Can you believe?

"Support our troops" and other incomplete sentiments

2008-07-03T14:15:00.000-07:00

(But first, proof--above--that we made it to Maine! Next stop, Russia.)

Two days ago I sat on a bench outside Aubuchon Hardware, looking at the cars parked in front of me. A fair proportion of them had "Support our troops" stickers. I used to have a "Support our troops--bring them home" sticker on our car until someone pried it off.

In this USA election season, and in particular on this Independence Day weekend, it would be great to add more content to these laudable sentiments. Just as there is "cheap grace," there is "cheap support," and I suppose the "Support" sticker itself is the cheapest.

So here is the American Christian pacifist's manual on supporting our troops, version one:

1. Support our Constitution. Believe it or not, the U.S. Constitution gives authority to declare war to the Congress, not the President. So: elect wise congresspeople and give them political cover to apply their wisdom in times of national hysteria. If necessary, run for Congress yourself! Promote conversations about what a sustainable national stewardship might look like in a dangerous world. The neo-cons argue that we can only thrive as a nation by dominating the world and its resources. Too often, peace people fall back on platitudes, but our politicians need us to step up to the challenge of looking at the same dangers that the neo-cons see, and offering another path--one that competently reframes human survival and well-being in realistic, unsentimental terms. This should not be an impossible task: how "realistic" has our leaders' unquestioned faith in aggressive militarism turned out to be?

2. Hold the President accountable. Whoever approves military action, the President is commander-in-chief and the embodiment of elected civilian political control over the military. Don't let the power go to his/her head!! Nobody's life (whether American life or the supposed enemy's) is worth cheap bravado, impulsiveness, imperial arrogance, unwillingness to negotiate, bad planning, corruption of any kind. And so on. In a democracy, "support our troops" cannot and must not mean "let our leaders do our thinking for us."

3. Remember: Troops are not symbols on legs, they are people. To support a soldier means to care about his or her well-being, to pray for him or her, to think about that person as a member of the human race, as someone's child, someone's sibling or parent, rather than simply a representative of a specific country. We should be prayerfully vigilant that the troops' willingness to risk their necks on our behalf would never be exploited by politicians, and particularly not in the service of imperial goals that are never publicly discussed. (See "Why We Fight.")

4. Love and pray for our enemies. Whether or not you personally (as, say, a disciple of the Prince of Peace) acknowledge having enemies, the community known as the USA has enemies--people dedicated to various programs of doing us harm. It doesn't do the cause of peace much good to deny this reality by spiritualizing it beyond the ability of our common-sense friends and neighbors to track our meaning. Often our troops are supposed to be in between us and those enemies, so how we regard these enemies may have a direct bearing on the welfare of our troops. So, here are some thoughts about loving our enemies:

We should use the word "enemies" cautiously, only in its technical sense of nations or groups that intend harm and are organizing to carry out that intent. Experienced military people understand this use, and understand the importance of knowing enemies well, respecting them, and understanding their motivations.
We know from history that enemies seldom remain enemies permanently, and can within a lifetime become close allies! How will we know when the designation "enemy" is simply wrong?
How did they become our enemies? What responsibility do we have for creating antagonists through insults and injuries caused by us, whether intentionally or not? How do we correct this situation?
How do we publicly talk about our enemies, as citizens and as politicians? Even our cruelest, most ruthless enemies have to operate with some attention to public relations--do we make it easier for them to whip up grievances by talking about them in simplistic or dehumanizing terms? What does that kind of behavior do to fence-sitters in the global audience?

5. Support excellent Veterans Administration and military mental health programs. Demand care for soldiers with any and all kinds of injuries. Soldiers are part of our national community who suffer unusual traumas compared to most civilians; it does not compromise our peace witness to insist that those traumas be treated.

6. Practice intelligent patriotism. Understand the legitimate affection and loyalty behind most people's patriotism, even as we all strive to resist the cynical manipulation of those values by some politicians. Many, if not most, soldiers come from patriotic families; how can we support troops if we don't understand the idealism behind healthy patriotism? Many of the peace people I know are deeply conflicted about patriotism in general, but it is important to continue communicating with people who haven't experienced those conflicts.

For a citizen of a democracy to support the troops means to understand the national and global context within which the national leadership argues for the use of troops. With that in mind, Rick Shenkman's Just How Stupid Are We? (judging by this excerpt) must be depressing reading. However, one of the statistics in the excerpt frustrated me, and maybe someone reading this can help out. Shenkman cites a survey that reveals that "About 1 in 4 Americans can name more than one of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment (freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly and petition for redress of grievances.) But more than half of Americans can name at least two members of the fictional [Simpsons] cartoon family...." According to the survey, only 1 in 1000 can list all five freedoms in the First Amendment. But what if the question had simply concerned freedoms listed in the Bill of Rights, rather than specifying the First Amendment? I wouldn't be surprised if more than one in a thousand people knew five freedoms in the Bill of Rights, without necessarily knowing where in the Bill of Rights they were listed.

Another exhortation I agree with ... mostly: Read the Bible well. Arthur O. Roberts' latest reflections on the Northwest Yearly Meeting Web site, "Reading the Bible in Public Worship," struck me in contradictory ways.

Before reading my reservations, please read Arthur's original article. Having read the Bible in public worship many times, and been involved in the preparation and leadership of hundreds of meetings for worship in which the Bible was read out loud, I agree on some level with everything he says. I also remember my own recent remembrance in this blog about the comments of Meshak Mudamba and Eileen Malova after their tour of Friends meetings in North America--they were concerned with the lack of reverence among too many of us.

On the NWYM pastors' list, Howard Macy responded positively to Arthur's column, and added an important thought: "...I think that Scripture is likely to be the most important thing said in a worship gathering, so it ought to be read clearly and well." In fact I agree that this might well be very true--a healthy reminder in a self-centered age. We might believe (if we dared let the thought surface) that our own inspired comments outrank a reading from the Bible, but we ought to have a built-in skepticism about any such claim.

I'm an advocate for the authoritative and crucial role of the Bible in forming us as a people and empowering our discernment, as well as furnishing the language, images, and essential doctrines of our worshipping lives. In this I'm very sure I'm in agreement with the founding generations of Quakers as well as probably the majority of Friends worldwide to this day. So why do I feel an inward resistance even as I nod in agreement with Arthur and Howard?

My concerns may simply be the leftover static of an adult convert brought up by atheist parents. Because of this, perhaps you should read no further! Just stick with Arthur. But I cannot deny an inward rebellion against ritual, or against any practice in public worship that may become ritualized. Arthur eloquently warns: "There is no 'religious way' of reading. Sing-song, unctuous intonation, and other forms of affected speech rob the Scripture of its power to speak to ordinary folks through ordinary voices." But I think that 75% of the time I hear the Bible read in public worship, it sounds affected to me. And no matter how it is read, I can feel the secular ghost of my past switching into ceremonial mode: this is not meant to be real life, I'm now audience for someone else's performance. This passage may be urgent, prophetic, passionate, but I'm supposed to be listening with piety and awe. And in this state of piety, the text itself slips by like skates on ice.

Just to prove how inconsistent I am, I usually don't have these feelings when I'm listening to (or reading) Scripture as part of a sermon, whether in programmed or unprogrammed context. The Bible is then meshing explicitly with the community's task of discernment. (I love this description of the new Berean believers in Acts 17:10-12.)

