appear deluded or disreputable.
Take, as just one example, the case of near-death experiences, which were a culturally submerged phenomenon until Raymond A. Moody started compiling testimony in the late 1960s. After decades of research, we know such experiences are commonplace and surprisingly consistent in certain features — not just the tunnels and bright lights and encounters with dead relatives but also the psychological aftermath, marked by a shift toward greater selflessness, spirituality and cosmic optimism.
Maybe they are all just mental illusion (even if some of their features are not exactly easy for existing models of brain function to explain), the result of some evolutionary advantage to feeling peaceful at the brink of death. But just conceding their persistent existence is noteworthy,
given how easy it is to imagine a world where these kinds of experiences didn’t happen, where nobody came back from the threshold of death with a life-changing account of light suffused with love or where the experiences of the dying were just a random dreamlike jumble.
If near death experiences didn’t happen, it would be a pretty telling point against religion. But, such experiences do happen so you have to consider them a point in favor of taking religion seriously. And if you read widely and with an open mind, I promise — those kinds of points
have a way of piling up.
All of which is to say that the world in 2021, no less than the world in 1521 or 321, presents considerable evidence of an originating intelligence presiding over a law-bound world well made for our minds to understand, and at the same time an array of spiritual forces that seem to intervene unpredictably in our existence. That combination corresponds reasonably well to the cosmology offered in many major world religions, from Christianity with its creator God who exists outside of space and time and its ministering angels and interceding saints, to Hinduism with its singular divinity finding embodiment in a pantheon of gods. Almost as if the old faiths had a somewhat plausible grasp on reality all along.
But wait, you might say: Given that Hinduism and Christianity are actually pretty different, maybe this attempted spell-breaking doesn’t get us very far. Postulating an uncreated divine intelligence or ultimate reality doesn’t tell us much about what God wants from us. Presupposing
an active spiritual realm doesn’t prove that we should all go back to church, especially if these experiences show up cross-culturally, which means they don’t confirm any specific dogma. This essay isn’t titled “How to Become a Presbyterian” or “How to Know Which Faith Is True.” The spell-breaking I’m offering here is a beginning, not an end. It creates an obligation without telling you how exactly to fulfill it. It opens onto further arguments, between religious traditions and within them, that aren’t easily resolved.
The difficulties of those ancient arguments — along with the challenge of dealing with religion as it’s actually embodied, in flawed people and institutions — are a big part of what keeps the spell of materialism intact. For finite and suffering creatures, religious belief offers important
kinds of hope and consolation. But unbelief has its own comforts: It takes a whole vast zone of ideas and arguments, practices and demands, supernatural perils and metaphysical complexities, and whispers: “well, at least you don’t have to spend time thinking about that.” But actually you do. So, if you are standing uncertainly on the threshold of whatever faith tradition you feel closest to, you don’t have to heed the inner voice insisting that it’s necessarily more reasonable and sensible and modern to take a step backward. You can recognize instead that reality is
probably not as materialism describes it, and take up the obligation of a serious human being preparing for life and death alike — to move forward, to step through.
Ross Douthat is a New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist. He is the author of "The Decadent Society," "To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism," “Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics”, “Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class”. He is the film critic for National Review.
As Episcopalians, or at least as people who associate with Episcopalians, we see God revealed in Scripture, nature and reason. Did we "think" our way into believing this or was it something else (the Wisdom of God perhaps) that brought us into the thinking and believing of the Creator God who loves us wholeheartedly?
Lastly, the author brings up modern-day atheism which he postulates as simply believing in the material world alone; or, rejecting outright the idea of non-material truth.
What I am wondering is what you think of this? Do you "think" your way into believing or is it something else? How would this author have us treat our neighbors and those less fortunate than ourselves?
I hope to see you on-line or in-person on Tuesday.
-Fr. Dave
How To Think Your Way Into Religious Belief
Ross Douthat, The New York Times, 8.21.21
A friend said to me some years ago, “If appreciating some of the ideas in St. Augustine’s ‘Confessions’ was enough to make you a Christian, then I’d be a Christian. But a personal God? The miracles? I can’t get there yet.” I get a lot of emails expressing some version of this
sentiment. Sometimes it’s couched in the form of regretful unbelief: I’d happily go back to church, except that we all know there is no God.
So this is an essay with a suggested blueprint for thinking your way into religious belief.
Many highly educated people who hover at the doorway of a church or synagogue relate to religion on a communal or philosophical level. They want to pass on a clear ethical inheritance to their children. They find certain God-inspired writers inspiring. The biblical references of the
civil rights era are more moving than secular defenses of equality. Yet they struggle to make the leap of faith, to reach a state where the supernatural parts become believable and the grace to accept the impossible is bestowed.
The “new atheist” philosopher Daniel Dennett once wrote a book called “Breaking the Spell,” that implies religious faith prevents believers from seeing the world clearly. But what if atheism is actually the prejudice held against the evidence? In that case, Dennett’s book is actually a
good way to describe the materialist defaults in secular culture – materialism is a spell that has been cast over modern minds, and the fastest way to become religious is to break it.
Imagine yourself back in time, to an era — ancient, medieval, pre-Darwin — when you think it made sense for an intelligent person to believe in God. Your historical self might have been religious because religious ideas provide an explanation for the most important features of
reality.
First, the idea that the universe was created with intent, intelligence and even love explained why the world in which you found yourself had the appearance of a created thing: not just orderly, law-bound and filled with complex systems necessary for human life, but also vivid and
beautiful and awesome in a way that resembles and yet exceeds the human capacity for art.
Second, the idea that human beings are fashioned, in some way, in the image of the universe’s creator explained why your own relationship to the world was particularly strange. Your fourth- or 14th-century self was obviously part of nature, an embodied creature with an animal form, and yet your consciousness also seemed to stand outside it, with a peculiar sense of immaterial objectivity, an almost God’s-eye view — constantly analyzing, tinkering, appreciating, passing moral judgment.
Finally, the common religious assumption that humans are material creatures connected to a supernatural plane explained why your world contained so many signs of a higher order of reality, the incredible variety of experiences described as “mystical” or “numinous,” unsettling or
terrifying, or just really, really weird — ranging from baseline feelings of oneness and universal love to strange happenings at the threshold of death to encounters with beings that human beings might label (gods and demons, ghosts and faeries) but never fully understand.
Now consider the possibility that in our own allegedly disenchanted era – after Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin, Einstein — that all of this is still true. I do not mean to claim that 500 years of scientific progress have left the world’s great religions untouched or unchallenged. Many supernatural-seeming events can now be given purely material explanations. And the modern experience of globalization has had an inevitable relativizing effect, downgrading confidence in any one faith’s exclusive claims to truth. But there are also important ways in which the progress of science and the experience of modernity have strengthened the reasons to entertain the idea of God.
The great project of modern physics, for instance, has led to speculation about a multiverse in part because it has repeatedly confirmed the strange fittedness of our universe to human life. If science has discredited certain specific ideas about how God structured the natural world, it has also made the mathematical beauty of physical laws, as well as their seeming calibration for the emergence of life, much clearer to us than they were to people 500 years ago.
Similarly, the remarkable advances of neuroscience have only sharpened the “hard problem” of consciousness: the difficulty of figuring out how physical processes alone could create the lived reality of conscious life, from the simple experience of color to the complexities of reasoned thought. So notable is the failure to discover consciousness in our dissected tissue that certain materialists, like Dennett, have fastened onto the idea that both conscious experience and selfhood must be essentially illusions. This idea, no less than the belief in a multiverse of infinite realities, requires a leap of faith. In fact, the very notion of scientific progress — our long track record of successful efforts to understand the material world — doubles as evidence that our minds have something in common with whatever mind designed the universe. As much as religious believers (and nonbelievers) worry about the confidence with which our modern technologists play God, the fact that humans can play God at all is pretty strange — and a better reason to think of ourselves as made in a divine image than the medieval people ever knew.
The resilience of religious theories is matched by the resilience of religious experience. The disenchantment of the modern world is a myth of the intelligentsia: In reality it never happened.
Instead, through the whole multi-century process of secularization, the decline of religion’s political power and cultural prestige, people kept right on having near-death experiences and demonic visitations and wild divine encounters. They just lost the religious structures through
which those experiences used to be interpreted.
Read the British novelist Paul Kingsnorth’s recent account of his pilgrimage from unbelief through Zen Buddhism and Wicca to Christianity, and you will find a story of mysterious happenings that would fit neatly into the late Roman world in which Christianity first took shape.
Or read Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Living With a Wild God,” a memoir by an inveterate skeptic of organized religion, which describes mystical experiences that came to her unbidden, with a biblical mix of awe, terror and mystery. “It was a furious encounter with a living substance that
was coming at me through all things at once,” Ehrenreich writes. “One reason for the terrible wordlessness of the experience is that you cannot observe fire really closely without becoming part of it.” So the God-experience falls on nonbelievers as well as on believers. The nonbeliever
is just more likely to be baffled by what it all might mean, or more resistant, as Ehrenreich remains, to the claim that it should point toward any particular religion’s idea of God.
Likewise, with experiences that seem like hauntings and possessions, psychic or premonitory events, or brushes with the strange “tricksters” that used to be read as faeries and now get interpreted, in the light of science fiction and the space age, as extraterrestrials. In the 21st
century, as in the 19th or the 14th, they just keep on happening, frequently enough that even the intelligentsia can’t completely ignore them: You can read about ghosts in The London Review of Books and Elle magazine; you can find accounts of bizarre psychic phenomena in the pages of The New Yorker.
You could see this resilience in the 19th century when Protestant belief weakened but séances and mediums came rushing in. You can see it today where institutional Catholicism is weakening but the demand for exorcisms is going up. It’s something the secular mind now concedes and indeed expects. But if your claim is that religious experience is mostly just misinterpretation, it’s a substantial concession to acknowledge that it persists through ages of reason as well as ages of faith, and endures even when cultural and medical and scientific authorities discount or dismiss it.
Of course, religion could be the exception: a desire with no real object, a set of experiences with no correlate outside the mind, sustained by a combination of wishful thinking, the desire of mortal creatures to believe in the imperishable and the inevitability of what debunkers of
supernatural fraud sometimes call “residua,” the slice of strange events that lie outside our current scope of explanation. But today, in secular and educated circles, any natural human eagerness to believe coexists with the opposite sort of pressure, to dismiss supernatural
experiences lest you appear deluded or disreputable.
Take, as just one example, the case of near-death experiences, which were a culturally submerged phenomenon until Raymond A. Moody started compiling testimony in the late 1960s. After decades of research, we know such experiences are commonplace and surprisingly consistent in certain features — not just the tunnels and bright lights and encounters with dead relatives but also the psychological aftermath, marked by a shift toward greater selflessness, spirituality and cosmic optimism.
Maybe they are all just mental illusion (even if some of their features are not exactly easy for existing models of brain function to explain), the result of some evolutionary advantage to feeling peaceful at the brink of death. But just conceding their persistent existence is noteworthy,
given how easy it is to imagine a world where these kinds of experiences didn’t happen, where nobody came back from the threshold of death with a life-changing account of light suffused with love or where the experiences of the dying were just a random dreamlike jumble.
If near death experiences didn’t happen, it would be a pretty telling point against religion. But, such experiences do happen so you have to consider them a point in favor of taking religion seriously. And if you read widely and with an open mind, I promise — those kinds of points
have a way of piling up.
All of which is to say that the world in 2021, no less than the world in 1521 or 321, presents considerable evidence of an originating intelligence presiding over a law-bound world well made for our minds to understand, and at the same time an array of spiritual forces that seem to intervene unpredictably in our existence. That combination corresponds reasonably well to the cosmology offered in many major world religions, from Christianity with its creator God who exists outside of space and time and its ministering angels and interceding saints, to Hinduism with its singular divinity finding embodiment in a pantheon of gods. Almost as if the old faiths had a somewhat plausible grasp on reality all along.
But wait, you might say: Given that Hinduism and Christianity are actually pretty different, maybe this attempted spell-breaking doesn’t get us very far. Postulating an uncreated divine intelligence or ultimate reality doesn’t tell us much about what God wants from us. Presupposing
an active spiritual realm doesn’t prove that we should all go back to church, especially if these experiences show up cross-culturally, which means they don’t confirm any specific dogma. This essay isn’t titled “How to Become a Presbyterian” or “How to Know Which Faith Is True.” The spell-breaking I’m offering here is a beginning, not an end. It creates an obligation without telling you how exactly to fulfill it. It opens onto further arguments, between religious traditions and within them, that aren’t easily resolved.
The difficulties of those ancient arguments — along with the challenge of dealing with religion as it’s actually embodied, in flawed people and institutions — are a big part of what keeps the spell of materialism intact. For finite and suffering creatures, religious belief offers important
kinds of hope and consolation. But unbelief has its own comforts: It takes a whole vast zone of ideas and arguments, practices and demands, supernatural perils and metaphysical complexities, and whispers: “well, at least you don’t have to spend time thinking about that.” But actually you do. So, if you are standing uncertainly on the threshold of whatever faith tradition you feel closest to, you don’t have to heed the inner voice insisting that it’s necessarily more reasonable and sensible and modern to take a step backward. You can recognize instead that reality is
probably not as materialism describes it, and take up the obligation of a serious human being preparing for life and death alike — to move forward, to step through.
Ross Douthat is a New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist. He is the author of "The Decadent Society," "To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism," “Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics”, “Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class”. He is the film critic for National Review.
Tuesday, August 24
There are two readings this week - the primary discussion reading for Tuesday is an article from the Atlantic stressing the importance of living a life of gratefulness. It makes a distinction between "gratitude" - which the author asserts is a momentary emotion - and "gratefulness" which the author says is a way of life. Nevertheless, under the category of successful ageing, this is an important discussion to have.
The secondary reading is from the WSJ and it provides a good overview of Afghanistan and the rise of the Taliban's swift victory. This is not required for Tuesday but I included it because we probably will talk about it so I'd like us to have at least one source article on it which is the same. Also, there may be a link between one and the other. (Secondary reading link: The Taliban's Swift Victory was Years in the Making.)
Also, I have been working on a way for us to have an in-person meeting in the Parish Hall. If you are interested in joining me on Tuesday, I'll have the coffee made.
Blessings to you and may God watch over the people of Afghanistan and Haiti and may the Wisdom of God be upon all who watch over and bring relief to those in need.
Gratefulness, an Overall Orientation
Scott Barry Kaufman, The Atlantic 8.18.21
Countless books have been written on the “power of gratitude” and the importance of counting your blessings, but that sentiment may feel like cold comfort during the coronavirus pandemic. Refusing to look at life’s darkness and avoiding uncomfortable experiences can be detrimental to mental health. This “toxic positivity” is ultimately a denial of reality. Telling someone to “stay positive” in the middle of a global crisis is missing out on an opportunity for growth, not to mention likely to backfire and only make them feel worse. As the gratitude researcher Robert Emmons of UC Davis writes, “To deny that life has its share of disappointments, frustrations, losses, hurts, setbacks, and sadness would be unrealistic and untenable. Life is suffering. No amount of positive thinking exercises will change this truth.”
The antidote to toxic positivity is “tragic optimism,” a phrase coined by psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl. Tragic optimism involves the search for meaning amid the inevitable tragedies of human existence, something far more practical and realistic during trying
times. Researchers who study “post-traumatic growth” have found that people can grow in many ways from difficult times — including having a greater appreciation of one’s life and relationships, as well as increased compassion, altruism, purpose, utilization of personal strengths, spiritual development, and creativity. Importantly, it’s not the traumatic event itself that leads to growth (no one is thankful for COVID-19), but rather how the event is processed, the changes in worldview that result from the event, and the active search for meaning that people undertake during and after it.
In recent years, scientists have begun to recognize that the practice of gratitude can be a key driver of post-traumatic growth after an adverse event, and that gratitude can be a healing force. Indeed, a number of positive mental-health outcomes are linked to a regular gratitude practice, such as reduced lifetime risk for depression, anxiety, and substance-abuse disorders.
The human capacity for resiliency is quite remarkable and underrated. A recent study surveyed more than 500 people from March to May 2020. It found that even during those terrifying early months of the pandemic, more than 56 percent of people reported feeling grateful, which was 17 percent higher than any other positive emotion. Those who reported feeling more grateful also reported being happier. What’s more, even more people—69 percent of respondents—reported expecting to feel grateful two to three months in the future.
I believe that an overlooked route to gratitude is exposure to difficult circumstances. There are many basic advantages of life itself that we too often take for granted. After all, humans have a natural tendency to adapt and become used to situations that are relatively stable. When
individuals become aware that their advantages are not guaranteed, many then come to appreciate them more.
Indeed, several studies have found that people who have confronted difficult circumstances report that their appreciation for life itself has increased, and some of the most grateful people have gone through some of the hardest experiences. Kristi Nelson, the executive director of A Network for Grateful Living, faced her own mortality at the age of 33, when she received a cancer diagnosis and had to undergo multiple surgeries, chemo, and radiation. Nevertheless, she writes that she was constantly on the lookout for opportunities to cultivate gratefulness: I was in the hospital, separated from all my friends and family and tethered to all kinds of IVs and dealing with pain. And yet, I had nurses and technicians and doctors and cleaners who came into my room every single day. I remember thinking, what if this is my whole world now, what if this is all I have? And then I thought, I can always love these people. Nelson makes a distinction between gratitude—a momentary emotion—and gratefulness, an “overall orientation” that is “not contingent on something happening to us, but rather a way that we arrive to life.”
The gratitude researcher Lilian Jans-Beken and existential positive psychologist Paul Wong created an “Existential Gratitude Scale” to measure the tendency people have to feel grateful for all of human existence, not just the positive aspects. Their scale includes items such as:
I am grateful for my life even in times of suffering.
I am grateful that my inner resources have increased as a result of overcoming adversities.
I am grateful for the people in my life, even for those who have caused me much pain.
I am thankful that I have something to live for, even though life has been very hard for me.
I am grateful that every crisis represents an opportunity for me to grow.
I have learned the importance of gratitude through suffering.
The researchers found that existential gratitude was associated with higher spiritual well-being.
This finding is important considering that gratitude and spirituality have been shown to be protective factors against both anxiety and depression.
A common misconception is that gratitude is necessarily self-serving, that it’s all about appreciating my life and my blessings, in spite of the suffering of others. But as Emmons and the psychoanalyst Robin Stern of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence note, “True gratefulness rejoices in the other. Its ultimate goal is to reflect back the goodness that one has received by creatively seeking opportunities for giving.” Indeed, the researchers who did the pandemic gratitude study found that the more grateful people were, the more they reported that they were more likely to help others.
Gratitude as a fleeting emotion can come and go, but gratefulness, or “existential gratitude,” can pervade your entire life, throughout its ups and downs. It asks for nothing but is on the lookout to find the hidden benefit and the opportunities for growth in everything—even during a global pandemic. As Emmons said at the recent International Meaning Conference, “Gratitude is not just a switch to turn on when things go well; it is also a light that shines in the darkness.”
Scott Barry Kaufman is a cognitive scientist and humanistic psychologist. He is the founder and director of the Center for the Science of Human Potential, and the author of several books, including Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization.
The secondary reading is from the WSJ and it provides a good overview of Afghanistan and the rise of the Taliban's swift victory. This is not required for Tuesday but I included it because we probably will talk about it so I'd like us to have at least one source article on it which is the same. Also, there may be a link between one and the other. (Secondary reading link: The Taliban's Swift Victory was Years in the Making.)
Also, I have been working on a way for us to have an in-person meeting in the Parish Hall. If you are interested in joining me on Tuesday, I'll have the coffee made.
Blessings to you and may God watch over the people of Afghanistan and Haiti and may the Wisdom of God be upon all who watch over and bring relief to those in need.
Gratefulness, an Overall Orientation
Scott Barry Kaufman, The Atlantic 8.18.21
Countless books have been written on the “power of gratitude” and the importance of counting your blessings, but that sentiment may feel like cold comfort during the coronavirus pandemic. Refusing to look at life’s darkness and avoiding uncomfortable experiences can be detrimental to mental health. This “toxic positivity” is ultimately a denial of reality. Telling someone to “stay positive” in the middle of a global crisis is missing out on an opportunity for growth, not to mention likely to backfire and only make them feel worse. As the gratitude researcher Robert Emmons of UC Davis writes, “To deny that life has its share of disappointments, frustrations, losses, hurts, setbacks, and sadness would be unrealistic and untenable. Life is suffering. No amount of positive thinking exercises will change this truth.”
The antidote to toxic positivity is “tragic optimism,” a phrase coined by psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl. Tragic optimism involves the search for meaning amid the inevitable tragedies of human existence, something far more practical and realistic during trying
times. Researchers who study “post-traumatic growth” have found that people can grow in many ways from difficult times — including having a greater appreciation of one’s life and relationships, as well as increased compassion, altruism, purpose, utilization of personal strengths, spiritual development, and creativity. Importantly, it’s not the traumatic event itself that leads to growth (no one is thankful for COVID-19), but rather how the event is processed, the changes in worldview that result from the event, and the active search for meaning that people undertake during and after it.
In recent years, scientists have begun to recognize that the practice of gratitude can be a key driver of post-traumatic growth after an adverse event, and that gratitude can be a healing force. Indeed, a number of positive mental-health outcomes are linked to a regular gratitude practice, such as reduced lifetime risk for depression, anxiety, and substance-abuse disorders.
The human capacity for resiliency is quite remarkable and underrated. A recent study surveyed more than 500 people from March to May 2020. It found that even during those terrifying early months of the pandemic, more than 56 percent of people reported feeling grateful, which was 17 percent higher than any other positive emotion. Those who reported feeling more grateful also reported being happier. What’s more, even more people—69 percent of respondents—reported expecting to feel grateful two to three months in the future.
I believe that an overlooked route to gratitude is exposure to difficult circumstances. There are many basic advantages of life itself that we too often take for granted. After all, humans have a natural tendency to adapt and become used to situations that are relatively stable. When
individuals become aware that their advantages are not guaranteed, many then come to appreciate them more.
Indeed, several studies have found that people who have confronted difficult circumstances report that their appreciation for life itself has increased, and some of the most grateful people have gone through some of the hardest experiences. Kristi Nelson, the executive director of A Network for Grateful Living, faced her own mortality at the age of 33, when she received a cancer diagnosis and had to undergo multiple surgeries, chemo, and radiation. Nevertheless, she writes that she was constantly on the lookout for opportunities to cultivate gratefulness: I was in the hospital, separated from all my friends and family and tethered to all kinds of IVs and dealing with pain. And yet, I had nurses and technicians and doctors and cleaners who came into my room every single day. I remember thinking, what if this is my whole world now, what if this is all I have? And then I thought, I can always love these people. Nelson makes a distinction between gratitude—a momentary emotion—and gratefulness, an “overall orientation” that is “not contingent on something happening to us, but rather a way that we arrive to life.”
The gratitude researcher Lilian Jans-Beken and existential positive psychologist Paul Wong created an “Existential Gratitude Scale” to measure the tendency people have to feel grateful for all of human existence, not just the positive aspects. Their scale includes items such as:
I am grateful for my life even in times of suffering.
I am grateful that my inner resources have increased as a result of overcoming adversities.
I am grateful for the people in my life, even for those who have caused me much pain.
I am thankful that I have something to live for, even though life has been very hard for me.
I am grateful that every crisis represents an opportunity for me to grow.
I have learned the importance of gratitude through suffering.
The researchers found that existential gratitude was associated with higher spiritual well-being.
This finding is important considering that gratitude and spirituality have been shown to be protective factors against both anxiety and depression.
A common misconception is that gratitude is necessarily self-serving, that it’s all about appreciating my life and my blessings, in spite of the suffering of others. But as Emmons and the psychoanalyst Robin Stern of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence note, “True gratefulness rejoices in the other. Its ultimate goal is to reflect back the goodness that one has received by creatively seeking opportunities for giving.” Indeed, the researchers who did the pandemic gratitude study found that the more grateful people were, the more they reported that they were more likely to help others.
Gratitude as a fleeting emotion can come and go, but gratefulness, or “existential gratitude,” can pervade your entire life, throughout its ups and downs. It asks for nothing but is on the lookout to find the hidden benefit and the opportunities for growth in everything—even during a global pandemic. As Emmons said at the recent International Meaning Conference, “Gratitude is not just a switch to turn on when things go well; it is also a light that shines in the darkness.”
Scott Barry Kaufman is a cognitive scientist and humanistic psychologist. He is the founder and director of the Center for the Science of Human Potential, and the author of several books, including Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization.
Tuesday, August 17
During the discussion last Tuesday, I referenced a scholarly article about a Christian perspective on depression. Many of you wanted to read it so it is attached here:
Dealing with Depression: A Christian Perspective
This coming Tuesday, our article to discuss is this: Love is medicine for fear, by Arthur Brooks. The author asserts that fear, in general, is on the rise. The antidote is love. He then outlines four different ways to use or take the medicine. I'd like to discuss this with you and see if it has any merit in your life. Using #2 of Brooks' hypothesis, I greatly enjoy our time together and look forward to seeing you.
Love is Medicine for Fear
Arthur Brooks, The Atlantic 7.16.20
We are living in a time of fear. The coronavirus pandemic has threatened our lives, health, and economy in ways most Americans have never experienced. We have no idea what the future will bring. According to the American Psychological Association’s annual “Stress in America”
survey, the percentage of people in the U.S. who say that “the future of our nation is a significant source of stress” rose to 83 percent in June 2020, up from 63 percent in 2017.
But even before the pandemic, fear about the future was high and on the rise. Gallup found that the percentage of Americans who had experienced worry “during a lot of the day yesterday” rose from 36 percent to 45 percent from 2006 to 2018; similarly, feelings of stress rose from 46 percent to 55 percent. This matches my personal experience. Given what I write about for a living, it may not be surprising that I start many conversations by asking people about their happiness. If you make the mistake of talking to me on an airplane, that’s where the conversation is going to go. In recent years, I have noticed, people have told me more and more that they are afraid.
People’s fears vary widely. The pandemic aside, the answers I hear are all over the place, from leaders they don’t trust, to environmental problems, to simply being able to support themselves and take care of their families. According to Chapman University’s annual “Survey of American Fears,” almost 74 percent of Americans in 2018 were afraid of corrupt government officials, nearly 62 percent were afraid of pollution in bodies of water, and 57 percent were afraid of not having enough money for the future.
One way of dealing with these fears is to strive to eliminate the threats that caused them. But while social and economic progress is important and possible, there will always be threats to face and things to fear. The way to combat fear within ourselves is with its opposite emotion—which is not calmness, or even courage. It’s love.
The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu wrote in the Tao Te Ching, “Through Love, one has no fear.” More than 500 years later, Saint John the Apostle said the same thing: “There is no fear in love.
But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” This is a very strong argument: Love neutralizes fear. It took about 2,000 years, but contemporary neurobiological evidence has revealed that Lao Tzu and Saint
John were absolutely on the money.
Fear is a primary emotion processed in the amygdala, a part of the brain that detects threats and signals to the body to produce the stress hormones that make us ready for fight or flight. This is largely involuntary, and, while necessary for survival, is unpleasant (except under controlled circumstances, such as roller coasters). The fear response is also maladapted to modern life. For example, a friend of mine with a large Twitter following once told me that he felt his chest tighten every day as he clicked on the social media app on his phone. His amygdala was alerting him that dangerous threats lay ahead, and he was getting a dose of adrenaline and cortisol in response—even though nothing was likely going to harm him.
However, we have a natural modulator of the hyperactive amygdala: the neuropeptide oxytocin, sometimes called the “love molecule.” Oxytocin is often produced in the brain in response to eye contact and touch, especially between loved ones. The feeling it creates is intensely pleasurable; indeed, life would be unbearable without it. There is evidence that an oxytocin deficit is one reason for the increase in depression during the coronavirus pandemic, with its lockdowns and social distancing. Oxytocin has also been found to reduce anxiety and stress by inhibiting the response of the amygdala to outside stimuli. If you have loving contact with others, the outside world will seem less scary and threatening to you. What Saint John asserted is literally true: Perfect love drives out fear.
Our current fear problem is not due to a proliferation of threats. Despite all the troubles we face, as my Harvard colleague Steven Pinker has shown, the world of the 21st century is safer for the vast majority of us than the world of previous eras (current pandemic aside). The real issue is that we have too little love in our lives to protect us against our fears.
Americans are getting lonelier. Former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has written a book about this, and the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration has declared a “loneliness epidemic,” specifically citing “living alone, being unmarried … no participation in social groups, fewer friends, and strained relationships” as the culprits. Clearly, a lack of relationships makes life’s fears harder to cope with.
The pandemic makes things worse by driving friends and neighbors apart. But our political culture has been doing this as well for some time, with brutal efficiency. In 2016, the Pew Research Center found that people were more likely than before to express negative opinions about others simply because of their affiliation with the opposite political party, and this is especially true among those who are highly engaged in politics. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll that ran from late 2016 to early 2017, 13 percent of Americans have “ended a relationship with a family member or close friend over the [2016] election.”
The math here is easy: More isolation plus more hostility equals less love; less love equals more fear. To reduce fear, we need to bring more love into our lives. If you’re not sure how to get started, let me suggest the following approach, which starts pretty easy and advances in
difficulty.
1. Confess your fear to someone you trust. Many people carry their fears stoically, never sharing them openly with others. Hidden fear often expresses itself obliquely and in unproductive ways, such as hostility or aloofness. It is also a missed opportunity: To confess fear, while scary in and of itself, is an act of vulnerability that stimulates the love you crave, in yourself and in the ones you allow to comfort you.
2. Make your love overt. Today, tell someone you love her or him. Not someone you would normally say that to, but rather to a friend or family member for whom this would not feel natural. The point here is to break a barrier of expression for yourself but in a way that is relatively safe. The more you say “I love you,” the less strange or scary it will feel. It is a small act of courage. The payoff is not just more closeness, but also an increase in your fortitude, which you might need for the next step.
3. Take a risk. Confess your love or admiration for someone who doesn’t know that you have these feelings. This requires particular courage in the case of romantic love, because the risk of personal rejection feels so high—and is even harder if you have no practice with this kind of
rejection. It is a direct confrontation of fear with love. But even telling someone you’d like to be friends, or telling a co-worker you admire them, can feel risky, because the feeling could be unrequited. Do it anyway. If you want, blame the coronavirus: Say the lockdown has made you a
little crazy. Or tell the person why you are doing it, and let them comfort you (and see where it goes from there).
4. Love your enemies. This is perhaps the hardest piece of advice, in our polarized ideological climate. But it may also result in an enormous payoff to you personally as well as to the broader culture of contempt we have come to inhabit. Try resolving for a week not to attack anyone over differences of opinion, in person or on social media. Disagreement is fine, but try to have those conversations with understanding and kindness.
I realize that this advice runs counter to today’s culture. If you think someone is wrong, your instinct may be to hate more, to fight harder. But you can’t insult anyone into agreement, and you probably have little or no real power to force others to do your will. Furthermore, antagonism, the opposite of an expression of love, will likely only make your fears worse.What I’m suggesting isn’t easy. Showing love in the face of fear isn’t a natural reaction. Fear instinctively provokes fight or flight, not tenderness and affection. But remember: Instinct doesn’t care if you are happy. You need to violate your instincts if you want to build a better, less fearful life.
So stand up to your amygdala. Walk toward your fear. Face it, feel it, and love courageously.
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, and a professor of management practice at the Harvard Business School.
Dealing with Depression: A Christian Perspective
This coming Tuesday, our article to discuss is this: Love is medicine for fear, by Arthur Brooks. The author asserts that fear, in general, is on the rise. The antidote is love. He then outlines four different ways to use or take the medicine. I'd like to discuss this with you and see if it has any merit in your life. Using #2 of Brooks' hypothesis, I greatly enjoy our time together and look forward to seeing you.
Love is Medicine for Fear
Arthur Brooks, The Atlantic 7.16.20
We are living in a time of fear. The coronavirus pandemic has threatened our lives, health, and economy in ways most Americans have never experienced. We have no idea what the future will bring. According to the American Psychological Association’s annual “Stress in America”
survey, the percentage of people in the U.S. who say that “the future of our nation is a significant source of stress” rose to 83 percent in June 2020, up from 63 percent in 2017.
But even before the pandemic, fear about the future was high and on the rise. Gallup found that the percentage of Americans who had experienced worry “during a lot of the day yesterday” rose from 36 percent to 45 percent from 2006 to 2018; similarly, feelings of stress rose from 46 percent to 55 percent. This matches my personal experience. Given what I write about for a living, it may not be surprising that I start many conversations by asking people about their happiness. If you make the mistake of talking to me on an airplane, that’s where the conversation is going to go. In recent years, I have noticed, people have told me more and more that they are afraid.
People’s fears vary widely. The pandemic aside, the answers I hear are all over the place, from leaders they don’t trust, to environmental problems, to simply being able to support themselves and take care of their families. According to Chapman University’s annual “Survey of American Fears,” almost 74 percent of Americans in 2018 were afraid of corrupt government officials, nearly 62 percent were afraid of pollution in bodies of water, and 57 percent were afraid of not having enough money for the future.
One way of dealing with these fears is to strive to eliminate the threats that caused them. But while social and economic progress is important and possible, there will always be threats to face and things to fear. The way to combat fear within ourselves is with its opposite emotion—which is not calmness, or even courage. It’s love.
The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu wrote in the Tao Te Ching, “Through Love, one has no fear.” More than 500 years later, Saint John the Apostle said the same thing: “There is no fear in love.
But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” This is a very strong argument: Love neutralizes fear. It took about 2,000 years, but contemporary neurobiological evidence has revealed that Lao Tzu and Saint
John were absolutely on the money.
Fear is a primary emotion processed in the amygdala, a part of the brain that detects threats and signals to the body to produce the stress hormones that make us ready for fight or flight. This is largely involuntary, and, while necessary for survival, is unpleasant (except under controlled circumstances, such as roller coasters). The fear response is also maladapted to modern life. For example, a friend of mine with a large Twitter following once told me that he felt his chest tighten every day as he clicked on the social media app on his phone. His amygdala was alerting him that dangerous threats lay ahead, and he was getting a dose of adrenaline and cortisol in response—even though nothing was likely going to harm him.
However, we have a natural modulator of the hyperactive amygdala: the neuropeptide oxytocin, sometimes called the “love molecule.” Oxytocin is often produced in the brain in response to eye contact and touch, especially between loved ones. The feeling it creates is intensely pleasurable; indeed, life would be unbearable without it. There is evidence that an oxytocin deficit is one reason for the increase in depression during the coronavirus pandemic, with its lockdowns and social distancing. Oxytocin has also been found to reduce anxiety and stress by inhibiting the response of the amygdala to outside stimuli. If you have loving contact with others, the outside world will seem less scary and threatening to you. What Saint John asserted is literally true: Perfect love drives out fear.
Our current fear problem is not due to a proliferation of threats. Despite all the troubles we face, as my Harvard colleague Steven Pinker has shown, the world of the 21st century is safer for the vast majority of us than the world of previous eras (current pandemic aside). The real issue is that we have too little love in our lives to protect us against our fears.
Americans are getting lonelier. Former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has written a book about this, and the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration has declared a “loneliness epidemic,” specifically citing “living alone, being unmarried … no participation in social groups, fewer friends, and strained relationships” as the culprits. Clearly, a lack of relationships makes life’s fears harder to cope with.
The pandemic makes things worse by driving friends and neighbors apart. But our political culture has been doing this as well for some time, with brutal efficiency. In 2016, the Pew Research Center found that people were more likely than before to express negative opinions about others simply because of their affiliation with the opposite political party, and this is especially true among those who are highly engaged in politics. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll that ran from late 2016 to early 2017, 13 percent of Americans have “ended a relationship with a family member or close friend over the [2016] election.”
The math here is easy: More isolation plus more hostility equals less love; less love equals more fear. To reduce fear, we need to bring more love into our lives. If you’re not sure how to get started, let me suggest the following approach, which starts pretty easy and advances in
difficulty.
1. Confess your fear to someone you trust. Many people carry their fears stoically, never sharing them openly with others. Hidden fear often expresses itself obliquely and in unproductive ways, such as hostility or aloofness. It is also a missed opportunity: To confess fear, while scary in and of itself, is an act of vulnerability that stimulates the love you crave, in yourself and in the ones you allow to comfort you.
2. Make your love overt. Today, tell someone you love her or him. Not someone you would normally say that to, but rather to a friend or family member for whom this would not feel natural. The point here is to break a barrier of expression for yourself but in a way that is relatively safe. The more you say “I love you,” the less strange or scary it will feel. It is a small act of courage. The payoff is not just more closeness, but also an increase in your fortitude, which you might need for the next step.
3. Take a risk. Confess your love or admiration for someone who doesn’t know that you have these feelings. This requires particular courage in the case of romantic love, because the risk of personal rejection feels so high—and is even harder if you have no practice with this kind of
rejection. It is a direct confrontation of fear with love. But even telling someone you’d like to be friends, or telling a co-worker you admire them, can feel risky, because the feeling could be unrequited. Do it anyway. If you want, blame the coronavirus: Say the lockdown has made you a
little crazy. Or tell the person why you are doing it, and let them comfort you (and see where it goes from there).
4. Love your enemies. This is perhaps the hardest piece of advice, in our polarized ideological climate. But it may also result in an enormous payoff to you personally as well as to the broader culture of contempt we have come to inhabit. Try resolving for a week not to attack anyone over differences of opinion, in person or on social media. Disagreement is fine, but try to have those conversations with understanding and kindness.
I realize that this advice runs counter to today’s culture. If you think someone is wrong, your instinct may be to hate more, to fight harder. But you can’t insult anyone into agreement, and you probably have little or no real power to force others to do your will. Furthermore, antagonism, the opposite of an expression of love, will likely only make your fears worse.What I’m suggesting isn’t easy. Showing love in the face of fear isn’t a natural reaction. Fear instinctively provokes fight or flight, not tenderness and affection. But remember: Instinct doesn’t care if you are happy. You need to violate your instincts if you want to build a better, less fearful life.
So stand up to your amygdala. Walk toward your fear. Face it, feel it, and love courageously.
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, and a professor of management practice at the Harvard Business School.
Tuesday, August 10
What Simone Biles Was Saying
Jason Gay, WSJ 7.28.21
Simone Biles was trying to tell us for a long, long time.
In recent years, the transcendent gymnast regularly signaled her ambivalence about putting her body on the line for a sport that had ground her down both physically and mentally. She was candid about her aversion at representing organizations—USA Gymnastics and the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee—she believes failed to protect her and hundreds of others from sexual abuse by a team physician, Larry Nassar.
These are not old scandals; they’re open wounds. To Biles, gymnastics weren’t an easy escape —they were a reminder of trauma.
As a result, this remarkable talent, capable of producing earth’s most joyful athletic moments, could occasionally seem deprived of joy herself. To her credit, Biles didn’t try to hide this, either. The same person who could torque her airborne body in ways that thrillingly defied gravity, also publicly acknowledged depression in which she slept all the time, because it was the “closest thing to death.”
“I didn’t want to leave my room, and I didn’t want to go anywhere,” Biles said in an episode of her recent docu-series, “Simone vs. Herself.” “I kind of just shut everybody out.”
U.S. gymnast Simone Biles is withdrawing from Thursday’s all-around final at the Tokyo Olympics, a day after she pulled out of the team competition citing the need to focus on her mental health. WSJ’s Andrew Beaton reports from Japan.
Biles told the Journal’s Louise Radnofsky that when the Tokyo Olympics were pushed from 2020 to 2021, she thought about quitting the sport altogether.
And yet she did not. Because she is Simone Biles, the GOAT—surrounded by all the societal and commercial pressures of that label—she decided to give it one more go, here, at these delayed and melancholy Games, with their empty stadia, masked medal ceremonies and tight rules against the sort of warm human interaction that make the Olympics great.
Biles came to Tokyo literally to do what her critics are currently pleading with her to do. She tried to rally, get her head straight, shut out the noise and perform like she’d done so many times before. This time, she couldn’t.
On Tuesday, after a wobbly attempt at the vault, Biles removed herself from the final of the team gymnastics competition, citing concerns about a state of mind she believed put her at risk for injury.
“I wasn’t in the right mental space,” she said after her teammates finished with silver.
Now Biles has withdrawn from Thursday’s individual all-around competition—her signature showcase, and an event she has not lost since 2013. Individual event competitions will follow, but it’s unclear if Biles will compete there, either.
It’s an extraordinary Olympic moment. The GOAT has hit the brakes.
Biles’s self-removal will also be an indelible moment for the widening conversation about mental health in sports. It’s already prompted a cascade of discussion—and, not surprisingly, a lot of agitation.
Why is she doing this? Isn’t she letting her team down? What if so-and-so cited mental health to depart a Game 7?
Etc. and so on. Much of the consternation boils down to change. Athletes see the world differently now. Sports, and the culture around it, is evolving from hard-headed stoicism and toward something more self-aware, and hopefully, humane.
If you were raised on athletes gritting through broken bones and concussions and quietly soldiering on amid personal traumas, I get it: This can be jarring.
But the world is changing beneath our feet.
Treating mental health as physical health is a transformation long overdue, and not just in sports.
If what Biles is saying by stepping aside doesn’t connect with you, that’s OK. I assure you it’s reaching someone else.
The isolation of the past year and a half has pushed a lot of uncomfortable conversations into the light. That this is blowing up in these stressful, sterilized, no-family Games is hardly a shock. It should be lost on no one this was the first time in Biles’s career that her parents weren’t watching from the stands.
Biles isn’t the first elite athlete to step aside citing mental health, and she won’t be the last. As in the case of Naomi Osaka’s departure from the French Open, it’s notable that it’s coming from a position of power. Biles, it’s no exaggeration, is gymnastics—a towering figure who transformed her sport with athletic excellence and by bravely speaking truth to power. Her platform is unrivaled. Her influence is vast.
This is part of what makes her decision to step away significant. It’s also the reason she can do it.
Biles may be the greatest gymnast ever, but they’ll remember her for this, too, and I suspect she’ll be proud
Jason Gay, WSJ 7.28.21
Simone Biles was trying to tell us for a long, long time.
In recent years, the transcendent gymnast regularly signaled her ambivalence about putting her body on the line for a sport that had ground her down both physically and mentally. She was candid about her aversion at representing organizations—USA Gymnastics and the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee—she believes failed to protect her and hundreds of others from sexual abuse by a team physician, Larry Nassar.
These are not old scandals; they’re open wounds. To Biles, gymnastics weren’t an easy escape —they were a reminder of trauma.
As a result, this remarkable talent, capable of producing earth’s most joyful athletic moments, could occasionally seem deprived of joy herself. To her credit, Biles didn’t try to hide this, either. The same person who could torque her airborne body in ways that thrillingly defied gravity, also publicly acknowledged depression in which she slept all the time, because it was the “closest thing to death.”
“I didn’t want to leave my room, and I didn’t want to go anywhere,” Biles said in an episode of her recent docu-series, “Simone vs. Herself.” “I kind of just shut everybody out.”
U.S. gymnast Simone Biles is withdrawing from Thursday’s all-around final at the Tokyo Olympics, a day after she pulled out of the team competition citing the need to focus on her mental health. WSJ’s Andrew Beaton reports from Japan.
Biles told the Journal’s Louise Radnofsky that when the Tokyo Olympics were pushed from 2020 to 2021, she thought about quitting the sport altogether.
And yet she did not. Because she is Simone Biles, the GOAT—surrounded by all the societal and commercial pressures of that label—she decided to give it one more go, here, at these delayed and melancholy Games, with their empty stadia, masked medal ceremonies and tight rules against the sort of warm human interaction that make the Olympics great.
Biles came to Tokyo literally to do what her critics are currently pleading with her to do. She tried to rally, get her head straight, shut out the noise and perform like she’d done so many times before. This time, she couldn’t.
On Tuesday, after a wobbly attempt at the vault, Biles removed herself from the final of the team gymnastics competition, citing concerns about a state of mind she believed put her at risk for injury.
“I wasn’t in the right mental space,” she said after her teammates finished with silver.
Now Biles has withdrawn from Thursday’s individual all-around competition—her signature showcase, and an event she has not lost since 2013. Individual event competitions will follow, but it’s unclear if Biles will compete there, either.
It’s an extraordinary Olympic moment. The GOAT has hit the brakes.
Biles’s self-removal will also be an indelible moment for the widening conversation about mental health in sports. It’s already prompted a cascade of discussion—and, not surprisingly, a lot of agitation.
Why is she doing this? Isn’t she letting her team down? What if so-and-so cited mental health to depart a Game 7?
Etc. and so on. Much of the consternation boils down to change. Athletes see the world differently now. Sports, and the culture around it, is evolving from hard-headed stoicism and toward something more self-aware, and hopefully, humane.
If you were raised on athletes gritting through broken bones and concussions and quietly soldiering on amid personal traumas, I get it: This can be jarring.
But the world is changing beneath our feet.
Treating mental health as physical health is a transformation long overdue, and not just in sports.
If what Biles is saying by stepping aside doesn’t connect with you, that’s OK. I assure you it’s reaching someone else.
The isolation of the past year and a half has pushed a lot of uncomfortable conversations into the light. That this is blowing up in these stressful, sterilized, no-family Games is hardly a shock. It should be lost on no one this was the first time in Biles’s career that her parents weren’t watching from the stands.
Biles isn’t the first elite athlete to step aside citing mental health, and she won’t be the last. As in the case of Naomi Osaka’s departure from the French Open, it’s notable that it’s coming from a position of power. Biles, it’s no exaggeration, is gymnastics—a towering figure who transformed her sport with athletic excellence and by bravely speaking truth to power. Her platform is unrivaled. Her influence is vast.
This is part of what makes her decision to step away significant. It’s also the reason she can do it.
Biles may be the greatest gymnast ever, but they’ll remember her for this, too, and I suspect she’ll be proud
Tuesday, August 3
The topic for Tuesday is understanding why people are vaccine hesitant and perhaps what the vaccinated can do to help (there is plenty we can do that won't help). We all know or are in contact with someone who has not yet received the vaccination. Jesus' command of loving our neighbor as ourselves most likely keeps us from shunning the unvaccinated by the vaccinated and vice-versa. God, however, has left it to us to figure out how to make it through this time. Let's talk about what we can do, or not do, to help.
America is Getting Unvaccinated People All Wrong
This week's discussion group will be led by Dr. Rick Machemer, who sends the following message and bonus reading:
The attached essay from Scientific American, July, 2021, is not a new concept. It is one with which we are familiar but that’s also sometimes lost in the “heat” of discussions. Science is one way – among many ways – of knowing about our world. But it is not a way to prove something…as often seems to be the tendency. We know that the constant in the natural and physical sciences is change. And with change, comes uncertainty. I have the sense that this change/uncertainty/lack of absolute proof may be a part of the many reasons for the controversy about SARS-CoV-2: e.g., vaccinations, viral variants, and the changing suggestions/recommendations/
mandates that fill our daily news. Oreskes describes this “being right or not” far better than I’ve done here.
Is Science Actually Right?
America is Getting Unvaccinated People All Wrong
This week's discussion group will be led by Dr. Rick Machemer, who sends the following message and bonus reading:
The attached essay from Scientific American, July, 2021, is not a new concept. It is one with which we are familiar but that’s also sometimes lost in the “heat” of discussions. Science is one way – among many ways – of knowing about our world. But it is not a way to prove something…as often seems to be the tendency. We know that the constant in the natural and physical sciences is change. And with change, comes uncertainty. I have the sense that this change/uncertainty/lack of absolute proof may be a part of the many reasons for the controversy about SARS-CoV-2: e.g., vaccinations, viral variants, and the changing suggestions/recommendations/
mandates that fill our daily news. Oreskes describes this “being right or not” far better than I’ve done here.
Is Science Actually Right?
Tuesday, July 27
The Presiding Bishop called on all Episcopalians to pray for peace, truth and freedom for the people of Cuba. Is there something more we should do?
There are two WSJ articles for this week. The first one, What is Happening in Cuba, is a good reference article. The second one, An Uprising of Despair, is an opinion piece of what the U.S. should do. I'm interested to hear what you think and what our role as Christians should be in this.
-Fr. Dave
What is Happening in Cuba
Anthony Harrup and Santiago Perez, WSJ 7.19.21
Cuban citizens took to the streets across the country for the first time in more than six decades to protest against deteriorating living conditions and the lack of basic goods and services, including medical attention amid increasing numbers of coronavirus infections.
The protests, with thousands of people calling for an end to the 62-year-old communist regime, began July 11 in the western city of San Antonio de los Baños, later spreading to more than 40 cities and towns including the capital Havana. President Miguel Díaz-Canel quickly deployed security forces across the country. His government disrupted communications, with the state-run phone and network monopoly, Etecsa, halting internet service.
In Havana, state forces were sent out July 11, including so-called rapid-reaction brigades and Communist Party militants armed with heavy sticks. Some protesters were attacked, and more than 100 were arrested, according to activists. In subsequent days, hundreds of Cubans lined up outside police stations to look for missing relatives whose whereabouts were unknown. Cuba’s Interior Ministry said one person had died when a group of protesters attacked a police station in a town near Havana. It said a number of people had been injured in the incident, including police officials.
In an effort to quell tensions, and lessen the acute shortages of food, medicine and other essential products that have angered Cubans, Prime Minister Manuel Marrero announced last week that such goods brought to the island by visitors would no longer be subject to customs duties.
What triggered the wave of protests?
The Cuban economy contracted more than 11% last year amid the pandemic, which led tourism to dry up and brought about a drop in remittances from Cubans living abroad—both vital sources of income for families.
Cubans stand for hours in line to buy basic goods such as chicken or bread, or even to take a bus.
The island has been increasingly hit by hours-long electricity outages, and, in recent weeks, coronavirus infections have surged, according to authorities, putting a strain on the country’s health system.
After suffering relatively few Covid-19 cases in 2020, and only 146 deaths, the island saw a pickup this year, with the curve steepening in April and more so in June. The government has reported close to 2,000 deaths so far.
What has been the communist government’s response?
President Díaz-Canel said the protests were being led by a minority of “counter-revolutionaries, sold out to the U.S. government,” taking advantage of the difficult situation in Cuba and the pandemic.
He urged supporters of the regime to take back the streets from the demonstrators, which led to attacks on protesters. Soon after the unrest began, authorities cut off most communications with the outside world and deployed security forces across the country.
Among those arrested were visual artist Luis Manuel Otero, a highly visible figure among Cuban dissidents, poet Amaury Pacheco and José Daniel Ferrer, the leader of Cuba’s most important opposition group.
On Saturday, the government bused in thousands of people to Havana’s seaside promenade for a mass rally in support of the regime. Similar demonstrations—in which people waved tiny Cuban flags—were held at a dozen cities around the island. Communist Party members, state workers and students are required to attend government mass events.
What are the implications for the Cuban regime?
Since taking power in a 1959 revolution, Cuba’s communist regime has weathered a number of economic and political crises, while remaining defiant against calls for change in the face of the U.S. economic embargo. The unraveling of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought about a so-called special period, one of the worst economic contractions in Cuba’s history. The loss of Soviet economic backing led to severe food and fuel shortages that crippled economic activity.
In more recent times, the island has seen diminished support from once oil-rich Venezuela, which provides cheap oil to the island in exchange for doctors, teachers and other advisers. Venezuela faces its own economic crisis under socialist leader Nicolás Maduro and is also subject to U.S. sanctions.
An easing of U.S. sanctions against Cuba under the Obama administration, which had promised to bring more tourists and dollars to the island, was reversed by the Trump administration, leading in turn to a hardening of the communist government’s position.
How is this different from previous protests?
The demonstrations are unprecedented in Cuba. For the past six decades, Cuba has been a country where protests have been virtually nonexistent. All protests were quickly suffocated.
Protesters this time appear willing to stand up against the government.
A longtime Communist Party apparatchik, Mr. Díaz-Canel is seen by many Cubans as lacking the charisma and revolutionary legitimacy of his predecessors— Fidel Castro, the emblematic leader of the 1959 revolution who died in 2016, and his brother Raúl Castro, who succeeded
Fidel as president but retired in 2018. Earlier this year, Mr. Díaz-Canel also assumed the top job in Cuba’s ruling Communist Party.
Social media has been an essential factor in organizing the wave of protests. Relatively new to the island, it has empowered a young generation of Cuban activists who use it to spread their ideas and organize protests. As demonstrators sought to broadcast the current protests live with their cellphones, authorities cut internet service on several occasions. Kentik, a U.S.-based network monitoring company, reported countrywide internet outages July 11. Mobile and fixed-line phone service were also selectively cut off, crippling communications and blocking the internet signal from activists’ cellphones, they said.
What has been the U.S. response?
President Biden is voicing support for the protesters, calling it a “clarion call for freedom and relief.” The Cuban government has responded to past crises by allowing mass emigration to the U.S., but U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said Cubans attempting to
reach the U.S. by boat won’t be allowed in.
Mr. Díaz-Canel blames electricity outages, as well as shortages of food and medicines, on the U.S. embargo and the restrictions re-imposed by the Trump administration that cut off Cuban access to hard currency. He is calling on the Biden administration to remove the sanctions.
In Florida, home to many Cuban-Americans, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis urged Mr. Biden to help provide internet to Cubans on the island. But such effort would require equipment on the ground to get the signal. The government strictly controls imports of such equipment.
“We’re considering whether we have the technological ability to reinstate that access,” Mr. Biden said. He said his administration is considering allowing for more remittances to Cuba and sending Covid-19 vaccines, but needs assurances that the Cuban government wouldn’t take
advantage of the assistance.
An Uprising of Despair in Cuba
The Editorial Board, WSJ 7.12.21
The remarkable protests in Cuba this weekend show that the Cuban people still yearn for a life free of tyranny despite decades of repression. President Biden hit the right note on Monday by expressing American support for the protesters, and let’s hope he follows through by increasing pressure on the regime.
The protests weren’t planned or organized. Cubans massed in the streets to register their opposition to the economic fallout from Covid-19, which has been mismanaged on the island; widespread shortages of food and medicine; and the numerous daily blackouts from failing
electric power. Protesters picked up the cry of freedom and sang the popular “Patria y Vida” (Homeland and Life) as a way of repudiating Che Guevara’s revolutionary slogan “Homeland or Death.” Social media is dangerous to the dictatorship because it allows people to share their
dissatisfaction and feel they aren’t alone.
This time is also different because Fidel Castro is dead, his brother Raúl no longer holds an official position, and successor Miguel Díaz-Canel has no claim to legitimacy beyond the military and intelligence services that back him. The public’s willingness to risk arrest by heading into the streets is a signal that their suffering is so great that most Cubans have nothing left to lose. The regime is taking no chances. Mr. Díaz-Canel has unleashed his military and Ministry of Interior agents to stop the protests with arrests and beatings. On Sunday he called for “revolutionaries”—plain-clothes thugs—to take to the streets to attack protesters and warned that his opponents “will have to go over our dead body if they want to overturn the revolution.” This state use of violence is standard operating procedure in Cuba, and there are reports that Mr. Díaz-Canel has cut off all internet service that the regime controls. He won’t give up easily because he has much to lose.
The U.S. can’t dictate events in Cuba, but we were heartened to hear President Biden issue a statement on Monday that Sunday’s protests are a “clarion call for freedom and relief from the tragic grip of the pandemic and from the decades of repression and economic suffering” dished
out by Havana. He also called on “the Cuban regime to hear their people and serve their needs at this vital moment rather than enriching themselves.”
The Administration's challenge is to back up those words with real support for the liberation of this long-suffering nation. Step one is not to return to the failed appeasement of Barack Obama that expanded U.S. travel and commerce with the island but achieved nothing in political or economic reform. The regime is more vulnerable since Donald Trump restored some U.S. sanctions, and its allies in Venezuela can no longer provide much oil to keep the lights on and the military well-fed.
The U.S. can tighten the financial squeeze and impose Magnitsky sanctions on Cuba’s human-rights violators. Helping protesters foil Cuba’s internet shutdown would be invaluable, and a warning to Russia and China not to meddle by propping up the regime is warranted. The odds on a freedom revolution may be long, but the Cuban people need to hear loud and clear that America is on their side, and not on the Communist regime’s.
There are two WSJ articles for this week. The first one, What is Happening in Cuba, is a good reference article. The second one, An Uprising of Despair, is an opinion piece of what the U.S. should do. I'm interested to hear what you think and what our role as Christians should be in this.
-Fr. Dave
What is Happening in Cuba
Anthony Harrup and Santiago Perez, WSJ 7.19.21
Cuban citizens took to the streets across the country for the first time in more than six decades to protest against deteriorating living conditions and the lack of basic goods and services, including medical attention amid increasing numbers of coronavirus infections.
The protests, with thousands of people calling for an end to the 62-year-old communist regime, began July 11 in the western city of San Antonio de los Baños, later spreading to more than 40 cities and towns including the capital Havana. President Miguel Díaz-Canel quickly deployed security forces across the country. His government disrupted communications, with the state-run phone and network monopoly, Etecsa, halting internet service.
In Havana, state forces were sent out July 11, including so-called rapid-reaction brigades and Communist Party militants armed with heavy sticks. Some protesters were attacked, and more than 100 were arrested, according to activists. In subsequent days, hundreds of Cubans lined up outside police stations to look for missing relatives whose whereabouts were unknown. Cuba’s Interior Ministry said one person had died when a group of protesters attacked a police station in a town near Havana. It said a number of people had been injured in the incident, including police officials.
In an effort to quell tensions, and lessen the acute shortages of food, medicine and other essential products that have angered Cubans, Prime Minister Manuel Marrero announced last week that such goods brought to the island by visitors would no longer be subject to customs duties.
What triggered the wave of protests?
The Cuban economy contracted more than 11% last year amid the pandemic, which led tourism to dry up and brought about a drop in remittances from Cubans living abroad—both vital sources of income for families.
Cubans stand for hours in line to buy basic goods such as chicken or bread, or even to take a bus.
The island has been increasingly hit by hours-long electricity outages, and, in recent weeks, coronavirus infections have surged, according to authorities, putting a strain on the country’s health system.
After suffering relatively few Covid-19 cases in 2020, and only 146 deaths, the island saw a pickup this year, with the curve steepening in April and more so in June. The government has reported close to 2,000 deaths so far.
What has been the communist government’s response?
President Díaz-Canel said the protests were being led by a minority of “counter-revolutionaries, sold out to the U.S. government,” taking advantage of the difficult situation in Cuba and the pandemic.
He urged supporters of the regime to take back the streets from the demonstrators, which led to attacks on protesters. Soon after the unrest began, authorities cut off most communications with the outside world and deployed security forces across the country.
Among those arrested were visual artist Luis Manuel Otero, a highly visible figure among Cuban dissidents, poet Amaury Pacheco and José Daniel Ferrer, the leader of Cuba’s most important opposition group.
On Saturday, the government bused in thousands of people to Havana’s seaside promenade for a mass rally in support of the regime. Similar demonstrations—in which people waved tiny Cuban flags—were held at a dozen cities around the island. Communist Party members, state workers and students are required to attend government mass events.
What are the implications for the Cuban regime?
Since taking power in a 1959 revolution, Cuba’s communist regime has weathered a number of economic and political crises, while remaining defiant against calls for change in the face of the U.S. economic embargo. The unraveling of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought about a so-called special period, one of the worst economic contractions in Cuba’s history. The loss of Soviet economic backing led to severe food and fuel shortages that crippled economic activity.
In more recent times, the island has seen diminished support from once oil-rich Venezuela, which provides cheap oil to the island in exchange for doctors, teachers and other advisers. Venezuela faces its own economic crisis under socialist leader Nicolás Maduro and is also subject to U.S. sanctions.
An easing of U.S. sanctions against Cuba under the Obama administration, which had promised to bring more tourists and dollars to the island, was reversed by the Trump administration, leading in turn to a hardening of the communist government’s position.
How is this different from previous protests?
The demonstrations are unprecedented in Cuba. For the past six decades, Cuba has been a country where protests have been virtually nonexistent. All protests were quickly suffocated.
Protesters this time appear willing to stand up against the government.
A longtime Communist Party apparatchik, Mr. Díaz-Canel is seen by many Cubans as lacking the charisma and revolutionary legitimacy of his predecessors— Fidel Castro, the emblematic leader of the 1959 revolution who died in 2016, and his brother Raúl Castro, who succeeded
Fidel as president but retired in 2018. Earlier this year, Mr. Díaz-Canel also assumed the top job in Cuba’s ruling Communist Party.
Social media has been an essential factor in organizing the wave of protests. Relatively new to the island, it has empowered a young generation of Cuban activists who use it to spread their ideas and organize protests. As demonstrators sought to broadcast the current protests live with their cellphones, authorities cut internet service on several occasions. Kentik, a U.S.-based network monitoring company, reported countrywide internet outages July 11. Mobile and fixed-line phone service were also selectively cut off, crippling communications and blocking the internet signal from activists’ cellphones, they said.
What has been the U.S. response?
President Biden is voicing support for the protesters, calling it a “clarion call for freedom and relief.” The Cuban government has responded to past crises by allowing mass emigration to the U.S., but U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said Cubans attempting to
reach the U.S. by boat won’t be allowed in.
Mr. Díaz-Canel blames electricity outages, as well as shortages of food and medicines, on the U.S. embargo and the restrictions re-imposed by the Trump administration that cut off Cuban access to hard currency. He is calling on the Biden administration to remove the sanctions.
In Florida, home to many Cuban-Americans, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis urged Mr. Biden to help provide internet to Cubans on the island. But such effort would require equipment on the ground to get the signal. The government strictly controls imports of such equipment.
“We’re considering whether we have the technological ability to reinstate that access,” Mr. Biden said. He said his administration is considering allowing for more remittances to Cuba and sending Covid-19 vaccines, but needs assurances that the Cuban government wouldn’t take
advantage of the assistance.
An Uprising of Despair in Cuba
The Editorial Board, WSJ 7.12.21
The remarkable protests in Cuba this weekend show that the Cuban people still yearn for a life free of tyranny despite decades of repression. President Biden hit the right note on Monday by expressing American support for the protesters, and let’s hope he follows through by increasing pressure on the regime.
The protests weren’t planned or organized. Cubans massed in the streets to register their opposition to the economic fallout from Covid-19, which has been mismanaged on the island; widespread shortages of food and medicine; and the numerous daily blackouts from failing
electric power. Protesters picked up the cry of freedom and sang the popular “Patria y Vida” (Homeland and Life) as a way of repudiating Che Guevara’s revolutionary slogan “Homeland or Death.” Social media is dangerous to the dictatorship because it allows people to share their
dissatisfaction and feel they aren’t alone.
This time is also different because Fidel Castro is dead, his brother Raúl no longer holds an official position, and successor Miguel Díaz-Canel has no claim to legitimacy beyond the military and intelligence services that back him. The public’s willingness to risk arrest by heading into the streets is a signal that their suffering is so great that most Cubans have nothing left to lose. The regime is taking no chances. Mr. Díaz-Canel has unleashed his military and Ministry of Interior agents to stop the protests with arrests and beatings. On Sunday he called for “revolutionaries”—plain-clothes thugs—to take to the streets to attack protesters and warned that his opponents “will have to go over our dead body if they want to overturn the revolution.” This state use of violence is standard operating procedure in Cuba, and there are reports that Mr. Díaz-Canel has cut off all internet service that the regime controls. He won’t give up easily because he has much to lose.
The U.S. can’t dictate events in Cuba, but we were heartened to hear President Biden issue a statement on Monday that Sunday’s protests are a “clarion call for freedom and relief from the tragic grip of the pandemic and from the decades of repression and economic suffering” dished
out by Havana. He also called on “the Cuban regime to hear their people and serve their needs at this vital moment rather than enriching themselves.”
The Administration's challenge is to back up those words with real support for the liberation of this long-suffering nation. Step one is not to return to the failed appeasement of Barack Obama that expanded U.S. travel and commerce with the island but achieved nothing in political or economic reform. The regime is more vulnerable since Donald Trump restored some U.S. sanctions, and its allies in Venezuela can no longer provide much oil to keep the lights on and the military well-fed.
The U.S. can tighten the financial squeeze and impose Magnitsky sanctions on Cuba’s human-rights violators. Helping protesters foil Cuba’s internet shutdown would be invaluable, and a warning to Russia and China not to meddle by propping up the regime is warranted. The odds on a freedom revolution may be long, but the Cuban people need to hear loud and clear that America is on their side, and not on the Communist regime’s.
Tuesday, July 20
What Should Doctors Do When We Experience a Miracle
Daniela J. Lamas, MD, The New York Times 7.2.21
It was just before dawn in the intensive care unit when something unexpected happened. My Covid-19 patient’s condition had been worsening for weeks, and we had finally recommended to his family that we stop all aggressive interventions. It was clear he was dying. But that night, my team watched in amazement as his oxygen levels started to rise, slowly at first and then steadily. Standing outside his room, I found myself, somewhat uncomfortably, thinking of miracles.
As a critical-care doctor, I become nervous at the very idea of miracles. I hear the word and think of tense family meetings and impossible hopes. I imagine loved ones at the bedside waiting for improvement that will never come. Miracles are often what patients’ families beg for, and they’re not something that I can provide. But then there are patients like this one.
Doctors all have cases that shake us and that we find ourselves revisiting, particularly amid this pandemic. Often these are cases of the patients that we were unable to save, but there are also patients whose very survival proves us wrong. I struggle with what to make of these outcomes
and how to navigate the questions that they raise. The longer I practice critical care, the more I wonder: What does it mean for a miracle to happen in the intensive care unit?
Though the word “miracle” has a religious overtone, I am not invoking the spiritual or the supernatural. As doctors in training, we attend entire lectures to help us navigate conversations with families who are waiting for divine intervention to bring their loved one back from the brink. What I am interested in is how we deal with the one-in-a-million outcomes, the patients who surprise and humble us.
Consider the patient from that overnight shift. He was a young father with Covid-19 and a cascade of complications, including pneumonia, sepsis and devastating bleeding. By the time I met him, he had been deeply sedated for more than a month and was attached to a ventilator and a lung bypass machine to keep him alive.
As the days and then weeks passed, punctuated by one medical catastrophe after another, it became clear to all of us in the I.C.U. that the damage to his lungs was not survivable. He was dying. His family started to prepare themselves to say goodbye, but they asked us to wait a few more days before we took him off the machines. Now, a year later, he is still recovering but is at home and with his family, and I marvel over the photographs they send me.
Though his story is remarkable, there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to share it. Not because our predictions as his medical providers were wrong — I am comfortable with admitting to prognostic error — but because most people, when faced with illness, secretly believe that they
may be the outlier, that improvement is possible even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Doctors want that for our patients as well. That is what leads oncologists to offer terminally ill patients fifth lines of chemotherapy and last-hope clinical trials, and it is what
brings surgeons back to the operating room one last time.
Sometimes that drive to beat the odds is what pushes doctors to be great. But if taken too far, these instincts lead to false hope and suffering for our patients and their families, protracted critical-care admissions and futile procedures. After all, in most cases in the I.C.U., our initial
prognoses are correct. So there’s a risk to standing at the bedside, thinking about that one patient who made it home despite our predictions. We can give that experience too much weight in influencing our decisions and recommendations. Doctors do not want to deprive our patients of the chance to surprise us. But we must also ask ourselves how many deaths we are willing to prolong for the possibility of one great save.
A great save can be complicated. As tempting as it is to focus only on life or death in the I.C.U., there is a vast world between survival and true recovery. Even patients who do surprise us by making it out of intensive care might never improve enough to return to the activities they love.
If a life is remarkably “saved,” only for the person to suffer for months in long-term care hospitals, delirious and dependent on a ventilator, that’s not a total success.
Of course, there are cases in which improvement is truly impossible — a person’s cancer is too far gone, the sepsis too advanced. But in other cases, for better or worse, I find that I am now more willing to push forward than I once was. This might mean I give that extra round of
antibiotics or that one last trial of high-dose steroids.
I try not to push for too long and risk causing pain because I am unwilling to acknowledge the realities in front of me. But I might let myself hope for a few more hours or a few more days while working to prepare my patient’s family, and myself, for the likelihood that the person they
love will not be OK.
On a recent weekend in the I.C.U., one of my patients was a woman in her 60s with cancer that had caused her lungs and liver to fail. The doctor who had been taking care of her for the week told me the plan: If she was no better on Monday, the family would take her off the ventilator, but they wanted to wait through the weekend. Why? I asked. Well, my colleague explained, they wanted to give her time for a miracle.
When I visited my patient early Saturday morning, she was still intermittently awake, fluttering her eyelids, and I hoped she was not in pain. As day turned to night, her blood pressure teetered. And before my shift ended, I entered the room again to find her adult children gathered at the bedside. “She’s not getting better, is she?” her daughter asked. As gently as I could, I explained that despite our best efforts, she was not.
Her daughter started to cry as she realized that there would be no Hail Mary save, no reason to wait until Monday. There would be no miracle, but perhaps there would be peace. It was time to say goodbye.
To the Editor:
Re “When Doctors Experience a Miracle,” by Daniela J. Lamas (Sunday Review, July 4):
For those of us who perhaps didn’t wait long enough for that so desired miracle to occur, reading Dr. Lamas’s piece reaffirmed what we always feared or wondered about. What if we had waited one more day, or one more hour or one more iota of a second? Would that miracle have
happened?
Ultimately those left behind are often filled with the guilt and grief of always wondering: What if? And yet, for years I have had a life-affirming sticker on my desk that reads “Expect a Miracle.” And that’s not a bad idea.
Carrie Klein, Chapel Hill, N.C.
To the Editor:
While it is difficult to argue with Dr. Daniela Lamas being “more willing to push forward” in pursuit of the “one in a million” cure after the recovery of a catastrophically ill Covid patient, we cannot ignore the critical role of patient choice in medical practice.
As a hospice physician, I care for the other 999,999 patients — those devastated by non-beneficial I.C.U. care, and families horrified by the suffering of their loved ones. The right of patients and families to decide what their doctors should do based on facts delivered clearly and
with compassion rightly drives the decision to “push forward” — or to end suffering despite a minuscule chance of survival — not doctors hoping for miracles.
Joseph Sacco, Branford, Conn.
The writer is chief medical officer at The Connecticut Hospice.
To the Editor:
Dr. Daniela Lamas discusses the unfortunately too rare occurrence when patients overcome the long odds of a deadly disease and find that their own health improves beyond a physician’s expectation. She calls this a miracle, although she insists that she is “not invoking the spiritual or supernatural.” Then why use the term miracle at all and not something more appropriate like an unexpected outcome?
I am not playing a game of semantics. Rather, I think that employing fantastical language illustrates the fact that many doctors forget that they are practitioners of incomplete knowledge that is given to them. Science has provided physicians many insights into the amazing complexity of the human body, but like any science, it is incomplete and always evolving. When things happen outside their level of understanding, physicians only mislead patients by invoking magical language to cover for these gaps in their knowledge.
David J. Mogul, Chicago
The writer is a professor of biomedical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
To the Editor:
Dr. Daniela Lamas is quick to discount metaphysical intervention in a seemingly miraculous cure. Yet faith does play a role for the patient, family members and the medical profession. Over these Covid months I have visited I.C.U.s numerous times. My collaboration with staff in dealing with the critically ill has brought comfort and peace to many. Yes, we prayed for miracles, and there were a few medically unexplainable cures. God? I’d like to think so!
The aid of religion in guiding correct ethical choices for the sick person is invaluable. When a decision is made to end futile care, there is a moment when trust unites all involved, recognizing that the outcome is out of our hands.
(Rev.) Michael P. Orsi
Naples, Fla
Daniela J. Lamas, MD, The New York Times 7.2.21
It was just before dawn in the intensive care unit when something unexpected happened. My Covid-19 patient’s condition had been worsening for weeks, and we had finally recommended to his family that we stop all aggressive interventions. It was clear he was dying. But that night, my team watched in amazement as his oxygen levels started to rise, slowly at first and then steadily. Standing outside his room, I found myself, somewhat uncomfortably, thinking of miracles.
As a critical-care doctor, I become nervous at the very idea of miracles. I hear the word and think of tense family meetings and impossible hopes. I imagine loved ones at the bedside waiting for improvement that will never come. Miracles are often what patients’ families beg for, and they’re not something that I can provide. But then there are patients like this one.
Doctors all have cases that shake us and that we find ourselves revisiting, particularly amid this pandemic. Often these are cases of the patients that we were unable to save, but there are also patients whose very survival proves us wrong. I struggle with what to make of these outcomes
and how to navigate the questions that they raise. The longer I practice critical care, the more I wonder: What does it mean for a miracle to happen in the intensive care unit?
Though the word “miracle” has a religious overtone, I am not invoking the spiritual or the supernatural. As doctors in training, we attend entire lectures to help us navigate conversations with families who are waiting for divine intervention to bring their loved one back from the brink. What I am interested in is how we deal with the one-in-a-million outcomes, the patients who surprise and humble us.
Consider the patient from that overnight shift. He was a young father with Covid-19 and a cascade of complications, including pneumonia, sepsis and devastating bleeding. By the time I met him, he had been deeply sedated for more than a month and was attached to a ventilator and a lung bypass machine to keep him alive.
As the days and then weeks passed, punctuated by one medical catastrophe after another, it became clear to all of us in the I.C.U. that the damage to his lungs was not survivable. He was dying. His family started to prepare themselves to say goodbye, but they asked us to wait a few more days before we took him off the machines. Now, a year later, he is still recovering but is at home and with his family, and I marvel over the photographs they send me.
Though his story is remarkable, there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to share it. Not because our predictions as his medical providers were wrong — I am comfortable with admitting to prognostic error — but because most people, when faced with illness, secretly believe that they
may be the outlier, that improvement is possible even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Doctors want that for our patients as well. That is what leads oncologists to offer terminally ill patients fifth lines of chemotherapy and last-hope clinical trials, and it is what
brings surgeons back to the operating room one last time.
Sometimes that drive to beat the odds is what pushes doctors to be great. But if taken too far, these instincts lead to false hope and suffering for our patients and their families, protracted critical-care admissions and futile procedures. After all, in most cases in the I.C.U., our initial
prognoses are correct. So there’s a risk to standing at the bedside, thinking about that one patient who made it home despite our predictions. We can give that experience too much weight in influencing our decisions and recommendations. Doctors do not want to deprive our patients of the chance to surprise us. But we must also ask ourselves how many deaths we are willing to prolong for the possibility of one great save.
A great save can be complicated. As tempting as it is to focus only on life or death in the I.C.U., there is a vast world between survival and true recovery. Even patients who do surprise us by making it out of intensive care might never improve enough to return to the activities they love.
If a life is remarkably “saved,” only for the person to suffer for months in long-term care hospitals, delirious and dependent on a ventilator, that’s not a total success.
Of course, there are cases in which improvement is truly impossible — a person’s cancer is too far gone, the sepsis too advanced. But in other cases, for better or worse, I find that I am now more willing to push forward than I once was. This might mean I give that extra round of
antibiotics or that one last trial of high-dose steroids.
I try not to push for too long and risk causing pain because I am unwilling to acknowledge the realities in front of me. But I might let myself hope for a few more hours or a few more days while working to prepare my patient’s family, and myself, for the likelihood that the person they
love will not be OK.
On a recent weekend in the I.C.U., one of my patients was a woman in her 60s with cancer that had caused her lungs and liver to fail. The doctor who had been taking care of her for the week told me the plan: If she was no better on Monday, the family would take her off the ventilator, but they wanted to wait through the weekend. Why? I asked. Well, my colleague explained, they wanted to give her time for a miracle.
When I visited my patient early Saturday morning, she was still intermittently awake, fluttering her eyelids, and I hoped she was not in pain. As day turned to night, her blood pressure teetered. And before my shift ended, I entered the room again to find her adult children gathered at the bedside. “She’s not getting better, is she?” her daughter asked. As gently as I could, I explained that despite our best efforts, she was not.
Her daughter started to cry as she realized that there would be no Hail Mary save, no reason to wait until Monday. There would be no miracle, but perhaps there would be peace. It was time to say goodbye.
To the Editor:
Re “When Doctors Experience a Miracle,” by Daniela J. Lamas (Sunday Review, July 4):
For those of us who perhaps didn’t wait long enough for that so desired miracle to occur, reading Dr. Lamas’s piece reaffirmed what we always feared or wondered about. What if we had waited one more day, or one more hour or one more iota of a second? Would that miracle have
happened?
Ultimately those left behind are often filled with the guilt and grief of always wondering: What if? And yet, for years I have had a life-affirming sticker on my desk that reads “Expect a Miracle.” And that’s not a bad idea.
Carrie Klein, Chapel Hill, N.C.
To the Editor:
While it is difficult to argue with Dr. Daniela Lamas being “more willing to push forward” in pursuit of the “one in a million” cure after the recovery of a catastrophically ill Covid patient, we cannot ignore the critical role of patient choice in medical practice.
As a hospice physician, I care for the other 999,999 patients — those devastated by non-beneficial I.C.U. care, and families horrified by the suffering of their loved ones. The right of patients and families to decide what their doctors should do based on facts delivered clearly and
with compassion rightly drives the decision to “push forward” — or to end suffering despite a minuscule chance of survival — not doctors hoping for miracles.
Joseph Sacco, Branford, Conn.
The writer is chief medical officer at The Connecticut Hospice.
To the Editor:
Dr. Daniela Lamas discusses the unfortunately too rare occurrence when patients overcome the long odds of a deadly disease and find that their own health improves beyond a physician’s expectation. She calls this a miracle, although she insists that she is “not invoking the spiritual or supernatural.” Then why use the term miracle at all and not something more appropriate like an unexpected outcome?
I am not playing a game of semantics. Rather, I think that employing fantastical language illustrates the fact that many doctors forget that they are practitioners of incomplete knowledge that is given to them. Science has provided physicians many insights into the amazing complexity of the human body, but like any science, it is incomplete and always evolving. When things happen outside their level of understanding, physicians only mislead patients by invoking magical language to cover for these gaps in their knowledge.
David J. Mogul, Chicago
The writer is a professor of biomedical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
To the Editor:
Dr. Daniela Lamas is quick to discount metaphysical intervention in a seemingly miraculous cure. Yet faith does play a role for the patient, family members and the medical profession. Over these Covid months I have visited I.C.U.s numerous times. My collaboration with staff in dealing with the critically ill has brought comfort and peace to many. Yes, we prayed for miracles, and there were a few medically unexplainable cures. God? I’d like to think so!
