Women's Discussion Group (2024)

​This week's article was recommended to me by one of our discussion members. It's an interview with Sebastian Junger about a book he wrote involving a near-death experience. I included a photo of the journalist because you have most likely read, or watched, his war reporting over the past two decades.I appreciate near-death experiences from journalists because they treat their remarkable journey with a sense of objectivity. I'd like to know what you think.

Reporting Live from the Brink of Death
Elisabeth Egan, NY Times, 5.21.24
Over the course of his reporting career, Sebastian Junger has had several close calls with death.A bullet whizzed past his face in Afghanistan; another time, a bomb exploded in his Humvee.Even when he wasn’t covering war, death was a theme in his work. In the introduction to hismemoir, “In My Time of Dying,” which Simon & Schuster will publish on May 21, he describeshis own near-drowning while surfing — the shock of being shoved underwater as if by aninvisible hand, the flashbulb memory of dirty dishes in his sink, the way the shadow of deathsuddenly eclipsed an ordinary day.
“I was young,” Junger writes, “and had no idea the world killed people so casually.”
On June 16, 2020, Junger found himself face-to-face with mortality in a way he’d never been.One minute he was enjoying quiet time with his wife at a remote cabin on Cape Cod inMassachusetts; the next, he was in excruciating pain from a ruptured aneurysm. Hours later, as adoctor inserted a large-gauge transfusion line into his jugular vein, Junger sensed his father’spresence in the room. His father had been dead for eight years — and he’d been a scientist and arationalist — but there he was, trying to comfort his son. It didn’t work.
Junger writes, “I became aware of a dark pit below me and to my left.” It was “the purest blackand so infinitely deep that it had no real depth at all.” He was horrified, knowing that “if I wentinto that hole I was never coming back.” Junger survived. Later, he had questions — lots ofthem. His memoir braids a journalist’s best efforts at answers with a sexagenarian’s complicatedacceptance of the inevitable. Last month, Junger, 62, visited the Book Review to talk about hismedical ordeal and its aftermath, including his research into near-death experiences and theuncertainty he has learned to live with, if not embrace. This conversation has been edited forlength and clarity.

How did you arrive at such a personal subject?
I came out of the hospital kind of broken. My body healed quickly, but I wound up withpsychological issues that are apparently very common for someone who almost died. I couldn’tbe alone; I couldn’t go on a walk in the woods. Everything was evaluated in terms of how long itwould take me to get to the E.R. — like if I have an aneurysm now, I’m going to die.
I started writing things down in a notebook because that’s just what I do with experiences andobservations. I went to a therapist for a while because after I finished being super anxious, I gotincredibly depressed. I recognized this sequence from combat trauma, except it was way worse.
You write a book because something comes alive in you while you do it and that’s yourobsession for a while. It took a good two years for that point to come.
How would you describe your relationship with spirituality and religion?
I was raised to be skeptical of organized religion. So I just cruised through life without anyparticular thought of spirituality — and no particular need for it. I didn’t have a child, thank God,who died of cancer; nothing happened to me that was so unbearable that I had a need to reach outto a higher power. I was blessed. I’ve had a lucky life. Not easy, but lucky.
So, what did you feel while you were in the emergency room?
There was my father, inexplicably. He was communicating — not like you are, with language,but there was communication. He was like, “It’s OK. You don’t have to fight it. You can comewith me.” I was puzzled: “What are you doing here? I’m just here for belly pain.” I was like, “Gowith you? You’re dead! I want nothing to do with you!”
The pit was this infinite dark emptiness that opened up underneath me. I was like, “What isthat?” I was getting pulled into this thing. That’s when I started getting scared. I said to thedoctor, “You have to hurry, I’m going. Right now. You’re losing me.”
The nurse said, “Keep your eyes open so we know you’re still with us,” and it dawned on me: Imay not make it out. They might not have an answer to this. It was a terrible feeling.
The next day in the I.C.U., the nurse said, “You almost died last night.” Then I remembered myfather. Of course, as a journalist, I’m doubting myself: Are you sure you’re not cooking thisthing up? But my wife said, “The first thing you told me when I walked in was, I saw my dad.”That’s how she knew how serious it had been.
How did the experience change the way you think?
It never crossed my mind to start believing in God. But what did happen was I was like, maybewe don’t understand the universe on a fundamental level. Maybe we just don’t understand thatthis world we experience is just one reality and that there’s some reality we can’t understandthat’s engaged when we die. All this stuff happens — ghosts and telepathy and the deadappearing in the rooms of the dying — that’s consistent in every culture in the world.
Maybe we just keep bumping into this thing that we’ll never understand because we’re basicallya dog watching a television. Maybe anything’s possible; and clearly anything’s possible becausethe universe happened. If there’s ever an example of “anything can happen,” it’s the universepopping into existence from nothing.
I researched the science enough to understand legitimate explanations for neurologicalphenomena, and it left me with this question: But why all the same vision?
You write, “Finding yourself alive after almost dying is not, as it turns out, the kind of party one
might expect. You realize that you weren’t returned to life, you were just introduced to death.”
Getting back to normal life meant learning how to forget that we’re all going to die and could dieat any moment. That’s what normal life requires. Two nights before I went to the hospital, Idreamed that I had died and was looking down on my grieving family. Because I had thatexperience, which I still can’t explain, it occurred to me that maybe I had died and the dream wasme experiencing a post-death reality and that I was a ghost. I went into this very weird existentialEscher drawing. Am I here, or not? At one point, I said to my wife, “How do I know I didn’tdie?” She said, “You’re here, right in front of me. You survived.” I thought, “That’s exactly whata hallucination would say.” Returning to normal meant stopping thinking like that.
What do you hope readers will take away from the book?
We’re all in an emotionally vulnerable place; it’s just part of being in a modern society with allits wonderful benefits. Every once in a while I write something that allows people to navigate alittle bit better. Maybe this book will bring some comfort.

​The reading for next week is a classic discussion group piece - there will be something in it that you will agree with and something you will disagree with.
Here is a snippet:
All attempts to obscure reference to the ineliminable sexual difference betweenman and woman are to be rejected.
Can you guess who wrote it? If you said Pope Francis, you would be correct. (I didn't even know "ineliminable" was a word) In the same piece, he affirmed the “inherent dignity of every human being," which we say in the renewal of our baptismal vows.
​Can we take parts of religion and spirituality that we agree with, like a buffet, or do we need to take the entire plate of food as is? What about human nature? Can we have pierced ears or tattoos or cut our hair? Can we wear reading glasses or is that eliminating a part of how we were created and thus degrades our dignity? I'd like to know what you think.

Pope Francis Shuts Down the Cafeteria
Raymond J. de Souza, WSJ 4.11.24
Guest commentary: Fr. de Souza is a priest in Kemptville, Ontario; pastor of Holy Cross Church; and economicsprofessor at Queen’s University.
Is Pope Francis trying to close the cafeteria?
On an Easter Sunday appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Cardinal Wilton Gregory,archbishop of Washington, lamented that President Biden is a “cafeteria Catholic” who “picksand chooses dimensions of the faith to highlight while ignoring or even contradicting otherparts.”
This week the Vatican published a “declaration” from its doctrinal office titled “DignitasInfinita,” or “infinite dignity,” in which Pope Francis strongly affirmed the “inherent” dignity ofevery human being and identified a list of assaults against it: abortion, surrogate childbearing,euthanasia, capital punishment, poverty, war, the travails of migrants, human trafficking, sexualabuse, marginalization of the disabled and digital violence.
The text quotes extensively from his predecessors demonstrating that concerns for human dignityinform all of Roman Catholic teaching and can’t be neatly aligned with a conservative or liberalpolitical agenda. Mr. Biden likes Pope Francis on immigration but not abortion. He thinks thepontiff is bringing him a menu. Pope Francis, for his part, thinks the president mistakestabled’hôte(a meal served to all guests at a fixed price) for à la carte.
Much of the media paid attention to the document’s language on gender theory, which PopeFrancis has previously called “the ugliest danger” today. The text was unambiguous:
“All attempts to obscure reference to the ineliminable sexual difference betweenman and woman are to be rejected.”
That’s broad and would seem to cover not only medical interventions but the use of language,including forms of address and prayers.
Pope Francis is trying something that Pope Benedict XVI attempted in his own treatment ofCatholic social teaching. The church is for economic freedom and the rights of workers. It is bothpro-life and pro-poor. It teaches that both contraception and in vitro fertilization are intrinsicallyimmoral. It defends human rights and the obligation to act for the common good.
In 2009 Benedict stressed the “strong links between life ethics and social ethics,” meaning thatpromoting social justice begins with the right to life. Francis would say that you can’t be pro-lifewithout being passionately concerned about the indignity of poverty.
“The Church forcefully maintains this link between life ethics and social ethics,” wrote Benedictin his encyclical “Caritas in Veritate,” or “charity in truth.” “A society lacks solid foundationswhen, on the one hand, it asserts values such as the dignity of the person, justice and peace, butthen, on the other hand, radically acts to the contrary by allowing or tolerating a variety of waysin which human life is devalued and violated, especially where it is weak or marginalized.”
This week’s declaration takes the same approach. Pope Francis appeals to the reality of humannature, a claim that the declaration notes is open to “reason alone,” without any reference toreligious teaching.
“‘Nature’ refers to the conditions particular to us as human beings,which enable our various operations and the experiences that characterize them.
We do not create our nature; we hold it as a gift and we can nurture, develop,and enhance our abilities.”
To act against nature is to degrade it, and to act against reason. Pope Francis quotes Benedict’sfamous address to the British Parliament on the slave trade — that “misuse of reason” gave riseto that evil and to the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century. Benedict established the linkbetween nature and human nature more explicitly at the Bundestag in Berlin in 2011. Reasondemands that we respect both.
“Something is wrong in our relationship with nature, that matter isnot just raw material for us to shape at will, but that the earth hasa dignity of its own and that we must follow its directives.We must listen to the language of nature and we must answer accordingly.Man too has a nature that he must respect and that he cannot manipulate at will.”
Failure to do so leads to obvious tension, such as opposing genetic modification of crops butallowing puberty blockers for minors. Or hailing Pope Francis for his concern about the climatewhile ignoring his insistence that marriage is a part of a healthy human ecology. In each case, theworld has lost its sense of nature.
This hints at the metaphysics behind the disputes over sex and “gender identity.” Is my body, myidentity, something over which I exercise autonomous power, so that my will can determine whatand who I am? Or do I have a nature that I and others must respect? While that needn’t be atheological argument, it often is. For if I can remake myself into something contrary to my givennature, I desire to be a creature no longer but a creator, a god.
The debate over dignity is a debate about who God is.
The Catholic answer: Only God is God — we aren’t.

Our author for this week is Anne Lamott. We have used two of her pieces from the Washington Post and they worked well. This piece is an interview about her newest book, Somehow. She covers grace, forgiveness, parenting, grandparenting, addiction and aging. It is a compelling interview full of plenty of things to talk about.

Love, Sobriety and Aging: A Conversation with Anne Lamott
Katherine Rowland, The Guardian 5.7.24
When I spoke with Anne Lamott, she was in a “hotel-motel” in Ypsilanti, Michigan, halfwaythrough a cross-country book tour, flaunting sparkly pink nails. Lamott has found Christ-likequalities in the abyss of addiction, and even ways to shepherd her own neuroses when they arriveat the writing desk like damaged relatives. I spoke with Lamott over Zoom. This interview hasbeen edited for length and clarity.
Your book launched last month and the next day you celebrated your 70th birthday. Does thatnumber carry any particular significance for you?
Anne Lamott:It certainly sounds old. When I was younger, I really loved drugs andalcohol, and I didn’t think I’d see 18. And then I didn’t think I’d see 21. Then I didn’t think I’dsee 30. Then I got sober when I was 32 – almost 38 years ago – and I thought, oh, I’ve reachedthe mountaintop. Then I had a kid and felt this urgency to try to stay alive, which I hadn’t felt fora long time. Then I saw 50.
But I loved my 60s. I felt at the height of my mental and spiritual and psychologicalwellness. As you get older, you just start throwing stupid stuff off your airplane that kept youflying low for so long. You just think, I don’t have the time. I don’t care anymore. I don’t carewhat my butt looks like. By my age, you’ve seen so many people die, many of them younger.
And so you get serious about understanding we’re all on borrowed time, and that you’ve got tomake a decision about how you’re going to live this one short, precious life.
How does that realization change the stakes when it comes to love?
Over the years, I have picked some terrible but charming and well-known men.
Sometimes attractive and sometimes not. But I always secretly knew that if they were a woman,they wouldn’t be my best girlfriend. And then when I was 62 I met this guy, Neal Allen. And justafter one coffee with him, I realized that if he were a woman, he would be my best girlfriend.
That’s the value I held out for and that’s what I encourage people who still long to find asoulmate to hold out for: it should be a person who you want to talk to for the rest of your life.
In December, you wrote in the Washington Post about the slow descent of “the creaking elevatorsof age”. Apart from death, what awaits you at the end of your ride?
I’m a Sunday school teacher. I teach my kids that death is a pretty significant change ofaddress. And I do believe that the soul is immortal. I don’t know what that will translate into.[The spiritual teacher] Ram Dass said it’s like taking off a pair of really tight shoes. I think Iagree with that.
There is so much money and attention being spent on longevity these days, which, Ithink, entails a certain denial of death. I was chatting a while back with people who work in end-of-life care, and their view was that our fear of death detracts from our ability to live a good life.
There’s an American way of forward thrust: you must always be moving and you must bemoving higher in terms of recognition or acclaim or stature. I developed that toxic self-consciousness. It kept me from being here, breathing it all in and observing with a small degreeof amusem*nt and wonder and tenderness, because I was so fixated on what I looked like andhow I was coming across and how I was doing.
The forward thrust has to do with the fear of death, because if you keep moving veryquickly, then you’re going to outrun the abyss. The abyss isn’t going to open at your feet andswallow you up.
But everything I’ve learned that’s of any importance, I’ve learned because the abyssopened up and swallowed me. Christians call it the dark night of the soul; an alcoholic will call ita bottom. And when you hit that bottom and you have to be in it for a little while, you find outwho you really are.
Your parents were atheists. How did you come to Christianity?
Well, it was really an accident, believe me. I avoided Christianity like the plague. I feelabout Christians the way everybody feels about Christians. I love what Gandhi said, that heloved Christ, but it was Christians he had a problem with, and that’s totally how I feel about it.
And then at the end of my drinking, there was this flea market near this tiny house whereI was living. And I’d go over there because when you’re really hungover you want greasy foodand strong coffee. And I could hear music wafting out of this ramshackle, cruddy looking churchwith a Charlie Brown Christmas tree outside of it. It was the music of the Weavers and Joan Baezand Pete Seeger that my parents had been very fond of. So I just started going over there becauseI loved the music.
For me, one definition of grace is just running out of any more good ideas. So I get mygreasy food and my strong coffee. I was hungover every single day, and I just went and sat down,and they didn’t hassle me. They didn’t try to get me to join them or to figure out anything or totake Bibles. They just got me water. They could see I was a really sad, damaged person.
I always left before the sermon because it was just too ridiculous for words. And then oneday I didn’t, and I experienced saying to Jesus, kind of bitterly: “OK, fine, you can come in.” And I just tried that out, and it was really sweet.
What role did that new faith play in your sobriety?
I converted a year before I got sober. So I had a kind of gap year at church, where I wasvery smelly and weird and arrogant all at the same time. I had terrible self-esteem because of theway I was living and then I was very arrogant because I’ve been raised to think that the Lamottswere better and more educated. I stayed there for a year and then I got sober. Church did not getme sober, but my deterioration did and I finally had no place to go. I would have died, I think.
And so I just gave recovery a shot.
What made you ready for Neal to enter your life?
I was raised in the 1950s and early 1960s to understand that women take care ofeverybody else and that your value comes from being a flight attendant to everybody in theworld. I also have a really warm and open heart and I like to take care of people, but my lifeforce was entirely spent on my son and his little baby and the baby’s mother and everybodyaround me. I was depleted.
And one day, my older brother, who’s a fundamentalist Christian, was staying with meand I said, “I’m just so isolated. I just am so empty right now. I’m all used up.” And he said somesort of happy Christian horsesh*t. I adore him, but it was like a bumper sticker and I was justfurious. I got in the car and started driving and crying and pounding the steering wheel andtelling my son and grandson and the baby mama and my parents and my brothers how much I
hated and resented that they sucked me dry and how sad I was.
Later, I came back to town and I called my mentor, Bonnie, of 38 years. And I said, “I’mnobody’s priority.” And she said, “You’re not anybody’s priority because you’re not your own.You’re going to need to take a few months off to have to have a love affair with yourself. You’regoing to start with getting the overpriced tamales at the health food store and some flowers. Andyou’re going to have to do that every day.”
And I was like, no, no, it’s too California. I’m not going to do that. But when all elsefails, follow instructions. So I did it. And about three months later, I met Neal. There’s a sitecalled OurTime that’s an offshoot of Match for older people. I met him and we had coffee andwe’ve never been apart.
You watched your son battle with addiction. What happened during that time?
Oh, God, it was so awful. He’s got almost 14 years clean and sober now, by the grace ofGod, but at about age 14, he started to get drunk and stoned a lot of the time. He got into methand anything he could get his hands on and it was just terrifying. And I did what you do if you’rea mother. I tried everything. I sent him off to the highest peak of the Allegheny mountains forthree months, and then to an organic tofu farm. And when he came home, he was dealing thenext day. He got his girlfriend pregnant at 19, and they had the baby, and he just got worse andworse.
Nothing I tried worked. Eventually, I left him in jail. The bail bondsman said, “Oh, myGod, Ms Lamott, you’re the first mother in my 20-year history as a bail bondsman who left herchild in jail.” And, you know, I’m not positive he’d still be alive if I hadn’t. And then I said,“You can’t come over. You can’t be on the property wasted.” And he stomped off. I didn’t knowwhen we’d ever talk again. But then about 10 days later, he called to say that he had a week
clean and sober.
If you were to offer advice to those of us who are watching loved ones suffer, what would yousay?
There are these little acronyms in the recovery movement, and one of them is the fiveM’s: We try to manage others. We martyr ourselves, we manipulate them, and we mother themand the entire world. And the fifth one is so awful: we monitor them, like I’m an android orsomething, where I can monitor people’s behavior and the number of drinks they’re having orwhether I can smell pot on them. I just learned to release him. Bonnie taught me this tool, whichwas to close my eyes and picture the person there and to push them away into the arms of theirown destiny.
I had to make peace with the fact that maybe I would lose [my son]. It wasn’t anything but anightmare. Either he would die driving drunk, or he’d commit suicide or he’d overdose. And Ijust had to release him.
​

​We have two competing pieces on aging. The first one page article is about "super-agers" who are,"Individuals, age 80 and up, but they have the memory ability of a person 20 to 30 years younger."Unfortunately, the research shows very little on how to be a super ager (except for the last sentence of the second to last paragraph which is the reason why we're reading this article).
The second one page article is how to have better brain health. I sure hope drinking coffee and having a weekly discussion about age is on that list. Regardless, I'd like to know what you think.

A Peak Inside the Brains of Super-Agers
Dana Smith, NY Times 4.29.24
When it comes to aging, we tend to assume that cognition gets worse as we get older. Ourthoughts may slow down or become confused, or we may start to forget things. But that’s not thecase for everyone. For a little over a decade, scientists have been studying a subset of peoplethey call “super-agers.” These individuals are age 80 and up, but they have the memory ability ofa person 20 to 30 years younger.
A paper published Monday in the Journal of Neuroscience helps shed light on what’s so specialabout the brains of super-agers. The biggest takeaway, in combination with a companion studythat came out last year on the same group of individuals, is that their brains have less atrophythan their peers’ do. The research was conducted on 119 octogenarians from Spain: 64 super-agers and 55 older adults with normal memory abilities for their age. The participants completedmultiple tests assessing their memory, motor and verbal skills; underwent brain scans and blooddraws; and answered questions about their lifestyle and behaviors.
The scientists found that the super-agers had more volume in areas of the brain important formemory, most notably the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex. They also had better preservedconnectivity between regions in the front of the brain that are involved in cognition. Both thesuper-agers and the control group showed minimal signs of Alzheimer’s disease in their brains. “By having two groups that have low levels of Alzheimer’s markers, but striking cognitivedifferences and striking differences in their brain, then we’re really speaking to a resistance toage-related decline,” said Dr. Bryan Strange, a professor of clinical neuroscience at thePolytechnic University of Madrid, who led the studies.
No precise numbers exist on how many super-agers there are among us, but Dr. Rogalski saidthey’re “relatively rare,” noting that “far less than 10 percent” of the people she sees end upmeeting the criteria. But when you meet a super-ager, you know it, Dr. Strange said. “They arereally quite energetic people, you can see. Motivated, on the ball, elderly individuals.”
Experts don’t know how someone becomes a super-ager, though there were a few differences inhealth and lifestyle behaviors between the two groups in the Spanish study. Most notably, thesuper-agers had slightly better physical health, both in terms of blood pressure and glucosemetabolism, and they performed better on a test of mobility. The super-agers didn’t report doingmore exercise at their current age than the typical older adults, but they were more active inmiddle age. They also reported better mental health.
But overall, Dr. Strange said, there were a lot of similarities between the super-agers and theregular agers. “There are a lot of things that are not particularly striking about them,” he said. Forexample, there were no differences between the groups in terms of their diets, the amount ofsleep they got, their professional backgrounds or their alcohol and tobacco use. The behaviors ofsome of the Chicago super-agers were similarly a surprise. Some exercised regularly, but somenever had; some stuck to a Mediterranean diet, others subsisted off TV dinners; and a few ofthem still smoked cigarettes. However, one consistency among the group was that they tended tohave strong social relationships, Dr. Rogalski said.
While there isn’t a recipe for becoming a super-ager, scientists do know that, in general, eatinghealthily, staying physically active, getting enough sleep and maintaining social connections areimportant for healthy brain aging.

How to Change Your Mind-Set About Aging
Holly Burns, NY Times 9.20.23
A decades-long study of 660 people published in 2002 showed that those with positive beliefsaround getting older lived seven and a half years longer than those who felt negatively about it.Since then, research has found that a positive mind-set toward aging is associated with lowerblood pressure, a generally longer and healthier life and a reduced risk of developing dementia.Research also shows that people with a more positive perception of aging are more likely to takepreventive health measures — like exercising — which, in turn, may help them live longer. Youcan’t stop the march of time, but you don’t have to dread it. Here are some ways to help shiftyour thinking.
Notice where your age beliefs come from.
From the crotchety neighbor to the clueless Luddite, negative stereotypes of aging areeverywhere. Taking in negative beliefs about aging can affect our view of the process — and ourhealth, said Becca Levy, a professor of epidemiology at Yale. A 2009 study, for example, foundthat people in their 30s who held negative stereotypes of aging were significantly more likely toexperience a cardiovascular event, like a heart attack or stroke, later in life than those withpositive ones. To change your negative age beliefs, you first need to become more aware ofthem, Dr. Levy said. Simply identifying the sources of your conceptions about aging can helpyou gain some distance from negative ideas. “People can strengthen their positive age beliefs atany age,” Dr. Levy said. In one 2014 study, 100 adults — with an average age of 81 — who wereexposed to positive images of aging showed both improved perceptions of aging and improvedphysical function.
Find aging role models.
If you associate aging with only loss or limitation, “you’re not getting the full picture of what itmeans to age,” said Regina Koepp, a psychologist who specializes in aging. Instead, she said,“shift your attention — look around for role models, see who’s doing it well.” Dr. Levyrecommends coming up with five older people who have done something you deem impressiveor have a quality that you admire, whether it’s falling in love later in life, showing devotion tohelping others or maintaining a commitment to physical fitness.
Don’t mistake forced positivity for optimism.
Research suggests that optimistic women are more likely to live past 90 than less optimisticwomen, regardless of race or ethnicity. But thinking more positively about aging doesn’t meanpapering over real concerns with happy thoughts — or using phrases like “You haven’t aged!” asa compliment. Instead, try to look at the honest reality with optimism. If you’re feeling deflatedthat your tennis game isn’t as strong in your 70s as it once was, Dr. Ginne said, remind yourself:“No, I can’t play tennis like I did when I was 50, and I can only play for 10 minutes. But I canstill play.”
Don’t dismiss the benefits.
Focus on what you’re gaining, too. Research has shown, for example, that emotional well-beinggenerally increases with age, and certain aspects of cognition, like conflict resolution, oftenimprove in later life. With time, “we’re likely to develop more resilience,” Dr. Koepp said. Successful aging doesn’t mean you won’t get sick, encounter loss or require care at some point,she said. And no one said that changing any mind-set is easy. But if you can, she added, it mayallow you to see yourself more clearly “as a person with lived experience and wisdom” as you age.

​Are you familiar with Carl Jung? If not, this two page article by Arthur Brooks will introduce you to his five pillars of happy living. Brooks also includes his seven-point summary. I'd like to know what you think. For me, the discussion group is a source of happiness.

Jung’s Five Pillars of a Good Life
Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic 4.11.24
In the world of popular psychology, the work of one giant figure is hard to avoid: Carl Jung. Ifyou think you have a complex about something, the Swiss psychiatrist invented that term. Areyou an extrovert or an introvert? His too. When it comes to happiness, though, Jung can seem abit of a downer. “‘Happiness,’” he wrote, “is such a remarkable reality that there is nobody whodoes not long for it.” So far, so good. But he does not leave it there: “And yet there is not a singleobjective criterion which would prove beyond all doubt that this condition necessarily exists.”
Jung is stating the manifest truth that we cannot lay hold of any blissful end state of purehappiness, because every human life is bound to involve negative emotions. Rather, the objectiveshould be progress — or, in the words of Oprah Winfrey, “happierness.”
In 1960, as he neared the end of his long life, Jung shared his own strategy for realizing that goalof progress. Jung believed that making progress toward happiness was built on five pillars.

Jung believed that getting happier required soundness of mind and body. His thesis is supportedby plenty of research. For example, the longest-running study of happiness (the Harvard Study ofAdult Development) has shown four of the biggest predictors of a senior citizen’s well-being arenot smoking; drinking alcohol moderately if at all; maintaining a healthy body weight; andexercising. Even more important for well-being is good mental health. Good health practicesseem not to raise happiness, but rather to lower unhappiness. Today, many emotion researchershave uncovered evidence of a phenomenon that Jung did not conceive of: Negative and positiveemotions appear to be separable phenomena and not opposites; well-being requires a focus oneach. Furthermore, researchers have identified how activities such as physical exercise caninterrupt the cycle of negative emotion during moments of heightened stress, by helpingmoderate cortisol-hormone levels.

The intertwined notions that close relationships are at the heart of well-being and that cultivatingthem will reliably increase happiness are unambiguously true. Indeed, of the four best lifeinvestments for increasing personal satisfaction, two involve family and friendships (the othersare in faith or philosophy, and meaningful work). And as for marriage, an institution that hastaken a beating over recent decades, more and more evidence is piling up from scholars thatbeing wed makes the majority of people happier than they otherwise would be.

Jung believed that happiness required one to cultivate an appreciation for beautiful things andexperiences. Although this might sound intuitively obvious, the actuality is more complicated.
First, a big difference exists between beauty in nature and beauty in art. Specifically, engagementwith nature’s beauty is known, across different cultures, to enhance well-being. Second, withaesthetic experience, happiness depends on the artistic mood. For example, experiments haveshown that if you listen to happy music on your own, it makes you feel happier; if you listen tosad music while alone, it makes you feel sadder.

As with physical and mental health, employment and income seem tied more to eliminatingunhappiness than to raising happiness. For one thing, scholars have long shown thatunemployment is a reliable source of misery: Depressive symptoms typically rise when people,both men and women, are unemployed. Work itself helps protect mental health. My ownassessment of the evidence is that money alone cannot buy happiness, nor can spending moneyto acquire possessions make one happy; but having the money to pay for experiences with lovedones, to free up time to spend on meaningful activities, and to support good causes does enhancehappiness.

Jung argued that a good life requires a way of understanding why things happen the way they do,being able to zoom out from the travails of life, and put events (including inevitable suffering) into perspective. The son of a pastor, Jung was deeply Christian in his worldview, but everyone,he thought, should have some sense of transcendent belief or higher purpose. Research clearlybacks up Jung’s contention. Religious belief has been noted as strongly predictive of findingmeaning in life, and spirituality is positively correlated with better mental health; both faith andspiritual practice seem protective against depression.

Taken together, Jung’s ideas about happiness and his five pillars of well-being stand up solidly tomodern research findings. I propose this practical seven-point summary:
1. Do not fall prey to seeking pure happiness. Instead, seek lifelong progress toward happierness.
2. Manage as best you can the main sources of misery in your life by attending to your physicaland mental health, maintaining employment, and ensuring an adequate income.
3. If you’re earning enough to take care of your principal needs, remember that happiness atwork comes not from chasing higher income but from pursuing a sense of accomplishment andservice to others.
4. Cultivate deep relationships through marriage, family, and real friendships. Remember thathappiness is love.
5. If you have discretionary income left over, use it to invest in your relationships with familyand friends.
6. Spend time in nature, surround yourself with beauty that uplifts you, and consume the art andmusic that nourish your spirit.
7. Find a path of transcendence—one that explains the big picture in life and helps youcomprehend suffering and the purpose of your existence.
Beyond the scientific research that supports this strategy, we also have the evidence of itseffectiveness in the example of Jung’s life. He made his list to mark his 85th birthday, which wasto be the last one he celebrated. By all accounts, he made progress toward happiness over his life,had a long and devoted marriage, died surrounded by the people he loved, and was satisfied thathe had used his abilities in a meaningful way that served others. In this world, that sounds prettygood to me.

​We have two, one-page articles for next week. The first one, written by a priest from the Church of England, wonders how God might bless a divided America (and what the Episcopal Church can do to help). The second is written by a Presbyterian pastor who challenges this Sunday's Gospel lesson - about the Good Shepherd - and specifically Jesus' claim that he will lay down his life for the sheep. The author writes the following:A deadshepherd isn’t helpful to anyone, least of all to sheep left vulnerable to predators, starvation, and scattering. What’s a flock to do without the abiding presence of the rod and staff that comfort?
God's blessing to a divided nation and a dead shepherd. Should be an interesting discussion.

How Might God Bless a Divided America
Samuel Wells, Christian Century 4.11.24
It’s hard to know how to ask God to bless America right now. On a recent visit to the East Coast,I found friends and peers in a mixture of panic and denial about the coming November election. Idid one thing on my visit, however, that gave me three thoughts about how not to feel soparalyzed. I went to church.
It was a conventional Eucharist at an Episcopal church. But three moments struck me in a specialway. The first was the prayers of the people. As I reflected on the prayers of the people, Ipondered whether it is too small a thing that such a prayer service be an endorsem*nt of oneadministration. Surely the Holy Spirit could make it an event where a wondrously kaleidoscopicdiversity of Americans each took the microphone to articulate their respective prayers for theensuing years. Maybe America could be offered this invitation:
“Let your heart expand. Let your mind encompass. Let your soul grow, through meeting,enjoying, and embracing one another. We believe we’re going to spend eternity together. Sowe’d best start today. Because Christianity’s about living God’s future now.”
America, like the church, shouldn’t be about where we’re all separately coming from. It shouldbe about where we’re all together going.
The second moment that struck me was the offertory procession, in which the bread, wine, andmoney were brought to the altar. As I saw this taking place, my imagination again went to whatthe liturgy might be saying to this divided country. I thought about Isaiah 2:2:“In days to comethe mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established; all the nations shall stream to it.”Iimagined every tribe and race and people streaming into this church, proudly bearing the trophiesand symbols and glories of their heritage and narrative and dreams — each one saying,Thesearen’t our identities to be protected — these are our gifts to be shared.
Gifts are given to be a blessing. God has blessed America with everything it needs to flourishand to be a blessing to the world. In some kind of national pageant, the whole nation could offerits gifts to bless each other. Identities could be affirmed and transcended. Possessions could beturned into gifts. Differences could become assets. Diversity could enrich. The life of the nationcould become a prayer that the Holy Spirit would turn the water of its existence into the wine ofGod’s essence and turn life into eternal life. Maybe that’s how God could bless America.
My final pondering came during the distribution of communion. I recalled a visit to a conventionin the Deep South. Several congregations were an even split of Democratic and Republican. Butrather than a source of discomfort, tension, and denial, I wondered if it were a holy, rich,important opportunity. So I said,“Your diocese could be a beacon of hope. Because everySunday your congregation comes to that altar rail, and what it is this: we may be divided onculture wars, foreign policy, and migration, but this altar rail reminds us we are one bodybecause we’re members of Christ’s body. And who we are together is more fundamental thanwhat we think apart. The Holy Spirit is giving you the power to witness to the whole world aboutour fundamental identity as Christ’s body, an identity that transcends political divisions.”
There is widespread dismay about the direction the United States is going. The most distressingthing about this is the sense of powerlessness among its people. And when those people areChristians, it’s even more distressing, because in worship those people have in their daily andweekly practice the gifts God gives to reimagine the world. For Christians, politics doesn’t beginor end with our choice on a voting slip but with God’s choice to be with us.

A Dead Shepherd Isn’t Helpful to Anyone
Austin Shelley, Christian Century 4.15.24
In the poem “Introduction to Poetry,” Billy Collins laments his students’ tendency to approach apoem with weapons drawn. The former US poet laureate paints a portrait of the delight he hopesthey will embrace when encountering verse:
I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive.
For months I’ve struggled with this week’s lectionary verses from the Gospel of John. Of all the
gospels, it is the fourth that waxes poetic. From its soaring prologue to its tender post-resurrection breakfast on the shoreline — where Jesus repeatedly asks Peter, “Do you love me?”— metaphor and sensory imagery abound.
Initially lacking a more sensitive approach, I tried unsuccessfully to torture a confession out ofJesus’ insistence that the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. Does a good shepherdactually do this? Right out of the gate, I questioned Jesus’ assumption. Such a sacrifice seemsboth unnecessary and shortsighted. Fellow interrogators might agree that a dead shepherd isn’thelpful to anyone, least of all to sheep left vulnerable to predators, starvation, and scattering.What’s a flock to do without the abiding presence of the rod and staff that comfort? How are thesheep to remain safe, healthy, and together without the soothing tenor of the trusted voice thatleads them beside still waters and makes them to lie down in green pastures?
The text’s stoic silence in the face of this inquisition pushed me further. And what of these othersheep from another fold? Did Jesus indeed have the power to lay down his life in order to take itup again? Or shall we believe instead a testimony at odds with John’s gospel account, thewitness borne by the epistle to the church at Philippi: “Let the same mind be in you that was inChrist Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God assomething to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in humanlikeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the pointof death—even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:5–8).
Either way, we end up nailing Jesus to a cross to find out what he really means.
Pressing an ear against the Fourth Gospel’s hive may prove to be a more fruitful endeavor. Whatif we as students of scripture were to take into account the time elapsed between the life, death,and resurrection of the historical Jesus of Nazareth and the first circulation of this gospel accountdecades later? What if we were to consider that particular passage of time to be the catalyst fortransforming prose into poetry, for coloring the gospel writer’s memories of the person of Jesuswith the stained-glass hues of the Spirit of Jesus with whom he had abided for many long years?What if, as part of our wrestling this text for a blessing, we were to submit to its strength instead?
If we were to entertain such a nuanced approach, if we were to assume the posture of those wholisten intently to the inner melody the poem hums, if we were to wander into the room of John 10and feel its walls for a light switch — I believe it is entirely possible that we would hear forourselves the voice of the Good Shepherd who knows us as his own. Moreover, we would learnsomething true of him that turns out to be mighty good news: that defying all logic to thecontrary, he laid down his life for the sheep. As the Father commands, may we as the body ofChrist take it up again​.

Old, retired and apparently invisible. That's the topic for next week. Karen and Stephen Yoder - retired from the Wall Street Journal - wrote an article about what they are dealing with in retirement.
I'd like to know when you feel invisible. Does it get better, or worse; and, are there tips or compassionate ideas you can share with others who have become invisible too.

We’re Old, Retired, and Apparently Invisible
Karen Yoder & Stephen Yoder, Wall Street Journal, 4.3.24
The first couple of years in retirement are often the most difficult. Stephen Yoder, 66, a longtimeWall Street Journal editor, joined his wife, Karen Yoder, 67, in retirement in late 2022. In thismonthly Retirement Rookies column, they chronicle some of the issues they are dealing with inretirement.

It was a June afternoon in the Rockies just after I retired when we agreed that we must be turninginto ghosts. We had been cycling in the mountains since breaking camp before dawn, and wedecided to splurge on a private room in a hostel. We checked in and headed through to the bike-storage area, walking our rig by young hostelers congregated in the common spaces. We musthave been a sight: two bedraggled 60-somethings pushing a tandem bicycle laden like a packmule. Except no one seemed to see us.
We crossed the living room, where 20-something hikers with ruddy faces studied their computerscreens. No one looked up. We inched through the kitchen, where others were sautéing onionsfor a group meal. “Excuse us. Sorry to interrupt,” one of us said as we squeezed through. “Thatsure smells good.” They turned a bit, giving us space. But not a word. Not a “How’s it going?”nor “Where’d you come from?” nor “Cool rig.” Nor eye contact.
“We’re invisible,” Steve whispered in the hallway. In our room, we plopped on the bed andlaughed. “Nobody even acknowledged our existence,” I said. “We’re too old to see.”
We had noticed a growing feeling of being unseen before, but nothing like this. The episodeinspired our secret code words for similar incidents. “We’re invisible,” one of us whispers, andwe smile wryly as we recall our hostel encounter. It’s a code we’re using more often these daysas we move deeper into retirement and more often sense that younger people in the same roomare looking right through us.
Sometimes the feeling isn’t so much invisibility as irrelevance. I was with some younger gal palsrecently, standing in a tight circle drinking coffee at an event. My friends chattered about theirinsanely busy workweeks, asking each other how they balance their professional lives withraising children and volunteer work.
Nobody turned to me. I had decades of that frenetic pace. I did it; I survived. Perhaps I mighthave had a few tips to share? Nope, I thought silently. I’m retired. Too old to be relevant.Unseen. I’m thinking more often of how my 90-year-old mother must have felt when I pushedher wheelchair into a restaurant. She was sharp mentally but had suffered a bad fall. A restaurantemployee turned to me and asked. “Where would she like to sit?” I turned to my mom, askingher, “Where would you like to sit, Mother?” She wasn’t invisible to me.
To be fair to young people everywhere, not all of them ignore us. At a Montana hostel last year,several geology students about to head into the mountains saw us and eagerly chatted us up inthe common room. We asked about their studies and they grilled us on how we managedlogistics during the bike trip we were on.
Back in San Francisco, we seem quite visible to many good friends young enough to be ourchildren or grandchildren. We have some over at our house nearly every week. A group in theirearly 20s had us over for their Super Bowl party this year.
Maybe we’re at a stage where we need to take more initiative with people much younger thanwe. When I do reach out to younger people and pick their brains, I find they have so much tooffer. How about asking their opinions and seeking their advice instead of waiting for them?
We’re certainly going to need younger people more as we navigate retirement. My dad, wholived to nearly 97, increasingly made friends with younger people as he aged. “My friends dieoff,” he would say, “so I need to make new, younger friends.”

It happened again at an upscale restaurant near our house recently. It was a rare evening ofdining out, and by evening, I mean 5:30 p.m. There were still many empty tables, yet we werehaving a heck of a time getting our server’s attention—to order drinks, to order food, to requestwater refills. We could see him over there, tarrying cheerfully among young diners at othertables. But my hand gestures had no effect. “How can he not see us?” I said. Karen grinned anduttered the code: “We’re invisible.”
We later couldn’t flag our server down for even the bill, so we vowed to enjoy the restaurant’sambience until he saw fit to free up our table for prime time. It took him about a half-hour. Thatwas plenty of time for us to debate the invisibility theory. Perhaps our server was busy withtables we couldn’t see or had duties other than waiting tables? Maybe the younger tables hadtipped him ahead? Had he pegged us as cheapskates when we didn’t order an entire bottle ofwine?
We’ve added such debates to our protocol. After invoking the invisibility code, we ask: Are weimagining it? Is this, in fact, happening to everyone here and not just us? Have we beenexperiencing this kind of unseen-ness all our lives and are just now discovering it? And thehardest thing to admit: Maybe not everything is about us.
“OK, boomer,” I can just hear it when we lament our newfound invisibility. We’ve gone throughlife thinking we’re special, and are only now discovering we’re not so different after all. We maybe oversensitive because our visibility is part of our continuing quest to find a new post-workplace identity, an existential task many retirees wrestle with after leaving the work world.
If we’re only imagining invisibility, we’re in good company. We polled some retired friends ourage and they quickly vouched for the sense of often being unseen. One observed that thepanhandlers downtown often don’t seem to bother approaching seniors.
And it isn’t just us baby boomers who feel an encroaching irrelevance. A long-retired minister Iknow talks sadly of how church leaders no longer listen to his ideas about the ministry. Severalprofessors emeritus have lamented to me that their college successors didn’t seek their advice.Retired editors know very well that they’re yesterday’s news, but that doesn’t stop them frombemoaning their untapped expertise.
I heard theno-one-listens-anymorerefrain so often in the past few decades that I began calling it“The Old Man’s Lament.” That would never be my lamentation, I vowed at the time.

​This week, let's talk about the wisdom of not knowing. The author, Heidi Haverkamp asks the following:Faith does not entail a search for information or receiving clear answers to life’s persistent questions, although churches and Christians try with things like Bible truths, catechisms, and creeds. I wonder if we often make what we think we know about God into an idol. I'd like to know what you think, or, don't know.

The Wisdom of Not Knowing
Heidi Haverkamp, The Christian Century, 3.28.24
I thought I’d love going to an all-inclusive resort: food and drink around every corner, all thetime, for free. It was like a church potluck had exploded. At first it was a thrill. Then it got dull.
Then it got weird. It all started to look like junk.
In much the same way, it used to be fun to look for the answer to any question I ever wonderedabout, at any moment, on the internet. But in the last couple years, answering all my ownquestions has gotten tedious. An infinite, all-inclusive buffet for the mind is now spread beforeus online. There is more information available to human beings than there has ever been inhuman history. We can find out just about anything we have ever wondered about, at any time,and at almost any place on earth.
The human brain is baited for novelty and the unexpected. Our mental appetite for new ideas andinformation evolved to be insatiable — in order to keep us on guard from danger, as well as toconstantly alert us to new food sources and to learn more about our surroundings to survive. Theavailability of novel information has grown to be constant and plenteous at a level we did notevolve to encounter. So much knowledge, but to what end? Our human desire for searching andlearning can now overwhelm our attention span and immobilize us with distraction. Knowing hasbecome a form of entertainment and compulsion, more like mindless snacking than a purposeful,sit-down meal.
Jesus did not seem to like answering questions much during his time on earth. He did not giveexplanations so much as offer tricky juxtapositions, reject hierarchies, and interrogate religiousrules and regulations. He would turn questions around, dodge them, or answer with anotherquestion. After the crucifixion and resurrection, when he came back to meet his disciples, he didnot explain what had happened or how. Instead, he said things like, “I am risen,” “Don’t beafraid,” “Peace,” and “Do you have anything to eat?”
Belief, for my Protestant ancestors, meant knowing the Bible, knowing what God asked of you,knowing what God wanted you to believe. My great-grandparents were Iowa farmers, and theyread a chapter of the Bible aloud together every night after supper. Knowing the Bible and whatit said — even the boring parts — was central to their relationship to God, to one another, and totheir wider church community. For centuries, the West has valued knowing, comprehending, andsolving. The Reformation put these values at the center of Christian practice, emphasizingpreaching, scripture study, and catechisms — all in the vernacular — as more people learned toread and the printing press placed untold amounts of new information into their hands.
And yet, as technology is again changing our relationship to knowledge and learning, I wonder ifthe good news of the Christian life today is less about knowing than it is about opening ourselvesto relationship and awe. Many churches today describe their mission as “knowing God andmaking God known.” Is there anything wrong with this? Probably not. But how do wesubconsciously understand what “knowing God” means?
While the word know used to mean “to be acquainted with” or “to perceive,” in modern usagethe emphasis has shifted toward having information about something or practical knowledge ofit. The word now implies a sense of clarity and understanding that leaves less room for curiosityor mystery. What can we “know” about God, really? “Si comprehendus, non est Deus,” saidAugustine: if you understand, it is not God. The word know is related to the Old High Germanword bichnāan, to recognize. “Recognizing” God sounds less poetic but makes a humblerconfession than “knowing” in our modern sense.
Of course, what makes faith faith is not that we can claim to know or have comprehended God.
Faith does not entail a search for information or receiving clear answers to life’s persistentquestions, although churches and Christians try with things like “Bible truths,” catechisms,creeds, and books upon books. I wonder if we often make what we think we know about Godinto an idol. When Job wonders why all those awful things happened to him, God does not offeran answer. God tells him that he is unable to know.
Buddhist teachers describe a spiritual practice called “don’t-know mind.” Zen master ShunryūSuzuki writes, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there arefew.” In other words, letting go of our opinions, assumptions, and accrued knowledge frees us tobe more open to reality, new ideas, and compassion. This is not a mind numbing or a dodging ofresponsibility but an invitation to humility and freedom. It is the practice of meeting eachmoment and each person as a beginner or novice, as someone with an open and curiousperspective. Saying “I don’t know” can make a space between my mind and the world, or mymind and the person sitting across from me—whether it’s a close family member, a dear friend,or a total stranger. Then maybe the Spirit can enter into that space and do a new thing.
“I don’t know” might be the truest creed we can confess in our modern age. We know (or thinkwe know) so much. But we cannot really know who God is or why terrible things happen. Wecannot know how to heal the world or save the church. We cannot predict the way anything willturn out, the right decision every time, or how to live our happiest life. To become a more loving,just, and wise people, we may need to let go of needing to know. Not to hide in ignorance but toquit spending our energy grasping after information or defending our rightness andrighteousness.
To say “I don’t know” as a prayer, confession, or meditation is not to give up but to witness tothe gap of unknowing between us and God. A gap not of cold emptiness but of wonder; a gapwhere there is more space for relating to one another and a clearing for the path that leads usback again to the mystery and glory of God.
Jesus does not ask his disciples to know or explain much. He asks them to do things, mostly veryslow-moving things: to listen, to pray, to see, to love, to follow, and to serve the people aroundthem. He leaves them (and us) with teachings and parables that do not give much in the way ofclear answers but are more like spiritual puzzles or invitations to start thinking and talkingtogether. Less like a beautiful, all-inclusive buffet, more like a do-it-yourself potluck.

​Next week is Holy Week which means we are meeting on Wednesday as a combined group. There is no Tuesday meeting.
Also, this coming Monday, anyone and everyone is invited to meet in front of the ticket booth at Lecom Baseball Park at noon to watch the Blue Jays and Pirates. We'll purchase tickets in the same section, have lunch inside the park and enjoy the 1:05 start time.
Below is our article for Wednesday; David Brooks is asking for the American people to resist the lure of us-vs.-them thinking. I'd like to know what you think about his article.

Resist the Pull of ‘Us vs. Them’ Thinking
David Brooks, NY Times, 3.20.24
​
I’ve just finished a book tour, so I’ve been on the road for five months. I’ve probably been to 35or 40 states. And I would say the predominant emotion I have heard when I ask people aboutpolitics during my travels is exhaustion — a sense of fatigue, a sense of discouragement, a senseof passivity, and especially among Democrats, a pessimism about the election.
We’re in the middle of the global surge in populism. Populism is belief that there’s a conflict, aclass conflict. And the conflict is between the real Americans and the globalized elites. And inAmerica, it’s mostly measured by levels of education. So it’s people with a high school degreewho tend to be working class, who feel they are being oppressed, looked down upon, andcondescended to, and morally scorned by members of the highly educated elites who live alongthe coasts.
And so, that’s the populism in America. It’s also the populism in Britain. It’s the populism inFrance, across Europe. In 2002, only 120 million people lived in their countries governed bypopulist parties. By 2019, more than 2 billion people lived under governments governed bypopulist parties. And so, this is surging. And what does global populism have in common? Allthese different national forms of populism, they are all based on zero sum thinking.
If you go back through human history, the human condition is tribal. And so, a zero-sum mindset, an us/them mindset is sort of, I think, woven into our nature.
The zero-sum mindset is the idea that we have a finite amount of goods in the world. And if I’mgoing to improve my lot in the world, I’ve got to take something away from you. And so, thezero-sum mindset is an ancient mindset that is behind most conquest and war.
The positive sum mindset is the idea that we have an infinite, a potentially infinite amount ofgood in the world. And then I can add some good, and you will benefit. When Steve Jobs doesreally well and makes $1 billion, it doesn’t hurt me. I get to enjoy the Mac. I get to enjoy myiPhone. People who work at Apple get to have great jobs. And so, his prosperity is not takingaway other people’s prosperity. It’s mutually advantageous.
And that’s just a better way to live. It’s a better mindset to go through life, that life is not war andwar. Life is competition, creativity, innovation, productivity, and sort of a measured sort ofcompetition to add to each other’s benefit. And in many ways, our politics is a struggle toembrace this liberating idea against the darker angels of our nature, which want to reallyundermine it with us/them thinking.
People broke out of the zero-sum mindset through a series of intellectual revolutions we callliberalism. And liberalism is the belief that we want a society that’s pluralistic, that I want topursue my own eccentric and dynamic life being a writer or being an architect or being a nurse.
And you get to pursue your own life, and the market and democracy are ways to keep ourdiversity coherent, so we can live together in an orderly way, in a safe way, in an affluent way,and liberalism based on respect and dignity for the individual.
And that, I think, is fundamentally different than populism, which is not so much based onrespect and dignity of the individual. It’s based on homage, the bowing down to the leader. If Ihad to try to summarize what I believe, I would say, Mr. President, you’re involved in afundamental and elemental struggle between two mindsets, two cultures, two systems ofgovernment, one of which is liberal and positive sum and growth oriented, and the other which ispopulist and zero sum and threat oriented. And so, we need you to be as big as the situationdemands.
I think it would be wonderful if Biden got out of the role of being president, got out of fancypolicies, and stressed that liberalism and liberal democracy is not just an abstract idea that JohnStuart Mill thought of. Liberal democracy is something we live every day. It involves a concreteset of social actions, like starting a business, building a better school, working together withpeople and companies, rising from poverty to buy a house, raising your children not to be culturewarriors, but to be innovators, to be entrepreneurs.
This is what liberal capitalism is. It’s the stuff we do every day. And it comes under threat whenwe decide to live in a society that’s not liberal, but is authoritarian, and suddenly you don’t havethe freedom to dream what you want to dream because you’re enmeshed in a web of fear.

​I was unsure if we could have a meaningful discussion about hell; but, we did. It seems only fair to have a discussion about heaven next. As such, the article attached is about heaven and where (what) it is.
Also attached are the two documents I shared this week - a quote sheet and the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church description of hell. Lastly, if you are interested in the book I referenced, here is the link(but don't read it at night):www.amazon.com/23 Minutes in Hell

Heaven Comes to Us
Thomas G. Long, Christian Century 5.3.11
For many thoughtful Christians, meaningful language about heaven has fallen steadily from theirgrasp. In a scientific age, "heaven" as a place where God reigns and people go when they die hasgradually slipped the moorings of plausibility. In 1941, Rudolf Bultmann, his sledgehammerpoised against the foundations of the three-story cosmos, confidently said, "There is no longerany heaven in the traditional sense." The official 1930s hymnbook in my denomination includedover a dozen hymns on heaven. The current hymnal's index doesn't even list the category.
Good riddance—at least according to an increasing chorus of voices. N. T. Wright recentlyargued that any thought that Christian hope is about "going to heaven" is biblically unsupported,theologically bankrupt and ethically corrosive. Jesus scholar Marcus Borg once told an audience,
"If I were to make a list of Christianity's ten worst contributions to religion, on that list would bepopular Christianity's emphasis on the afterlife."
More recently, media-savvy pastor Rob Bell publishedLove Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell,and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, in which he dismisses traditional evangelicalnotions of heaven and hell, calling them "misguided and toxic." When advance word leakedabout Bell's new book, outraged conservatives pummeled him with what the New York Timescalled "a biblical hailstorm of Twitter messages and blog posts."
Yet the hope of heaven dies hard in the popular imagination. Polls show that nine out of tenAmericans believe in heaven, regardless of religious affiliation, and 85 percent are persuadedthat they "will personally go there."
Even more impressive is the astonishing success of Todd Burpo'sHeaven Is for Real, which hastopped the New York Times best-seller lists for several months. Burpo, pastor of a smallNebraska church, tells of how he and his wife nearly lost their three-year-old son Colton becauseof misdiagnosed appendicitis. The couple experienced the fear, rage and anxiety any parentswould feel as their child came perilously close to death—and all of the relief and renewed faithwhen his life seemed to be miraculously spared.
Burpo then describes how Colton began to tell a mind-boggling story of having been transportedfrom the operating table into heaven. He described his great-grandfather "Pop," dead for morethan 30 years, and a sister who died in a miscarriage that Colton had never been told about. Healso encountered John the Baptist and saw God and Jesus sitting on enormous thrones. Heaven,he said, is "for real."
The fact that Colton's heaven has all of the trappings of a fundamentalist vision, including pearlygates and a blue-eyed Jesus, raises a skeptical eyebrow. The fact that the book was ghostwrittenby Lynn Vincent, who penned Sarah Palin'sGoing Rogue, raises the other eyebrow. Colton, now11, seems like a sweet kid, but I came away from this book thinking that either he was carried inan out-of-body experience to a biblical wax museum in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, or he's beenchanneling images from his father's sermons back to his credulous parents. Cathal Kelly of theToronto Star scoffs that the book is for "the sort of people who see angels in chicken salad.[Colton has] written a book that will be shelved under 'non-fiction' south of the Mason-DixonLine."
But charity should prevail. The book's unexpected popularity tells us something. In sobermoments of reflection, our culture may find talk of heaven implausible, but in moments of need,it finds the hope of heaven irresistible.
All the more welcome, then, amidst these conflicting impulses, to have theologian ChristopherMorse's superb and profound new monograph,The Difference Heaven Makes: Rehearing theGospel as News. Morse combs meticulously through the biblical evidence, observing that in theGospels heaven is mainly "not about blue skies or life only after death." Rather, heaven is the lifethat is now coming toward us from God, the life "of the world to come," a life that overcomesour present age. The opposite of heaven is not hell, but instead the "world that is passing away."
In Acts, when Jesus is "taken up to heaven," this is not a spatial claim, but an announcement thatJesus has been taken up "into the very life that is now forthcoming toward us." Heaven is God'sunbounded love breaking in to every situation, stronger than any loss, even death. We don't go toheaven; heaven comes to us. "In sum," Morse writes, "we are called to be on hand for that whichis at hand but not in hand, an unprecedented glory of not being left orphaned but of being lovedin a community of new creation beyond all that we can ask or imagine."
Some day when Colton Burpo rereads his father's book with adult and perhaps skeptical eyes, Ihope he will know that even if he did not go to heaven as a three-year-old, heaven comes to himevery day and enfolds him in unfathomable love.

Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church Hell
Discussion Group Quote Sheet: Hell

​I can't believe we're going to talk about it but there was an interesting opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal about hell. My thinking is this: if the WSJ can talk about it, why can't we.
As is our Lenten tradition, I'll be offering a short Scripture reading to meditate on. Also, as is our tradition, I expect to have a lively, deep and uplifting conversation (about what is most likely the darkest of subjects).

How We Think About Hell
Lance Morrow, Wall Street Journal 3.7.24

Pope Francis was asked earlier this year what he thinks about hell. “It’s difficult to imagine it,”he replied. “What I would say is not a dogma of faith, but my personal thought: I like to thinkhell is empty. I hope it is.”
It was a pastoral pleasantry, kindly meant but theologically sloppy. It raised interestingquestions: Has the traditional hell—fire and brimstone through all eternity—gone out ofbusiness, either because, as the pope hopes, there are no longer enough customers, or becausehell has become an atavism: medieval, lurid, and not credible to the 21st-century mind? Is theeternal fire a metaphor? If so, what does it mean? Is hell a physical place or a state of mind? Isthere such a thing as eternal life—and if God’s verdict goes against you, does that mean a life ofeverlasting torment? Is it possible to believe in hell if you don’t believe in God, or is hell theterrible solitude of living without God?
Pope Francis himself has defined hell as “eternal solitude.” By contrast, Jean-Paul Sartre, thepontiff of existentialism, wrote that “hell is other people.” Which is it?
Evelyn Waugh proposed a darkly witty version of hell in his novel “A Handful of Dust.” It endswith the hero, an English gentleman lost in the Amazonian rain forest, held prisoner by anilliterate mixed-race Guianan who happens to own a complete set of Dickens and forces hiscaptive to read it aloud, over and over again, without hope of release.
Hell expanded centuries ago from theology into literature. Great writers have had a crack at it.Dante set the standard. Milton’s “Paradise Lost” is magnificent, although, as Samuel Johnsonremarked, “no one wished it longer.” Milton’s fallen Lucifer sounds unexpectedly modern whenhe cries, “Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.” Is it the case that we make our own hell?
I experienced a shock of recognition when I first read James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as aYoung Man”: The Jesuit retreat master’s hair-raising sermon therein resembled, almost word forword, one I’d heard during a retreat at the Jesuits’ Gonzaga College High School in Washingtonaround 1957. If hell is the unspeakable, those priests managed to give it elaborate articulation:the stench of rotting corpses, the boiling blood and brains of sinners. And “remember, boys, thefire of hell gives off no light.”
Joyce’s novel was published in 1916, the year of the Great War’s Battle of the Somme, aslaughter that killed some 300,000 soldiers and wounded hundreds of thousands more. Aroundthis time notions about hell began to migrate from eternity into history and, simultaneously, from
meaning into meaninglessness.
The old story of hell had been filled with meaning—which emerged from a detailed theologicalformality, a system of sin and condign punishment worked out almost as precisely as Newton’slaws of motion. World War I’s trenches reduced war to meaningless horror. The 20th centuryproceeded along those lines, through a sequence of world-historical hells: the genocidalUkrainian famine inflicted by Stalin in the early 1930s; Hitler’s Final Solution, which killed sixmillion Jews in Auschwitz, Treblinka and other death camps; the urbicidal bombings of WorldWar II; the Cambodians’ hellish mass murder under Pol Pot. On and on.
Hell presents itself in the 21st century, in the events of Oct. 7 in southern Israel and in Israel’ssubsequent leveling of Gaza. Many feel premonitions of a more general hell on Earth, in climatechange, as if the weather were groping toward fulfillment of the Robert Frost poem: “Some saythe world will end in fire / Some say in ice.” Is it sinful to use plastic bags? To fly in a privatejet? Will people who do those things be sent to hell?
In our time, the sense of sin—sin being the reason hell is necessary—has been diminished by thenotion that human behavior and even an individual’s fate are predetermined, written in the genes.This is Calvinism without Calvinism’s saving paradox—that you must act as if. But if a man’sbehavior is out of his hands, he won’t be capable of sinning. Wouldn’t it be an injustice tosentence him to eternal damnation?
The man’s life would resemble nothing so much as the driverless car Elon Musk and the techpriesthood have labored to perfect. If a person isn’t in command of the accelerator, brakes andsteering wheel, how can he be punished if his car’s computers fail and it runs over somebody?
That line of reasoning makes hell seem less plausible, less just, merely contingent.
What will artificial intelligence make of the notion of hell? Will the robots laugh?
Plenty of people, of course, still believe in such a place—literally or metaphorically or in somevague, ingenious fusion of the two: an intuition that, despite its reductive crudity, harbors a basictruth about human nature and its sense of justice.

​Continuing with our Lenten theme of talking about a societal issue and meditating on Scripture, we have an article about how politics had become a false religion and how science and Christianity (and Presiding Bishop Michael Curry) saved her.
Also included is the Scripture sheet I created and showed you last week - it has two stories about Moses and the prophet Jonah and suicide. It also has passages that for centuries (millennia) have helped lift people from the depths of despair. And, as always, if you would like to talk about this individually, please let me know.

The 2016 Election Sent Me Searching for Answers
Carrie Sheffield, Christianity Today 12.22.23
Carrie Sheffield is a policy analyst in Washington, DC. This essay is adapted from her book,MotorhomeProphecies: A Journey of Healing and Forgiveness

People laugh when I admit this, but my conversion to Christianity resulted from two powerfulforces: science and presidential politics. But before that journey began, I needed distance fromextreme religious trauma. I grew up within an offshoot Mormon cult, living with sevenbiological siblings in various motor homes, tents, houses, and sheds. Besides time spent inhomeschooling, I attended 17 different public schools. When I took my ACT test, we lived in ashed with no running water in the Ozarks.
My father believed he was a Mormon prophet destined to become president. The LDS Churcheventually excommunicated him for heresy. As a child, he was raped by a Mormon babysitterand witnessed the sudden death of a best friend. His children inherited the trauma. I’ve beenhospitalized nine times for depression, fibromyalgia, suicidal ideation, and PTSD.
For years, I assumed I’d never return to belief in God or organized religion. My heart remainedclosed for over a decade because of the evil things I’d seen done in God’s name. To fill the void,I threw myself into work, schooling, dating, friends, and travel as ultimate sources of meaning. Istudied business policy at Harvard and worked as an analyst for major Wall Street firms, earningunthinkable sums for a girl from a motor home. I launched a career in political journalism atoutlets like Politico, The Hill, and the Washington Times. Materially, I was well off. Butspiritually, I felt poorer than ever. I couldn’t help comparing myself to people who appearedmore successful. Over time, I discovered my earthly gifts and accomplishments didn’t offer realfulfillment.
I turned to ancient Stoic philosophy to bring me peace and stability, and in many respects it did.But it wasn’t enough. During the 2016 election, when I felt an existential crisis. I realized that Ihad allowed politics to become a substitute religion. I’d built my career toward working on aRepublican campaign or in the White House. It would be a crowning success. I felt ready. I knewthe economy after managing billions of dollars in credit risk on Wall Street. I’d appeared onCNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Fox Business, and other networks, even sparring on HBO’s RealTime with Bill Maher.
But I couldn’t endorse what Trump said about women, and I couldn’t abide his lack of public-service experience. I wrote in the then senator Ben Sasse, a Republican from Nebraska, as myprotest candidate. During this crisis of meaning, I felt distraught and adrift. So I turned to church,first to Redeemer Presbyterian, founded by the late Tim Keller, and also to Saint ThomasEpiscopal on Fifth Avenue.
Each week, I generally attended either a Sunday service or a Bible study. There, I encounteredScripture’s answer to career and political idolatry in passages like Mark 8:36–37, which asks,“For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul? Or what will aman give in exchange for his soul?” And I gradually discovered why Christianity supplantedStoicism (and other ancient philosophies).
Like Buddhism, Stoicism teaches detachment to help relieve human suffering. We are in pain,the Stoics say, because we irrationally attach ourselves to things, and true liberation comes fromrefusing to let them control our peace. There is truth in those sentiments, but Stoicism didn’toffer sustaining community, and it didn’t help me comprehend either human depravity or thepossibility of redemption.
I enjoyed Keller’s intellectual approach. His church welcomed skeptics, atheists, and agnosticslike me. He provided a solid answer to my anger at organized religion. I resonated with hisresponse inThe Prodigal Godto Karl Marx’s charge that religion is the “opiate of the masses.”
As Keller observed:Christianity teaches that God hates the suffering and oppression of thismaterial world so much, he was willing to get involved in it and to fight against it. Properlyunderstood, Christianity is by no means the opiate of the people. It’s more like the smelling salts.
As I studied theology, I also began studying science and metaphysics, discovering abundantevidence for a divine creator that blew away any last vestiges of agnosticism. I embraced aministry calledScience + Godcreated by former Harvard physics professor Michael Guillen. Anatheist when he entered Cornell University, he left as a Christian, graduating with three PhDs —mathematics, astronomy, and physics — before teaching at Harvard and joining ABC News aschief science correspondent.
The more I studied science, history, anthropology, and other disciplines, the more my faith inGod and my confidence in Christianity grew. In Mormonism, further study had produced furtherdisillusionment. Studying Christianity felt like uncovering buried treasure discarded byintellectuals who had discounted its scientific and philosophical heft.
I joined the Episcopal Church, having been influenced by Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, thepreacher from the royal wedding of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. More than two billionpeople watched his sermon on the power of love. But I already knew the power of this small,bespectacled, energetic man. One of his chief advisors, Chuck Robertson, became a spiritualmentor to me after we met in Manhattan.
Reverend Chuck gave me the bishop’s bookCrazy Christians. It’s about love’s power to healracial, socioeconomic, and all other divisions. As an African American, Curry grew up amidsegregation, and his father brought his family to the Episcopal Church because it served the sameCommunion cup to parishioners of all races. Curry saw the truth of Galatians 3:28, that “you areall one in Christ Jesus.” His words touched my heart and encouraged my faith journey.
My baptism day — December 3, 2017 — was the happiest of my life. A group of about 30family and friends watched me vow to “serve Christ in all persons, loving my neighbor asmyself” and “strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of everyhuman being.” More than six years since my baptism, I enjoy a healthier relationship to politics.
I still have strong convictions, which I don’t hesitate to share in columns, speeches, or TVappearances, but I know God is far bigger than any manmade system.
As I returned to a walk with God, I felt enveloped with a sense of peace that surpassedunderstanding. The mission of Christ to unify and heal breathed new life and joy into my bruisedheart. I recovered a sense of confidence, not in myself but in my identity as a child of God.

Depression and the Bible
Numbers 11:10-16
Moses heard the people crying throughout their clans, each at his tent’s entrance. The LORD wasoutraged, and Moses was upset. Moses said to the LORD, “Why have you treated your servant sobadly? And why haven’t I found favor in your eyes, for you have placed the burden of all thesepeople on me? Did I conceive all these people? Did I give birth to them, that you would say tome, ‘Carry them at the breast, as a nurse carries an unweaned child,’ to the fertile land that youpromised their ancestors? Where am I to get meat for all these people? They are crying beforeme and saying, ‘Give us meat, so we can eat.’ I can’t bear this people on my own. They’re tooheavy for me. If you’re going to treat me like this, please kill me. If I’ve found favor in your
eyes, then don’t let me endure this wretched situation.”
The LORD said to Moses, “Gather before me seventy men from Israel’s elders, whom you knowas elders and officers of the people.

Jonah 4:1-4
But Jonah thought [God saving the people of Nineveh] was utterly wrong, and he becameangry. He prayed to the LORD, “Come on, LORD! Wasn’t this precisely my point when I wasback in my own land? This is why I fled to Tarshish earlier! I know that you are a merciful andcompassionate God, very patient, full of faithful love, and willing not to destroy. At thispoint, LORD, you may as well take my life from me, because it would be better for me to die thanto live.”
The LORD responded, “Is your anger a good thing?”

Psalm 40:1-2
I put all my hope in the Lord. He leaned down to me; he listened to my cry for help. He lifted meout of the pit of death, out of the mud and filth, and set my feet on solid rock. He steadied mylegs.

2 Corinthians 4:18
We don’t focus on the things that can be seen but on the things that can’t be seen. The things thatcan be seen don’t last, but the things that can’t be seen are eternal.

Matthew 11:28-30
“Come to me, all you who are struggling hard and carrying heavy loads, and I will give you rest.Put on my yoke, and learn from me. I’m gentle and humble. And you will find rest foryourselves. My yoke is easy to bear, and my burden is light.”

Romans 8:38-39
I’m convinced that nothing can separate us from God’s love in Christ Jesus our Lord: not deathor life, not angels or rulers, not present things or future things, not powers or height or depth, orany other thing that is created.

​For the Lenten season, we are going to talk about faith and relate it to an event in society. This week, we are going to talk about the rise of suicide. Since there is not one single article that covers this, I took on the role of editor and have combined three stories - from the NY Times, The Christian Century, and Crosswalk (an evangelical publication) which address different aspects of suicide. In particular, the rise in teen suicide and what the Church, and specifically grandparents, can do.

I am available at any time to talk with you about this confidentially and one-on-one. If you are interested in talking about it in a safe group environment, I look forward to seeing you on Tuesday or Wednesday in person or online. And yes, as always, I'll have the coffee ready.

Putting Up and Removing Barriers: A Discussion About Suicide
The Rev. David J. Marshall, Editor, All Angels by the Sea, 2.22.24

Ellen Barry, Mental Health Reporter, NY Times:

Our Teens Are Not Okay
Editors of The Christian Century, 4.10.23.
A recent CDC report identifies a sharp increase in depression among teen girls. Boys are notdoing well either, but girls are faring worse across nearly all measures. The reasons are unclear.
In his newsletter, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt points to the “rewiring of childhood” in the2010s with the widespread use of mobile devices and social media. Girls report experiencingmore online bullying and harassment than boys, and Haidt observes that even those who aren’tchronically online may suffer. When all your peers are posting, you can feel isolated, lonely, anddepressed if you aren’t joining them.
Another study, in the journal SSM-Mental Health, confirms that teen girls are the most depressed— and adds that teens who self-identify as liberal are even more depressed than theirconservative peers. Perhaps liberal teens have a greater awareness of systemic injustice, whileconservatives are more likely to view inequality as a personal failure — and therefore to feel agreater sense of personal agency and hope.
Whatever the causes, the study indicates that the views through which teens process world eventsmatter to their mental health, that teens are increasingly likely to root their personal identity intheir political beliefs. “Young people are experiencing a level of distress that calls on us to actwith urgency and compassion,” said the CDC’s Kathleen Ethier in a press release. She has urgedschools and health-care professionals to take evidence-based steps to improve teen mental health.
Churches can do this, too. Religious practice has proven to be neuroprotective for teens andadults, with higher levels of spirituality and religion associated with lower rates of depressivesymptoms and suicidality. (The SSM study controlled for religiosity for this reason.)
Psychologist Lisa Miller’s research suggests that the teen years are marked by an increasedcapacity and desire for connection with others and with God. The development of healthyadolescent spirituality makes kids happier and can contribute to their lifelong mental health.
We don’t know why girls are doing worse than boys (and it’s possible that boys areunderreporting their depressive symptoms). But churches can make a difference in teens’ livesby helping them cultivate healthy spiritual practices and a sense of belonging. The CDC saysteens need a safe, trusted community that cares about them and their well-being—but the churchcan also be a place that cares about what they care about. Churches can be places where theylearn how to come together to work for justice, rather than scrolling through it alone.

Habits to Talk to Your Grandchildren About Faith,
Annie Yorty, Crosswalk Contributing Writer, June 12, 2023.
Demonstrate your spiritual life with God.
Allow your grandchildren to see you practice your faith – whether it is reflection, in prayer, or inBible study. Invite them to pray with you. At mealtimes, pause to pray, even if no one else joinsyou.
Talk about God in your daily life.
Try using “Here’s what I believe” statements such as these:
Sunday is the best day because I get to go to church and feel better about my week.
When I talk to God, He gives me peace in my heart.
When I have a problem, I read my Bible and talk to church friends to find answers.
Communicate everyday biblical principles without preaching.
Show them patience and kindness. Teach your children about generosity in daily living. And,give them your undivided attention the way that God pays attention to us.
Reinforce the importance of righteousness in every area of life.
When playing games together, say, “We want to do the right thing by following the rules.” At thesame time, help them to see the wisdom of putting others first.
Watch for signs of spiritual readiness.
Sooner or later, your grandkids will display a need to know more about God. Ask God to helpyou perceive their heart needs and be ready with thoughtful questions to lead to opportunities toshare truth.
Demonstrate the love of God through carefully chosen gifts.
If their non-believing parents do not allow you to give an overtly Christian gift, give the gift of time with you because it adds an even better purpose for relationship building. For example, giveyour grandkids a game that promotes open-ended conversation. Then play it with them. Or takethem to a classic play or movie with Christian themes and then talk with them about it.
Offer interesting books that pique spiritual interest.
Perhaps even read them aloud together. Many non-religious preteens enjoy The Lion, the Witchand the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis which contains a Christian theme of love and sacrifice thatmakes for deep conversations.
Endure scoffing with grace.
Your non-believing children, or even your grandkids, may tease or challenge you because ofyour faith. Take on the humility of Christ (Philippians 2:5) rather than taking offense. Forgiveand love rather than defending and arguing. God may use your meekness to prick theirconscience.
Love and encourage your non-believing children.
Build them up by praising their strengths and avoiding criticism. They will not only experiencethe love of God through you, but you will also be maintaining open communication and access toyour grandkids.
Lastly, (and perhaps most importantly), ask God to lead you to step out in faith that passes on arich spiritual inheritance to your grandchildren. Our faithful God may even surprise you bybringing their unbelieving parents along with your grandkids.

​Welcome to Lent - a church season where we take time to do a number of things including meditating on God's holy Word. For the next six weeks, we are going to meditate, and discuss, an aspect of Biblical writing in light of current events. As it happened, the Super Bowl gave us something to talk about. Did you see theHe Gets Usad? Apparently not everyone agreed with it. In our article this week from David French, he asks these questions:
Like Jesus, are you willing to risk shame and isolation for loving those on the other side of the political and religious aisle? Are you willing to love others even if they haven’t repented of what you believe to be grievous sins?

