The Mark Of Cain

While considered suburban, with my mailing address Elgin, the western half of Kane County is decidedly rural.  Our house is surrounded by horse farms and corn fields that stretch to the west and south through much the rest of Illinois to Iowa, Nebraska, and beyond.  Our quiet countryside looks much as it has, by and large, for much of the 20th century.  The parsonage is about four miles south and west of the church on a pleasant drive past acres of corn, the tiny town of Plato Center just down the road.

If we decide to head to the slightly larger yet still tiny town of Burlington, we head in the other direction.  Driving up Burlington Road, we drive past a Buddhist Temple/Monastery.  In the winter, it's quite a sight, the monks in their orange robes out shoveling the long, sloped driveway.

If we want to make our way to Hampshire or Huntley or even Woodstock, we head up IL Rte 47, one of those razor-straight Illinois roads that still amaze at just how straight they are.  About three miles north and west at the intersection of Plank Road and 47, sits the Temple Shirdi Sai of Chicago and the Suburbs.  Each week, the parking lot and surrounding roads are jammed with cars as believers from around the Metro area make their way to what looks like an old country church to worship their God, remember their prophet, and to celebrate their community and its devotion to service for God with one another.

Now, Oak Creek, Wisconsin isn't very far from where we live, either.  It would probably take about an hour and a half to get to this Milwaukee suburb, maybe more if the interchanges are jammed up.  I have to wonder what these rural enclaves of very different faiths are thinking today, one week after Wade Michael Page shot six people before turning the gun on himself.  It hasn't been enough for domestic terrorists that Christian churches provide opportunities for them to act out their violent fantasies.  Now a small group of peace-loving, God-fearing non-Christians  have found themselves quite literally in the crosshairs of white supremacists.

I have been thinking about our local outposts from world religious expression quite a bit over the past week. I've been thinking about the many ways our country still cradles the wounds inflicted upon us by terror in the name of the God called All-Merciful.  I've been angry that small-minded ideologues have been screeching at any attempt to label an act of racist terror, well, an act of racist terrorism.  Before the bodies had even cooled last week, as it became clear the killer wasn't just some depressed nutjob but a racist reveling in armchair Armageddon who, reaching a point in his life where he had nothing left to lose, got out of his chair with his gun in his hand, we heard not from average Americans or thoughtful commentators but from the right.  Their refrain, yet again, is the same as it has always been: Do not place responsibility for yet more right-wing violence on the rhetoric of the right.  Do not mention the DoJ report that cited right-wing domestic terrorism as the greatest terror threat facing the United States.  And please don't, whatever you do, bring up the matter of guns.

We also saw and read many news organizations struggle to state the obvious as headline after headline seemed to purse its lips in confusion as journalists sought a motive for the killing.  That Page was a racist; with ties to groups linked to other acts of violence; that Page had recently been through a series of personal shocks that left what few ties to others he might have had lying in tatters; none of these things seemed to matter for some, at least, of those whose job is to tell us what was abundantly clear from the evidence.

That ours is a violent, hate-filled land is clear from the abundant evidence.  That hatred is aimed at any difference, real or perceived.  The violence can be as simple as the sneered epithet, the casual threat, or the on-going dehumanization of any persons whose lives don't fit in with an ideology.  It might express itself in a beating, the trashing of a place of worship, or intimidation.  Bodies pile up, one or two at a time, whether they're young gay men and women whose lives are destroyed by others or even themselves; people of color who find themselves committing the national crime of living while black; Muslims who wish only to build houses of worship to Allah that continue to be burned down.

Our failure to look at the mass grave, into which we continue to toss bodies on an almost daily basis, is mute testimony to our refusal to deal with this sickness that pervades our land.  It is also evidence of our refusal to hear the blood of our brothers and sisters as it cries out to us from the ground.  Until we are willing to name this murderous impulse as part of our collective heritage; until we are willing to do actual work to prevent our fellow Americans from adding to the pile of corpses; until we can look in the face of Wade Michael Page and see our reflection staring back at us; until these things happen, we shall continue to read and hear of more mass killings.  Until then, we should note the mark of all our foreheads, denoting our failure as siblings to our fellow Americans, a failure that, yet again, has ended in death.

For Hire!

I just sent the following email:

Mr. Stengel,

With the public announcement of Fareed Zakaria's suspension both from your own publication and CNN, I am writing to offer my services as a replacement columnist.  Having written daily on my web log, "What's Left In The Church", for over six and a half years, without ever once writing anything not my own words without attribution, I believe I come fully qualified not only as having proved I can produce the work required.  I can do so without any fear I might be yet another mainstream journalist/commentator caught in the plagiarism trap.

Hiring a blogger would also reduce your costs, as I would work for far less than I am sure you paid Mr. Zakaria.  Needing only to produce a single piece of writing once a week, I believe an initial fee of $100 per column would be more than adequate compensation.  That would, of course, be subject to review based upon reader response, the links from any columns I would write to other columnists, bloggers, and internet users.

Furthermore, hiring a blogger would mean little in the way of training on the mechanics of writing on the internet.  Since I do so every single day, I am well aware of how to use a variety of platforms, and would feel right at home almost immediately.

Finally, hiring a blogger would give Time immediate visibility and publicity.  It would attract a new and desired cohort to your readership as people might well check and see what, precisely, I might do for and in your venerable magazine.  It would create the kind of marketing buzz too few publications now have, as you made a daring move to include new voices more familiar with new technologies as well as various traditions already existing within the communities that discuss politics on the Internet.

The only requests I would make are two.  First, I would require complete editorial freedom as regards topics and approach.  While I certainly respect the right of editorial oversight regarding style, word limit, and appropriateness, I believe we as a nation are best served by as wide an array of viewpoints as possible.  With that in mind, I would only ask that I not be asked to approach subjects from any particular point of view.  Second, for the sake of my family, I would need to work from my home in rural Elgin, IL.  While the occasional visit to the offices in New York City would certainly be necessary, I see little reason to uproot my family and move to the New York Metropolitan Area.  The advent of the internet would seem to me to let this be the easier of the two requests I am making.

As of today, August 11, 2012, I have published 3,585 post at the following site: http://whatsleftinthechurch.blogspot.com  You may look through them at your leisure.  Consider these my clippings in my application.  Thank you in advance for your consideration.  If you have any questions, feel free to contact me via my email address, gksafford@yahoo.com, or my personal cell phone number, (XXX) XXX-XXXX.

Sincerely,

Geoffrey Kruse-Safford

Yes, I really did send this off to Time.  No, I don't expect them to take it seriously.

I Ain't Afraid Of No Ghosts

Just in time for my usual late-summer/early-autumn foray in to my self-indulgent ghost post, along with sparing me the effort of working too hard here so I can get a whole lot of far more difficult writing done elsewhere, I want to relate an incident that occurred at casa Kruse-Safford last Wednesday night.

It was about ten p.m., and I had gone to the garage to make sure all the animals were inside for the evening.  I noticed the driver-side rear door of my car was open.  My first reaction was frustration with our younger daughter for not closing it.  Then, I realized that when she'd exited the car earlier that day, she had gone out the passenger side, because it's closer to the door from the garage to the house.  I then wondered why it was hanging open - not far, mind you, but clearly open, with the dome light shining bright - and figured my wife was perhaps rooting around in the back seat for something.  What, I couldn't possibly imagine.  Furthermore,  it was light enough and clear enough that if anyone was over there, I would have seen them.  There was no one there.

Still, I figured someone had to be over there, so I took a couple steps toward my car and called out my wife's name.

That's when the car door closed.  On its own.

Like most garages, ours is an acoustic nightmare.  The smallest sound becomes amplified by repeated echoing off the wood walls and concrete floor.  Not just the sight of the door closing but the audible "fwump" as it did so, with the automatic door locks engaging and the tail lights flickering to signal the car was now locked - all of that was both clearly visible and audible.  I stood still for a moment, and I won't deny a certain ill sensation in my gut.  Not so much frightened, I will admit to being more than a little unnerved by the experience.