When we gather, we intend to meet with the sovereign God, however variably we experience that meeting, or its apparent absence, during the time of worship. I vividly remember when I had no such expectation or hope, and didn't even know that people such as Quakers existed, or that Christians had a deeper reality than the pious culture that my parents made fun of. Despite their atheism, my parents did own a Bible--it was in a zippered leather cover with a glass marble zipper pull that contained a mustard seed. As far as I know, they never opened it. Now that I cannot do without frequent exposure to this amazing book, I don't want the leather, the zipper, the marble, or anything else that smells like ritual or magic. I want the urgent, ecstatic, despairing, instructing, inspiring, recounting, correcting, singing, often rough voice of our family's book to be unmediated by polite convention.

But I'm just one person. For everyone who finds the public reading of Scripture consistently helpful, please be sure to take Arthur's good advice into account, and ignore my reservations. And, in fact, the more you do that, the more likely I'll finally get sold on the practice.

PS: One time at Ohio Yearly Meeting in Barnesville, Ohio, I was told that conservative Friends traditionally do not take the Bible to meeting for worship, much less have pew Bibles in the meetinghouse. They expected that Friends would read the Bible daily in individual and family devotions, and be so steeped in the Scriptures that the quotations and references they might need in vocal ministry would arise from that deep knowledge, without reference to a printed text. How much of this is true today? How much was ever true?

Righteous links:

Russia Today reports that space tourism will soon be more affordable: $200,000. Gratuities not included?

Judy and I went to 20 different churches on 20 Sundays earlier this year, but here's a book about going to a different church every Sunday for a year.

Why not?--"Obama courting evangelicals once loyal to Bush."

Christian Peacemakers witness and suffer trauma, too. Where is accountability here?

Dessert: The end of Muddy Waters' concert at Molde, Norway, 1977.

Neither here nor there

2008-06-26T18:45:00.000-07:00

When I left the USA for Canada in 1972, everything I owned fit into one large backpack. Now that our furniture and most of our books and papers are in storage, everything else we own fits into nine bags--dufflebags, suitcases, backpacks. Getting those things from Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine, was enough of a trial; what will it be like to get them all to Russia?

In any case, those bags are what we're living out of for the next two weeks as we spend time in Maine with friends and relatives, and get ready for the flight to Moscow on July 9. Aside from clothes and shoes, some of the things in those bags:

Russia: The Once and Future Empire from Pre-History to Putin, Philip Longworth

A History of Modern Russia from Nicholas II to Vladimir Putin, Robert Service

Two Bibles: Oxford Annotated with Apocrypha (NRSV) and The Message

Bride and Prejudice (DVD; the Indian musical remake of Pride and Prejudice)

The May-June issue of Quaker Life, with the appropriate theme of ministry outside the box

Sim City 4 (Judy is working on her new city right now; pop. 591)

An Anne Tyler novel

Rosetta Stone instructional CDs, Russian, levels one and two; a Russian/Norwegian dictionary; a Russian/English idiomatic dictionary; Russian Verbs of Motion

The Gift of the Stranger: Faith, Hospitality, and Foreign Language Learning, David I. Smith and Barbara Carvill

Another DVD: Crossroads 2007, Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy, B.B. King, Susan Tedeschi, and other guitar heroes; a gift from Mike Slothower

A talking stuffed Tigger.

We just found out that Judy's visa has arrived. (I will be using the one I got last year.) So we really can expect to leave on July 9. Right now, living out of bags, we're in a strange zone--neither here nor there. We can't go back to Portland, Oregon; our house will shortly be occupied by someone else. And we're not yet in Elektrostal. The gift of this zone--time to write the reports, answer the e-mails, and make the logistical phone calls we didn't get to do in that last wild flurry of preparation, housecleaning, packing, and goodbye-saying back in Oregon. Time to pray with hope and anticipation. Time to enjoy Maine--for example, the wonderful strawberries Nat brought us today from the place near the Friends China Camp.

To post this entry, I will drive to the village and use the library's high speed wireless Internet connection from my parking place at the library's parking lot. Thank you, librarians!! And village police, don't worry, I won't be parked here much longer.

Righteous links:

When Israel goes to war ... when Israel negotiates

Jim Wallis comments on James Dobson and Tom Minnery, who charge Barack Obama with "dragging biblical understanding through the gutter" and having a "fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution" (based on Wallis's quotations of them). I know lots of Friends pay attention to Dobson and Co.; I hope they're fair-minded enough to look for some context.

"When Religions Talk" (The Economist) and Martin Marty's comments on the article.

My old hero, Albert King, and his version of "Stormy Monday Blues."

Rolling and reading

2008-06-19T09:38:00.001-07:00

Judy and I are in Lebanon, Indiana, on our way to Cincinnati, Richmond IN, and Indianapolis (and eventually Portland, Maine, and from there to Elektrostal, Russia). We have the television on, and are seeing vivid coverage of the floods here in the Midwest. But we don't need the pictures to believe the scale of this disaster; all along our journey here from Portland, Oregon, we heard first-hand details from railroad staffers and passengers. As we got off the train at the Minneapolis-St Paul station, one passenger said to another, "I hear that most of the water is out of our house. But my brother-in-law is still underwater."

The Iowa state government has a Web site with information for donors and for people affected by the floods.

Judy and I left Portland, Oregon, on the Amtrak "Empire Builder" train this past Monday. It's been nearly 20 years since our last long-distance ride on Amtrak, and the years have not been kind to the USA's passenger rail service. Years of politicking and financial uncertainty seem to have produced a corporate culture that seemed to me (with apologies to any of you who work for Amtrak) to be thin, amateurish, and slightly resentful. We could not blame Amtrak for the awful floods along the Mississippi River system, and the consequent need to substitute bus for rail between Minneapolis/St Paul and Chicago, but the lack of information to passengers, the last-minute confusions, the truly awful bus trip (despite a super driver), all seemed more about management than meteorology.

The on-board route brochure was not the best marketing. Its upbeat language described a level of service that cannot actually be reliably delivered; at the same time, nobody had edited the text, so that many paragraphs (for example) referred to photos that were simply not there.

However, let's be fair: During our forty hours on the train, we were safely and comfortably carried through scenes of indescribable natural beauty, with wonderful commentary from Park Service volunteers for the climactic stretch. Nobody confiscated our liquids and gels or asked us to take our shoes off; our seating areas were twice as large as those on airlines; we were allowed TEN pieces of luggage between the two of us; we could walk around or lower our tray tables whenever we wanted. We arrived in the Twin Cities two and a half hours late, but despite the flood-related transfer, our express bus to Chicago arrived only two hours after our original scheduled train arrival time.

"Country music is considered a highly traditional music, and train songs are at its heart." I was in our train's lounge car when I read these words from Rodney Clapp's book Johnny Cash and the Great American Contradiction: Christianity and the Battle for the Soul of a Nation. "These very songs, especially now that rail passenger travel is almost entirely a thing of the past, intentionally hearken to old ways. Yet even as they were written and sung at the peak of rail travel, most country train songs themselves lionized transience, not permanence, and times ahead, not those behind. These are apparently traditional and nostalgic songs themselves enamored with restless movement and progress."

The 48 hours we spent in Amtrak's care gave me a chance finally to finish reading and meditating on this excellent book. So many themes central to contemporary Quaker thought are touched on in this book--the struggle with elitism, the role of prophetic religion, the legitimacy of patriotism, the theology and spirituality of nonviolence, just for starters; I'd love to see lots of Friends reading and commenting on this book (as well as Clapp's earlier meditation on the discipleship of social presence and courteous, assertive dialogue, Border Crossings: Christian Trespasses on Popular Culture and Public Affairs). Friends who tend to dismiss evangelical Christian thought may never have encountered this kind of writing; Friends who embrace evangelicalism may be equally startled by Clapp's direct challenge to cheap grace.