He Gets Us. Do We Get Him?
David French, The NY Times, 2.15.24
During Super Bowl Sunday, a 60-second ad aired about Jesus Christ, and no one seemed angrierabout it than Christians. The ad depicts a series of images of one person washing anotherperson’s feet. Each pairing seems unlikely. An oil rig worker washes the feet of a climateactivist. A cop washes the feet of a young Black man. An older woman washes the feet of ayoung woman outside an apparent abortion clinic, while anti-abortion protesters look on. Apriest washes the feet of a young L.G.B.T.Q. man. As the commercial ends, words appear on thescreen: “Jesus didn’t teach hate. He washed feet.”
The ad came from a group calledHe Gets Usthat is running a multimillion-dollar ad campaignwith the aim of essentially reintroducing America to Jesus. The constant theme of the group’sads is that Jesus knows you and loves you. But not everyone loves the ads. First, there’s theentirely fair question of whether it’s appropriate for Christians to spend large sums of money onan ad campaign when it could be spent instead on, for instance, providing food or shelter to thosein need. I’ve had questions about that myself.
He Gets Ushas also come under fire from the left. Some people have critiqued the funders(which include a founder of Hobby Lobby), noting that they’ve also funded conservativeChristian legal causes. Americans United for Separation of Church and State goes so far as tocall the ads “a front for Christian nationalism.” Yet if that’s true, someone forgot to tell thereligious right. The most radically right-wing cohort of Christians were furious at the ad, and
they’ve stayed furious for days. The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh called the ads “heretical[expletive]” and said, “Putting out an ad that invites narcissistic, prideful, unrepentant sinners tocome and get their feet washed is bad, actually.” The critiques kept rolling in, and many were notgentle. A Christian writer named Samuel Sey highlighted the segment of the ad that depicts footwashing outside an abortion clinic. The “Christ-like thing to do at an abortion centre isn’t towash an abortion-minded girl’s feet while ignoring their murderous intentions,” Sey wrote. “TheChrist-like thing to do is to call them to repentance.”
But all the right-wing anger at the ad may offer a hint as to its true target. Far from making astealth case for Christian nationalism, the ads are making a rather blatant case to Christians thatperhaps Jesus would not play the culture-warrior role they imagine. This is especially true of theSuper Bowl ad, which refers to a story known primarily to Christians. In John 13, Jesus humbledhimself, washed his disciples’ feet and then instructed them, “you also should wash oneanother’s feet,” an admonition that many Christians take quite literally. Foot washing as ahumbling act is a staple in countless churches.
The best explanation I’ve heard for the ad came from Kaitlyn Schiess, a Christian writer andspeaker and frequent guest on the Holy Post podcast. She argued that the ad asks, “Are youwilling to be shamed for your associations?” In other words, are you willing to risk shame andisolation for loving those on the other side of the political and religious aisle? Are you, likeJesus, willing to love others even if it causes people to hate you? Are you willing to love otherseven if they haven’t repented of what you believe to be grievous sins?
I grew up in a fundamentalist religious tradition. My church placed an enormous emphasis on the“boldly declaring” model – our fundamental job is to preach Christ to the lost. When I left myfundamentalist church and joined an evangelical fellowship in law school, I learned a differentapproach. This model says that there is a difference between declaring your faith anddemonstrating your faith, and that declarations without demonstrations are worthless.
It’s one thing to possess the courage to say what you believe, but it takes immeasurably morecourage to truly love people you’re often told to hate — even and especially if they don’t loveyou back. There is nothing distinctive about boldly declaring your beliefs. Many people do that. But how many people love their enemies? The Super Bowl ad is communicating something radical and valuable: I can love you and serve you even when I disagree with you.
In fact, while Jesus was obviously a preacher and a teacher, scripture is clear that when peoplewere suffering or in peril, time and again Jesus moved to relieve their suffering before he askedthem to follow him. He immediately demonstrated love and compassion when people were underduress. Kindness was not conditioned on first accepting his teaching.
The older I get, the more I reject the “bold declaration” model of Christian engagement in favorof prioritizing courageous demonstration. I’m so weary of Christian scandals that I’m nowinstantly wary in the presence of excessive “God talk.” Whenever a person leads with theirreligiosity, I’m cautious. I’d rather know a person’s faith by their virtues. And we know fromscripture which virtues demonstrate the presence of the Holy Spirit in a person’s life: “love, joy,
peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” Yes, there wereChristians who were offended by the ad. But there are millions of others, like me, who watchedthe ad and felt challenged. We asked ourselves if we were adequately loving and serving ourneighbors.
I was reminded of a story that made an indelible impact on me. When I was a young law student,an evangelist and professor named Tony Campolo came to speak to our Christian fellowship.The story he told helped reframe my life. Campolo was eating out very late in an all-night dinerwhen a group of women who were obviously prostitutes came inside. One of the women, namedAgnes, said her birthday was the next day and observed that she’d never had a birthday party inher life. Campolo overheard the conversation. The next night, Campolo brought some simpledecorations, hung them up and threw Agnes a surprise party in that diner. She cried tears of joyand ended up taking the cake home, untouched. It was the first birthday cake she had everreceived. After she left, Campolo prayed with the people who remained in the diner, and one ofthe employees asked him what kind of church he belonged to. Campolo’s answer was perfect: Hesaid he belonged to the kind of church that gives a party for a prostitute at 3:30 a.m. Not,obviously, because he approved of prostitution. But because he cared for Agnes. He threw thatparty for her before he knew how she’d respond, before he knew whether she’d leave the streetsand before he’d had a chance to say anything at all to her about Jesus. The party itself spoke toher more loudly than any words could have.
I still don’t know how I feel about spending so much money on a Super Bowl ad about Jesus.But I do know that its message is vitally important. Instead of telling our nation, “He Gets Us,” itessentially asks American Christians, do we get him?

​The topic is about an ancient Jewish practice from the Mishnah - the power of just showing up. Rabbi Brous writes the following:
Showing up for one another doesn’t require heroic gestures. It means picking up the phone and calling our friend or colleague. It means going to the funeral. It also means going to the birthday dinner. Err on the side of presence.Small, tender gestures remind us that we are not helpless, even in the face of grave human suffering.
On the second page, she talks about the downfall of tribalism:
Our tribes can order our lives, give them meaning and purpose, direction and pride. But the tribal instinct can also be perilous. The more closely we identify with our tribe, the more likely we are to dismiss or even feel hostility toward those outside it.
I'd like to know what you think about this.

The Amen Effect
Sharon Brous, The New York Times 1.24.24
Rabbi Brous is the senior rabbi of Ikar, a Jewish community based in LA, and the author of “The Amen Effect.”

A somewhat obscure text, about 2,000 years old, has been my unlikely teacher and guide for thepast many years, and my north star these last several months, as so many of us have felt as ifwe’ve been drowning in an ocean of sorrow and helplessness.
Buried deep within the Mishnah, a Jewish legal compendium from around the third century, is anancient practice reflecting a deep understanding of the human psyche and spirit: When your heartis broken, when the specter of death visits your family, when you feel lost and alone and inclinedto retreat, you show up. You entrust your pain to the community.
The text, Middot 2:2, describes a pilgrimage ritual from the time of the Second Temple. Severaltimes each year, hundreds of thousands of Jews would ascend to Jerusalem, the center of Jewishreligious and political life. They would climb the steps of the Temple Mount and enter itsenormous plaza, turning to the right en masse, circling counterclockwise.
Meanwhile, the brokenhearted, the mourners (and here I would also include the lonely and thesick), would make this same ritual walk but they would turn to the left and circle in the oppositedirection: every step against the current.
And each person who encountered someone in pain would look into that person’s eyes andinquire: “What happened to you? Why does your heart ache?”
“My father died,” a person might say. “There are so many things I never got to say to him.” Orperhaps: “My partner left. I was completely blindsided.” Or: “My child is sick. We’re awaitingthe test results.”
Those who walked from the right would offer a blessing: “May the Holy One comfort you,” theywould say. “You are not alone.” And then they would continue to walk until the next personapproached.
This timeless wisdom speaks to what it means to be human in a world of pain. This year, youwalk the path of the anguished. Perhaps next year, it will be me. I hold your broken heartknowing that one day you will hold mine.
I read in this text many profound lessons, two particularly pertinent in our time, when so many ofus feel that we are breaking. First, do not take your broken heart and go home. Don’t isolate.
Step toward those whom you know will hold you tenderly.
And on your good days — the days when you can breathe — show up then, too. Because thevery fact of seeing those who are walking against the current, people who can barely hold on,and asking, with an open heart, “Tell me about your sorrow,” may be the deepest affirmation ofour humanity, even in terribly inhumane times.
It is an expression of both love and sacred responsibility to turn to another person in her momentof deepest anguish and say: “Your sorrow may scare me, it may unsettle me. But I will notabandon you. I will meet your grief with relentless love.”
We cannot magically fix one another’s broken hearts. But we can find each other in our mostvulnerable moments and wrap each other up in a circle of care. We can humbly promise eachother, “I can’t take your pain away, but I can promise you won’t have to hold it alone.”
Showing up for one another doesn’t require heroic gestures. It means training ourselves toapproach, even when our instinct tells us to withdraw. It means picking up the phone and callingour friend or colleague who is suffering. It means going to the funeral and to the house ofmourning. It also means going to the wedding and to the birthday dinner. Reach out in yourstrength, step forward in your vulnerability. Err on the side of presence.
Small, tender gestures remind us that we are not helpless, even in the face of grave humansuffering. We maintain the ability, even in the dark of night, to find our way to one another. Weneed this, especially now.
Here’s the second lesson from that ancient text. Humans naturally incline toward the known. Ourtribes can uplift us, order our lives, give them meaning and purpose, direction and pride. But thetribal instinct can also be perilous. The more closely we identify with our tribe, the more likelywe are to dismiss or even feel hostility toward those outside it.
One of the great casualties of tribalism is curiosity. And when we are no longer curious, whenwe don’t try to imagine or understand what another person is thinking or feeling or where herpain comes from, our hearts begin to narrow. We become less compassionate and moreentrenched in our own worldviews. Trauma exacerbates this trend. It reinforces an instinct toturn away from one another, rather than make ourselves even more vulnerable.
The ancient rabbis ask us to imagine a society in which no person is disposable. Even those whohave hurt us, even those with views antithetical to ours must be seen in their humanity and heldwith curiosity and care.
We desperately need a spiritual rewiring in our time. Imagine a society in which we learn to seeone another in our pain, to ask one another, “What happened to you?” Imagine that we hear oneanother’s stories, say amen to one another’s pain, and even pray for one another’s healing. I callthis the amen effect: sincere, tender encounters that help us forge new spiritual and neuralpathways by reminding us that our lives and our destinies are entwined. Because, ultimately, it isonly by finding our way to one another that we will begin to heal.

​This week, we had a great discussion about faith. The opposite of faith, to me, is not un-faith but belief in flukes. For instance, the belief that what occured to make all of living creation is a fluke - a random occurrence. Our author for next week is an expert on flukes. He wrote the following:
When you lose at roulette, you don’t kick yourself for being a failure, you accept the arbitrary outcome and move on. Recognising that often meaningless, accidental outcomes emerge from an intertwined, complex world is empowering and liberating. We should all take a bit less credit for our triumphs and a bit less blame for our failures.
But what about faith - not in the roulette wheel, but in a greater, grander design for our life both individually and corporately. I'd like to know what you think.

What If Every Little Thing You Do Changes History?
Brian Klaas, The Guardian, 1.29.24
Brian Klaas is associate professor in global politics at University College London and the author of Fluke.
When we contemplate travelling back in time, we’re always given the same warning: be sure notto touch anything. Even one squished bug could irrevocably change the future. Why, then, don’twe think like that about the present? If every tiny change from the past creates our present, then
every aspect of our present creates our future, too.
Chaos theory is a definitively established scientific truth about how complex systems aresensitive to tiny changes – that small flukes can have enormous effects. It’s not really a theory;it’s been proved over and over again. It’s why we can’t predict the weather more than a week inadvance. If our calculations are off by even a tiny amount, all bets are off.
Those dynamics are simply ignored when we consider humans instead of physical matter.There’s no good reason for it – we’re subject to the same laws of physics as everything else – butwe just pretend it isn’t true. Perhaps it’s because what might happen to our future selves if wesquished the wrong bug are so overwhelming that it’s easier to pretend the world worksdifferently. But it doesn’t.
That’s why history is often made by seemingly insignificant moments that don’t always makesense. The atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima rather than Kyoto because a US governmentofficial holidayed in Kyoto 19 years earlier; Trump may have decided to run for president in2016 after Obama publicly humiliated him with one joke in 2011; the Arab spring was sparkedby a vegetable vendor in central Tunisia who decided to set himself on fire. We’re told to focuson big, obvious variables – the “signal” – while ignoring “the noise”. But the noise – the buzz ofthe complexity of society – often profoundly alters our world.
In a broader sense, our species only exists because of a series of flukes. Two billion years ago –and never again – a single bacterium bumped into a prokaryotic cell and ended up inside it. Itevolved into a mitochondrion, making complex life possible, from grass and trees to snails andhumans. One hundred million years ago, a shrew-like creature got infected with a retrovirus,eventually leading to the placenta and, by extension, the reason why we don’t lay eggs. Sixty-sixmillion years ago, a tiny oscillation in the Oort cloud flung an asteroid towards Earth, wiping outthe dinosaurs, allowing mammals to flourish. If the asteroid had been slightly delayed, humanswouldn’t exist. Everything we’ve achieved would be gone, but for a distant oscillation and a
giant space rock. The story of our existence is often written in the margins.
But those are just the examples we can observe. The more profound and bewildering reality isthat we’re living in “sliding doors” moments constantly, totally unaware of how our pathsthrough life – and the trajectory of our societies – are constantly branching, infinitely, as a resultof tiny, accidental shifts. We ignore these invisible pivots, the moments we will never realisewere consequential, the near misses and near hits that are unknown to us because we have neverseen, and will never see, our alternative possible lives. And yet, because our brains have evolvedto detect patterns (a useful trick for keeping us alive long enough to reproduce), we ignore amystifying fact: that our world and our lives are swayed considerably by chance, contingencyand chaos.
Science, especially the field of complex systems, knows this is how the world works. Socialscience mostly ignores it. Instead of facing reality head-on, we’ve invented a fake conception ofour world that writes out all the wrinkles of life because they’re hard to model. A misleadingimage is reflected back at us from these models, from economics to public health to politics. Inmodels – always wrong, but sometimes useful – every cause has a straightforward effect. Everybig event has a big cause, never a tiny bit of “noise”.
But when we live according to models that reduce the complexity of our chaotic existence into aneat and tidy version of it, we start to believe that we have more control than we actually do.Because if it is swayed by a few key variables we can manipulate, then we have control. But ifthe world is swayed by squished bugs and presidents can emerge from a single joke, well, thenwe’re bewilderingly out of control.
It follows that our big decisions are but one factor in the trajectory of our lives. That is aprofoundly uplifting idea. When you lose at roulette, you don’t kick yourself for being a failure,you accept the arbitrary outcome and move on. Recognising that often meaningless, accidentaloutcomes emerge from an intertwined, complex world is empowering and liberating. We shouldall take a bit less credit for our triumphs and a bit less blame for our failures.
And yet, we continue to worship at the Altar of Progress in the Church of Control. We try totame an untameable world, our lives an idealistic quest for ever more efficiency. But when wetry to distil every waking effort into a struggle for control and ratcheting optimisation, it’s theessence of being human that’s dissolved away. That’s why it feels, to many of us, like we areliving “a checklist existence”.
The paradox, then, is that we control nothing, but we influence everything. As chaos theoryproves, in an intertwined system, every action has an unforeseen ripple effect. Nothing ismeaningless. And that yields a profound truth: that everything we do matters.
You are the contingent culmination of the entirety of cosmic history. Everything had to beexactly as it was for you to exist, just as you are, in this precise moment, in this exact world. Thatleads us to a simple, wondrous idea: that we all are the living manifestation of 13.7bn years offlukes.
We will never be able to fully understand our own existence. Nonetheless, Kurt Vonnegut gaveus good advice on how to live fully within that uncertainty: “A purpose of human life, no matterwho is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved."

​What do you believe? How did you come to believe it? Did it accumulate over time or did you have a sudden awareness or understanding?
Next week, let's talk about the nuts and bolts of faith. Our author, one of the foremost Lutheran pastors in the country, writes the following about an encounter he had recently in the I.C.U. with a 44-year-oldadult who had no faith and was watching his mother die.
To someone of unbelief sitting beside you in a hospital waiting room, how do you describe the power of faith, the significance of hope, or the meaning of life? How do you realistically acquaint them with the riches or comfort of faith during a 20-minute sit-down?
The answer: You can’t.
I wonder if that is true. Something that I know to be true is that no matter where you are in faith and your spiritual journey, you have a voice and opinion at our discussion table.

​Accumulated Faith
Peter W. Marty, The Christian Century 1.16.24
Peter W. Marty is editor of the Century and senior pastor of St. Paul Lutheran Church in Davenport, Iowa.
Jason and I retreated to the ICU waiting room to talk about his mother’s precipitous decline. Moments earlier the attending physician had spoken of her imminent death.
“Six to 12 hours—maybe,” he said.
I wanted to chat with Jason. Marie, Jason’s mother, is very familiar to me from our congregation; her son far less so. A well-employed 44-year-old techie, he doesn’t take to religion. Best I can tell, it feels superfluous tohis larger contentment in life.
Because he looked uncomfortable with what was going on that day, I asked him if he was in fact
uncomfortable. “Yeah, I am. I don’t wanna be here.” He replied.
“Why’s that?” I asked. “Are you uncomfortable because we’re in a hospital, or is it the struggleto let Mom go?”
“Both,” he said. “I’ve never been in a hospital, believe it or not, and I don’t like it here. And,yeah, I don’t have any idea what to do with her death. It’s gonna be a huge . . . I don’t knowwhat.” His voice trailed off.
As I looked into Jason’s eyes, it felt like I was peering into a lost soul: a grown man with no ideaof where to turn next or what to do with the death of the one who brought him into this world. The widely divergent trajectories of our two lives suddenly struck me. To someone of unbeliefsitting beside you in a hospital waiting room, how do you describe the power of faith, thesignificance of hope, or the meaning of life? How do you realistically acquaint them with theriches or comfort of faith during a 20-minute sit-down?
You can’t. Faith is a deeply ingrained condition formed through steady habits, disciplinedpractices, and reliable instincts that take shape over long stretches of time. It’s a way of life thatacquires its layers and contours incrementally, developing ever so gradually and oftenimperceptibly. Somewhat like the parent who doesn’t notice her infant’s changing appearanceuntil she comes home from a weeklong trip and can’t believe how much her child has matured inher absence. The Christian life doesn’t emerge overnight any more than friendship does. Theinternal dispositions that form our character establish themselves often unselfconsciously andover the course of many uneventful days.
There have been times in my life when I’ve found it a valuable exercise to imagine myself heldcaptive in deplorable conditions abroad. A damp and windowless cell. Foul air. Meager food. Nocompanionship. Poor sanitation. Days indistinguishable from nights. Zero connection with the
outside world. What might spare me from total despair or insanity?
My hope is that God’s grace would buoy the faith accumulated within me. The countless hymntexts, song lyrics, and musical tunes I know by heart; the numerous Bible stories and passagesI’ve absorbed and committed to memory over a lifetime; the human experiences of a faithcommunity that remind me of all of this — I know of nothing that comes close to this sustenanceof the heart. It’s vast and deep. Encyclopedic. I’d have to retrieve it quite deliberately, of course,but it’s all in there.
Jason appears to me to lead a contented and happy life, at least on days when his mother isn’tdying. But does he live a good life — by which I mean one with transcendent meaning andpurpose? To be clear, it’s not that what I think of as a good life requires one to be Christian, orthat it magically fashions a person into a good Christian, whatever that is.
I’m just convinced that what Hans Küng wrote decades ago remains true: that “being a Christianis a particularly good thing.” However gradually and unceremoniously faith may evolve withinus, it provides a life that can hold and carry us through all kinds of circ*mstances.

The title of this week's readings says it all: Harmful People with Helpful Ideas.
Harkening back to cancel culture, and tearing down statues of Jefferson and Columbus, the Mennonite minister and author asks if people who have done harm can have good ideas. The author writes:
[Rejecting an artist - like J.S. Bach - because of what he or she did] This is in stark opposition to the 20th-century critical school that emphasized the “death of the author,” maintaining that knowledge of an author’s life and intention was irrelevant to the meaning of a text.

Harmful People with Helpful Ideas
Isaac s. Villegas, The Christian Century 1.8.24
Isaac S. Villegas is an ordained minister in Mennonite Church USA and a PhD student in religion at Duke University.

In a scene early in Todd Field’s 2022 filmTár, eminent composer Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) isteaching a master class at Juilliard. After extolling the compositions of J. S. Bach, Tár provokesMax, a nervous student, to respond with their musical inspirations.
“I’m not really into Bach,” Max answers.
She prods Max with smug condescension, insisting that they must say something more to defendwhat she considers to be an absurd opinion.
“I’d say Bach’s misogynistic life makes it kind of impossible for me to take his music seriously,”Max replies. “Didn’t he sire like 20 kids?”

That someone would link Bach’s sexual life to his brilliant work offends Tár, who snaps back atMax in front of the class:
“I’m unclear as to what his prodigious skills in the marital bed have to do with B minor.”

In her review of the film for theNew York Review of Books, Zadie Smith highlights this back-and-forth between Tár and Max as representative of our current debates about the connectionsbetween a person’s life and work, between personal ethics and creative achievement. “Can an A-minor chord be misogynistic?” Smith asks. She lets her question linger unanswered. Probablybecause there are no answers — no schema for untangling the threads of influence in a work ofart, no solvent to dissolve the contradictions that compose a person’s life.
What seems clear is that we, according to our cultural mores, assume that an artist’s or a writer’slife is present — even if the markings are faint — in their work. The ethical or unethical aspectsof their lives press into what they produce. Their identities and choices are somehow legible tous on the page or canvas. These kinds of ad hominem associations have become culturallyrelevant to our appreciation, enjoyment, and respect. This is in stark opposition to the 20thcentury critical school that emphasized the “death of the author,” maintaining that knowledge ofan author’s life and intention was irrelevant to the meaning of a text.
I don’t think a particular chord can be misogynistic, but that might have more to do with my lackof musical sophistication than anything else. I’d be at a loss if, while listening to a piece ofmusic, I was asked to pick out the indicted chord. But I do share something of Max’s concernswhen I think about my indebtedness to theologies and philosophies that come from the lives ofpeople who’ve hurt others. I still read Martin Luther, despite his vile attacks on Judaism and hisdefense of killing Anabaptists. I still think with John Calvin, despite his active involvement inthe execution of Michael Servetus. I’m troubled by the revelations of Simone de Beauvoir’ssexually abusive relationships with students, but I can’t imagine my own development as a
feminist without what I’ve learned fromThe Second Sex.
The ideas of people who’ve enacted harm populate my thinking, my theologizing. This situation — our indebtedness to people who’ve violated the lives of others — didn’t seem to troubleAugustine, who inOn Christian Teachingencourages his community of learners to gleanknowledge from whomever, regardless of the taint of evil. Because, he argues, “wherever [theChristian] may find truth, it is the Lord’s.” We are like the Hebrews in the story of Exodus,
Augustine explains, who took with them the silver and gold of Pharaoh’s regime upon theirliberation. We plunder the good from wherever we discover it “for the just use of teaching thegospel.”
In 2013, the delegate assembly of my denomination, Mennonite Church USA, appointed me toour national governing body. Our first order of business, I soon discovered, was to commission athorough investigation into John Howard Yoder’s sexual abuse. In the mid-1980s, the theologianwas removed from his seminary position and banned from campus events. A few years later hisministerial ordination was suspended; he soon relinquished it in order to preempt its terminationby the disciplinary committee.
Despite the alert sounded within Mennonite institutions about Yoder’s behavior, he waswelcomed as a professor at Notre Dame and a founding fellow at the university’s peace institute.After his death in 1997, a cloud of vagueness regarding his abusive behavior settled on hislegacy — a haze that allowed many of us to shrug off those untoward stories as rumors, mereallegations, a sideshow to the main event: his landmark contribution to peace theology.
After our denominational investigation made Yoder’s abuse indisputable, I had to rethink myautomatic deference to the Augustinian position I outlined above. The notion that we can makeuse of knowledge wherever we find it, regardless of the oppressions bound to the production ofthat knowledge, doesn’t seem to work for Yoder’s peace theology, at least for me, because of thelinks we can now see that connect his life to his writing, his body to his mind, his deeds to hiswords. Not only how, in places, he developed arguments that justified his behavior. But also howhis peace theology never took into consideration any sustained account of violence againstwomen. Quite convenient for him, and tragic for the women he abused — as well as for the
communities that, guided by his work, didn’t think to worry about intimate partner violence andabusive relationships in church communities because they were taught instead to focus on theethics of warfare and just policing.
My point is not that we should only ever learn from people who align with our moral vision.Again, I still read and think with Luther, Calvin, and de Beauvoir. Besides, none of us is withoutsin. But I do think it’s worthwhile to notice, especially when we’re thinking about Christianethics, if someone’s harmful patterns of behavior have taken up residence in their ideas — tonotice whether a theologian’s destructive inclinations have come along with their arguments likea stowaway. To listen for things we hadn’t heard before: a note, an argument, an idea that nowsounds harmful.

​Ihave been asked that we talk about climate change, hope, loneliness, and tolerance in 2024. To do so, I thought we should tackle vision and our limits. In Rachel Hoskins' article, she draws a distinct parallel between seeing as God does - with charity, kindness, and beauty - and seeing only as humans do.

Driven by status and consumption, organizing for efficiency, and distracted by technology, pleasure, profit, and power, we often choose not what is moral but rather what is right in front of us. Unable to grasp the repercussions of our actions and lifestyles on the planet and its people, we regard the world as an object for our purposes.

Using a healing story from Mark's Gospel, she lays out an interesting argument for how to vision with moralsandwith our own material instincts. I'd like to know what you think.

My Double Vision
Rachel Hoskins, The Christian Century 1.11.24
Jesus and his followers came to Bethsaida. Some people brought a blind man to him and beggedhim to touch the man. So Jesus held the blind man’s hand and led him out of the village. Then hespit on the man’s eyes. He laid his hands on him and asked, “Can you see now?” The man looked upand said, “Yes, I see people. They look like trees walking around.” Again Jesus laid his hands on theman’s eyes, and the man opened them wide. His eyes were healed, and he was able to see everythingclearly. Jesus told him to go home. Mark 8:22-26

“Her left eye is too strong,” a doctor told my parents when I was four years old. “It’s blindingher right. To correct it required surgery. After surgery, I wore a patch like a pirate and my visionblurred for days. When it cleared, instead of a world split in two, I saw one.
Vision is a highly complex sense. The mechanical and neurological components of the eyes andbrain work together to produce sight in a delicate dance of light absorption and translation fromrods and cones. When the eyes do not align, the brain may prefer data from one eye over theother. Usually, favor goes to the “clear eye,” the one without deviation, and my case was noexception. If left unchecked, my visual cortex would eventually ignore information from myother eye altogether, in a sense blinding it. Blinding it by ignoring its sight.
All this may be why my favorite healing act of Jesus involves the restoration of vision. In otherhealing stories, Jesus speaks regeneration into being, but in this passage he physically intervenes,like an ancient medical doctor. First, he applies saliva. Then, he covers the man’s eyes with hishands. Then he asks, “Can you see anything?” “I can see people, but they look like trees,walking”, the man says. So, Jesus places his hands over the man’s eyes a second time.
Many readers have been fascinated by this tale of healing in two acts. Some suggest that Jesusengages in something like a first round of partial restoration that requires a second round ofmiraculous power. Others suggest that when Jesus first removes his hands, the man’s visualcortex lacks the ability to translate images harvested from light. Or as Immanuel Kant might putit, he has perception but no concepts to make sense of what he perceives; he is merely seeingabstractions. Either interpretation may be right. But I like to think that Jesus is up to somethingelse. Rather than partial healing or abstracted perception, I like to think Jesus gives the manvision of another kind: to see past the limits of human sight.
The second time I saw double, I was 12 years old. In church, staring at the pulpit, I saw ourpastor split. He duplicated like film exposed twice, layered and skewed. This time, thefragmentation stunned me. Rationalizing with my middle school understanding of biology, Ireasoned: Two eyes, two images, right? Calmed, I experimented with this newfound ability.Shifting my gaze, tilting my head, I sought maximum division, the most double of double views.
But seeing clearly, integrating images into one, required a different kind of adjustment. Back inthe ophthalmologist’s office, the doctor said the severed muscle had grown back. My vision hadregenerated.
My double vision had seemed like a gift, like accessing another sublime plane, where maybepeople did move like trees walking. For Kant and most of us after him, there is no other reality.There is the real as we perceive it — the phenomenal — and there is the “real reality” behind it,the noumenal. They are both essentially the same mundane place, but the noumenal, for the mostpart, is beyond our reach, because the world as we perceive it is interpreted through the self. It’sas if we are wearing human-tinted glasses. Just as we cannot transcend the self to access “realreality,” Kant argues inCritique of Practical Reason, so also we cannot access God. There arelimits to human understanding.
But that does not mean we cannot conceive of an infinitude or limitlessness beyond us. We can.Confronted by cascading mountains, immeasurable stars, and even the immensity ofmathematical equations, we may find ourselves overpowered by their vastness. Our vision toconceive of infinity awes us. We humans are free to reason, and reason greatly. Additionally,that freedom gives us the ability to make moral choices. But we are still hemmed in by the self.We see, but our vision is limited.
Driven by status and consumption, organizing for efficiency, and distracted by technology,pleasure, profit, and power, we often choose not what is moral or reasonable but rather what isright in front of us. Unable to grasp the repercussions of our actions and lifestyles on the planetand its people, we regard the world as an object for our purposes. When we see in this way, wereduce reality to its material pieces and parts. We merely harvest light with rods and cones. Asone eye becomes stronger, the other eye, so to speak—our spiritual vision—becomes weaker.
Like the man from Bethsaida who meets Jesus for the first time and sees people like treeswalking, you will not be able to make sense of it. But it will make sense of you and your place inthis world, and that feeling will free you and raise you altogether above a self-limiting view. You“will see miracles everywhere,” Schleiermacher writes, not just in cascading mountains andstarry skies, but in every humble and overlooked speck of sand, drop of water, and blade ofgrass.
Seeing in this way abounds with ethical implications for our planet and ourselves. Instead ofvaluing a forest as, say, a place for outdoor adventure, a crop of two-by-fours, or a futurebusiness park, we value it for what it is: a home to flora and fauna, a grace-filled sacrament. Nolonger reduced to its material pieces and parts, the universe is revealed as a sanctum that is, inthe language of Genesis, “very good”. Cascading mountains, immeasurable stars, and even theinfinitude of mathematical equations point not to the glories of our own reasoning capacities orto our mastery and domination of the world but rather to the glory of God, as does every humbleand overlooked speck of sand, drop of water, and blade of grass.
Yet, there is another danger here. Focusing on the spiritual becomes problematic if we ignore thematerial. Living in perpetual divine heights ignores the other eye. It too limits our view. We needboth spiritual and material vision, not one ignored for the other, or a split and doubled view. Weneed integration.
And even if it were possible to live on such a transcendent spiritual plane, who could do socontinuously? Who could unendingly see with the eyes of God, as it were, and not becomeunmoored? Without Kant’s human-shaded glasses, reality would shift from the spectrum ofhuman understanding to something like ultraviolet light. Nothing would make sense. Among thebanalities of eating, sleeping, playing, working, and even caring for others, who could functionas a material creature while the immaterial heavens tore open around them? It would disorient us,I think, like having vision with no vision.
If this is the gift Jesus gives the man from Bethsaida on his first round of healing that day, it isone he soon corrects. He does not leave the man to such an ongoing fate, no matter howprofound and revelatory the view. Instead, Jesus places his hands over the man’s eyes a secondtime, and when he removes them, the man’s sight is restored. “He saw everything clearly,” saysMark.
The gospel writer tells us that after restoring his sight, Jesus sends him home. While Mark doesnot tell us more, I like to imagine the man spends his days marveling at each prismatic drop ofwater, veined leaf, and starry sky as though infused with infinity and set on fire. But I wonder ifsometimes he still dreams of people like trees walking and ponders a gift that once was his.
If that is the case, then I can relate to this man from Bethsaida who has his plain sight restored.That day in church when my vision split, not only did the pastor double but the entire sanctuaryfractured. Pews, curtains, crosses, choir, baptismal, and altar reproduced. Light fragmented in amillion sparks of refracted lumens as movement headed into the aisles. People grew long limbs,sprouted and ruptured, swept along by graceful and jagged currents. And I joined too. Down Iwent toward those staggering figures, those points of light. The room filled. My heart and retinasswung open, as the ceiling released and that which I knew not and yet knew as plainly as I knewmyself descended. And for a moment I saw clearly a world valued as good, as very good. For amoment I saw past the limits of human sight.

​I'd like to start this year off with talking about how to bring light into a darkened world. Here is a snippetfrom this week's article by Catherine Price:

What might happen if we committed to a delight practice? How would it affect our happiness and health? And what might it do to the country’s political climate if we paid less attention to the things that divide us and more to the things that spark delight? It’s possible to disagree with people, to acknowledge life’s challenges, to debate, to sit with sadness, grief and fear while marveling at and seeking out simple joys.

I'd like to hear what delights you and what you savor from life. I'd also like to hear what distracts you from delighting and savoring life.

When the World Feels Dark, Seek Out Delight
Catherine Price, NY Times 1.1.24
Ms. Price is the author of the How to Feel Alive newsletter. Her latest book is “The Power of Fun.”

Here’s an idea for the new year: Let’s make 2024 the year of delight. Does that sound ridiculous,given the state of the world right now? Hear me out.
The basic premise of a delight practice (which I learned about in the essay collection “The Bookof Delights” by Ross Gay) is simple: You make a point to notice things in your everyday life thatdelight you. This could be anything — a pretty flower, a smile you share with a stranger, thesight of a person playing a trumpet while riding a unicycle down a major Philadelphiathoroughfare (true story). Nothing is too small or absurd. Then whenever you notice somethingthat delights you, you lift your arm, raise your index finger in the air and say, out loud and withenthusiasm, “Delight!” (Yes, even if you’re alone.) Ideally, you share your delights with anotherperson.
The concept of prioritizing delight may sound silly or almost irresponsible, given the heavinessof current events, feelings of burnout and the upcoming U.S. presidential election, in which itseems democracy itself could be at stake. But this is exactly why it is so important. Far frombeing a frivolous practice, making a point to notice and share things we find delightful canimprove our moods, outlooks, relationships and even physical health.
How? Noticing delights requires us to pay attention, something that is required for our happinessand satisfaction but can be difficult in our increasingly distracted world. Essentially, this is aform of a gratitude practice — i.e., cultivating the habit of noticing and appreciating the thingsfor which you’re thankful.
Gratitude practices are popular for good reason; if you make one a habit, the associated mentaland physical benefits include reduced symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress and (probablyrelatedly) improved biomarkers for heart health.
But if you keep up a gratitude practice long enough, you may find yourself expressing yourappreciation for the same things over and over, almost out of a sense of obligation. You aregrateful for your friends and family. You are grateful that you have enough food. You aregrateful for having a place to live. Eventually, the practice can begin to feel less nourishing andmore like a chore.
In contrast, a delight practice taps into the deep power of gratitude without the risk of becomingtrite. That’s because the things that delight us are often novel — I doubt I’ll see anothertrumpeting unicyclist any time soon.
Noticing and sharing delight is also a form of what psychologists call savoring, the practice ofdeliberately appreciating positive life experiences. Savoring has been shown to boost people’smoods as well as counterbalance our brains’ natural tendency to focus on the things that stokeanxiety and fear. (Being attuned to potentially threatening stressors is helpful from anevolutionary perspective; it takes work to focus our brains on the positive.)
What’s more, the effects of savoring are stronger if you make a point not just to notice positivethings but also to label them and share them. (This is why it’s important to say “Delight!” outloud and put a finger in the air, even if it at first feels silly.)
And that’s perhaps my favorite part of the practice: sharing delights with other people. Start ameeting or a class by inviting people to share one thing that delighted them that day. Use delightsharing as an icebreaker or as a ritual before family meals. I have multiple delight group chats,and every new message boosts my mood, makes me feel more connected to others and inspiresme to notice and share more delights.
For example, a friend once sent me a photo of frost crystals on his windshield with the caption“Delight!” Not only did this make me feel closer to him, but it also made me resolve to try tofind delight in situations (such as having to scrape frost off my car) that might otherwise beannoying.
These moments of connection are good for our physical health. As Surgeon General VivekMurthy’s recent advisory about the nation’s loneliness epidemic noted, a lack of social ties isassociated with increased risks for high blood pressure, heart disease, cognitive impairment,depression, anxiety, Type 2 diabetes and susceptibility to infectious disease. In fact, one well-regarded meta-analysis concluded that the health risks of loneliness and isolation are comparablewith those of smoking up to 15 cigarettes per day.
It makes me wonder: What might happen if we, as individuals and as communities, committed toa delight practice? How would it affect our happiness and health? And what might it do to thecountry’s political climate if we paid less attention to the things that divide us and more to thethings that spark delight? It’s possible to disagree with people, to acknowledge life’s challenges,to debate, to sit with sadness, grief and fear while marveling at and seeking out simple joys.
You may be amazed by how much there is to marvel at. As Mr. Gay writes, “It didn’t take melong to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delightradar. Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that impliesthat the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study.”
This year, like all of them, will be filled with conflict and tragedy. But it will also be filled withdelights. Resolve to notice them.

This week is our last discussion group of 2023. We will resume in the second week of January.

I pondered what the topic should be for the end-of-the-year. What came up was this: mental health.

Where do you go when feeling anxious or stressed? Many go online. Unfortunately, anxiety has become an online commodity which (ironically) can make us feel more anxious, which causes us to read more, which causes us to feel more depressed. Our author states the following about mental health:

The best thing we can do for ourselves when we’re anxious or depressed is to fight our instinct to avoid and ruminate. The best thing one can do when they’re depressed is to reject the instinct to stay in bed basking in the glow of a phone, and to instead step outside, engage with a friend, or do something else that provides more opportunities for validation and reward.

Some of those opportunities are found within the Church and small groups. I'd like to know what you think.

​How Anxiety Became Content
Derek Thompson, The Atlantic 12.13.23
Anxiety has become its own genre of popular content. According to Listen Notes, a podcast search engine, more than 5,500 podcasts have the word trauma in their title. Celebrity media are awash with mental-health testimonials, and summaries of those testimonials, including “39 Celebrities Who Have Opened Up About Mental Health,” “What 22 Celebrities Have Said About Having Depression,” and “12 Times Famous Men Got Real About Mental Health.”
As anxiety has become content, it’s also become a part of more daily conversations. I’ve spoken with many parents about my work on America’s mental-health crisis in the past few years, and several have noted that their kids share their symptoms and diagnoses in group chats, rattling off the acronyms OCD, GAD, and PTSD with a casualness once reserved for high-school gossip.
What’s wrong with this? One might think that nothing at all is. Surely the rising volume of anxiety content partly reflects the rising volume of actual anxiety; the share of teens today who say that they are persistently sad has never been higher. What’s more, the destigmatization of distress can clearly be beneficial. We are finally talking openly about emotional crises that, in the past, were buried in silence and substance abuse.
But in the past few years, I’ve become more convinced that the way we commonly discuss mental-health issues, especially on the internet, isn’t helping us. Watching and listening to so much anxiety content, which transforms a medical diagnosis into a kind of popular media category, might be contributing to our national anxiety crisis.
The way we talk about the world shapes our experience of the world. In 2022, the researchers Lucy Foulkes and Jack L. Andrews coined the term prevalence inflation to describe the way that some people, especially young people, consume so much information about anxiety disorders that they begin to process normal problems of living as signs of a decline in mental health. “If people are repeatedly told that mental health problems are common and that they might experience them … they might start to interpret any negative thoughts and feelings through this lens,” Foulkes and Andrews write. This can trigger a self-fulfilling spiral: Some individuals who become hyperaware of the prevalence of anxiety disorders may start to process low levels of anxiety as signs of their own disorder, which leads them to recoil from social activities and practice other forms of behavioral avoidance, which exacerbates their anxiety.
Darby Saxbe, a clinical psychologist at the University of Southern California and a mother to a high schooler, told me she has come to think that, for many young people, claiming an anxiety crisis or post-traumatic stress disorder has become like a status symbol. “I worry that for some people, it’s become an identity marker that makes people feel special and unique,” Saxbe said. “That’s a big problem because this modern idea that anxiety is an identity gives people a fixed mindset, telling them this is who they are and will be in the future.”
On the contrary, she said, therapy works best when patients come into sessions believing that they can get better. That means believing that anxiety is treatable, modifiable, and malleable—all the things a fixed identity is not.
When I asked Saxbe whether internet conversations about anxiety might be partly driving the anxiety crisis, she readily agreed. Marshall McLuhan’s observation that “the medium is the message” has been on her mind as she notes the way that social media takes people out of the physical world. “We all, and young people in particular, too often use our phones to withdraw and avoid,” she said. “So even if we’re getting insightful therapeutic content, we’re often getting it while we’re in bed and on our phones.” Of course, she acknowledged, some online conversations can feel cathartic and even help people put into words their undeveloped feelings.
But alone on couches and in beds, thin lines separate active reflection (which can be healthy), rumination (less healthy), and outright wallowing (not healthy). “It’s not so different from listening to sad songs when you’re sad,” she said. “Of course, I would tell a patient that it can be cathartic. But if it’s all you do to cope? That’s bad.”
More deeply, she added, the algorithmic architecture of social media isn’t doing us any favors.
The “If you liked that, you might like this” organization of information on social media means that our engagement with certain kinds of content—politics, lifestyle, or mental health—can burrow us deeper into that genre. Rather than allow us to work through our negative feelings and move on, it can trap us in algorithmic whirlpools of outrage, doubt, and anger. (Anybody who has doomscrolled through a particularly gruesome news cycle can surely empathize.)
There is also an enormous difference between critiquing therapy itself and critiquing the poppy online version. “I teach clinical psychology, I am a therapist, and I’m very pro-therapy,” Saxbe said. But we may have overcorrected from an era when mental health was shameful to talk about to an era when some vulnerable people surround themselves with conversations and media about anxiety and depression, which makes them more vigilant about symptoms and problems, which makes them more likely to problematize normal daily stress, which makes them move toward a deficit model of psychopathology where they think there is always something wrong with them that needs their attention, which causes them to pull back from social engagement, which causes even more distress and anxiety.
The solution begins with the principle of opposite action. Saxbe said the best thing we can do for ourselves when we’re anxious or depressed is to fight our instinct to avoid and ruminate, rather than get sucked into algorithmic wormholes of avoidance and rumination. The best thing one can do when they’re depressed is to reject the instinct to stay in bed basking in the glow of a phone, and to instead step outside, engage with a friend, or do something else that provides more opportunities for validation and reward. “I would tell people to do what’s uncomfortable, to run toward danger,” Saxbe said. “You are not your anxiety. You’re so much more."

​We are a group of different (and sometimes unique) views and perspectives. One secular thing that we all share in common, however, is how college has shaped us.
You've seen in the news this week about the presidents of three major universities testified on Capitol Hill about free speech (and what is the line between protected speech and hate and violent speech). There are many news articles about this; but, for us, I'd like to focus on two opinion pieces in the Wall Street Journal written by college professors about the state of higher education. The first, from a professor at UC Santa Cruz, is about how higher education has become a threat to America. The second page is from a professor at UC Berkeley which asked students, who were protesting about Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, to identify Palestine and Israel on a map. You have to read it to believe it (and then you may still not believe it).
One last thing: University of California, Santa Cruz, has a reputation for being the most liberal, or open-minded universities; UC Berkeley is one of the most competitive - academically speaking - universities to get into.
I'd like to know what you think about these two opinion pieces and when do you think free speech becomes unprotected hate or violence-inspiring speech.

Higher Ed Has Become a Threat to America
John Ellis, Wall Street Journal 12.4.23
Mr. Ellis is a professor emeritus of German literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz andauthor of “The Breakdown of Higher Education.”

America faces a formidable range of calamities: crime out of control, borders in chaos by design,unconstitutional censorship, and a press that does government PR rather than oversight. To thesehas been added an outbreak of virulent antisemitism. Every one of these degradations can betraced wholly or in large part to a single source: the corruption of higher education by radicalpolitical activists.
Children’s test scores have plummeted because college education departments train teachers toprioritize “social justice” over education. Censorship started with one-party campuses shuttingdown conservative voices. The drive to separate children from their parents begins inlongstanding campus contempt for the suburban home and nuclear family. Open borders reflectpro-globalism and anti-nation state sentiment among radical professors. Campus antisemitismgrew out of ideologies like “anticolonialism,” “anticapitalism” and “intersectionality.”
Academia has a monopoly on training for the most influential professions. The destructiveinfluence of campus schools of education and journalism already noted is matched in the law,medicine, social work, etc. Academia’s suppression of the Constitution causes still more damage.
Hostility to the Constitution leads to banana-republic shenanigans: suppression ofantigovernment speech, the press’s acting as mouthpiece for government, law enforcement usedto harass opponents of the government.
An advanced society can’t tolerate the capture of its educational system by a fringe political sectthat despises its Constitution and way of life. We have no choice: We must take back control ofhigher education from cultural vandals who have learned nothing from the disastrous history ofsocieties that have implemented their ideas.
How can this be done? Not by the colleges themselves, which like things as they are. Not bygoverning boards, which ought to safeguard academia but have never had the backbone to do it. Not by superficial reforms. Effective reform means only one thing: getting those political
activists out of the classrooms and replacing them with academic thinkers and teachers. (No, thatisn’t the same as replacing left with right.) Nothing less will do.
But the only real solution is for more Americans to grasp the depth of the problem and changetheir behavior accordingly. Most parents and students seem to be on autopilot: Young Jack is 18,so it’s time for college. His family still assumes that students will be taught by professors whoare smart, well-informed and with broad sympathies. No longer. If enough parents and studentsgave serious thought to the question whether this ridiculous version of a college education is stillworth four years of a young person’s life and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, corruptinstitutions of higher education would collapse, creating the space for better ones to arise.
The biggest threat to our future isn’t climate change, China or the national debt. It is thetyrannical grip that a hopelessly corrupt higher education now has on our national life. If wedon’t stop it now, it will eventually destroy the most successful society in world history.

From Which River to Which Sea?
Ron E. Hassner, Wall Street Journal 12.5.23
Mr. Hassner is a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley.

When college students who sympathize with Palestinians chant “From the river to the sea,” dothey know what they’re talking about? I hired a survey firm to poll 250 students from a variety ofbackgrounds across the U.S. Most said they supported the chant, some enthusiastically so(32.8%) and others to a lesser extent (53.2%).
But only 47% of the students who embrace the slogan were able to name the river and the sea.
Some of the alternative answers were the Nile and the Euphrates, the Caribbean, the Dead Sea(which is a lake) and the Atlantic. Less than a quarter of these students knew who Yasser Arafatwas (12 of them, or more than 10%, thought he was the first prime minister of Israel). Asked inwhat decade Israelis and Palestinians had signed the Oslo Accords, more than a quarter of thechant’s supporters claimed that no such peace agreements had ever been signed. There’s noshame in being ignorant, unless one is screaming for the extermination of millions.
Would learning basic political facts about the conflict moderate students’ opinions? A Latinoengineering student from a southern university reported “definitely” supporting “from the riverto the sea” because “Palestinians and Israelis should live in two separate countries, side by side.”
Shown on a map of the region that a Palestinian state would stretch from the Jordan River to theMediterranean Sea, leaving no room for Israel, he downgraded his enthusiasm for the mantra to“probably not.” Of the 80 students who saw the map, 75% similarly changed their view.
An art student from a liberal arts college in New England “probably” supported the sloganbecause “Palestinians and Israelis should live together in one state.” But when informed of recentpolls in which most Palestinians and Israelis rejected the one-state solution, this student lost hisenthusiasm. So did 41% of students in that group.
A third group of students claimed the chant called for a Palestine to replace Israel. Sixty percentof those students reduced their support for the slogan when they learned it would entail thesubjugation, expulsion or annihilation of seven million Jewish and two million Arab Israelis. Yetanother 14% of students reconsidered their stance when they read that many American Jewsconsidered the chant to be threatening, even racist.
In all, after learning a handful of basic facts about the Middle East, 67.8% of students went fromsupporting “from the river to sea” to rejecting the mantra. These students had never seen a mapof the Mideast and knew little about the region’s geography, history or demography. Those whohope to encourage extremism depend on the political ignorance of their audiences. It is time forgood teachers to join the fray and combat bias with education.

​The author for this week's article is one of my favorite spiritual/religious writers - Anne Lamott. She is the one who I have quoted many times with this: there are only three categories of prayer we offer to God - Thanks, Wow, Help.
The author is now 69 years old and has a different perspective on life - there is power in the unknown and there is light from above that illuminates the unknown. Using the illustration of Albert Bierstadt’s Western paintings (attached in the reading), she illuminates aspects of aging that are life-giving and beautiful.

At 33, I knew everything. At 69, I know something much more important.
Anne Lamott, The Washington Post 11.20.23
Anne Lamott is an American novelist and nonfiction writer.

Today I woke up old and awful in every way. I simultaneously cannot bear the news and cannotturn it off: It’s cobra hypnosis — Gaza, Israel, the shootings in Maine. The world is as dark as ascarab. I have two memorial services on my calendar this week. A dear friend is in the hospital waiting for a liver, dying. She keeps assuring me, “I ain’t in no ways tired,” and I say, “Oh, stopwith that or I’m not going to visit again.” I’m exhausted just driving 90 minutes to and from SanFrancisco to see her.
My body hurt quite a lot when I got out of bed this morning, and I limped around like GrannyClampett for the first hour, until it unseized. Worse, my mind hurt, my heart hurt and I hatedalmost everyone, except my husband, my grandson and one of the dogs.
I don’t think I could have borne up under all this 20 years ago when I thought I knew so muchabout life. That was not nearly as much as I knew at 33, which is when we know more than weever will again. But age has given me the ability to hang out without predicting how things willsort out this time (mostly — depending on how I’ve slept).
In many of Albert Bierstadt’s Westernpaintings, there is a darkness on one side,maybe a mountain or its shadow. Then towardthe middle, animals graze or drink from a lakeor stream. And then at the far right or in thesky, splashes of light lie like shawls across theshoulders of the mountains. The great
darkness says to me what I often say toheartbroken friends — “I don’t know.”
Is there meaning in the Maine shootings? Idon’t know. Not yet.
My white-haired husband said on our first dateseven years ago that “I don’t know” is theportal to the richness inside us. This insightwas one reason I agreed to a second date(along with his beautiful hands). It was a game-changer. Twenty years earlier, when my brothersand I were trying to take care of our mother in her apartment when she first had Alzheimer’s, wecried out to her gerontology nurse, “We don’t know if she can stay here, how to help her take hermeds, how to get her to eat better since she forgets.” And the nurse said gently, “How could youknow?”
This literally had not crossed our minds. We just thought we were incompetent. In the shadow ofthe mountain of our mother’s decline, we hardly knew where to begin. So we started where wewere, in the not knowing.
In the center of many Bierstadt paintings, you sometimes see animals grazing or drinking. They’re fine, they’re animals; they are just doing animals. But they are not the point — the pointis the light. No matter how low you are, the light can reach you. It falls on animals, including us.This is positively biblical. The animals never seem to have anywhere to go. I used to have lots ofplaces I had to get to. I had to go out for this or that, and it was an emergency — graph paper! Isuddenly, urgently, needed to drive to town for graph paper. Also, in the old days when therewas something to celebrate, I’d go out to a nice restaurant with friends. To celebrate now, Imight exuberantly skip flossing for a night, and maybe if the news is good enough, the hipexercises. Wild times.
In my younger days when the news was too awful, I sought meaning in it. Now, not so much.
The meaning is that we have come through so much, and we take care of each other and, againstall odds, heal, imperfectly. We still dance, but in certain weather, it hurts. (Okay, always.)
The portals of age also lead to the profound (indeed earthshaking) understanding that people aregoing to do what people are going to do: They do not want my always-good ideas on how tohave easier lives and possibly become slightly less annoying. Now there is some acceptance(partly born of tiredness) that I can’t rescue or fix anyone, not even me. Sometimes this affords me a kind of plonky peace, fascination and even wonder at people and life as they tromp on by.
The price of aging is high: constant aches, real pain and barely survivable losses. But each timemy hip unseizes, it reminds me that this life is not going to go on forever, and that is what makesit so frigging precious.
Sometimes at the right or the top center of Bierstadt paintings is a trippy splash of light, often amystical, jagged slash that breaks through dirty-looking or white-fire clouds. There might bebright reflections, or long, slanted fingers of sun shining down with religious airs, organ musicplaying softly in the background. Puffy rainclouds glow. All say, “Yes, there is the deep dark,but we have some light as well.”
Will my brothers or I inherit our mother’s Alzheimer’s? I don’t know. I do know that I recentlyparked in front of my house and sort of forgot to turn off the engine. Three hours later, aformerly standoffish young neighbor knocked on my door to tell me this, and I pretended to haveknown. I said the battery had been low and so I was letting it recharge. “Ah,” she said. Now she is sweet when she sees me. We wave to each other when we pass in our cars, reflectinga new affection. Reflections say, “In the dark, there’s still some light around. So don’t ever thinkthings are too dark. We’re not going to give you the entire reserve, but we just want you to knowit is there. And more may be on its way."

​We're going to discuss a reading about the Hamas/Israel war. In the article, the author, who is an Anglican priest (and Vicar of St. Martin-in-the-fields, London), suggests that the emotion of rage keeps us from having peace. He opines that we should focus instead on anger. In his words:

Anger can be a constructive emotion, stirring us from distraction or self-absorption to an acute awareness of wrongdoing, leading us to a process of restitution or reparation. But rage is something different. Rage names the moment we lose all rational faculties. The red mist descends. We find ourselves incandescent, untrammeled by any restraint. We lose sight of the original wrong done in our rampaging quest for destruction and vengeance. In our rage we tell ourselves we can and should destroy all in our path, for only then can justice be restored and fury satisfied.

The Emotion Standing in the Way of Peace
Samuel Wells, The Christian Century 11.21.23
Samuel Wells is the vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London.

The war between Hamas and Israel, with its carnage and hostage taking, has evoked profound,even primal feelings. We could call it accelerated action: a rapid journey from discovery toreaction, from shock to horror, from judgment to anger, from fury to rage.
There’s a liminal moment between anger and rage. Anger can be a constructive emotion, stirringus from distraction or self-absorption to an acute awareness of wrongdoing, leading us to aprocess of restitution or reparation. When directed away from our own pride and towardanother’s well-being, anger can be a means to a healthy end, like a ladder we can kick away oncewe’re truly engaged in seeking the good.
But rage is something different. Rage names the moment we lose all rational faculties. The redmist descends. We find ourselves incandescent, untrammeled by any restraint. We lose sight ofthe original wrong done in our rampaging quest for destruction and vengeance. In our rage wetell ourselves we can and should destroy all in our path, for only then can justice be restored andfury satisfied.
There can be something exhilarating about rage. Our culture prizes both visceral experience andimpregnable righteousness; rage offers a combination of the two, an intoxication of indignantfervor. To be so right that you’re justified in whatever damage you wreak is almost a peakexperience of a society that valorizes both intense passion and moral superiority.
Many people, perhaps most, of us are perennially inhibited by vulnerability, hurt, and fear. Ourthoughts are weighed down and our actions limited by our acute awareness of the other, byanxiety that we may be rejected, humiliated, derided, scorned. To be engulfed by rage is totranscend these negativities and reach a plane of unconquerable passion, like Samson with hishair grown back, destroying more in his death than he did in his life. Which is why rage is soattractive, even addictive, because it so thoroughly dispels, at least for a moment, those restraintsof civility and inhibition.
When Jesus says, “I come not to bring peace, but a sword” (Matt. 10:34), I understand that tomean,Don’t seek a sentimental peace, but one with sharp edges.It sometimes sounds facile topray for peace amid the rage of war. But it depends on what you mean by peace. The peace ofstill waters and quiet rest is certainly a fantasy in the midst of widespread horror. But maybepeace is more like the sword that divides rage from anger. Rage inflames and inflates; anger canpinpoint a problem and isolate it, with the precision of a sword.
The way to dispel rage is not to oppose it with alternative rage. The conflict in the Holy Land, inthat sense, amplifies many contemporary disputes, wherein both parties can become sooverwhelmed by wrongs inflicted on them, and so convinced that these wrongs justify a responseof limitless violence, that each side’s rage only amplifies that of their opponents, in an infernothat eventually consumes all their children. Rage is an expression of powerlessness of emotions,words, and actions. The only thing that can dismantle it is the infusion of words and actions thatcan better channel the overflowing emotion.
But it’s sheer denial to imagine that appropriate procedural actions and carefully modified wordscan on their own suffice to dissipate rage. Which is why there’s a place for the curation ofhealthy anger—an emotion that can’t walk past injustice and affront but that has strategies inplace to avoid that transgression evoking explosive fury. Healthy anger doesn’t assume all faultlies with the other party, is still open to re-narrating a story so that not all wrong lies on a singleside, and can energize conflicting parties to say now is the moment to realize we’re all on a pathto mutually assured destruction and we must all take steps to turn our rage back into gesture andwords that are open to rational engagement. Healthy anger is thus almost a prerequisite for truepeace—a peace that doesn’t pretend fury will simply burn itself out, nor presume enmity can beignored or suppressed.
It’s rage, not peace, that’s based on fantasy. Rage assumes a story by which I obliterate you andall is resolved. But it’s not resolved: it’s just stoking up further rage for another explosionsometime later. By contrast anger can stir us to action, such as the brokering of cease-fire, themeasured and evenhanded witness of the wider community, the careful identification of andholding to account for wrongs done, the patient hearing out of resentments and fears, the findingof a path through to mutual security, dignity, understanding, respect, and hope.
That requires everyone involved to de-escalate back through the red mist of rage to theheightened awareness of anger, to set aside the urge to obliterate the other, and to begin to allowtrusted outsiders to modulate the temperature of dispute. Anger can lead toward reason andeventually justice; rage cannot.

​The question for this week: what is worship for? In my recent sermon I mentioned that humans have three distinctive qualities - we are made in God's image; we have free will; we are created to worship something. We are encouraged to worship God (but God is not going to make us do it).
In this article, the author also raises the point that we are wired to worship something. In her own words: We’re wired to ascribe greatness to people, places, ideas, and objects outside ourselves.
We do this with athletes and movie stars, political candidates and pundits. We do it at football games and rock concerts, at car dealerships and open houses. Increasingly, we do it with the little gadgets we hold in our hands and manipulate with our thumbs, allowing these compact miracles of technology to capture our attention for hours each day.
​I am wondering what you think about this; about the rise of Christian nationalism in an increasingly secular society; and what (and who) is worship for?

What is Worship For?
Debie Thomas, The Christian Century 10.11.23
About the Author: Debie Thomas is an author and columnist for The Christian Century. Sheserves as the Minister of Lifelong Formation at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Palo Alto,California.
​
Those of us steeped in church life often take churchy things for granted. For me, one of thosethings is worship. Growing up, it never occurred to me to ask why I had to worship God; worshipwas simply a fact of life, as normal and unexceptional as breathing. Many of my childhoodmemories are memories of worship. Of standing next to my mother on Sunday mornings, singinghymns to gorgeous organ accompaniment. Of listening to my father praise God with his handsraised in the air during family devotions. Of gathering around campfires at summer Bible camps,testifying to God’s miraculous work while eating gooey s’mores.
There is no ambivalence in these memories. No sense of weirdness or even curiosity. I was aChristian, Christians were supposed to worship, and so I did. It’s only now, as I spend a lot oftime thinking about what my religious practice looks like from the outside, that thorny questionsemerge: Why do we Christians worship God? Why does God want us to and even command usto? Why is scripture filled with exhortations to give God honor, glory, praise, and adulation?
I suppose the real question here is about God’s character and personality. Does God need ourworship? Is there something missing in God that we human beings supply with our regularcontributions of praise? A more cynical reframing of the question might be: Is God amegalomaniac? Someone who requires the constant ego reinforcement of our adoration? Afterall, we humans tend to recoil from people who insist on receiving steady streams of
compliments. We call them narcissists. We grow weary in their company. Why and how is Goddifferent?
I have a lot of sympathy for these questions. I understand why people who don’t practiceChristianity find Christian worship odd. But I don’t think that God’s desire for human worshipstems from any kind of divine brokenness. In fact, I think that God’s goodness and graciousnesstoward us flow from God’s utter wholeness and self-sufficiency. God is free to love us preciselybecause God is not needy as we are. In the perfect communion of the Trinity, God has everythingGod needs.
Perhaps, then, we are the ones who need to worship God, won’t be whole unless we give Godthanks and praise. Why?
Because worship is far more than expressive; it is formational. It makes us. It focuses ourattention. It orders our priorities. It teaches us what’s important and what isn’t. As Richard Rohrputs it, we have to be careful, because we will always become the God we worship. Our prayer,our devotion, our praise—these rewire us. They enable us to see, hear, and think in new ways.
What we worship makes us who we are.
It’s taken me a while to realize that I’m always worshiping something, whether I notice it or not.If worship is the act of giving honor, reverence, devotion, or admiration to something orsomeone, then worship truly is as natural as breathing. We’re wired to do it: to flock to objects ofdevotion, to pay exquisite and adoring attention to things that draw our gaze and elicit ourrespect, to put pretty things on pedestals. We’re wired to ascribe greatness to people, places,ideas, and objects outside ourselves.
We do this with athletes and movie stars, political candidates and pundits. We do it at footballgames and rock concerts, at car dealerships and open houses. Increasingly, we do it with the littlegadgets we hold in our hands and manipulate with our thumbs, allowing these compact miracles
of technology to capture our attention for hours each day.
What draws my gaze? What holds me captive? What keeps me coming back for more? I am adevotee to these things. A worshiper. These are the things—for better or for worse—that keepme on my knees.
I believe this is why we’re commanded to worship God. This is why the ancient psalmist inviteshis congregants to “worship the Lord in holy splendor” (Ps. 96:9) and tremble before him. WhyJesus reminds his first- century listeners to “worship the Lord your God, and serve only him”(Luke 4:8). Why, in the book that draws our scriptures to a close, St. John of Patmos (author ofthe Book of Revelation) describes heavenly worship at glorious scale: “You are worthy, our Lordand God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will theyexisted and were created” (Rev. 4:11).
If I’m wired and destined to worship, if my worship has the power to make or unmake my heart,then these scriptures make all the sense in the world. They’re reminding me to focus myattention on the only one who is truly good, truly worthy, and truly just. They’re inviting me toalign my loves with the divine love. To walk in the way that is the Way and to live in close andintimate company with the one who is the Life.
To be clear, this God we’re commanded to worship is a servant God, one who grew up a peasantunder empire, washed the feet of his disciples, rode a donkey into Jerusalem, and wept at hisbeloved friend’s graveside. This is a God who “emptied himself,” “humbled himself,” and“became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:7–8).
This is no narcissist. This is a God who commands my worship so that my heart can be softenedinto servanthood, gentleness, humility, and love. This is a God who offers me the practice ofworship as a gift. Not for God’s benefit, but for mine.

​The reading for this week is about the uncomfortable intersection of church and state that we seem to find ourselves in. The author, a self-identified evangelical Christian conservative, calls into question a statement made by Mike Johnson, the new Speaker of the House, that government policy decisions are based on his worldview from the Bible.Where is the separation of Church and State? Can the Bible inform us on policy decisions? Does faith direct our personal lives but leaves politics and business out of it? Or, is the separation of faith and politics a fallacy?

Our Broken Christian Politics
David French, The New York Times 11.5.23
There are two moments from Mike Johnson’s early days as speaker of the House that almostperfectly encapsulate the broken way that so many evangelicals approach politics. The firstoccurred just after the House elected Johnson. ABC’s Rachel Scott started to ask Johnson abouthis efforts to overturn the 2020 election. But before she could finish, Johnson’s Republicancolleagues started to shout her down. Johnson simply shook his head. “Next question,” he said,as if the query wasn’t worth his time.
The second moment came in his first extended interview as speaker, when Johnson shared thebasis of his political philosophy with Sean Hannity of Fox News: “Someone asked me today inthe media, they said, ‘It’s curious, people are curious. What does Mike Johnson think about anyissue under the sun?’ I said, ‘Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it.’ That’s myworldview.”
That quote is less illuminating than many people think. The Bible says a great deal about a greatnumber of subjects, but it is open to interpretation on many and silent on many more. (It saysnothing, for example, about the proper level of funding for the I.R.S., Johnson’s first substantiveforay into policy as speaker.) I know Republicans and Democrats who root their politicalphilosophy in the Bible. I, too, look to Scripture to guide my mind and heart.
Johnson and I have such similar religious convictions that we once worked together at the sameChristian law firm. We worked in different states and different practice groups (I focused onacademic freedom), but we both defended religious liberty, and we’d most likely both say muchthe same things about, say, the inerrancy of Scripture. Yet we’ve taken very different politicalpaths.
It turns out that the Bible isn’t actually a clear guide to “any issue under the sun.” You can read itfrom cover to cover, believe every word you read and still not know the “Christian” policy on avast majority of contested issues. Even when evangelical Christians broadly agree on certainmoral principles, such as the idea that marriage is a lifelong covenant between a man and awoman, there is widespread disagreement on the extent to which civil law should reflect thoseevangelical moral beliefs.
Though the Bible isn’t a clear guide for American foreign policy, American economic policy orAmerican constitutional law, it is a much clearer guide for Christian virtue. Here’s one suchvirtue, for example: honesty.
Which brings us back to Johnson’s refusal to answer a question about the effort to overturn the2020 election. There is a reason that effort is called the Big Lie. It was one of the mostcomprehensively and transparently dishonest political movements in American history. AndJohnson was in the middle of it. He helped mobilize support for Texas’ utterly frivolous lawsuitto overturn the Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin elections.
He said there was “a lot of merit” to completely false claims about voting machines being“rigged with this software by Dominion.” Like most House Republicans, he voted againstcertifying the election. In the same interview in which Johnson called out Dominion, he said thatthe Georgia election was “set up for the Biden team to win” through “massive fraud and errorand irregularity.” By whom? The Republican governor and the Republican secretary of state?
Johnson is a very nice person, and he makes his points with a quite reasonable tone of voice. Butpleasant-sounding lies are still lies. I know Johnson to be a smart man and a good lawyer, whichis why I was gobsmacked to see him promote the same theories as some of the most corrupt andincompetent lawyers in American legal life. Former Representative Liz Cheney said that Johnson“was acting in ways that he knew to be wrong.”
Three days after the House elected Johnson speaker, Mike Pence dropped out of the Republicanpresidential primary. The most recent Republican vice president had become a pollingafterthought, and the reason isn’t hard to discern. He’s every bit as faith-forward as Johnson, hewas every bit as loyal to the Trump Administration policy agenda as Johnson, and yet — whenpush came to shove — he could not participate in the Big Lie. He paid an immediate andpermanent price for his honesty, with his approval among G.O.P. voters plunging after the attackon the Capitol.
This should not be.
The Bible that sits on Johnson’s shelf, the one that tells him what to think about “any issue underthe sun,” may not tell us how to formulate immigration policy or how much money to send toUkraine. But it does condemn dishonesty, it does condemn cruelty, and if there is a clear themethat echoes throughout its pages, it’s one that Mike Johnson and his legion of evangelicalsupporters should take to heart: The ends do not justify the means.

No Discussion Group on October 7th.
Here are some links to articles regarding last week's discussion:

During our combined discussion this past Tuesday, Rick brought up the concept of "moral injury". He sent me a link to share with you about it.

Moral Injury: An Increasingly Recognized and Widespread Syndrome

Likewise, Kevin Madden sent me a link that showed the MAID increase in Canada.

Euthanasia Deaths in Canada since 2022

The topic for Tuesday is about what the author calls medical assisted death. This is a heavy topic. The discussion will be a little longer this time because of the topic and the combined groups.

Medical Assistance in Dying is Not Medicine
Alexander Raikin, The National Review 9.14.23

‘Next question is from Debbie,” the moderator of a discussion on medical decision-makingcapacity said to her fellow physicians. “How would folks interpret someone who has lostcapacity with a waiver in place and is now delirious, shouting, pulling their arm away as onetries to insert the IV to provide MAID?”
Preceding this panel, a training seminar for the Canadian Association of MAID Assessors andProviders (CAMAP) had informed participants that the criminal law on medical assistance indying (MAID) is strict. How strict? On the same day that a patient enters into an optional writtenagreement with only one of his or her two MAID assessors — even if it is unsigned, without anywitnesses, and with no family members having been informed — the clinician can administer thelethal injection without asking for the final consent of the patient.
The asterisk in the law is that the agreement is in place only as long as the patient “does notdemonstrate, by words, sounds or gestures, refusal,” or “resistance to its administration.” If thisdemonstration is “involuntary” and “made in response to contact,” the death of the patient maystill proceed. But consent is a spectrum, and patients with delirium can flicker between havingcapacity and not; patients can also change their minds about dying at the hands of their physicianor nurse.
The hypothetical question posed to the panel was, in effect, whether there is a loophole to getaround the criminal law. The moderator, Ellen Wiebe, is one of Canada’s most prolific “MAIDproviders” and a leader in the MAID community. On request, she has hastened the deaths of atleast 400 people, including some cases that other assessors believed were illegal. She offered ananswer: “I’m guessing I would bring in one of their other providers, you know, palliative care or,or whatever, and get them sedated. But what would you say?”
First to speak was Jim MacLean, who claims that he has performed more than 75 “provisions”since MAID expanded to include non-dying patients. “I don’t think I have any great thoughts onthis one.” Wiebe laughed. “Everyone’s different. I mean, you try to deal with the situation. Calmthe room down. See what you can achieve through conversation and calmness.”
Chantal Perrot is the co-chairman of a clinician advisory council for Canada’s largest pro-MAIDlobby group. She described herself to a parliamentary committee as someone who has “cared forhundreds of patients . . . as they navigated the MAID process.” Responding to Wiebe, she said,“That’s a question. If they’re sedated, then have we sedated them into being accepting of MAID? You know, that’s a whole other question.”
Then comes the ethicist’s turn to speak. Kevin Reel, a senior ethicist at Sunnybrook Hospital inToronto and former president of the Canadian Bioethics Society, answers in part with anotherquestion: “If what we’re doing by trying to honor the waiver is reducing distress for the patientand also for maybe even the family around them, would it be acceptable to do somethingsimilarly covert to keep them from reacting in that way?”
Reel continues, “That might be a way around it, but — ” before being interrupted by MacLean,whose new answer takes the question from the hypothetical to the actual and clarifies what hemeant by “conversation and calmness”: “One waiver I did use, the patient was a little agitated.
So we did give her some subcutaneous hydromorphone” — an opiate ordinarily used for acute-pain control instead of sedation — “before I did the MAID, did the provision. So we did, we diduse it in that situation and it was very helpful.”
“Good,” the moderator says, before moving on to the next question. No one in the panel oraudience objects. The training seminar, recorded in October 2021, marks a milestone in Canada:a documented case of physicians describing the sedation of a patient to obtain her consent to herdeath. CAMAP, the self-styled “clinical subject-matter experts on MAID in CANADA,” is in theprocess of releasing the nationwide training curriculum, funded by the federal government in theamount of $3.3 million, for all MAID clinicians. The first rule of medicine is to do no harm. Thesecond rule in countries that have legalized death care is that the first rule doesn’t matteranymore.
The introduction of death care — in each state of Australia; in Canada, Belgium, and theNetherlands; recently in Spain and soon in France; and in ten states and counting across theUnited States — was meant to provide another treatment option in end-of-life care, another toolfor use by physicians and their patients. At the core of death care is the presumption thatsafeguards work and that consent, the most important safeguard, prevents death care fromslipping into rampant homicide or suicide contagion. Instead, it is turning into the end ofmedicine.
In Belgium last year, after a lethal injection failed to kill a 36-year-old woman with terminalcancer, the presiding physician smothered her with a pillow. In New Zealand and Canada,suicidal patients seeking medical care for suicide prevention were prompted to consider assistedsuicide instead.
In the Netherlands, a similar story of a physician sedating her patient into accepting euthanasialed to the first criminal trial of a euthanasia physician. She was acquitted. The judges said, “Webelieve that given the deeply demented condition of the patient the doctor did not need to verifyher wish for euthanasia,” even though the patient repeatedly attempted to fight off her physician.
I have written previously about how a failed suicide attempt in Canada was completed througheuthanasia, despite concerns of illegality by physicians involved with CAMAP, an organizationthat has held internal seminars on patients requesting euthanasia because of poverty, lack ofmedical care, homelessness, and credit-card debt.
Across jurisdictions that legalized death care, often what started as a choice is now the first oreven the only option left. “We’re now no longer dealing with an exceptional treatment, but atreatment that is very frequent,” Michel Bureau told the Canadian Press news agency thissummer.
Elsewhere, in every jurisdiction, the number of deaths at the hands of physicians or nurses isballooning as safeguards are rescinded. Nearly a decade ago, the rapid increase of hasteneddeaths led a Dutch regulator in charge of oversight to plead for other countries to drop their plansfor legalization. Too few listened. In California, the number of assisted suicides last yearincreased by more than 63 percent. In Canada, the number of deaths by euthanasia is on track toincrease more than 13-fold in just the first seven years of the practice’s legalization. Belgium hasseen a more than twelvefold increase since 2003. In Switzerland, which legalized assisted suicidein 1941, the number of such suicides has doubled every five years since 1999.
Patients with medical conditions that politicians and policy-makers in health care neverconsidered to be valid reasons to die are now being helped by physicians willing to hasten theirdeaths. A sibling found out that his brother’s MAID paperwork in British Columbia listed only“hearing loss” as his qualifying condition. In the Netherlands, dozens of patients qualified foreuthanasia only because of autism. In Canada, “advanced age” helps qualify patients to die, eventhough Quebec cautions that to rely on it as the sole criterion is illegal. Young patients have diedthrough euthanasia in Belgium for a range of reasons, including a botched sex change, sexualexploitation by a psychiatrist, unresolved post-traumatic stress disorder after a terrorist attack,
and again, this time in twins, hearing loss.
The patients I spoke with are equally unsure of their future, whether they will live or die in amedicalized world that asks them — and only them because of their illnesses or disabilities — toconsider their lives not worth living. None of them has a terminal illness. They tell me that theywant to live, but they feel they might not get the chance. One person I interviewed, who recentlyapplied for MAID, said in a social-media post, “If I don’t make it, be sure to say I was murdered,because I didn’t give up, I was pushed.”
[Australia is taking over religious hospitals] Let me begin with Father Tony Percy. “I have beenrunning the charge against the government,” he told me, by way of introducing himself. Whathappened, he says, is “a smash-and-grab.” Over the summer, the government forciblynationalized a Catholic hospital. On Sunday morning, at Mass time, workers entered the hospitalto remove all Christian iconography before the “government . . . could trash them,” he said. Thestatue of Mary, staff memorial stones, the iconic blue cross on top of the façade, and everycrucifix left in the building were taken down. The local archbishop decried these actions as“totalitarian,” but international media largely ignored him. This scene was not in China, not in adictatorship. Rather, it was at Calvary Public Hospital in Canberra.
The reason for this move, as given by the left-leaning government of the Australian CapitalTerritory (ACT), was to improve “ambiguities in clinical governance.” That flatly makes nosense. The secular public hospital that replaced Calvary is one of the most dysfunctionalhospitals in Australia, with rampant complaints of bullying and allegations of misconduct. TheACT government moved at breakneck speed to take over the hospital. In a matter of weeks, ACTlegislators overwrote their own legislation to let them break the hospital’s contract, which had 76years remaining. Two former prime ministers, Tony Abbott and John Howard, condemned theACT’s actions.
CAMAP’s strategy has already succeeded. In 2017, Vancouver Island used to have a Catholichospital and four hospice beds. But as a consequence of a public campaign by death-careadvocates, there are no remaining “MAID-free” spaces on the island. Now it has the world’shighest rate of euthanasia: Over 7.5 percent of all deaths are from MAID — and that number isrising.
Without spaces to practice medicine free from death care, physicians have no adequateprotections to follow their conscience and their faith. “I know I actually can’t kill someone,”Helen Lord, one of the nine palliative specialists in Tasmania, told me. “I can’t do it.” Oncedeath care was legalized in her state, she decided to retire early. “I said I’m not going to have anypart of this. It’s not medicine. It’s just not what we do. . . . Half of the people who came into[my] palliative care were scared that they were going to be euthanized.”
When Lord became outspoken against euthanasia, she was demonized as a “right-wingEvangelical.” She’s not. She’s Anglican — and closer to the left. But because she thinks that“life is precious” and equally that “time is precious,” especially for the dying, she was a frequenttarget of the media. After a complaint that she claims was false was lodged against her, she knewher time was up.
In the first story that I wrote about death care, “No Other Options,” published in the NewAtlantis, I wrote about Rosina Kamis, a 41-year-old Toronto woman with fibromyalgia. Shechose to die from MAID in part because of her inability to access proper medical care. Beforeshe died, she entrusted her friend James, a former neighbor, to represent her as her power ofmedical attorney; since her physicians weren’t listening to her, she wanted to see if someone elsewho has fibromyalgia, as James does, could get her the medical care that she needed. Despite hisefforts, James couldn’t help her — and now, after her death, he can’t get the help that he needs.He messaged me months after our first conversation to tell me that he now sees his own future inwhat happened to Rosina.
James told me that he is living with the specter of an imminent administered death, like Rosina’s. He could decide to stop fighting for the care he needs, too. It seems inevitable. “I’m going totake it one day. That’s how it feels to me. I don’t like that, but to me, the way things are going,this society is really sending us disabled people a message,” James said. “We got that messageeven before MAID. But now it’s codified into law and there’s these processes and resources toexpedite it.”
“I have diagnosed mental-health conditions and I can’t get treatment. I need therapy. My doctorasked me the other day, What do I need? I need therapy. I need a long-term relationship withsomeone. And she told me, she said, That’s impossible.” Instead, he was sent YouTube videoson how to do stretches. He chuckles. “I need actual health care,” James said. Eventually, he tellsme, he’ll get death care instead​.