Which didn't stop me from walking over and seeing who might have closed my door.  As I wrote above, the garage was lit well enough that another human being would have been clearly visible.  I saw no one.  All the same, there has been a rash of break-ins in our general area in recent weeks, so it was at least possible someone was checking out my dented, six-year-old Kia for any goodies it might contain (all the while ignoring the tens of thousands of dollars of DJ equipment stored out there, my wife's car, the other contents of the garage like lawn and garden tools) and I walked the five or so steps from where I had stood just behind my wife's car behind my own and looked down the driver side toward the front of my car and the rear wall of the garage.

No one.  No sound of someone trying to scuffle away.  No shadow of someone crouching behind the front end of my car.  I looked left and right, and I saw nothing.  There was no one in the garage except me.  I tried the handle of my car and, just as the lights indicated, it was locked (a safety feature on the Kia I happen to like; I don't have to engage the remote locks if the rear doors close after the front doors because they do so automatically).  Except, I hadn't locked my car when I got out of it that afternoon, and I had seen the rear door close and the lights flash indicating that the door locks had engaged.

I stood for another moment, looked around the garage again, then went in the house.  I locked the door behind me - again, something I do every night; we live in the middle of nowhere but safety first and all that - and, seeing Lisa at the kitchen sink doing some late-night dishes, said, "That was the freakiest thing I've ever seen," and proceeded to tell her what had just happened.

Lisa was more put out by the events I related than I was, to be honest.  Getting over the initial surprise of seeing something happen that shouldn't happen, I became, in a day or two, more intrigued by it than anything.  While I haven't started setting up cameras in the garage or returning each night at the same time, I would enjoy seeing it, or something similar, happen again.  Singular events such as this, while interesting, mean little. As I told my youngest sister on the phone, it's just a car door closing.  I do not for one moment believe our house haunted (although, if it were, that would be awesome; more on that in a moment).

I have come to the conclusion that, whatever the phenomena we label "hauntings" might be, there is little of which to be scared.  If, indeed, they are the physical manifestations of some non-physical remnant of human beings, then at worst they are little more than attention-getting devices.  Were our house haunted, it wouldn't be something about which to tremble.  On the contrary, it would demonstrate that someone loved this place enough to hang out after they were "gone" (whatever that might mean), indicating an emotional attachment linked to fond memories and pleasant experiences.  Far from finding such a thing frightening, I find solace in the fact that others who once lived in the space my family now occupies had such an attachment.  It bodes well for my family's sojourn here.

For what it's worth, that's what happened and how I feel about what happened.  It isn't something about which I worry or brood.  It isn't something that scares me, prevents me from going to the garage, makes me jump at each little bump and knock our very noisy house makes.  Should such an event or a similar such occur, it would mean for me that something might just want to let someone know it's still out and about, which I might well acknowledge with joy.

Last night, Lisa and I were waiting for Moriah to get home from a party.  We were sitting and watching Season 8 of NCIS on DVD.  The episode in which recurring character Mike Franks is murdered was on.  In a flashback, Franks and Gibbs are talking about the possibility that we see ghosts.  In a piece of writing that I find really beautiful, Franks says, "We see them.  Our lives are filled with them, not just the ones we kill, but the ones we remember.  That's why, wherever I go, I make sure the space is filled with lots of naked women."  The last part is a good line, but I like so much the idea that our lives are, indeed, filled with the spirits of those who have shared our lives at one time or another; the ghosts of our lives aren't just those who have died, but who have passed from our lives to whatever came next for them.  Lingering in our hearts and minds, we keep them close as we knew them in order to keep that part of our lives real.  It also serves to keep them alive as well, even if an arrested, attenuated life.

To live surrounded by such would not be a burden.  It wouldn't be frightening.  I wouldn't consider it a threat to my family.  I would welcome such experiences as part of the wonder and mystery that is our world, a celebration of life-in-death that, after all, resonates with my own Christian faith quite well.  Still, what happened isn't anything at all like that.  It was a car door closing.  Intriguing, to be sure, yet hardly anything to cast me running and screaming like a little girl from my own garage.

The Soundtrack Of Your Life

It's been a crazy summer here at casa Kruse-Safford.  My ten day sojourn back at my Ancestral Villa was an unexpected break for me even as the rest of my family puttered about their busy lives.  The recovery of our equanimity has been slow, not aided by an impending trip by Lisa and Miriam to southern Illinois to visit Lisa's 98 year old paternal grandmother, in hopes of beginning the discussion that might bring her to live out her remaining years with us.  For someone for whom stability and routine seem necessary for psychological balance, the past five or six weeks have been a life-lesson in the need to cope with the sudden and rapid succession of change.

I was inspired to do this, in part, because I read Scott McLemee's review of The Mind's Ear, with his invocation of the soundtrack that accompanies reading any particular philosopher.

In order to help myself a bit, I'm thinking of reworking my "Thoughts on America" series of posts into a set of two or three more coherent, clear, and slightly longer essays with the intention of offering the final product for publication.  I was re-reading them yesterday, and despite many flaws, I think there are many more virtues there.  This will require a bit more work, so at least for today, rather than exhaust my brain on yet another blog post (I was actually considering highlighting yet another Romney campaign goof but the poor guy has suffered enough, I think) I thought I'd do something light and fun.

Moriah is taking AP American History, which includes quite a bit of summer work, both reading and writing. She has been dutiful and consistent, working through each day, the ear buds firmly attached to her iPhone as she does her work with the music that keeps her happy.  Lord knows I can't complain about that.  Doing homework to music was a necessity in my youth; I would put an album on the turntable, sometimes agonizing over which record to play.

Last night at dinner, Moriah confessed that she "didn't like" Bob Marley, although the only song she knew by name, "Three Little Birds", was one she did like.  I then told the story of sitting around the dining room table in my childhood home with my mother, my sister, and my niece, playing some of the songs I'd loaded on my iPhone.  The first one I played was Opeth's "Heir Apparent".

Moriah countered with her current near-obsession, the British boy band One Direction.

Miriam parried this with K. T. Tunstall's "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree".

Back at my childhood home, I also played for my sister Amos Lee's "Violin", because I know that's the kind of thing she would love.

And I played "Poetry Man" by Phoebe Snow for my family last night.

This diverse set of music reminded me of the wonderful differences among even those who share so much.

I should note that some music I reserve for special occasions.  Early mornings, in particular, seem fitted to jazz, the music of Vangelis, and other such things.  I can listen to Joni Mitchell and CSNY for hours on end during high spring, but that music seems ill-suited for late summer/early fall when different songs make their appearance (my personal favorite as summer winds in to autumn is October Project, a short-lived pop group featuring the marvelous lead singer Mary Fahl.  Her recording of an old Arabic wedding song is stunning.

What sets your mood, not just for a day, but perhaps for a season?  What keeps you going while you're reading or sitting at your desk either at the office or home?  What music, whether long ago or just the past hour, passed through your ears making you smile, keeping you going?

A Thousand Words, At Least

As a follow on to this post . . .

I know it won't shut anyone up, but a nice dose of reality warms the soul.

When Accountants Run The Churches

I almost wrote about this story yesterday, but needed to get that overview of Romney-Thus-Far off my chest.  To say I was appalled is to add a mild descriptor to my reaction.

The General Board of Global Ministries' independent audit committee recommended at its annual meeting that the agency suspend funding to the United Methodist East Africa Annual Conference (EAAC).

In a report submitted to Global Ministries, the auditors noted that they had conducted three internal audits of the treasury of the EAAC in Kampala, Uganda, since April 2011. The most recent audit was as complete as possible with the available records. It was conducted during a two-week period ending June 30, 2012, and covered projects funded from 2009, 2010, and 2011.

