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How Evil Is Tech? NYTimes | OP-ED COLUMNIST David Brooks NOV. 20, 2017 Not long ago, tech was the coolest industry. Everybody wanted to work at Google, Facebook and Apple. But over the past year the mood has shifted. Some now believe tech is like the tobacco industry — corporations that make billions of dollars peddling a destructive addiction. Some believe it is like the N.F.L. — something millions of people love, but which everybody knows leaves a trail of human wreckage in its wake. Surely the people in tech — who generally want to make the world a better place — don’t want to go down this road. It will be interesting to see if they can take the actions necessary to prevent their companies from becoming social pariahs. There are three main critiques of big tech. The first is that it is destroying the young. Social media promises an end to loneliness but actually produces an increase in solitude and an intense awareness of social exclusion. Texting and other technologies give you more control over your social interactions but also lead to thinner interactions and less real engagement with the world. As Jean Twenge has demonstrated in book and essay, since the spread of the smartphone, teens are much less likely to hang out with friends, they are less likely to date, they are less likely to work. Eighth graders who spend 10 or more hours a week on social media are 56 percent more likely to say they are unhappy than those who spend less time. Eighth graders who are heavy users of social media increase their risk of depression by 27 percent. Teens who spend three or more hours a day on electronic devices are 35 percent more likely to have a risk factor for suicide, like making a plan for how to do it. Girls, especially hard hit, have experienced a 50 percent rise in depressive symptoms. The second critique of the tech industry is that it is causing this addiction on purpose, to make money. Tech companies understand what causes dopamine surges in the brain and they lace their products with “hijacking techniques” that lure us in and create “compulsion loops.” Snapchat has Snapstreak, which rewards friends who snap each other every single day, thus encouraging addictive behavior. News feeds are structured as “bottomless bowls” so that one page view leads down to another and another and so on forever. Most social media sites create irregularly timed rewards; you have to check your device compulsively because you never know when a burst of social affirmation from a Facebook like may come. The third critique is that Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook are near monopolies that use their market power to invade the private lives of their users and impose unfair conditions on content creators and smaller competitors. The political assault on this front is gaining steam. The left is attacking tech companies because they are mammoth corporations; the right is attacking them because they are culturally progressive. Tech will have few defenders on the national scene. Obviously, the smart play would be for the tech industry to get out in front and clean up its own pollution. There are activists like Tristan Harris of Time Well Spent, who is trying to move the tech world in the right directions. There are even some good engineering responses. I use an app called Moment to track and control my phone usage. The big breakthrough will come when tech executives clearly acknowledge the central truth: Their technologies are extremely useful for the tasks and pleasures that require shallower forms of consciousness, but they often crowd out and destroy the deeper forms of consciousness people need to thrive. Online is a place for human contact but not intimacy. Online is a place for information but not reflection. It gives you the first stereotypical thought about a person or a situation, but it’s hard to carve out time and space for the third, 15th and 43rd thought. Online is a place for exploration but discourages cohesion. It grabs control of your attention and scatters it across a vast range of diverting things. But we are happiest when we have brought our lives to a point, when we have focused attention and will on one thing, wholeheartedly with all our might. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote that we take a break from the distractions of the world not as a rest to give us more strength to dive back in, but as the climax of living. “The seventh day is a palace in time which we build. It is made of soul, joy and reticence,” he said. By cutting off work and technology we enter a different state of consciousness, a different dimension of time and a different atmosphere, a “mine where the spirit’s precious metal can be found.” Imagine if instead of claiming to offer us the best things in life, tech merely saw itself as providing efficiency devices. Its innovations can save us time on lower-level tasks so we can get offline and there experience the best things in life. Imagine if tech pitched itself that way. That would
be an amazing show of realism and, especially, humility, which these days
is the ultimate and most disruptive technology.
Democracy assumes a well-informed citizenry that argues about solutions — not about facts. — David Ignatius, Nov 23, 2017.
By Jim Wallis November 17 Washington
Post
Many traditions in the history of Christianity have attempted to combat and correct the worship of three things: money, sex and power. Catholic orders have for centuries required “poverty, chastity, and obedience” as disciplines to counter these three idols. Other traditions, especially among Anabaptists in the Reformation, Pentecostals and revival movements down through the years have spoken the language of simplicity in living, integrity in relationships and servanthood in leadership. All of our church renewal traditions have tried to provide authentic and more life-giving alternatives to the worship of money, sex and power — which can be understood and used in healthy ways when they are not given primacy in one’s life. President Trump is an ultimate and consummate worshiper of money, sex and power. American Christians have not really reckoned with the climate he has created in our country and the spiritual obligation we have to repair it. As a result, the soul of our nation and the integrity of the Christian faith are at risk. As Abraham Lincoln, a politician with a deep knowledge of Christianity, stated in his first inaugural address, political action can, undertaken rightly, appeal to the “better angels of our nature.” But political action undertaken badly, and reckless inaction, can mislead and dispirit us — and appeal to our worst demons, such as greed, fear, bigotry and resentment, which are never far below the surface. Trump’s adulation of money and his love for lavish ostentation (he covers everything in gold) are the literal worship of wealth by someone who believes that his possessions belong only to himself, instead of that everything belongs to God and we are its stewards. In 2011, before his foray into politics, Trump said, “Part of the beauty of me is that I’m very rich.” And in his 2015 speech announcing his candidacy for president, he said: “I’m really rich. .?.?. And by the way, I’m not even saying that in a braggadocio — that’s the kind of mind-set, that’s the kind of thinking you need for this country.” Later, during the campaign, Trump suggested that our country must “be wealthy in order to be great.” Lately, faith leaders have spoken out against the proposed Republican budgets and tax plans. The Circle of Protection , a group of leaders from all the major branches of Christianity, of which I am a part, said in a letter to Congress: “We care deeply about many issues facing our country and world, but ending persistent hunger and poverty is a top priority that we all share. These are biblical and gospel issues for us, not just political or partisan concerns. In Matthew 25, Jesus identified himself with those who are immigrants, poor, sick, homeless and imprisoned, and challenged his followers to welcome and care for them as we would care for Jesus himself.” The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, too, has rejected the tax plan, calling it “unacceptable as written,” and “unconscionable in parts” as it would enrich the wealthy and shortchange the middle class and the poor. And yet, much Christian support for Trump and his administration continues. Then there’s sex. Before Trump, Republicans liked to suggest that theirs was a fairly Puritanical party of family values with high standards for its candidates (despite many embarrassing exceptions). But Trump’s boastful treatment of women — including bragging in a video about grabbing their genitals — and his serial infidelity and adultery are clear evidence of his idolatrous worship of sex. And it no longer seems like his is a unique case. Speaking of embarrassing situations, the polls showing that evangelical Christians in Alabama express the most support for Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore — even after seven women have accused him of unwanted advances when they were teenagers and he was in his 30s — may be the most damning testimony as to the politicized moral hypocrisy of white evangelicals. Or as Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore warned his fellow religionists this past week, “Christian, if you cannot say definitively, no matter what, that adults creeping on teenage girls is wrong, do not tell me how you stand against moral relativism.” And yet, according to a new poll, 72 percent of evangelicals now say that “an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life,” though only 30 percent thought so a mere six years ago . Other responses to Roy Moore’s alleged behavior have been even worse than silence. Take Alabama state Rep. Ed Henry, who was also Trump’s Alabama campaign co-chairman, and who tried to discredit and deny the women’s stories, saying: “You can’t sit on something like this for 30-something years with a man as in the spotlight as Roy Moore and all of a sudden, three weeks before a senatorial primary, all of a sudden these three or four women are going to talk about something in 1979? I call bull.” Some have tried to play down Moore’s behavior, like Marion County, Ala., GOP Chairman David Hall, who said: “I really don’t see the relevance of it. . . She’s not saying that anything happened other than they kissed.” Alabama State Auditor Jim Zeigler even used a biblical story to legitimize Moore’s alleged offenses. “Take Joseph and Mary,” he said. “Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus.” Trump, unsurprisingly, has been coy on the matter. He has not called for Moore to step aside, and the White House press secretary said the president “does not believe we can allow a mere allegation . . . from many years ago to destroy a person’s life.” When it comes to worshiping power, Republican Christians most obviously stray from scripture in their attitudes on race. When 81 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump despite his blatant and constant use of racial bigotry for his own political interest, it showed that the operative word in the phrase “white Christian” is “white” and not “Christian.” When white Christians say they did not vote for Trump because of his bigotry but for other reasons, faith leaders of color answer with a damning question: His racial bigotry wasn’t a deal-breaker for you? Week after week, Trump reveals that his leadership is always and only about himself; not the people, the country or even his party — and certainly not about godliness. During his recent whirlwind trip through Asia, for instance, he bragged constantly about his red carpet treatment, and seemed to thrive on the attention and flattery while putting precious little effort into diplomacy. (“They were all watching,” Trump gushed of people who he said called him in droves to congratulate him on the splendor of his visit to China. “Nothing you can see is so beautiful.”) The conflicts between his money, power and governing are always resolved in the same way — by his selfishness; by whatever happens to appeal to him, and only him, in that moment. Though he ran an anti-interventionist campaign, for instance, Trump reportedly decided to ramp up the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan this year after an adviser showed him a picture of Afghani women wearing miniskirts in the 1970s. All leaders struggle with these temptations, and public figures must wrestle with them the most. Christians, rightly enough, have never expected perfect leaders — just those who can keep up their end of the moral struggle. But for Trump, there is no moral struggle. He is not immoral — knowing what is right and wrong, and choosing the wrong — he rather seems amoral: lacking any kind of moral compass for his personal or professional life. That’s why the Christian compromise with Trump and his ilk has put faithful Americans at such serious risk. Central to the health of our society is for American
Christians to rescue an authentic, compassionate and justice-oriented faith
from the clutches of partisan abuse, and from the idolatry of money, sex
and power. The word “repentance” in Christian, Jewish and Islamic traditions
means much more than feeling sorry about the past; it also means “turning
around” to equity and healing personally, and systemically in our institutions
of policing and criminal justice, education, economics, voting rights,
immigration and refugees, racial geography, housing, and more. Making repentance
practical is the spiritual task ahead.
Beatles v. Mahler “Eleanor Rigby,” I’d argue, is just as profound as Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony. But the Mahler, scored for large orchestra, chorus and two vocal soloists, is a whole lot longer, lasting more than 80 minutes. --NYTimes chief classical music critic ANTHONY TOMMASINI JULY 30, 2017 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/30/arts/music/trump-classical-music.html
Origin of Modern Political Lies A key moment came in the 1970s, when Irving Kristol,
the godfather of neoconservatism, embraced supply-side economics — the
claim, refuted by all available evidence and experience, that tax cuts
pay for themselves by boosting economic growth. Writing years later, he
actually boasted about valuing political expediency over intellectual integrity:
“I was not certain of its economic merits but quickly saw its political
possibilities.” In another essay, he cheerfully conceded to having had
a “cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit,” because it was all about
creating a Republican majority — so “political effectiveness was the priority,
not the accounting deficiencies of government.”
Free Cheese Russians are fond of a proverb, “besplatniy sir biyvaet tol’ko v mishelovke”: “Free cheese can be found only in a mousetrap.” NYTimes 2017 July 28
Streetcar Expansion Vern's
personal letter (below) is cited in this news report:
GOVERNMENT & POLITICS
Country Club Plaza residents at the Kirkwood and Sulgrave Regency face a hefty property tax for a Midtown streetcar system. But residents at the nearby Walnuts likely wouldn’t. Normally tax-exempt churches also could be hit for thousands of dollars a year. Is the tax boundary for Kansas City’s proposed expanded streetcar zone fair? A mail-in election is underway right now to determine whether the downtown streetcar system expands or stalls. But in Kansas City’s great streetcar debate this summer, questions are swirling about how the taxing district boundaries were drawn. Proponents say an expanded taxing district along the Main Street corridor is the best shot at extending downtown’s wildly popular streetcar system to the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Critics counter that the proposed boundaries, involving both sales and property tax increases, impose an unjust lug on a small segment of Kansas City taxpayers. “The whole thing has been gerrymandered,” says Greg Allen, whose financial business on Linwood Boulevard is in the proposed tax zone. “There is a huge problem of unfairness here. This is being levied on the backs of a relatively narrow property tax base.” Some streetcar supporters who themselves would pay the higher assessment respond it’s well worth it. “I think the first phase of the streetcar has been very successful,” said City Councilwoman Katheryn Shields, who lives just east of the Plaza and would pay the higher tax on her condo unit. “I feel very strongly it will be very helpful. I’m willing to pay.” Streetcar advocates point out the tax approach was approved by the Jackson County Circuit Court. They are pushing hard for support in the mail-in election, with ballots due Aug. 1. Qualified voters will decide whether to create a special transportation development district (TDD), which could eventually extend the streetcar track 3.75 miles from Union Station to UMKC. More elections would be required to actually impose any taxes. But an expanded streetcar district sets the stage. It would actually have two different tax districts. The entire area, from the Missouri River to 53rd Street and from State Line Road to Campbell Street, would have a 1-cent sales tax increase for 30 years. A smaller boundary, generally one-third mile from Main Street but bigger in some places, would also face a 25-year property assessment for residential, commercial and even tax-exempt properties like churches. The local money would raise half the estimated $227 million project cost, with hopes of the rest from the federal government. A draft special assessment map is available from the 16th circuit court. The final assessment zone would be determined later by an elected board. But the “model” assessment boundary curves and bumps out in certain areas. Some have even suggested that the Walnuts complex was left out of the assessment zone because influential people such as former mayor Kay Barnes live there. Those involved in drawing the lines vehemently deny that. “It has absolutely nothing to do with where Kay Barnes lives,” said leading streetcar advocate David Johnson. “I didn’t even know where she lived. I thought she still lived in Briarcliff.” They maintain the assessment zone is drawn to incorporate the parts of town that would benefit most from streetcar expansion in the Main Street corridor, plus Westport and the Plaza. Opponents say the tax burden isn’t equitably distributed and wonder why the entire city isn’t being asked to contribute to such a hugely expensive project. Plaza area condos If new streetcar boundaries are approved, two subsequent elections could lead to the sales and property tax increases. That has prompted considerable scrutiny of which properties would be subject to the property tax. The special assessment would run about $266 annually on a $200,000 residential unit or home, and higher for more expensive units. A few Plaza area residents have complained privately to The Star that the Sulgrave Regency, 121 W. 48th St., is within the model assessment zone, while the Walnuts, 5049 Wornall Road, is not. One person who asked not to be named wrote, “The discussion buzzing in our building is The Walnuts have some power brokers who pulled some strings...leaving out The Walnuts raises another question about a fair process.” Johnson and attorney Doug Stone, who created the model assessment zone map, explained that the model assessment zone includes properties within walking distance of the streetcar line. The boundary bumps out more than one-third mile at the Plaza and Westport because those are contiguous walkable districts. “Special assessments are imposed on property that benefits from a specific improvement,” Stone said, adding that the natural walking distance in the Plaza and Westport is greater due to their pedestrian nature. Stone said the Walnuts is farther west from Main Street than other Plaza buildings. Likewise, the Polsinelli law firm office on the west side of Roanoke Parkway/Madison Avenue, is not in the assessment zone, while commercial properties just east of Madison are. Stone acknowledged it’s a subjective judgment, but the Jackson County Circuit Court deemed the streetcar proposal legal. Allen says the setup is ludicrous. “What is walkable about including all the commercial property in Westport and the Plaza? That has to do with grabbing the tax base,” he argued. Lee Derrough agrees. He lives in a Kirkwood townhome on 50th Street, right on the boundary, and says he and many neighbors are upset about how the boundaries were drawn to include their buildings. “It’s a pretty big chunk of change, and it goes for 25 years,” he said. “People that aren’t excited are the ones who will have to pay for it and never use it.” Derrough thinks the cumbersome mail-in election and tax approach is a perversion of Missouri’s transportation development district law, which is normally used for a few properties and smaller projects. “This is bad public policy, some of the worst I’ve ever witnessed,” he said. “To me, it’s immoral.” Some residents who would pay the assessment say they are fine with it. Betsy Paul, who lives at the Sophian Plaza at 46th and Warwick, said she believes the benefits are worth the extra cost on her condo. “I would ride it from here downtown,” she said. “It would be fabulous because it would open a lot of options where I wouldn’t have to drive my car. I could go downtown to the farmer’s market, pick up some stuff and not have to worry about parking.” Still, Paul said, many of her neighbors oppose this type of taxation. Churches and nonprofits Another bone of contention is that the special assessment would hit churches and other Midtown nonprofits. The district would exempt the first $300,000 of property value for nonprofits, but the special assessment would apply after that. That’s how the transportation district law works. St. Paul’s Episcopal Church and School would pay an estimated $10,000 a year, which could diminish funds available for its food pantry and other ministries, said Rector Stan Runnels. “Most of my parishioners are in favor of the streetcar, but we’re all wondering how are we going to manage this, how [to] afford it?” Father Gary Ziuraitis of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Redemptorist Church, 3333 Broadway, estimates the church property, which includes Cristo Rey High School, would pay about $4,000 a year for 25 years. Church donors want their money to help people, not pay a tax bill. “They want that to go to the work of God,” Ziuraitis said. Vern Barnet, a longtime Kansas City interfaith leader, says he is a big user and proponent of the bus system. But he believes the proposed taxes are regressive. “Let those who will benefit, primarily the developers, pay for the project instead of low-income homeowners and nonprofits, including churches,” he wrote in a widely distributed letter. Stone responded that special assessments, unlike regular property taxes, apply to tax-exempt properties that also derive a benefit from an improvement. Johnson pointed out that nonprofits already pay the downtown streetcar assessment, and it’s not stopping the Church of the Resurrection from expanding in downtown. Meanwhile, Community Christian Church, 4601 Main St., supports the project. Associate Pastor Ryan Motter estimated the church would pay about $1,700 a year. But he said the church already gives out about $500 worth of bus passes to the homeless each year, so it would probably save that amount once the free streetcar rolls by. He said a majority of the congregation believes the streetcar is a big benefit. “It fits in line with our values of caring for God’s creation,” he said. “The accessibility of reliable transportation, especially for those who are poor. It’s also encouraging and building community.” Lynn Horsley: 816-226-2058, @LynnHorsley #StreetcarLetter
Here is the text: Folks who know I support public transportation -- but are unfamiliar with the details of the streetcar expansion proposal -- are surprised to learn how opposed I am to the project. So here are two bits of an explanation. FIRST THE BURDEN
SECOND, THE PROCESS
Vern Barnet has lived in Westport since 1993. He has received numerous civic and religious awards. He wrote a weekly column for The Kansas City Star for 18 years, founded the Greater Kansas City Interfaith Council, and has taught at area universities and seminaries. One of his recent books, published internationally, is for health care providers. Paid for by SMART
KC, Sherry Delanes, Treasurer [logo] 2824
__________
Dear Chairman-- Many of us do want a streetcar, even though it does little to improve transit. The problem is the financing. It is wrong to destroy social capital among poor folks who cannot afford the special assessments and regressive sales tax increases. How about matching those under the poverty line with those who can afford to subsidize the poor? Those who can pay will be the main beneficiaries, anyhow. I'd happily register for a matching arrangement for 25 and 30 years. Since about twice as many people voted for the streetcar expansion district as those who voted No, two Yes voters could share their subsidizing of one poor person, a minimal outlay by those who have the means. Let those who have the means finance the streetcar since it is more about development than about transportation. I don't know that any system of financing like this has ever been done, and it would require some administrative overlay. Or maybe matching arrangements could be offered simply by volunteers who promise poor people to pay their assessments and sales tax increase with appropriate documentation and receipts. Another way of financing would be to eliminate the sales tax except on luxury items and make graded assessments on property, such as no assessment on homes under $100,000, a fractional assessment on homes at $100,000 and a graduated, exponential rise to the most expensive property. Those who can, let them pay. Do not push poor people out of their homes and communities by asking to finance what will benefit the chiefly the wealthy. My proposal may be laughable. But at least think about the poor who may be excellent citizens and worthy human beings.. And in the meantime, please consider the city-wide concern expressed in yesterday's vote on Question 1. Sincerely, Vern Barnet
Trump on violence 
Muslims for America Since July 4, 1776 [excerpt]
At the declaration of our Independence on July 4, 1776, two of the first three heads of states who recognized the sovereignty of the United States were Muslims. Morocco’s Moroccan sultan Muhammad III was first, Johannes de Graaf of Nederland’s was the second and Tipu Sultan of Mysore (India) was the third.
#170610
#170602 The Opinion Pages | OP-ED COLUMNIST Donald Trump Poisons the World David Brooks JUNE 2, 2017 This week, two of Donald Trump’s top advisers, H. R. McMaster and Gary Cohn, wrote the following passage in The Wall Street Journal: “The president embarked on his first foreign trip with a cleareyed outlook that the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage.” That sentence is the epitome of the Trump project. It asserts that selfishness is the sole driver of human affairs. It grows out of a worldview that life is a competitive struggle for gain. It implies that cooperative communities are hypocritical covers for the selfish jockeying underneath. The essay explains why the Trump people are suspicious of any cooperative global arrangement, like NATO and the various trade agreements. It helps explain why Trump pulled out of the Paris global-warming accord. This essay explains why Trump gravitates toward leaders like Vladimir Putin, the Saudi princes and various global strongmen: They share his core worldview that life is nakedly a selfish struggle for money and dominance. It explains why people in the Trump White House are so savage to one another. Far from being a band of brothers, their world is a vicious arena where staffers compete for advantage. In the essay, McMaster and Cohn make explicit the great act of moral decoupling woven through this presidency. In this worldview, morality has nothing to do with anything. Altruism, trust, cooperation and virtue are unaffordable luxuries in the struggle of all against all. Everything is about self-interest. We’ve seen this philosophy before, of course. Powerful, selfish people have always adopted this dirty-minded realism to justify their own selfishness. The problem is that this philosophy is based on an error about human beings and it leads to self-destructive behavior in all cases. The error is that it misunderstands what drives human action. Of course people are driven by selfish motivations — for individual status, wealth and power. But they are also motivated by another set of drives — for solidarity, love and moral fulfillment — that are equally and sometimes more powerful. People are wired to cooperate. Far from being a flimsy thing, the desire for cooperation is the primary human evolutionary advantage we have over the other animals. People have a moral sense. They have a set of universal intuitions that help establish harmony between peoples. From their first moments, children are wired to feel each other’s pain. You don’t have to teach a child about what fairness is; they already know. There’s no society on earth where people are admired for running away in battle or for lying to their friends. People have moral emotions. They feel rage at injustice, disgust toward greed, reverence for excellence, awe before the sacred and elevation in the face of goodness. People yearn for righteousness. They want to feel meaning and purpose in their lives, that their lives are oriented toward the good. People are attracted by goodness and repelled by selfishness. N.Y.U. social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has studied the surges of elevation we feel when we see somebody performing a selfless action. Haidt describes the time a guy spontaneously leapt out of a car to help an old lady shovel snow from her driveway. One of his friends, who witnessed this small act, later wrote: “I felt like jumping out of the car and hugging this guy. I felt like singing and running, or skipping and laughing. Just being active. I felt like saying nice things about people. Writing a beautiful poem or love song. Playing in the snow like a child. Telling everybody about his deed.” Good leaders like Lincoln, Churchill, Roosevelt and Reagan understand the selfish elements that drive human behavior, but they have another foot in the realm of the moral motivations. They seek to inspire faithfulness by showing good character. They try to motivate action by pointing toward great ideals. Realist leaders like Trump, McMaster and Cohn seek to dismiss this whole moral realm. By behaving with naked selfishness toward others, they poison the common realm and they force others to behave with naked selfishness toward them. By treating the world simply as an arena for competitive advantage, Trump, McMaster and Cohn sever relationships, destroy reciprocity, erode trust and eviscerate the sense of sympathy, friendship and loyalty that all nations need when times get tough. By looking at nothing but immediate material interest, Trump, McMaster and Cohn turn America into a nation that affronts everybody else’s moral emotions. They make our country seem disgusting in the eyes of the world. George Marshall was no idealistic patsy. He understood that America extends its power when it offers a cooperative hand and volunteers for common service toward a great ideal. Realists reverse that formula. They assume strife and so arouse a volley of strife against themselves. I wish H. R. McMaster was a better student of Thucydides. He’d know that the Athenians adopted the same amoral tone he embraces: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” The Athenians ended up making endless enemies and destroying their own empire.
