Christians and Torture

Via Rod Dreher:

Here's a shocker: a new Pew poll finds that Christians support torture more than non-believers do. What's more, Evangelicals are more pro-torture than white mainline Protestants and white non-Hispanic Catholics -- but that Catholics and Evangelicals are more pro-torture than average Americans.

And get this: the more often you go to church, the more pro-torture you're likely to be!

What on earth are these Christians hearing at church?! Very sad indeed.

Very sad indeed.

Safe, Legal, and Early

Over at Beliefnet, Steve Waldman takes note of a curious statistic in the abortion debate:

According to a 2007 survey commissioned by a progressive think tank called Third Way, 69 percent of Americans believe abortion is the "taking of a human life," but 72 percent believe it should be legal.

Let that soak in. Most people think abortion is taking a human life and yet favor the procedure being legal...

Waldman ponders what this means. He suggests that Americans are not immoral or inconsistent, but believe that there are gradations to human life. While most Americans believe that a 6 week old fetus is really a human life, they are more comfortable with the idea of aborting a 6 week old fetus that is is no bigger than a poppy seed, even though it has a beating heart, than they are aborting a 26 week old one that is almost certainly viable outside the womb.

Bill Clinton gave us "safe, legal, and rare" which captures the position of many people in the middle of the abortion debate. But Waldman wonders if we might find more common ground between pro-choice and pro-life activists and find a way to turn down the dial on the culture wars if we found a way to made our abortion laws and policies support a "safe, legal, and early" philosophy. Make abortion easy in the first trimester, more difficult in the second, and nearly impossible in the third unless the mother's life is in danger.

This kind of policy, he says, would require compromises from both sides:

My fantasy is that if the political system embraced the safe-legal-early doctrine, a few activists might even accept the legitimacy of part of their opponents' argument. Pro-choicers who accepted this framework would be implicitly conceding that, for at least part of the pregnancy, there's a "baby" in the womb--and the woman's right to terminate that life is neither absolute nor nine months in duration. With early abortions not only legal but easier, pro-choice activists could then have the confidence to accept what many of them have publicly avoided but privately wanted: reasonable, tightly written prohibitions on third trimester abortions while genuinely protecting the life of the mother.

Open minded pro-lifers would take note of these concessions from their "enemies," viewing them as a sign that these pro-choicers--far from being hideous baby killers--fully embrace a moral dimension to the abortion decision.

Meanwhile, any pro-lifers who accept this framework would be making a concession, too. They'd be saying, in effect, that if the other side can concede that something precious is alive - and becoming more alive with each day - then they could, in turn, acknowledge that reasonable people, of different faiths, can disagree about when exactly that baby becomes alive enough to have legal rights.

Open minded pro-choicers would take note of these concessions, feeling less condemned and more respected.

Would this work? I doubt that many pro-life or pro-choice activists would go along. If you are pro-life and hold religious convictions about when life begins a policy that works just to shift the amount of abortions to an earlier moment in the term doesn't change the facts on the ground. Most pro-choice activists I know adhere to a hard-line on choice issues in political battles but are willing to concede in private conversations that they are not as comfortable with late-term abortions. But their over-riding concern is to protect choice - women control their own bodies - and they fear any compromise that might begin to chisel away at what they consider to be a hard-fought-for right.

My own preference, since I am pro-choice and pro-life but believe that there are indeed gradations of human life in the womb, would be to keep the goal "safe, legal, and rare" and do the work we need to do in religious communities and in our society to support mothers and children in such a way that abortion isn't viewed as a necessary choice. At the same time I could support Waldman's idea of making birth control, Plan B, RU-486, and abortion in the first trimester as accessible and easy as possible so that more unplanned pregnancies are avoided or ended, if that choice is made, as early as possible.

Healing

This post on Beliefnet.com today couldn't have come at a better time!
I'm reposting it for anyone else who has ever been hurt...including by a former church.

Jesus Dying at the Movies

Over at GetReligion Douglas LeBlanc draws favorable attention to an essay by Joshua Land that looks beyond the culture war response to Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ and Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ and appreciates them both for their artistic vision and message, different as they were.