The report stated in its recommendation "that all funds for the conference be suspended indefinitely, until such time as the EAAC is prepared to accept responsibility to be accountable and all internal controls have been put in place."

--snip--

 The projects reviewed and affected by the suspension of funds include, among others, Humble United Methodist School, Humble United Methodist Vocational High School, Hope for Africa Children's Choir Music Academy, Mukono and Namunkanaga HIV/AIDS and Malaria Awareness, Trinity United Methodist Church in Wanyange, United Methodist Women Center in Jinja, and the United Methodist Empowerment Center of Jinja.

The audit report was emailed to Bishop Daniel Wandabula, who leads the EAAC. The Global Ministries audit committee will continue to seek resolution on the outstanding issues.

Global Ministries accepted the independent audit committee's recommendation and has suspended all funding to the EAAC effective immediately.

I wasn't sure about the boundaries, but the East Africa Annual Conference, according to the United Methodist Church's website,  include the nations of Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan, and Uganda, with Episcopal offices in Uganda's capital of Kampala.

So . . . because the conference exists across the boundaries of nations living with varieties of internal strife, despotism, civil war and secession, the threat of the spread of militant Islam and terrorist groups (the northeast of Kenya, bordering the near non-state of Somalia, is pretty much an armed camp as Kenya defends itself from the radicals trying to move south), the ravages of neo-colonialism, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, endemic corruption, official neglect from their putative First World allies; for all these reasons, the United Methodist Church, in its infinite wisdom is going to punish United Methodist Christians who live and work in these countries.

It was a Capt. Renault moment for those auditors, announcing themselves "shocked! shocked!" that there might be problems with financial audits in countries with the abundant problems listed above.  Which, obviously, should not be read as a defense of any potential malfeasance on the part of church officials; since none is alleged that doesn't seem to be the problem.  Rather, the problem is the Conference doesn't have, according to their own auditors, "internal controls".  Without specifics, I'm guessing that means applying the rules for fiduciary responsibility contained in the United Methodist Discipline.

The list of ministries effected by the abrupt end of funding is not only long, but diverse, some of which address the most pressing problems across national boundaries.

In 1 Corinthians, chapter 9, St. Paul defends his ministry, apostleship, and his right to chastise the Corinthian congregation from a variety of attacks laid upon him by the nitpickers who insist he has no right or reason to act the way he has.  In the course of his defense, he insists that, rather than rely upon the abundant and contrary claims of human authority, he rests solely upon what he calls "the law of Christ" (in contrast, specifically in the text, to what he calls "the law of God").  He describes himself as willing to be all things to all people in order to do the one thing to which he has been called - spread the Gospel.

Rather than focus on the first part of the chapter, I think we should remember this last part in our dealings with settings and contexts with which we are unfamiliar.  Rather than cut off funding, wouldn't it be wonderful if GBGM decided to be all things to all people, so the gospel could be preached and lived in the nations of east Africa?  Wouldn't it be nice if it found ways to work with and around local conditions that create barriers for the kinds of accountability controls other areas consider necessary?  Rather than demand the churches in east Africa conform to a set of standards that would be impossible to apply, wouldn't it be nice if GBGM thanked the accountants for their work, sat down with the Bishop and the pastoral and lay leadership in east Africa and said, "What do we need to do in order more effectively to do the work of the United Methodist Church?"

That would take humility, though.  And wisdom.  A smattering of cunning, certainly, as well as a heaping dose of leadership.  This year has demonstrated an abundant lack of these virtues among "the leadership" of the United Methodist Church.  So, we surrender the ministry of the church in east Africa to the bean counters (I keep picturing the teacher in the film version of Pink Floyd's The Wall for some reason).  Rather than work with them both to get them the funds they need to do their work but also to start to put in place those "internal controls" about which they seem so concerned, we're just going to punish the churches and the people they serve.

Hallelujah.

The Romney Campaign

I think we should take stock of the presumptive Republican nominee for President and his campaign over the previous couple weeks.

He went on a foreign trip in which he insulted his British hosts, alienated millions of Palestinian and Arabs with a declaration that he will reverse decades of American policy on the status of Jerusalem, and managed to make it through Poland with the endorsement of an aging and unpopular former President.  In a year in which the single biggest issue voters care about is the economy, one would have thought such a trip might have been far more low key.  Instead, he managed to display a kind of ineptitude that was both glorious and appalling at the same time.

He returned home and, almost immediately, opened up two attacks upon President Obama that are demonstrably false.  First there was the whole Ohio voting suit.  The past couple days have seen him go after waivers the Obama Administration has granted to states on the administration of welfare funds and programs, waivers for which he applied when governor of Massachusetts.  Both stories, resulting in vigorous pushback from the parties involved, the press, and the Obama campaign, demonstrate - if any more demonstration was needed - how beholden Romney feels himself to the crazy wing of the Republican Party.

At the same time all this has been going on, his increased visibility has certainly changed the poll numbers.  Now, I have said in the past that I'm not a big fan of polling.  I'm not.  Recently participating in a phone poll conducted by Rasmussen, I can testify to the odd nature of contemporary polling practice and procedure, while I wonder at the statistical methods such companies use to evaluate the rather odd results that must flow from such a stilted way of conducting public surveys.  In any case, with all these caveats and warnings, the evidence from polling data, taken with as many grains of salt as one might think necessary, is clear: The more folks hear and see Romney, the less they like him.  His negatives have hit record highs, his personal approval numbers are in George W. Bush territory, and President Obama has taken a lead not only in those "swing states" that are so dearly loved by political reporters.  The President has a near-statistically significant lead nationally, with a huge majority in potential Electoral College votes.

With the Republican National Convention shaping up to highlight some of the most unpopular Republican elected officials - Nikki Hailey from South Carolina, Rick Scott from Florida, and John Kasich from Ohio - Party chair Reince Priebus (I had to check Google on the spelling) has made it clear he wants the single least popular Republican celebrity, Sarah Palin, to speak, something many of us would endorse.  Nothing would demonstrate the total disconnect from reality that effects the Republican Party like having Palin in a primetime speaking spot.  I read somewhere yesterday the Republicans are gearing up for a repeat of 1992, when they gave Pat Buchanan primetime and it destroyed the Bush campaign.

There is a whole lot of chatter about the effect outside money will have on the Presidential race, and it is true enough that the Republicans have a clear lead on this front.  All the same, while this might effect down-ballot races, I'm puzzled as to how Romney, so beholden to that part of the electorate that believes Pres. Obama is a socialist born in Kenya, raised by Marxist tutors and paling around with domestic terrorists, recovers from a display of their florid psychosis.

None of this should be taken as an attack upon those voters who call themselves Republican but are not ready for their dose of Thorazine.  It is, however, a warning.  There might well be many attractive Republican candidates for any number of offices, from US Congress to county coroner that deserve election.  At the national level, however, the Republican Party has become less a body uniting a coalition of groups in order to govern the nation by developing particular policies, and more a conglomerate of wealthy, powerful individuals who exploit fear and social and economic unease to ensure their continued wealth and power.  While the Democrats are beholden to many of these same groups, the money trail this year is pretty clear; the folks who write the big checks think the Republicans are stupid enough to ignore the many ways they will be screwed by Republican policies.

Romney cannot escape this reality.  That's why, as people learn more about him, Obama takes a clear lead.  The stars just aren't in their courses for the guy this year, I guess.

Gaze In Wild Wonder (UPDATE)

Depressed and saddened by the contraction of our national vision, the meanness and occasional idiocy of our politics, and the devout desire to remember our greatness as a country lies not in the banalities of commercial life but our ability to achieve what many thought impossible, I wrote this post back on June 11.

All we are currently offered by way of some consoling vision is the comfort of material gain.  We see so many threats around the globe, we no longer believe it possible to do much more than keep them at some arm's length, staving off the eventual disaster.