#170519 Mitch Landrieu, mayor of New Orleans
Thank you for coming. The soul of our beloved City is deeply rooted in a history that has evolved over thousands of years; rooted in a diverse people who have been here together every step of the way — for both good and for ill. It is a history that holds in its heart the stories of Native Americans — the Choctaw, Houma Nation, the Chitimacha. Of Hernando De Soto, Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, the Acadians, the Islenos, the enslaved people from Senegambia, Free People of Colorix, the Haitians, the Germans, both the empires of France and Spain. The Italians, the Irish, the Cubans, the south and central Americans, the Vietnamese and so many more. You see — New Orleans is truly a city of many nations, a melting pot, a bubbling caldron of many cultures. There is no other place quite like it in the world that so eloquently exemplifies the uniquely American motto: e pluribus unum — out of many we are one. But there are also other truths about our city that we must confront. New Orleans was America’s largest slave market: a port where hundreds of thousands of souls were bought, sold and shipped up the Mississippi River to lives of forced labor of misery of rape, of torture. America was the place where nearly 4000 of our fellow citizens were lynched, 540 alone in Louisiana; where the courts enshrined ‘separate but equal’; where Freedom riders coming to New Orleans were beaten to a bloody pulp. So when people say to me that the monuments in question are history, well what I just described is real history as well, and it is the searing truth. And it immediately begs the questions, why there are no slave ship monuments, no prominent markers on public land to remember the lynchings or the slave blocks; nothing to remember this long chapter of our lives; the pain, the sacrifice, the shame... all of it happening on the soil of New Orleans. So for those self-appointed defenders of history and the monuments, they are eerily silent on what amounts to this historical malfeasance, a lie by omission. There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it. For America and New Orleans, it has been a long, winding road, marked by great tragedy and great triumph. But we cannot be afraid of our truth. As President George W. Bush said at the dedication ceremony for the National Museum of African American History & Culture, “A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them.” So today I want to speak about why we chose to remove these four monuments to the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, but also how and why this process can move us towards healing and understanding of each other. So, let’s start with the facts. The historic record is clear, the Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and P.G.T. Beauregard statues were not erected just to honor these men, but as part of the movement which became known as The Cult of the Lost Cause. This ‘cult’ had one goal — through monuments and through other means — to rewrite history to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity. First erected over 166 years after the founding of our city and 19 years after the end of the Civil War, the monuments that we took down were meant to rebrand the history of our city and the ideals of a defeated Confederacy. It is self-evident that these men did not fight for the United States of America, They fought against it. They may have been warriors, but in this cause they were not patriots. These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for. After the Civil War, these statues were a part of that terrorism as much as a burning cross on someone’s lawn; they were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city. Should you have further doubt about the true goals of the Confederacy, in the very weeks before the war broke out, the Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, made it clear that the Confederate cause was about maintaining slavery and white supremacy. He said in his now famous ‘cornerstone speech’ that the Confederacy’s “cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” Now, with these shocking words still ringing in your ears... I want to try to gently peel from your hands the grip on a false narrative of our history that I think weakens us. And make straight a wrong turn we made many years ago — we can more closely connect with integrity to the founding principles of our nation and forge a clearer and straighter path toward a better city and a more perfect union. Last year, President Barack Obama echoed these sentiments about the need to contextualize and remember all our history. He recalled a piece of stone, a slave auction block engraved with a marker commemorating a single moment in 1830 when Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay stood and spoke from it. President Obama said, “Consider what this artifact tells us about history... on a stone where day after day for years, men and women... bound and bought and sold and bid like cattle on a stone worn down by the tragedy of over a thousand bare feet. For a long time the only thing we considered important, the singular thing we once chose to commemorate as history with a plaque were the unmemorable speeches of two powerful men.” A piece of stone — one stone. Both stories were history. One story told. One story forgotten or maybe even purposefully ignored. As clear as it is for me today... for a long time, even though I grew up in one of New Orleans’ most diverse neighborhoods, even with my family’s long proud history of fighting for civil rights... I must have passed by those monuments a million times without giving them a second thought. So I am not judging anybody, I am not judging people. We all take our own journey on race. I just hope people listen like I did when my dear friend Wynton Marsalis helped me see the truth. He asked me to think about all the people who have left New Orleans because of our exclusionary attitudes. Another friend asked me to consider these four monuments from the perspective of an African American mother or father trying to explain to their fifth grade daughter who Robert E. Lee is and why he stands atop of our beautiful city. Can you do it? Can you look into that young girl’s eyes and convince her that Robert E. Lee is there to encourage her? Do you think she will feel inspired and hopeful by that story? Do these monuments help her see a future with limitless potential? Have you ever thought that if her potential is limited, yours and mine are too? We all know the answer to these very simple questions. When you look into this child’s eyes is the moment when the searing truth comes into focus for us. This is the moment when we know what is right and what we must do. We can’t walk away from this truth. And I knew that taking down the monuments was going to be tough, but you elected me to do the right thing, not the easy thing and this is what that looks like. So relocating these Confederate monuments is not about taking something away from someone else. This is not about politics, this is not about blame or retaliation. This is not a naïve quest to solve all our problems at once. This is however about showing the whole world that we as a city and as a people are able to acknowledge, understand, reconcile and most importantly, choose a better future for ourselves making straight what has been crooked and making right what was wrong. Otherwise, we will continue to pay a price with discord, with division and yes with violence. To literally put the Confederacy on a pedestal in our most prominent places of honor is an inaccurate recitation of our full past. It is an affront to our present, and it is a bad prescription for our future. History cannot be changed. It cannot be moved like a statue. What is done is done. The Civil War is over, and the Confederacy lost and we are better for it. Surely we are far enough removed from this dark time to acknowledge that the cause of the Confederacy was wrong. And in the second decade of the 21st century, asking African Americans — or anyone else — to drive by property that they own; occupied by reverential statues of men who fought to destroy the country and deny that person’s humanity seems perverse and absurd. Centuries old wounds are still raw because they never healed right in the first place. Here is the essential truth. We are better together than we are apart. Indivisibility is our essence. Isn’t this the gift that the people of New Orleans have given to the world? We radiate beauty and grace in our food, in our music, in our architecture, in our joy of life, in our celebration of death; in everything that we do. We gave the world this funky thing called jazz, the most uniquely American art form that is developed across the ages from different cultures. Think about second lines, think about Mardi Gras, think about muffaletta, think about the Saints, gumbo, red beans and rice. By God, just think. All we hold dear is created by throwing everything in the pot; creating, producing something better; everything a product of our historic diversity. We are proof that out of many we are one — and better for it! Out of many we are one — and we really do love it! And yet, we still seem to find so many excuses for not doing the right thing. Again, remember President Bush’s words, “A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them.” We forget, we deny how much we really depend on each other, how much we need each other. We justify our silence and inaction by manufacturing noble causes that marinate in historical denial. We still find a way to say ‘wait’/not so fast, but like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “wait has almost always meant never.” We can’t wait any longer. We need to change. And we need to change now. No more waiting. This is not just about statues, this is about our attitudes and behavior as well. If we take these statues down and don’t change to become a more open and inclusive society this would have all been in vain. While some have driven by these monuments every day and either revered their beauty or failed to see them at all, many of our neighbors and fellow Americans see them very clearly. Many are painfully aware of the long shadows their presence casts; not only literally but figuratively. And they clearly receive the message that the Confederacy and the cult of the lost cause intended to deliver. Earlier this week, as the cult of the lost cause statue of P.G.T Beauregard came down, world renowned musician Terence Blanchard stood watch, his wife Robin and their two beautiful daughters at their side. Terence went to a high school on the edge of City Park named after one of America’s greatest heroes and patriots, John F. Kennedy. But to get there he had to pass by this monument to a man who fought to deny him his humanity. He said, “I’ve never looked at them as a source of pride... it’s always made me feel as if they were put there by people who don’t respect us. This is something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime. It’s a sign that the world is changing.” Yes, Terence, it is and it is long overdue. Now is the time to send a new message to the next generation of New Orleanians who can follow in Terence and Robin’s remarkable footsteps. A message about the future, about the next 300 years and beyond; let us not miss this opportunity New Orleans and let us help the rest of the country do the same. Because now is the time for choosing. Now is the time to actually make this the City we always should have been, had we gotten it right in the first place. We should stop for a moment and ask ourselves — at this point in our history — after Katrina, after Rita, after Ike, after Gustav, after the national recession, after the BP oil catastrophe and after the tornado — if presented with the opportunity to build monuments that told our story or to curate these particular spaces... would these monuments be what we want the world to see? Is this really our story? We have not erased history; we are becoming part of the city’s history by righting the wrong image these monuments represent and crafting a better, more complete future for all our children and for future generations. And unlike when these Confederate monuments were first erected as symbols of white supremacy, we now have a chance to create not only new symbols, but to do it together, as one people. In our blessed land we all come to the table of democracy as equals. We have to reaffirm our commitment to a future where each citizen is guaranteed the uniquely American gifts of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That is what really makes America great and today it is more important than ever to hold fast to these values and together say a self-evident truth that out of many we are one. That is why today we reclaim these spaces for the United States of America. Because we are one nation, not two; indivisible with liberty and justice for all... not some. We all are part of one nation, all pledging allegiance to one flag, the flag of the United States of America. And New Orleanians are in... all of the way. It is in this union and in this truth that real patriotism is rooted and flourishes. Instead of revering a 4-year brief historical aberration that was called the Confederacy we can celebrate all 300 years of our rich, diverse history as a place named New Orleans and set the tone for the next 300 years. After decades of public debate, of anger, of anxiety, of anticipation, of humiliation and of frustration. After public hearings and approvals from three separate community led commissions. After two robust public hearings and a 6-1 vote by the duly elected New Orleans City Council. After review by 13 different federal and state judges. The full weight of the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government has been brought to bear and the monuments in accordance with the law have been removed. So now is the time to come together and heal and focus on our larger task. Not only building new symbols, but making this city a beautiful manifestation of what is possible and what we as a people can become. Let us remember what the once exiled, imprisoned and now universally loved Nelson Mandela and what he said after the fall of apartheid. “If the pain has often been unbearable and the revelations shocking to all of us, it is because they indeed bring us the beginnings of a common understanding of what happened and a steady restoration of the nation’s humanity.” So before we part let us again state the truth clearly. The Confederacy was on the wrong side of history and humanity. It sought to tear apart our nation and subjugate our fellow Americans to slavery. This is the history we should never forget and one that we should never again put on a pedestal to be revered. As a community, we must recognize the significance of removing New Orleans’ Confederate monuments. It is our acknowledgment that now is the time to take stock of, and then move past, a painful part of our history. Anything less would render generations of courageous struggle and soul-searching a truly lost cause. Anything less would fall short of the immortal words of our greatest President Abraham Lincoln, who with an open heart and clarity of purpose calls on us today to unite as one people when he said: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds...to do all which may achieve and cherish — a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” Thank you.
Perspective on Terrorism In the four decades between 1975 and 2015, terrorists born in the seven nations in Trump’s travel ban killed zero people in America, according to the Cato Institute. Zero. In that same period, guns claimed 1.34 million lives in America, including murders, suicides and accidents. That’s about as many people as live in Boston and Seattle combined. It’s also roughly as many Americans as died in all the wars in American history since the American Revolution, depending on the estimate used for Civil War dead. It’s true that Muslim Americans — both born in the United States and immigrants from countries other than those subject to Trump’s restrictions — have carried out deadly terrorism in America. There have been 123 such murders since the 9/11 attacks — and 230,000 other murders. Last year Americans were less likely to be killed by Muslim terrorists than for being Muslim, according to Charles Kurzman of the University of North Carolina. The former is a risk of approximately one in six million; the latter, one in one million. The bottom line is that most years in the U.S., ladders kill far more Americans than Muslim terrorists do. Same with bathtubs. Ditto for stairs. And lightning. Above all, fear spouses: Husbands are incomparably more deadly in America than jihadist terrorists. And husbands are so deadly in part because in America they have ready access to firearms, even when they have a history of violence. In other countries, brutish husbands put wives in hospitals; in America, they put them in graves. . . . --Nicholas Kristof
Concerning Actions of Official Prejudice 2017 January 27
Kansas City, MO (January 27, 2017) We, the Greater Kansas City Interfaith Council, begin all our meetings with words that include the following: “We gather to accomplish this work of service, honor the sacred in each of us, and deepen our relations...” As an organization committed to this with our thoughts, words and deeds, we find ourselves disheartened by news reports that point to the idea of creating a registry of Muslims in the United States. Profiling people on the basis of religion will not keep us safe, nor does it demonstrate what we value most: respecting and honoring the sacred in everyone. It will set a dangerous precedent, placing the nation on a path toward eroding civil rights and universal human rights. Such a registry would seem more like a reaction to fear than a solution to the threats that created the fear. As a Council, we cannot come up with a single reason for how a nationwide registry of Muslims advances our organizational vision to create the most welcoming community for all people. We will not support actions that discriminate against whole groups of people based on faith, life philosophy, race, national origin or ethnicity. American history is peppered with these types of victimizing events, always resulting in unjust and tragic consequences: internment of Japanese Americans in World War II, suppression of German-speaking Americans in World War I, persecution of Irish, Italian and Hispanic Catholic immigrants, and executions of so called witches in Salem, Massachusetts, to name a few. In Nazi Europe, identifying Jews with yellow Stars of David resulted in the murder of 6 million Jews and the defeat and repudiation of Hitlerism following the Holocaust. In Kansas City, and in America, we believe we can and must do better. The Greater Kansas City Interfaith Council mission statement reads, “We are growing a sustainable, pervasive culture of knowledge, respect, appreciation, and trust amongst people of all faiths and religious traditions in the Greater Kansas City community.” Therefore, we must always stand for civil liberties guaranteed by our constitution, and universal human rights for all. At this extraordinary time in our nation’s history, we are called to affirm our profound commitment to developing deeper understanding of each other’s faiths and traditions, and to foster appropriate bilateral and multilateral interfaith dialogue and interaction. In the face of threats to immigrants, religious minorities, people of color, the LGBTQIA community, and so many others, as well as the rise of hate speech and hate crimes, we affirm our belief in the inherent worth and dignity of every person. We hold fast to our unwavering resolve to model our spiritual and religious values of mutual respect and cooperation. When we see any attempts to discriminate against whole groups of people based on faith, life philosophy, race, national origin or ethnicity, we remain steadfast in expanding awareness of the spiritual values of ANY faith tradition because it is these values that can help us resolve issues and challenges occurring in the environmental, social and personal realms of our lives. We joyously celebrate the gifts of religious pluralism in our city because it is a celebration of the interconnectedness of all life. Whatever our individual faith traditions, we simply can’t imagine being separate. We can’t imagine our lives without each other. As people of conscience, we declare our commitment to translate our values into action as we stand on the side of love with the most vulnerable among us. We welcome and invite all to join in this commitment for justice. The time is now. We ask leaders of all faiths and people of humane and compassionate conscience to sign this statement as a show of support, and stand with us for the sake of all. Rev. Kelly Isola
The Greater Kansas City Interfaith Council (GKCIC) is a non-profit 501(c)3 organization, which has a Board of Directors that strives for inclusiveness. The Council is comprised of Faith Directors, as well as At-Large Directors, who belong to 22 distinct faith philosophies represented in the greater Kansas City area. Working through Directors, Alternates, Advisors and Friends, the Council strives to provide engaging and educational programs about the many diverse faiths and traditions represented in Greater Kansas City by joining religion, spirit and community. As a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, The Greater Kansas City Interfaith Council takes no position on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for office.
CPS Stands in Opposition to 'Muslim Ban' Executive Orders Joined by Local Interfaith Groups Crescent Peace Society Stands In Opposition to 'Muslim Ban' Executive Orders Joined by Kansas Interfaith Action, Greater Kansas City Interfaith Council, The Center for Religious Experience and Study, KC For Refugees, and Hatebusters, Inc. (Overland Park, KS, 1/27/2017) -- The Crescent Peace Society (CPS), a Kansas City area interfaith organization, was joined today by Kansas Interfaith Action, The Greater Kansas City Interfaith Council, The Center for Religious Experience and Study (CRES), KC For Refugees and Hatebusters, Inc., in opposing President Trump’s ‘Muslim Ban’ Executive Orders halting the acceptance of Syrian refugees and restricting immigration and travel from several Muslim majority nations including Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. “These Executive Orders are expected to focus on refugees, immigrants and visa holders from Muslim majority countries only. It is clear that this is the first step in implementing the President’s promised ‘Muslim Ban,’ effectively excluding people based on their religion,” said CPS President, Ahsan Latif. “Predicating travel, immigration and refuge from harm on the basis of religion, or a religious litmus test, is un-American. I grew up learning the American values of pluralism and freedom of religion. The enactment of these policies threatens to turn our long held Constitutional values into just another set of alternative facts.” This policy harkens back to another dark time in our history, when during World War II the United States turned away Jewish refugees seeking our protection and instead sent them back to Europe where many did not survive. “Refugees entering this country are already the most vetted of all people entering our borders,” said Latif. “They undergo several levels of screening by multiple national security agencies before they are even selected as refugees.” These orders will adversely affect American Muslims seeking to host their family members from overseas. They would prevent citizens from aiding parents and grandparents seeking medical treatment and tarnish our image as a country that stands for the ideals of religious freedom and tolerance. “This ‘Muslim Ban’ does not make our country safer,” said Latif. "Instead it will be a propaganda tool for our enemies who portray America as the perpetrators of a holy war against them." The Executive Orders claim to focus on nations with some unspecified correlation to terrorism. However, the countries included do not have a record of committing terrorist acts in the United States (Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, for example, are not included on the list). Additionally, statistics show that over 116 times more Americans have died from gun violence compared to terrorism (CNN: American deaths in terrorism vs. gun violence in one graph). "It is important to address the issue of terrorism, but it should be based on evidence and hard data instead of faith, race or national origin,” said Latif. The Crescent Peace Society is a Kansas City area interfaith organization seeking to enhance the understanding of Muslim cultures through educational and cultural activities involving the exchange of ideas and experiences among people of diverse cultures. Its mission is to build bridges among faith communities, encourage dialogue, and promote justice and mutual understanding. If there are groups interested in having a Muslim speaker meet with their congregation or organization regarding Muslims in America or Islam, they email a request to: crescentpeacesociety@gmail.com. MEDIA CONTACTS:
Cultural Crossroads supports the full exercise of religious liberty for all and is opposed to any limitation on immigration based upon religious restrictions. The United States was founded on the basis of freedom and religious liberty is one of the most basic of those freedoms. Any classification or treatment of citizens or immigrants based upon religion is counter to the very ideals of America and what America stands for. If America loses our unique position in the world as the bastion of religious liberty, it will not only destroy the American dream, it will destroy the preeminent position of the United States in the eyes of the world....and history. Cultural Crossroads is a nonprofit organization which conducts multicultural education for children and families and provides dialogue opportunities for adults and promotes mutual respect and understanding of diversity by focusing on the commonalities among peoples, rather than the differences. Our Vision is a society which honors the heritage of our diverse cultures amid a climate of mutual respect and a shared future. More information is available at www.culturalcrossroads-kc.org Cultural Crossroads, Inc.
“Since the liar is free to fashion his ‘facts’ to fit the profit and pleasure, or even the mere expectations, of his audience, the chances are that he will be more persuasive than the truth teller.” --Hannah Arendt, 1967 10 Times Trump Spread Fake News JAN. 18, 2017
Thomas L. Friedman JAN. 18, 2017
I Used
to Be a Human Being
Only I can fix it -- Donald Trump
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/08/opinion/the-power-of-altruism.html The Power of Altruism
Western society is built on the assumption that people are fundamentally selfish. Machiavelli and Hobbes gave us influential philosophies built on human selfishness. Sigmund Freud gave us a psychology of selfishness. Children, he wrote, “are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.” Classical economics adopts a model that says people are primarily driven by material self-interest. Political science assumes that people are driven to maximize their power. But this worldview is clearly wrong. In real life, the push of selfishness is matched by the pull of empathy and altruism. This is not Hallmark card sentimentalism but scientific fact: As babies our neural connections are built by love and care. We have evolved to be really good at cooperation and empathy. We are strongly motivated to teach and help others. As Matthieu Ricard notes in his rigorous book “Altruism,” if an 18-month-old sees a man drop a clothespin she will move to pick it up and hand it back to him within five seconds, about the same amount of time it takes an adult to offer assistance. If you reward a baby with a gift for being kind, the propensity to help will decrease, in some studies by up to 40 percent. When we build academic disciplines and social institutions upon suppositions of selfishness we’re missing the motivations that drive people much of the time. Worse, if you expect people to be selfish, you can actually crush their tendency to be good. Samuel Bowles provides a slew of examples in his book “The Moral Economy.” For example, six day care centers in Haifa, Israel, imposed a fine on parents who were late in picking up their kids at the end of the day. The share of parents who arrived late doubled. Before the fine, picking up their kids on time was an act of being considerate to the teachers. But after the fine, showing up to pick up their kids became an economic transaction. They felt less compunction to be kind. In 2001, the Boston fire commissioner ended his department’s policy of unlimited sick days and imposed a limit of 15 per year. Those who exceeded the limit had their pay docked. Suddenly what had been an ethic to serve the city was replaced by a utilitarian paid arrangement. The number of firefighters who called in sick on Christmas and New Year’s increased by tenfold over the previous year. To simplify, there are two lenses people can use to see any situation: the economic lens or the moral lens. When you introduce a financial incentive you prompt people to see their situation through an economic lens. Instead of following their natural bias toward reciprocity, service and cooperation, you encourage people to do a selfish cost-benefit calculation. They begin to ask, “What’s in this for me?” By evoking an economic motivation, you often get
worse outcomes. Imagine what would happen to a marriage if both people
went in saying, “I want to get more out of this than I put in.” The prospects
of such a marriage would not be good.
In 1776, Adam Smith defined capitalism as a machine that takes private self-interest and organizes it to produce general prosperity. A few years later America’s founders created a democracy structured to take private factional competition and, through checks and balances, turn it into deliberative democracy. Both rely on a low but steady view of human nature and try to turn private vice into public virtue. But back then, there were plenty of institutions that promoted the moral lens to balance the economic lens: churches, guilds, community organizations, military service and honor codes. Since then, the institutions that arouse the moral lens have withered while the institutions that manipulate incentives — the market and the state — have expanded. Now economic, utilitarian thinking has become the normal way we do social analysis and see the world. We’ve wound up with a society that is less cooperative, less trusting, less effective and less lovely. By assuming that people are selfish, by prioritizing arrangements based on selfishness, we have encouraged selfish frames of mind. Maybe it’s time to upend classical economics and political science. Maybe it’s time to build institutions that harness people’s natural longing to do good. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTOpinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter. A version of this op-ed appears in print on July
8, 2016, on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: The Power
of Altruism. T
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/10/opinion/the-unity-illusion.html
Paul Ryan says it’s time for Republicans to unite with the presumptive nominee Donald Trump. Sure, Trump says racist things sometimes and disagrees with most of our proposals, but Republicans have to go into this campaign as a team. There has to be a Republican majority in Congress to give ballast to a Trump presidency or block the excesses of a Clinton one. If Republicans are divided from now until Election Day they will lose everything. Unity will also be good for the conservative agenda. Congressional Republicans are currently laying out a series of policy proposals. If they hug Trump, maybe he’ll embrace some of them. Or, as a Wall Street Journal editorial put it this week: “There’s no guarantee Mr. Trump would agree to Mr. Ryan’s agenda, but there’s no chance if Mr. Ryan publicly refuses to vote for him.” These are decent arguments. Unfortunately, they are philosophically unsound and completely unworkable. For starters, this line of thinking is deeply anticonservative. Conservatives believe that politics is a limited activity. Culture, psychology and morality come first. What happens in the family, neighborhood, house of worship and the heart is more fundamental and important than what happens in a legislature. Ryan’s argument inverts all this. It puts political positions first and character and morality second. Sure Trump’s a scoundrel, but he might agree with our tax proposal. Sure, he is a racist, but he might like our position on the defense budget. Policy agreement can paper over a moral chasm. Nobody calling themselves a conservative can agree to this hierarchy of values. The classic conservative belief, by contrast, is that character is destiny. Temperament is foundational. Each candidate has to cross some basic threshold of dependability as a human being before it’s even relevant to judge his or her policy agenda. Trump doesn’t cross that threshold. Second, it just won’t work. The Republican Party can’t unify around Donald Trump for the same reason it can’t unify around a tornado. Trump, by his very essence, undermines cooperation, reciprocity, solidarity, stability or any other component of unity. He is a lone operator, a disloyal diva, who is incapable of horizontal relationships. He has demeaned and humiliated everybody who has tried to be his friend, from Chris Christie to Paul Ryan. Some conservatives believe they can educate, convert or civilize Trump. This belief is a sign both of intellectual arrogance and psychological na?vet?. The man who just crushed them is in no mood to submit to them. Furthermore, Trump’s personality is pathological. It is driven by deep inner compulsions that defy friendly advice, political interest and common sense. It’s useful to go back and read the Trump profiles in Vanity Fair and other places from the 1980s and 1990s. He has always behaved exactly as he does now: the constant flow of insults, the endless bragging, the casual cruelty, the need to destroy allies and hog the spotlight. “Donald was the child who would throw the cake at the birthday parties,” his brother Robert once said. Psychologists are not supposed to diagnose candidates from afar, but there is a well-developed literature on narcissism that tracks with what we have seen of Trump. By one theory narcissism flows from a developmental disorder called alexithymia, the inability to identify and describe emotions in the self. Sufferers have no inner voice to understand their own feelings and reflect honestly on their own actions. Unable to know themselves, or truly love themselves, they hunger for a never-ending supply of admiration from outside. They act at all times like they are performing before a crowd and cannot rest unless they are in the spotlight. To make decisions, these narcissists create a rigid set of external standards, often based around admiration and contempt. Their valuing criteria are based on simple division — winners and losers, victory or humiliation. They are preoccupied with luxury, appearance or anything that signals wealth, beauty, power and success. They take Christian, Jewish and Muslim values — based on humility, charity and love — and they invert them. Incapable of understanding themselves, they are also incapable of having empathy for others. They simply don’t know what it feels like to put themselves in another’s shoes. Other people are simply to be put to use as suppliers of admiration or as victims to be crushed as part of some dominance display. Therefore, they go out daily in search of enemies to insult and friends to degrade. Trump, for example, reportedly sets members of his campaign staff off against each other. Each person is up one day and belittled another — always kept perpetually on edge, waiting for the Sun King to decide the person’s temporary worth. Paul Ryan and the Republicans can try to be loyal
to Trump, but he won’t be loyal to them. There’s really no choice. Congressional
Republicans have to run their own separate campaign. Donald Trump does
not share.