LeBlanc offers up two snippets from the article, the first about Gibson's movie:

With the notable exceptions of Jim Caviezel (The Thin Red Line) as Jesus and Monica Bellucci as Mary Magdalene, the cast is composed mostly of little-known actors, but far more problematic from a commercial standpoint was Gibson’s decision to shoot the film entirely in the languages of the first century — Latin, Hebrew, and Aramaic — only agreeing to English subtitles after some resistance. The overall look and tone of the film, as well as its content, are closer to those of a medieval Passion Play than to anything else in contemporary cinema. The chiaroscuro-heavy visual style is derived from Baroque painting, particularly the work of Caravaggio, whom Gibson and cinematographer Caleb Deschanel have cited as an influence.

… But whatever one thinks of The Passion of the Christ, Gibson deserves more credit than he’s gotten for refusing to compromise his singular vision, to the point of risking some $30 million of his own money. That the film wound up grossing more than 10 times that amount at the domestic box office in no way negates the fact that its maker conceded nothing to commercial considerations. Indeed, it’s safe to say that for many millions of viewers, The Passion of the Christ is the only true art film they’ll ever see.

I am not sure exactly what qualifies as a "true art film." I can appreciate, though, the comparison made between Gibson's movie and the medieval Passion Play, both of which focus heavily on the suffering of Jesus. And I can also appreciate the fact that for many Christians, the suffering and blood and death of Jesus is the whole point, or one half of the whole point along with the resurrection, of their Christian faith. But it is precisely because this is so that I don't think Gibson was risking very much by making this movie. It may very well be where his faith is centered too, and he wanted to give artistic expression to his faith. But I don't think there was ever any doubt that a movie made by Gibson about the suffering of Jesus would wind up grossing more than 10 times what Gibson put up of his own money.

The Last Temptation of Christ was most visibly controversial because of its portrayal of Jesus having impure thoughts about the women in his life. But according to Land that was not the most controversial aspect of the story. LeBlanc gives us this paragraph from Land's essay about this movie:

Far more disturbing to the discerning viewer is the film’s highly unorthodox vision of who Jesus is. Both the Kazantzakis novel and the Schrader screenplay begin by pondering the central mystery of Christianity, the Incarnation — the notion that Jesus was simultaneously fully human and fully divine. The subject has been a matter of intense theological controversy since the early days of Christianity but the Kazantzakis-Schrader version of Jesus is clearly skewed toward the human end of the spectrum. The Jesus of The Last Temptation of Christ is a Nietzschean superman who struggles to overcome fear, doubt, and self-loathing, and only gradually becomes aware of his divine nature and purpose on earth. When we first see him, he is making crosses for the Romans to use for the execution of Jewish prisoners. Prone to sudden seizures, he’s a masochist who wears a belt of nails to punish himself for his sins — much closer in spirit to Scorsese’s Jake La Motta than to anything resembling God in the flesh.

I suppose this is why I like this movie the most of all the Jesus movies I have seen. Because I think that this is the way, the only way, it works. For Jesus and for us. We become divine gradually, if we become divine at all, as we struggle to overcome our fear, doubt, and self-loathing. Jesus didn't become less human in this process, though. He became more human, more deeply human, and hence he also became more divine.

The whole Land essay is interesting and worth a read. I came away from it with a greater appreciation for Mel Gibson's movie especially. But I'll take Kazantzakis' and Scorsese's vision of Jesus over Gibson's any day. I guess that makes me a highly unorthodox Christian.

The Resurrection of Jimmy Carter

In the last few days I have seen two bloggers, conservative Rod Dreher and progressive Kevin Mattson, recall and praise Jimmy Carter's famous (or infamous) "malaise" speech and lay claim to it as a conservative, no progressive, statement of values.

You may recall that Carter delivered the speech to a national television audience on July 15, 1979. The country was in the midst of a national energy crisis. Carter had cut short a vacation after truckers and residents had rioted in Levittown, PA to protest fuel costs and rampant inflation. Carter came home and called a national summit of leaders to talk about the country's challenges. Ten days later he delivered the speech. In it he said:

I know, of course, being president, that government actions and legislation can be very important. That's why I've worked hard to put my campaign promises into law -- and I have to admit, with just mixed success. But after listening to the American people I have been reminded again that all the legislation in the world can't fix what's wrong with America. So, I want to speak to you first tonight about a subject even more serious than energy or inflation. I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy.

I do not mean our political and civil liberties. They will endure. And I do not refer to the outward strength of America, a nation that is at peace tonight everywhere in the world, with unmatched economic power and military might.

The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.

The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.

He suggested that there were two possible paths ahead:

...One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.

All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem.