The aid of religion in guiding correct ethical choices for the sick person is invaluable. When a decision is made to end futile care, there is a moment when trust unites all involved, recognizing that the outcome is out of our hands.
(Rev.) Michael P. Orsi
Naples, Fla
Tuesday, July 13
The Men's Discussion Group on Tuesday, July 13, will be facilitated by Rick Machemer.
Brain health. Simple words – complicated phenomenon. We know it when we see it. We know it when we have it. But what promotes brain health? What allows us to experience it far into the later stages of our life? Is it a matter of “luck?” Or maybe it’s “right living?” Or perhaps it has something to do with the bacteria that live in our gut? We’ll begin this exploration with an article about exercise and how exercise changes brain structure and function: Exercise and the Brain – The Conversation. We’ll expand to life style factors beyond exercise, look briefly at the microbiome-brain relationship in several disease states, and end with a few of the latest looks at what may be behind the rapid rise in neurological diseases of multiple kinds.
Exercise and the Brain: Three Ways Physical Activity Changes Its Very Structure
November 17, 2020 8.55am EST
Áine Kelly, Professor in Physiology, Trinity College Dublin
Memory
Many studies suggest that exercise can help protect our memory as we age. This is because exercise has been shown to prevent the loss of total brain volume (which can lead to lower cognitive function), as well as preventing shrinkage in specific brain regions associated with memory. For example, one magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan study revealed that in older adults, six months of exercise training increases brain volume.
Another study showed that shrinkage of the hippocampus (a brain region essential for learning and memory) in older people can be reversed by regular walking. This change was accompanied by improved memory function and an increase of the protein brain-derived neutropic factor (BDNF) in the bloodstream.
BDNF is essential for healthy cognitive function due to its roles in cell survival, plasticity (the brain’s ability to change and adapt from experience) and function. Positive links between exercise, BDNF and memory have been widely investigated and have been demonstrated in young adults and older people.
BDNF is also one of several proteins linked with adult neurogenesis, the brain’s ability to modify its structure by developing new neurons throughout adulthood. Neurogenesis occurs only in very few brain regions – one of which is the hippocampus – and thus may be a central mechanism involved in learning and memory. Regular physical activity may protect memory in the long term by inducing neurogenesis via BDNF.
While this link between exercise, BDNF, neurogenesis, and memory is very well described in animal models, experimental and ethical constraints mean that its importance to human brain function is not quite so clear. Nevertheless exercise-induced neurogenesis is being actively researched as a potential therapy for neurological and psychiatric disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and depression.
Blood vessels
The brain is highly dependent on blood flow, receiving approximately 15% of the body’s entire supply – despite being only 2-3% of our body’s total mass. This is because our nervous tissues need a constant supply of oxygen to function and survive. When neurons become more active, blood flow in the region where these neurons are located increases to meet demand. As such, maintaining a healthy brain depends on maintaining a healthy network of blood vessels.
Regular exercise increases the growth of new blood vessels in the brain regions where neurogenesis occurs, providing the increased blood supply that supports the development of these new neurons. Exercise also improves the health and function of existing blood vessels, ensuring that brain tissue consistently receives adequate blood supply to meet its needs and preserve its function.
Finally, regular exercise can prevent, and even treat, hypertension (high blood pressure), which is a risk factor for development of dementia. Exercise works in multiple ways to enhance the health and function of blood vessels in the brain.
Inflammation
Recently, a growing body of research has centred on microglia, which are the resident immune cells of the brain. Their main function is to constantly check the brain for potential threats from microbes or dying or damaged cells, and to clear any damage they find.
With age, normal immune function declines and chronic, low-level inflammation occurs in body organs, including the brain, where it increases risk of neurodegenerative disease, such as Alzheimer’s disease. As we age, microglia become less efficient at clearing damage, and less able to prevent disease and inflammation. This means neuroinflammation can progress, impairing brain functions – including memory.
But recently, we’ve shown that exercise can reprogramme these microglia in the aged brain. Exercise was shown to make the microglia more energy efficient and capable of counteracting neuroinflammatory changes that impair brain function. Exercise can also modulate neuroinflammation in degenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s disease and multiple sclerosis. This shows us the effects of physical activity on immune function may be an important target for therapy and disease prevention.
So how can we ensure that we’re doing the right kind of exercise – or getting enough of it – to protect the brain? As yet, we don’t have robust enough evidence to develop specific guidelines for brain health though findings to date suggest that the greatest benefits are to be gained by aerobic exercise – such as walking, running, or cycling. It’s recommended adults get a minimum of 150 minutes per week of moderate intensity aerobic exercise, combined with activities that maintain strength and flexibility, to maintain good general health.
It must also be noted that researchers don’t always find exercise has beneficial effect on the brain in their studies – likely because different studies use different exercise training programmes and measures of cognitive function, making it difficult to directly compare studies and results. But regardless, plenty of research shows us that exercise is beneficial for many aspects of our health, so it’s important to make sure you’re getting enough. We need to be conscious of making time in our day to be active – our brains will thank us for it in years to come.
Brain health. Simple words – complicated phenomenon. We know it when we see it. We know it when we have it. But what promotes brain health? What allows us to experience it far into the later stages of our life? Is it a matter of “luck?” Or maybe it’s “right living?” Or perhaps it has something to do with the bacteria that live in our gut? We’ll begin this exploration with an article about exercise and how exercise changes brain structure and function: Exercise and the Brain – The Conversation. We’ll expand to life style factors beyond exercise, look briefly at the microbiome-brain relationship in several disease states, and end with a few of the latest looks at what may be behind the rapid rise in neurological diseases of multiple kinds.
Exercise and the Brain: Three Ways Physical Activity Changes Its Very Structure
November 17, 2020 8.55am EST
Áine Kelly, Professor in Physiology, Trinity College Dublin
Memory
Many studies suggest that exercise can help protect our memory as we age. This is because exercise has been shown to prevent the loss of total brain volume (which can lead to lower cognitive function), as well as preventing shrinkage in specific brain regions associated with memory. For example, one magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan study revealed that in older adults, six months of exercise training increases brain volume.
Another study showed that shrinkage of the hippocampus (a brain region essential for learning and memory) in older people can be reversed by regular walking. This change was accompanied by improved memory function and an increase of the protein brain-derived neutropic factor (BDNF) in the bloodstream.
BDNF is essential for healthy cognitive function due to its roles in cell survival, plasticity (the brain’s ability to change and adapt from experience) and function. Positive links between exercise, BDNF and memory have been widely investigated and have been demonstrated in young adults and older people.
BDNF is also one of several proteins linked with adult neurogenesis, the brain’s ability to modify its structure by developing new neurons throughout adulthood. Neurogenesis occurs only in very few brain regions – one of which is the hippocampus – and thus may be a central mechanism involved in learning and memory. Regular physical activity may protect memory in the long term by inducing neurogenesis via BDNF.
While this link between exercise, BDNF, neurogenesis, and memory is very well described in animal models, experimental and ethical constraints mean that its importance to human brain function is not quite so clear. Nevertheless exercise-induced neurogenesis is being actively researched as a potential therapy for neurological and psychiatric disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and depression.
Blood vessels
The brain is highly dependent on blood flow, receiving approximately 15% of the body’s entire supply – despite being only 2-3% of our body’s total mass. This is because our nervous tissues need a constant supply of oxygen to function and survive. When neurons become more active, blood flow in the region where these neurons are located increases to meet demand. As such, maintaining a healthy brain depends on maintaining a healthy network of blood vessels.
Regular exercise increases the growth of new blood vessels in the brain regions where neurogenesis occurs, providing the increased blood supply that supports the development of these new neurons. Exercise also improves the health and function of existing blood vessels, ensuring that brain tissue consistently receives adequate blood supply to meet its needs and preserve its function.
Finally, regular exercise can prevent, and even treat, hypertension (high blood pressure), which is a risk factor for development of dementia. Exercise works in multiple ways to enhance the health and function of blood vessels in the brain.
Inflammation
Recently, a growing body of research has centred on microglia, which are the resident immune cells of the brain. Their main function is to constantly check the brain for potential threats from microbes or dying or damaged cells, and to clear any damage they find.
With age, normal immune function declines and chronic, low-level inflammation occurs in body organs, including the brain, where it increases risk of neurodegenerative disease, such as Alzheimer’s disease. As we age, microglia become less efficient at clearing damage, and less able to prevent disease and inflammation. This means neuroinflammation can progress, impairing brain functions – including memory.
But recently, we’ve shown that exercise can reprogramme these microglia in the aged brain. Exercise was shown to make the microglia more energy efficient and capable of counteracting neuroinflammatory changes that impair brain function. Exercise can also modulate neuroinflammation in degenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s disease and multiple sclerosis. This shows us the effects of physical activity on immune function may be an important target for therapy and disease prevention.
So how can we ensure that we’re doing the right kind of exercise – or getting enough of it – to protect the brain? As yet, we don’t have robust enough evidence to develop specific guidelines for brain health though findings to date suggest that the greatest benefits are to be gained by aerobic exercise – such as walking, running, or cycling. It’s recommended adults get a minimum of 150 minutes per week of moderate intensity aerobic exercise, combined with activities that maintain strength and flexibility, to maintain good general health.
It must also be noted that researchers don’t always find exercise has beneficial effect on the brain in their studies – likely because different studies use different exercise training programmes and measures of cognitive function, making it difficult to directly compare studies and results. But regardless, plenty of research shows us that exercise is beneficial for many aspects of our health, so it’s important to make sure you’re getting enough. We need to be conscious of making time in our day to be active – our brains will thank us for it in years to come.
Tuesday, July 6
American Economist Milton Friedman was the topic of a piece in the Wall Street Journal this week. The author asks if Friedman was right when he said “I predict that China will move increasingly toward political freedom if it continues its successful move to economic freedom.”
Is a free market associated with political freedom? What about religious freedom? What does the Bible say about this? These questions and more will be discussed on Tuesday - both in person and on-line.
Was Milton Friedman Wrong About China?
It’s bigness, not capitalism, that lets Beijing get away with so many abuses.
William McGurn, WSJ, 6.28.21
“I predict that China will move increasingly toward political freedom if it continues its successful move to economic freedom.”
So spoke Milton Friedman in 2003. It seemed a good idea at the time, especially after the transformations of the dictatorships in Taiwan and South Korea into messy but functioning democracies. But as Joe Biden is now finding out, Chinese President Xi Jinping operates from a very different premise: that the West has had its day, and Beijing’s blend of Communist Party rule and state capitalism is the ticket to Make China Great Again.
He appears to be getting away with it. Under Mr. Xi, Beijing has carried out genocide against China’s Uyghur minority, threatened Taiwan with invasion, shut down a pro-democracy newspaper in Hong Kong, covered up the origins of Covid-19, and so on. Even so, China’s economy continues to boom—it grew more than 18% in the first quarter from a year earlier—and Friedman now looks to have gotten it colossally wrong about capitalism and freedom.
Or did he?
Today some would argue that global capitalism isn’t the Chinese Communist Party’s enemy but its ally. There’s some truth to this. Certainly without the prosperity delivered by global trade and investment, Beijing wouldn’t be in a position to modernize its military, or to use its investments and foreign aid to expand its influence overseas. But Mr. Xi’s relative immunity from foreign pressure has less to do with any unique genius of what some call its “market Leninism” than something much more prosaic: the country’s 1.4 billion population.
Size has always been China’s lure. In the 1930s, a Shanghai-based American businessman named Carl Crow wrote a book called “400 Million Customers” noting the vast riches that might be had if you could sell each Chinese an apple a day. Half a century later, when the population
had more than doubled and China began opening up, the details changed, but the dream was the same: Imagine selling every Chinese a Coke!
This bigness is Mr. Xi’s trump card. Any normal-size nation, even a relatively large one such as Vietnam or Japan, simply lacks the leverage over investors and other countries to get away with what China does routinely.
Nor is Mr. Xi shy about using this leverage. Look at Australia. In April 2020, Prime Minister Scott Morrison called for a genuine World Health Organization investigation into the origins of Covid-19. It came on the heels of other decisions that irked Beijing, such as Canberra’s decision
to ban Huawei on security grounds from participating in its 5G rollout and criticism of Beijing over its treatment of the Uyghurs.
China’s response? An all-out war on Australian exports. Australian wines were particularly hard hit, as China imposed tariffs of up to 220% set to last for five years. Australian beef, barley, lobster, timber and coal have also been hit, which is particularly hard for an export-oriented economy such as Australia’s.
That’s why most foreigners doing business in China are so quick to run up the white flag when Beijing shows displeasure. John Cena, professional wrestler and star of the new “Fast & Furious” movie, recently issued a groveling apology after referring to Taiwan as a “country” during an interview. Hollywood appreciates that China now offers a larger box office than the U.S.
All that said, the story of capitalism in China is far from over. No one knows how lasting Mr. Xi’s actions will prove, or the real costs of China’s many inefficiencies. After all, there was a day, not so long ago, when the received wisdom held that America was doomed to lose its global
dominance to another brand of Asian state-directed insider capitalism—Japan Inc.
Meanwhile, China faces significant constraints, including a rapidly aging society and a grossly skewed male-to-female sex ratio, both consequences of its disastrous population policies. China doesn’t even have a convertible currency. And the wrecking ball Mr. Xi is taking to Hong Kong doesn’t exactly inspire confidence about Beijing’s appreciation for international financial centers.
Plainly China-style capitalism is on President Biden’s mind. When he announced his American Jobs Plan back in March, the president sold this huge increase in the federal role in the economy as a way “to win the global competition with China in the upcoming years.” Milton Friedman
may once have been a tad too optimistic about prospects for freedom in China. But if Joe Biden seriously intends for the U.S. to outcompete China, surely the Friedman prescription for a freer, more nimble U.S. private sector would serve him better than a paler version of Xi Jinping’s
government-directed growth.
Is a free market associated with political freedom? What about religious freedom? What does the Bible say about this? These questions and more will be discussed on Tuesday - both in person and on-line.
Was Milton Friedman Wrong About China?
It’s bigness, not capitalism, that lets Beijing get away with so many abuses.
William McGurn, WSJ, 6.28.21
“I predict that China will move increasingly toward political freedom if it continues its successful move to economic freedom.”
So spoke Milton Friedman in 2003. It seemed a good idea at the time, especially after the transformations of the dictatorships in Taiwan and South Korea into messy but functioning democracies. But as Joe Biden is now finding out, Chinese President Xi Jinping operates from a very different premise: that the West has had its day, and Beijing’s blend of Communist Party rule and state capitalism is the ticket to Make China Great Again.
He appears to be getting away with it. Under Mr. Xi, Beijing has carried out genocide against China’s Uyghur minority, threatened Taiwan with invasion, shut down a pro-democracy newspaper in Hong Kong, covered up the origins of Covid-19, and so on. Even so, China’s economy continues to boom—it grew more than 18% in the first quarter from a year earlier—and Friedman now looks to have gotten it colossally wrong about capitalism and freedom.
Or did he?
Today some would argue that global capitalism isn’t the Chinese Communist Party’s enemy but its ally. There’s some truth to this. Certainly without the prosperity delivered by global trade and investment, Beijing wouldn’t be in a position to modernize its military, or to use its investments and foreign aid to expand its influence overseas. But Mr. Xi’s relative immunity from foreign pressure has less to do with any unique genius of what some call its “market Leninism” than something much more prosaic: the country’s 1.4 billion population.
Size has always been China’s lure. In the 1930s, a Shanghai-based American businessman named Carl Crow wrote a book called “400 Million Customers” noting the vast riches that might be had if you could sell each Chinese an apple a day. Half a century later, when the population
had more than doubled and China began opening up, the details changed, but the dream was the same: Imagine selling every Chinese a Coke!
This bigness is Mr. Xi’s trump card. Any normal-size nation, even a relatively large one such as Vietnam or Japan, simply lacks the leverage over investors and other countries to get away with what China does routinely.
Nor is Mr. Xi shy about using this leverage. Look at Australia. In April 2020, Prime Minister Scott Morrison called for a genuine World Health Organization investigation into the origins of Covid-19. It came on the heels of other decisions that irked Beijing, such as Canberra’s decision
to ban Huawei on security grounds from participating in its 5G rollout and criticism of Beijing over its treatment of the Uyghurs.
China’s response? An all-out war on Australian exports. Australian wines were particularly hard hit, as China imposed tariffs of up to 220% set to last for five years. Australian beef, barley, lobster, timber and coal have also been hit, which is particularly hard for an export-oriented economy such as Australia’s.
That’s why most foreigners doing business in China are so quick to run up the white flag when Beijing shows displeasure. John Cena, professional wrestler and star of the new “Fast & Furious” movie, recently issued a groveling apology after referring to Taiwan as a “country” during an interview. Hollywood appreciates that China now offers a larger box office than the U.S.
All that said, the story of capitalism in China is far from over. No one knows how lasting Mr. Xi’s actions will prove, or the real costs of China’s many inefficiencies. After all, there was a day, not so long ago, when the received wisdom held that America was doomed to lose its global
dominance to another brand of Asian state-directed insider capitalism—Japan Inc.
Meanwhile, China faces significant constraints, including a rapidly aging society and a grossly skewed male-to-female sex ratio, both consequences of its disastrous population policies. China doesn’t even have a convertible currency. And the wrecking ball Mr. Xi is taking to Hong Kong doesn’t exactly inspire confidence about Beijing’s appreciation for international financial centers.
Plainly China-style capitalism is on President Biden’s mind. When he announced his American Jobs Plan back in March, the president sold this huge increase in the federal role in the economy as a way “to win the global competition with China in the upcoming years.” Milton Friedman
may once have been a tad too optimistic about prospects for freedom in China. But if Joe Biden seriously intends for the U.S. to outcompete China, surely the Friedman prescription for a freer, more nimble U.S. private sector would serve him better than a paler version of Xi Jinping’s
government-directed growth.
Tuesday, June 29
Because of vacation and serving on the Bishop Search Committee, my schedule through August has me missing half of the Thursday discussion group times. After discussing it at Thursday's meeting, we decided to put the group on summer hiatus and to resume in the fall.
I will only be gone for two Tuesdays during the summer. As such, the Tuesday group will continue through the summer. Here is the reading for next week. It strikes at the core of what do we do with the Bible - in particular passages that evoke/encourage/command killing. It is an interesting read and written well enough that you will probably find something you agree with and something you don't.
Lastly, we had our first in-person and on-line discussion group. From the feedback I received, it worked well. I am very excited about this and am appreciative of everyone's willingness to give new things a try (and the patience to allow me to have some things that fail).
Blessings to you all.
Why Does the Bible Talk About Killing Boys and Girls?
Matthew Schlimm, Christian Century, 6.21.21
I recently felt heartbreak when my daughter, shortly after receiving her first Bible, stumbled onto Deuteronomy 20, which commands Israelites to kill all that breathes in Canaan (vv. 16–18). I’m a pacifist, and that chapter is probably the last one I would want her to read. It happened to be one of her first.
“Dad, why does it talk about killing the boys and girls?” As if that question wasn’t bad enough on its own, she asked it first thing in the morning, before I had any coffee.
“I don’t know,” I slowly replied.
“But you teach the Bible! You’re supposed to know this stuff!”
At that moment, I wanted to resign from my job as a professor of Old Testament and find another line of work. Despite her young age, she knew enough to know that the killing described in that text was wrong. I’m very familiar with scholarly and pastoral responses to texts like
Deuteronomy 20; I’ve even written about some of them. At that moment, each and every explanation seemed worthless and unconvincing. What do you say to a girl in elementary school about a text with which you have such a complicated relationship?
One all too common way that Christians have responded to such questions is to talk about the difference between the Old and New Testaments, point out that this text is part of the Old Testament, and then talk about how superior the New Testament is.
I refuse to go that route. I am in love with the document that Christians have called the “Old Testament,” and I want my daughter to share that love. Rejecting the Old Testament closes readers off to the first three-fourths of the Bible. It means disowning the very Bible Jesus used. It
increases the shameful distance between Jewish and Christian communities of faith—between our theological grandparents, our theological neighbors, and ourselves. Furthermore, historically, this approach has perpetuated its own forms of violence: rejecting the Old Testament is precisely what German scholars and pastors did in the first half of the 20th century, paving the way for theological justifications of antisemitism and Nazism, as Susannah Heschel documents in The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany.
It would be great if Christians could stop using the term “Old Testament.” It’s not the term Jesus used; he spoke instead about the scriptures or about the law, the prophets, and the Psalms. “Old Testament” is too often interpreted as meaning that the first 39 books of our Bibles are outdated and of little use. I hate that. I only use the term because Christians aren’t always familiar with alternatives like “First Testament” or “Hebrew Bible.” Plus, names rarely do justice to what they describe. (I hope they don’t—my last name is a German word that means “bad, evil, naughty.”)
But there is another reason I didn’t tell my daughter to stick to the New Testament. The Old Testament is where I learned my pacifism, and the Old Testament says every bit as much about loving enemies as the New Testament does.
One of the Bible’s oldest laws says that if your enemy’s ox or donkey wanders away, you should return it (Exod. 23:4). The next verse says that if there’s someone who hates you, and that person has a donkey that’s suffering under a heavy load, unable to move, your job is to set the donkey free—especially if you don’t want to! When Leviticus 19:18 talks about loving your neighbor as yourself, it’s talking about a neighbor who has wronged you and whom you think deserves mistreatment in return. Proverbs 25:21 tells people to feed and give water to their enemies. It’s the Old Testament that dreams of a world free of violence when weapons will be turned into gardening tools (Isa. 2:4; Mic. 4:3).
Jesus didn’t invent a new ethic of nonviolence. He was simply a really good interpreter of the Old Testament. As he says when kicking off his Sermon on the Mount, he didn’t come to abolish the law but to show its fullest sense.
I can’t give a satisfactory explanation of why Deuteronomy 20 should be in our Bibles. But I also can’t turn away from countless Old Testament texts that have inspired me to love peace.
“If one were to choose a single word to describe the reality for which God created the world,” writes Paul Hanson, professor emeritus at Harvard Divinity School, “that word would be ‘shalom.’” He talks about the book of Isaiah and its visions of peace, which include wolf and
lamb, leopard and goat, lion and calf, bear and cow all relaxing and enjoying straw together (11:6–7, 65:25). Wolves, leopards, lions, and bears—these predators are biblical symbols for violent rulers and nations (Ezek. 22:27; Dan. 7:4–6). In Isaiah, God transforms the most violent
beasts into friends of young, vulnerable animals. Long before I ever heard of Stanley Hauerwas, John Howard Yoder, or even Mahatma Gandhi, these sorts of visions from the Old Testament formed my identity.
A consistent theme in the Old Testament is that people should trust in God, not in weapons. To see how often this theme appears in the Bible, we need to remember that ancient peoples didn’t use horses for hobbies, transport, or farming. Horses were military animals. Before combustible engines, tanks were called “chariots.”
God’s law forbids the Israelites from having horses (Deut. 17:16). Imagine the US Congress outlawing the army from having tanks. In worship, Israelites sang songs with words like, “The horse for victory? No way! Even with all its strength, it cannot rescue” (Ps. 33:17). Another
ancient song: “Some use swords, some use horses, but as for us, we call on the name of the Lord our God” (Ps. 20:7). Zechariah tells Jerusalem to rejoice over her coming king, saying explicitly that this king will not ride on a warhorse or chariot, but instead will come in peace on a donkey (9:9–10).
The Israelites’ foundational story of salvation emphasizes the foolishness of weapons. Recently escaped slaves, the Israelites wander across the Sea of Reeds like a group of homeless refugees. Egyptian chariots bolt across the landscape in hot pursuit. But amid the muddy bottom of that sea, chariot wheels become stuck in the mire. When the waters come crashing down, armor weighs the soldiers down. Every sign of military strength ends up working against the Egyptians.
In another time and place, long after the monarchy has been established, the Assyrian war machine encircles Jerusalem. Brutal war criminals of the ancient world, the Assyrians appear ready to torture and kill the people of God. Not once but twice, the Bible tells how God miraculously saves Jerusalem without one of the city’s soldiers doing so much as firing an arrow (2 Kings 18:13–19:37; Isa. 36:1–37:38). I could go on. The Old Testament is far underused as a document that can help us find ways to make peace in the world.
Few things are more contentious today than the question of who has the right to which land in the Middle East. Smack-dab in the middle of Genesis, readers find one of the only stories involving Abraham’s adult son Isaac (26:13–33). He’s repeatedly approached by Philistines who
demand that he vacate the land on which he lives. Isaac could respond with violence. God has repeatedly promised his family land, and both Abraham and Isaac have legitimate claims to the land. Isaac, nevertheless, finds peace the most attractive solution. He gives up valuable real
estate. Isaac doesn’t pretend that the Philistines’ demands are fair, but he does give them land rather than opting for violence.
At times, the Old Testament presents God as violent. Exodus 15:3 calls God a warrior, and the common title “Lord of hosts” could be easily translated “Lord of armies.” How can I worship such a God, given my pacifist commitments?
I find it helpful to recognize that there are some things God is and does that are off-limits to humans. A core biblical virtue is humility, which begins with the recognition that we are not God. Human beings lack every type of perfection: we’re not all good, all powerful, or all
knowing. Who among us should cast the first stone—or pull the trigger?
Here’s the thing: we don’t need to be violent, because God will fight for us. Our job, as Exodus 14:14 puts it, is simply to stay calm while God wages our battles. If vengeance belongs to God (Deut. 32:35), then I don’t need to take revenge on anyone. My load is lightened. I can take the path of nonviolence, because the emotional burden of retribution no longer belongs to me. It belongs to God. I can even pray that God will take vengeance on evildoers as a way of handing this desire for revenge over to God. The Psalms have ample prayers where people give their anger to God (Pss. 5 and 11, for example). When Jesus tells us to pray for our enemies, there’s a good chance he’s thinking of these sorts of prayers from the Psalms.
But there are also texts in the Bible that encourage human violence, like the passage my daughter read. While I can explain the meaning of those Hebrew words and the context in which they were written, I can’t explain why they should be in our Bibles. Nor do I think I have the
authority to overturn 2,000 years of church teaching that Deuteronomy 20 does belong there.
In the end, I stand by my initial response: “I don’t know.” I don’t know why this chapter is in our Bibles. That answer obviously let my daughter down. But I hope that I’m teaching her that faith is a place where questions often go unanswered. I hope that she learns that our job is to have
compassion for people who struggle with the Bible, not to come up with apologetic answers that beat them into submission.
The truth is, we’re finite beings trying to grasp the infinite through texts that are thousands of years old. We’re fooling ourselves if we think everything will have an easy answer—or even any answer at all. Maybe these texts are in our Bibles so that we worship God more than God’s word.
Medical doctors don’t have a cure for every disease. Activists don’t have a solution for every social evil. I certainly don’t have an answer to every question about the Bible. Does that mean our work is in vain? No. It means we’re not God.
There are many things about the Bible we can explain, but some things we simply cannot. Some texts are best labeled “hazardous materials” and handled with utmost care. We should neither carelessly throw them away nor insist that they’re harmless. Instead, we should recognize the danger in trying to incorporate them into our daily lives.
I wonder if the Bible itself has even placed some warning labels around texts like Deuteronomy 20. I remember pastoring a church in 2003 and listening to parishioners justify the US invasion of Iraq by mentioning Joshua—a book whose characters implement Deuteronomy 20’s
commands about killing. I wish I’d had the insight and courage at the time to say, “I’m all in favor of US troops parading around Baghdad, blowing on trumpets, and shouting. But let’s not fire a single weapon until we see something just as miraculous as Jericho’s walls falling down.” If the Bible is a conversation, then parts of Joshua seem to take the commands from Deuteronomy 20 and say, Before assuming you have the authority to kill others with God on your side, see if God will miraculously defeat every one of your enemy’s defenses while you do
nothing more than embody holiness, make music, and use your voice.
New Testament scholar Jordan Ryan talks about the “tyranny of application,” the common assumption that whatever text happens to be before us is the one we should apply to our lives. I cringe at the thought of people trying to apply Deuteronomy 20 to their lives. A better approach to biblical texts is to ask, “Are there other texts in the Bible with a different perspective? If so, which text is most applicable to us in our unique time and place?” Answering these questions makes interpretation a more complicated enterprise. We need a thorough knowledge of both the Bible and ourselves, discernment from the Holy Spirit, and a faithful community to guide us. But as the story of Jesus’ temptation reminds us, resisting evil means knowing which scriptures are most applicable—not just going with whichever one the devil lays out before us.
Last night, my daughter and I opened her Bible together. Wanting to look at some different parts of the Bible, I showed her some psalms I like. With a long yellow marker in her tiny hand, she highlighted Psalm 9:18. Her Good News Bible reads, “The needy will not always be neglected;
the hope of the poor will not be crushed forever.” I thought of her classmates who come to school in January without mittens, hats, boots, or snow pants. They don’t get to play. They have to stand on the blacktop at recess while the other kids frolic in the snow, build snowmen, slide
down hills, and make snow angels. If my daughter’s Bible teaches her that God has compassion for her low-income classmates, then I want that book in her hands—even if some parts are inexplicable. I worry about the impression Deuteronomy 20 may leave on her, but I also look
forward to seeing how texts about shalom captivate her imagination.
Matthew Schlimm is assistant professor of Old Testament at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary. His
newest book is This Strange and Sacred Scripture: Wrestling with the Old Testament and Its Oddities
I will only be gone for two Tuesdays during the summer. As such, the Tuesday group will continue through the summer. Here is the reading for next week. It strikes at the core of what do we do with the Bible - in particular passages that evoke/encourage/command killing. It is an interesting read and written well enough that you will probably find something you agree with and something you don't.
Lastly, we had our first in-person and on-line discussion group. From the feedback I received, it worked well. I am very excited about this and am appreciative of everyone's willingness to give new things a try (and the patience to allow me to have some things that fail).
Blessings to you all.
Why Does the Bible Talk About Killing Boys and Girls?
Matthew Schlimm, Christian Century, 6.21.21
I recently felt heartbreak when my daughter, shortly after receiving her first Bible, stumbled onto Deuteronomy 20, which commands Israelites to kill all that breathes in Canaan (vv. 16–18). I’m a pacifist, and that chapter is probably the last one I would want her to read. It happened to be one of her first.
“Dad, why does it talk about killing the boys and girls?” As if that question wasn’t bad enough on its own, she asked it first thing in the morning, before I had any coffee.
“I don’t know,” I slowly replied.
“But you teach the Bible! You’re supposed to know this stuff!”
At that moment, I wanted to resign from my job as a professor of Old Testament and find another line of work. Despite her young age, she knew enough to know that the killing described in that text was wrong. I’m very familiar with scholarly and pastoral responses to texts like
Deuteronomy 20; I’ve even written about some of them. At that moment, each and every explanation seemed worthless and unconvincing. What do you say to a girl in elementary school about a text with which you have such a complicated relationship?
One all too common way that Christians have responded to such questions is to talk about the difference between the Old and New Testaments, point out that this text is part of the Old Testament, and then talk about how superior the New Testament is.
I refuse to go that route. I am in love with the document that Christians have called the “Old Testament,” and I want my daughter to share that love. Rejecting the Old Testament closes readers off to the first three-fourths of the Bible. It means disowning the very Bible Jesus used. It
increases the shameful distance between Jewish and Christian communities of faith—between our theological grandparents, our theological neighbors, and ourselves. Furthermore, historically, this approach has perpetuated its own forms of violence: rejecting the Old Testament is precisely what German scholars and pastors did in the first half of the 20th century, paving the way for theological justifications of antisemitism and Nazism, as Susannah Heschel documents in The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany.
It would be great if Christians could stop using the term “Old Testament.” It’s not the term Jesus used; he spoke instead about the scriptures or about the law, the prophets, and the Psalms. “Old Testament” is too often interpreted as meaning that the first 39 books of our Bibles are outdated and of little use. I hate that. I only use the term because Christians aren’t always familiar with alternatives like “First Testament” or “Hebrew Bible.” Plus, names rarely do justice to what they describe. (I hope they don’t—my last name is a German word that means “bad, evil, naughty.”)
But there is another reason I didn’t tell my daughter to stick to the New Testament. The Old Testament is where I learned my pacifism, and the Old Testament says every bit as much about loving enemies as the New Testament does.
One of the Bible’s oldest laws says that if your enemy’s ox or donkey wanders away, you should return it (Exod. 23:4). The next verse says that if there’s someone who hates you, and that person has a donkey that’s suffering under a heavy load, unable to move, your job is to set the donkey free—especially if you don’t want to! When Leviticus 19:18 talks about loving your neighbor as yourself, it’s talking about a neighbor who has wronged you and whom you think deserves mistreatment in return. Proverbs 25:21 tells people to feed and give water to their enemies. It’s the Old Testament that dreams of a world free of violence when weapons will be turned into gardening tools (Isa. 2:4; Mic. 4:3).
Jesus didn’t invent a new ethic of nonviolence. He was simply a really good interpreter of the Old Testament. As he says when kicking off his Sermon on the Mount, he didn’t come to abolish the law but to show its fullest sense.
I can’t give a satisfactory explanation of why Deuteronomy 20 should be in our Bibles. But I also can’t turn away from countless Old Testament texts that have inspired me to love peace.
“If one were to choose a single word to describe the reality for which God created the world,” writes Paul Hanson, professor emeritus at Harvard Divinity School, “that word would be ‘shalom.’” He talks about the book of Isaiah and its visions of peace, which include wolf and
lamb, leopard and goat, lion and calf, bear and cow all relaxing and enjoying straw together (11:6–7, 65:25). Wolves, leopards, lions, and bears—these predators are biblical symbols for violent rulers and nations (Ezek. 22:27; Dan. 7:4–6). In Isaiah, God transforms the most violent
beasts into friends of young, vulnerable animals. Long before I ever heard of Stanley Hauerwas, John Howard Yoder, or even Mahatma Gandhi, these sorts of visions from the Old Testament formed my identity.
A consistent theme in the Old Testament is that people should trust in God, not in weapons. To see how often this theme appears in the Bible, we need to remember that ancient peoples didn’t use horses for hobbies, transport, or farming. Horses were military animals. Before combustible engines, tanks were called “chariots.”
God’s law forbids the Israelites from having horses (Deut. 17:16). Imagine the US Congress outlawing the army from having tanks. In worship, Israelites sang songs with words like, “The horse for victory? No way! Even with all its strength, it cannot rescue” (Ps. 33:17). Another
ancient song: “Some use swords, some use horses, but as for us, we call on the name of the Lord our God” (Ps. 20:7). Zechariah tells Jerusalem to rejoice over her coming king, saying explicitly that this king will not ride on a warhorse or chariot, but instead will come in peace on a donkey (9:9–10).
The Israelites’ foundational story of salvation emphasizes the foolishness of weapons. Recently escaped slaves, the Israelites wander across the Sea of Reeds like a group of homeless refugees. Egyptian chariots bolt across the landscape in hot pursuit. But amid the muddy bottom of that sea, chariot wheels become stuck in the mire. When the waters come crashing down, armor weighs the soldiers down. Every sign of military strength ends up working against the Egyptians.
In another time and place, long after the monarchy has been established, the Assyrian war machine encircles Jerusalem. Brutal war criminals of the ancient world, the Assyrians appear ready to torture and kill the people of God. Not once but twice, the Bible tells how God miraculously saves Jerusalem without one of the city’s soldiers doing so much as firing an arrow (2 Kings 18:13–19:37; Isa. 36:1–37:38). I could go on. The Old Testament is far underused as a document that can help us find ways to make peace in the world.
Few things are more contentious today than the question of who has the right to which land in the Middle East. Smack-dab in the middle of Genesis, readers find one of the only stories involving Abraham’s adult son Isaac (26:13–33). He’s repeatedly approached by Philistines who
demand that he vacate the land on which he lives. Isaac could respond with violence. God has repeatedly promised his family land, and both Abraham and Isaac have legitimate claims to the land. Isaac, nevertheless, finds peace the most attractive solution. He gives up valuable real
estate. Isaac doesn’t pretend that the Philistines’ demands are fair, but he does give them land rather than opting for violence.
At times, the Old Testament presents God as violent. Exodus 15:3 calls God a warrior, and the common title “Lord of hosts” could be easily translated “Lord of armies.” How can I worship such a God, given my pacifist commitments?
I find it helpful to recognize that there are some things God is and does that are off-limits to humans. A core biblical virtue is humility, which begins with the recognition that we are not God. Human beings lack every type of perfection: we’re not all good, all powerful, or all
knowing. Who among us should cast the first stone—or pull the trigger?
Here’s the thing: we don’t need to be violent, because God will fight for us. Our job, as Exodus 14:14 puts it, is simply to stay calm while God wages our battles. If vengeance belongs to God (Deut. 32:35), then I don’t need to take revenge on anyone. My load is lightened. I can take the path of nonviolence, because the emotional burden of retribution no longer belongs to me. It belongs to God. I can even pray that God will take vengeance on evildoers as a way of handing this desire for revenge over to God. The Psalms have ample prayers where people give their anger to God (Pss. 5 and 11, for example). When Jesus tells us to pray for our enemies, there’s a good chance he’s thinking of these sorts of prayers from the Psalms.
But there are also texts in the Bible that encourage human violence, like the passage my daughter read. While I can explain the meaning of those Hebrew words and the context in which they were written, I can’t explain why they should be in our Bibles. Nor do I think I have the
authority to overturn 2,000 years of church teaching that Deuteronomy 20 does belong there.
In the end, I stand by my initial response: “I don’t know.” I don’t know why this chapter is in our Bibles. That answer obviously let my daughter down. But I hope that I’m teaching her that faith is a place where questions often go unanswered. I hope that she learns that our job is to have
compassion for people who struggle with the Bible, not to come up with apologetic answers that beat them into submission.
The truth is, we’re finite beings trying to grasp the infinite through texts that are thousands of years old. We’re fooling ourselves if we think everything will have an easy answer—or even any answer at all. Maybe these texts are in our Bibles so that we worship God more than God’s word.
Medical doctors don’t have a cure for every disease. Activists don’t have a solution for every social evil. I certainly don’t have an answer to every question about the Bible. Does that mean our work is in vain? No. It means we’re not God.
There are many things about the Bible we can explain, but some things we simply cannot. Some texts are best labeled “hazardous materials” and handled with utmost care. We should neither carelessly throw them away nor insist that they’re harmless. Instead, we should recognize the danger in trying to incorporate them into our daily lives.
I wonder if the Bible itself has even placed some warning labels around texts like Deuteronomy 20. I remember pastoring a church in 2003 and listening to parishioners justify the US invasion of Iraq by mentioning Joshua—a book whose characters implement Deuteronomy 20’s
commands about killing. I wish I’d had the insight and courage at the time to say, “I’m all in favor of US troops parading around Baghdad, blowing on trumpets, and shouting. But let’s not fire a single weapon until we see something just as miraculous as Jericho’s walls falling down.” If the Bible is a conversation, then parts of Joshua seem to take the commands from Deuteronomy 20 and say, Before assuming you have the authority to kill others with God on your side, see if God will miraculously defeat every one of your enemy’s defenses while you do
nothing more than embody holiness, make music, and use your voice.
New Testament scholar Jordan Ryan talks about the “tyranny of application,” the common assumption that whatever text happens to be before us is the one we should apply to our lives. I cringe at the thought of people trying to apply Deuteronomy 20 to their lives. A better approach to biblical texts is to ask, “Are there other texts in the Bible with a different perspective? If so, which text is most applicable to us in our unique time and place?” Answering these questions makes interpretation a more complicated enterprise. We need a thorough knowledge of both the Bible and ourselves, discernment from the Holy Spirit, and a faithful community to guide us. But as the story of Jesus’ temptation reminds us, resisting evil means knowing which scriptures are most applicable—not just going with whichever one the devil lays out before us.
Last night, my daughter and I opened her Bible together. Wanting to look at some different parts of the Bible, I showed her some psalms I like. With a long yellow marker in her tiny hand, she highlighted Psalm 9:18. Her Good News Bible reads, “The needy will not always be neglected;
the hope of the poor will not be crushed forever.” I thought of her classmates who come to school in January without mittens, hats, boots, or snow pants. They don’t get to play. They have to stand on the blacktop at recess while the other kids frolic in the snow, build snowmen, slide
down hills, and make snow angels. If my daughter’s Bible teaches her that God has compassion for her low-income classmates, then I want that book in her hands—even if some parts are inexplicable. I worry about the impression Deuteronomy 20 may leave on her, but I also look
forward to seeing how texts about shalom captivate her imagination.
Matthew Schlimm is assistant professor of Old Testament at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary. His
newest book is This Strange and Sacred Scripture: Wrestling with the Old Testament and Its Oddities
Tuesday, June 22
You may have seen the signs on St. Armand that address concerns about private homes becoming motels. The question of rentals and single-family homeowners are on the thoughts of residents on Longboat and Anna Maria.
For the Marshalls, the house we share a back fence with recently sold. Our fear was that it would be purchased by a corporation who would rent it. Instead, some very nice homeowners from Virginia moved in. Nevertheless, housing is a concern around here. Some of us may even find referendums in our local elections about restricting the number of rentals in a particular community.
This article sheds some light on what rentals mean to the housing market and perhaps will help us make voting decisions in the future.
The Bible has something to say about this topic as well so I look forward to talking with you about it.
There is a change this next week - we are going to offer in-person discussions as well as on-line. If you are interested in meeting in person, meet in my office by 10 am on Tuesday . Otherwise, I'll see you on-line!
BlackRock is Not Ruining the US Housing Market
Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, 6.17.21
The BlackRock saga sounds grotesque. At a time of maximal desperation in the U.S. housing market, giant investment banks, such as BlackRock, are buying up some of the few houses left on the market, boxing families out of the American dream. They’re turning these homes into rental units that they will, in some cases, leave to decay. Such faceless institutional investors are reportedly more likely than ordinary “mom and pop” landlords to aggressively raise rent—and evict people who can’t afford it.
Americans don’t agree about much, but they seem united in believing that this is a despicable state of affairs. In the past few days, institutional housing investors have drawn criticism from Fox News as well as left-wing commentators.
But this outrage is misdirected. If we have any chance of fixing the completely messed-up, unaffordable U.S. housing market, we should direct our ire toward real culprits rather than boogeymen.
The U.S. has roughly 140 million housing units, a broad category that includes mansions, tiny townhouses, and apartments of all sizes. Of those 140 million units, about 80 million are stand-alone single-family homes. Of those 80 million, about 15 million are rental properties. Of those
15 million single-family rentals, institutional investors own about 300,000; most of the rest are owned by individual landlords. Of that 300,000, BlackRock—largely through its investment in the real-estate rental company Invitation Homes—owns about 80,000. (To clear up a common
confusion: The investment firm Blackstone established Invitation Homes, in which BlackRock, a separate investment firm, is now an investor. Don’t yell at me; I didn’t name them.)
Megacorps such as BlackRock, then, are not removing a large share of the market from individual ownership. Rental-home companies own less than half of one percent of all housing, even in states such as Texas, where they were actively buying up foreclosed properties after the
Great Recession. Their recent buying has been small compared with the overall market.
Besides, BlackRock and investors like it aren’t necessarily taking homes away from ordinary families. As the Vox reporter Jerusalem Demsas explains, institutional investors tend to buy homes that need significant repairs. That means they’re often competing with other investors--
individuals who buy houses to rent them out, as a side gig or a main gig—not with typical young couples who are looking to turn a key and walk into a finished house. Meanwhile, institutional investors are more likely than individuals to report making improvements to their rental holdings and spend more per unit.
If, contrary to that last point, real-estate investors are routinely flouting renters’ rights and letting properties decay around their residents, the government should investigate them: It would be a mitzvah for the U.S. government to make a strong statement about protecting America’s tens of millions of renters.
But before we follow the example of some countries in moving to block investment funds from buying real estate—for fear that banks are squeezing individuals out of the housing market and generally being extremely private-equity-ish in an economic sector that’s supposed to be about basic needs—we should ask ourselves what exactly would change for middle-class families if we did. Millions of mom-and-pop investors would still be out there, buying millions of single-family houses and renting them out to millions of people. The overall texture of the U.S. housing market would remain the same.
Nothing in the BlackRock saga is central to America’s larger housing problem, which is, simply stated: Where the hell are all the houses? A ton of people want to own new homes right now—including the largest crop of 30-somethings in American history. But single-family-home construction is in a rut, having fallen in the 2010s to its lowest levels in 60 years. The pandemic threw a few extra wrenches into home construction that will hopefully resolve themselves in the near future.
Far worse than corporations taking a few thousand units off the market for owners are the governments and noisy NIMBYish (not in my backyard) residents taking millions of units off the market for owners and renters alike—by blocking construction projects in the past few decades. (California alone has an estimated shortage of 3 million housing units.) From New York to California, deep-blue cities and states have amassed a pitiful record of blocking housing construction and failing to meet rising demand with adequate supply. Many of the people
tweeting about BlackRock are represented by city councils and state governments, or are surrounded by zoning laws and local ordinances that make home construction something between onerous and impossible.
Through law and custom, the U.S. has encouraged people to buy and cherish their houses. But by asking Americans to see their homes as precious investment vehicles, these laws activate a scarcity mindset and sow the seeds of NIMBYism: Don’t dilute my equity with new
construction!
How can we encourage Americans to support more housing construction near where they live?
Maybe the answer is … more single-family rentals. As the Bloomberg columnist Conor Sen points out, homeowners tend to look down on nearby construction, because more ample housing could drive down the cost of their property. But renters might celebrate nearby construction for the same general principle: Ample housing might hold down their rent.
In the arithmetic of online outrage—where big banks are evil, and landlords suck—nothing is more villainous than a big-bank landlord. But the larger villain in America’s housing crunch isn’t the faceless Wall Street Goliath overseeing your apartment building or house; it’s the forces
stopping any new apartment buildings or houses from existing in the first place: your neighbors, local laws, and local governments. If we can’t see the culprit of America’s housing crisis, that’s because we’re eager to look everywhere except in the mirror.
Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he writes about economics, technology, and the media. He is the author of Hit Makers and the host of the podcast Crazy/Genius
For the Marshalls, the house we share a back fence with recently sold. Our fear was that it would be purchased by a corporation who would rent it. Instead, some very nice homeowners from Virginia moved in. Nevertheless, housing is a concern around here. Some of us may even find referendums in our local elections about restricting the number of rentals in a particular community.
This article sheds some light on what rentals mean to the housing market and perhaps will help us make voting decisions in the future.
The Bible has something to say about this topic as well so I look forward to talking with you about it.
There is a change this next week - we are going to offer in-person discussions as well as on-line. If you are interested in meeting in person, meet in my office by 10 am on Tuesday . Otherwise, I'll see you on-line!
BlackRock is Not Ruining the US Housing Market
Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, 6.17.21
The BlackRock saga sounds grotesque. At a time of maximal desperation in the U.S. housing market, giant investment banks, such as BlackRock, are buying up some of the few houses left on the market, boxing families out of the American dream. They’re turning these homes into rental units that they will, in some cases, leave to decay. Such faceless institutional investors are reportedly more likely than ordinary “mom and pop” landlords to aggressively raise rent—and evict people who can’t afford it.
Americans don’t agree about much, but they seem united in believing that this is a despicable state of affairs. In the past few days, institutional housing investors have drawn criticism from Fox News as well as left-wing commentators.
But this outrage is misdirected. If we have any chance of fixing the completely messed-up, unaffordable U.S. housing market, we should direct our ire toward real culprits rather than boogeymen.
The U.S. has roughly 140 million housing units, a broad category that includes mansions, tiny townhouses, and apartments of all sizes. Of those 140 million units, about 80 million are stand-alone single-family homes. Of those 80 million, about 15 million are rental properties. Of those
15 million single-family rentals, institutional investors own about 300,000; most of the rest are owned by individual landlords. Of that 300,000, BlackRock—largely through its investment in the real-estate rental company Invitation Homes—owns about 80,000. (To clear up a common
confusion: The investment firm Blackstone established Invitation Homes, in which BlackRock, a separate investment firm, is now an investor. Don’t yell at me; I didn’t name them.)
Megacorps such as BlackRock, then, are not removing a large share of the market from individual ownership. Rental-home companies own less than half of one percent of all housing, even in states such as Texas, where they were actively buying up foreclosed properties after the
Great Recession. Their recent buying has been small compared with the overall market.
Besides, BlackRock and investors like it aren’t necessarily taking homes away from ordinary families. As the Vox reporter Jerusalem Demsas explains, institutional investors tend to buy homes that need significant repairs. That means they’re often competing with other investors--
individuals who buy houses to rent them out, as a side gig or a main gig—not with typical young couples who are looking to turn a key and walk into a finished house. Meanwhile, institutional investors are more likely than individuals to report making improvements to their rental holdings and spend more per unit.
If, contrary to that last point, real-estate investors are routinely flouting renters’ rights and letting properties decay around their residents, the government should investigate them: It would be a mitzvah for the U.S. government to make a strong statement about protecting America’s tens of millions of renters.
But before we follow the example of some countries in moving to block investment funds from buying real estate—for fear that banks are squeezing individuals out of the housing market and generally being extremely private-equity-ish in an economic sector that’s supposed to be about basic needs—we should ask ourselves what exactly would change for middle-class families if we did. Millions of mom-and-pop investors would still be out there, buying millions of single-family houses and renting them out to millions of people. The overall texture of the U.S. housing market would remain the same.
Nothing in the BlackRock saga is central to America’s larger housing problem, which is, simply stated: Where the hell are all the houses? A ton of people want to own new homes right now—including the largest crop of 30-somethings in American history. But single-family-home construction is in a rut, having fallen in the 2010s to its lowest levels in 60 years. The pandemic threw a few extra wrenches into home construction that will hopefully resolve themselves in the near future.
Far worse than corporations taking a few thousand units off the market for owners are the governments and noisy NIMBYish (not in my backyard) residents taking millions of units off the market for owners and renters alike—by blocking construction projects in the past few decades. (California alone has an estimated shortage of 3 million housing units.) From New York to California, deep-blue cities and states have amassed a pitiful record of blocking housing construction and failing to meet rising demand with adequate supply. Many of the people
tweeting about BlackRock are represented by city councils and state governments, or are surrounded by zoning laws and local ordinances that make home construction something between onerous and impossible.
Through law and custom, the U.S. has encouraged people to buy and cherish their houses. But by asking Americans to see their homes as precious investment vehicles, these laws activate a scarcity mindset and sow the seeds of NIMBYism: Don’t dilute my equity with new
construction!
How can we encourage Americans to support more housing construction near where they live?
Maybe the answer is … more single-family rentals. As the Bloomberg columnist Conor Sen points out, homeowners tend to look down on nearby construction, because more ample housing could drive down the cost of their property. But renters might celebrate nearby construction for the same general principle: Ample housing might hold down their rent.
In the arithmetic of online outrage—where big banks are evil, and landlords suck—nothing is more villainous than a big-bank landlord. But the larger villain in America’s housing crunch isn’t the faceless Wall Street Goliath overseeing your apartment building or house; it’s the forces
stopping any new apartment buildings or houses from existing in the first place: your neighbors, local laws, and local governments. If we can’t see the culprit of America’s housing crisis, that’s because we’re eager to look everywhere except in the mirror.
Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he writes about economics, technology, and the media. He is the author of Hit Makers and the host of the podcast Crazy/Genius
Tuesday, June 15
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
May 24
What Introverts and Extroverts Can Learn From Each Other
Arthur Brooks, The Atlantic, 5.20.21
A YEAR BEFORE the pandemic changed all of our lives, a friend sent me a link to a survey based on academic research that rates your personality traits on a numeric scale. He was particularly keen to know my extroversion score, to see if the test was accurate. His results had shown that he scored at the 15th percentile. He sent it to me as the most extroverted person he knows. Sure enough, I scored at the 96th percentile.
“Lucky you,” he remarked, “extroverts are a lot happier.” He was right about that, on average. Decades of research have consistently shown that extroverts have a significant happiness edge over introverts. They report higher levels of general well-being as well as more frequent moments of joy.
COVID-19, however, has given us extroverts our comeuppance. Research published in March in the scientific journal PLOS One studied the impact of the pandemic on people with various personality characteristics. The authors found that mood worsened for extroverts but improved for introverts. As my friend said, only half joking, “Why don’t we just stay locked down forever?”
In ordinary times, American introverts are like cats living in Dogland: underappreciated, uncomfortable, and slightly out of place. A side effect of shutting down the world was to turn it into Catland, at least for a little while. That gave the introverts a chance to lord their solitary comfort over the rest of us, for once. To this I say, “Woof.”
But the temporary shift has also created a kind of social-science field experiment, highlighting all the ways in which introverts and extroverts can learn from each other. If we take the lessons to heart, we can all benefit.
PSYCHOLOGISTS SEE extroversion as one of the Big Five personality traits, along with agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism. The Big Five theory has been a staple of psychology since the 1980s, but the introvert-extrovert binary was first popularized in
1921 by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, who posited that the two groups have different primary life goals. The former, he thought, seek to establish autonomy and independence; the latter seek union with others. Those stereotypes have persisted to this day.
The German-born psychologist Hans Eysenck further developed Jung’s theory in the 1960s, arguing that our genetics determine our relative extroversion. He believed that cortical arousal—that is, the brain’s level of alertness—was more difficult for extroverts than introverts, so the former seek stimulation in the company of others, ideally the fresh company of new people. Subsequent research has shown mixed results on Eysenck’s specific theory, but has found clear cognitive differences between the groups.
One common explanation for the happiness differential between introverts and extroverts follows from stereotypes like Jung and Eysenck’s: Humans are inherently social animals, so contact brings happiness; extroverts seek out contact, so extroverts are happier. The fact that introverts prefer solitude and often struggle with sociability doesn’t mean that avoiding contact makes them happier. It just means they prefer something that makes them unhappy. Nothing strange here—you can also prefer unhealthy food.
There are complementary cultural explanations for the happiness differential. To begin with, extroversion is highly rewarded in American society, and predicts a significant edge in earning power—on average, extroverts make about $12,000 more per year than introverts.
Extroverts attain other advantages in the workplace as well, such as promotions to leadership positions and high performance evaluations.
Some resent these patterns, and believe they show a lack of cultural depth. In her book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain lists the many advances made by introverts—from the theory of gravity to Google—and argues that admiring and
rewarding extroversion is not just unfair, but hinders progress. If you ever feel disillusioned by Americans’ habit of elevating egotistical-yet-charismatic leaders, you might have to admit that Cain has a point.
WHETHER WE ARE introverts or extroverts, we don’t need to regret our sojourn to Catland or dread the return to Dogland. On the contrary, each group can teach the other a lesson that can improve all of our well-being.
1. INTROVERTS SHOULD FOCUS MORE ON THE FUTURE, LIKE EXTROVERTS DO.
In 2001, a group of Oxford scholars broke a sample of survey respondents into four groups: happy extroverts, unhappy extroverts, happy introverts, and unhappy introverts. As expected, the happy extroverts outnumbered the happy introverts, by about two to one. But the researchers were more interested in what drove the rare happy introvert’s relatively high well-being.
They found the same characteristics among both happy groups: optimism, a sense of life purpose, and self-esteem. Extroverts, of course, love to talk to others about the future, their dreams, their life’s purpose. As psychologists have long shown, we tend to act according to the
commitments we have articulated to others, so the extrovert habit of telling everyone you meet about your goals makes you more likely to reach them and therefore get happier.
Happy introverts have figured out how to envision the future without all the (uncomfortable, for them) personal sharing with lots of people. They tend to have close one-on-one friendships instead, where they can share their dreams if and when they choose.
2. EXTROVERTS SHOULD WORK ON DEEP FRIENDSHIPS, WHICH INTROVERTS TEND TO HAVE MORE OF.
Intimate friendships are not only good for sharing your dreams. They are also a clear and direct producer of happiness. In particular, forging close friendships with people from whom you have nothing to gain is an intense source of satisfaction. But doing so isn’t easy, especially for
extroverts, because of their love of crowds, audiences, fresh contact, and excitement.
The pandemic’s pause in life’s rhythms has left society’s dogs in a state of social withdrawal, explaining the current happiness inversion. But it also presents an opportunity for extroverts to cultivate more real friendships like introverts have. While this might not be the natural tendency—research shows that extroverts tend to have a lot of low-depth friendships with other extroverts—it is more optimal for happiness. Extroverts should set a goal for the next few weeks and months to deepen one friendship before life returns to normal.
If they don’t know how to begin, they should just watch a happy introvert do it. I am a dog, but my 18-year-old daughter is a cat. She and her closest cat-friend talk for an hour or two every day, making a point to update each other on their life plans. Find your nearest happy cats and act like them.
BEYOND THE SPECIFICS of introversion and extroversion, there is one important lesson in all this: Watching and learning from people very different from you is a great way to learn to be happier. Indeed, a love of human diversity of all types, from culture to character to politics, is
required for a full education in well-being.
None of us has a lock on the best practices, and surrounding ourselves with people just like us will not inspire new ideas to raise our life satisfaction. For the happiest world, we need cats and dogs—together.
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, 5.20.21
A YEAR BEFORE the pandemic changed all of our lives, a friend sent me a link to a survey based on academic research that rates your personality traits on a numeric scale. He was particularly keen to know my extroversion score, to see if the test was accurate. His results had shown that he scored at the 15th percentile. He sent it to me as the most extroverted person he knows. Sure enough, I scored at the 96th percentile.
“Lucky you,” he remarked, “extroverts are a lot happier.” He was right about that, on average. Decades of research have consistently shown that extroverts have a significant happiness edge over introverts. They report higher levels of general well-being as well as more frequent moments of joy.
COVID-19, however, has given us extroverts our comeuppance. Research published in March in the scientific journal PLOS One studied the impact of the pandemic on people with various personality characteristics. The authors found that mood worsened for extroverts but improved for introverts. As my friend said, only half joking, “Why don’t we just stay locked down forever?”
In ordinary times, American introverts are like cats living in Dogland: underappreciated, uncomfortable, and slightly out of place. A side effect of shutting down the world was to turn it into Catland, at least for a little while. That gave the introverts a chance to lord their solitary comfort over the rest of us, for once. To this I say, “Woof.”
But the temporary shift has also created a kind of social-science field experiment, highlighting all the ways in which introverts and extroverts can learn from each other. If we take the lessons to heart, we can all benefit.
PSYCHOLOGISTS SEE extroversion as one of the Big Five personality traits, along with agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism. The Big Five theory has been a staple of psychology since the 1980s, but the introvert-extrovert binary was first popularized in
1921 by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, who posited that the two groups have different primary life goals. The former, he thought, seek to establish autonomy and independence; the latter seek union with others. Those stereotypes have persisted to this day.
The German-born psychologist Hans Eysenck further developed Jung’s theory in the 1960s, arguing that our genetics determine our relative extroversion. He believed that cortical arousal—that is, the brain’s level of alertness—was more difficult for extroverts than introverts, so the former seek stimulation in the company of others, ideally the fresh company of new people. Subsequent research has shown mixed results on Eysenck’s specific theory, but has found clear cognitive differences between the groups.
One common explanation for the happiness differential between introverts and extroverts follows from stereotypes like Jung and Eysenck’s: Humans are inherently social animals, so contact brings happiness; extroverts seek out contact, so extroverts are happier. The fact that introverts prefer solitude and often struggle with sociability doesn’t mean that avoiding contact makes them happier. It just means they prefer something that makes them unhappy. Nothing strange here—you can also prefer unhealthy food.
There are complementary cultural explanations for the happiness differential. To begin with, extroversion is highly rewarded in American society, and predicts a significant edge in earning power—on average, extroverts make about $12,000 more per year than introverts.
Extroverts attain other advantages in the workplace as well, such as promotions to leadership positions and high performance evaluations.
Some resent these patterns, and believe they show a lack of cultural depth. In her book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain lists the many advances made by introverts—from the theory of gravity to Google—and argues that admiring and
rewarding extroversion is not just unfair, but hinders progress. If you ever feel disillusioned by Americans’ habit of elevating egotistical-yet-charismatic leaders, you might have to admit that Cain has a point.
WHETHER WE ARE introverts or extroverts, we don’t need to regret our sojourn to Catland or dread the return to Dogland. On the contrary, each group can teach the other a lesson that can improve all of our well-being.
1. INTROVERTS SHOULD FOCUS MORE ON THE FUTURE, LIKE EXTROVERTS DO.
In 2001, a group of Oxford scholars broke a sample of survey respondents into four groups: happy extroverts, unhappy extroverts, happy introverts, and unhappy introverts. As expected, the happy extroverts outnumbered the happy introverts, by about two to one. But the researchers were more interested in what drove the rare happy introvert’s relatively high well-being.
They found the same characteristics among both happy groups: optimism, a sense of life purpose, and self-esteem. Extroverts, of course, love to talk to others about the future, their dreams, their life’s purpose. As psychologists have long shown, we tend to act according to the
commitments we have articulated to others, so the extrovert habit of telling everyone you meet about your goals makes you more likely to reach them and therefore get happier.
Happy introverts have figured out how to envision the future without all the (uncomfortable, for them) personal sharing with lots of people. They tend to have close one-on-one friendships instead, where they can share their dreams if and when they choose.
2. EXTROVERTS SHOULD WORK ON DEEP FRIENDSHIPS, WHICH INTROVERTS TEND TO HAVE MORE OF.
Intimate friendships are not only good for sharing your dreams. They are also a clear and direct producer of happiness. In particular, forging close friendships with people from whom you have nothing to gain is an intense source of satisfaction. But doing so isn’t easy, especially for
extroverts, because of their love of crowds, audiences, fresh contact, and excitement.
The pandemic’s pause in life’s rhythms has left society’s dogs in a state of social withdrawal, explaining the current happiness inversion. But it also presents an opportunity for extroverts to cultivate more real friendships like introverts have. While this might not be the natural tendency—research shows that extroverts tend to have a lot of low-depth friendships with other extroverts—it is more optimal for happiness. Extroverts should set a goal for the next few weeks and months to deepen one friendship before life returns to normal.
If they don’t know how to begin, they should just watch a happy introvert do it. I am a dog, but my 18-year-old daughter is a cat. She and her closest cat-friend talk for an hour or two every day, making a point to update each other on their life plans. Find your nearest happy cats and act like them.
BEYOND THE SPECIFICS of introversion and extroversion, there is one important lesson in all this: Watching and learning from people very different from you is a great way to learn to be happier. Indeed, a love of human diversity of all types, from culture to character to politics, is
required for a full education in well-being.
None of us has a lock on the best practices, and surrounding ourselves with people just like us will not inspire new ideas to raise our life satisfaction. For the happiest world, we need cats and dogs—together.
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.
May 18
Why Are We So Spiteful?
Charlie Tyson, the Atlantic, 5.12.21
The purest eruption of spite I have ever witnessed took place at a former friend’s birthday party some years ago. We were all in our early 20s, and alcohol had been flowing freely. I slipped into the kitchen to refill my drink; when I returned, the birthday girl, her cheeks flushed from the
wine, had become incensed at her boyfriend for some unaccountable transgression. On the coffee table was an enormous cake, brought by her now-disgraced boyfriend. The birthday girl seized the platter and, with a terrific crash, hurled the cake to the floor. “Now none of us can have any,” she seethed, raising an accusatory frosting-covered finger as guests began edging toward the door.
Spite defies logic. We act spitefully—lashing out to harm someone else, even at a cost to ourselves—when the desire to punish overrides other considerations. People in the throes of spite’s poisonous pleasures do not care if they injure themselves, or make the whole world worse
off, so long as they satisfy their rancor. Yet because spite involves a self-inflicted cost, this petty and ultimately antisocial emotion bears a family resemblance to altruism. Many spiteful actors believe they are behaving nobly: meting out justice where it is due.
That we live in a particularly spiteful age is the very plausible premise of Spite: The Upside of Your Dark Side. According to Simon McCarthy-Jones, the book’s author and a psychologist at Trinity College Dublin, spite “may be the last weapon of the downtrodden.” Disadvantaged
people acting out of spite can pull their oppressors down a few pegs. As a form of costly punishment aimed at the rich and powerful, spite can weaken dominance hierarchies and promote fairness. The book suggests that spite can be soothed, though never banished, by more
just political arrangements. McCarthy-Jones provides a few real-world examples of “counter dominant spite,” in which spiteful actors take down the powerful. He cites research on contemporary hunter-gatherer societies showing that swaggering group members who attempt to bully and dominate others are frequently killed. He applauds the spitefulness of consumer boycotts, in which we refrain from buying products we like in order to punish a corporation for its actions. His argument that spite promotes fairness, however, relies mainly on a famous economics experiment known as the “ultimatum game.” In the game, one player is given a sum of money—say, $10—and is tasked with splitting it with a second player, who can either accept or reject the proposal. If the offer is accepted, both players get to keep the money (even if it is split unevenly); if it’s rejected, both players receive nothing. Researchers have found that many people turn down free money if the offer is too low. One explanation for the “spiteful rejection” of low offers is that people are willing to suffer to punish someone who has violated a norm of fairness. Spite, then, can promote social cooperation and sustain positive social norms—at least in the laboratory.
Unfortunately, as McCarthy-Jones proceeds through his survey of the psychological literature, his category of spite broadens into incoherence. Actions he describes as spiteful include: making someone wait for a parking space; suicide bombings; bacteria releasing toxins; Captain Ahab’s pursuit of the white whale; and the Holocaust. Through a zoomed-out lens, every action that includes a self-inflicted cost starts to look spiteful, but the category ceases to be meaningful.
Distinct phenomena—envy, sadism, schadenfreude, reckless idealism, world-historical malice—get flattened. Lost in all this is spite’s peculiar emotional texture, its blend of childish vindictiveness and rashness. Recall the toppled birthday cake. Spite is fundamentally petty.
In turning our attention to spite, McCarthy-Jones has identified an important element in the emotional climate of the present. It’s no coincidence that the book’s most spirited sections include a lengthy replay of Brexit (examples of “spite voting”). During the lead-up to Brexit,
Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister of Scotland, warned voters: “Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face.” Some voters thought Britain would be economically worse off if it left the European Union—yet they voted to leave anyway to thumb their noses at the elites in London and the
bureaucrats in Brussels.
The spitefulness of our politics can be plausibly traced to a number of causes: fear and hatred of others; shocks due to technological change; disinformation campaigns by corporations and political actors; the collapse of local communities and institutions; fantasies about a now-irretrievable national past. What leads political communities to reject the common good and instead choose to fight over a shrinking pie (or toppled cake)?
What emerges from the evidence assembled in the book is a picture of spite as part of the corrosive effects of economic inequality. That spite wells up in response to inequality is suggested by the ultimatum game: Low offers provoke spiteful rejections. But the relationship between spite and social stratification is more intricate. Feelings of spite, it turns out, are intimately tied to judgments about status. People often act spitefully, McCarthy-Jones argues, to gain an advantage over a rival. In competitive contexts in which resources are limited, damaging
someone else’s status can rebound to our benefit. Evidence from laboratory games shows that players will often destroy each other’s chance at monetary gain not to restore equality, but to get ahead.
Posing as a victim is easy, as is claiming that one’s efforts to humiliate others are serving the greater good. Thus, our judgments about who needs to be “put in their place” are frequently defective. Spite is a symptom of social breakdown. But it is not a trustworthy guide to fair action.
This ugly feeling is self-multiplying: It tends to lead not toward justice but toward more spite
Charlie Tyson, the Atlantic, 5.12.21
The purest eruption of spite I have ever witnessed took place at a former friend’s birthday party some years ago. We were all in our early 20s, and alcohol had been flowing freely. I slipped into the kitchen to refill my drink; when I returned, the birthday girl, her cheeks flushed from the
wine, had become incensed at her boyfriend for some unaccountable transgression. On the coffee table was an enormous cake, brought by her now-disgraced boyfriend. The birthday girl seized the platter and, with a terrific crash, hurled the cake to the floor. “Now none of us can have any,” she seethed, raising an accusatory frosting-covered finger as guests began edging toward the door.
Spite defies logic. We act spitefully—lashing out to harm someone else, even at a cost to ourselves—when the desire to punish overrides other considerations. People in the throes of spite’s poisonous pleasures do not care if they injure themselves, or make the whole world worse
off, so long as they satisfy their rancor. Yet because spite involves a self-inflicted cost, this petty and ultimately antisocial emotion bears a family resemblance to altruism. Many spiteful actors believe they are behaving nobly: meting out justice where it is due.
That we live in a particularly spiteful age is the very plausible premise of Spite: The Upside of Your Dark Side. According to Simon McCarthy-Jones, the book’s author and a psychologist at Trinity College Dublin, spite “may be the last weapon of the downtrodden.” Disadvantaged
people acting out of spite can pull their oppressors down a few pegs. As a form of costly punishment aimed at the rich and powerful, spite can weaken dominance hierarchies and promote fairness. The book suggests that spite can be soothed, though never banished, by more
just political arrangements. McCarthy-Jones provides a few real-world examples of “counter dominant spite,” in which spiteful actors take down the powerful. He cites research on contemporary hunter-gatherer societies showing that swaggering group members who attempt to bully and dominate others are frequently killed. He applauds the spitefulness of consumer boycotts, in which we refrain from buying products we like in order to punish a corporation for its actions. His argument that spite promotes fairness, however, relies mainly on a famous economics experiment known as the “ultimatum game.” In the game, one player is given a sum of money—say, $10—and is tasked with splitting it with a second player, who can either accept or reject the proposal. If the offer is accepted, both players get to keep the money (even if it is split unevenly); if it’s rejected, both players receive nothing. Researchers have found that many people turn down free money if the offer is too low. One explanation for the “spiteful rejection” of low offers is that people are willing to suffer to punish someone who has violated a norm of fairness. Spite, then, can promote social cooperation and sustain positive social norms—at least in the laboratory.
Unfortunately, as McCarthy-Jones proceeds through his survey of the psychological literature, his category of spite broadens into incoherence. Actions he describes as spiteful include: making someone wait for a parking space; suicide bombings; bacteria releasing toxins; Captain Ahab’s pursuit of the white whale; and the Holocaust. Through a zoomed-out lens, every action that includes a self-inflicted cost starts to look spiteful, but the category ceases to be meaningful.
Distinct phenomena—envy, sadism, schadenfreude, reckless idealism, world-historical malice—get flattened. Lost in all this is spite’s peculiar emotional texture, its blend of childish vindictiveness and rashness. Recall the toppled birthday cake. Spite is fundamentally petty.
In turning our attention to spite, McCarthy-Jones has identified an important element in the emotional climate of the present. It’s no coincidence that the book’s most spirited sections include a lengthy replay of Brexit (examples of “spite voting”). During the lead-up to Brexit,
Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister of Scotland, warned voters: “Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face.” Some voters thought Britain would be economically worse off if it left the European Union—yet they voted to leave anyway to thumb their noses at the elites in London and the
bureaucrats in Brussels.
The spitefulness of our politics can be plausibly traced to a number of causes: fear and hatred of others; shocks due to technological change; disinformation campaigns by corporations and political actors; the collapse of local communities and institutions; fantasies about a now-irretrievable national past. What leads political communities to reject the common good and instead choose to fight over a shrinking pie (or toppled cake)?
What emerges from the evidence assembled in the book is a picture of spite as part of the corrosive effects of economic inequality. That spite wells up in response to inequality is suggested by the ultimatum game: Low offers provoke spiteful rejections. But the relationship between spite and social stratification is more intricate. Feelings of spite, it turns out, are intimately tied to judgments about status. People often act spitefully, McCarthy-Jones argues, to gain an advantage over a rival. In competitive contexts in which resources are limited, damaging
someone else’s status can rebound to our benefit. Evidence from laboratory games shows that players will often destroy each other’s chance at monetary gain not to restore equality, but to get ahead.
Posing as a victim is easy, as is claiming that one’s efforts to humiliate others are serving the greater good. Thus, our judgments about who needs to be “put in their place” are frequently defective. Spite is a symptom of social breakdown. But it is not a trustworthy guide to fair action.
This ugly feeling is self-multiplying: It tends to lead not toward justice but toward more spite
May 11
The Tocquevillian Descent Into Tyranny
Joshua Charles, Epoch Times, 4.12.21
At the end of his seminal work, “Democracy in America,” Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville offered a stunningly prescient “prophecy” of how democratic institutions could easily fall into a tyranny. Nearly two centuries later, his “prophecy” seems to draw closer and closer to fulfillment every day.
He opens his “prophecy” with this bracing assertion:
“I had noted in my state in the United States that a democratic state of society similar to the American model could lay itself open to the establishment of despotism [the exercise of absolute power, especially in a cruel and oppressive way] with unusual ease … If despotism were to be established in present-day democracies, it would probably assume a different character. It would be more widespread and kinder. It would debase men without tormenting them.”
Freedom is such a normal concept in American thought and rhetoric that the idea that our system could become tyrannical “with unusual ease” makes us skeptical. How could that be? Tocqueville explains how.
He describes a society awash in prosperity and luxury unseen since the beginning of the world. But at the same time, a mass of citizens “turned in upon themselves in a restless search for those petty, vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls.” Each is almost totally disconnected from the rest. “He exists only in himself and for himself,” Tocqueville predicts.
Socially disconnected: check.
Above this mass disconnection stands “an immense and protective power which alone is responsible for looking after their enjoyments and watching over the destiny.” Tocqueville describes this power (the government) as a sort of reverse-patriarchy. Fathers, after all, seek to “prepare men for manhood.” But this government “seeks only to keep them [the citizens] in perpetual childhood.”
Lack of maturity and increased childishness: check.
You see, this is a society of amusement. Its spiritual core is gone. “[the elected government] prefers its citizens to enjoy themselves provided they have only enjoyment in mind,” Tocqueville declares. But there’s a catch: “It works readily for their happiness, but wishes to be the only provider and judge of it.” This government provides and even anticipates their needs, secures their pleasures, and directs their industry. In spine-tingling words, Tocqueville said it ultimately aims to “remove from them entirely the bother of thinking and the troubles of life.”
Intellectually debased and superficial: check.
The end result is that freedom in day-to-day choices is restricted more and more, day after day, as the state “gradually removes autonomy itself from each citizen.”
Society is inundated with laws, rules, and regulations managing every detail of life. Even the ambitious and entrepreneurial struggle to break through them, Tocqueville foresaw. This web of regulations “does not break men’s wills but it does soften, bend, and control them…It does not tyrannize but it inhibits, represses, drains, snuffs out, dulls out so much effort that finally it reduces each nation to nothing more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals with the government as shepherd.”
Stifling economic regulations: check.
Such a system seems to be the opposite of democratic. But ironically, it is the democratic principle itself that leads to it. “They derived consolation,” Tocqueville observes of these future citizens, “from being supervised by thinking that they have chosen their supervisors.” In other words, because they chose their government through their vote, they do not fear its encroachments on liberty. It’s a creature of
their own making after all.
But Tocqueville believed the opposite. Rather than being a creature of the people, such a government gradually makes the people into its creature. Its regulation of every aspect of life “gradually blots out their mind and enfeebles their spirit.” As a result, the people delegate more and more of their ability to choose how they live their lives to the state, whose decision and provision they begin to rely upon even
more than they rely upon themselves.
Yes, they retain the right to vote. But, in arguably the most penetrating statement of his entire career, Tocqueville observed:
“It is, indeed, difficult to imagine how men who have completely given up the habit of self-government could successfully choose those who should do it for them, and no one will be convinced that a liberal, energetic, and prudent
government can ever emerge from the voting of a nation of servants.”
In other words, a nation of individuals who no longer govern themselves can’t be expected to wisely choose those who will govern them. They no longer know what free, virtuous, and wise decision-making is. Therefore, retaining the vote doesn’t achieve them much, since slowly but surely the government they mold begins to mold them.
Unprecedented dependence on government for day-to-day life: check.
Eerily enough, Tocqueville predicted the rise of demagogues who would claim “the defects they see had far more to do with the country’s Constitution than with … the electorate.” Is this not precisely what we have seen in our own day? The people are endlessly flattered, and the Constitution is constantly trashed.
The terminus point described by Tocqueville is chilling:
“The vices of those who govern, and the ineptitude of those governed, would soon bring it to ruin, and the people, tired of its representatives and of itself, would create free institutions or would soon revert to its abasement to one single master.”
This is the unavoidable end for any people who have lost their virtue, their vigilant watch over their institutions, and accepted the erroneous idea that they control a government they’ve become dependent upon. When such a point is reached, there are only two options left: revert to freedom, or the further consolidation of power into fewer and fewer hands—even, perhaps, a single person’s hands.
I pray we are not there yet. But I fear we are much closer than we ever dared to
think.
Joshua Charles is a former White House speechwriter, No. 1 New York Times bestselling author, a historian, and public speaker. He’s been a historical adviser for several documentaries and published books on topics ranging from the Founding Fathers, to Israel, to the role of faith in American history, to the impact of the Bible on human civilization. He is a Tikvah and Philos Fellow and has spoken around the country on topics such as history, politics, faith, and worldview. He is a concert pianist and holds a master’s in government and a law degree.
Joshua Charles, Epoch Times, 4.12.21
At the end of his seminal work, “Democracy in America,” Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville offered a stunningly prescient “prophecy” of how democratic institutions could easily fall into a tyranny. Nearly two centuries later, his “prophecy” seems to draw closer and closer to fulfillment every day.
He opens his “prophecy” with this bracing assertion:
“I had noted in my state in the United States that a democratic state of society similar to the American model could lay itself open to the establishment of despotism [the exercise of absolute power, especially in a cruel and oppressive way] with unusual ease … If despotism were to be established in present-day democracies, it would probably assume a different character. It would be more widespread and kinder. It would debase men without tormenting them.”
Freedom is such a normal concept in American thought and rhetoric that the idea that our system could become tyrannical “with unusual ease” makes us skeptical. How could that be? Tocqueville explains how.
He describes a society awash in prosperity and luxury unseen since the beginning of the world. But at the same time, a mass of citizens “turned in upon themselves in a restless search for those petty, vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls.” Each is almost totally disconnected from the rest. “He exists only in himself and for himself,” Tocqueville predicts.
Socially disconnected: check.
Above this mass disconnection stands “an immense and protective power which alone is responsible for looking after their enjoyments and watching over the destiny.” Tocqueville describes this power (the government) as a sort of reverse-patriarchy. Fathers, after all, seek to “prepare men for manhood.” But this government “seeks only to keep them [the citizens] in perpetual childhood.”
Lack of maturity and increased childishness: check.