Should you watch the Super Bowl? How Politics Has Poisoned Islam No religious test in early Constitutional debates, a glimpse Pope Francis on Interfaith Dialogue 2015 June 6 Brian Zahnd: For the Common Good Karen Armstrong: Religion
and Violence (Fields of Blood)
LINKS to Muslim leaders condemning violence
The Brutal Bible
(my title)
War of Choice
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/29/opinion/israels-image-issue.html Roger Cohen International affairs and diplomacy. The New York Times Israel's Image Issue
This is an interesting moment in relations between the United States and Israel. Call it a poisonous lull. The vitriol around the Iran nuclear deal has subsided. But something is rotten in the special bond. The American ambassador to Israel, Daniel Shapiro, was recently dismissed as a “little Jew boy” by a former aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for saying that “two standards” seem to apply in the way the law is applied to Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank and that “too much Israeli vigilantism in the West Bank goes on unchecked.” Shapiro was stating the obvious. Israeli settlers are citizens entitled to the full protection of civil law. The 2.8 million Palestinians in the West Bank are not. Their decades-old limbo places them in a permanent state of vulnerability subject to Israeli military law. Israel, in turn, exercises corrosive dominion; hence the vigilantism. What was interesting was that Shapiro chose to speak out — a reflection of the acute frustration of the Obama administration with Israeli policies that cement what Secretary of State John Kerry has called a “one-state reality.” That reality is one in which Israel cannot remain a Jewish and democratic state. The situation was well-described in a Human Rights Watch report published this month: “On the one hand, Israel provides settlers, and in many cases settlement businesses, with land, water infrastructure, resources, and financial incentives to encourage the growth of settlements. On the other hand, Israel confiscates Palestinian land, forcibly displaces Palestinians, restricts their freedom of movement, precludes them from building in all but 1 percent of the area of the West Bank under Israeli administrative control, and strictly limits their access to water and electricity.” It’s not only within the administration that frustration is running high. The American Jewish community has grown more divided. Increasingly, younger Jews are distancing themselves from Israeli policies seen as unjust, unlawful, immoral or self-defeating. On college campuses where movements like Black Lives Matter have focused minds on issues of oppression and injustice, it does not take much to draw a parallel with the Palestinian cause, however lacking in nuance that analogy may be. A right-wing Israeli government, including illiberal ministers contemptuous of the Palestinian national movement, makes it harder to put the case for support of Israel. If Netanyahu is now an Israeli moderate, what does that say about the extent of Israeli Messianic nationalism? Gary Rosenblatt, the editor of The Jewish Week and a strong supporter of Israel, sent me an article he published recently whose first paragraph reads: “Even as Israel endures daily ‘lone wolf’ attacks from young Palestinians prepared to die for the cause of spilling Jewish blood, American Jewish leaders confide that generating support for the Jewish state is becoming increasingly difficult these days — even within the Jewish community, and especially among younger people.” “To be pro-Israel is being seen as more and more of a right-wing thing,” Amna Farooqi, the president of J Street U, the campus branch of J Street, the liberal pro-Israel, pro-peace Jewish lobbying group, told me. “It’s false. You can be pro-Israel and progressive, but American Jewish leaders must be transparent on the settlements. You can’t say you support two states if you don’t take a clear position, for example, against funding activities over the Green Line.” Farooqi, a senior at the University of Maryland, is a Pakistani-American Muslim elected to lead J Street U last summer. Raised in an immigrant family critical of Israel, but also in a neighborhood — Maryland’s Montgomery County — that was heavily Jewish, she came gradually to a Zionist’s belief in Israel’s right to exist combined with the conviction that “you cannot support Israel without grappling with the occupation. Keeping quiet will not help.” When she started college, she initially thought of getting involved with Students for Justice in Palestine, but found there was little interest in engaging people with different views. “My talking to people who already believed what I believed was not useful,” she told me. “I wanted to go to Hillel and talk to people who did not believe there was an occupation. Two-state advocacy was easier with J Street. There’s no point sitting in an echo chamber.” Farooqi’s message, through her own many-layered identity in a time of growing polarization, is important. The current situation is unsustainable. As United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, remarked this month, “It is human nature to react to occupation, which often serves as a potent incubator of hate and extremism.” Palestinian leaders also have a responsibility to curb that hate — to cease incitement, hold elections, overcome divisions and abandon their sterile retreat into victimhood. But nothing can excuse Israel’s relentless pursuit of the very occupation that undermines it. Close American tax loopholes that benefit settlers. Label West-Bank products so that consumers can make informed decisions. Pressure businesses, as Human Rights Watch puts it, to “comply with their own human rights responsibilities by ceasing settlement-related activities.” © 2016 The New York Times Company
WORLD Muslims Around The World Condemn Paris Attacks Claimed By ISIS BY JACK JENKINS NOV 14, 2015 11:39AM CREDIT: AP PHOTO/KIN CHEUNG Candles are lit as people gather in Hong Kong, Saturday, Nov. 14, 2015, to mourn for the victims killed in Friday's attacks in Paris. French President Francois Hollande said more than 120 people died Friday night in shootings at Paris cafes, suicide bombings near France's national stadium and a hostage-taking slaughter inside a concert hall. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung) Muslim leaders the world over are condemning the horrific terror attacks that struck Paris Friday night, expressing outrage and shock at an onslaught of shootings and bombings that left at least 120 dead and hundreds wounded. The outpouring of support for the victims and and
disgust for the attacks began even before ISIS, the militant terrorist
group current terrorizing entire sections of Iraq and Syria, claimed responsibility
for the carnage. Muslim imams, scholars, commentators, and average Muslims
expressed grief and horror using social media. The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community,
an Islamic movement founded in British India in the 19th century, released
a statement rebuking the “barbaric attacks.”
Shuja Shafi, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, repeated Al-Qadri’s rejection of ISIS. “This attack is being claimed by the group calling
themselves ‘Islamic State’,” he said. “There is nothing Islamic about such
people and their actions are evil, and outside the boundaries set by our
faith.”
There is nothing Islamic about such people and their actions are evil, and outside the boundaries set by our faith. Leaders of several Muslim-majority nations also spoke out. Iranian president Hassan Rouhani called the attacks a “crime against humanity,” Qatari foreign minister Khaled al-Attiyah described them as “heinous,” and Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister declared they were “in violation and contravention of all ethics, morals and religions.” Saudi Arabia’s highest religious body also spoke out, saying “terrorists are not sanctioned by Islam and these acts are contrary to values of mercy it brought to the world.” Joko Widodo, president of Indonesia — the largest Muslim nation population-wise — said “Indonesia condemns the violence that took place in Paris.” In the United States, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim social justice group, quickly issued a press release rejecting terrorism — something they do regularly in response to such incidents. Their statement also made mention of a bombing in Beirut, Lebanon on Thursday that wounded 200 and killed 45. Three residents of Dearborn, Michigan lost their lives in that attack attack, which ISIS also claimed responsibility for. “These savage and despicable attacks on civilians, whether they occur in Paris, Beirut or any other city, are outrageous and without justification,” CAIR’s statement read. “We condemn these horrific crimes in the strongest terms possible. Our thoughts and prayers are with the loved ones of those killed and injured and with all of France. The perpetrators of these heinous attacks must be apprehended and brought to justice.” CAIR is also part of a broad coalition of Muslim groups scheduled to hold a press conference noon Saturday to collectively condemn the attacks. The group is said to include representatives from CAIR, American Muslims for Palestine, Islamic Circle of North America, Muslim Alliance in North America, Muslim American Society, Muslim Legal Fund of America, Muslim Ummah of North America, and the Mosque Cares. Pope Francis appeared to echo their rejection of ISIS’s religious claims in a phone interview with the Italian Bishops’ Conference television network on Friday. Explaining that he sees the violence as part of a “piecemeal Third World War,” he said “there is no religious or human justification” for the attacks. [The pope] said ‘there is no religious or human justification’ for the attacks. “I am close to the people of France, to the families
of the victims, and I am praying for all of them,” Pope Francis said. “I
am moved and I am saddened. I do not understand, these things hard to understand.”
“We are shocked by this new manifestation of maddening,
terrorist violence and hatred which we condemn in the most radical way
together with the pope and all those who love peace,” said Rev. Federico
Lombardi, the Vatican’s chief spokesman said in a statement.
Such responses are common after terror attacks,
although many Muslims and non-Muslims have expressed frustration with being
expected to condemn repeatedly the actions of small militant groups who
commit violence in the name of Islam, whereas Christians and members of
other religious groups are rarely expected to do the same. Other Muslims
expressed frustration that leaders of some Middle Eastern nations condemned
the Paris attack but not the sometimes deadly tactics used to silence political
opposition in their own countries.
|
library arrest
#171028 To THE REVEREND ROSE SCHWAB and The Shawnee Mission Unitarian Universalist Church 9400 Pflumm Rd Lenexa, KS 66215-3308 Congratulations to the Shawnee Mission Unitarian Universalist Church on its great good fortune in calling the Reverend Rose Schwab as your minister, and to Rose on her extraordinary opportunity to serve this exceptional congregation, and also to serve a remarkable community in the Kansas City area, and furthermore, to bring her gifts to her colleagues and to the Unitarian Universalist Association. This happy occasion is a formal recognition of a fruitful relationship already begun. I deeply regret that it is impossible for me to join in the day’s celebration in person. I cherish the congregation I once served, I welcome Rose as a colleague, and I rejoice that the installation ceremony shows that the light of liberal religion is kindled anew. The Reverend Vern Barnet,
DMn
minister emeritus THE CENTER FOR RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE AND STUDY ("CRES") My Political Platform 1. Honest, transparent, universal attempts at fairness
and justice
The Swastika and St Teresa's Academy 0. New information about intent
0. Aaron Barnhart's blog (Sept 27) provides new information about intent not included in the KC Star editorial. I would have written differently had the editorial been more complete. I still think the school officials, closest to the situation, were best positioned to handle the situation from an educational perspective, and that school "punishment" is a poor response, especially since the school had no oversight for the off-campus incident for which parents bare primary responsibility. A course of reflection, education, and apology is more likely to produce correction than punishment. I believe an apology has been made and it appears the students have begun some serious education. 00. Bill Tammeus also has
written. He
praises The Star editorial.
1. The Star's misbegotten editorial
Submitted photo caption: St. Teresa’s Academy students, whose faces are blurred here, pose with a swastika made of beer pong cups. Where to begin with the St. Teresa’s Academy students
only lightly punished by the school after posing for party pics with the
swastika they’d fashioned with beer pong cups?
[This capitalization
is The Stars, not mine. --VB]
2. Vern's complaint
On Sep 23, 2017, at 8:52 AM, Vern Barnet <vern@cres.org> wrote: NOT FOR PUBLICATION I have not read where the students who constructed a swastika have been shown to be willful in making light of the horrors of Nazism. Before The Star's harsh editorial against what it judges as inadequate punishment, some measure of the students' intent, as well as their ignorance, seems appropriate. Your editorial even notes the swastika was constructed "backwards." The swastika has been an honored and cherished nature symbol in India and elsewhere for thousands of years. Some might argue its widespread provenance suggests the healthy human spirit easily and spontaneously is expressed in such symbols. Scholars of religious phenomenology have studied such questions. I have not seen where The Star has documented an evil intent and purpose of the students. The cross, usually associated with Christianity, has been horribly misused by the hateful and vile group, the Klu Klux Klan. This does not mean the appearance of the cross should be prohibited or condemned. Educating these students is appropriate. Your editorial says the students appear to be ignorant. Educating your readers is also appropriate. Extracting judgment without knowing intent is likely to produce resentment. Unless this incident was knowingly willful, education and apology is what is required. Your editorial should have been based on facts that the students were intent on evil, on making light of the Holocaust horrors. Because the editorial cites no evidence of wicked intent, your editorial fails to justify the harsh punishment you call for. In my career I have spent nearly five decades opposing religious prejudice. I founded the Kansas City Interfaith Council. I have awards from many civic and religious groups, including Jewish. I worry when bias appears. I work for correction and understanding. I support penalties when appropriate. But if these students meant no harm (which you have not demonstrated), how will punishing these students bring them into the light with gratitude for understanding the mischief and hurt they have caused others, rather than offering them reflection and guidance? --Vern Barnet
3. The Star's response
On 9/23/2017 9:06 AM, Melinda Henneberger wrote: Hi Vern, We called for education, so I'm not sure how that's too harsh. Alums are demanding expulsion but if you read again I think you'll see that we are not. Thanks, Melinda Sent from my iPhone 4. Vern's rejoinder
Vern Barnet
#170628_penal The Penal Substitutionary Theory of Atonement This is a response to a friend's presentation of a position taken by Wm. Paul Young in his book, Lies We Believe about God, namely that the penal substitutionary theory of atonement is a lie. I responded in two parts: PART ONE It is not a lie, any more than green is a lie. Young's accusation arises out of the perverted Modernist way of thinking about religion. It is simply a very bad metaphor, but for those in authoritarian or unexamined mindsets, it's about the best they can do. Calling this a lie is like accusing the sun of bad intentions. Young would do better to offer his own, healthier, metaphor, and help others see that the penal substitutionary theory is a bad metaphor. To explain away a mystery is to rationalize the incommensurable, like wanting to define pi as 3.14 and letting it go at that, ignoring the fact that pi is not a rational number but in fact, when expressed in decimal form, extends endlessly. But if we must have a metaphor for our salvation, one need not rely on Abelard (who might be among the best known of those who avoided the substitutionary theory; see Tillich's discussion in Vol 2, page 172 of his 'Systematic') but recall Irenaeus, as he ends the preface to book five of 'Against Heresies': 'Sic enim et legitime eis contradices, et de praeparato iaccipies adversus eos contradictiones, illorum quidem sententias per coelestem fidem, velut stercora, abjiciens;--solum autem verum et firmum magistrum sequens, Verbum Dei, Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum: qui propter immensam suam dilectionem factus est quod sumus nos, uti nos perficeret esse quod et ipse.' The later part of which I translate as 'only emulating the true and enduring Teacher, the Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, who through His boundless tenderness, became what we are, that He might complete us to be even what He Himself is,' suggests we are saved to life eternal by our following the example or model of Christ. I read this not as substitution but as participation. Where does the medieval Christian world define which theory of atonement is 'correct'? The mystery had several explanations, none solving what is incommensurable. But Modernist religion easily becomes the kind of authoritarian Fundamentalism which insists on the likes of the penal substitutionary theory as if it exhausts the meaning of the mystery. To make clear I am questioning Modernism more than those sickened by it, who have been disabled from seeing better metaphors--as I said, 'it's about the best they can do'--let me quote from an interview with Brian McLaren: "A young man told me he was leaving the church because we didn’t take the Bible literally enough. Then he told me, “When I was younger, I had a violent temper. I nearly killed a man once with my bare hands. If I don’t go to a church where black is black and white is white, I might do something violent again.” "Now I might quarrel with this man’s understanding of the best way to deal with deep anger issues, and I certainly don’t see the world in his simple black and white terms. But understanding that his more fundamentalist way of thinking was related to a deep inner struggle with violence helped me to at least appreciate the “why” behind his convictions. "I have to recall Jesus’ words about “not causing one of these little ones to stumble,” or Paul’s counsel about not judging people in disputable matters. . . . I want to be gentle with them, understanding that their current understanding may be all that’s holding them together at this point.' . . . PART TWO I agree with you when you write "great many conservative/traditional Christians understand the idea of penal substitutionary atonement, for example, in a very literal (not metaphorical) way." The problem is that liberals also see the question in literal ways; that's why it is called a lie. A metaphor is not true or false; it is either apt or not, more or less. Calling the theory a lie or an untruth (not implying intent) is part of the same language game as calling it a truth. Both are traps. The statement that ideas about God as vengeful are "not true" seems equally to miss the point. What are we to make of biblical passages such as Deut 32:35? or the destruction of life in the Flood? or God killing the 2509 men who offered incense? or the revenge God extracts . . . . Are these passages reflections, factual or not, of the way humans experience the uncertainties of human existence? To treat these statements, and the penal substitutionary atonement theory, as propositional truths, judging them either true or false perpetuates the unhealthy Enlightenment-Modernist misunderstanding of religious language (which includes the focus on "beliefs," alas, an inheritance from the Reformation). Using the metaphor of monotheism, a report of a unified, non-dualistic governor of the world, the the penal substitutionary atonement theory is a possible outcome. The problem is the fundamentalists don't see monotheism as a metaphor, and therefore have few optional frames of reference by which to make sense out of their experience and gain a sense of how the universe works. Fundamentalists need less to be told they are wrong, but rather enticed to see multiple ways of making sense out of the mystery of experience, and to be less compulsive about making sense and more able to enjoy the mystery itself. Young's work might be more fruitful if he eschewed the ground owned by the fundamentalists instead of arguing from it, and moved instead to accepting the experience and framework implied by the theory, and offered alternative visions. Maybe the does this -- I am responding simply to what you have presented about his book. I don't like the title. It is not very sympathetic. A chief reason why I find the the penal substitutionary atonement theory appalling is not because it is a lie but because it, as a powerful metaphor, models an often unjust justice system, extant still in America today. I'm more interested in the origins and effects of
conceptions like the penal substitutionary atonement theory than I am in
whether it is a lie or the truth. Arguing about it on literal grounds is
not a very effective antidote the poison it spreads in society and in the
soul.
#179417CuiBono Cui Bono? A New York Times columnist counseled those upset by the frequent fact that some persist in believing politicians' lies. Better to abandon arguments based on facts which do not pursuade the partisans and instead ask, "Who benefits?" from the false claims. "Cui Bono?" is ancient and worthy advice.
#170417yoga
Because I have had such respect for Benedictine College, and am so disappointed by the needless and ignorant yoga controversy, and since several acquaintances have asked for a quick comment on the matter, I thought as a courtesy, I should let you know my reply. Here it is: "Yoga?! The rosary beads became a part of Christian practice largely because the Muslims adopted the Buddhist beads from India. The days of the week -- the Sun's day, the Moon's day, etc come from pagan gods. How many Christians have Christmas trees? -- another incorporation of pagan practices. Not to mention the derivation of "Easter." Or how the Christians have usurped the Jewish Torah and reinterpreted large passages for their own purposes. No great religion is uninfluenced by others. They all borrow and steal and it is a wonderful enrichment with their differences. Taxes -- try doing taxes using Roman, not Arabic numerals, brought to the West from India by Muslim scholars. As for the place-holding zero, some think it developed from the Buddhist "sunya." Aquinas did not let the fact that he read Aristotle in Latin translations of Arabic translations of the Greek originals stop him from benefiting from, and incorporating, Aristotle's thoughts about God. These are a few examples from an overwhelming treasury of multifaith encounters. Let us contribute to one another freely to celebrate the mysteries of faith by practicing whatever methods bring us to charity with one another and healing within ourselves."
#170401UUA Ever since the 1968 Cleveland General Assembly,
the UUA has pushed a demographic agenda and often neglected a religious
mission. So much wasted energy! So little to show for it! People of color
will be attracted when UU churches offer a comprehensive spiritual experience
instead of the diversion or fad of the moment, era, or in-group.
1st Principle: The inherent worth
and dignity of every person;
The notion that Christianity necessarily depends upon the factual historicity of literal bodily resurrection on one hand, or, on the other, can be summarized as myth reduced to psychological interpretation, is like questioning the Greeks of the classical period for their demonstration that the many temples were convincing evidence of the gods. The modern secular understanding of religion is like looking at oscilloscope squiggles resulting from a performance of Beethoven's *Hammerklavier* Sonata in order to understand the meaning of that music.
#170223_OlatheMurder The Olathe Murder Ignorance and hatred -- and guns -- abound, and
social media comments and remarks by certain politicians that encourage
prejudice and violence lead to incidents ranging from disrespect to hate
crimes of violence and terrorism. The latest local example is here, where
men thought to be Middle-Eastern (actually Indian) were shot -- this early
report 2017 Feb 23 --
Hate can indeed be blind. Three Christians were murdered at Overland Park Jewish sites in 2014 by an anti-Semite who thought they were Jewish; now folks with Indian heritage were attacked because the hater thought they looked Middle-Eastern. An inter-faith
prayer vigil and peace march
Sunday, February
26th, 2017
http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/crime/article134776369.html Here is a wonderful guest column: GUEST COMMENTARY
BY MINDY CORPORON Special to The Star There were not enough white faces in the crowd. This was the thought that crossed my mind when I joined the large crowd at the Ball Conference Center in Olathe for the walk to honor the victims of the deeadly shooting in a family restaurant in Olathe. There was a large crowd of brown faces and a smattering of white. I exited my car alone looking for my spouse and friends. I walked toward a crowd of solemn people behind a group of about 10 young adult brown men. I had no fear. As I found the end of the walking group, I saw three familiar faces, friends of mine, and joined with them. They are Jewish. I am Christian. We walked quietly, we talked some and we hugged one another. As we felt more comfortable talking out loud and sharing our current lives, how they intertwined almost three years ago, I was stopped by a brown couple behind me and offered a hug. I was thankful that they felt comfortable hugging me. I hugged them back. Kindness has no color. Hate is real. Evil is real. When hate and evil are not interrupted, redirected or stopped these two can shatter lives. They shattered the lives of my family on April 13, 2014. Since losing my father and son, I have learned information I would rather not know. I wish I didn’t know that the shooter in our murders was well known for years for his anti-Semitic views, tirades and verbal abuse. How many people crossed his path and could have redirected him? I have also learned much more about the people in our community, their cultures, faiths and commonalities with me. Kindness has no color. I have been welcomed at Yom Kippur, the most solemn religious fast of the Jewish year, the last of the 10 days of penitence that begin with Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year). I have attended a few iftars, the meal eaten by Muslims after sunset during Ramadan. I have attended a Shabbat service at a local synagogue. I have attended Friday prayers at a local mosque. I have sat in a meeting with a pastor, a rabbi and an imam. (This is not a joke, although it sounds like a good lead in!) All of these took place while I continued my personal faith in Christianity. From the moment I came upon my deceased father and injured son in a parking lot, the trajectory of my journey changed. The violence that cut their lives short cuts deep. From overcome with pain to finding healing and peace, my journey is to bring faiths together for understanding. The man who killed on April 13, 2014, and the man who killed on Feb. 22, 2017, have commonalities … other than the color of their skin, which happens to be white. They harbor hate instead of understanding. We should not stand by and allow anyone else to be so misled by his or her ignorance of the other and let evil and hate overcome them. Understanding leads to kindness. Kindness makes a ripple, and a ripple can form a wave. A wave of understanding and kindness will change our world. Interrupt, redirect and stop ignorance, hate and evil with education, understanding and kindness. Take action by participating in SevenDays — Make a Ripple, Change the World on April 18-24. Join us in our mission to promote interfaith dialogue by engaging all people to discover commonalities and overcome evil with acts of kindness. Visit givesevendays.org Mindy Corporon is the mother of Reat Underwood and daughter of Dr. William Corporon, who were murdered by a convicted white supremacist in a hate crime outside of Jewish facilities in April 2014 along with Terri LaManno. Corporon, family and friends created SevenDays — Make a Ripple, Change the World to spread kindness and interfaith understanding. FROM THE MOMENT I CAME
UPON MY DECEASED FATHER AND INJURED SON IN A PARKING LOT THE TRAJECTORY
OF MY JOURNEY CHANGED.