He then proposed a series of steps to be taken to address the energy crisis. These steps included finding and using more domestic sources of energy. including both drilling and the expansion of solar power, and he called for major conservation efforts. He challenged every person to make personal sacrifices to use less energy and he called on the Legislature to bring him legislation mandating various forms of conservation.

So was it a conservative speech or a progressive speech?

Here is conservative Dreher at Beliefnet:

This was not the speech of some America-hating leftist. Carter did not try to tear down the country, he simply wanted it to come together and direct itself toward a goal other than unlimited growth or unending progress. As Andrew Bacevich points out in The New American Militarism, the president recognized the high cost of empire:

In July of 1979, Carter already anticipated that a continuing and unchecked thirst for imported oil was sure to distort U.S. strategic priorities with unforeseen but adverse consequences. He feared the impact of that distortion on American democracy still reeling from the effects of the 1960s. So he summoned his fellow citizens to change course, to choose self-sufficiency and self-reliance and therefore true independence but at a cost of collective sacrifice and lowered expectations.

Self-sufficiency, discipline, sacrifice, conservation, independence, the striving for meaning and purpose beyond material wealth. All of these characteristics were once associated with conservatism, and they were all part of a speech given by a man who was naval officer, farmer and large landowner, small businessman, Sunday school teacher, and Southerner. Does this not sound the background of a conservative?

Here is progressive Mattson at The American Prospect:

You might have heard that the speech was a disaster. That it was all about Jimmy Carter, the "loser" president, shirking his responsibilities. Sean Wilentz writes in The Age of Reagan, "Carter appeared to be abdicating his role as leader and blaming the people themselves for their own afflictions." This interpretation is repeated countless times in history textbooks.

But in fact, the speech worked. It prompted an overwhelmingly favorable response. Carter received a whopping 11 percent rise in his poll numbers. The mail that poured into the White House testified that many citizens felt moved by the speech. One man wrote to Carter, "You are the first politician that [sic] has said the words that I have been thinking for years. Last month I purchased a moped to drive to work with. I plan to use it as much as possible, and by doing so I have cut my gas consumption by 75%."

In the end, Jimmy Carter did blow the situation, but it wasn't because of the speech itself. Rather, he blew the opportunity that the speech opened up for him. Just two days after July 15, Carter fired his Cabinet, signifying a governmental meltdown. The president's poll numbers sank again as confusion and disarray took over. Carter could give a great speech, but there were two things he couldn't manage: to govern well enough to make his language buoy him or to find a way to yoke the energy crisis with concrete civic re-engagement initiatives. Though Americans were inspired by the speech, many were still stumped as to what was expected of them. As Time magazine described it: "The President basked in the applause for a day and then set in motion his astounding purge, undoing much of the good he had done himself."

Short-term losses, though, sometimes hide long-term opportunities. Today that language of civic sacrifice resonates even more powerfully, after eight years of conservative rule grounded in talk about the virtues of free markets and self-interest. Carter's vision of humbled leadership and engaged citizenship also contrasts nicely with the hubris of George W. Bush. A vision of government and citizens working together to overcome a crisis might offer progressives a way to set realistic expectations about what government can and cannot do. It would seem that our current president has started to learn that lesson.

What strikes me after reading Carter's speech again and then the comments of Dreher and Mattson is how in modern understanding both terms conservative and liberal has become unmoored from their meaningful roots.

What does it mean to be a conservative today? For the last eight years it has meant letting the financial markets run free so the rich can get richer and it has meant using America's military power to extend its empire under the guise of defending freedom and promoting democracy in the world. What is conservative about any of that? "Free markets" is a core conservative value, but where in the free market orgy that we have recently experienced were the values of thrift, self-discipline, conservation, sacrifice, honor? These were once known as conservative values too. And where in the Iraq misadventure was any sense of the limits of power, any acknowledgment that fallen human nature cannot just be remade with guns and money? Nothing so demonstrated George Bush's unhingement from anything conservative when he championed a free election in Palestine and then was surprised that the democratically elected government turned out to be Hamas. Democracy doesn't just happen with an election. Any conservative knows this. Culture and tradition can't just be changed overnight.