In Johnny Cash and the Great American Contradiction, Clapp is, in part, measuring Johnny Cash's stature by showing how the great country musician both embodied and deliberately defied the contradictions inherent in being a Christian performer, a Southerner and a patriot. But Clapp's primary purpose is not to cause us to admire Johnny Cash, although he succeeded in that (for me, anyway); it is to ask us as Christians to consider the hard intellectual and spiritual work inherent in advancing "democracy for grown-ups." If we can see "contradictions" as occasions for dialogue rather than for distress that we can't impose unity, then Clapp's book provides a whole series of interrelated dialogues, perhaps especially between the "democracy of the parade" that characterizes the U.S. North and the "democracy of the revival" in the South. An earthier formulation for dialogue is suggested by Rodney Clapp's first sentence of Chapter 3: "In country music, holiness is the pork to hedonism's beans."

Contradictions that are openly named and discussed can be great dilemmas, but hidden contradictions can do immense harm. An important example in Clapp's book is provided by right-wing politics, which depends for its captivating power on a number of concealments--such as the amount of government resources required to clear the way for, defend, and continuously undergird the interests of capitalists who go on to pose as anti-government.

From Reagan to George W. Bush, the New Right has attracted Americans across the spectrum by marrying "lower-taxes" libertarianism (especially advantageous to the most wealthy) to social conservatism (resonant with middle- and lower-class Americans worried about cultural and communal degradation). In political and cultural terms, it has been an extraordinarily successful marriage. However, perhaps partly because of its success, the New Right has gone to extremes that now threaten the marriage and clearly have not served living democratic community, and indeed, real community of any other sort.

Rodney Clapp also takes direct aim at those on the political left who marginalize faith, treating it "at best as an epiphenomenon and an instrumental or secondary good [and thereby failing] ... to understand the devout as they understand themselves." (And, needless to say, consequently losing access to a crucial dialogue.)

Christians have much to contribute to building "democracy for grown-ups," according to Rodney Clapp. For example (and here's a ticklish one for Quakers!), the doctrine of original sin is an important antidote to the myths of progress and American innocence. And Christians can be (ought to be) a standing challenge whenever politicians use scapegoating techniques. Significantly, Clapp numbers anti-gay campaigns among his examples of scapegoating.

Righteous links:

Where I'd be in Portland tomorrow evening if we were not on our way east.

Edgy apologetics: clash of the committed, Christian vs Muslim. I have mixed feelings about this story. All we need is more intercommunal fireworks, but doesn't dialogue involve taking risks for honesty? (Here's a link to a PDF-format article I found helpful, C.M. Naim's "Getting Real About Christian-Muslim Dialogue.")

Mary Kay Rehard's Kenya News blog presents excerpts from an interview with Oliver Kisaka, a Friend who serves as vice president of the NCCK--the National Council of Churches of Kenya.

Tricia Gates Brown of Northwest Yearly Meeting edited Christian Peacemaker Teams' book about the hostage drama/tragedy of 2005-06, 118 Days: Christian Peacemaker Teams Held Hostage in Iraq.

Changing times in Norway: Two stories from aftenposten.no's English-language pages. Wilhelmsen, where my Uncle Martin served as a skipper, decides to flag out to Malta; and retailers protest against unfair application of no-Sunday-shopping law.

UPDATE: Another flood-related Web site provides easy access to a number of states' agencies and responders, and other donor resources.

One of the founders of rock music, Chuck Berry, looks back at the blues:

Online Videos by Veoh.com

Naughty words

2008-06-12T23:37:00.000-07:00

Maclean's Magazine is in trouble in a British Columbia tribunal for publishing a book excerpt accused of inciting hatred against Muslims. The case came up in an interesting New York Times article about different understandings of free speech and its boundaries in different democracies.

The founders of the English-language Moscow-based The eXile exulted over the lack of American-style libel laws in Russia when they began their journalistic roller-coaster ride eleven years ago, but now find themselves in far more trouble than Maclean's. And as Sean Guillory points out, people seem to have very mixed feelings about The eXile's apparent demise: its constant stream of gonzo gossip and purely gratuitous offensiveness mixed with interesting political insights (some of which were actually delivered with less than the publication's normal minimum of scatological references) just hasn't inspired huge outcries from defenders of free speech everywhere.

The Times article points out that different societies balance the value of free speech and the value of intercommunal comity in different ways, with the USA being at the free-speech-first end of the spectrum. What's ironic to me is that in some of those other countries, mainstream political discourse often has far more wicked satire than the relatively tame American fare. Context is everything.

I'd write more, and look up links to examples, but I'm sitting on stairs in our empty house, in our last hours here before we begin our weekend in Eugene OR and then our journey to New England in advance of relocating to Russia. Most of our possessions are in a barn, under an orange tarp--all except our most important possessions, our relationships.

Count the unchallenged assumptions.

Snooky Pryor serves today's dessert. (Get it while it's fresh; I can't keep up with the disappearing clips.) (Ana Popovic's version of this song here.)

Where have all the brain cells gone?

2008-06-05T20:07:00.000-07:00

In 1969, the Maurer family, including 16-year-old Johan, moved from the center of Evanston, Illinois, to the city's northwest corner, just a few blocks from Skokie to the east and Wilmette to the north.

(Fourteen-year-old Ellen was not around for the move; she was in foster care in Ann Arbor, Michigan.)

Our next-door neighbors to the north were the Blackwells. In my own family, alcohol was king; when I needed a break, the Blackwells quietly welcomed me into their home.

Eugene Blackwell had an MBA from the University of Chicago and spent a lifetime in advertising and newspapers. He had an insatiable appetite for ideas, as I found when I started exploring his library. He encouraged me to take home books from his library and--best of all--report back to him on what I found.

These days, as we've been preparing our house for the rental market, I've come across a lot of things I've not seen for years. One of these was the spiral-bound notebook in which I kept track of my reading for Eugene Blackwell. I'm really impressed by my 16-year-old self--all the more so since I am not sure my brain has truly kept up. Back then, I seem to have devoured books that now would take me a lot longer to read. Where have all the brain cells gone? But as I follow my own sons' reading patterns with admiration, it's nice to take a bit of credit for what I might have passed on.

Here are some of the books I excerpted in my Blackwell notebook. They probably reveal less about me than about the times I grew up in, and some of the intellectual fashions of those times. After all, many of these books were the pop psychology and pop politics of their day:

Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative, New York, Atheneum, 1966. Maybe the biggest single theme in my reading was war and my attempt to understand it. In 1969, I had just started to reject the militarism of my mother. Thanks to my diaries, I can trace my own evolving commitment to nonviolence, which was in turn part of my journey to Christianity. Here's one of Ardrey's passages I found noteworthy:

The fun, one might say, has gone out of the border. The concerted defense of a border by forty, fifty, or a hundred animals leaves the intruder in a condition less stimulated than stupefied. And so the more sophisticated and highly evolved among primate speciels--the great apes, the baboons, the langurs, the vervet, rhesus, and Japanese monkeys--no longer intrude but maintain each other's exclusive space by avoidance.

If this be so--and I am speculating, since we possess no fossil record of ancient behavior to confirm this evolutionary progress from defense to avoidance--then a great red question mark must overhang the human species: Why has man, with all his intellectual resources, been incapable either through intuition or instruction of absorbing a lesson so obvious to monkeys and apes? Why do we still intrude when the consequences are apt to be more painful than paying? [pp245-46]

(I can't help reflecting how alien this universal use of "man" now feels to me.)