2017Patel Eboo Patel in Kansas City, 2017 February 24. 1. Eboo Patel's keynote address repeated his error
that America was “designed” for religious diversity. It was not. I would
fail any student in my American religious history class who said so. Religious
pluralism is a happy accident, and we are fortunate that statements like
the one from George Washington he likes to quote can be used against folks
who share the view of the annual Hobby Lobby advertisement, that we were
founded as a Christian Nation. But neither their nor Patel’s views are
correct. It is astonishing that Patel is so misinformed, and that he keeps
repeating this basic misunderstanding of American religious history. [Here
is an on-line source that indicates the complexity of the question in both
historical and some contemporary contexts:
2. I do think Patel's approach is basic. It is a very convincing and effective way of saying that we ought to be nice to each other. This sometimes appears to be an overwhelming a challenge! And yet the more urgent, larger questions of our endangered environment, the violation of personhood, and the broken community are left unaddressed in any systematic way, failing to use the wisdom of the world's religious traditions so that we may be restored with nature, the self made whole, community in covenant, and the sacred found afresh. 3. Patel’s praise for Kansas City may have showed his affection for our town but failed to demonstrate his assertion that he knows us. He did repeatedly mention the few organizations with which he has contact — the Kansas City Interfaith Youth Alliance, SevenDays, Project Equality, the Tammeus blog, and a school at which he spoke in 2009 (I did not hear him identify Notre Dame de Sion). These organizations are wonderful and deserve recognition and praise. He was right to feature them, but I do not recall his even mentioning The Festival of Faiths, which brought him here in 2009. I am glad the Religious Literacy Project was mentioned during the course of the day. But his ingratiating remarks about our community could have been supported by acknowledging the Interfaith Council (founded in 1989), represented on the afternoon panel. He might have shown awareness of the half-hour network special CBS TV did on interfaith work here in 2002. He seemed unaware of the City’s selection by Harvard’s Pluralism Project and Religions For Peace-UN Plaza as the site of the nation’s first “Interfaith Academies” for religious professionals and students in 2007. He seemed unaware of the five-county study commissioned by Jackson County, which after months of work and community hearings following 9/11, produced a 35,000-word report on how the various faith communities fared, with extensive recommendations. He might have known about the 2001 “Gifts of Pluralism” conference held here over parts of three days, attended by 250 people with no national speaker drawing folks to the event. It would have been helpful if he were aware of the United Way study of models for interfaith organizations and Kansas City configurations. Since he spoke about medicine, his acknowledgment of The Essential Guide to Religious Traditions and Spirituality for Healthcare Providers, a 740-page reference book created an edited largely in Kansas City, published in London and New York in 2013. Organizations — like the Crescent Peace Society and the Dialogue Institute Kansas City — from within particular faiths doing interfaith outreach should also been part of his background knowledge if he wanted to convince us that he knew Kansas City. And he seemed to know nothing of the work of The Star's former religion editor.or what may be the most stunning evidence of our work on pluralism: the play, The Hindu and the Cowboy, performed many times in the years since the “Gifts” conference in many venues. The gifts of Cultural Crossroads, including its community calendar and the Plaza Library's Human Spirit collection, have enhanced interfaith relationships here. This off-the-top-of-my-head list is a sampling, the mention of some of which would have conveyed something more than Eboo's polite acknowledgment of those with whom he has current contact. My hearing is not perfect -- did I miss something? It is unfair to expect a distinguished international speaker, organizer, and author like Patel to know any of these details, but then he should not assert he knew Kansas City the way he claimed to know us, just as he asserts knowledge about American religious history of which he appears to be ignorant. He could have said something like, "From the folks I have met, I sense there may be much more happening here than I know," rather than presuming he had identified all the great things about Kansas City's interfaith activity. 4. I place these reservations in the context of his strong appeal as a otherwise knowledgeable and inspirational speaker. I admire and honor him. I respect his writing and his work, especially with young people. Although I wish he could have presented us with material directly relating to the murder in Olathe that occurred earlier in the week, I thought his workshop exercise design was excellent. I am grateful for the opportunity to hear him again. [My rant above has been linked from the Bill Tammeus 'Faith Matters' Blog entry for 2017 Feb 28 about the Project Equality's "2017 Diversity and Inclusion Summit."] *Here is an on-line
source that indicates the complexity of the question in both historical
and some contemporary contexts:
--
Congratulations on a very successful "Summit"! You brought together a wonderful group of folks who will surely move us forward, so important at this time of local, national, and international distress. Eboo is a fantastic inspirational speaker, a prominent voice for understanding, and one of America's most significant organizers. . . . I am writing now to ask you please to consider a next step. You have the skill and perhaps access to financial resources to make this next step happen. Interfaith work in Kansas City is fragmented, in "silos," and it would be so much more effective if the various groups and leaders were brought together to identify their distinctive missions and areas in which they can cooperate and be mutually supportive. This kind of problem often appears with new social movements, but in the last decade or so the proliferation of folks with no idea, or very little, of what other folks are doing is becoming acute. The stories I could tell! The United Way study of interfaith organizations here some years back revealed significant potential but inadequate financial support to position Kansas City beyond what it formerly has been as a national leader in interfaith work. A conference you might convene, bringing the various "stake holders" together might very well achieve the "critical mass" to attract the money our city needs to make the difference we all want. I am sure many would support your efforts to develop such a conference, so I hope, amid all the other items on your agenda, you will consider this amazing opportunity as evidence of the success of Friday's "Diversity and Inclusion Summit."
It is time to stop using Roman numerals. Referring to Super Bowl 51 as LI is absurd. Let's fdace it: Clarity of the written and spoemn word is a virtue. Let's use plain English. My response: A writer to The Star (Sunday, page 16A) complains about using Roman numerals. He objects to the label Super Bowl LI . He asks us to use plain English. He wants us to write Super Bowl 51. Roman numerals have been a part of plain English for centuries. He is advocating using Arabic numerals, which are more recent in the English language. Yes, the decimal system using Arabic numerals is easier. Try doing your income tax with Roman numerals. What we call Arabic numerals seem to have originated in India. Favoring Arabic over Roman numerals is fine, but to call the latter plain English and not the former may be imprecise. My point is that we habitually deny our indebtedness, historically and today, to what we think of as foreign culture, except, maybe, when we dine. Examples from Islam in general and from the Arabs in particular are all around us. We are benefited by knowing and embracing others. Vern Barnet
HUSTON SMITH From a note to the Greater Kansas City Interfaith
Council
Huston Smith died Dec 30. The Vedanta Society brought him here several times; and, although I knew him since 1969 or 70 [when, I as a graduate student at the University of Chicago Divinity School, I met him after he spoke about his filming in Tibet; and before that, he was already famous to me because my Buddhist teacher from Penn State, Chen Chi Chang, used Smith's book in a graduate seminar at the University of Nebraska in 2005-6]. [He and I ran into each other at various interfaith conferences, such as the 1990 Assembly of the World's Religions]. I interviewed him a number of times [here in Kansas City], but my greatest extended joy was spending time with him between presenting him to several groups on one of his book tours, 2005 October, including at Rime Buddhist Center and Unity Village, with an unforgettable luncheon at Gordon and Nancy Beaham's with David, whom some of you may recall; and earlier that year, in April, taking him to his parents' graves in Marshall, MO. . . . I never have encountered a person who more accurately could be called "a scholar and a gentleman." (Since I also knew his father-in-law, Henry Nelson Wieman, as one of my teachers, I'm starting to feel a bit of age!) . . . Here are a few of my favorite photos:
Smith promoted his just-published book, The Soul of Christianity, and he took questions (how he loved questions!) from the audience at the Rime Buddhist Center in 2005. The
New York Times
Huston Smith, a renowned scholar of religion who pursued his own enlightenment in Methodist churches, Zen monasteries and even Timothy Leary’s living room, died on Friday at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 97. His wife, Kendra, confirmed his death. Professor Smith was best known for “The Religions of Man” (1958), which has been a standard textbook in college-level comparative religion classes for half a century. In 1991, it was revised and expanded and given the gender-neutral title “The World’s Religions.” The two versions together have sold more than three million copies. The book examines the world’s major faiths as well as those of indigenous peoples, observing that all express the Absolute, which is indescribable, and concluding with a kind of golden rule for mutual understanding and coexistence: “If, then, we are to be true to our own faith, we must attend to others when they speak, as deeply and as alertly as we hope they will attend to us.” “It is the most important book in comparative religious studies ever,” Stephen Prothero, a professor of religion at Boston University, said in an interview. Professor Smith may have reached his widest audience in 1996, when Bill Moyers put him at the center of a five-part PBS series, “The Wisdom of Faith With Huston Smith.” (Each installment began with a Smith quotation: “If we take the world’s enduring religions at their best, we discover the distilled wisdom of the human race.”) Richard D. Hecht, a professor of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, called Professor Smith “one of the three greatest interpreters of religion for general readers in the second half of the 20th century,” the others being Joseph Campbell and, in Britain, Roderick Ninian Smart. Professor Smith, whose last teaching post was at the University of California, Berkeley, had an interest in religion that transcended the academic. In his joyful pursuit of enlightenment — to “turn our flashes of insight into abiding light,” as he put it — he meditated with Tibetan Buddhist monks, practiced yoga with Hindu holy men, whirled with ecstatic Sufi Islamic dervishes, chewed peyote with Mexican Indians and celebrated the Jewish Sabbath with a daughter who had converted to Judaism. It was through psychedelic drugs in the early 1960s that Professor Smith believed he came closest to experiencing God. Leary, a Harvard professor who championed mind-altering substances, recruited Professor Smith to help in an investigation of psychedelic drugs. At the time, Professor Smith was teaching philosophy nearby at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Leary thought that he had had a profound religious experience in Mexico in August 1960 when he first ate psilocybin mushrooms, which can produce hallucinations. Accordingly, he wanted religious experts to be part of his Harvard Psilocybin Project for the study of mind-altering drugs. Richard Alpert, a colleague in Harvard’s psychology department, was a critical figure in the initiative. (He later took the name Ram Dass.) On New Year’s Day in 1961, Leary’s team ingested mushrooms in his living room. “Such a sense of awe,” Professor Smith said afterward. “It was exactly what I was looking for.” A year later, the group gathered in a church basement as a Good Friday service was being held upstairs and tried an experiment involving 20 volunteers in which half were given the psilocybin mushrooms and the other half a placebo. Professor Smith received the drug, which was legal at the time, and reported that he was certain he had had a personal experience with God. He thought that the voice of a soprano singing upstairs was surely that of an angel. “From that moment on, he knew that life is a miracle, every moment of it,” Don Lattin wrote in “The Harvard Psychedelic Club,” a 2010 account of the psychedelic research project, “and that the only appropriate way to respond and be mindful of the gift of God’s love was to share it with the rest of the world.” Professor Smith later became disenchanted with Leary’s “tune in, turn on, drop out” gospel, but he retained his belief that the briefest of insights from a psychedelic trip could be mind-expanding. Those early drug experiments, however, were enough for him, he wrote in “Cleansing the Doors of Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals” (2000). (The word entheogenic refers to substances that produce an altered state of consciousness for spiritual purposes — “God-enabling,” in Professor Smith’s words.) “If someone were to offer me today a substance that (with no risk of producing a bummer) was guaranteed to carry me into the Clear Light of the Void and within 15 minutes would return me to normal,” Professor Smith wrote, “I would decline.” Huston Cummings Smith was born to Methodist missionaries on May 31, 1919, in Suzhou, China. The family soon moved to the ancient walled city Zang Zok, a “caldron of different faiths,” he wrote in his 2009 memoir, “Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine.” “I could skip a few blocks from my house past half the world’s major religions,” he added. “Side by side they existed.” He decided to be a missionary, and his parents sent him to Central Methodist University, a small church-affiliated liberal arts college in Fayette, Mo. He was ordained a Methodist minister but soon realized that he had no desire to “Christianize the world,” as he put it; he would rather teach than preach. Admitted to the University of Chicago Divinity School, he became intrigued by the scientific rationalism propounded by Henry Nelson Wieman, an influential liberal theologian there. He also became attracted to Professor Wieman’s daughter, Kendra, then an undergraduate. They married in 1943. Besides his wife, he is survived by two daughters, Gael Rosewood and Kimberly Smith; three grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. Professor Smith was working on his doctorate at Berkeley and leading Sunday services at a Methodist church when he encountered a book that changed his life: “Pain, Sex and Time: A New Outlook on Evolution and the Future of Man” (1939), by Gerald Heard. Mr. Heard advanced an expansive view of spirituality and came to be called “the grandfather of the New Age movement.” Professor Smith read all two dozen of Mr. Heard’s books and in 1947 visited him at Trabuco College, which Mr. Heard had founded in the Santa Ana Mountains. After dinner, they retired to a large rock. “They just sat there in silence, gazing at the barren canyon walls,” Mr. Lattin wrote in “The Harvard Psychedelic Club.” “Huston realized there was nothing he needed to ask the man. It was enough just to sit with him on the edge of the canyon.” Mr. Heard told Professor Smith how to get in touch with Aldous Huxley, the novelist, mystic and psychedelic pioneer, and Professor Smith took a bus into the Mojave Desert to Huxley’s cabin. The two had a deep conversation about boundless desert sand and Old Testament prophets. Professor Smith received his Ph.D. in 1945 from the University of Chicago, taught for two years at the University of Denver and accepted a professorship at Washington University in St. Louis. Huxley recommended he meet Swami Satprakashananda, a Hindu monk who had founded the Vedanta Society of St. Louis in 1938. Professor Smith soon became actively involved with the society as well as an associate minister of a Methodist congregation in St. Louis. In 1955, he turned his popular college lectures into a series of programs on world religions for the National Educational Television network, the precursor to PBS. On one program, he demonstrated the lotus position. He was hired by M.I.T. in 1958 and two years later joined other professors in inviting Huxley to deliver seven lectures, which drew standing-room-only crowds. In the decade since their last meeting, Huxley had experimented with mescaline and written “The Doors of Perception,” which became a counterculture classic. Professor Smith confessed to him that he had never had a full-blown mystical experience despite his studies of religious mysticism. Huxley said Leary could probably supply what he wanted, and gave Professor Smith his phone number. Professor Smith joined campaigns for civil rights in the 1960s and for a more tolerant understanding of Islam in the 2000s. He wrote more than a dozen books and held professorships at Syracuse University and Berkeley. He helped introduce the Dalai Lama to Americans. Despite his liberal views, Professor Smith argued that science might not totally explain natural phenomena like evolution. He clung to his Methodism while criticizing some of its dogma. He prayed in Arabic to Mecca five times a day. His favorite prayer was written by a 9-year-old boy whose mother had found it scribbled on a piece of paper beside his bed. “Dear God,” it said, “I’m doing the best I can.” The
Interfaith Observer
by Paul Chaffee
That life came to an end when Huston Smith, 97, died in Berkeley, California on Friday, December 30. The New York Times published a splendid obituary that details the many facets of this man’s life. At the heart of it all was Smith’s impulse to pursue and practice whatever truth he found, wherever he found it. Howard Thurman, another interfaith mystic, repeatedly would say, “Something is true because it is true; it is not true because of where it comes from.” Just so, being an avowed Methodist all his life didn’t at all hinder Smith’s belief in “the possibility of wisdom in multiple faith perspectives,” as Rev. Heng Sure remembers in his compelling story about knowing and working with him. It was in his particularities that Huston Smith was so interesting. He began his career as a missionary who did not want to “Christianize” the world. He became a distinguished academic who loved teaching and writing – but who did his most basic research not in simply ‘studying’ a faith but living it. For more than 10 years each, he practiced Vedanta (studying under Swami Satprakashananda, founder of the St. Louis Vedanta Center), Zen Buddhism (studying under Goto Zuigan), and Sufi Islam. Professor Smith was hardly confined to Harvard and UC Berkeley’s ivory towers, where he taught, or at MIT, Syracuse, and many more. Aldus Huxley, Joseph Campbell, Timothy Leary, Bill Moyers and similar luminaries and ‘thought-leaders’ were close friends and frequent colleagues. And not just the famous, by any means. As the Times article put it, “he meditated with Tibetan Buddhist monks, practiced yoga with Hindu holy men, whirled with ecstatic Sufi Islamic dervishes, chewed peyote with Mexican Indians, and celebrated the Jewish Sabbath with a daughter who had converted to Judaism.” His habit of praying five times a day came from Islam. He also helped introduce the Dalai Lama to the West. He championed Indigenous traditions, taking, for instance, more than a dozen American Indians to the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Cape Town, South Africa in 1999. He was part of a research group organized by Timothy Leary around peyote and LSD, with fascinating results. He wrote a book on religion and science, and was an enduring champion of peace and justice for all. Rob Sellers, president of the Council for the Parliament of the World’s Religions, wrote a remarkable profile of Huston Smith, published last February in TIO. The whole story is engaging, but the following captured me: … it was the chance to meet Huston Smith personally that made such a profound impact upon me. While attending a conference entitled “The World’s Religions after 9-11” in Montreal, Canada, in 2006, I sat very close to the front of a huge convention hall to hear him address thousands of conferees from all over the globe. Unable to stand at the podium, Smith was seated at a table at center stage. With a gentle demeanor and voice projection dimmed by age, he nonetheless held the audience spellbound. At the conclusion of the session, I rushed to the platform to meet him. Rather than tower above this seated and frail world religions giant, I knelt beside his chair, took his hand, and said, “Dr. Smith, you are one of my heroes.” Without pausing, he smiled and replied, “And if I knew you I’m sure that you would be one of my heroes too!” My own most powerful memory
of Huston Smith was the glowing smile that never left his face for long.
Not a self-glorifying glow, but the glow of happiness and joy a person
can feel for another person, and the attendant joy of being deeply perceived
and sharing life where love is unconditional. He dove into the reality
of the Spirit from many, many different religious, spiritual, philosophical
perspectives, and emerged with us as a man obviously consumed with love
and building bridges that connect us all meaningfully. He was one of a
kind, a giant in our midst, and his influence, God willing, will grow and
endure for many years to come.
from
January 04, 2017
Anyone who has read my work in the last 15 years (and even before, though with less focus then) knows that I have been -- and continue to be -- a strong proponent of interfaith understanding and dialogue. Huston Smith, the man who helped the world with that task perhaps more than almost anyone else, died the other day at age 97. I first learned of it Friday evening when my oldest sister, who lives in Berkeley, Calif., not far from Huston and Kendra Smith, sent me a note saying he had breathed his last about 7:30 that morning at his Berkeley home. I was surprised that it took until Sunday for a news story to show up about the death of this remarkable religion scholar, who had a lot of connections to Missouri, including the fact that he attended college at Central Methodist in Fayette, Mo. Several years ago I was privileged to hear Smith when he spoke at Country Club Christian Church in Kansas City. He was quite elderly and mostly deaf but he was still articulate and engaging. What Huston Smith, most famous for his book, The World's Religions, brought to the discipline of religious studies was both a deep respect for religious traditions other than his own Methodist version of Christianity, and great humility about what can be known in any final way and what, by contrast, requires faith. It is an attitude I seek to model in my own latest book, The Value of Doubt. Smith sought to understand religions by getting inside of them and seeing what make them tick. He walked a mile or more in Hindu shoes, in Muslim shoes, in Jewish shoes and on and on. Sometimes his investigations of spiritual traditions and new spiritual movements led him to some strange places, such as when he sought to understand what Timothy Leary and others were learning about spiritual insights through use of psychedelic drugs. But for Smith the idea was never to turn on and drop out, as Leary advised, but to learn. We have entered a time in the politics of the United States when the openness and respect that Smith taught when it came to religious traditions is under severe strain, as the man who will become president in a matter of days is the same man who has wanted to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. Perhaps one helpful thing to do might be to send Donald Trump a copy of Smith's book about world religions with a plea that he read it with an open heart. That may seem wildly optimistic, but I'm betting if Smith were still here and in good physical and mental shape, he might do that very thing himself. Read more here:
RUNNING COMMENTARY ON American Public Square session January 17, 2017 "Religion & Race: Chasm or Bridge?" Because I care about religion and I hate the evil of racism and other oppressions, and some folks welcome criticism intended to be constructive, I offer these thoughts with the hope that public programs can be better described, enhanced, and made more inclusive according to the subject. The panel tonight often seemed
unknowingly disrespectful of religious diversity. Even though at one point
when several said that their Christian faith required them to love those
of other religions, it seemed they were saying we [Jews, Muslims, etc]
should all be worshipping together. The all-Protestant panel gave little
evidence of knowing anything about, or even acknowldging that there are,
Roman Catholics in our community.
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Vern Barnet
Thank you for your contributions to last night's APS panel. While I appreciate the efforts, I thought you might be interested in my running comments (complaints!) about the program. Briefly, I agree with Rabbi that the program could have better been called "Christianity and Race" -- or even more fittingly, "Protestantism and Race." To my heart, it was largely a "feel-good" evening that felt good unless you valued diversity. Here is a link to my perspective: http://www.cres.org/sidebar.htm#APS (right-hand column) Thank you for the good work you do; please consider other perspectives. Vern
Barnet
A number of people who have seen this commentary have let me know they agree with it. But perhaps I should give an example of a more substantial question which might better have framed the conversation: From your faith background
and experience with how people grow in your spiritual tradition, how does
your faith free us from racism, or at least lighten the load, (1) individual
by individual, and (2) how is that process reflected and enhanced by religious
communities affected by larger social forces, and (3) what are those forces
as you understand them?
2016 Dec
15 Summary Three Families of Faith and Our Crises
#trim Why I am not Fat Q. Why are you not fat? Many people your age are at least overweight. Why are you careful about your body? A. Six reasons. First, while health cannot be assured by any regimen, one can certainly improve the chances of well-being by attention to diet, exercise, sleep, and other practices. Michael Pollan's three rules make sense: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Of course, by food he means real food, not the highly processed stuff, even with added vitamins, that is sold as food. (Yes, I have some health challenges, and all of us are subject to dangers, known and unknown.) Second, I am a minister, and I have learned that some people foolishly look to me as a model. What kind of spiritual message would I be giving if I appeared guilty of the sin of gluttony? How can I appear to be managing my life well and inspire confidence in my judgment and decisions if I am obese? How can I expect people to take my advice if I am thoughtless about my body, which the Bible calls the temple of the spirit? (1 Corinthians 6:19) I am a sinner, and enough of my sins are already manifest without demonstrating the (literally) deadly sin of overeating. It is especially important for those of us in the ministry who preach about the power of our thoughts to affect our health. Third, even if gluttony were not sinful, it often indicates lack of control of one's appetite. Self-control is an important spiritual discipline, and I am poor in many areas, but somehow I have learned the distinction between hunger and appetite. Being a bit hungry everyday reminds me of the multitudes who are hungry all the time, and those whose wealth leads them into forgetfulness and do nothing about the starving. Fourth, regularly overeating supports a corrupt capitalistic economy which constantly entices one to eat bad "food" and to eat too much. This violates not only personal health but also damages the environment in ways we do not often recognize. Red meat is especially dangerous environmentally because it is an inefficient source of protein and brings environmental costs of refrigeration and transportation. I am reeducating my taste buds to eat much less meat so as to respect ecological balances. Fifth, I care about those who must sit next to me in tight quarters, such as in some theaters and places like airplanes (although I no longer travel). I don't want to make others uncomfortable the way fat people impose on me and restrict and crowd space around me. I try to be polite and considerate. American obesity has tripled in the last 50 years, and largely consequent diabetes is seven times is prevelant, with these two diseases alone costing incalculable misery and calculable expenses of $1,000,000,000 a day, and related costs of $$1,000,000,000,000 each year, according to David Bornstein in a New York Times report. As a member of society, I do not want to cause others to bear the costs of my suger lust. Sixth, my financial resources need to be carefully managed, and budgeting for one good meal a day is sufficient. I am glad when I can buy a meal for someone else, just as I am grateful when friends take me out or invite my into their homes. I can happily tolerate two meals in a single day. Still, awareness of how one spends one's money can keep one from habitual over-indulging. Q. What is it like for you to see fat people? Are you judgmental? Don't you like fat people? A1. We all have different gifts and abilities. I admit I sometimes have to work through my tendency to judge fat people, especially in the clergy or other roles where they might be emulated. Of course I have fat friends and fat people I admire. I usually don't know their genetic dispositions, histories, circumstances, and struggles. I know that "obesity and its precursor — being overweight — are not one disease but instead, like cancer, they are many," as the NYTimes reports. Reminding myself of my tendency to be self-righteous helps manage the issue. But being judgmental is a problem I have to keep working to overcome. Q. Do you discriminate against fat people? A2. I try to see the whole person. As a society we finally no longer feel social pressure to tolerate unwelcome smoking, but we generally have not looked at gross overeating and the commercial causes for obesity the same way. I know for some fat people, accepting the way they are is a spiritual achievement. Self-loathing is destructive, but the desire to be healthy makes sense for the individual and for that person's family and friends and society at large. Certainly we should not coerce our bodies into shapes that some advertisers present. But I am ready to condemn the lures that lead people to unhealthy decisions, and I want always to respect every individual's personhood. Among my friends are the overweight and the obese; while I wish they were able to manage their health risks better, I admire and love them and cherish their friendship and am inspired by their virtues. But I also admire those, especially of my age, who have found ways to keep themselves trim. Q. Don't you know that some people simply are addicted to foods? They can't help themselves. Like any addiction, the brain is changed so as to compel certain behaviors. A3. Yes, and our nation is addicted to salt, sugar, fats, and other substances that the food processors add to what started out as foods, and that we may amplify at the table by adding still more of these substances that become poisonous in quantity. But one does not have to allow an addiction to shape or ruin one's life. While addicts do not need condemnation, they need understanding and help, and I'm writing about this to increase awareness. Acknowledging addiction is often the first step to freedom from addiction. Q. Were you not at one time at least a litle pudgy? A4. Yes, and not so long ago. My best weight was probably in the early '80s after a 77-day fast from solid food as a religious discipline; my doctor said I was in better shape after the fast than before I began. At various times since, I've tried several methods with exercise to control my weight, including diet drinks, counting calories, and sundry forms of select food restrictions, with various short-lasting success. What currently works for me, exercise, sleep, and intermittant fasting with a balanced diet, may not work for others. I like being energetic and trim, easily fitting into my clothes. As I approach my 76th birthday, I am optimistic about maintaining a heathly weight.