To their credit progressives have historically been consistent champions of personal freedom. Civil Rights for minorities, equal rights for women, gay rights, workers rights, etc. At its best the progressive vision has worked to remove barriers to equal access and level the playing field so that everyone has an opportunity. But an opportunity to do what? To shop? To have bigger homes and cars and TVs? Too often the progressive message has lacked a connection with a larger vision that we are trying to build something worthwhile here. We are removing shackles and barriers so we can build heaven on earth, so we can create more healthy communities, a more livable planet, a more just social order. But when individual freedom is detached from social vision, we are free to check out and watch TV. Community service and civic engagement are core progressive values. It takes a village to raise a child, but the villagers have to come out of their homes.

It isn't surprising to me that a conservative and a progressive would both claim Jimmy Carter as one of their own. He was both conservative and progressive. He embodied the conservative values Rod Dreher named: "self-sufficiency, discipline, sacrifice, conservation, independence, the striving for meaning and purpose beyond material wealth." But he also believed in the progressive vision that we could put those conservative values to work to bring meaningful and lasting change to our society. He supported the onward march of personal freedom and continued to work tirelessly long after he left the White House to give others the chance to have a piece of the economic and political pie. But the key here is that although he was free himself he continued to work on behalf of the others. Personal freedom connected to social vision.

In any case I am glad to see Jimmy Carter getting another hearing. His 1976 presidential campaign was the first one I worked on and it pained me to watch him be tarred and feathered as his presidency wore on. I have long since come to see that he was not a great President; he was not just a victim of circumstances beyond his control like the hostage crisis that finally undid him. He had a good vision of where the country needed to go, but he lacked the skills to move that vision forward. He ran a brilliant campaign in 1975 but he did not run a brilliant White House. The "malaise" speech, though, was brilliant; it was the follow-up that wasn't.

Too Busy to Pray?

Information Age Prayer can help:

Information Age Prayer is a subscription service utilizing a computer with text-to-speech capability to incant your prayers each day. It gives you the satisfaction of knowing that your prayers will always be said even if you wake up late, or forget.

We use state of the art text to speech synthesizers to voice each prayer at a volume and speed equivalent to typical person praying. Each prayer is voiced individually, with the name of the subscriber displayed on screen.

For $3.95 a month they have you covered. Unless you aren't Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, or Unaffiliated. If you click on the "Other Religions" tab you get:

We apologize but other religions are not yet supported.

It occurs to me that this might be how God is able to keep track of the billions of prayers coming his/her way.

Moms a Bulldog and an Archangel

Quinn Bradley is the son of Newsweek writer Sally Quinn and former Washington Post publisher Benjamin Bradlee. Quinn lives with a congenital birth defect, Velo-Cardio-Facial Syndrome. In the current edition of Newsweek he talks about his illness and writes this about his mom:

… pretty soon after I was born, my doctor detected a heart murmur, and when I was about three months old, I had to have open-heart surgery. I think this was a pretty crappy time for my parents. They thought I might die, and I could have died. My mom says the night before my heart operation was one of the worst nights of her life. She wasn’t allowed to nurse me. She could barely even hold me. When they took me into the operating room the next day, she basically fainted.

… She’s a very powerful woman. She’s like a bulldog, or a lioness. You don’t want to mess with her. She has controlled a lot of my life. Sometimes I’m angry about that, because I feel I’m in the passenger seat of the car and I have to ride wherever the driver wants me to go. Sometimes I feel as if I have no freedom.

But there is a flip side to everything. And there is truth in everything that we say. I couldn’t have lived without my mom. She’s saved my ass a million times. She has been like an archangel to me. She had the wings that I didn’t. And she’s basically carried me everywhere I’ve been.

Just a nice, uplifting piece. Via GetReligion

Holy Week Thoughts

My newsletter article this week:

For Western Christians Holy Week is upon us. It begins this Sunday with Palm Sunday. Palm Sunday celebrates the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem followed by a week of drama that culminates in his betrayal, arrest, trial, execution, and resurrection on Easter Sunday. Even as a progressive Christian who doesn't take literally the details of the story, I look forward each year to retelling and re-imagining the Holy Week narrative.

Over the years my thinking about this week and the specifics of Jesus' last days has been in flux? Did he really ride a donkey into the city, replaying the story from the prophetic book Zechariah? Was he making a messianic claim? Did he provoke a "fight" in the Temple? Was he trying to get himself killed in the hopes that God would intervene? Was there really a Judas who betrayed him? Was there anyone there at the foot of the cross? Was there anyone to bury him after he died? Three days in the tomb is symbolic, but how long was it really before some of his followers began to proclaim his resurrection?