And finally we must know that the territorial imperative--just one, it is true, of the evolutionary forces playing upon our lives--is the biological law on which we have founded our edifices of human morality. Our capacities for sacrifice, for altruism, for sympathy, for trust, for responsibilities to other than self-interest, for honesty, for charity, for friendship and love, for social amity and mutual interdependence, have evolved just as surely as the flatness of our feet, the muscularity of our buttocks, and the enlargement of our brains, out of the encounter on ancient African savannahs between the primate potential and the hominicd circumstance. Whether morality without territory is possible in man must remain as our final, unanswerable question. [p. 351]

Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation, New York, Macmillan, 1964. I loved the fact that Arthur Koestler began his examination of the creative process with a serious look at humor. (I laboriously copied out this related chart.) But I read the many stories of creative breakthroughs with great interest, and pondered this warning:

Modern man lies isolated in his artificial environment, not because the artificial is evil as such, but because of his lack of comprehension of the forces which make it work--of the principles which relate his gadget to the forces of nature, to the universal order. It is not central heating which makes his existence "unnatural," but his refusal to take an interest in the principles behind it. By being entirely dependent on science, yet closing his mind to it, he leads the life of an urban barbarian. [p. 264]

Anthony Storr, Human Aggression, New York, Atheneum, 1968. More fodder for my fascination with war.

... I have endeavoured to make it plain that aggression is a drive as innate, as natural, and as powerful as sex, and that the theory that aggression is nothing but a response to frustration is no longer tenable in the light of biological research. It is vitally important that we finally discard the kind of futile optimism which is implicit in the frustration-aggression hypothesis, and face the fact that, in man, as in other animals, the aggressive drive is an inherited constant, of which we cannot rid ourselves, and which is absolutely necessary for survival. [p. 109]

Lt.-Gen. E.L.M. Burns, Megamurder, New York, Random House, 1966.

Mr. [Herman] Kahn points out that most Americans seem to think, rather self-righteously, that although the united States possesses in the SAC and Polaris submarines such a terrifying power of destruction, "We would never start a nuclear war." Nevertheless, he goes on relentlessly, the United States would be obliged to do exactly that, to start a nuclear exchange, if the Soviet Union should invade Western Europe with conventional forces and if the existing NATO conventional forces were unable to resist them. [p. 206]

American Anthropological Association, War: The Anthropology of Armed Conflict and Aggression, Garden City, Natural History Press, 1968. Although Eugene Blackwell's books had already prepared me to see humans at war as a biological and psychological phenomenon, not just a political one, this book War finished the job. I saw it on display in the new books section of the Evanston Public Library, and read it cover to cover in record time. Any illusion about war as a thoughtful tool, wisely yielded by intelligent leaders in full command of their motivations, was demolished by this symposium-in-print.

... The capacity for human aggression is an outcome, in part,of natural selection for heightened sentiment structures focused about self-identity and cooperative social structure. Natural selection for complex and prolonged cooperation has endowed man with greater degress of affect interplay than in other animals. These are necessary for other-commitment which develops through self-commitment. But the social and symbolic structures which permit him to perform shared tasks to insure his existence also insure frustration, pain, and group conflict. In short, groups mean conflict. [Ralph L. Holloway, Jr., p. 42]

... The main process of preparing a people for war is simply training them to participate obediently in mobilization for concerted action in emergencies. War does not require training a people to hate an external enemy. Since training for mobilization is unavoidable, and the elimination of intergroup hostility wold be irrelevant, it is clear that the prevention of war will not be accomplished either by eliminating its basis in psychological preparation or by improving human nature. Rather the problem of ensuring peace must be approached by the innovation of political and administrative safeguards that guarantee that alternative processes of conflict resolution are not interrupted by war-by-mistake. [Anthony F.C. Wallace, p. 182]

Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1961.

For many reasons, I do not believe that the twentieth century will see a disarmed world, but it may see a world government or the equivalent. Until that day arrives, it will be of great value to try to keep, indeed make, the problem of national security intellectually and diplomatically simple, and the diffusion of nuclear weapons wold seem to go exactly the wrong way. The two-power case seems both intellectually and practically more controllable than the Nth-power case. The diffusion of nuclear weapons not only complicates the over-all analytic problem, but the stakes at risk if events go badly would seem to be less in the two-power than in the Nth case. [p. 494]

Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Wiener, The Year 2000: A framework for Speculation on the Next 33 Years, New York Macmillan, 1967. Much of this book consists of lists of changes, trends, influences, social and scientific innovations, and demographic developments, along with possible wars and other cataclysms, all categorized by varying degrees of likelihood. It's fascinating to compare predictions and outcomes; and, interestingly, these Cold-War era thinkers turned out to be optimistic more often than pessimistic.

If computer capacities were to continue to increase by a factor of ten every two or three years until the end of the century (a factor between a hundred billion and ten quadrillion), then all current concepts about computer limitations will have to be reconsidered. Even if the trend continues for only the next decade or two, the improvements over current computers would be factors of thousands to millions. If we add the likely enormous improvements in input-output devices, programming and problem formulation, and better understanding of the basic phenomena being studied, manipulated, or simulated, these estimates of improvement may be wildly conservative. And even if the rate of change slows down by several factors, there would still be room in the next thirty-three years for an overall improvement of some five to ten orders of magnitude. Therefore, it is necessary to be skeptical of any sweeping but often meaningless or nonrigorous statement such as "a computer is limited by the designer--it cannot create anything he does not put in," or that "a computer cannot be truly creative or original." By the year 2000, computers are likely to match, simulate, or surpass some of man's most "human-like" intellectual abilities, including perhaps some of his aesthetic and creative capacities, in addition to having some new kinds of capabilities that human beings do not have. If it turns out that they cannot duplicate or exceed certain characteristically human capabilities, that will be one of the most important discoveries of the twentieth century. [p. 89]

Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, New York, Ballantine Books, 1968.

Our entire economy is geared to growing population and monumental waste. Buy land and hold it; the price is sure to grow. Why? Exploding population and finite resources. Buy natural resources stocks; their price is sure to go up. Why? Exploding population and finite resources. Buy automotive or airline stocks; their price is sure to go up. Why? More people to move around. Buy baby food stocks; their price is sure to go up. Why? You guess. And so it goes. Up goes the population, and up goes that magical figure, the Gross National Product (GNP). And, as anyone who takes a close look at the glut, waste, pollution, and ugliness of America today can testify, it is well-named--as gross a product as one could wish for. We have assumed the role of the robber barons of all time. We have decided that w are the chosen people to steal all we can get of our planet's gradually stored and limited resources. To hell with future generations, and to hell with our fellow human beings today. We'll fly high now--hopefully they'll pay later. [pp.149-150]

Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Pocket Books, 1954. As a result of borrowing this book from Eugene Blackwell's shelf, I decided to take the experimental elective in philosophy that was offered in my last year of high school.

The mind of man (and here at last is the great thesis of Kant) is not passive wax on which experience and sensation write their absolute and yet whimsical will; nor is it a mere abstract name for the series or groups of mental states; it is an active organ which molds and coordinates sensations into ideas, an organ which transforms the chaotic multiplicity of experience into the ordered unity of thought. [p. 267]

Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, Garden City, Doubleday, 1969. Little did I know, when I first read this book, what a fertile set of ideas it contains for Quaker dialogues on the roles of boundaries and doctrine, the shape of worship, and the constant, subtle struggle against elitism.

The truth of the matter is: no society, not even our severely secularized technocracy, can ever dispense with mystery and magical ritual. These are the very bonds of social life, the inarticulate assumptions and motivations that weave together the collective fabric of society and require periodic collective affirmations. But there is one magic that seeks to open and vitalize the mind, another that seeks to diminish and delude. There are rituals which are imposed from on high for the sake of invidious manipulation; there are other rituals in which men participate democratically for the purpose of freeing the imagination and exploring self-expression. There are mysteries which, like the mysteries of state, are no better than dirty secrets; but there are also mysteries which are encountered by the community (if such exists) in a stance of radical equality, and which are meant to be shared in for the purpose of enriching life by experiences of awe and splendor.

Norbert Wiener, God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion, Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 1964.