After the Election That's how the light gets in. --Leonard Cohen, "Anthem" Spirit of Light,
--adapated
from what I heard the Rev Kendyl Gibbons say
My Political Desires It appears, despite the historical pattern of the nation reversing the party holding the Presidency for two terms, Clinton has won the popular vote, even though losing the Electoral College. This means a divided nation, not an overwhelming repudiation of decency. And remember, many did not vote for Clinton because of what they perceived as indecent greed in her expensive Wall Street speeches. Granted that her flaws are like a flea bite compared to Trump's car-bomb explosions, the "false equivalency" perpetrated by the media confounded many voters perceptions. Thinking with a long view, this loss for Democrats may be better than a partial win in the federal government with the Democrats controlling only the White House. Since the GOP shortly will own all, all, branches of the federal government, perhaps buyers' remorse will set in when folks realize that the failure to address our problems was not so much in the Obama White House but due to the obstruction in the Congress and poor Court decisions. This may become clear by the mid-term elections two years from now, assuming at some point truth will again be valued when pain sets in. We need to * restore a sense that politics is a holy enterprise and demand those seeking to serve be worthy of such expectations * correct gerrymandering * allow a majority of the House members (Republicans and Democrats and Independents) to vote on bills instead of insisting that a minority (a majority of the majority) control the issues to be debated * correct Citizens United
and reduce money in politics
* follow Constitutional custom and procedures * greatly reduce income and wealth dispartity to pay for needed infrastructure and social programs by taxing the wealthy appropiately, reinstating reasonable inheritance taxes, etc.
The KC librarian
on trial
http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/crime/article172164062.html photo: KC librarian Steve Woolfolk says he is 'elated' at being found not guilty. Library head R. Crosby Kemper III says police and prosecutors were out of line. Ian Cummings The Kansas City Star BY IAN CUMMINGS
Kansas City librarian Steve Woolfolk has received a national award and been put on trial for the same act: trying to stop police from arresting a library patron. After a trial Friday in Kansas City Municipal Court, Woolfolk was found not guilty on charges of obstruction, interfering with an arrest, and assaulting a police officer. The charges against Woolfolk, the Kansas City Public Library’s director of programming and marketing, stemmed from an incident in May 2016 when Woolfolk tried to stop the arrest of library patron Jeremy Rothe-Kushel during the question-and-answer part of a talk by Middle East expert and diplomat Dennis Ross at the Plaza library. Rothe-Kushel of Lawrence had been in the middle of asking Ross a series of challenging questions when he was seized by private guards and off-duty police working security at the public event. Library officials protested the arrests, with executive director R. Crosby Kemper III publicly saying that he was outraged and that the city was violating the First Amendment. Kansas City police stood by the arrests, and city prosecutors added the assault charge against Woolfolk nearly a year later. After a trial that ran late into the afternoon Friday, Kansas City Municipal Judge Joseph H. Locascio issued a quick ruling acquitting Woolfolk on all three counts, remarking: “It was a public event.” Assistant City Attorney Mike Heffernon, who prosecuted the case at trial, referred questions to City Prosecutor Linda Miller. She could not be reached Friday night. Woolfolk said he was relieved the ordeal was over. He had been saving a bottle of Macallan scotch for about a year, since the case was scheduled for trial, and hoped to open it Friday night. “I’m elated. I could not be happier,” Woolfolk said. “Free speech is a fundamental tenet of the library system.” During the months the case worked through the system, the American Library Association threw in its support and gave the Kansas City library the Paul Howard Award for Courage. Woolfolk received the Lemony Snicket Prize for Noble Librarians Faced with Adversity. If Woolfolk had been convicted on any of the charges, he could have faced up to 6 months in jail. The assault charge could have brought a fine of up to $1,000. Rothe-Kushel had been scheduled for trial the same day on charges of trespassing and resisting arrest, but prosecutors dropped the charges a few months before the case went to court. Miller earlier had said she could not comment on why the charges against Rothe-Kushel were dropped. The arrests occurred on May 9, 2016, as Ross spoke at the inaugural Truman and Israel Lecture, established by the Truman Library Institute and the Jewish Community Foundation of Greater Kansas City. The Plaza library hosted the lecture. Woolfolk, as director of public programming, was in charge. The library typically does not have security at such events. In this case, the Jewish Community Foundation proposed to hire private and off-duty police security for Ross. The library agreed — on condition, library officials said, that security not remove anyone from audience without the library’s permission. The event proceeded without incident until Ross took a question from Rothe-Kushel, who asked a long, convoluted question that among other things concerned whether Jewish Americans such as himself should oppose actions by the U.S. and Israel that amount to “state-sponsored terrorism.” The exchange was recorded on video. “When are we going to stand up and be ethical Jews and Americans?” Rothe-Kushel asked. As seen in the video, Rothe-Kushel was still standing at the microphone and speaking quietly when a guard grabbed him and he shouted, “Get your hands off of me right now!” After Woolfolk tried to intervene, officers arrested both men. Woolfolk said he suffered a torn medial collateral ligament in his knee when a police officer kneed him in the leg. Kemper, the library director, said the library paid workers’ compensation for the injury. Kemper had been vocal in defending both Woolfolk and Rothe-Kushel after the arrests. He criticized police and prosecutors for insisting on pressing the case, calling it “prosecutorial misconduct.” “The good news is, justice was done,” Kemper said after the trial. “It was always ridiculous. “A security guy went overboard. Even that is understandable,” he said. “What wasn’t understandable is that the police and the prosecutors went to the mat on this.”
The Kansas City Star
Free-speech case for KC librarian still unfolding BY IAN CUMMINGS icummings@kcstar.com The Kansas City Public Library and a librarian who was arrested last year during a public event are receiving two national awards for defense of free speech. But the same week the awards were announced, city prosecutors filed two new charges against the librarian. The awards and the charges stem from a May 9 incident in which the librarian, Steve Woolfolk, intervened to try to stop the arrest of library patron Jeremy Rothe-Kushel during the question-and-answer part of a talk by Middle East expert and diplomat Dennis Ross at the Plaza library. Kansas City library officials have protested the charges, saying off-duty police and private security wrongly seized Rothe-Kushel, of Lawrence, while he was asking questions. Police and prosecutors have stood by the arrests, saying Rothe-Kushel was disrupting the event and that they removed him. The American Library Association has awarded the Kansas City Library the Paul Howard Award for Courage, given biannually for “unusual courage for the benefit of library programs or services.” Woolfolk, the library’s director of public programming, will receive the Lemony Snicket Prize for Noble Librarians Faced with Adversity, named for the pen name of Daniel Handler, author of the “A Series of Unfortunate Events” books. “I have long relied on librarians to stand up for our essential rights of freedom and expression,” Handler said in a statement about the awards. “Mr. Woolfolk’s commitment and gumption are inspiring to behold, and it is an honor to stand up for him in the form of an ovation.” The awards will be presented during the ALA’s annual conference in Chicago in June. Woolfolk and R. Crosby Kemper III, the library’s executive director, will attend the conference with two board members. They will also collect a third award for community awareness. Kansas City library officials announced the awards Wednesday. Two days earlier, city prosecutors filed the two new charges against Woolfolk: obstruction and assault. The assault charge accuses Woolfolk of repeatedly pushing a detective. Woolfolk had originally been charged last year only with interfering with Rothe-Kushel’s arrest. Rothe-Kushel is charged with trespassing and resisting arrest. Both men are scheduled to go to trial July 21. Kemper said the combination of the awards and the new charges made for “an absurd situation.” “We’re honored by the recognition of Steve and the library,” Kemper said. “We’re thrilled by that, and we think we’re doing a really good job as a library. And one of the things we’re doing really well is events.” As for the continued prosecution of the case, Kemper said, “It doesn’t pass any kind of smell test. … It’s absurd and it’s Dickensian and it’s outrageous.” The addition of new charges nearly a year after the incident especially offended Kemper, he said. “They’re playing games with the law. It’s disgraceful.” Kansas City prosecutor Linda Miller, who took charge of the office earlier this month, said the new charges were added after prosecutors recently reviewed the case. Police have said Rothe-Kushel disrupted the event, which was hosted by the library together with the Truman Library Institute and the Jewish Community Foundation, by persisting in asking questions after the speaker attempted to move on. Among other things, his question concerned whether Jewish Americans such as himself should be more critical of actions by the U.S. and Israel that Rothe-Kushel characterized as “state-sponsored terrorism.” When a private security guard and an off-duty police officer - both hired by the Jewish Community Foundation for the event — grabbed Rothe-Kushel, Woolfolk tried to intervene and officers arrested him as well. Library officials have said they don’t normally have security at their events, but they allowed the Jewish Community Foundation to bring hired security, including off-duty officers. The library had told the co-sponsors that no one should be removed from the event without their permission. In his report, arresting officer Brent Parsons of the Kansas City Police Department describes the event as private. But it was a public event. Police emails show that Parsons made a note in the arrest report indicating an “anti-Jewish bias” in the alleged offense, and that police officials said that note should be removed. Parsons disagreed. Kansas City police have declined to say what decision was ultimately reached. Rothe-Kushel, who is Jewish, said he doesn’t think he did anything wrong, and that he is thankful for Woolfolk’s support. Ian Cummings: 816-234-4633,
@Ian__Cummings
The Kansas City Star
BY IAN CUMMINGS icummings@kcstar.com A man arrested along with a librarian during a public event at a Kansas City library earlier this year says city prosecutors offered him a plea deal on the condition that he release police and private security from civil liability in the incident. The man, library visitor Jeremy Rothe-Kushel, and the librarian, Steve Wool-folk, have refused plea offers, arguing that the arrests violated their First Amendment rights. Both plan to fight their case in city court. A hearing in the case is scheduled for Wednesday. Rothe-Kushel said he was offered a plea deal of 30 hours of community service and no jail time if he signed a document that would keep anyone involved from being sued. Police arrested the men during a May 9 talk by Middle East expert and diplomat Dennis Ross at the Plaza library. Rothe-Kushel, of Lawrence, was seized by off-duty police working with private security as he spoke to Ross during the question-and-answer portion of the talk. Woolfolk, the library’s director of public programming, was arrested when he tried to intervene. Rothe-Kushel faces a city charge of trespassing and resisting arrest. Wool-folk is charged with interfering in Rothe-Kushel’s arrest. Both men said they did nothing wrong and had no interest in any plea that would involve admitting guilt. “First of all, this is not the correct way to discuss civil liability, when I’m still under threat of charges that could put me in jail,” Rothe-Kushel said. “And the information is already out in the public that these charges could be specious.” The head of the city’s library system, R. Crosby Kemper III — backed by the American Library Association — has protested the arrests and charges, saying they cut to the core of the library’s function as a place to exchange ideas freely. But police have stood by the arrests, and city prosecutor Lowell Gard said his office is prepared to go to trial. “If the police say, ‘We’re going to handcuff you,’ you need to not fight,” Gard said. “We don’t want to encourage anyone to resist arrest.” Gard declined to discuss the plea negotiations but said a release from civil liability would not be part of a plea offer written by the city prosecutor’s office. Civil liability could be a part of negotiations between other parties in the case, including the defendants, the police, the library and the Jewish Community Foundation, a sponsor of the event. The Jewish Community Foundation hired the off-duty police and security. The Truman Library Institute also sponsored the May 9 event. If those parties came to an agreement, Gard said, the prosecutor could sign off on dismissing the charges. The Jewish Community Foundation’s interest in the plea negotiation could be explained if it were considered the victim of the trespassing in which Rothe-Kushel was charged, Gard said. But library officials have said the event belonged to the library and that they had instructed the Jewish Community Foundation that its private security was not to remove anyone except in case of imminent danger. Rothe-Kushel said he believed the Jewish Community Foundation sought protection from civil liability to protect against a possible lawsuit. He said he received the plea offer from his attorney after a meeting at the city prosecutor’s office on Aug. 10. The Jewish Community Foundation declined to comment on the case. For Rothe-Kushel, a key question is whether he was disrupting the event and trespassing. Standing right behind him,
in line to ask a question, was Ian Munro, of Kansas City. Munro said he
found Rothe-Kushel’s comments rambling and hard to understand, but didn’t
see him as disruptive.
KC Library
Violated
2016 October 6
The Kansas City Public Library continues to work through the aftermath of an incident near the end of its May 9, 2016, event featuring longtime Middle East envoy Dennis Ross, which resulted in the arrest of two people including a Library manager by off-duty police. The episode at the Library’s Plaza Branch arose from a question to Ross, posed by a local activist during the evening’s question-and-answer session. The reaction by members of an outside security detail, who immediately accosted the questioner, was improper and an infringement on free speech, Library Director Crosby Kemper maintains. And he says the ensuing arrests were unwarranted. “The Library strives to be a place where people of all points of view can feel safe, welcome, and free to express themselves in an appropriate way,” Kemper says. “And so this incident deeply troubles us.” What happened: The off-duty officers were part of a small, private security squad arranged by the Jewish Community Foundation of Greater Kansas City, one of the Library’s partners in the event. That was to supplement standard Library security. The activist, Jeremy Rothe-Kushel, was first to the microphone when Ross’ presentation turned to Q&A, and his question inferred that the U.S. and Israel have engaged in state-sponsored terrorism. Ross responded and, when Rothe-Kushel attempted to follow up, he was grabbed by one of the private security guards and then by others in the private security detail. Steven Woolfolk, the Library’s director of programming and marketing, attempted to intervene, noting that public discourse is accepted and encouraged at a public event held in a public library. Rothe-Kushel was subsequently arrested for trespassing and resisting arrest. Woolfolk was charged with interfering with his arrest. Their cases are pending. Kemper termed the response of private security and police “an egregious violation of First Amendment rights. “The First Amendment’s protection of the rights of free speech and assembly is cherished by all Americans but particularly by libraries and their patrons,” he says. “An overzealous off-duty police officer violated the rights of one of our patrons at Ambassador Ross’ talk in the Library and doubled down by arresting Steve Woolfolk, who was trying to explain the Library’s rules to the officer. “In defense of the freedom of speech, the Library stands fully in support of Steve.” ___________ 2016 October 6 The library incident has a
follow-up in today's Star: {Arrested Kansas City librarian gets support
from national library group}
The first Star report, {Kansas
City library officials defend employee arrested during public event}
Here is another account of
the situation: {Security hired by pro-Israel group arrests questioner at
Dennis Ross speech in Kansas City Public Library} --
I am more likely to respect Dennis Ross than the writer is, but that makes no difference in evaluating the arrests. I certainly distance myself from certain 9/11 theories, but they deserve First Amendment protection. I can understand the desire for security after three Christians were killed on Jewish sites in April, 2014. Despite my own multiple, painful
experiences with slander, lies, and intimidation in Kansas City (beginning
September 16, 2001, about 3:30 pm, and continuing for years until I left
the Interfaith Council, and at least one time thereafter), I could not
have imagined such a public and outrageous display of disrespect for the
First Amendment -- at a public library. We are fortunate to have library
leadership to challenge the misuse of security apparatus and defend Constitutional
rights of citizens and the sacred space of public forums.
THE KANSAS CITY
STAR 161019
Community loss The events that
have taken place recently involving the arrest of a librarian and a visitor
at a talk given in the Kansas City Library is shocking (10-6, A6, “Arrested
librarian gets support from national group”). This is disturbing on several
levels.
Dick
Phalen, Kansas City
Gordon Beaham III, 1932-2016
#160916 Patriotism From 1009 comments, The New York Times designated Vern's as a "Times Pick" and featured it in response to David Brook's column of 2016 September 16, "The Uses of Patriotism" discussing Kaepernick's decision not to stand during the National Anthem. Bombs bursting in air?http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/16/opinion/the-uses-of-patriotism.html?comments#permid=19814351 MORE: "But why not set the whole issue aside by not singing the national anthem at NFL games? "The practice of singing the U.S. anthem at sporting events dates back to the late 1800s and gained ground at Major League Baseball games around the time the United States entered the First World War. Thus not only patriotism, but militarism became connected with the proxy wars of the gladiators on the field." --John Stackhouse
(PhD ‘87) holds the Samuel J. Mikolaski Chair of Religious Studies at Crandall
University in Moncton, Canada. He was a wide receiver for the decidedly
mediocre Widdifield Wildcats Secondary School football team.
Vern's Neo-Baroque Rant http://www.atheos-app.com/ http://psuvanguard.com/atheosapp/ Why does this app apparently view religion in terms of belief? using the modern/Enlightenment concepts of truth and falsity? This seems like evaluating how delicious chef-prepared dish might be solely by whether the food is to be consumed with either a fork or a spoon. Does the app embrace metaphor? is it able to deal with myths as paradigmatic models of sacred reality? Do the app authors understand how perverted the modern (relatively recent) conception of religion is as a separate category? Can you assess truth claims on, say, Beethoven’s C sharp minor Quartet or the Velasquez painting, Las Meninas, or the Christian doctrine of the Trinity or the Buddhist teaching of pratityasamutpada or the Hindu story of the Bhagavad Gita? If the app says that the ghost of Hamlet’s father could not actually exist, does that mean Shakespeare’s play is worthless? What about Don Quixote? Am I wrong to say I saw a beautiful sunset, even after the age of Copernicus? I am all in favor of critical thinking (Dawkins, whose foundation sponsors you, was a great scientist, but his understanding of religion was extraordinarily narrow). Certainly we need more and better-skilled critical thinkers, especially in our political discussions, but to approach religion as if the app as described could be a significant tool by which to apprehend faith is like using a grenade to construct the Alhambra. Please tell me I am significantly misunderstanding the nature, usefulness, and careful design of this product, and please understand how, from the description on this page, I might have come to such a misunderstanding. Vern Barnet
MOVING FORWARD Published 2016 September
11 in the Kansas City Star,
After two years of preparation, all 15 members of the Kansas City Interfaith Council were scheduled to announce its Oct 26-28 "Gifts of Pluralism" conference to the media at Pembroke Hill School. Before leaving home, I turned on the news and then called additional interfaith leaders to meet with us. With a TV monitor in the background replaying scenes of horror, Council members and guests, one by one, A to Z, American Indian to Zoroastrian, spoke urgently, condemning the attacks and working to strengthen our community by building understanding and relationships among us of all faiths. The Council continued its work. Out of the terror of that day, we struggled to make something good. The Gifts of Pluralism conference, with triple the expected participation, produced both local and national fruits of the spirit, some of which continue to grow. Although there can be no compensation
for the losses of 9/11, we have learned to move forward together.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/01/opinion/how-religion-can-lead-to-violence.html I am surprised that Gary Gutting confuses religion with belief and fails to note that classical Judaism and Vedic Hinduism are also "revealed" religions. His historical presentation and logical argument fails because it does not recognize that various faiths at different times emphasize one or more of the "four c's" of religion -- creed, code, cultus, and community. Intolerance most often arises from social rather than theological forces, though they may be expressed or justified in language akin to belief; failing to see the real causes of violence is a critical defect in Gutting's argument.
The Value of Doubt: Why Unanswered Questions, Not Unquestioned Answers, Build Faith a new book by Kansas City's Bill Tammeus 1. If Tammeus wanted me to dispute, agree, challenge, applaud, rethink, and long to be in a group discussing this book, he utterly succeeded. 2. An effulgent fusion of personal stories, spiritual explorations, and profoundly personal questions for every Christian to ponder afresh. 3. You've heard, and asked yourself, these questions before, to a dead end. Here's how to think them forward. --Vern Barnet,
a forty-year fan of Bill Tammeus
Worship elements
for 160710
KCPT 2016 June 3 Why does KCPT cancel important public affairs and news programs like Washington Week in Review? I hate missing KC Week in Review but I can imagine production constains. However, Washington Week was obviously broadcast on other PBS stations. Shame, especially in this important season when you should be helping to providing information for the citizenry. Time for local fundraising at the end of WWIR was provided. This is hardly the first time you have cheated Kansas City of important national broadcasts in favor of fluff.
Prostitution I received this information: Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter posted an op-ed in the Washington Post on May 31, 2016, expressing his disagreement with the human rights and public health organizations that are advocating for the complete legalization of prostitution and sex trade — even the most abusive aspects. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate says he agrees with Amnesty International, UNAIDS and other groups that say that those who sell sex acts should not be arrested or prosecuted — but he cannot support proposals to decriminalize buyers and pimps.
However, in the face of testimony of many professional prostitutes who have praised their work as non-exploitative and helped them advance with their lives, whose incomes would be limited by this proposal, and in consideration of my ignorance about what seems to be a very complicated question, I wonder about his opposition to full legalization and would be interested in what informed folks might say. One thing I am looking for is an explanation of why someone might sell his or her labor in legitimate sex therapy but not in other forms of sex work; it seems classist in favor of the privileged class. Why is engaging a psychiatrist's precious mind for an hour legitimate but engaging a prostitute's precious body necessarily evil? Other cultures do not see the world in this way. In our own country I'd want to know more about Nevada, for example. Of course I'm opposed to all "sex-trafficking" but I distinguish that from truly voluntary prostitution. Religious phenomenology, from ancient times to our own day includes temple or sacred prostitutes, and I would need to know more about how that works before I could come to a complete agreement with Carter.
Our Culture of Clutter, Noise, and Branding No doubt I am unfair to the Human Potential Movement to associate it with those group sessions in the 60s where participants were instructed to write a term of identity or aspiration on their blank tee shirts. Yes, there was a time when tee shirts were blank. Sort of like the silence we never hear anymore. I've heard of selling one's soul to the devil, but now runner Nick Symmonds* auctions some of his skin to T-Mobile. If he wants to do something with his skin, why not donate the space to a charity? Visiting both coasts in ages past, I saw people wearing clothes with the manufacturer's name as part of the design, becoming an expression of the wearer's identity, a practice since invading the Heartland. Now you are known by your brand. Kids have killed for brand-name shoes. Despite Lady Bird Johnson's efforts to reduce billboards in America, we are now financially forced to call public buildings by the corporations who purchase naming rights. We move from advertisements, tweets, interruptions, bullet-points, passcodes, PowerPoint, and multi-tasking all the way to distraction and hell. With the bombast of our politics I rest my case. Plain skin is space. Simple is sumptuous. Silence is sacred. *Kansas City Star, 2016 May 13, page
11A
Education "The object of the educational system, taken as a whole, is not to produce hands for industry or to teach the young how to make a living. It is to produce responsible citizens" --Robert Maynard Hutchins. Implied, I think, is the notion that citizens cannot be resposible ules they know enough of the arts and the physical and social sciences to fully enjoy life participating in community, nation, and global culture and affairs.
http://globallee.blogspot.com/2008/05/remembering-garma-cc-chang-buddhist.html I studied with Chen-Chi Chang at the University of Nebraska (visiting prof from Penn State) around 1965. He has shaped my life. One funny anecdote for those who remember typewriters and typing paper. He began one class session by saying that our assignment for the following session was to write a 20-page paper on "the Void." When he completed his instructions, I reached under my chair where I had a box of typing paper and produced 20 blank sheets of paper which I handed to him and said, "Here, Professor Chang, is my paper on the Void." He ceremonially thumbed through the sheets and when he finished, he said, "Ah, very good, Mr Barnet, and here is your grade" as he made a zero with his finger in the air. The class applauded. I learned to love the Vimalakirti Sutra from him. I still have notes from his lectures. After leaving the Univ of Nebraska, I studied at the Univ of Chicago Divinity School. My 500-page doctoral paper at the affiliated Unitarian Universalist seminary was on the Void. Vern Barnet
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=
Chang, Garma Chen-Chi (1920-1988) An authority on Buddhist philosophy, born in China and educated at Kong-ka Monastery, eastern Tibet. Chang came to the United States after World War II and was a research fellow at the Bollingen Foundation in New York from 1955 onward. At the time of his death, Dr. Chang was Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. He wrote a number of books, including The Practice of Zen (1959), The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa (1962), and The Essential Teachings of the Tibetan Mysticism (1963). He also wrote an important review of the book The Third Eye (1958), by Lop-sang Rampa, published in Tomorrow magazine as part of an expos? of the author. Chang showed that Rampa's knowledge of Buddhism and Tibetan occultism was "inaccurate and superficial" and characterized the book as "interesting and highly imaginative fiction." This review appeared alongside a second article, which noted that "Lopsang Rampa" had been born Cyril Henry Hoskins, son of a British plumber. Sources:
——. Teachings of Tibetan Yoga. New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1963. ——. "Tibetan Phantasies." Tomorrow 6, 2 (Spring 1958): 13-16. Chang, Garma Chen-Chi, ed. The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa. New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1962. Re-print, Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala, 1977.
"Actually, What is Interfaith?" Speaker -- Rabbi Alon Goshen-Gottstein, Founder and Director of the Elijah Interfaith Institute in Jerusalem, Israel Moderator -- Ambassador Allan J Katz, Founder of American Public Square This is not a review of the
evening, which I attended in support of the wonderful efforts of the Faith
Always Wins Foundation, and in memory of those who were murdered by an
anti-Jewish fanatic April 13, 2014 in Overland Park, KS. Rather what follows
is simply my emailed reactions. I post these reactions because good intentions
alone often fail. Programs of informed quality will make the ripples we
need to change the world.
1. The program was disappointing to me. If I had a flicker of interest in interfaith work, our speaker would have pretty much doused the spark. I was hoping an enthusiastic and committed account of his experience and vision. It sounded instead as if he wanted to do an academic analysis, but he did not seem well acquainted with work done in that arena, either. I did have some difficulty hearing, so I may have missed some good stuff. However, I didn't hear bubbling enthusiasm at the reception afterwards. You've been to many more recent "interfaith" experiences than I lately, so I wonder how valuable you might have found the program. I always think if you are going to talk about interfaith, you should do some interfaith. Even though the venue would not have made that easy, a simple exercise or two with audience members pairing up would have made the evening much more lively, given folks a chance to know each other more deeply, and created a context for the speaker's remarks. I hate to see opportunities wasted. 2. I was embarrassed by the program last night. The speaker achieved being both abstract and shallow at the same time. I think [--] was disappointed, too. There was no excitement I could detect at the reception afterwards. If I had a spark of interest in interfaith work before the speech, it would have been pretty well doused by the speech. The speaker failed to draw upon his own experience and clearly was not acquainted, on one hand, with the work of academics (which he seemed to want to be), and on the other, with how to move or motivate or cheer an audience. So whatever you did instead last night was a better use of your time. There were less than 100 people, I think, in that large auditorium. Such a shame to waste the occasion. 3. We all honor those whose lives were taken
two years ago, and want to support the vision and efforts of SevenDays.