You see, this is a society of amusement. Its spiritual core is gone. “[the elected government] prefers its citizens to enjoy themselves provided they have only enjoyment in mind,” Tocqueville declares. But there’s a catch: “It works readily for their happiness, but wishes to be the only provider and judge of it.” This government provides and even anticipates their needs, secures their pleasures, and directs their industry. In spine-tingling words, Tocqueville said it ultimately aims to “remove from them entirely the bother of thinking and the troubles of life.”
Intellectually debased and superficial: check.
The end result is that freedom in day-to-day choices is restricted more and more, day after day, as the state “gradually removes autonomy itself from each citizen.”
Society is inundated with laws, rules, and regulations managing every detail of life. Even the ambitious and entrepreneurial struggle to break through them, Tocqueville foresaw. This web of regulations “does not break men’s wills but it does soften, bend, and control them…It does not tyrannize but it inhibits, represses, drains, snuffs out, dulls out so much effort that finally it reduces each nation to nothing more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals with the government as shepherd.”
Stifling economic regulations: check.
Such a system seems to be the opposite of democratic. But ironically, it is the democratic principle itself that leads to it. “They derived consolation,” Tocqueville observes of these future citizens, “from being supervised by thinking that they have chosen their supervisors.” In other words, because they chose their government through their vote, they do not fear its encroachments on liberty. It’s a creature of
their own making after all.
But Tocqueville believed the opposite. Rather than being a creature of the people, such a government gradually makes the people into its creature. Its regulation of every aspect of life “gradually blots out their mind and enfeebles their spirit.” As a result, the people delegate more and more of their ability to choose how they live their lives to the state, whose decision and provision they begin to rely upon even
more than they rely upon themselves.
Yes, they retain the right to vote. But, in arguably the most penetrating statement of his entire career, Tocqueville observed:
“It is, indeed, difficult to imagine how men who have completely given up the habit of self-government could successfully choose those who should do it for them, and no one will be convinced that a liberal, energetic, and prudent
government can ever emerge from the voting of a nation of servants.”
In other words, a nation of individuals who no longer govern themselves can’t be expected to wisely choose those who will govern them. They no longer know what free, virtuous, and wise decision-making is. Therefore, retaining the vote doesn’t achieve them much, since slowly but surely the government they mold begins to mold them.
Unprecedented dependence on government for day-to-day life: check.
Eerily enough, Tocqueville predicted the rise of demagogues who would claim “the defects they see had far more to do with the country’s Constitution than with … the electorate.” Is this not precisely what we have seen in our own day? The people are endlessly flattered, and the Constitution is constantly trashed.
The terminus point described by Tocqueville is chilling:
“The vices of those who govern, and the ineptitude of those governed, would soon bring it to ruin, and the people, tired of its representatives and of itself, would create free institutions or would soon revert to its abasement to one single master.”
This is the unavoidable end for any people who have lost their virtue, their vigilant watch over their institutions, and accepted the erroneous idea that they control a government they’ve become dependent upon. When such a point is reached, there are only two options left: revert to freedom, or the further consolidation of power into fewer and fewer hands—even, perhaps, a single person’s hands.
I pray we are not there yet. But I fear we are much closer than we ever dared to
think.
Joshua Charles is a former White House speechwriter, No. 1 New York Times bestselling author, a historian, and public speaker. He’s been a historical adviser for several documentaries and published books on topics ranging from the Founding Fathers, to Israel, to the role of faith in American history, to the impact of the Bible on human civilization. He is a Tikvah and Philos Fellow and has spoken around the country on topics such as history, politics, faith, and worldview. He is a concert pianist and holds a master’s in government and a law degree.
May 4
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.
April 27
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.
April 20
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.
April 13
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."
April 6
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
March 30
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
March 23
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.
March 16
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.
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.
March 9
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
March 2
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.
Tuesday, February 23
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.
Tuesday, February 16
Is Authenticity Enough for Christian Apologetics?
Ted Turnau, Christianity Today Book Review 2.5.21
Pastor’s note: for today’s reading, I wanted to give a brief description of two words used in the article – apologetics and authenticity. Apologetics is quite literally defense of the faith; the Greek word apologia means “defense” as a lawyer gives at a trial. Authenticity, in a Christian sense, is what feels true to one on the inside. The opposite end of authenticity is Biblical authority/truth. On one side there is the inner circle of truth – it feels true so it has to be true. The other side is the exterior circle truth of biblical authority – the Bible says it’s true so it has to be true.
Justin Bailey’s Reimagining Apologetics: The Beauty of Faith in a Secular Age highlights a problem that plagues certain forms of Christian persuasion: the failure to take imagination seriously. For some Christians, apologetics is a matter of dry-as-the-desert technical arguments or of intellectually arm-wrestling non-Christians into submission. Add an evangelical ethos hopelessly enamored with perpetual culture-warring, and you have a profound problem in Christian witness.
Bailey begins by noting that, according to philosopher Charles Taylor, we live in a world where everyone assumes that ultimate answers lie within. We follow what resonates with our inner life. Therefore, the wise apologist who wants to reach a non-Christian engages not with what is
(externally, objectively) true, but with what (internally, subjectively) moves him or her emotionally and aesthetically. Not truth, but beauty. Not rationality, but authenticity. The key lies with the imagination. We must provide space, Bailey writes, for non-Christians to “feel their way into faith.”
After providing a brief philosophy and theology of the imagination, Bailey turns to novelists Marilynne Robinson (of Gilead fame) and George MacDonald (who inspired C. S. Lewis) as models of what such engagement would look like. They created imaginary worlds that allowed
non-Christians to see through the eyes of faith. He then applies his findings to apologetical method based on a threefold model of the imagination: sensing, seeing, and shaping.
Sensing prioritizes the aesthetics of belief, emphasizing what non-Christians would find beautiful and believable.
Seeing invites them to try on a Christian vision — a larger, “thicker” view of reality.
Shaping invites them to a “poetic participation” that encourages them to situate their own life-projects within God’s redemption project. By suspending the question of truth to pursue beauty and imaginative resonance, Bailey argues, apologetics will appeal to those alienated from God but seeking authenticity.
Authenticity and Authority
Many conservative Christians, and apologists in particular, have been culturally tone-deaf and have made themselves (ourselves) an obnoxious presence that few non-Christians are interested in engaging. But Bailey’s book is part of a growing movement that emphasizes beauty and imaginative resonance. Sound missiology (the study of religious [typically Christian] missions and their methods and purposes) seeks to contextualize the gospel in ways that make sense to a particular people group. In this case, the target group is those of our own culture alienated from Jesus.
That said, I do have concerns. There is always the risk that contextualization will lead to a compromised message—a gospel paganized in translation. Bailey is well aware of these risks, but I am concerned he never fully reckons with the risks of contextualizing the gospel to the
particular social imaginary that prevails in today’s Western world. Authenticity necessarily places the self first and foremost, judging all beliefs and lifestyles by the standard of “What feels right for me?” As Bailey writes, we all must take “authentic ownership of our lives,” and the job
of apologetics is to help create ample spaces in which non-Christians can create something attuned to the beauty that God has created, in which God is somehow present, beckoning them forward.
If I had to pinpoint a central cause for concern in Reimagining Apologetics, it would be the author’s stance on biblical authority. Though Bailey affirms biblical authority occasionally, it is de facto marginalized in his actual methodology. He never truly allows the Bible to delimit the
imaginative space legitimately available to the non-Christian in his or her exploration. Why? Because when appealing to those seeking authenticity, beauty must be considered as separable from truth in the interest of not disrupting the fragile “feeling into faith” process. In fact, Bailey decries what he calls contemporary apologists’ “fixation on truth.”
This has specific consequences for faith. Both of Bailey’s apologetical role models, MacDonald and Robinson, denied that God would eternally punish anyone who rejected him. They were unable to quite believe in a God who was less generous and gracious than they imagined him to
be. And Bailey never corrects them, as if conforming God to our imaginary image of him is somehow justified. This is treacherously close to inviting non-Christians to violate the first and second commandments (I am the Lord God; take no other gods but me) and presenting that as a
genuine life of faith. Even for the most mature Christians, the way God is portrayed in the Bible won’t always appear beautiful or good. The real journey of faith involves spiritual wrestling to conform our imaginations to the reality of God and God’s character as revealed in Scripture.
Submitting one’s imagination and will to someone else is always a struggle, but Christians simply don’t have the license to do otherwise and call it genuine (“authentic”) faith.
Submitting to another’s authority is anathema to the ethos of authenticity. Again, Bailey understands this, noting that we must orient and “reframe” the non-Christian’s quest within God’s project, but I am unconvinced that he quite squares that circle. In essence, he is using the
textures and channels of authenticity (what resonates with the seeker) to move seekers past and out of authenticity toward the willing, joyful acceptance of an authority and life-direction not of their own. But I remain unsure that Bailey even acknowledges the contradiction, assuming
instead that, at its best, Christian faith dovetails seamlessly with the yearning for authenticity.
Competing Authenticities
Further, we live in a world of multiple competing authenticities. Simply showing the Christian vision’s “thickness” will not suffice. Tara Isabella Burton’s recent book Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World explores a dazzling array of “intuitional” religions that have lured
people away from traditional religions in the age of the internet, with examples ranging from online fan cultures to occult and “wellness” movements to political ideologies left and right. All of these communities are super “thick” in the imaginations of their adherents. They resonate profoundly within the minds and lives of their followers. How are we to differentiate between competing thick imaginative visions?
This is where “presuppositional” apologetics – which advances Christian faith as the basis for all thought – gives important guidance. Bailey dismisses it in one footnote as a form of Scriptural “foundationalism” focused not on rational truthfulness, like classical apologetics, but on biblical truth. This struck me as both unfair and curious, given that his own imaginative apologetics (sensing/seeing/shaping) bears a striking structural resemblance to the presuppositional argument: trying on the non-Christian’s perspective, showing how it falls apart, then inviting the non-Christian to see reality through Christian eyes.
A few years ago, I taught a college student who confessed to me that my class convinced her she wasn’t a Christian. Intrigued, I asked to discuss her revelation over coffee. She told me she used to pray, and she figured this kind of behavior marked her out as a Christian. But that changed when she took my comparative worldviews class, which starts with Christian theism. She learned that God isn’t a vague idea but a person with specific traits and desires. She didn’t like that at all, and so she stopped seeing herself as Christian. We talked, and I tried to persuade her both that God exists and that this was something to celebrate. I’ve always felt strange about that exchange. One the one hand, that outcome seemed inevitable: God is who he is, and I couldn’t have denied that in my teaching. On the other hand, it felt like I was doing the opposite of what I should have done. Had I read Reimagining Apologetics before those conversations, I would have spent more time exploring why she prayed, how it made her feel, and what resonated with her about connecting with God.
Ted Turnau teaches culture, religion, and media studies at Anglo-American University in Prague, Czech Republic. He is a co-author of The Pop Culture Parent: Helping Kids Engage Their World for Christ.
Ted Turnau, Christianity Today Book Review 2.5.21
Pastor’s note: for today’s reading, I wanted to give a brief description of two words used in the article – apologetics and authenticity. Apologetics is quite literally defense of the faith; the Greek word apologia means “defense” as a lawyer gives at a trial. Authenticity, in a Christian sense, is what feels true to one on the inside. The opposite end of authenticity is Biblical authority/truth. On one side there is the inner circle of truth – it feels true so it has to be true. The other side is the exterior circle truth of biblical authority – the Bible says it’s true so it has to be true.
Justin Bailey’s Reimagining Apologetics: The Beauty of Faith in a Secular Age highlights a problem that plagues certain forms of Christian persuasion: the failure to take imagination seriously. For some Christians, apologetics is a matter of dry-as-the-desert technical arguments or of intellectually arm-wrestling non-Christians into submission. Add an evangelical ethos hopelessly enamored with perpetual culture-warring, and you have a profound problem in Christian witness.
Bailey begins by noting that, according to philosopher Charles Taylor, we live in a world where everyone assumes that ultimate answers lie within. We follow what resonates with our inner life. Therefore, the wise apologist who wants to reach a non-Christian engages not with what is
(externally, objectively) true, but with what (internally, subjectively) moves him or her emotionally and aesthetically. Not truth, but beauty. Not rationality, but authenticity. The key lies with the imagination. We must provide space, Bailey writes, for non-Christians to “feel their way into faith.”
After providing a brief philosophy and theology of the imagination, Bailey turns to novelists Marilynne Robinson (of Gilead fame) and George MacDonald (who inspired C. S. Lewis) as models of what such engagement would look like. They created imaginary worlds that allowed
non-Christians to see through the eyes of faith. He then applies his findings to apologetical method based on a threefold model of the imagination: sensing, seeing, and shaping.
Sensing prioritizes the aesthetics of belief, emphasizing what non-Christians would find beautiful and believable.
Seeing invites them to try on a Christian vision — a larger, “thicker” view of reality.
Shaping invites them to a “poetic participation” that encourages them to situate their own life-projects within God’s redemption project. By suspending the question of truth to pursue beauty and imaginative resonance, Bailey argues, apologetics will appeal to those alienated from God but seeking authenticity.
Authenticity and Authority
Many conservative Christians, and apologists in particular, have been culturally tone-deaf and have made themselves (ourselves) an obnoxious presence that few non-Christians are interested in engaging. But Bailey’s book is part of a growing movement that emphasizes beauty and imaginative resonance. Sound missiology (the study of religious [typically Christian] missions and their methods and purposes) seeks to contextualize the gospel in ways that make sense to a particular people group. In this case, the target group is those of our own culture alienated from Jesus.
That said, I do have concerns. There is always the risk that contextualization will lead to a compromised message—a gospel paganized in translation. Bailey is well aware of these risks, but I am concerned he never fully reckons with the risks of contextualizing the gospel to the
particular social imaginary that prevails in today’s Western world. Authenticity necessarily places the self first and foremost, judging all beliefs and lifestyles by the standard of “What feels right for me?” As Bailey writes, we all must take “authentic ownership of our lives,” and the job
of apologetics is to help create ample spaces in which non-Christians can create something attuned to the beauty that God has created, in which God is somehow present, beckoning them forward.
If I had to pinpoint a central cause for concern in Reimagining Apologetics, it would be the author’s stance on biblical authority. Though Bailey affirms biblical authority occasionally, it is de facto marginalized in his actual methodology. He never truly allows the Bible to delimit the
imaginative space legitimately available to the non-Christian in his or her exploration. Why? Because when appealing to those seeking authenticity, beauty must be considered as separable from truth in the interest of not disrupting the fragile “feeling into faith” process. In fact, Bailey decries what he calls contemporary apologists’ “fixation on truth.”
This has specific consequences for faith. Both of Bailey’s apologetical role models, MacDonald and Robinson, denied that God would eternally punish anyone who rejected him. They were unable to quite believe in a God who was less generous and gracious than they imagined him to
be. And Bailey never corrects them, as if conforming God to our imaginary image of him is somehow justified. This is treacherously close to inviting non-Christians to violate the first and second commandments (I am the Lord God; take no other gods but me) and presenting that as a
genuine life of faith. Even for the most mature Christians, the way God is portrayed in the Bible won’t always appear beautiful or good. The real journey of faith involves spiritual wrestling to conform our imaginations to the reality of God and God’s character as revealed in Scripture.
Submitting one’s imagination and will to someone else is always a struggle, but Christians simply don’t have the license to do otherwise and call it genuine (“authentic”) faith.
Submitting to another’s authority is anathema to the ethos of authenticity. Again, Bailey understands this, noting that we must orient and “reframe” the non-Christian’s quest within God’s project, but I am unconvinced that he quite squares that circle. In essence, he is using the
textures and channels of authenticity (what resonates with the seeker) to move seekers past and out of authenticity toward the willing, joyful acceptance of an authority and life-direction not of their own. But I remain unsure that Bailey even acknowledges the contradiction, assuming
instead that, at its best, Christian faith dovetails seamlessly with the yearning for authenticity.
Competing Authenticities
Further, we live in a world of multiple competing authenticities. Simply showing the Christian vision’s “thickness” will not suffice. Tara Isabella Burton’s recent book Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World explores a dazzling array of “intuitional” religions that have lured
people away from traditional religions in the age of the internet, with examples ranging from online fan cultures to occult and “wellness” movements to political ideologies left and right. All of these communities are super “thick” in the imaginations of their adherents. They resonate profoundly within the minds and lives of their followers. How are we to differentiate between competing thick imaginative visions?
This is where “presuppositional” apologetics – which advances Christian faith as the basis for all thought – gives important guidance. Bailey dismisses it in one footnote as a form of Scriptural “foundationalism” focused not on rational truthfulness, like classical apologetics, but on biblical truth. This struck me as both unfair and curious, given that his own imaginative apologetics (sensing/seeing/shaping) bears a striking structural resemblance to the presuppositional argument: trying on the non-Christian’s perspective, showing how it falls apart, then inviting the non-Christian to see reality through Christian eyes.
A few years ago, I taught a college student who confessed to me that my class convinced her she wasn’t a Christian. Intrigued, I asked to discuss her revelation over coffee. She told me she used to pray, and she figured this kind of behavior marked her out as a Christian. But that changed when she took my comparative worldviews class, which starts with Christian theism. She learned that God isn’t a vague idea but a person with specific traits and desires. She didn’t like that at all, and so she stopped seeing herself as Christian. We talked, and I tried to persuade her both that God exists and that this was something to celebrate. I’ve always felt strange about that exchange. One the one hand, that outcome seemed inevitable: God is who he is, and I couldn’t have denied that in my teaching. On the other hand, it felt like I was doing the opposite of what I should have done. Had I read Reimagining Apologetics before those conversations, I would have spent more time exploring why she prayed, how it made her feel, and what resonated with her about connecting with God.
Ted Turnau teaches culture, religion, and media studies at Anglo-American University in Prague, Czech Republic. He is a co-author of The Pop Culture Parent: Helping Kids Engage Their World for Christ.
Tuesday, February 9
Have you been on the receiving end of ageism? It appears that the pandemic, and the roll-out of the vaccinations, have not reduced the incidents of ageism but may have increased it. Our author for next week's reading suggests that ageism depends upon where you live. Incidentally, she didn't mention Florida in her article but the map shows we are in the darkest shaded areas at 45%.
If you have felt the effects of ageism, I'm wondering how you reacted and counteracted it. If you are wondering what the spiritual side of this is, I hope you will join me in next week's discussion.
May God bless you this week,
- Dave
Worried About Ageism?
Clare Ansberry, Wall Street Journal 2.1.21
Are you biased against older people? It may depend, in part, on where you live.
A recent study of data collected from all 50 states found that implicit bias—a subconscious negative attitude—against older people was most prevalent in the country’s southeastern and northeastern states, including New Jersey, the Carolinas and Florida. The findings were based on
responses of 803,000 people ages 15 to 94 who completed a test involving photos of young and old people and words associated with those images.
A second part of the study overlaid age-bias results with each state’s health data, looking at things like diet, smoking and obesity. Those states that ranked high in implicit age bias had a larger percentage of adults with poor health and higher per capita Medicare spending.
“When considering what it is like to grow old in the United States, where people live matters,” writes Hannah Giasson, a research fellow at Stanford University and lead author of the study, which was published in July in the European Journal of Social Psychology.
Subconscious negative attitudes toward older people were more prevalent in southeastern and northeastern states than in other regions, research showed. Montana scored lowest at 39.6% New Jersey scored highest at 47.9%
Researchers didn’t determine why certain states showed more bias. One theory is that in states with a large population of retirees, there may be more tension between young and old over how government dollars are spent on things like housing, medical facilities and support networks, says William Chopik, an assistant professor of psychology at Michigan State University and one of the authors of the study. Popular retirement destinations also often have specific and separate neighborhoods, which may not encourage positive interactions between younger and older people, allowing stereotypes to linger, says co-author Dr. Giasson.
Understanding attitudes toward older adults is especially important during the pandemic, since ageism could affect how elders are treated. A study published in November found that survey respondents, who were more hostile toward older people and considered them to be a drain on the economy and health-care system, washed their hands less frequently and didn’t believe in social distancing.
“The attitude is: ‘I don’t care. I’m not going to change. It’s an older person’s problem,’ ” says Michael Vale, a graduate student at the University of Akron and one of the authors of the study. Survey respondents who fell into the “benevolently ageist” category of being protective but
patronizing tended to be more fearful of the pandemic’s impact, washed their hands and felt strongly about the need to social distance. The study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, examined the results of a survey conducted in April and May of 335 people between the ages of
18 and 80.
Another study, published in November by the Lancet, analyzed Twitter posts about Covid-19 and older adults in the 10 days following the declaration of the pandemic. It found that nearly one-fourth of the tweets played down the importance of the virus because it was deadlier among older individuals.
Concerns about ageism in the coronavirus era are mounting. The American Psychological Association recently posted tips for its own members on avoiding bias, including “being self aware,” about their language, attitudes and assumptions. Previous research has identified hot
spots in the U.S. for Alzheimer’s disease.
“With the pandemic there has been a parallel outbreak of ageism,” wrote a group of social scientists who specialize in aging for a piece in the Journals of Gerontology. They cited references to people over 70 as being uniformly helpless and discussions about chronological age
being used to determine who gets medical care. Furthermore, many older people might internalize negative impressions themselves and believe they are not worth medical care, says Becca Levy, an epidemiologist and social psychologist at Yale University who has been
researching age stereotypes since the 1990s.
In a research paper published in the December Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, she found that people 65 and older who had negative age stereotypes didn’t think older persons who were “extremely sick with Covid-19” should go to the hospital. “It suggests not feeling
worthwhile,” she says.
Another possible factor might be that older people tend to be “generative” and concerned more about their children and grandchildren getting medical care than themselves, she says. “It’s not necessarily the result of ageism and internalized feelings about unworthiness, but about what to give to grandchildren,” she says. “It gets complicated.”
The good news, she says, is that attitudes can change, which in turn can improve health. Older persons with positive age stereotypes were 44% more likely to fully recover from severe disability and had a lower risk of developing dementia than those with negative age stereotypes,
according to her previous research.
Knowing the geography of ageism, as represented in the state study, is important, she says, because it identifies where it needs to be challenged. In the implicit age bias study of the 50 states, researchers looked at test results in which respondents associated photos of young and old people with positive words, like beautiful, or negative words, like nasty. If they were faster to pair a young face with a positive word than an old face, they were considered having an implicit preference for young people.
Colorado scored low in implicit bias, which doesn’t surprise Don Roll, an 82-year-old with four children and six grandchildren who lives outside Denver. Recently, he started using a cane because his vision has deteriorated. In grocery stores, as he taps down the aisles, he says people ask if he needs help finding anything. “It’s not that they are being condescending. They have been really nice about it,” he says. “Maybe they realize that one day, if they make it that far, they will be 82 as well.”
If you have felt the effects of ageism, I'm wondering how you reacted and counteracted it. If you are wondering what the spiritual side of this is, I hope you will join me in next week's discussion.
May God bless you this week,
- Dave
Worried About Ageism?
Clare Ansberry, Wall Street Journal 2.1.21
Are you biased against older people? It may depend, in part, on where you live.
A recent study of data collected from all 50 states found that implicit bias—a subconscious negative attitude—against older people was most prevalent in the country’s southeastern and northeastern states, including New Jersey, the Carolinas and Florida. The findings were based on
responses of 803,000 people ages 15 to 94 who completed a test involving photos of young and old people and words associated with those images.
A second part of the study overlaid age-bias results with each state’s health data, looking at things like diet, smoking and obesity. Those states that ranked high in implicit age bias had a larger percentage of adults with poor health and higher per capita Medicare spending.
“When considering what it is like to grow old in the United States, where people live matters,” writes Hannah Giasson, a research fellow at Stanford University and lead author of the study, which was published in July in the European Journal of Social Psychology.
Subconscious negative attitudes toward older people were more prevalent in southeastern and northeastern states than in other regions, research showed. Montana scored lowest at 39.6% New Jersey scored highest at 47.9%
Researchers didn’t determine why certain states showed more bias. One theory is that in states with a large population of retirees, there may be more tension between young and old over how government dollars are spent on things like housing, medical facilities and support networks, says William Chopik, an assistant professor of psychology at Michigan State University and one of the authors of the study. Popular retirement destinations also often have specific and separate neighborhoods, which may not encourage positive interactions between younger and older people, allowing stereotypes to linger, says co-author Dr. Giasson.
Understanding attitudes toward older adults is especially important during the pandemic, since ageism could affect how elders are treated. A study published in November found that survey respondents, who were more hostile toward older people and considered them to be a drain on the economy and health-care system, washed their hands less frequently and didn’t believe in social distancing.
“The attitude is: ‘I don’t care. I’m not going to change. It’s an older person’s problem,’ ” says Michael Vale, a graduate student at the University of Akron and one of the authors of the study. Survey respondents who fell into the “benevolently ageist” category of being protective but
patronizing tended to be more fearful of the pandemic’s impact, washed their hands and felt strongly about the need to social distance. The study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, examined the results of a survey conducted in April and May of 335 people between the ages of
18 and 80.
Another study, published in November by the Lancet, analyzed Twitter posts about Covid-19 and older adults in the 10 days following the declaration of the pandemic. It found that nearly one-fourth of the tweets played down the importance of the virus because it was deadlier among older individuals.
Concerns about ageism in the coronavirus era are mounting. The American Psychological Association recently posted tips for its own members on avoiding bias, including “being self aware,” about their language, attitudes and assumptions. Previous research has identified hot
spots in the U.S. for Alzheimer’s disease.
“With the pandemic there has been a parallel outbreak of ageism,” wrote a group of social scientists who specialize in aging for a piece in the Journals of Gerontology. They cited references to people over 70 as being uniformly helpless and discussions about chronological age
being used to determine who gets medical care. Furthermore, many older people might internalize negative impressions themselves and believe they are not worth medical care, says Becca Levy, an epidemiologist and social psychologist at Yale University who has been
researching age stereotypes since the 1990s.
In a research paper published in the December Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, she found that people 65 and older who had negative age stereotypes didn’t think older persons who were “extremely sick with Covid-19” should go to the hospital. “It suggests not feeling
worthwhile,” she says.
Another possible factor might be that older people tend to be “generative” and concerned more about their children and grandchildren getting medical care than themselves, she says. “It’s not necessarily the result of ageism and internalized feelings about unworthiness, but about what to give to grandchildren,” she says. “It gets complicated.”
The good news, she says, is that attitudes can change, which in turn can improve health. Older persons with positive age stereotypes were 44% more likely to fully recover from severe disability and had a lower risk of developing dementia than those with negative age stereotypes,
according to her previous research.
Knowing the geography of ageism, as represented in the state study, is important, she says, because it identifies where it needs to be challenged. In the implicit age bias study of the 50 states, researchers looked at test results in which respondents associated photos of young and old people with positive words, like beautiful, or negative words, like nasty. If they were faster to pair a young face with a positive word than an old face, they were considered having an implicit preference for young people.
Colorado scored low in implicit bias, which doesn’t surprise Don Roll, an 82-year-old with four children and six grandchildren who lives outside Denver. Recently, he started using a cane because his vision has deteriorated. In grocery stores, as he taps down the aisles, he says people ask if he needs help finding anything. “It’s not that they are being condescending. They have been really nice about it,” he says. “Maybe they realize that one day, if they make it that far, they will be 82 as well.”
Tuesday, February 2
So it appears the pandemic will last longer than we hoped. The discussion for this week will be about happiness and Arthur Brooks' article about the two types of happy people. I'll be interested to see how this fits into social distancing and the like. And, I imagine you will wonder how happiness fits into any sort of spirituality. I look forward to talking with you about this.
- Dave
There Are Two Kinds of Happy People
Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic 1.28.21
THESE DAYS, we are offered a dizzying variety of secrets to happiness. Some are ways of life: Give to others; practice gratitude. Others are minor hacks: Eat kale; play a board game. Some are simply an effort to make a buck.
I have found that most of the serious approaches to happiness can be mapped onto two ancient traditions, promoted by the Greek philosophers Epicurus and Epictetus. In a nutshell, they focus on enjoyment and virtue, respectively. Individuals typically gravitate toward one style or the other, and many major philosophies have followed one path or the other for about two millennia. Understanding where you sit between the two can tell you a lot about yourself—including your happiness weak points—and help you create strategies for a more balanced approach to life.
Epicurus (341–270 B.C.) led an eponymous school of thought—Epicureanism—that believed a happy life requires two things: ataraxia (freedom from mental disturbance) and aponia (the absence of physical pain). His philosophy might be characterized as, “If it is scary or painful,
work to avoid it.” Epicureans see discomfort as generally negative, and thus the elimination of threats and problems as the key to a happier life. Don’t get the impression that I am saying they are lazy or unmotivated—quite the contrary, in many cases. But they don’t see enduring fear and pain as inherently necessary or beneficial, and they focus instead on enjoying life.
Epictetus (c. 50–c. 135 A.D.) was one of the most prominent Stoic philosophers, who believed happiness comes from finding life’s purpose, accepting one’s fate, and behaving morally regardless of the personal cost. His philosophy could be summarized as, “Grow a spine and do
your duty.” People who follow a Stoic style see happiness as something earned through a good deal of sacrifice. Not surprisingly, Stoics are generally hard workers who live for the future and are willing to incur substantial personal cost to meet their life’s purpose (as they see it) without much complaining. They see the key to happiness as working through pain and fear, not actively avoiding them.
Epicureans and Stoics can coexist, and even cohabitate (my wife and I have such a mixed marriage). But in my experience, Stoics and Epicureans tend to look down on one another, and appear to have been doing so for about as long as both philosophies have existed. The 3rd-century biographer Diogenes Laërtius wrote that “Epictetus calls [Epicurus a] preacher of effeminacy and showers abuse on him.” While there’s no historical record of it, I can easily imagine Epicurus responding to Epictetus, “You totally need to chill out.”
For roughly 2,000 years, philosophers have asked which approach leads to greater happiness and a better life. My purpose here is different. Both views have virtues and weaknesses. I want to know what each of us, given our natural tendency toward one of the approaches, can learn and adopt from the other.
FOR EPICURUS, unhappiness came from negative thoughts, including needless guilt, fear of things we can’t control, and a focus on the inevitable unpleasant parts of life. The solution was to banish them from the mind. To this end, he proposed a “four-part cure”: Don’t fear God; don’t worry about death; what is good is easy to get (by lowering our expectations for what we need to be happy); what is terrible is easy to endure (by concentrating on pleasant things even in the midst of suffering). This is made all the easier when we surround ourselves with friendly people in a peaceful environment.
Epicurus promoted hedonia, from which we derive the word hedonism. However, he would not have recognized our current usage of the term. The secret to banishing negative thoughts, according to Epicurus, is not mindless debauchery—despite the baseless rumors that he led wild parties and orgies, he taught that thoughtlessly grabbing easy worldly pleasures is a mistake, because ultimately they don’t satisfy. Instead, reason was Epicurus’s best weapon against the blues. For example, here is the mantra he suggests we tell ourselves when the fear of death strikes: “Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it
does come, we no longer exist.”
In contrast to hedonia, the Stoic approach is known as eudaimonia, which might be defined as a life devoted to our greatest potential in service of our highest ideals. Stoicism is characterized by the principles of naturalism and moralism—changing the things we can to make life better while also accepting the things we can’t change. (The “Serenity Prayer” is very Stoic.) “Don’t demand that things happen as you wish,” Epictetus wrote in The Enchiridion, “but wish that they happen as they do happen, and you will go on well.”
Moralism is the principle that moral virtue is to be defined and followed for its own sake. “Tell yourself, first of all, what kind of man you want to be,” Epictetus wrote in his Discourses, “and then go ahead with what you are doing.” In other words, create a code of virtuous conduct for
yourself and live by it, with no loopholes for convenience.
Epicureans and Stoics are encouraged to focus their attention on different aspects of life—and death. Epicurus’s philosophy suggested that we should think intently about happiness, while for Stoics, the paradox of happiness is that to attain it, we must forget about it; with luck, happiness will come as we pursue life’s purpose. Meanwhile, Epicurus encourages us to disregard death while we are alive, and Epictetus insists that we confront it and ponder it regularly, much like the maranasati meditation in Buddhism, in which monks contemplate their own deaths and stages of decay.
PEOPLE HAVE ARGUED for centuries about which approach is better for happiness, but they largely talk past one another. In truth, each pursues different aspects of happiness: Epicurus’s style brings pleasure and enjoyment; Epictetus’s method delivers meaning and purpose. As
happiness scholars note, a good blend of these things is likeliest to deliver a truly happy life. Too much of one—a life of trivial enjoyment or one of grim determination—will not produce a life well lived, as most of us see it.
The big question is, therefore, how people can manufacture a good blend in their lives between the two approaches. Here are three ideas.
1. KNOW THYSELF.
This expression is one of the Delphic maxims, carved into the pronaos of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in ancient Greece. It acknowledges the fundamental truth that we can’t make forward progress in life if we don’t know where we are situated right now. Answering the question thus starts with an informal but honest answer to this question: When my mood is low, do I naturally look to increase my level of pleasure and enjoyment, or do I focus on meaning and purpose in my life? The former is a sign that you tend toward being an Epicurean, the latter that you are more of a Stoic.
2. BEEF UP THE OTHER SIDE.
The key to blending enjoyment and meaning is not to suppress what you have, but to bolster what you lack. Once you have situated yourself on the spectrum, you can formulate a strategy to strengthen the discipline you are missing (assuming that you’re not in the middle already).
At the end of each day, you might examine the events you experienced, and ask yourself harmonizing questions. For example:
3. BUILD A HAPPINESS PORTFOLIO THAT USES BOTH APPROACHES.
Finally, it is important to pursue life goals in which each happiness approach reinforces the other. That portfolio is simple, and I have written about it before: Make sure your life includes faith, family, friendship, and work in which you earn your success and serve others. Each of
these elements flexes both the Stoic and the Epicurean muscles: All four require that we be fully present in an Epicurean sense and that we also work hard and adhere to strong commitments in a Stoic sense.
So to all you Stoics: Take the night off. And to all you Epicureans: Time to get back to work.
ARTHUR C. BROOKS is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a professor of the practice of public leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, a professor of management practice at the Harvard Business School, and host of the podcast The Art of Happiness With Arthur Brooks.
- Dave
There Are Two Kinds of Happy People
Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic 1.28.21
THESE DAYS, we are offered a dizzying variety of secrets to happiness. Some are ways of life: Give to others; practice gratitude. Others are minor hacks: Eat kale; play a board game. Some are simply an effort to make a buck.
I have found that most of the serious approaches to happiness can be mapped onto two ancient traditions, promoted by the Greek philosophers Epicurus and Epictetus. In a nutshell, they focus on enjoyment and virtue, respectively. Individuals typically gravitate toward one style or the other, and many major philosophies have followed one path or the other for about two millennia. Understanding where you sit between the two can tell you a lot about yourself—including your happiness weak points—and help you create strategies for a more balanced approach to life.
Epicurus (341–270 B.C.) led an eponymous school of thought—Epicureanism—that believed a happy life requires two things: ataraxia (freedom from mental disturbance) and aponia (the absence of physical pain). His philosophy might be characterized as, “If it is scary or painful,
work to avoid it.” Epicureans see discomfort as generally negative, and thus the elimination of threats and problems as the key to a happier life. Don’t get the impression that I am saying they are lazy or unmotivated—quite the contrary, in many cases. But they don’t see enduring fear and pain as inherently necessary or beneficial, and they focus instead on enjoying life.
Epictetus (c. 50–c. 135 A.D.) was one of the most prominent Stoic philosophers, who believed happiness comes from finding life’s purpose, accepting one’s fate, and behaving morally regardless of the personal cost. His philosophy could be summarized as, “Grow a spine and do
your duty.” People who follow a Stoic style see happiness as something earned through a good deal of sacrifice. Not surprisingly, Stoics are generally hard workers who live for the future and are willing to incur substantial personal cost to meet their life’s purpose (as they see it) without much complaining. They see the key to happiness as working through pain and fear, not actively avoiding them.
Epicureans and Stoics can coexist, and even cohabitate (my wife and I have such a mixed marriage). But in my experience, Stoics and Epicureans tend to look down on one another, and appear to have been doing so for about as long as both philosophies have existed. The 3rd-century biographer Diogenes Laërtius wrote that “Epictetus calls [Epicurus a] preacher of effeminacy and showers abuse on him.” While there’s no historical record of it, I can easily imagine Epicurus responding to Epictetus, “You totally need to chill out.”
For roughly 2,000 years, philosophers have asked which approach leads to greater happiness and a better life. My purpose here is different. Both views have virtues and weaknesses. I want to know what each of us, given our natural tendency toward one of the approaches, can learn and adopt from the other.
FOR EPICURUS, unhappiness came from negative thoughts, including needless guilt, fear of things we can’t control, and a focus on the inevitable unpleasant parts of life. The solution was to banish them from the mind. To this end, he proposed a “four-part cure”: Don’t fear God; don’t worry about death; what is good is easy to get (by lowering our expectations for what we need to be happy); what is terrible is easy to endure (by concentrating on pleasant things even in the midst of suffering). This is made all the easier when we surround ourselves with friendly people in a peaceful environment.
Epicurus promoted hedonia, from which we derive the word hedonism. However, he would not have recognized our current usage of the term. The secret to banishing negative thoughts, according to Epicurus, is not mindless debauchery—despite the baseless rumors that he led wild parties and orgies, he taught that thoughtlessly grabbing easy worldly pleasures is a mistake, because ultimately they don’t satisfy. Instead, reason was Epicurus’s best weapon against the blues. For example, here is the mantra he suggests we tell ourselves when the fear of death strikes: “Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it
does come, we no longer exist.”
In contrast to hedonia, the Stoic approach is known as eudaimonia, which might be defined as a life devoted to our greatest potential in service of our highest ideals. Stoicism is characterized by the principles of naturalism and moralism—changing the things we can to make life better while also accepting the things we can’t change. (The “Serenity Prayer” is very Stoic.) “Don’t demand that things happen as you wish,” Epictetus wrote in The Enchiridion, “but wish that they happen as they do happen, and you will go on well.”
Moralism is the principle that moral virtue is to be defined and followed for its own sake. “Tell yourself, first of all, what kind of man you want to be,” Epictetus wrote in his Discourses, “and then go ahead with what you are doing.” In other words, create a code of virtuous conduct for
yourself and live by it, with no loopholes for convenience.
Epicureans and Stoics are encouraged to focus their attention on different aspects of life—and death. Epicurus’s philosophy suggested that we should think intently about happiness, while for Stoics, the paradox of happiness is that to attain it, we must forget about it; with luck, happiness will come as we pursue life’s purpose. Meanwhile, Epicurus encourages us to disregard death while we are alive, and Epictetus insists that we confront it and ponder it regularly, much like the maranasati meditation in Buddhism, in which monks contemplate their own deaths and stages of decay.
PEOPLE HAVE ARGUED for centuries about which approach is better for happiness, but they largely talk past one another. In truth, each pursues different aspects of happiness: Epicurus’s style brings pleasure and enjoyment; Epictetus’s method delivers meaning and purpose. As
happiness scholars note, a good blend of these things is likeliest to deliver a truly happy life. Too much of one—a life of trivial enjoyment or one of grim determination—will not produce a life well lived, as most of us see it.
The big question is, therefore, how people can manufacture a good blend in their lives between the two approaches. Here are three ideas.
1. KNOW THYSELF.
This expression is one of the Delphic maxims, carved into the pronaos of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in ancient Greece. It acknowledges the fundamental truth that we can’t make forward progress in life if we don’t know where we are situated right now. Answering the question thus starts with an informal but honest answer to this question: When my mood is low, do I naturally look to increase my level of pleasure and enjoyment, or do I focus on meaning and purpose in my life? The former is a sign that you tend toward being an Epicurean, the latter that you are more of a Stoic.
2. BEEF UP THE OTHER SIDE.
The key to blending enjoyment and meaning is not to suppress what you have, but to bolster what you lack. Once you have situated yourself on the spectrum, you can formulate a strategy to strengthen the discipline you are missing (assuming that you’re not in the middle already).
At the end of each day, you might examine the events you experienced, and ask yourself harmonizing questions. For example:
- Did this event bring me enjoyment? Did it also bring me meaning?
- Did this make me feel afraid? Did I learn something from this fear that will lead to less fear in the future?
- Did this serve my interests? Did it serve the interest of others?
3. BUILD A HAPPINESS PORTFOLIO THAT USES BOTH APPROACHES.
Finally, it is important to pursue life goals in which each happiness approach reinforces the other. That portfolio is simple, and I have written about it before: Make sure your life includes faith, family, friendship, and work in which you earn your success and serve others. Each of
these elements flexes both the Stoic and the Epicurean muscles: All four require that we be fully present in an Epicurean sense and that we also work hard and adhere to strong commitments in a Stoic sense.
So to all you Stoics: Take the night off. And to all you Epicureans: Time to get back to work.
ARTHUR C. BROOKS is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a professor of the practice of public leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, a professor of management practice at the Harvard Business School, and host of the podcast The Art of Happiness With Arthur Brooks.
Tuesday, January 26
Since the beginning of the Jesus movement, we've been trying to figure out how to exist with people we don't agree with. One Old Testament scholar took it a step further when he wrote, "In the beginning, there was an argument."
The reading this week takes a look at how we can deal with people who stormed the capital on January 6th. Her opinion is that we must find a way to coexist.
There are a number of Christian virtues and ideals at play here, primarily Jesus' directive to pray for those who we call enemies. He even said we should love them. One quick note; "love" in this sense is not to condone what they do but instead find a different way. What would that look like today? I think that is something worthy of discussion.
God's peace to you and to our neighbors and especially to those for whom we disagree.
- Dave
Coexistence is the Only Option
Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic 1.19.21
They could be realtors or police officers, bakers or firefighters, veterans of American wars or CEOs of American companies. They might live in Boise or Dallas, College Park or College Station, Sacramento or Delray Beach. Some are wealthy. Some are not. Relatively few of them
were at the United States Capitol on January 6, determined to stop Congress from certifying a legitimate election.
As a group, it’s hard to know what to call them. They are too many to merit the term extremists. There are not enough of them to be secessionists. For want of a better term, I’m calling them seditionists. Republicans are not seditionists, nor is everyone who voted for Trump, nor is every conservative: Nothing about rejecting your country’s political system is conservative. Still, the seditionists are numerous. In December, 34% of Americans said they did not trust the outcome of the 2020 election. More recently, 21% said that they either strongly or somewhat support the storming of the Capitol building.
Even if we assume that only half of those polled are impassioned by politics, and even if we put the number of truly seditious Americans at 10 or 15%, that’s a large number of people. For although Trump will eventually exit political life, the seditionists will not. They will remain, nursing their grievances, feverishly posting on social media. A member of the West Virginia state legislature filmed himself in the mob breaking into the Capitol on January 6: “We’re taking this country back whether you like it or not,” he told his Facebook followers. A New Mexico county commissioner came home from the riots; bragged about his participation; and, according to authorities, told a public meeting that he planned to go back to D.C., but this time carrying firearms.
We could also see more violence. Since the election, the Bridging Divides Initiative, a group that tracks and counters political violence in the U.S., has observed a singularly ominous metric: a sharp uptick in the number of protests outside the homes of politicians and public figures,
including city- and county-level officials, many featuring “armed and unlawful paramilitary actors.” In Idaho, aggressive protesters shut down a public-health meeting; in Northern California, numerous public-health officials have resigned in the face of threats from anti-maskers. Death threats are already shaping U.S. politics at a higher level too.
Outside politics, outside the law, outside the norms—the seditionists have in fact declared their independence from the rest of us. January 6 was indeed their 1776: They declared that they want to live in a different America from the one the rest of us inhabit. And yet they cannot be wished away. We have no choice except to coexist.
But how? Clearly we need regulation of social media, but that’s years away. Of course we need better education, but that doesn’t help us deal with the armed men who were standing outside the Ohio Statehouse this week.
Here’s another idea: Drop the argument and change the subject. That is the advice you will hear from people who have studied Northern Ireland before the 1998 peace deal, or Liberia, or South Africa, or Timor-Leste—countries where political opponents have seen each other as not just wrong, but evil; countries where not all arguments can be solved and not all differences can be bridged. In the years before and after the peace settlement in Northern Ireland, for example, many “peacebuilding” projects did not try to make Catholics and Protestants hold civilized debates about politics, or talk about politics at all. Instead, they built community centers, put up Christmas lights, and organized job training for young people.
This was not accidental. The literature in the fields of peacebuilding and conflict prevention overflows with words such as local and community-based and economic regeneration. It’s built on the idea that people should do something constructive—something that benefits everybody, lessens inequality, and makes people work alongside people they hate. That doesn’t mean they will then get to like one another, just that they are less likely to kill one another on the following day.
Infrastructure investment can produce projects benefiting all of society. So can a cross-community discussion about infrastructure, or even infrastructure security. Get potential protesters of different political views into a room, and ask them, “How are we going to protect our state capitol during demonstrations?” Ask for ideas. Take notes. Make the problem narrow, specific, even boring, not existential or exciting. “Who won the 2020 election?” is, for these purposes, a bad topic. “How do we fix the potholes in our roads?” is, in contrast, superb.
Not that this phenomenon is anything new: In 1930, a white Texan named Jessie Daniel Ames founded an organization called the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, a group that campaigned against anti-Black violence. Ames both intervened directly, even confronting lynch mobs in person, and engaged in education and advocacy. Her group sometimes sat uneasily alongside its northern counterparts—its members opposed federal intervention and denounced lynching, not for universal reasons but on the grounds that it was
contrary to the creed of southern, white, Christian women—but it worked: In areas where the group operated, the violence went down.
Rachel Brown, the founder of an anti-violence group called Over Zero, told me that she sometimes uses that case study when talking to religious leaders, business leaders, and veterans across the country—people who might be heard in the seditious community—when trying to
persuade them to start parallel projects of their own. Clearly the Republican Party is well placed to reach out to members who have rejected democracy, which is why it’s important to support the Adam Kinzingers and the Ben Sasses, and the Mitch McConnells.
Not coincidentally, this is exactly the kind of advice that can be heard from psychologists who specialize in exit counseling for people who have left religious cults. Roderick Dubrow-Marshall, a psychologist who has written about the similarities between cults and extremist
political movements, told me that in both cases, identification with the group comes to dominate people psychologically. “Other interests and ideas become closed off,” he said. “They dismiss anything that pushes back against them.” Remember, the people in the Capitol really believed that they were on a mission to save America, that it was patriotic to smash windows and kill and injure police. Before they can be convinced otherwise, they will have to see some kind of future for themselves in an America run by Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and a Democratic Congress.
I recognize that this is not what everyone wants to hear. Even as I write this, I can hear many readers of this article uttering a collective snort of annoyance. Quite a few, I imagine, feel that, having won the election, they don’t want to pay for a bunch of happy-clappy vaccine volunteers,
or new roads in rural America, or mental-health services and life counseling for the conspiracy infected—let them learn to live with us. I can well imagine that many will resent every penny of public money, every ounce of political time, that is spent on the seditious minority. Some might
even prefer to track down every last Capitol-riot sympathizer and shame them on social media, preferably with enough rigor that they lose their jobs.
I know how they feel, because I often feel that way too. But then I remember: It won’t work. We’ll wake up the next morning, and they’ll still be there.
Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic, a senior fellow of the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism.
The reading this week takes a look at how we can deal with people who stormed the capital on January 6th. Her opinion is that we must find a way to coexist.
There are a number of Christian virtues and ideals at play here, primarily Jesus' directive to pray for those who we call enemies. He even said we should love them. One quick note; "love" in this sense is not to condone what they do but instead find a different way. What would that look like today? I think that is something worthy of discussion.
God's peace to you and to our neighbors and especially to those for whom we disagree.
- Dave
Coexistence is the Only Option
Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic 1.19.21
They could be realtors or police officers, bakers or firefighters, veterans of American wars or CEOs of American companies. They might live in Boise or Dallas, College Park or College Station, Sacramento or Delray Beach. Some are wealthy. Some are not. Relatively few of them
were at the United States Capitol on January 6, determined to stop Congress from certifying a legitimate election.
As a group, it’s hard to know what to call them. They are too many to merit the term extremists. There are not enough of them to be secessionists. For want of a better term, I’m calling them seditionists. Republicans are not seditionists, nor is everyone who voted for Trump, nor is every conservative: Nothing about rejecting your country’s political system is conservative. Still, the seditionists are numerous. In December, 34% of Americans said they did not trust the outcome of the 2020 election. More recently, 21% said that they either strongly or somewhat support the storming of the Capitol building.
Even if we assume that only half of those polled are impassioned by politics, and even if we put the number of truly seditious Americans at 10 or 15%, that’s a large number of people. For although Trump will eventually exit political life, the seditionists will not. They will remain, nursing their grievances, feverishly posting on social media. A member of the West Virginia state legislature filmed himself in the mob breaking into the Capitol on January 6: “We’re taking this country back whether you like it or not,” he told his Facebook followers. A New Mexico county commissioner came home from the riots; bragged about his participation; and, according to authorities, told a public meeting that he planned to go back to D.C., but this time carrying firearms.
We could also see more violence. Since the election, the Bridging Divides Initiative, a group that tracks and counters political violence in the U.S., has observed a singularly ominous metric: a sharp uptick in the number of protests outside the homes of politicians and public figures,
including city- and county-level officials, many featuring “armed and unlawful paramilitary actors.” In Idaho, aggressive protesters shut down a public-health meeting; in Northern California, numerous public-health officials have resigned in the face of threats from anti-maskers. Death threats are already shaping U.S. politics at a higher level too.
Outside politics, outside the law, outside the norms—the seditionists have in fact declared their independence from the rest of us. January 6 was indeed their 1776: They declared that they want to live in a different America from the one the rest of us inhabit. And yet they cannot be wished away. We have no choice except to coexist.
But how? Clearly we need regulation of social media, but that’s years away. Of course we need better education, but that doesn’t help us deal with the armed men who were standing outside the Ohio Statehouse this week.
Here’s another idea: Drop the argument and change the subject. That is the advice you will hear from people who have studied Northern Ireland before the 1998 peace deal, or Liberia, or South Africa, or Timor-Leste—countries where political opponents have seen each other as not just wrong, but evil; countries where not all arguments can be solved and not all differences can be bridged. In the years before and after the peace settlement in Northern Ireland, for example, many “peacebuilding” projects did not try to make Catholics and Protestants hold civilized debates about politics, or talk about politics at all. Instead, they built community centers, put up Christmas lights, and organized job training for young people.
This was not accidental. The literature in the fields of peacebuilding and conflict prevention overflows with words such as local and community-based and economic regeneration. It’s built on the idea that people should do something constructive—something that benefits everybody, lessens inequality, and makes people work alongside people they hate. That doesn’t mean they will then get to like one another, just that they are less likely to kill one another on the following day.
Infrastructure investment can produce projects benefiting all of society. So can a cross-community discussion about infrastructure, or even infrastructure security. Get potential protesters of different political views into a room, and ask them, “How are we going to protect our state capitol during demonstrations?” Ask for ideas. Take notes. Make the problem narrow, specific, even boring, not existential or exciting. “Who won the 2020 election?” is, for these purposes, a bad topic. “How do we fix the potholes in our roads?” is, in contrast, superb.
Not that this phenomenon is anything new: In 1930, a white Texan named Jessie Daniel Ames founded an organization called the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, a group that campaigned against anti-Black violence. Ames both intervened directly, even confronting lynch mobs in person, and engaged in education and advocacy. Her group sometimes sat uneasily alongside its northern counterparts—its members opposed federal intervention and denounced lynching, not for universal reasons but on the grounds that it was
contrary to the creed of southern, white, Christian women—but it worked: In areas where the group operated, the violence went down.
Rachel Brown, the founder of an anti-violence group called Over Zero, told me that she sometimes uses that case study when talking to religious leaders, business leaders, and veterans across the country—people who might be heard in the seditious community—when trying to
persuade them to start parallel projects of their own. Clearly the Republican Party is well placed to reach out to members who have rejected democracy, which is why it’s important to support the Adam Kinzingers and the Ben Sasses, and the Mitch McConnells.
Not coincidentally, this is exactly the kind of advice that can be heard from psychologists who specialize in exit counseling for people who have left religious cults. Roderick Dubrow-Marshall, a psychologist who has written about the similarities between cults and extremist
political movements, told me that in both cases, identification with the group comes to dominate people psychologically. “Other interests and ideas become closed off,” he said. “They dismiss anything that pushes back against them.” Remember, the people in the Capitol really believed that they were on a mission to save America, that it was patriotic to smash windows and kill and injure police. Before they can be convinced otherwise, they will have to see some kind of future for themselves in an America run by Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and a Democratic Congress.
I recognize that this is not what everyone wants to hear. Even as I write this, I can hear many readers of this article uttering a collective snort of annoyance. Quite a few, I imagine, feel that, having won the election, they don’t want to pay for a bunch of happy-clappy vaccine volunteers,
or new roads in rural America, or mental-health services and life counseling for the conspiracy infected—let them learn to live with us. I can well imagine that many will resent every penny of public money, every ounce of political time, that is spent on the seditious minority. Some might
even prefer to track down every last Capitol-riot sympathizer and shame them on social media, preferably with enough rigor that they lose their jobs.
I know how they feel, because I often feel that way too. But then I remember: It won’t work. We’ll wake up the next morning, and they’ll still be there.
Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic, a senior fellow of the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism.
Tuesday, January 19
This topic has come up quite a bit so I think it is time for us to talk about it. There are some social difficulties and tensions with who should be vaccinated and when. Some are wondering if following Jesus means to give up one's place in line and let someone else get vaccinated, or, is following Jesus getting a vaccination when it is available for you.
Also, I am concerned about what may happen this weekend in the country in regards to the possibility of violence in our state capitals. In college, I internshipped with folks in and near Washington's capital in Olympia. The capital is shutting down as they have already received threats. I can only imagine this is happening elsewhere. I pray - literally - that we won't need to talk about any of this next week. May God bless you and may God watch over our nation and that the promise of peace come quickly upon all.
- Dave
Vaccination by Age is the Way to Go
Paul E. Peterson, Wall Street Journal 1.12.21
The distribution of Covid vaccines is proceeding slowly even as a new, faster-moving viral variant arrives from London. The number of vaccinations administered last month was less than 25% of the original projections, while Covid hospitalizations and deaths reached new highs across the country. Perhaps inoculations will pick up in the coming weeks, but this has been what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls “Phase A,” when the serum is reserved for two highly accessible, readily identifiable groups: health-care workers and
nursing-home residents.
“Phase B” could be much worse. It is true that the CDC finally said on Tuesday that it would release doses initially held back for second injections and that the shots should be available to anyone over 65 and those with pre-existing conditions. But states still have wide latitude to set priorities. Many are still deliberating, and some have turned the question over to officials at the county or even hospital level. Other states are sorting the elderly between those who have two or more comorbidities and those who don’t.
In many states, essential workers have been assigned priority. They are spreaders, it is said. They encounter the public when policing the streets, stocking shelves at grocery stores, or teaching in schools. The definition of essential worker has at times expanded to include Uber drivers, meatpackers and all those in the retail and manufacturing industries. The head of the Texas Restaurant Association says
prioritization should go to those helping to “feed Texans.”
Each addition and distinction may seem reasonable, but the cost in delay and confusion is high. Covid vaccinations are proving more complicated than the flu shot. Out of an abundance of caution, some hospitals are requiring recipients to be tested for Covid first, and then wait 15 minutes after the vaccination to check for an allergic reaction. Applying the Phase B regulations will add to these delays. How does a person prove employment or a health condition? Must pharmacies turn away applicants who lack supporting documentation? With all these delays, summer could come and go before Phase B ends and the general public can finally be vaccinated.
It is time for simplification. To deliver free vaccines with maximum speed, the health-care system needs to follow a simple rule that applies to everyone. Fortunately, such a rule is readily available: date of birth. The older the person, the higher the priority. One can prove one’s age simply by showing a driver’s license, Medicare or Medicaid card, or another form of identification. For most, that information is already embedded in the files of hospitals, pharmacies and doctors’ offices.
Age is a powerful predictor of vulnerability. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says that in his state more than 80% of Covid victims are over 65. In Massachusetts the average age of death from the virus during roughly the first two weeks of December was 80. Over that short period, 420 octogenarians and older in the state died—a death rate of 143 per 100,000. The death rate for those between 70 and 80 was 33 per 100,000. For those 60 and 70, the rate was less than 10 per 100,000. Rates for those in their prime working years—30 to 50—came to about 1 per
100,000.
Now that the CDC has recommended birth date to be a critical factor used to establish priority after health-care workers and nursing-home residents, the president and the president-elect need to urge states to follow this recommendation, thereby greatly enhancing the chances of distributing the vaccine efficiently.
This isn’t a perfect solution. When Florida announced that everyone over 65 was eligible, it set the limit too low. Thousands of retirees stood in long lines late at night hoping to be inoculated before supplies were exhausted. Better to set a higher age limit at the beginning. It can be relaxed after the very old have been accommodated, supplies increase and systems become more efficient.
The executive director of the Association of Immunization Managers says it doesn’t make much difference which group is served first, “as long as states are putting vaccine doses into arms.” That point is valid insofar as every vaccination brings us one person closer to herd immunity. But if reducing fatalities, extreme illnesses and heavy burdens on the medical system is also important, it makes a lot of difference which age group is first vaccinated.
The need for simplicity and speed is similarly important. Shortening the pandemic by one month would save thousands of lives. This isn’t the right moment for deliberate selection among multiple claimants for protection. Keep it simple. Tempus fugit: Vaccinate the population before autumn leaves begin to fall.
Mr. Peterson is professor of government at Harvard and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Also, I am concerned about what may happen this weekend in the country in regards to the possibility of violence in our state capitals. In college, I internshipped with folks in and near Washington's capital in Olympia. The capital is shutting down as they have already received threats. I can only imagine this is happening elsewhere. I pray - literally - that we won't need to talk about any of this next week. May God bless you and may God watch over our nation and that the promise of peace come quickly upon all.
- Dave
Vaccination by Age is the Way to Go
Paul E. Peterson, Wall Street Journal 1.12.21
The distribution of Covid vaccines is proceeding slowly even as a new, faster-moving viral variant arrives from London. The number of vaccinations administered last month was less than 25% of the original projections, while Covid hospitalizations and deaths reached new highs across the country. Perhaps inoculations will pick up in the coming weeks, but this has been what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls “Phase A,” when the serum is reserved for two highly accessible, readily identifiable groups: health-care workers and
nursing-home residents.
“Phase B” could be much worse. It is true that the CDC finally said on Tuesday that it would release doses initially held back for second injections and that the shots should be available to anyone over 65 and those with pre-existing conditions. But states still have wide latitude to set priorities. Many are still deliberating, and some have turned the question over to officials at the county or even hospital level. Other states are sorting the elderly between those who have two or more comorbidities and those who don’t.
In many states, essential workers have been assigned priority. They are spreaders, it is said. They encounter the public when policing the streets, stocking shelves at grocery stores, or teaching in schools. The definition of essential worker has at times expanded to include Uber drivers, meatpackers and all those in the retail and manufacturing industries. The head of the Texas Restaurant Association says
prioritization should go to those helping to “feed Texans.”
Each addition and distinction may seem reasonable, but the cost in delay and confusion is high. Covid vaccinations are proving more complicated than the flu shot. Out of an abundance of caution, some hospitals are requiring recipients to be tested for Covid first, and then wait 15 minutes after the vaccination to check for an allergic reaction. Applying the Phase B regulations will add to these delays. How does a person prove employment or a health condition? Must pharmacies turn away applicants who lack supporting documentation? With all these delays, summer could come and go before Phase B ends and the general public can finally be vaccinated.
It is time for simplification. To deliver free vaccines with maximum speed, the health-care system needs to follow a simple rule that applies to everyone. Fortunately, such a rule is readily available: date of birth. The older the person, the higher the priority. One can prove one’s age simply by showing a driver’s license, Medicare or Medicaid card, or another form of identification. For most, that information is already embedded in the files of hospitals, pharmacies and doctors’ offices.
Age is a powerful predictor of vulnerability. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says that in his state more than 80% of Covid victims are over 65. In Massachusetts the average age of death from the virus during roughly the first two weeks of December was 80. Over that short period, 420 octogenarians and older in the state died—a death rate of 143 per 100,000. The death rate for those between 70 and 80 was 33 per 100,000. For those 60 and 70, the rate was less than 10 per 100,000. Rates for those in their prime working years—30 to 50—came to about 1 per
100,000.
Now that the CDC has recommended birth date to be a critical factor used to establish priority after health-care workers and nursing-home residents, the president and the president-elect need to urge states to follow this recommendation, thereby greatly enhancing the chances of distributing the vaccine efficiently.
This isn’t a perfect solution. When Florida announced that everyone over 65 was eligible, it set the limit too low. Thousands of retirees stood in long lines late at night hoping to be inoculated before supplies were exhausted. Better to set a higher age limit at the beginning. It can be relaxed after the very old have been accommodated, supplies increase and systems become more efficient.
The executive director of the Association of Immunization Managers says it doesn’t make much difference which group is served first, “as long as states are putting vaccine doses into arms.” That point is valid insofar as every vaccination brings us one person closer to herd immunity. But if reducing fatalities, extreme illnesses and heavy burdens on the medical system is also important, it makes a lot of difference which age group is first vaccinated.
The need for simplicity and speed is similarly important. Shortening the pandemic by one month would save thousands of lives. This isn’t the right moment for deliberate selection among multiple claimants for protection. Keep it simple. Tempus fugit: Vaccinate the population before autumn leaves begin to fall.
Mr. Peterson is professor of government at Harvard and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Tuesday, January 12
Here is our reading for this week. It is an opinion piece from the New York Times about the radical side of Jesus. The author raises the belief that Jesus was open to everyone; especially the least desirable; and asks what happened to that movement. He quotes the response from the Church to the AIDS epidemic which still has ramifications today. How did we get so quick to judge and exclude, the author asks. I wonder that too.
During this season of Epiphany, when we recall our baptismal covenant and find ways to be the light to others, I think this article raises some good questions that I'd like to discuss with you.
God's peace to you and our nation.
-Dave
the_forgotten_radicalism_of_jesus_christ.discussion_groups_1.10.21.pdf
During this season of Epiphany, when we recall our baptismal covenant and find ways to be the light to others, I think this article raises some good questions that I'd like to discuss with you.
God's peace to you and our nation.
-Dave
the_forgotten_radicalism_of_jesus_christ.discussion_groups_1.10.21.pdf
Tuesday, December 15
How involved should the Church be in international politics?
The video below, from the Wall Street Journal, is about Hong Kong businessman Jimmy Lai and his recent arrest. He is outspoken in his belief that the Church should be involved. I am interested in what you think.
https://www.wsj.com/video/series/main-street-mcgurn/wsj-opinion-the-vaticans-silence-over-jimmy-lai-and-china/D7930342-1A81-4DFE-A2E7-89607BBD151E
The primary source for our discussion will be the video. If you would like something to read, I have attached the accompanying article.
God's peace to you and to all in Hong Kong,
- Dave
The Silence of Pope Francis
William McGurn, WSJ Opinion 12.7.20
Jimmy Lai has embraced his destiny. Last Wednesday the founder of one of Hong Kong’s most popular newspapers, Apple Daily, was arrested on ginned-up fraud charges. On Thursday he was clapped into jail as a national security risk. Thus did a man who started the week a Hong Kong billionaire end it a Chinese dissident.
Mr. Lai’s jailing has provoked condemnation from figures as diverse as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Soviet refusenik Natan Sharansky and New York Rep. Eliot Engel. They have been joined by journalists, activists and politicians such as the Labour Party’s Sarah Champion and other members of Parliament who on Monday raised Mr. Lai’s plight in Britain’s House of Commons.
The silence might be understandable if Pope Francis were in the tradition of pontiffs who hold themselves aloof from worldly affairs. But Pope Francis is a man who readily weighs in on outrages wherever he finds them, whether it be modern air conditioning, American capitalism or Catholic moms who breed “like rabbits.”
But on China . . . silence. It’s the deliberate consequence of the Vatican’s 2018 agreement with Beijing, just recently renewed, that gives the Communist state extraordinary say over the selection of Catholic bishops—and whose terms Rome insists on keeping secret. The Vatican defends the deal as the means for carving out protections for the church’s continued presence in China. Unfortunately, rather than herald a thaw in China’s hostility toward religion, persecution has increased— and not only against Catholics.
“China is one of the world’s worst abusers of religious liberty,” says William Mumma, CEO of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. “What makes China’s repression especially repugnant is the heavy involvement of the highest levels of government. Whether it is Christians, Tibetan Buddhists, Falun Gong or Uighur Muslims, the government attacks religious freedom in pursuit of absolute power. No religious believer, no religious leader, can in good conscience turn their gaze away from this repression.”
But this is precisely what Pope Francis is doing. Hong Kong’s Cardinal Joseph Zen notes it is not a recent development, that Hong Kong hearts have been “broken” by the lack of encouragement from the pope amid the protests and mass arrests that have marked their continuing struggle with Beijing. “It has been 1½ years that we are waiting for a word from Pope Francis,” he says, “but there is none.”
Would it make a difference if the pope were to speak? History suggests it could, by highlighting the lack of moral legitimacy that is any Communist regime’s greatest insecurity. Not to mention the enhanced moral standing of a church that would come from insisting on speaking the truth about such regimes.
In a passing mention in a new book, Pope Francis rightly refers to the Muslim Uighurs in a list of “persecuted peoples.” It is as tepid a criticism as it gets and may well be the only critical thing he has ever said about China. Even so, the Chinese Foreign Ministry apparently felt wounded enough that this single sentence required public repudiation at a press conference.
Alas, Pope Francis not only chooses to see no evil in China, he won’t hear of any, either. In September, Cardinal Zen flew to Rome on his own initiative to talk to Pope Francis about what Beijing was doing to the Catholic faithful in Hong Kong and China. Pope Francis refused to see him. Yet later the pope did find the time to discuss justice and inequality with an NBA players union delegation, which presented him with a Black Lives Matter T-shirt.
I confess I am not unbiased here. Jimmy is my godson. And I love him.
So perhaps I am wrong and Pope Francis is right. Perhaps the Vatican is cleverly playing the long game. Then again, China has a centuries long history of making monkeys out of foreigners who told themselves they had the upper hand.
If the Vatican’s approach is to be justified by cold realpolitik, it ought to have the integrity to not shirk from acknowledging the price. To wit, it now requires Pope Francis to look the other way when China unjustly jails or persecutes those of his own flock.
In Robert Bolt’s play “A Man for All Seasons,” Thomas More remains silent rather than assent to the oath recognizing King Henry VIII’s second marriage. The Duke of Norfolk asks why the king didn’t just leave More to his silence. The chief minister to the king answers, because “this ‘silence’ of his is bellowing up and down Europe!”
Pope Francis’s silence on China and Jimmy Lai likewise bellows up and down the world. But not in an attractive way.
The video below, from the Wall Street Journal, is about Hong Kong businessman Jimmy Lai and his recent arrest. He is outspoken in his belief that the Church should be involved. I am interested in what you think.
https://www.wsj.com/video/series/main-street-mcgurn/wsj-opinion-the-vaticans-silence-over-jimmy-lai-and-china/D7930342-1A81-4DFE-A2E7-89607BBD151E
The primary source for our discussion will be the video. If you would like something to read, I have attached the accompanying article.
God's peace to you and to all in Hong Kong,
- Dave
The Silence of Pope Francis
William McGurn, WSJ Opinion 12.7.20
Jimmy Lai has embraced his destiny. Last Wednesday the founder of one of Hong Kong’s most popular newspapers, Apple Daily, was arrested on ginned-up fraud charges. On Thursday he was clapped into jail as a national security risk. Thus did a man who started the week a Hong Kong billionaire end it a Chinese dissident.
Mr. Lai’s jailing has provoked condemnation from figures as diverse as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Soviet refusenik Natan Sharansky and New York Rep. Eliot Engel. They have been joined by journalists, activists and politicians such as the Labour Party’s Sarah Champion and other members of Parliament who on Monday raised Mr. Lai’s plight in Britain’s House of Commons.
The silence might be understandable if Pope Francis were in the tradition of pontiffs who hold themselves aloof from worldly affairs. But Pope Francis is a man who readily weighs in on outrages wherever he finds them, whether it be modern air conditioning, American capitalism or Catholic moms who breed “like rabbits.”
But on China . . . silence. It’s the deliberate consequence of the Vatican’s 2018 agreement with Beijing, just recently renewed, that gives the Communist state extraordinary say over the selection of Catholic bishops—and whose terms Rome insists on keeping secret. The Vatican defends the deal as the means for carving out protections for the church’s continued presence in China. Unfortunately, rather than herald a thaw in China’s hostility toward religion, persecution has increased— and not only against Catholics.
“China is one of the world’s worst abusers of religious liberty,” says William Mumma, CEO of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. “What makes China’s repression especially repugnant is the heavy involvement of the highest levels of government. Whether it is Christians, Tibetan Buddhists, Falun Gong or Uighur Muslims, the government attacks religious freedom in pursuit of absolute power. No religious believer, no religious leader, can in good conscience turn their gaze away from this repression.”
But this is precisely what Pope Francis is doing. Hong Kong’s Cardinal Joseph Zen notes it is not a recent development, that Hong Kong hearts have been “broken” by the lack of encouragement from the pope amid the protests and mass arrests that have marked their continuing struggle with Beijing. “It has been 1½ years that we are waiting for a word from Pope Francis,” he says, “but there is none.”
Would it make a difference if the pope were to speak? History suggests it could, by highlighting the lack of moral legitimacy that is any Communist regime’s greatest insecurity. Not to mention the enhanced moral standing of a church that would come from insisting on speaking the truth about such regimes.
In a passing mention in a new book, Pope Francis rightly refers to the Muslim Uighurs in a list of “persecuted peoples.” It is as tepid a criticism as it gets and may well be the only critical thing he has ever said about China. Even so, the Chinese Foreign Ministry apparently felt wounded enough that this single sentence required public repudiation at a press conference.
Alas, Pope Francis not only chooses to see no evil in China, he won’t hear of any, either. In September, Cardinal Zen flew to Rome on his own initiative to talk to Pope Francis about what Beijing was doing to the Catholic faithful in Hong Kong and China. Pope Francis refused to see him. Yet later the pope did find the time to discuss justice and inequality with an NBA players union delegation, which presented him with a Black Lives Matter T-shirt.
I confess I am not unbiased here. Jimmy is my godson. And I love him.
So perhaps I am wrong and Pope Francis is right. Perhaps the Vatican is cleverly playing the long game. Then again, China has a centuries long history of making monkeys out of foreigners who told themselves they had the upper hand.
If the Vatican’s approach is to be justified by cold realpolitik, it ought to have the integrity to not shirk from acknowledging the price. To wit, it now requires Pope Francis to look the other way when China unjustly jails or persecutes those of his own flock.
In Robert Bolt’s play “A Man for All Seasons,” Thomas More remains silent rather than assent to the oath recognizing King Henry VIII’s second marriage. The Duke of Norfolk asks why the king didn’t just leave More to his silence. The chief minister to the king answers, because “this ‘silence’ of his is bellowing up and down Europe!”
Pope Francis’s silence on China and Jimmy Lai likewise bellows up and down the world. But not in an attractive way.
Tuesday, December 8
Here is an interesting article from the New York Times asking an important question - when should federal inmates get vaccinated for Covid-19? It is about general public health as well as an ethical; and spiritual; question. I'd like to hear what you think about it.
God's peace to you,
- Dave
When Should Inmates Get the Vaccine?
By Roni Caryn Rabin, New York Times, 12-2.20
They live in crowded conditions, sharing bathrooms and eating facilities where social distancing is impossible. They have high rates of asthma, diabetes and heart disease. Many struggle with mental illness. A disproportionate number are Black and Hispanic, members of minority
communities that have been hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic. So should prisoners and other detainees be given priority access to one of the new Covid-19 vaccines?
With distribution expected to start as early as this month, public health officials are scrambling to develop guidelines for the equitable allocation of limited vaccine supplies. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will meet on Tuesday to make initial determinations about who gets the first shots.
There is broad consensus that health care workers who treat Covid-19 patients should be first in line. Other high-priority groups include residents and employees of long-term care facilities, essential workers whose jobs keep people fed and society running, and medically vulnerable and older adults — roughly in that order. Prison inmates are not ranked in the top tiers of the federal criteria, even though some of the largest outbreaks have occurred in the nation’s prisons. More than 2,200 inmates were sickened and 28 people died, for example, after an outbreak in the San Quentin State Prison in California over the summer.
Yet the C.D.C. advisory committee has prioritized correctional officers and others who work in jails and prisons for the first phase of immunizations. The federal prison system will set aside its initial allotment for such employees, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. The discrepancy raises a chilling prospect: another prison outbreak that kills scores of inmates after the only preventive was reserved for staff. Officials at the Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Now several groups, including the American Medical Association, are calling for coronavirus vaccines to be given to inmates and employees at prisons, jails and detention centers, citing the unique risks to people in confinement — and the potential for outbreaks to spread from
correctional centers, straining community hospitals. “We aren’t saying that prisoners should be treated any better than anybody else, but they shouldn’t be treated any worse than anybody else who is forced to live in a congregate setting,” said Dr. Eric Toner, co-author of a report on
vaccine allocation published by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. The report lists prisoners as a priority group, Dr. Toner said, though not “at the very tiptop, but at the next tier down.”
Some states, in their own distribution plans, already are moving in that direction. North Carolina, for example, plans to give first priority to health care providers, but also includes people at high risk for severe disease and high risk for exposure to the virus. That list includes people in congregate living settings, such as migrant farm camps, jails and prisons, and homeless shelters, along with other “historically marginalized” populations.
Allocating precious medical resources to people who are serving time may be anathema to much of the public, but it is widely accepted that the nation has an ethical and legal obligation to safeguard the health of incarcerated individuals. There is also a powerful public health argument to be made for prison vaccination: Outbreaks that start in prisons and jails may spread to the surrounding community. “Prisons are incubators of infectious disease,” Dr. Toner said. “It’s a fundamental tenet of public health to try and stop epidemics at their source,” he added.
One approach, under consideration by the National Commission on Covid-19 and Criminal Justice, would be to prioritize vaccination only for prisoners and detainees whose medical conditions or advanced age put them at great risk should they become ill. “This isn’t a criminal
justice recommendation,” said Khalil Cumberbatch, a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan group focused on criminal justice policy. “It’s a public health recommendation. The virus is not in a vacuum if it’s in a state prison.”
The United States holds some 2.3 million individuals in prisons, jails and other detention centers, incarcerating more people per capita than any other nation. That includes nearly 500,000 people who have not been convicted of a crime and are awaiting trials, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. (Some jails have taken steps to reduce overcrowding since the pandemic started.) The figure also includes some 44,000 youngsters who are held in juvenile facilities and an estimated 42,000 in immigration detention centers. People held in confinement are uniquely vulnerable to the virus. Incarcerated individuals are four times more likely to become infected than people in the general population, according to a study by the criminal justice commission. Over all, Covid19 mortality rates among prisoners are higher than in the general population.
So far, at least 200,000 inmates have already been infected with Covid-19, and at least 1,450 inmates and correctional officers have died from the virus, according to a database maintained by The New York Times. Those numbers most likely underestimate the magnitude of the problem, because reporting requirements are spotty and vary from state to state, said Dr. Tom Inglesby, an infectious disease expert at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and another co-author of the vaccine allocation report.
In Connecticut, doctors tested over 10,000 prisoners in state prisons and jails from March to June and found that 13 percent were infected with the coronavirus, according to research published in The New England Journal of Medicine. Inmates who lived in dormitory housing were at the highest risk. Older inmates and Latino inmates also were more likely than others to be infected.
Even before the pandemic, many older inmates had poor health after decades of “hard living,” said Dr. Charles Lee, president-elect of the American College of Correctional Physicians. “From my experience, their physiological age is generally 20 years greater than their chronologic age — from drugs, from fights, from being incarcerated and homeless, and not getting health care,” Dr. Lee said. Up to 40 percent of incarcerated adults are Black, Dr. Lee said, a group with higher rates of chronic diseases, such as diabetes, hypertension and asthma.
Many argue that regardless of public health considerations, society has both legal and ethical responsibilities to protect the health of inmates. “There are truly bad guys in prison, but the vast majority of people in prisons and jails are not what the media makes us think about — they are
not mass murderers,” said Arthur Caplan, director of medical ethics at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine. “Many people are about to get released soon. Many are in for petty crimes.” “The ethical obligation is to protect the lives of prisoners, not just see them as
sources of disease,” Mr. Caplan added.
God's peace to you,
- Dave
When Should Inmates Get the Vaccine?
By Roni Caryn Rabin, New York Times, 12-2.20
They live in crowded conditions, sharing bathrooms and eating facilities where social distancing is impossible. They have high rates of asthma, diabetes and heart disease. Many struggle with mental illness. A disproportionate number are Black and Hispanic, members of minority
communities that have been hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic. So should prisoners and other detainees be given priority access to one of the new Covid-19 vaccines?
With distribution expected to start as early as this month, public health officials are scrambling to develop guidelines for the equitable allocation of limited vaccine supplies. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will meet on Tuesday to make initial determinations about who gets the first shots.
There is broad consensus that health care workers who treat Covid-19 patients should be first in line. Other high-priority groups include residents and employees of long-term care facilities, essential workers whose jobs keep people fed and society running, and medically vulnerable and older adults — roughly in that order. Prison inmates are not ranked in the top tiers of the federal criteria, even though some of the largest outbreaks have occurred in the nation’s prisons. More than 2,200 inmates were sickened and 28 people died, for example, after an outbreak in the San Quentin State Prison in California over the summer.
Yet the C.D.C. advisory committee has prioritized correctional officers and others who work in jails and prisons for the first phase of immunizations. The federal prison system will set aside its initial allotment for such employees, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. The discrepancy raises a chilling prospect: another prison outbreak that kills scores of inmates after the only preventive was reserved for staff. Officials at the Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Now several groups, including the American Medical Association, are calling for coronavirus vaccines to be given to inmates and employees at prisons, jails and detention centers, citing the unique risks to people in confinement — and the potential for outbreaks to spread from
correctional centers, straining community hospitals. “We aren’t saying that prisoners should be treated any better than anybody else, but they shouldn’t be treated any worse than anybody else who is forced to live in a congregate setting,” said Dr. Eric Toner, co-author of a report on
vaccine allocation published by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. The report lists prisoners as a priority group, Dr. Toner said, though not “at the very tiptop, but at the next tier down.”