As engineering techniques become more and more able to achieve human purposes, it must become more and more accustomed to formulate human purposes. In the past, a partial and inadequate view of human purposes has been relatively innocuous only because it has been accompanied by technical limitations that made it difficult for us to perform operations involving a careful evaluation of human purpose. This is only one of the many places where human impotence has hitherto shielded us from the full destructive impact of human folly. [p. 64]

Render unto man the things which are man's and unto the computer the things which are the computer's. This would seem the intelligent policy to adopt when we employ men and computers together in common undertakings.... What we need now is an independent study of systems involving both human and mechanical elements. [p. 73]

Theodore J. Gordon, The Future, New York, St. Martin's Press, 1965. Once again, the discussion of war drew my attention:

It is an oversimplification to say that the war syndrome, the battle archetype, is derived purely from the primal instinct for self-preservation. It has in it elements of group psychosis, chauvinism, pride, glory, and mysticism. Successful elimination of war must be based on a solution that satisfies the intrinsic drives that cause war.

We can look around our contemporary society for other situations which are not war, yet satisfy the same drives. Sports? Partially. Picture the frenzied support of the home team. Law? Religion? Economic competition? Three elements are missing from most of these which are present in the war situation: personal participation in support of the group, finality of decision, and personal risk. It is my contention that measures designed for total war elimination may be only temporary until a non-war solution is found which has these three elements present to a large degree, at least until evolution or education has carried us to the point where the primal archetype is no longer important. [pp.58-60]

My notebook also includes quotations from Robert M. Hutchins' The Learning Society. It ends in 1971 with two newspaper items: "Documents bare pre-Tonkin plans to hit N. Viets," by Murray Marder and Charles M. Roberts, a Washington Post article I copied from the June 14, 1971, Chicago Sun-Times; and and the full text of Judge Gurfein's decision in the New York Times/Pentagon Papers case, from the June 21, 1971, Chicago Tribune.

Rediscovering this notebook brought back a flood of memories from four decades ago. Few of those memories are more precious than time spent with Eugene Blackwell and his books. Right now we're in the process of packing up most of our books for storage--although eleven boxes have been sold to Powell's Books. What will we do to be sure the remaining books don't remain in boxes indefinitely? Will I be, in some way, a Eugene Blackwell to someone else?

Righteous links:

The Pew Forum, "Assessing a More Prominent 'Religious Left'"

I have a massive collection of Quaker Life issues. One that fell open on its way from one pile to another was the May 2000 issue with Vera Dyck's "The Healing Power of Open Worship," and my accompanying column. "No Shortage of Power."

Preach it, Fleming Rutledge!! "When God Disturbs the Peace."

I really wanted to say something to mark the occasion of Obama's crossing the primary finish line for his nomination as the Democrats' candidate for the U.S. presidency. But the Noli Irritare Leones thoughts are close to mine, and better organized.

Jeff Healey, rest in peace. (Here's his version of "How Blue Can You Get," at the 2006 Notodden Blues Festival.)

And here's Robert Nighthawk. This clip is a real time capsule, for better or for worse. Some of the best musicians sang lyrics I can barely stand to hear--this is a good example. Meanwhile, the Maxwell Street culture recorded here is all but gone, except in a few films and clips like this one.

Should all evangelical Friends be in one organization?

2008-05-29T19:34:00.000-07:00

In my last Quaker Life editorial, back in the summer of 2000, I wrote a "wish list" for Friends United Meeting, including the following item:

Christian unity among Friends: FUM occupies a central place in the world of Friends; as someone said at the February meeting of our General Board, FUM at its core is "unapologetically evangelical and authentically Quaker." Based on this identity, FUM is well-placed to work with Christian Friends from every corner of the Quaker world. During my time, we have collaborated with Friends General Conference on publications in Russian and with Evangelical Friends International on work in Ramallah and pastors' conferences in East Africa and Latin America. At one point, we had field staff working together in Palestine from Northwest, Iowa, North Carolina and Philadelphia Yearly Meetings. Eventually it will make sense for Friends United Meeting and Evangelical Friends International to merge, but in the meantime, whenever collaboration allows us to be more faithful, we ought to jump at the chance.

Concerning the merger of FUM and Evangelical Friends International: I think I've changed my mind.

At the time I wrote those words, I knew first-hand the enormous effort involved in the care and feeding of a Friends organization, particularly one with the comprehensive responsibilities of a (more or less) denomination. It just didn't make sense to me that two such organizations with similar core values but fairly small constituencies could justify operating in parallel. Surely a unified evangelical body would have more economies of scale. All that was necessary was for a new generation of leaders to come on the scene, leaders who perhaps weren't so personally invested in seeing the flaws in each other's organizations.

I also believed that the two bodies would strengthen each other. EFI and its mission arm, Evangelical Friends Mission, seemed to me to have a "why not?" energy and attitude towards new missions, whereas FUM seemed to be permanently oriented toward maintaining very mature (charitably stated) mission relationships, with no energy left for reaching people who'd never heard of us. Individual FUM yearly meetings, including some in Kenya, were becoming more active, but I don't think FUM could take credit for that.

If EFI could be seen as more mission-oriented, what would FUM bring to a merger? As a whole, FUM Friends seemed to me to be more committed to, and more patient with, Friends' traditions, especially in decisionmaking. I also felt, rightly or wrongly, that Friends in FUM were more accustomed to Christian diversity.

(I am now defining FUM as those Friends who actually value their FUM affiliation, not those who are in dual-affiliation Quaker bodies but not personally committed at all to FUM or to what earlier generations charmingly called "orthodox" Quakerism. Also note: Capital-E Evangelical Friends are part of EFI; small-e evangelical Friends also include those Friends in FUM who agree with FUM's purpose statement, and also include significant numbers of Friends in the so-called liberal and conservative yearly meetings. If this paragraph makes no sense at all to you, consider yourself fortunate!)

I've now been in an Evangelical Friends yearly meeting a year longer than I was head of the FUM staff, and I'm starting to make some comparisons. But those comparisons are not what led me to begin doubting the wisdom of merger. Despite some distressing innovations in a few parts of the EFI side (abandonment of monthly meetings, for example, and increased use of ceremony), and what looks to me like a decline in FUM's vitality, the similarities outweigh the differences. Instead, here's what leads me to doubt the wisdom of merging:

Some years ago (1994?), a Cuban Friend proposed an "apostolic council" of Friends who would help us discern the Holy Spirit's guidance for the new challenges of the 21st century (and, I'd add, the post-denominational era). What would such a body do to help us maintain the Quaker identity without the organizational overhead? Could such a body of elders be credible without even the faint hint of accountability now occasionally provided by bodies such as FUM and EFI?

Righteous links:

Kafka Comes to America, and its author comes to Portland. (Thanks to Rachel Hampton for the news.)

Far from Moscow is a delightful blog on Russian contemporary music and culture.

Sean Guillory provided the above reference. His own outlet, Sean's Russia Blog, links to his recent eXile article examining the Nemtsov/Milov would-be expose of the Putin presidential era.

One more Russian link, utterly without political agenda: a Google-driven site to plan your Moscow city transportation online. (The site is building up a database for transportation between Russian cities as well.)

Goodbye to a courageous Iranian spiritual leader, Hassan Dehqani-Tafti.

Here's an amazing photo: the first time a camera has caught a spacecraft descending to the surface of another planet.

The Artis family enjoys playing blues, and we're invited to enjoy with them:

Online Videos by Veoh.com

Losses, part two

2008-05-22T14:40:00.000-07:00

For years after my sister Ellen was murdered, I dreamed about her. The dreams were always the same: she came back from wherever she had been hiding to tell me that it had all been a big mistake. She hadn't been killed--how could I have thought that!?--she'd simply disappeared to have some time for herself, or, in another variation, she'd been away at camp. Since, in real life, she had run away from home more than ten times, and had also run away from a foster home and a hospital, it was entirely believable, until I woke up again. That last moment between sleeping and waking was always an instant of wild hope.