But I would not be faithful without saying that I felt last night's program
failed to meet the promise of the vision. . . .
A Non-Lawyer for the Court Many of my friends are lawyers. I admire the legal profession. But why do lawyers possess all the seats of the Supreme Court? The Constition does not specify lawyers for the Court. The Supreme Court should be democracy's temple of justice, not a hothouse where, by acrane arguments, lawyers twist the law to their own ends, too often displayed when folks actually read divided decisions of the Court. Lawyers are not the only ones who can recognize justice. Groups of highly qualified people of diverse backgrounds working together often produce superior outcomes. Therefore I suggest that at least one Supreme Court Justice, the next one, be a non-lawyer smart enough to access and comprehend the history and technicalities of the law, with a heart beating to justice in the body of democracy, trained in some other profession such as medicine, education, social service, government, business, the arts, sports, science, the media, or religion. Kansas City alone has several such polymaths who
would enhance the Court's work, and from the nation's talent pool we could
easily find someone who would make the Constitution blaze anew with the
light of justice for a democratic nation.
RESPONSE TO DONALD TRUMP published in The Kansas City Star
2015 Dec 18
The Muslim tradition has given much to
our civilization, from the Arabic numerals we use everyday to the Kansas
City landmark on the Plaza, Giralda tower. Muslims were part of America
before the United States itself was formed. Muslims have made contributions
to our community in every conceivable way -- in sports, medicine, education,
public safety and the armed forces, business, government, and the arts.
Hateful and ignorant remarks by Donald Trump serve as powerful recruiting
tools for terrorists; he actually plays into the dangerous and mistaken
apocalyptic world vision of ISIS and reinforces their befouled view of
who we are. Kansas Citians embrace our Muslim friends, as we embrace those
of all faiths, who are building a community of mutual support and understanding.
--The Rev Vern Barnet, DMn, minister
emeritus
Center for Religious Experience and Study ("CRES") Ramesh Ponnuru concludes a recent column (Star, Nov 28) by saying that "Islam really is our enemy." Does he view Christian terrorists like the KKK to say Christianity is our enemy? No. Scoundrels, fanatics, and terrorists -- and politicians -- may wrap themselves in the language of faith, but their deeds betray the very faiths they claim. Why would Ponnuru give any credit to what terrorists say when they claim they act in the name of their faiths? Why should he respect what deranged terrorists have to say about religion, rather than our respected fellow Muslim citizens, Muslim authorities here and around the world, and the millions of Muslims world-wide suffering and fleeing from the terrorists? The best antidote to the disease of
terrorism is Islam itself. Ponnuru plays into terrorists' plan by dividing
good people of all faiths among themselves instead of focusing on the evil
itself and its perpetrators.
In The Star's Voices of Faith column September 19, a Christian minister answered the question, "Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God?" by saying that "a non-Trinitarian 'God' describes a false god, leaving mankind with no hope of salvation." Muslims are not Trinitarian. But neither are Jews. What are we to make of many passages of Christian scripture which affirm that the Christian God is the God of the Jews? For example, in Matthew 22:32, Jesus himself makes this claim. In Acts 3:13, Peter makes a similar claim. In Romans 4, Paul justifies Christianity in terms of the God of Abraham, who was not a Trinitarian. James 2:23 says that Abraham was God's "friend." Apparently you can be God's friend and not be a Trinitarian. Other citations would be redundant. Though their understandings of God's nature varies, Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship the same God. Even among Christians, how God is perceived varies greatly. Misunderstanding another's faith can lead to much mischief, but friendships among folks of all faiths can bring surprising blessings. Vern Barnet
submitted as a Letter to the Editor, The KC Star 2015 September 19, published in the Sunday edition, September 27. Here is the original column, to which I object:
In his encyclical, “Laudato Si,” Pope Francis has beautifully and powerfully written about the moral dimensions and dangers of our violation of the environment. The cultural trance that makes us exploit and separate us from the environment, and from one another, deceives us like the devil himself. There are three dimensions in which the sacred is revealed: nature, personhood, and community. Gandhi used a single term “swaraj“ (self-rule) to unite the Asian understanding of managing one’s own personhood with Western-style social urges in the political Indian movement seeking independence from Britain. Now Pope Francis, by addressing the environment, approaches unifying all three dimensions of the sacred and offers us a fresh chance to see the underlying interdependence that is the fundamental character of all that exists. If Francis helps us wake from the cultural trance that has been disastrously deepened by greed and willful ignorance, we may yet escape the doom the signs for which are all around us. Instead we may come closer to sharing and celebrating the miracle of abundant life. The Statement was published
Click for the Vatican site for the document. Click for a Interfaith P?L Study Guide
Statement on Bishop
Finn's Resignation 2015 April 21
Published in The
Kansas City Star 2015 Apr 24
Submission to the KCStar for Lent KCStar Letter about Yoder ? Citygroup (published 2014 Dec 16) Post
toKansasAllsFair about same-sex marriage,
Review of Hair and Together, Country
Joe and the Fish,
KCStar Letter about Teilhard(submitted 2014 June 7) KCStar Letter about Ian G Barbour (puiblished 2014 Feb 3 ) NT Times comment on "Israel’s N.S.A. Scandal" about the US giving Israel unredacted information about individuals' private lives for political, not security, purposes. Statement for the 2014 Gun Violence
Community Forum
Response to KCStar Faith Walk for 2014 Nov
22 about the purpose of "the conjugal act."
|
|
Many Christians are observing Lent. It is a time
of personal and group repentance. Repentance is something we Americans
do not do very well. We sanitize our history and our present practices.
Yet as we condemn extremism and terrorism, we would honor this season more
fully by recounting some of our sins.
|
used by permission, from
Beauty
Will Save the World, p219-220.
For the Common Good
We are Jews, Christians and Muslims. And we are friends. We seek to follow our respective religions faithfully. We do not believe all religions are the same. We recognize the reality of our religious differences. But we are friends. We are devout in our faith and respectful of our friendship. Our faith and friendship need not be mutually exclusive. We recognize that we share common space—the common space of a shared planet. For the sake of the common good we seek common ground. We do not share a common faith, but we share a common humanity. In our different religions we do not practice the same rituals or pray the same prayers. But in our shared humanity we hold to a common dream: Shalom, Salaam, Peace. We hold to the dream that our children may play in peace without fear of violence. And so… We pledge not to hate. We pledge not to dehumanize others. We pledge to do no harm in the name of God. As individuals we do not compromise the truth claims of our respective religions— But we will not use truth claims to fuel hate or justify violence. We will practice our respective faiths: Judaism, Christianity, Islam. But we believe our faith can be practiced in the way of peace— We believe our faith truly practiced need never be at odds with humanitarian ideals. Our religions share a complex and intertwined history— A history of interaction that has too often been tumultuous and bloody. We believe there must be a better way and we seek that better way. The way of peace. We are Jews, Christians and Muslims. And we are friends. We seek common ground for the common good. Shalom, Salaam, Peace. Ahmed El-Sherif
Samuel Nachum Brian Zahnd |
| “Let me not
to the marriage of true minds admit impediments,” begins one of Shakespeare's
most famous sonnets — which he wrote to his young male friend.
Sometimes people say that marriage has always been between one man and one woman who love each other. But there are many contrary examples. Consider Solomon with his 700 wives and 300 concubines. Are we talking political alliances, procreation, property rights, honored servants, companionship, sexual opportunities — or love? Producing offspring was very important to early societies. In the Bible, Onan’s father forced him to have sex with his dead brother’s wife to perpetuate the family line. This custom, the “levirate” marriage, continued into Jesus’ time. Love is fickle, and what society then needed above all was stability. Marriage did not originate in love between partners but as a compact between families or groups. This is why in the Bible, most marriages were arranged by the parents, sometimes when the children were infants, though Isaac was 40 years old when Rebecca was selected for him. Women were like property. But David did not buy King Saul’s daughter; instead he proved his worthiness by presenting Saul with the foreskins of 200 Philistines. In the Christian era, Paul prohibited bishops from having more than one wife (1 Tim. 3:2), but Christians experimented with marriage in many forms. Marriage was not declared a sacrament within the Roman Catholic Church until 1215. Before then, weddings were often held outside the church because they were less about love than about social stability. The late Yale historian John Boswell documented Christian practices through the 18th Century of church unions of men in love. Male couples pledged fidelity for life, joined right hands before the altar, shared a cup of wine, heard biblical passages (such as Psalm 133), and received the priest’s blessing. |
In America, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) of
Utah practiced polygamy until it was outlawed, and some break-away groups
still favor it in practice.
The 19th Century experiment in Oneida, N.Y., led by John Humphrey Noyes, prohibited monogamy. The community practiced complex marriage: every man was the husband of every woman, and every woman was the wife of every man. Exclusive relationships were forbidden because members of the “body of Christ” should love each and all. Laws against blacks and whites marrying continued in the US until 1967. In 1996 the Defense of Marriage Act prohibited federal recognition of same-sex marriage, with the stated purpose of insuring the sanctity of marriage. Did that work, even for politicians? Within a few years of passage politicians violating marriage vows included Bill Clinton, Tom DeLay, Eliot Spitzer, Rudolph Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, David Vitter, John Ensign, Mark Sanford, Robert Livingston, Jim McGreevey, Kwame Kilpatrick, Gavin Newsom, Antonio Villaraigosa, and John Edwards. Some in this list favored the DOMA legislation. Clinton, for example, signed it. Larry Craig (arrested in a men’s restroom) with his wife standing with him, denied he is gay. Pastor Ted Haggard is not in politics. Mark Foley is not married but his solicitation of House pages led to his resignation. Sarah Palin announced her daughter, Bristol, a leader in the abstinence movement, was pregnant during her presidential campaign, and would marry the father, but the father declined to marry the mother of his child. It is hard to see any evidence that DOMA has protected heterosexual marriage. In much of the last 2000 years, weddings had little to do with romance, but we’ve come to expect an affair of the heart. Whether union, marriage or some other word is used to describe the commitment, the idea of two becoming one is both tricky and full of sacred meaning. Most cultures in world history have blessed or at least tolerated same-sex relationships. Consider for example, |
classical
Greek traditions, in which love between spouses was considered decidedly
inferior to love between male friends. Plato’s Symposium makes this
quite clear.
While two men or two woman alone, without surrogates or previous marriage, cannot bring children into a same-sex marriage, they can bring to their children from adoption or an earlier marriage the most important foundation, namely love. Many heterosexual sexual marriages are childless but legal. Marriage, in fact, is both a legal and, for many, a religious institution. While states do have authority to change the civil meaning of marriage (as in permitting divorce and marriage of mixed races, and now in places, same-sex couples, but not yet in Kansas), government cannot tamper with the spiritual meanings of marriage, and religious institutions may always grant restrictions and expand freedoms for marriage as they choose. But the state, unlike religions, must treat each person equally. Two people who declare their love and desire to commit themselves in the sacred relationship must be recognized by the state, whether they are same– or opposite-sex partners. It is sad that religions would discriminate within their own communities, as, for example, women are discriminated against in the Roman Catholic Church by being denied priesthood. But as women are full citizens with every civil right in the eyes of the state, so same-sex couples, regardless of religious customs, must in the eyes of the state, be recognized with the civil right of marriage. As some conservatives have observed, the state actually promote social stability by recognizing and supporting the civil commitment of marriage between same-sex as well as opposite-sex couples. Kansas cannot stop men loving men and women loving women, anymore than it can stop men and women loving each other. So, bigots, get over it. And get on with your lives instead of interfering with people who love each other. Vern Barnet (vern@cres.org)
|
| Hair
has been called the most exciting musical to hit Broadway since Leonard
Bernstein's West Side Story. It is not surprising, then, that RCA
Victor seems unable to keep the record shops supplied with the original
cast album – either of them. For there are two “original cast” recordings,
one (LSO 1143) produced when Hair opened Joseph Papp's Public Theatre
last year, and the second (LSO 1150) from the present incarnation
at the Biltmore. I saw Hair when it was still underground, before
it underwent the changes to appeal to the prurient interests of the over-thirty
audiences which now flock to and applaud a less than honest Broadway production.
So though your record shop is apologetic
about having only the first first recording, grab it and risk disappointing
your friends because you failed to purchase the “unexpurgated” version.
The stodgy New York Times finds the second album superior
to the first; but in fact, the second is heavy-handed, artificial, and
grossly commercial, as only a commercial hippie product can be. It is unfortunate
that James Rado (who with Gerome Ragni wrote the lyrics) replaces Walker
Daniels as Claude in the new production. The title song “Hair,” for example,
is a natural ornament for any
Though the play is billed as an “American tribal love-rock musical,” composer Galt MacDermot has not written much genuine rock; he has mainly substituted guitars for the traditional Broadway orchestra. As a play about war (the Revolutionary, the Civil, the Vietnam), sex (all kinds), civil rights (including miscegenation), drugs, the draft, education, the generation gap, astrology, air and water pollution, Eastern religions, and space travel, Hair is a landmark in our generation’s attempt to escape a manifesto; as music, Hair, by recognizing recent folk and rock developments in popular music, simply legitimizes the use of “rock” in theatre and fails to reach the standard of innovation achieved by, say, Gershwin in Porgy and Bess. The best song is the hymn “Ain't Got No – I got Life” which begins the first album. The male leads sings what they ain't got (and the chorus comments): no pot (busted!),
After an extended and pleasant catalog in this fashion, Mother 1947 asks, “What have you got, 1967, that makes you so damn superior and gives me such a headache?” The inevitable and cleanly optimistic and profoundly religious response: I got life, mother;
laughs, sister;
The honesty, frankness, and openness of the play is joyously captured on the first disk, nowhere better illustrated than in Shelley Plimpton's disarmingly corny “Frank Mills:” “If you see him, tell him that I don't want the two dollars back, just him.” As the radio stations seem intent on
playing original “original cast” album if you want to hear what Hair
is really about.
|
While these
days it's fashionable if not politically obligatory for liberals like myself
to accept anything black, I can now admit that I just don't find much soul
music worth listening to – an opinion kept private until buttressed by
the release of Country Joe and the Fish: Together (Vanguard VSD
79277). The first cut on the disk is “Rock and Soul Music,” a mock tribute
to James Brown. The Fish have “discovered” in soul a great new beat (Bam),
and they play it, once (Bam), twice (Bam Bam), thrice (Bam, Bam, Bam).
This is the best satire on bad popular music since Peter Paul and Mary's
“Dog Blue.”
The cut that has been most aired is “The Harlem Song,” a commercial, much more successful as music and comment than the LSD advertisement in the first Fish album. David Cohen's spoken introduction is in flawless travelogue diction. He says: Glorious, breath-taking, spectacular! Relax in the grandeur of America's yesteryear – Harlem, land of enchanting contrasts, where the romantic past touches the hands of the exciting present. First, the pleasure of being received with warmth and genuine hospitality, the easy adjustment to the comfort and style of superb meals, exotic beverages, colorful entertainment, and dynamite action. The music is in a pleasant Hawaiian-country style, broken with an interlude of conversation on the street, itself perfect in stereotypic dialect. “I was havin' a good meal of wat'rmel'n and hom'ly grits... “ The musical phrasing of “Harlem Song” is immaculate, as if to contrast with the mess suggested at the end of the ad: “If you can't go to Harlem, maybe you'll be lucky and Harlem will come to you.” The “Good Guys-Bad Guys Cheer” illustrates the futility of the good-bad guy polarity, and the consequent confusion that accompanies insistent and persistent side-taking. The “Cheer” leads into “The Streets of Your Town” (New York), in which the striking phrase, “The subway is not the underground” carries more weight the first time you hear the song than on repeated playings. The final cut, “An Untitled Protest,” is a rock recitative. The subject is Vietnam, and perhaps more effective in its quiet way than the earlier Fish “I-Feel-Like-I'm Fixin'-To-Die Rag.” The new protest is conceived in personal rather than political terms; and, as in the quatrain below, the satire is not raucous but sad, Superheros fill the skies,
The new Fish record is the group's most successful album as social comment, but it falls short of the high achievement in the earlier “Electric Music for the Mind and Body” in purely musical terms. The new record has no music that can compare with “Flying High” or “Lorraine.” Instead, the emphasis on the novelty song rock of which the Fish are capable. “Waltzing in the Moonlight,” for instance, is a tortured flamenco with dull chord progressions and a bromidic use of the Spanish style. One vocalist’s “Away Bounce My Bubbles” is often and indefensibly off-pitch. The electronic tricks in “Susan” are annoying. Some of the organ playing in this album is good, however, especial in “Bright Suburban Mr. And Mrs. Clean Machine,” where, before we get to the third floor, “underwear, Barbie dolls, war toys, plastic artificial flowers . . ,” we hear the gospel tabernacle sound – it never sounded as good! The most interesting song musically is “Catacean,” which has several distinguished solos. But the song is just beginning when it ends, “Open the door and love walks in; close the door and you're alone again.” Mr. Barnet is a graduate student at the Meadville
Theological School.
|
| LETTER to The Kansas City Star, 2014 June
7
Thank you for the story about the Jesuit scientist and theologian, ("Tough Talk," June 7). As a religion-hater finishing high school, I first heard about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in 1960 when his book, The Phenomenon of Man, became available in English. Teilhard's reconciliation of science and religion led me into the ministry and ultimately into interfaith work. The separate categories of science and religion are arbitrary historical accidents. To see the world and ourselves whole requires transcending the confines of ordinary human language which at best can only point to the Holy. The world’s religions typically find the Holy in the realms of nature (primal religions), selfhood (Asian faiths), and the history of covenanted community (monotheistic traditions). Teilhard's vision, often stretching the language of science toward the divine, implies the congruence of these three realms. The interfaith promise is nothing less than the restoration of nature, the recovery of the whole self, and the life of a community of love. To move beyond our overwhelmingly fragmented, oppressive, and exploitive secularism, we must see that these three realms are one, that our environmental, personal, and social disorders can be healed by the same unitive vision that enthralled Teilhard. Vern Barnet
Kansas City, MO |
| The Good Book
Exposes Our Vulnerabilities — As It Should By Elissa Strauss
You know what could use a trigger warning? The bible. If any book merits a note of caution it is the one that is colloquially referred to as good. In the recent debate over whether colleges should warn students of material that deals with potentially post-traumatic stress syndrome inducing topics like war, sexual violence, racism, and anti-Semitism, I couldn’t help but think about how the raw and vulgar bible has sat warning-less for centuries. Students at the University of California Santa Barbara and Oberlin College believe novels like Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” (for racial violence) and “The Great Gatsby” (for misogynistic violence) should be presented with a warning label, all the while the world’s most popular book, easily found at safe-seeming places like churches, synagogues and hotel rooms, is brimming with much worse. The bible is a book without heroes or hagiography; there’s hardly a character who fails to misstep. Instead we get war, slavery, rape, deceit, plagues, smiting, apocalypses and, in some ways the most threatening of them all: soul-crushing doubt in the Almighty. And yet, historically speaking, how many soldiers, victims of sexual assault and believers have found comfort in its words? For many of us today the bible is the stuff of myth or tribal tales, but in previous generations many took it as God’s word. Imagine the horror of reading about not just people but also God’s capacity for violence while also believing that God was the author. So why didn’t the architects of the bible (you might believe it is God, I believe it was various people over time) try to do some damage control? If not by way of slapping a warning on the cover, at least in the editing of the text? Thank God they didn’t. The bible is a raw, sometimes bleeding text, pulsing with fear and bitterness and the crumbling of will in the face of temptation. I believe that this very rawness is responsible for its endurance. Because what is raw is also tender, and it is in this tender place where real transformation happens. The bible does not shy away from our vulnerabilities, nor does it seek to accommodate them. Instead, when read with an honest mind (which is, regrettably, not a universal phenomenon), it exposes us to them, and ultimately ourselves. It is this intrinsically unapologetic nature of
the text, its refusal to soothe or conceal, which not so long ago took
me by great surprise and ultimately drew me in.
|
Until five years ago, I
had never read the bible and knew of it only through the second-hand sanitized
versions I learned at Hebrew school or from watching Disney movies. If
I hadn’t been invited to be an artist fellow at LABA, a laboratory for
Jewish culture which hosts a non-religious house of study, I am not sure
I would have ever gotten around to it. So entranced I became with the unsparing
nature of the text on human behavior, I eventually became co-director of
the house of study.
Every year as new fellows come study with us, many of whom who have also never read the text, I see them go through the same experience of being caught off guard and shaken up by the piercing directness of the bible. They are triggered, and it is from that place that they are inspired to create. I lack the vitriol some feel against those who are trying to make trigger warnings happen. Those students are well-meaning and want to protect the people among them who have experienced trauma. But the question is, what are they really protecting them from? If it’s from reading something that might take them outside their comfort zone, that might cause more harm than good. (With exception, of course, of serious cases of PTSD.) As Los Angeles Times’ Megan Daum wrote in her column on the topic, we are already self-censoring enough: “Liberals stay away from Fox News. Conservatives shield themselves from MSNBC. We choose to live in particular neighborhoods or regions in part because we want neighbors who share our values. We rant away on social media, but we’re usually just talking to people who already agree with us. We call that an echo chamber, but isn’t it also a way of living inside one big trigger warning?” If the ban is an attempt to shield some individuals from others’ insensitive comments, well this is what a good professor should help out with through the facilitation of nuanced conversation that makes everyone uncomfortable and not just those with a troubled personal connection. When everyone is vulnerable, everyone grows, through the development of empathy for others or a reckoning with their past. This is how we prepare students for a big bad world filled with wounded people and devoid of trigger-warnings. The bible has long-served a similar role. Its nakedness pushes those of us who study it to strip down too, and contemplate just what is at stake for ourselves and those around us. It does not shy away from the dark matter of life, and so we should not shy away from it or any other of the good books that do the same, because reading them together is how we grow. Elissa Strauss is a contributing editor to the Forward.