Some states, in their own distribution plans, already are moving in that direction. North Carolina, for example, plans to give first priority to health care providers, but also includes people at high risk for severe disease and high risk for exposure to the virus. That list includes people in congregate living settings, such as migrant farm camps, jails and prisons, and homeless shelters, along with other “historically marginalized” populations.
Allocating precious medical resources to people who are serving time may be anathema to much of the public, but it is widely accepted that the nation has an ethical and legal obligation to safeguard the health of incarcerated individuals. There is also a powerful public health argument to be made for prison vaccination: Outbreaks that start in prisons and jails may spread to the surrounding community. “Prisons are incubators of infectious disease,” Dr. Toner said. “It’s a fundamental tenet of public health to try and stop epidemics at their source,” he added.
One approach, under consideration by the National Commission on Covid-19 and Criminal Justice, would be to prioritize vaccination only for prisoners and detainees whose medical conditions or advanced age put them at great risk should they become ill. “This isn’t a criminal
justice recommendation,” said Khalil Cumberbatch, a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan group focused on criminal justice policy. “It’s a public health recommendation. The virus is not in a vacuum if it’s in a state prison.”
The United States holds some 2.3 million individuals in prisons, jails and other detention centers, incarcerating more people per capita than any other nation. That includes nearly 500,000 people who have not been convicted of a crime and are awaiting trials, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. (Some jails have taken steps to reduce overcrowding since the pandemic started.) The figure also includes some 44,000 youngsters who are held in juvenile facilities and an estimated 42,000 in immigration detention centers. People held in confinement are uniquely vulnerable to the virus. Incarcerated individuals are four times more likely to become infected than people in the general population, according to a study by the criminal justice commission. Over all, Covid19 mortality rates among prisoners are higher than in the general population.
So far, at least 200,000 inmates have already been infected with Covid-19, and at least 1,450 inmates and correctional officers have died from the virus, according to a database maintained by The New York Times. Those numbers most likely underestimate the magnitude of the problem, because reporting requirements are spotty and vary from state to state, said Dr. Tom Inglesby, an infectious disease expert at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and another co-author of the vaccine allocation report.
In Connecticut, doctors tested over 10,000 prisoners in state prisons and jails from March to June and found that 13 percent were infected with the coronavirus, according to research published in The New England Journal of Medicine. Inmates who lived in dormitory housing were at the highest risk. Older inmates and Latino inmates also were more likely than others to be infected.
Even before the pandemic, many older inmates had poor health after decades of “hard living,” said Dr. Charles Lee, president-elect of the American College of Correctional Physicians. “From my experience, their physiological age is generally 20 years greater than their chronologic age — from drugs, from fights, from being incarcerated and homeless, and not getting health care,” Dr. Lee said. Up to 40 percent of incarcerated adults are Black, Dr. Lee said, a group with higher rates of chronic diseases, such as diabetes, hypertension and asthma.
Many argue that regardless of public health considerations, society has both legal and ethical responsibilities to protect the health of inmates. “There are truly bad guys in prison, but the vast majority of people in prisons and jails are not what the media makes us think about — they are
not mass murderers,” said Arthur Caplan, director of medical ethics at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine. “Many people are about to get released soon. Many are in for petty crimes.” “The ethical obligation is to protect the lives of prisoners, not just see them as
sources of disease,” Mr. Caplan added.
Tuesday, December 1
I'd like to know your opinion on this question: The only people concerned about keeping their location data private are people who have something to hide.
This was the primary question raised in an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal; who, incidentally, has been following how the U.S. government tracks our activities through our cell phones and has written a number of articles on it over the years.
This is our discussion topic this week for a number of reasons. First, I think it's good that you know what your phone is collecting and sending. Second, I'd really like to know your thoughts on the topic of privacy and commercial use - say, for instance, that because you bought a Toyota, does that allow the company to track where, and how fast, you drive the vehicle. Third, I'd like to know if you think the government should be involved in this... which relates to the opening question.
In addition to the article, I'd suggest you watch this video on YouTube. It is from the WSJ so I am assuming it is factually based.
https://youtu.be/SXAShotdFZo
Lastly, if you are wondering what the Bible might have to say about something so modern, you might be surprised. Tune in and find out!
God's peace to you,
- Dave
Most Americans Object to Government Tracking of Their Cellphones
Byron Tau, WSJ 11.25.20
A new survey found widespread concern among Americans about government tracking of their whereabouts through their digital devices, with an overwhelming majority saying that a warrant should be required to obtain such data.
A new Harris Poll survey indicated that 55% of American adults are worried that government agencies are tracking them through location data generated from their cellphones and other digital devices. The poll also found that 77% of Americans believe the government should get a warrant to buy the kind of detailed location information that is frequently purchased and sold on the commercial market by data brokers.
The Wall Street Journal has reported that several U.S. law-enforcement agencies are buying geolocation data from brokers for criminal-law enforcement and border-security purposes without any court oversight.
Federal agencies have concluded that they don’t require a warrant because the location data is available for purchase on the open market. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that a warrant is required to compel cellphone carriers to turn over location data to law enforcement, but it hasn’t addressed whether consumers have any expectation of privacy or due process in data generated from apps rather than carriers.
Modern mobile-phone applications like weather forecasts, maps, games and social networks often ask consumers permission to record the phone’s location. That data is then packaged and resold by brokers. Computers, tablets, cars, wearable fitness tech and many other internet-enabled devices also have the potential to generate location information that is collected by companies.
The buying and selling of the location data drawn from modern technology have become a multibillion-dollar business—frequently used by corporations for targeted advertising, personalized marketing and behavioral profiling. Wall Street firms, real-estate developers and many other corporations use such information to guide decisions on investments, developments and planning.
Law enforcement, intelligence agencies, the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. military have also begun buying from the same pool of data for espionage, intelligence, criminal-law enforcement and border security. The Journal reported earlier this year that several agencies of the Department of Homeland Security were buying the mobile-phone location data on Americans through a specialized broker.
The survey by Harris, an American market research and global consulting firm, found that some Americans said they would take steps to avoid such tracking. Forty percent of respondents said they would block such tracking on their phones with software, while 26% said they would change their habits and routines to be less predictable. Another 23% said they would leave their phone at home more, while 32% said they wouldn’t do anything different.
The survey also inquired about views toward location privacy in general. A majority of respondents disagreed with the statement, “The only people concerned about keeping their location data private are people who have something to hide.” The poll found 60% of Americans somewhat or strongly disagreed with that statement, while 39% strongly or somewhat agreed.
Older Americans were less concerned about government surveillance than younger Americans. Of those surveyed between 18 and 34, 65% said they were worried about government location tracking. For respondents 65 and older, only 39% were concerned.
Nonwhite Americans were more likely to be concerned than white Americans about location data surveillance by government agencies. The poll found 65% of Black respondents, 65% of Hispanic respondents and 54% of Asian Americans surveyed said they were somewhat or very concerned, compared with 51% of white respondents.
The poll, which Harris conducted online between Nov. 19 and Nov. 21, surveyed 2,000 American adults. Harris doesn’t provide a margin of error because of its online methodology and weighting. A poll of that sample size typically carries a margin of error of about plus or minus 3%.
Write to Byron Tau at byron.tau@wsj.com
This was the primary question raised in an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal; who, incidentally, has been following how the U.S. government tracks our activities through our cell phones and has written a number of articles on it over the years.
This is our discussion topic this week for a number of reasons. First, I think it's good that you know what your phone is collecting and sending. Second, I'd really like to know your thoughts on the topic of privacy and commercial use - say, for instance, that because you bought a Toyota, does that allow the company to track where, and how fast, you drive the vehicle. Third, I'd like to know if you think the government should be involved in this... which relates to the opening question.
In addition to the article, I'd suggest you watch this video on YouTube. It is from the WSJ so I am assuming it is factually based.
https://youtu.be/SXAShotdFZo
Lastly, if you are wondering what the Bible might have to say about something so modern, you might be surprised. Tune in and find out!
God's peace to you,
- Dave
Most Americans Object to Government Tracking of Their Cellphones
Byron Tau, WSJ 11.25.20
A new survey found widespread concern among Americans about government tracking of their whereabouts through their digital devices, with an overwhelming majority saying that a warrant should be required to obtain such data.
A new Harris Poll survey indicated that 55% of American adults are worried that government agencies are tracking them through location data generated from their cellphones and other digital devices. The poll also found that 77% of Americans believe the government should get a warrant to buy the kind of detailed location information that is frequently purchased and sold on the commercial market by data brokers.
The Wall Street Journal has reported that several U.S. law-enforcement agencies are buying geolocation data from brokers for criminal-law enforcement and border-security purposes without any court oversight.
Federal agencies have concluded that they don’t require a warrant because the location data is available for purchase on the open market. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that a warrant is required to compel cellphone carriers to turn over location data to law enforcement, but it hasn’t addressed whether consumers have any expectation of privacy or due process in data generated from apps rather than carriers.
Modern mobile-phone applications like weather forecasts, maps, games and social networks often ask consumers permission to record the phone’s location. That data is then packaged and resold by brokers. Computers, tablets, cars, wearable fitness tech and many other internet-enabled devices also have the potential to generate location information that is collected by companies.
The buying and selling of the location data drawn from modern technology have become a multibillion-dollar business—frequently used by corporations for targeted advertising, personalized marketing and behavioral profiling. Wall Street firms, real-estate developers and many other corporations use such information to guide decisions on investments, developments and planning.
Law enforcement, intelligence agencies, the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. military have also begun buying from the same pool of data for espionage, intelligence, criminal-law enforcement and border security. The Journal reported earlier this year that several agencies of the Department of Homeland Security were buying the mobile-phone location data on Americans through a specialized broker.
The survey by Harris, an American market research and global consulting firm, found that some Americans said they would take steps to avoid such tracking. Forty percent of respondents said they would block such tracking on their phones with software, while 26% said they would change their habits and routines to be less predictable. Another 23% said they would leave their phone at home more, while 32% said they wouldn’t do anything different.
The survey also inquired about views toward location privacy in general. A majority of respondents disagreed with the statement, “The only people concerned about keeping their location data private are people who have something to hide.” The poll found 60% of Americans somewhat or strongly disagreed with that statement, while 39% strongly or somewhat agreed.
Older Americans were less concerned about government surveillance than younger Americans. Of those surveyed between 18 and 34, 65% said they were worried about government location tracking. For respondents 65 and older, only 39% were concerned.
Nonwhite Americans were more likely to be concerned than white Americans about location data surveillance by government agencies. The poll found 65% of Black respondents, 65% of Hispanic respondents and 54% of Asian Americans surveyed said they were somewhat or very concerned, compared with 51% of white respondents.
The poll, which Harris conducted online between Nov. 19 and Nov. 21, surveyed 2,000 American adults. Harris doesn’t provide a margin of error because of its online methodology and weighting. A poll of that sample size typically carries a margin of error of about plus or minus 3%.
Write to Byron Tau at byron.tau@wsj.com
Tuesday, November 17
Hello, thank you for an interesting discussion about homelessness and the hopelessness we can all feel when trying to address their plight. The good news is that there are people making a difference.
For this week, we will talk about an upcoming Supreme Court case involving what many are calling religious liberties. Attached is an article about it from NBC News.
The church at All Angels fared the hurricane very well, thanks be to God. May God bless you and especially those whose lives have been changed because of hurricanes.
- Dave
Supreme Court Takes Up Religious Freedom
Pete Williams, NBC News, November 3, 2020
A legal battle over the reach of religious freedom returns to the Supreme Court on Wednesday, requiring the justices to consider whether the Constitution allows a religious freedom exception to anti-discrimination laws.
The dispute, between the city of Philadelphia and a Catholic charity that refuses to place children in foster care with same sex-couples, is the first of this term's blockbuster cases to be heard with Justice Amy Coney Barrett on the court.
The decision is likely to have a nationwide impact. Since the Supreme Court struck down laws against gay marriage in 2015, lawsuits have sprung up around the nation brought by bakers, florists, photographers and others who say their religious beliefs will not allow them to provide services for same-sex weddings.
In the background is the court's 1990 decision that said religious groups are not exempt from general local, state and federal laws, including those banning discrimination. A decision to overturn that ruling would make it easier for businesses to claim a religious exemption from antidiscrimination laws that cover sexual orientation. But civil liberties groups say it would blunt efforts to fight discrimination.
Two years ago, the court confronted but failed to decide a similar issue in the case of a Colorado man who said baking cakes for same-sex weddings would violate his religious freedom and right of free expression, even though a state law banned discrimination based on sexual orientation.
The current case is an appeal brought by Catholic Social Services, one of about 30 agencies that contract with Philadelphia to find homes for abused and neglected children. After learning in 2018 that the charity would not consider same-sex couples as potential parents for foster children, the city insisted that all its contractors agree not to discriminate.
In its lawsuit, Catholic Social Services said endorsing same-sex couples as foster parents would violate its religious teachings about marriage. Mark Rienzi, the lawyer for the charity, said Philadelphia is demanding that a religious agency act according to the city's beliefs.
"If you don't speak the government's preferred message on marriage, you are excluded from providing foster care," he said.
In response, the city said the charity is free to express and practice its religious views but not to dictate the terms of municipal contracts. Neal Katyal, who represents the city in the case, said the Constitution does not entitle Catholic Social Services to perform child care services "on the city's behalf, with city funds, pursuant to a city contract, in a manner that the city has determined would be harmful to its residents and the thousands of children it has a duty to protect."
Whatever the charity's rights when it is regulated by the government, Katyal said, "it is not entitled to perform services for the government however it sees fit."
The city also said the charity is not being punished for its religious views, noting that it still has city contracts, worth millions of dollars a year, to perform other services for children in foster care.
Lower federal courts said the city acted properly to enforce its nondiscrimination laws. The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that "religious belief will not excuse compliance with general civil rights laws."
Paul Smith, a Washington, D.C., lawyer who has argued gay rights cases in the past, said the justices will likely be looking for a way "to create more space for religious liberty claims." He said last term's ruling that LGBTQ people are covered under existing civil rights laws could make the court more willing to accommodate religious objections.
"I'd be surprised if five justices couldn't find a way to do a narrow-gauge ruling in favor of Catholic Social Services," he said.
The court will hear the case in a telephone conference call and issue a decision by early next summer.
For this week, we will talk about an upcoming Supreme Court case involving what many are calling religious liberties. Attached is an article about it from NBC News.
The church at All Angels fared the hurricane very well, thanks be to God. May God bless you and especially those whose lives have been changed because of hurricanes.
- Dave
Supreme Court Takes Up Religious Freedom
Pete Williams, NBC News, November 3, 2020
A legal battle over the reach of religious freedom returns to the Supreme Court on Wednesday, requiring the justices to consider whether the Constitution allows a religious freedom exception to anti-discrimination laws.
The dispute, between the city of Philadelphia and a Catholic charity that refuses to place children in foster care with same sex-couples, is the first of this term's blockbuster cases to be heard with Justice Amy Coney Barrett on the court.
The decision is likely to have a nationwide impact. Since the Supreme Court struck down laws against gay marriage in 2015, lawsuits have sprung up around the nation brought by bakers, florists, photographers and others who say their religious beliefs will not allow them to provide services for same-sex weddings.
In the background is the court's 1990 decision that said religious groups are not exempt from general local, state and federal laws, including those banning discrimination. A decision to overturn that ruling would make it easier for businesses to claim a religious exemption from antidiscrimination laws that cover sexual orientation. But civil liberties groups say it would blunt efforts to fight discrimination.
Two years ago, the court confronted but failed to decide a similar issue in the case of a Colorado man who said baking cakes for same-sex weddings would violate his religious freedom and right of free expression, even though a state law banned discrimination based on sexual orientation.
The current case is an appeal brought by Catholic Social Services, one of about 30 agencies that contract with Philadelphia to find homes for abused and neglected children. After learning in 2018 that the charity would not consider same-sex couples as potential parents for foster children, the city insisted that all its contractors agree not to discriminate.
In its lawsuit, Catholic Social Services said endorsing same-sex couples as foster parents would violate its religious teachings about marriage. Mark Rienzi, the lawyer for the charity, said Philadelphia is demanding that a religious agency act according to the city's beliefs.
"If you don't speak the government's preferred message on marriage, you are excluded from providing foster care," he said.
In response, the city said the charity is free to express and practice its religious views but not to dictate the terms of municipal contracts. Neal Katyal, who represents the city in the case, said the Constitution does not entitle Catholic Social Services to perform child care services "on the city's behalf, with city funds, pursuant to a city contract, in a manner that the city has determined would be harmful to its residents and the thousands of children it has a duty to protect."
Whatever the charity's rights when it is regulated by the government, Katyal said, "it is not entitled to perform services for the government however it sees fit."
The city also said the charity is not being punished for its religious views, noting that it still has city contracts, worth millions of dollars a year, to perform other services for children in foster care.
Lower federal courts said the city acted properly to enforce its nondiscrimination laws. The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that "religious belief will not excuse compliance with general civil rights laws."
Paul Smith, a Washington, D.C., lawyer who has argued gay rights cases in the past, said the justices will likely be looking for a way "to create more space for religious liberty claims." He said last term's ruling that LGBTQ people are covered under existing civil rights laws could make the court more willing to accommodate religious objections.
"I'd be surprised if five justices couldn't find a way to do a narrow-gauge ruling in favor of Catholic Social Services," he said.
The court will hear the case in a telephone conference call and issue a decision by early next summer.
Tuesday, November 10
Can you believe it, a group in British Columbia, Canada gave a lump sum cash payment of $7,500 to homeless people to see what impact it would have on their lives. If you would like to see how it turned out, feel free to read the attached article. If you are interested in talking about it, how this experiment could affect how Sarasota handles its homeless, and even how All Angels could impact the lives of homeless people, you are invited to attend our discussion group this week.
God's peace to you and to our nation,
- Dave
A Canadian study gave $7,500 to homeless people
Sigal Samuel, Vox, October 27, 2020
Ray is a 55-year-old man in Vancouver, Canada. He used to live in an emergency homeless shelter. But over the past year, he’s been able to pay for a place to live and courses to prepare him for his dream job — in part because he participated in a study called the New Leaf Project. The study, conducted by the charity Foundations for Social Change in partnership with the University of British Columbia, was fairly simple. It identified 50 people in the Vancouver area who had become homeless in the past two years. In spring 2018, it gave them each one lump sum of $7,500. And it told them to do whatever they wanted with the cash.
“At first, I thought it was a little far-fetched — too good to be true,” Ray said. “I went with one of the program representatives to a bank and we opened up a bank account for me. Even after the money was there, it took me a week for it to sink in.”
Over the next year, the study followed up with the recipients periodically, asking how they were spending the money and what was happening in their lives. Because they were participating in a randomized controlled trial, their outcomes were compared to those of a control group: 65 homeless people who didn’t receive any cash. Both cash recipients and people in the control group got access to workshops and coaching focused on developing life skills and plans.
The results? The people who received cash transfers moved into stable housing faster and saved enough money to maintain financial security over the year of follow-up. They decreased spending on drugs, tobacco, and alcohol by 39 percent on average, and increased spending on food, clothes, and rent, according to self-reports. “Counter to really harmful stereotypes, we saw that people made wise financial choices,” Claire Williams, the CEO of Foundations for Social Change, told me.
The study, though small, offers a counter to the myths that people who become poor get that way because they’re bad at rational decision-making and self-control, and are thus intrinsically to blame for their situation, and that people getting free money will blow it on frivolous things or addictive substances. Studies have consistently shown that cash transfers don’t increase the consumption of “temptation goods”; they either decrease it or have no effect on it.
“I have been working with people experiencing homelessness as a family physician for 16 years and I am in no way surprised that the people who received this cash used it wisely,” Gary Bloch, a Canadian doctor who prescribes money to low-income patients, told me. “It should be fairly self-evident by now that providing cash to people who are very low-income will have a positive effect,” he added. “We have seen that in other work (conditional cash transfer programs in Latin America, guaranteed annual income studies in Manitoba), and I would expect a similar outcome here.”
What’s more, according to Foundations for Social Change, giving out the cash transfers in the Vancouver area actually saved the broader society money. Enabling 50 people to move into housing faster saved the shelter system $8,100 per person over the year, for a total savings of $405,000. That’s more than the value of the cash transfers, which means the transfers pay for themselves.
“People think that the status quo is cheap, but it’s actually incredibly expensive,” Williams said. “So why don’t we just give people the cash they need to transform their lives?”
Williams developed the idea for the New Leaf Project when her co-founder sent her a link to a 2014 TED talk by the historian Rutger Bregman titled “Why we should give everyone a basic income.” It argued that the most effective way to help people is to simply give them cash.
The general idea behind basic income — that the government should give every citizen a monthly infusion of free money with no strings attached — has gained momentum in the past few years, with several countries running pilot programs to test it.
And the evidence so far shows that getting a basic income tends to boost happiness, health, school attendance, and trust in social institutions, while reducing crime. Recipients generally spend the money on necessities like food, clothes, and utility bills.
But Williams and her collaborators decided that rather than give people monthly payments, they’d give one big lump sum. “The research shows that if you give people a larger sum of cash up front, it triggers long-term thinking,” as opposed to just keeping people in survival mode, Williams explained. “You can’t think about maybe registering for a course to advance your life when you don’t have enough money to put food on the table. The big lump sum at the front end gives people a lot more agency.”
That’s what it did for Ray. In addition to getting housing, he used the cash transfer to take the courses he needed to become a front-line worker serving people with addictions. “Now I can work in any of the shelters and community centers in the area,” he told me, adding that receiving a cash transfer had felt like a vote of confidence. “It gives the person their own self-esteem, that they were trusted.”
Not everyone was eligible for a cash transfer, however. The study only enrolled participants who’d been homeless for under two years, with the idea that early intervention most effectively reduces the risk of people incurring trauma as a result of living without a home. And people with severe mental health or substance use issues were screened out of the initiative. Williams said this was not out of a belief that there are “deserving poor” and “undeserving poor” — a woefully persistent frame on poverty — but out of a desire to avoid creating a risk of harm and to ensure the highest likelihood of success.
“If there was null effect from people receiving the cash, from an investor perspective it could be seen as a ‘waste of money’ because it didn’t actually demonstrate impact in somebody’s life,” Williams said. “We just wanted to start small, and the idea is that with subsequent iterations we’ll start relaxing those parameters.”
She also said it was a difficult decision to include a control group of people who wouldn’t receive any cash, but ultimately, the control group was deemed necessary to prove impact. “We knew that we needed the rigor, because people would be skeptical about giving people cash. We wanted that evidence base that can assuage some of people’s concerns when they want to see the hard facts,” she told me.
Going forward, Foundations for Social Change is trying to raise $10 million to scale up its cash transfer approach to multiple cities across Canada. It plans to give out 200 cash transfers in the next iteration, which will also be run as a randomized controlled trial. Based on feedback from study participants and a Lived Experience Advisory Panel — a group of people who’ve experienced homelessness — the charity will offer a new array of non-cash supports to both the cash recipients and the control group, including a free smartphone.
The charity also hopes to work with other populations, like people exiting prison and people exiting sex work. To Williams, the time feels ripe. “I think the pandemic has really softened people’s attitudes to the need for an emergency cash payment when people fall upon hard times,” she said.
God's peace to you and to our nation,
- Dave
A Canadian study gave $7,500 to homeless people
Sigal Samuel, Vox, October 27, 2020
Ray is a 55-year-old man in Vancouver, Canada. He used to live in an emergency homeless shelter. But over the past year, he’s been able to pay for a place to live and courses to prepare him for his dream job — in part because he participated in a study called the New Leaf Project. The study, conducted by the charity Foundations for Social Change in partnership with the University of British Columbia, was fairly simple. It identified 50 people in the Vancouver area who had become homeless in the past two years. In spring 2018, it gave them each one lump sum of $7,500. And it told them to do whatever they wanted with the cash.
“At first, I thought it was a little far-fetched — too good to be true,” Ray said. “I went with one of the program representatives to a bank and we opened up a bank account for me. Even after the money was there, it took me a week for it to sink in.”
Over the next year, the study followed up with the recipients periodically, asking how they were spending the money and what was happening in their lives. Because they were participating in a randomized controlled trial, their outcomes were compared to those of a control group: 65 homeless people who didn’t receive any cash. Both cash recipients and people in the control group got access to workshops and coaching focused on developing life skills and plans.
The results? The people who received cash transfers moved into stable housing faster and saved enough money to maintain financial security over the year of follow-up. They decreased spending on drugs, tobacco, and alcohol by 39 percent on average, and increased spending on food, clothes, and rent, according to self-reports. “Counter to really harmful stereotypes, we saw that people made wise financial choices,” Claire Williams, the CEO of Foundations for Social Change, told me.
The study, though small, offers a counter to the myths that people who become poor get that way because they’re bad at rational decision-making and self-control, and are thus intrinsically to blame for their situation, and that people getting free money will blow it on frivolous things or addictive substances. Studies have consistently shown that cash transfers don’t increase the consumption of “temptation goods”; they either decrease it or have no effect on it.
“I have been working with people experiencing homelessness as a family physician for 16 years and I am in no way surprised that the people who received this cash used it wisely,” Gary Bloch, a Canadian doctor who prescribes money to low-income patients, told me. “It should be fairly self-evident by now that providing cash to people who are very low-income will have a positive effect,” he added. “We have seen that in other work (conditional cash transfer programs in Latin America, guaranteed annual income studies in Manitoba), and I would expect a similar outcome here.”
What’s more, according to Foundations for Social Change, giving out the cash transfers in the Vancouver area actually saved the broader society money. Enabling 50 people to move into housing faster saved the shelter system $8,100 per person over the year, for a total savings of $405,000. That’s more than the value of the cash transfers, which means the transfers pay for themselves.
“People think that the status quo is cheap, but it’s actually incredibly expensive,” Williams said. “So why don’t we just give people the cash they need to transform their lives?”
Williams developed the idea for the New Leaf Project when her co-founder sent her a link to a 2014 TED talk by the historian Rutger Bregman titled “Why we should give everyone a basic income.” It argued that the most effective way to help people is to simply give them cash.
The general idea behind basic income — that the government should give every citizen a monthly infusion of free money with no strings attached — has gained momentum in the past few years, with several countries running pilot programs to test it.
And the evidence so far shows that getting a basic income tends to boost happiness, health, school attendance, and trust in social institutions, while reducing crime. Recipients generally spend the money on necessities like food, clothes, and utility bills.
But Williams and her collaborators decided that rather than give people monthly payments, they’d give one big lump sum. “The research shows that if you give people a larger sum of cash up front, it triggers long-term thinking,” as opposed to just keeping people in survival mode, Williams explained. “You can’t think about maybe registering for a course to advance your life when you don’t have enough money to put food on the table. The big lump sum at the front end gives people a lot more agency.”
That’s what it did for Ray. In addition to getting housing, he used the cash transfer to take the courses he needed to become a front-line worker serving people with addictions. “Now I can work in any of the shelters and community centers in the area,” he told me, adding that receiving a cash transfer had felt like a vote of confidence. “It gives the person their own self-esteem, that they were trusted.”
Not everyone was eligible for a cash transfer, however. The study only enrolled participants who’d been homeless for under two years, with the idea that early intervention most effectively reduces the risk of people incurring trauma as a result of living without a home. And people with severe mental health or substance use issues were screened out of the initiative. Williams said this was not out of a belief that there are “deserving poor” and “undeserving poor” — a woefully persistent frame on poverty — but out of a desire to avoid creating a risk of harm and to ensure the highest likelihood of success.
“If there was null effect from people receiving the cash, from an investor perspective it could be seen as a ‘waste of money’ because it didn’t actually demonstrate impact in somebody’s life,” Williams said. “We just wanted to start small, and the idea is that with subsequent iterations we’ll start relaxing those parameters.”
She also said it was a difficult decision to include a control group of people who wouldn’t receive any cash, but ultimately, the control group was deemed necessary to prove impact. “We knew that we needed the rigor, because people would be skeptical about giving people cash. We wanted that evidence base that can assuage some of people’s concerns when they want to see the hard facts,” she told me.
Going forward, Foundations for Social Change is trying to raise $10 million to scale up its cash transfer approach to multiple cities across Canada. It plans to give out 200 cash transfers in the next iteration, which will also be run as a randomized controlled trial. Based on feedback from study participants and a Lived Experience Advisory Panel — a group of people who’ve experienced homelessness — the charity will offer a new array of non-cash supports to both the cash recipients and the control group, including a free smartphone.
The charity also hopes to work with other populations, like people exiting prison and people exiting sex work. To Williams, the time feels ripe. “I think the pandemic has really softened people’s attitudes to the need for an emergency cash payment when people fall upon hard times,” she said.
Tuesday, November 3
Finding Hope When Everything Feels Hopeless
Elizabeth Bernstein, The Wall Street Journal, October 27, 2020
I’ve got the perfect four-letter word for the moment: Hope.
Yes, it feels increasingly elusive—seven months into a pandemic, during an emotionally exhausting election cycle, as winter bears down. Yet hope is the very best reaction for the moment, psychologists say. It’s crucial to our physical and mental health. It guards against anxiety and despair. And it protects us from stress: Research shows that people with higher levels of hope have better coping skills and bounce back from setbacks faster. They’re better at problem-solving and have lower levels of burnout. They have stronger relationships, because they communicate better and are more trusting. And they’re less-stressed parents— more able to teach their children to set goals and solve problems.
“You can think of hope as a PPE—a Personal Protective Emotion,” says Anthony Scioli, a professor of psychology at Keene State College in Keene, N.H., and coauthor of “Hope in the Age of Anxiety” and “The Power of Hope.”
Most psychologists define hope as a yearning for something possible but not certain—such as a better future—and a belief that you have some power to make it happen. And they believe it has two crucial components: Agency, or the motivation, to achieve the desired goal. And a strategy, or pathway, to do that. This is how it differs from optimism, which is the belief the future will work out no matter what you do.
Think of it like this: If you want to lose 10 pounds, you need a plan—a healthy diet or an exercise program—and the willpower to follow it. Without this, you’ve got no real hope for a fitter body. Just wishful thinking.
The good news: Hope is malleable. You can boost it.
Some people are more hopeful than others, thanks to a combination of nature and nurture. Dr. Scioli believes these people draw on four main resources: Attachment is a sense of continued trust and connection to another person. Mastery, or empowerment, is a feeling of being strong and capable—and of having people you admire and people who validate your strengths. Survival has two features—a belief that you aren’t trapped in a bad situation, and an ability to hold on to positive thoughts and feelings even while processing something negative. Spirituality is a belief in something larger than yourself.
The good news: Hope is malleable. You can boost it. Scientists say it’s important that the area of the brain that activates when we feel hopeful—the rostral anterior cingulate cortex—sits at the intersection of the limbic system, which governs our emotions, and the prefrontal cortex, where thoughts and actions are initiated. This shows we have some influence over feelings of hope (or hopelessness). “Hope is a choice,” says Rick Miller, clinical director of the Center for the Advanced Study and Practice of Hope at Arizona State University.
Of course, it seems harder to choose hope at the moment, when the world seems so bleak and our brains are on high alert, constantly scanning for threat. “Hope is competing with all our other thoughts and emotions for attention right now,” says Mr. Miller, author of “The Soul, Science and Culture of Hope.” “It has to struggle to find its place in our mind.”
Here’s some advice for everyone whose hope could use a boost right now.
Measure it
To increase hope, it helps to know your baseline or starting point—and which areas you need to improve.
In the early 1990s, a psychologist named C.R. Snyder created the Adult Trait Hope Scale, a list of 12 questions that test whether a person has both the agency and the pathway-thinking necessary for hope. And Dr. Scioli has a longer online quiz that explores the four areas he believes hopeful people draw on: attachment, mastery, survival and spirituality. It can measure both your current level of hope and your long-term capacity for it.
Read history
Since the pandemic began, I’ve read books on the Black Death, the Civil War, Winston Churchill’s inner circle during the London Blitz and Miami in 1980 (it was a very bad year). Each one cheered me up. They helped me put 2020 in perspective. They reminded me that bad times do end. And they gave me an intimate peek at how people have held onto hope in the darkest times.
“If you look at how surprising events often come about in unpredictable ways, it can get you out of a fatalist way of thinking,” says Michael Milona, an assistant professor of philosophy at Ryerson University in Toronto and author of a just-published white paper on hope and optimism commissioned by the John Templeton Foundation, a philanthropic institution that funds scientific research. Dr. Milona suggests focusing on the ways history has moved forward positively, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall or Nelson Mandela’s journey from prison to president of South Africa.
Future cast
Imagine yourself happy when life returns to normal. Arizona State’s Mr. Miller recommends visualizing four areas of your life—home and family, career, community and recreation—and to ask yourself how you would like them to look in the future. Picture them in great detail. (Who are you with? What are you doing? How do you look?) Those are your goals. Next, think about what you need to do now to make that vision happen. Now you’ve got agency.
Take a small step
Often, when we’re stressed, we become overwhelmed. Setting one goal for the week—and identifying the steps we need to take to reach it—can give us a sense of control. “Once we begin to experience the success in those steps, we start to see more clearly that the future is possible and we have the power to pursue that goal,” says Chan Hellman, executive director of the Hope Research Center at the University of Oklahoma-Tulsa and co-author of “Hope Rising: How the Science of Hope Can Change Your Life.”
Watch your words
When we despair, we tend to speak in absolutes: “I’ll never catch a break.” “Things will always be like this.” “I’m overwhelmed.” “We’re doomed.” These are hope killers.
Many years ago I interviewed Elie Wiesel, the Nobel laureate, author and Holocaust survivor. Mr. Wiesel told me something I have never forgotten: “Every word we speak or write matters.”
Heed Mr. Wiesel’s advice. Think carefully about your words. Use hopeful language: “I can.” “We will.” “It’s possible.”
Spread hope
Emotions are contagious. And everyone is searching for hope right now. So model it for others. Explain what makes you hopeful. Share your goals. And describe how you plan to reach them. You may garner support. You’ll inspire others, showing what is possible.
Remember: Hope begets hope. “When people around you are energized, that can energize you, as well,” says Dr. Milona.
Elizabeth Bernstein, The Wall Street Journal, October 27, 2020
I’ve got the perfect four-letter word for the moment: Hope.
Yes, it feels increasingly elusive—seven months into a pandemic, during an emotionally exhausting election cycle, as winter bears down. Yet hope is the very best reaction for the moment, psychologists say. It’s crucial to our physical and mental health. It guards against anxiety and despair. And it protects us from stress: Research shows that people with higher levels of hope have better coping skills and bounce back from setbacks faster. They’re better at problem-solving and have lower levels of burnout. They have stronger relationships, because they communicate better and are more trusting. And they’re less-stressed parents— more able to teach their children to set goals and solve problems.
“You can think of hope as a PPE—a Personal Protective Emotion,” says Anthony Scioli, a professor of psychology at Keene State College in Keene, N.H., and coauthor of “Hope in the Age of Anxiety” and “The Power of Hope.”
Most psychologists define hope as a yearning for something possible but not certain—such as a better future—and a belief that you have some power to make it happen. And they believe it has two crucial components: Agency, or the motivation, to achieve the desired goal. And a strategy, or pathway, to do that. This is how it differs from optimism, which is the belief the future will work out no matter what you do.
Think of it like this: If you want to lose 10 pounds, you need a plan—a healthy diet or an exercise program—and the willpower to follow it. Without this, you’ve got no real hope for a fitter body. Just wishful thinking.
The good news: Hope is malleable. You can boost it.
Some people are more hopeful than others, thanks to a combination of nature and nurture. Dr. Scioli believes these people draw on four main resources: Attachment is a sense of continued trust and connection to another person. Mastery, or empowerment, is a feeling of being strong and capable—and of having people you admire and people who validate your strengths. Survival has two features—a belief that you aren’t trapped in a bad situation, and an ability to hold on to positive thoughts and feelings even while processing something negative. Spirituality is a belief in something larger than yourself.
The good news: Hope is malleable. You can boost it. Scientists say it’s important that the area of the brain that activates when we feel hopeful—the rostral anterior cingulate cortex—sits at the intersection of the limbic system, which governs our emotions, and the prefrontal cortex, where thoughts and actions are initiated. This shows we have some influence over feelings of hope (or hopelessness). “Hope is a choice,” says Rick Miller, clinical director of the Center for the Advanced Study and Practice of Hope at Arizona State University.
Of course, it seems harder to choose hope at the moment, when the world seems so bleak and our brains are on high alert, constantly scanning for threat. “Hope is competing with all our other thoughts and emotions for attention right now,” says Mr. Miller, author of “The Soul, Science and Culture of Hope.” “It has to struggle to find its place in our mind.”
Here’s some advice for everyone whose hope could use a boost right now.
Measure it
To increase hope, it helps to know your baseline or starting point—and which areas you need to improve.
In the early 1990s, a psychologist named C.R. Snyder created the Adult Trait Hope Scale, a list of 12 questions that test whether a person has both the agency and the pathway-thinking necessary for hope. And Dr. Scioli has a longer online quiz that explores the four areas he believes hopeful people draw on: attachment, mastery, survival and spirituality. It can measure both your current level of hope and your long-term capacity for it.
Read history
Since the pandemic began, I’ve read books on the Black Death, the Civil War, Winston Churchill’s inner circle during the London Blitz and Miami in 1980 (it was a very bad year). Each one cheered me up. They helped me put 2020 in perspective. They reminded me that bad times do end. And they gave me an intimate peek at how people have held onto hope in the darkest times.
“If you look at how surprising events often come about in unpredictable ways, it can get you out of a fatalist way of thinking,” says Michael Milona, an assistant professor of philosophy at Ryerson University in Toronto and author of a just-published white paper on hope and optimism commissioned by the John Templeton Foundation, a philanthropic institution that funds scientific research. Dr. Milona suggests focusing on the ways history has moved forward positively, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall or Nelson Mandela’s journey from prison to president of South Africa.
Future cast
Imagine yourself happy when life returns to normal. Arizona State’s Mr. Miller recommends visualizing four areas of your life—home and family, career, community and recreation—and to ask yourself how you would like them to look in the future. Picture them in great detail. (Who are you with? What are you doing? How do you look?) Those are your goals. Next, think about what you need to do now to make that vision happen. Now you’ve got agency.
Take a small step
Often, when we’re stressed, we become overwhelmed. Setting one goal for the week—and identifying the steps we need to take to reach it—can give us a sense of control. “Once we begin to experience the success in those steps, we start to see more clearly that the future is possible and we have the power to pursue that goal,” says Chan Hellman, executive director of the Hope Research Center at the University of Oklahoma-Tulsa and co-author of “Hope Rising: How the Science of Hope Can Change Your Life.”
Watch your words
When we despair, we tend to speak in absolutes: “I’ll never catch a break.” “Things will always be like this.” “I’m overwhelmed.” “We’re doomed.” These are hope killers.
Many years ago I interviewed Elie Wiesel, the Nobel laureate, author and Holocaust survivor. Mr. Wiesel told me something I have never forgotten: “Every word we speak or write matters.”
Heed Mr. Wiesel’s advice. Think carefully about your words. Use hopeful language: “I can.” “We will.” “It’s possible.”
Spread hope
Emotions are contagious. And everyone is searching for hope right now. So model it for others. Explain what makes you hopeful. Share your goals. And describe how you plan to reach them. You may garner support. You’ll inspire others, showing what is possible.
Remember: Hope begets hope. “When people around you are energized, that can energize you, as well,” says Dr. Milona.
Tuesday, October 27
Hello! Thanks for an interesting week of discussions about altruism and effectiveness. Part of what makes people happy is giving and helping others. But, what about the other side - buying things to make ourselves feel happy. The article for this week says that we can't buy things to make us happy, nor can we elect someone to make us happy, nor can we create a governmental or free market society that will then create happiness. Nope. You'll have to read it to find out where happiness is. One line, however, that I really appreciated is this:
"The world encourages us to love things and use people. But that’s backwards. Put this on your fridge and try to live by it:
Love people; use things."
May God bless you and everyone that you love,
- Dave
Are We Trading Our Happiness for Modern Comforts?
Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic, 10.22.20
One of the greatest paradoxes in American life is that while, on average, existence has gotten more comfortable over time, happiness has fallen. According to the United States Census Bureau, average household income in the U.S., adjusted for inflation, was higher in 2019 than has ever been recorded for every income quintile. And although income inequality has risen, this has not been mirrored by inequality in the consumption of goods and services. For example, from 2008 to 2019, households in the lowest income quintile increased spending on eating out by an average of about 22 percent; the top quintile increased spending on eating out by an average of just under 8 percent. Meanwhile, domestic government services have increased significantly: For example, federal spending on education, training, employment, and social services increased from 2000 to 2019 by about 30 percent in inflation-adjusted terms.
New American homes in 2016 were 1,000 square feet larger than in 1973 and living space per person, on average, has nearly doubled. The number of Americans who use the internet increased from 52 to 90 percent from 2000 to 2019. The percentage who use social media grew from 5 to 72 percent from 2005 to 2019.
But amid these advances in quality of life across the income scale, average happiness is decreasing in the U.S. The General Social Survey, which has been measuring social trends among Americans every one or two years since 1972, shows a long-term, gradual decline in happiness—and rise in unhappiness—from 1988 to the present.
There are several possible explanations for this paradox: It could be that people are uninformed about all of this amazing progress, that we can’t perceive progress very well when it occurs over decades, or that we are measuring the wrong indicators of “quality of life.” I suspect the answer is all three. The last idea, however, is especially important to understand in order to improve our own happiness.
There’s nothing new about the idea that consumption doesn’t lead to happiness—that concept is a mainstay of just about every religion,
and many philosophical traditions as well. Arguably, Karl Marx’s greatest insight came from his theory of alienation, in part defined as a sense of estrangement from the self that comes from being part of a materialistic society in which we are cogs in an enormous market-based machine.
But you don’t have to be religious (or a Marxist) to see how absurd some of the claims that come out of our hyper-consumerist society are. We are promised happiness with the next pay raise, the next new gadget—even the next sip of soda. The Swedish business professor Carl Cederström argues persuasively in his book The Happiness Fantasy that corporations and advertisers have promised satisfaction, but have led people instead into a rat race of joyless production and consumption. Though the material comforts of life in the U.S. have increased for many of its citizens, those things don’t give life meaning.
The answer, as Marx and his modern followers today would have it, is to adopt a different system of economic governance, specifically scientific socialism, which leaves people less exposed to the power of markets. But it’s not at all clear that this is the road to greater well-being. Indeed, many have observed that socialism’s focus on who gets what is every bit as materialistic as a market-based society.
Though government intervention can certainly help meet basic needs—food on the table, money when people are unemployed, health care that doesn’t break the bank—interacting with the government is not a joyful process. Even in our mixed economy, people get caught up in the net of bureaucracy. Scientific socialism—or at least, scientific public administration—reduces citizenship to a series of cold transactions with the government. Empty consumerism and soulless government are the traditional two explanations for our modern alienation. These days, there is a brand-new one: tech. The tech revolution promised us our heart’s desires: everything you want to know at the click of a mouse; the ability to become famous to strangers; anything you want to buy, delivered to your door in days without you having to leave home.
But our happiness has not increased as a result—on the contrary. Mounting evidence shows that media and technology use predict deleterious psychological and physiological outcomes, especially among young people. This is particularly true in the case of social-media use. The psychologist Jean M. Twenge has shown that social media increases depression, especially among girls and young women.
We don’t get happier as our society gets richer, because we chase the wrong things. Consumerocracy, bureaucracy, and technocracy promise us greater satisfaction, but don’t deliver. Consumer purchases promise to make us more attractive and entertained; the government promises protection from life’s vicissitudes; social media promises to keep us connected; but none of these provide the love and purpose that bring deep and enduring satisfaction to life.
This is not an indictment of capitalism, government, or technology. They never satisfy—not because they are malevolent, but rather because they cannot. This poses a real dilemma, not just for society, but for each of us as individuals. But properly informed, we are far from defenseless. Here are three principles to help us keep the forces of modern life from ruining our happiness.
1. DON’T BUY THAT THING. A group of my colleagues at Harvard show in their research that to get happier as we prosper, we need to change the choices we make with our financial resources. In an extensive review of the literature, they analyze the happiness benefits of at least four uses of income: buying consumer items, buying time to pay for help (by, say, hiring people to do tasks you don’t enjoy), buying accompanied experiences (for example, going on vacation with a loved one), and donating charitably or giving to friends and family. The evidence is clear that, although people tend toward the first, much greater happiness comes from the other three.
2. DON’T PUT YOUR FAITH IN PRINCES (OR POLITICIANS). If I complain that government is soulless or that a politician is making me unhappy—which I personally have done many times—I am saying that I think government should have a soul or that politicians can and should bring me happiness. This is naïve at best.
Some of history’s greatest tyrants have promised that a government or political leader could bring joy to life. In 1949, the Soviet government promoted the slogan “Beloved Stalin is the people’s happiness.” Few leaders have delivered more misery and death than Stalin—but looking at this slogan makes me think twice about my own expectations of governments and politicians.
3. DON’T TRADE LOVE FOR ANYTHING. I have referenced in this column before a famous study that followed hundreds of men who graduated from Harvard from 1939 to 1944 throughout their lives, into their 90s. The researchers wanted to know who flourished, who didn’t, and the decisions they had made that contributed to that well-being. The lead scholar on the study for many years was the Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant, who summarized the results in his book Triumphs of Experience. Here is his summary, in its entirety: “Happiness is love. Full stop.”
What this means is that anything that substitutes for close human relationships in your life is a bad trade. But the point goes much deeper. You will sacrifice happiness if you crowd out relationships with work, drugs, politics, or social media. The world encourages us to love things and use people. But that’s backwards. Put this on your fridge and try to live by it: Love people; use things.
I realize that one could easily read this column as a jeremiad against modern life. That isn’t my intention. (Indeed, I am a very public proponent of democratic capitalism with a modern welfare state.) Rather, I mean to appeal to all of us to remember that material prosperity has both benefits and costs. The costs come when we allow our hunger for the fruits of prosperity to blind us to the timeless sources of true human happiness: faith, family, friendship, and work in which we earn our success and serve others. Regardless of how the world might change, those have always been, and will always be, the things that deliver the satisfaction we crave.
ARTHUR C. BROOKS is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a professor of the practice of public leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, a senior fellow at the Harvard Business School, and host of the podcast The Art of Happiness With Arthur Brooks.
"The world encourages us to love things and use people. But that’s backwards. Put this on your fridge and try to live by it:
Love people; use things."
May God bless you and everyone that you love,
- Dave
Are We Trading Our Happiness for Modern Comforts?
Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic, 10.22.20
One of the greatest paradoxes in American life is that while, on average, existence has gotten more comfortable over time, happiness has fallen. According to the United States Census Bureau, average household income in the U.S., adjusted for inflation, was higher in 2019 than has ever been recorded for every income quintile. And although income inequality has risen, this has not been mirrored by inequality in the consumption of goods and services. For example, from 2008 to 2019, households in the lowest income quintile increased spending on eating out by an average of about 22 percent; the top quintile increased spending on eating out by an average of just under 8 percent. Meanwhile, domestic government services have increased significantly: For example, federal spending on education, training, employment, and social services increased from 2000 to 2019 by about 30 percent in inflation-adjusted terms.
New American homes in 2016 were 1,000 square feet larger than in 1973 and living space per person, on average, has nearly doubled. The number of Americans who use the internet increased from 52 to 90 percent from 2000 to 2019. The percentage who use social media grew from 5 to 72 percent from 2005 to 2019.
But amid these advances in quality of life across the income scale, average happiness is decreasing in the U.S. The General Social Survey, which has been measuring social trends among Americans every one or two years since 1972, shows a long-term, gradual decline in happiness—and rise in unhappiness—from 1988 to the present.
There are several possible explanations for this paradox: It could be that people are uninformed about all of this amazing progress, that we can’t perceive progress very well when it occurs over decades, or that we are measuring the wrong indicators of “quality of life.” I suspect the answer is all three. The last idea, however, is especially important to understand in order to improve our own happiness.
There’s nothing new about the idea that consumption doesn’t lead to happiness—that concept is a mainstay of just about every religion,
and many philosophical traditions as well. Arguably, Karl Marx’s greatest insight came from his theory of alienation, in part defined as a sense of estrangement from the self that comes from being part of a materialistic society in which we are cogs in an enormous market-based machine.
But you don’t have to be religious (or a Marxist) to see how absurd some of the claims that come out of our hyper-consumerist society are. We are promised happiness with the next pay raise, the next new gadget—even the next sip of soda. The Swedish business professor Carl Cederström argues persuasively in his book The Happiness Fantasy that corporations and advertisers have promised satisfaction, but have led people instead into a rat race of joyless production and consumption. Though the material comforts of life in the U.S. have increased for many of its citizens, those things don’t give life meaning.
The answer, as Marx and his modern followers today would have it, is to adopt a different system of economic governance, specifically scientific socialism, which leaves people less exposed to the power of markets. But it’s not at all clear that this is the road to greater well-being. Indeed, many have observed that socialism’s focus on who gets what is every bit as materialistic as a market-based society.
Though government intervention can certainly help meet basic needs—food on the table, money when people are unemployed, health care that doesn’t break the bank—interacting with the government is not a joyful process. Even in our mixed economy, people get caught up in the net of bureaucracy. Scientific socialism—or at least, scientific public administration—reduces citizenship to a series of cold transactions with the government. Empty consumerism and soulless government are the traditional two explanations for our modern alienation. These days, there is a brand-new one: tech. The tech revolution promised us our heart’s desires: everything you want to know at the click of a mouse; the ability to become famous to strangers; anything you want to buy, delivered to your door in days without you having to leave home.
But our happiness has not increased as a result—on the contrary. Mounting evidence shows that media and technology use predict deleterious psychological and physiological outcomes, especially among young people. This is particularly true in the case of social-media use. The psychologist Jean M. Twenge has shown that social media increases depression, especially among girls and young women.
We don’t get happier as our society gets richer, because we chase the wrong things. Consumerocracy, bureaucracy, and technocracy promise us greater satisfaction, but don’t deliver. Consumer purchases promise to make us more attractive and entertained; the government promises protection from life’s vicissitudes; social media promises to keep us connected; but none of these provide the love and purpose that bring deep and enduring satisfaction to life.
This is not an indictment of capitalism, government, or technology. They never satisfy—not because they are malevolent, but rather because they cannot. This poses a real dilemma, not just for society, but for each of us as individuals. But properly informed, we are far from defenseless. Here are three principles to help us keep the forces of modern life from ruining our happiness.
1. DON’T BUY THAT THING. A group of my colleagues at Harvard show in their research that to get happier as we prosper, we need to change the choices we make with our financial resources. In an extensive review of the literature, they analyze the happiness benefits of at least four uses of income: buying consumer items, buying time to pay for help (by, say, hiring people to do tasks you don’t enjoy), buying accompanied experiences (for example, going on vacation with a loved one), and donating charitably or giving to friends and family. The evidence is clear that, although people tend toward the first, much greater happiness comes from the other three.
2. DON’T PUT YOUR FAITH IN PRINCES (OR POLITICIANS). If I complain that government is soulless or that a politician is making me unhappy—which I personally have done many times—I am saying that I think government should have a soul or that politicians can and should bring me happiness. This is naïve at best.
Some of history’s greatest tyrants have promised that a government or political leader could bring joy to life. In 1949, the Soviet government promoted the slogan “Beloved Stalin is the people’s happiness.” Few leaders have delivered more misery and death than Stalin—but looking at this slogan makes me think twice about my own expectations of governments and politicians.
3. DON’T TRADE LOVE FOR ANYTHING. I have referenced in this column before a famous study that followed hundreds of men who graduated from Harvard from 1939 to 1944 throughout their lives, into their 90s. The researchers wanted to know who flourished, who didn’t, and the decisions they had made that contributed to that well-being. The lead scholar on the study for many years was the Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant, who summarized the results in his book Triumphs of Experience. Here is his summary, in its entirety: “Happiness is love. Full stop.”
What this means is that anything that substitutes for close human relationships in your life is a bad trade. But the point goes much deeper. You will sacrifice happiness if you crowd out relationships with work, drugs, politics, or social media. The world encourages us to love things and use people. But that’s backwards. Put this on your fridge and try to live by it: Love people; use things.
I realize that one could easily read this column as a jeremiad against modern life. That isn’t my intention. (Indeed, I am a very public proponent of democratic capitalism with a modern welfare state.) Rather, I mean to appeal to all of us to remember that material prosperity has both benefits and costs. The costs come when we allow our hunger for the fruits of prosperity to blind us to the timeless sources of true human happiness: faith, family, friendship, and work in which we earn our success and serve others. Regardless of how the world might change, those have always been, and will always be, the things that deliver the satisfaction we crave.
ARTHUR C. BROOKS is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a professor of the practice of public leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, a senior fellow at the Harvard Business School, and host of the podcast The Art of Happiness With Arthur Brooks.
Tuesday, October 20
This was certainly an interesting week of discussions. One thread that came up in each group, including the book study, was altruism. Can one give without getting back? Although there is no clear answer to that, I have an interesting article about effective altruism. It is written in a way that will both inspire and irritate the reader. I'm not sure if that is a good thing, but, it should make for an interesting discussion.
Blessings to you,
- Dave
The Rise of the Rational Do-Gooders
Zachary Pincus-Roth, Washington Post 9.23.20
Brian Ottens wished he could buy his 8-year-old daughter a better iPad. The first-generation one she’d inherited from her great-grandmother didn’t support the game she wanted to play. But Ottens has different priorities. “We just explain it to her: iPads are expensive, and this several hundreds of dollars could go toward helping a lot of animals,” he says. When her school went online during the covid-19 pandemic, Ottens was forced to give in and buy a low-end Chromebook. Still, he says, “if it never showed up, I think she would have continued feeling the same way. I understand why.” Every year, Ottens and his wife donate a large amount to charities, mainly ones that advocate for animals. In 2018, they gave $49,000, which was 27 percent of their combined salary. This year they plan to give $60,000. They vary the amount to maximize their tax benefits, so that they can give more in the long run.
Ottens, 43, is an engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., working on devices that look for signs of life on places like Mars and Saturn’s moon Titan. It’s a stressful job: He needs to keep his team on a strict timetable, and there’s unexpected weekend work. But he seeks out the stress. The more stress he has, the more animals will live. “Once I discovered this access I had for reducing suffering, it motivated me to compete for the highest-stress job I could withstand,” he says, “and it usually came along with higher pay, and that higher pay has meant I could donate a lot more.” His wife is on board with his giving. The couple don’t own a fancy car or take expensive vacations. When planning their finances for the year, nixing donations is just not on the table.
Ottens’s choices are unimaginable for many, but they’re typical of effective altruism, a movement devoted to improving the world in the most logical, evidence-based way possible. Oxford professor William MacAskill, who helped found the movement, estimates that if you’re a one-person U.S. household earning more than $58,000, you’re in the top 1 percent in the world, even accounting for global cost differences. Since a dollar means far more to the less fortunate than to those living in such comfort, effective altruists donate a large percentage of their income. And to further harness that dollar, they seek out causes that most efficiently save lives. They land on ones that many of us haven’t considered before, especially since those lives tend to be on the other side of the world, or nonhuman — or yet to be lived.
It’s no coincidence that the effective altruism movement came about when evidence-based practices — using science and data to make decisions, rather than conventions and intuition — were on the rise in areas such as government and health care; however, EA hasn’t yet gone mainstream.
One question about EA is whether the “E” is harder than the “A.” One EA group ragged on New York Times columnist David Brooks, who in 2013 had written a critique of earning money at a hedge fund in order to donate it to far-away recipients. (“You might become one of those people who loves humanity in general but not the particular humans immediately around.”)
Motivation is a hole in effective altruism’s armor. Isn’t it better if an art-loving rich person gives to a local museum rather than buying a yacht? But an EA might argue that society is paying for that contribution, in the form of a tax deduction. And can’t wealthy nonprofits find other means of making up the difference — like a museum selling a lesser-known work that it doesn’t display anyway? The arguments can go on and on.
Jason Dykstra is a radiologist in Holland, Mich. His family of four lives on around $48,000 annually and has given away about 75 percent of their take-home income for the past seven years. Dykstra often gets pushback from his peers. “To be able to convince them that someone halfway around the world is just as important as their kid or their grandkid or favorite church buddy, that’s the challenge I’ve run into,” he says. He thinks the pandemic could help EA, as it has awakened Americans to the horrors of infectious diseases and economic instability. “It’s helped them to empathize better with problems that the rest of the world faces all the time,” he says.
Think about the moral issues your friends and family have argued about over the past few years. Donald Trump. Race relations. The 2020 campaign. Immigration. Abortion. Trump. Trump. Trump. Effective altruists might personally care about these things, but they are not the causes the movement tends to focus on. “Anything that involves party politics ... EA tries to stay out of those things because it’s so unlikely that we’d be able to make a difference,” says Julia Wise, 35, community liaison at the Center for Effective Altruism. Issues in the news may be galvanizing. But, Wise says, “we’ve been looking for problems that are boring.”
Dylan Matthews, a former Washington Post reporter, is the head writer of Future Perfect, a section of Vox that’s funded by private donors and explores how to do the most good. Matthews identifies as an effective altruist himself; he once donated a kidney to a stranger. At Vox, he grapples with how to communicate the movement’s ideas convincingly. One colleague joked that he should write an article saying that instead of sending toothbrushes to children detained at the Mexico border, people should be spending that money on malaria. But he wouldn’t write something like that, he says, because he wouldn’t want to dismiss anyone’s pain. “EA is not an oppression Olympics,” he says, “and if it becomes an oppression Olympics, a lot of good and smart people will be turned off.”
But as EA has become more flexible, it still faces a daunting force: the human brain. Even for Geistwhite, 33, who hosted the D.C. gathering and works as a statistician for the U.S. Agency for International Development, it’s been a long road to shifting his intuitions. He grew up
in the town of Farmington, N.M., in a conservative family, inheriting a “Fox News perspective,” as he puts it over dinner at NuVegan Cafe
in Northwest Washington. He would volunteer for the Salvation Army, occasionally on programs that gave gifts to kids. But when they
opened their gifts, he recalls, they just seemed confused. He heard about GiveWell while in college at Princeton and eventually started coming around to EA beliefs.
Geistwhite once worked for nine months at a health clinic in Sierra Leone and now keeps a photo of his co-workers there at his desk. One had difficulty concentrating in the afternoon because he would pass up the $1.50 daily lunch to save money to support his family. The photo is a reminder of who needs help. “It’s the suffering that’s important,” Geistwhite says. “It’s not how I feel about it.”
Blessings to you,
- Dave
The Rise of the Rational Do-Gooders
Zachary Pincus-Roth, Washington Post 9.23.20
Brian Ottens wished he could buy his 8-year-old daughter a better iPad. The first-generation one she’d inherited from her great-grandmother didn’t support the game she wanted to play. But Ottens has different priorities. “We just explain it to her: iPads are expensive, and this several hundreds of dollars could go toward helping a lot of animals,” he says. When her school went online during the covid-19 pandemic, Ottens was forced to give in and buy a low-end Chromebook. Still, he says, “if it never showed up, I think she would have continued feeling the same way. I understand why.” Every year, Ottens and his wife donate a large amount to charities, mainly ones that advocate for animals. In 2018, they gave $49,000, which was 27 percent of their combined salary. This year they plan to give $60,000. They vary the amount to maximize their tax benefits, so that they can give more in the long run.
Ottens, 43, is an engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., working on devices that look for signs of life on places like Mars and Saturn’s moon Titan. It’s a stressful job: He needs to keep his team on a strict timetable, and there’s unexpected weekend work. But he seeks out the stress. The more stress he has, the more animals will live. “Once I discovered this access I had for reducing suffering, it motivated me to compete for the highest-stress job I could withstand,” he says, “and it usually came along with higher pay, and that higher pay has meant I could donate a lot more.” His wife is on board with his giving. The couple don’t own a fancy car or take expensive vacations. When planning their finances for the year, nixing donations is just not on the table.
Ottens’s choices are unimaginable for many, but they’re typical of effective altruism, a movement devoted to improving the world in the most logical, evidence-based way possible. Oxford professor William MacAskill, who helped found the movement, estimates that if you’re a one-person U.S. household earning more than $58,000, you’re in the top 1 percent in the world, even accounting for global cost differences. Since a dollar means far more to the less fortunate than to those living in such comfort, effective altruists donate a large percentage of their income. And to further harness that dollar, they seek out causes that most efficiently save lives. They land on ones that many of us haven’t considered before, especially since those lives tend to be on the other side of the world, or nonhuman — or yet to be lived.
It’s no coincidence that the effective altruism movement came about when evidence-based practices — using science and data to make decisions, rather than conventions and intuition — were on the rise in areas such as government and health care; however, EA hasn’t yet gone mainstream.
One question about EA is whether the “E” is harder than the “A.” One EA group ragged on New York Times columnist David Brooks, who in 2013 had written a critique of earning money at a hedge fund in order to donate it to far-away recipients. (“You might become one of those people who loves humanity in general but not the particular humans immediately around.”)
Motivation is a hole in effective altruism’s armor. Isn’t it better if an art-loving rich person gives to a local museum rather than buying a yacht? But an EA might argue that society is paying for that contribution, in the form of a tax deduction. And can’t wealthy nonprofits find other means of making up the difference — like a museum selling a lesser-known work that it doesn’t display anyway? The arguments can go on and on.
Jason Dykstra is a radiologist in Holland, Mich. His family of four lives on around $48,000 annually and has given away about 75 percent of their take-home income for the past seven years. Dykstra often gets pushback from his peers. “To be able to convince them that someone halfway around the world is just as important as their kid or their grandkid or favorite church buddy, that’s the challenge I’ve run into,” he says. He thinks the pandemic could help EA, as it has awakened Americans to the horrors of infectious diseases and economic instability. “It’s helped them to empathize better with problems that the rest of the world faces all the time,” he says.
Think about the moral issues your friends and family have argued about over the past few years. Donald Trump. Race relations. The 2020 campaign. Immigration. Abortion. Trump. Trump. Trump. Effective altruists might personally care about these things, but they are not the causes the movement tends to focus on. “Anything that involves party politics ... EA tries to stay out of those things because it’s so unlikely that we’d be able to make a difference,” says Julia Wise, 35, community liaison at the Center for Effective Altruism. Issues in the news may be galvanizing. But, Wise says, “we’ve been looking for problems that are boring.”
Dylan Matthews, a former Washington Post reporter, is the head writer of Future Perfect, a section of Vox that’s funded by private donors and explores how to do the most good. Matthews identifies as an effective altruist himself; he once donated a kidney to a stranger. At Vox, he grapples with how to communicate the movement’s ideas convincingly. One colleague joked that he should write an article saying that instead of sending toothbrushes to children detained at the Mexico border, people should be spending that money on malaria. But he wouldn’t write something like that, he says, because he wouldn’t want to dismiss anyone’s pain. “EA is not an oppression Olympics,” he says, “and if it becomes an oppression Olympics, a lot of good and smart people will be turned off.”
But as EA has become more flexible, it still faces a daunting force: the human brain. Even for Geistwhite, 33, who hosted the D.C. gathering and works as a statistician for the U.S. Agency for International Development, it’s been a long road to shifting his intuitions. He grew up
in the town of Farmington, N.M., in a conservative family, inheriting a “Fox News perspective,” as he puts it over dinner at NuVegan Cafe
in Northwest Washington. He would volunteer for the Salvation Army, occasionally on programs that gave gifts to kids. But when they
opened their gifts, he recalls, they just seemed confused. He heard about GiveWell while in college at Princeton and eventually started coming around to EA beliefs.
Geistwhite once worked for nine months at a health clinic in Sierra Leone and now keeps a photo of his co-workers there at his desk. One had difficulty concentrating in the afternoon because he would pass up the $1.50 daily lunch to save money to support his family. The photo is a reminder of who needs help. “It’s the suffering that’s important,” Geistwhite says. “It’s not how I feel about it.”
Tuesday, October 13
We are going to talk about the science, or lack-thereof, of near-death experiences. Here are two articles talking about the subject. The primary text, Understanding Near-Death Experiences, gets into the neurology behind the phenomenon and brings up the subject in saying it can be simulated, perhaps, by a particular drug. The other article, which is not required reading, is from an MD who had her own experience and believes it is beyond scientific understanding.
There are many more articles about this so, if you are so inclined, feel free to do your own reading and let the group know what you found.
Many blessings to you this week,
- Dave
Near-Death Experiences Are Real, Doctor Says
David Oliver, US News, 10.17.17
In 1987, Barbara Bartolome says she died. And 30 years later, she continues to tell her story. The Santa Barbara, California-based retiree says she went into cardiac arrest after an X-Ray technician tipped an exam table the incorrect way during a Myelogram test, accidentally lowering her head instead of raising it. The test involves injecting an iodine dye into a person's spinal cord to help spot damage to discs. But Bartolome says when the table tipped, the dye injected at the base of her skull flowed into her brain instead of the spinal cord.
"I've been told that the change in pressure there would have caused my brain to malfunction," she says. This "very quickly resulted in confusion, hyperventilation and then cardiac arrest," Bartolome says, but what happened next is something more difficult to explain. Bartolome says she had a near-death experience, a phenomenon in which people report conscious events around them even though they may be clinically dead. Such experiences still have their skeptics, but Bartolome – the founder and director of International Association for Near-Death Studies, Santa Barbara – is certainly not alone.
Near-death experiences are real, "without a doubt," according to Houma, Louisiana-based Dr. Jeffrey Long. He runs the Near Death Experience Research Foundation and has studied more than 4,000 such experiences, in addition to working full-time in radiation oncology. People like Bartolome submit experiences to his foundation and are required to answer a more than 140-question survey to help verify their claims. To vet these people, many of these questions are the same, just asked in a slightly different way to make sure everything adds up.
Long isn't the only one doing research on the subject. Dr. Sam Parnia, an associate professor of medicine at New York University Langone Medical Center, launched a comprehensive study of near-death experiences in 2008. He published research involving 2,060 cardiac arrest patients, called AWARE, in 2014 in Resuscitation. That said, Parnia doesn't think the term "near-death experience" is the one people should be using, since it's "very poorly defined and it's what's led to a lot of controversy and debate," he says.
Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, questioned the claims of Eben Alexander's book "Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife," which details a near-death experience while he underwent a meningitis-induced coma. "The fact that mind and
consciousness are not fully explained by natural forces, however, is not proof of the supernatural," Shermer writes. "In any case, there is a reason they are called near-death experiences: the people who have them are not actually dead."
Parnia says the people studied are those who have objectively died and come back. Biologically, that's referred to as cardiac arrest, where doctors try to intervene after someone's heart stops beating. And Long also has a message for the inevitable skeptics: You can't explain away the consistent lucidity of near-death experiences.
When Bartolome went into cardiac arrest, she says she suddenly found herself up on the ceiling looking down very calmly and peacefully at the scene below her. "If I'm up here and my body's down there and he's calling code blue, I think I might've just died," she remembers thinking. She noticed a presence up there – who she later referred to as a "being" – and told the being she wanted to go back into her life. She was stuck in a difficult marriage, and the being knew that. It asked her, "But if you go back, you'll still be in your marriage. What will you do?" She told the being that she would get strong enough to leave her husband.
Down below, doctors had been trying to figure out what to do to save her life, she says. They ended up performing two precordial thumps (i.e. pounding the center of her chest), the second of which brought her back to life.
After she woke up, she told the staff she was watching their every move from above, leaving them stunned with what she was able to recall.
That's where Parnia comes in: His research focuses on resuscitated people's mental and cognitive experience at that specific moment when they have gone through death. He calls it an actual death experience.
The brain shuts down within two to 20 seconds after the heart stops, Parnia says, so even when doctors try to revive patients, they don't usually get enough blood into brain to get it functioning again. And that's what made the AWARE study turn heads: 39 percent of patients who lived after cardiac arrest could describe a perception of awareness even if they couldn't recall specific memories. These people didn't have an explicit memory of these events, though more granular research in further interviews revealed 9 percent of people who reported this perception of awareness went through what's commonly referred to as a near-death experience, and 2 percent had an "out-of-body experience" – meaning they could hear and see events. In one substantiated case from the AWARE study, "consciousness and awareness appeared to occur during a three minute period when there was no heartbeat."
Parnia is in the midst of working on a follow-up study, called AWARE II, with a public announcement likely in the next six months. It will try to answer questions the first study raised.
For example, is it true that up to 40 percent of people have awareness but just don't recall it?
Parnia says his team has built in tests for visual and auditory awareness for specific moments
during cardiac arrest and CPR where they can test for implicit learning if people can't explicitly
recall memories.
"For instance, in some cases people who appear unconscious are given names of cities and objects," he says. "When they have recovered they have been asked to recall any memories. Even though they have no recall, when asked to 'randomly' think of cities, those who had been exposed to the stimuli are statistically more likely to choose the same cities compared to control subjects. Thus indicating they had heard it."
New Clues Found in Understanding Near-Death Experiences
Robert Martone, Scientific American, 9.10.19
Imagine a dream in which you sense an intense feeling of presence, the truest, most real experience in your life, as you float away from your body and look at your own face. You have a twinge of fear as memories of your life flash by, but then you pass a transcendent threshold and are overcome by a feeling of bliss. Although contemplating death elicits fear for many people, these positive features are reported in some of the near-death experiences (NDEs) undergone by those who reached the brink of death only to recover.
Accounts of NDEs are remarkably consistent in character and content. They include intensely vivid memories involving bodily sensations that give a strong impression of being real, more real even than memories of true events. The content of those experiences famously includes memories of one’s life “flashing before the eyes,” and also the sensation of leaving the body, often seeing one’s own face and body, blissfully traveling through a tunnel toward a light and feeling “at one” with something universal.
Not surprisingly, many have seized on NDEs as evidence of life after death, heaven and the existence of God. The descriptions of leaving the body and blissful unity with the universal seem almost scripted from religious beliefs about souls leaving the body at death and ascending toward heavenly bliss. But these experiences are shared across a broad range of cultures and religions so it’s not likely that they are all reflections of specific religious expectations. Instead, that commonality suggests that NDEs might arise from something more fundamental than religious or cultural expectations. Perhaps NDEs reflect changes in how the brain functions as we approach death.
Many cultures employ drugs as part of religious practice to induce feelings of transcendence that have similarities to near-death experiences. If NDEs are based in brain biology, perhaps the action of those drugs that causes NDE-like experiences can teach us something about the NDE state. Of course, studying NDEs has significant technical hurdles. There is no way of examining the experience in animals, and rescuing a patient at death’s door is far more important than interviewing them about their NDE. Moreover, many of the drugs used to induce religious states are illicit, which would complicate any efforts to study their effects.
Although it’s impossible to directly examine what happens to the brain during NDEs, the stories collected from them provide a rich resource for linguistic analysis. In a fascinating new study, NDE stories were compared linguistically with anecdotes of drug experience in order to identify a drug that causes an experience most like a near-death experience. What is remarkable is how precise a tool this turned out to be. Even though the stories were open-ended subjective accounts often given many years after the fact, the linguistic analysis focused down not only to a specific class of drugs, but also to a specific drug as causing experiences very similar to NDEs.
This new study compared the stories of 625 individuals who reported NDEs with the stories of more than 15,000 individuals who had taken one of 165 different psychoactive drugs. When those stories were linguistically analyzed, similarities were found between recollections of near-death and drug experiences for those who had taken a specific class of drug. One drug in particular, ketamine, led to experiences very similar to NDE. This may mean that the near-death experience may reflect changes in the same chemical system in the brain that is targeted by drugs like ketamine.
The researchers drew on a large collection of NDE stories they had collected over many years. To compare NDEs with drug experiences, the researchers took advantage of a large collection of drug experience anecdotes found in the Erowid Experience Vaults, an open-source collection of accounts describing firsthand experiences with drugs and various substances.
In this study, the recollections of those who experienced NDEs and those who took drugs were compared linguistically. Their stories were broken down into individual words, and the words were sorted according to their meaning and counted. In this way, researchers were able to compare the number of times words having the same meaning were used in each story. They used this numerical analysis of story content to compare the content of drug-related and near-death experiences.
Each of the drugs included in these comparisons could be categorized by their ability to interact with a specific neurochemical system in the brain, and each drug fell into a specific category (antipsychotic, stimulant, psychedelic, depressant or sedative, deliriant, or hallucinogen). Few similarities were found when the accounts of one stimulant drug were compared with another within the same stimulant drug class, and few if any similarities were found between accounts of stimulant drug experience and NDEs. The same was true for depressants. The stories associated with hallucinogens, however, were very similar to one another, as were stories linked to antipsychotics and deliriants. When recollections of drug effects were compared with NDEs, stories about hallucinogens and psychedelics had the greatest similarities to NDEs, and the drug that scored the highest similarity to NDEs was the hallucinogen ketamine. The word most strongly represented in descriptions of both NDEs and ketamine experiences was “reality,” highlighting the sense of presence that accompanies NDEs. High among the list of words common to both experiences were those related to perception (saw, color, voice, vision), the body (face, arm, foot), emotion (fear) and transcendence (universe, understand, consciousness).
The researchers then sorted words into five large principal groups according to their common meaning. Those principal components dealt with perception and consciousness, drug dependency, negative sensations, drug preparation, and also a group that included disease state, religion and ceremony. NDEs reflected three of these components related to perception and consciousness, religion and ceremony, disease state, and drug preparation. The component related to perception and consciousness was labeled “Look/Self” and included terms such as color, vision, pattern, reality and face. The component “Disease/Religion” contained elements such as anxiety, ceremony, consciousness and self, whereas the component related to preparation “Make/Stuff” contained elements such as prepare, boil, smell and ceremony. Again, ketamine had the greatest overlap with NDEs in this type of analysis.
Other drugs that cause similar experiences to NDEs include LSD and N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT). The famous hallucinogen LSD was as similar as ketamine to NDEs when the near-death event was caused by cardiac arrest. DMT is a hallucinogen found in South American plants and used in shamanistic rituals. It caused experiences like NDEs and is also made in the brain, leading to speculation that endogenous DMT may explain NDEs. It is not known, however, whether levels of DMT change in a meaningful way in the human brain near death, so its role in the phenomenon remain controversial.
This study has significant weaknesses because it is based on purely subjective reports—some taken decades after the event. Similarly, there is no way to substantiate the accounts in the Erowid collection as there is no way to prove that any individual took the drug they claimed or believed they were taking. This makes it all the more remarkable that a linguistic analysis of stories derived in this manner could discriminate among different drug classes in their similarities to NDEs.
Linking near-death experiences and the experience of taking ketamine is provocative yet it is far from conclusive that both are because of the same chemical events in the brain. The types of studies needed to demonstrate this hypothesis, such as measuring neurochemical changes in the critically ill, would be both technically and ethically challenging. The authors propose, however, a practical application of this relation. Because near-death experiences (NDEs) can be transformational and have profound and lasting effects on those who experience them, including a sense of fearlessness about death, the authors propose that ketamine could be used therapeutically to induce an NDE-like state in terminally ill patients as a “preview” of what they might experience, so as to relieve their anxieties about death. Those benefits need to be weighed against the risks of potential ketamine side effects, which include feelings of panic or extreme anxiety, effects that could defeat the purpose of the intervention.
More important, this study helps describe the psychological manifestations of dying. That knowledge may ultimately contribute more to alleviating fear of this inevitable transition than a dose of any drug.
Robert Martone is a research scientist with expertise in neurodegeneration. He spends his free time kayaking and translating Renaissance Italian literature.
There are many more articles about this so, if you are so inclined, feel free to do your own reading and let the group know what you found.
Many blessings to you this week,
- Dave
Near-Death Experiences Are Real, Doctor Says
David Oliver, US News, 10.17.17
In 1987, Barbara Bartolome says she died. And 30 years later, she continues to tell her story. The Santa Barbara, California-based retiree says she went into cardiac arrest after an X-Ray technician tipped an exam table the incorrect way during a Myelogram test, accidentally lowering her head instead of raising it. The test involves injecting an iodine dye into a person's spinal cord to help spot damage to discs. But Bartolome says when the table tipped, the dye injected at the base of her skull flowed into her brain instead of the spinal cord.
"I've been told that the change in pressure there would have caused my brain to malfunction," she says. This "very quickly resulted in confusion, hyperventilation and then cardiac arrest," Bartolome says, but what happened next is something more difficult to explain. Bartolome says she had a near-death experience, a phenomenon in which people report conscious events around them even though they may be clinically dead. Such experiences still have their skeptics, but Bartolome – the founder and director of International Association for Near-Death Studies, Santa Barbara – is certainly not alone.
Near-death experiences are real, "without a doubt," according to Houma, Louisiana-based Dr. Jeffrey Long. He runs the Near Death Experience Research Foundation and has studied more than 4,000 such experiences, in addition to working full-time in radiation oncology. People like Bartolome submit experiences to his foundation and are required to answer a more than 140-question survey to help verify their claims. To vet these people, many of these questions are the same, just asked in a slightly different way to make sure everything adds up.
Long isn't the only one doing research on the subject. Dr. Sam Parnia, an associate professor of medicine at New York University Langone Medical Center, launched a comprehensive study of near-death experiences in 2008. He published research involving 2,060 cardiac arrest patients, called AWARE, in 2014 in Resuscitation. That said, Parnia doesn't think the term "near-death experience" is the one people should be using, since it's "very poorly defined and it's what's led to a lot of controversy and debate," he says.
Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, questioned the claims of Eben Alexander's book "Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife," which details a near-death experience while he underwent a meningitis-induced coma. "The fact that mind and
consciousness are not fully explained by natural forces, however, is not proof of the supernatural," Shermer writes. "In any case, there is a reason they are called near-death experiences: the people who have them are not actually dead."
Parnia says the people studied are those who have objectively died and come back. Biologically, that's referred to as cardiac arrest, where doctors try to intervene after someone's heart stops beating. And Long also has a message for the inevitable skeptics: You can't explain away the consistent lucidity of near-death experiences.
When Bartolome went into cardiac arrest, she says she suddenly found herself up on the ceiling looking down very calmly and peacefully at the scene below her. "If I'm up here and my body's down there and he's calling code blue, I think I might've just died," she remembers thinking. She noticed a presence up there – who she later referred to as a "being" – and told the being she wanted to go back into her life. She was stuck in a difficult marriage, and the being knew that. It asked her, "But if you go back, you'll still be in your marriage. What will you do?" She told the being that she would get strong enough to leave her husband.