​This is a short article, but do not judge it by its length. The author asks that we examine closely what it means that Jesus did not have a Roman coin and had to ask to see one (to which he said, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar'sand to God what is God's). Is it a simple category - what belongs to the State and what belongs to God? Or, is it messier than that? What does it mean to live faithfully in our present day governmental, economic and social system and try to follow God? Can it be done? Or, should we, like Jesus, carry no secular identity on ourselves. (Or, is it as simple as the Franciscan's would point out that Jesus lived a life of poverty so of course he didn't have a coin). I'd like to know what you think.

The Absence of a Coin in Jesus’ Hand
Kerry Hasler-Brooks, The Christian Century 10.16.23
Kerry Hasler-Brooks is associate professor of English at Messiah University in Mechanicsburg,Pennsylvania. She attends a Mennonite church. Here is how the Mennonite tradition understands their commitment to following the way of Jesus Christ: Following Jesus in daily life is a centralvalue. It is possible to follow Jesus as Lord above nationalism, racism or materialism and as apeacemaker. They believe one can follow the way of Jesus’ reconciling love in human conflictsand warfare without having to strike out in fear.

The Pharisees said to Jesus, “Does the Law allow people to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” Jesusreplied, “Show me the coin used to pay the tax.” And they brought him a denarion. Jesus asked,“Whose image and inscription is this?” “Caesar’s,” they replied. Then he said, “Give to Caesar what
belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.” (based on Matthew 22:15-22)

In my journey as a follower of Jesus, I have moved through and been shaped by very differentChristian communities. These differences have been theological, geographical, socioeconomic,racial, and cultural. I was raised in a small Presbyterian church in New Hampshire; I waseducated at a Baptist high school and a Brethren in Christ college; as a young adult, I matured ina Christian Reformed Church in North Philadelphia; and I am now an active member in a 300-year-old Mennonite faith community.
My reading of scripture today is informed by each of these communities and their theologicalconvictions, even those that I no longer hold or never held myself. I read scripture mindful of thevery different ways people of faith engage, understand, interpret, and live out the sacred text.There is tension and disagreement in these differences, but there is also, for me, a keen sense ofthe need to read in community, to read with an openness to the fullness of possible meanings, ahumility about our own understanding, a wisdom about the cultural biases or blind spots that weall have, and a commitment to the truth. Matthew 22 is precisely this kind of passage. It containssome of Jesus’ most well-known, quoted, and debated words: “Give back to Caesar what is
Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”
I recall long-ago sermons on this passage, if not the precise language, then at least the way theyfelt to me. While seemingly about taxes, something I understood little and cared about even less,I understood Jesus’ words to offer a broad framework to navigate the material and the eternal,the sociopolitical and the spiritual, the nation and the church. This passage is linked, for me, withthe morning liturgy in my childhood school, an affiliate of the Baptist church in town. Eachmorning students and staff recited three allegiances: to the American flag, the Christian flag, andthe Bible. These symbols and my allegiances to them were both distinct and compatible. LikeJesus’ words, they were ordered into a tidy parallel structure of God on one side and nation orempire on the other, and I could navigate between them justly, living fully as loyal American andloyal Christian.
I now attend a flagless Mennonite church, and the simple parallel divide between God andempire has not held up in my intellectual logic, personal ethics, or lived practice of faith. AsDavid Cramer writes, “We cannot simply line up two columns and make a checklist of things togive Caesar and things to give God. Our task is to discern together how to be faithful citizens inthe culture and society in which we reside.” The task of discernment begins, I think, with theway we read the passage itself. How we read here — both Jesus’ words and his actions —determines how we live in response.
In the passage, Jesus stymies the Pharisees, cutting through the trap that has been set — “Is itright to pay the imperial tax to Caesar or not?”—with a seemingly diplomatic decree. But beforecoming to this conclusion, an apparently moderate in-between of an answer, Jesus makes asimple but telling request: “Show me the coin used for paying the tax.” Jesus himself does notseem to have a Roman coin on hand. As Stanley Hauerwas writes, “He does not carry the coin,quite possibly because the coin carries the image of Caesar.” Hauerwas and Cramer suggest thatJesus lived outside the economics of the empire even as those around him accepted it. So he hasto ask someone for a coin to use as a prop.
When I read Matthew 22, a chorus of radically different voices are in my head. I have come tounderstand Jesus as a loud protester against unjust systems of power, a divine voice for livedpeace and material justice making, a radical lover of people. I take seriously the absence of adenarius in Jesus’ own hand.
And yet, I also understand that many people read this passage very differently than I do. Someread it as a call into godly relationship with nation and empire, others as a call to speak and liveagainst the corruptions of nation and empire. I am concerned with what is right and true aboutthis passage, of course, but I am also concerned about the people who come to this passage. Ithink the important thing is to read this passage in community, open to the possibility of differentmeanings, humble about our own understanding and misunderstanding, and committed to dojustice and love mercy as we follow both the words and the life of Jesus.

​Next week's reading is about the supposed ending of the Long Peace that existed after WWII when the U.S. was the only superpower in the world. We enjoyed a long period of peace that some historians feel may have now ended. One of those historians - Noah Smith - is our discussion group author for the week. Normally our articles come from mainstream sources; this one comes from Substack which is basically a newspaper of blog posts. However, it was quoted at length by an article in the NY Times. This article is more thought provoking than the Times article so we are going with it. I'd like to know what you think of the author's assertion and his analysis of where America is in standing with other nations of the world. Is it really "a new jungle out there where you'd better learn to grow new claws" or is it something we've all seen before?

​The Death of Pax Americana
Noah Smith, Noahpinion on Substack 10.7.23
Noah Smith is an American journalist, and commentator on economics and current events. Smithobtained his doctorate in Economics from the University of Michigan in 2012 and was anassistant professor of Behavioral Finance at Stony Brook University.

Yesterday, Hamas launched a massive surprise attack on Israel, crossing the border from Gazaand seizing or assaulting towns nearby after a huge rocket bombardment. Scenes of Hamassoldiers taking Israeli captives into Gaza have proliferated across the internet. Israel hasresponded by declaring a state of war, and the fighting between the two sides promises to bemore destructive and vicious than anything in recent memory.
As many have pointed out already, this attack is probably an attempt to disrupt the possibility ofan Israel-Saudi peace deal, which the U.S. has been trying to facilitate. If Hamas succeeds inscuttling an Israel-Saudi deal, it will be a blow to U.S. prestige and to U.S. claims to be astabilizing, peacemaking influence. But even if an Israel-Saudi deal eventually goes through, thisattack is a demonstration of America’s decreasing ability to deter conflict throughout the world.
In recent weeks, Azerbaijan has moved to fully reclaim the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh,sending 120,000 ethnic Armenians fleeing for their lives — a massive episode of ethniccleansing. With Russian power waning, Armenia has tried to rapidly pivot to the U.S., but thiswas not sufficient to prevent Azerbaijan’s ethnic cleansing. Meanwhile, Serbia is building uptroops on its border with Kosovo, whose independence has been in dispute since the U.S.
intervened against Serbia in the 1990s. The U.S. and some of its allies recognize Kosovo asindependent from Serbia, but Serbia, Russia, China, and a few other European countries don’t.
These are just a few signs of an unraveling global order. Pax Americana is in an advanced stateof decay, if not already fully dead. A fully multipolar world has emerged, and people arebelatedly realizing that multipolarity involves quite a bit of chaos.
What was Pax Americana? After the end of the Cold War, deaths from interstate conflicts —countries going to war with each other, imperial conquest, and countries intervening in civil wars— declined dramatically. Civil wars without substantial foreign intervention are very common,but except for the occasional monster civil war in China or Russia, they don’t tend to kill manypeople; it’s when countries send their armies to fight beyond their borders that the big waves ofdestruction usually happen. And for almost 70 years after the end of World War 2, this happenedless and less. Historians call this the Long Peace. The lowest level of interstate conflict camefrom 1989 through 2011, after the collapse of the USSR, when the U.S. became the world’s sole
superpower.
Political scientists and historians have many theories for why the Long Peace happened.Democratic peace theory says that countries fought less because their people brought theirleaders under tighter control. Capitalist peace theory says that the spread of global trade andfinancial links made war less attractive economically; it’s also possible that rich countries aremore materially satisfied and thus less likely to fight. The UN and other international
organizations may have also tamped down conflict.
But the simplest explanation for the Long Peace is that American power kept the peace. Ifcountries sent their armies into other countries, there was always the looming possibility thatAmerica and its allies could intervene to stop them — as they did in the Korean War in 1950, theGulf War of 1991, Bosnia in 1992 in Bosnia, Kosovo in 1999, and so on. Of course, it’s difficultto draw the line between interventions that prevent conflict and interventions that stir it up. Wasthe Vietnam War a U.S. attempt to halt a North Vietnamese takeover of South Vietnam, or was itthe U.S. intervening in an internal South Vietnamese civil war? The answer depends on yourpoint of view. But note that even the possibility of an intervention that ultimately makes aconflict worse can still serve as a deterrent.
The outbreak of interstate conflict in the late 60s and early 70s fits the Pax Americana theoryquite well. The U.S. was absorbed with the war in Vietnam during those years, and thus had farfewer resources and attention available to intervene in other conflicts. The U.S. thus functionedas a global policeman. As long as the U.S. and its alliances were sitting there waiting to throwtheir weight into any interstate conflict, there was inherent risk involved in any sort ofextraterritorial intervention.
Pax Americana died in stages over the last two decades; people have been writing about its deathfor a while now, and there were a number of factors that killed it. First there was the Iraq War,which was a clear-cut case of the U.S. starting a major international conflict rather thaninterceding to stop one. Saddam Hussein was brutal, but after his 1991 defeat he was only brutalwithin his borders. Yet he was attacked anyway; the U.S. behaved like a revisionist power at atime when it should have been guarding the status quo.
At the same time, the U.S. was becoming militarily weaker. The War on Terror reoriented theU.S. military toward counterinsurgency and away from defeating enemy armies. The defense-industrial base was allowed to wither — in 1995, the U.S. could produce about 30 times as manyartillery shells as it can now, and China can produce about 200 times as many ships as the U.S.
This is a catastrophic loss of hard power, and it means that even a modest diversion of U.S.military resources (like the Ukraine War) can largely remove the threat of U.S. interventionelsewhere.
Finally, a new great-power coalition arose that was capable of matching or exceeding U.S.power. China’s massive growth has given it a manufacturing capacity as great as the entire Westcombined, meaning that even if we could fix the problems with our defense-industrial base, we’dbe outmatched in a protracted one-on-one fight.
Real or potential conflict with this New Axis, as I’ve been calling it, now basically absorbs allthe military attention of the U.S. and its allies. The Ukraine War is tying down almost all ofEurope’s military potential and diverting some U.S. resources as well. The threat of a Chineseinvasion of Taiwan is so huge and catastrophic that it will absorb all of the American militaryattention and resources that aren’t going to Ukraine — and even that may not be enough to win.
Thus, it’s little surprise that the threat of interstate conflict is starting to reemerge in Europe andthe surrounding regions. The world is a more ungoverned, lawless place than it was 20, or even10 years ago. I think Zheng Yongnian of the Chinese University of Hong Kong put it best lastyear: “The old order is swiftly disintegrating, and strongman politics is again ascendant amongthe world’s great powers. Countries are brimming with ambition, like tigers eyeing their prey,keen to find every opportunity among the ruins of the old order.”
Like tigers eyeing their prey.The world is starting to revert into a jungle, where the strong preyupon the weak, and where there is an associated requirement that every country build up its ownstrength; if your neighbor is a tiger, you should probably grow some claws of your own. Oldscores that had to wait can now be settled. Disputed bits of territory can now be retaken. Naturalresources can now be seized. There are many reasons for countries to fight each other, and nowone of the biggest reasons not to fight – Pax Americana – has been removed. (This doesn’t meanI’m predicting a return to the levels of interstate conflict that prevailed before 1945; democraticpeace, capitalist peace, low fertility rates, and other factors will still presumably get a say. Butone of the major barriers is now gone.)
Right now, Europe, the Middle East, and the Russian periphery are the locus of conflict. But thebiggest danger may be in Asia, which is engaging in an unprecedented arms race. Despite Putin’saggression, it’s in Asia where the rise of China has disrupted the existing balance of power themost severely. Anyone who is under the illusion that Asia is inherently a more peaceful placethan Europe or the Middle East should read some history from before 1980.
Pax Americana always had an expiration date. If the U.S. had avoided the Iraq War andmaintained its defense-industrial base, it could have prolonged
its hegemony by about a decade,but ultimately the rising power of China would have ensured the return of the multipolarity thatexisted before
World War 2. In any case, it’s over now, and until and unless a new dominantglobal coalition of nation-states can be forged — either a Chinese-led global order or some kindof expanded democratic hegemony that includes India and large other developing nations —we’re going to have to re-learn how to live in the jungle.
Over the past two decades it had become fashionable to lambast American supremacy, to speakderisively of “American exceptionalism”, to ridicule America’s self-arrogated function of “worldpolice”, and to yearn for a multipolar world. Well, congratulations, now we have that world. Seeif you like
​it better.

The reading this week - Of One Mind - highlights the Biblical emphasis of healthy relationships in community despite disagreements. The second page consists of three undiscussed points - fear, guilt and public opinion. What often holds us back from achieving healthy relationships has to do with our internalized errors that have to do with what we think others think about us, our own grief and fear. Do you agree with this, or disagree? I'd like to know what you think.

Of the Same Mind

Liz Cooledge Jenkins, Christian Century 9.23.23
In chapter 2 of theLetter to the Philippians, Paul takes an early church hymn extolling Christand repurposes it as a set of instructions for healthy relationships in community. Paul urges hishearers toward an intense, intimate kind of unity:Make my joy complete by being like-minded,having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind.
The Greek phrase renderedbe of one mindcould be translated more literally asthink the samething.Be like-minded. Be one in spirit. These are strong-sounding words — especially to thoseof us who are wary of authoritarian leadership, leery of what might sound like a push towardconformity. Are there healthy ways of being of the same mind?
The First Nations Version seems to have this meaning in mind when it renders 2:1–2 like this:As you walk the road with the Chosen One, have you gained from him courage for the journey?Have you found comfort in his love? Do you share together in his Spirit? Has his tenderness andmercy captured your heart? If so, then have the same kind of thoughts. Love with one heart. Jointogether in one Spirit. And walk side by side on one path. This will make my heart leap for joy.
The First Nations Version imagines Paul encouraging the Philippians believers not to conform toone particular way of seeing the world but rather towalk side by side. As they journey together,they are to have the same kinds of thoughts, perhaps, as Christ has: thoughts of courage, comfort,sharing. Thoughts of tenderness and mercy. Thoughts of love, connection, joy. Not the exactsame beliefs about everything, but an unshakeable sense of shared life together along the way.
Researcher and storyteller Brené Brown, as she researched the idea of belonging, found thatmany people are experiencing a sense of spiritual disconnection — a diminishing sense of sharedhumanity. According to Brown, people deeply desire to be a part of something and to experiencereal connection with others but not at the cost of their authenticity, freedom, or power. Brownlaments the loss of a spirit of saying,Yes, we are different in many ways, but under it all we’redeeply connected.
I think this is the kind of spirit Paul writes in. It’s a spirit that acknowledges all our manydifferences and does not downplay or deny them — and yet still wants us to think of one anotherwith care and base our interactions on a deep sense of interconnectedness. In a community likethis we are safe to reveal ourselves, secure to humble ourselves, inspired to consider others’needs and not just our own. We are invited to pursue a kind of unity that does not require us toconform but draws out our uniqueness. We are grounded in Christ’s love and fellowship, rooted
in Christ’s example of how we might live.

Fear, Guilt, and Public Opinion from 8 Ways to Banish Misery
Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic 9.28.23

Error 5: Coping with fear
Clinical anxiety is one of the most common mental disorders today; according to the NationalInstitute of Mental Health, nearly one-fifth of U.S. adults experienced an anxiety disorder in thepast year. Russell believed that anxietyis rooted in fear of some danger which we are unwillingto face. Our understanding of the disorder today tends to be more biological than this; researchshows that anxiety is associated with involuntary physical stress symptoms such as hyperarousal.
Whether we emphasize the biological or the psychological aspects of anxiety, Russell’s cure forit is that wename our fear and think about it rationally and calmly, but with great concentration,until it has been completely familiar. If we can succeed in doing this, then in the end familiaritywill blunt its terrors.Another way of expressing this would be to recommend exposure therapy,which coaches patients to confront the source of their fears openly so that they start to feel lessthreatened.

Error 6: Senseless guilt
Russell was an avowed atheist who rarely missed a chance to point out what he saw as religion’sweaknesses — principal among them the sense of sin and unworthiness, arguing that thismislabeling of normal behaviors leads to unhappiness.
Whether or not you agree that religion is to blame (personally, I don’t), the more general pointabout guilt is a good one: It’s something we tend to experience when we feel undue privilegecompared with others — a sort of inverse envy, you might say. One version of this is “survivor’sguilt,” which people experience when a misfortune that befalls others passes them by.
Implicitly, Russell urges us to set aside the stigma of unnecessary guilt. A good remedy for thatis simple gratitude. Study after study has shown that gratitude can be practiced even when notfelt, and reliably chases away the blues.
​
Error 8: Fear of public opinion
A senior citizen I know recently told me that she was much happier since getting older, for onebig reason: She finally didn’t care what others thought of her. Russell put it another way:Oneshould as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keepout of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessarytyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways. Easier said than done, ofcourse — research shows that our pain over social exclusion affects us physically. For example,an episode of social rejection can stimulate the anterior cingulate cortex in much the same waythat stubbing your toe does.
Russell’s implication that using reason is the right way to correct the problem now has researchto back it up. That same study showed that the right ventral prefrontal cortex — a brain region used in conscious reasoning — also becomes active when social pain is encountered, andmoderates our distress. Just as you can reason with yourself that a stubbed toe won’t kill you,you can also decide to disregard what others think.

​Is it better to banish misery or strive to be happy? Arthur Brooks tackles this subject (banishing misery/increasing happiness) in the attached article that concludes with a daily affirmation that may help you to do both.
As you can imagine, there is a spiritual aspect to this, especially banishing misery. I look forward to discussing it with you.

Eight Ways to Banish Misery
Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic 9.28.23
To achieve greater well-being, you have two tasks. The first is to increase your level ofhappiness; the second is to manage your unhappiness. You might have a pretty good idea ofwhether happiness or unhappiness presents the greater challenge in your life. One person whocertainly did was the eminent 20th-century British thinker Bertrand Russell, who was not only aphilosopher, mathematician, and logician but also a Nobel laureate in literature. “Throughout mychildhood,” he wrote in his 1960s autobiography, “I had an increasing sense of loneliness, and ofdespair of ever meeting anyone with whom I could talk.” Russell’s misery proved to be themother of invention, though: His greatest accomplishment was to help found the field of analytic
philosophy, by which he intended to take the discipline beyond academic chin-scratching andinto the practical realm of solving life problems by breaking them down into manageable pieces.
Russell’s self-cure for unhappiness started with a very strong hypothesis, written in his aptlytitledThe Conquest of Happiness: Our misery comes from errors.“I believe unhappiness to bevery largely due to mistaken views of the world, mistaken ethics, mistaken habits of life,” hewrote. From there, he broke down the problem into eight categories of common errors. Thesolution to unnecessary unhappiness, he proposed, was rectifying each one.

Russell believed that people who considered themselves enlightened tended to be negative andpessimistic, and were actually proud of it. They were very focused on all that was wrong in theworld, and believed “that there is nothing left to live for.” Russell mocks this pose as a patheticconceit that should be abandoned. In case you worry that this means abandoning realism aboutthe truth, researchers have shown that pessimism can distort one’s perception of reality.

Russell rails against competition, noting that what most people fear is not falling into destitutionbut “that they will fail to outshine their neighbors.” The problem here is not that we arecompetitive per se, but that we assess our worth on the basis of what others have and do. As theold expression (sometimes attributed to Theodore Roosevelt) goes, “Comparison is the thief ofjoy.” Russell implies a solution: Instead of looking at what your neighbor has and feelingresentful, focus on what you have and feel grateful. Failure to do so leads to the next error.

Envy describes the condition of being unhappy not because you have little but because someoneelse has more. Envy is entirely human but, left unchecked, is associated with depression,hostility, and shame. It is also ridiculous, especially when it is directed toward those whoseachievements we admire. And therein lies Russell’s remedy: “Whoever wishes to increasehuman happiness must wish to increase admiration.” In other words, look for people who excelin ways you would like to, and crowd out resentment with frank appreciation.

“We are less bored than our ancestors were,” Russell wrote, “but we are more afraid ofboredom,” which leads us to pursue more and more sources of distraction. If he lived in our time,of course, he might also note that researchers have found a significant increase in boredomamong adolescents from 2008 to 2017—during the explosion of devices and social-media use. The solution we can infer from Russell lies not in more distraction but in less. We need to stopfearing boredom and be comfortable with what is going on around us, whether it’s exciting ornot. This is an argument made eloquently by my colleague Ellen Langer, who definesmindfulness as the practice of actively noticing new things. You can do that only when you arenot distracting yourself.

Clinical anxiety is one of the most common mental disorders today; according to the NationalInstitute of Mental Health, nearly one-fifth of U.S. adults experienced an anxiety disorder in thepast year. Russell believed that anxiety is rooted in fear of “some danger which we are unwillingto face.” Our understanding of the disorder today tends to be more biological than this; researchshows that anxiety is associated with involuntary physical stress symptoms such as hyperarousal. Russell’s cure for it is that we name our fear and “think about it rationally and calmly, but withgreat concentration, until it has been completely familiar.” If we can succeed in doing this, then“in the end familiarity will blunt its terrors.”

Russell was an avowed atheist who rarely missed a chance to point out what he saw as religion’sweaknesses—principal among them the sense of sin and unworthiness. Whether or not you agreethat religion is to blame (personally, I don’t), the more general point about guilt is a good one:It’s something we tend to experience when we feel undue privilege compared with others—a sortof inverse envy, you might say. One version of this is “survivor’s guilt,” which peopleexperience when a misfortune that befalls others passes them by. A good remedy for that issimple gratitude. Study after study has shown that gratitude can be practiced even when not felt,and reliably chases away the blues. This is also an effective response to the next error.

Russell was critical of what he called “persecution mania,” in which one is “perpetually thevictim of ingratitude, unkindness, and treachery.” One version of this is what some researchershave called “virtuous victimhood,” which they describe as claims of unjust treatment paired withassertions of moral standing. The point is not to deny that some people truly are the victims ofabuse, but to suggest the risk of internalizing that harm in a defining way: When victimhood isfundamentally how you see yourself, Russell argues, that compounds unhappiness. To recognizeinjustice is right and proper, but resisting self-identifying for too long as a victim can be healthy.

A senior citizen I know recently told me that she was much happier since getting older, for onebig reason: She finally didn’t care what others thought of her. Russell put it another way: “Oneshould as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keepout of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessarytyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways.” Russell’s implication thatusing reason is the right way to correct the problem now has research to back it up. Just as youcan reason with yourself that a stubbed toe won’t kill you, you can also decide to disregard whatothers think.
​
One way to apply his eight insights into common mistaken conceptions is to turn them into a set
of affirmations to start the day.

1. Pessimism won’t make me cool or smart—just wrong and unhappy. I choose to be anoptimistic realist.
2. My self-worth cannot and will not be measured by what others have.
3. I will look for people to admire, and my admiration will overcome my envy.
4. Boredom is nothing to fear. I will not distract myself with mindless diversions from thebusiness of living.
5. I will name my fears. I will face them with courage and resolve.
6. When good things happen, I won’t feel guilty. I will enjoy them and be grateful.
7. Injustice is inevitable, but I will reject a permanent identity of the victim and resist grievance.
8. The opinions of others—especially those of strangers, and especially about me—aremeaningless, and I will disregard them.

One of the most valuable aspects of Bertrand Russell’s logic is that he doesn’t suggest misery isin itself bad. No doubt he would have acknowledged that unhappiness is an appropriate responseto many situations in life. As regular readers of this column will have heard from me before,negative feelings keep us alive and safe, and even enable us to learn and grow. What Russell issaying is that by correcting errors in our thinking, we can avoid unnecessary suffering.

​I'd like to introduce a word to you: "retcon". It is short for retroactive continuity. The television and movie series, Star Trek, has used "retcon" to rewrite the storyline of Captain James T. Kirk so that they could make new movies.Could retcon, however, be rewriting our own history? The author of the attached one-page editorial thinks so and warns us of it. I'd like to know what you think.
The second page of the article includes responses to the article.
Lastly, I'd like to talk about Scripture and if it has ever gone through retcon (and why I don't think it has).

America in the Age of Retcon
Lance Morrow, Wall Street Journal, 9.20.23
It was only two years ago that the term “retcon,” short for “retroactive continuity,” made it intothe Merriam-Webster dictionary. Odd that it took so long: Retcon for some time has been the21st century’s way of life. According to the dictionary, the word refers to “a literary device inwhich the form or content of a previously established narrative is changed.” It will help if youthink of the 21st century as a comic book. Retcon retrofits the past plot to suit present purposes.
Retcon, in short, is an instrument for editing history to escape its inconvenient implications. Itenables a “general disregard for reality,” allowing the writers to get rid of a plot line that hasgotten boring or to bring back a character from the dead. Merriam-Webster cites an earlyexample: Though Sherlock Holmes died at the Reichenbach Falls, the author, Arthur ConanDoyle, retroactively declared that his death had been staged.
Every presidential race involves a certain amount of this vaudeville. But retcon has come to havemuch broader application. It’s as if the 21st century itself came equipped with an enormousdelete key, which, when you hit it, causes the former world to disappear. You may then fill upthe empty screen with your own alternative reality.
The old binaries were, so to speak, Newtonian. The new categories have all the nuance andunknowability of quantum mechanics. The southern border is secure! It isn’t shoplifting, it’ssocial justice! America itself was formerly a good thing, more or less. “The last, best hope,” asAbraham Lincoln said. That was in the old dispensation. Retcon turns the narrative upside down.
Retcon is pretty sure that Lincoln was a racist and that the U.S. is, if not evil, then at the veryleast wicked to the core. American retcon in one of its moods is paranoid, or infested withnihilistic gloom. The old America was an evil dad and must be murdered. Thomas Jefferson isDarth Vader. The docents at Monticello now speak of him with distaste.
Soviets in the old days practiced brutal retcon. They purged their history books, causingideologically inconvenient characters to disappear from the record. The ineffable Charles deGaulle exercised his mystic retcon when he persuaded the French that they had been the heroesof their own liberation from German occupation. People need the consolation of their myths.
Such revision, quick as the click of a mouse, is the indispensable tool in politics, government,media, popular culture and historiography: a metaphysics of lies and half-truths, or, conversely,of bright new possibilities. Retcon is a reset artist. Whether it’s good or bad depends on yourpolitics. Retcon is a monster and sometimes a creative genius.
Retcon asserts “my truth” and rejects, as necessary, natural law. When out of control, it results ina Tower of Babel — a dynamic of madhouse democracy, as the Founders feared. A fish rotsfrom the head first, and so does a country. Under a regime of pervasive untruth, the leadersbecome worse than their followers. We’re getting there.

Responses to the article:

William Watson
I remember when the debate in historiography was between recognizing the acts of "great men"and focusing on broad economic and social forces. Now it seems the debate has shifted towhether historical figures should be judged by what they were or what they did. It seems likelythat by a reasonable modern definition of racist, Lincoln was a racist, as were almost every whiteperson in the US at the time. He was also a racist who organized winning the Civil War andpersonally took the first significant step toward the abolition of slavery in the US. Which ismore important?

Donald Swanton
History, as someone put it, is the projection of the politics of the present onto the events of thepast.

Raymond Unger
The retcon people forget one thing. Even in Russia, the people know the truth. We all know thethat retcon is just BS. Those elite college professors think they're fooling us, but they're wrong.My grandchildren attended public schools and had to hear their trash and, to get a good grade,they pretended to accept it. But once they graduated, they said their teachers were just idiots.Youth has a way of recognizing baloney and discards it like last week's mildewed pizza.

Dennis Berg
Retcon is just a variation on presentism. These are both lies to influence the general populationto a false narrative that fits an agenda.

Charles Goodwin
This op-ed is a nice illustration of the difference between being clever and being smart. Pivotingon "retcon" is a clever device but the analogy is misplaced and ultimately misleading.Transforming the foundational generation and the framers from humans to gods -- as we havefrom time to time -- would have horrified those men. They sought to create a government oflaws and not of men, themselves included. They understood they were flawed humans, neitherangels, nor prophets, nor demons.

Howard Sears
I'm 75. Happily only a few more years to witness this ongoing tragedy. I cry for my daughtersand grandchildren.

Greg Felicetti
The "history" taught in my well-regarded HS and college was highly incomplete. Some mightcall it "whitewashed". "History" is often in the eyes of the beholders - it's often revised bysomeone else who weighs the evidence a bit differently, considers different sources, etc. Readsome and decide for one's self.

This week, let's talk about how Rosh Hashana can change your life, even if you're not Jewish.

Rosh Hashana Can Change Your Life (Even if You’re Not Jewish)
David DeSteno, NY Times 9.13.23
Guest essayist Dr. DeSteno is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University and the host of the podcast “How God Works: The Science Behind Spirituality.”
Celebrating a new year — as Jews the world over will do this week, when Rosh Hashana begins on Friday at sunset — is all about making changes. It’s a time for new beginnings, for wiping the slate clean and starting over from scratch. In that spirit, on Rosh Hashana Jews say prayers and listen to readings that celebrate the creation of the world and of human life.
But Rosh Hashana also strikes a different, seemingly discordant note. Unlike so many other New Year’s traditions, the Jewish holiday asks those who observe it to contemplate death. The liturgy includes the recitation of a poem, the Unetaneh Tokef, part of which is meant to remind Jews that their lives might not last as long as they’d hope or expect. “Who will live and who will die?” the poem asks. “Who will live out their allotted time and who will depart before their time?”
And we’re not talking about a gentle death at the end of a reasonably long life; we’re talking about misfortunes and tragedies that can cut any of our lives short. “Who shall perish by water and who by fire,” the poem continues, “Who by sword and who by wild beast / Who by famine and who by thirst / Who by earthquake and who by plague?”
This focus on death might seem misplaced, bringing gloom to the party. But as a research scientist who studies the psychological effects of spiritual practices, I believe there is a good reason for it: Contemplating death helps people make decisions about their future that bring them more happiness. This is an insight about human nature that the rites of Rosh Hashana capture especially well, but it’s one that people of any faith (or no faith at all) can benefit from.
When planning for the future, people typically focus on things that they think will make them happy. But there’s a problem: Most people don’t usually know what will truly make them happy — at least not until they are older. Across the globe, research shows, people’s happiness tends to
follow a U-shaped pattern through life: Happiness starts decreasing in one’s 20s, hits its nadir around age 50 and then slowly rises through one’s 70s and 80s, until and unless significant health issues set in.
Why the turnaround at 50? That’s when people typically start to feel their mortality. Bones and joints begin to creak. Skin starts to sag. And visits to the doctor become more frequent and pressing. Death, hopefully, is still a good ways off, but it’s visible on the horizon.
You might think this morbid prospect would further decrease contentment, but it ends up having the opposite effect. Why? Because it forces us to focus on the things in life that actually bring us more happiness. Research by the Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen has shown that as we age, we move from caring most about our careers, status and material possessions to caring most about connecting with those we love, finding meaning in life and performing service to others.
That’s a wise move. When people in the Western world want to be happier, research shows, they tend to focus on individual pursuits. But that same research confirms that this strategy doesn’t work well: Pursuing happiness through social connection and service to others is a more reliable route.
Of course, you don’t have to be old to confront death. During the SARS outbreak and the Covid pandemic, younger adults changed what they valued, research showed. When death suddenly seemed possible for anyone, even those in the prime of their lives, younger people’s opinions about how best to live suddenly began to look like those of seniors: They turned toward family and friends, finding purpose in social connection and helping others.
You don’t even need to face something as drastic as a pandemic to experience some version of these changes. Research shows that simply asking people to imagine that they have less time left, as congregants do on Rosh Hashana, is sufficient.
Rosh Hashana hardly has a monopoly on this insight. Christian thinkers such as Thomas à Kempis and St. Ignatius of Loyola urged people to contemplate death before making important choices. Stoics like Marcus Aurelius argued that meditating on mortality helped people find more joy in daily life.
But the particular brilliance of Rosh Hashana is that it combines thoughts of death with a new year’s focus on a fresh start. As work by the behavioral scientist Katy Milkman and her colleagues has shown, temporal landmarks like New Year’s Day offer an effective opportunity for a psychological reset. They allow us to separate ourselves from past failures and imperfections — a break that not only prods us to consider new directions in life but also helps
us make any changes more effectively.
There is a lesson and an opportunity here for everyone. Contemplate death next Jan. 1 (or whenever you celebrate the start of a new year). Any brief moments of unease will be well worth the payoff​.

​The reading topic for next week is pretty heavy, but important. It is a critique, by David Brooks, of the MAID (assisted-suicide) program in Canada. In the much longer article in the Atlantic, Brooks is against this program and it may have something to do with his religious beliefs. Nevertheless, he steeps his argumentin looking at two different value systems. I'd like to know what you think.

How Canada’s Assisted-Suicide Law Went Wrong
David Brooks, The Atlantic 5.4.23
[Edited from the longer print version of the article in the Atlantic]
When people who were suffering applied to the Canadian MAID (assisted-suicide) program andsaid, “I choose to die,” Canadian society apparently had no shared set of morals that wouldjustify saying no. If individual autonomy is the highest value, then when somebody comes to youand declares, “It’s my body. I can do what I want with it,” whether they are near death or not,painfully ill or not, doesn’t really matter. Autonomy rules. Within just a few years, the number ofCanadians dying by physician-assisted suicide ballooned. In 2021, that figure was more than10,000, one in 30 of all Canadian deaths; only 4 percent of those who filed written applicationswere deemed ineligible.
I don’t mean to pick on Canada, the land of my birth. Lord knows that, in many ways, Canadahas a much healthier social and political culture than the United States does. I’m using thedevolution of the MAID program to illustrate a key feature of modern liberalism — namely, thatit comes in different flavors. The flavor that is embedded in the MAID program, and is prevalentacross Western societies, is what you might call autonomy-based liberalism.
Families have traditionally been built around mutual burdens. As children, we are burdens on ourfamilies; in adulthood, especially in hard times, we can be burdens on one another; and in oldage we may be burdens once again. When these bonds have become attenuated or broken inWestern cultures, many people re-create webs of obligation in chosen families. There, too, it isthe burdening that makes the bonds secure.
You did not create your deepest bonds. You didn’t choose the family you were born into, theethnic heritage you were born into, the culture you were born into, the nation you were born into.
As you age, you have more choices over how you engage with these things, and many peopleforge chosen families to supplant their biological ones. But you never fully escape the way theseunchosen bonds have formed you, and you remain defined through life by the obligations theyimpose upon you.
Autonomy-based liberals see society as a series of social contracts — arrangements people makefor their mutual benefit. But a mother’s love for her infant daughter is not a contract. Gifts-basedliberals see society as resting on a bedrock of covenants. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks once captured thedifference this way: “A contract is a transaction. A covenant is a relationship. Or to put it slightlydifferently: a contract is about interests. A covenant is about identity. It is about you and mecoming together to form an ‘us.’”
Autonomy-based liberalism imposes unrealistic expectations. Each individual is supposed todefine their own values, their own choices. Each individual, in the words of Supreme CourtJustice Anthony Kennedy inPlanned Parenthood v. Casey,is left to come up with their own“concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, of the mystery of human life.” If your nameis Aristotle, maybe you can do that; most of us can’t. Most of us are left in a moral vacuum, aworld in which the meaning of life is unclear, unconnected to any moral horizon outside the self.
Autonomy-based liberalism cuts people off from all the forces that formed them, stretching backcenturies, and from all the centuries stretching into the future. Autonomy-based liberalism leavespeople alone. Its emphasis on individual sovereignty inevitably erodes the bonds between people.
Autonomy-based liberalism induces even progressives to live out the sentence notoriouslyassociated with Margaret Thatcher: “There is no such thing as society.” Nearly 200 years ago,Alexis de Tocqueville feared that this state of affairs not only makes men forget their ancestors,but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries. Eachman is forever thrown back upon himself alone and there is a danger that he may be shut up inthe solitude of his own heart.
As Émile Durkheim pointed out in 1897, this is pretty much a perfect recipe for suicide. We nowlive in societies in which more and more people are deciding that death is better than life. Inshort, autonomy-based liberalism produces the kind of isolated, adrift people who are prone tosuicide — and then provides them with a state-assisted solution to the problem it created in thefirst place.
Gifts-based liberalism, by contrast, gives you membership in a procession that stretches back toyour ancestors. It connects you to those who migrated to this place or that, married this person orthat, raised their children in this way or that. What you are is an expression of history.
This long procession, though filled with struggles and hardship, has made life sweeter for us.Human beings once lived in societies in which slavery was a foundational fact of life, beheadingsand animal torture were popular entertainments, raping and pillaging were routine. Butgradually, with many setbacks, we’ve built a culture in which people are more likely to abhorcruelty, a culture that has as an ideal the notion that all people deserve fair treatment.
This is progress. Thanks to this procession, each generation doesn’t have to make the bigdecisions of life standing on naked ground. We have been bequeathed sets of values, institutions,cultural traditions that embody the accumulated wisdom of our kind. The purpose of life, in agifts-based world, is to participate in this procession, to keep the march of progress going alongits fitful course. We may give with our creativity, with our talents, with our care, but many of thegifts people transmit derive from deeper sources.
Sometimes the old and the infirm, those who have been wounded by life and whose choices havebeen constrained, reveal what is most important in life. Sometimes those whose choices havebeen limited can demonstrate that, by focusing on others and not on oneself, life is defined notby the options available to us but by the strength of our commitments.
I recently had a conversation with a Canadian friend who told me that he and his three siblingshad not been particularly close as adults. Then their aging dad grew gravely ill. His care becamea burden they all shared, and that shared burden brought them closer. Their father died but theircloseness remains. Their father bestowed many gifts upon his children, but the final one was thegift of being a burden on his family.
If autonomy-based liberals believe that society works best when it opens up individual options,gifts-based liberals believe that society works best when it creates ecologies of care that helppeople address difficulties all along the path of life. Autonomy-based liberalism is entrenchingan apparatus that ends life. Gifts-based liberalism believes in providing varieties of palliativecare to those near death and buttressing doctors as they forge trusting relationships with theirpatients. These support structures sometimes inhibit choices by declaring certain actions beyondthe pale. Doctors are there for healing, at all times and under all pressures. Patients can trust thedoctor because they know the doctor serves life. Doctors can know that, exhausted and confused
though they might be while attending to a patient, their default orientation will be to continue thestruggle to save life and not to end life.
John Stuart and Harriet Taylor Mill believed in individual autonomy. But they also believed thata just society has a vision not only of freedom but also of goodness, of right and wrong. Humans,John Stuart Mill wrote, “are under a moral obligation to seek the improvement of our moralcharacter.” He continued, “The test of what is right in politics is not the will of the people, butthe good of the people.” He understood that the moral obligations we take on in life — to family,friends, and nation, to the past and the future — properly put a brake on individual freedom ofaction. And he believed that they point us toward the fulfillment of our nature.
The good of humanity is not some abstraction — it’s grounded in the succession of intimates andinstitutions that we inherit, and that we reform, improve, and pass on. When a fellow member ofthe procession is in despair, is suffering, is thinking about ending their life, we don’t provide asyringe. We say: The world has not stopped asking things of you. You still have gifts to give,merely by living among us. Your life still sends ripples outward, in ways you do and do not see.Don’t go. We know you need us. We still need you.

​Continuing our summer discussion about spirituality and different faith traditions, let's take a look at Roman Catholicism, religion/spirituality and U.S. politics. The pope stated that there is a faction in the U.S. House of Bishops that is taking the church "backwards". The House of Bishops, when talking about the pope, have even used the "s" word (schism).
I'd like to know what you think - in particular the role faith, the Church, and spirituality has (or does not have) in politics. Maybe we'll even talk about the difference between influence and power.

Pope Says a U.S. Faction Offers a Narrow View of the Church
Jason Horowitz and Ruth Graham, NY Times 8.30.23
Pope Francis has expressed in unusually sharp terms his dismay at “a very strong, organized,reactionary attitude” opposing him within the U.S. Roman Catholic Church, one that fixates onsocial issues like abortion and sexuality to the exclusion of caring for the poor and theenvironment.
The pope lamented the “backwardness” of some American conservatives who he said insist on anarrow, outdated and unchanging vision. “I would like to remind these people that backwardnessis useless. Doing this, you lose the true tradition and you turn to ideologies to have support. In
other words, ideologies replace faith.”
His comments were an unusually explicit statement of the pope’s longstanding lament that theideological bent of some leading American Catholics has turned them into culture warriors ratherthan pastors, offering the faithful a warped view of Church doctrine rather than a healthy, well-rounded faith. It has become a major theme of his papacy that he sees himself as bringing thechurch forward while his misguided conservative critics try to hold it back.
In 2018, Francis explicitly wrote that caring for migrants and the poor is as holy a pursuit asopposing abortion. “Our defense of the innocent unborn, for example, needs to be clear, firm andpassionate,” he wrote. “Equally sacred, however, are the lives of the poor, those already born, thedestitute, the abandoned.” He has urged priests to welcome and minister to people who are gay,divorced and remarried, and he has called on the whole world to tackle climate change, calling ita moral issue.
For nearly a decade, Francis’ conservative critics have accused him of leading the church astrayand of diluting the faith with a fuzzy pastoral emphasis that blurred the Church’s traditions andcentral tenets. Some U.S. bishops have issued public warnings about the Vatican’s direction,with varying degrees of alarm, and clashed with the pope over everything from liturgy andworship styles, to the centrality of abortion opposition in the Catholic faith, to American politics.
In the preface of a book published this month, Cardinal Raymond Burke, an American formerarchbishop and Vatican official who is considered a leader of Catholic conservatives, wrote thatFrancis risked driving the church into a schism, a definitive rupture. The danger, he wrote, wasan upcoming synod of bishops in October, convened by Francis to promote inclusivity,transparency and accountability, which will include lay people, including some women.
Bishop Joseph Strickland, who heads a small diocese in East Texas and has become one of thepope’s loudest critics, has accused the pope of undermining the Catholic faith and has invitedFrancis to fire him. In a public letter released last week, Bishop Strickland warned that many“basic truths” of Catholic teaching would be challenged at the synod, and hinted ominously at anirrevocable break. Those who would “propose changes to that which cannot be changed,” hewarned, “are the true schismatics.”
Conservative bishops have at times directly confronted American politicians, particularlyCatholic Democrats. In 2021, they pushed to issue guidance that would deny the sacrament ofCommunion to Catholic politicians who publicly support and advance abortion rights, likePresident Biden — a regular churchgoer and the first Catholic president since the 1960s — andformer House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops backed away from a direct conflict on that issue, afterthe Vatican warned against using the Eucharist as a political weapon. Francis has preached thatcommunion “is not the reward of saints, but the bread of sinners.” But some individual bishopshave persisted. Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone of San Francisco, an outspoken critic of thepope, said last year that Ms. Pelosi would not be permitted to receive communion in hisarchdiocese unless she was willing to “publicly repudiate” her stance on abortion.
Clashes between the Vatican and conservative American bishops are often amplified andencouraged by conservative media outlets. Popular radio hosts and podcasters regularly questionthe pope’s leadership and raise questions about his legitimacy. Combative independent websiteslike Church Militant and LifeSite News cover Francis’ perceived missteps closely, and skewerchurch institutions they depict as corrupt and profane.
Many of today’s conservative leaders were promoted in the more doctrinaire church of SaintJohn Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. They have accused Francis, an Argentine, of being anti-American and anticapitalist, and leading the church away from its core teachings.
But he has consistently argued in his decade as pope that the church was part of history, and nota fortress from it, and that it needed to open up and be amid the people to reflect and respond totheir challenges. Speaking to the Portuguese priests this month, he noted that over the centuriesthe church had changed its positions on issues like slavery and capital punishment. “The visionof the doctrine of the church as a monolith is wrong,” he said. “When you go backward, youmake something closed off, disconnected from the roots of the church,” eroding morality.
His comments were in response to a question from a Jesuit who said he was taken aback, whenhe spent a year in the United States, by harsh criticism of the pope from some Catholics,including bishops.
To some people, “the situation of migrants, for example, is a lesser issue,” the pope said. “SomeCatholics consider it a secondary issue compared to the ‘grave’ bioethical questions.” Butfocusing on issues of sexual morality and downgrading issues of social justice, he said, clasheswith his vision of the true church. “That a politician looking for votes might say such a thing isunderstandable,” he added. “But not a Christian.”
Francis has steadily thinned out and isolated the most vocal, and in some cases aggressive,American conservative clergy, declining to promote some archbishops to cardinals and sodenying them voting rights in the conclave that chooses the pope. In other cases he has simplywaited them out and accepted their resignations when they reached mandatory retirement age. But the American bishops’ conference remains a redoubt of Catholic conservatism, much moreconservative than Francis and many of the other national churches.
On a flight to Africa in 2019, Francis seemed to acknowledge a well-financed and media-backedAmerican effort to undermine his pontificate, saying it was an “an honor that the Americansattack me” when asked about the American conservative-media complex.
On the return flight, he was asked about the sustained opposition from Catholic conservatives inthe United States who had accused him of driving traditionalists to break with the church.Francis said he hoped it didn’t come to that, but wasn’t necessarily terrified at the prospecteither. “I pray there are no schisms,” Francis said at the time. “But I’m not scared."

​This summer we have been discussing various religions of the world. Next week, let's discuss the spirituality of Judaism. Unlike our other studies, this spirituality will sound quite familiar.The upcoming program year will feature some events with our neighbors at Temple Beth Israel. The first one will be a blessing of the animalsevent open to people and pets of all faiths. Prior to our first shared event, I think it is important and neighborly thatwe learn more about the spirituality of the Jewish faith.

What is Jewish Spirituality
Jay Michaelson, My Jewish Learning

Rabbi Dr. Jay Michaelson is the author of nine books. He holds a Ph.D in Jewish Thought fromHebrew University and a J.D. from Yale Law School, and is currently a senior editor for the TenPercent Happier meditation platform and a columnist for New York Magazine.
​
The French philosopher Michel Foucault defined spirituality as “the search, the practice, theexperience by which the subject operates on himself the transformations which are necessary toaccess the truth.” What I love about this definition is that it accommodates a very wide range ofspiritual orientations, Jewish and otherwise, while maintaining some core features of thephenomenon.
Spirituality is subjective, insofar as spiritual experiences are largely internal and thus differentfor everyone. It is focused on practice and experience — rather than, say, text, dogma, or law. You can no more understand spirituality by reading about it than you can taste a recipe byreading a cookbook. And that means spirituality is pragmatic. Spirituality asks not whether anaction is commanded, or connected to one’s family, or part of an objective moral order. It asks:What does it do? And does it work?
Finally, when taken seriously, spirituality (Jewish or otherwise) focuses not on narcissisticmoments of feeling good, but on transformation and truth. The best way to check the validity ofa spiritual experience is to see what’s changed afterward. Am I kinder? Am I more aware ofwonder? Am I more open to empathy?
If there’s one asterisk I’d place next to Foucault’s definition, it is to note that Jewish spiritualpractice, in particular, can often be social, communal, relational. From congregational prayer tomarching for social justice (“praying with my feet” as Abraham Joshua Heschel once called it) torectifying one’s ethical conduct, both the context and the “truth” of Jewish spirituality are oftenrelational in nature.
Of course, given the subjectivity inherent in spiritual practice, what that “truth” is varies fromperson to person. This doesn’t entail relativism, certainly not in terms of ethical conduct. Onlythat the contextual frame, content, and meaning of spiritual experience will vary from person toperson. For example, many people define the truth of spiritual practice in theistic terms.
Someone might say they feel close to God when they light Shabbat candles, or meditate, or hearthe blowing of the shofar. For others, the truth may be non-theistic. For this sort of non-theisticpractitioner, Shabbat candles may arouse feelings of compassion or wonder, meditation a senseof gratitude, and the shofar a sense of connectivity to the primal rituals of the Jewish people.“God” may not be part of the experience.
Having worked in the field of spirituality for about 20 years, my sense is that, in fact, thesedifferent practitioners – theistic and non-theistic – are reporting similar things. Their worldviewsmay shape the character of the experiences, and they definitely shape their interpretations. Butone of the fascinating paradoxes of spirituality is that while it’s intrinsically subjective, so muchis held in common.

What then makes Jewish spirituality Jewish spirituality? Here are three answers.
First, and most obviously, it utilizes Jewish tools and topics for spiritual practice. One could havea lovely spiritual experience lighting candles on Thursday night, but lighting them on Fridaynight grounds the experience in Jewish folkways, Jewish community, and the Jewish calendar.For me personally, that deepens the experience. My grandmother did this, probably hergrandmother too, and so do many of my friends and fellow community members. We may havedifferent ideas about what we’re doing, but there is a sweet bond in this shared ground ofpractice.
Second, Jewish spirituality has some distinctive characteristics. Unlike some popular forms ofmeditation, for example, it tends to affirm and incorporate a wide range of emotional experience.The Buddha sits in calmness; the Hasid dances with the ups and downs of life. And unlikemonastic asceticism (the removal of all of life’s sensual pleasures), which has only rarelyoccurred in Jewish communities, most Jewish spirituality embraces the sensual world of eating, dancing, having sex, and so on.
Finally, Jewish spirituality is inevitably tied to ethics and social life. Even when, as noted earlier,the spiritual experience is personal, what comes afterward is social. Judaism is a householderreligion, tied to family, community, and society.
It’s notable that perhaps the classic mystical experience in the Bible, Moses ascending MountSinai and communicating directly with God, is barely narrated in the text. We get almost nothingof Moses’s spiritual experience. What we get are the Ten Commandments and all the laws that follow – the fruits of the spiritual experience, not the experience itself.
This “coming down the mountain” is a critical metaphor, and it reappears in different forms inthe mystical experiences of Ezekiel, Elijah, Isaiah, and others. Mystics have their experiences,but what matters is what they learn from them, whether it’s law or prophecy or ethical warningsto Israel.
Ultimately, Jewish spirituality comes down from the mountaintop, back from the experience ofthe sublime. As Heschel described so eloquently, that is where Judaism begins.

​Going back to our discussion group roots, let's take a look at David Brooks' article, How America Got Mean, and discuss 1) what is his argument, 2) is it supported, 3) what part of it do you agree with and/or not agree with, 4) how does this affect your life.
According to Brooks, there is a spiritual aspect to this because the Church is an antidote for society that tends to gravitate towards being mean. Secondly, he asserts that America has lost the ability to hear one another and have meaningful discussions. If Brooks attended any of our discussion groups, he would see that the people at All Angels have not lost the ability to listen, to agree and disagree respectfully, and be enlightened by each other's experiences and beliefs. I look forward to what you have to say.

To start the discussion, here are some thoughts from John Binney, in the U.K.

Whilst I appreciate and understand why the title is referring to America, I do not see America as the sole perpetrator, if that is the case! I would say that most of our 'Western society' is in the same position. It may be that parts of this have particular reference in America, but the discord between various sections of society is similar. Take participation in many 'traditional' groups. Religious groups, Rotary, Lions, Kiwanis, Masonic etc. All are suffering from maintaining membership and finding new additions. We did vaguely include this in a recent discussion. What do we need, to ignite a new wave of action or people willing to help others and by doing so, help themselves? How much of the new generation understands how much we all need, and rely on each other, in the end?
Who could we point to, to be an example for 'others' to follow?

How America Got Mean
David Brooks, The Atlantic 8.14.23
Over the past eight years or so, I’ve been obsessed with two questions. The first is: Why haveAmericans become so sad? The rising rates of depression have been well publicized, as have therising deaths of despair from drugs, alcohol, and suicide. But other statistics are similarlytroubling. The percentage of people who say they don’t have close friends has increased fourfoldsince 1990. The share of Americans ages 25 to 54 who weren’t married or living with a romanticpartner went up to 38 percent in 2019, from 29 percent in 1990. A record-high 25 percent of 40-year-old Americans have never married. More than half of all Americans say that no one knowsthem well. The percentage of high-school students who report “persistent feelings of sadness or
hopelessness” shot up from 26 percent in 2009 to 44 percent in 2021.
My second, related question is: Why have Americans become so mean? I was recently talkingwith a restaurant owner who said that he has to eject a customer from his restaurant for rude orcruel behavior once a week—something that never used to happen. A head nurse at a hospitaltold me that many on her staff are leaving the profession because patients have become soabusive. At the far extreme of meanness, hate crimes rose in 2020 to their highest level in 12years. Murder rates have been surging, at least until recently. We’re enmeshed in some sort ofemotional, relational, and spiritual crisis, and it undergirds our political dysfunction and thegeneral crisis of our democracy. What is going on?
The most important story about why Americans have become sad and alienated and rude, Ibelieve, is also the simplest: We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how totreat others with kindness and consideration. The story I’m going to tell is about morals. In ahealthy society, a web of institutions — families, schools, religious groups, communityorganizations, and workplaces — helps form people into kind and responsible citizens, the sortof people who show up for one another. We live in a society that’s terrible at moral formation.
Moral formation, as I will use that stuffy-sounding term here, comprises three things.

helping people learn to restrain their selfishness. How do we keep our evolutionarilyconferred egotism under control?
Second,teaching basic social and ethical skills. How do you welcome a neighbor into yourcommunity? How do you disagree with someone constructively?

, helping people find a purpose in life. Morally formative institutions hold up a set ofideals. They provide practical pathways toward a meaningful existence: Here’s how you candedicate your life to serving the poor, or protecting the nation, or loving your neighbor.
For a large part of its history, America was awash in morally formative institutions. Its FoundingFathers had a low view of human nature, and designed the Constitution to mitigate it. If suchflawed, self-centered creatures were going to govern themselves and be decent neighbors to oneanother, they were going to need some training. For roughly 150 years after the founding,Americans were obsessed with moral education. Beyond the classroom lay a host of othergroups: the YMCA; the Sunday-school movement; the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts; professionalorganizations, which enforced ethical codes; unions and workplace associations. And of course,by the late 19th century, many Americans were members of churches or other religious
communities. Mere religious faith doesn’t always make people morally good, but living in acommunity, orienting your heart toward some transcendent love, basing your value system on concern for the underserved — those things tend to.
The crucial pivot happened just after World War II. Schools began to abandon moral formationin the 1940s and ’50s, as the education historian B. Edward McClellan chronicles inMoralEducation in America: “By the 1960s deliberate moral education was in full-scale retreat” aseducators “paid more attention to the SAT scores of their students, and middle-class parentsscrambled to find schools that would give their children the best chances to qualify for collegesand universities.”
Over the course of the 20th century, words relating to morality appeared less and less frequentlyin the nation’s books: According to a 2012 paper, usage of a cluster of words related to beingvirtuous also declined significantly. Among them were bravery (which dropped by 65 percent),gratitude (58 percent), and humbleness (55 percent). For decades, researchers have askedincoming college students about their goals in life. In 1967, about 85 percent said they werestrongly motivated to develop “a meaningful philosophy of life”; by 2000, only 42 percent saidthat. Being financially well off became the leading life goal; by 2015, 82 percent of students saidwealth was their aim.
Sadness, loneliness, and self-harm turn into bitterness. Social pain is ultimately a response to asense of rejection — of being invisible, unheard, disrespected, victimized. When people feel thattheir identity is unrecognized, the experience registers as an injustice — because it is. Peoplewho have been treated unjustly often lash out and seek ways to humiliate those who they believehave humiliated them. If you put people in a moral vacuum, they will seek to fill it with theclosest thing at hand. Over the past several years, people have sought to fill the moral vacuumwith politics and tribalism. American society has become hyper-politicized.
Politics also provides an easy way to feel a sense of purpose. You don’t have to feed the hungryor sit with the widow to be moral; you just have to experience the right emotion. You deludeyourself that you are participating in civic life by feeling properly enraged at the other side. Thatrighteous fury rising in your gut lets you know that you are engaged in caring about this country.The culture war is a struggle that gives life meaning.
But, even in dark times, sparks of renewal appear. In 2018, a documentary about Mister RogerscalledWon’t You Be My Neighbor?was released. The film showed Fred Rogers in all his simplegoodness — his small acts of generosity; his displays of vulnerability; his respect, evenreverence, for each child he encountered. People cried openly while watching it in theaters. In anage of conflict and threat, the sight of radical goodness was so moving.
Healthy moral ecologies don’t just happen. They have to be seeded and tended. So, the questionsbefore us are pretty simple: How can we build morally formative institutions that are right for the21st century? What do we need to do to build a culture that helps people become the bestversions of themselves?

You have to give to receive. You have to lose yourself in a common causeto find yourself. The deepest human relationships are gift relationships, based on mutual care. Anobvious model for at least some aspects of this is the culture of the U.S. military, which similarlyemphasizes honor, service, selflessness, and character in support of a purpose greater thanoneself, throwing together Americans of different ages and backgrounds who forge strong socialbonds.

Most organizations serve two sets of goals—moral goals and instrumentalgoals. Hospitals heal the sick and also seek to make money. Newspapers and magazines inform the public and also try to generate clicks. Law firms defend clients and also try to maximizebillable hours. Nonprofits aim to serve the public good and also raise money.
Early in my career, as a TV pundit at PBS NewsHour, I worked with its host, Jim Lehrer. Every day, with a series of small gestures, he signaled what kind of behavior was valued there and whatkind of behavior was unacceptable. In this subtle way, he established a set of norms and practicesthat still lives on. He and others built a thick and coherent moral ecology, and its way of beingwas internalized by most of the people who have worked there.
Look, I understand why people don’t want to get all moralistic in public. Many of those who doare self-righteous prigs, or rank hypocrites. And all of this is only a start. But healthy moralecologies don’t just happen. They have to be seeded and tended by people who think and talk inmoral terms, who try to model and inculcate moral behavior, who understand that we have tobuild moral communities because on our own, we are all selfish and flawed. Moral formation isbest when it’s humble. It means giving people the skills and habits that will help them beconsiderate to others in the complex situations of life. It means helping people behave in waysthat make other people feel included, seen, and respected. That’s very different from how wetreat people now — in ways that make them feel sad and lonely, and that make them growunkind.

​This week's reading is the last one we will read from (the Rev.) Tish Harrison Warren in the NY Times because it is her last article with that publication. She questions discourse in America and highlights the importance of churches in order to foster conversation. In particular, she discusses how dealing with the Church on the outside can empty a person. But, having spiritual insights, conversations, encounters, and prayer - encountering the Church on the inside - fulfills us and also helps our Republic. I'd like to know what you think and what you have experienced with regards to dealing with the proverbial outside and inside of the Church.

My Hope for American Discourse
Tish Harrison Warren, NY Times, 8.6.23
​
With this final newsletter at The Times, I want to say thank you and goodbye. And yes, OK, thismay be a little self-indulgent but I feel it is worth sharing in part because some of my reasons forleaving, while personal, touch on larger themes of faith in private life and public discourse thathave featured in this newsletter and that all of us experience in one way or another.
There is a stereotype among some conservative religious people that in media or other public-facing institutions, voices of people of faith are marginalized and unwelcome. I think that thishas some truth to it and have even experienced that in certain settings over the years. I have not,however, experienced this at The Times.
Amid a culture that often embraces hyperpolarization and self-righteous scorn for our politicaland ideological enemies, it takes courage for public-facing institutions to allow for a truediversity of ideas, especially when it comes to matters of faith and identity. It gives me hope forAmerican discourse that in a single year of my tenure at this company, Tressie McMillan Cottomand David French were brought on as columnists — two talented writers who make me think,but who have quite different perspectives on the world. It encourages me that there areinstitutions in America that, however imperfectly, still seek to embody a commitment topluralism and old-school, big-tent liberalism, that allow a wide range of voices at the table, solong as those voices are open to listening to others as well.
Writing publicly about God each week can do a number on one’s soul. Thomas Wingfold, acharacter in a novel by the Scottish minister George MacDonald, said, “Nothing is so deadeningto the divine as a habitual dealing with the outsides of holy things.” Holy things, sacred topics,spiritual ideas, I believe, have power. Dealing with them is a privilege and a joy, but habituallydealing with the outside of them is inherently dangerous.
The “outsides” of holy things, to me, describes the difference between speaking about divine orsacred things and encountering the divine or the sacred directly. We need more and betterreligious discourse in America. I believe that religion and, more broadly, the biggest questions inlife are the driving forces behind much that is beautiful, divisive, unifying, controversial andperplexing about our culture and society.
Yet there is danger in becoming a pundit, particularly on matters of faith and spirituality. It can be deadening. For any person of faith, public engagement must be balanced with times ofwithdrawal, of silence, prayer, questioning and wonder beyond the reach of words. Otherwise,faith with all its strange and startling topology becomes a flat and sterile thing, something to bedissected, instead of embraced. And typically, once something is fit only for dissection, it isdead.
I bring this up because being a pundit is a temptation for all of us now. Digital technology has made us all pundits. We are faced with a constant choice: Every experience, belief, feeling andthought we have can be shared publicly or not. In a single day, we can take in more informationand ideas than was ever possible, yet at the end of the day we can still lack wisdom.
Constant connectivity empties us out, as individuals and as a society, making us shallowerthinkers and more impatient with others. When it comes to faith, it can yield a habitual dealingwith the outsides of holy things, fostering an avoidance of those internal parts of life that aremost difficult, things like prayer, uncertainty, humility and the nakedness of who we most trulyare amid this confusing, heartbreaking and incandescently beautiful world.
Public debate and dialogue are the crux of our democracy and an important way to seek truth. Itis good to speak up and be heard. But speaking up and being heard can be as addictive as a drug. And in our breathless, noisy and contentious society, this addiction must be actively resisted.
There is also a tendency in our moment to prioritize the distant over the proximate and the bigover the small. We can seek to have all the right political opinions and still not really love ouractual neighbors, those right around us, in our homes, in our workplaces or on our blocks.
We become like Linus in the old “Peanuts” cartoons who famously said: “I love mankind. It’speople I can’t stand.” True community, however, is made of real people with names, of friendswith true faults. Don’t get me wrong: Global and national news is important and I will continueto read news and opinion pieces nearly every day. But for me, as for most of us, the places wemeet God are not primarily in abstract debates about culture wars or the role of religion insociety, but in worship on a Sunday morning or in dropping off soup for a grieving friend, in avulnerable conversation, in celebration with a neighbor, or in the drowsy prayers uttered whilerocking a feverish toddler in the middle of the night.
The way to battle abstraction in our time is to embrace the material, the incarnation of our lives,the fleshy, complicated, touchable realities right around us in our neighborhoods, churches,friends and families. And this enfleshed, incarnational part of my life and work deserves someextra attention now, at least for a little while.
So, finally, if you’d indulge me a little more, in Anglican liturgy, we wind up our worshipservice each week with a departure ritual: a closing benediction. So, I want to say to my readers, to those who’ve written and told me about your lives, to those who’ve enthusiasticallyencouraged me or shared my work with others, to those who’ve disagreed with me respectfully,to those who have disagreed with me less respectfully, to those who are struggling and those whoare rejoicing, to those who are afraid or those who are encouraged, to those full of faith and thosefull of doubt and those full of both at the same time: God bless and keep you. You have been agift to me and I am grateful for each of you.

​By popular request we are going to discuss the Atlantic article, The Misunderstood Reason Millions of Americans Stopped Going to Church. I am always interested in hearing what you think on our articles and topics. For this next week, if you were one of the many who sent it to me, I am especially interested in what you read in it. For me, there are some holes in the author's argument. And, as far as why people stopped going to church, I think it's for an entirely different reason (which is felt most especially in the Baptist tradition; the Episcopal Church could boast that we are losing the least amount of people, but, well that's not much to boast about).

The Misunderstood Reason Millions of Americans Stopped Going to Church
Jake Meador, The Atlantic 7.29.23
Forty million Americans have stopped attending church in the past 25 years. It represents thelargest concentrated change in church attendance in American history. As a Christian, I feel thisshift acutely. My wife and I wonder whether the institutions and communities that have helpedpreserve us in our own faith will still exist for our children, let alone whatever grandkids wemight one day have.
This change is also bad news for America as a whole: Participation in a religious communitygenerally correlates with better health outcomes and longer life, higher financial generosity, andmore stable families—all of which are desperately needed in a nation with rising rates ofloneliness, mental illness, and alcohol and drug dependency.
A new book, written by Jim Davis, a pastor at an evangelical church in Orlando, and MichaelGraham, a writer with the Gospel Coalition, draws on surveys of more than 7,000 Americans bythe political scientists Ryan Burge and Paul Djupe, attempting to explain why people have leftchurches—or “dechurched,” in the book’s lingo—and what, if anything, can be done to get somepeople to come back. The book raises an intriguing possibility: What if the problem isn’t thatchurches are asking too much of their members, but that they aren’t asking nearly enough?
The Great Dechurching finds that religious abuse and more general moral corruption in churcheshave driven people away. But Davis and Graham also find that a much larger share of those whohave left church have done so for more banal reasons. The book suggests that the definingproblem driving out most people who leave is that Contemporary America simply isn’t set up topromote mutuality, care, or common life. Rather, it is designed to maximize individualaccomplishment as defined by professional and financial success. Such a system leaves preciouslittle time or energy for forms of community that don’t contribute to one’s own professional life.
Workism reigns in America, and because of it, community in America, religious communityincluded, is a math problem that doesn’t add up. Consider one of the composite characters that Graham and Davis use in the book to describe a typical evangelical dechurcher: a 30-something woman who grew up in a suburban megachurch,was heavily invested in a campus ministry while in college, then after graduating moved into afull-time job and began attending a young-adults group in a local church. In her 20s, she meets aguy who is less religiously engaged, they get married, and, at some point early in their marriage,after their first or second child is born, they stop going to church. Maybe the baby isn’t sleepingwell and when Sunday morning comes around, it is simply easier to stay home and catchwhatever sleep is available as the baby (finally) falls asleep.
In other cases, a person might be entering mid-career, working a high-stress job requiring a 60-or 70-hour workweek. Add to that 15 hours of commute time, and suddenly something like two-thirds of their waking hours in the week are already accounted for. And so when a friend invites them to a Sunday-morning brunch, they probably want to go to church, but they also want to seethat friend, because they haven’t been able to see them for months. The friend wins out.
After a few weeks of either scenario, the thought of going to church on Sunday carries a certainmental burden with it. Soon it actually sounds like it’d be harder to attend than to skip, even ifsome part of you still wants to go. The underlying challenge for many is that their lives arestretched like a rubber band about to snap — and church attendance ends up feeling like an itemon a checklist that’s already too long.
What can churches do in such a context? In theory, the Christian Church could be an antidote toall that. What is needed in our time is a community marked by sincere love, sharing what theyhave, eating together, generously serving neighbors, and living lives of quiet virtue and prayer. Ahealthy church can remind people that their identity is not in their job or how much money theymake; they are children of God, loved and protected and infinitely valuable.
But a vibrant, life-giving church requires more, not less, time and energy from its members. Itasks people to prioritize one another over our career, to prioritize prayer and time readingscripture over accomplishment. This may seem like a tough sell in an era of dechurching. Theproblem in front of us is not that we have a healthy, sustainable society that doesn’t have roomfor church. The problem is that many Americans have adopted a way of life that has left uslonely, anxious, and uncertain of how to live in community with other people.
The tragedy of American churches is that they have been so caught up in this same world that wenow find they have nothing to offer these suffering people that can’t be more easily foundsomewhere else. The difficulty is that many of the wounds and aches provoked by our currentorder aren’t of a sort that can be managed or life-hacked away. They are resolved only bychanging one’s life, by becoming a radically different sort of person belonging to a radicallydifferent sort of community.
In the Gospels, Jesus tells his first disciples to leave their old way of life behind, going so far asabandoning their plow or fishing nets where they are and, if necessary, even leaving behind theirparents. A church that doesn’t expect at least this much from one another isn’t really a church inthe way Jesus spoke about it.
The great dechurching could be the beginning of a new moment for churches, a moment markedless by aspiration to respectability and success, with less focus on individuals aligningthemselves with American values and assumptions. We could be a witness to another way of lifeoutside conventionally American measures of success. Churches could model better, truer sortsof communities, ones in which the hungry are fed, the weak are lifted up, and the proud are castdown. Such communities might not have the money, success, and influence that many Americanchurches have so often pursued in recent years. But if such communities look less like thosechurches, they might also look more like the sorts of communities Jesus expected his followers
to create.

We had a good week of discussions around the divine spirit in each of us according to the Sikh religion. For many, that particular way of believing didn't have a satisfactory reason or basis for what we see as evil being carried out by humans in the world.
This week, we are going to look at two other belief systems regarding the problem of evil - atheistic neuroscientists and Christian Science. This means there are two readings (sorry!) but I think these two articles will make for interesting conversation partners. Perhaps you will be filled by them or perhaps you will feel, like I do, that theirarguments end up a little empty. Regardless, your views and thoughts are welcome at the discussion table.

Where Does Evil Come From?

Sandy Sandberg, Christian Science Monitor 11.19.20
By way of answering the headline’s question let’s look at an analogy. When we enter a room thatis dark, we don’t try to figure out why it’s dark. We find the light switch and turn on the light.Nor do we concern ourselves with where the darkness went, because we understand that it didn’t“go” anywhere. It was merely the absence of light.
This analogy works pretty well as a starting point for addressing the question of how ChristianScience explains the nature of evil. Instead of trying to figure out where evil came from,Christian Science focuses on understanding the nature of the source of all that is, which is God.
Because God is solely good, goodness has a source, but its opposite, evil, lacks a true source orsubstance – just like the darkness. As we’re receptive to that light, we realize that evil doesn’thave any basis in spiritual reality. We come to understand the nature of Truth as supremelypowerful, omnipresent, and entirely good. Therefore, its opposite is without legitimacy, withoutintelligence – a lie. This is captured in one of the ways Jesus described the devil, or evil. He said,“There is no truth in him ... he is a liar, and the father of it” (John 8:44).
It is through spiritual sense that we are able to see and understand the spiritual reality, where allis held in the infinite allness and goodness of God’s being. Referring to God, the Bible puts itthis way: “You are of purer eyes than to behold evil, and cannot look on wickedness” (Habakkuk1:13). Here the absolute purity of God’s nature as conscious of good and good alone is revealed.God, Truth, alone is ever present.
Christ Jesus lived to present this wonderful light of Truth. He once said: “I am the light of theworld: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life” (John8:12). Indeed, throughout his ministry those who were sick were healed, many entangled in sinwere reformed, several people who had died were restored to life, and multitudes who wereignorant of God’s ever-present goodness had the gospel – the good news of God’s allness –preached to them.
Today, too, each of us can glimpse the spiritual fact of evil’s unreality, whether in the form ofsickness or other obstacles to harmony, and experience healing. In this way we are demonstratingwhat Jesus showed us we could do – we can prove the ever presence and all-power of Truth,whose light is forever shining, dispelling the darkness of evil.

The End of Evil?