So many questions that I don't know the answer to. And so many different opinions and theories from the bible itself as well as biblical scholars and everyday Christians. I don't know what I believe about the details of Jesus' last days. But I do have a pretty good idea why he ended up on a cross. First let me say that I don't buy the traditional explanation. The traditional explanation is that his death was part of God's plan. To pay the price for our sin, or to be lifted up in glory fully revealed as the Son of God. There are actually more than a few biblical and theological explanations of how his death was a necessary part of God's plan for the world.

I don't think it was part of God's plan. I don't think his death was necessary, for him or for us. I do think it was almost inevitable and not at all surprising, given the times he lived in and the way the Romans had little tolerance for dissent of any kind and the way they made frequent use of crucifixion to punish trouble-makers and set a public example.

I also think there was something about Jesus himself that made his untimely death almost inevitable and not at all surprising. Christian theology says that Jesus was fully God and fully human. What I think this means is that Jesus was more fully human than most of us and therefore he looked more God-like in the eyes of some of those who saw him.

I don't think that Jesus was born divine. Or more precisely, I think we are all born divine. We are all born with the spark of the divine in us. I think that Jesus may well have been born gifted (or haunted) with a spiritual restlessness. I suspect that he became a serious spiritual seeker. He didn't suddenly emerge on the scene inspired at 30. He spent his young life "in the wilderness" metaphorically, learning to know himself and digging deeper into the spiritual traditions of his day. It seems almost certain that he also spent some time in the wilderness literally as a disciple of John the Baptist. This would have been part of his vision quest.

However it happened - and we really don't know any details of his young life - he emerged publicly on the scene as a deeply spiritual person, more fully human. In one sense, of course, you are either human or you are not. But when we grow spiritually and emotionally we become more fully human, we tap more deeply into our capacity to be spiritually awake, emotionally intelligent. It is always in there in all of us, but we don't all grow at the same rate. And to be honest some of us are so scarred and beaten down and cynical that we become less human as time goes on.

Jesus became more fully human. He likely knew himself deeply; he faced his demons. He knew his spiritual tradition more deeply, remembering always that he was always fully Jewish. He was full of compassion for the suffering of his people; he wanted them to be liberated from their bondage the way he was liberated. He had found a way of navigating his spiritually hungry, poverty-stricken, sometimes brutal world; it was a way that offered healing and hope. It was a spiritual path, and he began to share it with family, friends, and strangers.

What could be dangerous about that? How could that possibly get you killed? When the system is sick, there is nothing more dangerous than a healthy person. While some will be attracted to the "light" and want to learn and feed off of it's warmth, those who profit emotionally or financially or politically off of the way things are now will be threatened. They will want to fix or remove the "problem." By definition, any people occupied by a foreign power is a "sick" system.

The Bible says that even his own family thought he was crazy, at least for a time. As his traveling entourage moved from town to town he attracted curiosity, followers, and opposition. His open table and public acts of healing threatened the boundaries and rules of the cultural and religious establishment. His peaceful non-resistance to the violence of Roman rule threatened the political powers. If, as the scriptures tell us, his journeying took him to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover he was being watched carefully. It wouldn't have taken much provocation during the already highly charged Passover celebration (a celebration, after all, all about liberation from oppressive political rule) to get him arrested, quickly tried, and hung on a cross. If he engaged in a symbolic act of protest at the Temple as scripture reports, that would have been enough to seal his death warrant.

It might have been the end of the Jesus story, too. It wasn't, but that is a subject for another post. Let me end this one by reiterating that I believe the path that Jesus found for himself and shared with others was a path of healing and hope. It was both an inward journey that led to a deeper, more fully human person. And it was an outward journey that led to more fully human and just communities. It was personal and it was political. It was liberating and it was dangerous. It was then, and it is now.

Helping Our People Die

Apparently we are not doing a very good job of it. Last week I saw this article about a study in the American Medical Association that showed that terminally ill religious people were more likely to choose invasive, life-prolonging treatments than non-religious people. This seemed to me to be counter-intuitive. If a person believes they are going to heaven why prolong dying with expensive, invasive treatments. The Christianity Today blog talked to a person involved in the study who explained what he thinks is going on here:

While it would initially appear that this specific patient population is "clinging to life" or are afraid of death, we do not believe that this is the best interpretation. In fact, patients who were positive religious copers were far more likely to recognize that they were terminally ill cancer patients! So they are pursuing aggressive measures despite the fact that they knew they were dying! So what gives?