My life has been full of angels in the form of loving and helpful people. For these awful dreams, a violin-playing therapist named Sigurd Hoppe, a Friend in Northern Yearly Meeting, turned out to be the angel. After listening to my story at a Friends conference, he gently questioned me and found out that we had never had a funeral for her. On his advice, and nearly twenty years after her death, First Friends Meeting in Richmond, Indiana, arranged and hosted a complete funeral, just as if there'd been a more normal interval since her death. (First Friends: more angels!) My surviving sister came and read a letter from Ellen. One of our friends told us that she had felt Ellen's presence. The dreams ended with that funeral.

Sometimes the angels that have ministered most deeply to me, however, have been authors--novelists I've never actually met. Maybe this is, at least in part, because in my growing up years I hardly ever told anyone in real life what it was like to live in a hermetically sealed family where violence and alcohol shaped our daily uncertainties, and respectability dictated our public face. Books were a private source of comfort, providing both assurance (others also had crazy families, and survived!) and a rich source of fantasy.

The Accidental Tourist

The older I got, the more I allowed real people into my world, but I never abandoned books. After all, books didn't care if you cried your eyes out. How would Anne Tyler even know that, reading The Accidental Tourist, I lost it when I read how her hero's murdered son came back to life in his dreams? But it was as if Tyler was one of those angels who provided a path back to the human community, human solidarity, when all I thought I wanted in my grief was perfect isolation.

The Lovely Bones

More recently, another fictional murder victim touched me deeply through the literary device of an observation post in heaven from which she watched her family and friends coping with their wrenching loss--and her killer covering his tracks. Susie Salmon was fourteen when she was murdered, and so was my sister.

There were important differences in our situations--Susie's was a loving family, but Ellen was estranged from our parents and in full revolt from their values. Even so, I cherished the fantasy (is that the right word?) that Ellen was watching us from heaven, and in some heavenly way was encouraging us to live.

I saw precious few signs of hope in the first years after her death. Years later, I had to smile when I heard that the mother of the man, Tyrone King, who killed my sister tried to give my father Gospel tracts in the courtroom where her son was on trial for murder!

All along I'd wanted to stop dreaming about my sister coming back and explaining the "misunderstanding"; it was vital to say goodbye to her on that level. But all my adult life I've also wanted her not to be forgotten. And those tearful hours reading Sebold's novel, and pausing to think about Ellen and where she might now be, were among the times I've felt closest to her since our violent separation.

The Shack

My most recent experience with a literary angel ministering to this deep grief--and my determination to remember--happened just a few days ago. William P. Young's novel The Shack has raised controversies among some Friends pastors, some of whom defend this book passionately and some of whom charge it with silliness at least and serious heresy at worst. An unstamped note in a mailbox invites grieving father Mack to meet "Papa" (God) in the very place where Mack's daughter had been brutally killed by a serial murderer. Papa turns out to be a black woman. And God loves to cook as well as talk theology. The other members of the Trinity are are also given more or less unstereotypical portrayals--but more than that I dare not say for fear of spoiling the book for you.

Having read the comments on the pastors' e-mail list before reading the book, my heresy detector was definitely on a hairtrigger, but, despite Papa's dogma-busting assertions of the primacy of relationship over rules, and expectancy over expectations, I could not find it. What I did find, however, were intimations of grace and immortality and redemption every bit as wrenching/comforting as The Lovely Bones. And not only did they concern the fate of Missy, the victim, but also of family members who blamed themselves for contributing to her death, and particularly for Mack's father, whose abusive ways had distorted Mack's ability to receive grace from God and perceive grace in the church. God also speaks very directly to the murderer's place in God's purposes, but I'm just not going to say more; see for yourself. Just know that I read that part with Tyrone King in my own thoughts, and the image of his mother trying to evangelize my atheist father.

Honestly, I don't understand why some church people are so nervous about the grace-over-law emphasis of this book. It's completely framed within the paramount importance of personal relationship with God. There's no question of God saying "anything goes," but here's the central proposition of William Young's book: within that trust-filled relationship, marked by knowing fully how much God loves you, the fruits of the Spirit will flourish, including self-control. Apart from that relationship, the rules that some find so reassuring come across to me as intellectual bullying dressed up in a pseudo-spiritual black leather binding. And when I think of what some of the heroic defenders of biblical normalcy have been able to swallow in today's American political context--illegal invasion, torture, indefinite detention for years, to name a few--I'm ready for an evangelical bias towards grace. Maybe when we see our country staggering from the awful effects of stressing grace and experiencing the overwhelming love of God, we'll need some stern literary countermeasures. In the meantime, let the debate continue!

(Losses, part one.)

Righteous links:

I'm not the only one who asks, "What is it with tears?"

For one homicide victim--at Abu Ghraib--there were more smiles than tears. But how real were the smiles? Errol Morris takes a second look at a notorious photo.

Bill McKibben, "The defining moment for climate change."

Poetry of Bill Jolliff: two poems that made me want to read more.

The Bible in Linux: So far I've been using GnomeSword as a reader, but most of the available Bible modules are public domain or nonstandard. Two versions, NET and ESV, seem excellent, but I miss NRSV and NIV and the Message. The NET notes are especially helpful.

Pam Ferguson confesses that she peeks into other customers' shopping carts. "It is time for a new diet."

Sue Foley's voice is incredibly matched for the electric blues guitar--sometimes it sounds like she plays her vocal chords with a slide. Judge for herself on "Queen Bee," the second of her two tunes here:

Atlanta shorts

2008-05-15T12:43:00.000-07:00

Not much time to write this week--just about to pack up my computer to go home after a few intense days in Atlanta.

President Bush says that his commentary on negotiation with terrorists and radicals, part of his speech in Israel's Knesset, was not aimed at Barack Obama. Who was it aimed at? There is nobody advocating what he specifically described. ("Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.") Who are those "some" upon whom this mud is supposed to cling? And where did Bush get his understanding of what it means to negotiate?

Sorry to repeat myself somewhat (here too): Wouldn't a minimum-level understanding of "love your enemies" include describing them accurately and making an attempt to communicate with them directly?

More on the subtleties of contemporary mudslinging: Noli Irritare Leones on "Crypto-Muslims and religion as Super Glue."

One of Jeremiah Wright's most controversial sermons, from which a microscopic selection was played endlessly for a few weeks, was actually a commentary on Psalm 137 (notorious for its line about dashing babies against the rocks). That very psalm is the case study for Jason Byassee's good article in Christianity Today, "Reading with the saints: the art of biblical interpretation." (Yes, he uses the word "hermeneutics.")

More righteous links

Yet another theory interpretation for the JFK assassination: "In a new book, JFK and the Unspeakable, Catholic theologian and peace activist Jim Douglass shows us a different Kennedy, born of the Cold War, but reborn and turning toward peace. For that, Douglass contends, he was killed by the powers that be."

Google provides a convenient method of donating to Myanmar disaster relief while (this is not a criticism, just an observation) possibly increasing its "Google Checkout" rolls.

Oregonians: Have you voted yet? For those of us in the Portland area, Willamette Week Online makes its primary election ballot cheat-sheet available. The WW endorsements are just the beginning; reader comments make this a much richer resource.

In Communion, the publication of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship, has (at least) two interesting articles on the theme of "walls"--Maria Khoury's "Living on the wrong side of the wall" (the Separation Wall or the Apartheid Wall, depending on your viewpoint); and "Wanderings and wonderings about women and walls." In case Demetra Velisarios Jaquet's reflections on the situation of women in Eastern Orthodoxy tempts us Friends to feel smug, keep reading. Her description of the "many tools for avoiding subjects that are too risky or scary to talk about" seem to me to apply equally to us.