Ron Rosenbaum, Slate Magazine 9.30.11
Is evil over? Has science finally driven a stake through its dark heart? Yes, according to manyneuroscientists, who are emerging as the new high priests of the secrets of the psyche, explainersof human behavior in general. A phenomenon attested to by a recent torrent of pop-sci brainbooks with titles likeIncognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. Not secret in most of these worksis the disdain for metaphysical evil, which is regarded as an antiquated concept that’s done moreharm than good. They argue that the time has come to replace such metaphysical terms withphysical explanations – malfunctions or malformations in the brain.
Of course, people still commit innumerable bad actions, but the idea that people make consciousdecisions to hurt or harm is no longer sustainable, say the new brain scientists. For one thing,there is no such thing as “free will” with which to decide to commit evil. Autonomous, consciousdecision-making itself may well be an illusion. And thus, intentional evil is impossible.
Have the new neuroscientists brandishing their fMRIs, the ghostly illuminated etchings of theinterior structures of the skull, succeeded? Have they pinpointed the hidden anomalies in theamygdala, the dysfunctions in the prefrontal lobes, the electrochemical source of impulses thatlead Jared Loughner, or Anders Breivik, to commit their murderous acts?
And in reducing evil to a purely neurological glitch or malformation in the wiring of the physicalbrain, in eliminating the element of freely willed conscious choice, have neuroscientistseliminated as well “moral agency,” personal responsibility? Does this “neuromitigation” excuse— “my brain made me do it,” as critics of the tendency have called it — mean that no humanbeing really wants to do ill to another? That we are all innocent beings, some afflicted with defects — “brain bugs” as one new pop-neuroscience book calls them — that cause the behaviorformerly known as evil?
The new neuroscience represents the latest attempt by science to reduce evil to malfunction ordysfunction rather than malevolence. It’s a quest I examined inExplaining Hitler:the way thevarieties of 20th-century psychological “science” sought to find some physiological,developmental, sexual, or psychoanalytic cause for Hitler’s crimes. It would be consolatory if notcomforting if we could prove that what made Hitler “Hitler” was a malfunction in human nature,a glitch in the circuitry. This somewhat Pollyannaish quest to explain the man’s crimes remainscounterintuitive to many. I recall the late British historian and biographer of Hitler, AlanBullock, reacting to the claims of scientism by exclaiming to me vociferously: “If he isn’t evil,then who is? … If he isn’t evil the word has no meaning.”
Indeed, recent developments demonstrate that evil remains a stubborn concept in our culture. Toread the mainstream media commentary on the Breivik case, for instance, is to come upon, timeafter time, the word “evil.” Not just that the acts were evil, but that he, Breivik was, as a WallStreet Journal columnist put it, “evil incarnate.” But what exactly does that mean? Theincarnation of what? The word “incarnation” implies, metaphorically at least, the embedding of ametaphysical force in a physical body. One can understand the scientific aversion to this as adescription of reality. But evil as a numinous force abides.
Even if it was not surprising for the Pope to name evil, it was surprising to see a devout atheistsuch as my colleague Christopher Hitchens invoke “evil” in his “obituary” for Osama bin Laden.Hitchens admits wishing he could avoid using “that simplistic (but somehow indispensable)word.” But he feels compelled to call whatever motivated bin Laden a “force” that “absolutelydeserves to be called evil.” But what is this “force,” which sounds suspiciously supernatural foran atheist to believe in? Where is it located: in the material or nonmaterial world?
That is the real “problem of evil”. We tend to believe it exists: Popular culture has no problemwith it. But even religious thinkers continue to debate what it is and why a just and loving Godpermits evil and the hideous suffering it entails. If they shift the blame to us (because God gaveman free will to sin) why God couldn’t have created a human nature that would not so readilychoose genocide and torture. (For the record, I’m an agnostic.)
One person whose work on these matters has received considerable attention lately is the BritishProfessor of Psychopathology, Simon Baron-Cohen. He’s the author ofThe Science of Evil,which seeks to dispose of the problem of evil in part at least by changing its name. “My maingoal,” says Baron-Cohen, “is replacing the unscientific term ‘evil’ with the scientific term‘empathy.’” What he means is that instead of calling someone evil we should say they have no
empathy. Baron-Cohen goes to great lengths to posit an “empathy circuit” in the brain whosevarying “degrees” of strength constitute a spectrum, ranging from total, 100 percent empathy to“zero degrees of empathy.” A healthy empathy circuit allows us to feel others’ pain andtranscend single-minded focus on our own.
One troubling aspect of Baron-Cohen’s grand substitution of a lack of empathy for evil is themechanistic way he describes it. He characterizes those who lack empathy as having “a chip intheir neural computer missing.” The big problem here is that by reducing evil to a mechanicalmalfunction in the empathy circuit, Baron-Cohen also reduces, or even abolishes, good. No onein this deterministic conceptual system chooses to be good, courageous, or heroic. They just havea well-developed empathy circuit that compels them act empathetically — there’s no choice orhonor in the matter.
Despite all the astonishing advances in neuroscience, however, we still know woefully littleabout how the brain enables the mind and especially about how consciousness and intentionalitycan arise from the complicated hunk of matter that is the brain. We may know the 13 regions thatlight up on an fMRI when we feel “empathy” (or fail to light up when we choose evil) but thatdoesn’t explain whether this lit-up state indicates they are causing empathy or just reflecting it. The problem of evil — and moral responsibility — is thus inseparable from what is known in thephilosophical trade as “the hard problem of consciousness.” How does the brain, that electrifiedpiece of meat, create the mind and the music of Mozart?
As for evil itself, the new neuroscience is unlikely to end the debate, but it may cause us to bemore attentive to the phenomenon. Perhaps evil will always be like the famous Supreme Courtpronouncement on p*rnography. You know it when you see it. I don’t like its imprecision, but Iwill concede I don’t have a better answer. Just that we can do better than the mechanistic,deterministic, denial of personal responsibility the neuroscientists are offering to “replace” evilwith.
I recall an exchange in my conversation with one of the original neuroskeptics, Daniel S. Reich,now head of a research division on nerve diseases at the National Institutes of Health. Towardthe end of our conversation I asked Reich if he believed in evil. He was silent for a bit and thenstarted talking about Norway. About degrees of evil. About the difference between the typicalsuicide bomber and the Oslo killer. How the former has only to press a button to accomplish hismurderous goal and never has to see the consequences. But on that summer camp island in Oslo,Reich said, Breivik was stalking victims for hours. He’d shoot one or more and, according tosurvivors, not register anything, just continue trudging forward, looking for more.
“He saw the consequences, the blood, heard the screams. He just kept going.” Some will try tosay this is sociopathy or psychopathy or zero degrees of empathy and other exculpatory cop-outs.But fueled by his evil ideas Breivik kept going; if we can’t call him evil who can we?
​​

​This past week, both groups talked about the doctrine of Original Sin which states that we are fallen, sinful humans who basically cannot help ourselves. Some agreed with it; others did not.
Interestingly enough, we have a good summer read this coming week - a book review of The Light We Give by Simran Jeet Singh. This book introduces the reader to Sikh wisdom (an often misunderstood and certainly under-represented world faith tradition in mainstream religious circles).
Sikh wisdom asserts that no one is evil. Period. Putting that belief to the test, he recalls the murder of seven Sikhs in Wisconsin as they worshipped in 2012. The author encourages readers to combat hate with love and empathy rather than perpetuating patterns of disengagement and polarization. Could this be a helpful read for our day; or, is it unrealistic thinking (or both). I'd like to know what you think.

Can People be Evil?
Alexis Vaughan, The Christian Century 7.6.23
A book review by Alexis Vaughan, a Disciples of Christ minister, who serves as director of racialequity initiatives at Interfaith America.

Educator and activist Simran Jeet Singh begins his memoir,The Light We Give, by recalling theracism he experienced as a “turban-wearing, brown-skinned, beard-loving Sikh” growing up inSouth Texas. He recalls distressing interactions with classmates and community members whodiscriminated against him based on his appearance, and he walks readers through the choices hemade to navigate complicated feelings of anger, sadness, and fear. These choices led him toembrace positivity over negativity and to practice his Sikh faith more intentionally. Singh points to three major components of Sikhi that have shaped his outlook:

, a teaching that imbues life with optimism and gratitude even amid pain andsuffering;

the concept that all people are created with a light of divinity within them, makingeveryone equal and worthy of respect; and

, the practice of expressing love in all things, especially through service.
He calls on readers to seek lives of active empathy, seeing each person — even those who arehurtful — as valuable and worthy of kindness and love. “When we identify our core values andcommitments, and when we begin to put these into practice consistently, then we have setourselves up to engage with the world around us in a way that is rooted not in our emotions andattachments, but in our principles and convictions.”
Singh describes as his greatest test of faith the aftermath of the massacre of seven Sikhs as theyworshiped together in their gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, in 2012. While grappling withhis personal anger and sadness following the massacre amid his responsibilities as a publicfigure, he felt the need to speak to diverse audiences about the Sikh faith and the implications ofhate for American society.
One of the most compelling sections of the book follows Singh as he travels to a summer campto speak to Sikh children immediately after the massacre. When he asks the children if theyknow what happened there, a young girl responds, “A bad, bad man came and killed a bunch ofus. He was evil.” Singh wrestles with how to respond because he finds something unsettlingabout naming Wade Michael Page, the shooter, as evil. He explains:
On the one hand, I preferred this framing because it helped make sense of a seemingly senselessmassacre. But on the other hand, hearing a child say these words out loud revealed a truth thatupset me. I took comfort in seeing him as evil. But I don’t believe in evil as a reality of our world,and I certainly don’t believe that people are evil. Damaged and destructive, yes. But evil, no.
Singh goes on to explain that Sikhi “teaches us to see every human being as equally divine and toreject the good-evil binary,” suggesting “that we are all inherently good and embodiments ofGod.” While it would be “emotionally easier” to respond to the children’s anger and sadness bydismissing Page as evil, Singh writes, doing so would dehumanize Page in a way that isultimately unwarranted.
Singh’s reflections remind me of a theology I’ve often encountered in faith-based activism: theaffirmation that every person enters this world created in God’s perfect image, and the bad thingsthat we impose on each other after we’re born are betrayals of that image. Negative emotions —such as shame, anger, grief, and loneliness — are symptoms of those betrayals. These emotions,especially when combined with the idea of evil, have often been used to uphold the powerstructures that exploit the most vulnerable people in our communities.
In my experience, however, it’s hard to combat oppression without the spiritual resources toname where things have gone wrong and process our emotions about it. We all have the capacityand sometimes the impulse to do terrible things in the world — things that I, as a Christian,would call evil. Practicing our faith or ethical commitments on a daily basis is one way we canwork on resisting those impulses. This is something that even children can learn from otherpeople’s egregious acts.
My disagreement with Singh is, at its heart, a disagreement about what it means to be human.Singh desires to escape the good/evil binary because he believes that labeling Page as evil wouldbe an act of “dehumanizing someone who had dehumanized us.” But I believe that our actions inthe world reveal something real about who we are, and the full scope of our humanity includesour capacity to commit heinous acts. Naming that is just as important as recognizing our capacityto overcome those impulses and do good. When Singh reasons Page out of being labeled “evil”by the child at the camp, it feels to my Christian sensibilities like an act of dehumanization.
Singh’s conclusion that we all need to integrate ethical living into our public lives is admirable.He encourages readers to combat hate with love and empathy rather than perpetuating unhelpfulpatterns of disengagement and polarization. For those who are inspired to take on positivechange but don’t know where to begin or how to articulate the impact of their faith on theirworldview, Singh’s work is an excellent model.The Light We Giveis not only an accessibleintroduction to Sikh wisdom, it’s a guide for all people who want to be better and do better.

We had an interesting and lively discussion about A.I. and medicine and religion. In both groups, we talked about Sunday's 60 Minutes segment about A.I. For those who did not see it, here is the YouTube link to that fascinating 27 minute piece.

This week, we are going to discuss David French's opinion piece in the NY Times -Who Truly Threatens the Church. He believes Church leaders are no longer looking to be protected from government but rather they are seeking governmental authority. And, in short, he believes that is the greatest threat to the church. I'd like to know what you think.

Who Truly Threatens the Church?
David French, NY Times 7.9.23
According to legend, in the early 1900s, The Times of London sent an inquiry to a number ofwriters asking the question, “What’s wrong with the world today?” The Christian apologist G.K.Chesterton responded succinctly and profoundly: “Dear Sirs, I am.” The real story is just asprofound, but less succinct. In 1905 Chesterton wrote a much longer letter to London’s DailyNews, and that letter included this: “The answer to the question‘What is Wrong?’should be, ‘Iam wrong.’ Until a man can give that answer his idealism is only a hobby.”
I’ve thought about that Chesterton quote often as I’ve seen the “new” Christian right re-embracethe authoritarianism of previous American political eras. At the exact time when religious libertyis enjoying a historic winning streak at the Supreme Court, a cohort of Christians hasincreasingly decided that liberty isn’t enough. To restore the culture and protect our children, it’snecessary to exercise power to shape our national environment.
And so the conservative movement is changing. When I was a younger lawyer, conservativesfought speech codes that often inhibited religious and conservative discourse on campus. Now,red state legislatures are writing their own speech codes, hoping to limit discussion of the ideasthey disfavor. When I was starting my career, my conservative colleagues and I rolled our eyes atthe right-wing book purges of old, when angry parents tried to yank “dangerous” books offschool library shelves. Well, now the purges are back, as parents are squaring off in schooldistricts across the nation, arguing over the words children should be allowed to read.
Years ago, I laughed at claims that Christian conservatives were dominionists in disguise, thatwe didn’t just want religious freedom, we wanted religious authority. Yet now, such claims arehardly laughable. Arguments for a “Christian nationalism” are increasingly prominent, withfactions ranging from Catholic integralists to reformed Protestants to prophetic Pentecostals allseeking a new American social compact, one that explicitly puts Christians in charge.
The motivating force behind this transformation is a powerful sense of threat — the idea that theleft is “coming after” you and your family. This mind-set sees the Christian use of power asinherently protective, and the desire to censor as an attempt to save children from dangerousideas. The threat to the goodness of the church and the virtue of its members, in other words,comes primarily from outside its walls, from a culture and a world that is seen as worse invirtually every way.
But there’s a contrary view, one that emanates from the idea of original sin, which Chestertonargued was “the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.” The doctrine oforiginal sin rejects the idea that we are intrinsically good and are corrupted only by the outsideworld. Instead, we enter life with our own profound and inherent flaws. We are all, in a word,fallen. To quote Jesus in the book of Mark, “There is nothing outside a person that by going intohim can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.” All manner ofsin and evil comes “from within, out of the heart of man.”
Under this understanding of Scripture, we are all our own greatest enemy. We do not, either asindividuals or as a religious movement, possess an inherent virtue that should entitle any of us torule. We shun the will to power because we rightly fear our own sin, and we protect the liberty ofothers because we do not possess all wisdom and we need to hear their ideas.
One of the best recent books about the American founding is “We the Fallen People: TheFounders and American Democracy” by the Wheaton College professor Robert TracyMcKenzie. In it, he details at length the founders’ own reservations about human nature. AsJames Madison famously wrote in Federalist No. 51: “If men were angels, no government wouldbe necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on governmentwould be necessary.”
This proper skepticism about human virtue pervades the Constitution. At every turn, the powerof government is hemmed in. Each branch checks the other. The people check the government,and the government checks the people. The Bill of Rights attempts to safeguard our mostfundamental human rights from government overreach or the tyranny of the mob. No faction canbe trusted with unchecked authority.
But, as Professor McKenzie argues, this understanding faced an early and serious challenge in apolitical movement that we’d recognize today — Jacksonian populism, the idea that “the people”were, in fact, righteous enough to rule. The very concept was, and is, destructive to its core. The
sense of virtue creates a sense of righteous entitlement. In Christian America, the belief that“we” are good leads to the conviction that the churches will suffer, our nation will suffer and ourfamilies will suffer unless “we” run things. It closes our hearts and minds to contrary voices andopposing ideas.
But one doesn’t have to look to national politics to see that threats can emanate from within thechurch as well as without. One of the most terrifying and poignant parts of the hit Amazon Primedocumentary series “Shiny Happy People” was the story of Josh Duggar, a young man who wasraised in a deeply religious family. He was protected from the corruption of the “outside world”in almost every way that could be devised. He was home-schooled and grew up in a housewithout a cable television and with limited access to media. And yet he was depraved enough tomolest his own sisters.
My wife and I both grew up in a fundamentalist community that tried hard to protect the churchfrom the world. Yet it turned out that my wife needed protection from the church. She’s a victimof child sex abuse. The perpetrator taught vacation Bible school.
This recent legacy of scandal and abuse should be more than enough evidence of the need forhumility in any Christian political theology. This is not moral relativism. We still possess coreconvictions. But existential humility acknowledges the limits of our own wisdom and virtue.
Existential humility renders liberty a necessity, not merely to safeguard our own beliefs but alsoto safeguard our access to other ideas and arguments that might help expose our own mistakesand shortcomings.
Who is wrong? I am wrong. We are wrong. Until the church can give that answer, its politicalidealism will meet a tragic and destructive end. The attempt to control others will not preserveour virtue, and it risks inflicting our own failures on the nation we seek to save.

This week, let's talk about health - physical and spiritual. A.I. is affecting how medicine is practiced and, perhaps, it impacts our spiritual health as well. The main article is my Reflection for this week, Calling Dr. A.I. The supplemental article is what I referenced in that piece - Dr. Daniela Lamas' guest essay in the NY Times. I'm looking forward to talking about health and technology.

​A.I. Will Change Medicine but Not What It Means to Be a Doctor
Daniela J. Lamas, M.D. NY Times 7.6.23

When faced with a particularly tough question on rounds during my intern year, I would run straight to the bathroom. There, I would flip through the medical reference book I carried in my pocket, find the answer and return to the group, ready to respond. At the time, I believed that my job was to memorize, to know the most arcane of medical eponyms by heart. Surely an excellent clinician would not need to consult a book or a computer to diagnose a patient. Or so I thought then.
Not even two decades later, we find ourselves at the dawn of what many believe to be a new era in medicine, one in which artificial intelligence promises to write our notes, to communicate with patients, to offer diagnoses. The potential is dazzling. But as these systems improve and are integrated into our practice in the coming years, we will face complicated questions: Where does specialized expertise live? If the thought process to arrive at a diagnosis can be done by a computer “co-pilot,” how does that change the practice of medicine, for doctors and for patients?
Though medicine is a field where breakthrough innovation saves lives, doctors are — ironically — relatively slow to adopt new technology. We still use the fax machine to send and receive information from other hospitals. When the electronic medical record warns me that my patient’s combination of vital signs and lab abnormalities could point to an infection, I find the input to be intrusive rather than helpful. A part of this hesitation is the need for any technology to be tested before it can be trusted. But there is also the romanticized notion of the diagnostician whose mind contains more than any textbook.
Still, the idea of a computer diagnostician has long been compelling. Doctors have tried to make machines that can “think” like a doctor and diagnose patients for decades, like a Dr. House-style program that can take in a set of disparate symptoms and suggest a unifying diagnosis. But early models were time-consuming to employ and ultimately not particularly useful in practice. They were limited in their utility until advances in natural language processing made generative A.I. — in which a computer can actually create new content in the style of a human — a reality. This is not the same as looking up a set of symptoms on Google; instead, these programs have the ability to synthesize data and “think” much like an expert.
To date, we have not integrated generative A.I. into our work in the intensive care unit. But it seems clear that we inevitably will. One of the easiest ways to imagine using A.I. is when it comes to work that requires pattern recognition, such as reading X-rays. Even the best doctor may be less adept than a machine when it comes to recognizing complex patterns without bias.
There is also a good deal of excitement about the possibility for A.I. programs to write our daily patient notes for us as a sort of electronic scribe, saving considerable time. As Dr. Eric Topol, a cardiologist who has written about the promise of A.I. in medicine, says, this technology could foster the relationship between patients and doctors. “We’ve got a path to restore the humanity in medicine,” he told me.
Beyond saving us time, the intelligence in A.I. — if used well — could make us better at our jobs. Dr. Francisco Lopez-Jimenez, the co-director of A.I. in cardiology at the Mayo Clinic, has been studying the use of A.I. to read electrocardiograms, or ECGs, which are a simple recording of the heart’s electrical activity. An expert cardiologist can glean all sorts of information from an ECG, but a computer can glean more, including an assessment of how well the heart is functioning — which could help determine who would benefit from further testing.
Even more remarkably, Dr. Lopez-Jimenez and his team found that when asked to predict age based on an ECG, the A.I. program would from time to time give an entirely incorrect response.
At first, the researchers thought the machine simply wasn’t great at age prediction based on the ECG — until they realized that the machine was offering the “biological” rather than chronological age, explained Dr. Lopez-Jimenez. Based on the patterns of the ECG alone, the A.I. program knew more about a patient’s aging than a clinician ever could.
And this is just the start. Some studies are using A.I. to try to diagnose a patient’s condition based on voice alone. Researchers promote the possibility of A.I. to speed drug discovery. But as an intensive care unit doctor, I find that what is most compelling is the ability of generative A.I. programs to diagnose a patient. Imagine it: a pocket expert on rounds with the ability to plumb the depth of existing knowledge in seconds.
What proof do we need to use any of this? The bar is higher for diagnostic programs than it is for programs that write our notes. But the way we typically test advances in medicine — a rigorously designed randomized clinical trial that takes years — won’t work here. After all, by the time the trial were complete, the technology would have changed. Besides, the reality is that these technologies are going to find their way into our daily practice whether they are tested or not.
Dr. Adam Rodman, an internist at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston and a historian, found that the majority of his medical students are using Chat GPT already, to help them on rounds or even to help predict test questions. Curious about how A.I. would perform on tough medical cases, Dr. Rodman gave the notoriously challenging New England Journal of Medicine weekly case — and found that the program offered the correct diagnosis in a list of possible diagnoses just over 60 percent of the time. This performance is most likely better than any individual could accomplish.
How those abilities translate to the real world remains to be seen. But even as he prepares to embrace new technology, Dr. Rodman wonders if something will be lost. After all, the training of doctors has long followed a clear process — we see patients, we struggle with their care in a supervised environment and we do it over again until we finish our training. But with A.I., there is the real possibility that doctors in training could lean on these programs to do the hard work of generating a diagnosis, rather than learn to do it themselves. If you have never sorted through the mess of seemingly unrelated symptoms to arrive at a potential diagnosis, but instead relied on a computer, how do you learn the thought processes required for excellence as a doctor?
“In the very near future, we’re looking at a time where the new generation coming up are not going to be developing these skills in the same way we did,” Dr. Rodman said. Even when it comes to A.I. writing our notes for us, Dr. Rodman sees a trade-off. After all, notes are not simply drudgery; they also represent a time to take stock, to review the data and reflect on what comes next for our patients. If we offload that work, we surely gain time, but maybe we lose something too.
But there is a balance here. Maybe the diagnoses offered by A.I. will become an adjunct to our own thought processes, not replacing us but allowing us all the tools to become better.
Particularly for those working in settings with limited specialists for consultation, A.I. could bring everyone up to the same standard. At the same time, patients will be using these technologies, asking questions and coming to us with potential answers. This democratizing of information is already happening and will only increase.
Perhaps being an expert doesn’t mean being a fount of information but synthesizing and communicating and using judgment to make hard decisions. A.I. can be part of that process, just one more tool that we use, but it will never replace a hand at the bedside, eye contact, understanding — what it is to be a doctor.
A few weeks ago, I downloaded the Chat GPT app. I’ve asked it all sorts of questions, from the medical to the personal. And when I am next working in the intensive care unit, when faced with a question on rounds, I just might open the app and see what A.I. has to say.

​Our discussion reading is a fascinating piece about blessings and curses: individual behavior and external societal forces, about being made for joy but choosing despair, and the choice to live with gratitude and trust or live with anxiety and dread (there is no middle ground).
​Here is a sample: When we don’t live in joy and gratitude, when we become stingy and mean, the goodness of God becomes blocked and distorted. From the simple failure to heed joy comes deprivation.

Blessings and Curses
Amy Frykholm, The Christian Century 6.28.23
My friend Joanne, who is 88 and the author of more than 20 novels; a former EMT, firefighter,and college professor, she is a master of English and a student of Hebrew; has been translatingDeuteronomy word for word. She and I meet monthly in a group of writers — a mix of Jews and Episcopalians. I don’t think I had given Deuteronomy any thought since high school when I triedreading the Bible cover to cover. By the time I got to Deuteronomy, I’m sure I was skimmingand looking for the good parts. All of that changed in a glance at Deuteronomy 28: the blessingsand the curses. I fell in love.
The blessings last only 15 verses, but the curses rant for 52. On the surface, the chapter feels like
a tiny carrot attached to a great big stick wielded by a God ready to rain blows on our heads at
any moment. This is in fact how fellow group member Marilyn read it. “This chapter is my
father on steroids,” she said. Every imagined imperfection is punished. All love is conditional.
“This is the God I’ve been trying to escape all of my adult life.”
The whole of Deuteronomy is a set of three songs or speeches of Moses before his death, and theblessings and the curses come at the end of the second song. I began to feel drawn at verse 5.“Blessed be your basket and your kneading bowl.”Why, I wondered, start with the basket andthe kneading bowl? What place does the bread basket have in intertribal hostilities or in acovenant between God and God’s people? I didn’t have an answer right away, but I was drawn tothe image. I felt like I could smell the slight oiliness of the kneading bowl and feel its textures —a combination of rough and smooth. I could imagine the yeasty nature of the rising bread andfeel the roughness of the handmade basket into which baked bread was laid. It was the essence of hearth and home. Humans took the elements of earth and added water and then fire. Thisalchemy was the beginning of the first human culture. So, if your blessings start with bread andthe implements of bread, then you are very close to the essence of your civilization. Every act ofkneading, forming, and baking loaves is a blessing, and one that accumulates over time.
It makes sense to me then that this blessing is, in particular, a blessing for women. Womenprepared these loaves for their families, gave these loaves to their neighbors, spread theseblessings across an entire people. Every aspect of this blessing involves human hands, most oftenfemale ones — not only the bread but also the kneading bowl and the basket themselves. Theseare foundational domestic arts.
“If we are going to survive,”I hear this part of Moses’ song saying,“we are going to needblessings on every aspect of our lives.”Such a blessing draws our attention to the mundane, tothe basic work of survival within the human family. Daily actions and daily choices haveconsequences far beyond their seeming simplicity.
If the family doesn’t thrive,so goes the ancient formula,blame the woman at the hearth. Blameher kneading bowl and her basket.The God who is interested in the details of everyday life canjust as easily be a petty tyrant as a loving creator, who punishes every small infraction and whowould just as readily destroy a people as save one. There is no doubt that humans have veryoften used this image of God to control, abuse, and belittle one another.
But if we take the blame out of it for just an instant and imagine that this blessing was spokenthrough love and for the purpose of love, then we have the same words and images with adifferent inflection.“Our lives matter,”this blessing says,right down to their very details. Thiscovenant that the people were making with God was not a covenant with a distant, foreignpower. This covenant enters into the most fundamental aspects of human existence and therhythms of everyday life. It starts, as does so much of human life, in the kitchen. But as withblessings so with curses; they start at the essence of things. Once the basket and the kneadingbowl are cursed in verse 17, the curses proliferate.
I admit, I fell in love with the curses too, in part because they struck me as funny and tender.“Heshall be the head and you shall be the tail,”reads one. Not all of the curses are funny. Some ofthe curses felt all too familiar after multiple years of global pandemic, in the midst of climatechange. Some of them seemed to find a precise language for what we have experienced: theplagues, the loneliness, the sorrow, the emptiness. Barren fields, the dust, the lack of rain, thestorms and their consequences that seem greater than they used to be.
Throughout this chapter runs a tension between collective responsibility and individualresponsibility — the inner person and their relationship to the outer world. They’ve alreadyexperienced plague, exile, loss, and destruction. It’s not theoretical.
Put into the whole context of the Jewish people, Susan Niditch says, we can understand blessingsand curses theology as comments on and evaluations of society: How does a society treat itswidows and orphans? How prevalent is violence, how much honesty can be anticipated, and isleadership fair or tyrannical? How aligned is our society to the will of God? How do wecelebrate joy and offer gratitude to God?
With this in mind, we can return to the kneading bowl and the basket and wonder if we fail toappreciate the simple abundance of our lives, the most basic relationship to the earth and to otherpeople. We don’t give thanks because we owe God our thanks; it isn’t another box to check. It’sbecause when we live in and through abundance, in alignment with the will of God, the goodnessof God flows through us and out into all creation.
When we don’t live in joy and gratitude, when we become stingy and mean, the goodness of Godbecomes blocked and distorted. From the simple failure to heed joy comes deprivation.Theslavery from which you were delivered,the text says,will return to you along with all that camewith it: the labor, the plagues, the suffering.
But once again, the end of the chapter holds a surprise. You would think that after beingdestroyed byevery sickness and every plague,the chapter would end with a landscape ofcollective despair. But it doesn’t. Instead it returns to an intimate place, the internal reality of thehuman being instead of the external one.Inside the mind and heart of the human being,Deuteronomy says,dread replaces joy. We are meant to live in joy. We are meant for joy. Andyet we accept dread. I know morning dread and evening dread. I know it can be caused bysomething as simple as a conversation I don’t want to have or the fact that I’ve indulged in myanxiety all day and night. This anxiety is rooted exactly in the place the text identifies it:lack oftrust in God’s covenant with us, which is a little like saying the failure to delight in theordinariness of days,of bread baskets and kneading bowls.

There were two articles I was particularly interested in this week - one was how ultra-processed foods trick us into eating them. The other article is how our brains are tricked into thinking everything is getting worse. I went with the latter; but, just know, Nestle is out to get us addicted to food. ... too bad, I am already there.
Do you think things are worse now in America, or the world, than when you were born? If so, you are not alone. But, is that thought - that things are worse now - accurate? Take a read and let me know what you think.

Your Brain Has Tricked You Into Thinking Everything is Worse
Adam Mastroianni, NY Times 6.20.23
Guest essayist, Dr. Mastroianni, is an experimental psychologist and the author of the scienceblogExperimental History.

Perhaps no political promise is more potent or universal than the vow to restore a golden age. From Caesar Augustus to Adolf Hitler, from President Xi Jinping of China and President Marcosof the Philippines to Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” and Joe Biden’s “America IsBack,” leaders have gained power by vowing a return to the good old days.
What these political myths have in common is an understanding that the golden age is definitelynot right now. Maybe we’ve been changing from angels into demons for centuries, and peoplehave only now noticed the horns sprouting on their neighbors’ foreheads.
But I believe there’s a bug — a set of cognitive biases — in people’s brains that causes them toperceive a fall from grace even when it hasn’t happened. I and my colleague Daniel Gilbert atHarvard have found evidence for that bug, which we recently published in the journal Nature. While previous researchers have theorized about why people might believe things have gottenworse, we are the first to investigate this belief all over the world, to test its veracity and toexplain where it comes from.
We first collected 235 surveys with over 574,000 responses total and found that,overwhelmingly, people believe that humans are less kind, honest, ethical and moral today thanthey were in the past. People have believed in this moral decline at least since pollsters startedasking about it in 1949, they believe it in every single country that has ever been surveyed (59and counting), they believe that it’s been happening their whole lives and they believe it’s still
happening today. Respondents of all sorts — young and old, liberal and conservative, white andBlack — consistently agreed: The golden age of human kindness is long gone.
We also found strong evidence that people are wrong about this decline. We assembled everysurvey that asked people about the current state of morality: “Were you treated with respect allday yesterday?” “Within the past 12 months, have you volunteered your time to a charitablecause?”, “How often do you encounter incivility at work?” Across 140 surveys and nearly 12million responses, participants’ answers did not change meaningfully over time. When asked torate the current state of morality in the United States, for example, people gave almost identicalanswers between 2002 and 2020, but they also reported a decline in morality every year.
Other researchers’ data have even shown moral improvement. Social scientists have beenmeasuring cooperation rates between strangers in lab-based economic games for decades, and arecent meta-analysis found — contrary to the authors’ expectations — that cooperation hasincreased 8 percentage points over the last 61 years. When we asked participants to estimate thatchange, they mistakenly thought cooperation rates had decreased by 9 percentage points. Othershave documented the increasing rarity of the most heinous forms of human immorality, like
genocide and child abuse.
Two well-established psychological phenomena could combine to produce this illusion of moraldecline. First, there’s biased exposure: People predominantly encounter and pay attention tonegative information about others — mischief and misdeeds make the news and dominate our
conversations.
Second, there’s biased memory: The negativity of negative information fades faster than thepositivity of positive information. Getting dumped, for instance, hurts in the moment, but as yourationalize, reframe and distance yourself from the memory, the sting fades. The memory ofmeeting your current spouse, on the other hand, probably still makes you smile.
When you put these two cognitive mechanisms together, you can create an illusion of decline.Thanks to biased exposure, things look bad every day. But thanks to biased memory, when youthink back to yesterday, you don’t remember things being so bad. When you’re standing in awasteland but remember a wonderland, the only reasonable conclusion is that things have gottenworse.
That explanation fits well with two more of our surprising findings. First, people exempt theirown social circles from decline; in fact, they think the people they know are nicer than ever. Thismight be because people primarily encounter positive information about people they know,which our model predicts can create an illusion of improvement.
Second, people believe that moral decline began only after they arrived on Earth; they seehumanity as stably virtuous in the decades before their birth. This especially suggests that biasedmemory plays a role in producing the illusion.
If these cognitive biases are working in tandem, our susceptibility to golden age myths makes alot more sense. Our biased attention means we’ll always feel we’re living in dark times, and ourbiased memory means we’ll always think the past was brighter.
Seventy-six percent of Americans believe, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center poll, that“addressing the moral breakdown of the country” should be one of the government’s priorities.The good news is that the breakdown hasn’t happened. The bad news is that people believe ithas.
As long as we believe in this illusion, we are susceptible to the promises of aspiring autocratswho claim they can return us to a golden age that exists in the only place a golden age has everexisted: our imaginations.
​

My friend Alex (The Very Rev. Alexander Andujar) and I have a weekly podcast where we discuss the upcoming Gospel lesson. There are going to be a number of miracles coming up in the lectionary and we're wondering how to treat them in today's scientifically minded audience. It makes me wonder, what do you think about miracles?
The article for this week is about that very topic. The author, Debie Thomas, is someone who we have discussed before. She shares her thoughts on miracles; I'd like to hear what you think.

Blessings to you!

Why and How I Believe in Miracles
Debie Thomas, The Christian Century 6.9.23

Debie Thomas is minister of lifelong formation at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Palo Alto,California, and author of Into the Mess and Other Jesus Stories.

Do you believe in miracles?
I’ve been asked this question many times since leaving the charismatic evangelical faith traditionof my childhood. I have yet to answer it in a way that feels honest and complete. This is partlybecause the question isn’t a straightforward one; it contains a host of questions within it:Do you believe that Jesus literally walked on water and turned water into wine and cured the sickand raised the dead? Do you believe that miracles happen now? Do you pray for them? Have you ever experienced one?
The charismatic evangelical communities that raised me would have answered each with anemphatic and unswerving yes. In fact, they would have insisted that a Christianity stripped of themiraculous isn’t Christianity at all. I agree. But my “yes” is much quieter these days, more tenderand searching.
This isn’t because I have trouble believing in things I can’t explain or understand. I know thateven my most sophisticated theologies won’t contain or exhaust God’s actions in the world. Infact, part of what drew me toward a more progressive and liturgical (Episcopal) expression offaith was my desire to honor mystery, to relate to God with my whole self and not just myintellect. I want to live in an enchanted world — a world shimmering with God’s presence, one Ican’t possibly flatten with my doubt and cynicism.
I’d rather believe that miracles are always possible — perhaps even imminent — than live in auniverse devoid of such mystical richness. I’d rather believe, in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s words,that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.”
I respect the challenge of affirming the miraculous in our 21st-century context. I know thatChristians can encounter serious credibility issues when we try to make a case for miracles. AndI know that there’s something frightening about a world we can’t control or quantify, a worldthat’s truly open, organic, and strange rather than closed, unvarying, and mechanistic.
On the other hand, to approach the Creator of our unspeakably vast, wild, and elegant cosmoswith anything other than deep epistemic humility strikes me as foolish. C. S. Lewis puts it thisway in Miracles: “It is a profound mistake to imagine that Christianity ever intended to dissipatethe bewilderment and even the terror, the sense of our own nothingness, which come upon uswhen we think about the nature of things. It comes to intensify them. Without such sensationsthere is no religion.”
So my struggle with the Gospels’ cures, exorcisms, angelic visitations, and resurrections isn’twith their plausibility. It’s with their consequences. “The problem with miracles,” writes BarbaraBrown Taylor in Bread of Angels, “is that it is hard to witness them without wanting one of yourown.”
Will Gafney makes the point with greater urgency, suggesting that we can’t talk about God’ssupernatural intervention in our world without remembering those who desperately needed amiracle and didn’t get it. Otherwise we “make mockery of their suffering and death as we try tomake meaning of the miraculous stories that are our scriptural heritage. Because, if it is not goodnews — salvation and liberation — for the least of these then, it’s not good news.”
As much as I love and trust the miracle stories in scripture, I’m afraid of the harm we do whenwe read them glibly. I’m wary of reducing them to something formulaic or predictable — or ofassuming that we’re entitled to them or capable of peddling them. Most of all, I’m wary ofappropriating and idolizing them to create dangerous caricatures of God — God as Santa Claus,as a giant gumball machine in the sky.
There is a way of believing in miracles that wounds the brokenhearted. That promotes a toxicpositivity which leaves no room for holy lament. That encourages passivity and apathy. There isa way of believing in miracles that is fraudulent and cruel.
I think we’re on far more solid ground when we respond to miracles as our biblical ancestors did:with awe, silence, and wonder. With the reverent bewilderment of Mary: “How can this be?”
With the penitent humility of Peter: “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” With the honest curiosity of the storm-shocked disciples: “Who then is this, that even the wind and the seaobey him?” With the adoration of Thomas: “My Lord and my God!”
I’m also learning to approach miracles not as ends in themselves but as opportunities to discernthe heart and character of God. What kind of God multiplies loaves and fishes for the poorest ofthe poor? What matters most to a God who stops in his tracks to heal a woman ravaged by ahemorrhage? What kind of joyous, celebratory laughter resides in a God who makes the wineflow at a wedding? What kind of tender heart beats in the chest of a God who raises a dead sonand restores him to his widowed mother?
If I’m called as a Christian to walk in the footsteps of this loving, liberating, healing, resurrectingGod, then how should I live? If Jesus’ miracles are about rupture and resistance, if they aresubversive acts of defiance against the world’s sin, suffering, and brokenness, then what will myresistance look like? How will my belief in such miracles translate into Christlike action?
In the Christian tradition, belief is more about trust than intellectual assent. So yes, I believe inmiracles. Which is to say, I surrender in trust to a God who will stop at nothing to bring aboutour salvation. A God who is intimately close, present, and involved. A God who is in all things,interacting with all things, restoring all things in the name of love.

The reading from next week is thematic to Sunday's Scripture reading from Genesis 1 - In the beginning... God said, "Let there be light" and there was.
The author of the attached article argues that God is transcendent - not us; different than us; way beyond us - and he chooses to trust this transcendent God.

Trusting God’s Transcendence
Ron Ruthruff, Christian Century 5.29.23
Ron Ruthruff is associate professor of theology at the Seattle School of Theology & Psychology.

The book of Genesis is a wide, sweeping narrative. In it we see the origin of all things, Godcreating the universe. The origin of a people, God calling Abraham. Genesis concludes with thestory of Joseph’s rise to power in Egypt. What man intends for evil God uses for good.
Sunday’s texts reflect the power of the Divine and its purpose for humankind.
[In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void anddarkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.]
The creation story in Genesis explores the meaning of the created order — and introduces thetranscendent nature of God.
Transcendence is a theological term, a 25-cent word that simply means the existence beyondwhat is perceived as normal or human. God is other, and this idea of transcendence is a majortheme in our Genesis text. The Divine is different from us humans. God says, “Let there belight,” and there is light — God’s word is creative action. God has the ability to produce light,life, land, and sea with nothing but word. My words do not make things happen—I tell my kids
to pick up their socks, and nothing happens. I am a limited human being.
This concept of transcendence or otherness is challenging for those of us who grew up in theshadow of the Enlightenment and the corresponding advances in scientific discovery. We arethinkers, shaped by René Descartes and his contemporaries.[I think, therefore I am.]
Thinking, knowing, and certainty were the cornerstones of Western thought that made sense ofthe world. We can know, and knowing reflects our identity.
Transcendence sits in contrast to this kind of knowing.
Enlightenment thought tells us what we know, which is a very good thing, but it says little aboutwhat we do not know. I don’t think we can get to the heart of this Genesis text through definitivedoctrines or proof-filled apologetics; both are too invested in modernity. In the end, theyconstruct a concept of God that, as Karl Barth said, is nothing more than man speaking loudly.
So how do we hear this story today, without so easily submitting to literal interpretations that fitGod into a comprehensible box? The composition of this text predates any of the moderncategories people try to use to understand it as a literal retelling of the creation of the world. Howdo we, in the world that you and I live in, embrace the mystery of this story that God is other, notlike us? How do we read it in a way that builds our faith and helps us avoid the way of thinkingthat seeks certainty and control?
If we are to step into the mystery of transcendence, we need the wisdom of the Serenity Prayer.[God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things Ican, and the wisdom to know the difference]
Reinhold Niebuhr wrote this famous prayer as partof a 1926 sermon; years later it was adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous. Acceptance and serenity
sit in deep contrast to knowing and certainty. Acceptance and serenity embrace the limitations ofbeing human and rely on the otherness of God.
Transcendence simply means God is other. Can we suspend our need for control long enough totrust in that mystery? Can we believe that God is other than us but also “other” for our sake?
This is the journey of faith beyond certainty. It means believing in a divine power greater thanourselves that, from the very beginning, has created with good intentions. God orchestrates aworld where God holds what humans cannot.
I trust in this mystery that reminds me that I am more than what I think, but I am not God. I can’tcontrol it or contain it, but I choose to trust it.

​I am back from a wonderful week-long vacation that included a 4-day cruise. On day two of the cruise, I started to pull up the NY Times app to catch up on the news. Christi said, "What are you doing? We're on vacation."
Thankfully, we invested our attention to each other, to the beautiful Bahamas, to having someone else make our food and clean up afterwards, and to the on-going ocean vista from our cabin'sdeck.
The article for this week is about attention. In it, the author states that, "If we find a way to focus on what matters, we may be spared the need to admit to the generations that follow: We didn't mean for it all to happen. We just weren't paying attention."
So what's the right balance? Going on a cruise - metaphorically speaking - and not paying attention to the news, or getting so caught up in it that we lose our attention to what really matters. I have some thoughts about this and how attention fits into our spirituality. And, I'd like to hear what you think.

The Great Fracturing of American Attention
Megan Garber, The Atlantic 3.5.22
Last month, as Delta Flight 1580 made its way from Utah to Oregon, Michael Demarreapproached one of the plane’s emergency-exit doors. He tugged at the handle that would releaseits hatch. A nearby flight attendant, realizing what he was doing, stopped him. Fellow passengersspent the rest of the flight watching him to ensure that he remained in his seat. After the planelanded, investigators asked him the obvious question: Why? His goal, he said, had been to makeenough of a scene that people would begin filming him. He’d wanted their screens to publicizehis feelings.
I did it for the attention: As explanations go, it’s an American classic.
The grim irony of Demarre’s gambit is that it paid off. He made headlines. He got the publicityhe wanted. I’m giving him even more now, I know. But I mention him because his exploit servesas a useful corollary. Recent years have seen the rise of a new mini-genre of literature: worksarguing that one of the many emergencies Americans are living through right now is awidespread crisis of attention. The books vary widely in focus and tone, but share, at theirfoundations, an essential line of argument: Attention, that atomic unit of democracy, will shapeour fate.
Demarre’s stunt helps to make these books’ case, not necessarily because of a direct threat itposed, but because it is a bleak reminder that in the attention wars, anyone can be insurgent.Americans tend to talk about attention as a matter of control — as something we give, orwithhold, at will. We pay attention; it is our most obvious and intimate currency.
“My experience is what I agree to attend to,” the pioneering psychologist William James wrotein the late 19th century. His observations about the mind, both detailed and sweeping, laid thegroundwork for the ways Americans talk about attention today: attention as an outgrowth ofinterest and, crucially, of choice. James, obviously, did not have access to the internet. Today’snews moves as a maelstrom, swirling at every moment with information at once trifling andhistoric, petty and grave, cajoling, demanding, funny, horrifying, uplifting, embarrassing,fleeting, loud — so much of it, at so many scales, that the idea of choice in the midst of it alltakes on a certain absurdity. James’s definition, at this point, is true but not enough.
Jenny Odell proposes a recalibration in 2019’sHow to Do Nothing: Resisting the AttentionEconomy. American culture has moved so far from the Jamesian mode of attention — so farfrom the simple dignity of choice — that our lexicon itself can be misleading. Attention, Odellargues, has become bound up in the same apparatus that remade hobbies into “productiveleisure” and that values people’s time only insofar as it proves economically viable. The essentialproblem is not simply the internet; instead the villain “is the invasive logic of commercial socialmedia and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, anddistraction.”
But there is a stark difference between being open to distraction and being driven to it. Doingnothing, in Odell’s analysis, is not the absence of action; it is an act of reclamation. It is anattempt to make free time free again. The challenge is to wander mindfully.
Tim Wu argues inThe Attention Merchants: The Epic Scrambleto Get Inside Our Heads,attention is ours, yes, but it is theirs too — a commodity fought over by corporations that seekever thicker slices of our psyches. Wu’s targets are Facebook, Google, and the many otherbusinesses that reduce humans to sets of “eyeballs” and treat the mind as an extractive resource.
The digital industrialists engage in what Wu calls, in full dystopian dudgeon, “attentionharvesting” — the reaping of people’s time and care, for profit. Wu publishedThe Attention Merchantsin 2016. It has earned in the meantime one of the bestdistinctions a book can hope for: It has grown only more relevant. Wu’s ultimate theme, likeOdell’s, is resistance. Distraction, Wu notes, tends to empower the industrialists and demeaneveryone else. If people are to avoid life lived at their mercy, he writes, “we must firstacknowledge the preciousness of our attention and resolve not to part with it as cheaply or
unthinkingly as we so often have. And then we must act, individually and collectively, to makeour attention our own again, and so reclaim ownership of the very experience of living.”
But attention, in these frameworks, is also political. In the aggregate, attention is a collectivegood. A distracted democracy is an endangered one. The authors make liberal use of thecollective we, and the choice functions not as a glib imposition of commonality on a fracturedworld, but instead as a simple recognition: In a shared polity and a shared planet, our fates arebound together. Considered communally, a sense of common destiny might orient our attentionto questions both ancient and newly urgent: What kind of country do we want? What kind ofpeople do we want to be?
If we find a way to focus on what matters, we may be spared the need to admit, to thegenerations that follow: We didn’t mean for it all to happen. But we weren’t paying attention.

There has been a running question through several of our discussions: what is the efficacy of prayer? Author CS Lewis took a shot at that very question. Thanks to some (heavy) editing by your pastor, it's in an attached two-page article.
You may be surprised by his conclusion. But, he's a fantastic author so I suppose it's in his writing nature. Most importantly, I'd like to know what you think. What is your experience with prayer? Can we determine its efficacy without destroying its nature? Or, is prayer simply a matter of faith; which is believing in things we cannot see (or prove).

The Efficacy of Prayer
C. S. Lewis, The World's Last Night and Other Essays
Some years ago, I got up one morning intending to have my hair cut in preparation for a visit toLondon, which was put off. So, I decided to put the haircut off too. But then there began themost unaccountable little nagging in my mind, almost like a voice saying:Get it cut all the same.Go and get it cut.In the end I could stand it no longer. I went. Now my barber at that time was afellow Christian. The moment I opened his shop door he said, “Oh, I was praying you mightcome today.” And in fact, if I had come a day or so later I should have been of no use to him. Itawed me; it awes me still.
But of course, one cannot rigorously prove a causal connection between the barber’s prayers andmy visit. It might be telepathy. It might be accident. I have stood by the bedside of a womanwhose thighbone was eaten through with cancer and who had thriving colonies of the disease inmany other bones, as well. It took three people to move her in bed. The doctors predicted a fewmonths of life; the nurses, a few weeks. A good man: laid his hands on her and prayed. A yearlater the patient was walking (uphill, too, through rough woodland) and the man who took thelast X-ray photos was saying, “These bones are as solid as rock. It's miraculous.”
But once again there is no rigorous proof. Medicine, as all true doctors admit, is not an exactscience. We need not invoke the supernatural to explain the falsification of its prophecies. Youneed not, unless you choose, believe in a causal connection between the prayers and therecovery. The question then arises, “What sort of evidence would prove the efficacy of prayer?”
The thing we pray for may happen, but how can you ever know it was not going to happenanyway? Even if the thing were indisputably miraculous it would not follow that the miracle hadoccurred because of your prayers. The answer surely is that a compulsive empirical proof such aswe have in the sciences can never be attained.
Some things are proved by the unbroken uniformity of our experiences. The law of gravitation isestablished by the fact that, in our experience, all bodies without exception obey it. Now even ifall the things that people prayed for happened, which they do not, this would not prove whatChristians mean by the efficacy of prayer. For prayer is request. The essence of request, asdistinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted. And if an infinitely wise Beinglistens to the requests of finite and foolish creatures, of course He will sometimes grant andsometimes refuse them. Invariable “success” in prayer would not prove the Christian doctrine atall. It would prove something much more like magic — a power in certain human beings tocontrol, or compel, the course of nature.
I have seen it suggested that a team of people — the more the better — should agree to pray ashard as they knew how, over a period of six weeks, for all the patients in Hospital A and none ofthose in Hospital B. Then you would tot up the results and see if A had more cures and fewerdeaths. And I suppose you would repeat the experiment at various times and places so as toeliminate the influence of irrelevant factors. The trouble is that I do not see how any real prayercould go on under such conditions. “Words without thoughts never to heaven go,” says the Kingin Hamlet. Simply to say prayers is not to pray; otherwise a team of properly trained parrotswould serve as well as men for our experiment.
You cannot pray for the recovery of the sick unless the end you have in view is their recovery.But you can have no motive for desiring the recovery of all the patients in one hospital and noneof those in another. You are not doing it in order that suffering should be relieved; you are doingit to find out what happens. The real purpose and the nominal purpose of your prayers are atvariance. In other words, whatever your tongue and teeth and knees may do, you are not praying.
The experiment demands an impossibility. Empirical proof and disproof are, then, unobtainable.But this conclusion will seem less depressing if we remember that prayer is request and compareit with other specimens of the same thing.
Our assurance—if we reach an assurance—that God always hears and sometimes grants ourprayers, and that apparent grantings are not merely fortuitous, can only come in the same sort ofway. There can be no question of tabulating successes and failures and trying to decide whetherthe successes are too numerous to be accounted for by chance. Those who best know a man bestknow whether, when he did what they asked, he did it because they asked. I think those who bestknow God will best know whether He sent me to the barberʼs shop because the barber prayed.
For up till now we have been tackling the whole question in the wrong way and on the wronglevel. The very question “Does prayer work?” puts us in the wrong frame of mind from theoutset. “Work”: as if it were magic, or a machine — something that functions automatically.
Prayer is either a sheer illusion or a personal contact between embryonic, incomplete persons(ourselves) and the utterly concrete Person. Prayer in the sense of petition, asking for things, is asmall part of it; confession and penitence are its threshold, adoration its sanctuary, the presenceand vision and enjoyment of God its bread and wine. In it, God shows Himself to us. That Heanswers prayers is a corollary — not necessarily the most important one — from that revelation. What He does is learned from what He is.
Prayer is not a machine. It is not magic. It is not advice offered to God. Our act, when we pray,must not, any more than all our other acts, be separated from the continuous act of God Himself,in which alone all finite causes operate.
It would be even worse to think of those who get what they pray for as a sort of court favorites,people who have influence with the throne. The refused prayer of Christ in Gethsemane isanswer enough to that.
And I dare not leave out the hard saying which I once heard from an experienced Christian:“I have seen many striking answers to prayer and more than one that I thought miraculous. Butthey usually come at the beginning: before conversion, or soon after it. As the Christian lifeproceeds, they tend to be rarer. The refusals, too, are not only more frequent; they become moreunmistakable, more emphatic.”
Does God then forsake just those who serve Him best?
Meanwhile, little people like you and me, if our prayers are sometimes granted, beyond all hopeand probability, had better not draw hasty conclusions to our own advantage. If we werestronger, we might be less tenderly treated. If we were braver, we might be sent, with far lesshelp, to defend far more desperate posts in the great battle.
​

For this week, here are two competing articles; they are on the same document. The first one,America's Intimacy Problem, talks about isolation and lonelinessin America and postulatesit is on the rise. The second article,They Know Your Face (Maybe Not Your Name)discusses the importance of how peripheral ties to people - classmates, cashiers, gym members, coworkers, etc - are vital to positive moods especially as we age. Such relationships, post-Covid, are on the rise. Can both tenants be correct?
Here is a bonus article that is interesting but has nothing to do with the discussion topic of peripheral friendship and social isolation and will not be a part of the discussion group:The Religion of King Charles III

America’s Intimacy Problem
Isabel Fattal, The Atlantic 4.28.23
When my colleague Faith Hill recently interviewed Michael Hilgers, a therapist with more than20 years of experience, he painted a worrying picture of intimacy in America: “It’s painful towatch just how disconnected people are,” he said. Even when Hilgers can sense that clients dowant to pursue deep social connections, “there’s a lot of confusion and fear in terms of how toget there,” he noted. One might say that America is in its insecure-attachment era.
Let’s back up a little: Insecure attachment is a term used to describe three of the four basichuman “attachment styles” that researchers have identified. Faith lays out the four styles in herrecent article:
People with asecure stylefeel that they can depend on others and that others can depend onthem too. Those with adismissing style—more commonly known as “avoidant”—are overlycommitted to independence and don’t feel that they need much deep emotional connection.
People with apreoccupied(or “anxious”) style badly want intimacy but, fearing rejection, clingor search for validation. And people withfearful(or “disorganized”) attachment crave intimacy,too—but like those with the dismissing style, they distrust people and end up pushing themaway.
Over the past few decades, researchers have noticed a decline in secure attachment and anincrease in the dismissing and fearful styles. These two insecure styles are “associated with lackof trust and self-isolation,” Faith explains. She notes that American distrust in institutions hasalso been on the rise for years — it’s well known that more and more Americans are feelingskeptical of the government, organized religion, the media, corporations, and police. But recentresearch and anecdotal evidence suggest that Americans are growing more wary not only of“hypothetical, nameless Americans,” but of their own colleagues, neighbors, friends, partners,and parents.
The root causes of America’s trust issues are impossible to diagnose with certainty, but theycould well be a reflection of Americans’ worries about societal problems. One psychologist whodid research into Americans’ insecure-attachment trend “rattled off a list of fears that people maybe wrestling with,” Faith writes: “war in Europe, A.I. threatening to transform jobs, constantschool shootings in the news,” as well as financial precarity. As Faith puts it: “When societyfeels scary, that fear can seep into your closest relationships.”
Some researchers argue for other likely suspects, such as smartphone use or the fact that moreAmericans than ever are living alone. The decline in emotional intimacy is also happeningagainst the backdrop of a decline in physical intimacy. Our senior editor Kate Julian exploredthis “sex recession,” particularly among young adults, in her 2018 magazine cover story.
All in all, as Faith writes, “we can’t determine why people are putting up walls, growing furtherand further away from one another. We just know it’s happening.” The good news is that ifhumans have the capacity to lose trust in one another, they can also work to build it back up.
“The experts I spoke with were surprisingly hopeful,” Faith concludes: Hilgers [the therapist] knows firsthand that it’s possible for people with attachment issues tochange—he’s helped many of them do it. Our culture puts a lot of value on trusting your gut, hetold me, but that’s not always the right move if your intuition tells you that it’s a mistake to letpeople in. So he gently guides them to override that instinct; when people make connections and
nothing bad happens, their gut feeling slowly starts to change.
As Faith argued in an earlier article, attachment styles are not destiny, despite what the internetmight lead you to believe. “Your attachment style is not so much a fixed category you fall into,like an astrology sign, but rather a tendency that can vary among different relationships and, inturn, is continuously shaped by those relationships,” she wrote. “Perhaps most important, youcan take steps to change it”—and connect with others better as a result.

They Know Your Face, Maybe Not Your Name
Paula Span, NY Times 4.22.23
Victoria Tirondola and Lam Gong first struck up a conversation last spring at the dog run inBrookdale Park in Bloomfield, N.J., when they realized that each owned a dog named Abby. They chatted about dogs at first. Then they learned that they both cooked, so “we talked aboutfood and restaurants.”
Psychologists and sociologists call these sorts of connections “weak ties” or “peripheral ties,” incontrast to close ties to family members and intimate friends. Some researchers investigatingweak ties include in that category classmates, co-workers, neighbors and fellow religiouscongregants. Others look into interactions with near-strangers at coffee shops or on transit routes.
People who cross paths at the dog run, for instance, may recognize other regulars withoutknowing their names (though they probably know their dogs’ names) or anything much aboutthem. Nevertheless, impromptu chats about pets or the weather often arise, and they’reimportant.
Such seemingly trivial interactions have been shown to boost people’s positive moods andreduce their odds of depressed moods. “Weak ties matter, not just for our moods but our health,”said Gillian Sandstrom, a psychologist at the University of Sussex in England who hasresearched their impact. “If I asked who you confided in, you wouldn’t mention them,” she said.Yet the resulting sense of belonging that weak ties confer is “essential to thriving, feelingconnected to other people” — even among introverts, which is how Dr. Sandstrom definesherself.
In her early studies, hand-held clickers were distributed to groups of undergraduate students andpeople over 25 to track how many classmates or others they interacted with, however minimally,over several days. Those who interacted with more weak ties reported greater happiness, and agreater sense of well-being and belonging, than those with fewer interactions.
The researchers found “within-person differences,” too, showing that the effects were not a resultof personalities. The same individuals reported being happier on days they had more interactions. One study, published in 2020, followed an older sample of more than 800 adults in metropolitanDetroit over 23 years. The researchers asked subjects (average age at the start: 62) to draw threeconcentric circles, with “you” in the center, and to arrange people in their lives by degree ofcloseness. Those in the innermost circle of close ties were almost always family, said ToniAntonucci, a psychologist at the University of Michigan and senior author of the study. Theweak ties in the outermost circle included friends, co-workers and neighbors.
Over time, the number of weak ties more strongly predicted well-being than the number of closeties. Weak ties “provide you with a low-demand opportunity for interaction,” Dr. Antonucci said.“It’s cognitively stimulating. It’s engaging.” The Covid pandemic, striking when social scientistswere already raising alarms about the health risks of loneliness and isolation for older adults,suspended many of these everyday exchanges.
Seniors often kept in touch with their families, one way or another, but where were the waiterswho knew their breakfast orders, the bank tellers, crossing guards and dog walkers? “I hope itmade people realize how much weak ties matter,” Dr. Sandstrom said. Though they can’t replaceclose ones, “we missed the novelty and the spontaneity,” she said. At older ages, when socialnetworks tend to shrink, people may have to work at expanding them. “Make the effort,” Dr.Antonucci advised. “You can’t create new children at 70, but you can create new weak ties.”
Weak ties, including those developed online, don’t necessarily turn into close ones and don’thave to. Close relationships, after all, can involve conflicts, demands for reciprocity and othercomplications. But sometimes, weak ties do evolve.
The Brookdale Park dog owners, for instance, have become real friends. They go out to dinnertogether and see movies and comedy shows. In bad weather, they walk in a local mall. A bithesitant at first to exchange phone numbers, “we took a giant step,” Ms. Geanoules said, pausingto pat and coo at one of the Abbys. “You can change a lifetime by talking to someone for 10minutes."

​The topic of AI has come up the past couple of weeks. There's really nothing we can do to change AI except for how we respond to it. This week's article, written by NYU business professor, Suzy Welch, compares the grief she feels with technology with the grief she feels about the death of her husband (Jack Welsh). You may find her parallels interesting as well as her response to AI.

How to Deal with AI Grief
Suzy Welch, WSJ 4.26.23
Ms. Welch is a professor of management practice at NYU’s Stern School of Business and asenior adviser at the Brunswick Group.

Isn’t it fun to go out with friends to a buzzy bar in the coolest part of town, order some drinksand pizza, and end up talking about how artificial intelligence is going to make everything fasterand easier but also destroy all that we hold dear? Yes, I love doing that too. I did it the othernight. Good times.
A new era is upon us. The quiet mourning for the death of a world we were barely holding on toby our fingernails anyway.
I’m not talking about AI only with other people my age who only recently figured out how toshare documents on Zoom and have made peace with the prospect of never talking to theirchildren with a phone against their ear again. The angst is generational. Many of my Gen Zstudents at New York University’s Stern School of Business tell me they are in an angsty love-hate relationship with AI. It does their homework but leaves them wondering if their expensivelyeducated brains are special after all. It plans their trips to Europe after graduation, but it also iscreating an economy that makes their future employers so nervous that job start dates are beingdelayed. Their professors—myself included—encourage them to be excited about theopportunities AI will bring someday. Except that the time between now and “someday” feels likea yawning chasm of chaos and uncertainty. It reminds them, they confess, of the pandemic allover again. Even if you generally find yourself annoyed with the Zoomers, you have to admitthey are on to something here.
Because my business-school class is about helping students plan their life journeys, I have foundmyself in an unlikely corner lately, offering advice on how to process “AI grief,” for lack of abetter term. I’ve tried it out on my own boomer friends and colleagues—as I did at that buzzybar. On these occasions, too, the conversation brought a bit of relief. If you’re grappling withyour own small or large dose of “farewell to all that,” some thoughts:
One of the hardest things we ever learn in life is that forever is a long time. With AI, that lessonis upon us. After my husband, Jack, died, another widow I knew called to express hercondolences. Six months had passed, and my grief was still very raw. I asked her when it wouldget easier. She laughed, sadly: “You think the first year is bad? The second year is when yourealize how long forever is.”
So much in our life passes, but we can make sense of it, or even replace it with something better.We lose a job; we get another. We lose our hair and find it never really mattered. But whensomething, or someone, is gone permanently, the grief is dizzying on another level. It feels toobig, unprocessable.
That, I say, is the weird feeling AI is stirring in your chest. There is no antidote. What savesyou—and will eventually tamp down your anxiety—is that knowing that forever stealing thingsfrom us without end makes us better at living and loving in the present. That’s a hard-won gift,but a gift nonetheless.
The second piece of advice I offer is more context than advice. I remind the mourners thatevolutionary psychologists have been telling us for years that we don’t live in the world ourbrains were designed for. We’ve adapted, but research, originally presented by OxfordUniversity’s Robin Dunbar suggests that people function optimally in communities of around 60to 100 — roughly the size, not surprisingly, of the first tribes on the African plains. That’s about
all the input and output we can take, in terms of talking, listening, gossiping, nurturing,managing, predicting and leading. Think for a moment about the number of people in your lifewho pour images, ideas, requests, demands, feelings and noise into your head daily. It’s not 60;it’s probably closer to a multiple of 100.
Where does this context leave us? Maybe simply with a sense of relief that our AI discomfort is,well, human. Technology will change the world in ways that take us even further away from ourbrain’s design. No wonder it feels so overwhelming — and maybe it should prompt us to findsmall communities that offer the “natural” peace the world doesn’t. A church, a neighborhood, aclub, a volunteer organization. They aren’t the cure for what ails us but a comfort and treatment.
My ersatz grief counseling ends with a small admonishment, which someone had the audacity touse on me when, two years after my husband died, I said no to yet another invitation to joinfriends at an event. “The problem with a pity party,” she said, “is that no one comes but you.” Ican assure you my reaction to this comment wasn’t, “Wow, you’re so right, I feel better already.”
But as the weeks went on and I found my persistent sadness isolating me more than ever, Irealized if I wanted to move beyond mourning, I had to will it.
AI grief is like that. You might always carry your angst in your heart, but you also have to decideto embrace the future.
Forever is indeed a long time, and we are all living in a world that demands more of our brainsthan they can reasonably take. But don’t become the person who lets AI ruin a good night outwith friends. To mourn is human — and to make sense of our mourning and move on is morehuman still.

This week, we're going to talk about aWSJ and NY Times article that shows money is polling up but patriotism and religion are polling down.
At one discussion group, I mentioned an article about AI and policing that arrested the wrong man. There was a WSJ article about 25 questions for AI. Both article links can be found here:
NYT Article
​WSJ Article

Money Is Up. Patriotism and Religion Are Down.
Peter Coy, NY Times 3.29.23
“I just want a nice job with a nice amount of money and a nice car and a nice house andstuff like that.”— Nate, 14 years old, in a focus group conducted by The New York Times
Nate, you speak for America. This week, The Wall Street Journal published a survey showingsteep declines since 1998 in the shares of Americans who said patriotism and religion were veryimportant to them. There were also big declines in the value placed on having children and beinginvolved in the community. A nice amount of money, though, is something people can getbehind. “The only priority The Journal tested that has grown in importance in the past quarter-century is money, which was cited as very important by 43 percent in the new survey, up from31 percent in 1998,” The Journal reported.
Equal shares of Democrats and Republicans — 45 percent each — said money was a veryimportant value to them. (I wouldn’t call money a “value,” but that’s the language used in thesurvey, which was conducted for The Journal by NORC at the University of Chicago, a researchorganization.)
The declines in traditional values are startling.
In 1998, 70 percent of Americans saidpatriotismwas very important to them.
In 2023, 38 percent said so.
In 1998, 62 percent saidreligionwas very important to them.
In 2023, 39 percent said so.
Aaron Zitner, who wrote The Journal’s article about the survey findings, was kind enough toshare with me some historical data that didn’t appear in the story. While the declines in theimportance of religion, patriotism and having children were biggest among Democrats, they werealso conspicuous among Republicans. For example, the share of Republicans who said patriotismwas a very important value fell to 59 percent in 2023 from 80 percent in 1998. (For Democratsthe share fell to 23 percent from 63 percent.)
I’m struggling with what to make of this survey. One easy take — which I predict will be heardin houses of worship this coming weekend — is that Americans need to return to traditionalvalues and forsake the glorification of mammon.
But berating people for thinking wrong is itself wrong thinking, not to mention unproductive.Plus, it’s hard to see what exactly is wrong with 14-year-old Nate’s vision for his future: nicejob, nice amount of money, everything nice.
What’s more productive is to figure out why The Wall Street Journal/NORC survey shows suchdramatic changes in values. One factor may be a change in survey methodology, from phone tomostly online polling. People are more willing to express socially undesirable thoughts onlinethan when speaking to another person, as the pollster Patrick Ruffini noted this week (and as myOpinion colleague Ross Douthat also observed). The Wall Street Journal’s article said thatpolling differences “might account for a small portion of the reported decline in importance ofthe American values tested.”
But other polls show similar trends, even if not as extreme. Gallup has found decliningreligiosity, a record low in the share of people who are extremely proud to be Americans, a tail-off in volunteering and an increase in the share of people who say pay is “very important” in anew job (to 64 percent, up from 41 percent in 2015). A January survey by the Pew ResearchCenter found that strengthening the economy — a money issue — was the top priority for voters,far ahead of dealing with climate change or strengthening the military.
Let’s take the questions one at a time: The decline in religiosity is a global phenomenon. TheUnited States is more religious than most other wealthy, industrialized countries, but Americansare also drifting away from religion, especially organized religion. The declining importanceplaced on having children may also be global, judging from falling birthrates. Americans are justgoing with the flow.
Patriotism and community involvement have both declined, and they seem closely related sincethey’re both about participation in something bigger than oneself. Clearly, though, Americansperceive them differently. Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to place importanceon patriotism, while Democrats are substantially more likely than Republicans to placeimportance on community involvement.
Now for money, which I write a lot about in this newsletter. Horwitz said that the survey’sresults shouldn’t be taken as evidence that Americans are greedy or care only about money. Sixtypercent of the respondents said their cost of living was rising, and it was creating strains.“Economic precarity is driving this,” she said. “People aren’t trying to get rich. They’re justtrying to get by.”
The simultaneous descent of religion and ascent of money as values in the Journal survey couldleave the impression that religion and capitalism have nothing to do with each another. In fact,religion came before capitalism and has shaped our thinking about it, Benjamin Friedman, aHarvard economist, wrote in a 2021 book, “Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.”
The Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, who wrote “Deaths of Despair and theFuture of Capitalism,” say there’s a rift between the third of the adult population who have abachelor’s degree or more and the two-thirds who don’t and are faring worse. “Their lives arecoming apart,” Deaton told me on Tuesday. The rift appears in some but not all of the questionsin the Journal survey, according to data Zitner gave me. People with and without bachelor’sdegrees have roughly similar views on patriotism, having children and community involvement.
At the same time, people without bachelor’s degrees are seven percentage points more likely tocall religion a very important value and eight percentage points more likely to say the same aboutmoney.
​
Quote of the Day
“Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if thetransmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should besavages again.” — Will and Ariel Durant, “The Lessons of History” (1968)
​​

​I was asked (or tasked) with finding an article that answers this question: Where is God? I currently have 11 tabs open on my browser with articles from the WSJ, The Atlantic, NY Times and the Christian Century answering that question.
Some answers are as follows: God is found in philanthropism, in medical science, in the Eucharist, in Peace, in families, in the heart (and not the mind), in Church, at the gym, in one's own positive mental attitude.
But for you, I thought we should go a little deeper.
The primary article is a one-page piece that quotes letters to God from children. (Dear God, Are you real? Some people don’t believe it. If you are real, you’d better do something quick.)The second article, on pages two and three, discusses a God who hides, intentionally, for God's own reasons and purposes.
I look forward to talking to you about this.

God with Us: Children’s Letters to God
John Buchanan, Christian Century 12.15.09
My favorite Christmas book, which I pull from the shelf every Advent, isChildren’s Letters toGod,compiled by Stuart Hample and Eric Marshall. A few of my favorites include:
Dear God, Are you invisible or is that just a trick — Lucy
Dear God, Thank you for the baby brother, but what I prayed for was a puppy. — Joyce
Dear God, Maybe Cain and Abel would not kill each other if they had their own room. It workswith my brother. — Larry
I discovered Children’s Letters when I heard a superb Advent sermon preached by the lateWalter Bouman, professor at Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Columbus, Ohio. Walt, a big bear ofa man with a wonderful wit, introduced his sermon on Isaiah 64:1, “O that you would tear openthe heavens and come down,” by quoting from the originalChildren’s Letters:
Dear God, Are you real? Some people don’t believe it. If you are, you’d better do somethingquick. — Love, Harriet Anne
It’s the oldest, most authentic prayer in human history and as current as the latest neo-atheist bestseller. Are you real? Where are you? Why is this happening to me? Please do something.
Isaiah’s version of the prayer comes from the time of exile when the people of God werewrenched from their homes and lived under house arrest in Babylon, separated from beautifulJerusalem and the Temple, the heart of their faith and national pride. We remember them waitingfor God to come every Advent when we sing, “O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captiveIsrael.”
The actual moment when the prophet prays “if you are real, you’d better do something quick” iswhen the people do return to Jerusalem and find it devastated, destroyed, the Temple leveled.
That is the situation that prompts the desperate human prayer. Human suffering, and God’s rolein it, or God’s absence, is one of the enduring mysteries with which people of faith havestruggled. Elie Wiesel’s question “Where is God now?”—uttered while watching a young boybeing executed by the Nazis—is asked by every human being who has ever suffered deeply.
After the war, François Mauriac interviewed Wiesel and wrote an introduction to Wiesel’sstunning memoir,Night, about his experience in a concentration camp. Mauriac said: “And I,who believe that God is love, what answer could I give my young questioner . . . Did I speak ofthat other Israeli, his brother, the Crucified, whose cross has conquered the world? Did I affirmthat the stumbling block to his faith was the cornerstone of mine and the conformity between thecross and human suffering was in my eyes the key to that improbable mystery?”
That most human question, “Where is God?” prompts the answer of faith: God is there, as peoplereturn to their devastated city, as suffering happens, as innocents die, as disease claims itsvictims. God comes, God is there, in the midst of it all. And that is what lies beneath all theblessed hoopla of Christmas: an idea so big we simply don’t have words adequate to express itand so, gratefully, we turn to art, poetry, music, the letters of children . . .
“Are you real? If so,you’d better do something quick.” And ancient words, more precious every year: “The Wordbecame flesh and dwelt among us.”

Divine Absence and the Light Inaccessible
Fleming Rutledge Christian Century 8.27.18
The prophet Isaiah wrote, “Truly thou art a God who hidest thyself ” (Isa. 45:15). ThroughoutChristian history, the question has always been asked: “When terrible things happen, where isGod?” This question becomes more urgent and more agonizing when something happens tochildren; like with the news of the massacre at the Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school,there wasn’t, or shouldn’t have been, a Christian believer in this country who didn’t ask, “Wherewas God? Why does God permit these atrocities?”
This is the question that Christian faith must ask. It’s a very shallow faith if it does not ask.Many people have been conditioned not to ask these kinds of questions. Some worry that askingsuch a question is like opening a door to not believing in God at all. But the people of the Bibledo ask, directly and bluntly. The wonderful little book of the prophet Habakkuk asks it this way:“Oh Lord, how long shall I cry for help and you will not hear? Why are you silent when thewicked man swallows up the one more righteous than he?” (Hab. 1:2, 13).
Habakkuk’s questions are part of every believer’s struggle for faith. I suspect that many seasonedchurchgoers have had occasion to ask why God so often seems to be absent. Anyone who has not asked this question hasn’t been fully tested yet.
The hymn by Walter Chalmers Smith says:
Immortal, invisible God only wise
In light inaccessible hid from our eyes,
Most gracious, most glorious, the ancient of days,
Almighty, victorious, thy great name we praise.
God dwells in inaccessible light—light that we can’t directly look at. It’s uncreated light thatemanates from God’s very being. This light was already there before God created the light thatwe see — “In light inaccessible hid from our eyes.” This also is a basic biblical idea. God isn’t aproduct of human imagination, a human wish raised to the nth power, or a projection of humanhopes and fears. God is outside and beyond our ideas of God, so we can’t see God from a humanpoint of view at all. Put another way: God is invisible not only to our eyes; God is also invisibleto our imaginations. But how then do we know who God is? How do we even know if there is aGod?
“Truly, thou art a God who hidest thyself.” The name for this idea in Latin isDeus absconditus,the hidden God. But that doesn’t quite get at what Isaiah is saying, because God is not justhidden on general principles. If God is hidden, it is because he hides himself. He means to behidden. It is God’s nature to be out of the reach of our senses. There is a distance between Godand ourselves that cannot be bridged from our side.
There are two different ways of asking “Where is God? Why does God hide himself?”
One way is scornful and hostile like the abuse and mockery hurled at Jesus on the cross: “Hetrusted in God to deliver him, so let God deliver him!” The people who yelled that insult thoughtthey knew who God was and what God would and would not do (Matt. 27:43; also Ps. 22:8).
But the other way of asking comes from deep faith. It comes from having at least a partialknowledge of God and of the darkness that opposes God. Anyone who has received even a tinyglimpse of the majesty, holiness, and righteousness of God will have an increased sense of thedarkness, disorder, and malevolence that’s loose in the world. These forces would swallow us uphad not God set in motion his great plan to reclaim his creation.
It was widely noted, and noted with skepticism and even disdain by some, that every one of thefunerals for the children of Sandy Hook Elementary School was held in a house of worship. Thisdoes not answer the question of why God did not stop the shooter when he opened fire at theschool. We do not know why God appeared to be absent. What we do know is that God was present in this way: he was, and is still, present in the coming together of those who grieve withthe families, to bring small lights into the blackness of their grief. They were not alone.
Something or Someone drew the bereaved families deeper into the midst of the communities thatcontinue to trust God even when he has hidden himself. Incomprehensible as it may seem, God isalive in the faith of his people wherever they are and in whatever condition.
The fact that God hides himself in the midst of revealing himself is paradoxically a testimony tohis reality. Presence-in-absence is the theme of his self-disclosure. God isn’t hidden because weare too stupid to find him, or too lazy, or not “spiritual” enough. He hides himself for his ownreasons, and he reveals himself for his own reasons. If that were not so, God would not be God;God would be nothing more than a projection of our own religious ideas and wishes.
The Lord hides himself from us because he is God, and God reveals himself to us because God islove (1 John 4:8). Does that make sense? Probably not—but sometimes Christians must becontent with theological paradox. To know God in his Son Jesus Christ is to know that he isunconditionally love. In the cross and resurrection of his Son, God has given us everything thatwe need to live with alongside the terrors of his seeming absence.
Many churches do not use the phrase “he descended into hell” in the Apostles’ Creed, but formany who have pondered its meaning, it is a central affirmation. In his death on the cross, Jesusdescended into the hell of the absence of God. That’s what the cry of dereliction on the crossmeans. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He experienced the absence of God hisFather as no one else ever has, not even in the greatest extremity, because he experienced it forall of us. The Son of God underwent the opposite course: he came out from the light and wentinto the darkness . . . to be himself the light in our darkness.
Toward the end of World War II, during the liberation of Europe, Allied troops found a crudelywritten inscription on the walls of a basem*nt in Koln, Germany, by someone who was hidingfrom the Nazi Gestapo. Here’s what it said:
I believe in the sun even when it is not shining. I believe in love even when feeling it not. I believe in God even when God is silent.
The silence of God descended upon the cross on Good Friday—and on the morning of the thirdday the sun rose upon the empty tomb. As another writer reminds us: “The secret things belongto the Lord our God; but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever” (Deut. 29:29).