Down below, doctors had been trying to figure out what to do to save her life, she says. They ended up performing two precordial thumps (i.e. pounding the center of her chest), the second of which brought her back to life.
After she woke up, she told the staff she was watching their every move from above, leaving them stunned with what she was able to recall.
That's where Parnia comes in: His research focuses on resuscitated people's mental and cognitive experience at that specific moment when they have gone through death. He calls it an actual death experience.
The brain shuts down within two to 20 seconds after the heart stops, Parnia says, so even when doctors try to revive patients, they don't usually get enough blood into brain to get it functioning again. And that's what made the AWARE study turn heads: 39 percent of patients who lived after cardiac arrest could describe a perception of awareness even if they couldn't recall specific memories. These people didn't have an explicit memory of these events, though more granular research in further interviews revealed 9 percent of people who reported this perception of awareness went through what's commonly referred to as a near-death experience, and 2 percent had an "out-of-body experience" – meaning they could hear and see events. In one substantiated case from the AWARE study, "consciousness and awareness appeared to occur during a three minute period when there was no heartbeat."
Parnia is in the midst of working on a follow-up study, called AWARE II, with a public announcement likely in the next six months. It will try to answer questions the first study raised.
For example, is it true that up to 40 percent of people have awareness but just don't recall it?
Parnia says his team has built in tests for visual and auditory awareness for specific moments
during cardiac arrest and CPR where they can test for implicit learning if people can't explicitly
recall memories.
"For instance, in some cases people who appear unconscious are given names of cities and objects," he says. "When they have recovered they have been asked to recall any memories. Even though they have no recall, when asked to 'randomly' think of cities, those who had been exposed to the stimuli are statistically more likely to choose the same cities compared to control subjects. Thus indicating they had heard it."
New Clues Found in Understanding Near-Death Experiences
Robert Martone, Scientific American, 9.10.19
Imagine a dream in which you sense an intense feeling of presence, the truest, most real experience in your life, as you float away from your body and look at your own face. You have a twinge of fear as memories of your life flash by, but then you pass a transcendent threshold and are overcome by a feeling of bliss. Although contemplating death elicits fear for many people, these positive features are reported in some of the near-death experiences (NDEs) undergone by those who reached the brink of death only to recover.
Accounts of NDEs are remarkably consistent in character and content. They include intensely vivid memories involving bodily sensations that give a strong impression of being real, more real even than memories of true events. The content of those experiences famously includes memories of one’s life “flashing before the eyes,” and also the sensation of leaving the body, often seeing one’s own face and body, blissfully traveling through a tunnel toward a light and feeling “at one” with something universal.
Not surprisingly, many have seized on NDEs as evidence of life after death, heaven and the existence of God. The descriptions of leaving the body and blissful unity with the universal seem almost scripted from religious beliefs about souls leaving the body at death and ascending toward heavenly bliss. But these experiences are shared across a broad range of cultures and religions so it’s not likely that they are all reflections of specific religious expectations. Instead, that commonality suggests that NDEs might arise from something more fundamental than religious or cultural expectations. Perhaps NDEs reflect changes in how the brain functions as we approach death.
Many cultures employ drugs as part of religious practice to induce feelings of transcendence that have similarities to near-death experiences. If NDEs are based in brain biology, perhaps the action of those drugs that causes NDE-like experiences can teach us something about the NDE state. Of course, studying NDEs has significant technical hurdles. There is no way of examining the experience in animals, and rescuing a patient at death’s door is far more important than interviewing them about their NDE. Moreover, many of the drugs used to induce religious states are illicit, which would complicate any efforts to study their effects.
Although it’s impossible to directly examine what happens to the brain during NDEs, the stories collected from them provide a rich resource for linguistic analysis. In a fascinating new study, NDE stories were compared linguistically with anecdotes of drug experience in order to identify a drug that causes an experience most like a near-death experience. What is remarkable is how precise a tool this turned out to be. Even though the stories were open-ended subjective accounts often given many years after the fact, the linguistic analysis focused down not only to a specific class of drugs, but also to a specific drug as causing experiences very similar to NDEs.
This new study compared the stories of 625 individuals who reported NDEs with the stories of more than 15,000 individuals who had taken one of 165 different psychoactive drugs. When those stories were linguistically analyzed, similarities were found between recollections of near-death and drug experiences for those who had taken a specific class of drug. One drug in particular, ketamine, led to experiences very similar to NDE. This may mean that the near-death experience may reflect changes in the same chemical system in the brain that is targeted by drugs like ketamine.
The researchers drew on a large collection of NDE stories they had collected over many years. To compare NDEs with drug experiences, the researchers took advantage of a large collection of drug experience anecdotes found in the Erowid Experience Vaults, an open-source collection of accounts describing firsthand experiences with drugs and various substances.
In this study, the recollections of those who experienced NDEs and those who took drugs were compared linguistically. Their stories were broken down into individual words, and the words were sorted according to their meaning and counted. In this way, researchers were able to compare the number of times words having the same meaning were used in each story. They used this numerical analysis of story content to compare the content of drug-related and near-death experiences.
Each of the drugs included in these comparisons could be categorized by their ability to interact with a specific neurochemical system in the brain, and each drug fell into a specific category (antipsychotic, stimulant, psychedelic, depressant or sedative, deliriant, or hallucinogen). Few similarities were found when the accounts of one stimulant drug were compared with another within the same stimulant drug class, and few if any similarities were found between accounts of stimulant drug experience and NDEs. The same was true for depressants. The stories associated with hallucinogens, however, were very similar to one another, as were stories linked to antipsychotics and deliriants. When recollections of drug effects were compared with NDEs, stories about hallucinogens and psychedelics had the greatest similarities to NDEs, and the drug that scored the highest similarity to NDEs was the hallucinogen ketamine. The word most strongly represented in descriptions of both NDEs and ketamine experiences was “reality,” highlighting the sense of presence that accompanies NDEs. High among the list of words common to both experiences were those related to perception (saw, color, voice, vision), the body (face, arm, foot), emotion (fear) and transcendence (universe, understand, consciousness).
The researchers then sorted words into five large principal groups according to their common meaning. Those principal components dealt with perception and consciousness, drug dependency, negative sensations, drug preparation, and also a group that included disease state, religion and ceremony. NDEs reflected three of these components related to perception and consciousness, religion and ceremony, disease state, and drug preparation. The component related to perception and consciousness was labeled “Look/Self” and included terms such as color, vision, pattern, reality and face. The component “Disease/Religion” contained elements such as anxiety, ceremony, consciousness and self, whereas the component related to preparation “Make/Stuff” contained elements such as prepare, boil, smell and ceremony. Again, ketamine had the greatest overlap with NDEs in this type of analysis.
Other drugs that cause similar experiences to NDEs include LSD and N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT). The famous hallucinogen LSD was as similar as ketamine to NDEs when the near-death event was caused by cardiac arrest. DMT is a hallucinogen found in South American plants and used in shamanistic rituals. It caused experiences like NDEs and is also made in the brain, leading to speculation that endogenous DMT may explain NDEs. It is not known, however, whether levels of DMT change in a meaningful way in the human brain near death, so its role in the phenomenon remain controversial.
This study has significant weaknesses because it is based on purely subjective reports—some taken decades after the event. Similarly, there is no way to substantiate the accounts in the Erowid collection as there is no way to prove that any individual took the drug they claimed or believed they were taking. This makes it all the more remarkable that a linguistic analysis of stories derived in this manner could discriminate among different drug classes in their similarities to NDEs.
Linking near-death experiences and the experience of taking ketamine is provocative yet it is far from conclusive that both are because of the same chemical events in the brain. The types of studies needed to demonstrate this hypothesis, such as measuring neurochemical changes in the critically ill, would be both technically and ethically challenging. The authors propose, however, a practical application of this relation. Because near-death experiences (NDEs) can be transformational and have profound and lasting effects on those who experience them, including a sense of fearlessness about death, the authors propose that ketamine could be used therapeutically to induce an NDE-like state in terminally ill patients as a “preview” of what they might experience, so as to relieve their anxieties about death. Those benefits need to be weighed against the risks of potential ketamine side effects, which include feelings of panic or extreme anxiety, effects that could defeat the purpose of the intervention.
More important, this study helps describe the psychological manifestations of dying. That knowledge may ultimately contribute more to alleviating fear of this inevitable transition than a dose of any drug.
Robert Martone is a research scientist with expertise in neurodegeneration. He spends his free time kayaking and translating Renaissance Italian literature.
Tuesday, October 5
The topic for next week is out of this world - should we go to Mars? It's not if we can but should we? How about the Moon? Should we go there or focus our attention with NASA on our climate and low orbit exercisions?
The decade of space travel starting with John F. Kennedy was also a very tumultuous decade for the United States. The author of this article, Marina Koren, brings up the parallels and the budget tensions that naturally arise when we look to the skies. Similar questions arise - should the U.S. go it alone or should we have a multinational group go; like with the International Space Station.
I look forward to talking with you about this, and, whatever else comes up between now and then.
God's peace to you,
- Dave
Can We Still Go to Mars?
Marina Koren, 10.1.20, The Atlantic
Elsewhere in the solar system, a NASA rover is on its way to Mars. It carries, among other things, several pieces of spacesuit material. Designers want to see how the samples fare in the planet’s dusty, radiation-laden environment—the sturdy fabrics of the suit’s exterior, the cut-resistant fibers of its gloves, the shatterproof plastic of the bubble helmet that might someday reflect the soft light of a Martian sunset. When future astronauts arrive on the surface, the spacesuit designers back on Earth must be sure that they’re appropriately dressed for the occasion. The rover lands in February. Those future Mars explorers—who knows?
Men managed to make it to the moon 50 years ago, and for years now, setting foot on the red planet has felt like the clearest next step. Someday, an astronaut might be hunched over a desk, a wastebasket full of crumpled paper nearby, trying to come up with the right words—something as good as Neil Armstrong’s famous line—before her spaceship lands on Mars. That landing, NASA has said, would come in 2033. An Armstrong moment on Mars has always been far from guaranteed, but now, in this particular year of American history, that future feels further away than ever. The coronavirus pandemic has diminished all sorts of human endeavors, including space exploration, one of our dreamiest ambitions. “No virus is stronger than the human desire to explore,” the NASA administrator declared in April, when coronavirus cases were rising fast and the country’s response was already stumbling. Even in times like these, the leader of the only organization to send humans to another world has to believe that’s still possible, and on some level, he’s right; COVID-19 will not, in the end, stop humankind from someday reaching Mars. On the timelines required for space travel, a year, or more, of slowed activity counts as a small setback. But the exigencies of the pandemic still could influence America’s ambitions in the cosmos: The national impulse to reach for other worlds might be eroding.
Like many workplaces this spring, NASA sent its most of its employees home and hunkered down. While the agency put some projects on hold, it pressed ahead with others. A pair of NASA astronauts flew to the International Space Station and back in a SpaceX capsule. The Mars rover Perseverance launched on its months-long journey into deep space. These efforts, years in the making, were nearing their finish lines as the coronavirus spread across the country, and NASA deemed them “mission essential.”
Both launches, especially the historic flight of Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken—whom NASA affectionately advertised as “space dads”—for a moment drew Americans’ attention from a seemingly ceaseless current of tragedies, including stories of infected Americans dying in ambulances and footage of Black Americans dying at the hands of white police officers. Some people were delighted, grateful for a spot of good news. Others were surprised, even aghast, at the timing. You’re doing this now? Really?
The critique echoed the feelings of many Americans during NASA’s most famous era: the race to the moon. In the late 1960s, the Apollo program unfolded against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, civil-rights demonstrations, and political assassinations. Polling from that time shows that the majority of Americans didn’t think the Apollo program was worth the cost. The exception was a survey conducted on the day of the moon landing, when the mood around the world was euphoric. Even in that moment, though, the problems of our planet firmly grounded the minds of some Americans.
Still, space historians told me, in those halcyon days of human spaceflight, even with all its turmoil, the country functioned on a basic level. In the late 1960s, a different virus known as the “Hong Kong flu” killed roughly 100,000 Americans, but did not destabilize the country the way COVID-19 has. Throughout the decade, the national economy was thriving, and an American passport meant something. Though the Vietnam War roiled American politics, the active front was in a distant country. The war’s toll was heavy—an estimated 47,434 Americans died in battle between 1964 and 1975—but in six months, COVID-19 deaths in the United States outnumbered American casualties in the past five wars combined.
Even before the pandemic paralyzed the country, the prospect of Americans making it to Mars in the 2030s was far-fetched. In February 2019, a year before the first American died from COVID19, an independent research group published a report about NASA’s Mars dreams. At Congress’s request, NASA had asked the group to evaluate whether the agency could launch astronauts to the red planet in 2033, not to land, but to loop around and come back, as the early Apollo missions did. The conclusion was bleak; given NASA’s current plans, an orbital mission would be “infeasible under all budget scenarios and technology development and testing schedules.” The researchers found that astronauts might be able to launch in 2037, without any schedule delays or budget shortfalls, but believed 2039 would be more realistic, which would push a landing to the 2040s.
NASA is not humankind’s only ticket to other worlds. Private companies are developing their own dreams, and their own rockets. As the pandemic set in, NASA paused some work on a rocket designed to send astronauts to the moon, but Elon Musk’s SpaceX continued testing prototypes for its Mars spaceship. SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin have received sizable contracts from NASA to do their work, and Musk often says that SpaceX wouldn’t be what it is today without NASA’s support, financial and otherwise. But his private company could end up leapfrogging the storied space agency on infrastructure that could send people to Mars. (Musk said recently he believes SpaceX could deliver people to the red planet in the 2020s, but the billionaire entrepreneur is, famously and by his own admission, overly optimistic about schedules, so take that with a grain of Mars dust.) SpaceX might not go it alone in the end, deciding to join forces with NASA, but the world’s top space agency would not be at the controls.
In the business of spaceflight, delays are virtually unavoidable, even under the best of circumstances. A pandemic, then, might slow down NASA’s long-term plans—but something would have, no matter what. Donald Rapp, who worked on Mars programs as a chief technologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory before he retired, doesn’t think the effects of the pandemic today will be disruptive enough to scuttle any future mission to Mars. The 2030s, in his view, is an overly optimistic goal, and he doesn’t expect astronauts to reach the red planet until potentially the 2060s.
But the work for a Mars journey in the 2030s must be done in this decade, and for NASA, such an ambitious mission might be a tougher sell now, both to the American public and to lawmakers. Months before the virus struck, the Trump administration was already struggling to persuade Congress to fund its top priority—sending Americans back to the moon in the next four years, with an eye toward Mars after that. To reach that goal, NASA must either make cuts to existing programs or receive billions of dollars in additional funding. “If you try to sell ‘humans to Mars’ this year, next year, or even the next year, I think you’ve got a tough road to travel,” Rapp told me.
But how might the public react to enthusiastic rhetoric about other worlds in 2021, when, for many of us, this world still clearly demands extra attention? If the national unity of the Apollo era is mostly a myth, at some point NASA might have to face down the reality that Americans aren’t so space-happy. The agency runs extensive and often brilliant public-relations campaigns for its missions: recruiting schoolchildren to name space rovers, imbuing spacecraft with lovable personalities, and pitching its astronauts—both space dads and others—as talented yet relatable figures. Even so, Logsdon, the space historian, already sees the national impulse that fueled Apollo, that believed in the idea of America reaching deeper into the cosmos, weakening. “That impulse is certainly less widespread than it was 50 years ago,” he said.
As government agencies go, NASA is looked upon fondly. Although some Americans blanch at spending more than $20 billion on NASA each year, a 2019 poll found that a plurality of participants, when told that the agency’s annual funding accounts for half a percent of the national budget, say that they'd prefer the government spend a greater portion of its resources on NASA. But just 18 percent think going to Mars should be a top priority, the survey found, and even fewer think NASA should focus on sending astronauts back to the moon. Instead, survey participants thought NASA should focus more on climate-change research and the study of asteroids that could strike Earth, two areas that receive far less funding than human spaceflight. “If it was up to the public to set space priorities, the NASA budget would be flipped,” Teasel Muir-Harmony, a historian and a curator of Apollo artifacts at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, told me.
The agency will have a chance to see, in February, how eager Americans are to think about a place that’s not this one. Perseverance will land on Mars and start to dig for evidence of fossilized alien life. Perhaps people will latch on to this distant robot as a distraction from the strain of the pandemic; perhaps the concerns of Mars will seem extra hard to care about. What might the country look like then? How many more Americans will have died?
The swatches of spacesuit material that Perseverance carries are, in a way, an emblem of American optimism. They posit that one day these fabrics might be wrapped around the bodies of astronauts, sheltering them from an environment they weren’t made to survive. These Armstrongs and Aldrins might walk up to Perseverance, its batteries long dead, and see, next to one of its wheels, beneath a blanket of rust-colored dust, a plaque of a snake coiled around a rod. A symbol of medicine, added as a tribute to the brave people who tended to others during the 2020 pandemic, years before—in this future, a distant memory.
The decade of space travel starting with John F. Kennedy was also a very tumultuous decade for the United States. The author of this article, Marina Koren, brings up the parallels and the budget tensions that naturally arise when we look to the skies. Similar questions arise - should the U.S. go it alone or should we have a multinational group go; like with the International Space Station.
I look forward to talking with you about this, and, whatever else comes up between now and then.
God's peace to you,
- Dave
Can We Still Go to Mars?
Marina Koren, 10.1.20, The Atlantic
Elsewhere in the solar system, a NASA rover is on its way to Mars. It carries, among other things, several pieces of spacesuit material. Designers want to see how the samples fare in the planet’s dusty, radiation-laden environment—the sturdy fabrics of the suit’s exterior, the cut-resistant fibers of its gloves, the shatterproof plastic of the bubble helmet that might someday reflect the soft light of a Martian sunset. When future astronauts arrive on the surface, the spacesuit designers back on Earth must be sure that they’re appropriately dressed for the occasion. The rover lands in February. Those future Mars explorers—who knows?
Men managed to make it to the moon 50 years ago, and for years now, setting foot on the red planet has felt like the clearest next step. Someday, an astronaut might be hunched over a desk, a wastebasket full of crumpled paper nearby, trying to come up with the right words—something as good as Neil Armstrong’s famous line—before her spaceship lands on Mars. That landing, NASA has said, would come in 2033. An Armstrong moment on Mars has always been far from guaranteed, but now, in this particular year of American history, that future feels further away than ever. The coronavirus pandemic has diminished all sorts of human endeavors, including space exploration, one of our dreamiest ambitions. “No virus is stronger than the human desire to explore,” the NASA administrator declared in April, when coronavirus cases were rising fast and the country’s response was already stumbling. Even in times like these, the leader of the only organization to send humans to another world has to believe that’s still possible, and on some level, he’s right; COVID-19 will not, in the end, stop humankind from someday reaching Mars. On the timelines required for space travel, a year, or more, of slowed activity counts as a small setback. But the exigencies of the pandemic still could influence America’s ambitions in the cosmos: The national impulse to reach for other worlds might be eroding.
Like many workplaces this spring, NASA sent its most of its employees home and hunkered down. While the agency put some projects on hold, it pressed ahead with others. A pair of NASA astronauts flew to the International Space Station and back in a SpaceX capsule. The Mars rover Perseverance launched on its months-long journey into deep space. These efforts, years in the making, were nearing their finish lines as the coronavirus spread across the country, and NASA deemed them “mission essential.”
Both launches, especially the historic flight of Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken—whom NASA affectionately advertised as “space dads”—for a moment drew Americans’ attention from a seemingly ceaseless current of tragedies, including stories of infected Americans dying in ambulances and footage of Black Americans dying at the hands of white police officers. Some people were delighted, grateful for a spot of good news. Others were surprised, even aghast, at the timing. You’re doing this now? Really?
The critique echoed the feelings of many Americans during NASA’s most famous era: the race to the moon. In the late 1960s, the Apollo program unfolded against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, civil-rights demonstrations, and political assassinations. Polling from that time shows that the majority of Americans didn’t think the Apollo program was worth the cost. The exception was a survey conducted on the day of the moon landing, when the mood around the world was euphoric. Even in that moment, though, the problems of our planet firmly grounded the minds of some Americans.
Still, space historians told me, in those halcyon days of human spaceflight, even with all its turmoil, the country functioned on a basic level. In the late 1960s, a different virus known as the “Hong Kong flu” killed roughly 100,000 Americans, but did not destabilize the country the way COVID-19 has. Throughout the decade, the national economy was thriving, and an American passport meant something. Though the Vietnam War roiled American politics, the active front was in a distant country. The war’s toll was heavy—an estimated 47,434 Americans died in battle between 1964 and 1975—but in six months, COVID-19 deaths in the United States outnumbered American casualties in the past five wars combined.
Even before the pandemic paralyzed the country, the prospect of Americans making it to Mars in the 2030s was far-fetched. In February 2019, a year before the first American died from COVID19, an independent research group published a report about NASA’s Mars dreams. At Congress’s request, NASA had asked the group to evaluate whether the agency could launch astronauts to the red planet in 2033, not to land, but to loop around and come back, as the early Apollo missions did. The conclusion was bleak; given NASA’s current plans, an orbital mission would be “infeasible under all budget scenarios and technology development and testing schedules.” The researchers found that astronauts might be able to launch in 2037, without any schedule delays or budget shortfalls, but believed 2039 would be more realistic, which would push a landing to the 2040s.
NASA is not humankind’s only ticket to other worlds. Private companies are developing their own dreams, and their own rockets. As the pandemic set in, NASA paused some work on a rocket designed to send astronauts to the moon, but Elon Musk’s SpaceX continued testing prototypes for its Mars spaceship. SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin have received sizable contracts from NASA to do their work, and Musk often says that SpaceX wouldn’t be what it is today without NASA’s support, financial and otherwise. But his private company could end up leapfrogging the storied space agency on infrastructure that could send people to Mars. (Musk said recently he believes SpaceX could deliver people to the red planet in the 2020s, but the billionaire entrepreneur is, famously and by his own admission, overly optimistic about schedules, so take that with a grain of Mars dust.) SpaceX might not go it alone in the end, deciding to join forces with NASA, but the world’s top space agency would not be at the controls.
In the business of spaceflight, delays are virtually unavoidable, even under the best of circumstances. A pandemic, then, might slow down NASA’s long-term plans—but something would have, no matter what. Donald Rapp, who worked on Mars programs as a chief technologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory before he retired, doesn’t think the effects of the pandemic today will be disruptive enough to scuttle any future mission to Mars. The 2030s, in his view, is an overly optimistic goal, and he doesn’t expect astronauts to reach the red planet until potentially the 2060s.
But the work for a Mars journey in the 2030s must be done in this decade, and for NASA, such an ambitious mission might be a tougher sell now, both to the American public and to lawmakers. Months before the virus struck, the Trump administration was already struggling to persuade Congress to fund its top priority—sending Americans back to the moon in the next four years, with an eye toward Mars after that. To reach that goal, NASA must either make cuts to existing programs or receive billions of dollars in additional funding. “If you try to sell ‘humans to Mars’ this year, next year, or even the next year, I think you’ve got a tough road to travel,” Rapp told me.
But how might the public react to enthusiastic rhetoric about other worlds in 2021, when, for many of us, this world still clearly demands extra attention? If the national unity of the Apollo era is mostly a myth, at some point NASA might have to face down the reality that Americans aren’t so space-happy. The agency runs extensive and often brilliant public-relations campaigns for its missions: recruiting schoolchildren to name space rovers, imbuing spacecraft with lovable personalities, and pitching its astronauts—both space dads and others—as talented yet relatable figures. Even so, Logsdon, the space historian, already sees the national impulse that fueled Apollo, that believed in the idea of America reaching deeper into the cosmos, weakening. “That impulse is certainly less widespread than it was 50 years ago,” he said.
As government agencies go, NASA is looked upon fondly. Although some Americans blanch at spending more than $20 billion on NASA each year, a 2019 poll found that a plurality of participants, when told that the agency’s annual funding accounts for half a percent of the national budget, say that they'd prefer the government spend a greater portion of its resources on NASA. But just 18 percent think going to Mars should be a top priority, the survey found, and even fewer think NASA should focus on sending astronauts back to the moon. Instead, survey participants thought NASA should focus more on climate-change research and the study of asteroids that could strike Earth, two areas that receive far less funding than human spaceflight. “If it was up to the public to set space priorities, the NASA budget would be flipped,” Teasel Muir-Harmony, a historian and a curator of Apollo artifacts at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, told me.
The agency will have a chance to see, in February, how eager Americans are to think about a place that’s not this one. Perseverance will land on Mars and start to dig for evidence of fossilized alien life. Perhaps people will latch on to this distant robot as a distraction from the strain of the pandemic; perhaps the concerns of Mars will seem extra hard to care about. What might the country look like then? How many more Americans will have died?
The swatches of spacesuit material that Perseverance carries are, in a way, an emblem of American optimism. They posit that one day these fabrics might be wrapped around the bodies of astronauts, sheltering them from an environment they weren’t made to survive. These Armstrongs and Aldrins might walk up to Perseverance, its batteries long dead, and see, next to one of its wheels, beneath a blanket of rust-colored dust, a plaque of a snake coiled around a rod. A symbol of medicine, added as a tribute to the brave people who tended to others during the 2020 pandemic, years before—in this future, a distant memory.
Tuesday, September 29
In today's news there are protests in the street - in fact, I received a text from Bradenton Christian School that they are rerouting school busses to avoid a protest in downtown Bradenton that may affect the bridges - the pandemic has taken over 200,000 lives, there is talk of a potential unpeaceful transfer of power, Supreme Court nominees, voter fraud, corporate espionage; so much to talk about.
But, I'd like us to go into a different direction that may change the way we see higher education. Maybe it's a way of diverting our minds, or it'll give us a break from what we are reading, but I think it will prompt good discussions. One question is how does the potential shift in higher education change the way nonprofits are run?
May the peace of God rest on our hearts and in our communities,
- Dave
Here is the website address for the discussion group:
https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
Free Market Can Deliver Free College
By Daniel Pianko
Wall Street Journal, Sept. 21, 2020
The Covid-19 pandemic forced colleges to shift to online learning, often with disastrous results. Students are no fools and many of them are suing for a discount. They have realized what higher education is loath to admit: Instruction is not what they, their parents and the American taxpayer are paying full price for.
The most common discount on offer appears to be a 10% tuition reduction, but some students are pushing for far more. They claim that nonacademic activities, from school plays and concerts to networking and parties, represent a lot more than 10% of the price tag of college. Such discounts imply that students are still getting 90% of the value of higher education (about $45,000 worth, on average) from their Zoom lectures, but much of the educational content has become widely available for free. Students and parents can’t be faulted for suspecting that an online education should cost next to nothing.
At some institutions, it already does. Primarily online Southern New Hampshire University recently announced a free first year for incoming students in light of the pandemic. California-based National University—which offers an array of online classes—cut tuition by up to 25% for
full-time students and says that new scholarships will make enrollment nearly free for Pell Grant-eligible students.
Can the pandemic finally bring the traditional college pricing model to its knees? Or will these examples remain outliers?
Insight into the future of higher education may come from an unlikely source: the brokerage industry. Like higher ed, stock trading is a highly regulated field with massive barriers to change. Recall the stereotypical stockbrokers of the 1980s: Tom Wolfe’s “Masters of the Universe” or
Merrill Lynch’s “Thundering Herd.” For years, the traditional brokerage industry was considered too difficult to replicate with technology. How could the internet replace a white-shoe adviser who not only took trade orders but also answered the phone, offered personal advice and took part in estate planning and other higher-order wealth-management tasks?
The mighty were felled quicker than expected. Over 30 years, technology reduced the cost of trading a stock from hundreds of dollars to virtually zero.
In 1988, a ragtag group working far from Wall Street began disrupting the brokerage business. It was led by Joe Ricketts, the larger-than-life founder of Ameritrade, who was the first to enable stock trading by touch-tone phone. Ameritrade introduced online stock trading only seven years later.
My first client as a junior investment banker out of college was Ameritrade, and much of my job involved carrying bags for Mr. Ricketts on roadshows. In 1998, when most other firms charged $199 a trade, he revolutionized the brokerage industry by offering to trade unlimited shares for $8 a trade. After days on the road together, I finally worked up the courage to ask him: “How much lower than $8 a trade can stock trading go?”
With a twinkle in his eye, Mr. Ricketts responded, “One day, Ameritrade will pay you to trade.” I thought he had lost his business sense, if not his mind. Who gives away a product that everyone else is charging $200 for?
Yet Mr. Ricketts saw the future: Today, almost no large brokerage firm is charging for stock trades. Firms make money from new revenue sources, like selling order flow to market makers. It’s not unlike the way Gmail is free for users, whose data then helps Google sell targeted
advertising. In the first quarter of 2020, fintech unicorn Robinhood raked in $100 million in order-flow sales alone. Ameritrade’s successor was sold last November for around $26 billion.
Higher ed is where the brokerage business was in the late 1990s: poised for transformation. Even before the pandemic, momentum was building in the education market away from high-cost operators and toward low-cost ones. Southern New Hampshire University and Western
Governors University, nonprofits that charge less than $10,000 a year in tuition, have already become some of the largest and fastest-growing institutions in the country. They each serve more than 100,000 students by using online delivery and competency-based instruction to drive down costs dramatically without sacrificing quality.
These mega-universities will leverage technology to drive tuition revenue to zero over time. Some are already on the way, and the pandemic may accelerate the shift for many others. Rather than collecting tens of thousands of dollars from students up front, colleges might make money by forming partnerships with employers, by charging students a percentage of their post-graduation income, or via government-issued social-impact bonds tied to successful outcomes like graduation rates.
Mr. Ricketts’s lesson should be clear to every college president in America: Technological change affects industries in deep, novel ways that established players ignore at their own peril. New education models are already driving tuition down, but there’s still room for massive, structural price-driven disruption in this industry. In the wake of the pandemic, the winner will be the institution that takes the cost of online learning down to free.
Just as no one 30 years ago could have foreseen what would befall brokerage fees, few now can imagine what will befall colleges in a world without tuition revenue. But that world may be coming. If it is, the debate over free college will become an anachronism. Will you greet it with
disbelief or a twinkle in your eye?
But, I'd like us to go into a different direction that may change the way we see higher education. Maybe it's a way of diverting our minds, or it'll give us a break from what we are reading, but I think it will prompt good discussions. One question is how does the potential shift in higher education change the way nonprofits are run?
May the peace of God rest on our hearts and in our communities,
- Dave
Here is the website address for the discussion group:
https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
Free Market Can Deliver Free College
By Daniel Pianko
Wall Street Journal, Sept. 21, 2020
The Covid-19 pandemic forced colleges to shift to online learning, often with disastrous results. Students are no fools and many of them are suing for a discount. They have realized what higher education is loath to admit: Instruction is not what they, their parents and the American taxpayer are paying full price for.
The most common discount on offer appears to be a 10% tuition reduction, but some students are pushing for far more. They claim that nonacademic activities, from school plays and concerts to networking and parties, represent a lot more than 10% of the price tag of college. Such discounts imply that students are still getting 90% of the value of higher education (about $45,000 worth, on average) from their Zoom lectures, but much of the educational content has become widely available for free. Students and parents can’t be faulted for suspecting that an online education should cost next to nothing.
At some institutions, it already does. Primarily online Southern New Hampshire University recently announced a free first year for incoming students in light of the pandemic. California-based National University—which offers an array of online classes—cut tuition by up to 25% for
full-time students and says that new scholarships will make enrollment nearly free for Pell Grant-eligible students.
Can the pandemic finally bring the traditional college pricing model to its knees? Or will these examples remain outliers?
Insight into the future of higher education may come from an unlikely source: the brokerage industry. Like higher ed, stock trading is a highly regulated field with massive barriers to change. Recall the stereotypical stockbrokers of the 1980s: Tom Wolfe’s “Masters of the Universe” or
Merrill Lynch’s “Thundering Herd.” For years, the traditional brokerage industry was considered too difficult to replicate with technology. How could the internet replace a white-shoe adviser who not only took trade orders but also answered the phone, offered personal advice and took part in estate planning and other higher-order wealth-management tasks?
The mighty were felled quicker than expected. Over 30 years, technology reduced the cost of trading a stock from hundreds of dollars to virtually zero.
In 1988, a ragtag group working far from Wall Street began disrupting the brokerage business. It was led by Joe Ricketts, the larger-than-life founder of Ameritrade, who was the first to enable stock trading by touch-tone phone. Ameritrade introduced online stock trading only seven years later.
My first client as a junior investment banker out of college was Ameritrade, and much of my job involved carrying bags for Mr. Ricketts on roadshows. In 1998, when most other firms charged $199 a trade, he revolutionized the brokerage industry by offering to trade unlimited shares for $8 a trade. After days on the road together, I finally worked up the courage to ask him: “How much lower than $8 a trade can stock trading go?”
With a twinkle in his eye, Mr. Ricketts responded, “One day, Ameritrade will pay you to trade.” I thought he had lost his business sense, if not his mind. Who gives away a product that everyone else is charging $200 for?
Yet Mr. Ricketts saw the future: Today, almost no large brokerage firm is charging for stock trades. Firms make money from new revenue sources, like selling order flow to market makers. It’s not unlike the way Gmail is free for users, whose data then helps Google sell targeted
advertising. In the first quarter of 2020, fintech unicorn Robinhood raked in $100 million in order-flow sales alone. Ameritrade’s successor was sold last November for around $26 billion.
Higher ed is where the brokerage business was in the late 1990s: poised for transformation. Even before the pandemic, momentum was building in the education market away from high-cost operators and toward low-cost ones. Southern New Hampshire University and Western
Governors University, nonprofits that charge less than $10,000 a year in tuition, have already become some of the largest and fastest-growing institutions in the country. They each serve more than 100,000 students by using online delivery and competency-based instruction to drive down costs dramatically without sacrificing quality.
These mega-universities will leverage technology to drive tuition revenue to zero over time. Some are already on the way, and the pandemic may accelerate the shift for many others. Rather than collecting tens of thousands of dollars from students up front, colleges might make money by forming partnerships with employers, by charging students a percentage of their post-graduation income, or via government-issued social-impact bonds tied to successful outcomes like graduation rates.
Mr. Ricketts’s lesson should be clear to every college president in America: Technological change affects industries in deep, novel ways that established players ignore at their own peril. New education models are already driving tuition down, but there’s still room for massive, structural price-driven disruption in this industry. In the wake of the pandemic, the winner will be the institution that takes the cost of online learning down to free.
Just as no one 30 years ago could have foreseen what would befall brokerage fees, few now can imagine what will befall colleges in a world without tuition revenue. But that world may be coming. If it is, the debate over free college will become an anachronism. Will you greet it with
disbelief or a twinkle in your eye?
Tuesday, September 22
I am on Barna Research Group's Pastor's Panel. They sent me an article titled, White Christians Have Become Even Less Motivated to Address Racial Injustice. This is not an opinion piece, they are basing it on research. I think it will provide for an interesting discussion.
The article is currently web based so it did not print well. For the easier to read copy, click on this link. https://www.barna.com/research/american-christians-race-problem/
May the peace of the Lord be with you,
- Dave
Here is the website address for the discussion group:
https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
White Christians Have Become Even Less Motivated to Address Racial Injustice -
September 15, 2020
This article is an excerpt from Race Today, a Barna briefing available exclusively on Barna Access.
This year, the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor and the shooting of Jacob Blake have sparked a nationwide conversation about racial justice. Some of the more prominent responses include a series of marches with historic attendance, a players’ strike in the NBA and WNBA and new policies concerning issues such as Confederate symbols on flags and reparations for Black residents. Social media has swirled with resources and hashtags, books on anti-racism have risen to top of the best-seller lists, and leaders in government, business and religious institutions have invited deep and at times public examination of their actions and influence. One might assume that the events of 2020 have increased awareness of racial injustice in the United States and motivation to address it. But the story isn’t so straightforward, new Barna research (conducted in partnership with Dynata) suggests. Yes, there are signs the past year has clarified how Americans think about racial injustice—but that doesn’t mean they see the issue, or their role within it, with greater urgency. In the Church especially, there is a sense that people are doubling down on divides.
Christians Increasingly Acknowledge Past Racial Oppression—But Not Present Problems
As Barna previously reported, data from the summer of 2019 show 46 percent of practicing Christians say the country “definitely” has a race problem, just behind the 51 percent of all U.S. adults who feel this way. Have recent events, including several months of widely covered protests and demonstrations, changed perceptions at all? As of the July 2020 survey, practicing Christians—self-identified Christians who say their faith is very important in their lives and have attended a worship service within the past month—are no more likely to acknowledge racial injustice (43% “definitely”) than they were the previous summer. There is actually a significant increase in the percentage of practicing Christians who say race is “not at all” a problem in the U.S. (19%, up from 11% in 2019). Among self-identified Christians alone, a similar significant increase occurs (10% in 2019, 16% in 2020). Like in 2019, Black adults remain much more likely than their white peers to say the country has a race problem, and this sentiment is even stronger among self-identified Christians (81% vs. 76% of all Black U.S. adults). To best look at the intersection of faith and race / ethnicity, this release will report most on self-identified Christians among a nationally representative sample. Barna is unable to report on Asian Christians due to low sample size. There is, however, a boost in Christians’ willingness to strongly agree that, historically, the U.S. has oppressed minorities—from 19 percent in the 2019 survey to 26 percent in the summer of 2020 (for both self-identified and practicing Christians, respectively). As this increased acknowledgment of past injustice does not correspond with increased acknowledgment of present injustice, it might indicate that either more people are beginning to gain education and understanding of U.S. racial history, or that more people are beginning to regard racial oppression as an issue we’ve moved beyond.
Motivation to Address Racial Injustice Has Declined in the Past Year
When Barna asks “How motivated are you to address racial injustice in our society?”, we see numbers moving out from the middle—toward being less motivated. In 2019, one in five U.S. adults was “unmotivated” (11%) or “not at all motivated” (9%); just a year later, in the summer of 2020, that percentage has increased to 28 percent (12% unmotivated, 16% not at all motivated). Meanwhile, the number of those who are “somewhat motivated” has shrunk and the number of those who are motivated has held fairly steady over the past year, indicating some of those who might have previously been on the fence about addressing racial injustice have become more firmly opposed to engaging. The unmotivated segment has seen growth among both practicing and self-identified Christians. Among self-identified Christians, the unmotivated group has shifted from 19 percent in 2019 (10% unmotivated, 9% not at all motivated) to 30 percent (12% unmotivated, 18% not at all motivated) in 2020. For practicing Christians, those who were unmotivated in 2019 (9% unmotivated, 8% not at all motivated) have also increased to 30 percent (12% unmotivated, 18% not at all motivated) in 2020. In one year, that’s more than a 11 percentage point increase overall in Christians who are uninspired to address racial injustice, including a doubling of those who say they are “not at all motivated” in both the practicing and self-identified groups. Some Christians are willing to admit uncertainty on the topic; one in five is “unsure” about whether they are motivated to address racial injustice (10% in 2019, 9% in 2020). Some minority groups are, naturally, highly motivated to address the racial injustices that may affect them. Among self-identified Christians, Black adults in particular (46% “very motivated”), followed by Hispanic adults (23% “very motivated”), are eager to be involved—something few white self-identified Christians express (10% “very motivated”).
The research for this study surveyed 1,525 U.S. adults online between June 18 and July 6 2020 via a national consumer panel. The survey over-sampled African American, Asians, and Hispanics. Statistical weighting has been applied in order to maximize representation by age, gender, ethnicity, education, and region. The margin of error is plus or minus 1.8 at a 95% confidence interval. Due to low sample size when segmenting practicing Christians by race / ethnicity in the 2020 study, Barna instead chose to report on self-identified Christians—a nationally representative sample—throughout the briefing. Barna is also unable to report on Asian self-identified Christians or U.S. Elders due to low sample size. 2019 Survey Conducted in Partnership with Racial Justice and Unity Center (Michael Emerson, Glenn Bracey, Chad Brennan) The research for this study surveyed 2,889 U.S. adults online between July 19 and August 5, 2019 via a national consumer panel. The survey over-sampled Practicing Christians, African American, Asians, and Hispanics. Statistical weighting has been applied in order to maximize representation by age, gender, ethnicity, education, and region. The margin of error is plus or minus 1.89 at a 95% confidence interval.
The article is currently web based so it did not print well. For the easier to read copy, click on this link. https://www.barna.com/research/american-christians-race-problem/
May the peace of the Lord be with you,
- Dave
Here is the website address for the discussion group:
https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
White Christians Have Become Even Less Motivated to Address Racial Injustice -
September 15, 2020
This article is an excerpt from Race Today, a Barna briefing available exclusively on Barna Access.
This year, the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor and the shooting of Jacob Blake have sparked a nationwide conversation about racial justice. Some of the more prominent responses include a series of marches with historic attendance, a players’ strike in the NBA and WNBA and new policies concerning issues such as Confederate symbols on flags and reparations for Black residents. Social media has swirled with resources and hashtags, books on anti-racism have risen to top of the best-seller lists, and leaders in government, business and religious institutions have invited deep and at times public examination of their actions and influence. One might assume that the events of 2020 have increased awareness of racial injustice in the United States and motivation to address it. But the story isn’t so straightforward, new Barna research (conducted in partnership with Dynata) suggests. Yes, there are signs the past year has clarified how Americans think about racial injustice—but that doesn’t mean they see the issue, or their role within it, with greater urgency. In the Church especially, there is a sense that people are doubling down on divides.
Christians Increasingly Acknowledge Past Racial Oppression—But Not Present Problems
As Barna previously reported, data from the summer of 2019 show 46 percent of practicing Christians say the country “definitely” has a race problem, just behind the 51 percent of all U.S. adults who feel this way. Have recent events, including several months of widely covered protests and demonstrations, changed perceptions at all? As of the July 2020 survey, practicing Christians—self-identified Christians who say their faith is very important in their lives and have attended a worship service within the past month—are no more likely to acknowledge racial injustice (43% “definitely”) than they were the previous summer. There is actually a significant increase in the percentage of practicing Christians who say race is “not at all” a problem in the U.S. (19%, up from 11% in 2019). Among self-identified Christians alone, a similar significant increase occurs (10% in 2019, 16% in 2020). Like in 2019, Black adults remain much more likely than their white peers to say the country has a race problem, and this sentiment is even stronger among self-identified Christians (81% vs. 76% of all Black U.S. adults). To best look at the intersection of faith and race / ethnicity, this release will report most on self-identified Christians among a nationally representative sample. Barna is unable to report on Asian Christians due to low sample size. There is, however, a boost in Christians’ willingness to strongly agree that, historically, the U.S. has oppressed minorities—from 19 percent in the 2019 survey to 26 percent in the summer of 2020 (for both self-identified and practicing Christians, respectively). As this increased acknowledgment of past injustice does not correspond with increased acknowledgment of present injustice, it might indicate that either more people are beginning to gain education and understanding of U.S. racial history, or that more people are beginning to regard racial oppression as an issue we’ve moved beyond.
Motivation to Address Racial Injustice Has Declined in the Past Year
When Barna asks “How motivated are you to address racial injustice in our society?”, we see numbers moving out from the middle—toward being less motivated. In 2019, one in five U.S. adults was “unmotivated” (11%) or “not at all motivated” (9%); just a year later, in the summer of 2020, that percentage has increased to 28 percent (12% unmotivated, 16% not at all motivated). Meanwhile, the number of those who are “somewhat motivated” has shrunk and the number of those who are motivated has held fairly steady over the past year, indicating some of those who might have previously been on the fence about addressing racial injustice have become more firmly opposed to engaging. The unmotivated segment has seen growth among both practicing and self-identified Christians. Among self-identified Christians, the unmotivated group has shifted from 19 percent in 2019 (10% unmotivated, 9% not at all motivated) to 30 percent (12% unmotivated, 18% not at all motivated) in 2020. For practicing Christians, those who were unmotivated in 2019 (9% unmotivated, 8% not at all motivated) have also increased to 30 percent (12% unmotivated, 18% not at all motivated) in 2020. In one year, that’s more than a 11 percentage point increase overall in Christians who are uninspired to address racial injustice, including a doubling of those who say they are “not at all motivated” in both the practicing and self-identified groups. Some Christians are willing to admit uncertainty on the topic; one in five is “unsure” about whether they are motivated to address racial injustice (10% in 2019, 9% in 2020). Some minority groups are, naturally, highly motivated to address the racial injustices that may affect them. Among self-identified Christians, Black adults in particular (46% “very motivated”), followed by Hispanic adults (23% “very motivated”), are eager to be involved—something few white self-identified Christians express (10% “very motivated”).
The research for this study surveyed 1,525 U.S. adults online between June 18 and July 6 2020 via a national consumer panel. The survey over-sampled African American, Asians, and Hispanics. Statistical weighting has been applied in order to maximize representation by age, gender, ethnicity, education, and region. The margin of error is plus or minus 1.8 at a 95% confidence interval. Due to low sample size when segmenting practicing Christians by race / ethnicity in the 2020 study, Barna instead chose to report on self-identified Christians—a nationally representative sample—throughout the briefing. Barna is also unable to report on Asian self-identified Christians or U.S. Elders due to low sample size. 2019 Survey Conducted in Partnership with Racial Justice and Unity Center (Michael Emerson, Glenn Bracey, Chad Brennan) The research for this study surveyed 2,889 U.S. adults online between July 19 and August 5, 2019 via a national consumer panel. The survey over-sampled Practicing Christians, African American, Asians, and Hispanics. Statistical weighting has been applied in order to maximize representation by age, gender, ethnicity, education, and region. The margin of error is plus or minus 1.89 at a 95% confidence interval.
Tuesday, September 15
Say what you want about our time, at least we are thinking about our constitution. One of the best documents written in the past 1,000 years,
I think it would be interesting to have a discussion group about it. Attached is an article written by Danielle Allen, a political philosopher and professor at Harvard, which can be found in the upcoming October edition of the Atlantic.
I have edited the article for our group; if you'd like the full edition, I'd be happy to send it to you.
Natural law and God's law were defining elements in the constitution. Professor Allen examines it through the lens of slavery, the 3/5th rule, and the inevitably of freedom for all.
God's peace to you and to our nation,
- Dave
The Flawed Genius of the Constitution
Danielle Allen, The Atlantic, October 2020
The best that can be said about the compromises regarding slavery that also helped the Constitutional Convention achieve unanimity is this: Those who knew enslavement was wrong but nonetheless accepted the compromises believed they were choosing a path that would lead
inexorably, if incrementally, to freedom for all.
We cannot, however, assume with James Wilson and Benjamin Franklin and others like them that incrementalism was the only available path to freedom for all. It is also not clear that the Constitution’s compromises even accelerated the march of freedom, whether for enslaved people
or for people more generally. The U.S. gave the vote to all male citizens regardless of skin color or former condition of servitude only with the Fifteenth Amendment, in 1870. Until that point, African Americans as well as some white men in states that made tax payment a prerequisite had been denied the right to vote. These changes required a bloody civil war, and even they were still partial. Pennsylvania and Rhode Island maintained tax-paying qualifications into the 20th century; women and Native Americans did not yet have suffrage. In both Britain and the United States, true universal suffrage was not adopted until well into the 20th century, and fights for voting rights persist.
In other words, the Constitution did not earn an earlier release from bondage or promote universal suffrage for men much faster than was accomplished under Britain’s constitutional monarchy. Nor much faster than was achieved in Canada, a country we can look to for an answer
to the question of what might have happened had the North American colonies that came to form the United States failed in their bid for freedom.
What did accelerate the march of freedom for all was abolitionism, a social movement that crystallized in both the United States and the United Kingdom in the years immediately following the revolutionary break between the two. Moral leadership made this difference.
Freedom flows from the tireless efforts of those who proclaim and pursue protection of the equal human dignity of all.
So why, then, do I love the Constitution? I love it for its practical leadership. I love it because it is the world’s greatest teaching document for one part of the story of freedom: the question of how free and equal citizens check and channel power both to protect themselves from
domination by one another and to secure their mutual protection from external forces that might seek their domination.
Why do we have three distinct aspects of power—legislative, executive, and judicial—and why is it best to keep them separate and yet intermingled? A typical civics lesson skates over the deep philosophical basis for what we glibly call “separation of powers” and “checks and balances.” Those concepts rest on a profound reckoning with the nature of power.
The exercise of power originates with the expression of a will or an intention. The legislature, the first branch, expresses the will of the people. Only after the will is expressed can there be execution of the desired action. The executive branch, the second branch, is responsible for this.
The judiciary comes third as a necessary mediator for addressing conflicts between the first and second branches. The three elements of power—will, execution, and adjudication—are separated to improve accountability. It is easier to hold officials accountable if they are limited in what they are permitted to do. In addition, the separation of powers provides a mechanism by which those who are responsible for using power are also always engaged in holding one another accountable.
James Madison, in The Federalist Papers, a series of newspaper opinion pieces written by Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay in 1787 and 1788 in support of the proposed Constitution, put it this way:
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first
enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is no doubt the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.
To ensure that power could be held accountable, the designers of the Constitution broke power into its component parts. They assigned one power to each of three branches. Then they developed rules and procedures that would make it possible for officers in each branch to not
only exercise their own powers but also, to some extent, check and counterbalance the use of power by others. The point of giving each branch ways of slowing down the other branches was to ensure that no branch would be able to dominate and consolidate complete power.
The rules and procedures they devised can also be called “mechanisms”—procedures that in themselves organize incentives and requirements for officeholders so that power flows in good and fair ways.
The U.S. Constitution is full of mechanisms like this to structure the incentives of officeholders to make sure power operates in fair ways. Here is a smattering of my favorite examples, courtesy of the identification in The Federalist Papers of the highest and best features of the Constitution:
Each branch should have as little agency as possible in the appointment of the members of the other, which means no branch can surreptitiously come to control another by populating its personnel and staff. Each branch should be as little dependent as possible on the others for emoluments annexed to their offices, which means no branch falls under the sway of another by virtue of hoping for a raise.
No double-office holding is permitted, which means that trying to play a role in more than one branch at the same time is strictly off-limits. The executive has a veto over legislation, but it can be overruled by a two-thirds vote of the Senate, which means that an executive decision (on
legislation) emanating from support of a bare majority of the people cannot overrule a view emanating from a supermajority of the country.
The executive can propose the draft of treaties, but ratification requires senatorial advice and consent, which prevents treaties from being struck as personal deals with benefits to the executive and thereby hinders corruption. The Senate must approve Supreme Court appointments made by the president, but the Court has the power of review over laws passed by Congress, which means Congress can be overruled by justices to whose appointment the legislative branch has itself consented.
The Constitution is the law of the land and establishes powers of enforcement, but it can be changed through a carefully articulated amendment process, by the people’s standing legislative representatives or by representatives to conventions especially elected for the purpose—which means the final power always rests with the people.
I delight in the cleverness of these mechanisms. There are many more. Instituting a bicameral legislature—having a Senate and a House of Representatives—is itself a check on monolithic legislative power. I marvel at the Constitution’s insight into the operations of power. I respect the ambition of the people who sought to design institutions and organize the government with the goal of ensuring the safety and happiness of the people. I see its limits, but I love its avowal—by stipulating the process for amendment, to date exercised 27 times—of its own mutability.
Remarkably, the Constitution’s slow, steady change has regularly been in the direction of moral improvement. In that regard, it has served well as a device for securing and stabilizing genuine human progress not only in politics but also in moral understanding. This is what figures like
Franklin and Wilson anticipated (or at least hoped for).
The Constitution is a work of practical genius. It is morally flawed. The story of the expansion of human freedom is one of shining moral ideals besmirched by the ordure of ongoing domination. I muck the stalls. I find a diamond. I clean it off and keep it. I do not abandon it because of
where I found it. Instead, I own it. Because of its mutability and the changes made from generation to generation, none but the living can own the Constitution. Those who wrote the version ratified centuries ago do not own the version we live by today. We do. It’s ours, an adaptable instrument used to define self-government among free and equal citizens—and to secure our ongoing moral education about that most important human endeavor. We are all responsible for our Constitution, and that fact is empowering. That hard-won empowerment is why I love the Constitution. And it shapes my native land, which I love also simply because it is my home. The second love is instinctual. The first comes with open eyes.
This article appears in the October 2020 print edition with the headline “The Constitution Counted My Great-Great-Grandfather as Three-Fifths of a Free Person.”
DANIELLE ALLEN is a political philosopher and the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard. She is the author of Talking to Strangers, Our Declaration, and Cuz
I think it would be interesting to have a discussion group about it. Attached is an article written by Danielle Allen, a political philosopher and professor at Harvard, which can be found in the upcoming October edition of the Atlantic.
I have edited the article for our group; if you'd like the full edition, I'd be happy to send it to you.
Natural law and God's law were defining elements in the constitution. Professor Allen examines it through the lens of slavery, the 3/5th rule, and the inevitably of freedom for all.
God's peace to you and to our nation,
- Dave
The Flawed Genius of the Constitution
Danielle Allen, The Atlantic, October 2020
The best that can be said about the compromises regarding slavery that also helped the Constitutional Convention achieve unanimity is this: Those who knew enslavement was wrong but nonetheless accepted the compromises believed they were choosing a path that would lead
inexorably, if incrementally, to freedom for all.
We cannot, however, assume with James Wilson and Benjamin Franklin and others like them that incrementalism was the only available path to freedom for all. It is also not clear that the Constitution’s compromises even accelerated the march of freedom, whether for enslaved people
or for people more generally. The U.S. gave the vote to all male citizens regardless of skin color or former condition of servitude only with the Fifteenth Amendment, in 1870. Until that point, African Americans as well as some white men in states that made tax payment a prerequisite had been denied the right to vote. These changes required a bloody civil war, and even they were still partial. Pennsylvania and Rhode Island maintained tax-paying qualifications into the 20th century; women and Native Americans did not yet have suffrage. In both Britain and the United States, true universal suffrage was not adopted until well into the 20th century, and fights for voting rights persist.
In other words, the Constitution did not earn an earlier release from bondage or promote universal suffrage for men much faster than was accomplished under Britain’s constitutional monarchy. Nor much faster than was achieved in Canada, a country we can look to for an answer
to the question of what might have happened had the North American colonies that came to form the United States failed in their bid for freedom.
What did accelerate the march of freedom for all was abolitionism, a social movement that crystallized in both the United States and the United Kingdom in the years immediately following the revolutionary break between the two. Moral leadership made this difference.
Freedom flows from the tireless efforts of those who proclaim and pursue protection of the equal human dignity of all.
So why, then, do I love the Constitution? I love it for its practical leadership. I love it because it is the world’s greatest teaching document for one part of the story of freedom: the question of how free and equal citizens check and channel power both to protect themselves from
domination by one another and to secure their mutual protection from external forces that might seek their domination.
Why do we have three distinct aspects of power—legislative, executive, and judicial—and why is it best to keep them separate and yet intermingled? A typical civics lesson skates over the deep philosophical basis for what we glibly call “separation of powers” and “checks and balances.” Those concepts rest on a profound reckoning with the nature of power.
The exercise of power originates with the expression of a will or an intention. The legislature, the first branch, expresses the will of the people. Only after the will is expressed can there be execution of the desired action. The executive branch, the second branch, is responsible for this.
The judiciary comes third as a necessary mediator for addressing conflicts between the first and second branches. The three elements of power—will, execution, and adjudication—are separated to improve accountability. It is easier to hold officials accountable if they are limited in what they are permitted to do. In addition, the separation of powers provides a mechanism by which those who are responsible for using power are also always engaged in holding one another accountable.
James Madison, in The Federalist Papers, a series of newspaper opinion pieces written by Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay in 1787 and 1788 in support of the proposed Constitution, put it this way:
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first
enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is no doubt the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.
To ensure that power could be held accountable, the designers of the Constitution broke power into its component parts. They assigned one power to each of three branches. Then they developed rules and procedures that would make it possible for officers in each branch to not
only exercise their own powers but also, to some extent, check and counterbalance the use of power by others. The point of giving each branch ways of slowing down the other branches was to ensure that no branch would be able to dominate and consolidate complete power.
The rules and procedures they devised can also be called “mechanisms”—procedures that in themselves organize incentives and requirements for officeholders so that power flows in good and fair ways.
The U.S. Constitution is full of mechanisms like this to structure the incentives of officeholders to make sure power operates in fair ways. Here is a smattering of my favorite examples, courtesy of the identification in The Federalist Papers of the highest and best features of the Constitution:
Each branch should have as little agency as possible in the appointment of the members of the other, which means no branch can surreptitiously come to control another by populating its personnel and staff. Each branch should be as little dependent as possible on the others for emoluments annexed to their offices, which means no branch falls under the sway of another by virtue of hoping for a raise.
No double-office holding is permitted, which means that trying to play a role in more than one branch at the same time is strictly off-limits. The executive has a veto over legislation, but it can be overruled by a two-thirds vote of the Senate, which means that an executive decision (on
legislation) emanating from support of a bare majority of the people cannot overrule a view emanating from a supermajority of the country.
The executive can propose the draft of treaties, but ratification requires senatorial advice and consent, which prevents treaties from being struck as personal deals with benefits to the executive and thereby hinders corruption. The Senate must approve Supreme Court appointments made by the president, but the Court has the power of review over laws passed by Congress, which means Congress can be overruled by justices to whose appointment the legislative branch has itself consented.
The Constitution is the law of the land and establishes powers of enforcement, but it can be changed through a carefully articulated amendment process, by the people’s standing legislative representatives or by representatives to conventions especially elected for the purpose—which means the final power always rests with the people.
I delight in the cleverness of these mechanisms. There are many more. Instituting a bicameral legislature—having a Senate and a House of Representatives—is itself a check on monolithic legislative power. I marvel at the Constitution’s insight into the operations of power. I respect the ambition of the people who sought to design institutions and organize the government with the goal of ensuring the safety and happiness of the people. I see its limits, but I love its avowal—by stipulating the process for amendment, to date exercised 27 times—of its own mutability.
Remarkably, the Constitution’s slow, steady change has regularly been in the direction of moral improvement. In that regard, it has served well as a device for securing and stabilizing genuine human progress not only in politics but also in moral understanding. This is what figures like
Franklin and Wilson anticipated (or at least hoped for).
The Constitution is a work of practical genius. It is morally flawed. The story of the expansion of human freedom is one of shining moral ideals besmirched by the ordure of ongoing domination. I muck the stalls. I find a diamond. I clean it off and keep it. I do not abandon it because of
where I found it. Instead, I own it. Because of its mutability and the changes made from generation to generation, none but the living can own the Constitution. Those who wrote the version ratified centuries ago do not own the version we live by today. We do. It’s ours, an adaptable instrument used to define self-government among free and equal citizens—and to secure our ongoing moral education about that most important human endeavor. We are all responsible for our Constitution, and that fact is empowering. That hard-won empowerment is why I love the Constitution. And it shapes my native land, which I love also simply because it is my home. The second love is instinctual. The first comes with open eyes.
This article appears in the October 2020 print edition with the headline “The Constitution Counted My Great-Great-Grandfather as Three-Fifths of a Free Person.”
DANIELLE ALLEN is a political philosopher and the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard. She is the author of Talking to Strangers, Our Declaration, and Cuz
Tuesday, September 8
One thing we can say about the pandemic is that it is making us reimagine life. Many are seeking what is beneficial and important instead of material gains or societal status. This article from the Wall Street Journal asks the question, what makes for a good life? The editor asked subscribers what does a good life mean to them. It has been an interesting read to hear what others think. Both the article and the responses are included here.
If you are unable to be a part of the discussion this week, I'd like to hear from you. What makes a "good life" to you? Let me know if it is okay to share your response.
May God bless you and our nation,
- Dave
A Good Life Doesn’t Mean an Easy One
For many, ‘psychological richness’ is more valuable than simple happiness
Alison Gopnik, Wall Street Journal Aug. 28, 2020
What makes a good life? Philosophers have offered two classic answers to the question, captured by different Greek words for happiness, hedonia and eudaimonia. A hedonic life is free from pain and full of everyday pleasure—calm, safe and serene. A eudaemonic life is a virtuous and purposeful one, full of meaning.
But in a new study, philosopher Lorraine Besser of Middlebury College and psychologist Shigehiro Oishi of the University of Virginia argue that there is a third important element of a good life, which they call “psychological richness.” And they show that ordinary people around the world think so, too.
According to this view, a good life is one that is interesting, varied and surprising—even if some of those surprises aren’t necessarily pleasant ones. In fact, the things that make a life psychologically rich may actually make it less happy in the ordinary sense.
After all, to put it bluntly, a happy life can also be boring. Adventures, explorations and crises may be painful, but at least they’re interesting. A psychologically rich life may be less eudaemonic, too. Those unexpected turns may lead you to stray from your original purpose and act in ways that are less than virtuous.
Profs. Besser and Oishi make the case for a psychologically rich life in a paper that has just appeared in the journal Philosophical Psychology. But is this a life that most people would actually want, or is it just for the sort of people who write philosophy articles?
To find out, the authors and their colleagues did an extensive study involving more than 3,000 people in nine countries, recently published in the Journal of Affective Science. The researchers gave participants a list of 15 descriptive words such as “pleasant,” “meaningful” and “interesting,” and asked which best described a good life.
When they analyzed the responses, Profs. Besser and Oishi found that people do indeed think that a happy and meaningful life is a good life. But they also think a psychologically rich life is important. In fact, across different cultures, about 10-15% of people said that if they were forced to choose, they would go for a psychologically rich life over a happy or meaningful one.
In a second experiment the researchers posed the question a different way. Instead of asking people what kind of life they would choose, they asked what people regretted about the life they had actually led. Did they regret decisions that made their lives less happy or less meaningful? Or did they regret passing up a chance for interesting and surprising experiences? If they could undo one decision, what would it be? When people thought about their regrets they were even more likely to value psychological richness—about 30% of people, for example, in both the U.S. and South Korea.
The desire for a psychologically rich life may go beyond just avoiding boredom. After all, the unexpected, even the tragic, can have a transformative power that goes beyond the hedonic or eudaemonic. As a great Leonard Cohen song says, it’s the cracks that let the light come in.
In response to our question about what makes a “good life”:
Al Romig, Texas
A spiritual belief. Loving and being loved. Good enough health to enjoy it. A sense of purpose. Continuous learning.
Nancy Irving, Ohio
Here are some key attributes for my husband and me: health, freedom, “enough,” serving others, sharing our blessings.
Barry Zalma, California
A wife who loves me after 52 years of marriage, children who grow into successful adults, and loving grandchildren. Everything else is meaningless.
Stephen RS Martin, Arizona
The first sine qua non to a good life is absolute financial security, which includes the complete absence of debt. True happiness and peace of mind are impossible without it.
Samuel Zimmer, Austria A reasonable proximity to bodies of water, fulfilling pursuits, frequent reading, and bountiful Weißbier [wheat beer] upon the clock’s 5 p.m. strike.
Michele McGovern, Pennsylvania
When I was a kid, I always thought the people in the neighborhood who had a second refrigerator in the garage—affectionately known as the “beer fridge”—had “made it.” They were living the good life. Now that I’m an adult, I think I might have had it right as a kid. The good life—just enough money to buy a second fridge and beverages to put in it, enough friends and family members to join in that you need the fridge, and enough time and inclination to enjoy it with them.
Unknown
A good life is knowing that, despite your parenting, your children have turned out to be good people.
If you are unable to be a part of the discussion this week, I'd like to hear from you. What makes a "good life" to you? Let me know if it is okay to share your response.
May God bless you and our nation,
- Dave
A Good Life Doesn’t Mean an Easy One
For many, ‘psychological richness’ is more valuable than simple happiness
Alison Gopnik, Wall Street Journal Aug. 28, 2020
What makes a good life? Philosophers have offered two classic answers to the question, captured by different Greek words for happiness, hedonia and eudaimonia. A hedonic life is free from pain and full of everyday pleasure—calm, safe and serene. A eudaemonic life is a virtuous and purposeful one, full of meaning.
But in a new study, philosopher Lorraine Besser of Middlebury College and psychologist Shigehiro Oishi of the University of Virginia argue that there is a third important element of a good life, which they call “psychological richness.” And they show that ordinary people around the world think so, too.
According to this view, a good life is one that is interesting, varied and surprising—even if some of those surprises aren’t necessarily pleasant ones. In fact, the things that make a life psychologically rich may actually make it less happy in the ordinary sense.
After all, to put it bluntly, a happy life can also be boring. Adventures, explorations and crises may be painful, but at least they’re interesting. A psychologically rich life may be less eudaemonic, too. Those unexpected turns may lead you to stray from your original purpose and act in ways that are less than virtuous.
Profs. Besser and Oishi make the case for a psychologically rich life in a paper that has just appeared in the journal Philosophical Psychology. But is this a life that most people would actually want, or is it just for the sort of people who write philosophy articles?
To find out, the authors and their colleagues did an extensive study involving more than 3,000 people in nine countries, recently published in the Journal of Affective Science. The researchers gave participants a list of 15 descriptive words such as “pleasant,” “meaningful” and “interesting,” and asked which best described a good life.
When they analyzed the responses, Profs. Besser and Oishi found that people do indeed think that a happy and meaningful life is a good life. But they also think a psychologically rich life is important. In fact, across different cultures, about 10-15% of people said that if they were forced to choose, they would go for a psychologically rich life over a happy or meaningful one.
In a second experiment the researchers posed the question a different way. Instead of asking people what kind of life they would choose, they asked what people regretted about the life they had actually led. Did they regret decisions that made their lives less happy or less meaningful? Or did they regret passing up a chance for interesting and surprising experiences? If they could undo one decision, what would it be? When people thought about their regrets they were even more likely to value psychological richness—about 30% of people, for example, in both the U.S. and South Korea.
The desire for a psychologically rich life may go beyond just avoiding boredom. After all, the unexpected, even the tragic, can have a transformative power that goes beyond the hedonic or eudaemonic. As a great Leonard Cohen song says, it’s the cracks that let the light come in.
In response to our question about what makes a “good life”:
Al Romig, Texas
A spiritual belief. Loving and being loved. Good enough health to enjoy it. A sense of purpose. Continuous learning.
Nancy Irving, Ohio
Here are some key attributes for my husband and me: health, freedom, “enough,” serving others, sharing our blessings.
Barry Zalma, California
A wife who loves me after 52 years of marriage, children who grow into successful adults, and loving grandchildren. Everything else is meaningless.
Stephen RS Martin, Arizona
The first sine qua non to a good life is absolute financial security, which includes the complete absence of debt. True happiness and peace of mind are impossible without it.
Samuel Zimmer, Austria A reasonable proximity to bodies of water, fulfilling pursuits, frequent reading, and bountiful Weißbier [wheat beer] upon the clock’s 5 p.m. strike.
Michele McGovern, Pennsylvania
When I was a kid, I always thought the people in the neighborhood who had a second refrigerator in the garage—affectionately known as the “beer fridge”—had “made it.” They were living the good life. Now that I’m an adult, I think I might have had it right as a kid. The good life—just enough money to buy a second fridge and beverages to put in it, enough friends and family members to join in that you need the fridge, and enough time and inclination to enjoy it with them.
Unknown
A good life is knowing that, despite your parenting, your children have turned out to be good people.
Tuesday, September 1
Preparing Your Mind for Uncertain Times
Eric Weiner, The Atlantic August 25, 2020
This is a time of questions without answers. Will I get infected? When will there be a vaccine? Is my job/retirement secure? When will life be normal again? The experts may have guesses, or estimates, for some of these quandaries but there is no certainty, and this drives us nuts. Humans abhor uncertainty, and will do just about anything to avoid it, even choosing a known bad outcome over an unknown but possibly good one. In one British study participants experienced greater stress when they had a 50 percent chance of receiving an electric shock than when they had a 100 percent chance. Intolerance for uncertainty puts people at greater risk for ailments such as depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
We take it as a given that uncertainty is always bad and, conversely, that certitude is always good. Yet ancient philosophy, as well as a growing body of scientific evidence, suggests otherwise. Uncertainty need not hobble us, and “in the right form and in the right amount, it’s actually a great pleasure,” says Daniel Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard.
We engage in certain activities—such as watching thrillers or reading mysteries—precisely because the outcome is uncertain. Or, say you receive a note from a secret admirer. The mystery of who sent it, Gilbert says, yields “the kind of uncertainty you would find delicious and delightful.” Yet we remain largely oblivious to our own love of pleasant—call it benign— uncertainty. Gilbert and his colleagues have found that even though uncertainty about a positive event prolongs people’s pleasure, we’re generally convinced that we’ll be happiest when all uncertainty is eliminated.
What about the darker kind of uncertainty, the kind many of us are facing now? Not only the immediate suffering of illness and job loss caused by the pandemic, but its open-ended nature. We don’t know when it will end. You might have noticed that this kind of uncertainty—let’s call it malign uncertainty—tends to make bad moods worse. But, again, this is only a tendency, not a foregone conclusion. We are not fated to suffer when faced with malign uncertainty. We have a choice.
In my experience, there are two ways to solve the “problem” of the unknown: by decreasing the amount of perceived risk or by increasing our tolerance for uncertainty. Most of us focus almost exclusively on the former. Many philosophers think this is a mistake. Philosophers have wrestled with uncertainty and impermanence since at least the time of the ancient Greeks. Stoicism, a philosophy that flourished in the third century B.C. in Athens, is especially well suited for helping people cope with uncertainty. And for good reason: The Stoics lived during particularly unsettled times. Athens had lost much of its independence as a city-state, and the death of Alexander the Great several years earlier had left a power vacuum in the region. The old order had collapsed and a new one had yet to take its place.
Much of life lies beyond our control, Stoics believe, but we do control what matters most: our opinions, impulses, desires, and aversions. Our mental and emotional states. “Change what you can, accept what you cannot” sums up the Stoic creed. Master this skill, they say, and you will be “invincible.” This isn’t easy, the Stoics concede, but it is possible. Accepting the uncertainty inherent in life—particularly pandemic life—is better than fighting a constant battle against it, one we are bound to lose, the Stoics would say.
There’s a scene in the movie Lawrence of Arabia where Lawrence, played by Peter O’Toole, calmly extinguishes a match between his thumb and his forefinger. A fellow officer tries it himself, and squeals in pain. “Oh! It damn well hurts,” he says. “Certainly it hurts,” Lawrence replies. “Well, what’s the trick, then?” “The trick,” Lawrence says, “is not minding that it hurts.”
Lawrence’s response is pure Stoic. Sure, he felt the pain, yet it remained a sensation, a reflex. It never metastasized into panic. Lawrence didn’t mind the pain, in the literal sense of the word: He didn’t allow his mind to dwell on, and amplify, what his body had felt. Likewise, the pandemic has hijacked the circumstances of our lives—that’s the reality we can’t avoid. But our minds and our reactions are still our own.
To show the power of mindset, Stoics use the metaphor of a cylinder rolling down a hill. Gravity ensures the cylinder will start rolling, but its shape determines how smoothly and quickly it rolls. We can’t control the hill, or gravity, but we can control the shape of our cylinder, the state of our minds.
For instance, let’s say you find yourself, like many parents, working from home while caring for a young child. Those facts represent the hill; they are immovable. What you can move is your attitude. It needn’t be a momentous shift either—we can’t all be Mother Teresa—but a subtle realignment from resistance to, if not total acceptance, at least tolerance.
The ability to tolerate uncertainty can bring great rewards. Uncertainty, after all, drives the quest for knowledge. The best scientists know this intuitively, and are willing to live with unknowns as they explore new frontiers. “I don’t have to know an answer,” the theoretical physicist Richard Feynman said. “I don’t feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose.” Tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity are also linked with greater creative thinking, as several studies have found. The English Romantic poet John Keats introduced the term negative capability to describe a similar phenomenon. Writing to his brothers in 1817, he posited that writers are at their most creative when “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
Japanese philosophers go a step further. Don’t merely tolerate uncertainty and its close cousin impermanence, they counsel; celebrate it. “The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty,” wrote Yoshida Kenkō, a 14th-century Buddhist monk.
Consider the sakura, or cherry blossom. The trees are famously fleeting. They bloom for only a week or two, and then the petals are gone. Other flowers—plum blossoms, for instance—last considerably longer. Why go to such great lengths to cultivate something as fragile as the cherry blossom?
Because “beauty lies in its own vanishing,” says Donald Richie in his book A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics. Life is ephemeral. Everything we know and love will one day cease to exist, ourselves included. That is life’s one certainty. The cherry blossom is lovely not despite its transience but because of it. This has always been the case. The pandemic has driven home our own transience. And while it may be too much to ask to celebrate this truth under such dire circumstances, we can learn to tolerate the unknown, and perhaps even catch glimpses of the beauty underlying life’s uncertainties.
Eric Weiner, The Atlantic August 25, 2020
This is a time of questions without answers. Will I get infected? When will there be a vaccine? Is my job/retirement secure? When will life be normal again? The experts may have guesses, or estimates, for some of these quandaries but there is no certainty, and this drives us nuts. Humans abhor uncertainty, and will do just about anything to avoid it, even choosing a known bad outcome over an unknown but possibly good one. In one British study participants experienced greater stress when they had a 50 percent chance of receiving an electric shock than when they had a 100 percent chance. Intolerance for uncertainty puts people at greater risk for ailments such as depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
We take it as a given that uncertainty is always bad and, conversely, that certitude is always good. Yet ancient philosophy, as well as a growing body of scientific evidence, suggests otherwise. Uncertainty need not hobble us, and “in the right form and in the right amount, it’s actually a great pleasure,” says Daniel Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard.
We engage in certain activities—such as watching thrillers or reading mysteries—precisely because the outcome is uncertain. Or, say you receive a note from a secret admirer. The mystery of who sent it, Gilbert says, yields “the kind of uncertainty you would find delicious and delightful.” Yet we remain largely oblivious to our own love of pleasant—call it benign— uncertainty. Gilbert and his colleagues have found that even though uncertainty about a positive event prolongs people’s pleasure, we’re generally convinced that we’ll be happiest when all uncertainty is eliminated.
What about the darker kind of uncertainty, the kind many of us are facing now? Not only the immediate suffering of illness and job loss caused by the pandemic, but its open-ended nature. We don’t know when it will end. You might have noticed that this kind of uncertainty—let’s call it malign uncertainty—tends to make bad moods worse. But, again, this is only a tendency, not a foregone conclusion. We are not fated to suffer when faced with malign uncertainty. We have a choice.
In my experience, there are two ways to solve the “problem” of the unknown: by decreasing the amount of perceived risk or by increasing our tolerance for uncertainty. Most of us focus almost exclusively on the former. Many philosophers think this is a mistake. Philosophers have wrestled with uncertainty and impermanence since at least the time of the ancient Greeks. Stoicism, a philosophy that flourished in the third century B.C. in Athens, is especially well suited for helping people cope with uncertainty. And for good reason: The Stoics lived during particularly unsettled times. Athens had lost much of its independence as a city-state, and the death of Alexander the Great several years earlier had left a power vacuum in the region. The old order had collapsed and a new one had yet to take its place.
Much of life lies beyond our control, Stoics believe, but we do control what matters most: our opinions, impulses, desires, and aversions. Our mental and emotional states. “Change what you can, accept what you cannot” sums up the Stoic creed. Master this skill, they say, and you will be “invincible.” This isn’t easy, the Stoics concede, but it is possible. Accepting the uncertainty inherent in life—particularly pandemic life—is better than fighting a constant battle against it, one we are bound to lose, the Stoics would say.
There’s a scene in the movie Lawrence of Arabia where Lawrence, played by Peter O’Toole, calmly extinguishes a match between his thumb and his forefinger. A fellow officer tries it himself, and squeals in pain. “Oh! It damn well hurts,” he says. “Certainly it hurts,” Lawrence replies. “Well, what’s the trick, then?” “The trick,” Lawrence says, “is not minding that it hurts.”
Lawrence’s response is pure Stoic. Sure, he felt the pain, yet it remained a sensation, a reflex. It never metastasized into panic. Lawrence didn’t mind the pain, in the literal sense of the word: He didn’t allow his mind to dwell on, and amplify, what his body had felt. Likewise, the pandemic has hijacked the circumstances of our lives—that’s the reality we can’t avoid. But our minds and our reactions are still our own.
To show the power of mindset, Stoics use the metaphor of a cylinder rolling down a hill. Gravity ensures the cylinder will start rolling, but its shape determines how smoothly and quickly it rolls. We can’t control the hill, or gravity, but we can control the shape of our cylinder, the state of our minds.
For instance, let’s say you find yourself, like many parents, working from home while caring for a young child. Those facts represent the hill; they are immovable. What you can move is your attitude. It needn’t be a momentous shift either—we can’t all be Mother Teresa—but a subtle realignment from resistance to, if not total acceptance, at least tolerance.
The ability to tolerate uncertainty can bring great rewards. Uncertainty, after all, drives the quest for knowledge. The best scientists know this intuitively, and are willing to live with unknowns as they explore new frontiers. “I don’t have to know an answer,” the theoretical physicist Richard Feynman said. “I don’t feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose.” Tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity are also linked with greater creative thinking, as several studies have found. The English Romantic poet John Keats introduced the term negative capability to describe a similar phenomenon. Writing to his brothers in 1817, he posited that writers are at their most creative when “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
Japanese philosophers go a step further. Don’t merely tolerate uncertainty and its close cousin impermanence, they counsel; celebrate it. “The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty,” wrote Yoshida Kenkō, a 14th-century Buddhist monk.
Consider the sakura, or cherry blossom. The trees are famously fleeting. They bloom for only a week or two, and then the petals are gone. Other flowers—plum blossoms, for instance—last considerably longer. Why go to such great lengths to cultivate something as fragile as the cherry blossom?
Because “beauty lies in its own vanishing,” says Donald Richie in his book A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics. Life is ephemeral. Everything we know and love will one day cease to exist, ourselves included. That is life’s one certainty. The cherry blossom is lovely not despite its transience but because of it. This has always been the case. The pandemic has driven home our own transience. And while it may be too much to ask to celebrate this truth under such dire circumstances, we can learn to tolerate the unknown, and perhaps even catch glimpses of the beauty underlying life’s uncertainties.
Tuesday, August 25
How exciting - the Marshalls might experience their first tropical storm on Tuesday. Depending on the cone of uncertainty, we will have our Men's Group on Tuesday and Women's Discussion Group on Thursday.
One common thread that is coming up in our discussions is that things are a little tense in our communities; tempers seem to be shorter and it seems easier to offend others.