We have become more than cowardly.  We, as a people, have become blind.  We have lost the ability even to celebrate that which is best about all of us as a people.  We stagger through our days, hoping only that the collapse will come tomorrow, grateful at the end of each day that we have reached it safely.

In the middle of Sunday night, the Mars rover, Curiosity, made its marvelous, maddening, successful descent to the surface of the fourth planet, using a robotic sky crane that lowered the one-ton vehicle to the surface on its own smarts.  Among the first photos they snapped was this one from its forward looking hazard cameras.

In the distance lies the mountain at the center of the crater in which Curiosity sits, and to which it is going to travel.  The plan is to sample the old rocks at the bottom, to see if there are any traces of organic compounds, a sign that, at the very least, conditions once existed that offered the possibility of Martian microbial life.  Knowing the planet was once warmer, the atmosphere denser, allowing running water to run long enough to cut deep channels across the planet's surface, we continue to wonder if we may have once had some kind of neighbors in the solar system.

I do not think it wrong to take a moment to celebrate our vicarious return to Mars on a parochial, national level.  True enough, from the Martian perspective, what is the United States?  Yet, among the residents of the third rock, who else has flung orbiters and landers and rovers to snap a photo or two, to taste the Martian wind and sand, to do what needs to be done to answer the question that may be the most fundamental question we human beings ask: Are we alone in the Universe?

We Americans are living in troubled times.  Mass death, global warming, drought, civil war abroad, the stupidity of our politics at home that mocks those who have set aside their lives to defend our land and way of life, and the sense that we just can't do even the most basic tasks of self-governance: these are the realities that seem to mock our public life.  Curiosity, its engines getting ready to fire up and head out on its slow, deliberate journey across the bottom of a crater on another world, reminds us that this litany of national failure doesn't tell the whole picture.  We are a people who do indeed know how to do great things, marvelous things, wonderful things that make us all gaze in wonder at new places no one has ever seen, discovering things no one has ever known.

Over the next several days, as the first color, panoramic images come back from the many cameras on Curiosity, we all should stand and cheer ourselves.  In a time when we think we can no longer accomplish much of anything, Curiosity's pictures remind us that we do the spectacular quite well.

UPDATE:  JPL managed to piece together the following video from 297 still images Curiosity snapped as it descended.  It is truly spectacular.

On Those 15 Vet Groups In Ohio

This is kind of an update on my post Saturday on the lie going around that the President of the United States wants to restrict military voting rights in Ohio.  It seems Mitt Romney has joined the FAILelujah Chorus, displaying the kind of principled idiocy I haven't seen since Emily Latella's op-ed's on Saturday Night Live.

I'm sure by now there are folks who are saying, "Well, if Obama isn't trying to restrict military voting, then why are there 15 vet groups petitioning the court against the lawsuit?"

All I can say, yet again, is read the motion.

[I]n the event this Court concludes that Ohio’s current statutory scheme is unconstitutional, Defendants reasonably can be expected to seek to minimize the resulting expense to the State, disruption to the electoral process, and additional burden on election workers, see Blackwell, 467 F.3d at 1008, such as by asking this Court to reduce or eliminate the additional days of early voting for military voters. Plaintiffs, in turn, intend to seek an expansion of the early voting period through Election Day for all voters, which may impose substantial financial and logistical burdens on the State.(Italics added)

Those fifteen groups are merely petitioning to intervene in the case because they feel a ruling seeking, as they note quite clearly in the italicized portion above, to expand early voting to all citizens, might result in Ohio removing the early voting privileges for all Ohio residents, military or civilian.  The groups are intervening only to ensure that doesn't happen.

The above linked story on Mitt Romney's attempt to make up down on this case includes the following tidbit:

On Friday, the Obama Campaign actually signed a brief to the court that backed the petition of those groups – welcoming them into the case, because the Obama campaign says it wants to ensure that military voters aren’t kept from early voting.

I do so hope Romney continues to insist that the sky is green and grass blue on this matter, because it will demonstrate just how beholden he has become to the crazy wing of the Republican Party. 

FAIL-Force Winds

So I was perusing my feed on Facebook and came across this story.

Now Obama is on record trying to restrict the votes of military personnel.

Wow.  Really?  Not passing the sniff test, I typed "federal lawsuit ohio voting military" in to the Google-machine, and the intertubes spat out several pages of stories all saying the same thing.  Some came from places like Drudge and Hot Air, sure, but others were mainstream news outlets, including network affiliates in  Ohio cities.

Didn't look good.

After several pages of scrolling, I found a DailyKos piece that, while certainly no more reliable, ideologically, than all the Breitbart/Instapundit/LGF right-wing sites, had the virtue of a link to the actual text of the very real suit filed in a physical federal court.  The very first sentence of the complaint filed by co-plaintiffs Obama for America, the DNC, and the Ohio Democratic Party reads:

Plaintiffs bring this lawsuit to restore in-person early voting for all Ohioans during the three days prior to Election Day – a right exercised by an estimated 93,000 Ohioans in the last presidential election.

Wait.  What?  The lawsuit is brought to bring back voting rights Ohio residents had previously enjoyed?  What does that have to do with restricting military voting?

Reading through the lawsuit, we come to the money shot.

Specifically, taken together, Amended Substitute House Bill Number 194 (“HB 194”), Amended Substitute House Bill Number 224 (“HB 224”) and Substitute Senate Bill Number 295 (“SB 295”), all enacted by the 129 the Ohio General Assembly, impose different deadlines for in-person voting prior to Election Day (“early voting”) on similarly situated voters.  Prior to the enactment of these laws, there was a single uniform deadline of the Monday before Election Day for inperson early voting.  After the enactment of these laws, voters using the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voter Act (“UOCAVA”) may vote early in-person at a board of elections office up through the Monday before Election Day, while non-UOCAVA voters can vote early in-person at a board of elections office (or designated alternate site) only up until 6 p.m. on the Friday before Election Day.

OK.  So, if you read this far and no farther, it certainly looks like plaintiffs are whining because military personnel have an undo advantage in exercising their right to vote.

Which is why folks need to keep reading.

The Ohio General Assembly has failed to articulate any justification for this differential treatment of UOCAVA and non-UOCAVA voters, and no justification can be discerned.  Indeed, these different deadlines exist despite the fact that, for purposes of in-person early voting, both UOCAVA and non-UOCAVA voters are identically situated, i.e., they are qualified electors who are physically present in their home county when they desire to vote in-person at their county board of elections office prior to Election Day. . . .

[A]s a result of HB 224 and SB 295, most Ohio voters will not be permitted to vote in the three days prior to Election Day for no apparent reason.  Without early voting in these last three days before Election Day, tens of thousands of citizens who would have otherwise exercised their right to vote during this time period, including Plaintiffs’ members and supporters, may not be able to participate in future elections at all. 

In other words, plaintiffs want to restore early voting to non-military personnel.  Much of the body of the suit rehearses the confused and contradictory history of attempts the Ohio legislature has made to restrict the ability to exercise voting rights.  In their haste and (probably) confusion, they let stand a very nice privilege for the military personnel who might be home on leave prior to Election Day; they revoked this same privilege for folks who, as the suit says, "are similarly situated", i.e., they, too, are residing in their legal residence and are otherwise able to vote.  If they show up at the polls on Saturday and Sunday between an Army Major or a Navy pilot, however, they will be turned away.  The suit is being brought to make sure that civilian gets the same opportunity to vote early as the uniformed folks standing in line.

In other words, the story the folks on the right are pushing is the exact freaking opposite of reality.  There is nothing in this lawsuit that seeks to restrict any voting by anyone, military or civilian; rather the entire intent of the lawsuit is to expand opportunities to vote for all Ohio residents.


There is an irony here.  The story was originally "broken" by the folks at Breitbart.com.  The author of the initial story is . . . wait for it . . . an attorney.