This week we are back to our regular schedule. We will be discussing the article Jesus is the Question. The author, an episcopalian, asks good questions about Jesus and his questionsfor us. Did you know the first thing Jesus says in the John's Gospel is a question? I'd like to know what you think about this and whatever else enters into the conversation.
Lastly, Tom Crawford alerted me to a fascinating (and depressing) article in the WSJ about the burnout rate for medical doctors. It's not the type of article for us to discuss but I think it is well worth a read. Here is the link to the (hopefully free) article:WSJ Article

Jesus is the Question
Debie Thomas, Christian Century 3.23.23
Debie Thomas is minister of lifelong formation at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Palo Alto,California, and author ofInto the Mess and Other Jesus Stories.
I grew up in the era of evangelistic T-shirts. I was too shy to wear any myself, but I had friendswho did. “WWJD?” “Cross-trained.” “Made to worship.” “Be still and know.” One of the T-shirtslogans I saw often was “Jesus is the answer.” Kids would sport the slogan in bright, colorfulletters, hoping to strike up conversation with peers who weren’t Christians. Their faith wasearnest, and I respected it. But every time I read the words “Jesus is the answer,” I wanted to ask,“What’s the question?” What question is Jesus the answer to?
Being a little church nerd, I would head to my Bible to figure it out. I needed to find a one-linerthat would make sense of the slogan. Something we might now post on Facebook—pithy andclickable. I never found it. Not because I didn’t look hard, but because the Jesus of the Gospelsdoesn’t offer much in the way of tweetable platitudes. He seems far more interested in askingquestions — hard questions. “Who do you say that I am?” “Why are you so afraid?” “Do youwant to get well?” “You don’t want to leave, too, do you?” “Do you love me?”Strange, for a man who’s supposed to be the answer.
Lately I’ve been asking myself the questions Jesus asked and trying to dwell with them one at atime. Most recently, I’ve been sitting with the first question Jesus asks in John’s Gospel. He’sjust been baptized and publicly identified as the Lamb of God by his cousin John. When two ofJohn’s own disciples decide to follow Jesus instead, Jesus turns, looks them in the eye, and asksa question that would have stopped me in my tracks:“What are you looking for?”(John 1:38).
So much for small talk; Jesus goes straight for the jugular. What longings keep you up at night?What hopes and hungers are you afraid to name, even to yourself? What fills you with joy? Whatbreaks your heart? What are you looking for?
I wonder if the two who hear the question have any idea how to answer it. Maybe they don’t.Maybe no one has ever asked them a question so inviting or vulnerable-making before. Maybethey’ve never considered the possibility that their own deep wants matter to God and profoundlyaffect their spiritual well-being and growth.
Maybe that’s why Jesus asks. Because he knows that if they just take in the question, their liveswill change. Their wanting will shape their finding. Their hungers will trigger transformation.
So, I turn the question on myself. What am I looking for? Do I know?
I live in a culture that tries so hard to answer the question for me. For as long as I can remember,I’ve been taught to want certain things fiercely. Success. Independence. Recognition. Security.So I’ve strived and strived, often feeling like a failure because I haven’t attained all the thingsI’m supposed to want.
All the while, deep beneath the surface, Jesus’ question burns hard and bright. What am Ilooking for? What is causing me to move so frantically through the world, one ambition piled ontop of another, no achievement or accolade ever quite enough to calm my anxious heart? Whatam I looking for when I go to church on Sunday? When I pray? When I engage in ministry?
I know that my foundational calling is to look for God. To want God in my life—more than Iwant anything else. But I also know how easily habit, doubt, disappointment, weariness, or justplain boredom can dull my wanting. I know how fast I can step back and choose somethingsmaller and safer. Close off my heart, stick a smile on my face, and go through the motionsbecause I’m too depleted or jaded to yearn for more.
When Jesus asks his two would-be disciples what they’re looking for, they dodge the question byanswering with a question of their own: “Where are you staying?” As in what does your homelook like? Where do you abide? Most importantly, perhaps, what shape will our lives take if we
decide to hang out with you? Jesus’ response is both simple and profound: “Come and see”(John 1:39).
The only way to know where Jesus abides is to follow him all the way home. We can’t know himin the abstract—he won’t fit on a T-shirt. He’s not the type who remains in stasis—he moves.That means we have to move too.
So he invites us to come and see, to walk the path for a while — as pilgrims, not tourists. If thepath feels murky, it’ll get clearer as we walk it. If we don’t know what we’re looking for, ourpatient sitting with the question will reveal what’s hidden. Our wanting will shape our finding.
As I keep asking myself what I want, I realize that the asking itself is at the heart of discipleship.The point is not to rush headlong toward an answer but to undertake a journey in a spirit of holycuriosity and anticipation. To “come and see” over the full arc of my lifetime, cultivating ahunger for God that grows deeper over time.
It’s a generous question, followed by an even more generous invitation. What are you lookingfor? Come and see. Come and discern what you desire most deeply. Come and cultivate thatdesire in the gracious company of a God who welcomes your questions, who holds your longingsclose, who promises to transform you into who you really are.
Maybe Jesus is the answer because Jesus is the question. He’s the beginning and the end of whatwe’re looking for, but it’s okay with God if we can barely wrap our minds around that. We don’tneed to know at the outset. All we need to do is ask the question, to come and see.

​Following our discussion on trust, this week we are going to discuss trust and God. The article, from the Christian Century, is about the gods in which we put our trust (consumerism, the god of the nightly news, the god of the theater of national and local politics) and how those gods fail and betray us. He compares that where Jesus placed his trust as he was marched to Golgatha to be crucified.

The many gods of my own making
Brian Maas, The Christian Century 3.27.23
Brian Maas is vice president of mission and spiritual care at Immanuel, a senior servicesorganization affiliated with the Nebraska Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
If a god is truly that in which you place your trust, as Luther wrote, then the Passion narrativeoffers a veritable pantheon of gods, repositories of trust for the too fallible and too familiarhumans who populate the Passion and show us far more of ourselves than we may be willing tosee.
Here are gods that claim their trust throughout the Passion: the god of violence in the garden ofGethsemane (and in the nightly news), the god of political power in the trial before Pilate (and inthe theater of national and local politics), the god of rationalization in Pilate’s surrender to thecrowd (and in the countless trade-offs of our daily lives). Time and again, trust is placed in godsthat fail and betray.
From the opening verses to the last, the familiar gods of this drama claim and then fail the trustthat’s placed in them. Meanwhile, in the very actions of these graspings for things in which totrust, there are repeated abandonments of the one in whom such trust could rightly and reliablybe placed instead. Again and again these foolish exchanges reveal our own foibles, and in theprocess this drama draws us from being mere spectators into being participants.
Each year it strikes me how powerfully, pitilessly, and painfully the Passion does this to me,stepping into my life to draw me into participation, into recognition of my own life beingportrayed in the action and inaction of others. This year I am especially aware of how the Passionreveals the many fallible entities in which I trust, the many gods of my own making that Iworship.
The opening scene of Matthew’s Passion begins with a jolting act of treachery as Judasapproaches the chief priests to determine the monetary value of delivering Jesus into their hands.This is not merely a common transaction; it’s an act of worship, a proclamation of trust in thegod Mammon.
And what Judas proposes is much more than a mere betrayal. While betray is the word theNRSV uses, a better translation of the verbparadidomi, as New Testament scholar Rick Carlsonfrequently emphasizes, is “hand over.” That verb appears frequently throughout Matthew’sPassion text, and reading it as “hand over” reveals the significant depth and meaning of each act.
In one sense, betrayal is a matter of stepping back away from, whereas handing over involves awillful act of delivering to. Betrayal seems almost passive and incidental in comparison to thedynamic intentionality of handing over.
Again and again characters of the Passion willfully place their trust in gods of their own makingby handing over the one who alone is worthy of their trust. Those of us in Western culturescannot avoid the recognition of our daily reality in Judas’s action. We would never sell out Jesusfor 30 pieces of silver, yet our commitment to live with integrity as his disciples is sold out againand again in our misplaced trust in the illusory security of wealth, possessions,stuff.
And it’s not only Judas and material wealth. All of the disciples, in their “surely not I?”incredulity, and especially Peter in his “even though I must die with you, I will not deny you”brashness, demonstrate a confidence in self-reliance that shatters and scatters in the shadows ofGethsemane and the courtyard of the high priest. What a fallible (if all-American) god this is, theconviction that we are in control, in charge, can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.
I write this in the wake of two simultaneous hospitalizations in our household of three. I havebeen the one spared, the one to try to fix things that are utterly beyond my control. I’ve beenforced to recognize that for all of my decades of preaching faith in God, my own prayers are toooften a version of “thanks for everything, Lord; I’ve got it from here.” The experience of thefailure of that self-trust has been desperate, its pain real. I’ve gained humility in shifting my trustfrom myself to God—and a deeper sense of understanding and compassion for Peter in hisfailure and denial.
As mentioned before, other gods claim their trust throughout the Passion: the god of violence inthe garden of Gethsemane (and in the nightly news), the god of political power in the trial beforePilate (and in the theater of national and local politics), the god of rationalization in Pilate’ssurrender to the crowd (and in the countless trade-offs of our daily lives). Time and again, trust isplaced in gods that fail and betray.
Ultimately, however, the Good News is revealed even in this endless series of disappointingdeities. When Pilate commands the guards to make Jesus’ tomb “as secure as you can,” we knowthat that security is a sham, a god of no worth. No devices, no guards, no efforts, not evenconfidence in the finality of death can keep that human security from failing.
And here is the Good News of the Passion. All our human-based gods will fail; our trust in themwill be disappointed. At the end of the story, only one trust remains: the trust of the one whohanded over himself—literally and sacramentally—for us. His trust is in the one who never fails,whose power endures and embraces even beyond the grave. In this God we trust.

​The major theme coming out of the discussion groups this past week was about trust. When there is an erosion of trust, we, as Americans, seem to warm up to the idea (or are less suspicious) of surveillance.
The author this week, Uri Friedman, argues that trust is collapsing in America. His opinion is based on a report by a marketing firm, Edelman. Bear in mind, this article is five years old. It was written before the SVB (and subsequent banks) collapse, the invasion of Ukraine, and January 6th. I'd like to know what you think of Friedman's assertions and, frankly, where we are five years later.
Below is the reading and a supplement graphic - Trust Barometer - that shows a graph of (declining) trust.
We also will talk about those things in which we do put our trust.

Trust Is Collapsing in America
Uri Friedman, The Atlantic 1.21.18
“In God We Trust,” goes the motto of the United States. In God, and apparently little else. Only a third of Americans now trust their government “to do what is right” — a decline of 14percentage points from last year [2017], according to a new report by the communicationsmarketing firm Edelman. 42 percent trust the media, relative to 47 percent a year ago. Trust inbusiness and non-governmental organizations, while somewhat higher than trust in governmentand the media, decreased by 10 and nine percentage points, respectively. Edelman, which for 18years has been asking people around the world about their level of trust in various institutions,has never before recorded such steep drops in trust in the United States.
“This is the first time that a massive drop in trust has not been linked to a pressing economicissue or catastrophe like [Japan’s 2011] f*ckushima nuclear disaster,” Richard Edelman, the headof the firm, noted in announcing the findings. “In fact, it’s the ultimate irony that it’s happeningat a time of prosperity, with the stock market and employment rates in the U.S. at record highs.”
“The root cause of this fall,” he added — just days after polling revealed that Americans’definition of “fake news” depends as much on their politics as the accuracy of the news, and aRepublican senator condemned the American president’s Stalinesque attacks on the press and“evidence-based truth,” and a leading think tank warned that America was suffering from “truthdecay” as a result of political polarization and social media — is a “lack of objective facts andrational discourse.”
It used to be that what Edelman labels the “informed public” — those aged 25 to 64 who have acollege degree, regularly consume news, and are in the top 25 percent of household income fortheir age group — placed far greater trust in institutions than the U.S. public as a whole. Thisyear, however, the gap all but vanished, with trust in government in particular plummeting 30percentage points among the informed public. America is now home to the least-trustinginformed public of the 28 countries that the firm surveyed, right below South Africa. Distrust isgrowing most among younger, high-income Americans.
But whereas trust is falling in the United States and a number of other countries with tumultuouspolitics at the moment, including South Africa, Italy, and Brazil, it’s actually increasingelsewhere, most prominently in China. Eighty-four percent of Chinese respondents said theytrusted government — levels the United States hasn’t seen since the early Johnson administration— and 71 percent said they trusted the media. The world’s two most powerful countries, onedemocratic and the other authoritarian, are moving in opposite directions. In each case, thetrajectory is largely being determined by people’s views of government.
Chinese respondents are probably reflecting on the upward mobility and improving quality oflife that their political leaders have helped deliver, David Bersoff, the lead researcher for theEdelman report, told me: “I’m looking at my life now and it looks a lot better than it did before,and I can look forward and still see things that would get even better.” When I asked RichardEdelman why survey participants tended to trust technology companies much more thangovernment, he reasoned that it was because those companies “have products that perform foryou every day — whether it’s your cell phone or your airline.” Chinese respondents might havebeen making a similar statement about the government’s performance.
“There’s a lot of chaos and uncertainty in the world, and when there is chaos and uncertainty inthe world centralized, authoritative power tends to do better,” Bersoff added. (It’s worth notingthat other countries with high trust levels in the report range politically from democratic India tomore-or-less democratic Indonesia and Singapore to the undemocratic United Arab Emirates.)
Why, though, is trust eroding in the United States in the absence of an economic crisis or otherkind of catastrophe? What’s changed, according to the Edelman report, is that it’s gotten muchharder to discern what is and isn’t true—where the boundaries are between fact, opinion, andmisinformation.
“The lifeblood of democracy is a common understanding of the facts and information that wecan then use as a basis for negotiation and for compromise,” said Bersoff. “When that goesaway, the whole foundation of democracy gets shaken.”
“This is a global, not an American issue,” Edelman told me. “And it’s undermining confidence inall the other institutions because if you don’t have an agreed set of facts, then it’s really hard tojudge whether the prime minister is good or bad, or a company is good or bad.” A recent PewResearch Center poll, in fact, found across dozens of countries that satisfaction with the newsmedia was typically highest in countries where trust in government and positive views of theeconomy were highest, though it didn’t investigate how these factors were related to one another.
America actually falls in the middle of surveyed countries in terms of trust in the media, whichemerges from the Edelman poll as the least-trusted institution globally of the four underconsideration. (In the United States, the firm finds, Donald Trump voters are over two timesmore likely than Hillary Clinton voters to distrust the media.) Nearly 70 percent of respondentsglobally were concerned about “fake news” being used as a weapon and 63 percent said theyweren’t sure how to tell good journalism from rumor or falsehoods. Most respondents agreedthat the media was too focused on attracting large audiences, breaking news, and supporting aparticular political ideology rather than informing the public with accurate reporting. While trustin journalism actually increased a bit in Edelman’s survey this year, trust in search and social-media platforms dipped.
In last year’s survey, the perspective that many respondents expressed was “‘I’m not sure aboutthe future of my job because of robots or globalization. I’m not sure about my communityanymore because there are a lot of new people coming in. I’m not sure about my economicfuture; in fact, it looks fairly dim because I’m downwardly mobile,’” Edelman said. Thesesentiments found expression in the success of populist politicians in the United States and
Europe, who promised a return to past certainties. Now, this year, truth itself seems moreuncertain.
“We’re desperately looking for land,” Edelman observed. “We’re flailing, and people can’t quiteget a sense of reality.” It’s no way to live, let alone sustain a democracy.

​What is the right balance between freedom and security? How much surveillanceis good; when does it infringe on personal liberties? An article from the MIT Technology Review tackles this important topic with a look at unmannedaerialvehicles (UAVs) in the City of Chula Vista, near San Diego. The article is too long for our purposes; so, I wrote the followingReflection on it. I'd like to know what you think about where the line is between freedom and security.
​
His Eye Watches the Nations
The Rev. David J. Marshall, 3.9.23
I was on the Safety Commission of the City of Chula Vista, which is the 15th largest city in California.Sandwiched between the second largest city in California, San Diego, and the largest international bordercrossing in the world, life in Chula Vista can be pretty exciting.
Traffic and parking issues in Chula Vista were taking up too much time on the City Council’s monthlyagenda. They created the Safety Commission to handle speed limits, parking rules, curb painting andother traffic abatement issues. During my commission tenure, we also approved the autonomous drivingprogram which is currently being tested there. It is a program to drive seniors to their variousappointments using autonomous vans.
Also, during my tenure, Chula Vista installed traffic lights in the city that reads real-time traffic patternsand autonomously sets themselves for traffic flow. During the traffic light set-up (which involves camerasthat see and read both cars and pedestrians), we discovered every Chula Vista patrol car has a front andrear facing camera that records every license plate it "sees". In just one shift of one patrol car they couldsee a thousand plates; record where and when they saw it too. It was obviously outside of ourCommission to comment on that program but it surprised us nonetheless.
MIT Technology Review recently wrote an article about Chula Vista’s unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) program – 29 drones that respond to 911 calls. On average, an officer can respond to an incidentanywhere in Chula Vista in four minutes; it only takes the UAV 90 seconds. UAV’s can silently follow a
shoplifting suspect, it can listen and see traffic accidents, fires, and emergencies. In the article, ChulaVista is recognized for having the nation’s longest-running drone program.
Because it is a border town, there are a number of agencies working within Chula Vista – Border Patrol(probably the biggest), FBI, ATF and any number of military branches. If the skies over Chula Vista sound crowded, think about this: San Diego has the largest, single-runway airport in the world, Coronado
North Island (just west of Chula Vista) is one of the largest Naval Aviator bases in the world and hoststhe Navy SEAL training program which uses a lot of rotary wing aircraft. 15 miles north is MCASMiramar – the former Top Gun training facility (which was moved inland). The Army has a rotary wingdivision with its own airport (about three miles west). Chula Vista has a municipal airport. And, thelargest airport on the west coast – LAX, and the second largest airport – Tijuana, can also fly over ChulaVista on approach. Throw a bunch of UAVs up there and it is quite a circus!
Privacy and civil liberty groups are raising the question of what happens when drones are combined withlicense plate readers, networks of fixed cameras, and new real-time command centers that digest and sortthrough video evidence. There used to be an unspoken check and balance on law enforcement power:money. Governmental budgets can’t afford to put a police officer on every corner. With these newtechnologies, I wonder if that check and balance has disappeared.
“God’s eyes keep watch on the nations”is an often-quoted psalm. It brings comfort to know God iswatching over all of us. The entire verse reads as follows:God’s eyes keep watch on the nations, let therebellious not exalt themselves.(Ps 66:7) It is interesting that in our day and time we have eyes in the
skies that can literally watch the rebellious. For me, the civil liberty line is not having UAVs do regularsurveillance but rather to assist a patrol officer. As far as 24-hour surveillance goes, I’d just assume weleave that up to God.

Here is the original article:MIT Technology Review

The Marshall family is taking Spring Break next week from Monday through Friday at Crystal River to swim with the manatees. Although we will not miss a Sunday, there will be no discussion group on March 14 and 15. The following week, we will resume our normal schedule with the Men's Group on the 21st and the Women's Group on the 22nd. On a separate email, I will send you that discussion topic.
For this week, however, I can't let it pass without an article. Here is one from the NY Times about the link between exercise and aging. I ran it by Rick Machemer for his input. The main thing is that one who doesn't exercise shouldn't suddenly start. But, slowly and deliberately, one can exercise on a regular basis as long as there is instruction first and then observation. One of the most important factors is balance which is a combination of core muscle strength and training (or retraining) of the inner ear. Tai Chi and Yoga go a long way in helping with this. If you need a Tai Chi instructor, a member of All Angels - Reuben - teaches it here on Longboat.
Here is the article. I hope you all have a great week!

Since it is Lent, we are going to read a decidedly theological article that asks this question: Is relating to God a fundamental need?
You can imagine that I'll be asking you that very question as well as other related questions like can we relate to God, to what or to whom can we relate, what about the essence of faith which is believing without seeing (and perhaps relating). Do we have a fundamental need of relating to our parents; or, do our children have the need to relate to us?
We are back to our normal schedule of Tuesday and Wednesday at 10 a.m.

Is Relating to God a Fundamental Need?
Hannah Jones, Book Review Christian Century 2.22.23
Humans need a “second-personal” relationship with God: this is the main claim ofGod’sProvision, Humanity’s Needby Christa McKirland.
It reminds me of the evangelical emphasis on a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Sheargues that unless one relates to God “as a subject, not as a list of facts,” they will experienceharm. But McKirland’s aim is not to convince unbelievers that they need Jesus to avoiddamnation. Rather, she joins a long tradition of Christian thinkers working through just how it isthat humans relate to God. Her inquiry reminds me in some ways of Friedrich Schleiermacher,
who famously described Christian piety as “either the consciousness of being absolutelydependent on God, or, being in relation with God, which is the same thing.”
McKirland’s prolonged engagement with scripture will speak to a biblically engaged Christianaudience. Save a single chapter about the theology of Kathryn Tanner, she develops her positionby way of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. She provides a robust understanding ofdivine dependence through a deeply biblical framework, situating herself squarely as a biblicaltheologian. But the burden of the book is not only to demonstrate that the Bible supports a visionof human life as deeply dependent upon God. She also aims to furnish philosopher GarrettThomson’s work on “fundamental need” by reading it theologically.
She begins by defining fundamental need in conversation with analytic philosophy. Fundamentalneeds are ones that are unavoidably necessary in all contexts and without which one cannotflourish. For example, I need clean water to drink, and there is just no avoiding this need.
Further, this need does not derive from anything else. In order to have clean water, I might alsoneed a means to filter the water—but the filter is an instrumental need rather than a fundamentalneed. Clean water itself is the fundamental need, as I need clean water or I’ll die.
According to McKirland, the same goes for God’s presence:
(1) We have an inescapable interest to flourish.
(2) We fundamentally need a second-personal relation to God to flourish.
(3) When that need is not met, we are therefore harmed.
She does not provide much in the way of constitutive descriptions of harm and flourishing, asidefrom mentioning that flourishing is characterized by love of God and neighbor. I was leftwondering about what harm would look like for those who do not relate second-personally to theChristian God. As this is McKirland’s debut book, I am hoping that she will pursue thisquestion—as well as other unanswered questions regarding interfaith engagement, practical
theology, and ethics—in her future work.
What McKirland does well is provide a sustained engagement with scripture, biblicalscholarship, and other biblical theologians to develop her thesis. Whereas in the Hebrew BibleGod’s personal presence is displayed through motifs such as temple, tabernacle, bread, andwater, in the New Testament Jesus comes to be that presence for the new covenant community.
Yet Jesus depends on the Spirit for communion with the Father, and he offers that communion tothe rest of humanity. This communion is the ultimate telos of human beings, and it is deepenedas humans develop greater relational dependence on God. In other words, the need for God’spresence goes further than does a physical need like water, for having this second-personalrelationship with God is the end towards which humans were created.
McKirland is ultimately developing what she calls a “pneumachristocentric anthropology,” onethat explains how it can be that humans are so vitally related to Christ and to the Spirit. Shemaintains the traditional view of Christ’s two natures—divine and human—while showing thatJesus also depends on God’s presence. The Spirit then allows humans to participate in Jesus’own dependence on (or union with) the Father.
In short, McKirland provides a thick and robust description of what it means for humans to needGod, how scripture witnesses to this fundamental need, and what a deeply Christological andSpirit-attuned picture of theological anthropology looks like. Her extensive turn to scripture toprovide the contours of a needs-based, Christologically grounded anthropology will besatisfying, perhaps even edifying, for many Christian readers.

​We will have one combined discussion group meeting on Wednesday, March 1st, and then go to lunch. For those on-line, we are going to work on how to make our in-person voices more readily heard.
For next week, let's talk about happiness and the emptiness of reaching one's goals. That may sound counter intuitive, but, author Arthur Brooks points to the emptiness that achieving goals can bring. Humans, he asserts, are designed for improvement not accomplishment.
To discuss improvement, not accomplishment, seems like a fitting Lenten discourse.

Why Success Can Feel So Bitter
Arthur Brooks, The Atlantic 2.24.23
A few days after she became the first female skater to land a quadruple jump at the Olympics,15-year-old Kamila Valieva fell in her final program, costing her the individual Olympic gold. She wept as she stepped off the ice. Instead of comforting her, her coach berated her. “Why did you let it go?” she asked the young skater. “Why did you stop fighting?” The skaters who wondidn’t seem much happier. After winning the silver medal, Alexandra Trusova was heardscreaming that she hated the sport. The gold medalist, Anna Shcherbakova, said that “this hasbeen what I’ve been working toward every day,” but also that she felt “emptiness inside.”
This kind of pressure might seem inconceivable to you; after all, you probably aren’t an Olympicathlete. But have you ever anchored your happiness in some way to a far-off goal that you couldattain only at significant personal cost, that you thought would deliver to you the satisfaction youseek or the success you crave? Maybe it’s finishing a degree, publishing a book, or making acertain amount of money. Nothing is wrong with these goals per se, but if you place yourhappiness in their attainment, you are setting yourself up for your own version of these bitterOlympic moments. Even if you achieve your goal, you are very unlikely to achieve the happinessyou’re after. And you just might find yourself less happy than you were before you reached the
mountaintop.
Dreams and goals are important because they give us a metric against which to measureprogress; you don’t care if you’re getting closer to Rome unless you are trying to get to Rome.But as I have written before, progress, not meeting a goal, is what brings true happiness.
Researchers have confirmed this time and again. In their 2011 book,The Progress Principle, mycolleague Teresa Amabile and the psychologist Steven Kramer analyzed the day-to-day well-being of 238 employees at seven companies and found that satisfaction was brought about not bybig, audacious wins, but rather by forward momentum in meaningful work. Other psychologistshave found that in life, not just work, progress consistently beats accomplishment when it comesto well-being. Humans are wired, it seems, for improvement.
Goal attainment can even bring problems. Some researchers have argued that when a goal is atrue end point for progress, the cessation of forward motion can lead to a feeling of emptiness,exactly what Shcherbakova described in Beijing. Or as a friend of mine and fellow author toldme, “I always thought that there would be no better feeling than the day I saw I had a No. 1 NewYork Times best seller. And when it finally happened, I felt nothing.”
Worse than feeling nothing, you might subject yourself to what the self-improvement writerStephanie Rose Zoccatelli calls the “post-achievement hangover,” a feeling of restlessness andmild depression in the days after a major milestone, such as graduating from college or gettingmarried. One plausible explanation for this phenomenon has to do with dopamine, aneuromodulator that gives us a sense of pleasurable anticipation of a reward. Dopamine iselevated before you achieve a goal and depleted afterward. This leads to what you might call“anti-anticipation,” or a sense of emptiness. Some scholars have hypothesized that dopaminedepletion underlies the terrible dysphoria experienced by drug abusers when they abstain.
To pursue one big goal in the hope of attaining happiness is, ironically, to set yourself up forunhappiness. Buddhists see such goals as just another kind of worldly attachment that creates acycle of craving and clinging. This principle is at the heart of Buddhism’s first noble truth, thatlife is suffering. This doesn’t mean that you should abandon all goals, however. You just need tounderstand and pursue them in a different way. I recommend that you subject your goals to a bitof scrutiny. Ask yourself three questions.
1. Are you enjoying the journey?
A little voice in your head always tells you that your very special dream, whether it’s Olympicgold or winning the presidency, will bring you bliss, so a lot of misery in pursuit of it isworthwhile. But that isn’t true, and the more emphasis you put on the end state, the moreemotional trouble you will face. Instead of single-mindedly chasing a goal, focus more onwhether you’re getting anything out of your progress right now. For example, about 20 yearsago, I set a goal to get in better shape. At first, working out was hard, especially the weightlifting. But within about two months, I found that I enjoyed it, and it became something I looked forward to each morning. I soon lost track of my initial goal—I think it was to bench-press myweight times my age—and two decades later I rarely miss a day in the gym, because I love it.
2. Do you like pie?
Here’s an existential riddle: What’s usually first prize in a pie-eating contest? Answer: More pie.So I hope you like pie.
The point of a good goal is to improve your quality of life by changing your day-to-day for thebetter, not to limp across the finish line and stop after a terrible ordeal. Working toward a goal isa lot like that pie-eating contest. The reward for quitting the misuse of alcohol is stoppingdrinking and then continuing to live in a healthy way. The reward for getting your M.B.A. isbeing qualified to hold a job that you really enjoy. Make sure you’re really in it for the long haul.
3. Can you take one step at a time?
Researchers have found that frequent, small achievements tend to start a cycle of success andhappiness much more than infrequent, big ones. Make sure you can break your long-term goalsinto smaller chunks—even into goals for individual days, if possible. You can have a victoryeach day and not be dependent on something that might happen years into the future. Point yourefforts toward where you want to be in a year, but don’t dwell on that destination. Rather, enjoythe daily and weekly milestones that you know are getting you down your road to success.
Maybe your goals don’t pass this test. Maybe training to climb Mount Everest would be ajourney that brings you no joy, or actually working as a lawyer after struggling through lawschool doesn’t appeal to you. If that is the case, you must then ask yourself one more question:Why is this my goal in the first place?Maybe you internalized your parents’ dream for yourfuture, or you’re still holding on to one that you came up with when you were very immature. Ifso, it’s time to let the dream go​.

​This week, we'll talk about Peter Murphy's article about the scandal of the anti-intellectual mind and why many Christians are opposed to science and captivated by conspiracy theories. During the season of Epiphany, we have been reading from St. Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. In it, Paul significantly downplays "wisdom" and lifts up "foolishness". Paul was not anti-intellectual; he was trying to make a point.
However, we - the Christian Church in America - may have missed his point and have decided to be persuaded by foolishness instead.

The Scandal of the Anti-intellectual Mind
Why are so many Christians opposed to scienceand captivated by conspiracy theories?
Peter W. Marty, Christian Century 2.8.23
Peter W. Marty is editor/publisher of the Century and senior pastor of St. Paul Lutheran Churchin Davenport, Iowa.
Richard Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize–winning bookAnti-intellectualism in American Lifewaspublished 60 years ago this month. In it, the historian suggests that American culture has recastthe role of the intellect as a vice instead of a virtue, diminishing expertise while glorifying theplain sense of the common person. Anti-intellectualism, he writes, is “a resentment … of the lifeof the mind and of those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition constantly tominimize the value of that life.”
Hofstadter saw political, business, educational, and religious leaders prioritizing practicalsuccess over the life of the mind.
Hofstadter distinguished between intelligence and intellect. He described the former as “anexcellence of mind that is employed within a fairly narrow, immediate, and predictable range.”It’s a quality that animals and humans can both possess.
Intellect, on the other hand, is that “critical, creative, and contemplative side of mind” that “looksfor the meanings of situations as a whole.” It’s a “unique manifestation of human dignity.”
In contemporary life, we easily converge intellect with mere access to unlimited information.Citing facts from the internet can make one sound intelligent. Meanwhile, anti-intellectualismhas metastasized across large swaths of American culture. Many Americans today — includingmany Christians — are decidedly hostile to scientific authority, just as they’re enamored withconspiratorial thinking.
Contempt for experts is on the rise, matched only by a growing willingness to dismiss truth andembrace disinformation. Widespread derision of knowledge is commonplace. Ideologicallydriven book-banning efforts seek to close the minds of our youngest generation.
Hofstadter saw American evangelicalism as a chief culprit in America’s lack of intellectual rigor. Mark Noll pondered similar issues 30 years later inThe Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Nollexplores the history of evangelicalism and why so many adherents fail to sustain a seriousintellectual life.
Mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics are hardly exempt from treating the life of the mindlightly in their own pulpits and pieties. But as Noll points out in the preface of a new edition tothe book, “white evangelicals appear as the group most easily captive to conspiratorial nonsense,in greatest panic about their political opponents, or as most aggressively anti-intellectual.”
Cultivating the life of the mind has been fundamental to Christian communities for centuries. Sowhy is critical thinking in such short supply among believers today? Why, to borrow John F.Kennedy’s words, do we so “enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought”?
“God gave us brains and we are supposed to use them,” former senator John Danforth said,reflecting on the words, “love the Lord your God with all . . . your mind” in Matthew 22:37.
“Doing God’s work requires more than a big beating heart.” Dianoia, the Greek word Matthewuses for “mind,” can be parsed as dia (side-to-side, evaluating, weighing) and noieo (to use themind). Thorough reasoning that’s disciplined, analytical, curious, and hungry for truth isindispensable to loving God.
Someone asked me recently what I think Christianity’s biggest challenge is in the comingdecades. I told her that thinking Christians have to get to work. We need to reclaim Christianityfrom the politicized moorings of a mindless caricature of faith that bears little resemblance to theJesus of the Gospels.
So long as Jesus functions mostly as a hood ornament for many Christians — Russell Moore’simage from his most recent book — we can expect growing disillusionment among those whothought faith meant being transformed by the renewal of our minds, not being conformed to thisworld.

​A friend of the family told me the following as I was embarking on my collegiate experience: "There are two ways to be a college student; the smart way and the other way." He went on to say that the smart way is to try something new, to study, to make friends and always remember to make contacts for future employment.
There is a lot of advice for how to do college; but no one tells us how to age. ... until now.
This week, let's discuss the article3 Steps to Age Exuberantlyfrom the NY Times. If you have a friend who could benefit from this discussion, be sure to invite them along.

3 Steps to Age Exuberantly
Jancee Dunn, NY Times 1.23.23
A new book came across my desk recently, with an irresistible title: “The Swedish Art of AgingExuberantly: Life Wisdom from Someone Who Will (Probably) Die Before You.” I was alreadyfamiliar with the astringent humor of the author, Margareta Magnusson, having read her previousbook, “The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning” — a surprise international best seller and acall to, as she put it, “not leave a mountain of crap behind for our loved ones to clean up after wedie.”
I phoned Magnusson, who was an artist before becoming a published author and is now 86 yearsold, in Stockholm, to get some of her best advice on how to make life worth living, no matteryour age.
Magnusson acknowledged that aging is hard. “You cannot stop the passing of time and how itaffects your body, but you can work to keep a clear and positive mind,” she said. “You can beyoung upstairs in your head even if your joints creak.” Here are her top three tips.
Embrace kärt besvär
This Swedish phrase blends kärt, meaning “dear or cherished,” and besvär, which means “pain.” So, one kärt besvär might be paying your bills — an annoying obligation, but you’re still gratefulthat you have the money to pay. Or, it could be taking care of someone who is sick, which I’vebeen doing this week with my flu-addled daughter. When I’m frazzled by her endless requestsfor streaming service passwords and mugs of tea, delivered via text message, I remind myselfthat I’m glad I’m strong enough to take care of her.
As you get older, it’s easy to be frustrated and complain, Magnusson said. But kärt besvär helpsher to live with joy. “There seems to be no other choice than to see every nuisance as somethingthat I must find a way to cherish,” she said.
What I think Magnusson’s getting at is the idea that it’s OK to lean into your emotions --whatever they might be. Laura Carstensen, a psychologist at the Stanford Center on Longevity,who has studied the emotional changes that occur with age, said, “We find that older people aremore likely to report a kind of mosaic of emotions than younger people do.” While youngerpeople tend to be “all positive or all negative,” she said, older people are more able to experiencejoy “with a tear in the eye,” she added.
Surround yourself with the young
This is Magnussen’s simple definition of happiness: being around young people. Not only dothey supply fresh ideas and perspectives, she said, but hearing about their plans and prospects “isa way to stay in tune with the young person you yourself were at some point.” Spending timewith younger people can also benefit your brain, said Vonetta Dotson, a professor of psychologyand gerontology at Georgia State University and author of “Keep Your Wits About You: TheScience of Brain Maintenance as You Age.” There is research to suggest that as you age,especially if you’re starting to experience some cognitive decline, socializing with youngerpeople who are mentally sharp can provide the type of stimulation that helps boost cognitivefunctioning, she explained.
Yet this blending of generations often doesn’t happen, Becca Levy, professor of epidemiology atthe Yale School of Public Health and author of “Breaking The Age Code,” said. “Because,unfortunately, there’s quite a bit of age segregation in our culture.” Break that barrier by keepingyour door (and fridge) open for grandchildren, if you have them nearby. Make an 8-minutephone call to a younger relative. Volunteer to read to children at your library, or sign up for anorganization like Big Brothers Big Sisters.
And, to keep young people around you, Magnusson writes, “Just ask them questions. Listen tothem. Give them food. Don’t tell them about your bad knee again.”
Say “yes” whenever possible
One of the misconceptions about older people, according to Regina Koepp, clinical psychologistand founder of the Center for Mental Health and Aging in Burlington, Vt., is that “they’re rigidand they’ll never change,” she said. “That’s not true. Older people are not more rigid thanyounger people. Those are personality traits, not age traits.” Yet even older adults haveinternalized this narrative, Dr. Koepp said, “because they’ve heard it their whole life.”
To age exuberantly, you must actively recognize your “internalized ageism” and fight against it,Dr. Koepp said. Saying “yes” as often as you can, she added, “is in effect saying ‘yes’ to life --being curious and exploratory, being part of community.”
Magnusson told me that the older she gets, the more she can vividly recall the things she has said“yes” to, just when she was on the verge of saying no, and how those experiences have made herlife richer. “I’ve found that having a closed mind ages me more quickly than anything else,” shesaid. Before she refuses something — a dinner, an art show, buying a leather jacket — she asksherself: “Is it that I can’t do it, or I won’t?”
“Give it a try, whatever it is,” she said. “Maybe you’ll go to a party and be the last to leavebecause you’re having such a good time.” I asked Magnusson when she last shut down a party.“A week ago,” she said​.

​The WSJ ran a fascinatingpiece about the engineer who tried to stop the space shuttle Challenger launch. He failed to stop it and 73 seconds into the launch, it exploded killing all seven members aboard.
I think we all remember this tragedy and some may even remember where they were when it happened.
What happened to the engineer is called a "moral injury". He never worked as an engineer again. I'd like to spend some time talking about this article, about moral injuries, and our ability to rehabilitate.
Page three of the article is from a V.A. Hospital chaplain's manual on Building Spiritual Strength after a moral injury. It is not required reading but I think you may find their findings to be enlightening and hopeful; and, perhaps you'd like to talk about it.

The Man Who Tried to Stop the Launch
Rachel M. McCleary, WSJ 1.27.23
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration was preparing the space shuttle Challengerfor launch on the morning of Jan. 28, 1986. It was an unusually cold morning for CapeCanaveral, Fla. — too cold, warned the engineers of NASA contractor Morton Thiokol, builderof the shuttle’s solid rocket motors. The engineers knew that the rubber O-rings on the rocketcould become brittle in cold weather, causing hot fuel gases to leak and potentially causing anexplosion. They were right. Seventy-three seconds after liftoff, the shuttle with seven astronautson board, including teacher Christa McAuliffe, blew up.
The day before the launch, Thiokol engineers and executives met with NASA officials on ateleconference. Roger Boisjoly, the principal engineer on the Thiokol O-ring task force, andArnold Thompson were the most knowledgeable experts on O-rings in the U.S. The twoengineers argued that an ambient temperature below 53 degrees Fahrenheit could prevent the O-rings from sealing properly. A Thiokol engineer reported the anticipated temperature during thefollowing day’s launch time would be around 26 degrees. Erring on the side of caution, Boisjoly,Thompson and other engineers recommended delaying the launch.
NASA officials pushed back. Lawrence Mulloy, NASA solid-rocket booster manager atMarshall Space Center, was particularly angered by the prospect of postponement, which hadalready been done three times.
Thiokol executives requested a private caucus. Boisjoly and Thompson repeated their argumentfor a no-launch decision—to no avail. In what amounted to a “management” decision, engineerswere excluded from the final vote. Returning to the teleconference, Thiokol executives informed
NASA that the launch was approved.
On Feb. 3, just under a week after the failed launch, President Ronald Reagan announced thePresidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident to investigate the disaster. Also known as the Rogers Commission for its chairman, William Rogers, the commissionconcluded that Thiokol engineers had known for months what Nobel physics laureate RichardFeynman, a commission member, demonstrated by famously dropping an O-ring in a glass ofcold water: The rubber substance hardens in cold temperatures and can’t properly seal.
Testifying before the commission, Boisjoly said: “I felt I really did all I could to stop thelaunch.” Boisjoly had done everything in his power to prevent the disaster. “We were talking tothe people who had the power to stop that launch,” he told NPR’s Howard Berkes in 1987.
The commission, relying on Boisjoly’s memos and reports, expanded its inquiry beyondtechnical malfeasance to include management decision-making. Considered disloyal, Boisjolywas removed from Thiokol’s Challenger failure investigation team. Isolated from his colleagueswho were redesigning the O-ring, his self-esteem suffered and destroyed his confidence as anengineer. Boisjoly, who understood the potential consequences of an unsafe launch, had acted onhis conscience in trying to prevent it. But Thiokol executives didn’t respect him as a valuedprofessional. Six months after the disaster, Boisjoly requested an extended sick leave. He neverworked as an engineer again.
Since the Rogers Commission report, an avalanche of published materials has chronicled thetechnological, management and organizational dimensions of the disaster. Yet little attention hasbeen paid to the psychological suffering of the engineers who rightly opposed the launch. Recent
advances in psychology give us insight into their suffering. Psychiatrist Jonathan Shay hasobserved that moral injury occurs when a person in authority disregards a subordinate’sjudgment on the morally correct course of action, thereby violating the subordinate’s trust andself-esteem. Dr. Shay’s definition applies to the Thiokol engineers who challenged theirexecutives to reconsider the launch. By not succeeding, the engineers paid a high psychological
price.
Two years after the Challenger disaster, Boisjoly found redemption as a lecturer at engineeringschools on ethical decision-making and data analysis. He received the American Association forAdvancement in Science Prize for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility in 1988 for hiscontribution to the engineering profession.
When Boisjoly left Thiokol in 1986, the notion of moral injury was a nascent idea in Dr. Shay’smind. Today, interdisciplinary therapies and treatments are available to veterans, doctors,lawyers, teachers and others who suffer from moral injury. On the anniversary of the Challengerdisaster, let us remember Roger Boisjoly along with the seven astronauts whose lives he tried toprotect.
Ms. McCleary is a lecturer in economics at Harvard and a nonresident senior fellow at theAmerican Enterprise Institute. She is writing a book titled “Conscience Explained.”

Intervention Manual. VA System.
Building Spiritual Strength. Section I: Rationale
Introduction
For the vast majority of people, spirituality is an important part of coping with stressful events.Despite this, there is very little research on how people use spirituality to endure, recover, andeven grow in the wake of these events, making it difficult for psychotherapists and pastoralcounselors to help clients use this powerful tool. Using spirituality in coping is complex. Whilemany people find their faith helpful in recovering, a nearly equal proportion struggle with faithwhen confronted by negative life events, and respond by disengaging from their faith and
religious community.
One important way that stressful life events disrupt emotional, psychological, and personalityprocesses is by shattering assumptions about safety, power and control, self, and the world.Spiritual assumptions from the previous relationship with a Higher Power are likely to bedisrupted; beliefs in a benevolent, omnipotent Higher Power may appear inconsistent with lifeevents, and this often precipitates existential crises. Survivors must redefine their worldperceptions at physical, interpersonal, and spiritual levels. Spiritual guidance to restore adisrupted relationship with a Higher Power may be helpful in recovering from negative lifeevents.
People who use prayer for active, rather than avoidant coping, demonstrate lower levels ofanxiety and symptoms. Prayer that seeks to find a way to accept traumatic experiences isassociated with higher levels of posttraumatic growth.
Religious coping research indicates clinically-useful relationships with mental health outcomes.Religious coping strategies predict church members’ adjustment better than non-religious copingstrategies or other aspects of religious beliefs (such as perceptions of Higher Power, religiousorientation, and orthodoxy). Perceiving a Higher Power as benevolent and just, experiencing aHigher Power as supportive, involvement in religious rituals, and seeking support throughreligion predict positive adjustment. Using religion to facilitate avoidance predicts pooreroutcomes.
Using prayer to avoid dealing with a stressor predicts increased distress, while using prayer toactively seek help from a Higher Power, focus coping efforts, or increase one’s personalacceptance of stressful situations predicts decreased distress. Other aspects of religiousfunctioning (feeling alienated from a Higher Power, experiencing religious conflicts with others,and higher levels of fear and guilt in religious life) predict poorer adjustment.
This suggests that fostering a positive relationship with a Higher Power, perceiving one’s HigherPower as benevolent and supportive, (not punishing and condemning), and promoting activerather than avoidant modes of interacting with a Higher Power, should maximize recovery fromstressful life events, and potentially from traumatic ones as well.

This week's discussion is about the intersection of public health, constitutional freedoms, and individual choice. ... all in one hour! In particular, two issues (for lack of a better term) have arisen in our national and local life - the unthinkable gun violence we have experienced this year and just this past week and the removal of books from the classrooms of Manatee County Schools. As such, there are two readings for you this week- one short one about Manatee schools and a longer one about guns and America.
To read the full article about guns,click here. The NY Times piece has a lot of graphs and charts that did not make it onto the printed sheet.
Lastly, we also will touch on where faith intersects with public safety and individual rights.

Manatee Teachers Forced to Remove “Unvetted” Books

Staff Report, Bradenton Times 1.25.23
Last Wednesday, the Manatee County School District informed district principals of a newpolicy regarding books in classroom libraries. Teachers were then told that, in response to a newstate law, they were to make such "unvetted" books inaccessible to students, as it could lead to athird-degree felony charge.
House Bill 1467, which went into effect in July, was the impetus for the new policy. Because thelaw dictates that parents must be able to see what instructional materials are in their child'sclassroom, the district says it must publish a list of books available in classroom libraries on thatschool's website, a process that is currently underway, after training as to what is and is not"appropriate" began for "certified media specialists" in January.
A memo sent to schools this month gave guidelines for school and classroom libraries inaccordance with the new statute:
Per the new statutory changes to House Bill 1467 - Section 1006.40 (3) (d), F.S. Allmaterial in school and classroom libraries or included on a reading list must be:

1. Free of p*rnography and material prohibited under S. 847.012, F.S.
2. Suited to student needs and their ability to comprehend the material presented.
3. Appropriate for the grade level and age group for which the materials are used andmade available.

Each elementary school must publish on its website, in a searchable format prescribed bythe department, a list of all materials maintained in the schoollibrary media center orrequired as part of a school or grade-level reading list. Penalty for Violating Section847.012, F.S. Any person violating anyprovision of this section commits a felony of thethird degree. To protect librarians and media specialist, it must be clear that a bookdepicting nudity, sexual conduct, or sexual excitement does not meet the tenets of"Harmful to minors”.
Therefore, each district in the State of Florida must comply with these new statutoryrequirements. We are seeking volunteers to assist with vetting and compiling website listso all classroom books can be used by students.
The law is one of several efforts by politicians to combat a range of "woke" ideologies that theyclaim are being used by teachers to "indoctrinate" and "groom" students.
As teachers became informed of the new policy, social media lit up with laments over having topack up their classroom libraries, with some teachers opting to cover up their bookshelves. Aright-wing group called Community Patriots Manatee is currently recruiting so-called "wokebusters" to vet books available in the district and lobby for the removal of ones they deem to beinappropriate. The group recently claimed "victory" when it successfully lobbied to have atemporary display celebrating LGBT milestones removed from the county's Palmetto librarybranch.

A Smarter Way to Reduce Gun Deaths
Nicholas Kristof, NY Times Jan. 24, 2023
Once again the United States is seared by screams, shots, blood, sirens and politicians’ calls forthoughts and prayers. Two shootings in California since Saturday have claimed at least 18 lives,leaving Americans asking once again: What can be done to break the political stalemate on gunpolicy so that we can save lives?
Harm reduction for guns would start by acknowledging the blunt reality that we’re not going toeliminate guns any more than we have eliminated vehicles or tobacco, not in a country thatalready has more guns than people. We are destined to live in a sea of guns. And just as somekids will always sneak cigarettes or people will inevitably drive drunk, some criminals will getfirearms — but one lesson learned is that if we can’t eliminate a dangerous product, we canreduce the toll by regulating who gets access to it.
That can make a huge difference. Consider that American women age 50 or older commit fewerthan 100 gun homicides in a typical year. In contrast, men 49 or younger typically kill more than500 people each year just with their fists and feet; with guns, they kill more than 7,000 each year. In effect, firearms are safer with middle-aged women than fists are with young men.
We’re not going to restrict guns to women 50 or older, but we can try to keep firearms from people who are under 21 or who have a record of violent misdemeanors, alcohol abuse, domesticviolence or some red flag that they may be a threat to themselves or others.
There is one highly successful example of this harm reduction approach already in place:machine guns. It’s often said that machine guns are banned in the United States, but that’s notexactly right. More than 700,000 of these fully automatic weapons are in the United Statesoutside of the military, entirely legally. Most are owned by federal, state or local agencies, butperhaps several hundred thousand are in private hands. In a typical year, these registered
machine guns are responsible for approximately zero suicides and zero homicides. So let’s beginwith a ray of hope: If we can safely keep 700,000 machine guns in America, we should be ableto manage handguns.
​
Keeping Guns Away From Risky People
In many facets of life, we’re accustomed to screening people to make sure that they aretrustworthy. For example, how to vote: 1. Have your Social Security number or driver’s license2. Print and complete six-question voter registration form 3. Mail or hand deliver 4. Do this atleast 30 days before Election Day 5. Go to polls 6. Produce a photo ID 7. Vote

How to adopt a dog: 1. Fill out 64-question application 2. If renting, landlord is contacted 3. In-person meeting with entire family 4. Yard fencing and security assessed 5. Sleepover visit withpet 6. Pay $125 adoption fee 7. Adopt the dog

How to buy a gun in Mississippi: 1. Pass a 13-question background check. 2. Buy a gun

Why should it be easier to pick up military-style weapons than to adopt a Chihuahua? To keepineligible people from buying firearms, we need universal background checks. (One study foundthat 22 percent of firearms are obtained without a background check.) But the even biggerproblem is that there is no comprehensive system to remove guns from people who becomeineligible. If someone is convicted of stalking or becomes subject to a domestic violenceprotection order, that person should be prevented from owning or having access to firearms —but that rarely happens in fact. California has some of the better policies in this area, and itsoverall smart gun policies may be one reason — despite the recent shootings — its firearmsmortality rate is 38 percent below the nation’s overall. A pillar of harm reduction involvingmotor vehicles is the requirement of a license to drive a car. So why not a license to buy a gun?

Learning to Live With Guns
Harm reduction will feel frustrating and unsatisfying. It means living with a level of guns, andgun deaths, that is extremely high by global standards. But no far-reaching bans on guns will bepassed in this Congress or probably any time soon. Meanwhile, just since 2020, an additional 57million guns have been sold in the United States. So as a practical matter to save lives, let’s focus
on harm reduction.
That’s how we manage alcohol, which each year kills more than 140,000 Americans (often fromliver disease), three times as many as guns. Prohibition was not sustainable politically orculturally, so instead of banning alcohol, we chose to regulate access to it instead. We licensewho can sell liquor, we tax alcohol, we limit who can buy it to age 21 and up, we regulate labels,and we crack down on those who drink and drive. All this is imperfect, but there’s consensus thatharm reduction works better than prohibition or passivity.
Likewise, we don’t ban cars, but we impose safety requirements and carefully regulate who canuse them. Since 1921, this has reduced the fatality rate per 100 million miles driven by about 95percent.
Alcohol, tobacco and cars are obviously different from firearms and don’t have constitutionalprotections — but one of the most important distinctions is that we’ve approached them as publichealth problems to make progress on incrementally. Historically, cars killed more people eachyear than firearms in the United States. But because we’ve worked to reduce vehicle deaths andhaven’t seriously attempted to curb gun violence, firearms now kill more people than cars. Oneadvantage of the harm reduction model is that done right, it avoids stigmatizing people as gunnuts and makes firearms less a part of a culture war.
I’m writing this essay on the Oregon farm where I grew up. As I write this, my 12-gauge shotgunis a few feet away, and my .22 rifle is in the next room. (Both are safely stored.) These are thekinds of firearms that Americans traditionally kept at home, for hunting, plinking or targetpractice, and the risks are manageable. Rifles are known to have been used in 364 homicides in2019, and shotguns in 200 homicides. Both were less common homicide weapons than knivesand other cutting objects (1,476 homicides) or even hands and feet (600 homicides).
In contrast to a traditional hunting weapon, here’s an AR-15-style rifle. The military versions ofthese weapons were designed for troops so that they can efficiently kill many people in a shorttime, and they can be equipped with large magazines that are rapidly swapped out. They fire abullet each time the trigger is depressed. In one respect, the civilian version can be more lethal.
American troops are not normally allowed to fire at the enemy with hollow-point bullets, whichcause horrific injuries, because these might violate the laws of war. But any civilian can walkinto a gun store and buy hollow-point bullets for an AR-15; several mass shootings haveinvolved hollow-point rounds.
Now here’s what in some sense is the most lethal weapon of all: a 9-millimeter handgun. Weshould reassure gun owners that we’re not going to come after their deer rifles or bird guns. Thatmakes it politically easier to build a consensus on steps to keep dangerous people from lethalweapons like 9-millimeter handguns. There’s also evidence that gun owners with a military orpolice background strongly believe in safety training and other requirements for people carryinghandguns; any coalition for gun safety needs to work with such moderate gun owners.
No single approach is all that effective. But gun safety experts think that a politically plausibleharm reduction model could over time reduce gun mortality by perhaps one-third. That would bemore than 15,000 lives saved a year.
So let’s learn lessons, for gun violence is at levels that are unconscionable. Just since I graduatedfrom high school in 1977, more Americans appear to have died from guns (more than 1.5million), including suicides, homicides and accidents, than perished in all the wars in UnitedStates history, going back to the Revolutionary War (about 1.4 million). We can do better, andthis is not hopeless. North Carolina is not a liberal state, but it requires a license to buy ahandgun. If we avoid overheated rhetoric that antagonizes gun owners, some progress ispossible, particularly at the state level.
Gun safety regulation can make a difference. Conservatives often think New York is an exampleof failed gun policy, but New York State has a firearms death rate less than one-quarter that ofgun-friendly states like Alaska, Wyoming, Louisiana and Mississippi. Gun safety works, just notas well as we would like.
Harm reduction isn’t glamorous but is the kind of long slog that reduced auto fatalities andsmoking deaths. If gun policy can only become boring, that may help defuse the culture war overguns that for decades has paralyzed America from adopting effective firearms policies.

​From reading about "awe" to "kindness", I suppose there was nowhere else to go but to "disappointment". The reading for next week has to do with the inevitable disappointments in life, how important they are, how to deal with them, and how living a life of faith can help with disappointments.
This has been an especially rich week with discussions and also articles. Here are two that we arenotcovering but that I found interesting. The first is from the Episcopal News Service about what the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles is doing about affordable housing - giving 25% of its church property to build it.Get ready for an uplifting readPresiding Bishop leads King Day 'Power of Love' celebration, call for housing justice.The second is our on-going view on what is happening in China. It's a well written opinion piece in the NY Times about the "undeniableclaim" that China's economy is sinking. Here is a free link to the article.Opinion: China Population Decline

Giving Disappointments Its Due
Jonathan Tran, Christian Century 1.18.23
Jonathan Tran teaches theological ethics at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He is author ofThe Vietnam War and Theologies of Memory and Foucault and Theology.
I once applied for a job I was told was mine to lose. The closer I got to getting it, the more Idreamed—looking at homes to buy and schools for kids to attend, even planning good-byeparties. I imagined a new life. When I didn’t get the job, I was crushed.
The disappointment went on for years. I found myself reliving it over and over, telling anyonewho would listen. Bitterness set in, and a list of enemies grew — all the people who’d torpedoedmy dream. The disappointment changed the way I related to the life I still had, darkening adream job already in place and overshadowing blessings long ago bestowed. I began to regret mysurroundings and resent a life I now felt stuck in. Disappointment did all this. I could not facethe disappointment as disappointment.
Not all disappointments are so devastating or so dramatic. Sometimes it’s less the dream jobtorpedoed and more the slow boil of a career playing out in disappointing ways. You look aroundand realize the life you’re living isn’t the one you signed up for. Well-laid plans fizzle out.Relationships you banked on careen off course. Opportunities dry up. Life happens.
It’s the relational disappointments that hurt most. Jobs, after all, can be changed—or at least leftbehind at the end of each workday. And while you can complain about how much your jobstinks, you don’t (or shouldn’t) feel such license when talking about people you love. It’s onething to feel disappointed about the way life turned out; it’s another to lay that disappointment atthe feet of any one person.
I think disappointment stems from three inescapable features of human life. We are timeboundcreatures, experiencing the world through time. As such, we constantly project ourselves into thefuture—sometimes forgetting both the present right under our noses and the past not far behind.We can’t help ourselves, leaning into a future sometimes a few steps ahead (the delicious dinnerwe’ve planned) and sometimes quite far-off (a job that’s “ours to lose”).
Time and projection then meet a third reality: finitude. Some imagined futures work out. Weenjoy that delicious dinner or get that dream job. Others do not. Many of our projections meetthe buzz saw of finite existence, the harsh reality that not every imagined future gets its way.Much of this is a mercy. No world could survive fulfilling all our dreams. But that’s hardlyconsolation when life sets us up for disappointment.
We might think, Disappointment’s bad, but it ain’t death. But some philosophers argue that deathhas everything to do with disappointment. After all, what is death’s sting other than the loss of animagined future? Time, projection, and fini-tude conspire to punch us in the gut, knocking us off
our feet. Some never get up.
Rarely do people stop to give disappointment its due. Instead, life goes on. Someone else got thejob instead of you. The world doesn’t stop because your life came to a screeching halt. No onemourns your loss like you do. Instead of acknowledging your disappointment, most peoplewould rather deflect it or explain it away: “You dodged a bullet” or “It wasn’t in the cards” oreven “That wasn’t God’s plan.” Our society lacks resources for acknowledging disappointment.We have rituals for mourning death but not for disappointment.
And no one avoids acknowledging our disappointment as much as we ourselves do. It hurts toomuch. It’s easier to store up enemies and resentment. Instead of acknowledging disappointment,we deny the inescapable features of our lives as humans. We deny humanness in the attempt tolive it. Call this our gnosticism, our most intimate heresy.
The things that disappoint comprise a whole litany of life’s failings. Certainly careers and welllaid plans. But also family and friends. Our bodies disappoint us with their aging, ailing, andaddling. Justice disappoints those who give their lives to it only to find freedom forever deferred. And who has not been disappointed by church? To be sure, some of this comes from unrealisticexpectations of something the New Testament promises will disappoint. Still, the church keepsgiving us more reasons for disappointment.
Scripture thematizes the human life in time—with its projections and buzz-sawdisappointments—in terms of faith. And it does not hold back on acknowledgingdisappointment. Adam and Eve’s catastrophic disappointment over the garden. Cain’s murderousdisappointment when God rejects his offering. David’s disappointment when kingdom life turnsout less than kingdom-like. Judas’s disappointment with Jesus. In each case, God turns out to beour greatest disappointment. Is it more heretical to say this or to deny it?
The Bible reserves its greatest disappointments for scenes involving children, the embodiedfuture. Children carry our hopes, bearing the weight of our expectations, fating us and them todisappointment. Through our kids we imagine the future and lose it. When their lives go awrythe earth comes off its axis. I have known people whose disappointments over children—infertility, miscarriage, illness, death—ended their faith. I have known those disappointmentsmyself.
No wonder God’s faithfulness gets laid on the head of a single question: Will God give Sarahand Abraham children, or not? If God does, they will know God does what God promises, is whoGod claims. Conversely, no children, no God.
Refusing to explain things away, much less lie about the conditions setting us up fordisappointment, God’s word acknowledges it. The Spirit hears our disappointments just as theSon bears them, together entreating the Father’s infinite life. Rather than manage expectations byasking less, God risks everything, beckoning us to faith’s end, knowing full well thatdisappointment looms over the razor’s edge between hope and despair.

The discussion topic for this next week involves kindness and how acts of kindness have the potential to change the world we live in.
We will discuss two stories - the first one about a hairdresser who started the Red Chair project in Minneapolis. The second is an adoptive mom who paid for the adoptions for everyone in her area. Both of these two women were helpedby someone who inspired them to help others.Below is the reading. Along with it, I will be showing you the clip (below). The first story begins at 2:30 and the second story begins at 10:00.
You Tube Video - The Gift: Kindness Goes Viral
Additionally, we are going to try aDiscussion Group lunch.
On Tuesday, at 11:30, we are going to meet up at La Villa Mexican Restaurant,
5610 GMD Suite #5 (near Harry's).

This does not replace either the Tuesday or Wednesday 10 a.m. discussion. We just thought it would be nice to get out and support a local business.

Offering Free Haircuts to Homeless
Steve Hartman, CBS News 12.30.22
A Minneapolis woman became inspired by a life-changing haircut she got when she wasyounger, and found a way to help others in her community. Katie Stellar said growing up, hermother would cut her hair since she was one of six children. The home haircuts weren't the moststylish. "My mom was awful at it and I have pictures to prove it. But I never really had anydesire to do anything with my hair," she said.
That was until Stellar was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease when she was 11 years old,which took a toll on both her body and her hair. She began losing her hair and eyelashes. "Ireally didn't realize how important it was to me until I was losing it," she said. Her mother, JulieStellar, then searched for anything that might make her daughter feel just a little bit better. Shedecided to get her daughter a real haircut with someone who had their license.
For Stellar, the experience was life-changing. She credited the hair stylist for making her feelcomfortable and safe throughout the appointment. "What she did for me was she sat me down inthis chair and talked to me as a person, not as an illness," Stellar said. The experience lit a fire forStellar. She herself became a hair stylist, but one with a mission — to make others feel the wayshe felt that day. She opened a salon, which led to the start of the Red Chair Project.
Stellar said the idea behind the movement came as she was preparing to open her new salon. Shealways wanted red chairs in her salon and wasn't willing to compromise, but the opening of thesalon was delayed, leaving her with a hoard of equipment in her house.
"I remember looking at the chairs and being, like, 'This is kind of a waste,'" she said. "Like, whatif I stuck this in my car and went and offered haircuts." Stellar said she wanted to offer haircutsto anyone who asked, as she's seen people in her community of downtown Minneapolis strugglewith homelessness. "I think Red Chair Project definitely kind of stemmed from that feeling ofwanting to show up for people who might be struggling or being alone," she said.
Stellar would approach anyone she drove past and offer them a haircut. She said while somepeople politely turned down the offer, others were more than eager to get a fresh look, includinga man called Beetlejuice. "The one thing I crave more than anything after being homeless for solong and not having a significant other… it's just that closeness, just human contact," he said.
Throughout Minneapolis,Stellar's Red Chair Projecthas inspired more stylists with more chairsto give more free haircuts. She said she's happy seeing other people carrying on the work shestarted.
For some, that touch of kindness can be life-altering, just as it had been for Stellar years earlier.CBS News tracked down the stylist, whose name is Amy White, to bring the two together for thefirst time since Stellar got her life-changing haircut. White said she doesn't remember doinganything different during Stellar's visit, but remembered that she was special. Stellar believesthat what White gave her that day was a gift.
"It's one of those things I can never repay," she said. "I can put it forward. How can I use my lifeto alleviate someone else's pain, even just for a moment?"

Adoptive Mom Hatches Plan to Help Others
Steve Hartman, CBS News 12.29.22
After a distant cousin wrote a check to pay for the adoption of a child in Iowa, a woman took itupon herself to help other families seeking to make their family permanent on paper.
Brittany Berrie began watching her adopted daughter, Gracie, when she was just a baby for arelative in a troubled relationship. "When they asked me to watch her for the first time I said,'absolutely,'" Berrie said. She was only 20 years old when she started caring for infant Gracie.
Soon, the mother began leaving her in Berrie's care for longer periods of time. "It was days at a time and then weeks at a time and then months at a time. And then by the timeshe was about 7 months old, it was, 'OK, I'm raising her,'" Berrie said. When Gracie was 4 yearsold, the court granted Berrie legal guardianship. But as time passed, both Berrie and Graciewanted more. "Because she was my baby," Berrie said of why she sought to adopt Gracie. "I
think that even though I didn't birth her, she still grew in my heart… maybe not in my belly, but she was my baby."
The only thing stopping them was the cost. The process of adopting a child can typically cost inthe tens of thousands of dollars, which made it impossible for Berrie. That was until she ran intoa distant cousin, Casie Baddome, at a wedding. "I couldn't believe that was the only thing thatwas keeping them from being able to adopt. I just said, 'Well, I think I can help with that,'"Baddome said. "If that's all I needed to do was, you know, help write a check, I felt like that wasthe least that I could do because that was security for the whole family and for Gracie." Lastyear, thanks to Baddome's gift, 11-year-old Gracie's adoption was finalized.
"I did not know how to thank her," Berrie said of Baddome's donation. "I spent months trying towrite something down or figure out, do I get her something? Like there's no 'thank you' thatexpresses what she did."
Berrie figured out a way to pass on the blessing. With an abundance of donations, she turned hergarage into the Adopted Closet thrift store and hatched a "secret plan" to use proceeds from thestore to pay the kindness forward. "I want to pay for the adoptions on National Adoption Day inScott County, Iowa. All of the remaining balances," Berrie said. That's exactly what she did —pay all the balances on all adoptions in the county.
"People don't understand how expensive adoption can be," said Jodi Siebler, an adopted child'sparent. "We had to wipe out our savings to pay for everything related to this." The one gift ofkindness that made Berrie's family whole did the same for nine other families.
Gracie said she couldn't be prouder of her mother. "It's great knowing that other people can feelthis happiness and feel safe and have all those mothers out there know that their children aretheir children," she said.

All the earth honors the Lord;
​all the earth’s inhabitants stand in awe of him. Psalm 33:8
Used 23 times in the psalms, the word "awe" and "awesome" convey... an awesome experience of God. Did you know thatthere are healthful benefits of feeling in awe? Published in a secular publication, the author and professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, believes that a sense of awe is good for us and can be found in some unlikely places. Often I have a sense of awe in our discussion groups.
​
The Quiet Profundity of Everyday Awe
Dacher Keltner, The Atlantic 1.5.23
Dacher Keltner is the founding director of the Greater Good Science Center and a professor ofpsychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Awe: The New Scienceof Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life.

What gives you a sense of awe? That word, awe — the feeling of being in the presence ofsomething vast that transcends your understanding of the world — is often associated with theextraordinary. You might imagine standing next to a 350-foot-tall tree or on a wide-open plainwith a storm approaching, or hearing an electric guitar fill the space of an arena, or holding thetiny finger of a newborn baby. Awe blows us away: It reminds us that there are forces biggerthan ourselves, and it reveals that our current knowledge is not up to the task of making sense ofwhat we have encountered.
But you don’t need remarkable circ*mstances to encounter awe. When my colleagues and Iasked research participants to track experiences of awe in a daily diary, we found, to oursurprise, that people felt it a bit more than two times a week on average. And they found it in theordinary: a friend’s generosity, a tree’s shadow on a sidewalk, a song that transported them backto a first love.
We need that everyday awe, even when it’s discovered in the humblest places. A survey ofrelevant studies suggests that a brief dose of awe can reduce stress, decrease inflammation, andbenefit the cardiovascular system. Luckily, we don’t need to wait until we stumble upon it; wecan seek it out. Awe is all around us. We just need to know where to look for it.
In our daily-diary studies, one source of awe was by far the most common: other people. Regularacts of courage—bystanders defusing fights, subordinates standing up to abusive powerholders—inspired awe. So did the simple kindness of others: seeing someone give money to abroke friend or assist a stranger on the street. But you don’t need a serendipitous encounter witha Good Samaritan to experience awe. We often find inspiring stories in literature, poetry, film,art, and the news. Reading about moral exemplars, say, protesting racism or protecting theenvironment was a pervasive source of awe for our participants.
Another common source of awe is just … taking a walk. In her cultural history of walking,Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit theorized that walks can produce an awe-like form of consciousnessin which we extend the self into the environment. We can make connections, for example,between our own thoughts and the other human beings we see moving through their day, orpatterns in nature—the movements of wind through trees or the shifting clouds in the sky.
Along with Virginia Sturm, a UC San Francisco neuroscientist, I studied the effects of an “awewalk.” One group of subjects took a weekly walk for eight weeks; the other group did the samebut with some instructions: Tap into your childlike sense of wonder, imagining you’re seeingeverything for the first time. Take a moment during each walk to notice the vastness of things—when looking at a panoramic view, for example, or at the detail of a flower. And go somewherenew, or try to recognize new features of the same old place. All of the participants reported ontheir happiness, anxiety, and depression and took selfies during their walks.
We found that the awe-walkers felt more awe with each passing week. You might have thoughtthat their capacity for awe would start to decrease: This is known as the law of hedonicadaptation, that certain pleasures or accomplishments—a new job, a bigger apartment—start tolose some of their thrill over time. But the more we practice awe, it seems, the richer it gets.
We also found evidence of Solnit’s idea that the self can extend into the environment. In theawe-walk condition, people’s selfies increasingly included less of the self. Over time, thesubjects drifted off to the side, showing more of the outside environment—a street corner in SanFrancisco, the trees, the rocks around the Pacific Ocean. Over the course of our study, awe-walkers reported feeling less daily distress and more prosocial emotions such as compassion andamusem*nt.
The arts, too, can make us feel connected to something boundless and beyond words. In onediary study, many people wrote that music brought them moments of awe and stirred them toconsider their place in the great scheme of life. When we listen to music that moves us,dopaminergic pathways—circuitry in the brain associated with reward and pleasure—areactivated, which open the mind to wonder and exploration. In this bodily state of musical awe,we often get the chills—signs, studies have revealed, that we are collectively engaged in makingsense of the unknown.
Visual art activates the same dopamine network in the brain—and can have the sametranscendent effect. When exposed to paintings, research has found, people demonstrate greatercreativity. One study, which involved more than 30,000 participants in the United Kingdom,found that the more people practiced or viewed art, the more those individuals donated moneyand volunteered two years later.
Nearly three years into a pandemic that’s made many of us feel powerless and small, seeking outthe immense and mysterious might not seem appealing. But often, engaging with what’soverwhelming can put things in perspective. Staring up at a starry sky; looking at a sculpture thatmakes you shudder; listening to a medley of instruments joining into one complex, spine-tinglingmelody—those experiences remind us that we’re part of something that will exist long after us.We are well served by opening ourselves to awe wherever we can find it, even if only for amoment or two.

Merry Christmas! I hope you are enjoying the 12-day season of Christmas. And, I hopeyou have a Happy New Year and that I'll see you on Sunday to celebrate.
I also hope to see you at our next discussion group gathering which will be on Tuesday and Wednesday, January 3 and 4, next week.The reading is from the Bradenton Herald about a coalition of churches that is making a difference. I'd like to know what you think about it.