We believe that part of the answer lies in a forthcoming research study from our group that finds that their is a direct connection between patients who receive spiritual care from the medical system (particularly doctors and nurses) and their decision to enter hospice care (which is a choice leading to non-aggressive care). When you put these two studies together, we believe that the problem is that religious people who are dying (and remember that this patient population was almost entirely Christian - 95%+) along with their families are not receiving spiritual counsel IN THEIR MEDICAL DECISION MAKING. The patients are not clinging to life but are instead not being counseled in how to die. Patients who received spiritual care from the medical system did vastly better in measures of quality of life at the end of life and choosing hospice over cure.

Based on this, we hypothesize that there is a gap about formation of death for religious communities. It would appear that Christians as a pattern do not talk about death, model a good death, or articulate the characteristics of faithful dying. Terminal patients and their families are left alone in making these decisions -- and there is a significant minority (we are guessing between 10-30%) who are receiving aggressive care at the end of life because they do not know how to navigate the spiritual intersection involved in the complexities of medical decision making.

We believe that this is a place where religious communities have a major role to play in educating their congregations on the intersection of faith and medicine. We also believe that religious physicians and nurses have the potential role of helping those who are sick and dying in understanding how to navigate the spiritual complexities of dying because they are much more familiar with the world of medicine.

More Bad Christian Music

I hope you this makes you laugh as much as it did me.


Via Andrew Sullivan

Through My Eyes

A new movie where young gay Christians tell their story. Here is the trailer:

Why Didn't They Teach Us That in Church?

Quote from theolophiliacs:

I had always heard that people go off to the scary public universities and fall away from faith. The blame was always left at the feet of the Universities. I wonder if maybe we should be looking closer to home. Our catechism classes and Bible study’s need to be able to account for the advances in Scholarship and we need to openly discuss critiques of the Christian faith so that our kids can have a bit of preparation for life beyond the quaint Pizza and Soda parties of Youth Group.

The most spiritually liberating courses I took at Penn State were the religious studies classes I took my junior and senior year. Here were professors raising the faith questions I had been struggling with for 10 years. Studying the Bible through the lens of critical scholarship - I didn't even know there was such a thing until I went to college. Reading Bultmann and Tillich, and taking my first class in world religions. Then there was Rienhold Niebuhr, whose writings just blew me away. My spiritual quest was reborn in college.

Why didn't they teach us any of that in church? I am not making the same mistake.

Nature vs. Nurture

A tragic event--a suicide of a famous child of parents who both committed suicide--has prompted these two New York Times columnists to revisit the topic of Nature vs. Nurture in their column today.

As a child of parents who each have histories of anxiety and depression both personally and on both sides of their families, I have spent many hours during my formative years brooding over my genetic fate. I had put it all aside for a decade or so...until I had children of my own!

Denominational Implosion

Staff cuts are coming fast and furious at the denominational headquarters. Last month the position of Director of District Ministries and the office of Mission Interpretation was eliminated. This week we learn that the Washington Office has been closed and staff let go, Congregational Life Team leaders are being let go (6 regional support staff), and the governing board of the denomination is being immediately reduced from 29 to 19 positions. Apparently more cuts are coming.

What is troubling about this is the way this is happening without warning and transparency, and with no apparent connection to ministry priorities. While everyone has known the budget was facing a shortfall there was no emergency appeal, no message that stuff cuts might be necessary, no communication apart from posting on the website that the cuts had happened - and some of these staff cuts are not even on the website yet, and no explanation at all about how these cuts fit in with ministry priorities. If there are any ministry priorities anymore.

We appear to be in total survival-mode.

The Kindle and the Newspaper

Via Andrew Sullivan I saw this post about the cost of a NYTimes and a Kindle:

Not that it's anything we think the New York Times Company should do, but we thought it was worth pointing out that it costs the Times about twice as much money to print and deliver the newspaper over a year as it would cost to send each of its subscribers a brand new Amazon Kindle instead.

This would seem to me to be a smart move for local papers. A Kindle costs $359. The 2-year cost of my subscription to the Minneapolis Star Tribune is $338. I have been getting the print edition for all the years we have lived in Minnesota, but we have been talking for two years now about ending our subscription since we get most of our news online. It's going to happen eventually.