The Wall Street Journal published an article titled, How to Handle a Jerk. As a companion piece to it, I have included an article from Christianity Today that gives a different perspective, To Intervene or Not to Intervene. And, as you can imagine, Jesus gives us a way to handle jerks too. I look forward to talking with you about this next week.
God's peace to you, to our communities, and to our nation.
- Dave
Here is the website address for the discussion group:
https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
How to Handle a Jerk
Elizabeth Bernstein Wall Street Journal, 8.18.20
Dear Bonds,
How do you deal with a jerk? It seems like there are so many out there right now— male and female—whether it’s at the grocery store or online or just walking around the neighborhood. Everyone seems irritated and out for themselves. Today I went to Home Depot to buy some weed killer and some guy blatantly cut in line and then had the nerve to start berating me for calling him out. I’ve had it! —Fed Up
Dear Fed Up,
I agree, lots of people are falling short of their best behavior at the moment. Some days it feels like everyone’s gone nuts. It helps to remember that people are stressed and more than a little freaked out. Errands—and everything else—feel more dangerous, and folks are in a hurry to get back to their own bubbles, where life feels safer. Of course, some people are just plain rude, no matter what’s going on.
I recently wrote about bullies; these are people who use their strength or power to intimidate or harm someone they see as vulnerable. A bully could certainly be described as a jerk. But not all jerks are bullies. Some jerks are just obnoxious, self-absorbed or inconsiderate. Dealing with an everyday jerk is a two-part process. Part one: Do not engage. Once the jerkiness comes out—in your example, when the guy began berating you for pointing out his error—separate yourself from the encounter. Remember: You’re extremely unlikely to change someone else’s bad behavior. And the more you call that person out, the more likely he or she is going to get defensive and double down on it.
Keep calm and remain polite. Remove yourself physically if possible. Take some comfort in the fact that unless the person is a straight-up sociopath, he or she probably feels some sense of shame when left alone acting like an idiot.
(A caveat: This advice is meant for quick encounters with strangers. If you feel unsafe, or if you are under regular attack from someone you know, you need to call an authority, such as the police.)
Now for part two: Be thankful! This keeps you from spiraling into negativity. You can be grateful you’re not a jerk. And you can be thankful that successfully handling the encounter—without acting nastily yourself—makes you stronger. Dealing with someone who is acting poorly in a positive way gives you a chance to affirm your values, to model good behavior for everyone else, and to protect the world from getting uglier.
I know it’s not easy to stay positive when someone’s being nasty. I suggest coming up with a mantra that you can pull up quickly in the moment. Mantras create new neural pathways in your brain and condition you to be calmer and happier. They remind you who you want to be. And they can be just one word: “Peace.” Or a short phrase: “Never be dragged down” or “this too shall pass. (The one I use for jerks is “Just breathe.”)
Feel better? Now go forth and be strong.
To Intervene or Not to Intervene
Marshall Shelley, Christianity Today
A pastor encountered one of life's little dramas playing itself out as he entered the YMCA: A toddler wearing a wet bathing suit was coming out the door from the swimming pool area, and her mother was saying, "You are such a coward!"
The child was shivering, and her cheeks were wet-from tears or the pool? The pastor couldn't tell. She simply stood there shaking as her mother continued, "It's the same every week. You always make your daddy and me ashamed. Sometimes I can't believe you're my daughter." The pastor found himself thinking, I wonder what the penalty is for hitting a woman? "What she was doing was more hurtful, more brutal than a beating," he reflected. "It was emotional child abuse, and if it continues, that toddler will grow up feeling worthless, which will lead to all kinds of destructive behavior."
Most people feel the urge to do something, either immediately or eventually, to help the mother realize what's at stake, to help her be a better parent. Even if she isn't asking for help. When is intervention appropriate? How do you enter a situation uninvited? It's not an easy decision.
Tips for Interveners
Confront with tears.
In any confrontation, the tendency is for the person being confronted to say, "You don't understand. You don't know what I've gone through." Graciousness, tenderness, and empathy are important even when you have to be firm.
A psychologist told me a long time ago, 'When you have to confront, be sure to share how you feel — not just with your words but with your body language, your facial features, your tears. Let them know this isn't easy.' It was good advice. People are much more open if they don't feel you enjoy correcting them."
Confront with strength, not authority.
There's a difference between intervening from a position of strength and a position of authority. Authority means coming down with an imposed order and saying, "You need to stop this because the [police, management, the other people around you] disapproves." Intervening from the position of strength is to point out strongly the natural consequences of the present course. "If this keeps up, here's what's going to happen." And perhaps "Some of those things have happened to me, and they hurt like the blazes. Do you really want to do this?" Very few times will a person turn around by being told he is doing something evil or unacceptable. More often change will happen when a person is confronted with what's in his best interest — "Have you considered this consequence?"
Affirming the Importance of Life
Surprisingly, people tend to underestimate the value of their own lives. One of the duties of a pastor, especially when dealing with those destroying themselves but refusing help, is to remind people of the importance of life — their own included.
When it comes to helping those who don't want help, sometimes they, too, need to realize their own significance. God himself is interested in their decisions.
At times this can be done with indirect confrontation; at other times, however, it requires direct intervention.
One common thread that is coming up in our discussions is that things are a little tense in our communities; tempers seem to be shorter and it seems easier to offend others.
The Wall Street Journal published an article titled, How to Handle a Jerk. As a companion piece to it, I have included an article from Christianity Today that gives a different perspective, To Intervene or Not to Intervene. And, as you can imagine, Jesus gives us a way to handle jerks too. I look forward to talking with you about this next week.
God's peace to you, to our communities, and to our nation.
- Dave
Here is the website address for the discussion group:
https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
How to Handle a Jerk
Elizabeth Bernstein Wall Street Journal, 8.18.20
Dear Bonds,
How do you deal with a jerk? It seems like there are so many out there right now— male and female—whether it’s at the grocery store or online or just walking around the neighborhood. Everyone seems irritated and out for themselves. Today I went to Home Depot to buy some weed killer and some guy blatantly cut in line and then had the nerve to start berating me for calling him out. I’ve had it! —Fed Up
Dear Fed Up,
I agree, lots of people are falling short of their best behavior at the moment. Some days it feels like everyone’s gone nuts. It helps to remember that people are stressed and more than a little freaked out. Errands—and everything else—feel more dangerous, and folks are in a hurry to get back to their own bubbles, where life feels safer. Of course, some people are just plain rude, no matter what’s going on.
I recently wrote about bullies; these are people who use their strength or power to intimidate or harm someone they see as vulnerable. A bully could certainly be described as a jerk. But not all jerks are bullies. Some jerks are just obnoxious, self-absorbed or inconsiderate. Dealing with an everyday jerk is a two-part process. Part one: Do not engage. Once the jerkiness comes out—in your example, when the guy began berating you for pointing out his error—separate yourself from the encounter. Remember: You’re extremely unlikely to change someone else’s bad behavior. And the more you call that person out, the more likely he or she is going to get defensive and double down on it.
Keep calm and remain polite. Remove yourself physically if possible. Take some comfort in the fact that unless the person is a straight-up sociopath, he or she probably feels some sense of shame when left alone acting like an idiot.
(A caveat: This advice is meant for quick encounters with strangers. If you feel unsafe, or if you are under regular attack from someone you know, you need to call an authority, such as the police.)
Now for part two: Be thankful! This keeps you from spiraling into negativity. You can be grateful you’re not a jerk. And you can be thankful that successfully handling the encounter—without acting nastily yourself—makes you stronger. Dealing with someone who is acting poorly in a positive way gives you a chance to affirm your values, to model good behavior for everyone else, and to protect the world from getting uglier.
I know it’s not easy to stay positive when someone’s being nasty. I suggest coming up with a mantra that you can pull up quickly in the moment. Mantras create new neural pathways in your brain and condition you to be calmer and happier. They remind you who you want to be. And they can be just one word: “Peace.” Or a short phrase: “Never be dragged down” or “this too shall pass. (The one I use for jerks is “Just breathe.”)
Feel better? Now go forth and be strong.
To Intervene or Not to Intervene
Marshall Shelley, Christianity Today
A pastor encountered one of life's little dramas playing itself out as he entered the YMCA: A toddler wearing a wet bathing suit was coming out the door from the swimming pool area, and her mother was saying, "You are such a coward!"
The child was shivering, and her cheeks were wet-from tears or the pool? The pastor couldn't tell. She simply stood there shaking as her mother continued, "It's the same every week. You always make your daddy and me ashamed. Sometimes I can't believe you're my daughter." The pastor found himself thinking, I wonder what the penalty is for hitting a woman? "What she was doing was more hurtful, more brutal than a beating," he reflected. "It was emotional child abuse, and if it continues, that toddler will grow up feeling worthless, which will lead to all kinds of destructive behavior."
Most people feel the urge to do something, either immediately or eventually, to help the mother realize what's at stake, to help her be a better parent. Even if she isn't asking for help. When is intervention appropriate? How do you enter a situation uninvited? It's not an easy decision.
Tips for Interveners
Confront with tears.
In any confrontation, the tendency is for the person being confronted to say, "You don't understand. You don't know what I've gone through." Graciousness, tenderness, and empathy are important even when you have to be firm.
A psychologist told me a long time ago, 'When you have to confront, be sure to share how you feel — not just with your words but with your body language, your facial features, your tears. Let them know this isn't easy.' It was good advice. People are much more open if they don't feel you enjoy correcting them."
Confront with strength, not authority.
There's a difference between intervening from a position of strength and a position of authority. Authority means coming down with an imposed order and saying, "You need to stop this because the [police, management, the other people around you] disapproves." Intervening from the position of strength is to point out strongly the natural consequences of the present course. "If this keeps up, here's what's going to happen." And perhaps "Some of those things have happened to me, and they hurt like the blazes. Do you really want to do this?" Very few times will a person turn around by being told he is doing something evil or unacceptable. More often change will happen when a person is confronted with what's in his best interest — "Have you considered this consequence?"
Affirming the Importance of Life
Surprisingly, people tend to underestimate the value of their own lives. One of the duties of a pastor, especially when dealing with those destroying themselves but refusing help, is to remind people of the importance of life — their own included.
When it comes to helping those who don't want help, sometimes they, too, need to realize their own significance. God himself is interested in their decisions.
At times this can be done with indirect confrontation; at other times, however, it requires direct intervention.
Tuesday, August 18
Let me ask you a question, do you think there are occasions when public-health concerns outweigh the importance of religious freedom? Or, does religious freedom stand above all other concerns? How far should the freedom go when it comes to the health of others - especially non-believers?
These questions have been raised in microclimates around our country as hospitals address the pandemic. I think it would make for an interesting discussion about the intersection of religious freedom and public health.
At the risk of having something big occurring between now and when we will gather, let's discuss this article. I have included some discussion questions at the end of the piece if you'd like to talk it over with someone else.
God's peace to you and to our nation,
- Dave
Here is the website address for the discussion group:
https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
Hospitals’ Covid-19 Policies Face Religious-Rights Checks
Stephanie Armour, Wall Street Journal 8.10.20
The Trump administration has stepped up interventions in complaints by patients and health workers who say they’ve been victims of discrimination under policies that hospitals and other health organizations have adopted to combat the new coronavirus. One of the interventions involved a medical student who objected on religious grounds that he be required to shave his beard so he could wear a protective mask. Another involved a hospital’s refusal under its no-visitors rule during the pandemic to allow a bedside visit by a priest.
As the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights has intervened in the complaints, it has been negotiating settlements and issuing guidance to remind health organizations, states and local governments about their responsibilities under federal law. Some legal experts say the agency is overstepping its statutory authority. Lawyers who advocate for religious rights disagree and say the actions are legally sound.
The office cites laws it says give it authority to intervene in religious-discrimination claims when health organizations get federal money. They also point to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, which essentially prohibits the federal government from substantially burdening a person or institution’s religious exercise. “This is a time when the safeguards are put under stress,” Roger Severino, head of the Office for Civil Rights, said in an interview. In 2018, Roger Severino announced a new HHS division on Conscience and Religious Freedom. Some legal experts and advocates said the office’s actions in religious discrimination claims involving hospitals stand on shaky legal ground, saying its interpretation of the law is overly broad and is risky during a public-health emergency.
“HHS has no statutory authority to be enforcing its policy choices about religion and how to handle religion in health care,” said Richard Katskee, legal director at Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a litigation and advocacy group. Luke Goodrich, vice president and senior counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that defends religious freedom, said the agency had authority because most large hospitals get federal funding. He added that protecting religious freedoms was critical even during a pandemic—and can be done safely. “You don’t have to put religion and public health against each other,” Mr. Goodrich said.
The Office for Civil Rights intervened after a complaint was filed June 11 on behalf of the medical student who was doing rotations at Staten Island University Hospital, in New York City. The complaint said the hospital required him to shave his beard so that he could wear a protective mask. The student said shaving would violate his religious commitment to not cut his hair. The civil rights office said it communicated with the student and provided technical assistance to the hospital. The office said the hospital then granted the student an accommodation and let him wear an alternative form of protection called a Powered Air Purifying Respirator that he could wear with a beard.
Christian Preston, a hospital spokesman, said, “When he raised concerns over his religious needs, immediate steps were taken to understand and make an accommodation that adhered with his cultural and spiritual beliefs so he could continue his medical studies, safely.” At no point was the student asked to shave his beard, Mr. Preston said, but he was informed about safety guidelines that state a user must be clean shaved to be appropriately fit tested for an N95 mask. He said the student was reassigned to rotations in non-Covid-19 areas until a powered air-purifying respirator could be provided instead of an N95 mask.
In another complaint, Sidney and Susanna Marcus suffered severe injuries in a car accident on Memorial Day and got treatment at Prince George’s Hospital Center, in Maryland. While Mrs. Marcus’s condition improved, her husband’s condition worsened, and he was put on a ventilator because of the accident. Neither of the Marcuses had Covid-19. Mrs. Marcus asked a priest to visit her husband at the hospital to administer the sacrament of anointing the sick, which has been known as last rites. But the hospital system, University of Maryland Medical System, had implemented a policy banning visitors because of the pandemic, according to a June 9 complaint Mrs. Marcus filed with the office. The priest, who had agreed to wear personal protective equipment, wasn’t allowed in, according to the complaint.
“I didn’t know much about his condition, we couldn’t communicate, and I was very fearful for his condition,” Mrs. Marcus said. “We believe in the sacraments, our souls are united in God, and I needed to know he had access to that.”
The Office for Civil Rights provided technical assistance to the hospital, and HHS officials said the hospital system subsequently agreed to change its policy, allowing clergy to see patients. The system didn’t dispute the details of the complaint. Prince George's Hospital Center, where Sidney and Susanna Marcus were both treated following their accident.
“We have since amended our policy, with all individuals visiting a Covid-19 positive patient provided a form acknowledging the risk, and will allow clergy visits with adherence to safety protocols,” said University of Maryland Medical System spokeswoman Jania Matthews.
Legal experts said the agency’s use of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act as the basis for its authority is unusual. Robert Tuttle, a research professor of law and religion at George Washington University’s Law School, said championing religious rights during a pandemic risked endangering others. “It risks the health and safety of others,” Mr. Tuttle said. “What’s happening under the current administration, and HHS is the poster child, is a shift to religious freedoms no matter who suffers collateral damages from it.”
The Office of Civil Rights also became involved in the spring in disputes over rationing decisions involving ventilators to ensure they weren’t discriminatory. In July, it issued reminders against discrimination to health-care providers that get federal funding, including hospitals and state agencies. The guidance included instructions to ensure minorities didn’t face longer wait times for care and weren’t denied access to intensive care.
The office has taken a number of steps to champion religious rights, including a rule that enables health-care providers to refuse to perform, accommodate, or assist with certain health-care services on religious or moral grounds. A federal judge in Manhattan blocked the rule in November, saying it exceeded the agency’s authority. HHS is appealing. The agency has also been applauded by disability-rights advocates for getting involved in cases involving health providers’ actions during the pandemic.
A complaint filed in May focused on state guidance in Connecticut on hospital policies restricting visitors during the pandemic. The policies allowed only narrow exceptions for people to support individuals with disabilities who received particular services from the state. The complaint said the policy effectively denied support to people with disabilities who couldn’t understand medical decisions.
According to the complaint, one hospital broke the law when it didn’t make an exception to the visitor restrictions for a 73-year old patient with aphasia and severe short-term memory loss. The woman, who is mostly nonverbal, was denied in-person support to help with her communication and comprehension during care.
After the office became involved, the state issued a new order amending the restrictions so that people with disabilities can have in-person support.
Discussion Questions:
Do you think there are occasions when public-health concerns outweigh the importance of religious freedom?
Should the public health action be upheld by evidence? If so, should the action reflect the evidence or should there be a more or less boiler plate response?
What about religious preference; should it be upheld by spiritual polity and tradition? Who deems a particular religion to be significant or legitimate?
These questions have been raised in microclimates around our country as hospitals address the pandemic. I think it would make for an interesting discussion about the intersection of religious freedom and public health.
At the risk of having something big occurring between now and when we will gather, let's discuss this article. I have included some discussion questions at the end of the piece if you'd like to talk it over with someone else.
God's peace to you and to our nation,
- Dave
Here is the website address for the discussion group:
https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
Hospitals’ Covid-19 Policies Face Religious-Rights Checks
Stephanie Armour, Wall Street Journal 8.10.20
The Trump administration has stepped up interventions in complaints by patients and health workers who say they’ve been victims of discrimination under policies that hospitals and other health organizations have adopted to combat the new coronavirus. One of the interventions involved a medical student who objected on religious grounds that he be required to shave his beard so he could wear a protective mask. Another involved a hospital’s refusal under its no-visitors rule during the pandemic to allow a bedside visit by a priest.
As the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights has intervened in the complaints, it has been negotiating settlements and issuing guidance to remind health organizations, states and local governments about their responsibilities under federal law. Some legal experts say the agency is overstepping its statutory authority. Lawyers who advocate for religious rights disagree and say the actions are legally sound.
The office cites laws it says give it authority to intervene in religious-discrimination claims when health organizations get federal money. They also point to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, which essentially prohibits the federal government from substantially burdening a person or institution’s religious exercise. “This is a time when the safeguards are put under stress,” Roger Severino, head of the Office for Civil Rights, said in an interview. In 2018, Roger Severino announced a new HHS division on Conscience and Religious Freedom. Some legal experts and advocates said the office’s actions in religious discrimination claims involving hospitals stand on shaky legal ground, saying its interpretation of the law is overly broad and is risky during a public-health emergency.
“HHS has no statutory authority to be enforcing its policy choices about religion and how to handle religion in health care,” said Richard Katskee, legal director at Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a litigation and advocacy group. Luke Goodrich, vice president and senior counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that defends religious freedom, said the agency had authority because most large hospitals get federal funding. He added that protecting religious freedoms was critical even during a pandemic—and can be done safely. “You don’t have to put religion and public health against each other,” Mr. Goodrich said.
The Office for Civil Rights intervened after a complaint was filed June 11 on behalf of the medical student who was doing rotations at Staten Island University Hospital, in New York City. The complaint said the hospital required him to shave his beard so that he could wear a protective mask. The student said shaving would violate his religious commitment to not cut his hair. The civil rights office said it communicated with the student and provided technical assistance to the hospital. The office said the hospital then granted the student an accommodation and let him wear an alternative form of protection called a Powered Air Purifying Respirator that he could wear with a beard.
Christian Preston, a hospital spokesman, said, “When he raised concerns over his religious needs, immediate steps were taken to understand and make an accommodation that adhered with his cultural and spiritual beliefs so he could continue his medical studies, safely.” At no point was the student asked to shave his beard, Mr. Preston said, but he was informed about safety guidelines that state a user must be clean shaved to be appropriately fit tested for an N95 mask. He said the student was reassigned to rotations in non-Covid-19 areas until a powered air-purifying respirator could be provided instead of an N95 mask.
In another complaint, Sidney and Susanna Marcus suffered severe injuries in a car accident on Memorial Day and got treatment at Prince George’s Hospital Center, in Maryland. While Mrs. Marcus’s condition improved, her husband’s condition worsened, and he was put on a ventilator because of the accident. Neither of the Marcuses had Covid-19. Mrs. Marcus asked a priest to visit her husband at the hospital to administer the sacrament of anointing the sick, which has been known as last rites. But the hospital system, University of Maryland Medical System, had implemented a policy banning visitors because of the pandemic, according to a June 9 complaint Mrs. Marcus filed with the office. The priest, who had agreed to wear personal protective equipment, wasn’t allowed in, according to the complaint.
“I didn’t know much about his condition, we couldn’t communicate, and I was very fearful for his condition,” Mrs. Marcus said. “We believe in the sacraments, our souls are united in God, and I needed to know he had access to that.”
The Office for Civil Rights provided technical assistance to the hospital, and HHS officials said the hospital system subsequently agreed to change its policy, allowing clergy to see patients. The system didn’t dispute the details of the complaint. Prince George's Hospital Center, where Sidney and Susanna Marcus were both treated following their accident.
“We have since amended our policy, with all individuals visiting a Covid-19 positive patient provided a form acknowledging the risk, and will allow clergy visits with adherence to safety protocols,” said University of Maryland Medical System spokeswoman Jania Matthews.
Legal experts said the agency’s use of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act as the basis for its authority is unusual. Robert Tuttle, a research professor of law and religion at George Washington University’s Law School, said championing religious rights during a pandemic risked endangering others. “It risks the health and safety of others,” Mr. Tuttle said. “What’s happening under the current administration, and HHS is the poster child, is a shift to religious freedoms no matter who suffers collateral damages from it.”
The Office of Civil Rights also became involved in the spring in disputes over rationing decisions involving ventilators to ensure they weren’t discriminatory. In July, it issued reminders against discrimination to health-care providers that get federal funding, including hospitals and state agencies. The guidance included instructions to ensure minorities didn’t face longer wait times for care and weren’t denied access to intensive care.
The office has taken a number of steps to champion religious rights, including a rule that enables health-care providers to refuse to perform, accommodate, or assist with certain health-care services on religious or moral grounds. A federal judge in Manhattan blocked the rule in November, saying it exceeded the agency’s authority. HHS is appealing. The agency has also been applauded by disability-rights advocates for getting involved in cases involving health providers’ actions during the pandemic.
A complaint filed in May focused on state guidance in Connecticut on hospital policies restricting visitors during the pandemic. The policies allowed only narrow exceptions for people to support individuals with disabilities who received particular services from the state. The complaint said the policy effectively denied support to people with disabilities who couldn’t understand medical decisions.
According to the complaint, one hospital broke the law when it didn’t make an exception to the visitor restrictions for a 73-year old patient with aphasia and severe short-term memory loss. The woman, who is mostly nonverbal, was denied in-person support to help with her communication and comprehension during care.
After the office became involved, the state issued a new order amending the restrictions so that people with disabilities can have in-person support.
Discussion Questions:
Do you think there are occasions when public-health concerns outweigh the importance of religious freedom?
Should the public health action be upheld by evidence? If so, should the action reflect the evidence or should there be a more or less boiler plate response?
What about religious preference; should it be upheld by spiritual polity and tradition? Who deems a particular religion to be significant or legitimate?
Tuesday, August 11
I find it interesting that as we head closer to our national election, the more stories that seem to pop up but the less we can talk about. It's a strange phenomenon.
This week, the Women's Discussion Group is taking a vacation day, so it will just be the men's group. I have two articles for this week. The primary topic of discussion is from the Pew Research Center on the comfort and safety of in-person worship services. Nevertheless, we have stumbled onto the topic of palliative care recently so I included the other article which addresses the very difficult topic. A starter question is what do these articles have in common.
Last thing - the Wall Street Journal's daily email has a question and answer section. Their question for tomorrow is this: If you had the opportunity to turn an empty department store into something else, what would it be?
I'd like to know what you think.
Here is the website address for the discussion group:
https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
- Dave
Black, Hispanic worshippers more concerned about safety of religious services
Claire Gecewicz, Pew Research Center, 8.7.20
Black and Hispanic adults in the United States have been hit hard by the coronavirus outbreak and are more likely than white Americans to be concerned about contracting the virus and unknowingly spreading it to others. And these racial and ethnic discrepancies extend to the perceived safety of attending religious services during the outbreak, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.
Nearly three-quarters of white adults who report that they regularly attend religious services (72%) say they are “very” or “somewhat” confident they could safely attend in-person services right now at their regular house of worship without spreading or catching the coronavirus. By contrast, around half of Black (49%) and Hispanic (51%) Americans who are similarly observant express such confidence. The other half of Black and Hispanic attenders say they are “not too” or “not at all” confident they could safely go to in-person religious services right now without spreading or catching the virus, according to the survey, which was conducted July 13 to 19.
In this analysis, regular religious service attenders are defined as those who said in a 2019 survey that they typically attend services at least once or twice a month or say in the new survey that they attended in-person services in the last month.
Black and Hispanic worshippers also are less likely than their white counterparts to say they have actually gone to church or another house of worship recently. Just 19% of Black adults who typically attend religious services at least monthly (according to the 2019 survey) say they have gone to in-person services in the past month, and one-in-four Hispanic worshippers report having done so. By comparison, 39% of white worshippers say they attended in-person services in the last month.
Not surprisingly, those who say they feel safe attending in-person services are much more likely to have actually attended in-person services this summer, and this pattern holds true across racial and ethnic groups.
At the moment, watching religious services online or on TV is the more popular option for worshippers across racial and ethnic groups, although Black religious attenders (77%) are somewhat more likely than white (71%) and Hispanic (68%) attenders to say they have watched religious services online or on TV in the last month.
The higher levels of caution that Black and Hispanic adults have with respect to COVID-19 also are apparent when it comes to opinions about how – or if – houses of worship should be operating right now. Black and Hispanic attenders are far more likely than white attenders to say that their own congregation should be closed for in-person services: About four-in-ten Black (42%) and Hispanic attenders (37%) say this, compared with 21% of white attenders.
It is not that most white attenders think their congregations should be open without restrictions; just 15% say their houses of worship should currently be open to the public as normal, just as they were before the pandemic. But among white attenders, a majority (63%) think their congregation should be open for in-person religious services with modifications in place due to the coronavirus outbreak – such as social distancing, mask requirements or limited attendance. Fewer Black (44%) and Hispanic (51%) attenders say this is the right option for their congregations.
Opinions about what houses of worship should be doing during the coronavirus outbreak seem to reflect what respondents’ congregations actually are doing. White worshippers are much more likely than their Black and Hispanic counterparts to report that their congregations are holding in-person services with precautions in place. Roughly two-thirds of white attenders (65%) say their congregation is open in this way, compared with fewer Black (37%) and Hispanic (41%) worshippers. Meanwhile, about four-in-ten Black and Hispanic attenders say the congregation they attend most often is currently closed for in-person worship, compared with one-quarter of white attenders who say this.
Claire Gecewicz is a research associate focusing on religion research at Pew Research Center
Cancer, Religion, and ‘Good’ Death
Michael Sekeres, M.D. New York Times 7.28.20
When I first met my patient, three years ago, he was about my age chronologically, but caught in an eternal childhood intellectually. It may have been something he was born with, or an injury at birth that deprived his brain of oxygen for too long — I could never find out. But the man staring at me from the hospital bed would have been an apt playmate for my young son back home.
“How are you doing today, sir?” he asked as soon as I walked into his room. He was in his hospital gown, had thick glasses, and wore a necklace with a silver pendant around his neck. So polite. His mother, who sat by his bedside in a chair and had cared for him for almost half a century, had raised him alone, and raised him right. We had just confirmed he had cancer and needed to start treatment urgently. I tried to assess what he understood about his diagnosis.
“Do you know why you’re here?” I asked him.
He smiled broadly, looking around the room. “Because I’m sick,” he answered. Of course. People go to hospitals when they’re ill.
I smiled back at him. “That’s absolutely right. Do you have any idea what sickness you have?”
Uncertainty descended over his face and he glanced quickly over to his mother. “We were told he has leukemia,” she said. She held a pen that was poised over a lined notebook on which she had already written the word leukemia at the top of the page; I would see that notebook fill with questions and answers over the subsequent times they would visit the clinic. “What exactly is that?” she asked. I described how leukemia arose and commandeered the factory of the bone marrow that makes the blood’s components for its own sinister purposes, devastating the blood counts, and how we would try to rein it in with chemotherapy.
“The chemotherapy kills the bad cells, but also unfortunately the good cells in the bone marrow, too, so we’ll need to support you through the treatment with red blood cell and platelet transfusions,” I told them both. I wasn’t sure how much of our conversation my patient grasped, but he recognized that his mother and I were having a serious conversation about his health and stayed respectfully quiet, even when I asked him if he had questions. His mother shook her head.
“That won’t work. We’re Jehovah’s Witnesses and can’t accept blood.”
As I’ve written about previously, members of this religious group believe it is wrong to receive the blood of another human being, and that doing so violates God’s law, even if it is potentially lifesaving. We compromised on a lower-dose treatment that was less likely to necessitate supportive transfusions, but also less likely than standard chemotherapy to be effective.
“Is that OK with you?” my patient’s mother asked him. I liked how she included him in the decision-making, regardless of what he could comprehend.
“Sounds good to me!” He gave us both a wide smile.
We started the weeklong lower-dose treatment. And as luck would have it, or science, or perhaps it was divine intervention, the therapy worked, his blood counts normalized, and the leukemia evaporated.
I saw him monthly in my outpatient clinic as we continued his therapy, one week out of every month. He delighted in recounting a bus trip he took with his church, or his latest art trouvé from a flea market — necklaces with glass or metal pendants; copper bracelets; the occasional bolo tie.
“I bought three of these for five dollars,” my patient confided to me, proud of the shrewdness of his wheeling and dealing.
And each time I walked into the exam room to see him, he started our conversation by politely asking, “How’s your family doing? They doing OK?”
Over two years passed before the leukemia returned. We tried the only other therapy that might work without leveling his blood counts, this one targeting a genetic abnormality in his leukemia cells. But the leukemia raged back, shrugging off the fancy new drug as his platelets, which we couldn’t replace, continued to drop precipitously: Half normal. One-quarter normal. One-10th normal. One-20th normal.
He was going to die. I met with my patient and his mother and, to prepare, asked them about what kind of aggressive measures they might want at the end of life. With the backdrop of Covid-19 forcing us all to wear masks, it was hard to interpret their reactions to my questions. It also added to our general sense of helplessness to stop a merciless disease.
Would he want to be placed on a breathing machine?
“What do you think?” his mother asked him. He looked hesitantly at me and at her. “That would be OK,” he answered.
What about chest compressions for a cardiac arrest? Again his mother deferred to him. He shrugged his shoulders, unsure. I turned to my patient’s mother, trying to engage her to help with these decisions. “I worry that he may not realize what stage the cancer has reached, and want to avoid his being treated aggressively as he gets sicker,” I began. “Maybe we could even keep him out of the hospital entirely and allow him to stay home, when there’s little chance …” My voice trailed off.
Her eyes above her mask locked with mine and turned serious. “We’re aware. But we’re not going to deprive him of hope at the end …” This time her voice trailed off, and she swallowed hard.
I nodded and turned back to my patient. “How do you think things are going with your leukemia?”
His mask crinkled as he smiled underneath it. “I think they’re going good!”
A few days later, my patient developed a headache, along with nausea and dizziness. His mother called 911 and he was rushed to the hospital, where he was found to have an intracranial hemorrhage, a result of the low platelets. He slipped into a coma and was placed on a ventilator, and died soon afterward, alone because of the limitations on visitors to the hospital during the pandemic.
At the end, he didn’t suffer much. And as a parent, I can’t say for certain that I would have the strength to care for a dying child at home.
But I also can’t be certain if it was right to preserve his hope until he passed, while leaving him unprepared for a solitary death; perhaps unaware of what was occurring, but perhaps aware.
This week, the Women's Discussion Group is taking a vacation day, so it will just be the men's group. I have two articles for this week. The primary topic of discussion is from the Pew Research Center on the comfort and safety of in-person worship services. Nevertheless, we have stumbled onto the topic of palliative care recently so I included the other article which addresses the very difficult topic. A starter question is what do these articles have in common.
Last thing - the Wall Street Journal's daily email has a question and answer section. Their question for tomorrow is this: If you had the opportunity to turn an empty department store into something else, what would it be?
I'd like to know what you think.
Here is the website address for the discussion group:
https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
- Dave
Black, Hispanic worshippers more concerned about safety of religious services
Claire Gecewicz, Pew Research Center, 8.7.20
Black and Hispanic adults in the United States have been hit hard by the coronavirus outbreak and are more likely than white Americans to be concerned about contracting the virus and unknowingly spreading it to others. And these racial and ethnic discrepancies extend to the perceived safety of attending religious services during the outbreak, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.
Nearly three-quarters of white adults who report that they regularly attend religious services (72%) say they are “very” or “somewhat” confident they could safely attend in-person services right now at their regular house of worship without spreading or catching the coronavirus. By contrast, around half of Black (49%) and Hispanic (51%) Americans who are similarly observant express such confidence. The other half of Black and Hispanic attenders say they are “not too” or “not at all” confident they could safely go to in-person religious services right now without spreading or catching the virus, according to the survey, which was conducted July 13 to 19.
In this analysis, regular religious service attenders are defined as those who said in a 2019 survey that they typically attend services at least once or twice a month or say in the new survey that they attended in-person services in the last month.
Black and Hispanic worshippers also are less likely than their white counterparts to say they have actually gone to church or another house of worship recently. Just 19% of Black adults who typically attend religious services at least monthly (according to the 2019 survey) say they have gone to in-person services in the past month, and one-in-four Hispanic worshippers report having done so. By comparison, 39% of white worshippers say they attended in-person services in the last month.
Not surprisingly, those who say they feel safe attending in-person services are much more likely to have actually attended in-person services this summer, and this pattern holds true across racial and ethnic groups.
At the moment, watching religious services online or on TV is the more popular option for worshippers across racial and ethnic groups, although Black religious attenders (77%) are somewhat more likely than white (71%) and Hispanic (68%) attenders to say they have watched religious services online or on TV in the last month.
The higher levels of caution that Black and Hispanic adults have with respect to COVID-19 also are apparent when it comes to opinions about how – or if – houses of worship should be operating right now. Black and Hispanic attenders are far more likely than white attenders to say that their own congregation should be closed for in-person services: About four-in-ten Black (42%) and Hispanic attenders (37%) say this, compared with 21% of white attenders.
It is not that most white attenders think their congregations should be open without restrictions; just 15% say their houses of worship should currently be open to the public as normal, just as they were before the pandemic. But among white attenders, a majority (63%) think their congregation should be open for in-person religious services with modifications in place due to the coronavirus outbreak – such as social distancing, mask requirements or limited attendance. Fewer Black (44%) and Hispanic (51%) attenders say this is the right option for their congregations.
Opinions about what houses of worship should be doing during the coronavirus outbreak seem to reflect what respondents’ congregations actually are doing. White worshippers are much more likely than their Black and Hispanic counterparts to report that their congregations are holding in-person services with precautions in place. Roughly two-thirds of white attenders (65%) say their congregation is open in this way, compared with fewer Black (37%) and Hispanic (41%) worshippers. Meanwhile, about four-in-ten Black and Hispanic attenders say the congregation they attend most often is currently closed for in-person worship, compared with one-quarter of white attenders who say this.
Claire Gecewicz is a research associate focusing on religion research at Pew Research Center
Cancer, Religion, and ‘Good’ Death
Michael Sekeres, M.D. New York Times 7.28.20
When I first met my patient, three years ago, he was about my age chronologically, but caught in an eternal childhood intellectually. It may have been something he was born with, or an injury at birth that deprived his brain of oxygen for too long — I could never find out. But the man staring at me from the hospital bed would have been an apt playmate for my young son back home.
“How are you doing today, sir?” he asked as soon as I walked into his room. He was in his hospital gown, had thick glasses, and wore a necklace with a silver pendant around his neck. So polite. His mother, who sat by his bedside in a chair and had cared for him for almost half a century, had raised him alone, and raised him right. We had just confirmed he had cancer and needed to start treatment urgently. I tried to assess what he understood about his diagnosis.
“Do you know why you’re here?” I asked him.
He smiled broadly, looking around the room. “Because I’m sick,” he answered. Of course. People go to hospitals when they’re ill.
I smiled back at him. “That’s absolutely right. Do you have any idea what sickness you have?”
Uncertainty descended over his face and he glanced quickly over to his mother. “We were told he has leukemia,” she said. She held a pen that was poised over a lined notebook on which she had already written the word leukemia at the top of the page; I would see that notebook fill with questions and answers over the subsequent times they would visit the clinic. “What exactly is that?” she asked. I described how leukemia arose and commandeered the factory of the bone marrow that makes the blood’s components for its own sinister purposes, devastating the blood counts, and how we would try to rein it in with chemotherapy.
“The chemotherapy kills the bad cells, but also unfortunately the good cells in the bone marrow, too, so we’ll need to support you through the treatment with red blood cell and platelet transfusions,” I told them both. I wasn’t sure how much of our conversation my patient grasped, but he recognized that his mother and I were having a serious conversation about his health and stayed respectfully quiet, even when I asked him if he had questions. His mother shook her head.
“That won’t work. We’re Jehovah’s Witnesses and can’t accept blood.”
As I’ve written about previously, members of this religious group believe it is wrong to receive the blood of another human being, and that doing so violates God’s law, even if it is potentially lifesaving. We compromised on a lower-dose treatment that was less likely to necessitate supportive transfusions, but also less likely than standard chemotherapy to be effective.
“Is that OK with you?” my patient’s mother asked him. I liked how she included him in the decision-making, regardless of what he could comprehend.
“Sounds good to me!” He gave us both a wide smile.
We started the weeklong lower-dose treatment. And as luck would have it, or science, or perhaps it was divine intervention, the therapy worked, his blood counts normalized, and the leukemia evaporated.
I saw him monthly in my outpatient clinic as we continued his therapy, one week out of every month. He delighted in recounting a bus trip he took with his church, or his latest art trouvé from a flea market — necklaces with glass or metal pendants; copper bracelets; the occasional bolo tie.
“I bought three of these for five dollars,” my patient confided to me, proud of the shrewdness of his wheeling and dealing.
And each time I walked into the exam room to see him, he started our conversation by politely asking, “How’s your family doing? They doing OK?”
Over two years passed before the leukemia returned. We tried the only other therapy that might work without leveling his blood counts, this one targeting a genetic abnormality in his leukemia cells. But the leukemia raged back, shrugging off the fancy new drug as his platelets, which we couldn’t replace, continued to drop precipitously: Half normal. One-quarter normal. One-10th normal. One-20th normal.
He was going to die. I met with my patient and his mother and, to prepare, asked them about what kind of aggressive measures they might want at the end of life. With the backdrop of Covid-19 forcing us all to wear masks, it was hard to interpret their reactions to my questions. It also added to our general sense of helplessness to stop a merciless disease.
Would he want to be placed on a breathing machine?
“What do you think?” his mother asked him. He looked hesitantly at me and at her. “That would be OK,” he answered.
What about chest compressions for a cardiac arrest? Again his mother deferred to him. He shrugged his shoulders, unsure. I turned to my patient’s mother, trying to engage her to help with these decisions. “I worry that he may not realize what stage the cancer has reached, and want to avoid his being treated aggressively as he gets sicker,” I began. “Maybe we could even keep him out of the hospital entirely and allow him to stay home, when there’s little chance …” My voice trailed off.
Her eyes above her mask locked with mine and turned serious. “We’re aware. But we’re not going to deprive him of hope at the end …” This time her voice trailed off, and she swallowed hard.
I nodded and turned back to my patient. “How do you think things are going with your leukemia?”
His mask crinkled as he smiled underneath it. “I think they’re going good!”
A few days later, my patient developed a headache, along with nausea and dizziness. His mother called 911 and he was rushed to the hospital, where he was found to have an intracranial hemorrhage, a result of the low platelets. He slipped into a coma and was placed on a ventilator, and died soon afterward, alone because of the limitations on visitors to the hospital during the pandemic.
At the end, he didn’t suffer much. And as a parent, I can’t say for certain that I would have the strength to care for a dying child at home.
But I also can’t be certain if it was right to preserve his hope until he passed, while leaving him unprepared for a solitary death; perhaps unaware of what was occurring, but perhaps aware.
Tuesday, August 4
Hello! I imagine it is needless to say that I am relieved the hurricane/tropical storm stayed in the Atlantic.
I have been interested in questioning the logic behind what is called the "cancel culture" - which is the popular practice of withdrawing support for (canceling) public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive. This article does a good job addressing it; and, logically follows the problem with boycotting everything means the consumer has no energy to do something politically.
I look forward to talking about this in our discussion groups. The link to the Zoom discussion is here https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
- Dave
Boycotts Can’t Be A Test of Moral Purity
Zephyr Teachout, The Atlantic, 8.3.20
For some people, when they hear about some bad corporate practice, their first reaction is to consider cutting ties to the company. So it is not surprising that each time I discuss the democratic dangers of Facebook, Amazon, or Google, people always bring up personal consumer choice. Instead of policy (antitrust, data rules, outlawing arbitration), the conversation veers quickly into pride or guilt. One woman worries she can’t leave Facebook without leaving her social life. One man sheepishly says he quit Facebook for a few weeks and crept back when he missed his friends. At the heart of this conversation is a thesis: Using a service is an endorsement of its business model. Or more pointedly: If someone is not strong enough to boycott, she lacks standing to object to the behavior of lawmakers and petition them for change.
This belief is wrong, bad strategy, and dangerous for democracy. It is based on a confused idea of our obligations as consumers. This belief does not lead to more boycotts, but radically dampens activism: Guilt gets in the way of protest, and complicated chains of self-justification take the place of simple chains of democratic demand. This consumer model is most problematic when it comes to the biggest monopolies. Most people can’t boycott them, precisely because they are governmental and provide infrastructure services. We don’t ask people to boycott libraries in order to change library rules; we don’t ask people to boycott highways to ask for them to be safer; we don’t demand that you buy only bottled water while protesting water-utility governance.
Of course, a strategic, organized, well-thought-through boycott with political goals can be transformational. And there is nothing wrong with people personally quitting products when they can. However, ethical consumerism has taken too central a role in progressive thinking, and we shouldn’t require people to boycott essential communications infrastructure such as Facebook and Google in order to demand that they be broken up. The railroads were regulated by antimonopoly protesters who depended on the railroads, and the same can be true for the next generation of trust-busters. Boycotts can play a crucial role in political change, but not when they serve only as tests of individual integrity.
Boycotts do have widespread appeal. The Vox columnist Matthew Yglesias has taken a look at why, writing, “Consumer brands are a leverage point for progressive politics because there’s no gerrymandering & marketers care more about young people. Consumer marketing is almost the exact opposite of voting and a younger, more urbanized, and more female demographic carries more weight.”
This logic may lead to a short-term sense of empowerment, but to longer-term disempowerment — the more progressives lean into their consumer power as the key point of leverage, the less they focus on exercising their political power, the less long-term collective power they will amass. In other words, boycotts allow people to import virtuousness into their life without the struggle of organizing and building a coalition.
Today, there are hundreds of boycotts every year, and most do not have any appreciable impact. People lose interest, don’t maintain a public presence around a boycott, and the number of people involved is typically too small to make a market difference. What difference is made typically revolves around “the more modest goal of attracting media attention,” not the loss of income, the University of Pennsylvania professor Maurice Schweitzer says.
The Chick-fil-A boycott, one of the largest in recent memory, came about when the Chick-fil-A CEO made anti-gay marriage comments. Organizers staged kiss-ins, and mayors said Chick-filA was not welcome in their towns. But Chick-fil-A ignored the protests, people forgot the comments after a few years, and little changed. As one commentator put it, “It is hard to stay mad at a ubiquitous and powerful brand.” While, in theory, people did commit to stop eating at Chick-fil-A until it changed its posture on marriage equality, the company outlasted the protest; it still rates a zero on the Human Rights Campaign’s Buyers Guide, and LGBTQ people are not included in its nondiscrimination policy.
Ethical consumerism — and its close relatives corporate accountability and corporate social responsibility — is especially poorly suited to monopolized economies, and a tragic misfit for disciplining companies that play a quasi-governmental role. By accepting big corporations as partners, and not challenging their legitimacy as our rulers, the consumer-boycott model allows for short-term victories that appear to be progressive, while the partner corporation is building sufficient power to become boycott-proof.
If Chick-fil-A was hard to boycott, think about what boycotting Google would mean. First, imagine a one-person boycott, someone angry about, say, Google-enabled job discrimination. He would have to get rid of his Android phone and switch from Gmail. He’d have to stop using Google Search and Google Maps. He’d have to refuse to watch anything on YouTube. He’d have to get rid of Nest. If he owned a business, he’d have to avoid Google ads, which he might rely on to reach customers. He’d have to refuse to use municipal Wi-Fi in cities where Google is behind “free” Wi-Fi. If he had children, he would have to tell them to refuse to use the technology required to interact with their teachers.
And even if he succeeds in doing all these things, Google will not boycott him. If he uses the internet, he will necessarily see Google-served ads, and his responses and nonresponses to those ads will feed into Google’s data bank. Google will still collect information about him when he walks by a LinkNYC kiosk. Google will still collect his tax dollars in subsidies.
Now try imagining an effective organized boycott of Google, large enough to actually dent the company’s profits. There are more than 5 billion Google searches a day. Can we really imagine enough people switching to an alternate search engine or going without asking their question? Google will continue collecting information on those people regardless, and Search is just one part of the Google behemoth. As if that weren’t daunting enough, imagine a sector-based boycott of the data-collection practices of all the big tech companies—Facebook, Google, Amazon—for their shared behaviors.
In 2019, the city of Richmond, California, ended its contract with Vigilant Solutions, a dataanalytics company that does business with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The city of Berkeley, following suit, debated boycotting all companies that provided services to ICE and Customs and Border Protection, including Amazon, because these federal agencies rely on Amazon Web Services. The Berkeley city manager, Dee Williams-Ridley, argued against boycotting Amazon, because it “would have a huge negative impact to the citywide operations.” Amazon helps manage city documents, and hosts housing and mental-health programs, and Amazon servers host many other tech companies that provide services to the city. People unwittingly using the thing they are supposedly boycotting to advertise their boycott can seem funny. But the lack of choice facing all boycotters actually represents a serious narrowing of the window of moral political behavior.
The change in effectiveness can be confusing for people who remember the successful boycotts in the 1980s and ’90s of companies such as Nike, which came under fire for using sweatshops. Companies have reorganized their supply chains in a way that insulates them from liability and protest. Garment manufacturers no longer have direct relationships with big companies, who build systems of deliberate ignorance into their purchasing. According to Professor Richard Locke’s research on Nike, workplace conditions in almost 80 percent of its root suppliers remained either the same or worsened between 2001 and 2005, though the company’s records may appear better on paper. Most important, every part of Nike’s supply chain is monopolized, with just a few major players, so boycotters have nowhere else to go. A serious boycott would involve buying no foreign-manufactured garments, rather than targeting particular companies.
Growing consolidation of power interacts with the rise of social media, leading to more boycotts that are less effective and shorter-lasting. As Tufekci has argued, these actions tend to the ephemeral and episodic, instead of the effective and persistent. The result is a combination of hyperactivity online and decreased power.
There are also strong class and social elements to boycotting something like Facebook. It may not be essential for an upper-middle-class man living in New York, with an existing strong network of friends who appreciate his eccentricities, to use Facebook or Instagram. But a young person looking for work, let alone friendship, might find it hard to check out of all Facebook owned properties, because they are so central to social life, and the web of job connections. The human cost of social isolation is enormous, and while some people may have sturdy offline social networks, many people do not. I met one anti-monopoly activist who guiltily confessed that she stayed on Facebook because she wanted to check on her grandmother’s health.
People feel guilty about not boycotting, and that guilt gets in the way of full-throated political protest. In law, there is a doctrine called “exhaustion of remedies.” It prevents a litigant from seeking a remedy in a new court or jurisdiction until all claims or remedies have been pursued as fully as possible—exhausted—in the original one. In politics, consumer supremacy has led to a kind of exhaustion-of-remedies thinking, through which people adopt a hierarchy of modes of resistance, and feel they must first boycott, and only then ask lawmakers for change. It places consumer obligations over civic ones.
We need to change the current habits of protest in a way that places public, electoral politics at the heart of how we interact with corporate monopolies. If your local pizza parlor starts treating workers badly, sure, boycott it. But when a monopolistic drug company hikes up prices, or a social-media goliath promotes political lies to make more money, the right response is not to beg Google or Facebook for scraps, but to march to Congress and demand that the practices be investigated and the power of these companies be broken up. And if your representative fails to act, don’t boycott her. Replace her.
Zephyr Teachout is an associate professor of law at Fordham Law School. She is the author of Break ’Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom From Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money
I have been interested in questioning the logic behind what is called the "cancel culture" - which is the popular practice of withdrawing support for (canceling) public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive. This article does a good job addressing it; and, logically follows the problem with boycotting everything means the consumer has no energy to do something politically.
I look forward to talking about this in our discussion groups. The link to the Zoom discussion is here https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
- Dave
Boycotts Can’t Be A Test of Moral Purity
Zephyr Teachout, The Atlantic, 8.3.20
For some people, when they hear about some bad corporate practice, their first reaction is to consider cutting ties to the company. So it is not surprising that each time I discuss the democratic dangers of Facebook, Amazon, or Google, people always bring up personal consumer choice. Instead of policy (antitrust, data rules, outlawing arbitration), the conversation veers quickly into pride or guilt. One woman worries she can’t leave Facebook without leaving her social life. One man sheepishly says he quit Facebook for a few weeks and crept back when he missed his friends. At the heart of this conversation is a thesis: Using a service is an endorsement of its business model. Or more pointedly: If someone is not strong enough to boycott, she lacks standing to object to the behavior of lawmakers and petition them for change.
This belief is wrong, bad strategy, and dangerous for democracy. It is based on a confused idea of our obligations as consumers. This belief does not lead to more boycotts, but radically dampens activism: Guilt gets in the way of protest, and complicated chains of self-justification take the place of simple chains of democratic demand. This consumer model is most problematic when it comes to the biggest monopolies. Most people can’t boycott them, precisely because they are governmental and provide infrastructure services. We don’t ask people to boycott libraries in order to change library rules; we don’t ask people to boycott highways to ask for them to be safer; we don’t demand that you buy only bottled water while protesting water-utility governance.
Of course, a strategic, organized, well-thought-through boycott with political goals can be transformational. And there is nothing wrong with people personally quitting products when they can. However, ethical consumerism has taken too central a role in progressive thinking, and we shouldn’t require people to boycott essential communications infrastructure such as Facebook and Google in order to demand that they be broken up. The railroads were regulated by antimonopoly protesters who depended on the railroads, and the same can be true for the next generation of trust-busters. Boycotts can play a crucial role in political change, but not when they serve only as tests of individual integrity.
Boycotts do have widespread appeal. The Vox columnist Matthew Yglesias has taken a look at why, writing, “Consumer brands are a leverage point for progressive politics because there’s no gerrymandering & marketers care more about young people. Consumer marketing is almost the exact opposite of voting and a younger, more urbanized, and more female demographic carries more weight.”
This logic may lead to a short-term sense of empowerment, but to longer-term disempowerment — the more progressives lean into their consumer power as the key point of leverage, the less they focus on exercising their political power, the less long-term collective power they will amass. In other words, boycotts allow people to import virtuousness into their life without the struggle of organizing and building a coalition.
Today, there are hundreds of boycotts every year, and most do not have any appreciable impact. People lose interest, don’t maintain a public presence around a boycott, and the number of people involved is typically too small to make a market difference. What difference is made typically revolves around “the more modest goal of attracting media attention,” not the loss of income, the University of Pennsylvania professor Maurice Schweitzer says.
The Chick-fil-A boycott, one of the largest in recent memory, came about when the Chick-fil-A CEO made anti-gay marriage comments. Organizers staged kiss-ins, and mayors said Chick-filA was not welcome in their towns. But Chick-fil-A ignored the protests, people forgot the comments after a few years, and little changed. As one commentator put it, “It is hard to stay mad at a ubiquitous and powerful brand.” While, in theory, people did commit to stop eating at Chick-fil-A until it changed its posture on marriage equality, the company outlasted the protest; it still rates a zero on the Human Rights Campaign’s Buyers Guide, and LGBTQ people are not included in its nondiscrimination policy.
Ethical consumerism — and its close relatives corporate accountability and corporate social responsibility — is especially poorly suited to monopolized economies, and a tragic misfit for disciplining companies that play a quasi-governmental role. By accepting big corporations as partners, and not challenging their legitimacy as our rulers, the consumer-boycott model allows for short-term victories that appear to be progressive, while the partner corporation is building sufficient power to become boycott-proof.
If Chick-fil-A was hard to boycott, think about what boycotting Google would mean. First, imagine a one-person boycott, someone angry about, say, Google-enabled job discrimination. He would have to get rid of his Android phone and switch from Gmail. He’d have to stop using Google Search and Google Maps. He’d have to refuse to watch anything on YouTube. He’d have to get rid of Nest. If he owned a business, he’d have to avoid Google ads, which he might rely on to reach customers. He’d have to refuse to use municipal Wi-Fi in cities where Google is behind “free” Wi-Fi. If he had children, he would have to tell them to refuse to use the technology required to interact with their teachers.
And even if he succeeds in doing all these things, Google will not boycott him. If he uses the internet, he will necessarily see Google-served ads, and his responses and nonresponses to those ads will feed into Google’s data bank. Google will still collect information about him when he walks by a LinkNYC kiosk. Google will still collect his tax dollars in subsidies.
Now try imagining an effective organized boycott of Google, large enough to actually dent the company’s profits. There are more than 5 billion Google searches a day. Can we really imagine enough people switching to an alternate search engine or going without asking their question? Google will continue collecting information on those people regardless, and Search is just one part of the Google behemoth. As if that weren’t daunting enough, imagine a sector-based boycott of the data-collection practices of all the big tech companies—Facebook, Google, Amazon—for their shared behaviors.
In 2019, the city of Richmond, California, ended its contract with Vigilant Solutions, a dataanalytics company that does business with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The city of Berkeley, following suit, debated boycotting all companies that provided services to ICE and Customs and Border Protection, including Amazon, because these federal agencies rely on Amazon Web Services. The Berkeley city manager, Dee Williams-Ridley, argued against boycotting Amazon, because it “would have a huge negative impact to the citywide operations.” Amazon helps manage city documents, and hosts housing and mental-health programs, and Amazon servers host many other tech companies that provide services to the city. People unwittingly using the thing they are supposedly boycotting to advertise their boycott can seem funny. But the lack of choice facing all boycotters actually represents a serious narrowing of the window of moral political behavior.
The change in effectiveness can be confusing for people who remember the successful boycotts in the 1980s and ’90s of companies such as Nike, which came under fire for using sweatshops. Companies have reorganized their supply chains in a way that insulates them from liability and protest. Garment manufacturers no longer have direct relationships with big companies, who build systems of deliberate ignorance into their purchasing. According to Professor Richard Locke’s research on Nike, workplace conditions in almost 80 percent of its root suppliers remained either the same or worsened between 2001 and 2005, though the company’s records may appear better on paper. Most important, every part of Nike’s supply chain is monopolized, with just a few major players, so boycotters have nowhere else to go. A serious boycott would involve buying no foreign-manufactured garments, rather than targeting particular companies.
Growing consolidation of power interacts with the rise of social media, leading to more boycotts that are less effective and shorter-lasting. As Tufekci has argued, these actions tend to the ephemeral and episodic, instead of the effective and persistent. The result is a combination of hyperactivity online and decreased power.
There are also strong class and social elements to boycotting something like Facebook. It may not be essential for an upper-middle-class man living in New York, with an existing strong network of friends who appreciate his eccentricities, to use Facebook or Instagram. But a young person looking for work, let alone friendship, might find it hard to check out of all Facebook owned properties, because they are so central to social life, and the web of job connections. The human cost of social isolation is enormous, and while some people may have sturdy offline social networks, many people do not. I met one anti-monopoly activist who guiltily confessed that she stayed on Facebook because she wanted to check on her grandmother’s health.
People feel guilty about not boycotting, and that guilt gets in the way of full-throated political protest. In law, there is a doctrine called “exhaustion of remedies.” It prevents a litigant from seeking a remedy in a new court or jurisdiction until all claims or remedies have been pursued as fully as possible—exhausted—in the original one. In politics, consumer supremacy has led to a kind of exhaustion-of-remedies thinking, through which people adopt a hierarchy of modes of resistance, and feel they must first boycott, and only then ask lawmakers for change. It places consumer obligations over civic ones.
We need to change the current habits of protest in a way that places public, electoral politics at the heart of how we interact with corporate monopolies. If your local pizza parlor starts treating workers badly, sure, boycott it. But when a monopolistic drug company hikes up prices, or a social-media goliath promotes political lies to make more money, the right response is not to beg Google or Facebook for scraps, but to march to Congress and demand that the practices be investigated and the power of these companies be broken up. And if your representative fails to act, don’t boycott her. Replace her.
Zephyr Teachout is an associate professor of law at Fordham Law School. She is the author of Break ’Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom From Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money
Tuesday, July 28
We are going to take on a rather heavy topic this week - capital punishment. There was an opinion piece in the New York Times, by Jeffrey Rosen, Deputy US Attorney General, outlining his views on justice being served through carrying out the death penalty. The Episcopal Church, since 1958, has stood against capital punishment and reaffirmed that theological belief exactly one year ago. Deputy AG Rosen's piece and the ECUSA statement on Federal executions are attached.
There are more than just these two opinions about the matter but I found them to be rather opposed to each other and thus a good conversation starter.
Here is the link https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
It is a troubling topic in a troubling time; may God's peace be with you, your family, and our nation.
- Dave
Justice is Being Done
Jeffrey A. Rosen, Deputy Attorney General New York Times, July 27, 2020
A top Justice Department official says for many Americans the death penalty is a difficult issue on moral, religious and policy grounds. But as a legal issue, it is straightforward. This month, for the first time in 17 years, the United States resumed carrying out death sentences for federal crimes. On July 14, Daniel Lewis Lee was executed for the 1996 murder of a family to fund a white-supremacist organization. On July 16, Wesley Purkey was executed for the 1998 murder of a teenage girl. The next day, Dustin Honken was executed for five murders committed in 1993. The death penalty is a difficult issue for many Americans on moral, religious and policy grounds. But as a legal issue, it is straightforward. The United States Constitution expressly contemplates “capital” crimes, and Congress has authorized the death penalty for serious federal offenses since President George Washington signed the Crimes Act of 1790. The American people have repeatedly ratified that decision, including through the Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994 signed by President Bill Clinton, the federal execution of Timothy McVeigh under President George W. Bush and the decision by President Barack Obama’s Justice Department to seek the death penalty against the Boston Marathon bomber and Dylann Roof. The recent executions reflect that consensus, as the Justice Department has an obligation to implement the law. The decision to seek the death penalty against Mr. Lee was made by Attorney General Janet Reno (who said she personally opposed the death penalty but was bound by the law) and reaffirmed by then-Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder. Mr. Purkey was prosecuted during the George W. Bush administration, and his conviction and sentence were vigorously defended throughout the Obama administration. The former judge who imposed the death sentence on Mr. Honken, Mark Bennett, said that while he generally opposed the death penalty, he would not lose any sleep over Mr. Honken’s execution. In a New York Times op-ed published on July 17, two of Mr. Lee’s lawyers criticized the execution of their client, which they contend was carried out in a “shameful rush.” That objection overlooks that Mr. Lee was sentenced more than 20 years ago, and his appeals and other permissible challenges failed, up to and including the day of his execution. Mr. Lee’s lawyers seem to endorse a system of endless delays that prevent a death sentence from ever becoming real. But his execution date was announced almost a year ago, and was initially set for last December. After a series of delays, in the final minutes before the execution was to occur, Mr. Lee’s lawyers claimed the execution could not proceed because Mr. Lee still had time to seek further review of an appellate court decision six weeks earlier lifting a prior stay of execution. The Justice Department decided to pause the execution for several hours while the appellate court considered and promptly rejected Mr. Lee’s request. That cautious step, taken to ensure undoubted compliance with court orders, is irreconcilable with the suggestion that the department “rushed” the execution or disregarded any law. Mr. Lee’s lawyers also disregarded the cost to victims’ families of continued delay. Although they note that some members of Mr. Lee’s victims’ families opposed his execution, others did not. Mr. Lee’s lawyers and other death penalty opponents are entitled to disagree with that sentiment. But if the United States is going to allow capital punishment, a white-supremacist triple murderer would seem the textbook example of a justified case. And if death sentences are going to be imposed, they cannot just be hypothetical; they eventually have to be carried out, or the punishment will lose its deterrent and retributive effects. Rather than forthrightly opposing the death penalty and attempting to change the law through democratic means, however, Mr. Lee’s lawyers and others have chosen the legal and public-relations equivalent of guerrilla war. They sought to obstruct by any means the administration of sentences that Congress permitted, juries supported and the Supreme Court approved. And when those tactics failed, they accused the Justice Department of “a grave threat to the rule of law,” even though it operated entirely within the law enacted by Congress and approved by the Supreme Court. The American people can decide for themselves which aspects of that process should be considered “shameful.”
Jeffrey A. Rosen is the deputy attorney general.
Episcopal Church Statement on Federal Executions July 26, 2019
“Jesus told us that the greatest gift we could give is to lay down our own lives for another. Conversely, the taking of another life must be viewed as the greatest sacrilege.” The Most Reverend Edmond L. Browning, XXIV Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church “If it is not about love, it is not about God” The Most Reverend Michael B. Curry, XXVII and Current Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church On July 25th [2019], the Attorney General announced the Trump Administration’s intention to begin carrying out federal executions for the first time since 2003. Since 1958, The Episcopal Church has taught that the sacredness of life requires that no individual or group of individuals have the right to unnecessarily take the life of another person. The taking of a human life can be necessary in self-defense and war, but as retribution for even the most heinous crimes it is not justified. In ages past, prior to the development of modern prison systems, execution was a method to protect the community from future crimes. St. Paul recognized the reality of this necessity to use force to restrain greater evil. Even in this scenario, execution was not the right or prerogative of the state, but a necessity for communal safety that no longer exists. Even if our justice system never wrongly convicted, condemned, and killed an innocent person, even if our justice system was equitable in sentencing, capital punishment would not be justified. The death penalty is not theologically justifiable, in part because it is not necessary for the protection of innocent people and the state cannot morally justify killing for the sake of vengeance. In the Old Testament, animal and human sacrifice was used to reestablish the moral balance that sin destroyed by making an offering of those animals and people to God. Christ’s death atoned for all human sin, past, present, and future, thus reestablishing moral balance for all time. The premeditated and unnecessary killing of a person is unchristian and beyond the legitimate powers of the state. Therefore, The Episcopal Church condemns the decision by the Administration to execute prisoners. We call on the President to reverse this decision and utilize his Constitutional power to commute the sentences of all those condemned to death to life in prison without parole.
There are more than just these two opinions about the matter but I found them to be rather opposed to each other and thus a good conversation starter.
Here is the link https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
It is a troubling topic in a troubling time; may God's peace be with you, your family, and our nation.
- Dave
Justice is Being Done
Jeffrey A. Rosen, Deputy Attorney General New York Times, July 27, 2020
A top Justice Department official says for many Americans the death penalty is a difficult issue on moral, religious and policy grounds. But as a legal issue, it is straightforward. This month, for the first time in 17 years, the United States resumed carrying out death sentences for federal crimes. On July 14, Daniel Lewis Lee was executed for the 1996 murder of a family to fund a white-supremacist organization. On July 16, Wesley Purkey was executed for the 1998 murder of a teenage girl. The next day, Dustin Honken was executed for five murders committed in 1993. The death penalty is a difficult issue for many Americans on moral, religious and policy grounds. But as a legal issue, it is straightforward. The United States Constitution expressly contemplates “capital” crimes, and Congress has authorized the death penalty for serious federal offenses since President George Washington signed the Crimes Act of 1790. The American people have repeatedly ratified that decision, including through the Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994 signed by President Bill Clinton, the federal execution of Timothy McVeigh under President George W. Bush and the decision by President Barack Obama’s Justice Department to seek the death penalty against the Boston Marathon bomber and Dylann Roof. The recent executions reflect that consensus, as the Justice Department has an obligation to implement the law. The decision to seek the death penalty against Mr. Lee was made by Attorney General Janet Reno (who said she personally opposed the death penalty but was bound by the law) and reaffirmed by then-Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder. Mr. Purkey was prosecuted during the George W. Bush administration, and his conviction and sentence were vigorously defended throughout the Obama administration. The former judge who imposed the death sentence on Mr. Honken, Mark Bennett, said that while he generally opposed the death penalty, he would not lose any sleep over Mr. Honken’s execution. In a New York Times op-ed published on July 17, two of Mr. Lee’s lawyers criticized the execution of their client, which they contend was carried out in a “shameful rush.” That objection overlooks that Mr. Lee was sentenced more than 20 years ago, and his appeals and other permissible challenges failed, up to and including the day of his execution. Mr. Lee’s lawyers seem to endorse a system of endless delays that prevent a death sentence from ever becoming real. But his execution date was announced almost a year ago, and was initially set for last December. After a series of delays, in the final minutes before the execution was to occur, Mr. Lee’s lawyers claimed the execution could not proceed because Mr. Lee still had time to seek further review of an appellate court decision six weeks earlier lifting a prior stay of execution. The Justice Department decided to pause the execution for several hours while the appellate court considered and promptly rejected Mr. Lee’s request. That cautious step, taken to ensure undoubted compliance with court orders, is irreconcilable with the suggestion that the department “rushed” the execution or disregarded any law. Mr. Lee’s lawyers also disregarded the cost to victims’ families of continued delay. Although they note that some members of Mr. Lee’s victims’ families opposed his execution, others did not. Mr. Lee’s lawyers and other death penalty opponents are entitled to disagree with that sentiment. But if the United States is going to allow capital punishment, a white-supremacist triple murderer would seem the textbook example of a justified case. And if death sentences are going to be imposed, they cannot just be hypothetical; they eventually have to be carried out, or the punishment will lose its deterrent and retributive effects. Rather than forthrightly opposing the death penalty and attempting to change the law through democratic means, however, Mr. Lee’s lawyers and others have chosen the legal and public-relations equivalent of guerrilla war. They sought to obstruct by any means the administration of sentences that Congress permitted, juries supported and the Supreme Court approved. And when those tactics failed, they accused the Justice Department of “a grave threat to the rule of law,” even though it operated entirely within the law enacted by Congress and approved by the Supreme Court. The American people can decide for themselves which aspects of that process should be considered “shameful.”
Jeffrey A. Rosen is the deputy attorney general.
Episcopal Church Statement on Federal Executions July 26, 2019
“Jesus told us that the greatest gift we could give is to lay down our own lives for another. Conversely, the taking of another life must be viewed as the greatest sacrilege.” The Most Reverend Edmond L. Browning, XXIV Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church “If it is not about love, it is not about God” The Most Reverend Michael B. Curry, XXVII and Current Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church On July 25th [2019], the Attorney General announced the Trump Administration’s intention to begin carrying out federal executions for the first time since 2003. Since 1958, The Episcopal Church has taught that the sacredness of life requires that no individual or group of individuals have the right to unnecessarily take the life of another person. The taking of a human life can be necessary in self-defense and war, but as retribution for even the most heinous crimes it is not justified. In ages past, prior to the development of modern prison systems, execution was a method to protect the community from future crimes. St. Paul recognized the reality of this necessity to use force to restrain greater evil. Even in this scenario, execution was not the right or prerogative of the state, but a necessity for communal safety that no longer exists. Even if our justice system never wrongly convicted, condemned, and killed an innocent person, even if our justice system was equitable in sentencing, capital punishment would not be justified. The death penalty is not theologically justifiable, in part because it is not necessary for the protection of innocent people and the state cannot morally justify killing for the sake of vengeance. In the Old Testament, animal and human sacrifice was used to reestablish the moral balance that sin destroyed by making an offering of those animals and people to God. Christ’s death atoned for all human sin, past, present, and future, thus reestablishing moral balance for all time. The premeditated and unnecessary killing of a person is unchristian and beyond the legitimate powers of the state. Therefore, The Episcopal Church condemns the decision by the Administration to execute prisoners. We call on the President to reverse this decision and utilize his Constitutional power to commute the sentences of all those condemned to death to life in prison without parole.
Tuesday, July 21
Hello! If you have ever wanted to read an article that blended spiritual practices with neuroscience, here it is! The article is a book review in Christianity Today that I think you may find interesting. The author of the article asks Why do some people benefit from spiritual disciplines while others seem to flounder? Why do some people embrace them wholeheartedly while others just shrug them off? And why, after these disciplines help us grow for a time, does the fruit sometimes begin to fade? Believe it or not, neuroscience may have something to say about it. I am looking forward to the discussion.
Here is the Zoom link https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
God's peace to you,
- Dave
Stuck in a Spiritual Rut? Neuroscience Might Have the Answer.
Geoff Holsclaw, Christianity Today, book review. July 17, 2020
Read your Bible. Pray. Go to church—twice on Sundays. And don’t sin. Be sure not to sin. This was the extent of my spiritual formation.
Of course, no one talked about spiritual formation when I was growing up. Reading the Bible, fasting, and prayer were part of my devotions, not part of a package of historic “spiritual disciplines.” These were just the things we did to grow our faith—to become holy, as God is holy. And the simplicity of these activities served me well. Until—while in college—they didn’t.
That’s when I encountered various devotional books that led me down God’s ancient paths of transformation. As for so many, discovering this wider tradition of spiritual disciplines—which included practices like meditation, fasting, and Sabbath rest—was a revelation and a relief. I no longer had to cut my own path with God, each day, alone. Now an ancient way stretched before me that I could walk with others.
Jim Wilder’s new book, Renovated: God, Dallas Willard and the Church That Transforms, integrates these ancient pathways with findings from brain science about our neural pathways. Wilder shows how contemporary neuroscience transforms our understanding of spiritual formation. After a couple of years spent zealously practicing spiritual disciplines, two realizations emerged. First, it seemed many of my friends either resisted them or could not engage with them. They were not experiencing transformation like I had. Second, these practices didn’t fix everything in my own life. I still struggled with sin.
I would often go through the motions. And I fell into a new legalism just as my spiritual maturity plateaued. I wondered why my growth had stalled out. I soon found that other church leaders were wondering the same things. Why do some people benefit from spiritual disciplines while others seem to flounder? Why do some people embrace them wholeheartedly while others just shrug them off? And why, after these disciplines help us grow for a time, does the fruit sometimes begin to fade?
Renovated speaks to these very questions. Wilder’s book is for those feeling stuck in a spiritual-formation rut, for those longing to see others grow spiritually, and for those interested in how brain science transforms our understanding of spiritual growth.
Wilder’s book recommends a shift from thinking about God to thinking with God. The author, leaning on what we know about the brain, argues that thinking about God is too slow of a mental process to actively transform our lives. He calls it a “slow-track” mental process that can only focus on one thing at a time. Thoughts that develop on this slower track appear in our minds too late to inform actions in real time.
This slow-track process is great when there is time to pause and reflect on complex problems. It’s less helpful, however, amid the stress, fear, and disappointment of everyday life. As Wilder observes, our slow-track thinking focuses “our attention just in time to see our sinful reactions,” but not in time to follow Jesus at the speed of life. A better alternative, Wilder argues, is thinking with God, which utilizes “fast-track” mental processes that can focus on (and react to) multiple things at once.
Have you ever reacted to a dangerous situation without thinking? Have you ever responded to someone in a way you regret? This is your fast-track brain at work. Wilder explains that our fast-track brain “produces a reaction to our circumstances before we have a chance to consider how we would rather react.” A fast-track mind trained according to God’s will is able to think with God in the midst of real-time interactions. Thinking with God is like how a sports team wordlessly works together to achieve its goal. Or how a jazz band spontaneously flows together. When a team or a band practices together—stopping and starting over again until everything is flowing smoothly—this is like thinking about God (slow-track). The game or the performance is like thinking with God (fast-track).
Another shift Wilder describes is from a form of discipleship that goes from me to we. From our first cries to our final breaths, the necessity of being attached to someone—first to our parents and then to a larger group—means that my sense of “me” is always built upon an established sense of “we.” Our semi-automatic reactions to life are marked indelibly by the people we spend the most time with, the group we identify with. At the most basic level of our brains, we become like the ones we love.
Growing up, we all receive a fast-track pattern (or a “program file,” as Wilder calls it) that tells us how “my people” act in a given situation. And because this program file is buried in our fast-track brain, it is incredibly hard to override when we are tired, stressed, afraid, or angry. Because of this, Wilder argues that true transformation comes through changing our understanding of who “my people” are and how they act. As he writes, transforming our character “depends on becoming attached by love, joy, and peace to a new people.” And this is why discipleship is fundamentally a we, rather than me, activity.
By ourselves, it is nearly impossible to change the assumptions of our fast-track brain and the actions that flow out of them. Instead, our character changes in and through community as a process of trial and error, which involves learning how the people of God act in various situations. We first see how more mature disciples behave in the crucibles of everyday life. Then we imitate their reactions as best we can. And eventually we spontaneously act in a way that witnesses to our identification with a new people—the people of God.
The goal of all spiritual formation is being conformed to the image of Christ (Rom. 8:29), who was fully human as well as fully divine. So it only makes sense that a deep understanding of our humanity—including our brains—should inform that process. Renovated is a gift to the church, to all who long to understand the impact of neuroscience on spiritual maturity, and to all who were blessed by the work of Dallas Willard.
Geoff Holsclaw is a pastor at Vineyard North church in Grand Rapids, Michigan and an affiliate professor of theology at Northern Seminary. He and his wife Cyd are co-authors of Does God Really Like Me?: Discovering the God Who Wants to Be With Us (InterVarsity Press).
Here is the Zoom link https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
God's peace to you,
- Dave
Stuck in a Spiritual Rut? Neuroscience Might Have the Answer.
Geoff Holsclaw, Christianity Today, book review. July 17, 2020
Read your Bible. Pray. Go to church—twice on Sundays. And don’t sin. Be sure not to sin. This was the extent of my spiritual formation.
Of course, no one talked about spiritual formation when I was growing up. Reading the Bible, fasting, and prayer were part of my devotions, not part of a package of historic “spiritual disciplines.” These were just the things we did to grow our faith—to become holy, as God is holy. And the simplicity of these activities served me well. Until—while in college—they didn’t.
That’s when I encountered various devotional books that led me down God’s ancient paths of transformation. As for so many, discovering this wider tradition of spiritual disciplines—which included practices like meditation, fasting, and Sabbath rest—was a revelation and a relief. I no longer had to cut my own path with God, each day, alone. Now an ancient way stretched before me that I could walk with others.
Jim Wilder’s new book, Renovated: God, Dallas Willard and the Church That Transforms, integrates these ancient pathways with findings from brain science about our neural pathways. Wilder shows how contemporary neuroscience transforms our understanding of spiritual formation. After a couple of years spent zealously practicing spiritual disciplines, two realizations emerged. First, it seemed many of my friends either resisted them or could not engage with them. They were not experiencing transformation like I had. Second, these practices didn’t fix everything in my own life. I still struggled with sin.
I would often go through the motions. And I fell into a new legalism just as my spiritual maturity plateaued. I wondered why my growth had stalled out. I soon found that other church leaders were wondering the same things. Why do some people benefit from spiritual disciplines while others seem to flounder? Why do some people embrace them wholeheartedly while others just shrug them off? And why, after these disciplines help us grow for a time, does the fruit sometimes begin to fade?
Renovated speaks to these very questions. Wilder’s book is for those feeling stuck in a spiritual-formation rut, for those longing to see others grow spiritually, and for those interested in how brain science transforms our understanding of spiritual growth.
Wilder’s book recommends a shift from thinking about God to thinking with God. The author, leaning on what we know about the brain, argues that thinking about God is too slow of a mental process to actively transform our lives. He calls it a “slow-track” mental process that can only focus on one thing at a time. Thoughts that develop on this slower track appear in our minds too late to inform actions in real time.
This slow-track process is great when there is time to pause and reflect on complex problems. It’s less helpful, however, amid the stress, fear, and disappointment of everyday life. As Wilder observes, our slow-track thinking focuses “our attention just in time to see our sinful reactions,” but not in time to follow Jesus at the speed of life. A better alternative, Wilder argues, is thinking with God, which utilizes “fast-track” mental processes that can focus on (and react to) multiple things at once.
Have you ever reacted to a dangerous situation without thinking? Have you ever responded to someone in a way you regret? This is your fast-track brain at work. Wilder explains that our fast-track brain “produces a reaction to our circumstances before we have a chance to consider how we would rather react.” A fast-track mind trained according to God’s will is able to think with God in the midst of real-time interactions. Thinking with God is like how a sports team wordlessly works together to achieve its goal. Or how a jazz band spontaneously flows together. When a team or a band practices together—stopping and starting over again until everything is flowing smoothly—this is like thinking about God (slow-track). The game or the performance is like thinking with God (fast-track).
Another shift Wilder describes is from a form of discipleship that goes from me to we. From our first cries to our final breaths, the necessity of being attached to someone—first to our parents and then to a larger group—means that my sense of “me” is always built upon an established sense of “we.” Our semi-automatic reactions to life are marked indelibly by the people we spend the most time with, the group we identify with. At the most basic level of our brains, we become like the ones we love.
Growing up, we all receive a fast-track pattern (or a “program file,” as Wilder calls it) that tells us how “my people” act in a given situation. And because this program file is buried in our fast-track brain, it is incredibly hard to override when we are tired, stressed, afraid, or angry. Because of this, Wilder argues that true transformation comes through changing our understanding of who “my people” are and how they act. As he writes, transforming our character “depends on becoming attached by love, joy, and peace to a new people.” And this is why discipleship is fundamentally a we, rather than me, activity.
By ourselves, it is nearly impossible to change the assumptions of our fast-track brain and the actions that flow out of them. Instead, our character changes in and through community as a process of trial and error, which involves learning how the people of God act in various situations. We first see how more mature disciples behave in the crucibles of everyday life. Then we imitate their reactions as best we can. And eventually we spontaneously act in a way that witnesses to our identification with a new people—the people of God.