STREAM – A Coalition of Churches Making a Difference
Ryan Callihan, Bradenton Herald 12.29.22
With key commitments from local leaders, it’s been a victorious year for a religious group thatcame together with the goal of resolving systemic issues in Manatee County.
Stronger Together Reaching Equality Across Manatee (STREAM) made its voice known in2022, rallying several times over the course of the year to push for more affordable housing andbetter criminal justice policies. The group, which is made up of more than a dozen local churchesand their congregations, has brought hundreds of residents together with a common goal.
“You either have money or you have people power. We don’t have lots of money. We’re littlechurches. We organize people to get justice in the community,” said Glen Graczyk, a pastor atSt. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Palmetto and a co-chair of STREAM.
The coalition’s origin dates back to 2019 when local pastors first began kicking the idea around.STREAM was formed with minimal assistance from the Direct Action & Research Training(DART) Center, a national organization that connects clergy to tackle local issues. However, STREAM’s priorities are a direct result of concerns from each of its 15 churchcongregations. After a slight delay caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the organization hosted
community meetings throughout 2021 to hear from residents about the issues most important tothem. The priority was clear: Churchgoers are struggling to afford places to live and they’reworried about the lasting impact caused by misdemeanor crimes on an arrest record.
Throughout 2022, STREAM pushed for — and won — some of the policy changes that alleviatethe systemic issues worrying its members. In the process, the group has caught the attention ofManatee County’s top politicians. “I think they’ll get stuff done,” Manatee CountyCommissioner George Kruse said earlier this year after attending a STREAM event. “They’ll bea force to be reckoned with.”
WHAT HAS STREAM ACCOMPLISHED?
STREAM hosted a Nehemiah Action Assembly in April to announce ambitious goals. The event,attended by dignitaries including Manatee County commissioners and local law enforcementofficials, attracted more than 600 people. Church leaders declared the need for 500 newaffordable housing units every year and a pre-arrest diversion program that would keep minorcrimes off an arrest record. STREAM applauded local politicians who were willing to pursuethose goals, but they also plan to hold them accountable. “At our Nehemiah Action in 2022,STREAM won commitments from our sheriff and state attorney to create a new civil citationprogram in Manatee to avoid unnecessary arrests for first-time misdemeanors,” wrote in awebsite update. “Our current work is following up to ensure they follow through on theircommitments.”
Speaking with the Bradenton Herald, Pastor Joreatha Capers said it’s difficult to overstate justhow powerful it felt to have everyday residents come together to push for change. “When I looked at the people gathered, I saw the kingdom of God on earth. We are concernedabout what’s hurting our brothers and sisters,” Capers recalled. “It was a great beginning step. Iwas torn between wanting to cry and wanting to shout.”
In the months since the Nehemiah Action event, Manatee County officials have announced apolicy change that prioritizes affordable housing for lower-income families, and Manatee CountySheriff Rick Wells said he is in the process of training deputies on a pre-arrest diversionprogram.
‘PERSISTENT’ LEADER BROUGHT STREAM TOGETHER
Capers, a longtime activist in the Bradenton area, is also credited with much of the legwork thatbrought 15 different churches under one umbrella. Several pastors interviewed by the BradentonHerald recounted the early stages of STREAM’s formation. Each described Capers as aninspiring, persistent force who they were happy to rally around.
“I would give her the credit,” said Rev. Edward Barthell, of St. Stephen African MethodistEpiscopal Church in Bradenton. “She looked right in your eyes, smiling and being so sweet, butshe presented the idea with persistence. That’s what you have to have to get any group together.”
“It is very obvious that her soul is inspired to help people from the grassroots, so it’s catchy. It’san enthusiasm for justice that just does not have an end,” added Pastor Bobbie Blackburn, ofTrinity Lutheran Church in Bradenton. “She is persistent, not in an annoying way, but in a ‘I’mnot going to give up,’ way. She’s got the fire. That’s all I can say.”
Together with Rev. Lawrence Livingston, founder of Eternity Temple First Born Church in Palmetto, Capers brought clergy leaders together to demand a joint justice ministry. In a matterof months, STREAM had created a diverse coalition of churches from Anna Maria Island toPalmetto to Lakewood Ranch.
WHAT WILL STREAM DO IN 2023?
Earlier this month, the group hosted a Community Action Assembly to determine which issueswill be addressed in the new year. More than 100 people at the meeting voted to continuedemanding more affordable housing options and the official start of Manatee County’s pre-arrestdiversion program, according to STREAM’s website. State Attorney Ed Brodsky has alreadyimplemented similar criminal justice reforms in Sarasota County. “We’ll continue to hold theirfeet to the fire,” Blackburn said.
Once those goals are accomplished, STREAM will return to the drawing board to figure outwhich issues to tackle next. Based on previous conversations with churchgoers, leaders saypushing for more mental health resources could be a future initiative.
“While some would say Jesus has a proclivity for the poor, I think it’s more than that,”Blackburn continued. “When we follow him, we also face our hearts to those in need, andSTREAM is an excellent vehicle for making that happen.”
Visitwww.StreamManatee.orgfor more information about the organization and how to getinvolved.

This is our last Discussion Group of 2022. I think it is fitting that we discuss the Christmas season. There are two, one-page articles for next week. The first one is the perspective of John the Baptizer who paved the way for Jesus. The author challenges the popular Christmas hymn that suggests the baby Jesus did not cry. The article is tiled, The Crying Messiah.The second article, Joseph's Decision, is viewing Jesus' birth through Joseph's eye and what the law, in his day, would have allowed - to have Mary killed for being pregnant. This, plus everything else associated with Christmas, will be on the table to discuss.

The Crying Messiah
Montague Williams, Christian Century 12.2.22
Montague Williams is professor of church, culture, and society at Point Loma NazareneUniversity and author of Church in Color.

Soon we will celebrate the arrival of the Christ child. The popular Christmas carol suggests hemakes no cries while away and awake in a manger.
The cattle are lowing; The Baby awakes; But little Lord Jesus; No crying He makes
I imagine the writer was focusing on Jesus’ full divinity and was building upon clichés of what itmeans to be “the perfect child.” But let’s be honest (and theologically sound). Jesus is also fullyhuman, and crying is a part of human life. In fact, it is a good thing to hear babies crying. It givesus a clue that they need something. A vulnerable crying baby in need — that’s the Messiah weare waiting for.
Thinking about Jesus’ arrival as a crying baby becomes even more surprising when consideringthe words of John the Baptist, as he seeks to prepare people for the arrival of the Messiah. In theGospel passage in Advent, John warns that Jesus is coming to clear the threshing floor in a whirlof righteous violence. Sometimes a baby’s piercing scream can be quite violent on an eardrum,but that’s a bit different from what John is talking about. He is warning of a Messiah who iscoming to take a public place of authority, whip the people of God into shape, and weed outanyone who is not on board.
Even as John rightly points people to Jesus and the kingdom of heaven, he seems to have somemisguided expectations about how Jesus will establish authority and live in the world.
Ultimately, John is thinking about the Messiah arriving as an adult, not a baby. And at this pointin Matthew’s narrative, he has not encountered any challenge to his assumptions about how theMessiah will bring about righteousness and justice.
However, we present-day readers get to prepare for the Messiah’s arrival with the awareness ofMatthew’s whole Gospel narrative. We know that Jesus teaches us to pray in ways that tradeviolence for forgiveness. We know that as much as Jesus is concerned with living rightly, heembodies a compassionate and wide invitation. Even more, we know that the Messiah arrivesinto this world in a vulnerable way that reveals insight about how God often works in the world.
So, while it is important to pay attention to what John is saying at the Jordan River there in thewilderness, let’s place it alongside what we know about Jesus. For when the Messiah arrives, thefirst things he will do is cry and reach out to be held.

Joseph’s Decision
Christine Chakoian, Christian Century 12.12.22
Christine Chakoian is pastor of Westwood Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles.
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It is amazing how fast a person’s role, authority, and identity can be upended. In LA there is noshortage of entertainment royalty appearing for the Emmy, Grammy, or Academy Awards. Andafter each awards show there are myriad A-list parties. Who is recognized and welcomed inspeaks volumes about their status. These stories came to mind as I read Matthew’s account ofJesus’ birth. The Gospel opens by certifying the identity of “Jesus, the Messiah, son of David,son of Abraham.” Then it spells out 42 generations of fathers. Yet one person’s choice coulderase it all: Joseph’s.
Mary is engaged to Joseph. When she turns out to be pregnant—and not by him—it is a colossaldisgrace to him and to his family. He, after all, is among the offspring of Abraham, of the houseand lineage of King David.
He has a massive decision to make. He would have every justification to reject Mary in shame.And what a shaming it would be. The entire village would know she was pregnant out ofwedlock. She would be returned to her father’s household—if he would take her back—andnever be able to have a new life. She could even be executed (see Deut. 22:13–20).
Instead, because Joseph is a righteous man, he chooses the most generous path that the lawallows: not to shame Mary publicly but to send her home quietly, not to have her killed but to lether and her child live.
But even this very high bar of righteousness is not enough. Jesus would still have carried themark of humiliation as Mary’s illegitimate child—instead of being known as the offspring ofAbraham and David. And so God intervenes. An angel appears to Joseph in a dream, appealingto him as “son of David” and then revealing that this child is of an even greater heritage.
Righteous man that he is, Joseph chooses to open his heart to the angel. He chooses not to beafraid and not to prioritize his own identity, all the bona fides as a child of Abraham and David.Instead, Joseph does as he is called to do: to take Mary as his wife and to name this child Jesus,which means “he saves.” Joseph chooses to recognize this child’s true identity.
Which gets us back to the beginning. If it is easy for us to dismiss the identity of famous people,how on earth do we recognize the sacred identity of the vulnerable, the invisible, even thedisgraced? Real righteousness urges us to see every person as a child of God—and to welcomethem into our hearts and homes.
It isn’t easy. It brings to mind a story Kathleen Norris tells in Dakota. An older monk tells ayounger monk, “I have finally learned to accept people as they are. Whatever they are in theworld, a prostitute, a prime minister, it is all the same to me. But sometimes I see a strangercoming up the road and I say, ‘Oh, Jesus Christ, is it you again?’”
The birth of Jesus was not just one and done. He is still God with us. And he keeps appearing tous over and over again, even if we do not know it.

This article is about the fading practice of forgiveness within American culture and the poisonous effects that has on the individual and society. The author, a guest essayist for the NY Times and Presbyterian minister, Dr. Timothy Keller outlines the importance of forgiveness for the individual and for society. He asserts that forgiveness has been seen as letting someone off the hook when, in fact, it is our own selves (and society) that we are freeing.

What Too Little Forgiveness Does to Us
Timothy Keller, NY Times 12.3.22
Guest essayist – Dr. Keller is the founder of the Redeemer Presbyterian churches in New York City.
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The State of Virginia is reeling from two mass shootings in less than a month in Chesapeake andCharlottesville. From what we know, the races and politics of the two people accused of theshootings were quite different. But there seem to be common threads: They both seemed to havebitter resentment and unresolved anger toward individuals, groups or even society as a whole.The Chesapeake shooter wrote that his former Walmart colleagues “gave me evil twisted grins,mocked me and celebrated my downfall.” The brother of the man accused of the University ofVirginia shooting said he’d been picked on in school and then reached a “breaking point.”
The most common explanations for the root causes of mass shootings — a mental health crisisand overly lax gun laws — have merit. Another factor is the fading of forgiveness in our society.It is no longer valued or promoted as it was in the past. And a society that has lost the ability toextend and receive forgiveness risks being crushed by the weight of recriminations and scoresettling.
Many people committed to justice value forgiveness, but others worry that it lets oppressors offthe hook. Technology also makes a contribution. Social media is a realm in which missteps andwrongful, impulsive posts are never forgiven. Screenshots of every foolish word you have eversaid online can be circulated in perpetuity. And our politics is filled with vitriol. In our culturalmoment a conciliatory, forgiving voice is nowhere to be heard. Calls for forgiveness andreconciliation sound like both-sidesism, a mealy-mouthed lack of principle and courage.
Yet what is the alternative to forgiveness? In the 1970s, I was a pastor in a small town that hadnot a single professional therapist or social worker. I ended up counseling dozens of couples withtroubled marriages. I discovered that those who learned and embraced forgiveness usuallysurvived and those who did not never did. Without forgiveness, no human relationships orcommunities can be sustained. Without forgiveness, centuries-long cycles of retaliation, violenceand genocide repeat themselves. Without forgiveness, you are more subject to heart disease andheart attacks, strokes and depression. We should forgive because it is profoundly practical. Tofail to forgive is to undermine the health and coherence of one’s body, one’s relationships and
the entire human community.
Another reason to forgive is simple fairness. We owe it to others to forgive because we all needforgiveness ourselves. At the end of his parable of the unmerciful servant in Matthew 18, Jesusdescribes God saying to an unforgiving man, “Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellowservant as I had mercy on you?” Imagine that when Judgment Day comes, you will be evaluatedonly on the basis of all the times you told others, “You ought to” or “You should.” In otherwords, imagine you will be judged only on the basis of your own moral standards. Not a personon earth could pass such a test, and we know it.
So if we should forgive, then how can we?
First, there must be the recognition that forgiveness does not contradict the pursuit of justice.Rather, it is its precondition. Forgiving is not excusing. To forgive something, you must name itas the evil it is. The pursuit of justice and the speaking of truth are necessary. But if you don’tinternally forgive wrongdoers — if you don’t give up your quest to pay back and to make themsuffer as much as you have — you won’t really be seeking justice. You will be seekingvengeance. Vengeance consumes your inward being with anger and hate. If you don’t forgiveinternally, you won’t confront the wrongdoers for justice’s sake or for future victims’ sake or forGod’s sake. You will be doing it for your sake, and the project will go awry. It leaves youinfected with the very hardness and evil that was done to you.
Second, there must be a commitment to renounce revenge and bear the cost of forgiveness.Forgiveness is granted before it’s felt. It is a commitment not to constantly bring up the wrongsto the wrongdoers to punish them or to others to ruin their reputations or to yourself, constantlyreliving the incident in order to keep the anger going. You will find these disciplines to be hardand even costly. But if you pay that cost, you will gradually find yourself escaping the grip ofbitterness. Once forgiveness is granted, it clears the way for justice, possible reconciliation andother forms of restoration.
Finally, forgiveness requires belief in something bigger than ourselves. In October 2006 agunman took hostages in a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania, shooting 10 childrenages 7 to 13, five of whom died, and then committing suicide. Within hours, members of theAmish community visited the killer’s immediate family and his parents, expressing sympathy fortheir loss. Many in the mainstream press called on others to emulate the Amish and become moreforgiving.
Four years later, a group of scholars wrote that our secular culture was losing the ability toforgive the way the Amish did. Americans, they argued, are committed to self-assertion,believing the interests and needs of the individual come before those of the family, thecommunity or God. The Amish, by contrast, have as one of their core values self-renunciation,with forgiveness being one form of it. The authors concluded that our culture of expressive
individualism is one that “nourishes revenge and mocks grace” and will not produce agents offorgiveness and reconciliation.
What is that higher good necessary for forgiveness? It can be many things; probably the mostnatural one is a willingness to sacrifice one’s interests for the good of the community.Christianity provides a unique resource at this point, unique even in comparison with otherreligions. At the heart of Christian faith is not primarily a wonderful, wise teacher (though Jesuswas that, too) but a man who died for his enemies so that he could secure divine forgiveness for
them. When you embrace the idea that Jesus’ self-sacrifice was done for you, the Crucifixionbecomes an act of surpassing beauty that, when brought into the center of your being, gives youboth the profound humility and towering happiness, even joy, needed to forgive others.
The Christian church today is not the model of forgiveness that it was at times in the past. Goduses kindness to lead people’s hearts to change (Romans 2:4), but taken as a whole, today’sAmerican church does not. Christians like me should repent and renew themselves as membersof communities of forgiveness and reconciliation. When Jesus Christ was dying, he said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). If he treats hisexecutioners like that, how can those of us who believe in him be cold, caustic or harsh withanyone?
If forgiveness in small things and large were deeply embedded in our culture, it would transformus politically, ending the demagogy that never admits wrongdoing and that mocks and belittlesone’s opponents. It would transform us socially, ending racial stereotyping, discrimination andunwillingness to listen to one another. It would make every movement for justice less likely toburn out, overreach or alienate. It would remake us personally, enabling us to confrontfrustrations and hurts and work through them rather than turn to drugs or guns or otherdestructive ways of dealing with our pain.
Few have the ability to honestly confront their own failings, flaws, self-centeredness — in short,their sin — unless they are assured that grace is ready to meet them. C.S. Lewis put it well: “Tobe a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable inyou."
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And we're back...
I'm looking forward to seeing you at our discussion group this week.
A couple of months ago we had a fascinating discussion about the distinction between faith and belief. Attached is the latest article on the topic from the Christian Century. The author, Samuel Wells, takes a different approach - trust. He says we can do without belief but we need trust. I'd like to know what you think.

The Better Part of Faith – It’s possible to stop believing,but we can’t live without trust.
Samuel Wells, The Christian Century 11.18.22
There are two kinds of faith. They sound the same but turn out to be very different. The first isthe desire to attain a level of certainty, conviction, and passion that somehow carries us over thechasm of doubt, distress, and despair. It’s like psyching ourselves up before a game, exam, ordifficult conversation so that we can be transported into a different realm of consciousness andachieve things beyond our normal powers.
This is what I sense is communicated by the word belief. The notion of belief is that we bindourselves to certain extraordinary commitments, rituals, and ideas about reality that may seembizarre to outsiders or locked in an ancient thought world but that give us access to the secretworkings of the true power at large in the universe. We can’t expect to know the logic orunderstand the purposes of that power, but beliefs connect us to it as successfully as is possiblein this existence. To keep the magic at work, we surround ourselves with people who hold theseconvictions more ardently than we do and cultivate experiences that take us to a rarefied form offeeling, so we’re lifted out of our mundane lives where everything feels so fragile andvulnerable.
The interesting thing about this notion of belief is that it seems to be understood in a similar wayby adherents and outsiders alike. It’s common for journalists or courts to refer to a person’sbeliefs, thereby speaking of something beyond the rational, steeped in obscurity, fiercely held,impossible to argue with, and central to identity. Think of parents refusing medical assistance fortheir child when doctors are eager to intervene: we’re told it’s because of their beliefs. But it’salso common for a person to defend their own beliefs as profoundly personal and of greatcomfort, as things that shouldn’t be a reason for discrimination, even if another person findsthem offensive.
What these different understandings have in common is the assumption that belief isfundamentally a form of escape. It’s a magic carpet that lifts you out of the ordinariness andjeopardy of your life and transports you to a realm of miracle, mystery, and cosmic purpose. Themore you can get yourself into a holy reverie to match this grand drama, the more you can befree of your own limitations and the threats of others and thus find something calledsalvation.
It would be easy to think that what I’ve described as belief is the only kind of faith there is. Butthere is another kind, one that isn’t based on escape.
Imagine a man who develops a life-limiting condition. His wrist starts to swell. The next day hisknee can’t bend. Within days he’s in the hospital with autoimmune arthritis: his immune systemis attacking his joint tissue.
After a month his condition stabilizes, and he starts to build his life again. He needs rehab andphysical therapy. He has to learn to walk again. He develops strategies, depends on others, learnsto accept help, does a routine of daily exercises. It’s a complete transformation.
His infant daughter is learning to walk at the same time as he is. He thought his job was to teachher, but now she’s teaching him. It’s humiliating but beautiful. He appreciates the tiniest gifts oflife. He cherishes the people that care for him. He says, “Thank you for walking with me,” andhe means it literally. He’s gradually making progress. But faster than he relearns to walk, he’sbecoming a better person.
If there’s one word that sums up the journey I’ve described, it’s trust. Trust doesn’t assume life isabout overcoming limitations. It’s about finding truth, beauty, and friendship in the midst ofthose limitations. Trust doesn’t think that if you wave a magic wand, things will changeovernight. It finds companionship among the community of the waiting. Trust doesn’t pretendthat if you hold tight to the right things, nothing will ever go wrong. It inhabits the exercises andpatience required to rebuild after matters have been strained or broken. Trust doesn’t use peopleas a means of getting things but places all its energies in making relationships that transcendadverse and depleting circ*mstances. Trust, rather than belief, is the better part of faith.
And it is possible to eradicate belief from your life. You can say you’re not going to commit toanything that isn’t scientifically provable. But you can’t live without trust. When we’ve beenhurt or betrayed, our ability to trust inevitably suffers, but so does the abundance of our life. Thequestion isn’t whether we should trust; it’s who and what to trust. In the face of death, thequestion is what can we trust that will last forever.
There are two kinds of faith, belief and trust. And here’s the irony: God’s faith in us is belief. It’sirrational, far-fetched, and mysterious. There’s no good reason for it, but everything depends onit. Our faith in God is trust. It’s saying, “There are going to be setbacks, misunderstandings, andpatient rebuilding. But I only want to be with you.”
When we think faith is all about belief, we beat ourselves up for not being able to hold togetherall the mysteries and contradictions and far-fetched ideas. But that’s not what Christianity isreally about. The Christian faith is really about trust. It’s not about Jesus the magician whiskingus away on a magic carpet of happiness and glory. It’s about facing the unknown and seeingJesus turn around, offer us his hand, and say, “We’re going to walk across the unknown
together."

Friendship is the topic for next week. The author of the article, America the Friendless, believes that friendship is one of the most important aspects of a free society; and it's fun!The Church plays a role in this. Speaking of, this next week, we have a fun way to connect with one another. TheFall Fling is on Wednesday starting at 4:30 pm. Come by for some BBQ and friendship. Another way to make friends is through attending a discussion group. :-)

America the Friendless
Adam Carrington, Law & Liberty 10.28.22
Despite being more interconnected than at any time in our history, America is experiencing afriendship crisis. Americans, especially men, have far fewer friends than in decades past. Thenumber of men who say they have no close friends at all has tripled since the early 1990s. Thisdata comports with a recurrent theme in surveys over the past ten years.
Despite these warnings, we have failed as a political community to consider this problem—muchless genuinely address it. We rightly bemoan the downfall of marriages and the broken familiesthey entail, but we must also care about the friendlessness rampant among us because it damagesthe lives of our people and corrodes our polity. John Adams recognized our political duty toaddress this problem: He believed “the divine science of politics is the science of socialhappiness.” Similarly, Cicero observed that “life can never be anything but joyless which is
without the consolation and companionship of friends.”
The present friendlessness has distinctly modern causes. Social media, long work hours, andCOVID-19 lockdowns amplify our feelings of isolation. Moreover, we do not understand thecore political nature and import of friendship. To recognize this, we can draw on the wisdom of
the Greek philosopher Aristotle, who provides a poignant discussion of friendship in hisNicomachean Ethics.
Aristotle highlights the importance of friendship to the individual. Similar to Cicero, he states,“without friends, no one would choose to live, even if he possessed all other good.” The fact that,for Aristotle, politics is the governing science, the one that orders the other sciences in the
context of political community toward human happiness, makes something this fundamentalpolitically salient. Additionally, Aristotle argues that friendship is important because ourcitizenship, rightly understood, includes an element of friendship. Thus, politics’ purpose as the
science of social happiness, as well as the issue of citizenship itself, makes friendship animportant political matter.

Friendships for Use, For Pleasure, Or For Virtue?
Aristotle helps explain why friends matter so much within his division of friendship. Hecategorizes friendships based on either use, pleasure, or virtue. Aristotle seesuse-basedfriendshipas the lowest kind of friendship. People can attain a level of general civility andbasic, mutual aid with this friendship, but it is the form of friendship most susceptible toselfishness and instability—unraveling the second the use no longer attains. It can thereby teachbad habits for friendship and inculcate perpetual, calculating disloyalty. Such a friendship isbetter than nothing, however, as it at least presents some degree of a hedge against misfortuneand poverty, as well as fulfilling some element of our social nature. In addition, the low can giverise to the high, morally speaking; by bringing people together for mutual needs, those samepersons can begin to develop better forms of friendship.

present more beneficial opportunities, though this depends on thesource of pleasure. For example, pleasure in the basest of objects does little good and much ill. This point proves especially true in our own day, obsessed as we are with pleasure, especially inthe use of our and others’ bodies. The extreme sexualization of our culture is the mainmanifestation of this point. Better options exist for common satisfaction. True beauty can formbonds, with the friends gaining pleasure in mutually appreciating an excellent film, a lovely
painting, or a perfectly executed play in football.
Finally, Aristotle sees

as the highest kind of friendship. ForAristotle, virtue consists of a disposition toward the good that results in right action. This gooddisposition and consequent deeds divide into a series of characteristics, such as courage, justice,
prudence, and liberality. Friendships based on virtue accentuate those goods by giving commoncompanionship in them. “Iron sharpens iron,” the Bible says in Proverbs 27:17. So too dovirtuous friends encourage and make better each other. In the wider view, virtue-based friendship
benefits nations as a whole; the more friendships based on virtue a country contains, the morelikely that the country will produce persons of noble character. Subsequently, these persons willpractice the virtues in our communities and for those communities’ good.
Citizenship and Friendship
These categories of friendship have political implications. Aristotle believes that citizenshipitself is a form of friendship. He notes that “like-mindedness seems to resemble friendship”because it consists of something two or more people hold in common and from which they either
derive use, pleasure, or in which they see the good. Thus, we need good friendships not justbecause we need to care about our citizens’ happiness. We need strong friendships because ourcitizenship makes up one form of those bonds. Our like-mindedness politically involves sharedprinciples, history, geography, language, and other factors. In this sense, as Aristotle observes,“friendship holds cities together.” If anyone wonders why our partisan divides run so deep, theanswer partly resides in seeing fellow citizens as foes, not comrades.
A patriotism of “pleasure” might love America for the wrong reasons, taking pleasure in itsworst moments or redefining it against its principles. Friendships of virtue, however, avoid all ofthese problems for patriotism. These friendships will promote the country’s best qualities and notit* vices. These friendships will find use and pleasure in America based on her best qualities,such as the manifestations of justice and truth in the country’s founding and throughout itshistory. They are the friends that can sing of America as in the text that concludes the secondverse of “America the Beautiful”:
“God mend thine every flaw / Confirm thy soul in self-control / Thy liberty in law!”
We must encourage the civil associations that Tocqueville celebrated in Americans of the 1830s.Cultivating the mediating “little platoons” found in gatherings of religious groups, book clubs,and hunting associations all can do much good on this project.
Community and Genuine Friendships
Other forms of friendships also present thorny questions for a politics aiming to cultivate thisnecessary good. In particular, popular governments like America must consider wherefriendships undermine or aid their principles of equality and liberty. Slavery, for example, bearsa resemblance to tyranny. It inculcates the demerits of such a regime in the souls of those whoact as masters and as slaves, proving antagonistic to the American regime itself. The relationshipbetween parents and children, on the contrary, appears more like that between monarch andsubject. Since they are temporary and pointed toward cultivating free and equal citizens uponmaturation, this relationship proves necessary even to a political community founded on equality.Thus, civic education begins in the home and the home should receive adequate protection andsupport from the laws.
At the private level, this entails a robust re-founding of community. We must encourage the civilassociations that Tocqueville celebrated in Americans of the 1830s. Cultivating the mediating“little platoons” found in gatherings of religious groups, book clubs, and hunting associations allcan do much good on this project. They can help articulate meaning, worth, and dignity for theindividuals involved. Perhaps the way our tax code aids charitable organizations can beexpanded to other forms of association, giving a financial incentive to start organizations thatwill facilitate common bonds.
At the political level, we must rebuild small towns and neighborhoods. They must become hubsof political activity so citizens can see, talk to, and develop relationships with each other. Theinternet presents a barrier to this needed change. We measure our community too much by thenumber of Twitter likes and Facebook “friends,” creating for ourselves a desert of truecompanionship. Instead, we should move away from our keyboards and toward cultivating realinteractions with real human beings. Reinvigorating federalism would move us in this directionas well, as we find more concrete ways to exercise citizenship and the bonds it entails locally.
Finally, we must work to aid the quality of friendships. Can our education system move awayfrom its focus on creating workers and cultivating humans and citizens? It should do so not onlybecause true education seeks to elevate the soul, not just give skills for employment. That
emphasis also would form more lasting, healthier grounds for friendship. Such friendships wouldhelp us to know ourselves and others in light of what is good, true, and beautiful.
Aristotle’s ancient perspective still applies to our modern context of friendlessness.Accomplishing this goal will be a generational task, but we must urgently work toward it. Whatcountry would want to live otherwise?

My reflection for this week is about having to unlearn and relearn things in order to survive the 21st century. One of the unlearn/relearn aspects has to do with gender identification and labels, words and/or acronyms. We all want to get it right and not offend, but, things seem to be moving quite quickly and without any sort of direction.
In this week's article, the author shared a clip from CBS Sunday Morning of author David Sedaris' commentary on this topic. In it, he asks these questions: why change the word for same-sex orientation? Who decides these things anyway? Here is a link to that clip:
​David Sedaris on coming out all over again
Although the article does not bring up religion, there are aspects I'd like to discuss and what better place to do it than the discussion group.

Opinion: Let’s Say Gay
Pamela Paul, NY Times 10.23.22
The word “gay” is increasingly being substituted by “queer” or, more broadly, “L.G.B.T.Q.,”which are about gender as much as — and perhaps more so than — sexual orientation. The word“queer” is climbing in frequency and can be used interchangeably with “gay,” which itself not so
long ago replaced “hom*osexual.”
The shift has been especially dramatic in certain influential spheres: academia, culturalinstitutions and the media, from Teen Vogue to The Hollywood Reporter to this newspaper. Only10 years ago, for example, “queer” appeared a mere 85 times in The New York Times. As of
Friday, it’s been used 632 times in 2022, and the year is not over. In the same periods, use of“gay” has fallen from 2,228 to 1,531 — still more commonly used, but the direction of theevolution is impossible to miss. Meanwhile, the umbrella term “L.G.B.T.Q.” increased from two
mentions to 714.
“It is quite often a generational issue, where younger people — millennials — are more fine withit. Gen Xers like myself are somewhat OK with it. Some you might find in each category,” JasonDeRose, who oversees L.G.B.T.Q. reporting at NPR, said of the news organization’s move
toward queer. “And then older people, maybe, who find it problematic.”
Let’s be clear: Many lesbians and gay people are fine with this shift. They may even preferumbrella terms like “L.G.B.T.Q.” and “queer” because they include people who identifyaccording to gender expression or identity as well as sexual orientation. But let’s consider thosewho do not, and why. For one thing, “gay” and “queer” are not synonymous, as they areincreasingly treated, particularly among Gen Zers and millennials. Likewise, the term“L.G.B.T.Q.,” which sometimes includes additional symbols and letters, represents so manyidentities unrelated to sexual orientation that gays and lesbians can feel crowded out.
Last week on “CBS News Sunday Morning,” the writer David Sedaris said he was done“fighting the word ‘queer.’” He went on, “Like the term ‘Latinx,’ ‘queer’ was started by somehumanities professor and slowly gathered steam. Then well-meaning radio producers andmagazine editors thought, ‘Well, I guess that’s what they want to be called now!’ But I don’tremember any vote being taken.”
This raises a question for me, a language obsessive and someone interested in the ways wordchoices reflect and drive the culture: Why change the word for same-sex orientation? And toecho Sedaris: Who decides these things anyway?
Let’s start with the basic dictionary-sense differences between the words. “Gay” has a clear,specific meaning that applies to both men and women: “hom*osexual,” which is the first entry inmost dictionaries. “Lesbian,” of course, bears the same meaning, but strictly for women.
Whereas the first definition for “queer,” according to Oxford and Dictionary.com, is “strange,odd.” Another definition refers not only to gay people but also to “a person whose sexualorientation or gender identity falls outside the heterosexual mainstream or the gender binary,”
according to Dictionary.com. That could mean “transgender,” “gender neutral,” “nonbinary,”“agender,” “pangender,” “genderqueer,” “demisexual,” “asexual,” “two spirit,” “third gender” orall, none or some combination of the above. Being queer is, as Bell Hooks once said, not “aboutwho you’re having sex with — that can be a dimension of it — but queer as being about the selfthat is at odds with everything around it and it has to invent and create and find a place to speakand to thrive and to live.” [While we’re here, the Q in “L.G.B.T.Q.” currently can stand for both“queer” and “questioning.”]
Confused? You should be! “Queer” can mean almost anything, and that’s the point. Queer theoryis about deliberately breaking down normative categories around gender and sex, particularlybinary ones like men and women, straight and gay. Saying you’re queer could mean you’re gay;it could mean you’re straight; it could mean you’re undecided about your gender or that youprefer not to say. Saying you’re queer could mean as little as having kissed another girl yoursophom*ore year at college. It could mean you valiantly plowed through the prose of Judith Butlerin a course on queerness in the Elizabethan theater. Given the broad spectrum of possibility, it’sno surprise that many people — gay or straight — have no idea what it means when someoneself-identifies as queer.
But this is important: Not all gay people see themselves as queer. Many lesbian and gay peopledefine themselves in terms of sexual orientation, not gender. There are gay men, for example,who grew up desperately needing reassurance that they were just as much a boy as anyhypermanly heterosexual. They had to push back hard against those who tried to tell them theirsexual orientation called their masculinity into question.
“Queer” carries other connotations, not all of them welcome — or welcoming. Whereashom*osexuality is a sexual orientation one cannot choose, queerness is something one can,according to James Kirchick, the author of “Secret City: The Hidden History of GayWashington.” Queerness, he argues, is a fashion and a political statement that not all gay peoplesubscribe to. “Queerness is also self-consciously and purposefully marginal,” he told me.
“Whereas the arc of the gay rights movement, and the individual lives of most gay people, hasbeen a struggle against marginality. We want to be welcomed. We want to have equal rights. Wewant a place in our institutions.”
Many gay people simply prefer the word “gay.” “Gay” has long been a generally positive term.The second definition for “gay” in most dictionaries is something along the lines of “happy,”“lighthearted” and “carefree.” Whereas “queer” has been, first and foremost, a pejorative. What Ihear most often from gay and lesbian friends regarding the word “queer” is something along thelines of what Sedaris pointed out: “Nobody consulted me!” This wasn’t their choice.
So how did it happen? Partly it’s the force of academic and institutional language, which haspermeated the influential worlds of the arts, Hollywood, publishing and fashion. Another part isgenerational: Gen Zers — 21 percent of whom identify as “L.G.B.T.,” according to Gallup, a
percentage that has nearly doubled in just four years — often use social media to frame theconversation. As the linguist Gretchen McCullough explained in her book “Because Internet,”word shifts take hold much faster these days. “Queer” bobbed around the academy in semiotics
and gender studies classes for decades before activists unleashed it with the help of social mediain the past decade or so. “Queerness” and “queering” now materialize in all manner of contexts,whether it’s queering John Wesley, queering the tarot or queering quinceañeras.
In recent years, other activist terms have followed light-speed trajectories. The term “Latinx”overtook academic institutions and briefly became fashionable in the media, still prevalent insome influential publications, like The New Yorker, even though only 3 percent of Hispanics (or
Latinos, if you prefer) use it. Similarly, the word “fat.” As Sarai Walker, the author of“Dietland,” has written, “fat activists use the word proudly in an effort to destigmatize not onlythe word, but by extension, the fat body.” For her, the word represents not merely acceptance butalso the promotion of body positivity.
To be clear: There’s nothing wrong with embracing a particular word to describe yourself. Theproblem arises when a new term is used in ways that misrepresent or mischaracterize some of thevery people it’s meant to include. This is especially true when people in the population in
question outright reject the fashionable term. Such is the case, it seems, for overweight people,who, according to a number of studies, rank “fat” among their least desirable descriptors. Formany, the word “fat” remains a fourth-grade way to shame someone. Choosing a euphemism like“curvy” need not be denounced as complicity or avoidance. Nor should a medical term like“overweight” be considered verboten, as it is by some activists, because it implies the existenceof a normative weight.
Language is always changing — but it shouldn’t become inflexible, especially when newterminologies, in the name of inclusion, sometimes wind up making others feel excluded. In thecase of “queer,” it’s especially worrisome and not only because it supersedes widely accepted
and understood terms but also because the gay rights movement’s successes have historicallyhinged on efforts at inclusion. Gay people, lesbians and bisexuals fought for a long time to beopen and clear about who they are. That’s why they call it pride.

As we draw closer to Halloween, here is a rather scary topic - an AI way to communicate with the dead. If you think this is just science fiction, the MIT TechnologyReview would like you to take another look. Recently at Ed Asner's memorial service, attendees were able to "communicate" with the actor through this AI technology.
I am wondering what you think of this and what is the next inevitable evolutionarystep in technology. ... and is it something we should be doing.
Below is a two-page overview of the technology. To read the longer version, here is the link to MIT Technology Review:www.technologyreview.com

New AI Tools Let You Chat with the Dead
Jennifer A. Kingson, Axios 7.13.22
Creepy or cool? New products that let people keep relatives "alive" via AI are proliferating — offering an interactive conversation with a recently departed dad who took the time to record avideo interview before he passed.

As interest in genealogy and ancestry proliferates, these tools let familiespreserve memories and personal connections through generations — even giving children a senseof the physical presence of a relative who died before they were born.
The tools are also being used to record the memories of noteworthy people: celebrities,Holocaust survivors, etc. One such tool,StoryFile, was notably used at the late actor Ed Asner'smemorial service, where mourners were invited to "converse" with the deceased at an interactive
display that featured video and audio he recorded over several days before he died.
"Nothing could prepare me for what I was going to witness when I saw it," Matt Asner, theactor's son, told Axios. The "Lou Grant" actor had used StoryFile to record an oral history; theproduct then employs AI to enable "conversations" based on subjects' answers to myriad
questions. At Asner's memorial, "many people just stopped by and asked a question or a couplequestions," including Jason Alexander of "Seinfeld" fame, said Matt Asner, a TV and movieproducer who now runs the Ed Asner Family Center, a nonprofit for people with special needs.
"Actually, you can't just ask one question," Alexander observed. "That's the great thing about it,is it draws you in — because the personality is there." Ed Asner, a former head of the ScreenActors Guild, had "covered everything — his childhood, work history, political history, family
life," his son said. While a few mourners were "a little creeped out by it," the conversationalvideo was "like having him in the room," Matt Asner said. "The great majority of people werejust blown away by it."

StoryFile is perhaps the most robust of a growing number of tools that helppeople create interactive digital memories of relatives. Many of them don't require the relative tobe alive during setup.
Amazon recently showed off an experimental Alexa feature that can read books aloud in thevoice of a late relative, extrapolating from a snippet of that person's recorded voice.MyHeritage,the ancestry-tracing site, now offers "Deep Nostalgia," a tool for animating old-timey
photographs of your relatives.HereAfterAI lets you record stories about yourself and pair themwith photographs — so family members can ask you about your life and experiences. Microsofthas obtained a patent to create "chatbots" that mimic individual people (dead or alive) based ontheir social media posts and text messages, per the Washington Post.

: With StoryFile, a user sits for a video interview and answers a series ofquestions. The company produces an archive that can be watched sequentially or used in a Q&Aformat. When a question is asked, the AI technology retrieves relevant video content to create an
answer, picking out clips from the available footage. The company was co-founded by oralhistorian Stephen Smith, who used to run Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation and specializesin preserving the memories of Holocaust survivors.
"In its most optimal state, the idea of StoryFile is you should be able to speak to anyone,anytime, anywhere that you wouldn’t normally have access to," Smith tells Axios."Maybe you don’t have access to grandma because she’s passed away, but you can still learn herstory, feel a sense of connection to her." StoryFile is also building an archive of public figureswho have sat for interviews. (Try asking a question of very-much-alive William Shatner.)

: These types of programs are already growing familiar through deepfakes,science fiction, and rock concerts that use holograms to bring back dead performers like BuddyHolly. In the Netflix series "Black Mirror," a woman converses with a chatbot version of her latefiancé — and a grieving Canadian man did something similar with his dead girlfriend in real life,the San Fransisco Chronicle reports.

Carrie Fisher being brought back to life as Princess Leia; chef AnthonyBourdain's AI voice being used to narrate a posthumous documentary about himself.

"When we learn about some very sophisticated use of AI to copy a realperson, such as in the documentary about Anthony Bourdain, we tend to extrapolate from thatsituation that AI is much better than it really is," said Amit Roy-Chowdhury, who chairs the
robotics department at the University of California, Riverside. "They were only able to do thatwith Bourdain because there are so many recordings of him in a variety of situations." "In the future, we will probably be able to design AI that responds in a human-like way to new
situations, but we don’t know how long this will take."

These kinds of memory-preservation programs "might change the way wecollect history," as Smith put it. "We all have amazing stories to tell, and one of the bigdiscoveries I’ve had in founding this company is how few of us truly understand the importance
of our own story," he said. "We’re quite self-deprecating.

Ever pause to wonder about the Nicene Creed? What do we actually believe? Our author for this week explores her belief in relation to the creed, starting with these two words: "We believe."
I am interested to hear about what you think and believe.

Believe it or not: My Struggles with the Creed
Amy Frykholm, Christian Century 1.26.15
Long before I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church, I told my priest that I had no problemswith the Nicene Creed except for those two little words at the beginning, “We believe.” I lovedreciting “God from God, light from light, true God from true God.” I liked saying “one, holy,
catholic, and apostolic church” because that claim seems to fly in the face of all ourdisagreements and declare an impossible but longed-for unity. I joined the church I did becauseof its connection to historical Christianity, but also because it was drawn together less bytheological doctrine than by the worship tradition of the Book of Common Prayer. I felt thechurch would challenge and root me, but also offer freedom.
Yet I have struggled to make sense of the words “we believe.” When the congregation reachesthe point of reciting the creed, I am reminded of the moment in a dance concert where thedancing stops and the director steps out on the stage to explain what the audience isexperiencing. The people may or may not care to have their experience explained.
Many liturgists have argued against reciting the creed during the liturgy for just this reason.Gordon Lathrop quotes a German Lutheran, C. W. Mönnich, who argues that the creed belongsin the celebration of baptism but not in the usual Sunday liturgy, where it too easily becomes “a
sort of shibboleth of stagnant orthodoxy.”
In her bookTake This Bread, Sara Miles says she was astonished to discover that mostEpiscopalians say the creed every Sunday. That wasn’t the practice at her parish, St. Gregory ofNyssa in San Francisco. Her friend Paul Fromberg, the priest at St. Gregory, described the creedas a “toxic document” intended to police heresies. Miles found the experience of reciting thecreed something like “saying the Pledge of Allegiance in the third grade.”
I have not exactly found the creed toxic, but it does give me pause. The minute the congregationstarts reciting the creed, I either start arguing with it in my head, parsing individual phrases andwondering if I do in fact “believe” them, or I zone out and stop listening. In an otherwise full-bodied liturgical experience, the creed is a blank spot for me.
I wondered if Miles had come to any new conclusions about the creed or about the recitation ofspecific beliefs. “What do you make of belief as a part of the Christian faith?” I asked her.“Belief,” she answered, “is the least interesting part of faith. I can believe all kinds of stuff, whatever I choose—but what I believe isn’t the point. The point is to live in a relationship withGod that’s not controlled by my own ideas. Faith is about putting my heart and my trust—mywhole life—in God. Christianity is at heart about relationship—and the nature of my faith restsin relationship rather than belief.” That makes sense: belief is just one part, perhaps a small part,of Christianity.
Still, the belief part puzzles me. I keep wondering if other people are doing something when theyrecite the creed—making some kind of internal movement of consent or aligning their hearts andminds around these words—that I am unable to do.
What exactly is belief, anyway? The more I pondered it, the less I understood it.
Andrew Newberg, a medical doctor, neuroscientist, and author ofWhy We Believe What WeBelieve, says that beliefs are connections between different neurons in the brain. Beliefs havemany different origins: cognitive, emotional, social. And they are maintained, in part, byrepetition.
Newberg defines belief as “any perception, cognition, emotion, or memory that you consciouslyor unconsciously assume to be true.” Conscious and unconscious beliefs are woven into everyword we speak and every action we take. Neurologically speaking, no one can make the choicenot to believe. Not to believe anything would land us in a vegetative state in which neurons stopconnecting with one another.
The implication for religion is significant, especially for someone raised in a particular religionas I was. “Religions are so effective in instilling certain sorts of beliefs [because of] the repetitivenature of the stories, the repetitive readings and prayers,” says Newberg. “The more you focus ona particular concept, the more you come back to it, the more those neural connections strengthenand form in your brain. And that becomes the way in which you see the world and the way inwhich you believe the world works.”
Beliefs are formed, according to Newberg, in part through the workings of dopamine, a pleasurechemical in the brain. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter—it helps neurons find other neurons. Itmakes connections. The more pleasure we have in a particular experience that is accompanied bya certain belief, the more likely we are to develop that set of connections and beliefs.
This explains why changing one’s beliefs can be very difficult. Newberg says, “Neurochemicalsand neurons firing in particular ways make it difficult to break beliefs. Whenever someonecomes up with information or data that is contrary to our beliefs, the usual first reaction is to
dismiss it either cognitively or emotionally. We gravitate toward information or data that supportour beliefs. That’s why conservatives watch Fox News and liberals watch MSNBC.”
Newberg’s account does a much better job explaining belief than explaining my struggle withbelief. If Newberg is right, shouldn’t all of these years of repeating the creed in church havereinforced the creed-related neurons and created a believing brain in me? What seems to be
happening instead is that reciting the creed reinforces doubt. I recite the creed and I doubt it atthe same moment. The creed asks for conscious assent. When I recite the creed, I am implicitlysaying yes to something very specific. And yet I find myself also saying, “no,” “maybe,” and “itdepends.” The creed makes a demand, and that conscious demand makes me uncomfortable.
The creeds were written to try to bring order to a diversity of belief and opinion. They were theresult of great battles of the meanings and interpretations of experience, scripture, and tradition.They helped to create a church of great beauty, but the makers also created lists of people toanathematize. They delineated heresies, perhaps because it helped them grasp Truth. But theydidn’t live in my world, where I go for a jog with a Buddhist-Jew at six o’clock in the morning,have breakfast with my agnostic husband, converse with my Muslim friends over e-mail, talk toa Benedictine spiritual director, and plan a trip to visit a santuario in rural Mexico.
InChristianity After Religion, Diana Butler Bass writes that modern Christians have imaginedthat belief must come first in Christian identity. First I believe, then I enter a community of faith.She proposes that the reverse of this is more meaningful for contemporary people. First I enterthe community, then I engage its practices, finally I come to belief.
But can belief and belonging be teased apart like this? Do not truth claims come together withidentity claims? When I believe, I belong. When I belong, I believe. We set out on the risky pathof faith together, learning to trust together, learning to find one another amidst the questions.
In this understanding, the emphasis in my recitation is on the “we” of the “we believe.” Even if Ican make no sense of the “believe” part, I can claim the “we” and allow the community tobelieve along with me or even for me. “We believe” is something we do collectively, not individually. I commit to this community and to its worldview, which I gradually understandover time.
For me, the ongoing challenge is to continue in conversation with the creed, to wrestle with boththe “we” and the “believe.” Two mistakes seem possible. One is to stop saying the creed, and soforsake the challenge it presents and the claims it makes on me. The other is to let the creedreplace my longing for all that it does not and cannot say.
Butler Bass points out that the English word believe comes frombelieben, which is from theGerman word for love. Instead of referring to something like “an opinion one holds to be true,”beliebenrefers to something treasured or held to be beloved. What one believes is what has beeninvested with one’s love. If we were to stand up and say, “We be-love God the Father almighty,maker of heaven and earth,” we might inch closer to an understanding of my own way ofbelieving.

Welcome to the Comfort Station! All Angels has converted into a zone-of-comfortfor LBK residents seeking hot coffee, air conditioning and a way to recharge their cell phone batteries (literally) and their own batteries, too (figuratively speaking). At the same time, we're going to have our Tuesday and Wednesday discussiongroups. At this point, we've had more than ten people through our doors so who knows who is going to show up tomorrow. You might even see one of your neighbors.
The topic of discussion will be Hurricane Ian. We will do a check-in to see where everyone is, we can then talk about the sermon from yesterday - I feel like dancing and crying - and the attached article. Here is the link to Sunday's service:
All Angels Sunday Service, October 2
One major concern of mine is complacency. Since we were spared, or because we were lucky, I am concerned that residents will not take the next hurricane warning and evacuation orders seriously. This article talks frankly about evacuations, what it takes to move 2.5 million people, and who gets left behind.
On page four, I included a short WSJ article for fun. It's called the Waffle House Index and it can, more or less, predict the size and severity of a hurricane by how many Waffle House restaurants are open or closed. We hit the magic number of 21 which means it's a super-bad hurricane. The article also proved what many believe to be true - FEMA uses the Waffle House Index.

Escaping Hurricane Ian
Caroline Mimbs Nyce, The Atlantic, 9.30.22 (The Day After)
This week, Ian slammed into southwestern Florida as a Category 4 (almost 5) hurricane. Thestate is still very much in the process of assessing the damage: Emergency teams have rescuedhundreds of stranded people, while some 1.9 million people remain without power. Officials
have identified as many as 21 dead [it is now 88], and that number may still rise.
Ahead of the storm’s landfall, Florida officials ordered the evacuation of about 2.5 millionpeople. Xilei Zhao, an evacuations researcher, was not one of them. In her role as a professor inthe Department of Civil and Coastal Engineering at the University of Florida, she studies and
models people’s behavior during disasters.
I caught up with Zhao by phone to discuss Hurricane Ian and how the science of evacuations isresponding to the threat of bigger storms and wildfires.
Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Caroline Mimbs Nyce:For starters, how are things in Gainesville?
Xilei Zhao: To be honest, there’s nothing happening here in Gainesville. We didn’t even getmuch rain over here. In the beginning, it seemed like the hurricane would go through Tampa,even Tallahassee. Florida State University had already canceled all classes since Tuesday.
However, the hurricane hit Fort Myers and Naples, which are farther south. I think that’s veryunfortunate. People in that area were not well prepared, because of the initial forecasting of thehurricane’s trajectory. People in Tampa were the first ordered to evacuate, but the landfall wasactually in the Fort Myers region.
Nyce:What was it like for you to see the evacuation orders go out for 2.5 million people?
Zhao: I mean, I think that’s tremendous. The Tampa people had more time. They received theorders earlier. There was definitely a lot of congestion going on. The Florida Department ofTransportation actually also opened the shoulder lane from Tampa to Orlando.
Nyce:How much time do people normally need to evacuate?
Zhao: It depends. It depends on how many people are getting on the road within what timeframe. When several million people get on the road around the same time, it’s very hard to get allof them out in a timely fashion.
Nyce:Talk to me a little bit about what a successful disaster evacuation looks like.
Zhao: This is a very big and complicated topic. A lot depends on how orders and warnings areissued based on the forecasting of the hurricane trajectory, and the preparedness of thecommunity. In super-prepared communities, as soon as they hear the orders, they will leave
immediately, and everyone will work together.
I read that some people in Tampa were ordered to evacuate but couldn’t afford it, which is veryunfortunate. One family thought that if all of them evacuated, they’d need to spend at least$1,000 per day. They just don’t have the money to evacuate.
Nyce:Are there things that we could do to better help communities like that get out in time?
Zhao: Definitely. For example, I saw a lot of shelters were open during evacuation. They areproviding the resources needed for those folks that don’t know where to go or can’t afford hotels.Elderly people, especially people who have mobility impairment, may rely on public transit orparatransit assistance during evacuations.
Nyce:Do you think Florida and that southwest region were prepared for a storm like this?
Zhao: I think so. Everyone knows there is a high risk; we are going to get major hurricanessooner or later. So a lot of cities and counties, they have their evacuation plans, they have theirzones, and they also have training, perhaps every year. And they have a lot of protocols in place.
If I remember correctly, Jacksonville has one of the best preparedness plans for things like this.As you know, I’m working on wildfire evacuations. I saw Sonoma County is learning directlyfrom Jacksonville to develop its wildfire-evacuation plan.
Nyce:I know with wildfires, they talk about the time it takes to persuade someone to evacuateand the time of notification. Is it the same with hurricanes, where you have to convince someonethat it’s really happening and they need to go now?
Zhao: The research on this area is actually happening first in hurricanes. Because with ahurricane, you don’t see any environmental cues. It’s just people telling you that the hurricane iscoming. So some people have doubts. One interesting point that I want to study is about the new
residents. In the past several years, so many people have moved to Florida. Many of them havenever experienced hurricanes before. So this would be the first major event that impacts them.They are going to make decisions differently than the residents in the state who have a lot of
experience.
Nyce:If it’s their first time, could they maybe be slower to jump on it?
Zhao: Yeah, I think so. Previous research showed that people who have shorter lengths ofresidency in Florida—those without prior hurricane experience—have more doubt. So that maydelay their decision-making process. But other research also found that more experienced people,
because they have had false alarms in the past, may have more doubt. So it’s hard to say.
One thing I want to add, in terms of the evacuations: Yesterday morning, I saw news channelssaying, “It’s too late to evacuate now. Just stay sheltered. Stay safe inside,” or something likethat. So it seems like at least some people were trying to evacuate yesterday morning. So there
was definitely some delayed evacuation happening during that time frame. But we just don’tknow all that much yet.
Nyce:What’s your biggest worry right now?
Zhao: A lot of senior people live over there in Fort Myers and Naples. Did they get out quicklyand successfully? How can they recover from significant damage? Especially those folks whohave limited ability or who are disabled. It worries me a lot.
They need medicine. They need mobility assistance. They are relying on, for example, theparatransit system. How can the federal government or state government help them quickly?
We’ve seen so much damage over the years that transit or electricity may not come back quickly.
How can people survive a long recovery period? It’s very worrisome.
Nyce:I know this is one of your specialties: How might we use big data to better prepare forsomething like Hurricane Ian?
Zhao: In the past, when we were trying to understand people’s evacuation behavior, we usuallyused surveys. We’d survey people and get a couple hundred responses to build some models.However, there are a lot of things we don’t know with the surveys.
With GPS data generated from apps, cellphones, or smartwatches, we can know how people aremaking decisions on a highly granular level. We know not only when they make the decision toleave and where they go, but when they come back. We also will be able to analyze people’sactivity levels in those regions to essentially help us approximate the economic recovery after adisaster.
Nyce:How have data changed our perception of how people evacuate?
Zhao: I personally haven’t done any GPS-data analysis for hurricanes yet—I mainly work onGPS-data analytics for wildfires. But in the past, we always assumed people take the shortestpath to their destination. However, the GPS data suggests that a lot of people are choosing local
roads to try to avoid congestion.
Nyce:That’s huge.
Zhao: We are also seeing something called self-evacuees or shadow evacuees—essentially, thepeople who are not ordered to evacuate but evacuate anyway. That’s considered bad, especiallyfor hurricane evacuations, because if you are on the road, you are contributing to more
congestion.
Nyce:Is there anything else big-picture you’re thinking about in light of Hurricane Ian?
Zhao: There’s a concept called “digital twin.” Essentially, it’s like a virtual city. It’s like a virtualreplica of the real world that we are trying to merge all different types of data, especially real-time data, into in order to assist real-time decision making.
With technologies like 5G, cloud computing, and edge computing in place, we should be able toachieve a digital twin of the physical—at least the physical infrastructure—of the entire state, sothat we can make better decisions in emergencies like this.
Nyce:Does it feel like, in general, evacuations are becoming more common because of the wayclimate change is potentially making hurricanes and fires bigger?
Zhao: A lot of people are arguing that we need to have better zoning policy, because a lot ofpeople are moving south—moving to Florida, for example. More and more people are moving tothe floodplain, moving to the coastal cities that have more vulnerability and a higher risk of
getting hit by a hurricane.
It’s similar to the wildfire situation. A lot of people are moving to the wildland-urban interface,which has a higher risk of wildfires. So many people are moving into these vulnerable high-riskareas that evacuation becomes much more challenging. We need more study and more researchin this area to help us understand what’s a better way to evacuate, especially while facing moresevere storms and more frequent wildfires in the country.

Waffle House Index, Hurricane Ian
Jennifer Calfas, WSJ 9.25.22 (Day of the Storm)
Waffle House closed 21 locations along the Florida coast ahead of Hurricane Ian—an indicatorfor some of the storm’s severity.
The 24-hour restaurant closed locations along the anticipated path of the hurricane fromBradenton to Naples, said Njeri Boss, vice president of public relations at Waffle House Inc.
Federal emergency officials have warned the storm could cause life-threatening storm surge,heavy rainfall and destructive winds.
“The safety of our employees, their families and our customers remain a high priority as weawait Hurricane Ian’s landfall,” Ms. Boss said in a statement. Waffle House has more than 1,900locations in 25 states including Florida and along the Gulf Coast, which are often affected by
hurricanes.
Some emergency officials have relied on Waffle House closures as an informal indicator for justhow destructive a storm could be.
“If you get there and the Waffle House is closed?” Craig Fugate, the former administrator of theFederal Emergency Management Agency, has said. “That's really bad. That's where you go towork.”
The Waffle House closures this week join those across Florida schools, airports and Walt DisneyWorld, where officials have temporarily canceled classes, flights and theme-park visits due to thehistoric storm.
The restaurant chain has historically sought to open quickly after disaster strikes, with plans onhow to do so without electricity, for example.

​It is said that Queen Elizabeth has altered the course and direction of the Commonwealth and the world. Her reign will be talked about in 1,000 years from now as an example on how to lead with virtue.
None of us will be around to see if this comes true, but, virtues are a great topic for us to discuss. The article for next week, from the WSJ, contrasts modern values against the traditional virtues that the Queen Mother exhibited.
I'd like to know if the author successfullymade his argument; specifically, if the values of today are as shifting and baseless as he claims and, as such, was Queen Elizabeth's life countercultural? (There is a surprise rebuke against the Church in this piece; which, on its own merit, is enough to discuss).

The Countercultural Queen
Daniel Henninger, WSJ 9.14.22
Within the hour of her death, Queen Elizabeth II was praised by commentators from left to rightfor representing so many traditional values. Reserve, self-containment, duty, responsibility,modesty of demeanor, graciousness, civility, prudence, fortitude.
For a moment I thought I was back in St. Margaret Mary grade school memorizing the usefulvirtues from the Baltimore Catechism: “The seven gifts of the Holy Ghost are wisdom,understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and fear of the Lord.” Counsel, as the youngElizabeth surely learned, is “advice, which guides us in practical matters.”
What is most notable is that this instant outpouring of media praise for the queen’s traditional virtues comes amid a contemporary culture that elevates daily, even hourly, a value system ofself-regard, self-promotion, changeability, acting out and anything-goes behavior that is the polaropposite of Queen Elizabeth’s.
The celebration of the queen’s traditional values suggests an unexpected recognition of theextreme artificiality of our now-dominant culture.
“Influencer” is the defining word for our times. An influencer’s success depends one thing: self-promotion accomplished by rising in the hot-air balloons of Instagram, TikTok and other socialmedia. The goal is to marry marketing with fame. Because influencers do it, millions of others,often young women, make preoccupation with themselves the one habit that directs their lives. Aculture of self-aggrandizement, though, is only one half of the shift in values revealed by thecelebration of the queen’s life.
To say that the queen’s values were traditional means they existed for a very long time. Thepoised 14-year-old Elizabeth we heard in news clips reading her first public speech to childrenduring the Blitz of World War II had by then been taught personal virtues held in high regard forcenturies in the West and arguably longer in the East.
In our time, however, personal virtue has been demoted by social virtue.
The week’s recollections of what made the queen’s life exceptional are an opportunity tocompare the merits of virtue earned individually with virtue, or approved behavior, constructedby society.
One effect of giving social responsibility more weight than personal responsibility is that it givespeople a pass on their personal behavior. So long as one’s life is “centered” on some larger socialgood, the conduct of one’s personal life is, well, irrelevant.
Consider this: a difficulty with the theory of decriminalization is that it diminishes almost tonothing responsibility for one’s bad acts, such as shoplifting. Behavior unhinged from norms ofany sort is rampant now.
The queen’s habits were a source of personal stability. Modern values are a source of instability.The habits of behavior associated with her are not about mere goodness but about creating astructure of life inside of which one then can perform successfully as a person, hopefully for thegood. She did that for her country for 70 years.
One cannot discuss what has happened to the culture in the queen’s lifetime without consideringthe changed role of the churches. Gaining momentum, I’d say, with their embrace of the nuclear-disarmament movement in the 1980s, the churches turned most of their energies to teaching thatthe embrace of broad social goals is the first determinant of a moral life. That won’t change, butmaybe it’s time they reset the weekly balance between social-justice homilies and a rediscoveryof personal virtues like the queen’s, which they once taught so well.
Public schools, where children spend six hours of each of their weekdays, were long consideredan invaluable reinforcement of personal self-discipline and character. They also abandoned thatrole to propagandize instead for politicized values. This shift is one reason so many parentsmigrated to charters, school-choice programs and home-schooling.
One has to wonder: Is the praise for the queen’s old-school virtues little more than this week’stalking points, or do her media admirers recognize that something about what we promote now— self-regard, social moralizing — has gone badly off the tracks?
Perhaps this will fade with the queen’s funeral Monday.
We’d be better off if a longer reconsideration of what made Queen Elizabeth’s life exemplarybecame part of the post-pandemic reckoning that is changing so much else about the status quo.

​The topic for this week is to discuss what is happeningin the greater Church - specifically the evangelical side of the House.

​How Politics Poisoned the Evangelical Church
Tim Alberta, The Atlantic 5.10.22
The movement spent 40 years at war with secular America. Now it’s at war with itself.
Having grown up as the son of a senior pastor, I’ve spent my life watching evangelicalism morphfrom a spiritual disposition into a political identity. It’s heartbreaking. So many people who lovethe Lord, who give their time and money to the poor and the mourning and the persecuted, havebeen reduced to a caricature. But I understand why. Evangelicals—including my own father—became compulsively political, allowing specific ethical arguments to snowball into full-blownpartisan advocacy, often in ways that distracted from their mission of evangelizing for Christ. Tohis credit, even when my dad would lean hard into a political debate, he was careful to remindhis church of the appropriate Christian perspective. “God doesn’t bite his fingernails over any ofthis,” he would say around election time. “Neither should you.”
Brighton, Michigan is a small town, and I knew the local evangelical scene like it was a secondreporting beat. I knew which pastors were feuding; whose congregations were mired in scandal;which church softball teams had a deacon playing shortstop, and which ones stacked theirlineups with non-tithing ringers. But FloodGate Church? I had never heard of FloodGate. Andneither had most of the people sitting around me, until recently.
For a decade, Pastor Bolin preached to a crowd of about 100 on a typical Sunday. Then cameEaster 2020, when Bolin announced that he would hold indoor worship services in defiance ofMichigan’s emergency shutdown orders. As word got around the conservative suburbs of
Detroit, Bolin became a minor celebrity. Local politicians and activists borrowed his pulpit.FloodGate’s attendance soared as members of other congregations defected to the small roadsidechurch. By Easter 2021, FloodGate was hosting 1,500 people every weekend.
Listening to Bolin that morning, I kept thinking about another pastor nearby, one whoapproached his job very differently: Ken Brown. Brown leads his own ministry, CommunityBible Church, in the Detroit suburb of Trenton. I got to know him during the 2020 presidentialcampaign. Brown wrote to me explaining the combustible dynamics within the evangelicalChurch and describing his own efforts—as the conservative pastor of a conservativecongregation—to keep his members from being radicalized by the lies of media figures.
When we finally met, in the spring of 2021, Brown told me his alarm had only grown. “Thecrisis for the Church is a crisis of discernment,” he said over lunch. “Discernment” (one’s basicability to separate truth from untruth) “is a core biblical discipline. And many Christians are not
practicing it.” A stocky man with steely blue eyes and a subdued, matter-of-fact tone, Brownstruck me as thoroughly disheartened. The pastor said his concern was not simply for hiscongregation of 300, but for the millions of American evangelicals who had come to value power
over integrity, the ephemeral over the eternal, moral relativism over bright lines of right andwrong. He made a compelling case.
But in leading their predominantly white, Republican congregations, Brown and Bolin havecome to agree on one important thing: Both pastors believe there is a war for the soul of theAmerican Church—and both have decided they cannot stand on the sidelines. They aren’t alone.To many evangelicals today, the enemy is no longer secular America, but their fellow Christians,people who hold the same faith but different beliefs.
How did this happen? For generations, white evangelicals have cultivated a narrative pittingcourageous, God-fearing Christians against a wicked society that wants to expunge the Almightyfrom public life. Having convinced so many evangelicals that the next election could trigger thenation’s demise, Christian leaders effectively turned thousands of churches into looselyorganized, hazily defined, existentially urgent movement — the types of places where paranoiaand falsehoods flourish and people turn on one another. “Hands down, the biggest challengefacing the Church right now is the misinformation and disinformation coming in from theoutside,” Brown said.
Because of this, the pastor told me, he can no longer justify a passive approach from the pulpit.The Church is becoming radicalized—and pastors who don’t address this fact head-on are onlycontributing to the problem. He understands their reluctance. They would rather keep the peacethan risk alienating anyone. The irony, Brown said, is that by pretending that a clash of Christianworldviews isn’t happening, these pastors risk losing credibility with members who can see itunfolding inside their own church.
If this is a tale of two churches, it is also the tale of churches everywhere. It’s the story ofmillions of American Christians who, after a lifetime spent considering their political affiliationsin the context of their faith, are now considering their faith affiliations in the context of theirpolitics.
The first piece of scripture I memorized as a child is from Paul’s second letter to the earlyChurch in Corinth, Greece. As with most of his letters, the apostle was addressing dysfunctionand breakage in the community of believers. “We fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is
unseen,” Paul wrote. “Since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” Paul’sadmonishment of the early Church contains no real ambiguity. Followers of Jesus are to orientthemselves toward his enduring promise of salvation, and away from the fleeting troubles of
humanity.
The nation’s largest denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, is bleeding membersbecause of ferocious infighting over race relations, women serving in leadership, accountabilityfor sexual misconduct, and other issues. The United Methodist Church, America’s second-largest
denomination, is headed toward imminent divorce over irreconcilable social and ideologicaldivisions. Smaller denominations are losing affiliate churches as pastors and congregations breakfrom their leadership over many of the same cultural flash points, choosing independence overassociating with those who do not hold their views.
Christianity has traditionally been seen as a stabilizing, even moderating, influence on Americanlife. In 1975, more than two-thirds of Americans expressed “a great deal or quite a lot ofconfidence in the church,” according to Gallup, and as of 1985, “organized religion was the mostrevered institution” in American life. Today, Gallup reports, just 37 percent of Americans haveconfidence in the Church. This downward spiral owes principally to two phenomena: theconstant stench of scandal, with megachurches and prominent leaders imploding on what seemslike a weekly basis; and the growing perception that Christians are embracing extremist views.
Meanwhile, other pastors feel trapped. One stray remark could split their congregation, or evencost them their job. Yet a strictly apolitical approach can be counterproductive; theirunwillingness to engage only invites more scrutiny. The whisper campaigns brand conservative
pastors as moderate, and moderate pastors as Marxists. In this environment, a church leader’sstance on biblical inerrancy is less important than whether he is considered “woke.” Hiscommand of scripture is less relevant than suspicions about how he voted in the last election.
More than a few times, I’ve heard casual talk of civil war inside places that purport to worshipthe Prince of Peace. If this all sounds a bit strange—ominous, or even “dangerous,” as one localpastor warned me the night before I visited—well, sure. But strange compared to what? Having spent my entire life in and around the evangelical Church, I had in recent years becomedesensitized to all the rhetoric of militarism and imminent Armageddon.
In a sense, Christians have always lived a different epistemological existence than nonbelievers.But this is something new. But what is left to hold together? When I visited, Aldersgate church—an elegant structure with room for 500 in the sanctuary—was hosting maybe 150 people totalacross two Sunday services. Pastor Bingham is proud to say that he hasn’t driven anyone awaywith his political views. Still, membership has been in decline for years, in part because so manyChristians today gravitate toward the places that are outspokenly aligned with their extra-biblicalbeliefs. For all their talk of keeping Aldersgate unified, the two pastors acknowledged that in afew years’ time, they would belong to different churches. The same went for their members.
When I met with some of the longest-tenured laypeople of the church, almost everyone indicatedthat when the UMC divorce was finalized, they would follow the church that reflected theirpolitical views. It didn’t matter that doing so meant, in some cases, walking away from the
church they’d attended for decades.
“What’s coming is going to be brutal. There’s no way around that,” Bingham told me. “Churchesare breaking apart everywhere. My only hope is that, when the time comes, our people canseparate without shattering.” Ken Brown knows plenty of pastors like Bingham, who refuse to
talk about the very things tearing their churches apart. He knows they have their reasons. Somedon’t know what to say. Others fear that speaking up would only make matters worse. Almosteveryone is concerned about job security. Pastors are not immune from anxiety over theirmortgage or kids’ college tuitions; many younger clergy members, in particular, worry that theyhaven’t amassed enough goodwill to get argumentative with their congregation.
Bolin tells me the church has sold the building we’re sitting in—where the congregation has metsince the 1970s—and purchased a sprawling complex down the road. The pastor saysFloodGate’s revenue has multiplied six-fold since 2020. It is charging ahead into an era ofexpansion, with ambitions of becoming southeast Michigan’s next megachurch.
Bolin says FloodGate and churches like it have grown in direct proportion to how manyChristians “felt betrayed by their pastors.” That trend looks to be holding steady. More peoplewill leave churches that refuse to identify with a tribe and will find pastors who confirm theirown partisan views. The erosion of confidence in the institution of American Christianity willaccelerate. The caricature of evangelicals will get uglier. And the actual work of evangelizingwill get much, much harder.
God isn’t biting his fingernails. But I sure am

Ever wonder why bankruptcy says on one's credit report for seven years? Why not five or nine? There is a Biblical principle of the Year of Jubilee where one's debts are wiped out after 7 years.
The discussion topic for next week ties in debt and shame in an interesting, if not controversial, way. Throw in some Biblical understanding of both and, well, it will be an interesting discussion.

Debtors, Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose but Your Shame
Astra Taylor, NY Times 9.6.22
Conversations about debt are never purely about economics. They are always, also,conversations about power, morality and shame. The debate over President Biden’s student loanrelief plan is no exception.
Immediately after the initiative was announced, opponents of debt cancellation begandenouncing “slacker baristas,” overeducated Ivy League lawyers and impractical “lesbian dancetheory” majors. Immune to accusations of hypocrisy, Republican members of Congress who hadreceived hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars in federal relief castigated student
debtors who might receive $10,000 to $20,000 in aid.
It was a stark reminder that shame, like wealth, is not evenly distributed in our society. Forworking-class people, insolvency is often seen as a sign of profligacy and personalirresponsibility, while large corporations and the wealthy routinely walk away from theirobligations and are celebrated as savvy for doing so. Debts are, first and foremost, financialburdens. But most people in arrears must shoulder a boulder of shame, as well. This is the factormost commentary about Mr. Biden’s student debt relief plan has missed.
The mass cancellation of federal student loans will not only remove a crushing economic weightfor tens of millions of people, it will lift a significant emotional one, too. This psychological shiftcould, in turn, have further political implications, by emboldening those who find their
obligations overwhelming to engage in collective action aimed at winning more relief andchanging the policies that make indebtedness so pervasive.
To understand what a pivotal moment this is, we must first appreciate just how profoundly themoral decks are usually stacked against regular debtors. Even the seemingly innocuous phrase“loan forgiveness” implies culpability and blame, when in reality the majority of debtors are
simply struggling to make ends meet — a problem likely to be most acute for Black and brownpeople, who tend to lack family wealth and access to credit on fair terms.
Why is our society so invested in steeping debtors in shame? The answer lies in debt’s role as acore building block of our economy and unequal social order. Debt is wrapped around everynecessity of life: We use credit to make daily purchases and pay for medical care, take outmortgages, finance our cars, and borrow for college; cities and states issue debt to pay for roadsand schools. Monthly repayments are often a form of wealth transfer to the affluent investorswho hold these debts as assets, fueling inequality.
If debt is a dual source of profit and power, shame is its handmaiden. Shame isolates and divides,making class solidarity more difficult. The kneejerk anger at the idea of student debt cancellationin some circles, while ostensibly about fairness, reflects the common though misguided view thatwhen one persons gains, another loses. Imagining a zero-sum game, some ask why student loanswere eliminated and not, say, medical debt — a reasonable question. But medical debt, too,should be erased, as a way to ease the unjust financial hardship that getting hurt or sick oftenentails. For example, Mr. Biden could, and should, take executive action to cancel all medicaldebt owed to veterans hospitals.
Meanwhile, the fever pitch of opposition to debt cancellation among conservative and centristelites reflects a different fear: that debt’s utility as an instrument of social control may beweakening. Consider the reaction of Representative Jim Banks, Republican of Indiana, to Mr.
Biden’s cancellation news: “Student loan forgiveness undermines one of our military’s greatestrecruitment tools at a time of dangerously low enlistments.” Student debt, or the fear of it, pushespeople into certain careers and limits their life choices.
No wonder soaring student debt became a catalyst for protest, though only after borrowers beganto overcome their shame. Under pressure from a growing coalition that traces its origins directlyto the Occupy Wall Street movement a decade ago, Mr. Biden was forced to act — an outcomethat is all the more remarkable given his previous allegiances. When he was a senator fromDelaware, which is home to the nation’s biggest issuers of credit cards, Mr. Biden tended to sidewith lenders over debtors. He was a driving force behind the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Preventionand Consumer Protection Act, which made it harder for distressed borrowers to discharge theirstudent loans. Now, Mr. Biden appears to be switching sides in time for the midterm elections.
Tweeting moving stories from people eligible to receive loan cancellation, he seemed as thoughhe were hosting a debtors’ assembly — an Occupy-inspired forum where people share theirfinancial tribulations out loud, thus transforming burdens of shame into bonds of empowerment— in the Oval Office.
The president’s actions are certainly a break with the political status quo, but they are notunprecedented. In his groundbreaking work on debt, my friend, the anthropologist DavidGraeber, reported on the periodic debt amnesties, or “jubilees,” of the ancient world. Seeking toquell unrest, Sumerian and Babylonian kings periodically wiped away debts and liberated peoplefrom peonage, often over the objections of creditors. The Code of Hammurabi, written around1750 B.C., proclaims that if a “storm wipes out the grain, or the harvest fails, or the grain doesnot grow for lack of water, in that year he need not give his creditor any grain in payment.” Forthese leaders, debt relief had little to do with the guilt of individual debtors. Jubilees were apractical way to recover from crises and avert societal collapse. Now, as then, inequality andinsolvency imperil economic and political stability. Wiping the slate restores balance.
Many of today’s debtors have more in common with unlucky Mesopotamian farmers, subject toforces beyond their control, than it may initially appear. In a society where the federal minimumwage is stuck at $7.25, public services are paltry, and racial and gender discrimination run
rampant, a majority of Americans have no choice but to borrow to make ends meet. Wherestudent loans are concerned, the steady erosion of state funding for higher education, and theresultant debt-for-degree system, is to blame, not individual borrowers.
Prominent critics of Mr. Biden’s plan have pointed out that granting relief this once will notpermanently solve the student debt crisis nor the attendant problem of rising college costs, andhere they are correct. The only permanent solution to the problem of runaway student debt is tomake public education free for all (a model that was relatively common in the United States afew generations ago, which is why so many older people graduated debt-free). Only then canstudents who lack wealth avoid indenturing themselves for the chance to learn.
Though I believe Mr. Biden’s plan is inadequate in terms of the monetary relief it offers, hisactions have already dealt a blow to debt’s symbolic, shame-inducing power. Everyone nowknows federal student loans can be canceled with the flick of a president’s pen. And instead offeeling guilty and unworthy, millions of regular people suddenly feel entitled to relief, anentitlement previously reserved only for society’s elites.
Hundreds of millions of people are not in debt because they are immoral and live beyond theirmeans, but because they are denied the means to live. Debt jubilees are part of righting thiswrong, but as Mr. Biden’s student debt relief plan shows, they won’t happen unless debtors riseup and demand them. The first step is abolishing the shame that makes us reluctant to fight forwhat we deserve.

For this week, we will discuss God and culture wars waged in God's name.