I'm an unemployed former WalMart associate, and I figured out what the lawsuit said.

 

 

 

 

Fall Into The Culture Gap

Pulling a double-reverse on his statements about the role of culture in the success of Israel versus the failure of the Palestinian territories, Mitt Romney penned an op-ed in which he cited, among others, Jared Diamond's Guns,Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies to defend his position.  Diamond has returned the favor, penning his own piece for The New York Times, in which he states, among other things, that Romney seems not to have read the book he cites.

MITT ROMNEY'S latest controversial remark, about the role of culture in explaining why some countries are rich and powerful while others are poor and weak, has attracted much comment. I was especially interested in his remark because he misrepresented my views and, in contrasting them with another scholar's arguments, oversimplified the issue.

It is not true that my book "Guns, Germs and Steel," as Mr. Romney described it in a speech in Jerusalem, "basically says the physical characteristics of the land account for the differences in the success of the people that live there. There is iron ore on the land and so forth."

That is so different from what my book actually says that I have to doubt whether Mr. Romney read it. My focus was mostly on biological features, like plant and animal species, and among physical characteristics, the ones I mentioned were continents' sizes and shapes and relative isolation. I said nothing about iron ore, which is so widespread that its distribution has had little effect on the different successes of different peoples. (As I learned this week, Mr. Romney also mischaracterized my book in his memoir, "No Apology: Believe in America.")

That's not the worst part. Even scholars who emphasize social rather than geographic explanations - like the Harvard economist David S. Landes, whose book "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations" was mentioned favorably by Mr. Romney - would find Mr. Romney's statement that "culture makes all the difference" dangerously out of date. In fact, Mr. Landes analyzed multiple factors (including climate) in explaining why the industrial revolution first occurred in Europe and not elsewhere.

Now, it should be clear that it is possible Romney read Diamond's book, and merely misunderstands the larger argument the author makes.  Nothing wrong with that, readers do that all the time.  My point is not to prove or disprove Diamond's assertion on whether or not he read the book in question.  Rather, it is to point out how meaningless the entire idea of "culture" has become, a buzzword that can include or exclude whatever the user might wish, without any even basic rigor of definition.  As a result, we have far too many discussions that focus on something, "culture", that none of those involved in the discussion either understand or limit.

These discussions tend also to betray a lingering essentialism, in which "culture" becomes an outward expression of the inner life of the collection of individuals underneath whatever cultural umbrella we choose.  In the immediate case, Israeli economic success versus Palestinian economic failure becomes demonstrative, in Romney's telling of the tale, of some inner cultural superiority the Israelis possess, rather than numerical and military advantages by which they impose severe restrictions upon the Palestinian populations under their heel.

Other examples, such as the North Korea/South Korea divide, can be laid, not at the feet of culture, but at the feet of politics and policy; so, too, the United States/Mexican divide, which is a case in point of the much larger dominance of the US over much the rest of the western hemisphere.  The kinds of rebels against this hegemony - Castro's Cuba and Chavez's Venezuela - are as much protests against paracolonial exploitation as they are practical expressions of political ideologies.

There is no distinction inherent in a population, expressed as "culture" that explains anything about who the people are.  I would go so far as to insist that the very idea of "human nature", this holdover from Aristotelean essentialism, is as fraudulent as the metaphysics that accompanies it.  The reality of the variety of human social life belies any appeal to some inner core that explains much of anything.  That there are other, better, explanations that fit Ockham's famous razor far better than the insidious idea of "culture" should be clear enough.  That Romney continues to believe otherwise is more than a little troubling.

On Contingency: The Irrelevance For Theology Of Evolutionary Theory

My recent extended sojourn at what I called "the Ancestral Villa" on Facebook gave me the opportunity to dip in to my parents extensive and varied library.  I read An Army at Dawn, the first volume of Rick Atkinson's Liberation Trilogy, covering the Allied invasion of North Africa.  If anyone continues to think that WWII presented a simplistic, good-versus-evil story, complete with hagiography of "the Greatest Generation", this volume should disabuse them.

I also liberated a copy of Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment, an important volume in the Freudian reading of fairy tales.

Finally, there were two books by the late Stephen Jay Gould.  One, Dinosaur in a Haystack, is a collection of his essays from Natural History magazine.  The other is his marvelous Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History.  Gould was a rarity.  Like Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking, he had a gift not only for writing about science for a general audience, but for doing so without sacrificing the rigor necessary to make complicated matters clear to the uninitiated.  One need not know what an echinoderm is, or have forgotten the difference between phyla, class, and order from high school biology, yet still find rich rewards in Gould's work.

The revision of the fossilized remains of the Burgess Shale deposit in British Columbia is, Gould argues, the most important long-term paleontological work of the last third of the 20th century.  At the heart of this revision not only of the creatures themselves - including the clarification of a far wider variety not only of species and genera, but entirely new and extinct phyla - lies the deduction that comes from the consideration of this early variety in multicellular life in the aftermath of what is known as the Cambrian explosion (the fossils in the Burgess Shale come a couple hundred million years after that initial burst of evolutionary leaping-forward).  As Gould makes clear, the abundant evidence from the revision of the fossil record is that, rather than working within the strictures of modern taxonomic limitations, the Burgess remains represent an initial experimentation with variety that is stunning.  Creatures such as hallucigenia, pictured at the top, have left no evolutionary legacy; they also are so distinct as to represent not just genera or order unrelated to modern forms, but entire phyla of creatures that, within a couple hundred million years, were wiped out in an extinction event that left only roughly seven percent of genera to carry on in the newly decimated world.

The meta-argument Gould proposes from the evidence is simple enough, and should be clear from the referent of the book's title: more than any other piece of evidence, the Burgess Shale fossils demonstrate the role of contingency in the history of evolution.  Not only might the history of life have been radically different had different species survived the post-Cambrian extinction; almost without doubt there would have been little chance that large land animals including self-conscious primates, would have emerged.  Despite our most desperate, parochial desire to see in the emergence of Homo sapiens the inexorable yet invisible hand of evolutionary progress at work, the facts tell a far different story.  Things not only could have been different; if not for certain events that are, by definition unrepeatable, they very well might have been.

I can hear the creationists winding up their "Harrumphs" at such thoughts.  I would suggest, however, that this new understanding of the role of historical contingency demonstrates more clearly than anything else the total irrelevance of the theory of biological evolution through natural selection for any theology that calls itself Christian.  That evolution tells a very different story, rooted in very different assumptions, and flowing toward very different conclusion, has nothing whatsoever to do with the theological story of Creation.  The latter concerns itself with the relationship between the world created by God - a world that we all recognize contains the contingent, that which is by definition unpredictable and therefore cannot be controlled or understood prior to its emergence - and the God who created it.  Evolutionary theory, as partially reimagined by Gould through the lens of the Burgess Shale remains, tells a very different story that cannot, by definition, tell us anything other than what happened and, perhaps, how.

While it has been clear, to me at any rate, that biology and the Doctrine of Creation have nothing to do with one another, Gould's work in this book solidifies the irrelevance of the former for the latter.  Of course, this won't stop the Creationists, who have far too much invested in their odd reading of the first two chapters of Genesis (more, indeed, than they seem to have invested in the central message of the Christian Scriptures, the Gospel of Jesus Christ's death and resurrection).  All the same, it seems thoughtful Christians need no longer worry that there might yet be something in the theory of evolution that threatens our faith in the God who creates out of prodigal love.  Evolution tells its tale, the Doctrine of Creation tells its story, and, really, in the end, the former is about us, while the latter, as all good theological stories should be, is about God.

Little House On The Prairie

Today marks an anniversary for our family.  Thirteen years ago, after some let-downs and frustration, we arrived in Illinois after a months-long, 1,000 mile change of place that, looking back, is a marvel of planning mixed with hope, and not a little hilarity.