The goal of all spiritual formation is being conformed to the image of Christ (Rom. 8:29), who was fully human as well as fully divine. So it only makes sense that a deep understanding of our humanity—including our brains—should inform that process. Renovated is a gift to the church, to all who long to understand the impact of neuroscience on spiritual maturity, and to all who were blessed by the work of Dallas Willard.
Geoff Holsclaw is a pastor at Vineyard North church in Grand Rapids, Michigan and an affiliate professor of theology at Northern Seminary. He and his wife Cyd are co-authors of Does God Really Like Me?: Discovering the God Who Wants to Be With Us (InterVarsity Press).
Tuesday, July 14
This week our reading comes from the LA Times. It is a good publication and has a California vibe to it - they cover in depth stories about ecology, technology and entertainment. So, get some guacamole and chips and take a read.
I don't quite understand how limiting posts on social media sites actually encourages free speech, but at least we can have a good conversation about it. That being said, I am encouraged by the actions YouTube has taken to remove incendiary speech from their site. As a church, we publish our services on YouTube and not Facebook. I am disappointed with FB for many reasons, in particular their laissez faire approach to how their site has been used for bullying and misinformation. Am I concerned about the slippery slope and that someday YouTube will remove my channel because they want to stop all references to God? No, but, that may be a part of the discussion too.
God's peace to you, to our cities, and our nation,
- Dave
Kicking Racists Off Social Media Protects Free Speech
Los Angeles Times, Mary McNamara July 7, 2020
For years, people have claimed that the taming of the Internet was nigh. Whether cause for lamentation or celebration, the Wild West of content that stretched, unhampered by natural boundaries of river, mountain or sea, would be increasingly carved up and tied down by capitalism, privacy concerns, and technological reality.
Soon the gold rush of freedom, of instant fame and fortune, would be over — co-opted by corporations, governmental regulation and way too many cosmetic lines.
But not until recently did we consider the basic metaphorical issue. In the last few months, indeed the last few days, the internet has been forced to acknowledge what that “Wild West” label really means: a mythology of individualism, iconoclasm and opportunity that almost always veils — and often encourages — racism, bigotry, deception and abuse.
For many who lived through it, there was nothing romantic about the “taming” of the American West, with its obliteration and “relocation” of Native Americans, its spread of white Christian authority, its reliance on immigrants, including Black Southerners, fleeing oppression only to be met with similar bigotry. The Civil War was fought, in part, to keep Western states from becoming slave states; even so the beauty and possibilities of the “new” land were regularly blighted by the same systems that marred the old. And so it has been with the internet, as a flurry of corrective actions have shown.
In the last week alone:
Individually, each action could be construed as an inevitable, and even in some cases conservative, response to the Black Lives Matter movement which, after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, sent millions protesting across every state of the union and around the world.
Indeed, the most shocking part of the announcement that professional racists like Duke and Spencer were being kicked off YouTube was the revelation that they were still on YouTube — the platform had vowed to ban white supremacists and practitioners of hate speech last June.
But taken as a pattern, it seems the barons of the internet are finally acknowledging that they do not exist in an alternate universe, outside standard rules and regulations.
In many ways, Shane Dawson’s removal and ban may turn out to be the biggest news, with a much broader impact on the YouTube and influencer communities and their young audiences. As Dawson said in his apology, his racism was even more toxic because it was not couched in white supremacy but in humor and drama aimed at young people looking for an alternative to legacy media. Dawson’s use of blackface and racist humor also was, by his own admission, too frequent to be considered “a mistake,” especially to a world grown weary of similar apologies.
And he is not the only one being re-evaluated through the lens of current events. David Dobrik, Liza Koshy and other YouTubers have also recently apologized for racist humor or insensitivity.
Social media has, for many, become a replacement for traditional media, news and entertainment, in part because platforms like Twitter were seen as democratic; accessible by all and gate-kept by none, they were the ultimate expression of free speech.
Indeed, the protests over George Floyd’s death might not have expanded so widely if not for social media, which allowed the video of his terrible final minutes to circulate to millions. Social media has become a very effective tool of social policing, especially of the police. It’s our smartphones that give citizens the capability of documenting everything from Costco Karen to police firing tear gas at clearly peaceful protesters. It’s social media that allows those videos to go viral.
But as the Mueller report revealed, the lack of even basic gate-keeping can backfire and cause serious personal and societal damage. Whatever you believe about the president’s involvement, there is incontrovertible evidence that Russian operatives used Facebook and Twitter in an attempt to manipulate the 2016 election.
Last month, Twitter, bowing to pressure over the spread of misinformation and hate speech, began adding labels to tweets it considered inaccurate or particularly incendiary, including several issued by the president. In response, many Trump supporters are turning to a new platform, Parler, which has no such labels.
Facebook has refused to initiate any similar labels, though it does have a 27-page “community standards” guideline that prohibits the use of hate speech, incitement to violence and the spread of misinformation (although staff members recently protested CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s seeming refusal to apply these to President Trump).
In response to the advertising boycott, the site says many accounts breaking that policy have already been shut down. Zuckerberg has said he will meet with Stop Hate for Profit leaders, but that his opposition to tightening restrictions remains: The advertisers will be back, he has said, and the site will not change because it is not Facebook’s business to fact-check or police its patrons.
It is true that under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, made law 25 years ago, no social media platforms can be held liable for any statements made on the platform, or any subsequent actions taken because of those statements. But the law also allows those platforms to institute their own set of rules.
Social media platforms are all businesses, owned and operated by people who often make quite a bit of money doing so. “Freedom” is something these companies sell; free speech is a guaranteed constitutional right, but Facebook, like Costco, is private property — you can be told to take your speech elsewhere at any time.
And slowly, finally, that is what is beginning to happen. Kicking a few people off YouTube is not going to end racism any more than toppling a few statues will. But re-examining this country’s mythologies, around the Founding Fathers, the Confederacy or the “settling of the West” just might — and applying universal social standards to the social media posts and videos that make many people a great deal of money certainly will.
Free speech only works if everyone is actually free.
Mary McNamara is a culture columnist and critic for the Los Angeles Times. Previously she was assistant managing editor for arts and entertainment following a 12-year stint as television critic and senior culture editor. A Pulitzer Prize winner in 2015 and finalist for criticism in 2013 and 2014, she has won various awards for criticism and feature writing. She is the author of the Hollywood mysteries “Oscar Season” and “The Starlet.” She lives in La Crescenta with her husband, three children and two dogs.
I don't quite understand how limiting posts on social media sites actually encourages free speech, but at least we can have a good conversation about it. That being said, I am encouraged by the actions YouTube has taken to remove incendiary speech from their site. As a church, we publish our services on YouTube and not Facebook. I am disappointed with FB for many reasons, in particular their laissez faire approach to how their site has been used for bullying and misinformation. Am I concerned about the slippery slope and that someday YouTube will remove my channel because they want to stop all references to God? No, but, that may be a part of the discussion too.
God's peace to you, to our cities, and our nation,
- Dave
Kicking Racists Off Social Media Protects Free Speech
Los Angeles Times, Mary McNamara July 7, 2020
For years, people have claimed that the taming of the Internet was nigh. Whether cause for lamentation or celebration, the Wild West of content that stretched, unhampered by natural boundaries of river, mountain or sea, would be increasingly carved up and tied down by capitalism, privacy concerns, and technological reality.
Soon the gold rush of freedom, of instant fame and fortune, would be over — co-opted by corporations, governmental regulation and way too many cosmetic lines.
But not until recently did we consider the basic metaphorical issue. In the last few months, indeed the last few days, the internet has been forced to acknowledge what that “Wild West” label really means: a mythology of individualism, iconoclasm and opportunity that almost always veils — and often encourages — racism, bigotry, deception and abuse.
For many who lived through it, there was nothing romantic about the “taming” of the American West, with its obliteration and “relocation” of Native Americans, its spread of white Christian authority, its reliance on immigrants, including Black Southerners, fleeing oppression only to be met with similar bigotry. The Civil War was fought, in part, to keep Western states from becoming slave states; even so the beauty and possibilities of the “new” land were regularly blighted by the same systems that marred the old. And so it has been with the internet, as a flurry of corrective actions have shown.
In the last week alone:
- The Google-owned platform YouTube finally banned six white supremacist channels, including those belonging to former KKK leader David Duke and Richard Spencer, and demonetized longtime platform star Shane Dawson after he acknowledged that he had often used blackface, racist humor and inappropriate commentary.
- Reddit, which is owned by Condé Nast’s parent company, Advance Publications, banned thousands of communities that violated the company’s hate speech policies, including “The Donald,” a sub-reddit devoted to boosting support for President Trump through a panoply of racism, sexism, manipulated news and conspiracy theories.
- More than 500 companies, including Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Hershey, Adidas, Clorox and Ford, pulled their advertising from Facebook and Instagram as part of the Stop Hate for Profit initiative, demanding that the platforms tighten restrictions on misinformation and bigotry.
Individually, each action could be construed as an inevitable, and even in some cases conservative, response to the Black Lives Matter movement which, after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, sent millions protesting across every state of the union and around the world.
Indeed, the most shocking part of the announcement that professional racists like Duke and Spencer were being kicked off YouTube was the revelation that they were still on YouTube — the platform had vowed to ban white supremacists and practitioners of hate speech last June.
But taken as a pattern, it seems the barons of the internet are finally acknowledging that they do not exist in an alternate universe, outside standard rules and regulations.
In many ways, Shane Dawson’s removal and ban may turn out to be the biggest news, with a much broader impact on the YouTube and influencer communities and their young audiences. As Dawson said in his apology, his racism was even more toxic because it was not couched in white supremacy but in humor and drama aimed at young people looking for an alternative to legacy media. Dawson’s use of blackface and racist humor also was, by his own admission, too frequent to be considered “a mistake,” especially to a world grown weary of similar apologies.
And he is not the only one being re-evaluated through the lens of current events. David Dobrik, Liza Koshy and other YouTubers have also recently apologized for racist humor or insensitivity.
Social media has, for many, become a replacement for traditional media, news and entertainment, in part because platforms like Twitter were seen as democratic; accessible by all and gate-kept by none, they were the ultimate expression of free speech.
Indeed, the protests over George Floyd’s death might not have expanded so widely if not for social media, which allowed the video of his terrible final minutes to circulate to millions. Social media has become a very effective tool of social policing, especially of the police. It’s our smartphones that give citizens the capability of documenting everything from Costco Karen to police firing tear gas at clearly peaceful protesters. It’s social media that allows those videos to go viral.
But as the Mueller report revealed, the lack of even basic gate-keeping can backfire and cause serious personal and societal damage. Whatever you believe about the president’s involvement, there is incontrovertible evidence that Russian operatives used Facebook and Twitter in an attempt to manipulate the 2016 election.
Last month, Twitter, bowing to pressure over the spread of misinformation and hate speech, began adding labels to tweets it considered inaccurate or particularly incendiary, including several issued by the president. In response, many Trump supporters are turning to a new platform, Parler, which has no such labels.
Facebook has refused to initiate any similar labels, though it does have a 27-page “community standards” guideline that prohibits the use of hate speech, incitement to violence and the spread of misinformation (although staff members recently protested CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s seeming refusal to apply these to President Trump).
In response to the advertising boycott, the site says many accounts breaking that policy have already been shut down. Zuckerberg has said he will meet with Stop Hate for Profit leaders, but that his opposition to tightening restrictions remains: The advertisers will be back, he has said, and the site will not change because it is not Facebook’s business to fact-check or police its patrons.
It is true that under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, made law 25 years ago, no social media platforms can be held liable for any statements made on the platform, or any subsequent actions taken because of those statements. But the law also allows those platforms to institute their own set of rules.
Social media platforms are all businesses, owned and operated by people who often make quite a bit of money doing so. “Freedom” is something these companies sell; free speech is a guaranteed constitutional right, but Facebook, like Costco, is private property — you can be told to take your speech elsewhere at any time.
And slowly, finally, that is what is beginning to happen. Kicking a few people off YouTube is not going to end racism any more than toppling a few statues will. But re-examining this country’s mythologies, around the Founding Fathers, the Confederacy or the “settling of the West” just might — and applying universal social standards to the social media posts and videos that make many people a great deal of money certainly will.
Free speech only works if everyone is actually free.
Mary McNamara is a culture columnist and critic for the Los Angeles Times. Previously she was assistant managing editor for arts and entertainment following a 12-year stint as television critic and senior culture editor. A Pulitzer Prize winner in 2015 and finalist for criticism in 2013 and 2014, she has won various awards for criticism and feature writing. She is the author of the Hollywood mysteries “Oscar Season” and “The Starlet.” She lives in La Crescenta with her husband, three children and two dogs.
Tuesday, July 7
I hope you had a wonderful 4th of July.
Speaking of freedom, let's talk about what is happening in Hong Kong. I have attached two short articles - one from ABC news back in November and another from Hong Kong Free Press, July 1st, 2020. I also invite you to watch this very short video from two protesters in Hong Kong in their address to America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRaSaKwnnHE
For more background, below is the link to St. John's Anglican Cathedral, Hong Kong. As you can imagine, they cannot put political/freedom issues on their site. However, you may want to look under the tab, A Message of Hope, the message for the 25th of June 2020.
https://www.stjohnscathedral.org.hk/
With everything else happening in our country, I have not paid much attention to this story. Historically speaking, it is a dangerous thing to lose sight of things like this. As such, I look forward to talking with you about it. Lastly, this is a quickly moving situation so undoubtedly we will have more to talk about as the week progresses.
Here is the Zoom link
https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
Why exuberant Hong Kong protesters are waving American flags
By Ella Torres, Guy Davies, and Karson Yiu ABC News, November 28, 2019
President Trump on Wednesday signed the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which will seek to ensure that Hong Kong has sufficient autonomy from China to maintain favorable trading terms with the United States.
The bill, which would impose sanctions on Chinese officials for cracking down on the protesters, passed the House and Senate last week with nearly unanimous support.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who cosponsored the bill, said in a statement to ABC News that the signing "sends a clear signal to Beijing: the United States will not stand by and watch China break its treaty commitments and try to dominate all of Asia."
Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng told U.S. Ambassador Terry Branstad that the move constituted "serious interference in China's internal affairs and a serious violation of international law."
Protests in Hong Kong began in early June in response to a proposed law that would allow extradition to mainland China and in favor of more direct democracy. The law has since been withdrawn, but the protests have continued over police violence and expanded demands.
ABC News' Joseph Simonetti contributed to this report.
Hongkongers waving independence flags or chanting slogans risk arrest under national security law
by Kelly Ho Kong Free Press, 1 JULY 2020
Hong Kong protesters who wave pro-independence flags and chant relevant slogans will reportedly be seen as violating the newly-enacted national security law. It came ahead of online calls for a mass demonstration on the 23rd anniversary of the city’s handover to China.
According to local media citing police sources, displaying flags and banners and belting out slogans that advocate Hong Kong independence would be seen as subversive or secessionist, which are both prohibited under the national security legislation promulgated by Beijing on Tuesday.
Incriminating slogans will include “Hong Kong independence, the only way out” and “Hongkongers, build a nation” – commonly chanted by demonstrators at recent protests against the controversial law. Police will reportedly enforce the law at public gatherings and processions by giving out warnings. But the force can also make immediate arrests under “serious circumstances.”
InMedia reported that police cited the new legislation when they stopped and searched people at a protest staged by the League of Social Democrats in Wan Chai, before the Establishment Day ceremony on Wednesday morning. Officers were seen carrying a purple warning flag, which cautions against arrest and prosecution for breaking the national security law.
The law also criminalises terrorism and collusion with foreign forces to endanger national security. The four offences are widely-defined, with regular cases attracting penalties of a minimum of three years behind bars and a maximum of 10 years. In “serious cases,” offenders could face life imprisonment.
HKFP has reached out to police for comment.
At the reception in celebration of the HKSAR establishment, Chief Executive Carrie Lam said the implementation of the national anthem law and national security law signified the fulfilment of the Hong Kong government’s constitutional responsibility. The laws also brought One Country and Two Systems “back on the right track,” she said.
“The enactment of the National Security Law in Hong Kong is a turning point to take Hong Kong out of the current impasse and to restore stability and order from the chaos,” Lam said.
Police have rejected an application by the Civil Human Rights Front to organise the annual July 1 march, citing coronavirus fears and threats to public order. But pro-democracy lawmakers and activists have called on citizens to take to the streets on Wednesday afternoon, in opposition to the new national law.
On Tuesday, pro-democracy group Demosisto and several pro-independence organisations announced they will disband or cease local operation hours before the law was officially enacted in the city. High-profile activists including Joshua Wong and Nathan Law also resigned from Demosisto before its disbandment, expressing concerns over “political imprisonment” and fears for personal safety.
Kelly Ho has an interest in local politics, education and sports. She formerly worked at South China Morning Post Young Post, where she specialised in reporting on issues related to Hong Kong youth. She has a bachelor's degree in Journalism from the University of Hong Kong, with a second major in Politics and Public Administration.
Speaking of freedom, let's talk about what is happening in Hong Kong. I have attached two short articles - one from ABC news back in November and another from Hong Kong Free Press, July 1st, 2020. I also invite you to watch this very short video from two protesters in Hong Kong in their address to America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRaSaKwnnHE
For more background, below is the link to St. John's Anglican Cathedral, Hong Kong. As you can imagine, they cannot put political/freedom issues on their site. However, you may want to look under the tab, A Message of Hope, the message for the 25th of June 2020.
https://www.stjohnscathedral.org.hk/
With everything else happening in our country, I have not paid much attention to this story. Historically speaking, it is a dangerous thing to lose sight of things like this. As such, I look forward to talking with you about it. Lastly, this is a quickly moving situation so undoubtedly we will have more to talk about as the week progresses.
Here is the Zoom link
https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
Why exuberant Hong Kong protesters are waving American flags
By Ella Torres, Guy Davies, and Karson Yiu ABC News, November 28, 2019
President Trump on Wednesday signed the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which will seek to ensure that Hong Kong has sufficient autonomy from China to maintain favorable trading terms with the United States.
The bill, which would impose sanctions on Chinese officials for cracking down on the protesters, passed the House and Senate last week with nearly unanimous support.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who cosponsored the bill, said in a statement to ABC News that the signing "sends a clear signal to Beijing: the United States will not stand by and watch China break its treaty commitments and try to dominate all of Asia."
Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng told U.S. Ambassador Terry Branstad that the move constituted "serious interference in China's internal affairs and a serious violation of international law."
Protests in Hong Kong began in early June in response to a proposed law that would allow extradition to mainland China and in favor of more direct democracy. The law has since been withdrawn, but the protests have continued over police violence and expanded demands.
ABC News' Joseph Simonetti contributed to this report.
Hongkongers waving independence flags or chanting slogans risk arrest under national security law
by Kelly Ho Kong Free Press, 1 JULY 2020
Hong Kong protesters who wave pro-independence flags and chant relevant slogans will reportedly be seen as violating the newly-enacted national security law. It came ahead of online calls for a mass demonstration on the 23rd anniversary of the city’s handover to China.
According to local media citing police sources, displaying flags and banners and belting out slogans that advocate Hong Kong independence would be seen as subversive or secessionist, which are both prohibited under the national security legislation promulgated by Beijing on Tuesday.
Incriminating slogans will include “Hong Kong independence, the only way out” and “Hongkongers, build a nation” – commonly chanted by demonstrators at recent protests against the controversial law. Police will reportedly enforce the law at public gatherings and processions by giving out warnings. But the force can also make immediate arrests under “serious circumstances.”
InMedia reported that police cited the new legislation when they stopped and searched people at a protest staged by the League of Social Democrats in Wan Chai, before the Establishment Day ceremony on Wednesday morning. Officers were seen carrying a purple warning flag, which cautions against arrest and prosecution for breaking the national security law.
The law also criminalises terrorism and collusion with foreign forces to endanger national security. The four offences are widely-defined, with regular cases attracting penalties of a minimum of three years behind bars and a maximum of 10 years. In “serious cases,” offenders could face life imprisonment.
HKFP has reached out to police for comment.
At the reception in celebration of the HKSAR establishment, Chief Executive Carrie Lam said the implementation of the national anthem law and national security law signified the fulfilment of the Hong Kong government’s constitutional responsibility. The laws also brought One Country and Two Systems “back on the right track,” she said.
“The enactment of the National Security Law in Hong Kong is a turning point to take Hong Kong out of the current impasse and to restore stability and order from the chaos,” Lam said.
Police have rejected an application by the Civil Human Rights Front to organise the annual July 1 march, citing coronavirus fears and threats to public order. But pro-democracy lawmakers and activists have called on citizens to take to the streets on Wednesday afternoon, in opposition to the new national law.
On Tuesday, pro-democracy group Demosisto and several pro-independence organisations announced they will disband or cease local operation hours before the law was officially enacted in the city. High-profile activists including Joshua Wong and Nathan Law also resigned from Demosisto before its disbandment, expressing concerns over “political imprisonment” and fears for personal safety.
Kelly Ho has an interest in local politics, education and sports. She formerly worked at South China Morning Post Young Post, where she specialised in reporting on issues related to Hong Kong youth. She has a bachelor's degree in Journalism from the University of Hong Kong, with a second major in Politics and Public Administration.
Tuesday, June 30
Of all the evils that exist in society, racism is one of the most intractable,
because it is so difficult to name and so easy to deny. – James Cone
I heard this on a morning television news show: "If you need a cup of coffee and something to talk about today, I can help you with one of those." These articles won't help you get any coffee, but they will give you something to talk about.
The topic this week is too important to contain in just one article. And, as said by Professor Cone above, it is so difficult to name, I had to send you three pieces to read. If you only have time to read two pages, please read the Guardian interview of Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the last section of Dr. Cone's piece about what gives him hope.
To be a part of the discussion, click on this link https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
Men's Group - Tuesday at 10 am. The Women's Group - Thursday at 9 am.
And, if you really need some coffee, I'll do my best to help you with that too.
-Dave
Church of England Should Rethink Portrayal of a White Jesus 6.26.20
The Guardian
The Anglican church should reconsider the way statues and other representations of Jesus portray him as white in the light of the Black Lives Matter protests, the archbishop of Canterbury has said.
Justin Welby also said that the church must look very carefully to see if they should all be there.
In an interview on Friday, the head of the Church of England said the west in general needed to question the prevailing mindset that depicted Christ as a white man in traditional Christian imagery.
Asked if there had to be rethink on the white image of Jesus, Welby said: “Yes of course it does, this sense that God was white … You go into churches [around the world] and you don’t see a white Jesus.
“You see a black Jesus, a Chinese Jesus, a Middle-Eastern Jesus – which is of course the most accurate – you see a Fijian Jesus.”
Welby told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “Jesus is portrayed in as many ways as there are cultures, languages and understandings. And I don’t think that throwing out everything we’ve got in the past is the way to do it but I do think saying: ‘That’s not the Jesus who exists, that’s not who we worship,’ it is a reminder of the universality of the God who became fully human.”
He said that statues in Canterbury Cathedral would be under review on the back of the worldwide Black Lives Matter campaign to bring down monuments to controversial figures such as those engaged in the slave trade.
On the recent calls for statue removals, the archbishop said people should forgive the “trespasses” of people immortalised in the form of statues, rather than tearing them down.
Welby said: “Some names will have to change. I mean, the church, goodness me, you know, you just go around Canterbury Cathedral, there’s monuments everywhere, or Westminster Abbey, and we’re looking at all that, and some will have to come down. But yes, there can be forgiveness, I hope and pray as we come together, but only if there’s justice.”
But challenged if this meant some statues would be taken down from inside Canterbury Cathedral, he said: “No, I didn’t say that. I very carefully didn’t say that.”
He added that it was not his decision, and told the Today programme: “We’re going to be looking very carefully and putting them in context and seeing if they all should be there … The question arises. Of course it does.”
Theologians and White Supremacy: An interview with James H. Cone
America Magazine, 11.20.06
Are American theologians saying enough about racism?
No, they are not. Both Catholic and Protestant theologians do theology as if they do not have to engage with the problem of white supremacy and racism. Not all of them ignore it completely, but some write as if slavery, colonialism and segregation never existed. In fact, white supremacy is more deeply entrenched now than it was in the 1960’s and early 1970’s, because back then, the country acknowledged its racial problems more directly. The civil rights and black power movements forced the nation—through Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and a host of other courageous people—to confront racism as a cancer in the body politic. The churches did too, both Catholic and Protestant. Fighting for racial justice in the 1960’s was the churches’ finest hour.
But now, having confronted it years ago, they think they have made the racial situation better, whereas in some ways it is worse. It is like a new form of racism, in that it accepts the tokenism of a few blacks in churches, educational institutions and government in order to make people think everything is fine on the racial front. But just look at the statistics about the African-American community with regard to imprisonment, health care, education and employment. We are worse off today in areas like these. So I want to challenge white theologians and their churches to speak out in a sustained and prophetic way about racial injustice.
Why are white theologians so silent?
I think their silence stems partly from a distorted understanding of what the Gospel means in a racially broken world. White theologians have not succeeded in making an empathetic bond with the pains and hurts of people of color. If theologians perceived their own sons and daughters and parents as being discriminated against, they would not only write passionately against it but would make their rejection of injustice an essential part of their reflection on the Gospel. Just as Ralph Ellison wrote in the 1950’s about black invisibility in The Invisible Man, black suffering today still remains invisible to many whites. We bond with like-minded people of the same racial group, which is natural because we may live in the same apartment buildings, go to the same schools and churches and have similar values and histories. It is easy to make that kind of social and political bond. But when people look different, it is harder to make. But that is what the Gospel of Jesus is all about - making a human bond with the least of these.
Please say more on what the cross symbolizes for African-Americans.
The cross stands at the center of the Christian faith of African-Americans because Jesus’ suffering was similar to their American experience. Just as Jesus Christ was crucified, so were blacks lynched. In the American experience, the cross is the lynching tree. The crucifixion of Jesus was a first-century lynching. If American Christians want to understand the meaning of the cross, they have to view it through the image of the lynching tree on which approximately 5,000 mostly (but not exclusively) black people were killed.
What is most revealing, though, is not the large number of black lives lost, but the violence and the torture of the lynching and the horror it created in the African-American community. Whites would often leave a black body hanging on a tree or lamppost for several days just to terrorize the community, to let them know that this is a white man’s country, and if you don’t stay in your assigned place, the same fate can happen to you. Whites who did the lynching were respectable members of Christian churches and saw no contradiction between murdering black people and the Gospel of Jesus.
Whites did not see this contradiction partly because white theologians failed to point it out with sustained conviction and passion. They interpreted Jesus’ cross without any reference to the suffering blacks in their midst. It is amazing to me that few theologians have even mentioned lynching in connection with the cross or said a public word against it when it was so widespread. During the peak of the so-called lynching bees, between 1880 and 1930, there was no public opposition in the writings of prominent Protestant and Catholic theologians.
For example, the prominent social gospel theologian Walter Rauschenbusch said nothing, and neither did Reinhold Niebuhr. I have no doubt that they and others were against the lynching of African-Americans, but they did not say so publicly in their writings. Had blacks been lynching whites, they would surely have spoken out loud and clear. So I hold them accountable for their silence on black suffering. Silence in the face of innocent suffering is complicity in the act itself. While white theologians failed to see the connection between Jesus’ suffering and the African-American experience, blacks did not miss it. When they initially heard from white missionaries and preachers the story of Jesus, they saw a mirror of themselves in his suffering.
Recently, the U.S. Senate approved a resolution for failing to enact federal anti-lynching legislation decades ago, marking the first time the body has apologized for America’s treatment of black people. I contend that white Catholic and Protestant theologians should make a similar apology to African-Americans for their own silence. Perhaps if they could acknowledge their past failures, they could see the need to speak out against racial injustice today.
You mentioned criminal justice. Please expand on that.
The criminal justice system in the United States can be said to be doing much of the lynching today, in a new form. In the 1930’s, the American government decided to clamp down on public lynchings as being outside the law. When law enforcement officers had to confront an angry crowd that wanted to lynch a black person, they would tell the crowd not to lynch the prisoner directly. Instead, they told them to take him to court and lynch him there, using the death penalty. In the courtroom, the judges and juries were white. Blacks were excluded from juries and had few resources to defend themselves against either white mob violence or the violence of the criminal justice system. Whites could disregard the black insistence on equal justice because it was their court, and there would be a quick trial that would end in execution. Many scholars call that legal lynching.
Today, the number of incarcerated black people is far out of proportion to their numbers in the population as a whole. Then there are the drug penalties like the mandatory minimum drug laws created, in my opinion, especially for blacks, with harsher penalties for those convicted of crack cocaine sale or possession than for powdered cocaine, which is preferred by white addicts. There can be no equal justice until a black life is worth the same as a white life.
What are your hopes for a deeper understanding of the Gospel as transcending racial bonding?
Because of my faith in God and humanity, I have hope that together we can create a society and world not defined by white supremacy. I still believe that we can do what the Gospel demands— make a new world safe for all. Martin Luther King Jr. called it the beloved community. Even during the last year of his life, when all seemed lost, with blacks rejecting nonviolence and whites rejecting genuine racial justice, King did not lose hope that God could make a way out of no way, that there is a divine power of justice at work in the struggles of the poor that cannot be destroyed. It was truly amazing how Martin could sustain his hope for a beloved community at a time when nobody, black or white, seemed to believe in it or even care.
I speak out against white supremacy not because I have lost hope, but rather because I too have found it. Hope, for me, is found where two or three small groups of people—blacks, whites and other people of color who believe in Martin’s vision of the beloved community—become willing to bear witness to the Gospel’s transcending racial bonding and move toward human bonding. We need some signs of that transcending. Where will they come from if not from the church? And how will these signs be expressed, except by preachers and priests and rabbis?
James H. Cone is the Briggs Distinguished Professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He is the author of many books and articles on issues of race, including Martin and Malcolm & America, and Liberation: A Black Theology of Liberation. The interviewer is George M. Anderson, S.J., an associate editor of America, who met with Professor Cone at the seminary.
How An Iconic Painting of Jesus as a White Man Became So Widely Distributed Emily McFarlan,
The Washington Post 6.25.20
The painting, which has been reproduced a billion times, came to define what the central figure of Christianity looked like for generations of Christians in the United States — and beyond. For years, Sallman’s Jesus “represented the image of God,” said Carr, the director of ministry and administrative support staff at First Baptist Church of Glenarden in Maryland. When she grew up and began to study the Bible on her own, she started to wonder about that painting and the message it sent. “It didn’t make sense that this picture was of this white guy,” she said.
Carr isn’t the first to question Sallman’s image of Jesus and the impact it’s had not only on theology but also on the wider culture. As protesters around the United States tear down statues of Confederate heroes and demand an accounting for the country’s long legacy of racism, some in the church are asking whether the time has come to cancel what is called white Jesus — including Sallman’s famed painting.
The “Head of Christ” has been called the “best-known American artwork of the 20th century.” The New York Times once labeled Sallman the “best-known artist” of the 20th century, although that few recognized his name. “Sallman, who died in 1968, was a religious painter and illustrator whose most popular picture, ‘Head of Christ,’ achieved a mass popularity that makes Warhol’s soup can seem positively obscure,” William Grimes of the Times wrote in 1994.
The famed image began as a charcoal sketch for the first issue of the Covenant Companion, a youth magazine for a denomination known as the Swedish Evangelical Mission Covenant. Sallman, wanting to appeal to young adults, he gave his Jesus a “very similar feeling to an image of a school or professional photo of the time making it more accessible and familiar to the audience,” said Tai Lipan, gallery director at Indiana’s Anderson University, which has housed the Warner Sallman Collection since the 1980s. His approach worked.
The image was so popular that the 1940 graduating class of North Park Theological Seminary in Chicago commissioned Sallman to create a painting based on his drawing as their class gift to the school, according to the Evangelical Covenant Church’s official magazine. Sallman painted a copy for the school but sold the original “Head of Christ” to the religious publisher Kriebel and Bates, and what Lipan calls a “Protestant icon” was born. “This particular image of Jesus met the dawn of the ‘Mad Men,’ of the marketing agency,” said Matthew Anderson, an affiliate professor of theological studies at Concordia University in Montreal.
The image quickly spread, printed on prayer cards and circulated by organizations, missionaries and a wide range of churches: Catholic and Protestant, evangelical and mainline, white and black. Copies accompanied soldiers into battle during World War II, handed out by the Salvation Army and YMCA through the USO. Millions of cards produced in a project called “Christ in Every Purse” that was endorsed by then-President Dwight Eisenhower were distributed all around the world. The image appeared on pencils, bookmarks, lamps and clocks and was hung in courtrooms, police stations, libraries and schools. It became what the scholar David Morgan has heard called a “photograph of Jesus.” Along the way, Sallman’s image crowded out other depictions of Jesus. Some of the earliest images of Jesus showed him “with very dark skin and possibly African,” he said. Sallman wasn’t the first to depict Jesus as white, Morgan said. The Chicagoan had been inspired by a long tradition of European artists, most notable among them the Frenchman Leon-Augustin Lhermitte. But against the backdrop of U.S. history, of European Christians colonizing indigenous lands with the blessing of the Doctrine of Discovery and enslaving African people, Morgan said, a universal image of a white Jesus became problematic. “You simply can’t ignore very Nordic Jesus,” he said.
The backlash to Sallman’s work began during the civil rights movement, when his depiction of a Scandinavian savior was criticized for enshrining the image of a white Jesus for generations of Americans. That criticism has been renewed recently amid the current national reckoning over racism sparked by the May 25 death of George Floyd, a black man killed in an encounter with police in Minneapolis. This week, the activist Shaun King called for statues depicting Jesus as European to come down alongside Confederate monuments, calling the depiction a “form of white supremacy.”
Anthea Butler, an associate professor of religious studies and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania, has also warned of the damaging impact of depictions of white Jesus. “Every time you see white Jesus, you see white supremacy,” she said recently on the Religion News Service video series. Sallman’s Jesus was “the Jesus you saw in all the black Baptist churches.” But Sallman’s Jesus did not look like black Christians, according to the scholar. Instead, she said, that Jesus looked “like the people who were beating you up in the streets or setting dogs on you.” That Jesus sent a message, Butler said. “If Jesus is white and God is white,” she said, “then authority is white.”
Edward J. Blum, who co-wrote the 2014 book “The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America,” said many Christians remain hesitant to give up the image of white Jesus. He believes the continued popularity of white depictions of Jesus are “an example of how far in some respects the United States has not moved.” A decade after Sallman painted his “Head of Christ,” the Korean artist Kim Ki-chang created a picture cycle of the life of Christ in traditional Korean clothing and settings, featuring figures from Korean folk religion. “If white Jesus can’t be put to death, how could it possibly be the case that systemic racism is done?” Blum said. “Because this is one that just seems obvious. This one seems easy to give up."
More recently, Sofia Minson, a New Zealand artist who is of Ngāti Porou Māori, English, Swedish and Irish heritage, reimagined Sallman’s Jesus as an indigenous Māori man with a traditional face tattoo. And there are numerous popular depictions of Jesus as black. Vincent Barzoni’s “His Voyage: Life of Jesus,” depicts Jesus with dark skin and dreadlocks, his wrists bound, while the Franciscan friar Robert Lentz’s “Jesus Christ Liberator” depicts Jesus as a black man in the style of a Greek icon. Janet McKenzie’s “Jesus of the People,” modeled on a black woman, was chosen as the winner of the National Catholic Reporter’s 1999 competition to answer the question, “What would Jesus Christ look like in the year 2000?”
because it is so difficult to name and so easy to deny. – James Cone
I heard this on a morning television news show: "If you need a cup of coffee and something to talk about today, I can help you with one of those." These articles won't help you get any coffee, but they will give you something to talk about.
The topic this week is too important to contain in just one article. And, as said by Professor Cone above, it is so difficult to name, I had to send you three pieces to read. If you only have time to read two pages, please read the Guardian interview of Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the last section of Dr. Cone's piece about what gives him hope.
To be a part of the discussion, click on this link https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
Men's Group - Tuesday at 10 am. The Women's Group - Thursday at 9 am.
And, if you really need some coffee, I'll do my best to help you with that too.
-Dave
Church of England Should Rethink Portrayal of a White Jesus 6.26.20
The Guardian
The Anglican church should reconsider the way statues and other representations of Jesus portray him as white in the light of the Black Lives Matter protests, the archbishop of Canterbury has said.
Justin Welby also said that the church must look very carefully to see if they should all be there.
In an interview on Friday, the head of the Church of England said the west in general needed to question the prevailing mindset that depicted Christ as a white man in traditional Christian imagery.
Asked if there had to be rethink on the white image of Jesus, Welby said: “Yes of course it does, this sense that God was white … You go into churches [around the world] and you don’t see a white Jesus.
“You see a black Jesus, a Chinese Jesus, a Middle-Eastern Jesus – which is of course the most accurate – you see a Fijian Jesus.”
Welby told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “Jesus is portrayed in as many ways as there are cultures, languages and understandings. And I don’t think that throwing out everything we’ve got in the past is the way to do it but I do think saying: ‘That’s not the Jesus who exists, that’s not who we worship,’ it is a reminder of the universality of the God who became fully human.”
He said that statues in Canterbury Cathedral would be under review on the back of the worldwide Black Lives Matter campaign to bring down monuments to controversial figures such as those engaged in the slave trade.
On the recent calls for statue removals, the archbishop said people should forgive the “trespasses” of people immortalised in the form of statues, rather than tearing them down.
Welby said: “Some names will have to change. I mean, the church, goodness me, you know, you just go around Canterbury Cathedral, there’s monuments everywhere, or Westminster Abbey, and we’re looking at all that, and some will have to come down. But yes, there can be forgiveness, I hope and pray as we come together, but only if there’s justice.”
But challenged if this meant some statues would be taken down from inside Canterbury Cathedral, he said: “No, I didn’t say that. I very carefully didn’t say that.”
He added that it was not his decision, and told the Today programme: “We’re going to be looking very carefully and putting them in context and seeing if they all should be there … The question arises. Of course it does.”
Theologians and White Supremacy: An interview with James H. Cone
America Magazine, 11.20.06
Are American theologians saying enough about racism?
No, they are not. Both Catholic and Protestant theologians do theology as if they do not have to engage with the problem of white supremacy and racism. Not all of them ignore it completely, but some write as if slavery, colonialism and segregation never existed. In fact, white supremacy is more deeply entrenched now than it was in the 1960’s and early 1970’s, because back then, the country acknowledged its racial problems more directly. The civil rights and black power movements forced the nation—through Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and a host of other courageous people—to confront racism as a cancer in the body politic. The churches did too, both Catholic and Protestant. Fighting for racial justice in the 1960’s was the churches’ finest hour.
But now, having confronted it years ago, they think they have made the racial situation better, whereas in some ways it is worse. It is like a new form of racism, in that it accepts the tokenism of a few blacks in churches, educational institutions and government in order to make people think everything is fine on the racial front. But just look at the statistics about the African-American community with regard to imprisonment, health care, education and employment. We are worse off today in areas like these. So I want to challenge white theologians and their churches to speak out in a sustained and prophetic way about racial injustice.
Why are white theologians so silent?
I think their silence stems partly from a distorted understanding of what the Gospel means in a racially broken world. White theologians have not succeeded in making an empathetic bond with the pains and hurts of people of color. If theologians perceived their own sons and daughters and parents as being discriminated against, they would not only write passionately against it but would make their rejection of injustice an essential part of their reflection on the Gospel. Just as Ralph Ellison wrote in the 1950’s about black invisibility in The Invisible Man, black suffering today still remains invisible to many whites. We bond with like-minded people of the same racial group, which is natural because we may live in the same apartment buildings, go to the same schools and churches and have similar values and histories. It is easy to make that kind of social and political bond. But when people look different, it is harder to make. But that is what the Gospel of Jesus is all about - making a human bond with the least of these.
Please say more on what the cross symbolizes for African-Americans.
The cross stands at the center of the Christian faith of African-Americans because Jesus’ suffering was similar to their American experience. Just as Jesus Christ was crucified, so were blacks lynched. In the American experience, the cross is the lynching tree. The crucifixion of Jesus was a first-century lynching. If American Christians want to understand the meaning of the cross, they have to view it through the image of the lynching tree on which approximately 5,000 mostly (but not exclusively) black people were killed.
What is most revealing, though, is not the large number of black lives lost, but the violence and the torture of the lynching and the horror it created in the African-American community. Whites would often leave a black body hanging on a tree or lamppost for several days just to terrorize the community, to let them know that this is a white man’s country, and if you don’t stay in your assigned place, the same fate can happen to you. Whites who did the lynching were respectable members of Christian churches and saw no contradiction between murdering black people and the Gospel of Jesus.
Whites did not see this contradiction partly because white theologians failed to point it out with sustained conviction and passion. They interpreted Jesus’ cross without any reference to the suffering blacks in their midst. It is amazing to me that few theologians have even mentioned lynching in connection with the cross or said a public word against it when it was so widespread. During the peak of the so-called lynching bees, between 1880 and 1930, there was no public opposition in the writings of prominent Protestant and Catholic theologians.
For example, the prominent social gospel theologian Walter Rauschenbusch said nothing, and neither did Reinhold Niebuhr. I have no doubt that they and others were against the lynching of African-Americans, but they did not say so publicly in their writings. Had blacks been lynching whites, they would surely have spoken out loud and clear. So I hold them accountable for their silence on black suffering. Silence in the face of innocent suffering is complicity in the act itself. While white theologians failed to see the connection between Jesus’ suffering and the African-American experience, blacks did not miss it. When they initially heard from white missionaries and preachers the story of Jesus, they saw a mirror of themselves in his suffering.
Recently, the U.S. Senate approved a resolution for failing to enact federal anti-lynching legislation decades ago, marking the first time the body has apologized for America’s treatment of black people. I contend that white Catholic and Protestant theologians should make a similar apology to African-Americans for their own silence. Perhaps if they could acknowledge their past failures, they could see the need to speak out against racial injustice today.
You mentioned criminal justice. Please expand on that.
The criminal justice system in the United States can be said to be doing much of the lynching today, in a new form. In the 1930’s, the American government decided to clamp down on public lynchings as being outside the law. When law enforcement officers had to confront an angry crowd that wanted to lynch a black person, they would tell the crowd not to lynch the prisoner directly. Instead, they told them to take him to court and lynch him there, using the death penalty. In the courtroom, the judges and juries were white. Blacks were excluded from juries and had few resources to defend themselves against either white mob violence or the violence of the criminal justice system. Whites could disregard the black insistence on equal justice because it was their court, and there would be a quick trial that would end in execution. Many scholars call that legal lynching.
Today, the number of incarcerated black people is far out of proportion to their numbers in the population as a whole. Then there are the drug penalties like the mandatory minimum drug laws created, in my opinion, especially for blacks, with harsher penalties for those convicted of crack cocaine sale or possession than for powdered cocaine, which is preferred by white addicts. There can be no equal justice until a black life is worth the same as a white life.
What are your hopes for a deeper understanding of the Gospel as transcending racial bonding?
Because of my faith in God and humanity, I have hope that together we can create a society and world not defined by white supremacy. I still believe that we can do what the Gospel demands— make a new world safe for all. Martin Luther King Jr. called it the beloved community. Even during the last year of his life, when all seemed lost, with blacks rejecting nonviolence and whites rejecting genuine racial justice, King did not lose hope that God could make a way out of no way, that there is a divine power of justice at work in the struggles of the poor that cannot be destroyed. It was truly amazing how Martin could sustain his hope for a beloved community at a time when nobody, black or white, seemed to believe in it or even care.
I speak out against white supremacy not because I have lost hope, but rather because I too have found it. Hope, for me, is found where two or three small groups of people—blacks, whites and other people of color who believe in Martin’s vision of the beloved community—become willing to bear witness to the Gospel’s transcending racial bonding and move toward human bonding. We need some signs of that transcending. Where will they come from if not from the church? And how will these signs be expressed, except by preachers and priests and rabbis?
James H. Cone is the Briggs Distinguished Professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He is the author of many books and articles on issues of race, including Martin and Malcolm & America, and Liberation: A Black Theology of Liberation. The interviewer is George M. Anderson, S.J., an associate editor of America, who met with Professor Cone at the seminary.
How An Iconic Painting of Jesus as a White Man Became So Widely Distributed Emily McFarlan,
The Washington Post 6.25.20
The painting, which has been reproduced a billion times, came to define what the central figure of Christianity looked like for generations of Christians in the United States — and beyond. For years, Sallman’s Jesus “represented the image of God,” said Carr, the director of ministry and administrative support staff at First Baptist Church of Glenarden in Maryland. When she grew up and began to study the Bible on her own, she started to wonder about that painting and the message it sent. “It didn’t make sense that this picture was of this white guy,” she said.
Carr isn’t the first to question Sallman’s image of Jesus and the impact it’s had not only on theology but also on the wider culture. As protesters around the United States tear down statues of Confederate heroes and demand an accounting for the country’s long legacy of racism, some in the church are asking whether the time has come to cancel what is called white Jesus — including Sallman’s famed painting.
The “Head of Christ” has been called the “best-known American artwork of the 20th century.” The New York Times once labeled Sallman the “best-known artist” of the 20th century, although that few recognized his name. “Sallman, who died in 1968, was a religious painter and illustrator whose most popular picture, ‘Head of Christ,’ achieved a mass popularity that makes Warhol’s soup can seem positively obscure,” William Grimes of the Times wrote in 1994.
The famed image began as a charcoal sketch for the first issue of the Covenant Companion, a youth magazine for a denomination known as the Swedish Evangelical Mission Covenant. Sallman, wanting to appeal to young adults, he gave his Jesus a “very similar feeling to an image of a school or professional photo of the time making it more accessible and familiar to the audience,” said Tai Lipan, gallery director at Indiana’s Anderson University, which has housed the Warner Sallman Collection since the 1980s. His approach worked.
The image was so popular that the 1940 graduating class of North Park Theological Seminary in Chicago commissioned Sallman to create a painting based on his drawing as their class gift to the school, according to the Evangelical Covenant Church’s official magazine. Sallman painted a copy for the school but sold the original “Head of Christ” to the religious publisher Kriebel and Bates, and what Lipan calls a “Protestant icon” was born. “This particular image of Jesus met the dawn of the ‘Mad Men,’ of the marketing agency,” said Matthew Anderson, an affiliate professor of theological studies at Concordia University in Montreal.
The image quickly spread, printed on prayer cards and circulated by organizations, missionaries and a wide range of churches: Catholic and Protestant, evangelical and mainline, white and black. Copies accompanied soldiers into battle during World War II, handed out by the Salvation Army and YMCA through the USO. Millions of cards produced in a project called “Christ in Every Purse” that was endorsed by then-President Dwight Eisenhower were distributed all around the world. The image appeared on pencils, bookmarks, lamps and clocks and was hung in courtrooms, police stations, libraries and schools. It became what the scholar David Morgan has heard called a “photograph of Jesus.” Along the way, Sallman’s image crowded out other depictions of Jesus. Some of the earliest images of Jesus showed him “with very dark skin and possibly African,” he said. Sallman wasn’t the first to depict Jesus as white, Morgan said. The Chicagoan had been inspired by a long tradition of European artists, most notable among them the Frenchman Leon-Augustin Lhermitte. But against the backdrop of U.S. history, of European Christians colonizing indigenous lands with the blessing of the Doctrine of Discovery and enslaving African people, Morgan said, a universal image of a white Jesus became problematic. “You simply can’t ignore very Nordic Jesus,” he said.
The backlash to Sallman’s work began during the civil rights movement, when his depiction of a Scandinavian savior was criticized for enshrining the image of a white Jesus for generations of Americans. That criticism has been renewed recently amid the current national reckoning over racism sparked by the May 25 death of George Floyd, a black man killed in an encounter with police in Minneapolis. This week, the activist Shaun King called for statues depicting Jesus as European to come down alongside Confederate monuments, calling the depiction a “form of white supremacy.”
Anthea Butler, an associate professor of religious studies and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania, has also warned of the damaging impact of depictions of white Jesus. “Every time you see white Jesus, you see white supremacy,” she said recently on the Religion News Service video series. Sallman’s Jesus was “the Jesus you saw in all the black Baptist churches.” But Sallman’s Jesus did not look like black Christians, according to the scholar. Instead, she said, that Jesus looked “like the people who were beating you up in the streets or setting dogs on you.” That Jesus sent a message, Butler said. “If Jesus is white and God is white,” she said, “then authority is white.”
Edward J. Blum, who co-wrote the 2014 book “The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America,” said many Christians remain hesitant to give up the image of white Jesus. He believes the continued popularity of white depictions of Jesus are “an example of how far in some respects the United States has not moved.” A decade after Sallman painted his “Head of Christ,” the Korean artist Kim Ki-chang created a picture cycle of the life of Christ in traditional Korean clothing and settings, featuring figures from Korean folk religion. “If white Jesus can’t be put to death, how could it possibly be the case that systemic racism is done?” Blum said. “Because this is one that just seems obvious. This one seems easy to give up."
More recently, Sofia Minson, a New Zealand artist who is of Ngāti Porou Māori, English, Swedish and Irish heritage, reimagined Sallman’s Jesus as an indigenous Māori man with a traditional face tattoo. And there are numerous popular depictions of Jesus as black. Vincent Barzoni’s “His Voyage: Life of Jesus,” depicts Jesus with dark skin and dreadlocks, his wrists bound, while the Franciscan friar Robert Lentz’s “Jesus Christ Liberator” depicts Jesus as a black man in the style of a Greek icon. Janet McKenzie’s “Jesus of the People,” modeled on a black woman, was chosen as the winner of the National Catholic Reporter’s 1999 competition to answer the question, “What would Jesus Christ look like in the year 2000?”
FOLLOW UP: The discussion topic for this week had to do with issues of race and identity; specifically when it came to religious imagery. In one of the discussions, this video, by General Charles Q. Brown, who is the newly appointed Joint Chiefs of the Air Force (the first man of African descent to hold that position) came up. You are invited to listen to what is on General Brown's mind.
Tuesday, June 23
I am intrigued with the attached article about rage, the Bible, and the reason for protests in our country. More about the author, the Rev. Dr. Esau McCaulley, can be found here https://www.wheaton.edu/academics/faculty/esau-mccaulley/ In particular, he studied under one of my favorite theologians, NT Wright; which makes me rather envious. He raises several important questions in this piece, like this one: Do we risk the criticism commonly levied at Christians that we move too quickly to hope because faith pacifies? This question, along with others, I look forward to discussing with you.
What the Bible Says About Rage
By The Rev. Dr. Esau McCaulley, NY Times June 15, 2020
There are videos of Eric Garner and George Floyd being choked to death by police officers while pleading for their lives. There is a video of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy who was shot to death while playing with a toy gun. There is a video of Ahmaud Arbery, who was hunted and killed while out on a run. There is a video of a police officer mounting and handcuffing Dajerria Becton, 15 years old at the time, at a pool party.
Visible evidence of black suffering is not new. We have photographs of black lynchings. The videos are a reminder that the issue was never about a lack of evidence. They reveal the lengths to which those in power will go to avoid facing the truth. What is happening in those videos is a manifestation of systemic racism — and to acknowledge that would call into question the system that benefits the powerful.
When these videos stack one upon another and are added to our personal slights, a deep unsettling anger rises in the soul of a disinherited and beleaguered people. James Baldwin said, “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.”
What is the focus of our rage? Are we upset with the police officer who placed his knee on the neck of a man pleading for his life for nearly nine minutes while three fellow officers looked on? Are we mad at the vigilantes who got in a pickup truck to hunt down an unarmed black man? Are we enraged by the white woman who tried to weaponize the police by claiming that a black man who requested that she leash her dog in Central Park was threatening her life? Are we frustrated by the laws and customs that cast a pall over the black experience? Are we wearied with the apathy of so many?
The Bible is not silent about the rage of the oppressed. One of the most startlingly violent passages in the Bible comes from the lips of the disinherited. In Psalm 137 the psalmist says, “Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is the one who repays you according to what you have done to us. Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.”
How can wishing such an atrocity be in any sense a religious text? Psalm 137 is a psalm of the traumatized. It depicts the aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem, the sack of the city, sexual assault and brutalization of the innocent. What kind of song do you write if you are forced to watch the murder of your wife, your child, your neighbor?
Psalm 137 is trauma literature, the rage of those who lived. The question isn’t why the Psalmist wrote this. The question is what kind of song would the families of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd and Eric Garner be tempted to write after watching the video of their deaths? It would be raw and unfiltered. But more than an expression of rage, this psalm is a written record in time. It is a call to remember. This psalm, and the other psalms of rage, require us to remember the trauma that led to their composition.
The miracle of the Bible is not that it records the rage of the oppressed. The miracle is that it has more to say. The same texts that include a call for vengeance upon Israel’s enemies look to the salvation of its oppressors. Isaiah 49 says, “It is too small a thing for you to be my servant to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back those of Israel I have kept. I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.”
For Christians, rage (Psalm 137) must eventually give way to hope (Isaiah 49). And we find the spiritual resources to make this transition at the cross. Jesus could have called down the psalms of rage upon his enemies and shouted a final word of defiance before he breathed his last. Instead he called for forgiveness: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing,” he says in Luke 23.
It was not a false reconciliation: Jesus experienced the reality of state-sponsored terror. That is why the black Christian has always felt a particular kinship with this crucified king from an oppressed ethnic group. The cross helps us make sense of the lynching tree.
And Jesus’ resurrection three days after his crucifixion shows that neither the lynching tree nor the cross have the final say about those whom God values. The state thought that violence could stop God’s purposes. For the Christian, the resurrection makes clear the futility of the attempt. Further, Jesus’ profound act of forgiving his opponents provides me with the theological resources to hope.
Dare we speak of hope when chants of “I can’t breathe” echo in the streets? Do we risk the criticism commonly levied at Christians that we move too quickly to hope because faith pacifies? Resurrection hope doesn’t remove the Christian from the struggle for justice. It empties the state’s greatest weapon — the fear of death — of its power.
Hope is possible if we recognize that it does not rule out justice. It is what separates justice from vengeance. Howard Thurman wrote in his classic work “Jesus and the Disinherited” about how rage, once unleashed, tends to spill out beyond its intended target and consume everything. The hatred of our enemy that we take to the streets returns with us to our friendships, marriages and communities. It damages our own souls.
Christians contend for justice because we care about black lives, families and communities. We contend for reconciliation after the establishment of justice because there must be a future that is more than mutual contempt and suspicion. But justice and reconciliation cannot come at the cost of black lives. The only peaceful future is a just future. And because Christians should be a people for peace, we must be a people for justice even when it seems ever to elude us. Too many black lives have been lost to accept anything else.
Esau McCaulley is an assistant professor of New Testament at Wheaton College and a priest in the Anglican Church in North America, where he serves as the director of the Next Generation Leadership Initiative.
What the Bible Says About Rage
By The Rev. Dr. Esau McCaulley, NY Times June 15, 2020
There are videos of Eric Garner and George Floyd being choked to death by police officers while pleading for their lives. There is a video of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy who was shot to death while playing with a toy gun. There is a video of Ahmaud Arbery, who was hunted and killed while out on a run. There is a video of a police officer mounting and handcuffing Dajerria Becton, 15 years old at the time, at a pool party.
Visible evidence of black suffering is not new. We have photographs of black lynchings. The videos are a reminder that the issue was never about a lack of evidence. They reveal the lengths to which those in power will go to avoid facing the truth. What is happening in those videos is a manifestation of systemic racism — and to acknowledge that would call into question the system that benefits the powerful.
When these videos stack one upon another and are added to our personal slights, a deep unsettling anger rises in the soul of a disinherited and beleaguered people. James Baldwin said, “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.”
What is the focus of our rage? Are we upset with the police officer who placed his knee on the neck of a man pleading for his life for nearly nine minutes while three fellow officers looked on? Are we mad at the vigilantes who got in a pickup truck to hunt down an unarmed black man? Are we enraged by the white woman who tried to weaponize the police by claiming that a black man who requested that she leash her dog in Central Park was threatening her life? Are we frustrated by the laws and customs that cast a pall over the black experience? Are we wearied with the apathy of so many?
The Bible is not silent about the rage of the oppressed. One of the most startlingly violent passages in the Bible comes from the lips of the disinherited. In Psalm 137 the psalmist says, “Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is the one who repays you according to what you have done to us. Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.”
How can wishing such an atrocity be in any sense a religious text? Psalm 137 is a psalm of the traumatized. It depicts the aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem, the sack of the city, sexual assault and brutalization of the innocent. What kind of song do you write if you are forced to watch the murder of your wife, your child, your neighbor?
Psalm 137 is trauma literature, the rage of those who lived. The question isn’t why the Psalmist wrote this. The question is what kind of song would the families of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd and Eric Garner be tempted to write after watching the video of their deaths? It would be raw and unfiltered. But more than an expression of rage, this psalm is a written record in time. It is a call to remember. This psalm, and the other psalms of rage, require us to remember the trauma that led to their composition.
The miracle of the Bible is not that it records the rage of the oppressed. The miracle is that it has more to say. The same texts that include a call for vengeance upon Israel’s enemies look to the salvation of its oppressors. Isaiah 49 says, “It is too small a thing for you to be my servant to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back those of Israel I have kept. I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.”
For Christians, rage (Psalm 137) must eventually give way to hope (Isaiah 49). And we find the spiritual resources to make this transition at the cross. Jesus could have called down the psalms of rage upon his enemies and shouted a final word of defiance before he breathed his last. Instead he called for forgiveness: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing,” he says in Luke 23.
It was not a false reconciliation: Jesus experienced the reality of state-sponsored terror. That is why the black Christian has always felt a particular kinship with this crucified king from an oppressed ethnic group. The cross helps us make sense of the lynching tree.
And Jesus’ resurrection three days after his crucifixion shows that neither the lynching tree nor the cross have the final say about those whom God values. The state thought that violence could stop God’s purposes. For the Christian, the resurrection makes clear the futility of the attempt. Further, Jesus’ profound act of forgiving his opponents provides me with the theological resources to hope.
Dare we speak of hope when chants of “I can’t breathe” echo in the streets? Do we risk the criticism commonly levied at Christians that we move too quickly to hope because faith pacifies? Resurrection hope doesn’t remove the Christian from the struggle for justice. It empties the state’s greatest weapon — the fear of death — of its power.
Hope is possible if we recognize that it does not rule out justice. It is what separates justice from vengeance. Howard Thurman wrote in his classic work “Jesus and the Disinherited” about how rage, once unleashed, tends to spill out beyond its intended target and consume everything. The hatred of our enemy that we take to the streets returns with us to our friendships, marriages and communities. It damages our own souls.
Christians contend for justice because we care about black lives, families and communities. We contend for reconciliation after the establishment of justice because there must be a future that is more than mutual contempt and suspicion. But justice and reconciliation cannot come at the cost of black lives. The only peaceful future is a just future. And because Christians should be a people for peace, we must be a people for justice even when it seems ever to elude us. Too many black lives have been lost to accept anything else.
Esau McCaulley is an assistant professor of New Testament at Wheaton College and a priest in the Anglican Church in North America, where he serves as the director of the Next Generation Leadership Initiative.
Tuesday, June 16
In the wake of profound news of our time, there is a story that is not getting much traction - the challenge of church and state. Just for background information, this article has to do with the Payroll Protection Program which is designed to keep employers from laying off employees. All Angels looked into the PPP but found we do not qualify; not based on separation of church and state but because we were not going to lay off employees.
My undergraduate degree is in Political Science from a Benedictine University. My Roman Catholic academic advisor talked at length about the importance of the separation of church and state as it pertains to the autonomy of churches. Dr. Snyder would say that everything the State does has strings attached - not as an I-owe-you but rather as a marionette to its master so as to influence behavior and receive a desired outcome. As such, I found this article interesting.
Here is the Zoom link. https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
On a different topic, many folks have asked about the story of the Choctaw Indians and their relationship with Ireland from the sermon on Sunday. Here is one of the articles I read to prepare for the message.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/world/coronavirus-ireland-native-american-tribes.html
May God bless you and watch over you and may the peace of God rest upon our nation,
- Dave
The Quiet Demise of the Separation of Church and State
Nelson Tebbe, Micah Schwartzman and Richard Schragger New York Times, June 8, 2020
The First Amendment’s Establishment Clause prohibits the government from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion.” This has long been thought to prohibit direct government support for religion. The contours of that idea have been contested, and they have contracted over time. But the commitment to some form of separation of church and state has endured.
Yet in response to the coronavirus pandemic, Congress has approved a huge payout to small businesses and nonprofits that allows funding for clergy salaries — a direct payment of tax dollars for a core religious use that would have been unthinkable in previous eras.
Thousands of churches applied for help under the Paycheck Protection Program, and many have had their funding approved. We are witnessing an important moment in the nation’s constitutional history: the quiet demise of the already ailing separation of church and state.
In 1785, James Madison, the chief architect of the Establishment Clause, argued against a Virginia bill that would have paid for clergy salaries with tax dollars, even though it would have supported a relatively wide range of denominations. Madison’s essay making that case was once widely thought to provide the best historical evidence for the meaning of the clause. He believed it was a violation of religious freedom to “force a citizen to contribute three pence only of his property” to pay for the salaries of clergy, a mandate he saw as an “establishment” of religion by the government. Thomas Jefferson made much the same point in his religious freedom bill, which became the law in Virginia.
One hundred and sixty-two years later, in 1947, the Supreme Court evoked Madison’s essay in a seminal Establishment Clause decision, asserting that the clause “means at least this:” That “no tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion.”
In that decision, the court in fact upheld a New Jersey program that supported the transportation of students to all schools, including religious schools. But it emphasized that transportation services, like ordinary police and fire protection, were “so separate and so indisputably marked off from the religious function.”
And that was the point: The New Jersey program, unlike the Paycheck Protection Program that helps congregations pay their clergy members, did not directly support a religious mission. It merely provided students attending public and religious schools equal access to affordable transportation.
The Supreme Court reiterated in 2000 that the Establishment Clause prohibits direct funding of religious activities. “Actual diversion” of public support to religious uses “is constitutionally impermissible,” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote. And concerns are heightened when government aid takes the form of cash payments made directly to religious organizations, she emphasized.
Congress’s Paycheck Protection Program flouts this rule. As applied, the program explicitly extends to nonprofits, including churches — with no restrictions on payment of clergy salaries. Although the aid initially takes the form of a loan, it is largely forgivable if the recipient maintains its payroll size for a sufficient period.
The Small Business Administration waived its normal rules prohibiting aid for religious activities. Remarkably, it relied implicitly but unmistakably on a reading of the First Amendment that not only permits cash aid to houses of worship for core religious activities, but requires the government to pay for those activities.
The Paycheck Protection Program violates the constitutional rule requiring the separation of church and state, and it does so on an enormous scale. Nine thousand Catholic parishes have received loans so far. The Archdiocese of Louisville, for example, was awarded more than $20 million across 84 entities, for an average of $238,000 each. One church, St. James parish and school in Elizabethtown, Ky., received loans totaling $439,800.
Moreover, a national survey found that 40 percent of all Protestant churches had applied for government funds and that 59 percent of those applications were approved. The Jewish Federations of North America reported in late April that 575 organizations had received loans, with a median of $250,000 each and a total of $312 million. Recipients included more than 200 synagogues. With 445 entities awaiting word on their applications, the J.F.N.A. estimated that Jewish nonprofits could receive $500 million from the program.
Of course, the rule laid down by Justice O’Connor 20 years ago is vulnerable to revision by the current court, with its conservative majority. At least five justices have signed opinions indicating a willingness to allow public aid that is administered neutrally with respect to religion and that is secular in content. Later this month, the court is expected to decide a funding case in which it has an opportunity to go further and require religious schools to be included in a school choice program. Almost certainly, the court led by Chief Justice John Roberts will continue its campaign to revolutionize First Amendment law so that it favors religious actors.
What is remarkable is not that the federal government is spending tax dollars for religious uses in a way not seen before, or even that it is doing so on a vast scale. It’s how little pushback this program has elicited. With respect to public funding of religion, the separation of church and state has all but disappeared, without a bang or even a whimper.
More than likely, this tacit acceptance reflects compassion for the small businesses and nonprofits struggling during the pandemic. That concern is entirely understandable, especially given that houses of worship, like many other organizations, have been burdened by state public health restrictions. But as Justice David Souter once observed, “constitutional lines have to be drawn, and on one side of every one of them is an otherwise sympathetic case that provokes impatience with the Constitution and with the line.”
Constitutional interpretations forged during times of crisis tend to persist after the danger has eased. That is especially true in this context, where the separation of church and state had already been under sustained attack, making the foundational doctrine all the more vulnerable. In 2002, the Supreme Court ruled that states could indirectly fund religious schools through a voucher program. More recently, the court held that a state cannot exclude religious schools from a grant program for school playgrounds, even when the schools are owned and operated by churches.
Now the core constitutional rule against using taxpayer dollars to pay clergy is slipping away in face of the coronavirus crisis. That should give us pause. The obliteration by Congress and President Trump of a basic principle of separation is a significant development in American constitutional culture.
We should take a moment to reflect on what has happened and to reckon with a new constitutional structure in which the government supports the central missions of religious organizations on a large scale. The entanglement of church and state will bring predictable conflicts: efforts by religious groups to control government and by the government to control religious groups. The risk of government favoritism for some religions over others, and for religion over nonreligion, will be heightened.
In other words, the new church-state paradigm will raise the very dangers that Madison and Jefferson warned of when they articulated principles of religious freedom for our country.
Nelson Tebbe is a professor at Cornell Law School. Micah Schwartzman and Richard Schragger are professors at the University of Virginia School of Law.
My undergraduate degree is in Political Science from a Benedictine University. My Roman Catholic academic advisor talked at length about the importance of the separation of church and state as it pertains to the autonomy of churches. Dr. Snyder would say that everything the State does has strings attached - not as an I-owe-you but rather as a marionette to its master so as to influence behavior and receive a desired outcome. As such, I found this article interesting.
Here is the Zoom link. https://zoom.us/j/5955701807
On a different topic, many folks have asked about the story of the Choctaw Indians and their relationship with Ireland from the sermon on Sunday. Here is one of the articles I read to prepare for the message.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/world/coronavirus-ireland-native-american-tribes.html
May God bless you and watch over you and may the peace of God rest upon our nation,
- Dave
The Quiet Demise of the Separation of Church and State
Nelson Tebbe, Micah Schwartzman and Richard Schragger New York Times, June 8, 2020
The First Amendment’s Establishment Clause prohibits the government from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion.” This has long been thought to prohibit direct government support for religion. The contours of that idea have been contested, and they have contracted over time. But the commitment to some form of separation of church and state has endured.
Yet in response to the coronavirus pandemic, Congress has approved a huge payout to small businesses and nonprofits that allows funding for clergy salaries — a direct payment of tax dollars for a core religious use that would have been unthinkable in previous eras.
Thousands of churches applied for help under the Paycheck Protection Program, and many have had their funding approved. We are witnessing an important moment in the nation’s constitutional history: the quiet demise of the already ailing separation of church and state.
In 1785, James Madison, the chief architect of the Establishment Clause, argued against a Virginia bill that would have paid for clergy salaries with tax dollars, even though it would have supported a relatively wide range of denominations. Madison’s essay making that case was once widely thought to provide the best historical evidence for the meaning of the clause. He believed it was a violation of religious freedom to “force a citizen to contribute three pence only of his property” to pay for the salaries of clergy, a mandate he saw as an “establishment” of religion by the government. Thomas Jefferson made much the same point in his religious freedom bill, which became the law in Virginia.
One hundred and sixty-two years later, in 1947, the Supreme Court evoked Madison’s essay in a seminal Establishment Clause decision, asserting that the clause “means at least this:” That “no tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion.”
In that decision, the court in fact upheld a New Jersey program that supported the transportation of students to all schools, including religious schools. But it emphasized that transportation services, like ordinary police and fire protection, were “so separate and so indisputably marked off from the religious function.”
And that was the point: The New Jersey program, unlike the Paycheck Protection Program that helps congregations pay their clergy members, did not directly support a religious mission. It merely provided students attending public and religious schools equal access to affordable transportation.
The Supreme Court reiterated in 2000 that the Establishment Clause prohibits direct funding of religious activities. “Actual diversion” of public support to religious uses “is constitutionally impermissible,” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote. And concerns are heightened when government aid takes the form of cash payments made directly to religious organizations, she emphasized.
Congress’s Paycheck Protection Program flouts this rule. As applied, the program explicitly extends to nonprofits, including churches — with no restrictions on payment of clergy salaries. Although the aid initially takes the form of a loan, it is largely forgivable if the recipient maintains its payroll size for a sufficient period.
The Small Business Administration waived its normal rules prohibiting aid for religious activities. Remarkably, it relied implicitly but unmistakably on a reading of the First Amendment that not only permits cash aid to houses of worship for core religious activities, but requires the government to pay for those activities.
The Paycheck Protection Program violates the constitutional rule requiring the separation of church and state, and it does so on an enormous scale. Nine thousand Catholic parishes have received loans so far. The Archdiocese of Louisville, for example, was awarded more than $20 million across 84 entities, for an average of $238,000 each. One church, St. James parish and school in Elizabethtown, Ky., received loans totaling $439,800.
Moreover, a national survey found that 40 percent of all Protestant churches had applied for government funds and that 59 percent of those applications were approved. The Jewish Federations of North America reported in late April that 575 organizations had received loans, with a median of $250,000 each and a total of $312 million. Recipients included more than 200 synagogues. With 445 entities awaiting word on their applications, the J.F.N.A. estimated that Jewish nonprofits could receive $500 million from the program.
Of course, the rule laid down by Justice O’Connor 20 years ago is vulnerable to revision by the current court, with its conservative majority. At least five justices have signed opinions indicating a willingness to allow public aid that is administered neutrally with respect to religion and that is secular in content. Later this month, the court is expected to decide a funding case in which it has an opportunity to go further and require religious schools to be included in a school choice program. Almost certainly, the court led by Chief Justice John Roberts will continue its campaign to revolutionize First Amendment law so that it favors religious actors.
What is remarkable is not that the federal government is spending tax dollars for religious uses in a way not seen before, or even that it is doing so on a vast scale. It’s how little pushback this program has elicited. With respect to public funding of religion, the separation of church and state has all but disappeared, without a bang or even a whimper.
More than likely, this tacit acceptance reflects compassion for the small businesses and nonprofits struggling during the pandemic. That concern is entirely understandable, especially given that houses of worship, like many other organizations, have been burdened by state public health restrictions. But as Justice David Souter once observed, “constitutional lines have to be drawn, and on one side of every one of them is an otherwise sympathetic case that provokes impatience with the Constitution and with the line.”
Constitutional interpretations forged during times of crisis tend to persist after the danger has eased. That is especially true in this context, where the separation of church and state had already been under sustained attack, making the foundational doctrine all the more vulnerable. In 2002, the Supreme Court ruled that states could indirectly fund religious schools through a voucher program. More recently, the court held that a state cannot exclude religious schools from a grant program for school playgrounds, even when the schools are owned and operated by churches.
Now the core constitutional rule against using taxpayer dollars to pay clergy is slipping away in face of the coronavirus crisis. That should give us pause. The obliteration by Congress and President Trump of a basic principle of separation is a significant development in American constitutional culture.
We should take a moment to reflect on what has happened and to reckon with a new constitutional structure in which the government supports the central missions of religious organizations on a large scale. The entanglement of church and state will bring predictable conflicts: efforts by religious groups to control government and by the government to control religious groups. The risk of government favoritism for some religions over others, and for religion over nonreligion, will be heightened.
In other words, the new church-state paradigm will raise the very dangers that Madison and Jefferson warned of when they articulated principles of religious freedom for our country.
Nelson Tebbe is a professor at Cornell Law School. Micah Schwartzman and Richard Schragger are professors at the University of Virginia School of Law.
Tuesday, June 8
My subscription to the Wall Street Journal has ended because I have a new credit card. Unfortunately, WSJ's system is down so I can't resubscribe; yet. The story I was going to share this week was an NBC News/WSJ poll that said 80% of Americans feel the U.S. is out of control. God works in mysterious ways. I read this article in the Atlantic and felt much better about the state of our country. Hopefully you will too.
There is a lot to discuss this week. I look forward to chatting with you.
-Dave
This Upheaval Is How America Gets Better
Kori Schake, The Atlantic 6.8.20
This is an extraordinarily tense moment in the United States. Currently on display are police brutality, racism, a president fanning the flames and threatening to use force against peaceful protesters, and a Defense Department leadership initially complicit in using the military for partisan purposes. The head of the venerable Council on Foreign Relations considers the U.S. a “power in retreat.” Some American commentators compare the protests to uprisings against Middle East dictators, because in both cases, protesters believe that, as the writer Steven A. Cook has put it, “political institutions of the state and the prevailing social orders had combined to rob them of their dignity.” American diplomats are evidently struggling to justify our country as a functioning democracy.
Here’s how diplomats should justify our democracy: by recognizing that we are now seeing America becoming better than it was. This churning, disputatious, and even sometimes violent dynamic is what social change in America looks like. And what it has always looked like.
As the former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky once wrote, “American culture as I have experienced it seems so much in process, so brilliantly and sometimes brutally in motion, that standard models for it fail to apply.” This is what the American public is witnessing. Yes, recent events do bear similarities to when exasperated people in Tunisia and Egypt lashed out at their governments. And it’s scary to be part of. Our politicians are no less venal than politicians elsewhere. But what is different from the sorrowfully unsuccessful efforts to change government behavior elsewhere is the distributed system of political power in these United States, the vibrancy of a civil society that knows its rights, and the willingness of so many Americans to acknowledge the nation’s failings and take responsibility for improving society.
America’s standing in the world was damaged by Jim Crow, a segregated military fighting World War II, resistance to school integrations, the My Lai massacre, and the torture of prisoners after 9/11. Americans are not good at getting things right at the outset; we are good at making things right over time. White Americans are being challenged to accept responsibility for allowing black Americans to live in fear of police brutality. This raising of consciousness will change the U.S. as a country, and well it should.
Police in Buffalo that shoved and injured an elderly man have been suspended. The Army is investigating the aircrew of a helicopter, bearing medical insignia, that hovered dangerously over a crowd in Washington, D.C. The Justice Department is being sued for its decision to aggressively clear peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square, near the White House. The government of the District of Columbia painted Black Lives Matter down the middle of the street leading to the White House. Businesses are falling over themselves to be associated with racialjustice efforts.
Far from being a bludgeon of the state, the U.S. military is reinforcing its fealty to the Constitution rather than the president and modeling how to amplify black voices. The Air Force chief of staff flatly stated, “Every American should be outraged that the conduct exhibited by police in Minneapolis can still happen in 2020.” Months before the protests, the commandant of
the Marine Corps banned any display of Confederate symbols. And since the Lafayette Square disgrace, the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have scrambled to put themselves on the side of restraint in the face of peaceful protests. These developments are a beautiful reminder that the American military is part of a broader civilian society, not a repressive force.
The U.S. isn’t the only country where racism is a persistent problem. It’s not the only country where police have immunity to prey on their fellow citizens. It’s not the only country where the government would expand its powers and evade accountability if it could. Recent protests in Amsterdam, London, and elsewhere show that what happens in America matters for the advance of human rights and civil liberties elsewhere. Even when its citizens struggle and stumble, the U.S. is still the world’s best hope for advancing the truths we hold to be self-evident.
When the governments of Germany, Australia, and—astonishingly—Turkey call on the U.S. to respect press freedom, it is an embarrassment. But many Americans welcome their condemnation to support our common commitment to unfettered freedom of the press. Americans are strong enough to bear the hypocrisy of Turkey’s criticism and honest enough to absorb what Australia and Germany are telling us.
Many authoritarian governments have long tried to deal with dissatisfaction among their own citizens by stoking criticism of their external rivals, and America’s current turmoil provides such an opportunity. But while propagandists in Beijing may revel in decrying racism in America, how many law-enforcement officers in China would join hands and march with protesters, as the police chiefs of San Antonio and other cities have? Who in the Chinese military would kneel in front of protesters to acknowledge the justice of their cause, as members of the National Guard have in the U.S.?
Our struggles are the world’s struggles, because the values that form our republic are universal values. We believe that people have inherent rights and allow governments to curtail them in limited ways only for agreed purposes. What protesters are demanding right now is equal justice before the law, and making that principle a reality for black Americans will be a victory for human rights everywhere.
The Marquis de Lafayette, for whom the square in Washington is named, was a great friend to the U.S. “The welfare of America is bound closely to the welfare of all humanity,” he once wrote to his wife. “She is to become the honored and safe asylum of liberty.” By arguing and protesting and suing the government, Americans are trying to prove Lafayette right. This is American progress in the making.
There is a lot to discuss this week. I look forward to chatting with you.
-Dave
This Upheaval Is How America Gets Better
Kori Schake, The Atlantic 6.8.20
This is an extraordinarily tense moment in the United States. Currently on display are police brutality, racism, a president fanning the flames and threatening to use force against peaceful protesters, and a Defense Department leadership initially complicit in using the military for partisan purposes. The head of the venerable Council on Foreign Relations considers the U.S. a “power in retreat.” Some American commentators compare the protests to uprisings against Middle East dictators, because in both cases, protesters believe that, as the writer Steven A. Cook has put it, “political institutions of the state and the prevailing social orders had combined to rob them of their dignity.” American diplomats are evidently struggling to justify our country as a functioning democracy.
Here’s how diplomats should justify our democracy: by recognizing that we are now seeing America becoming better than it was. This churning, disputatious, and even sometimes violent dynamic is what social change in America looks like. And what it has always looked like.
As the former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky once wrote, “American culture as I have experienced it seems so much in process, so brilliantly and sometimes brutally in motion, that standard models for it fail to apply.” This is what the American public is witnessing. Yes, recent events do bear similarities to when exasperated people in Tunisia and Egypt lashed out at their governments. And it’s scary to be part of. Our politicians are no less venal than politicians elsewhere. But what is different from the sorrowfully unsuccessful efforts to change government behavior elsewhere is the distributed system of political power in these United States, the vibrancy of a civil society that knows its rights, and the willingness of so many Americans to acknowledge the nation’s failings and take responsibility for improving society.
America’s standing in the world was damaged by Jim Crow, a segregated military fighting World War II, resistance to school integrations, the My Lai massacre, and the torture of prisoners after 9/11. Americans are not good at getting things right at the outset; we are good at making things right over time. White Americans are being challenged to accept responsibility for allowing black Americans to live in fear of police brutality. This raising of consciousness will change the U.S. as a country, and well it should.