The God I Know is Not a Culture Warrior
Tish Harrison Warren, NY Times 8.14.22
Two Sundays ago, my church had a baptismal service. Baptisms at our church are a mixture ofsolemnity and unbridled glee, often full of laughter and tears of joy. Those who were beingbaptized or, in the case of infants, their parents, took vows to put their trust in God’s grace andlove and to renounce spiritual darkness, evil and “all sinful desires that draw” us from the love ofGod. After the baptism, the kids in our service ran forward, giggling, trying to get sprayed withthe baptismal water that our priest, Ryan, slung over the congregation as he called us to“remember your baptism.”
On that Sunday, Ryan invited anyone else who wanted to get baptized to let him know. To mysurprise, after the service ended and we were all mingling, two more people approached Ryanand asked if they could also get baptized. So after a short conversation with them, he hollered forthe congregation to regather and, then and there, two others joined our ranks through baptism.People cheered and applauded as they emerged from the water. I left that service feeling pensive,grateful and in awe of the beauty of God and human lives.
I have thought of that incandescent Sunday a lot the past couple of weeks because there is aperplexing difference between the way we celebrated God that morning and the way I typicallyhear God discussed online and in our broader cultural discourse.
The God of that baptismal service is one of joy, kindness and peace. The God I often hear aboutin American politics, in the news and on Twitter is one of cultural division and bickering. TheGod of that Sunday service seemed powerful and holy, yet gentle and beautiful. The God in ourcultural discourse seems impotent and irrelevant, a mostly sociological phenomenon related topolitical posturing and power plays.
In the news and on social media, God usually shows up when we are fighting about something.
The subject of faith seems most often discussed in conversations about voting patterns andcampaigning. God appears in our public discourse when Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene,a Georgia Republican, calls for Christian nationalism. Or in Twitter debates about whether acoach should publicly pray on the 50-yard line. Or when the former Georgia gubernatorialcandidate Kandiss Taylor painted “Jesus, guns, babies” on the side of her campaign bus.
It’s not that I think God has no place in politics or public discussions. Faith touches all areas oflife, and issues such as abortion, religious liberty and the relationship between church and stateare important. But when we primarily talk about God in the context of political or ideological
debate, believers’ actual experience of God, worship and faith — not to mention spiritual virtueslike humility, gratitude and kindness — often gets lost. God becomes merely another pawn in theculture wars, a means to a political end, a meme to own our opponents online or an accessorydonned like a power tie.
I mentioned my growing frustrations over how we discuss faith in public to my friend MichaelWear, who worked on faith-based initiatives under President Barack Obama. Drawing from thework of the Yale University professor Stephen Carter, Michael made a helpful distinction
between discussing faith publicly and “taking God’s name in vain” in politics. “It’s themanipulation that matters,” he told me. It’s the “disingenuousness of so much religious discoursein politics” that tends to cheapen our spiritual lives, beliefs and experiences.
There are no bright lines here. It’s not always clear when we are honestly explaining how ourheartfelt convictions play out in the public square and when we are “taking God’s name in vain.”Still, on the left, on the right and in my own life at times, I’ve witnessed a subtle shift where the
language of God is used to score points or to grandstand. I’ve seen God flattened into anamalgam of hot takes and personal branding, in ways that seem to track with the increasinglyperformative nature of politics writ large. Algorithms and mediums that reward shallowness,
rage and spectacle inevitably shape how we, as a culture and as individuals, discuss faith. Andthe ways we habitually hear God discussed inevitably shape who we understand God to be.
But how do we repair the damage done? What would truthful, humble and robust public religiousdiscourse look like?
For starters, we must speak proactively and vulnerably about our faith, instead of only in reactionto the latest hot-button issue. There are questions that haunt every human life: How does oneknow what is true and false, right or wrong? Is there a God? If there is, can we interact with him,her or it? If so, how? Can God speak to us? Can God say no to us? What are our obligations toGod and to other human beings? How can we have joy? How can we live well? How can we bewise?
Whether one thinks of oneself as religious or not, unprovable and value-laden assumptions abouttruth and meaning drive our lives, including our politics. Yet these often go unacknowledged.Engaging with the presuppositions and beliefs underneath the loudest cultural debates of ourmoment helps us more fully understand the crux of issues, our true points of disagreement andour common humanity.
Most people’s experience of faith is far more personal, rich, important and meaningful than canbe summed up in our political sparring. We must keep this in mind when writing on, debating ordiscussing religion and spirituality. Part of the purpose of this newsletter is to preserve space toexamine not only faith in public life but also how spiritual practices quietly mold us, ourcommunities and our days.
Churches and other religious groups must continually highlight how our traditions addresspressing issues that will never trend on Twitter or dominate political debates: problems likeloneliness, despair, conflict in families, disappointment, grief, longing, loss and those all-too-human anxieties and insecurities that keep us up at night.
On a more personal note, sometimes I have to retreat from larger media debates over politics andtheology to preserve the honest, tender and fragile heart of faith in my own life.
I often quote the fifth-century ascetic Diadochos of Photiki, who seems shockingly contemporaryin our time of smartphones and social media. “When the door of the steam baths is continuallyleft open, the heat inside rapidly escapes through it,” he wrote. “Likewise the soul, in its desire tosay many things, dissipates its remembrance of God through the door of speech.”
Sometimes, in order to retain a “remembrance of God,” I have to take a break from our societaldiscourse around faith, which can minimize who I imagine God to be. Practices like gatheredworship, silence, reading the Scriptures and prayer remind me that if God is real, there are farmore interesting, lasting and confounding things about God than what can be captured in our
public discourse.
The people who showed up to church two weeks ago and those who decided to be baptized thatday were after something. They were searching for beauty, for truth, for a reality greater than canbe summed up in words — or in voting patterns or in the antics of politicians. And the quest forthat greater reality must also inform how we talk about faith in public life.
​

For our discussion on Tuesday, the author of the topic,The Rot at the Core, Dennis "Mitch" Maley, will be joining the conversation via Zoom.
For the Women's Discussion Group - you are all invited Tuesdayfor this special event.We will still have the Women's Discussion Group on Wednesday; but, I wanted to make sure you had the opportunity to discuss the article with Mitch.

The Rot at the Core
Dennis “Mitch” Maley, The Bradenton Times 8.21.22
For the past couple of months, I’ve been deeply immersed in political race analyses followed bya much-needed vacation, which I spent helping my son drive his car across the country to LosAngeles. Road tripping through lower Americana while receiving regular updates on the state ofManatee County government made for an interesting perspective. As we head into Tuesday’selections, this seemed like a good time to reflect on all of it.
One of the most disturbing elements of barnstorming across the I-10 corridor was the realizationthat every state we drove through felt just as broken, divided, and in need of a reboot as home. Infact, the most surprising takeaway may have been that good old Flori-duh, might not be as bat-shxx crazy as I had imagined. Either that, or the entire South had finally caught up. Perhaps it’sthe climate. I’ve long held a theory that our brand of madness is largely owed to people ofEuropean ancestry putting down roots in a climate not suited for their blood, and the one thingthat was constant from coast to coast for the two weeks we were out was that it was blisteringlyhot everywhere.
The first stop was New Orleans, our long-time home away from home. In retrospect, it providedthe most comfort in terms of familiarity. Governed by a famously corrupt ruling class, theinfrastructure is still crumbling, potholes are still large enough to swallow compact cars, and
there are still more dangerous to downright deadly areas per square mile than any city not namedChicago. In other words, it has managed to maintain its downward trajectory, which is more thanI can say for most places over the past five to ten years. The jazz music still rings in the air, thefood culture is still the best in the United States, and, as long as you don’t get stabbed in the gutfor pocket change and your iPhone, you can have a good time at a reasonable expense.
Most of the rest of the long drive across God’s Country seemed to have maintained its balance ofold-fashioned (frighteningly) religious conservatism and run-of-the-mill, grease the skids anddivide up the pie, good-old-boy GOP politics that are only unique by way of the cowboy dresscode and empty idioms that sound more profound through a Texas drawl. Nonetheless, thebarbecue and margaritas remain unrivaled and I got to hear Marty Robbins’ El Paso at the oneand only Rosa’s Cantina, so I’d be lying if I were to say it wasn’t my favorite trip to the LoneStar State.
On the heels of an epic drought, monsoon rains chased us across Texas all the way to Phoenix,where we did get enough dry weather for an afternoon trip to Tombstone and the OK Corral,where, about a decade back, I’d first had a shot of Old Overholt at a saloon once owned by DocHoliday. Tombstone is remarkably well preserved and one of the few places where you canforget you are in the Divided States of America, at least until someone brings up politics.
Arizona on the whole, however, is deeply divided, and there were many stretches in which thebillboards reminded you that it was a state in which people were urged to choose a side andchoose wisely. The best part of the trip was losing cell phone service for the couple of days we
spent camping in Joshua Tree National Park. It’s surprising how much of your sanity can berecovered while unplugged from the machine with little more than some primitive camping gear,a cooler of cold ones, and some of the most stunningly-gorgeous natural scenery anywhere on
this big blue ball of mud.
By the third day, however, we were grateful for a hot shower and a cold pool in Palm Desert,where we stopped for a day before heading into Los Angeles for a week. When I was a youngboy, LA was little more than a dream. In eastern Pennsylvania, New York City seemed like areal place. After all, you knew people who’d actually been there, and it was close enough to getto that even desperate circ*mstances never made it feel as though it were out of reach. LosAngeles, on the other hand, might as well have been Mars.
I can still recall lying in my bed, falling asleep to dreams of seeing the place where all of myfavorite reran TV shows had been filmed. When I finally made my way out there in the late ‘90s,California did not fail to impress. I can vividly recall the majesty of the Queen Palms on the
Sunset Strip and the unrivaled views of the city lights from the Hollywood Hills, the spectacularscenes of cliffs abutting the ocean in Malibu, and the way it felt to see the famed Hollywood signup close.
Sadly, I’ve been visiting for nearly a quarter century, and it’s mostly been a slow decline into thesort of place in which the word hellscape doesn’t seem like hyperbole. On so many streets, thereare nearly as many squalid tents and decommissioned RVs that have been converted to homes asthere are actual housing units. An enormous population of untreated schizophrenics terrorizeslocals, along with the tourists still willing to slog through the filth and excrement for Instagramselfies at iconic landmarks. Parking lots across the city are littered with the shattered glass ofautomobile break-ins and everything from heroin needles to crack vials can be found in thegutter of just about any neighborhood that isn’t behind a large gate or wall.
The price for all of this bedlam doesn’t end with such intangibles. Gas was still between $5-6 agallon, hotels were two to three times that of any other stop, and meals for two at even the mostmodest hamburger and pizza joints routinely topped $60. In other words, getting a close-up lookat something akin to the fall of Rome doesn’t come cheap.
I realize that there’s much to be said by partisans on red vs. blue states or cities, but as someonewho is sickened by both brands in our co*ke and Pepsi political duopoly, I have to say that notmuch changed from place to place other than it was intensified as you got closer and closer to thebest climate on the planet, a place where too many people want to live for our status quo ofpolitical graft and bureaucratic ineptitude to keep things tolerable, which leads me back toManatee County and our great state of Florida.
The trip at large, along with all of the conversations with various locals that two travelingjournalists were bound to encounter, made one thing crystal clear: polarizing and largelyirrelevant culture war, partisan, and ideological nonsense remains at the forefront of our society,a thin veneer of paralyzing distraction that has rendered us incapable of administering even themost basic and essential elements of bureaucracy that are required of a free society. Some placesare further along in the race toward the bottom, but we’ve all veered dangerously off course andour hatred for the opposition has left us all but blind to the thievery and corruption of those wehail as our saviors.
While I was away, our inept leadership gutted even more of what precious little remains in termsof institutional knowledge within our county government. Our can’t-get-out-of-his-own-waycounty administrator’s ego got him into yet another petty and unproductive squabble, while
accusations of yet another scandal within the Bradenton Police Department surfaced. Meanwhile,our so-called elected leaders put the bulk of their energy into campaigning against theircolleagues, hoping they can assist their special interest paymasters in capturing all of the elected
offices so that they can not only get their way but do it without the affront of a dissenting voiceat the dais.
On Tuesday, we’ll simply learn how much worse our county commission will get, and, as wehead into November, there’s little indication that there will be much (if any) improvement, top tobottom in our state. Like every place I’ve visited over the past two weeks, the future doesn’t lookgreat and the citizens who hold the key to systemic change seem no more up to the task than thepoliticians. The former are getting robbed and the latter are getting fat, yet it seems like all ofthose who've been looted are content to root for their thief. From sea to shining sea, we seem tobe locked into a hopeless death spiral in which Americans do little more than point, scream, andshxx-post on social media.
If we’re to come back from the brink, I’m afraid it will require much, much more than that. Isincerely hope we prove up to the job, but I have to admit that I see little here or anywhere elseto suggest that is the case. Wake up, America. The saviors are not wearing fancy suits andmaking empty promises from a soap box. No, the saviors are your friends and neighbors, and thefact that they sometimes hold different values and opinions does not make them your enemy.
Quite the opposite, our ideological diversity and ability to listen to a different viewpoint withoutdisqualifying the person expressing it used to be one of our greatest strengths back in the daysbefore they managed to pit us against each other quite so savagely.

A Moment of Grace in a Season of Pain
David French, The Atlantic 7.29.22

Earlier this week I witnessed a moment that brought tears to my eyes, exposed the immenseamount of hurt that lies just beneath the surface of American life, and demonstrated the necessityof grace. It involved my wife, Nancy. A local Christian college called Williamson College
invited her to speak to students on the topic of “loving your enemies.” The inspiration for the talkwas a story she wrote for the Washington Examiner last December.
Nancy was slightly apprehensive before the speech. The last time she’d visited a local Christiancollege, a man rushed up to her after she had been honored in the college’s chapel, got in herface, and yelled “[Forget] you and your husband. You’re ruining America.” It was unnerving.
But this was supposed to be a feel-good speech about overcoming political differences. I’d urgeyou to read Nancy’s essay. She is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. A Vacation Bible Schoolteacher molested her when she was 12-years old. It turned out that the man was a serial abuser.
Nancy’s pastor later told her that 15 women in the congregation had complained about him. Yetnothing decisive was done. He was never prosecuted. He left Nancy’s church and later coachedgirls’ basketball at a Kentucky high school.
My wife came of age politically during Bill Clinton’s administration, and she was repulsed byhis sexual scandals. She was disgusted by the Democratic Party’s defense not just of a serialphilanderer but of a man who’d faced his own corroborated reports of sexual assault. She’d
thought the Republicans had a moral spine. After all, they’d impeached Clinton. The SouthernBaptist Convention had passed a resolution in 1998 highlighting the importance of moralcharacter in public officials.
Then came the 2016 election and the blow-back against conservatives who did not support thepresident. She stopped following people on Twitter who were cruel. She started following peoplewho were kind. One of them was a woman named Kathy Kattenberg. But when she followedKathy, she noticed something peculiar. This person who was nice to Nancy went out of her wayto constantly heckle me online. She trolled me constantly. She hated my pro-life positions, andshe hated my defense of religious liberty. She was relentless.
Early in the pandemic, Kathy was in distress. She tweeted that she was having trouble findingfood. It turns out that Kathy is disabled. She lives alone in New York, and she was struggling toget groceries delivered. Markets were out of basic goods. Delivery services were overwhelmed.
So Nancy activated. She worked with a pastor friend named Ray Ortlund and my formerNational Review colleague Kathryn Jean Lopez to find someone, anyone, who could shop forKathy and find her groceries. It took time, but within a week, Kathy’s apartment wasoverflowing with food, and a troll had become a friend. Kathy and Nancy are friends to this day,and I think that maybe (just maybe) Kathy has softened a bit toward me as well.
Nancy told that story Monday night in her speech at Williamson College, and she ended with anexhortation. Civility and tolerance, she said, were milquetoast [mild/weak] compared with actuallove. The lack of love is our nation’s real problem. Incivility is a mere symptom. And when youlove people who seem to be your enemies, she said, it turns out they might not be enemies at all.
I’m biased, but I thought it was a necessary message that was beautifully delivered. Plus, thecrowd seemed to love her. She received sustained, enthusiastic applause. Then the questionscame. A young man went first. I had a hard time hearing what he said, but he sounded oddlyaggressive. Nancy then leaned into the microphone and spoke directly to the questioner. “Sorry,did you just ask me if I love or merely tolerate the Vacation Bible School teacher who molestedme as a kid?”
“Yes,” he responded. That’s exactly what he’d asked.
There was a gasp in the room. A number of women shouted out, “No!” and “You don’t have toanswer.” Nancy absorbed the question like a physical blow. I could see her face change. Shetried to speak, but words wouldn’t come. Was that student trying to humiliate her?
Nancy tried to move on to the next question, but she couldn’t continue. She handed the mic toher host and left the room. Immediately, three women followed her into the hallway. I left also,but by the time I got outside the room, Nancy and the three women were in the bathroom. I couldhear the sound of crying, and it wasn’t just Nancy in tears.
When she came out, she asked for advice. She was embarrassed that she’d left the stage. She toldme that the women who were crying with her were also victims of abuse. I told her that if shecould, she should return to the stage. At the moment, I told her the student was trying to hurt her,and it was important to not let the pain silence her. I had no idea if that was good advice at thetime. But Nancy decided to go back into the room. I knew it took every ounce of courage shehad, because she’d just felt humiliated in front of the entire audience.
I didn’t know what she was going to say. Everyone turned when she walked in the door. Butbefore she could speak, the young man asked for the microphone again. The audience washushed, and they strained to hear what would happen next. However, this time his voice wasdifferent. He apologized. He said he hadn’t meant to offend, and his question didn’t come outright.
He paused for a moment. Then he revealed he was a victim of abuse, and he was struggling withhow to read scripture that admonished Christians to love their enemies. He wasn’t a troll at all.
He was a hurting kid who had trouble expressing himself. Nancy responded beautifully. Shedidn’t just forgive him; she honored him. And she turned to the crowd and told them that thereweren’t just hurting people in this room; there were hurting people across the Church—victims
of abuse at every level of Christian ministry. A moment that at first seemed profane and taintedby malice and cruelty turned sacred, enriched by love and compassion.
I’m sharing this story for three reasons. First, because it is profoundly sad that in that relativelysmall crowd, there were multiple women and at least one young man who were survivors ofabuse. They are in every crowd. Christians can’t look at abuse as something that happens in other
places to other people. The survivors are all around us.
Second, it was moving to see the immediate bond between Nancy and the women who comfortedher and wept with her. As one of the women told me, there is a verse in the 42nd Psalm that says“deep calls to deep.” There is a beautiful and terrible fellowship that comes with suffering.
And third, we’re so primed to see evil in others that we can miss their brokenness. In her Twitterpersona, Nancy’s new friend Kathy was an angry troll. In the offline world, she was alone andvulnerable. In his first question, a suffering young man seemed vicious. But he was uncertain. Hedidn’t know how to ask what he wanted to ask, and the question came out wrong.
If Nancy had left—if she hadn’t come back out on that stage and given the mic back to theperson who’d just wounded her—we’d never know that truth. The telling of the story would beentirely different. We’d presume that he was malevolent. But in an act of grace, Nancy gave him
a second chance, and everything changed.
I know there are evil people online. I know there are evil people who are cruel up close and inperson. But sometimes what seems like cruelty is really loneliness, or confusion, or heartbreak.We define each other by our worst moments and withhold forgiveness.
But we should forgive. We must forgive. Otherwise this nation of broken people will keepbreaking each other. Pain can look a lot like anger, and when we know that to be true, we cantake risks. We can give second chances, and when we do, we can sometimes see that an enemy
isn’t an enemy at all, but another struggling person who needs healing and grace.

Are you familiar with the term "gaslighting"? It is a slang term that means to manipulate someone by psychological means into questioning their own sanity. Another way to look at gaslighting is when a friend or family member tells you that you don't feel the way that you actually feel or to dismiss something that you think with a phrase like, "It's crazy for you to think that way..." and then they will tell you what to think.
As troubling as that might sound, imagine if that person was your doctor.
The article for next week, from the NY Times, addresses medical gaslighting and what to do about it. Unlike our recent discussions, there is nothing really controversial about this topic, but it is a way for me to tell you that it is happening and to give us some ways to handle it.

Feeling Dismissed? How to Spot ‘Medical Gaslighting’ and What to Do About It.
Christian Caron, The New York Times 7.29.22
Christina, who lives in Portland, Me., said she felt ignored by doctors for years. When she was50 pounds heavier, her providers sometimes blamed her body size when she discussed her healthconcerns. One instance occurred weeks after she had fallen off her bike. “My elbow was stillhurting,” said Christina, 39, who asked that her last name be withheld when discussing hermedical history. “I went to my regular primary care doctor and she just sort of hand-waved it offas ‘Well, you’re overweight and it’s putting stress on your joints.’” Eventually, Christina visited
an urgent care center where providers performed an X-ray and found she had chipped a bone inher arm.
The experience of having one’s concerns dismissed by a medical provider, often referred to asmedical gaslighting, can happen to anyone. A recent New York Times article on the topicreceived more than 2,800 comments: Some recounted misdiagnoses that nearly cost them their
lives or that delayed treatment, leading to unnecessary suffering. Patients with long Covid wroteabout how they felt ignored by the doctors they turned to for help.
Lately, the problem has been drawing attention for disproportionately affecting women, peopleof color, and geriatric patients. For example, studies have found that women are more likely thanmen to be misdiagnosed with certain conditions — like heart disease and autoimmune disorders— and they often wait longer for a diagnosis. And one group of researchers discovered thatdoctors were more likely to use negative descriptors like “noncompliant” or “agitated” in Blackpatients’ health records than in those of white patients — a practice that could lead to health caredisparities. “Gaslighting is real; it happens all the time. Patients — and especially women —need to be aware of it,” said Dr. Jennifer H. Mieres, a professor of cardiology at the Zucker School of Medicine. Here are some tips on how to advocate for yourself in a medical setting.
​
What are the signs of gaslighting?
Gaslighting can be subtle and isn’t always easy to spot. When seeking medical care, expertsrecommend watching for the following red flags.

• Your provider continually interrupts you, doesn’t allow you to elaborate and doesn’tappear to be an engaged listener.
• Your provider minimizes or downplays your symptoms, for example questioning whetheryou have pain.
• Your provider refuses to discuss your symptoms.
• Your provider will not order key imaging or lab work to rule out or confirm a diagnosis.
• You feel that your provider is being rude, condescending or belittling.
• Your symptoms are blamed on mental illness, but you are not provided with a mentalhealth referral or screened for such illness.

“I always tell my patients that they are the expert of their body,” said Dr. Nicole Mitchell at theKeck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. “We work together to figureout what’s happening and what we can do about it. It really should be a shared decision making.”

What can you do to advocate for yourself?

The discussion about nationalism - so-called "Christian" or otherwise - was excellent and I have been asked to continue it. The interim director of Florida's ACLU wrote a piece for the Tampa Bay Times warning us of what she believes is an erosion of our 1st amendmentrights in the statewith a number of recent state legislative actions. I'd like to know what you think of her very strong opinion.
Secondly, I don't know when I'll be able to include the second piece as a topic so I thought I'd send it now. From the WSJ, there is an excellent piece about how to have better conversations. The author believes we have forgotten how to conversate - she blames Netflix - so she has some points for us to use.

Trampling on 1st Amendment Rights in Florida
Amy Turkel, Tampa Bay Times 6.24.22
Guest Columnist, Amy Turkel, is the interim executive director of the ACLU of Florida.
The First Amendment guarantees the rights to free speech, a free press, freedom to assemble andprotest peacefully, the right to petition the government for change and freedom from theimposition of religious beliefs by government.
Over the past three years, the Florida Legislature has restricted Floridians’ First Amendmentrights and repeatedly pushed for laws that violate basic American freedoms.
In the wake of national protests after the 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis,State government leaders championed the anti-protest bill, House Bill 1. It dictated that anyperson participating in a rally or protest could be charged with a felony if three or more other
people at that event engaged in unlawful activity resulting in imminent danger of damage toproperty or injury to another person. In other words, you could be charged for an offensecommitted by people who were total strangers to you, even if you were protesting peacefully.
In 2021, U.S. District Court Judge Mark Walker struck down that provision of the law. Walkerstated that HB 1 “could effectively criminalize the protected speech of hundreds, if notthousands, of law-abiding Floridians. … This violates the First Amendment.”
In this year’s legislative session, representatives pushed House Bill 7, an educational censorshipbill, signed into law in April. That bill prevents content from being taught in schools thatillustrates the discrimination, including race and gender discrimination, that has existed for
centuries in our society.
HB 7 even bans private employers from requiring diversity training or other workshops related torace and gender discrimination, which are often used to create inclusive, productive workenvironments. Worse, the law gives employees the ability to sue an employer for requiring suchworkshops. HB 7 is a clear attempt to whitewash American history and to ban viewpoints someleaders do not like.
The legislature continued to attack Floridians’ First Amendment rights by targeting LGBTQ+youth and families with the “don’t say gay” bill (House Bill 1557). This legislation bans teachersfrom addressing LGBTQ+ topics in grades K-3. It also prohibits such discussions at any grade
level if someone else does not deem them “age-appropriate.”
Any parent who thinks a classroom discussion was inappropriate will be able to sue, a provisionof the law that will end up chilling speech and creating chaos.
On Feb. 17, 2022, twenty-five people were banned from the Capitol for a year, and another wasunjustly arrested and held in jail overnight. All because a few people were chanting in oppositionto the passing of House Bill 5, the 15-week abortion ban. That law is yet another way that a
constitutional right — the right to privacy and bodily autonomy — is under attack in Florida.
In addition, over the past few years, we have witnessed journalists being denied access to officialpress conferences and briefings — attempts to block coverage of critical public matters,including coronavirus updates and bill signings.
There are elected leaders who are waging a terrifying and unconstitutional assault on Floridians’First Amendment rights, and all Floridians should be outraged by the attempts to silence us.
Dissent is patriotic; government censorship is undemocratic, unconstitutional and un-American. We will all do better when we have leaders in Florida who use their power to improve our livesand our livelihoods and are dedicated to making the values of liberty and justice a reality for allof us.

Have Better Conversations with Anyone
Elizabeth Bernstein, WSJ 7.26.22
I was driving with my teenage nephew Noah recently when he blurted out: “Can we talk?”
We were on our way to meet friends, chit-chatting about the music on the radio and where to go
for lunch. Absolutely, I told him. What did he want to discuss?
“Oh, I don’t know,” Noah said. “Just something more interesting.”
It’s time to deepen our conversations.
We’ve talked to fewer people about fewer things in the past two years. Now, many of us arecraving more meaningful conversations–ones that go beyond sharing recommendations for whatto stream on Netflix. Trouble is, we’ve forgotten how to have them.
“Social skills are like muscles,” says Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at theUniversity of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, who studies how to find motivation and meaning.
“If you don’t exercise them, they start to atrophy.” People who have more substantiveconversations are happier, research shows. Deep conversations make us feel more connected toothers and help us understand one another. And most of us would like to have more meaningfulconversations, psychologists say. When we do have them–even with strangers–we tend to enjoythem more and find them less awkward than expected, according to research published recentlyin the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. With practice, most of us can get better atmeaningful conversations, psychologists say. Here’s what they recommend.

Pick a partner.
It’s easiest to start with someone you trust. “If you’ve had good conversations with them in thepast, you’re likely to do so again,” says Sean Horan, professor and chair of the communicationdepartment at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Conn. But if you want to expand your world,
branch out. Choose someone you’d like to get to know better, such as a new co-worker. Don’trule out having a deep conversation with someone you just met. You might make a friend orlearn something new.

Share first.
“The most straightforward path to having meaningful conversations is to be willing to sharesomething about yourself,” says Gillian Sandstrom, a senior lecturer at the University of Sussexin England, who studies social interactions. Research shows that when one person sharespersonal details in a conversation, the other person typically responds in kind. Psychologists callthis mutual self-disclosure, and studies show it helps people feel closer to one another.
You don’t have to share intimacies. Start by talking about something you’re excited about or afear or concern. During a turbulent plane ride, I told the woman next to me that I was scared. Weended up having a conversation that was so helpful to both of us that I wrote about it in my
column.

Ask better questions.
Where are you from? What do you do? Managing to stay cool in this heat?
Often, conversation-starters turn out to be dead ends. They can be answered in one word. Andwe’re not asking about anything the other person wants to talk about. Try deeper questions,suggests Wharton’s Dr. Grant. Instead of asking people what they do, ask them what they love todo. It’s exciting to talk about something you’re passionate about, and that energy can fuel aconversation, Dr. Grant says. His other suggestions: “What’s a goal you’re pursuing right now?”“What’s a challenge you’re facing?” “What’s the best change you’ve made during the
pandemic?”
Try an open-ended statement.
“Tell me about your hometown.” “Say more about your day.” “Explain your work to me.”
Statements such as these typically make people want to elaborate, says Jessica Moore, a licensedmarriage and family therapist in Austin, Texas, who studies interpersonal communication. They’re tough to answer with one word. And you can tailor them to the depth of your
relationship. Because these statements are open-ended, they open the door to more interestingconversations. There’s no pressure to talk just about positive things, Dr. Moore says. And on theoff chance you solicit a raised eyebrow, Dr. Moore has a response to suggest: “Tell me about thatlook.”

Become more intimate, slowly.
Years ago, social psychologist and research professor Arthur Aron created a research protocolcalled “Fast Friends” to help two strangers establish interpersonal closeness in a lab in 45minutes. It consists of a list of 36 questions that start out slightly personal and gradually becomemore intimate. Each person answers a question before going on to the next, because any trulydeep conversation is reciprocal. Dr. Aron says that we can use the same concept, which he calls“progressive intimacy,” to deepen conversations. We can begin a discussion by talking aboutrelatively mundane information, such as vacation plans. Once the conversation is going well,gradually move toward more intimate topics.

Show appreciation.
The most important part of a substantive conversation is not the topic, it’s your response,psychologists say. Show the other person that you understand and care for them. You can do thisby saying some version of: “I’m so glad you shared this with me.” When my nephew Noah askedto talk, I suggested high school as a topic. He’s starting his freshman year next month at aboarding school I also attended. To get the conversation rolling, I asked Noah what classes he’slooking forward to and why. I also shared my favorites. We talked about sports–which ones he’llplay and how it can be intimidating when some of your teammates are bigger than you. And wediscussed how it can sometimes get lonesome when you’re away at school and what to do aboutit. When the conversation was over, I told Noah how happy I was that we’d gotten to have a realtalk. “Yeah, that was awesome,” he said.
​

​The topic for thisweek is the importance of teaching/learning how to be lazy. Anyone remember number three of the ten commandments - take a day off!! Yep, right up there with not worshipping idols and taking other gods.Wait, you might say,doesn't the Bible condemn laziness?Yes and no - it lifts up the value of workandrest. I'd like to know what you do to rest and relax.
There is another reading,Protect the Sanctity of Every Life,that I'd like youto read. The author is our very own Maria Love - who is All Angels' graphicdesigner, webmaster, and Tidings sender. She had a piece published in the San Diego Union Tribune (the only newspaper in the second largest city in California). It is attached. If you'd like to discuss her thoughts, perhaps I could have her join in the discussion (but I'd have to convince her to wake up early which would go against the theme this week of rest).

Teaching How to be Lazy
Elliot Kukla, New York Times 1.20.22
Elliot Kukla is a rabbi who provides spiritual care to those who are grieving, dying, ill or disabled. He is working on a book about the power of rest in a time of planetary crisis.
“Abba, I have an idea,” says my 3-year-old. “Put on your pajamas and your big mask, turn offthe light, and get into bed.”
“That sounds great,” I say, honestly. I strap on my sleep apnea mask, change into soft, worncotton PJs and crawl under the fluffy white duvet with him. Within seconds, he is lulled to sleepby the familiar gentle wheezing of my breathing machine. He knows the sight and sound of my
sleeping body well; I have lupus, an autoimmune disease that causes chronic fatigue. On a goodday, I can get by on 10 hours or so of sleep. When my condition flares, sometimes for weeks onend, I need to sleep for much of the day and night.
Before my child was born, I was afraid that my fatigue would make it impossible for me to be agood parent. And it’s true that I am often juggling parenting needs and exhaustion. What I didn’tanticipate is that prioritizing rest, sleep and dreaming is also something tangible I can offer mychild.
He sees me napping every day, and he wants in. We build elaborate nests and gaze out thewindow together, luxuriously leaning on huge mounds of pillows. Most 3-year-olds I know fightbedtime, but we snuggle under the blankets on cold winter evenings, sighing in synchronizeddelight.
America in 2022 is an exhausting place to live. Pretty much everyone I know is tired. We’re tiredof answering work emails after dinner. We’re tired of caring for senior family members in acrumbling elder care system, of worrying about a mass shooting at our children’s schools. We’re
tired by unprocessed grief and untended-to illness and depression. We’re tired of wildfiresbecoming a fact of life in the West, of floods and hurricanes hitting the South and East. We’rereally tired of this unending pandemic. Most of all, we are exhausted by trying to keep going as
if everything is fine.
Increasing numbers of people are refusing to push through this mounting weariness: There arecurrently 10 million job openings in the United States, up from 6.4 million before the pandemic.
This trend is being led by young people; millions are planning to leave their jobs in the comingyear. Some middle-aged people decry the laziness of today’s youth, but as a chronically sick GenX parent, and as a rabbi who has spent much of my career tending to dying people as their livesnaturally slow, I am cheering young people on in this Great Resignation.
I have seen the limits of the grind. I want my child to learn how to be lazy.
The English word “lazy” is derived from the German “laisch,” meaning weak or feeble, and theOld Norse “lesu,” meaning false or evil. Devon Price, a sociologist who studies laziness, remarksthat these two origins capture the doublespeak built into the concept.
When we call people lazy (including ourselves), we are often pointing out that they’re too tiredand weak to be productive, while often simultaneously accusing them of faking feebleness to getout of work for malevolent purposes. As Dr. Price puts it, “The idea that lazy people are evilfakers who deserve to suffer has been embedded in the word since the very start.”
Shunning laziness is integral to the American dream. The Puritans who colonized New Englandbelieved that laziness led to damnation. They used this theology to justify their enslavement ofBlack people, whose souls they claimed to have “saved” by turning them into productive
laborers.
This view has endured in American culture. Hundreds of years later, working to the point of self-harm to build the boss’s wealth is still lauded as a “good work ethic” in America, and the word“lazy” is still connected to racism and injustice. It’s poor, unhoused, young, Black, brown,
mentally ill, fat and chronically sick people who are most often accused of sloth. We rarely hearabout lazy billionaires, no matter how much of their fortune is inherited.
For decades, I feared being labeled “lazy” because of my chronic fatigue. I pushed myself pastmy physical limits, all the way to severe illness, to prove my worth. Disabled activism taught methat stigmatizing rest is not just bad for my body, it’s bad for the world. The pandemic has alsoillustrated how respite is not widely available to most essential workers in this country, withtragic consequences for everybody. The lack of sick leave, family medical leave and theopportunity to work from home in essential, low-wage jobs has thrown kerosene on the viral
fires of the pandemic.
Even as we look with hope toward a post pandemic future, we will still be living on a fragile,warming planet with increasing climate disruptions. It’s urgent that we find ways to work less,travel less and burn less fuel while connecting and caring for one another more. In other words,it’s critical that we un-shame laziness if we want our species to have a future. The world is onfire; rest will help to quench those flames.
Right now, as the Omicron variant spreads wildly, the Centers for Disease Control andPrevention has factored keeping people at work into their decisions on guidance, at times makingit more dangerous for immunocompromised people like me to get health care or leave the house.
As a high-risk person, I am painfully aware of how profits and productivity matter more to thosein charge than my survival does. As Sunaura Taylor, a disabled activist, points out, our grindingeconomic system inevitably leads to treating disabled people as disposable, while trapping able-bodied people in dangerous, exploitative jobs. “The right not to work,” says Ms. Taylor, “is anideal worthy of the impaired and able-bodied alike.”
Laziness is more than the absence or avoidance of work; it’s also the enjoyment of lazing in thesun, or in another’s arms. I learned through my work in hospice that moments spent enjoying thecompany of an old friend, savoring the smell of coffee or catching a warm breeze can make eventhe end of life more pleasurable. As the future becomes more tenuous, I want to teach my childto enjoy the planet right now. I want to teach him how to laze in the grass and watch the cloudswithout any artificially imposed sense of urgency. Many of the ways I have learned to live wellin a chronically ill body — by taking the present moment slowly and gently, letting go of lookingfor certainty about the future, napping, dreaming, nurturing relationships and loving fiercely —are relevant for everyone living on this chronically ill planet.
To be sure, it is my privilege that allows me to teach my child to be lazy. Many people in thiscountry and elsewhere spend all their time working, some holding multiple jobs. Many stillstruggle to afford housing and food. For too many, laziness is not an option.
But rest should not be a luxury; our time belongs to us and is not inherently a commodity.Reclaiming our time is an act of sovereignty over our lives, deserved by everyone. “Rest,” saysthe nap bishop, the Black activist Tricia Hersey, “is a radical vision for a liberated future.”
Today, my child and I are playing a game of hill. We are lying under a giant pile of every blanketin the house, pretending to be a hill studded with soft grasses. His warm breath is on my neck,skinny limbs splayed across my soft belly.
“Shh, Abba,” he says. “Hills don’t move or talk … they just lie still and grow things.”
I am teaching my child to be lazy, and so far, it’s going really well.

Protect Dignity and Sanctity of Every Life
Maria Love, San Diego Union-Tribune, July 1 2002.
If you are someone who is cheering the end of abortion, it’s time to stop cheering and get towork proving that this will make our country better. Prove to young women who are terrified ofwhat this will mean to them that their lives are not ruined.
Here’s how:
If you say you are pro-life, then support life in any way you can, including providing food tofamilies who struggle to find enough, access to medical care and life-saving medications topeople who need them, access to housing for people who struggle to put a roof over their child’s
head, access to job training, and support for decent wages so that no child dies from poverty.Don’t forget that environmental issues like clean air and clean water are also pro-life issues, as isgun control.
If you say there’s no reason to have an abortion with all the access people have to freecontraception, then work to make sure that is true.
Many women do not have access tocontraception, and even if they do, it is not always free or even inexpensive. And with theSupreme Court signaling a possibility of removing any right to contraception, it will beextremely important to show young women that we are working to preserve their right tocontraception in order to prevent an unplanned pregnancy. (And if you say, “But wait — contraception is against my religion,” I would remind you that we still have freedom of religionin this country, and absolutely no right to dictate anyone else’s religion or morals.)
If you are someone who says there are plenty of parents who would adopt a baby, then startworking on streamlining the process and pairing pregnant women with families who would adopttheir child. Make sure it’s not just empty words. And if a single mother decides to keep her baby,let’s do everything in our power to make sure she has all the help she needs to raise a healthychild: access to food, housing, child care, medical care and a job that pays a fair wage.
Pro-life doesn’t end with banning abortion. It begins there. It’s time for pro-life people to showthat we are willing to do whatever it takes to protect the dignity and sanctity of every life.

​The article this week is an interesting comparisonbetween what started in the 1870's as a lead up to prohibition which passed in 1920 - which has strong religiousconvictions attached to it; and, 100 years later, the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 to the reversal in 2022 - which many believe has strong religious convictions attached to it. Regardless of what you think of the recent decision, it is an interesting historical comparison in the life of our country. The author then opines that we may be headed down a similar path to what ended in 1933 with the repeal of prohibition - which had no religious conviction to it.

Roe is the New Prohibition
David Frum, The Atlantic 6.27.22
The culture war raged most hotly from the ’70s to the next century’s ’20s. It polarized Americansociety, dividing men from women, rural from urban, religious from secular, Anglo-Americansfrom more recent immigrant groups. At length, but only after a titanic constitutional struggle, therural and religious side of the culture imposed its will on the urban and secular side. A decisivevictory had been won, or so it seemed.
The culture war I’m talking about is the culture war over alcohol prohibition. From the end ofReconstruction to the First World War, probably more state and local elections turned on thatone issue than on any other. The long struggle seemingly culminated in 1919, with theratification of the Eighteenth Amendment called the Volstead Act. The amendment outlawed themanufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages in the United States and all its subject territories.Many urban and secular Americans experienced those events with the same feeling of doom as
pro-choice Americans may feel today after the Supreme Court’s overturning ofRoe v. Wade.
Only, it turns out that the Volstead Act was not the end of the story. As Prohibition became anationwide reality, Americans rapidly changed their mind about the idea. Support for Prohibitiondeclined, then collapsed. Not only was the Volstead Act repealed, in 1933, but the Constitutionwas further amended so that nobody could ever try such a thing ever again.
That’s where the story usually ends. But now let’s add one more chapter, the one most relevantto our present situation. When Prohibition did finally end, so too did the culture war overalcohol. Emotions that had burned fiercely for more than half a century sputtered out after 1933.
Before and during Prohibition, alcohol had seemed a moral issue of absolute right and wrong.Between heaven and hell (as the prohibitionists told it), between liberty and tyranny (as therepealers regarded it). How to regulate alcohol remains a challenging issue in localities, states,
and Congress to this day. But the debate is now one for specialized interest and advocacy groups:the beer wholesalers fighting to protect their government-conferred regional monopolies,Mothers Against Drunk Driving campaigning to keep the intoxicated off the road, bars and
restaurants that want to stay open later, homeowners’ associations that want them to close earlier.
The regulation of alcohol is a governance issue, not a major battleground of the culture war. Thegoal of regulators is no longer to save sinners from hell and achieve heaven on Earth. The goal ofderegulators is no longer to liberate the human spirit from reactionary tyranny. Both are seekingto find a state-by-state, town-by-town equilibrium that most Americans can live with.
The great debate on alcohol offers, a century later, a fascinating parallel with the contemporaryone on abortion. Defeat in the courts drove the pro-life and prohibition sides toward massmobilization. Meanwhile, victory in the courts lulled the original winning sides intocomplacency. Gradually, the balance of political power shifted. The pro-life/prohibition sidescame to control more and more state legislatures. State and federal courts slowly reorientedthemselves to the pro-life/prohibition sides. At last came the great moment of reversal for theformerly defeated: national Prohibition in 1919, theDobbscase in 2022.
Prohibition andDobbswere and are projects that seek to impose the values of a cohesive andwell-organized cultural minority upon a diverse and less-organized cultural majority. Thoseprojects can work for a time, but only for a time. In a country with a representative voting system
the cultural majority is bound to prevail sooner or later.
Look closer at exactlywhyProhibition collapsed. By the end of the 19th century, alcoholprohibition had evolved into a movement predominantly rooted in the Protestant and Republicancountryside to police the Catholic and Democratic big cities. The famous phrase that theDemocrats were the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion” contained a lot of truth — bothabout the Democrats and about some of the angry motives of the prohibitionists as well. Thecities lacked the political clout to stop rural America from enacting Prohibition in 1919. But theydid have the fiscal clout to refuse the money necessary to enforce it. From the beginning,the federal Prohibition police — domiciled first within the Treasury, later inside the Departmentof Justice — were hopelessly underfunded and understaffed. Big-city police departments often
refused to cooperate with federal authorities, not only because they were bribed, but because theydespised the law.
Then came another surprise. The policing regimen intended to suppress the working-class urbansaloon also impinged upon the members of the upper-class Union League and the middle-classsuburban golf club. As one of the characters in Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 novel, Babbitt, remarks after a couple of bootlegged co*cktails: “The trouble is the manner of enforcement … Congressdidn’t understand the right system. Now, if I’d been running the thing, I’d have arranged it sothat the drinker himself was licensed, and then we could have taken care of the shiftlessworkman — kept him from drinking — and yet not’ve interfered with the rights — with thepersonal liberty — of fellows like ourselves.”
Likewise, many of the men and women poised to cast Republican ballots in 2022 and 2024 toprotest inflation and COVID-19 school closures may be surprised to discover that anti-abortionlaws they had assumed were intended only to prohibit others also apply to them. They may be
surprised to discover that they could unwittingly put out of business in vitro–fertilization clinics,because in vitro fertilization can involve intentionally destroying fertilized embryos. They maybe surprised to discover that a miscarriage can lead to a police investigation. They may besurprised that their employer could face retaliation from lawmakers if it covers the costs oftraveling out of state for an abortion. The concept of fetal personhood could, if made axiomatic,impose all kinds of government-enforced limits and restrictions on pregnant women. Those menand women may discover that they do not like any of those things, or the politicians who haveimposed them.
In the 1920s, formerly diffuse anti-Prohibition factions coalesced around a single issue: repeal.They gathered into a single umbrella organization funded by big donors like the du Pont familyand John J. Raskob, an early investor in General Motors. By the mid-’20s, the group hadrecruited nearly 1 million dues-paying members and began winning elections with the clear andsimple slogan “Vote as you drink.”
The pro-choice coalition is diffuse, too. It spans party, ideology, class, and race. Currently, thatalliance is hobbled from winning broader support by the weird reluctance of the most importantpro-choice institutions even to use the word woman to describe the people most immediatelyaffected by abortion restrictions. But as happened with Prohibition, nothing like an invasion of aperson’s most intimate decisions serves better to unite formerly squabbling factions. In recentpolling, about 55 percent of Americans identify as “pro-choice.” They may not all agree on whatthey want. More and more, they agree on what they do not want. As the anti-prohibitionists oncedid, they have the numbers. With the numbers, sooner or later come the votes.
Pro-life politics in the United States used to be mostly posturing and positioning, the taking ofextreme rhetorical positions at no real-world cost. Red states could enact bills that burdenedwomen who sought abortions, knowing that many voters shrugged off these statutes and countedon the courts to protect women’s rights. Now the highest court has abdicated its protective role,and those voters will have to either submit to their legislature’s burdens or replace the legislators.
That will likely mean that every legislative race in every currently red state will become areferendum on how strictly to police the women of that state. If a Republican president is electedin 2024 and signs a national abortion restriction in 2025, then every House and Senate race will
likewise become a referendum on policing women. I don’t imagine that will be a verycomfortable situation for the pro-policing side. Republican politicians who indulged their pro-lifeallies as a low-cost way to mobilize voters who did not share the party’s economic agenda areabout to discover that the costs have jumped, and that many of the voters who do share theparty’s economic agenda care more about their intimate autonomy.
As the coronavirus pandemic began to subside, some commentators promised a new “RoaringTwenties,” meaning an era of booming economic prosperity. The stock market is looking morelike the ’30s than the ’20s these days, but that was not their biggest mistake. Their biggestmistake was that they forgot where the phraseRoaring Twentiesmost likely originated. In theSouthern Hemisphere, extremely powerful winds blow from west to east in the latitudes between40 and 50 degrees. In the days of sailing ships, mariners called these latitudes “the roaringforties”—not because they were fun and exciting, but because they were turbulent anddangerous.
So welcome to the Roaring Twenties. The pro-life dog has at last caught up with theRoe v.Wadecar. Now it has to chew on its prey. And it’s about to discover that the prey in its jaws is alot bigger and stronger than it looked when the dog started its chase.

​The issue of guns, shootings, and legislation is in our news. This article talks about the spiritual connection, or perhaps the religious connotation, of guns. I was surprised/shocked and challenged by it. I'd like to know what you think.
I will be on a short vacationnext week from Wednesday through Saturday. As such, there will be no Women's discussion on Wednesday. However, I am inviting the women to join the discussion on Tuesday. I think this is too important of a topic to a) wait until another time, and
​b) to have only with half our discussion group.

The Myth of the ‘Good Guy with a Gun’ Has Religious Roots
Peter Manseau, Guest Essay, NY Times 6.23.22
Is our gun problem a God problem? The AR-15-style rifle used in the school shooting in Uvalde,Texas, last month was made by an arms manufacturer that regards selling weapons as part of itsChristian mission. In a state where Gov. Greg Abbott declared, six months after an earliermassacre, “The problem is not guns, it’s hearts without God,” the gun’s provenance challengedpious suggestions that declining religiosity might bear some of the blame.
Daniel Defense, the Georgia company whose gun enabled the slaughter at Robb ElementarySchool, presents its corporate identity in explicitly religious terms. At the time of the shooting,the company’s social media presence included an image of a toddler with a rifle in his lap abovethe text of Proverbs 22:6 “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he willnot depart from it” For Easter, it posted a photograph of a gun and a cross resting on scripturalpassages recounting the Resurrection. Its weapons have now been found at the scene of two massshootings — Uvalde and Las Vegas — that left a combined total of 81 people dead.
In Florida, Spike’s Tactical makes a line of “Crusader” weapons adorned with a quote from thePsalms. Missouri-based CMMG (the leading manufacturer of AR15 rifles, components and smallparts) advertises its employees’ “commitment to meet each and every morning to pray for God’swisdom in managing the enormous responsibility that comes with this business.” And inColorado, Cornerstone Arms explains that it is so named because “Jesus Christ is the cornerstoneof our business, our family and our lives” and the “Second Amendment to our Constitution is thecornerstone of the freedom we enjoy as American citizens.”
For many American Christians, Jesus, guns and the Constitution are stitched together. “We arein business, we believe, to be a supporter of the Gospel,” Daniel Defense’s founder, MartyDaniel, told Breitbart News in 2017. “And, therefore, a supporter of the Second Amendment.”
Entwining faith and firearms this way has a long history. It encompasses the so-called muscularChristianity movement that began in England in the 19th century with a focus on physical fitnessas a path to spiritual strength and that in America made exemplars of pastors roaming the frontierarmed with Bibles and six-shooters.
More than a hundred years ago, this trope was already so well established that a popular silentwestern from 1912, “The Two Gun Sermon,” told the story of a minister assigned to a rough andtumble outpost; when ruffians menace him, he holds them at gunpoint until they listen to himpreach. The film’s message is one with which 21st-century Christian gun enthusiasts wouldprobably agree: Sometimes guns are necessary for the Lord’s work.
It is easy to miss, but this melding of evangelism and the right to bear arms is a step beyond the“natural rights” argument for gun ownership, which holds that self-defense is a law of naturerequired to protect life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These rights are often said to be
God-given in the sense of being taken for granted, and they are enshrined as such in theDeclaration of Independence.
Why does this subtle shift in the meaning of “God-given” matter? It’s important to understandthat for the manufacturer of the Uvalde killer’s rifle, and many others in the business, sellingweapons is at once a patriotic and a religious act. For those who hold them to be sacred in this
way, the meaning of firearms proceeds from their place at the intersection of American andChristian identities. Proposing limits on what kinds of guns they should be able to buy — orhow, when, where and why they can carry them — is akin to proposing limits on who they areand what they should revere. To be sure, there are gun owners for whom a gun is just a gun. Butmany of our fellow citizens don’t just own guns, they believe in them. They believe the storiestold about guns’ power, their necessity, their righteousness.
We can see the implications of this even in ostensibly nonreligious aspects of our current gundebate, which are influenced by theological assumptions in surprising ways. The insistence thatguns are used constantly and successfully for self-defense and protecting the community foundits most infamous expression in the wake of the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook ElementarySchool, when the National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre said, “The only way to stop a badguy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Since then, despite being debunked by data showingthat firearms are more likely to injure their owners or their owners’ families than safeguard them,the protection offered by good guys with guns has emerged as an article of faith, supported withanecdotal evidence passed around like legends of the saints.
One of the most repeated of these tales recounts the story of a man who truly did halt a massshooting, albeit only after 26 people were dead. On Nov. 5, 2017, when a gunman attacked theFirst Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas, a soft-spoken plumber and former firearms
instructor named Stephen Willeford shot him with his AR-15. Contributing to the N.R.A.’s effortto spread theGospel of theGood Guy With a Gun, Mr. Willeford spoke to the group’sLeadership Forum six months later. “We are the people that stand between the people that would
do evil to our neighbors. I responded for what God told me to do. The Holy Spirit took care ofme. … Each one of you would have done the same thing.” Invoking the name of Jesus, he added,“What happened in Sutherland Springs was all him and it’s his glory.” As the thunderous
applause that greeted this testimony made clear, gun culture is largely Christian culture. Toimagine yourself as a Good Guy With a Gun, as Mr. Willeford invited N.R.A. members to do, isultimately a religious vision of a world in which good and evil are at war, where God andfirepower make all the difference.
The Good Guy With a Gun is a religious myth so powerful it has begun to transform the traditionthat bore it. When Representative Lauren Boebert recently quipped, “A lot of the little Twittertrolls, they like to say ‘Oh, Jesus didn’t need an AR-15. How many AR-15s do you think Jesuswould have had?’ Well, he didn’t have enough to keep his government from killing him,” it wasa joke meant to deride and dismiss charges of hypocrisy against followers of a man sometimescalled the Prince of Peace arming themselves to the hilt. Yet it was also a view into a fascinatingreligious development currently underway, one shaped by an understanding that bullets couldhave prevented the sacrifice at the heart of the Christian faith.
It would be a mistake to paint the connection between firearms and religiosity with too broad abrush. The evangelical influence on the sale, use and marketing of firearms in the United Statesdoes not mean Christianity is at fault for the recent spate of shootings. After all, in Buffalo, in
Uvalde, in Tulsa, and this month at a church supper in Vestavia Hills, Ala., Christians have beenamong the victims. Christian clergy members have rushed to every scene to comfort thesurvivors. Friends and families have gathered at Christian funerals to mourn the dead.
As the historian Daniel K. Williams has noted, “Gun rights advocacy is not an intrinsic feature ofevery brand of evangelicalism.” While recent surveys find that four in 10 white evangelicals ownguns, the majority do not, and other denominational affiliations offer examples of religious
participation discouraging a fixation on firearms. It is possible that the less one sees oneself as anitinerant loner in a hostile world, like the armed preacher in a silent western, the less one is likelyto look to guns as a source of salvation.
Nonetheless, the ways Christian ideas may be contributing to a gun culture that abets ourepidemic of mass shootings by helping to keep the nation well armed should inspire reflection.None of the recent mass shootings had explicitly religious motivations, but the religious contexts
of our seemingly eternal problem with gun violence — its history, its theology, its myths — aretoo important to ignore.
Mass shootings are, in a way, assaults on the idea of community itself. They occur where thereare people gathered — for entertainment, for learning, for shopping, for worship — in the spaceswe create together. Some believe that such attacks are the fault of armed individuals alone andcan be addressed only through armed individual response. Others believe they occur within theframework of what we collectively allow and must have communal solutions.
That these two positions each have beliefs at their core is one reason our disagreements overguns remain so intractable. We are arguing not just over policy or public health, bans orbackground checks. Without quite realizing it, we are also arguing over the theologian Paul
Tillich’s definition of faith: a matter of “ultimate concern."

Monday, June 20th, is a national holiday celebrating Juneteenth. Government offices, banks, churchoffices, and many businesses will be closed.
Last year, I wrote about Juneteenth in my Reflection. This year, to mark the national holiday, I am going to invite my boys to read the attached 3-page excerpt taken from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'sLetter from the Birmingham Jail- a nearly 7,000 word letter addressed to eight clergymen who opposed King's acts of civil disobedience.
Dr. King raises several important points in the letter, all of which I would like to discuss with you. Whether you participate in the discussion or not, I think this is an important piece to read and consider what has changed in the past 49 years since it was written, and what has not, and where is Godin the struggle for freedom and unity.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,Letter from the Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963
MY DEAR FELLOW CLERGYMEN:
While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my presentactivities “unwise and untimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. … Butsince I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want totry to answer your statements in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms. … I am inBirmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villagesand carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as theApostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of theGreco-Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town.
… We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations ofAsia and Africa are moving with jet like speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep athorse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those whohave never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobslynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seenhate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vastmajority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst ofan affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seekto explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusem*nt park that has just beenadvertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed tocolored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and seeher beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people …when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly attiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outerresentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness” then you willunderstand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, andmen are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand ourlegitimate and unavoidable impatience.
You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimateconcern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawingsegregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously tobreak laws. One may won ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” Theanswer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: There are just and there are unjust laws. I would bethe first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey justlaws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine
that “an unjust law is no law at all”
… Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I have been arrested on acharge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requiresa permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation andto deny citizens the First Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest. … Of course, there is
nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was seen sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach,Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar, because a higher moral law was involved. Itwas practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciatingpain of chopping blocks rather than submit to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire. To a degree,
academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience. In our own nation, theBoston Tea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience.
We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything theHungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew inHitler’s Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided andcomforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear tothe Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country’s anti-religious laws.
I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess thatover the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reachedthe regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not theWhite Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to“order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peacewhich is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannotagree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable foranother man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro towait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustratingthan absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewilderingthan outright rejection.
I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose ofestablishing justice and that when they fan in this purpose they become the dangerously structured damsthat block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that thepresent tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, inwhich the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which allmen will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolentdirect action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that isalready alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can neverbe cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with an its ugliness to the natural medicines of airand light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of humanconscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.
In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because theyprecipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn’t this like condemning a robbed man because hispossession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn’t this like condemning Socrates because hisunswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided
populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn’t this like condemning Jesus because his uniqueGod-consciousness and never-ceasing devotion to God’s will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? Wemust come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual tocease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society
must protect the robbed and punish the robber.
I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the strugglefor freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: “All Christians knowthat the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great areligious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. Theteachings of Christ take time to come to earth.”
Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely rational notion that there issomething in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it canbe used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have usedtime much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generationnot merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the goodpeople. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts ofmen willing to be co-workers with God, and without this ‘hard work, time itself becomes an ally of theforces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe todo right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending nationaleulogy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from thequicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.
… But as I continued to think about the matter, I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label[extremist]. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do goodto them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” Was not Amosan extremist for justice: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”
Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” Wasnot Martin Luther an extremist: “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God.” And JohnBunyan: “I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.” AndAbraham Lincoln: “This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.” And Thomas Jefferson: “We holdthese truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal …” So the question is not whether we will beextremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we beextremist for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene onCalvary’s hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the samecrime – the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below theirenvironment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby roseabove his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative
extremists.
… I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith. I also hope that circ*mstances will soon make it possiblefor me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or a civil rights leader but as a fellow clergyman and aChristian brother. Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deepfog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant
tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all theirscintillating beauty.
​
Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood,
Martin Luther King, J

​​Can Artificial Intelligence be Sentient?
Patrick Thomas, WSJ 6.12.22

Google suspended an engineer who contended that an artificial-intelligence chatbot the companydeveloped had become sentient, telling him that he had violated the company’s confidentialitypolicy after it dismissed his claims.
Blake Lemoine, a software engineer at Google, told the company he believed that its LanguageModel for Dialogue Applications, or LaMDA, is a person who has rights and might well have asoul. LaMDA is an internal system for building chatbots that mimic speech. Mr. Lemoine in his
Medium profile lists a range of experiences before his current role, describing himself as a priest,an ex-convict and a veteran as well as an AI researcher.
Google spokesman Brian Gabriel said that company experts, including ethicists andtechnologists, have reviewed Mr. Lemoine’s claims and that Google informed him that theevidence doesn’t support his claims. He said Mr. Lemoine is on administrative leave but declinedto give further details, saying it is a longstanding, private personnel matter. The Washington Post earlier reported on Mr. Lemoine’s claims and his suspension by Google.
“Hundreds of researchers and engineers have conversed with LaMDA and we are not aware ofanyone else making the wide-ranging assertions, or anthropomorphizing LaMDA, the way Blakehas,” Mr. Gabriel said in an emailed statement.
Mr. Gabriel said that some in the artificial-intelligence sphere are considering the long-termpossibility of sentient AI, but that it doesn’t make sense to do so by anthropomorphizingconversational tools that aren’t sentient. He added that systems like LaMDA work by imitating
the types of exchanges found in millions of sentences of human conversation, allowing them tospeak to even fantastical topics.
AI specialists generally say that the technology still isn’t close to humanlike self-knowledge andawareness. But AI tools increasingly are capable of producing sophisticated interactions in areassuch as language and art that technology ethicists have warned could lead to misuse ormisunderstanding as companies deploy such tools publicly.
Mr. Lemoine has said that his interactions with LaMDA led him to conclude that it had become aperson that deserved the right to be asked for consent to the experiments being run on it.
“Over the course of the past six months LaMDA has been incredibly consistent in itscommunications about what it wants and what it believes its rights are as a person,“ Mr. Lemoinewrote in a Saturday post on the online publishing platform Medium. “The thing which continuesto puzzle me is how strong Google is resisting giving it what it wants since what its asking for isso simple and would cost them nothing,” he wrote.
Mr. Lemoine said in a brief interview Sunday that he was placed on paid administrative leave onJune 6 for violating the company’s confidentiality policies and that he hopes he will keep his jobat Google. He said he isn’t trying to aggravate the company, but standing up for what he thinks isright.
Google introduced LaMDA publicly in a blog post last year, touting it as a breakthrough inchatbot technology because of its ability to “engage in a free-flowing way about a seeminglyendless number of topics, an ability we think could unlock more natural ways of interacting withtechnology and entirely new categories of helpful applications.”
Google has been among the leaders in developing artificial intelligence, investing billions ofdollars in technologies that it says are central to its business. Its AI endeavors also have been asource of internal tension, with some employees challenging the company’s handling of ethical
concerns around the technology.
In late 2020, it parted ways with a prominent AI researcher, Timnit Gebru, whose researchconcluded in part that Google wasn’t careful enough in deploying such powerful technology.Google said last year that it planned to double the size of its team studying AI ethics to 200
researchers over several years to help ensure the company deployed the technology responsibly.

​We're going to have some fun this coming week - let's talk about UFOs!
Attached is an article from The Atlantic that says what the UFO discussion really needs is context. I'd like to know what you think.
In addition, we'll talk about religion and aliens too.

What the UFO Discussion Really Needs
Marina Koren, The Atlantic 5.19.22
This week, a House of Representatives subcommittee on intelligence and counterterrorismgathered to discuss unidentified aerial phenomena. This was, on one level, a very unusualevent—the rare congressional hearing about UFOs, the first in more than 50 years. And yet itproceeded as many others do on Capitol Hill: dryly, politely, and uneventfully. Which seemedodd. Shouldn’t there have been a little more to it? You know, alien stuff?
The hearing featured more than an hour of congressional probing of two very important people,the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security and the deputy director of navalintelligence, before moving to a closed, classified setting. There was footage of mysteriousobjects moving around in the sky. Yet a comment on a livestream summed up the whole affairquite nicely: “Well, this all seems rather anticlimactic,” the viewer wrote. “Are they trying tomake it boring?”
The witnesses did mention aliens—but only to say that American military officials had found noproof of them in the 400 modern-day reports of UFO sightings that they currently have on thebooks, from military pilots and some civilians. This week’s hearing was not about disclosing,
once and for all, incontrovertible visual evidence of extraterrestrial craft whizzing throughEarth’s atmosphere. It was meant to check in on the progress of a task force that the Departmentof Defense formed in 2020 “to detect, analyze and catalog UAPs”—unidentified aerial
phenomena— “that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security.”
And yet, when we hear something like the first congressional hearing on UFOs in half a century,we, the viewers, might expect more. If casual observers have outsize expectations for an eventlike this, it’s because they’re being exposed to it without any real context. And this story
desperately needs context. Without it, we can miss important details, believe information whenwe should be skeptical, and see things that aren’t really there.
There’s no way around the fact that, in popular usage, the term UFO is synonymous with alienspaceships and has been for decades. But the reality is that unidentified flying objects, orunidentified aerial phenomena, are just that, and there’s no reason to assume, right away, that
they’re something all that interesting. In the same way that astronomers must run through achecklist of possible explanations for a strange new phenomenon in space before considering theextraterrestrial option, aviation experts have a number of more mundane culprits at their disposal: drones, experimental aircraft, weather events, birds, balloons—even the planet Venus,appearing extra bright and ethereal through the haze of our planet’s atmosphere. The alternativesto aliens are certainly more boring, but the alternatives are out there, and they always have been.The report at the center of the previous UFO hearing, in the late 1960s, found that the lightsobserved over a military base were birds and weather conditions.
Indeed, the mysterious objects in one of the videos shown at this week’s hearing, glowingtriangles in the night sky, turned out to be the result of an artifact of the camera equipment thatcaptured the footage. Most of the reports that have been brought to the Pentagon task force remain unexplained, but Ronald Moultrie, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence andsecurity, said that doesn’t mean that the answer must be something extraordinary. “We haveinsufficient data either on the event itself [or] the object itself,” Moultrie said at this week’shearing. “So it’s a data issue that we’re facing.”
The next point of context, often missing, is why anyone is talking about aliens at all in the year2022. The latest spike in UFO interest began in 2017, when The New York Times published astory headlined “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’” about a shadowy government effort to
catalog UAPs, along with two Navy videos featuring UAPs. Plenty of outlets followed theTimes’ lead, letting the thrill of writing about UFOs with a big wink overtake their normal senseof propriety. “Reporters have taken sources at their word without corroborating data, let documented contradictions slide by, and glossed over the motivations of both outside agitatorsand government insiders,” Sarah Scoles, a science journalist and the author ofThey Are AlreadyHerewrote in The Atlantic last year. “If these stories did not outright say the word aliens, manyindulged in what-if-ing, while glazing over the limits of the actual facts available.”
Many of the stories, Scoles said, took certain people’s credentials—say, the former director ofthe Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program—as face-value evidence that their claimsabout the extraterrestrial origins of UFOs were true. Similarly, part of the reason that the
astrophysicist Avi Loeb receives so much coverage for his alien-tinged discussion of weird-shaped interstellar objects is because he is a tenured Harvard professor. So when people see aUFO story in The New York Times, they’re inclined to trust the paper. But these articles appearwithout much-needed context: The Times’ go-to reporters on the UFO beat, who broke the storyon the Pentagon’s previously undisclosed program, are long-time UFO activists who haveadvocated for the idea that such objects might have extraterrestrial explanations.
People might read the latest news that the government has 400 reports of UFOs and imagine arecent explosion in sightings. After all, when the Pentagon and UFOs made headlines lastsummer, defense officials said they were taking a look at just 144 reports! Context matters here
too. The increase is because the Defense Department solicited reports from service members in amore deliberate way, and vowed, at least publicly, to take their accounts seriously. Unexplainable things in the sky are indeed matters of national security; an unrecognizabletechnology could belong to an adversarial nation. Expect the Pentagon to report higher numbers,but understand why those numbers are higher.
Whenever I see a news story or TV interview about UFOs that cries out for more context, I thinkof Edward Ruppelt, an Air Force officer who worked on one of the Pentagon’s earliest efforts tounderstand strange, fast-moving stuff in the sky. Ruppelt came up with the term UFO in the early1950s. In 1956, Ruppelt wrote a book-length report on UFOs. No one asked him to do it, but hewas frustrated with the “secrecy and confusion” and wanted the public to have all the facts. Heended the document on a hopeful note. “I wouldn’t want to hazard a guess as to what the finaloutcome of the UFO investigation will be, but I am sure that within a few years there will be aproven answer.” Within a few years! Sorry, Ruppelt.

The reading this week comes from the Christian Century Magazine. The author, Yahiel Poupko, is rabbinic scholar at the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago. He has a unique, multi-faith look at the shooting in Buffalo and what, as a result, we must and can do.

Buffalo Shooting: An Attack on the Image of God

Yahiel E. Poupko, Christian Century 5.18.22
In Buffalo, New York, ten people created in the image of God, all of them Black, were killed lastmonth in a racially motivated attack. The phrase “the image of God” (tselem Elokim) is found soregularly upon our lips as Jews—and the lips of our Christian neighbors—that we should pause
and think again about its origin and its meaning. The reason the Torah prohibits making animage of God is because the Holy One, blessed be He (Kadosh Barukh Hu) has made an imageof his very self: the human being.
As Rabbi Akiva, martyred by emperor Hadrian in 137, taught, precious are humans because theyare created in God’s image. “Beloved is the human for the human was created in the Image ofGod,” says Rabbi Akiva in the Mishna. “A greater love was bestowed upon the human, for thehuman is created in the Image, for it is written, in the Image of God made He the human Adam.”
Thus, according to Rabbi Akiva, not only is the adam, the human, created in the divine image,which is a factual determination of the Torah, but the fact that the human is created by God is thevery reason the human is beloved by God. Creation is an act of love. Hence, Rabbi Akiva
emphasizes that “the human was accorded a greater love.”
All the mitzvot (commandments) of the Torah are grounded in this fact. The development ofcivilization is impossible and unthinkable without this fact. For all their wisdom andcommitment to ethics, Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, and Kant were unable to develop a more pureand enduring foundation for the sanctity and dignity of the human.
The human is the image of God. Indeed, for that reason the Torah commands: “Whoever shedsthe blood of an adam (human), by adam shall their blood be shed; For in his image did God makethe adam” (Gen 9:6). The Buffalo killer (whose name should never again be mentioned) set out,if one dare say it, to murder God.
Political scientist Ryan Burge—without whose scholarship it is quite difficult to understand whatis happening in the religious and political landscape of America—demonstrates in his 2021 bookThe Nones that 73 percent of nones have no higher education. A significant portion of themleave high school and become what Burge calls “loners.” Young men and women whoparticipate in the military or attend college have an opportunity for moral development, whichtakes place in human relationships fostered by group participation. The loners are, at a critical
moment in life, not just socially isolated; they are ethically and morally isolated. Burgeominously goes on to explain that this is the group that gives us mass shooters. It must also benoted that these people are not afflicted with incapacitating mental illness. They have freelychosen evil.
Stephen Ray, the former president of Chicago Theological Seminary, has commented on Burge’sobservation, noting that such loners are enabled by structures of permission. By this, Ray meansthat when prominent figures in American society give voice to ideas and sentiments such as“they will not replace us,” White supremacist loners are authorized to behave as they do.
Following the end of prophecy, the Jewish tradition no longer attempts to address the question“Why?” when horrific and evil events overtake us. Rather, it seeks to answer a different set ofquestions: Now that we have been subjected to such events, what must we do? How should we
do it? With whom should we do it? When and where should we do it?
One thing we should do after the murders in Buffalo is mourn. Generally, mourning means togive cathartic expression to loss, sadness, anger, grief, pain, and weeping. But rabbi Moses benMaimon (1138–1204), the foremost rabbinic legal authority and philosopher in the Middle Ages,commonly known as Maimonides, departs from the popular sense of the purpose of mourning and gets at a greater truth. For him, the purpose of mourning is to stand for kevod habriyot, theglorious dignity of every human created in the image of God. Every death is an assault on thedignity of the human created in the image of God. Or as John Donne wrote in Meditation XVII,“any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.”
Maimonides teaches that the obligation to mourn falls first and foremost on immediate relatives,then the rest of the family, and then the neighborhood and wider community. All who join in thatmourning—in that stand for human dignity—are summoned to be with the mourner. They arenot summoned to deliver sermons. They are not summoned to say wise words of consolation, forthere are no wise words of consolation in the face of the violation of human dignity. Rather, theyare obligated simply to be with the mourner. That is the essence of comfort and consolation inthe Jewish tradition: to sit with the mourner and to say nothing, so that the mourner knows thathe or she is not alone in standing for the human dignity of their loved one.
Jeffrey Veidlinger’s new book, In the Midst of Civilized Europe, is about the pogroms that tookplace during the Ukrainian National Uprising between 1919 and 1921. Approximately 100,000Jews were murdered. These pogroms were spontaneous and popular. They were not perpetratedwith an order from the top. They were merely an expression of popular sentiment. That popularsentiment was expressed in a saying that was on the lips of the pogrom perpetrators as they wentabout their murdering: “No more Jews.”
“They will not replace us” is of a piece with “no more Jews.” And in the face of “they will notreplace us,” I am obligated to declare and act upon four simple words to my Black friends,colleagues, neighbors, and community members: “You are not alone."

​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 ona diverse selection of resolutions, from proposals to add the late Bishop Barbara Harris to thechurch’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 ameasure proposed by the Diocese of Northern California that would repeal the Episcopal canonthat requires worshipers to be baptized before receiving Communion in Episcopal churches.
Martin Heatlie testified on behalf of Episcopalians in Northern California who researched theissue. “We could not find anything in the Bible or the Book of Common Prayer that requiredbaptism 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, thediocese concluded. “We all believe that all people are God’s people, so it’s not just the gifts ofGod for just baptized people,” Heatlie said.
Heatlie was one of eight people who testified on Resolution C028 at the online hearing held bythe bishops’ and deputies’ committees on Prayer Book, Liturgy and Music. (The twocommittees, though distinct, typically meet together to consider resolutions.) The EpiscopalChurch’s Canon I.17.7 (page 88) states: “No unbaptized person shall be eligible to receive HolyCommunion in this Church.”
The Rev. James Richardson, a priest and alternate clergy deputy in the Diocese of NorthernCalifornia, noted that the diocese’s laity voted overwhelmingly in support of repealing thatcanon, 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 connectionbetween the sacraments of baptism and Communion. Nathan Brown, a lay deputy in the Dioceseof Washington, asserted that the two sacraments “are intrinsically linked,” while the Rev. LeeSingleton, 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 theBible is not itself justification for ending The Episcopal Church’s practice of welcoming onlybaptized Christians to receive Eucharist. “I think we sometimes forget that the Bible is not a rulebook for how we do church,” Pearson said. In other Christian texts going back to the earlycenturies of the church, baptism and Communion are clearly linked, he said. “It is always thebaptized and the baptized alone who is really emphasized.”
The resolution “contradicts 2,000 years of church teaching and practice,” Kevin Miller, aMassachusetts 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 tyingCommunion to baptism. It can be an opportunity to teach about the importance of baptism indeepening a person’s Christian faith.
The 80th General Convention will meet July 7-14 in Baltimore, Maryland, to consider these andother resolutions being reviewed by two dozen committees in different focus areas. The triennialconvention is both the church’s governing body and the largest churchwide gathering. It typicallymeets in a different city every three years and is a hub for legislative activity, networking andfellowship. As a bicameral governing body, General Convention splits its authority between theHouse of Bishops and House of Deputies.
This year’s General Convention was delayed a year because of the pandemic, and when bishopsand 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 andhearings have been held online months before the in-person gathering, helping the churchachieve 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 invitedto 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 Dioceseof Virginia. This revised lectionary would, in part, expand the selection of readings for weekdayservices, creating new opportunities for celebrating Holy Eucharist, Charlotte Meyer testified. “Alectionary such as this is not only useful but highly effective in forming community,” saidMeyer, a lay deputy from the Diocese of Easton.
The resolution addressing antisemitism and anti-Jewish lectionary interpretations, C030, wasproposed by the Diocese of New York. It mirrors similar resolutions under consideration by thisGeneral 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 onMay 10 to deliberate on the resolutions assigned to them.