In the autumn of 1998, Lisa and a year-old Moriah returned from a trip out here from our home in southern Virginia.  In the car on the way back from Richmond airport, Lisa broke down in tears, telling me she wanted to move back here.  I didn't hesitate, telling her, "Let's do it."  I won't detail the way it worked out, but it was, quite literally, a last minute thing, with a call to Lisa from the DeKalb District Superintendent coming on Memorial Day, and a move scheduled for August 1.  As we had already been given our moving papers in Virginia and were in the process of packing, the only things we had to arrange were getting our child, our belongings, and our pets from there to here.

From such beginnings, family legends are born.

A week before the move, not wanting our electronics and plants to sit for a week on a hot moving truck, we packed them in my Escort hatchback on a Sunday evening, our Ficus tree sitting on the floor of the passenger side of the car, for me to make a single-day drive to my mother-in-law's house in Sycamore, IL from our house in Jarratt, VA.  I woke up knowing I had an 18-hour drive ahead of me, showered, kissed Lisa, and went out to discover my car had a flat tire.  Instead of sighing and changing tires, I began to turn the air blue, with Lisa standing there trying to shush me.  Considering all our neighbors were church members, hearing their pastors husband screeching scatologies probably wasn't a good idea.  We ended up taking a tire from Lisa's car and putting it on my car while she took the flat to fix.

I showered again, Lisa and me laughing the whole time as we released the tension from the frustration.

I was in Indiana when the cell phone rang.  Lisa was calling, and she told me I had to bring the tire home with me, meaning once I got our things unloaded where we were storing them, I would have to put the donut on my car where it parked and fly with the tire back to IL.  I balked until Lisa told me that, being different sizes, driving with the changed tire on our Escort wagon would present a serious hazard.  So, after arriving at my in-law's then getting up early to take our car where we were storing it for the week, then heading to O'Hare with the tire in the back, I was settled in my mind.  We pulled up to the airport and the skycap asked if I was checking anything.  I handed the heavy, odd-shaped box to him and he asked, "Is this a tire?"  To this day, I have no idea how he knew, but I said, "Yes."

"Is it deflated?"

I looked at my mother-in-law, and she looked at me.

"We can't check it," he said.  "The baggage compartment isn't pressurized . . ."

"And it could explode," I finished, sighing.

My mother-in-law chuckled, grabbed the tire-box, and said, "I'll deflate it and ship it to you."

I arrived at National Airport and Lisa and I drove home.  She chuckled over the tire incident.

The next day, the movers arrived, emptying our house of belongings, including several pieces of furniture from a neighbor's house, generously offered to us at no price.  Two full-sized beds, plus bedroom furniture, a gorgeous blue barrel-back chair, and a piano later, and the truck was gone.

Moriah flew out to Illinois with my sister-in-law, who flew to Richmond, had lunch with us at the Texas-Wisconsin Border Cafe (long may it be remembered), then back to Illinois, all within a few hours.

Lisa and I made the trip in another long day's drive, looking so much like the Clampett's that, at one stop we made, glancing at the car we were driving, I did not want anyone seeing me walk to it and climb in.  In our Escort station wagon we had the last small items, two cats in carriers, one of whom spent all 18 hours carrying on non-stop, and a Great Dane who hated riding in a car panting in my ear and heating up the inside of the vehicle.

We had a day's rest before the actual move-in, spending most of it at my in-law's enjoying their pool as northern IL was then in the midst off a streak of 100+ degree days that was leaving a trail of bodies in the city of Chicago.  I did manage to retrieve my car, put the tire my mum-in-law had shipped next-day freight to us back where it belonged, and drove to the little town of LaMoille for my introduction to our new home for what turned out to be the next five years.

And where I was stopped by the police officer for the town, ostensibly for illegally passing a car that was making a left-hand turn.  Stearny, I would later learn, was just checking out the guy with the Virginia plates driving from one end of his town to the other.  Since I didn't violate any actual laws, he let me go, but it seemed an inauspicious beginning to our time there.

The next day, the cats back in their carriers and Gretchen once again panting in my ear, I drove down to our new house first.  Lisa was going to finish getting Moriah ready and head down about a half-hour later.  I pulled in to the driveway, and walked up to the parsonage, the last - or first, depending upon which way you were driving through town - house along the Main Street.  Little more than a narrow, north-south break in the cornfield that is Bureau County, LaMoille has the kind of charm only small midwestern farm towns can have, a kind of built-in nostalgia that gives one an idea what life might have been like in, oh, 1905 or so.

The house was locked, so I walked around to the back, peering in through the glass double-doors that led from the sitting room to the deck.  The single most impressive sight was the kitchen with its counter and cabinet space.  It would be several years before those cabinets were filled.

I walked back, and there were two men waiting for me.  Don Henderson and Mark Swanlund, members of the church, were rightly curious as to who might be at their empty church parsonage.  After introducing myself, they smiled and let me in.  I led Gretchen to her one and only trip to the basement; the events of that day so traumatized her it became impossible to get her ever again to head down there, which worried Lisa and me no end in the event of a possible tornado.  The cats were closed in the laundry room, where they proceeded to express their displeasure by sticking their paws under the door.  After the movers were done, one of our cats, Patch, spent three hours hissing at every single thing she encountered.

I have never once regretted our decision to move up here.  I consider Illinois my home, loving the expansive prairie, the opportunities I couldn't have imagined existed for our family, and most of all the people I have come to know and love over the years.  It's been a great beginning, these past 13 years.  Our younger daughter was born out here, and Moriah, arriving at the age of 2, is a Midwesterner through and through.  While our time in Jarratt was a great beginning, I don't think any of us would be as happy with one another or content in our lives if we hadn't come to the Land of Lincoln.

So, happy anniversary to us.

The Israel Trap

So Romney's in Israel and said some stupid things.  They won't be reported as stupid, of course.  For some reason, a whole lot of influential people seem to think the Israelis are our "friends".

The United States doesn't have friends.  There are countries with whom we are allied through various treaty obligations.  There are countries who share certain values with whom we work to further specific ends, not all of which are laudable.  To quote the first part of Benjamin Disraeli's dictum, countries don't have permanent friends (I only quote the first, because Disraeli's full quote errs; nations don't have permanent interests, either).

Going to Israel and saying that Jerusalem is the capital of the country is a horribly stupid, insulting, and dangerous thing to do.  Not least because it damages the furtherance of long-term goals for the region.  Having a President of the United States who states without fear of contradiction that the disputed non-capital of a country is in fact its capital might help him with the anti-Semitic Christian Zionists and the smattering of radical Zionists in America and Israel.  It does absolutely nothing, however, to further what should be the long-term goals for all parties interested in a peaceful settlement of the many disputes in the Middle East.

So, even though he doesn't care, Romney fell into what I have come to think of as "the Israel trap".  The one thing as sure as God made little white bunnies is every four years a major party candidate for President will heap encomiums upon the State of Israel.  Rather than consider our relations with the Israelis through the normal lens of realpolitique, statements to the effect of our on-going special relationship with Israel abound. The lie that it's the only democracy in the Middle East get repeated without correction (I think the Turks and the Iranians might disagree).  The nonsense that they are committed to a peaceful resolution of outstanding issues will be bandied about.  The quite remarkable claim that the United States can be "an honest broker" (to quote Al Gore from one of the 2000 election debates) in the disputes among parties in the Middle East will be repeated.

And all the while, the fires of hatred and war and death rise higher and higher because no one has the balls to stand up and tell the Israelis to knock it off.  I have repeated several times my admiration for Pres. George H. W. Bush, when he told Yitzhak Shamir he either had to dismantle settlements in the occupied territories or the money spigot would turn off.  Shamir thought Bush and his National Security Team were bluffing, even showing up at the White House to demand the US change its policies.  Bush, ever the New England gentleman, smiled and shook his head.  Shamir left the White House in a huff, heading straight to the airport for a flight to Tel Aviv (leaving me, among many other motorists, on the side of the road as their motorcade sped through the city).