Police in Buffalo that shoved and injured an elderly man have been suspended. The Army is investigating the aircrew of a helicopter, bearing medical insignia, that hovered dangerously over a crowd in Washington, D.C. The Justice Department is being sued for its decision to aggressively clear peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square, near the White House. The government of the District of Columbia painted Black Lives Matter down the middle of the street leading to the White House. Businesses are falling over themselves to be associated with racialjustice efforts.
Far from being a bludgeon of the state, the U.S. military is reinforcing its fealty to the Constitution rather than the president and modeling how to amplify black voices. The Air Force chief of staff flatly stated, “Every American should be outraged that the conduct exhibited by police in Minneapolis can still happen in 2020.” Months before the protests, the commandant of
the Marine Corps banned any display of Confederate symbols. And since the Lafayette Square disgrace, the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have scrambled to put themselves on the side of restraint in the face of peaceful protests. These developments are a beautiful reminder that the American military is part of a broader civilian society, not a repressive force.
The U.S. isn’t the only country where racism is a persistent problem. It’s not the only country where police have immunity to prey on their fellow citizens. It’s not the only country where the government would expand its powers and evade accountability if it could. Recent protests in Amsterdam, London, and elsewhere show that what happens in America matters for the advance of human rights and civil liberties elsewhere. Even when its citizens struggle and stumble, the U.S. is still the world’s best hope for advancing the truths we hold to be self-evident.
When the governments of Germany, Australia, and—astonishingly—Turkey call on the U.S. to respect press freedom, it is an embarrassment. But many Americans welcome their condemnation to support our common commitment to unfettered freedom of the press. Americans are strong enough to bear the hypocrisy of Turkey’s criticism and honest enough to absorb what Australia and Germany are telling us.
Many authoritarian governments have long tried to deal with dissatisfaction among their own citizens by stoking criticism of their external rivals, and America’s current turmoil provides such an opportunity. But while propagandists in Beijing may revel in decrying racism in America, how many law-enforcement officers in China would join hands and march with protesters, as the police chiefs of San Antonio and other cities have? Who in the Chinese military would kneel in front of protesters to acknowledge the justice of their cause, as members of the National Guard have in the U.S.?
Our struggles are the world’s struggles, because the values that form our republic are universal values. We believe that people have inherent rights and allow governments to curtail them in limited ways only for agreed purposes. What protesters are demanding right now is equal justice before the law, and making that principle a reality for black Americans will be a victory for human rights everywhere.
The Marquis de Lafayette, for whom the square in Washington is named, was a great friend to the U.S. “The welfare of America is bound closely to the welfare of all humanity,” he once wrote to his wife. “She is to become the honored and safe asylum of liberty.” By arguing and protesting and suing the government, Americans are trying to prove Lafayette right. This is American progress in the making.
Tuesday, June 2
If you had told me last Monday that this Monday, June 1st, the top story would not be the pandemic and, in fact, no mention of the Corona Virus would be mentioned in the morning national news until the second hour, I would have figured that either a vaccination was discovered on Tuesday, or, some country invaded us. What a tumultuous week, and weekend, it has been. And, who knows what this week holds.
I think it is time to talk about it. Attached is a Word to the Church - When the Cameras Are Gone, We Will Still Be Here - from our Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry, as well as a card that he mentioned in the piece.
Here is the Zoom discussion link.
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/5955701807
If you are unable to be a part of the discussion groups - men's discussion Tuesday at 10 am or the women's discussion Thursday at 9 am - but would like to talk with me about it, give me a call, 941-704-2131 or email me, dave@allangelslbk.org.
God's peace to you, to your family, and to our country.
Presiding Bishop Michael Curry’s Word to the Church: When the Cameras are Gone, We Will Still Be Here
May 30, 2020
A word to the Church from Presiding Bishop Michael Curry: “Our long-term commitment to racial justice and reconciliation is embedded in our identity as baptized followers of Jesus. We will still be doing it when the news cameras are long gone.” In the midst of COVID-19 and the pressure cooker of a society in turmoil, a Minnesota man named George Floyd was brutally killed. His basic human dignity was stripped by someone charged to protect our common humanity. Perhaps the deeper pain is the fact that this was not an isolated incident. It happened to Breonna Taylor on March 13 in Kentucky. It happened to Ahmaud Arbery on February 23 in Georgia. Racial terror in this form occurred when I was a teenager growing up black in Buffalo, New York. It extends back to the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 and well before that. It’s not just our present or our history. It is part of the fabric of American life. But we need not be paralyzed by our past or our present. We are not slaves to fate but people of faith. Our long-term commitment to racial justice and reconciliation is embedded in our identity as baptized followers of Jesus. We will still be doing it when the news cameras are long gone. That work of racial reconciliation and justice – what we know as Becoming Beloved Community – is happening across our Episcopal Church. It is happening in Minnesota and in the Dioceses of Kentucky, Georgia and Atlanta, across America and around the world. That mission matters now more than ever, and it is work that belongs to all of us. It must go on when racist violence and police brutality are no longer front-page news. It must go on when the work is not fashionable, and the way seems hard, and we feel utterly alone. It is the difficult labor of picking up the cross of Jesus like Simon of Cyrene, and carrying it until no one – no matter their color, no matter their class, no matter their caste – until no child of God is degraded and disrespected by anybody. That is God's dream, this is our work, and we shall not cease until God's dream is realized.
Is this hopelessly naïve? No, the vision of God’s dream is no idealistic utopia. It is our only real hope. And, St. Paul says, “hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit” (Romans 5:5). Real love is the dogged commitment to live my life in the most unselfish, even sacrificial ways; to love God, love my neighbor, love the earth and truly love myself. Perhaps most difficult in times like this, it is even love for my enemy. That is why we cannot condone violence. Violence against any person – conducted by some police officers or by some protesters – is violence against a child of God created in God’s image. No, as followers of Christ, we do not condone violence. Neither do we condone our nation’s collective, complicit silence in the face of injustice and violent death. The anger of so many on our streets is born out of the accumulated frustration that so few seem to care when another black, brown or native life is snuffed out. But there is another way. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, a broken man lay on the side of the road. The religious leaders who passed were largely indifferent. Only the Samaritan saw the wounded stranger and acted. He provided medical care and housing. He made provision for this stranger’s well-being. He helped and healed a fellow child of God. Love, as Jesus teaches, is action like this as well as attitude. It seeks the good, the well-being, and the welfare of others as well as one’s self. That way of real love is the only way there is. Accompanying this statement is a card describing ways to practice the Way of Love in the midst of pandemic, uncertainty and loss. In addition, you will find online a set of resources to help Episcopalians to LEARN, PRAY & ACT in response to racist violence and police brutality. That resource set includes faithful tools for listening to and learning from communities too often ignored or suppressed, for incorporating God’s vision of justice into your personal and community prayer life, and for positively and constructively engaging in advocacy and public witness. Opening and changing hearts does not happen overnight. The Christian race is not a sprint; it is a marathon. Our prayers and our work for justice, healing and truthtelling must be unceasing. Let us recommit ourselves to following in the footsteps of Jesus, the way that leads to healing, justice and love.
what_does_love_do_during_a_pandemic.pdf
I think it is time to talk about it. Attached is a Word to the Church - When the Cameras Are Gone, We Will Still Be Here - from our Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry, as well as a card that he mentioned in the piece.
Here is the Zoom discussion link.
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/5955701807
If you are unable to be a part of the discussion groups - men's discussion Tuesday at 10 am or the women's discussion Thursday at 9 am - but would like to talk with me about it, give me a call, 941-704-2131 or email me, dave@allangelslbk.org.
God's peace to you, to your family, and to our country.
Presiding Bishop Michael Curry’s Word to the Church: When the Cameras are Gone, We Will Still Be Here
May 30, 2020
A word to the Church from Presiding Bishop Michael Curry: “Our long-term commitment to racial justice and reconciliation is embedded in our identity as baptized followers of Jesus. We will still be doing it when the news cameras are long gone.” In the midst of COVID-19 and the pressure cooker of a society in turmoil, a Minnesota man named George Floyd was brutally killed. His basic human dignity was stripped by someone charged to protect our common humanity. Perhaps the deeper pain is the fact that this was not an isolated incident. It happened to Breonna Taylor on March 13 in Kentucky. It happened to Ahmaud Arbery on February 23 in Georgia. Racial terror in this form occurred when I was a teenager growing up black in Buffalo, New York. It extends back to the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 and well before that. It’s not just our present or our history. It is part of the fabric of American life. But we need not be paralyzed by our past or our present. We are not slaves to fate but people of faith. Our long-term commitment to racial justice and reconciliation is embedded in our identity as baptized followers of Jesus. We will still be doing it when the news cameras are long gone. That work of racial reconciliation and justice – what we know as Becoming Beloved Community – is happening across our Episcopal Church. It is happening in Minnesota and in the Dioceses of Kentucky, Georgia and Atlanta, across America and around the world. That mission matters now more than ever, and it is work that belongs to all of us. It must go on when racist violence and police brutality are no longer front-page news. It must go on when the work is not fashionable, and the way seems hard, and we feel utterly alone. It is the difficult labor of picking up the cross of Jesus like Simon of Cyrene, and carrying it until no one – no matter their color, no matter their class, no matter their caste – until no child of God is degraded and disrespected by anybody. That is God's dream, this is our work, and we shall not cease until God's dream is realized.
Is this hopelessly naïve? No, the vision of God’s dream is no idealistic utopia. It is our only real hope. And, St. Paul says, “hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit” (Romans 5:5). Real love is the dogged commitment to live my life in the most unselfish, even sacrificial ways; to love God, love my neighbor, love the earth and truly love myself. Perhaps most difficult in times like this, it is even love for my enemy. That is why we cannot condone violence. Violence against any person – conducted by some police officers or by some protesters – is violence against a child of God created in God’s image. No, as followers of Christ, we do not condone violence. Neither do we condone our nation’s collective, complicit silence in the face of injustice and violent death. The anger of so many on our streets is born out of the accumulated frustration that so few seem to care when another black, brown or native life is snuffed out. But there is another way. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, a broken man lay on the side of the road. The religious leaders who passed were largely indifferent. Only the Samaritan saw the wounded stranger and acted. He provided medical care and housing. He made provision for this stranger’s well-being. He helped and healed a fellow child of God. Love, as Jesus teaches, is action like this as well as attitude. It seeks the good, the well-being, and the welfare of others as well as one’s self. That way of real love is the only way there is. Accompanying this statement is a card describing ways to practice the Way of Love in the midst of pandemic, uncertainty and loss. In addition, you will find online a set of resources to help Episcopalians to LEARN, PRAY & ACT in response to racist violence and police brutality. That resource set includes faithful tools for listening to and learning from communities too often ignored or suppressed, for incorporating God’s vision of justice into your personal and community prayer life, and for positively and constructively engaging in advocacy and public witness. Opening and changing hearts does not happen overnight. The Christian race is not a sprint; it is a marathon. Our prayers and our work for justice, healing and truthtelling must be unceasing. Let us recommit ourselves to following in the footsteps of Jesus, the way that leads to healing, justice and love.
what_does_love_do_during_a_pandemic.pdf
Tuesday, May 26
Hello! Attached are the readings for our discussion groups this week. The topic is about Covid-19 and Church. I have included a number of readings; you are not required to read all of them to participate in the discussion; so that you can see what material is out there to read. The one I'd like to start with is the Roman Catholic Church in Orange County (CA). There is another story from the Washington Post about what happens when churches open "too quickly." There is a very good report from the CDC that goes into depth about what happened at "Church A" when they allowed public services. It is a very long read, and you certainly do not need to read all of it, but at least you'll get to see what I am reading. Lastly, I included my Reflection from last week about Safe Church.
May God bless you and surround you with the peace of Christ.
Men on Tuesday at 10 am and Women at 9 am on Thursday.
Here is the link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/5955701807
Looking forward to seeing you on Zoom,
- Dave
Catholic Church Plans to Open in Small Steps on June 14
Alex Wigglesworth, Los Angeles Times
May 23, 2020
The Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange announced plans for public Masses to resume in phases in Orange County starting June 14. The first phase includes allowing small groups of healthy people to gather for limited Mass, church officials said Friday in a news release. The second phase will allow for larger groups; the third will permit choirs and social gatherings. All phases will require participants to follow strict guidelines for social distancing and disinfection, officials said.
“The pandemic is far from over, so we will begin with small steps,” said Diocese of Orange Bishop Kevin Vann in a statement. “Realizing that reinfection is a concern, as we saw occurred in Texas and elsewhere, I am asking our pastors to prepare their churches to ensure that these guidelines are followed without exception.”
On Saturday, officials announced that Orange County has been approved by the state to mount a more aggressive reopening of local businesses.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has vowed to provide plans on reopening churches Monday, after previously saying such reopenings were just “a few weeks away.” In Orange County, the bishop’s advisors have been working on reopening guidelines for weeks, in consultation with county officials and medical experts, the release said. Those over 65 or who have an underlying health condition will be encouraged not to return when churches initially reopen, as will anyone who is sick or lives with someone who is sick. Holy water fonts will remain empty, hymnals will be removed, and people will be instructed not to touch one another, including during greetings. Church rituals that require touching, like the sign of peace, will be suspended. In most cases, churches will be required to limit their capacity to one-third of normal attendance, officials said. More Masses will be offered than usual, and people will be encouraged to come throughout the week to avoid crowding on Sundays. Vann extended a dispensation from the obligation to attend Mass on Sunday to permit the shift. The bishop also granted a temporary dispensation allowing priests to celebrate Mass outside of church buildings, including in gyms, parish halls and outdoor spaces.
Officials said Catholics should check parish websites for specific instructions on how Masses will be held and when attendance will be allowed.
Los Angeles Archbishop José H. Gómez said church service for now remains only via the internet. “I think it’s clear to all of us that it might be possible in the coming future to be able to open physically the churches and receive parishioners to come. It’s not going to be the same in the beginning, because there is the reality of the social distance and also making sure that the churches are sanitized and people are protected when they come to church,” Gomez said in a statement Saturday. “And I insist that that’s the most important thing — that we protect one another. We know that God is with us, but at the same time we have to be careful and make sure that we protect each other in this challenging time," he added. “So, let us keep praying. Let us keep working together."
Two churches reclose after faith leaders and congregants get coronavirus
Lateshia Beachum, Washington Post
May 19, 2020
Churches in states at the forefront of reopening efforts are closing their doors for a second time. Catoosa Baptist Tabernacle in Ringgold, Ga., less than 20 miles away from Chattanooga, Tenn., and Holy Ghost Catholic Church in Houston have indefinitely suspended services after members and leaders tested positive for the coronavirus shortly after reopening. The news of the canceled services comes as a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stated that large gatherings pose risk for coronavirus transmission and called on faith-based organizations to work with local health officials about implementing guidelines for modified activities. The report looked at a rural Arkansas church, where a pastor and his wife attended church events in early March. At least 35 of 92 attendees tested positive for the coronavirus, and three people died. An additional 26 cases and a death occurred in the community from contact with the church cases, the report confirmed. The report underscores the difficulty believers and faith leaders face as the need for the comfort of in-person worship grows stronger and lawmakers yield to a public growing tired of physical distancing measures. The First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released a letter to its general and local leaders on Tuesday that gives a
detailed phased-in approach to worship services. Local Mormon leaders must work the faith’s governing bodies to determine the time and
location of meetings, which can now resume on a limited basis. Church officials will adhere to local government regulations in their phased-in approach to resuming normal activities. Catoosa Baptist Tabernacle picked up its services following its state’s lead. In-person services resumed April 26, just days after Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp allowed fitness centers, bowling alleys and salons to reopen, the Christian Post reported. The day after the church reopened for in-person worship, Kemp allowed private social clubs and restaurants to reopen under certain restrictions. The decision for Catoosa Baptist Tabernacle to shutter its doors again is a result of several families in the congregation testing positive for the virus, despite the church’s caution to space seating six feet apart and to have its doors open to prevent frequent touching of doorknobs.
Around 25 percent of Catoosa Baptist Tabernacle members attended in-person service while the majority remained home and streamed services, according to the outlet. Locking its doors for the second time is an act of “extreme caution,” according to the church. “Our hearts are heavy as some of our families are dealing with the effects of the COVID-19 virus, and we ask for your prayers for each of them as they follow the prescribed protocol and recuperate at home,” the church said in a formal statement, according to the Christian Post. The church did not specify the number of families affected by the virus, according to the outlet.
Holy Ghost parish had suspended services even though Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s stay-at- home order for April 2 to April 30 had exempted places of worship, ABC News reported. The Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston had stopped weekday and Sunday Mass services on
March 18 and only allowed parishes to be open for parishioners seeking prayer, according to the outlet. Holy Ghost parish’s May 2 reopening happened around the time businesses and restaurants unlocked their doors for patrons. The archdiocese permitted its churches to restart services with the expectation that they follow state recommendations for reopening, according to ABC News.
The parish’s 900-seat building downsized the number of churchgoers for Sunday Mass to 179, according to the church in a statement. The May 2 service involved two priests who have since tested positive for the coronavirus. Three members of the church’s Redemptorists religious community were also confirmed to have the virus. “We ask you to please keep everyone impacted by this illness in your prayers,” the church said in a statement. The members who tested positive are asymptomatic and are quarantined, but those who attended the May 2 service are encouraged to monitor their health as a precautionary measure, according to the church. The choice to cease all services for an unspecified amount of time came a day after the Rev. Donnell Kirchner, a priest at the church, died on May 13, of what is believed to be covid-19,
the disease caused by the virus, according to ABC News. Kirchner was diagnosed with pneumonia before dying at the home he shared with others members of the Redemptorists religious order. It is unknown if he was tested for the coronavirus at the urgent care or emergency room he visited before being sent home with medication, according to church officials. Harris County, where the church is located, has the highest number of positive coronavirus cases in the state, ABC News reported.
reflection_safe_church_5.21.20.docx
covid-19_attack_rate_at_church_events.pdf
May God bless you and surround you with the peace of Christ.
Men on Tuesday at 10 am and Women at 9 am on Thursday.
Here is the link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/5955701807
Looking forward to seeing you on Zoom,
- Dave
Catholic Church Plans to Open in Small Steps on June 14
Alex Wigglesworth, Los Angeles Times
May 23, 2020
The Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange announced plans for public Masses to resume in phases in Orange County starting June 14. The first phase includes allowing small groups of healthy people to gather for limited Mass, church officials said Friday in a news release. The second phase will allow for larger groups; the third will permit choirs and social gatherings. All phases will require participants to follow strict guidelines for social distancing and disinfection, officials said.
“The pandemic is far from over, so we will begin with small steps,” said Diocese of Orange Bishop Kevin Vann in a statement. “Realizing that reinfection is a concern, as we saw occurred in Texas and elsewhere, I am asking our pastors to prepare their churches to ensure that these guidelines are followed without exception.”
On Saturday, officials announced that Orange County has been approved by the state to mount a more aggressive reopening of local businesses.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has vowed to provide plans on reopening churches Monday, after previously saying such reopenings were just “a few weeks away.” In Orange County, the bishop’s advisors have been working on reopening guidelines for weeks, in consultation with county officials and medical experts, the release said. Those over 65 or who have an underlying health condition will be encouraged not to return when churches initially reopen, as will anyone who is sick or lives with someone who is sick. Holy water fonts will remain empty, hymnals will be removed, and people will be instructed not to touch one another, including during greetings. Church rituals that require touching, like the sign of peace, will be suspended. In most cases, churches will be required to limit their capacity to one-third of normal attendance, officials said. More Masses will be offered than usual, and people will be encouraged to come throughout the week to avoid crowding on Sundays. Vann extended a dispensation from the obligation to attend Mass on Sunday to permit the shift. The bishop also granted a temporary dispensation allowing priests to celebrate Mass outside of church buildings, including in gyms, parish halls and outdoor spaces.
Officials said Catholics should check parish websites for specific instructions on how Masses will be held and when attendance will be allowed.
Los Angeles Archbishop José H. Gómez said church service for now remains only via the internet. “I think it’s clear to all of us that it might be possible in the coming future to be able to open physically the churches and receive parishioners to come. It’s not going to be the same in the beginning, because there is the reality of the social distance and also making sure that the churches are sanitized and people are protected when they come to church,” Gomez said in a statement Saturday. “And I insist that that’s the most important thing — that we protect one another. We know that God is with us, but at the same time we have to be careful and make sure that we protect each other in this challenging time," he added. “So, let us keep praying. Let us keep working together."
Two churches reclose after faith leaders and congregants get coronavirus
Lateshia Beachum, Washington Post
May 19, 2020
Churches in states at the forefront of reopening efforts are closing their doors for a second time. Catoosa Baptist Tabernacle in Ringgold, Ga., less than 20 miles away from Chattanooga, Tenn., and Holy Ghost Catholic Church in Houston have indefinitely suspended services after members and leaders tested positive for the coronavirus shortly after reopening. The news of the canceled services comes as a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stated that large gatherings pose risk for coronavirus transmission and called on faith-based organizations to work with local health officials about implementing guidelines for modified activities. The report looked at a rural Arkansas church, where a pastor and his wife attended church events in early March. At least 35 of 92 attendees tested positive for the coronavirus, and three people died. An additional 26 cases and a death occurred in the community from contact with the church cases, the report confirmed. The report underscores the difficulty believers and faith leaders face as the need for the comfort of in-person worship grows stronger and lawmakers yield to a public growing tired of physical distancing measures. The First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released a letter to its general and local leaders on Tuesday that gives a
detailed phased-in approach to worship services. Local Mormon leaders must work the faith’s governing bodies to determine the time and
location of meetings, which can now resume on a limited basis. Church officials will adhere to local government regulations in their phased-in approach to resuming normal activities. Catoosa Baptist Tabernacle picked up its services following its state’s lead. In-person services resumed April 26, just days after Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp allowed fitness centers, bowling alleys and salons to reopen, the Christian Post reported. The day after the church reopened for in-person worship, Kemp allowed private social clubs and restaurants to reopen under certain restrictions. The decision for Catoosa Baptist Tabernacle to shutter its doors again is a result of several families in the congregation testing positive for the virus, despite the church’s caution to space seating six feet apart and to have its doors open to prevent frequent touching of doorknobs.
Around 25 percent of Catoosa Baptist Tabernacle members attended in-person service while the majority remained home and streamed services, according to the outlet. Locking its doors for the second time is an act of “extreme caution,” according to the church. “Our hearts are heavy as some of our families are dealing with the effects of the COVID-19 virus, and we ask for your prayers for each of them as they follow the prescribed protocol and recuperate at home,” the church said in a formal statement, according to the Christian Post. The church did not specify the number of families affected by the virus, according to the outlet.
Holy Ghost parish had suspended services even though Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s stay-at- home order for April 2 to April 30 had exempted places of worship, ABC News reported. The Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston had stopped weekday and Sunday Mass services on
March 18 and only allowed parishes to be open for parishioners seeking prayer, according to the outlet. Holy Ghost parish’s May 2 reopening happened around the time businesses and restaurants unlocked their doors for patrons. The archdiocese permitted its churches to restart services with the expectation that they follow state recommendations for reopening, according to ABC News.
The parish’s 900-seat building downsized the number of churchgoers for Sunday Mass to 179, according to the church in a statement. The May 2 service involved two priests who have since tested positive for the coronavirus. Three members of the church’s Redemptorists religious community were also confirmed to have the virus. “We ask you to please keep everyone impacted by this illness in your prayers,” the church said in a statement. The members who tested positive are asymptomatic and are quarantined, but those who attended the May 2 service are encouraged to monitor their health as a precautionary measure, according to the church. The choice to cease all services for an unspecified amount of time came a day after the Rev. Donnell Kirchner, a priest at the church, died on May 13, of what is believed to be covid-19,
the disease caused by the virus, according to ABC News. Kirchner was diagnosed with pneumonia before dying at the home he shared with others members of the Redemptorists religious order. It is unknown if he was tested for the coronavirus at the urgent care or emergency room he visited before being sent home with medication, according to church officials. Harris County, where the church is located, has the highest number of positive coronavirus cases in the state, ABC News reported.
reflection_safe_church_5.21.20.docx
covid-19_attack_rate_at_church_events.pdf
Tuesday, May 19
There is an argument going on in Christianity - can a loving God send people to hell? This article helps to articulate both sides of the issue. ... and it has nothing to do with the pandemic. Yay!
Looking forward to seeing you on Zoom,
- Dave
Bart Ehrman’s Latest Attack on Christianity
The Gospel Coalition April 13, Randy Alcorn
[Bart Ehrman is professor of religious studies at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He also teaches eight of The Great Courses’s widely acclaimed Bible and Christianity classes, and has a part in 78 others. The subtitles of Ehrman’s books, including his five New York Times bestsellers, capture his premises: e.g., Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, How Jesus Became God: the Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee, and Forged: Writing in the Name of God—Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are.]
Whenever I read an Ehrman book, déjà vu kicks in. His core message is always: “Christians are dead wrong; I know because I used to be one before I became enlightened.” Each of Ehrman’s books deals with something else Christians are wrong about; and his newest, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife, is another volume in his expanding canon of deconversion doctrine.
Ehrman speaks with the authoritative tone of a historian-philosopher, a wise sage, unfolding humanity’s preoccupation with death and the fear of death. Beginning with the Epic of Gilgamesh, he then examines Homer, Virgil, Plato, and other ancients. Along the way he interjects his belief that there’s no need to fear death, since it’s simply ceasing to exist (the very thing many people fear).
Arriving at the Bible, simply one more myth to Ehrman, he presents what he calls the “older Hebrew view” that death is the final end, followed by nonexistence. He then addresses the “later Hebrew position” on resurrection and Judgment Day from the intertestamental era.
While he says little to refute pre-Christian views, once Ehrman gets to the historic Christian view of the afterlife, he conducts an all-out verbal siege. But he doesn’t rant and rave; he calmly presents his assertions, such as that Jesus and Paul disagreed on much, including the way of salvation, but shared a disbelief in an eternal hell. He says both of them, and the author of Revelation (whom he’s certain wasn’t the apostle John), taught annihilationism. He simply ignores or reinterprets passages to the contrary (e.g. Isa. 66:24; Dan. 12:2; Matt. 25:41, 46; Mark 9:43, 48; 2 Thess. 1:9; Jude 7, 13; Rev. 14:9–11; 20:10, 14– 15).
Interestingly, though Ehrman doesn’t believe there is a heaven, he leaves room for its possibility:
I certainly don’t think the notion of a happy afterlife is as irrational as the fires of hell; at least it does not contradict the notion of a benevolent creative force behind the universe. So I’m completely open to the idea and deep down even hopeful about it. But I have to say that at the end of the day I really don’t believe it either. (294)
However, Ehrman is certain he isn’t wrong about hell:
Are we really to think that God is some kind of transcendent sadist intent on torturing people (or at least willing to allow them to be tortured) for all eternity, a divine being infinitely more vengeful than anyone who has ever existed? (293–94)
At the end of the book Ehrman quotes from ex-evangelical Rob Bell:
In [universalism], the love of God knows no bounds and cannot be overcome. . . . In the words of one modern Christian author, once himself a committed evangelical with a passion for the biblical witness, in the end “Love Wins.”
Ehrman seems to offer universalism as a backup position to his naturalistic worldview. He’s saying, “I don’t believe in an afterlife, but if there is one then everyone will be in heaven.”
He goes on to essentially applaud the rise of universalism in Christian churches: “Harkening back to Origen, and Paul before him, these committed believers maintain that in the end no one will be able to resist the love of God. . . . Everyone will be saved.”
Opinion Isn’t Proof
I admire Ehrman’s skill as a persuasive communicator. Were he a lawyer he could take either side in any case and would likely persuade the jury. (Hence the vulnerability of uninformed Christians who read his books.) Yet Ehrman frequently states what he believes as if opinion constitutes proof. For instance, he emphatically says, “There was a time in human history when no one on the planet believed that there would be a judgment day at the end of time” (8). Really? No one? Does he have private access to an ancient poll taken of every living person?
Ehrman, after denying the Old Testament ever speaks of resurrection, explains in a footnote: Some readers may wonder why I am not contrasting this view of Job with the famous passage of Job 19:25–26: “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God” (ESV).
Ehrman negates Job by citing a Jewish scholar who says, “The text has been garbled and we cannot tell exactly what Job intended to say.” This scholar adds, “Job is almost certainly not talking about seeing God in the afterlife.” I consulted 12 major translations by different teams of Hebrew scholars, some of whom don’t hold to biblical inerrancy. Their translations contain only minor differences. All of them suggest Job is indeed speaking of seeing God in the afterlife.
This is just one example of Ehrman’s practice of either: (1) inaccurately conveying what the Bible says; (2) accurately conveying what the Bible says, then declaring it’s wrong; (3) arguing the text really doesn’t say what Christians believe it says (why does that matter if what it really says is also wrong?); and (4) citing Scripture in support of his contentions, even though he regularly dismisses Scripture’s validity.
When researching my book Heaven, I read more than 150 books on the subject, including many I disagreed with. And, in reading Ehrman’s book, I saw no evidence that he had read a single evangelical book on heaven, though he did manage to cite one on hell. While his footnotes reflect extensive research in ancient Greek texts, he seems largely unaware of what the Bible or evangelical Christians claim about heaven—the new earth. He refers to Revelation 21:1, and recognizes the teaching of bodily resurrection, yet doesn’t develop what the Bible teaches about the eternal dwelling place of God’s people.
With a few exceptions when he admits he’s not certain, I’m struck by Ehrman’s usual unswerving confidence that he is 100 percent right. He is, just like evangelicals, relying on an ultimate authority—but instead of the Bible, it’s his own intellect.
As he does in most of his books, Ehrman seeks to build credibility by sharing his testimony of conversion to unbelief. He professed faith at age 15 at Youth for Christ, then attended Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College. He was a card-carrying evangelical. His exodus from evangelicalism began when he went to Princeton Seminary, where he lost his faith in the Bible and Jesus:
[At Princeton] my scholarship led me to realize that the Bible was a very human book, with human mistakes and biases and culturally conditioned views in it. And realizing that made me begin to wonder if
the beliefs in God and Christ I had held and urged on others were themselves partially biased, culturally conditioned, or even mistaken. These doubts disturbed me not only because I wanted very much to know the Truth but also because I was afraid of the possible eternal consequences of getting it wrong. . . . What if I ended up no longer believing and then realized too late that my unfaithful change of heart had all been a huge blunder?
Ehrman appears to believe his studies at Princeton were guided by objective truth and his rejection of the Christian worldview was a courageous submission to this truth.
He claims, “In this book I will not be urging you either to believe or disbelieve in the existence of heaven and hell.” No reader could imagine Ehrman is urging belief in heaven or hell. But it seems intellectually dishonest to say he isn’t encouraging disbelief in them. Arguably that is a central purpose of the book.
In fact, to understand Heaven and Hell and Ehrman’s other writings, we must grasp that his deconversion redirected, rather than removed, his evangelistic zeal. Many people have quietly lost their faith, but Ehrman didn’t go gently into the night. Instead, he has become an eloquent apostle of deconversion, and his disciples are many.
While critics of the faith come and go, I regard Ehrman as one of the most significant modern opponents to the Christian faith. He’s a secular prophet to certain evangelical and ex-evangelical readers.
I feel sorry for Bart Ehrman, but I’m even more saddened at the harm done to those who embrace his teachings. We who believe the Bible must recognize this is about our adversary, Satan, who comes to destroy and devours people through persuasive arguments, and who when he lies, “speaks his native language” (John 8:44, NIV).
In a time when “everyone has a story,” people listen to stories without discernment. The personal testimony historically has been used by faith-affirmers to reach the lost. Now it has become a tool of faith-deniers to reach the found.
There are still wonderful conversion stories, and we should tell them. But we should also teach our children to cultivate their intellects and equip them to refute falsehood. And we should demonstrate the transcendent vibrancy of a generous, Christ-centered, and people-loving life, enlightened by the authentic God-man Jesus, full of grace and truth.
Finally, as we call on God to do the miraculous work of conversion in people’s lives, we “must hold firmly to the trustworthy message as it has been taught, so that [we] can encourage others by sound doctrine and refute those who oppose it” (Titus 1:9).
Randy Alcorn is the founder and director of Eternal Perspective Ministries (EPM) and the author of more than 40 books, including Does God Want Us to be Happy?, Heaven, and The Treasure Principle.
Looking forward to seeing you on Zoom,
- Dave
Bart Ehrman’s Latest Attack on Christianity
The Gospel Coalition April 13, Randy Alcorn
[Bart Ehrman is professor of religious studies at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He also teaches eight of The Great Courses’s widely acclaimed Bible and Christianity classes, and has a part in 78 others. The subtitles of Ehrman’s books, including his five New York Times bestsellers, capture his premises: e.g., Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, How Jesus Became God: the Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee, and Forged: Writing in the Name of God—Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are.]
Whenever I read an Ehrman book, déjà vu kicks in. His core message is always: “Christians are dead wrong; I know because I used to be one before I became enlightened.” Each of Ehrman’s books deals with something else Christians are wrong about; and his newest, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife, is another volume in his expanding canon of deconversion doctrine.
Ehrman speaks with the authoritative tone of a historian-philosopher, a wise sage, unfolding humanity’s preoccupation with death and the fear of death. Beginning with the Epic of Gilgamesh, he then examines Homer, Virgil, Plato, and other ancients. Along the way he interjects his belief that there’s no need to fear death, since it’s simply ceasing to exist (the very thing many people fear).
Arriving at the Bible, simply one more myth to Ehrman, he presents what he calls the “older Hebrew view” that death is the final end, followed by nonexistence. He then addresses the “later Hebrew position” on resurrection and Judgment Day from the intertestamental era.
While he says little to refute pre-Christian views, once Ehrman gets to the historic Christian view of the afterlife, he conducts an all-out verbal siege. But he doesn’t rant and rave; he calmly presents his assertions, such as that Jesus and Paul disagreed on much, including the way of salvation, but shared a disbelief in an eternal hell. He says both of them, and the author of Revelation (whom he’s certain wasn’t the apostle John), taught annihilationism. He simply ignores or reinterprets passages to the contrary (e.g. Isa. 66:24; Dan. 12:2; Matt. 25:41, 46; Mark 9:43, 48; 2 Thess. 1:9; Jude 7, 13; Rev. 14:9–11; 20:10, 14– 15).
Interestingly, though Ehrman doesn’t believe there is a heaven, he leaves room for its possibility:
I certainly don’t think the notion of a happy afterlife is as irrational as the fires of hell; at least it does not contradict the notion of a benevolent creative force behind the universe. So I’m completely open to the idea and deep down even hopeful about it. But I have to say that at the end of the day I really don’t believe it either. (294)
However, Ehrman is certain he isn’t wrong about hell:
Are we really to think that God is some kind of transcendent sadist intent on torturing people (or at least willing to allow them to be tortured) for all eternity, a divine being infinitely more vengeful than anyone who has ever existed? (293–94)
At the end of the book Ehrman quotes from ex-evangelical Rob Bell:
In [universalism], the love of God knows no bounds and cannot be overcome. . . . In the words of one modern Christian author, once himself a committed evangelical with a passion for the biblical witness, in the end “Love Wins.”
Ehrman seems to offer universalism as a backup position to his naturalistic worldview. He’s saying, “I don’t believe in an afterlife, but if there is one then everyone will be in heaven.”
He goes on to essentially applaud the rise of universalism in Christian churches: “Harkening back to Origen, and Paul before him, these committed believers maintain that in the end no one will be able to resist the love of God. . . . Everyone will be saved.”
Opinion Isn’t Proof
I admire Ehrman’s skill as a persuasive communicator. Were he a lawyer he could take either side in any case and would likely persuade the jury. (Hence the vulnerability of uninformed Christians who read his books.) Yet Ehrman frequently states what he believes as if opinion constitutes proof. For instance, he emphatically says, “There was a time in human history when no one on the planet believed that there would be a judgment day at the end of time” (8). Really? No one? Does he have private access to an ancient poll taken of every living person?
Ehrman, after denying the Old Testament ever speaks of resurrection, explains in a footnote: Some readers may wonder why I am not contrasting this view of Job with the famous passage of Job 19:25–26: “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God” (ESV).
Ehrman negates Job by citing a Jewish scholar who says, “The text has been garbled and we cannot tell exactly what Job intended to say.” This scholar adds, “Job is almost certainly not talking about seeing God in the afterlife.” I consulted 12 major translations by different teams of Hebrew scholars, some of whom don’t hold to biblical inerrancy. Their translations contain only minor differences. All of them suggest Job is indeed speaking of seeing God in the afterlife.
This is just one example of Ehrman’s practice of either: (1) inaccurately conveying what the Bible says; (2) accurately conveying what the Bible says, then declaring it’s wrong; (3) arguing the text really doesn’t say what Christians believe it says (why does that matter if what it really says is also wrong?); and (4) citing Scripture in support of his contentions, even though he regularly dismisses Scripture’s validity.
When researching my book Heaven, I read more than 150 books on the subject, including many I disagreed with. And, in reading Ehrman’s book, I saw no evidence that he had read a single evangelical book on heaven, though he did manage to cite one on hell. While his footnotes reflect extensive research in ancient Greek texts, he seems largely unaware of what the Bible or evangelical Christians claim about heaven—the new earth. He refers to Revelation 21:1, and recognizes the teaching of bodily resurrection, yet doesn’t develop what the Bible teaches about the eternal dwelling place of God’s people.
With a few exceptions when he admits he’s not certain, I’m struck by Ehrman’s usual unswerving confidence that he is 100 percent right. He is, just like evangelicals, relying on an ultimate authority—but instead of the Bible, it’s his own intellect.
As he does in most of his books, Ehrman seeks to build credibility by sharing his testimony of conversion to unbelief. He professed faith at age 15 at Youth for Christ, then attended Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College. He was a card-carrying evangelical. His exodus from evangelicalism began when he went to Princeton Seminary, where he lost his faith in the Bible and Jesus:
[At Princeton] my scholarship led me to realize that the Bible was a very human book, with human mistakes and biases and culturally conditioned views in it. And realizing that made me begin to wonder if
the beliefs in God and Christ I had held and urged on others were themselves partially biased, culturally conditioned, or even mistaken. These doubts disturbed me not only because I wanted very much to know the Truth but also because I was afraid of the possible eternal consequences of getting it wrong. . . . What if I ended up no longer believing and then realized too late that my unfaithful change of heart had all been a huge blunder?
Ehrman appears to believe his studies at Princeton were guided by objective truth and his rejection of the Christian worldview was a courageous submission to this truth.
He claims, “In this book I will not be urging you either to believe or disbelieve in the existence of heaven and hell.” No reader could imagine Ehrman is urging belief in heaven or hell. But it seems intellectually dishonest to say he isn’t encouraging disbelief in them. Arguably that is a central purpose of the book.
In fact, to understand Heaven and Hell and Ehrman’s other writings, we must grasp that his deconversion redirected, rather than removed, his evangelistic zeal. Many people have quietly lost their faith, but Ehrman didn’t go gently into the night. Instead, he has become an eloquent apostle of deconversion, and his disciples are many.
While critics of the faith come and go, I regard Ehrman as one of the most significant modern opponents to the Christian faith. He’s a secular prophet to certain evangelical and ex-evangelical readers.
I feel sorry for Bart Ehrman, but I’m even more saddened at the harm done to those who embrace his teachings. We who believe the Bible must recognize this is about our adversary, Satan, who comes to destroy and devours people through persuasive arguments, and who when he lies, “speaks his native language” (John 8:44, NIV).
In a time when “everyone has a story,” people listen to stories without discernment. The personal testimony historically has been used by faith-affirmers to reach the lost. Now it has become a tool of faith-deniers to reach the found.
There are still wonderful conversion stories, and we should tell them. But we should also teach our children to cultivate their intellects and equip them to refute falsehood. And we should demonstrate the transcendent vibrancy of a generous, Christ-centered, and people-loving life, enlightened by the authentic God-man Jesus, full of grace and truth.
Finally, as we call on God to do the miraculous work of conversion in people’s lives, we “must hold firmly to the trustworthy message as it has been taught, so that [we] can encourage others by sound doctrine and refute those who oppose it” (Titus 1:9).
Randy Alcorn is the founder and director of Eternal Perspective Ministries (EPM) and the author of more than 40 books, including Does God Want Us to be Happy?, Heaven, and The Treasure Principle.
Tuesday, May 12
I gathered a couple articles but didn't know how to put them together until I read one from the Washington Post and then it clicked. There are three pieces to this week's reading which center around religion, government, and Covid-19. Two are about Christian churches in the U.S. and one is about Islamic leaders and their response to the global pandemic.
Hope to see you at the discussion group!
-Dave
Bill Barr and the Bill of Rights The feds stand with a Virginia church cited for breaking lockdown.
WSJ, May 5, 2020
When Attorney General Bill Barr said last month that the federal government might intervene if state lockdowns go too far, critics derided him. Here’s what it means in practice: On Sunday the Justice Department backed a Virginia church whose pastor was cited for holding a service with 16 people.
Governor Ralph Northam’s lockdown prohibits many gatherings, including religious ones, of more than 10 souls. Flouting the restrictions is punishable by up to a year in jail and a $2,500 fine. The Lighthouse Fellowship Church, on the island of Chincoteague, exceeded the Governor’s cap by six. Its worshipers were observing six-foot social distancing, the church says in a lawsuit, and they were inside a sanctuary for 225. Nevertheless, the town’s police gave the pastor a citation and summons.
The church says this is unequal treatment, and it submits photographs to make the point. One of them is a recent picture of Mr. Northam at a coronavirus press briefing. At least 21 people are visible in the room. Businesses deemed essential, meanwhile, attract hundreds. The church shows a photo of a Walmart parking lot, where its lawyers counted 268 cars. Virginia’s state-run liquor stores are open and reportedly had their best March on record.
On Sunday the Justice Department weighed in, arguing that the church “has demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits of its claim under the Free Exercise Clause of the U.S. Constitution.” Therefore, the burden is on Virginia “to demonstrate that it has compelling reasons to treat Plaintiff differently than similar non-religious businesses.”
The Justice Department’s brief adds that Mr. Northam’s orders allow nonretail professional businesses to stay open, with no limit on “the ability of the workforce to assemble in conference rooms.” Virginia hasn’t filed a response yet, but the feds say it will be difficult to justify “a greater restriction on religious gatherings than similar secular gatherings.”
When pressed last month about whether New Jersey’s lockdown comported with the U.S. Constitution, Governor Phil Murphy said the question was above his pay grade: “I wasn’t thinking of the Bill of Rights when we did this.” We’re grateful Mr. Barr is.
**********
What Islamists Are Doing and Saying on COVID-19 Crisis
Andrew Hanna, Wilson Center, April 2, 2020
Islamic governments, parties, militias and religious leaders reacted in disparate ways to the eruption of the COVID-19 coronavirus across the Middle East and North Africa. ISIS instructed its followers not to travel to Europe, an epicenter of the disease. Conservative Sunni clerics cited conspiracy theories that blamed Shiites and atheists for triggering the worldwide pandemic. Some clerics in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Morocco even debated whether the outbreak was divine punishment against nonbelievers. Moderate Islamist parties collaborated with governments and offered followers practical advice on how to avoid contracting the virus.
The region hosts a wide spectrum of Islamic movements and parties or governments. At one end, they include moderate political groups such as Ennahda, a self-described Muslim democratic party and part of Tunisia’s coalitions governments since 2011. At the other end are extremist jihadi movements, such as al Qaeda and the Islamic State for Iraq and Syria (ISIS). In between are governments led by Islamist parties, as in Turkey, or that rule based on Sharia, as in Saudi Arabia.
International Union of Muslim Scholars (Qatar): On March 3, Yusuf al Qaradawi, chairman of the International Union for Muslim Scholars, issued a fatwa permitting Muslims to pray in their homes rather than attend Friday services at mosques. By March 14, IUMS issued an explicit call to suspend all congregational prayers.
Al Azhar (Egypt): On January 25, Sunni cleric Ahmed Issa al Maasrawi of Egypt’s Al Azhar University tweeted that the viral outbreak came “after China isolated more than 5 million Uighur Muslims.” But the country's top religious authority took the virus more seriously after Egypt confirmed its first case. On March 15, the university’s Council of Senior Scholars said public authorities could cancel Friday prayers if necessary.
Iraq: Iraq had confirmed its first case of COVID-19 on February 24. Four days later, Shiite scholar Hadi Al Modarresi said in a video that “Allah sent the disease” to punish China. On March 10, Moadarresi confirmed in a tweet that he tested positive for the virus.
Jordan: On March 2, Jordan confirmed its first case of the coronavirus in a person who had traveled to Italy. On March 8, Sunni scholar Ahmad al Shahrouri said that Jews were “more dangerous” than the coronavirus. Speaking on Yarmouk TV, a Brotherhood-affiliated channel, he said that Muslims could be “saved from these deadly diseases” through pursuit of jihad.
Morocco: On March 2, Morocco confirmed its first case of the coronavirus in a Moroccan man who had been living in Italy. On March 15, Hassan al Kettani, a prominent Salafist preacher, challenged the kingdom’s plan to close mosques. He posted a fatwa on Facebook that said the Prophet Mohammed “never authorized the closure of mosques or suspension of group prayer.” Omar Al Haddoushi, another leading Moroccan Salafist, echoed al Kettani and called the disease a “soldier of God” that conquered “great nations,” such as China, who “do not believe in God.”
Andrew Hanna is a research assistant at the U.S. Institute of Peace, which partners with the Woodrow Wilson Center on The Islamists.
**********
Some await God to save them from covid-19. They should consider the helpers he sent.
Colbert King, Washington Post, May 8, 2020
[The editorial starts with the joke of the man in a flood who sent away a rowboat, a motorboat and a helicopter because he believed God would save him. In heaven, God asked him why he ignored the people he sent to save him.] This old joke reminds me of some leaders in faith-based communities who believe that they and their congregations ought to ignore the guidance of federal health officials on responding to the novel coronavirus. They remain firm in their conviction that the shape and form of their rituals and rites of religious services must occur in the same place, at the same time and with the same faces; that without these conditions, communication with the Creator is somehow disabled. Thus, their certainty that covid-19 is an evil from which control and protection can only come direct from the Almighty. So, hugging and holding hands, passing the collection tray, and practicing a physical communion goes on, as if covid-19 stops at the sanctuary’s doors.
Bishop Gerald Glenn, founder and pastor of New Deliverance Evangelistic Church in Chesterfield, Va., disregarded the authorities urging the public to practice social distancing. He held an in-person service on March 22, telling the congregation, “I firmly believe that God is larger than this dreaded virus” and that he was going to keep on preaching “unless I’m in jail or in the hospital.” During an Easter Sunday address, it was announced that Glenn died of covid-19. Four family members all contracted the virus as well.
Pastor Tony Spell of Life Tabernacle Church near Baton Rouge ignored his governor’s order against gatherings of more than 50 people by hosting Sunday services that have numbered in the hundreds. As for the risk of his congregation getting covid-19, Spell said: “It’s not a concern. The virus, we believe, is politically motivated. We hold our religious rights dear, and we are going to assemble no matter what someone says.”
Pastor Gene Gouge at Liberty Baptist in Hickory, N.C., is having none of the public health announcements. “The news media is pure evil, communist propaganda,” he said. “Ninety-five percent of everything that has gone on about the last month or two is a mirage. It is an illusion, a delusion. It ain’t real.” Which, of course, are messages that they are privileged to preach.
There are, however, some people of faith, of which I am one, who believe that practitioners of modern medicine — the diagnosticians and treatment specialists, the scientists seeking cures for diseases, the public health officials providing science-based guidance on how to prevent covid- 19 from entering and spreading in our communities — might also be answers to our prayers. Some of us are stuck up on a rooftop in a flood. When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s motorboat happens along and invites us to come aboard, we say never mind, denying that the danger even exists and looking for a higher power. Then Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, piloting a helicopter, shouts down: “Grab this rope; I can lift you to safety.” But we shake our heads, looking instead to the heavens for rescue. Fellow believers, might we humbly consider who sent them and all those other courageous and skilled front-line workers our way?
Hope to see you at the discussion group!
-Dave
Bill Barr and the Bill of Rights The feds stand with a Virginia church cited for breaking lockdown.
WSJ, May 5, 2020
When Attorney General Bill Barr said last month that the federal government might intervene if state lockdowns go too far, critics derided him. Here’s what it means in practice: On Sunday the Justice Department backed a Virginia church whose pastor was cited for holding a service with 16 people.
Governor Ralph Northam’s lockdown prohibits many gatherings, including religious ones, of more than 10 souls. Flouting the restrictions is punishable by up to a year in jail and a $2,500 fine. The Lighthouse Fellowship Church, on the island of Chincoteague, exceeded the Governor’s cap by six. Its worshipers were observing six-foot social distancing, the church says in a lawsuit, and they were inside a sanctuary for 225. Nevertheless, the town’s police gave the pastor a citation and summons.
The church says this is unequal treatment, and it submits photographs to make the point. One of them is a recent picture of Mr. Northam at a coronavirus press briefing. At least 21 people are visible in the room. Businesses deemed essential, meanwhile, attract hundreds. The church shows a photo of a Walmart parking lot, where its lawyers counted 268 cars. Virginia’s state-run liquor stores are open and reportedly had their best March on record.
On Sunday the Justice Department weighed in, arguing that the church “has demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits of its claim under the Free Exercise Clause of the U.S. Constitution.” Therefore, the burden is on Virginia “to demonstrate that it has compelling reasons to treat Plaintiff differently than similar non-religious businesses.”
The Justice Department’s brief adds that Mr. Northam’s orders allow nonretail professional businesses to stay open, with no limit on “the ability of the workforce to assemble in conference rooms.” Virginia hasn’t filed a response yet, but the feds say it will be difficult to justify “a greater restriction on religious gatherings than similar secular gatherings.”
When pressed last month about whether New Jersey’s lockdown comported with the U.S. Constitution, Governor Phil Murphy said the question was above his pay grade: “I wasn’t thinking of the Bill of Rights when we did this.” We’re grateful Mr. Barr is.
**********
What Islamists Are Doing and Saying on COVID-19 Crisis
Andrew Hanna, Wilson Center, April 2, 2020
Islamic governments, parties, militias and religious leaders reacted in disparate ways to the eruption of the COVID-19 coronavirus across the Middle East and North Africa. ISIS instructed its followers not to travel to Europe, an epicenter of the disease. Conservative Sunni clerics cited conspiracy theories that blamed Shiites and atheists for triggering the worldwide pandemic. Some clerics in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Morocco even debated whether the outbreak was divine punishment against nonbelievers. Moderate Islamist parties collaborated with governments and offered followers practical advice on how to avoid contracting the virus.
The region hosts a wide spectrum of Islamic movements and parties or governments. At one end, they include moderate political groups such as Ennahda, a self-described Muslim democratic party and part of Tunisia’s coalitions governments since 2011. At the other end are extremist jihadi movements, such as al Qaeda and the Islamic State for Iraq and Syria (ISIS). In between are governments led by Islamist parties, as in Turkey, or that rule based on Sharia, as in Saudi Arabia.
International Union of Muslim Scholars (Qatar): On March 3, Yusuf al Qaradawi, chairman of the International Union for Muslim Scholars, issued a fatwa permitting Muslims to pray in their homes rather than attend Friday services at mosques. By March 14, IUMS issued an explicit call to suspend all congregational prayers.
Al Azhar (Egypt): On January 25, Sunni cleric Ahmed Issa al Maasrawi of Egypt’s Al Azhar University tweeted that the viral outbreak came “after China isolated more than 5 million Uighur Muslims.” But the country's top religious authority took the virus more seriously after Egypt confirmed its first case. On March 15, the university’s Council of Senior Scholars said public authorities could cancel Friday prayers if necessary.
Iraq: Iraq had confirmed its first case of COVID-19 on February 24. Four days later, Shiite scholar Hadi Al Modarresi said in a video that “Allah sent the disease” to punish China. On March 10, Moadarresi confirmed in a tweet that he tested positive for the virus.
Jordan: On March 2, Jordan confirmed its first case of the coronavirus in a person who had traveled to Italy. On March 8, Sunni scholar Ahmad al Shahrouri said that Jews were “more dangerous” than the coronavirus. Speaking on Yarmouk TV, a Brotherhood-affiliated channel, he said that Muslims could be “saved from these deadly diseases” through pursuit of jihad.
Morocco: On March 2, Morocco confirmed its first case of the coronavirus in a Moroccan man who had been living in Italy. On March 15, Hassan al Kettani, a prominent Salafist preacher, challenged the kingdom’s plan to close mosques. He posted a fatwa on Facebook that said the Prophet Mohammed “never authorized the closure of mosques or suspension of group prayer.” Omar Al Haddoushi, another leading Moroccan Salafist, echoed al Kettani and called the disease a “soldier of God” that conquered “great nations,” such as China, who “do not believe in God.”
Andrew Hanna is a research assistant at the U.S. Institute of Peace, which partners with the Woodrow Wilson Center on The Islamists.
**********
Some await God to save them from covid-19. They should consider the helpers he sent.
Colbert King, Washington Post, May 8, 2020
[The editorial starts with the joke of the man in a flood who sent away a rowboat, a motorboat and a helicopter because he believed God would save him. In heaven, God asked him why he ignored the people he sent to save him.] This old joke reminds me of some leaders in faith-based communities who believe that they and their congregations ought to ignore the guidance of federal health officials on responding to the novel coronavirus. They remain firm in their conviction that the shape and form of their rituals and rites of religious services must occur in the same place, at the same time and with the same faces; that without these conditions, communication with the Creator is somehow disabled. Thus, their certainty that covid-19 is an evil from which control and protection can only come direct from the Almighty. So, hugging and holding hands, passing the collection tray, and practicing a physical communion goes on, as if covid-19 stops at the sanctuary’s doors.
Bishop Gerald Glenn, founder and pastor of New Deliverance Evangelistic Church in Chesterfield, Va., disregarded the authorities urging the public to practice social distancing. He held an in-person service on March 22, telling the congregation, “I firmly believe that God is larger than this dreaded virus” and that he was going to keep on preaching “unless I’m in jail or in the hospital.” During an Easter Sunday address, it was announced that Glenn died of covid-19. Four family members all contracted the virus as well.
Pastor Tony Spell of Life Tabernacle Church near Baton Rouge ignored his governor’s order against gatherings of more than 50 people by hosting Sunday services that have numbered in the hundreds. As for the risk of his congregation getting covid-19, Spell said: “It’s not a concern. The virus, we believe, is politically motivated. We hold our religious rights dear, and we are going to assemble no matter what someone says.”
Pastor Gene Gouge at Liberty Baptist in Hickory, N.C., is having none of the public health announcements. “The news media is pure evil, communist propaganda,” he said. “Ninety-five percent of everything that has gone on about the last month or two is a mirage. It is an illusion, a delusion. It ain’t real.” Which, of course, are messages that they are privileged to preach.
There are, however, some people of faith, of which I am one, who believe that practitioners of modern medicine — the diagnosticians and treatment specialists, the scientists seeking cures for diseases, the public health officials providing science-based guidance on how to prevent covid- 19 from entering and spreading in our communities — might also be answers to our prayers. Some of us are stuck up on a rooftop in a flood. When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s motorboat happens along and invites us to come aboard, we say never mind, denying that the danger even exists and looking for a higher power. Then Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, piloting a helicopter, shouts down: “Grab this rope; I can lift you to safety.” But we shake our heads, looking instead to the heavens for rescue. Fellow believers, might we humbly consider who sent them and all those other courageous and skilled front-line workers our way?
Tuesday, May 5
Plate, Essays by Readers The Christian Century April 28, 2020
We gave our readers a one-word writing prompt: “Plate.” We received many compelling reflections. Below is a selection.
I remember sitting parked by the roadside once, terribly depressed and afraid about my daughter’s illness and what was going on in our family, when out of nowhere a car came along down the highway with a license plate that bore on it the one word out of all the words in the dictionary that I needed most to see exactly then. The word was TRUST. What do you call a moment like that? Something to laugh off as the kind of joke life plays on us every once in a while? The word of God? I am willing to believe that maybe it was something of both, but for me it was an epiphany. The owner of the car turned out to be, as I’d suspected, a trust officer in a bank, and not long ago, having read what I wrote of the incident, he found out where I lived and one afternoon brought me the license plate itself, which sits propped up on a bookshelf in my house to this day. It is rusty around the edges and a little battered, and it is also as holy a relic as I have ever seen.
Frederick Buechner Telling Secrets
Five years ago my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and moved in with me. She went from caring for herself to being totally dependent. She looked like my mom, but she no longer took showers or washed her clothes. She could not remember if she had taken her medication. And she was no longer eating. How would I get her to eat?
The doctor suggested medication to activate her appetite. Friends suggested preparing her favorite meals. But she just kept telling me, “I am not hungry. It’s too much.” She would push the plate away.
Out of frustration, I started doing for her what she did for me as a child. I grabbed a small salad plate and put a little food on it. “Just a spoonful,” I said. And she ate—she cleaned her plate. It worked again the next day.
Maybe the medicine was finally kicking in? Maybe I had finally fixed a meal she really liked? Then it hit me: she’d been saying meals were “too much.” Maybe the amount of food that most of us take for granted on a regular dinner plate was just overwhelming for her.
Now when we go out for dinner, I ask for a small plate and then take whatever meal is served and divide it. I re-plate it with just a spoonful of potatoes, a quarter of the piece of chicken, just three or four florets of broccoli. She smiles and begins to eat.
Walking this journey with my mother has been full of trial and error. One important lesson is that I need to listen more and trust that even though she is sick, she is still telling me what she needs. And when life feels like it is just too much, I can’t give up. I just try enjoying the meal in a smaller potion, on a smaller plate.
Donna Oberkreser Clearwater, Florida
When I was the new pastor of a small congregation, I went to visit Audrey, who hadn’t been seen at church in a while. I knocked on the apartment door and was met by the formidable presence of Audrey’s housekeeper, Sarah. She was a no-nonsense person with little patience for such intrusions. Audrey, however, spoke up from the living room to invite me in.
I went in and was warmly welcomed by the white-haired woman seated comfortably in her recliner. We spent the next several minutes talking about the wall of photographs. The conversation shifted to the church, and Audrey walked me through the ins and outs of living in a seaside community. She asked about my family, where I grew up, and what I thought of the congregation and its ministries.
About a half hour into the visit, Audrey asked if I would serve her communion. A flush of panic flooded me: I had no bread, no juice, and nothing to serve them in even if I had them. My portable set was back in the church office, where it wasn’t going to be of much help. Regaining my composure, I asked if there might be some bread and a bottle of grape juice around. Sarah rolled her eyes, but at Audrey’s insistence, she went hunting through the cabinets. After a few moments of searching and a lot of unnecessary noise, she pulled out a package of saltines and a small carton of prune juice. Audrey looked flustered and embarrassed. But we would make do. I asked for a cup and a small plate. Sarah pulled out a chipped, badly stained coffee cup and a plastic dessert plate with a crack running through it. Foolishly, seeking to try to make the moment sacred, I asked, “Do you have something a bit nicer?” “No,” Sarah grumbled, “this will have to do.”
I looked wistfully at the open door of the cabinet, where I could see a lovely small cut glass plate, but I gave in. I put the saltines on the plate and took the cup from Sarah, pouring in the dark brown juice. I asked her if she wanted to receive communion too; she rolled her eyes and said no.
As I proceeded through the short service and shared the plate and cup with Audrey, I knew Sarah was watching my every move. What startled me, however, was that she was also mouthing the responses: she knew the service by heart. I wondered why she chose not to join us at the table, but I accept that her silent responses were sufficient before God.
Ricki Aiello Enfield, Connecticut
We gave our readers a one-word writing prompt: “Plate.” We received many compelling reflections. Below is a selection.
I remember sitting parked by the roadside once, terribly depressed and afraid about my daughter’s illness and what was going on in our family, when out of nowhere a car came along down the highway with a license plate that bore on it the one word out of all the words in the dictionary that I needed most to see exactly then. The word was TRUST. What do you call a moment like that? Something to laugh off as the kind of joke life plays on us every once in a while? The word of God? I am willing to believe that maybe it was something of both, but for me it was an epiphany. The owner of the car turned out to be, as I’d suspected, a trust officer in a bank, and not long ago, having read what I wrote of the incident, he found out where I lived and one afternoon brought me the license plate itself, which sits propped up on a bookshelf in my house to this day. It is rusty around the edges and a little battered, and it is also as holy a relic as I have ever seen.
Frederick Buechner Telling Secrets
Five years ago my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and moved in with me. She went from caring for herself to being totally dependent. She looked like my mom, but she no longer took showers or washed her clothes. She could not remember if she had taken her medication. And she was no longer eating. How would I get her to eat?
The doctor suggested medication to activate her appetite. Friends suggested preparing her favorite meals. But she just kept telling me, “I am not hungry. It’s too much.” She would push the plate away.
Out of frustration, I started doing for her what she did for me as a child. I grabbed a small salad plate and put a little food on it. “Just a spoonful,” I said. And she ate—she cleaned her plate. It worked again the next day.
Maybe the medicine was finally kicking in? Maybe I had finally fixed a meal she really liked? Then it hit me: she’d been saying meals were “too much.” Maybe the amount of food that most of us take for granted on a regular dinner plate was just overwhelming for her.
Now when we go out for dinner, I ask for a small plate and then take whatever meal is served and divide it. I re-plate it with just a spoonful of potatoes, a quarter of the piece of chicken, just three or four florets of broccoli. She smiles and begins to eat.
Walking this journey with my mother has been full of trial and error. One important lesson is that I need to listen more and trust that even though she is sick, she is still telling me what she needs. And when life feels like it is just too much, I can’t give up. I just try enjoying the meal in a smaller potion, on a smaller plate.
Donna Oberkreser Clearwater, Florida
When I was the new pastor of a small congregation, I went to visit Audrey, who hadn’t been seen at church in a while. I knocked on the apartment door and was met by the formidable presence of Audrey’s housekeeper, Sarah. She was a no-nonsense person with little patience for such intrusions. Audrey, however, spoke up from the living room to invite me in.
I went in and was warmly welcomed by the white-haired woman seated comfortably in her recliner. We spent the next several minutes talking about the wall of photographs. The conversation shifted to the church, and Audrey walked me through the ins and outs of living in a seaside community. She asked about my family, where I grew up, and what I thought of the congregation and its ministries.
About a half hour into the visit, Audrey asked if I would serve her communion. A flush of panic flooded me: I had no bread, no juice, and nothing to serve them in even if I had them. My portable set was back in the church office, where it wasn’t going to be of much help. Regaining my composure, I asked if there might be some bread and a bottle of grape juice around. Sarah rolled her eyes, but at Audrey’s insistence, she went hunting through the cabinets. After a few moments of searching and a lot of unnecessary noise, she pulled out a package of saltines and a small carton of prune juice. Audrey looked flustered and embarrassed. But we would make do. I asked for a cup and a small plate. Sarah pulled out a chipped, badly stained coffee cup and a plastic dessert plate with a crack running through it. Foolishly, seeking to try to make the moment sacred, I asked, “Do you have something a bit nicer?” “No,” Sarah grumbled, “this will have to do.”
I looked wistfully at the open door of the cabinet, where I could see a lovely small cut glass plate, but I gave in. I put the saltines on the plate and took the cup from Sarah, pouring in the dark brown juice. I asked her if she wanted to receive communion too; she rolled her eyes and said no.
As I proceeded through the short service and shared the plate and cup with Audrey, I knew Sarah was watching my every move. What startled me, however, was that she was also mouthing the responses: she knew the service by heart. I wondered why she chose not to join us at the table, but I accept that her silent responses were sufficient before God.
Ricki Aiello Enfield, Connecticut
Tuesday, April 27
Discussion Group Reading
... Surprise, it's a video!
I've been trying to find a compelling article for us to read that has nothing to do with viruses, politics, the role of the 4th Estate, public safety/public rights, blame, anger, bewilderment, etc, etc, etc.
Maybe I just needed a break from the news.
So, here's one of my favorite pastors in America, Rob Bell, in a short video asking some compelling questions. What I'd like us to focus on is not what he says toward the end - Jesus didn't come here to start a religion - but rather, let's focus on the assertion that sometimes what got us to a certain place, understanding, or enlightenment, is now in the way of taking the next step in life. He talks about puberty being important but not wanting to stay in that mode but rather to move through it.
I'm wondering if there is something that got you to where you are that is now in the way? Was it an investment strategy, a bias, a primal instinct, a house, or, perhaps a long-held notion about God; and, does that thing now need to move out of the way to move into the next phase of life? I have some stories to talk about and I think you may as well. Let's spend an hour or so talking about something other than the current situation in front of us.
Or, we could always talk about the idea that Jesus said about Christianity, "You did what??!"
Here's the link. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQgHthZ72cU
Looking forward to Zooming with you. Here's the meeting link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/5955701807
-Fr. Dave
... Surprise, it's a video!
I've been trying to find a compelling article for us to read that has nothing to do with viruses, politics, the role of the 4th Estate, public safety/public rights, blame, anger, bewilderment, etc, etc, etc.
Maybe I just needed a break from the news.
So, here's one of my favorite pastors in America, Rob Bell, in a short video asking some compelling questions. What I'd like us to focus on is not what he says toward the end - Jesus didn't come here to start a religion - but rather, let's focus on the assertion that sometimes what got us to a certain place, understanding, or enlightenment, is now in the way of taking the next step in life. He talks about puberty being important but not wanting to stay in that mode but rather to move through it.
I'm wondering if there is something that got you to where you are that is now in the way? Was it an investment strategy, a bias, a primal instinct, a house, or, perhaps a long-held notion about God; and, does that thing now need to move out of the way to move into the next phase of life? I have some stories to talk about and I think you may as well. Let's spend an hour or so talking about something other than the current situation in front of us.
Or, we could always talk about the idea that Jesus said about Christianity, "You did what??!"
Here's the link. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQgHthZ72cU
Looking forward to Zooming with you. Here's the meeting link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/5955701807
-Fr. Dave
Tuesday, April 21
Hello!
I've been looking for an article about God in our everyday un-normal life. As it turns out, it is difficult to find an article that is relevant, less than three pages, and understandable; even to the educated and well-read group that we have. Despite this, I have attached an article that may well not be relevant nor understandable, but, at least it's short. ... thanks to some careful editing by yours truly. If you'd like to read the full article, you can find it at the Living Church magazine. But in the unedited version, the author goes into an article he wrote in 1988 about nuclear proliferation that I don't quite understand from a political-philosophical point of view nor do I see the Christian ethic view except for the obvious - God probably doesn't want us to blow each other up. Nevertheless, feel free to look it up.
Instead of thinking about the global God and how such a Creator can allow for this virus, the author invites us to look at the everyday God who is with us for each little decision we make. The ethics of the daily decisions we make may help us focus on the virtue of patience. If so, it truly would be a God-inspired action.
Here is the Zoom link for all Discussion Groups:
https://zoom.us/j/5955701807 Meeting ID: 595 570 1807
I've been looking for an article about God in our everyday un-normal life. As it turns out, it is difficult to find an article that is relevant, less than three pages, and understandable; even to the educated and well-read group that we have. Despite this, I have attached an article that may well not be relevant nor understandable, but, at least it's short. ... thanks to some careful editing by yours truly. If you'd like to read the full article, you can find it at the Living Church magazine. But in the unedited version, the author goes into an article he wrote in 1988 about nuclear proliferation that I don't quite understand from a political-philosophical point of view nor do I see the Christian ethic view except for the obvious - God probably doesn't want us to blow each other up. Nevertheless, feel free to look it up.
Instead of thinking about the global God and how such a Creator can allow for this virus, the author invites us to look at the everyday God who is with us for each little decision we make. The ethics of the daily decisions we make may help us focus on the virtue of patience. If so, it truly would be a God-inspired action.
Here is the Zoom link for all Discussion Groups:
https://zoom.us/j/5955701807 Meeting ID: 595 570 1807
Ethics: The Everyday Matters
Ethics: The Everyday Matters
Living Church, April 14, 2020 By Stanley Hauerwas
The virus has wounded us. Life was pretty good. Most of us knew when and from where our next meal or paycheck was coming. We could plan visits to see children or old friends. Spring training was soon to begin. If you cannot trust spring training you cannot trust anything. And that is exactly where we find ourselves. This damned virus has made us unsure if we can trust anything — and that includes God.
Ethics is often thought to deal with “big questions” and dramatic choices, but in fact the most important and significant aspects of our lives are found in the everyday. The everyday is made the everyday by the promises we make, which may not seem like promises at the time but turn out to make us people that can be trusted. Such trust comes through small acts of tenderness that are as significant as they are unnoticed. It makes a difference that I am told, “I love you” before I leave for the day even though the declaration may seem to be routine. It is often routine and that is why it is so important.
The kind of ethics associated with this way of characterizing the moral life is called an ethic of the virtues. I have recently written a book entitled The Character of Virtue: Letters to a Godson. The book, as the title implies, are letters commending a virtue I assume is relevant to my godson’s age and development. I try to help us see that the virtues are not the result of extraordinary behavior. Instead, they ride on the back of the everyday. Accordingly, the virtues are not the result of my trying hard, for example, to be patient. I become patient by taking the time to learn how to dribble the basketball well. We do discover in times like the present that the moral commitments we had forgotten make us who we are. I am thinking, for example, of the commitment of health care workers who resolve not to abandon the ill even though to remain present may endanger their own lives.
The wound that the virus has inflicted on us is to tempt us to become impatient with ourselves and others in an effort to return to the “normal.” We had not realized how dependent we have become on the everyday habit of going to church and seeing one another on Sundays. We had lost track of the significance of our willingness to touch one another as a sign that we rejoice in their presence. In short, we had lost the significance of the everyday, and we rightly want it back.
But we must be patient. We are an eschatological people. We believe we are agents in a story we did not make up and it is a story that is true. That the story is true makes it possible for us to live truthful lives. Such lives require us to recognize that we are a people who must die. We are not meant to survive this life. That is why we live not to survive but to love God and to have love for our neighbor. We have been wounded by this virus but we have not been morally destroyed. So, let us be patient with one another as God has remained patient with us.
Stanley Hauerwas is Gilbert T. Rowe Professor Emeritus of Divinity and Law at Duke Divinity School and canon theologian of the Diocese of Tennessee.
Living Church, April 14, 2020 By Stanley Hauerwas
The virus has wounded us. Life was pretty good. Most of us knew when and from where our next meal or paycheck was coming. We could plan visits to see children or old friends. Spring training was soon to begin. If you cannot trust spring training you cannot trust anything. And that is exactly where we find ourselves. This damned virus has made us unsure if we can trust anything — and that includes God.
Ethics is often thought to deal with “big questions” and dramatic choices, but in fact the most important and significant aspects of our lives are found in the everyday. The everyday is made the everyday by the promises we make, which may not seem like promises at the time but turn out to make us people that can be trusted. Such trust comes through small acts of tenderness that are as significant as they are unnoticed. It makes a difference that I am told, “I love you” before I leave for the day even though the declaration may seem to be routine. It is often routine and that is why it is so important.
The kind of ethics associated with this way of characterizing the moral life is called an ethic of the virtues. I have recently written a book entitled The Character of Virtue: Letters to a Godson. The book, as the title implies, are letters commending a virtue I assume is relevant to my godson’s age and development. I try to help us see that the virtues are not the result of extraordinary behavior. Instead, they ride on the back of the everyday. Accordingly, the virtues are not the result of my trying hard, for example, to be patient. I become patient by taking the time to learn how to dribble the basketball well. We do discover in times like the present that the moral commitments we had forgotten make us who we are. I am thinking, for example, of the commitment of health care workers who resolve not to abandon the ill even though to remain present may endanger their own lives.
The wound that the virus has inflicted on us is to tempt us to become impatient with ourselves and others in an effort to return to the “normal.” We had not realized how dependent we have become on the everyday habit of going to church and seeing one another on Sundays. We had lost track of the significance of our willingness to touch one another as a sign that we rejoice in their presence. In short, we had lost the significance of the everyday, and we rightly want it back.
But we must be patient. We are an eschatological people. We believe we are agents in a story we did not make up and it is a story that is true. That the story is true makes it possible for us to live truthful lives. Such lives require us to recognize that we are a people who must die. We are not meant to survive this life. That is why we live not to survive but to love God and to have love for our neighbor. We have been wounded by this virus but we have not been morally destroyed. So, let us be patient with one another as God has remained patient with us.
Stanley Hauerwas is Gilbert T. Rowe Professor Emeritus of Divinity and Law at Duke Divinity School and canon theologian of the Diocese of Tennessee.
Men's Discussion Group Article: Thursday, April 2, 9:00 am
Social Distance vs Social Isolation Lea Lis, MD, Psychology Today Mar 23, 2020
As a medical doctor, I am acutely aware there are risks and benefits to everything. It may seem obvious to socially isolate right now. However, human beings are social creatures, and social isolation is considered cruelty in most circumstances. Studies on both monkeys and humans have shown this can have a devastating impact on our psychology.
The famous study on Harry Harlow’s monkeys found that monkeys left without contact with other monkeys quickly got sick and died. Everyone understands how devastating social isolation can be. Remember the movie Castaway? Tom Hanks started to talk to his volleyball, naming it Wilson, after months of being left alone. And, he was willing to risk his life to rescue it.
So now, many of my friends don’t want to see me. And I am thinking, “Well, what are the actual pros – and cons – of social isolation?
Social distancing is important in controlling an outbreak. It makes sense to restrict your family from going to restaurants, or other crowded places. And many places are shut down, so it’s not even a choice. How far do we need to go? Do we hunker down and not even answer the door?
Well, the choice is not that obvious. For example, if your kid is an only child, can he/she still go on playdates? Or what if you are single? Can you still go on dates or meet up with friends?
Unless you are sick yourself, or in a very high-risk group, the answer is: Yes! However, you must weigh the risks of depression and anxiety, which will result from self-imposed isolation.
This may be worse than the risk of some contact with others (keep the groups small and try to stay seeing the same people over and over). If your friends are not sick, and if you are in a place where there is not a stay in place quarantine order then the risk is minimal. Especially, when compared to the risk of being alone and going into a negative spiral.
Why? Because the risk of transmission is less in small groups. And, it is less with those who do not show any symptoms. This situation might be around for a long
time and we have to live somehow. But the risks of getting very sick go up when people are over 65 or older, or have a chronic medical condition, so in evaluating the risks versus benefits of socializing it puts more weight in the social isolation category.
If you decide on the social distancing versus isolation approach some things you can do to mitigate the risk. You can try to see the same people over and over to avoid exposure to lots of new vectors of infection (aka, it is a great time for repeat playdate!).
It’s a great time to spend more time outside – weather permitting. There is less risk for transmission this way, due to fewer surfaces being contaminated. When you are older or have a medical condition, the risks of the virus go up, and the benefits of social isolation go up.
Don’t worry. There are some things you can do that present a very low risk:
• It is time to learn how to use Zoom conferencing and FaceTime. This will allow you to spend more time interacting with your family and friends.
• Spend dinner time together. Put the camera on during meals and you can eat together.
• Take outside walks with family members, and don’t touch or interact with other people. Stay six-feet apart as best as you can.
• Gratitude practices are great. You can do this online and in person. Everyone can go around the circle and say what they are grateful for. You can even do this during dinnertime or meals.
• Remember that social isolation has its risks, too. When in doubt, keep a level head, evaluate the real risks and benefits in a rational way, and do what is best for YOU.
Lea Lis, MD, is “The Shameless Psychiatrist." She is a double board-certified adult and child psychiatrist who has worked with non-traditional family arrangements throughout her career and considers these families “the new normal.”
As a medical doctor, I am acutely aware there are risks and benefits to everything. It may seem obvious to socially isolate right now. However, human beings are social creatures, and social isolation is considered cruelty in most circumstances. Studies on both monkeys and humans have shown this can have a devastating impact on our psychology.
The famous study on Harry Harlow’s monkeys found that monkeys left without contact with other monkeys quickly got sick and died. Everyone understands how devastating social isolation can be. Remember the movie Castaway? Tom Hanks started to talk to his volleyball, naming it Wilson, after months of being left alone. And, he was willing to risk his life to rescue it.
So now, many of my friends don’t want to see me. And I am thinking, “Well, what are the actual pros – and cons – of social isolation?
Social distancing is important in controlling an outbreak. It makes sense to restrict your family from going to restaurants, or other crowded places. And many places are shut down, so it’s not even a choice. How far do we need to go? Do we hunker down and not even answer the door?
Well, the choice is not that obvious. For example, if your kid is an only child, can he/she still go on playdates? Or what if you are single? Can you still go on dates or meet up with friends?
Unless you are sick yourself, or in a very high-risk group, the answer is: Yes! However, you must weigh the risks of depression and anxiety, which will result from self-imposed isolation.
This may be worse than the risk of some contact with others (keep the groups small and try to stay seeing the same people over and over). If your friends are not sick, and if you are in a place where there is not a stay in place quarantine order then the risk is minimal. Especially, when compared to the risk of being alone and going into a negative spiral.
Why? Because the risk of transmission is less in small groups. And, it is less with those who do not show any symptoms. This situation might be around for a long
time and we have to live somehow. But the risks of getting very sick go up when people are over 65 or older, or have a chronic medical condition, so in evaluating the risks versus benefits of socializing it puts more weight in the social isolation category.
If you decide on the social distancing versus isolation approach some things you can do to mitigate the risk. You can try to see the same people over and over to avoid exposure to lots of new vectors of infection (aka, it is a great time for repeat playdate!).
It’s a great time to spend more time outside – weather permitting. There is less risk for transmission this way, due to fewer surfaces being contaminated. When you are older or have a medical condition, the risks of the virus go up, and the benefits of social isolation go up.
Don’t worry. There are some things you can do that present a very low risk:
• It is time to learn how to use Zoom conferencing and FaceTime. This will allow you to spend more time interacting with your family and friends.
• Spend dinner time together. Put the camera on during meals and you can eat together.
• Take outside walks with family members, and don’t touch or interact with other people. Stay six-feet apart as best as you can.
• Gratitude practices are great. You can do this online and in person. Everyone can go around the circle and say what they are grateful for. You can even do this during dinnertime or meals.
• Remember that social isolation has its risks, too. When in doubt, keep a level head, evaluate the real risks and benefits in a rational way, and do what is best for YOU.
Lea Lis, MD, is “The Shameless Psychiatrist." She is a double board-certified adult and child psychiatrist who has worked with non-traditional family arrangements throughout her career and considers these families “the new normal.”