Read more: http://forward.com/
In response, Martin E Marty writes
Religious scholars . . . know that religious texts treat the extremes of existence, of life and death matters, of love and hate, care and brutality, and not only do they not shy away from discussing them but that they can also promote depth of understanding, care, solace, and healing. The human story gives unlimited illustrations of these. |
| LETTER to The Kansas City Star
published 2014 Feb 3 Are science and religion really in conflict, or do they support each other? No person has explored this question with greater skill than Ian G. Barbour who died late last year at the age of 90. His books, and especially Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues, comprehensively examine issues such as astronomy, evolution, quantum mechanics and human nature. He took a doctorate in physics from the University of Chicago and an advanced theological degree from Yale. In 1999, he won the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, often compared to the Nobel Peace Prize. The year Barbour’s Issues in Science and Religion was published, I began working my way through graduate theological studies at the University of Chicago by running errands for scientists there, and the awe I felt from the interplay of these two fields leads me to write this tribute to Barbour. Folks with inadequate backgrounds in science and religion (that is, most of us) can penetrate the mysteries of science and faith a little more deeply because of Barbour’s work. Vern Barnet
Kansas City, MO |
|
CRES highlights several sections Vatican City, 6 June 2015 (VIS) - “Today’s meeting is a sign of our shared desire for fraternity and peace; it is a testimony to the friendship and cooperation that has been developing over the years and which you already experience daily. To be present here today is already a 'message' of that dialogue which everyone seeks and strives for”, said Pope Francis to the participants in the ecumenical and interreligious meeting held in the Franciscan international study centre of Sarajevo. The leaders of the Muslim, Orthodox, Catholic and Jewish communities of Bosnia and Herzegovina greeted the Holy Father, who recalled one of the fruits of this desire for encounter and reconciliation – the establishment in 1997 of a local Council for Interreligious Dialogue, bringing together Muslims, Christians and Jews – and congratulated them on their work in promoting dialogue, coordinating common initiatives and developing relations with State authorities. “Your work in this region is immensely important, particularly in Sarajevo, which stands as the crossroads of peoples and cultures”, he said. “Here, on the one hand, diversity constitutes a great resource which has contributed to the social, cultural and spiritual development of this region, while, on the other, it has also been the cause of painful rifts and bloody wars. It is not by chance that the birth of the Council for Interreligious Dialogue and other valuable initiatives in the area of interreligious and ecumenical work came about at the end of the war, in response to the need for reconciliation and rebuilding a society torn apart by conflict. Interreligious dialogue here, as in every part of the world, is an indispensable condition for peace, and for this reason is a duty for all believers”. Francis underlined that interreligious dialogue, before being a discussion of the main themes of faith, is a “conversation about human existence”. “This conversation shares the experiences of daily life in all its concreteness, with its joys and sufferings, its struggles and hopes; it takes on shared responsibilities; it plans a better future for all. We learn to live together, respecting each other’s differences freely; we know and accept one another’s identity. Through dialogue, a spirit of fraternity is recognised and developed, which unites and favours the promotion of moral values, justice, freedom and peace. Dialogue is a school of humanity and a builder of unity, which helps to build a society founded on tolerance and mutual respect”. For this reason, “interreligious dialogue cannot be limited merely to the few, to leaders of religious communities, but must also extend as far as possible to all believers, engaging the different sectors of civil society. Particular attention must be paid to young men and women who are called to build the future of this country. It is always worth remembering, however, that for dialogue to be authentic and effective, it presupposes a solid identity: without an established identity, dialogue is of no use or even harmful. I say this with the young in mind, but it applies to everyone. “I sincerely appreciate all that you have managed to accomplish up to this point and I encourage each of you in your efforts for the cause of peace of which you, as religious leaders, are the first guardians here in Bosnia and Herzegovina. I assure you that the Catholic Church will continue to offer her full support and willingness to help”, the Pope emphasised. “We are all aware that there is a long way yet to go. Let us not be discouraged, however, by the difficulties, but rather continue with perseverance along the way of forgiveness and reconciliation. While we seek to recall the past with honesty, thereby learning the lessons of history, we must also avoid lamentation and recrimination, letting ourselves instead be purified by God Who gives us the present and the future: He is our future, He is the ultimate source of peace. “This city, which in the recent past sadly became a symbol of war and destruction, this Jerusalem of Europe, today, with its variety of peoples, cultures and religions, can become again a sign of unity, a place in which diversity does not represent a threat but rather a resource, an opportunity to grow together. In a world unfortunately torn by conflicts, this land can become a message: attesting that it is possible to live together side by side, in diversity but rooted in a common humanity, building together a future of peace and brotherhood. You can live life being a peacemaker!”. Following his discourse, and before asking all those present to pray for him and assuring them of his prayers, Pope Francis recited the following prayer “to the Eternal, One and True Living God, to the Merciful God”: “Almighty and eternal God,
We, the descendants of Abraham according to our
faith in You, the one God,
We pray to You, O Father,
May each of our thoughts, words and actions
|
| Why
Israel Lies
By Chris Hedges All governments lie, as I.F. Stone pointed out, including Israel and Hamas. But Israel engages in the kinds of jaw-dropping lies that characterize despotic and totalitarian regimes. It does not deform the truth; it inverts it. It routinely paints a picture for the outside world that is diametrically opposed to reality. And all of us reporters who have covered the occupied territories have run into Israel’s Alice-in-Wonderland narratives, which we dutifully insert into our stories—required under the rules of American journalism—although we know they are untrue. I saw small boys baited and killed by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza refugee camp of Khan Younis. The soldiers swore at the boys in Arabic over the loudspeakers of their armored jeep. The boys, about 10 years old, then threw stones at an Israeli vehicle and the soldiers opened fire, killing some, wounding others. I was present more than once as Israeli troops drew out and shot Palestinian children in this way. Such incidents, in the Israeli lexicon, become children caught in crossfire. I was in Gaza when F-16 attack jets dropped 1,000-pound iron fragmentation bombs on overcrowded hovels in Gaza City. I saw the corpses of the victims, including children. This became a surgical strike on a bomb-making factory. I have watched Israel demolish homes and entire apartment blocks to create wide buffer zones between the Palestinians and the Israeli troops that ring Gaza. I have interviewed the destitute and homeless families, some camped out in crude shelters erected in the rubble. The destruction becomes the demolition of the homes of terrorists. I have stood in the remains of schools—Israel struck two United Nations schools in the last six days, causing at least 10 fatalities at one in Rafah on Sunday and at least 19 at one in the Jebaliya refugee camp Wednesday—as well as medical clinics and mosques. I have heard Israel claim that errant rockets or mortar fire from the Palestinians caused these and other deaths, or that the attacked spots were being used as arms depots or launching sites. I, along with every other reporter I know who has worked in Gaza, have never seen any evidence that Hamas uses civilians as “human shields.” There is a perverted logic to Israel’s repeated use of the Big Lie—Gro?e L?ge—the lie favored by tyrants from Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin to Saddam Hussein. The Big Lie feeds the two reactions Israel seeks to elicit—racism among its supporters and terror among its victims. By painting a picture of an army that never attacks civilians, that indeed goes out of its way to protect them, the Big Lie says Israelis are civilized and humane, and their Palestinian opponents are inhuman monsters. The Big Lie serves the idea that the slaughter in Gaza is a clash of civilizations, a war between democracy, decency and honor on one side and Islamic barbarism on the other. And in the uncommon cases when news of atrocities penetrates to the wider public, Israel blames the destruction and casualties on Hamas. |
George Orwell in his novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” called this form of propaganda doublethink. Doublethink uses “logic against logic” and “repudiate[s] morality while laying claim to it.” The Big Lie does not allow for the nuances and contradictions that can plague conscience. It is a state-orchestrated response to the dilemma of cognitive dissonance. The Big Lie permits no gray zones. The world is black and white, good and evil, righteous and unrighteous. The Big Lie allows believers to take comfort—a comfort they are desperately seeking—in their own moral superiority at the very moment they have abrogated all morality. The Big Lie, as the father of American public relations, Edward Bernays, wrote, is limited only by the propagandist’s capacity to fathom and harness the undercurrents of individual and mass psychology. And since most supporters of Israel do not have a desire to know the truth, a truth that would force them to examine their own racism and self-delusions about Zionist and Western moral superiority, like packs of famished dogs they lap up the lies fed to them by the Israeli government. The Big Lie always finds fertile soil in what Bernays called the “logic-proof compartment of dogmatic adherence.” All effective propaganda, Bernays wrote, targets and builds upon these irrational “psychological habits.” This is the world Franz Kafka envisioned, a world where the irrational becomes rational. It is one where, as Gustave Le Bon noted in “The Crowd: A Study of the Public Mind,” those who supply the masses with the illusions they crave become their master, and “whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.” This irrationality explains why the reaction of Israeli supporters to those who have the courage to speak the truth—Uri Avnery, Max Blumenthal, Noam Chomsky, Jonathan Cook, Norman Finkelstein, Amira Hass, Gideon Levy, Ilan Papp?, Henry Siegman and Philip Weiss—is so rabid. That so many of these voices are Jewish, and therefore have more credibility than non-Jews who are among Israel’s cheerleaders, only ratchets up the level of hate. But the Big Lie is also consciously designed to send a chilling message to Gaza’s Palestinians, who have lost large numbers of their dwellings, clinics, mosques, and power, water and sewage facilities, along with schools and hospitals, who have suffered some 1,650 deaths since this assault began—most of the victims women and children—and who have seen 400,000 people displaced from their homes. The Big Lie makes it clear to the Palestinians that Israel will continue to wage a campaign of state terror and will never admit its atrocities or its intentions. The vast disparity between what Israel says and what Israel does tells the Palestinians that there is no hope. Israel will do and say whatever it wants. International law, like the truth, will always be irrelevant. There will never, the Palestinians understand from the Big Lie, be an acknowledgement of reality by the Israeli leadership. |
The Israel Defense Forces
website is replete with this black propaganda. “Hamas exploits the IDF’s
sensitivity towards protecting civilian structures, particularly holy sites,
by hiding command centers, weapons caches and tunnel entrances in mosques,”
the IDF site reads. “In Hamas’ world, hospitals are command centers, ambulances
are transport vehicles, and medics are human shields,” the site insists.
“... [Israeli] officers are tasked with an enormous responsibility: to protect Palestinian civilians on the ground, no matter how difficult that may be,” the site assures its viewers. And the IDF site provides this quote from a drone operator identified as Lt. Or. “I have personally seen rockets fired at Israel from hospitals and schools, but we couldn’t strike back because of civilians nearby. In one instance, we acquired a target but we saw that there were children in the area. We waited around, and when they didn’t leave we were forced to abort a strike on an important target.” Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, in a Big Lie of his own, said last month at a conference of Christians United for Israel that the Israeli army should be given the “Nobel Peace Prize … a Nobel Peace Prize for fighting with unimaginable restraint.” The Big Lie destroys any possibility of history and therefore any hope for a dialogue between antagonistic parties that can be grounded in truth and reality. While, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, the ancient and modern sophists sought to win an argument at the expense of the truth, those who wield the Big Lie “want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality.” The old sophists, she said, “destroyed the dignity of human thought.” Those who resort to the Big Lie “destroy the dignity of human action.” The result, Arendt warned, is that “history itself is destroyed, and its comprehensibility.” And when facts no longer matter, when there is no shared history grounded in the truth, when people foolishly believe their own lies, there can be no useful exchange of information. The Big Lie, used like a bludgeon by Israel, as perhaps it is designed to be, ultimately reduces all problems in the world to the brutish language of violence. And when oppressed people are addressed only through violence they will answer only through violence. This article was published at NationofChange at: http://www.nationofchange.org/why-israel-lies-1407246992. All rights are reserved. I do not want to believe what Hedges has written. But over and over, throughout the years, otherwise decent people here in Kansas City have lied to protect Israel even when the matters are local and only tangentially related to Israel. Many of these are documented and some in local print. So my personal knowledge and intimate experience require me to at least consider what Hedges has written, even as I detest the violence of Hamas. It is difficult to understand how Israel can continue to build settlements against international law and oppress those it occupies while claiming it wants peace. Since Israel (through AIPAC) has purchased the Congress, European govenments and the international community are the best hopes for a more balanced understanding of the requirements of justice, |
| NYTimes 2014 Aug 24
SundayReview | OPINION Israel’s Move to the Right Challenges Diaspora
Jews
LONDON — Liberal Zionists are at a crossroads. The original tradition of combining Zionism and liberalism — which meant ending the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, supporting a Palestinian state as well as a Jewish state with a permanent Jewish majority, and standing behind Israel when it was threatened — was well intentioned. But everything liberal Zionists stand for is now in doubt. The decision of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to launch a military campaign against Hamas in Gaza has cost the lives, to date, of 64 soldiers and three civilians on the Israeli side, and nearly 2,000 Palestinians, the majority of whom were civilians. “Never do liberal Zionists feel more torn than when Israel is at war,” wrote Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian’s opinion editor and a leading British liberal Zionist, for The New York Review of Books last month. He’s not alone. Columnists like Jonathan Chait, Roger Cohen and Thomas L. Friedman have all riffed in recent weeks on the theme that what Israel is doing can’t be reconciled with their humanism. But it’s not just Gaza, and the latest episode of “shock and awe” militarism. The romantic Zionist ideal, to which Jewish liberals — and I was one, once — subscribed for so many decades, has been tarnished by the reality of modern Israel. The attacks on freedom of speech and human rights organizations in Israel, the land-grabbing settler movement, a growing strain of anti-Arab and anti-immigrant racism, extremist politics, and a powerful, intolerant religious right — this mixture has pushed liberal Zionism to the brink. In the United States, trenchant and incisive criticism of Israeli policies by commentators like Peter Beinart, one of liberal Zionism’s most articulate and prolific voices, is now common. But the critics go only so far — not least to avoid giving succor to anti-Semites, who use the crisis as cover for openly expressing hatred of Jews. In the past, liberal Zionists in the Diaspora found natural allies among the left-wing and secular-liberal parties in Israel, like Labor, Meretz and Shinui. But Israel’s political left is now comatose. Beaten by Menachem Begin in the 1977 national elections, it briefly revived with Yitzhak Rabin and the hopes engendered by the 1993 Oslo Accords. But having clung to the Oslo process long past its sell-by date, the parliamentary left in Israel has become insignificant. Diaspora Jewish politics has also changed. In the 1960s, when I was an enthusiastic young Zionist in England planning to settle on a kibbutz in Israel, some organizations had names virtually identical to Israeli political parties. This identification lasted only as long as the institutions that prevailed in Israel seemed to Diaspora Jews to reflect a liberal Zionist viewpoint. Today, the dominant Diaspora organizations, like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League, as well as a raft of largely self-appointed community leaders, have swung to the right, making unquestioning solidarity with Israel the touchstone of Jewish identity — even though majority Jewish opinion is by no means hawkish. Though squeezed by a more vociferous and entrenched right, liberal Zionists have not given up without a fight. They found ways of pushing back, insisting that their two-state Zionism held out the only hope for an end to the conflict and setting up organizations to promote their outlook. J Street in America and Yachad in Britain, founded in 2008 and 2011 respectively, describe themselves as “pro-Israel and pro-peace” and have attracted significant numbers of people who seek a more critical engagement with Israel. I became an Israeli citizen in 1970, and I am still one today. I worked in the Jewish community in research and philanthropic capacities for 30 years, serving the interests of Jews worldwide. But in the 1980s, I began to rethink my relationship with Israel and Zionism. As recently as 2007, while directing the London-based Institute for Jewish Policy Research, an independent think tank, I still thought that liberal Zionism had a role to play. I believed that by encouraging Diaspora Jews to express reservations about Israeli policy in public, liberal Zionism could influence the Israeli government to change its policies toward the Palestinians. I still understood its dream of Israel as a moral and just cause, but I judged it anachronistic. The only Zionism of any consequence today is xenophobic and exclusionary, a Jewish ethno-nationalism inspired by religious messianism. It is carrying out an open-ended project of national self-realization to be achieved through colonization and purification of the tribe. This mind-set blocks any chance Israel might have to become a full-fledged liberal-democratic state, and offers the Palestinians no path to national self-determination, no justice for their expulsion in 1948, nor for the occupation and the denial of their rights. I came to see the notion that liberal Zionism might reverse, or even just restrain, this nationalist juggernaut as fanciful. I used my position at the think tank to raise questions about Israel’s political path and to initiate a community-wide debate about these issues. Na?ve? Probably. I was vilified by the right-wing Jewish establishment, labeled a “self-hating Jew” and faced public calls for me to be sacked. This just confirmed what I already knew about the myopia of Jewish leadership and the intolerance of many British Zionist activists. Today, neither the destruction wreaked in Gaza nor the disgraceful antics of the anti-democratic forces that are setting Israel’s political agenda have produced a decisive shift in Jewish Diaspora opinion. Beleaguered liberal Zionists still struggle to reconcile their liberalism with their Zionism, but they are increasingly under pressure from Jewish dissenters on the left, like Jewish Voice for Peace, Jews for Justice for Palestinians and Independent Jewish Voices. Along with many experts, most dissenting groups have long thought that the two-state solution was dead. The collapse of the peace talks being brokered by the American secretary of state, John Kerry, came as no surprise. Then, on July 11, Mr. Netanyahu definitively rejected any possibility of establishing an independent Palestinian state. The Gaza conflict meant, he said, that “there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan” (meaning the West Bank). Liberal Zionists must now face the reality that the dissenters have recognized for years: A de facto single state already exists; in it, rights for Jews are guaranteed while rights for Palestinians are curtailed. Since liberal Zionists can’t countenance anything but two states, this situation leaves them high and dry. Liberal Zionists believe that Jewish criticism of Israeli policies is unacceptable without love of Israel. They embrace Israel as the Jewish state. For it to remain so, they insist it must have a Jewish majority in perpetuity. Yet to achieve this inevitably implies policies of exclusion and discrimination. They’re convinced that Israel can be both Jewish and democratic, but they fail to explain how to reconcile God’s supreme authority with the sovereign power of the people. Meanwhile, the self-appointed arbiters of what’s Jewish in the Jewish state — the extreme religious Zionists and the strictly Orthodox, aided and abetted by Jewish racists in the Knesset like Ayelet Shaked, a Jewish Home Party member who recently called for the mothers of Palestinian “snakes” to be killed — are trashing democracy more and more each day. Particularly shocking are the mass arrests — nearly 500 since the beginning of July — of Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel for peacefully protesting, and the sanctions against Arab students at universities for posting pro-Gaza messages on social media. Pushed to the political margins in Israel and increasingly irrelevant in the Diaspora, liberal Zionism not only lacks agency; worse, it provides cover for the supremacist Zionism dominant in Israel today. Liberal Zionists have become an obstacle to the emergence of a Diaspora Jewish movement that could actually be an agent of change. The dissenting left doesn’t have all the answers, but it has the principles upon which solutions must be based. Both liberal Zionism and the left accept the established historical record: Jews forced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes to make way for the establishment of a Jewish state. But the liberals have concluded that it was an acceptable price others had to pay for the state. The left accepts that an egregious injustice was done. The indivisibility of human, civil and political rights has to take precedence over the dictates of religion and political ideology, in order not to deny either Palestinians or Jews the right to national self-determination. The result, otherwise, will be perpetual conflict. In the repressive one-state reality of today’s Israel, which Mr. Netanyahu clearly wishes to make permanent, we need a joint Israeli-Palestinian movement to attain those rights and the full equality they imply. Only such a movement can lay the groundwork for the necessary compromises that will allow the two peoples’ national cultures to flourish. This aspiration is incompatible with liberal Zionism, and some liberal Zionists appear close to this conclusion, too. As Mr. Freedland put it, liberal Zionists “will have to decide which of their political identities matters more, whether they are first a liberal or first a Zionist.” They should know that Israel is not Judaism. Jewish history did not culminate in the creation of the state of Israel. Regrettably, there is a dearth of Jewish leaders telling Diaspora Jews these truths. The liberal Zionist intelligentsia should embrace this challenge, acknowledge the demise of their brand and use their formidable explanatory skills to build support for a movement to achieve equal rights and self-determination for all in Israel-Palestine. Antony Lerman, a former director of the Institute
for Jewish Policy Research, is the author of “The Making and Unmaking of
a Zionist.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/23/opinion/sunday/
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| The Opinion Pages | OP-ED COLUMNIST
A War of Choice in Gaza
LONDON — Another round of violence is over in the Holy Land. More than 2,100 Palestinians, most of them civilians and many of them children, have been killed. More than 70 Israelis are dead. The grass, in that appalling Israeli metaphor, has been mown (and will now start growing again). Hamas, through its resistance, has burnished its reputation among Palestinians. Israel is angrier. Nobody is better off. Periodic eruptions are intrinsic to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategy of maintaining the status quo of rule over millions of Palestinians, expansion of West Bank settlements and maneuver to deflect American mediation. Oppressed people will rise up. Israel’s anemic embrace of a two-state objective is the best possible cover for the evisceration of that aim. Still, the question arises: Was this mini-war necessary? I think not. Certainly it was not in Israel’s strategic interest. Much mystery continues to shroud its genesis, the abduction on June 12 of three Israeli youths near Hebron and their murder, now attributed to a local Palestinian clan including Hamas operatives who acted without the knowledge or direction of the Hamas leadership. (There has been no major investigative piece in the American press on the incident, a troubling omission.) But enough detail has emerged to make clear that
Netanyahu leapt on “unequivocal proof”
Assaf Sharon of Tel Aviv University, the academic director of a liberal think tank in Jerusalem, has a powerful piece in The New York Review of Books. It makes the important point that Hamas was beleaguered before the violence, isolated by the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the rise of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. This weakness lay behind the reconciliation with Abbas. Netanyahu might have used this development to extend Abbas’s authority into a more open Gaza at the expense of Hamas, the very objective now apparently sought after so much needless loss of life. For more than two weeks after the abduction, persuasive
evidence that the teenagers were dead was kept from the Israeli public.
A hugely emotional return-our-boys campaign was pursued while the recording
of a phone call from one of those boys to the police in the immediate aftermath
of the kidnapping was not divulged. In it, shots and cries of pain could
be heard. As Shlomi Eldar wrote,
The effect of this concealment, whatever its justification,
was to whip up an Israeli frenzy. This was the context in which a Palestinian
teenager was killed by Israeli extremists. It was also the context of the
drift to war: air campaign, Hamas rockets and tunnel raids, Israeli ground
invasion. Drift is the operative word. Israel’s purpose was shifting. At
different moments it included “zero rockets,” demilitarizing Gaza and destroying
the tunnels. “Lacking clear aims, Israel was dragged, by its own actions,
into a confrontation it did not seek and did not control,” Sharon writes.
The only certainty now is that this will happen again unless the situation in Gaza changes. That in turn necessitates Palestinian unity and renunciation of violence. It also hinges on a change in the Israeli calculus that settlement extension, a divided Palestinian movement, and vacuous blah-blah on a two-state peace are in its interest, whatever the intermittent cost in blood. Two other recent pieces are essential reading in
the aftermath of the fighting. The first is Connie Bruck’s “Friends of
Israel”
Finally, read Yehuda Shaul
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| Israel’s
N.S.A. Scandal
COMMENT on the NY Times story about the US giving Israel unredacted information about individuals' private lives for political, not security, purposes -- Although I have many Jewish friends and have always
supported the existence of the state of Israel, I have also sought justice
for Palestinians. At one point, a leader in the Jewish community in line
with the Israeli government here in Kansas City tried to damage my relationships
with several prominent Muslims by intimating that I am homosexual. (The
tactic backfired.) The lengths Israeli operatives will go to here on a
relatively unimportant person (I merely founded the Greater Kansas City
Interfaith Council), makes Bamford's report credible to me.
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Gun Violence Community Forum describing CRES CRES --the Center for Religious Experience and Study, founded in 1982, is a Kansas City area institute promoting interfaith understanding. In 1989, we created the Interfaith Council as one of our many programs. Our work has been recognized by Harvard University’s Pluralism Project, a half-hour CBS-TV special, and numerous awards. By using the wisdom from the world’s primal, Asian, and monotheistic religious traditions, CRES seeks to reverse the endangered environment, the violation of personhood, and the broken community so that we may be restored with nature, the self made whole, community joined in covenant, and the sacred found afresh. We favor sensible regulation of guns and ammunition to reduce violence and accidents which destroy lives and damage the social fabric. Our website is www.cres.org. |
| The
Kansas City Star
2014/Nov/22
FAITH AND REASON,
Pope John Paul
II once wrote that “faith and reason are like two wings on which the human
spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.”
Michael Hayes
may be reached at faith@kcstar.com
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Dear Mr Hayes--
Thank you for writing well for The Star. In reading your column for today, I wondered if you were curious about how others might see the "natural result of the conjugal act." Seeing this differently might lead to a different conclusion about whether "artificial birth control is contrary to the natural result of the conjugal act." If you are curious, here is one of many possible
different ways of looking at sex:
The natural result of the conjugal act is pleasure.But, frankly, I wonder if we are looking too narrowly when we think biologically. What about spiritually? Perhaps the "natural result of the conjugal act" is an emotional and spiritual bonding between partners. This might be called Love. Scripture says, "God is Love." One way of looking at the "conjugal act" is spiritually, and the expression and deepening of love through the divine gift of sexuality might be the chief "natural result of the conjugal act."
Sincerely,
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| http://www.salon.com/2014/11/23
SUNDAY, NOV 23, 2014 05:59 AM CST Karen Armstrong on Sam Harris and Bill Maher: “It fills me with despair, because this is the sort of talk that led to the concentration camps” Blaming religion for violence, says Karen Armstrong, allows us to dismiss the violence we've exported worldwide MICHAEL SCHULSON
Karen Armstrong has written histories of Buddhism
and Islam. She has written a history of myth. She has written a history
of God. Born in Britain, Armstrong studied English at Oxford, spent seven
years as a Catholic nun, and then, after leaving the convent, took a brief
detour toward hard-line atheism. During that period, she produced writing
that, as she later described it, “tended to the Dawkinsesque.”