And that reminds me . . . Mitt, pay attention:  Tel Aviv is the capital of Israel.  Tel Aviv has been and will continue to be the capital of Israel.  Any attempt to alter this particular bit of the status quo would be an utter disaster for everyone, including the Israelis.

Should the Israelis decide, on their own, to take military action against the Iranians on whatever pretext, the United States should make clear it wants nothing to do with it.  It should work beforehand to prevent it.  We should do everything in our power beforehand to make clear to the world we are not siding with the Israelis in such a cataclysmic screw up.  Instead, we have Mittens saying he won't do anything about it.

Millions of Arabs and Muslims around the world know now, if Romney is elected President, what the score is.  Thoughtful American friends of Israel are banging their heads against the wall reserved for moments when American politicians do and say stupid things that are counter to our own interests as well as the interests of the Israeli people and state.

Name Them One By One

Like most folks on the Internet, I spend way too much time bitching about how wrong other people are.  I detest that.  Really.

I also spend an inordinate amount of time bemoaning the current state of our world.  There is much about which to complain.  The Syrian government is making war against its own people.  The planet is warming.  The US is in a near-nationwide drought.  Death and more death, hatred and bigotry and ignorance seem as rampant and ready to do their destructive work as ever.

I thought it might be nice, as the old hymn has us sing, to count some blessings for a change.

I'm grateful for being alive.  I realize that sounds trite, but it really isn't.  I have watched friends and family members die.  The simplest thing is the joy of inhaling and exhaling, the sweet taste of air entering my body, then the glad exhale that rids it of metabolic toxins.  The feel of the pulse beneath my skin, reminding me my heart is beating, blood still getting oxygen where it needs to go.  Life, in and for itself, is an abounding, overflowing joy.

I am surrounded by the most amazing people.  It is difficult for me to imagine someone more blessed and fortunate than I am in my most intimate relationships.  I was raised by parents who cared enough to give me both love and discipline.  They wanted me to excel, so they pushed me - at times I felt too hard, but don't all children feel that way? - to do better, to be better at whatever I was doing.  I was the youngest a five very different, yet exceedingly challenging siblings.  My brother and sisters lay down all sorts of challenges for me to follow, not the least of them being how to be myself.

My wife is the single individual for whom I am most thankful.  Anyone who knows Lisa will testify to her abounding energy, her great good humor and patience, her deep reservoir of love and kindness for everyone she meets, and an inner beauty that makes her outer beauty glow all the more.  No more prominent evidence of the reality of grace exists than my marriage to this singular individual who, day by day, amazes, astounds, and, yes, arouses me to no end.

Then there are my daughters.  Whoda thunk it, a guy like me having children so intelligent and thoughtful, so funny and fun-loving, so ready to face life?  I know I can never really do right by them as a father, but I try each day to make sure they know I am completely and utterly devoted to providing them with the best life they can have.

I have an amazing group of friends.  Really.  Folks I grew up with.  Folks with whom I went to seminary.  Members of the churches Lisa has served.  My co-workers.  I am fed and watered by their variety, the many things I have learned, the more than occasional ego-shattering that reminds me I'm just me, and while that's no big deal, it doesn't need to be.

I wake up and most mornings Lisa and I sit in our three-season room, drinking coffee, reading, occasionally taking the time to chat, catching one another up on our thoughts.  In the autumn and mid-spring, it can be dark, and we watch the sun rise, the light entering the room bit by bit.  In the summer, it's bright, the birds are in the feeders, the squirrels and chipmunks and rabbits out and about in the yard, and we marvel at our fortune to have our time in this place.  The coffee revives us.  The reading gives us our space and time.  Our sharing brings us together, reminding us how each day we need to renew all the bonds that tie our life together.

These simple joys, these privileges I have because of accidents of birth and history as well as the blessings I enjoy from a loving God, make each day something to look forward to.  Do they change the world?  I doubt it.  I never forget so much of these aren't so much blessings but rather, as I wrote, privileges that come from being American, being white, being middle class.  Yet, precisely because, being privileges they are neither automatic nor natural, I hope I never take them for granted.

Have a great and glorious day.  If you're not, take a moment of quiet and count your blessings.  You'll be amazed, I think, at how it keeps you humble and grateful.

Hold On There, Hoss

In comments, Ben Gosden:

"God does not ask us to change. God does not demand that we change. God doesn't care if we change. God just loves us."

Doesn't the love of God elicit a response of change? "While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. That proves God's love toward us." Is the love of God not the catalyst for transformation? (transformation = becoming more like Christ via sanctifying grace)

I would be more amused if this wasn't something that had been clear (at least to me) for, I don't know, decades.

The comment begs all sorts of questions, not the least of which is, "Um,  so?"

"Elicit a response" . . .  Sometimes the response is running the other way.  Sometimes it's spiritual deafness.  Sometimes it's a shrug.

What part of this comment means anything other than, "Well now, we can't let grace really be grace now, can we?"

Several years ago, I made a comment that, associating with the kinds of people he did, Jesus probably didn't get all schoolmarmish when folks said the first century equivalent of "Fuck".  I was chastised for this to no end, but I stand by it.  That's not who Jesus was.  That isn't how Jesus operated.  So many times, we hear how Jesus told people, "Go and sin no more," except, of course, he didn't always do that.  Neither did he tell people, "OK, I'll heal you/free you from demonic possession/offer you living water, but only if you promise to do good stuff for the rest of your life."  No, time and again we read of Jesus having pity or compassion for those who were suffering, and doing what was necessary to make their lives whole.

We rarely read about how they lived their lives after that crucial encounter, the exception being the Apostles and St. Paul.

Did the Samaritan woman at the well leave the man with whom she was shacking up?  I have no idea, the text doesn't say, and, really, does it matter?  For the reader of the story, isn't enough that this Gentile woman, a despised minority in an unclean land, encountered the Living God in the flesh who offered her love and compassion even though he knew everything about who she was?  When the man blind from birth came to Jesus, he didn't say, "Yup, the dude's blind because his parents were horrible people."  He said, "This man was born blind so the power of God could be revealed through his healing."  What a magnificent testimony that Jesus could see in this individual an opportunity for the revelation of the power and majesty of God!

With no questions asked.

The great gift of John Wesley is the reminder that following Christ offers the opportunity to live a life in and with the full knowledge of the grace of God in Christ.  It is never easy, requiring us to share our burdens with one another, hold one another accountable in love to the promises offered us in the Spirit.

The thing is . . . this isn't a requirement.  We need to stop thinking of it this way.  We need to stop considering it as such.  We need to stop teaching this.  Stop.  Stop stop stop.

God never never never ever ever ever ever ever gives up on us.  We either hold the cross and empty tomb as the lenses through which we come to understand our lives, individually and communally, or we should just say, "To hell with it."  These realities, as the primary revelation of who God is, exist whether we believe them or not, whether we accept them as significant and meaningful or not, whether the human race goes extinct or not.  The first lesson is - God is Love.  Everything else flows from that.  There are no buts, there are no conditions, there are no codicils, no limits.  This is true whether one has never heard the Good News - "Christ died for us while we were yet sinners; that proves God's love for us" is what St. Paul explicitly calls "Good News" - or has lived within this reality all one's life.  The freedom we have from the Father in the Son through the Spirit is real freedom, including the freedom to say, "No".

Actually, You Didn't Build It On Your Own

I find the whole "You Didn't Built That!" nonsense almost comical.  Never mind the reality that Gov. Romney is, as Jon Stewart says, deliberately misrepresenting Pres. Obama's speech.  Politicians make gaffes all the time, yet Pres. Obama didn't make one.  Bad grammar?  Sure.  Is bad grammar a "gaffe"?  No.