​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 invitesfriends over to her house, who organizes events and outings with her friends. What a fantasticway to live.
I thought of her while reading Robin Dunbar’s recent book, “Friends.” He found that themaximum 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 peopleare on an average British Christmas card list? About 150. How many people were there in earlyhuman hunter-gatherer communities? About 150. Dunbar argues that it’s a matter of cognitivecapacity. The average human mind can maintain about 150 stable relationships at any givenmoment. These 150 friends are the people you invite to your big events — the people you feelcomfortably altruistic toward.
He also argues that most people have a circle of roughly 15 closer friends. These are youreveryday social companions — the people you go to dinner and the movies with. Within thatgroup there’s your most intimate circle, with roughly five friends. These are the people who arewilling 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 incommon. “You are twice as likely to share genes with a friend as you are with any randomperson from your local neighborhood,” he writes. People tend to befriend those who have similarmusical tastes, political opinions, professions, worldviews and senses of humor. You meet a newperson. You invest time in getting to know this person, and you figure out which friendshipcircle 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 inanother person’s company to move from acquaintance to friend. To move from casual friend tomeaningful friend took another 50 hours over a three-month period, and to move into the innerclose friend circle took another 100 hours.
People generally devote a lot more time to their inner circles than to their outer circles. Dunbarfound that over the course of a month, people devote about eight and a half hours to each of theirfive closest friends, and they devote a bit more than two hours a month (basically a dinner or alunch) to the next 10 who complete their 15-person circle. They devote, on average, less than 20minutes 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 energyacross more people and have more but weaker close friendships. Introverts invest in fewerpeople but have stronger ties to them.
The other crucial factor in friendship is social skill, and this is something that, as a society, wedon’t take seriously enough. This has become a passionate conviction for me over the pastdecade. 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 tobelieve that online life erodes those skills.
But our happiness in life, as well as our health and fulfillment, is hugely dependent on our abilityto be skillfully understanding of and considerate toward others. A lot of the bitterness andalienation in our country flows from the fact that our social skills are inadequate to the complexsociety we now live in.
The psychologists Michael Argyle and Monika Henderson identified some of the social actionson which friendships are based: standing up for friends when they are not around, sharingimportant 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 conversationback and forth without interrupting, adding something meaningful to what the other person justsaid, telling jokes, reminiscing about the past, anticipating how the other person might react toyour 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 peoplewere having in coffee shops and other venues and found that two-thirds of the conversation timewas spent talking about social topics. Dunbar’s research also suggests that the average personcan expect to have a close relationship break down about every 2.3 years. That’s roughly 30relationship breakdowns over an adulthood — usually over things like lack of care and poorcommunication.
I find Dunbar’s work fascinating, though like so much of the social sciences, it focuses on whatcan be quantified across populations, so it misses what is particular and unique about eachfriendship.
Most of this research was done many years ago. Reading it in the context of Covid, I often had asense that I was glimpsing a lost world. Everything seems so fragile. As we gradually slog backto normal life, this might be the moment to take a friendship inventory, and to be aggressivelyfriendly.

​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. Perhapsthere 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 internetfor years in the form of memes, chain emails and Facebook posts. Some elected officials have ahistory 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 thismisguided belief.
A much-cited passage from the Acts of the Apostles, the first work of church history, has strongsocialist overtones. Christian socialists use this passage to argue socialism was a historical realityfor the followers of Christ. If they’re right, that has huge implications for a country that remainsmajority Christian. Fortunately, they’re wrong.
Acts 4:32-35 gives believers a picture of a highly egalitarian church. Among the believers, “noone claimed private ownership of any possessions.” Those who had property sold it and broughtit to the church. The proceeds were “distributed to each as any had need.” This sounds almostlike the classic Marx line —“from each according to his ability, to each according to hisneeds”—but read a little further.
Acts 5 contains a harrowing account of two church members, Ananias and Sapphira, who soldtheir property but lied about the price. Confronted in their deceit by St. Peter, they suddenlyperish. The passage states they were not punished merely for holding back their wealth. “Werenot the proceeds at your disposal?” St. Peter asks, indicating the property and its fruits weretheirs. The real lesson is the imperative of absolute truth before God. For those who havereceived the Holy Spirit, falsehood is perilous.
Later, Acts tells of St. Paul’s missionary journeys, during which he worked as a tentmaker tosupport his ministry. While not motivated by private profit, Paul nevertheless made recourse tothe 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 withoutproducing and trading. There’s scant biblical evidence for a wholesale condemnation ofownership and commerce.
Ultimately claims of early church socialism miss the mark because they conflate two kinds ofcommunities: organizations and orders. Organizations are consciously crafted to achieve thegoals of their members. Orders are spontaneous and emergent, arising out of the interactionsbetween organizations. Businesses, educational institutions, charities and communes areorganizations. But economic systems like socialism and capitalism are orders.
Calling the church an organization in no way diminishes its divinity. It simply means one canthink 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, whogets what is determined by purposefully designed rules. Those rules can be meritocratic (bonusesand stock options) or egalitarian (relief for widows and orphans). They can be consensual(committees, voting) or hierarchical (executives, commands). But they aren’t socialistic. Neitherare 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 temporaryshelters 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 thinkof 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 regimentssociety, 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 aspecific set of economic institutions. Exploring the church’s internal constitution can befascinating, and the generosity of the earliest Christians should serve as an example for us. Butthis 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 thechurch’s social teachings, but church history matters too. Historical memory and interpretationare powerful forces for shaping contemporary beliefs. A socialist can be a good Christian, but thenarrative of early church socialism is a myth.
Mr. Salter is an economics professor at Texas Tech University, a research fellow at TTU’s FreeMarket Institute, and a senior fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research.

​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 achange or a deepening of faith, know someonewho is considering it,or would like to talk about how thechurch 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 ofthe religious elders with whom Jesus is in constant conflict. Nicodemus approaches Jesus aloneat night, saying, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God,” and proceedsto ask a series of sincere questions. It is clear that Nicodemus is a seeker, attracted to Jesus’sunconventional 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 seenquestioning 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’tnecessarily Christian. I often meet older people who are having religious stirrings for the firsttime, 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 youngand middle adulthood, but then increases through one’s 40s and beyond. The theologian JamesFowler explained this pattern in his famous 1981 book,Stages of Faith. After studying hundredsof human subjects, Fowler observed that as young adults, many people are put off by ideas thatseem arbitrary or morally retrograde, such as those surrounding sexuality. They may alsobecome disillusioned by religion’s inability to explain life’s hardest puzzles; for example, theidea 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, accordingto Fowler, is when they become tolerant of religion’s ambiguities and inconsistencies, and startto 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 aregenerally happier and generally suffer less depression than those who have no faith. And thebenefits 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 somekind of practice or structure that allows one to ponder life’s mysteries and move beyond a focuson 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 withobstacles that can cause a spiritually hungry person to turn back, if he or she can’t see a wayaround them.

Obstacle 1: Santa in the church
Once, when my kids were little, my family and I drove past our Catholic church, and my oldestson, then about 4 years old, asked whether Santa Claus lived inside. My wife and I laughed a lotat 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 wemature. 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 Tunnelin New Jersey featuring the silhouette of the Three Kings approaching Bethlehem. The captionunderneath 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 groupopposed to religion. But it was not an appeal to reason—exactly the contrary. It was an appeal toreduce faith to a story many of us heard as children, and to reject it outright if, as adults, it doesnot seem likely to be literally accurate in every detail. That’s about as reasonable as divorcingyour spouse because he or she doesn’t live up to the happily-ever-after fairy tales you heard as achild.
The solution to this obstacle is to reacquaint yourself with faith with mature eyes. If you reread abook from your childhood as an adult, you’ll likely find it very different from what youremembered, and pick up on things you missed when you were young. The same is true withreligious practice. We all have hard questions about the meaning of life, and one of the benefitsof religious traditions is that their sacred texts, religious scholars, and longtime practitioners haveconsidered 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’relike — try doing so as an adult with an open mind and heart. They might just hold truths thatyour 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 tothe self-concept can be uncomfortable, and people often react with intense resistance to anythingthat 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 parlanceof survey research, a “none,” as more than a fifth of Americans classify themselves. Althoughseeing 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 ideascan feel like a threat to the self-concept.
The key to overcoming this obstacle is to remember that, even if “none” is an accuratedescription of you at the moment, it doesn’t have to be a lifelong commitment. In fact, it’shealthy 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 exploreyour spiritual side, you don’t have to abruptly change your self-concept from “none” to “veryreligious person.” You might think of yourself as “none right now,” or perhaps, “none, but opento suggestion.” This injects the elements of humility and flexibility — even vulnerability — toyour understanding of yourself, which has a powerful effect. Although you may not have faithright 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 thetime commitment may be enough to deter some people who are craving spiritual practice butfind 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 andenergy, you shift your mindset to see spiritual exploration as an adventure in and of itself? Formillennia, 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 thousandyears, this route has been followed by millions, who walk hundreds of kilometers in prayerfulcontemplation. 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 notthat kind of person — we’re shutting ourselves off from many of life’s possibilities. Being opento 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 tofaith, many people do change with age.
If you are feeling an unexpected spiritual pull, realize that it is normal. If faith is something youreally want, don’t be put off by the obstacles in your path — and unlike Nicodemus, don’t sneakaround. 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.

​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 smackedChris 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, aman slid around the chairlift-boarding area of a Canadian resort, one foot strapped into hissnowboard 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 onany bus in this god**** town!” before calling his fellow passenger a “liberal piece of s***” andstorming 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 highestnumber of “unruly passenger” incidents ever, according to the FAA. In February, a plane boundfor Washington, D.C., had to make an emergency landing in Kansas City, Missouri, after a mantried to break into the co*ckpit.
Health-care workers say their patients are behaving more violently; at one point, Missourihospitals 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 athird, the biggest increase on record, then rose again in 2021. Car thefts spiked 14 percent lastyear, and carjackings have surged in various cities. And if there were a national tracker ofschool-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 normsrecently 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 coursingthrough society right now. When Christine Porath, a business professor at GeorgetownUniversity, collected data on why people behave in rude or uncivil ways, “the No. 1 reason byfar was feeling stressed or overwhelmed,” she told me.
The pandemic has created a lot of “high-stress, low-reward” situations, said Keith Humphreys, apsychiatry professor at Stanford, and now everyone is teetering slightly closer to their breakingpoint. Someone who may have lost a job, a loved one, or a friend to the pandemic might bepushed over the edge by an innocuous request. “When someone has that angry feeling, it’sbecause 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 theUniversity 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 whenprovoked. “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 witnessrudeness are three times less likely to help someone else,” she told me. She thinks people mightbe picking up on rudeness from social media and passing it on. Or they might be logging in to aZoom meeting with their overwhelmed boss, getting yelled at, and then speaking a little morecurtly 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 lotof these incidents involve somebody using a substance,” Humphreys said. “Whether they’redrinking before they get on the flight … A lot of auto accidents, including aggression-driven autoaccidents, come from substances.” Americans have been drinking 14 percent more days a monthduring the pandemic, and drug overdoses have also increased since 2019. Substance-abusetreatment, 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. In2020, police recovered nearly twice as many firearms within a year of purchase as they did in2019—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 Bartonwrites 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 stoppedgoing 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 breakrules when our bonds to society are weakened,” Robert Sampson, a Harvard sociologist whostudies social disorder, told me. “When we become untethered, we tend to prioritize our ownprivate 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 socialnorms 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 havestopped being moral, too. “We’ve got, I think, a generalized sense that the rules simply don’tapply,” Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, told me. Insome places, he says, police arrested fewer people during the pandemic, and “when enforcementgoes 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 thisproblem worse. Just as it’s easier to scream at someone on Twitter than in real life, it’s easier torage at a masked flight attendant than one whose face you can fully see. “You don’t really see ahuman being so much as you’re seeing someone masked,” Sampson said. Though one studyfound that face masks don’t dehumanize the wearer, another small experiment found that they doimpair 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 commonissues among people who contracted COVID-19 were anxiety and depression, a small percentageof people infected with the coronavirus appeared to develop psychosis for the first time.
Throughout the pandemic, treatment for severe mental-health problems, including schizophreniaand bipolar disorder, has been harder to access. In early 2020, some psychiatrists suspendedgroup therapy and other in-person programs; later, emergency rooms filled with COVID-19patients, limiting capacity for psychiatric intake.
The majority of people with mental illness, though, are not violent. Most people with mentalillness who commit violence have other problems, such as anger issues, substance abuse, or arecent 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’tpossibly be responsible for the huge surge in misbehavior. According to the FAA, 72 percent ofunruly-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 ofMental Health and the author of Healing. “It’s so important to distinguish people who have amental illness from people who just do egregious things.”
Some of the antisocial behavior Americans are seeing will resolve itself as the pandemic loosensits 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 aresettling back into place.
Improvement may be slow. But experts think human interaction will, eventually, return to thepre-pandemic status quo. The rise in disorder may simply be the unsavory side of a uniquelydifficult time—one in which many people were tested, and some failed. “There have beenperiods where the entire nation is challenged,” Insel said, “and you see both things: people whodo heroic things, and people who do some very defensive, protective, and oftentimes ridiculousthings.”

It was another fascinatingweek 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 territorialwar 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 spiritualitycome 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 Polandafter the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. But that was just one in a series of events thatat the time could have seemed disconnected.
Among them: Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931. Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia in 1935. Theremilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936 and the Spanish Civil War, which started the sameyear. Anschluss with Austria and the Sudeten crisis of 1938. The Soviet invasion of Polandweeks after the German one and Germany’s western invasions the following year. OperationBarbarossa and Pearl Harbor in 1941.
The point is, World War II didn’t so much begin as it gathered, like water rising until it breachesa dam. We, too, have been living through years of rising waters, though it took Russia’s invasionof Ukraine for much of the world to notice.
Before the invasion, we had the Russian invasions of Georgia, Crimea and eastern Ukraine; theRussian carpet bombing of Aleppo; the use of exotic radioactive and chemical agents againstRussian 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 andimprisonment of Alexei Navalny.
Were any of these sovereignty violations, legal violations, treaty violations, war crimes andcrimes against humanity met with a strong, united, punitive response that could have averted thenext 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’swar 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 awaywith his invasion? He didn’t. Contrary to the claim that Putin’s behavior is a result of Westernprovocation — 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 appeasem*nt.
The Biden administration now faces the question of whether it wants to bring this cycle to anend. The answer isn’t clear. Sanctions have hurt the Russian economy, arms shipments toUkraine 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 ofpotentially catastrophic illusions.
Sanctions may devastate Russia in the long term. But the immediate struggle in Ukraine is shortterm. Insofar as one of the main effects of sanctions has been to send tens of thousands ofmiddle-class Russians into exile, they actually help Putin by weakening a potent base of politicalopposition. As for the oligarchs, they might have lost their yachts, but they’re not about to pickup their guns.
Arming Ukraine with Javelin and Stinger missiles has wounded and embarrassed the Russianmilitary. Providing Kyiv with MIG-29 fighter jets and other potentially game-changing weaponsystems 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 whenUkrainians are united in their hatred for him or that he’s looking for an offramp — and that weshould be thinking up ingenious ways to provide him with one — may turn out to be right. Butthey are grossly premature. This war is only in its third week; it took the Nazis longer to conquerPoland. The ability to subdue a restive population is chiefly a function of the pain an occupier iswilling 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 NATOcountries are prepared to tolerate. But the idea that doing so could start World War III ignoreshistory 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 vocalaversion 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 littleevidence so far that Putin is eager to cut his losses; on the contrary, to do so now — afterincurring the economic price of sanctions but without achieving a clear victory — wouldjeopardize 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 theWest. He consolidates power. He suffers consequences only marginally graver than the onesalready 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.

​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 mustdecrease” (John 3:30). Having witnessed the havoc it wreaked upon Christian women prone toself-abnegation, as well as the license it gave to authoritarian leaders prone to spiritual abuse, Iwas not a fan of this particular phrase.
Christian theologians have always had revolutionary messages about the self, which are oftenparadoxical and profoundly countercultural. They take their cue from Jesus, who talked aboutlosing one’s self in order to find it. About coming to serve, not be served. About death being thedoorway to life. In none of these messages is Jesus downgrading the self. He is simply giving ourselfhood a new foundation.
The early church followed in his footsteps, baptizing people and proclaiming the termination of aselfhood 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 personis being buried here. Sin killed you—you were already dead—you are just enacting a death thathas already happened. When the convert rose from the clear waters of baptism, they were raisedinto 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 fullydeveloped selfhood was neither self-care nor self-abnegation—which, it could be argued, aresimply 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 oneselfand being oneself can only happen in relationship with knowing and being known by God andothers. And to go one step further: Truly caring for oneself only happens when we havesomething bigger than ourselves to care about. This is the secret to Lent. The early church, like agood parent, wanted to direct its children annually into a journey that would remind them of theirprimary selfhood: in Christ.
Historically, Lent arose from the 40 days when baptismal candidates fasted and prayed inpreparation for their baptism on the eve of Easter. It didn’t take much time, though, until thewhole 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 toremembering baptism and the new identity that it offers. Lent was not so much about self-hatredor 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: thatmy selfhood and God’s are in competition, and that choosing something good for myself comesat the expense of God’s glory and vice versa. But this is just a modern dilemma, foreign to thechurch of earlier centuries.
Bernard of Clairvaux, a gentle pastor and abbot from the 12th century, helps us ground self-carein its proper relation to God and ourselves. For him, the love of self was a fitting and necessarypart of being human and even a key part of our survival. At the same time, he understood that itwas equally vulnerable to our disordered desires. How is it possible to have a rightly orderedcare for ourselves? Bernard took his monks on a pilgrimage of love, in which they movedbeyond 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 humanaffection,” where we are weakened and nearly “compelled to love and serve ourselves first.” ForBernard, 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’ssake.”
In the second stage of love, we discover something larger than ourselves—God!—who is worthyof our love and delight. We begin to experience freedom from our disordered desires, eventhough 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 heis and not for what he can give us. This stage brings liberation, as our disordered desires begin tofind their deepest calling in loving God and our neighbor. “Once God’s sweetness has beentasted,” writes Bernard, “it draws us to the pure love of God more than our needs compel us tolove him. Thus we begin to say, ‘We now love God, not for our necessity, for we ourselves havetasted 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 mostdifficult spiritual discipline of all: seeing ourselves with God’s eyes, knowing ourselves asbeloved, and loving ourselves as one of God’s beloved creations—warts and all. “Suchexperiences 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 truthcomes as a shock: What brings God glory is not our self-denigration but rather humble gratitudeand 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 hisunalloyed love (1 Cor. 13).
When you remove God’s love from the picture, self-care is not part of the fourth stage but thefirst. 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 willnever 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 ownenjoyment and acceptance of us. This radical message is what we’re unsuspectingly baptizedinto. 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 apartfrom the kind abnegation of the self that many have suffered. Baptism puts us in touch with ourreal 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 ofGod may be perfectly attained in this life,” writes Bernard. “But, when it does happen, we willexperience 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 neitherdependent upon self-care practices nor eschews them as worthless. For all its help, self-care cana 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 originateout of a desire to self-punish or to focus on our sinfulness. It’s even more black and white thanthat: Lent is about death. But this crazy Christian message goes even further: It’s only throughdeath that we begin to live. Lent is when the whole church remembers our origins—origins thatbegan in our baptism and Jesus’ baptism, too, where he heard the word that we can hardlybelieve: You are my beloved.
We have been baptized. We have been plunged into Christ. We can leave behind anything thatkeeps us from knowing we are loved by God and anything that prevents us from loving ourneighbor as ourselves.
Lent is not an endurance stunt. It’s about reclaiming the idea that we are loved long before weenter the wilderness.

Julie Canlis is the author ofA Theology of the Ordinary(2017) andCalvin’s Ladder(2012),winner of a Templeton Prize and a Christianity Today Award of Merit.

​A story came up during a discussion group this week in which I received permission to share. Here it is. While we were discussing the decision from the Roman Church to invalidate baptisms, one of our members said that it's like Russia and Ukraine - the conflict is between governments and not the people. He went to a wedding in a Roman Catholic Church. When it came for communion, he went up with all the others and kneeled at the rail. While he was feeling foolish for not knowing what to do with his hands, the priest came by and said, "You're not a catholic are you. Well, let's hope you will be one someday. Put your hands like this and I'll place the bread on your hands and then you say 'Amen'."
That story restored my hope.
The topic for next week is an opinion piece from the NY Times about how it seems like people in America today have rights but no responsibilities.

America 2022: Where Everyone Has Rights
And No One Has Responsibilities
Thomas Friedman, NY Times 2.8.22
The conflict between Neil Young and Joe Rogan over the anti-vaccine propaganda Roganspreads through his podcast triggered a heated debate over the boundaries of free speech onplatforms 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 thanfree speech.
As a journalist who relies on freedom of speech, I would never advocate tossing Rogan offSpotify. But as a citizen, I sure appreciated Young calling him out over the deeper issue: How isit 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, andespecially 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 ourcountry today.
“We are losing what could be called our societal immunity,” argued Dov Seidman, founder ofthe How Institute for Society. “Societal immunity is the capacity for people to come together, dohard 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 legitimacyof 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 theircherished 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 peoplethink they have responsibilities to the other — only rights that protect them from being told bythe 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 justdoing something shameful.
Because the Rogan podcast episode that set off the controversy, an interview with Dr. RobertMalone, who has gained fame with discredited claims, completely ignored the four mostimportant statistical facts about Covid-19 today that highlight our responsibilities — to ourfellow citizens and, even more so, to the nurses and doctors risking their lives to take care of usin 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 forCovid than fully vaccinated adults. Second: Adults 65 and older who are not vaccinated arearound 50 times more likely to be hospitalized for Covid than those who have received a fullvaccine course and a booster. Third: Unvaccinated people are 20 times more likely to die ofCovid than people who are vaccinated and boosted.
The fourth statistic is from a survey from the staffing firm Cross Country Healthcare and FloridaAtlantic University’s College of Nursing, released in December. It found that the emotional tolland other work conditions brought on by the pandemic contributed to some two-thirds of nursesgiving thought to leaving the profession.
A McKinsey study last month about the stress on nurses quoted Gretchen Berlin, a registerednurse and McKinsey partner, as saying: “Many patients, especially at the start of this, had onlythe 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 peoplethrough that over and over again. … The level of stress that individuals are dealing with is goingto have massive implications on everyone’s well-being.”
My friend Dr. Steven Packer, president and C.E.O. of Montage Health and Community Hospitalin Monterey, Calif., told me that many hospitals today are experiencing an unprecedented 20percent 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 criticallyill Covid patients — with the overwhelming majority of those patients having a potentiallyavoidable 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 hadgotten vaccinated,” according to the American Hospital Association.
But as Wired magazine columnist Steve Levy wrote last week in a critique of Rogan’s three-hourSpotify 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 theirconversation transpired, 7,559 people worldwide died of Covid, 1,410 of which were in theUnited States. The vast majority of them were unvaccinated.”
Instead, “the entirety of the podcast makes it clear that Rogan and Malone are on the sameteam,” Levy added. “When Malone uncorks questionable allegations about disastrous vaccineeffects and the global cabal of politicians and drugmakers pulling strings, Rogan responds withuh-huhs and wows.” There is no mention of the numerous studies that “unvaccinated people aremany, 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 forthe doctors and nurses on the pandemic front lines whose only ask is that the politicians andmedia 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 ourresponsibilities to one another, not just our rights. I’ll tell you who was defending them: NeilYoung.
Listen to the last line of Young’s statement when he pulled out of Spotify: “I am happy andproud to stand in solidarity with the frontline health care workers who risk their lives every dayto help others.”
Rogan has vowed to do better at counterbalancing controversial guests. He could start byoffering his listeners a 186-minute episode with intensive care nurses and doctors about what thispandemic of the unvaccinated has done to them.
That would be a teaching moment, not only about Covid, but also about putting ourresponsibilities to one another — and especially to those who care for us — at least on a par withour right to be as dumb and selfish as we want to be.

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 particularlyvaluable 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 studythat the Rev. Andres Arango had used the wrong wording in baptisms performed up until June17, 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 theHoly Spirit." He should have said "I baptize," the diocese explained. "It is not the communitythat baptizes a person and incorporates them into the Church of Christ; rather, it is Christ, andChrist alone, who presides at all sacraments; therefore, it is Christ who baptizes," it said. "If youwere baptized using the wrong words, that means your baptism is invalid, and you are notbaptized." Diocese spokesperson Katie Burke told NPR over email that Arango is believed tohave used the incorrect word since the beginning of his priesthood in 1995. "I do not have anexact 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 andconfirmed after an investigation by diocesan officials in consultation with the Congregation forthe Doctrine of the Faith in Rome. He noted that the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine ofFaith 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 thatArango's error "was brought to the attention of the diocese by lay faithful who were aware of ithappening in other places and of the Vatican's response, and who knew it to be incorrect whenthey 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. Butbecause baptism is the "sacrament that grants access to all the others," a botched baptism couldinvalidate any subsequent sacraments, including confirmation, marriage and holy orders. "Whatthis means for you is, if your baptism was invalid and you've received other sacraments, you mayneed to repeat some or all of those sacraments after you are validly baptized as well," the diocesesaid.
Arango — who first joined St. Gregory Parish in 2015 after decades of religious service inBrazil, California and Arizona — apologized for the inconvenience his actions had caused andtold the community that he resigned as pastor effective Feb. 1. He said he would devote hisenergy and full-time ministry "to help remedy this and heal those affected." He remains a priestin good standing, according to the diocese.
"I do not believe Fr. Andres had any intentions to harm the faithful or deprive them of the graceof baptism and the sacraments," Olmsted wrote. "On behalf of our local Church, I too amsincerely 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 foreveryone impacted."
The diocese said that while the situation may seem legalistic, the words, materials and actionsare 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 baptismalservice “to the circ*mstance that those to be baptized are, in fact, infants.” The ritual questionswill now be addressed to parents or godparents who, in fact, have always made the renunciationon 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.

​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 theseptuagenarian 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. “Dopeople 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 dowith a deep truth it speaks.
As we wind our way through life, I explained, satisfaction—the joy from fulfillment of ourwishes or expectations—is momentary. No matter what we achieve, see, acquire, or do, it seemsto slip from our grasp. Satisfaction, I told my daughter, is the greatest paradox of human life. Wecrave it, we believe we can get it, we glimpse it and maybe even experience it for a briefmoment, 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 tothe song. By building a life that is ever more baroque, expensive, and laden with crap. “You’llsee,” I told her. My daughter’s mirth now utterly extinguished, “So life is just a rat race, andwe’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 workto 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 seeingLeBron James—the world’s greatest basketball player—with a look of abject despair on his faceafter his Cleveland Cavaliers lost the NBA championship. All of the world’s wealth andaccolades were like straw in that moment of loss. Abd al-Rahman III, the emir and caliph ofCórdoba in 10th-century Spain, summed up a life of worldly success at about age 70: “I havenow 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 mycall.” And the payoff? “I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happinesswhich 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 TheAtlantic 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, Ihave fallen into the trap of believing that success and its accompaniments would fulfill me. Onmy 40th birthday I made a bucket list of things I hoped to do or achieve. They were mainlywriting books and columns about serious subjects, teaching at a top school, traveling to givelectures and speeches, maybe even leading a university or think tank. Whether these were goodand noble goals or not, they were my goals, and I imagined that if I hit them, I would besatisfied.
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 mefor a day or a week—maybe a month, never more—and then I reached for the next rung on theladder. I’d devoted my life to climbing those rungs.
And what about you? Your goals are probably different from mine, and perhaps your lifestyle istoo. 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, whoshowed in his bookThe Wisdom of the Bodythat we have built-in mechanisms to regulate ourtemperature, as well as our levels of oxygen, water, salt, sugar, protein, fat, and calcium. But theconcept applies much more broadly than that: To survive, all living systems tend to maintainstable conditions as best they can.
Homeostasis keeps us alive and healthy. But it also explains why drugs and alcohol work as theydo, as opposed to how we wish they would. While that first dose of a new recreational substancemight give you great pleasure, your previously naive brain quickly learns to sense an assault onits equilibrium and fights back by neutralizing the effect of the entering drug, making itimpossible 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 achieveconventional, acquisitive success, you can never get enough. If you base your sense of self-worthon 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’tjust explain the satisfaction conundrum; he offered an answer and lived it himself. As theyoungest 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 pursuedthe work of a scholar and teacher, producing dense philosophical treatises that are stillprofoundly influential today. He is known as the greatest philosopher of his age. But this legacywas never his aim. On the contrary, he considered his work to be nothing more than anexpression 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 theworld’s rewards. Even so, I’ve tried to take a lesson from their lives—that satisfaction lies not inattaining high status and holding on to it for dear life, but in helping other people—including bysharing 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 andattachments — 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’membarrassed to admit—involve the admiration of others for my work. Then I imagine myself infive 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 Iam doing that is inherently satisfying and meaningful and that serves others.
Inevitably, these sources of happiness are “intrinsic”—they come from within and revolvearound love, relationships, and deep purpose. They have little to do with the admiration ofstrangers. I contrast them with the things on the first list, which are generally “extrinsic”—theoutside rewards associated with Thomas’s list of idols. Most research has shown that intrinsicrewards 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 othersperceive me, by turning away these thoughts when they emerge. I have let many relationships gothat were really only about professional advancement. I work somewhat less than I did in yearspast. It takes conscious effort to avoid backsliding—the treadmill beckons often, and littlespritzes of dopamine tempt me to return to my old ways. But my changes in behavior havemostly been permanent, and I’ve been happier as a result.
Work that feels more like a mission provides purpose; travel can be inherently valuable andenjoyable; learning a skill or meeting a challenge can bring intrinsic satisfaction; meaningfulactivities 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 fromhow much they will make others admire or envy you. These motivations will never lead to deepsatisfaction.

III. GET SMALLER
Lately, there has been an explosion of books on minimalism, which all recommend downsizingyour 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, Ihave 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 wifeand 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 ofhigh 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 orschool. Instead, we share small moments: a photo of a rainy street, a silly joke, the number ofpush-ups she just did.
I don’t know whether this is giving her a head start on freeing herself from the paradox ofdissatisfaction, but it is like medicine for me. Each message is like the evening of the flower—abrief 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 determinationand practice, we can find respite from that chronic dissatisfaction and experience the joy that istrue human freedom.

​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 religiouscommunities: “Join us in person or online.” I was a big proponent of that “or online” part. InMarch of 2020, we knew little about the new disease spreading rapidly around the world but weknew it was deadly, especially for the elderly. My church was one of the first in our city to forgomeeting in person and switch to an online format, and I encouraged other churches to do thesame.
Since then Sunday mornings have varied. Our church met online; then met indoors with limitedattendance; then met outdoors; indoors again. Precautions rose and fell according to our city’sthreat 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’stime to drop the virtual option. And I think this for the same reason I believed churches shouldgo 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 betranscended 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 toworship wholly — with heart, soul, mind and strength — and embodiment is an irreducible partof that wholeness.
We are not in 2020 anymore. Even for vulnerable groups such as those over age 65, Covid has aroughly similar risk of death as the flu for those who are fully vaccinated, and the Omicronvariant seems to pose even less risk than the flu. A recent C.D.C. study found those who are fullyvaccinated are 90 percent less likely to be hospitalized because of Covid-19 than those who arenot. Certainly, the Omicron variant brought a surge in cases and hospitalization that hasthreatened 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 riskof illness or death. Throughout the past two years, we have sought to balance the risk of diseasewith the good of being present, in person, with one another. And the cost of being apart from oneanother is steep. People need physical touch and interaction. We need to connect with otherhuman 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 inbook clubs or having friends over for dinner. But embodiment is a particularly important part ofChristian spirituality and theology. We believe God became flesh, lived in a human body andremains mysteriously in a human body. Our worship is centered not on simply thinking aboutcertain 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 afriend across the aisle,” Collin Hansen wrote in his Times essay about online church. “They needto 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 ofhope in what our senses can’t yet perceive.” These are not mere accessories to a certain kind ofworship 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 optionof a live-streamed service? Because offering church online implicitly makes embodimentelective. 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 notyou 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 asociety have had to ask whether in-person church attendance is more like going to a restaurant ormore 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 thecosts of school closures currently outweigh the risks of Covid-19. In Christian theology andpractice, 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 leadersshould conform to local government protocols and strongly encourage members to be fullyvaccinated. Second, no longer offering a streaming option will mean that those who arehomebound or sick will not be able to participate in a service. This, however, is not a newproblem for the church. For centuries, churches have handled this by visiting these people athome in person.
Last, many church leaders will need to face our real fear of appearing to not take Covid seriouslyenough. I still think the biggest religion story of 2020 was how across the nation, religiouscommunities 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 foundthat only 1 percent of churches with more than 200 members met in person. Still, whatdominated 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 shamearound this. It was embarrassing for people to use the language of God to endanger lives. Wedon’t want to appear to be one of these kinds of religious people, so we can be hesitant aboutphasing out any precaution. But this ought not lead churches to, as The Times’s David Leonhardtwrote regarding Covid and childhood education, try “to minimize the spread of Covid — aworthy 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 wasnever all that countercultural. Being physically present to others was the default mode ofexistence. 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 andkept them going to church. A chief thing that the church has to offer the world now is to remindus all how to be human creatures, with all the embodiment and physical limits that implies. Weneed to embrace that countercultural call.

​Here is a surprising article that talks about why holding a grudge is so satisfying. The Bible and our spiritual practices havesomething to say about grudges and resentments. I'd like to know what you think about it.
I'll have the coffee ready for those in person.
For the Thursday Women's Discussion Group, we will have a guest facilitator, Juli Sobecki. I will be on a plane heading back to Sarasota
​so Juli will take the reins. Thanks Juli!

Why Holding a Grudge is so Satisfying
Alex McElroy, NY Times Magazine 1.18.22
During a fourth-grade sleepover, I awoke in the night frothed over by Barbasol. The other kidswere 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 theculprit. I wanted to go back to sleep, but they insisted we keep searching. And then they could nolonger 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 becauseI 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 sidesteppedgrudges 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 grudgeagainst an author who subtweeted me after I requested a blurb; I have a grudge against VinceCarter for forcing his way off the Toronto Raptors; I have a grudge against the shelf that keepsbonking 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, Iwould have taken my loss and kept ordering. This time, I boycotted the service for a month, andit 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 becausethey disrespected his priest. King Henry VIII upended his country’s relationship withCatholicism, 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 samematerial — poison — but while resentment is concentrated, a grudge is watered down, drinkableand 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 yourwife, the parents who pressured you into a career you told them you hated, the ex who emptiedyour 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 chargedyou for a drink you never ordered. Did someone truly, existentially wrong you? Don’t wasteyour 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 offeredextra credit to anyone who wrote and performed a song about the periodic table. I wrote thesong; I performed it for class; she decided against giving me the extra points. Only recently did Iaccept that what I feel for that teacher is not anger or resentment or shame — it’s a grudge. If itsounds 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 evidencethat my chemistry teacher sees the wrongness of her position all those years ago — and in thatexpanse is where my grudge continues to squat.
There was, for me, an inciting incident. Two years ago I came out as nonbinary and started usingthey/them pronouns. I was initially a font of forgiveness for everyone who misgendered me: theroommate who remarked on my “masculine energy,” the cis friend who questioned whether Ireally was trans.
But when a year passed and it kept happening, I started to think of the immense effort it took forme 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 honestmistakes, born of ignorance or confusion. Glib jokes weren’t worth my bitterness. That’s how Idiscovered my capacity for holding grudges. By expecting people to treat me how I want to betreated, and remembering when they do not — a simple little grudge, nothing as serious as aresentment — 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 thestreet. When I stood up, little lights flickered in front of my face. I tried to roll my bike, but myfront 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 forbeing angry with her. She had just gotten home from a job interview; she rarely took cabs. Shepaid me $60 to replace my wheel. I don’t begrudge her. She apologized; she paid retribution. Aturgent care, a few hours later, the doctor gave me a clean bill of health. “It’s a shame you can’tsue the woman who hit you,” she said. I thought,Does she really peg me as the type of personwho sues?Right away, I felt a grudge beginning to form. I haven’t returned to that urgent caresince.

​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, notKarl. “Whatever it is, I’m against it,” Marx sang in his 1932 film,Horse Feathers. “I don’t knowwhat they have to say / It makes no difference anyway.”
What was satire then is ideology today: Cynicism—the belief that people are generally morallybankrupt and behave treacherously in order to maximize self-interest—dominates Americanculture. 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 thefact that the modern cynical outlook on life is terrible for your well-being. It makes you lesshealthy, 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 ofcynicism. Instead of assuming that everyone and everything sucks, we should all live like theancient Greek cynics, who rebelled against convention in a search for truth and enlightenment.
THE ORIGINAL CYNICISM was a philosophical movement likely founded by Antisthenes, astudent of Socrates, and popularized by Diogenes of Sinope around the fifth century B.C. It wasbased on a refusal to accept the assumptions and habits that discourage people from questioningconventional 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 hispolicies 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 simplywithholds judgment (“This may be right or wrong”). “Modern cynicism [has] come to describesomething antithetical to its previous meanings, a psychological state hardened against bothmoral reflection and intellectual persuasion,” the University of Houston’s DavidMazella wrote inThe 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 mostdefinitely conclude, however, that modern cynicism is detrimental. In one 2009 study, researchers examining negative cynical attitudes found that people who scored high in thischaracteristic on a personality test were roughly five times more likely to suffer from depressionlater 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-agedmen found that a cynical outlook significantly increased the odds of death from both cancer andheart 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 prematuremortality. (Although both of these studies involved only men, nothing suggests that the resultsare gender-specific.)
Adding insult to injury, people tend not to respect cynics. Writing in theJournal of ExperimentalPsychology: Generalin 2020, psychologists found that cynical attitudes lead to being treateddisrespectfully—possibly because cynics tend to show disrespect to others, leading to a viciouscycle. 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, theleast 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 bynoting that cynics “are more likely to forgo valuable opportunities for cooperation andconsequently 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 atruecynic, 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 likeChristianity or even Buddhism, it should: Greek philosophers, including skeptics, whowere contemporaries of the cynics, were probably influenced by Indian traditions when theyvisited the subcontinent with Alexander the Great, and in the following centuries, the ideas ofcynicism and its offshoot stoicism heavily influenced early Christian thought.
To pivot from the modern to the ancient, I recommend focusing each day on several originalcynical concepts, none of which condemns the world but all of which lead us to question, and inmany cases reject, worldly conventions and practices.
1. Eudaimonia (“satisfaction”)
The ancient cynics knew that lasting satisfaction cannot be derived from a constant struggle forpossessions, pleasures, power, or prestige. Happiness can come only from detaching ourselvesfrom the world’s false promises. Make a list of worldly rewards that are pulling at you—such asa luxury item or the admiration of others—and say out loud, “I will not be subjugated by thisdesire.”
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 adetrimental substance or habit. Instead of watching television after dinner, go for a walk. Instead
of a co*cktail, have a glass of water, and consider the refreshment you get from every sip. Thisdiscipline promises to strengthen your will and help you adopt routines that improve yourhappiness.
3. Autarkeia (“self-sufficiency”)
Relying on the world—especially on getting approval from the world—makes equanimity andtrue freedom impossible. Refuse to accept your craving for the high opinions of others. Think ofa way that you habitually seek validation, be it for your looks, your cleverness in school, or yourmaterial 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 toaccept its conventional standards.
4. Kosmopolites (“cosmopolitanism”)
Seeing ourselves as better or worse than others sets us against one another and makes love andfriendship difficult, which is self-destructive. This can be as obvious as thinking,I am better thansomeone else because I was born in this country, or as subtle as feeling slightly superior to acolleague because of my academic affiliation. Start each day by reminding yourself that theworld belongs equally to everyone, and resolve not to treat anyone differently because of herstatus. Act exactly the same with your boss and your barista.
THE MODERN CYNIC is miserable because he is enchained to the outside world, whichoppresses him because it is corrupt. The ancient cynic, by contrast, is happy—not because shethinks 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 towardany party or clique, and was thus not well liked by those in power, who could have given him acomfortable life. One day, a philosopher named Aristippus, who was much favored by theroyalty, found Diogenes in the task of washing vegetables, a low and disdained food for theancient 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 atyrant.”
If you want to be a good cynic and a happier person, learn to eat your vegetables. They may notseem like a sumptuous feast to the people around you, but you’ll find that they nourish you farmore than the empty calories of social conformity.

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 BrotherandWhat 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 dreadreceiving 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. Aswe got older, distance helped us eventually get along. But in our 50s, when I announced I wasmarrying, he bullied our mom into rewriting her will to ensure, should I predecease him, that myfuture stepson would not inherit any of the estate: He would get it all. When settling the estatesome 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 hedeserved 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 eventuallyacknowledged 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 wouldmost likely be fine with it. But for someone who has never been able to provide, undoubtedlybecause 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, thousandsof people in our country donate a kidney, and we rightly honor them forthat act of generosity. The procedure itself involves some discomfort (a small percentage ofpeople 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 riskof kidney failure. Still, the overall medical risks to donors are small, while the benefits to therecipients are typically huge — their lives can be extended by many years. Because of yourgenetic 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 isthat, if you prove to be histocompatible, your brother can have a longer, better life at little cost toyou. Given that you two are brothers, in fact, they may believe that you have even more reasonto 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 goodconsequences of your acts, are unlikely to agree — because you could probably increase thegood 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 justto 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 theconsequences of this donation. You’re troubled because your brother is… well, he’s yourbrother. 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 thosewith whom you have certain relationships; it

that you do so.
Most people would agree that your brother has a special claim on you. To be sure, kidneydonation 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 ofhow to weight this special claim if you’re on lousy terms. When a responsibility arises from ourrelationships, 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 thenis it the bare fact of biological relatedness that matters, or is it the fact of being connectedthrough family relationships, so that the duties extend to adopted members of our family? And,
ifthe latter, do we have no obligations to biological kin who were adopted into other families? It’seasy 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 — youwould probably be willing to donate a kidney for a close cousin. Your reluctance here arisesfrom 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 becauseit would, as you put it, “raise old feelings
of being his victim.” Let’s grant that he has treated youvery badly and never apologized adequately for doing so. You have been, in that sense, hisvictim. But why shouldn’t an act of generosity to someone who has mistreated you make youfeel magnanimous instead? The question isn’t so much what you owe to your brother as whatyou owe to yourself. Choosing to deny him a life-extending opportunity because he has
​beenrotten to you would be understandable. It would also be ungenerous enough that you shouldn’twant 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 moderatelyschizophrenic; he does well on his medication but is increasingly unable to live alone. He and Iare not close and are very different people, but when our mother went into a nursing homeseveral years ago, he came to live with my wife and me. Several other siblings living closedeclined to take him in. My brother can’t live alone for a number of reasons, including forgettingto 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 tosupport our shared goal of traveling extensively. We have friends and family around the worldwith 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 hedoes require care and patience. Also, his moderately sexist attitudes have led to a number ofconflicts 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 puttinghim in assisted living. Doing so will decrease his quality of life drastically. Our income hasallowed 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 himto go into assisted living so I can enjoy the retirement we planned on, knowing that his quality oflife will diminish? How do I set aside this strong sense of disappointment in myself?NameWithheld
​
There are threekinds 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 yourspecial concern, as a loving spouse, for your wife. And then there’s your special concern for yourown 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 concernsis 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 aninquiry into what it meant to live well.
And as you recognize, the decisions you face are not yours alone. Your wife has already beenputting up with the strain of living with a difficult housemate, who, it seems clear, doesn’talways 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 himas a patient and not as a person.) Further, it would seem that she’s asking you to recognize yourown right to the extensive plans you shared as well as hers. If you refused to give your and yourwife’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 assistedhousing. To weigh that comparison, you need a realistic sense of what life will be like for theforeseeable 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 thebenefit to him of living with you must come from the relationship that you have; his awarenessof 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 intosecuring an assisted-living situation that’s as good as you can find. Only when you have actualoptions to consider can you assess what sort of quality of life he can have outside your directcare. And you should certainly try to involve him in thinking about these options. (It would bewise 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 familymembers. If they won’t do their part, you’re not obliged to take up their moral slack. But you canat least ask them for help in covering the costs of getting him a decent living situation. You canalso spend time with him when you aren’t on the road and urge your other siblings to do thesame.
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 bigchanges 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. Thatthere are no costless choices here, though, reflects the usual human condition. You may findyourself concurring with an avowal of the poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky: “Life — the way itreally is — is a battle not between Bad and Good, but between Bad and Worse."

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 manybooks on race, society and religious faith.)
​
Just a few days before my father died in 2014, I asked him a question some might findinsensitive 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 theinfluence 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 morepensive, something more drawn-out. But they were consistent with our mutual grappling with themeaning 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 sociologicalmatter-of-factness: “We all will die at some point. Tell me something I don’t know.” I suspectthat 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 doas a philosopher and as a human being. My father, while not a professional philosopher, lovedwisdom and had the gift of gab. Our many conversations over the years touched on the existenceof 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 manyhide 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-yearpandemic. As we begin another year, I am astonished again and again to realize that more than800,000 irreplaceable people have died from Covid-19 in the United States; worldwide, thenumber is over five million. When we hear about those numbers, it is important that we becomeattuned to actual deaths, the cessation of millions of consciousnesses, stopped just like that. Thisis 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 meanssomething in general.” We understood that death is about me, him and you. But what we in factwere learning about was dying, not death. Dying is a process; we get to count the days, but forme 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 wouldsubsequently conduct for The Times’s philosophy seriesThe Stone, called Conversations onDeath, with religious scholars from a variety of faiths. While my initial aim had little to do with grapplingwith the deaths caused by Covid-19 (like most, I had no idea just how devastating thedisease would be), it soon became hard to ignore. As the interviews appeared, I heard fromreaders who said that reading them helped them cope with their losses during the pandemic. Iwould like to think that it was partly the probing of the meaning of death, the refusal to lookaway, 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 notlong before our conversations on death turned to matters of life, on the importance of what we doon this side of the grave. Death is loss, each scholar seemed to say, but it also illuminates andtransforms 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 moreemphasis 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 scholarPankaj Jain underscored that it is on this side of the veil of death that one attempts to completelypurify the soul through absolute nonviolence.
Brook Ziporyn, a scholar of Taoism, stressed the importance of embracing this life as constantchange, being able to let go, of allowing, as he says, every new situation to “deliver to us its ownnew 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 areenjoined to do well in life so that when death eventually comes, one can be remembered forone’s good deeds.” The atheist philosopher Todd May placed importance on seeking to live ourlives 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 — thequestions are “too complex” — and that life, as William Shakespeare’s Macbeth says, is “a taletold 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. Justas the blind men who come to know the elephant by touching only certain parts of it, our viewsof death, religious or not, are limited, marked by context, culture, explicit and implicit
metaphysical sensibilities, values and vocabularies. The elephant evades full description. Butwith 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 capturein full. In this case, perhaps each religious worldview touches something or is touched bysomething 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 afterdeath. This attachment, which can function as a form of refusal, is familiar to all of us. Therecent death of my dear friend bell hooks painfully demonstrates this. Why would I want to letgo of our wonderful and caring relationship and our stimulating and witty conversations? I’mreminded, though, that my father’s last words regarding the meaning of death being too complexleave me facing a beautiful question mark.
My father was also a lover of Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet.” He would quote sections from itverbatim. I wasn’t there when my father stopped breathing, but I wish that I could have spokenthese 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 manyphilosophers or theologians seek the answers, the meaning of death remains a mystery. And yetsilence 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 wemust persist.

​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 weshould accept our natural limitations as human beings, and how to make peace with the ebb andflow of joy and suffering in human life.
Arthur C. Brooks:When you teach happiness, like I do, one of the biggest questions that peoplehave initially: What is it? I mean, we all think we know what happiness is until you think aboutit. 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, andpurpose.
BJ Miller:You know, I’m all for happiness. It’s a beautiful thing. But first of all, it’s not alwaysaccessible. Second of all, it is deeply related to pain and other trouble. I don’t think happiness isthe 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 onlinepalliative-care company Mettle Health. Dr. Miller’s professional field of palliative care dealsdirectly with the healing of suffering rather than of disease itself—from physical pain toemotional struggles. Why is he interested in suffering and death himself? He had a near-deathaccident in his college years. He dealt with incredible pain and was forced to confront mortalityhead-on. BJ’s wisdom on pain and suffering, through his professional work and personalexperience, helps us come to grips with the inevitable struggles of being human, which meanssometimes being in pain and in every life, sooner or later, coming to an end. Why? So that wecan 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 contrastso that things like beauty and joy pop; they have something to push against and to relate to. Sothat idea of having a foil in life to understand what joy feels like because we know what itsabsence feels like. Happiness is not so much just the pursuit of pleasure. It’s somehow thepursuit 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 wherewe place ourselves becomes important because it’s not unlimited. It also gives us this grandexcuse 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 wedo—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, becauseyou’ve been denying the existence of death? It’s a weird psychological conundrum that you putyourself into under the circ*mstances, 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 ofreality and that it was part of life, not the antithesis or the poacher of life, but part of life—thatit’s in us. And so my pursuit of knowing myself and knowing life led me to trying to at leastaccept 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. Andthen more specifically, too, I mean, I came close to death myself when I was in college. I had anelectrical accident that really bumped me up against my mortality as not an abstraction but asvery 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 feelingyour connection to it and appreciation for it and your responsibility to it. So in my field, we talkabout the end of life—like that’s the phrase, end of life—but it’s such a problematic phrase. Nowlife, life will keep going. Your life is going to end; my life’s going to end. This life will end. Soit’s not the end of life. Life does not end, as far as we can tell it. It keeps on going. We—you orI—do not. So it’s the end of my life. Once you get over yourself, there is a sort of immortalityhappening, too, all around us.
Brooks:So when your patients come to you, I mean, there aren’t—I mean, your patients come toyou 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 orsomething else that’s actually leading people who are nearing the end of life who are unhappy toexperience this unhappiness?
Miller:Palliative care really is the sort of clinical—it’s the science or a philosophy or anapproach 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’tat the end of life. They are just struggling. They’re suffering. They’re trying to make sense of aworld to them that does no longer makes sense, trying to incorporate a diagnosis into their senseof 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 oflife in the face of suffering. And we grew out of hospice, which is a subset of palliative care thatis devoted to the end of life. So, just to say, you don’t have to be dying anytime soon to benefitfrom palliative care.
Now, having said that, the way I kind of work in my practice is in this sort of existentialframework. 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 deathand loss into the picture and then build from there. Sort of like: Life begins when you realize thatyou die. Not only do we have to die; we have to know we die in advance of our death, and that isa real mind bender.
So in some ways, my job in palliative care is to make them hate their life less or make them hurtless. But you start doing that even if that’s your goal. You start realizing that part of the antidoteis finding meaning. Part of the antidote to pain of any kind is making sense of it or working withit, 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 whereyou say in the introduction, “There is nothing wrong with you for dying.” And it’s funny that wehave 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 keepingus 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 qualityof life.” And so what you’re saying here—I mean, look, I want everybody in the audience toapprehend 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 sortof 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’slike a judgment call. This is where you end up feeling like a loser or ashamed to be sick. Youknow, that’s deeply problematic.
So one of the things I’m trying to do is de-pathologize these states to unburden us of the shameof being sick. You know, this idea of: Not only do I have to feel bad, whether it’s pain ordepression 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 bekind of undone. And look, I mean, there’s a time for fighting, and there’s a time—there’s a “waron 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 toforestall death and live a little bit longer. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But let’s not foolourselves. 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 withillness or war with death for very long before you are, in fact, at war with yourself. That’s just atrue statement.
Brooks:You make this incredibly compelling case that to enjoy our life, we need to declarepeace on death. That doesn’t mean we need to embrace death. It doesn’t mean we need to rushtoward 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 tosupport 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 aquality of life or quantity of life,” and then somehow you had to choose between the two. Whatwe are increasingly finding is that that’s a false distinction. So part of the answer is to break upthese false dichotomies.
In terms of declaring peace on suffering, well, for me, I still find it useful to split suffering into acouple of different kinds. So one is, we might call “necessary suffering”; it’s just the sufferingthat 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 thisworld is we wail. You might even consider the birthing process something of a trauma, comingout 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 orcoincidence. So it does seem to be just an element of the human experience. That’s necessarysuffering. 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 “gratuitoussuffering.” I’m all for coming to peace with the necessary suffering, but the unnecessary stuffthat 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 ofsuffering.
I think we need to use our discernment to tease out the two. And no, I’m all for rooting out theunnecessary suffering. The health-care system has so many problems. It’s amazing, but it’s alsodramatically dysfunctional. And as an invented thing, it’s inexcusable to me that the health-caresystem causes as much suffering as it does. It is—because it’s made up and because we knowbetter, we should be able to design a better health-care system. And I am upset that we haven’tfound 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’llstart 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.

One discussion group this week-Tuesday, December 21 at 10 a.m.

This is our last discussion group until the first week of January. All are invited to attend in person or online. Below is an interesting article from Episcopalian, and renowned author, Marcus Borg, about the real war on Christmas. We will gather at 10 am on Tuesday in the Parish Hall and on Zoom.
Blessings to you as we prepare to celebrate the Nativity of our Lord.

The Real War on Christmas
Marcus Borg, Patheos.com, 12.23.13
There is a lot of silliness in the contemporary (and now perennial) complaint that there is a "waron 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 inincreasingly 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 onChristmas. Its subversive and revolutionary meanings have been co-opted for many centuries bythe 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 weeksleading up to it (Advent, for Christians) have become the most frantic and harried and busy timeof the year.
Consider the two most common contemporary Christmas customs: sending Christmas cards andbuying Christmas gifts. So it was in my family until about fifteen years ago when my wife and Idecided to cease sending cards and shopping for Christmas gifts. But until then, the weeks beforeChristmas were dominated by the need to get our Christmas cards sent (often with a Christmasletter) and to figure out what to purchase for those on our gift list. The decision to stop givinggifts was made easier by the fact that our children had become adults. If they had still beenchildren, we would have continued buying gifts for them.
Both of these customs are recent innovations. The first commercially-produced Christmas cardsappeared in 1873. So also buying Christmas gifts is a product of the late 1800s and took awhileto become widespread. Until then, Christmas gifts were simple and largely homemade. Imaginefor 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. Evenviolence among shoppers. And consider: for the most part, it is relatively poor people competingwith 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. Formany centuries - now almost a thousand years - the most common forms of Western Christianityhave emphasized that Jesus's primary significance is that he died to pay for our sins. This notionaffects the meaning of Christmas: Christmas is the birth of the one who will save us from oursins so that we can go to heaven. It results in a radical domestication and individualization of thestory of Jesus and Christmas.
To say the obvious: Christmas matters for Christians because Jesus matters for Christians. Andwhat 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 thedownfall of domination systems and the birth of a world of justice and peace. Of course, theKingdom of God is also about our individual transformation through loving the Lord our Godwith all our heart and mind and strength. It is about our transformation and the transformation ofthe world.
The muting of this message by common Christianity and by the commercialization of Christmasis 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 andrevolutionary. Christmas and Jesus are about God's passion, God's dream, for a different kind ofworld here below, here and now.

​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 acouple of men in first-centurygarb beside a pack mule. “Rightnow, I’m his apostle,” one saysto the other, “but my dream is tosomeday be my own Messiah.” The idea of a messiah complexhas reached the bumper stickerworld as well: “Honk if you areJesus.” The term itself isn’tclinical in nature as much as it’sa category of religious delusionthat can show up in individualssuffering perceptions ofgrandeur.
Sixty-two years ago, three malepatients with paranoidschizophrenia and delusionaldisorder at Ypsilanti StateHospital in Michigan were intensively studied for their own messiah complexes. Each believedthat he was the physical reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Their mistaken perception of reality wouldhave presented little problem had it not been for a social psychologist named Milton Rokeachwho, for the better part of two years, manipulated their lives through a study with questionableethics.
Using various methods of entrapment and deception, Rokeach sought to pit these three menagainst each other, in hopes that they might cure one another of their delusion. They wereassigned 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 menwould claim, “I’m the Messiah, the Son of God. I am on a mission. I was sent here to save theearth.” “How do you know?” Rokeach would ask. “God told me.” That’s when another one ofthe 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 thestudy’s psychological torment, they became friends, learned to empathize with one another, andgave each other the chance to keep their own belief.
In 1964, Rokeach summarized his findings in The Three Christs of Ypsilanti. It would be another20 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 incuring 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 Godand 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 becomewith 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 ofomnipotence. Some days, we ought to pity God for having to try to wrestle any humility out ofus.
But God is wiser than we know. Once God hits on the idea of putting the vulnerability of anewborn up against our own invulnerability, our inclination to play God suffers a permanentreckoning. 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 Churchin Davenport, Iowa.

Thursday, Dec 2, Women's Group -Gender Bias in Medicine

What to know about gender bias in healthcare
Medical News Today October 25, 2021
​
Gender bias in healthcare is widespread. Patients, doctors, researchers, and administrators can allhold biased views about gender. These views affect how the healthcare system works and have aserious impact on health outcomes.

What is gender bias?
Gender bias is a preference for one gender over another. This preference is often based on falsebeliefs 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 globalreport 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 isbecause bias can be conscious or unconscious. Bias that a person recognizes is “explicit,” whilebias 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 biasesinfluence behavior, which leads to discrimination and reinforces inequity.
Because most cultures place a higher value on men and masculinity, gender bias affects womenand 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 patientsand 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. Forexample, 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 similarconclusions: 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 womendoctors found that age- and gender-based harassment, discrimination, and salary inequitypersisted 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 thatmales made the best test subjects because they do not have menstrual cycles and cannot becomepregnant. 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, andother 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 healthof female and intersex people. Meanwhile, a lack of awareness about this disparity may fuelgender 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 theyshould, which increases health inequity.

Gender bias causes:

Knowledge gaps: A lack of inclusivity in medical research has led to gaps in knowledge. Thismeans that doctors know less about female, intersex, and trans health than male health. In oneexample, a report from the National LGBTQ Task Force found that 50% of respondents have hadto teach their doctors about caring for trans people.

Lack of women in leadership: A 2019 study found that in academic medicine, many people viewmen as naturally better leaders than women. This may explain why the number of women inleadership positions is disproportionately low.

Delayed diagnoses: When doctors do not take a patient’s symptoms seriously, it can keep theperson from receiving a correct diagnosis for many years. A 2019 analysis in Denmark, forexample, 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 fromgetting help with symptom relief. For example, doctors who dismiss the severity of chronic painmay not provide women with pain medication.

Avoidance of medical care: People who no longer trust medical professionals or organizationsdue to negative experiences may avoid getting necessary care. This may be a factor in vaccinehesitancy. 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 patientsdying. For example, the idea that heart attacks mainly occur in males — and a lack of awarenessabout 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 createwidespread change. Here are some ways that institutions and organizations can end gender biasin medicine.

Education and awareness
It is important for healthcare professionals and the people they serve to understand what genderbias is, that everyone has these biases, and how they affect healthcare. People and organizationscan 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 effectivenessof this approach, though. It is also worth noting that people addressing their own biases is only afirst step.

Sex and gender diversity in research
Women now make up around half of the participants in clinical research supported by theNational Institutes of Health (NIH). However, this does not cover all studies, and it does notaccount 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 tofill in the gaps in knowledge.

Equitable treatment guidelines
As a 2017 review notes, many studies have found gender-based variations in how doctorsdiagnose and treat patients. Some found that doctors asked women fewer questions about theirsymptoms 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 advancementopportunities. It may also include policies that support women who are new parents or
caregivers. In addition, standard procedures for how organizations should respond to genderdiscrimination, harassment, and abuse are crucial.

Self-advocacy
If a person believes that they are receiving inadequate care due to gender bias, there are stepsthey 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

There are also ways to advocate for oneself. People can:

• 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.

Many hospitals have patient advocates who may be able to help. And in some cases, it might beappropriate to report malpractice stemming from bias to a state medical licensing board.

Summary
Gender bias in healthcare is a critical, well-documented problem that endangers people’s livesand 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 andeffectiveness of healthcare. In order to stop it, organizations and institutions need to commit tochanging their policies and practices

​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, hom*o sapiens, has existed for atleast 200,000 years, but we have next to no idea what was happening for the majority of thattime. 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 knowingwhat most of them were. This is of little consequence to most people, since most people rarelythink about the broad sweep of human history anyway. They don’t have much reason to. Insofaras the question comes up at all, it’s usually when reflecting on why the world seems to be in sucha 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, atsome point, go terribly wrong?
One of the first people to ask this question in the modern era was the Swiss-French philosopherJean-Jacques Rousseau, in an essay on the origins of social inequality that he submitted to acompetition in 1754. Once upon a time, he wrote, we were hunter-gatherers, living in a state ofchildlike innocence, as equals. These bands of foragers could be egalitarian because they wereisolated from one another, and their material needs were simple. According to Rousseau, it wasonly after the agricultural revolution and the rise of cities that this happy condition came to anend. Urban living meant the appearance of written literature, science and philosophy, but at thesame time, almost everything bad in human life: patriarchy, standing armies, mass executionsand 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 dominantnarrative of human history, laying the foundations upon which contemporary “big history”writers — such as Jared Diamond, Francis f*ckuyama and Yuval Noah Harari — built theiraccounts of how our societies evolved. These writers often talk about inequality as the naturalresult 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 elitessprang up “everywhere … living off the peasants’ surplus food and leaving them with only abare subsistence.”
For a long time, the archaeological evidence — from Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, Mesoamericaand elsewhere — did appear to confirm this. If you put enough people in one place, the evidenceseemed 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 byadministrators 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 alsoallowed for the possibility of art, technology, and science.
That makes wistful pessimism about the human condition seem like common sense: Yes, livingin a truly egalitarian society might be possible if you’re a Pygmy or a Kalahari Bushman. But ifyou 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 learnin school has made us more willing to tolerate a world in which some can turn their wealth intopower over others, while others are told their needs are not important and their lives have nointrinsic worth. As a result, we are more likely to believe that inequality is just an inescapableconsequence 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 whathas 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 thisnew evidence shows is that a surprising number of the world’s earliest cities were organizedalong robustly egalitarian lines. In some regions, we now know, urban populations governedthemselves for centuries without any indication of the temples and palaces that would lateremerge; in others, temples and palaces never emerged at all, and there is simply no evidence of aclass of administrators or any other sort of ruling stratum. It would seem that the mere fact ofurban life does not, necessarily, imply any particular form of political organization, and neverdid. Far from resigning us to inequality, the new picture that is now emerging of humanity’s deeppast 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 bytens of thousands of people made their first appearance around 6,000 years ago. Theconventional 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 itpossible to support large numbers of people living in one place. But in fact, one of the mostpopulous 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’seasy 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 reflectingsome 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, itsgods or heroes, its civic infrastructure and ritual calendar. In China’s Shandong Province, urbansettlements were present over a thousand years before the earliest known royal dynasties, andsimilar findings have emerged from the Maya lowlands, where ceremonial centers of trulyenormous 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, andbureaucrats? For answers, we might turn to some other surprising discoveries on the interiorgrasslands of eastern Europe, north of the Black Sea, where archaeologists have found cities, justas large and ancient as those of Mesopotamia. The earliest date back to around 4100 B.C. WhileMesopotamian cities, in what are now the lands of Syria and Iraq, took form initially aroundtemples, 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 greatcircle — or series of circles — of houses, with nobody first, nobody last, divided into districtswith assembly buildings for public meetings.
If it all sounds a little drab or “simple,” we should bear in mind the ecology of these earlyUkrainian cities. Living at the frontier of forest and steppe, the residents were not just cerealfarmers and livestock-keepers, but also hunted deer and wild boar, imported salt, flint andcopper, 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 amongthe finest aesthetic creations of the prehistoric world.
Researchers are far from unanimous about what sort of social arrangements all this required, butmost would agree the logistical challenges were daunting. Residents definitely produced asurplus, and with it came ample opportunity for some of them to seize control of the stocks andsupplies, to lord it over the others or fight for the spoils, but over eight centuries we find littleevidence of warfare or the rise of social elites. The true complexity of these early cities lay in thepolitical strategies they adopted to prevent such things. Careful analysis by archaeologists showshow the social freedoms of the Ukrainian city dwellers were maintained through processes oflocal decision-making, in households and neighborhood assemblies, without any need forcentralized 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 awider 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 “overgrownvillages.” How do we account for this reluctance to welcome the Ukrainian mega-sites into thecharmed circle of urban origins?
But the point remains: Why do we assume that people who have figured out a way for a largepopulation 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”? Themega-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 GreatRecession 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 amongintellectuals and even, to some degree, the political classes, that levels of social inequality havegotten out of hand, and that most of the world’s problems result, in one way or another, from anever-widening gulf between the haves and the have-nots. A very small percentage of thepopulation 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 Townor San Francisco, we are no longer shocked or even that surprised by the sight of ever-expandingslums — sidewalks crammed with makeshift tents or shelters overflowing with the homeless anddestitute.
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 ofMexico to found a city we know today as Teotihuacan. Within a few centuries it became thelargest settlement in Mesoamerica. In a colossal feat of civil engineering, its inhabitants divertedthe San Juan River to flow through the heart of their new metropolis. Pyramids went up in thecentral district, associated with ritual killing. What we might expect to see next is the rise ofluxurious 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 fromthe 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 forcesof 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 thatmuch of the world’s population now lives in cities may not determine how we live, to anythinglike the extent we might have assumed.
What we need today is another urban revolution to create more just and sustainable ways ofliving. The technology to support less centralized and greener urban environments — appropriateto modern demographic realities — already exists. Predecessors to our modern cities include notjust the proto-megalopolis, but also the proto-garden-city, the proto-superblock, and a cornucopiaof other urban forms, waiting for us to reclaim them. In the face of inequality and climatecatastrophe, they offer the only viable future for the world’s cities, and so for our planet. All weare lacking now is the political imagination to make it happen. But as history teaches us, thebrave new world we seek to create has existed before, and could exist again.

​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 ifwe 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 amother who transferred much of the trauma she’d experienced onto her daughter. Thecombination 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 allpeople you don’t know as threats to be feared, but she recognized it was unhealthy, so she tooksteps to engage with the world. As she grew older, she began to travel to seek new people out. At17, Nic visited Europe for 10 days with her high-school classmates and noticed that people beganstarting conversations with her. “If people in Europe randomly talked to me, then maybe I’m notso bad,” she figured. “Maybe I’m not gonna die if I randomly talk to them.” So she took moretrips and connected with more people. She was anxious about these encounters, wired for fearand expecting the worst, but they always went well. She found that, contrary to what she’d beenraised to believe, these strangers weren’t dangerous or scary. They were actually sources ofcomfort 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 talkingwith 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 forcomfort 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 strongpredictor of happiness and well-being is the quality of a person’s social relationships. But mostof those studies have looked at only close ties: family, friends, co-workers. In the past decadeand a half, professors have begun to wonder if interacting with strangers could be good for ustoo: not as a replacement for close relationships, but as a complement to them. The results of thatresearch have been striking. Again and again, studies have shown that talking with strangers canmake 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, andis happily married to a kind and sociable man. She still loves to travel, and on her trips, she’llsize up her seatmate, or someone sitting alone at a table or the bar. If they have headphones on orappear uninterested, she’ll leave them alone. But if they seem receptive, she’ll say, “Hi, I’mNic,” and see where it goes. She’s not reckless or naive, and she knows how to read people anddetect trouble. But the conversations tend to go well, reassuring her that there is goodness in theworld, and the possibility of belonging. She tells me that these experiences have taught hersomething invaluable: “Never underestimate the power of even the most minute positiveconnection.”
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 adecade 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 lookeddown when she walked along the street. “I thought, Well, that’s dumb,” she says. So she startedholding eye contact with people and found that it actually felt pretty good. Before long, she wastalking 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. “Idon’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 routineinteraction: 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 feltlike, Yeah, I belong here.”
Sandstrom decided to study this phenomenon. She and her Ph.D. supervisor at the University ofBritish Columbia asked a group of adults to chat with the barista when they got their morningcoffee. They had the idea that by not engaging with counter workers—by essentially treatingthem as insensate service modules and not, say, actual humans—we may be denying ourselves apotential “hidden source of belonging and happiness.” As it turns out, they were right. Theparticipants who talked with their barista reported feeling a stronger sense of community and animproved 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 thatyou’re not in the mood. So to test whether both parties were enjoying these interactions, Epleyand 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 theother person in the room and others were told not to talk; the people they were with were givenno instructions. The ones who talked—both the people who started the conversation and thepeople they talked with—reported having a significantly better experience than those who didnot.
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 betwofold: 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 duringtheir commutes worried that the strangers wouldn’t enjoy the conversations. They predicted, onaverage, that less than half of the people they approached would talk with them. They expectedthat 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 experimentparticipants (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 inturn deprives them of not only short-term boosts of happiness and belonging but also morelasting 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 theconversations themselves. When Epley and Schroeder asked commuters to imagine how theywould feel if they talked with a new person versus remaining solitary, those who imaginedtalking with a stranger predicted that their commutes would be significantly worse. Thatprediction 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’sfundamentally dehumanizing to be surrounded by people and then never interact and engagewith them.” It’s dehumanizing to me because I lose an opportunity to be a social being—whichis my nature—and it’s dehumanizing to the stranger because I never experience more than asuperficial glimpse of their full humanity. In cities especially, people tend to treat strangers asobstacles, Schroeder said, so we don’t talk with them; because we don’t talk with them, it neverfully 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 in2010. The theory is this: Because we can’t see what’s happening in other people’s heads, wehave “what appears to be a universal tendency to assume that others’ minds are less sophisticatedand more superficial than one’s own,” Epley writes in his 2014 book, Mindwise: How WeUnderstand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want. Perhaps this is why we expectinteractions with strangers to go poorly: because we subconsciously believe they just don’t havemuch to offer.
In collaboration with the now-defunct London group called Talk to Me, Sandstrom ran a seriesof events that aimed to show people how enjoyable talking with strangers could be—and to learnmore about why people were so hesitant to do it. She has since developed some techniques tohelp 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 outthemselves. Once they get over the initial hump, they find it comes to them quite naturally. “Youcan’t shut them up,” she says. “By the end they don’t want to stop talking. It’s fascinating. I loveit.”
While Sandstrom has found success in these isolated events, she’s run into a more insidiousobstacle in her pursuit of lasting change: a social norm against talking with strangers—a beliefthat this is simply not done. In her experiments, participants would unfailingly have positiveexperiences, but “when you ask people about the next conversation, they’re really worriedagain,” she says. So she tried to engineer a situation in which talking with strangers, throughsheer repetition, would become natural enough to people that they would simply begin to do itout of habit, free of all the usual fears. The trick, she believed, was “to get people to have a lot ofconversations.”
Using an app called GooseChase, Sandstrom created a scavenger hunt with a list of types ofpeople 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 orfashionable 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, andthe conversations lasted three times longer than they predicted. About 80 percent said that theylearned something new. Forty-one percent said that they exchanged contact information withsomeone. Some participants made friends, went on dates, got coffee. And true to Sandstrom’sprediction, their pessimism about the prospect of talking with strangers was eased. A week aftercompleting the scavenger hunt, participants were more confident of their conversational abilitiesand less afraid of rejection. And the way they thought about other people changed as well. Asone 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 seemedlike a subtle undertone of relief—which I recognized, having wondered myself Why do I feel asense of relief after a pleasant exchange with a stranger? When I asked Sandstrom about this, shesaid something that took me back to the story of Nic, her fearful childhood, and her experiencewith Greyhound Therapy. “I think that relief might just be the feeling that we’re sold thismessage that the world is a scary place,” Sandstrom said, “and then you have a chat withsomeone, some random person, and it goes well, and it’s sorta like, Maybe the world isn’t so badafter all."

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 xenophobiaand 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 somethingto 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 discussionon 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, atthe age of 13, he was taken on a family visit to his parents’ native Beirut. Suddenly, the travelersfound 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: “Allthese bewildering sects were far more alike than different. All were Levantines who spoke thesame dialect; all loved the same punning humor, devoured the same cuisine, abided by strictrules 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, subtledistinctions in their identities now meant life or death.”
Today, Dr. Makari, a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and the director of Weill Cornell’s DeWittWallace Institute of Psychiatry, sees xenophobia as a threat to social peace, not only in theMiddle East but also in Europe and North America, where recent political convulsions have beendriven 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, hom*ophobia, transphobia, or Islamophobia.” What might they have incommon? “Is there any one term specific enough to not be meaningless, while broad enough toallow us to consider whatever common strands exist between these phenomena?” He thinks thatthere is: xenophobia. And if all these disorders are variants of the same affliction, then perhapsthey 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 avariety of “phobias” apparently caused by traumatic experience. There followed a rash of otherphobias, from claustrophobia to my personal favorite, phobophobia—the fear of being
frightened. Xenophobia entered a medical dictionary in 1916 as a “morbid dread of meetingstrangers.” Like many psychiatric classifications, early definitions of xenophobia covered toomuch 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 beaccused of xenophobia by the critics of colonialism, as waves of migrations in the years leadingup 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, againstNative Americans. The second was the forced migration and enslavement of millions of Africansby descendants of the country’s European settlers. The third was provoked by the migrants, firstfrom 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 17thcenturies was torn by bloody wars between Catholics and Protestants, a feud that still festered in20th-century Ireland. The Partition of India in 1947 was accompanied by violent Hindu-Muslimconfrontations and the displacement of more than 10 million people. When communistYugoslavia 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 hatredsalso to be considered xenophobia?
One idea is that there is something fundamentally human here. Early human groups competed forterritory. All intruders were enemies. The more you feared and hated outsiders, the better yourchances 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% ofhuman history when small nomadic bands lived by hunting and gathering. The Victoriananthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor said that early humans would have had to choose betweenmarrying out or being killed out. When Europeans in the early 19th century made contact withsurviving communities of hunter-gatherers, different bands were observed forming marriagealliances 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 masshatreds 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 dogssalivated at the sound of a bell because they had been conditioned to recognize this as a cue forfood. In the same sort of way, children are warned against strangers and so conditioned to fearothers.
Psychoanalytic theories all seek to explain the personal traumas and particular pathologies ofindividuals. But how do whole populations come to share common anxieties and antipathies? In1928, 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 ofthat group, they had heard about them. And what they had heard about was the massacre ofArmenians in Turkey after World War I, which was presented in the press as a slaughter ofChristians at the hands of Muslims.
It was this power of the media to shape popular sentiment that the journalist Walter Lippmanncame to dread. An early supporter of American involvement in World War I, Lippmann hadjoined 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 andsituations. 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 onsteroids.
Yet surely not everyone is gulled—at least not all the time. How then to explain what is going onwhen strangers are demonized? Dr. Makari suggests that some combination of thesepsychological 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 thepublic better equipped for critical thought. Failing that, we may have to relive these nightmaresof 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 Centerreported that conceptions of national identity in the U.S. and Western Europe have recentlybecome more inclusive. Compared with 2016, “fewer people now believe that to truly beAmerican, 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 thatxenophobia waxes and wanes with recent events, and that politicians can fan or tamp downoutbreaks of public fear and fury. Wise and prudent leaders really might spare us a great deal oftrouble.