"Giving to those who don't give up": Simon Barrow offers an example of creative donor education from Christian Aid.

Blues dessert for this week (and I'm off to the airport....)

"You can't divide the country up..."

2008-05-08T14:43:00.000-07:00

I don't expect the dawning of the Age of Aquarius on Inauguration Day, January 20. I expect that if the people make the best choice for U.S. president, the result on a policy level might be 5% better, or 10% better, than if they make the "wrong" choice.

But if Barack Obama wins, and his vision of a more united country, a "more perfect Union," is vindicated, part of our gain would be something other than immediate, miraculous payoffs in improved policies. Instead, it would be a wonderful defeat for divisive wedge campaigning, and a victory for his biggest moral priority--closing our country's "empathy gap." In the long term, closing that gap is a key element of opening up the political space for better policies.

I vividly remember an interview on public radio after the 1994 Republican congressional tidal wave. One of the Republican consultants said triumphantly that "born-again" Christians had voted 65% for the Republicans. When you play that wedge game, 65% seems equivalent to 100%, but what about the millions represented by the remaining 35%--aren't they people, too?

That memory came back to me when I listened to commentators talking about Hillary Clinton's successes in rural Indiana counties in the May 6 primary elections. Almost none of them talked about even the remote possibility that Hillary had simply done a better job making her case locally, and had therefore earned her county-by-county victories fair and square. Instead, her 60% or 65% majorities were interpreted as if it were physically and mentally impossible for a white farmer (or name your glib category) to vote for Barack Obama, even though many of them--in the thousands--actually did.

Again, when Paul Begala says that "eggheads and African Americans" can't carry the Democrats to the presidency, he perhaps unintentionally marginalizes those people (just think how African American eggheads might feel!) and at the same time marginalizes people who are NOT in those categories. Blue collar and rural white people can't be trusted to do the right thing, nor can eggheads of all colors and languages, when presented with wide-spectrum candidates and their programs; everything has to be targeted with narrow symbolism and clever rhetorical crowbars.

I vaguely remembered some delicious quotations from Harry S Truman and once again looted our partially boxed-up library for the Merle Miller oral biography, Plain Speaking, that contained them. (I know this book has been partially discredited for its apparent deviations from the original tape recordings, but these quotations are not from the weaker chapters, and furthermore are consistent with speeches and documents available from the online Truman archives for 1948.)

When 1948 was coming along, they said that if I didn't let up with my asking for a Fair Employment Practice Commission and asking for a permanent commission on civil rights and things of that kind, why, some of the Southerners would walk out.

I said if that happened, it would be a pity, but I had no intention of running on a watered-down platform that said one thing and meant another. And the platform I did run on and was elected on went straight down the line on civil rights.

...

People said I ought to pussyfoot around, that I shouldn't say anything that would lose the Wallace vote and nothing that would lose the Southern vote.

But I didn't pay any attention to that. I said what I thought had to be said. You can't divide the country up into sections and have one rule for one section and one rule for another, and you can't encourage people's prejudices. You have to appeal to people's best instincts, not their worst ones. You may win an election or so by doing the other, but it does a lot of harm to the country.

I want to be clear that I'm not for sentimentalizing people any more than I am for marginalizing them. Sometimes eggheads are wrong (or are right for the wrong reasons!) and sometimes outwardly unsophisticated rural people or blue-collar people are wrong. And when unethical media consultants want to sway these different audiences, they can use different counterfeits for different audiences. So you talk about Hillary's "cojones" to the Reagan Democrats, to choose one particularly idiotic example, or you hint that Obama, judged by the company he keeps, is "too radical "for our kind of people.

But I think Obama put it very well on Tuesday: "...while we may have different stories, we hold common hopes. We may not look the same or come from the same place, but we want to move in the same direction...." Counterfeits have to be calibrated for the audience; an authentic message, as Truman implied, will be the same everywhere.

I don't know whether it is useful to extend these reflections into the Quaker arena. Certainly no politician is trying to divide us (at least not in the USA--Kenya is a different story). But counterfeit Quakerisms do exist, and they come in many boutique varieties--from individualistic New Age spirituality make-overs with selected antiquarian accents, all the way to cliche-ridden generic evangelicalism. But the genuine thing is the same in every culture, every worship mode, every language, every socio-economic class: "Jesus Christ has come to teach his people himself."

Was the previous statement too categorical? I admit it; I do believe in the reality of error. Not wrong people so much as distorted or dead-end ideas. Or am I in error about that?

Righteous links:

Veteran political observer Joe Klein reinforces some of what I said above (or vice versa...) in his Time magazine commentary on the Clinton/Obama campaign, and what it may mean for the upcoming presidential contest. "In the end, Obama's challenge to the media is as significant as his challenge to McCain."

Presidential campaign politics sixty years ago: The Truman Library's online documents treasury from the 1948 campaign. And a Helen Thomas book review provides more pithy quotes.

Speaking of inaugurations: Moscow, Kremlin, May 7.

Joe Volk writes to President Bush concerning "this use of airpower against a civilian population" in Sadr City.

Are you spending or wasting your cognitive surplus?

Should the Christian Peacemaker Teams stay in northern Iraq? Some visionaries weigh in.

Ekklesia: Christian leaders mark Israel's anniversary with 'just peace' call. (Related text and signers.)

"Christian leaders are catching a vision that group discernment is an integral congregational skill for the empowered work of the church. At George Fox University, May 19-23: Leadership Institute for Group Discernment.

Laugh and cry at these Postcards from Yo Momma. Having had a very disconnected mother (to put it one way...), I read these "postcards" with a wistful sort of reverse nostalgia--for the mother I never had. (Thanks to the Newsweek Web site for the reference.)

Basic blues: Floyd Lee at Full Moon Lightnin's Clarksdale sessions. For more session clips, click on the poster's link below the player.

Floyd Lee WROX Full Moon Lightnin EXTRA
Uploaded by fullmoonlightnin

Does God hate divorce?

2008-05-01T12:19:00.000-07:00

"We seemed to be the perfect Christian family," said the banquet speaker. Nobody in her church could believe that her husband was abusive, and nobody in her church could understand what the secular counselor told her: the abuse in the family was the cause of her teenager's depression.

For over three years, Judy has been working for Abuse Recovery Ministry and Services, and I've attended the annual fundraising banquets ARMS has held in both Portland and Salem, Oregon. At each banquet, the speakers have included women whose pathways to safety, renewed faith, and healthy, Godly self-respect have included Her Journey study groups and materials provided by ARMS. (Men who've been helped by ARMS's ManKind program are also among the speakers at these events.) Again at last Saturday's Salem banquet, the "perfect Christian" wife reported the all-too-frequent experience of being counseled to submit because "God hates divorce...." (Malachi 2:16a, see context.) Here's the pattern in all its bitter irony:

The passage from Malachi is just as much about the community's unfaithfulness to God as about any individual covenant violation, but, too often the abusive husband (and his sometimes unwitting confederate, the usually male pastor) find it convenient to use Malachi's words exclusively to bind the victim.
In Malachi's time, most if not all divorces were initiated by men; the clear intent of the passage is to protect women from being selfishly abandoned, not to prevent women in violent situations from finding safety.
It's convenient for abusers and their confederates to emphasize only the first words of Malachi 2:16, "God hates divorce," leaving out the part where God hates it when a man covers himself with violence. Even if we accept the interpretation that "violence" here refers to the divorce itself, it seems self-serving to ignore the violence within an abusive marriage--and that the biblical caution is principally aimed at the man. Look at the tenderness with which Malachi talks about the ideals of marriage; compare that to the selfish domination of an abusive marriage.
The Bible itself doesn't support misplaced and selfish literalism. In God's name, Ezra commands divorce (Ezra 10:10-11) in the same sort of larger situation Malachi addresses--namely when Judah breaks faith and goes after daughters of foreign gods. In an abusive marriage, hasn't faith also been broken?
Malachi says, "... The Lord is acting as the witness between you and the wife of your youth, because you have broken faith with her ...." How dare anyone cover abuse with public piety when God witnesses the true state of affairs, even though the church and the pastor might be clueless?