Here's a small dose of reality.

Whether you start a lemonade stand, or a small steel fabrication plant, or a dry goods store, you didn't do it on your own.  The idea for the business may well be yours.

You still need folks who agree with your contention that such a business might succeed.  They're sometimes venture capitalists or banks.  In his biography of John D. Rockefeller, Ron Chernow quotes Rockefeller on the necessity of open lines of credit with a series of banks as he expanded his wholesale business to include the newly discovered oil wells in northwest Pennsylvania.  Had those banks not kept open revolving lines of credit, what began as a typical distribution center for urbanizing America might well have ended up just one of hundreds of dead Cleveland businesses in the earl post-Civil War era.

If businesses succeed, they might go public, which is little more than moving from banks to individuals and groups in the constant search for investment capital to maintain and expand their businesses.

Then, of course, there are all those pesky government regulations, like state incorporation laws that shield individuals from fiduciary and civil penalty should the business go belly-up.

Then there's the physical infrastructure that allows businesses to connect with potential customers.  Not only are those constructed and maintained by public entities; very often, they are created by the state in an effort to create an environment in which businesses can achieve their goals.  The first fifty to sixty years of our Republic was a veritable orgy of investment in roads and canals, then railroads, connecting an expansive and expanding continental nation in order to make both governance and commerce easier and profitable.  Historically, the United States government levied exclusionary tariffs on foreign goods to promote the growth of domestic business and industry.

Finally, there's the public-as-customer, allowing businesses to sell to public entities their goods and services, from food and beverages to planes, trains, and automobiles.  Some enormous business entities exist solely on public largess; they are private corporations, but their only customer is the United States government.

This isn't "grade school Marxism", as some doofus said on FOXNews. This is grade school American civics.  President Obama should be applauded for reminding us that Ben Franklin was correct: We hang together or we hang separately.

Why Folks Are Leaving The Churches

One would think it possible to allow some decent interval between an event as horrible as the massacre in Aurora, CO and opening one's festering gob and spewing out nonsense.  That filter, alas, doesn't seem to exist for some folks.  First this:

If a Christian dies early, if a Christian dies young, it seems tragic, but really it is not tragic because they are going to a wonderful place.. on the other hand, if a person doesn’t know Jesus Christ.. if they knowingly rejected Jesus Christ, then, basically, they are going to a terrible place.

Then, of course, there's Rick Warren, invited by then President-elect Obama to give the invocation as his inauguration.

When students are taught they are no different from animals, they act like it

Most folks who were around eleven years ago remember the chat between Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, a couple days after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, in which they mused that our many liberal social and cultural habits and practices had, perhaps, brought upon us God's wrath in the form of three thousand dead people.  Of course, they soon apologized, or at least issued what passes for apologies from people like this who really believe, as Jimmy Stewart once said, the sons-a-bitches deserved it.

Rick Warren has removed the tweet above, but as the Atheist Examiner website notes, it's still up on his Facebook page.  A later tweet seems to claim this particular tweet does not relate to the Aurora shooting.  However, Warren's record is against him, as the story above makes clear.

As for the Newcombe, the guy who comforted the mourning by telling them their dead loved ones were burning in hell for all eternity, should he apologize, I am sure he will not mean it any more than Robertson/Falwell meant their retractions/apologies.

I recently did a series of posts under the general theme "Everything's Connected".  I also have engaged in some thoughtful discussion with some United Methodist clergy on recent trends away from religious affiliation in the United States.  On a personal note, let me say that, given the rest of my personal beliefs and social and cultural commitments, were I not also deeply invested in my own Christian faith, I would no more associate with any organization that called itself a church, than I would tap-dance naked in a minefield.  Because, it isn't just these incidents.  It isn't just a few people or organizations or parachurch groups.  There are whole denominations that are dedicated to the proposition that, having been blessed with the Truth, they feel no obligation to sugarcoat their condemnation of pretty much everyone and everything.  Why should anyone not familiar with religion make any distinction between, say, a publicity-whore like Warren and the promotional material of the United Methodist Church?  Why should someone who never attended church care that the UCC and the AFA are really very different organizations?

While many UMC sit and ponder why it is more and more young people shrug and walk away (yes, I know there's evidence that there has been growth in membership and attendance among that much coveted age-cohort in our denomination; if true, then why is the hierarchy still acting like their feet are on fire and their asses are catching?) they might just want to consider this.  Instead of harrumphing about the absence of the word "Jesus" in denominational promotional ads, maybe they need to open their eyes and ears and take a look around.  "Jesus" is associated with a whole lot of heinous, horrible stuff.  Young people are smart, savvy, and most of all, discerning.  Since Jesus gets hauled in to hatred of gays, the damning of dead people, the promotion of ignorance, and the defense of violence, it seems to me we might need to be a bit more forgiving of these folks who look at our constant bleating of "Jesus!" and say, "Forget it.  Not interested."

If it weren't for the reality that I believe and live differently, I would probably do the exact same thing.  That I believe and live differently is just an accident of biography and circumstance.  Folks need to keep that in mind.

What The Hell Are These People Talking About?!?

Links on the internet are kind of like footnotes.  If you're not careful, you can spend hours chasing down one source after another.

So it was when I followed a link here to here to here to here and here.

Thankfully, someone kept the passage that was causing all the ruckus available for folks to read.

Because we have forgotten the biblical concepts of true authority and submission, or more accurately, have rebelled against them, we have created a climate in which caricatures of authority and submission intrude upon our lives with violence.

When we quarrel with the way the world is, we find that the world has ways of getting back at us. In other words, however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission in marriage. This means that we have sought to suppress the concepts of authority and submission as they relate to the marriage bed.

But we cannot make gravity disappear just because we dislike it, and in the same way we find that our banished authority and submission comes back to us in pathological forms. This is what lies behind sexual “bondage and submission games,” along with very common rape fantasies. Men dream of being rapists, and women find themselves wistfully reading novels in which someone ravishes the “soon to be made willing” heroine. Those who deny they have any need for water at all will soon find themselves lusting after polluted water, but water nonetheless.

True authority and true submission are therefore an erotic necessity. When authority is honored according to the word of God it serves and protects — and gives enormous pleasure. When it is denied, the result is not “no authority,” but an authority which devours. (italics added by Rachel Held-Evans)

This passage is from a book by someone named Douglas Wilson, entitled Fidelity: What it Means to be a One-Woman Man.  Now, if you've read the passage and are wondering, "Wow," don't feel alone.


Rather than get into any criticism of the words on display above, I really only have a couple questions, that I think deserve an answer.  First, what the hell is a complementarian?  That isn't even a word, for crying out loud!  In the last post linked above, Ms. Held-Evans insists she made a distinction between the alleged "complementarians" and what she calls "hard patriarchalists" (again, a non-word).  Reading this, I have to wonder what the latter group teach.

Do these various groups just make shit up, slap a label on it, and say, "Here, this is what the Bible teaches?"  Honest to God, I have no idea what any of these labels mean, what the quote excerpted above has to do with the Bible or the Christian religion or . . . human life outside rape fantasies.

No wonder people are leaving the Christian churches in droves.  My God, if my denomination taught something like this, you can bet I'd be Episcopalian before the sun set.

I realize Ms. Held-Evans is trying to extend every courtesy and benefit of the doubt to Mr. Wilson here.  That's very thoughtful and generous.  Thing is, this is little more than some guy's rape fantasy; "Close your eyes and think of England," isn't an ethic.  This is a freaking horror show.

My Interview With Trayvon Martin

Sean Hannity got an exclusive interview with George Zimmerman, so I thought I'd pull some strings and get an interview with Trayvon Martin to get his side of the story.

First, Trayvon, thank you for your time.

Trayvon.

Trayvon?

Oh, that's right.  George Zimmerman shot and killed you so you can't give your side of the story.