S: Over the course of your career, you’ve developed something of a reputation as an apologist for religion. Is that a fair characterization? If so, why do you think faith needs defenders? A: I don’t like the term “apologist.” The word “apologia” in Latin meant giving a rational explanation for something, not saying that you’re sorry for something. I’m not apologizing for religion in that derogatory sense. After I left my convent I thought, “I’ve had it with religion, completely had it,” and I only fell into this by sheer accident after a series of career disasters. My encounters with other faith traditions showed me first how parochial my original understanding of religion had been, and secondly made me see my own faith in a different way. All the faith traditions have their own particular genius, but they also all have their own particular flaws or failings, because we are humans and we have a fabulous ability to foul things up. The people who call me an apologist are often those who deride religion as I used to do, and I’ve found that former part of my life to have been rather a limited one. S: Your new book is a history of religion and violence. You point out, though, that the concept of “religion” didn’t even exist before the early modern period. What exactly are we talking about, then, when we talk about religion and violence before modern times? A: First of all, there is the whole business about religion before the modern period never having been considered a separate activity but infusing and cohering with all other activities, including state-building, politics and warfare. Religion was part of state-building, and a lot of the violence of our world is the violence of the state. Without this violence we wouldn’t have civilization. Agrarian civilization depended upon a massive structural violence. In every single culture or pre-modern state, a small aristocracy expropriated the serfs and peasants and kept them at subsistence level. This massive, iniquitous system is responsible for our finest achievements, and historians tell us that without this iniquitous system we probably wouldn’t have progressed beyond subsistence level. Therefore, we are all implicated in this violence. No state, however peace-loving it claims to be, can afford to disband its army, so when people say religion has been the cause of all the major wars in history this is a massive oversimplification. Violence is at the heart of our lives, in some form or another. S: How do ritual and religion become entangled with this violence? A: Well, because state-building was imbued with religious ideology. Every state ideology before the modern period was essentially religious. Trying to extract religion from political life would have been like trying to take the gin out of a cocktail. Things like road-building were regarded as a sort of sacred activity. Politics was imbued with religious feeling. The prophets of Israel, for example, were deeply political people. They castigated their rulers for not looking after the poor; they cried out against the system of agrarian injustice. Jesus did the same, Mohammed and the Quran do the same. Sometimes, religion permeates the violence of the state, but it also offers the consistent critique of that structural and martial violence. S: Is it possible to disentangle that critiquing role from the role of supporting state structures? A: I think in the West we have peeled them apart. We’ve separated religion and politics, and this was a great innovation. But so deeply embedded in our consciousness is the desire to give our lives some meaning and significance that no sooner did we do this than we infused the new nation-state with a sort of quasi-religious fervor. If you regard the sacred as something for which we are willing to give our lives, in some senses the nation has replaced God, because it’s now not acceptable to die for religion, but it is admirable to die for your country. Certainly in the United States, your national feeling, whether people believe in God or not, has a great spiritual or transcendent relevance — “God bless America,” for example; the hand on the heart, the whole ethos. We do the same in the U.K. with our royal weddings. Even in our royal weddings, the aristocracy are all in military uniform. S: Ah, that’s a great observation. A: In your great parades, you know, when a president dies, there’s the army there. The religiously articulated state would persecute heretics. They were usually protesting against the social order rather than arguing about theology, and they were seen as a danger to the social order that had to be eliminated. That’s been replaced. Now we persecute our ethnic minorities or fail to give them the same rights. S: I’d like to go deeper into this comparison between nationalism and religion. Some people would say that the ultimate problem, here, is a strain of irrationality in our society. They would argue that we need to purge this irrationality wherever we see it, whether it appears in the form of religion or nationalism. How would you respond? A: I’m glad you brought that up, because nationalism is hardly rational. But you know, we need mythology in our lives, because that’s what we are. I agree, we should be as rational as we possibly can, especially when we’re dealing with the fates of our own populations and the fates of other peoples. But we don’t, ever. There are always the stories, the myths we tell ourselves, that enable us to inject some kind of ultimate significance, however hard we try to be rational. Communism was said to be a more rational way to organize a society, and yet it was based on a complete myth that became psychotic. Similarly, the French revolutionaries were imbued with the spirit of the Enlightenment and erected the goddess of reason on the altar of Notre Dame. But in that same year they started the Reign of Terror, where they publicly beheaded 17,000 men, women and children. We’re haunted by terrible fears and paranoias. We’re frightened beings. When people are afraid, fear takes over and brings out all kind of irrationality. So, yes, we’re constantly striving to be rational, but we’re not wholly rational beings. Purging isn’t an answer, I think. When you say “purging,” I have visions of some of the catastrophes of the 20th century in which we tried to purge people, and I don’t like that kind of language. S: Let’s try a different analogy: Perhaps our search for narrative and meaning is a bit like a fire. It can go out of control and burn people pretty badly. Seeing this destruction, some people say we should just put out the fire whenever we can. There are others who argue that the fire will always be there, that it has benefits, and that we need to work with it to the best of our abilities. And you’re sort of in the latter camp, yes? A: I would say so … If we lack meaning, if we fail to find meaning in our lives, we could fall very easily into despair. One of the forensic psychiatrists who have interviewed about 500 people involved in the 9/11 atrocity, and those lone-wolves like the Boston Marathon people, has found that one of the principal causes for their turning to these actions was a sense of lack of meaning; a sense of meaningless and purposelessness and hopelessness in their lives. I think lack of meaning is a dangerous thing in society. There’s been a very strong void in modern culture, despite our magnificent achievements. We’ve seen the nihilism of the suicide bomber, for example. A sense of going into a void. S: In “Fields of Blood,” you explore how the material needs of people can give rise to more abstract ideas. So, speaking about nihilism as something particular to the modern era: Are there political or social conditions that underlie this sense of meaninglessness? A: Yes. The suicide bomber has been analyzed by Robert Tate of the University of Chicago, who has made a study of every single suicide bombing from 1980 to 2004. He has found that it’s always a response to the invasion of the homeland by a militarily superior power. People feel their space is invaded, and they resort to this kind of action because they can’t compete with the invaders. [Suicide bombing] was a ploy [first] used by the Tamil Tigers, who had no time for religion. Of the many Lebanese bombings [in the 1980s], only seven of them were committed by Muslims, three by Christians. The rest, some 17 or so, were committed by secularists and socialists coming in from Syria. I think a sense of hopelessness is particularly evident in the suicide bombings of Hamas, where these young people live in refugee camps in Gaza, with really very little hope or very little to look forward to. People who talk to survivors of these actions found that the desire to die a heroic death, to go out in a blaze of glory and at least have some meaning in their lives and be venerated and remembered after their death, was the driving factor. S: There’s a line in your book that struck me: “Terrorism is fundamentally and inherently political, even when other motives, religious, economic, and social, are involved. Terrorism is always about power.” A: I think I’m quoting some terrorist specialist there. Even when [terrorists] claim to be doing it for Allah, they’re also doing it for political motives. It’s very clear in bin Laden’s discourse. He talks about God and Allah and Islam and the infidels and all that, but he had very clear political aims and attitudes towards Saudi Arabia, towards Western involvement in Middle Eastern affairs. The way he talked always about Zionists and crusaders rather than Jews and Christians — these are political terms. Since the early 20th century the term “crusade” has come to stand for Western imperialism. In the Hamas martyr videos, the young martyr will segue very easily from mentioning Allah the Lord of the world, and then within a couple of words he’s talking about the liberation of Palestine — it’s pure nationalism — and then he’s into a third-world ideology, saying his death will be a beacon of hope to all the oppressed people who are suffering at the hands of the Western world. These things are mixed up in that cocktail in his mind, but there’s always a strong political element, not just a going towards God. In fact, all our motivation is always mixed. As a young nun, I spent years trying to do everything purely for God, and it’s just not possible. Our self-interest and other motivations constantly flood our most idealistic efforts. So, yes, terrorism is always about power — wanting to get power, or destroy the current power-holders, or pull down the edifices of power which they feel to be oppressive or corruptive in some way. S: How direct is the link between colonial policies in the Middle East and a terrorist attack in New York or London? A: I think — and I speak as a British person — when I saw the towers fall on September 11, one of the many, many thoughts that went through my head was, “We helped to do this.” The way we split up these states, created these nation-states that ISIS is pulling asunder, showed absolutely no regard for the people concerned. Nationalism was completely alien to the region; they had no understanding of it. The borders were cobbled together with astonishing insouciance and self-interest on the part of the British. Plus, a major cause of unrest and alienation has always been humiliation. Islam was, before the colonial period, the great world power, rather like the United States today. It was reduced overnight to a dependent bloc and treated by the colonialists with frank disdain. That humiliation has rankled, and it would rankle, I think, here in the States. Supposing in a few decades you are demoted by China, it may not be so pretty here. Every fundamentalist movement that I’ve studied, in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, is rooted in a profound fear of annihilation. S: So, when we in the West talk about religion as the cause of this violence, how much are we letting ourselves off the hook, and using religion as a way to ignore our role in the roots of this violence? A: We’re in danger of making a scapegoat of things, and not looking at our own part in this. When we look at these states and say, “Why can’t they get their act together? Why can’t they see that secularism is the better way? Why are they so in thrall to this benighted religion of theirs? What savages they are,” and so on, we’ve forgotten to see our implication in their histories. We came to modernity under our own steam. It was our creation. It had two characteristics. One of these was independence — your Declaration of Independence is a typical modernizing document. And you have thinkers and scientists demanding free thought and independent thinking. This was essential to our modernity. But in the Middle East, in the colonized countries, modernity was a colonial subjection, not independence. Without a sense of independence and a driving force for innovation, however many skyscrapers and fighter jets you may possess, and computers and technological gadgets, without these qualities you don’t really have the modern spirit. That modern spirit is almost impossible to acquire in countries where modernity has been imposed from outside. S: When you hear, for example, Sam Harris and Bill Maher recently arguing that there’s something inherently violent about Islam — Sam Harris said something like “Islam is the motherlode of bad ideas” — when you hear something like that, how do you respond? A: It fills me with despair, because this is the sort of talk that led to the concentration camps in Europe. This is the kind of thing people were saying about Jews in the 1930s and ’40s in Europe. This is how I got into this, not because I’m dying to apologize, as you say, for religion, or because I’m filled with love and sympathy and kindness for all beings including Muslims — no. I’m filled with a sense of dread. We pride ourselves so much on our fairness and our toleration, and yet we’ve been guilty of great wrongs. Germany was one of the most cultivated countries in Europe; it was one of the leading players in the Enlightenment, and yet we discovered that a concentration camp can exist within the same vicinity as a university. There has always been this hard edge in modernity. John Locke, apostle of toleration, said the liberal state could under no circumstances tolerate the presence of either Catholics or Muslims. Locke also said that a master had absolute and despotical power over a slave, which included the right to kill him at any time. That was the attitude that we British and French colonists took to the colonies, that these people didn’t have the same rights as us. I hear that same disdain in Sam Harris, and it fills me with a sense of dread and despair. S: Is Islamophobia today comparable to anti-Semitism? A: Let’s hope not. It’s deeply enshrined in Western culture. It goes right back to the Crusades, and the two victims of the crusaders were the Jews in Europe and the Muslims in the Middle East. S: Right, because Jews along the crusaders’ routes would be massacred — A: They became associated in the European mind. We’ve recoiled, quite rightly, from our anti-Semitism, but we still have not recoiled from our Islamophobia. That has remained. It’s also very easy to hate people we’ve wronged. If you wrong somebody there’s a huge sense of resentment and distress. That is there, and that is part of it, too. I remember speaking at NATO once, and a German high officer of NATO got up and spoke of the Turks resident in Germany, the migrant workers who do the work, basically, that Germans don’t want to do. He said, “Look, I don’t want to see these people. They must eat in their own restaurants. I don’t want to see them, they must disappear. I don’t want to see them in the streets in their distinctive dress, I don’t want to seem their special restaurants, I don’t want to see them.” I said, “Look, after what happened in Germany in the 1930s, we cannot talk like that, as Europeans, about people disappearing.” Similarly, a Dutch person got up and said, “This is my culture, and these migrants are destroying and undermining our cultural achievements.” I said, “Now you, as the Netherlands, a former imperial power, are beginning to get a pinprick of the pain that happened when we went into these countries and changed them forever. They’re with us now because we went to them first; this is just the next stage of colonization. We made those countries impossible to live in, so here they are now with us.” S: How should one respond to something like the treatment of women in Saudi Arabia, or the threat of terrorism that originates in Muslim countries? A: Saudi Arabia is a real problem, there’s no doubt about it. It has been really responsible, by using its massive petrol dollars, for exporting its extraordinarily maverick and narrow form of Islam all over the world. Saudis are not themselves extremists, but the narrowness of their religious views are antithetical to the traditional pluralism of Islam. We’ve turned a blind eye to what the Saudis do because of oil, and because we see them as a loyal ally, and because, during the Cold War, we approved of their stance against Soviet influence in the Middle East. Fundamentalism represents a rebellion against modernity, and one of the hallmarks of modernity has been the liberation of women. There’s nothing in the Quran to justify either the veiling or the seclusion of women. The Quran gave women rights of inheritance and divorce, legal rights we didn’t have in the West until the 19th century. That’s what I feel about the treatment of women in Saudi Arabia. It’s iniquitous, and it’s certainly not Quranic. S: Where do you, as someone outside of a tradition, get the authority to say what is or isn’t Quranic? A: I talk to imams and Muslims who are in the traditions. S: I think it’s easy to say, “Well the text isn’t binding” when you see something in there that you don’t like. But when you see something in the text that you do want to uphold, it’s tempting to go, “Oh, look, it’s in the text.” Oh, it is. We do it with all our foundation texts — you’re always arguing about the Constitution, for example. It’s what we do. Previously, before the modern period, the Quran was never read in isolation. It was always read from the viewpoint of a long tradition of complicated, medieval exegesis which actually reined in simplistic interpretation. That doesn’t apply to these freelancers who read “Islam for Dummies” … S: – and then do with it what they will. A: Yes.
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| Kansas City Star Letter to Editor
submitted 2014 Dec 11 published Dec 16 Yoder’s missteps According to the Dec. 11 New York Times, “Furor over move to aid big banks in funding bill,” by Jonathan Weisman, Kansas Republican U.S. Rep. Kevin Yoder inserted language, written by Citigroup, to eliminate the Dodd-Frank protection taxpayers have against having to pay for the banks’ mistakes in another financial crisis, as part of the spending bill decried by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. It sounds like Kansas’ financial irresponsibility is quite fashionable among Republicans nationwide. Vern Barnet
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| http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/04/opinion/how-politics-haspoisoned-islam.html
How Politics Has Poisoned Islam Mustafa Akyol FEB. 3, 2016 ISTANBUL — We Muslims like to believe that ours is “a religion of peace,” but today Islam looks more like a religion of conflict and bloodshed. From the civil wars in Syria, Iraq and Yemen to internal tensions in Lebanon and Bahrain, to the dangerous rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia, the Middle East is plagued by intra-Muslim strife that seems to go back to the ancient Sunni-Shiite rivalry. Religion is not actually at the heart of these conflicts — invariably, politics is to blame. But the misuse of Islam and its history makes these political conflicts much worse as parties, governments and militias claim that they are fighting not over power or territory but on behalf of God. And when enemies are viewed as heretics rather than just opponents, peace becomes much harder to achieve. This conflation of religion and politics poisons Islam itself, too, by overshadowing all the religion’s theological and moral teachings. The Quran’s emphasis on humility and compassion is sidelined by the arrogance and aggressiveness of conflicting groups. A suicide bomber blew himself up in a mosque in
Sana, Yemen, late last year. Credit Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
This political question even pit the prophet’s widow Aisha against his son-in-law Ali. Their followers killed one another by the thousands in the infamous Battle of the Camel in 656. The next year, they fought the even bloodier Battle of Siffin, where followers of Ali and Muawiyah, the governor of Damascus, crossed swords, deepening the divisions that became the Sunni-Shiite split that persists today. In other words, unlike the early Christians, who were divided into sects primarily through theological disputes about the nature of Christ, early Muslims were divided into sects over political disputes about who should rule them. It is time to undo this conflation of religion and politics. Instead of seeing this politicization of religion as natural — or even, as some Muslims do, something to be proud of — we should see it as a problem that requires a solution. This solution should start with a paradigm shift about the very concept of the “caliphate.” It’s not just that the savage Islamic State has hijacked this concept for its own brutal purposes. The problem goes deeper: Traditional Muslim thought regarded the caliphate as an inherent part of Islam, unintentionally politicizing the faith for centuries. But it was not mandated by either the Quran or the prophet, but instead was a product of the historical, political experience of the Muslim community. Moreover, once Muslim thought viewed the caliphate as an integral part of the religion, political leaders and Islamic scholars built an authoritarian political tradition around it. As long as the caliph was virtuous and law-abiding, Islamic thinkers obliged Muslims to obey him. This tradition did not consider, however, that virtue was relative, power itself had a corrupting influence and even legitimate rulers could have legitimate opponents. In the mid-19th century, the Ottoman Empire, then the seat of the caliphate, took a major step forward in the Muslim political tradition by importing Western liberal norms and institutions. The sultan’s powers were limited, an elected Parliament was established and political parties were allowed. This promising effort, which would make the caliph the head of a British-style democratic monarchy, was only half-successful. It ended when republican Turkey abolished the very institution of the caliphate after World War I. The birth of the modern-day Islamist movement was a reaction to this post-caliphate vacuum. The overly politicized Islamists not only kept the traditional view that religion and state are inseparable, they even recast religion as state. “True religion is no more than the system which God had decreed to govern the affairs of human life,” Sayyid Qutb, a prominent Islamist ideologue, wrote in the 1960s. And since God would never actually come down to govern human affairs, Islamists would do it in his name. Not all Islamic thinkers took this line. The 20th-century scholar Said Nursi saw politics not as a sacred realm, but rather a devilish zone of strife. “I seek refuge in God from Satan and politics,” he wrote. His followers built an Islamic civil society movement in Turkey, asking only religious freedom from the state. Contemporary Muslim academics such as Abdelwahab El-Affendi and Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im have articulated powerful Islamic arguments for embracing a liberal secularism that respects religion. They rightly point out that Muslims need secularism to be able to practice their religion as they see fit. I would add that Muslims also need secularism to save religion from serving as handmaiden to unholy wars of domination. None of this means that Islam, with core values of justice, should be totally blind to politics. Religion can play a constructive role in political life, as when it inspires people to speak truth to power. But when Islam merges with power, or becomes a rallying cry in power struggles, its values begin to fade. Mustafa Akyol is the author of “Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty,” and a contributing opinion writer. |
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Is It Wrong to Watch Football?
His body wrecked at 36, Antwaan Randle El regrets ever playing in the National Football League. After he died of an overdose of pain medication at 27, Tyler Sash was found to have chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease believed to be caused by repeated blows to the head. Concussion diagnoses have increased by about a third since the league let independent medical officials assess players. And it seems that with each N.F.L. veteran’s death, another diagnosis of C.T.E. is revealed. How can fans enjoy watching a game that helps ruin players’ lives? [See http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/02/05/is-it-wrong-to-watch-football for all entries to this discussion.] Do You Like to Watch Football?
Markus Koch Markus Koch played six years for the Washington Redskins, including on their Super Bowl championship team in 1988. He is a holistic health practitioner. Football is a spectacle of extreme athleticism, controlled mayhem and violence that entertains our thirst for domination. To really appreciate the glories of the game and what it does, though, maybe fans should watch more of it, and get closer to the real game. Perhaps, to really show the game fully and augment the experience, telemetric technology imbedded in uniforms could inform viewers of the condition of the anterior cruciate ligament, broken forearm or separated shoulder of their favorite players. Helmets could discolor and ooze when the dura mater in a player’s cranium is damaged. The N.F.L. could find yet another revenue stream with a downloadable app that could load metrics into a “game suit” featuring pneumatic devices allowing fans to feel every blindside sack by a 350-pound lineman, every “tremendous hit” experienced on the field. So everyone should intensely watch that linebacker with the steel plate over the 14-day-old fracture in his arm as he throws himself into the fray, and really, really identify ourselves with our by our disposable Sunday afternoon hero. Better yet, if we can stomach it, how about 24-hour coverage of what he’s gone through in the days leading up to his moments of fleeting glory? Did the screws go into his arm cleanly as the surgeon installed the plate? Is the Toradol and Novocaine kicking in? My God, how brave and proud we must feel! Watch. Watch closely. See everything. Nobody, outside of our families -- if they’ve been able to stick it out – gets to see the underpinnings of our bravery, our pride and perhaps our greed. Years later, when the cameras are gone, and our minds go “funny,” our legs don’t work, our backs are a contracted morass of inflexible knots that won’t let us sit in a chair with the kids at Christmas, we’ll resort to bottles and pills that we don’t want our kids to know about. By then, we’ll be on our own. Once, everyone wanted to watch us. Once, we wanted everyone to see us play. But now, unless a player is arrested after flying into a violent rage, or blows out his C.T.E.-infused brains under a highway overpass, there will be no televised coverage of our greatest challenges. ----
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Why Israel Lies
by Chris Hedges
The End of Liberal Zionism
by Antony Lermanaug
| Worship elements
for 160710
at Shawnee Mission Unitarian Universalist Church Call to Worship – Minister
and Members of the Congregation
Meditation spoken together
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I contribute thoughts for the DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION SUMMIT not from a particular faith tradition but as an overview of humanity’s religious urges from the Paleolithic to the present. My perspective is informed by study of religious phenomenology with some of the world’s great scholars, a career focused on interfaith work, wide travel, and community engagement including founding the Greater Kansas City Interfaith Council, chairing the Jackson County 9/11 Diversity Task Force, teaching in area seminaries and universities, and writing a weekly “Faith and Beliefs” column for The Kansas City Star and interacting with its readers for eighteen years. Modern world civilization is diseased because we have greatly diminished the essential ingredients of health: an intimacy with wonder, a temperament of gratitude, and a passion for service. We have lost a sense of the sacred as revealed in the world’s religions in three different arenas: nature, personhood, and society. As a result, the plague of our desacralized culture presents three parallel symptoms of our moribund extremities: our environmental crisis, the uncertainties of personhood, and a destructively partisan, exploitative society here and elsewhere. As the accompanying chart indicates, each symptom corresponds to the three realms in which the world’s religions have discovered and emphasized the sacred, which can be described as “that on which our lives depend.” * In PRIMAL FAITHS (such as traditions we have not yet completely extinguished, including the American Indian, tribal African, and Wiccan, as well as the ancient traditions of Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Maya and the Inca), we find ecological awe: nature is respected more than controlled; nature is a process which includes us, not a product external to us to be used or disposed of. Our proper attitude toward nature is wonder, not consumption. * In ASIAN RELIGIONS (such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism) we rediscover the awe of genuine personhood as our actions proceed spontaneously and responsibly from duty and compassion, without ultimate attachment to their results. * In MONOTHEISTIC TRADITIONS (including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), the awesome work of God is manifest in history’s flow toward justice when peoples are governed less by profit and winning and more by the covenant of service. The wisdom from these three families of faith was identified in the 2001 “Gifts of Pluralism” conference held in Kansas City, and celebrated in a unanimous Concluding Conference Declaration. Today many traditions are more visible and encountering each other as never before. This religious pluralism is not a threat; it is a gift. It is essential to our health. We are beginning to see that the three realms of the sacred interpenetrate and compose each other, different dimensions of a single reality, in ways largely hidden from previous generations. But we are still distracted and benumbed by particular and competing partial agendas instead of noticing—beholding—the sacred in all its expressions in a unitive vision. To each faith, interfaith exchange promises a deep and fresh understanding of its own tradition. To those faiths in respectful interchange, it also promises mutual purification. This in turn draws us to the restoration of nature, the recovery of the wholesome self, and the life of a community of love. We can pull back from the three great crises of our time by immersing ourselves in the wisdom of the world’s faiths and enacting their wisdom in wonder, gratitude, and service. The Rev. Vern Barnet, DMn
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BEETHOVEN
I was able to survive the desperation
of my first two years in college because of Beethoven's Last Quartets,
particularly the C-Sharp Minor (14) and the A Minor (15). I did not have
money for a proper phonograph, but I found an abandoned turn-table, made
a tone arm out of copper tubing, and brought a cheap needle and cartridge
to affix to the tubing, and wore out the records I had somehow acquired.
(Page 93 of my book includes a famous passage from the F Major Quartet.)
I love the symphonies well-performed (Michael Stern and the KC Symphony
did a wretched job this season on the 8th), and particularly the energy
of the 7th and the drama of the 9th, which leads to magnificent appropriation.
But I favor Beethoven's chamber
music over the symphonies. Less is more. The late works especially are
more intimate and transcendent at the same time. About 20 years ago, I
became obsessed with the piano sonatas, and particularly the late ones,
and most especially #29, the "Hammerklavier," which I listened to every
day for several years, obtained the score, and, by raiding 2nd-hand CD
stores, have acquired over a dozen recordings of this rarely-performed
masterpiece. The third movement, which follows the playful second, which
follows the astonishing first, compares with the most mystical passages
of the Last Quartets. This third movement is not very accessible at first
hearing, and begins in a most inconsequential way, but lifts to the highest
heaven and penetrates the darkest recesses of the heart. The CD performances
range in length for this single movement from 14 to 23 minutes, amazingly
different interpretations, yet all valid; I know of no other piece of music
so elastic. The final movement is fugal, one of the most difficult pieces
anyone ever wrote, a tour de force that leaves you simply aghast and dumbfounded.
GHTC survey Holy Week excerpt
I strongly, emphatically, suggest, not just for
Easter Vigil but for most regular large congregational services when any
number of the congregation feels it appropriate to exercise the option
on BCP page 362/368/373 following the Sanctus et Benedictus to express
a sense of reverence after acclaiming, through the recitation or chanting
of the text, of the holiness and advent of the divine by kneeling, that
the presider allow sufficient time for folks to get to the kneelers before
continuing with the Eucharistic Prayer. Failing to do so is like inviting
guests to a special dinner party but not waiting for those who move slowly
to make it to the table before the host or hostess begins eating. It is
disrespectful. Many of our congregation take time to move their bones.
In this service, we heard nothing before the words "your only and eternal
Son" (page 15 of the Easter Vigil printed program) until all were able
to take the kneeling attitude, as I perceived the situation. Because such
inhospitable rushing headlong through the Eucharistic Prayer makes it impossible
for many folks to continue joining their hearts with the presider in the
Eucharistic Prayer without this unseemly and unnecessary gap, it seems
not only disrespectful to those members of the congregation but also to
the majesty and beauty and dignity of the Prayer itself. The sound of the
kneelers being placed for use is itself a beautiful aural recognition of
the respect with which those folks attune their very incarnate bodies to
the mystery unfolding at the table and in our hearts. Can any song of any
angel present any greater honoring of the act of Thanksgiving than those
who humble their bodies to acknowledge the presence of the divine? To have
this so often disregarded, especially at a major festival of the Church
as Easter Vigil, requires the use of this "feedback" opportunity that it
be mentioned, while also respecting those who feel called to express their
devotion by remaining in standing prayer who surely could also benefit
from a pause to contemplate the meaning of the ancient words beginning,
“Holy, holy, holy . . . .”
Gordon
was a spiritual giant to me as well as a model civic leader, and he and
his family's world-wide interests and commitment to the future locally
and globally continue to inspire and shape my own life. My interfaith organization,
CRES, and later, the Interfaith Council, really began with a lecture he
sponsored at what was then the Midwest Research Institute, and his encouragement
over decades enriched my life in many ways, as I know he blessed so many
of us.