No wonder one of ARMS's most important initiatives is the training they offer for pastors and churches, so that these can become allies of God the witness and of victims, instead of unwitting confederates of the abuser. The Bible always contains the antidotes to its own misuse, when we learn how to let it speak for itself!

One thing that we've found from listening to so many stories of heartbreak and hope: domestic abuse is not confined to any social class or status, nor excluded from any. Domestic abuse occurs in every class, every income group, every level of supposed "sophistication." Despite my special scrutiny of the situation among evangelical church families, abuse occurs just as often among liberal or secular people. Two decades ago, Judy Brutz's research revealed that violence happens in liberal Quaker households--certainly a culture that honors equality and nonviolence. I don't suppose that even readers of Quaker blogs are immune!

One of the reasons I'm personally so impressed by ARMS concerns its roots in the evangelical Christian community--the very community where the misuse of the Bible can have devastating effects on a woman, not to mention the cost to the church as a whole. Secular commentators and agencies can make excellent partners for faith-based programs by expanding links with shelters and other community allies. However with the best intentions, they can also be essentially inaccessible to some people inside the evangelical subculture--who may suspect, rightly or wrongly, that those secular resources do not understand or respect them. The material developed by Stacey Womack and ARMS is thoroughly biblical, and consequently it beautifully honors God's loving, liberating intentions for all people.

People involved with ARMS are sometimes asked, "Aren't women sometimes perpetrators, and aren't men sometimes victims?" As an honest question, it's perfectly legitimate to ask what the statistics and realities are ... and the answer of course is "yes." The question can also be a diversionary tactic to reduce attention to the sad reality that women are statistically vastly more in danger (physical, mental, spiritual) from men than vice versa. And "blaming the victim" is a popular tactic reported over and over again, with all sorts of creative variations, in the stories of people helped by ARMS. Furthermore, victims themselves sometimes become secondary perpetrators, and ARMS provides classes specifically for that situation.

Witnesses, pastors, law enforcers, caregivers should not be ideologically blinded to any possible variation in patterns of abuse in particular situations, including males abused by females. But it's interesting that one of ARMS's biggest donors was a friend of ours, a man who experienced abuse from women. He was able to see past his own experience, bad as it was, to the urgent reality of the larger picture.

Just to let Judy and ARMS off the hook!--Everything I've said above about ARMS and its ministry is my personal opinion or observation; nothing is official and nobody should blame ARMS for what they've read here. But if you like what you've read, support ARMS and get in touch with them directly!! Or find a local equivalent and support them.

In this spirit of witnessing to a more holistic evangelicalism, here's something a bit different from my normal blues dessert. Northwest Yearly Meeting is well acquainted with Bill Jolliff and Jacob Henry, a father and son bluegrass partnership known for combining Gospel and peace themes to reach new audiences. I was delighted to find some youtube examples of their approach, and here's one--"You've Got to Choose." Jacob is playing mandolin, Bill's on banjo. Bill is also a professor at George Fox University and compiler of a Friends United Press book of Whittier's poetry.

When war's on the horizon, are the Savior's words less true? ... You've got to choose.

Cynics gone wild

2008-04-29T13:38:00.000-07:00

As a recovering politics addict, I've managed to stay surprisingly serene during the U.S. presidential nominations season. But the bizarre artificial controversy around the retiring pastor of Obama's church, Jeremiah Wright, is too much to bear.

The first question anyone with common sense ought to ask about this noise is, "What's the agenda?" If people are genuinely puzzled by the Jeremiah Wright soundbites, there's lots of ways to fill in the context. Two examples:


(posted by Wright's church)	(Bill Moyers' interview; full interview available here)

If someone isn't willing to exercise elementary fairness in assessing the controversy, then there's plenty to get hot about in favor of whatever prejudice already exists, or whatever fear one cares to exploit.

Barack Obama's task is clear: he needs to keep remembering what he knows, responding directly to direct questions, and constantly pointing to the larger perspective. Politics is hard work; there's no getting around the need to connect meaningfully with every undecided voter, while reinforcing the commitment he's already made to those of us who share many of his values.

But what do we do in response to the controversy; what's our responsibility when the cynics go wild? How do we respond when nationally-read commentators say things like this?--

Now it turns out that Mr. Wright doesn’t hate America, he loves the sound of his own voice. He is not out of touch with the American culture, he is the avatar of the American celebrity principle: he grabbed his 30-second spots of infamy and turned them into 15 minutes of fame."

(Alessandra Stanley, "Not Speaking for Obama, Pastor Speaks for Himself, at Length," New York Times.) After treating us to constant replays of carefully-selected expressions of Wright's angriest messages, accompanied by many hours and many pages of speculation about the effect on Obama's campaign, the country and its mass media can't grant this man his fifteen minutes of response?? What in the name of justice are they thinking? What could Obama's campaign even be thinking? Why couldn't someone just stand up and say, "You media trashed the man up one side and down the other; isn't it only fair that he now gets his day in the court of public opinion?"

The Bill Moyers interview was a wonderful treat: two Christian gentlemen sit down for an intelligent and respectful, even affectionate, conversation. Yes, Moyers is probably biased; as Stanley put it,

Bill Moyers, the host who knows and obviously admires Mr. Wright, gave the pastor every chance to elaborate on his bona fides, including two years in the Marine Corps and four as a Navy cardiopulmonary technician. Mr. Moyers showed old footage of Mr. Wright in surgical scrubs monitoring President Lyndon B. Johnson’s heart after his gall bladder surgery at Bethesda Naval Hospital in 1965.... He showed Mr. Wright’s service to his community throughout the years — tutoring programs, women’s groups, H.I.V. ministries. And he also gave Mr. Wright a chance to deconstruct the fiery sermon that seemed to blame America for the Sept. 11 attacks and clarify that he was quoting a former ambassador and intended to condemn the American government, not the nation itself. Mostly, he gave his guest a chance to show his softer side: in a dark suit and gray tie, Mr. Wright was courtly, genial, and something of an egghead, tossing out academic citations, literary references and words like "hermeneutics."

But of all the condescending (in some cases, tinged with racism) commentaries on Wright, that last sentence really got me--so Wright affected an "egghead" pose and used the word "hermeneutics" to impress and deceive viewers? Could it just be that "hermeneutics" is a word that comes up naturally when explaining the context for a sermon? When cynics go wild, natural and unforced explanations simply don't occur to them.

It's our job to interrupt the self-reinforcing idiocy with some interventions on our own. Since we're unlikely to get air time on Fox "News," it's up to us to reframe this amazing spectacle for our own families and neighbors:

"Who decided precisely what few seconds of Wright's sermons we'd get to hear? Why not try listening to the whole sermon before judging the preacher so harshly?"
"What would you do if, day after day, the media treated you as a rhetorical terrorist simply for preaching the awkward truths of the Bible? Wouldn't you want a chance to correct the record?"
"Don't you sometimes wonder whose interests are being served by constantly whipping up these controversies without any calm opportunities for all sides to be heard? Do you think it might be possible that somebody is trying to influence you?"

I'm not saying we should fight cynicism with cynicism, but it is time to get real.