But what if the newspaper sent me a new Kindle and in exchange I signed a 2 year contract for the price of a print edition. I get the paper delivered on the Kindle; they save the cost of printing and delivering the paper. I would bet that papers could get a better deal from Amazon if they can help sell lots of Kindles.

Something like this is going to have to happen if local papers are going to survive.

Apologizing for Marrying Ellen--NOT!

This YouTube video of a segment on the Jimmy Kimmel Show of a mock public service announcement about Proposition 8 is just too funny!

Compassion

Via Andrew Sullivan, I read this exchange between Bill Moyers and Karen Armstrong. The best part:

KAREN ARMSTRONG: ... I used, you know, to be a really spiteful human being.

BILL MOYERS: No.

KAREN ARMSTRONG: I learned a vicious form of rhetoric from my religious superiors. and also, from my teachers at Oxford. You know? And people used to say to me, "I would really hate to be your enemy," because I have this very sharp tongue that I knew how to use it. And I get in first before someone put me down. That kind of thing.

I found that, in my studies I had to practice, what I found called in a footnote the "science of compassion." There was a phrase coined by great Islamist, Louis Massignon. Science, not in the sense of physics or chemistry but in the sense of knowledge, scientia, the Latin word for knowledge.

And Latin--the knowledge acquired by compassion. Feeling with the other. Putting yourself in the position of the other. And this footnote said that a religious historian, like myself, must not approach the spiritualities of the past from the vantage point of post enlightenment rationalism. You mustn't look on this in a superior way and look at the author of "The Cloud of Unknowing," a 14th century text as, poor soul. You know?

And you had to recreate in a scholarly fashion, all the circumstances which had resulted in this spirituality or this teaching and not leave it, or certainly not write about it, until you can imagine yourself putting yourself in that position. Imagine yourself feeling the same. So when I wrote about Muhammad, for example, I had to put myself in the position of a man living in the hell of seventh century Arabia, who sincerely believed he had been touched by God.

And unless I did that, I would miss Muhammad. I had to put clever Karen, edgy Oxford educated Karen on the back burner. And go out of myself and enter into the mind of the other. And I found, much to my astonishment, it started changing me. I couldn't any longer be quite as vicious as I was or dismissive as I was in the kind of clever conversations-

BILL MOYERS: Why? This is the first time I've heard of a born again experience beginning with a footnote. Was it your imagination that said, "I have to see this world the way Muhammad saw it and experienced it?"

KAREN ARMSTRONG: I said that this footnote is right. If I go on writing, as I had been doing up to this point for saying, "This is all rubbish." You know, I know it all. These poor benighted souls in the past didn't know what they were talking about. I was not fulfilling my job as a historian.

It was my job to go in and recreate it, enter into that spirit. Leave myself behind and enter into the mind and society and outlook of the other. It's a form of what the Greeks called ekstasis. Ecstasy. That doesn't mean you go into a trance or have a vision. It means-- ekstasis means standing outside yourself. Putting yourself behind. And it is self, it's ego that hold us back from what we call God.

BILL MOYERS: You speak of the change in you. You're talking about a personal transformation. But take the next step. What would bring about the kind of real change in society and in politics that would be an extrapolation of or a continuation in community of what you're talking about?

KAREN ARMSTRONG: Okay. Not to treat other nations or other... in a way that we would not wish to be treated ourselves.

BILL MOYERS: Unless they've attacked you.

KAREN ARMSTRONG: Even so, I mean, there was a chance after 9/11, you know, when something different would have been done....

It's amazing to me how adding that last sentence changes the way I read this passage. Her testimony about the discipline required to practice compassion and its capacity to change a person is powerful. There is really no more important spiritual practice than learning to be compassionate.

Then I read that last sentence and I think about the opportunity squandered by Bush after 9/11 to really unite the country and the world and begin to address some of our deep problems, and I must confess that I find it difficult to feel compassion for him. He made such a mess of the world and he was so arrogant about it right up to the end. The best I can do at this point is to say that in terms of both intellectual and emotional intelligence he was in way over his head. I can't imagine being him and being President.

I have some more work to do.

At the Feeder

I went out to fill this feeders this evening and this little redpoll didn't want to leave. It hopped to the ground and stayed at my feet while I filled the feeder and then flew back up when I finished.

Signs of the Apocalypse?

Penn State blows out Indiana in the Big Ten tournament and we are talking basketball not football.

Bad Economy and Church Attendance

The Pew Research Center finds no increase in church attendance during the recent stock market drop.