Can you believe?

16 October 2025

"The cult of personality and its consequences"

Above: at Elektrostal's Victory Day celebration, May 9, 2010. (My photo.)

Below: selected pages from Khrushchev's "secret speech," February 26, 1956, as published by the state publishing house for political literature (Gospolitizdat') in 1959. Some of the headings: "Fabricated cases," "Stalin and the War," and "Genocide and Terror." Here's a link to the full text of this version and a link to one of the English-language translations.

Yesterday morning on our public radio station I heard Meghna Chakrabarti open her On Point program with these words:

It would later be called the Secret Speech, but on February 25th, 1956, a cold morning in Moscow, no one knew what to expect. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev stood before the 20th Congress of the Communist Party and did the unthinkable.

For a few wild moments, before she went on to explain her reasons for referring to this speech, my memories flashed back five decades to my student years at the Institute for Soviet and East European Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa. In those years, I studied Russian language and literature, Russian history, and the politics of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact. The "secret speech" was a landmark event in Soviet history, and I remember being fascinated by the speech itself and the varied commentaries on Khrushchev's motives, what he should have said, what he should not have said, and the uneven progress of the destalinization efforts that followed.

Among our friends in Russia, one retired scientist in particular remembered hearing about the speech the next day, and the quiet celebrations that ensued among her friends.

I remembered reading U.S. ambassador Chip Bohlen's memories of hearing about the speech. (Witness to History: 1929-1969.)

It was two weeks before I heard anything about the secret speech. On March 10, at a reception at the French Embassy for former President Vincent Auriol of France, a rumor circulated that Khrushchev had made a scathing attack on Stalin. The rumor, like many others, was transmitted by Parker, the Moscow correspondent for the London Worker. It seemed evident that the rumor had been planted by Russians who wanted the word out.

Liliana Lungina on the secret speech (episode 12).
Behind her, a photo of her late husband Semyon Lungin.

More recently, I watched the wonderful (and unexpectedly popular) autobiographical television series on author and translator Lilliana Lungina and read the book based on that series. (See this post: Ordinary heroes.) About the "secret speech," she told us,

It was not published, but read out in closed sessions. It was only published at the end of the 1980s. The address was intended exclusively for Party members. Nonetheless, everyone who was even slightly literate knew about it.
It dropped like an atom bomb, though much of what Nikita said people already knew. For [Liliana's husband] Sima and me there was absolutely nothing new in his speech, even the hint that Stalin had killed Sergei Kirov. And all the rest of it, too, about the “cult of the personality”—we knew all of that already, of course. Yet even for us, the fact that it had been uttered out loud, officially formulated and acknowledged, changed something. For others, for those who had tried to follow the Party line, it was earth-shattering.

I briefly wondered why Chakrabarti had brought up this event at this particular time. Yesterday's date doesn't match up with an anniversary of the speech. But she soon made the connection clear, and as she did so, my private reminiscences of student years came to a swift close. After talking about the speech and its impact at the time with Nikita Khrushchev's great granddaughter and with historian Wendy Goldman, Chakrabarti asked Goldman,

CHAKRABARTI: ... Okay, so we have invited you on today, Professor Goldman, to talk about what Stalinism actually is and was. Because quite a few historians and thinkers out there have wondered out loud whether the United States right now under Trumpism has anything to learn from Stalinism.
What would be your answer to that?
GOLDMAN: I think that there were certain signposts which were important on the road to terror in the 1930s, and I think these signposts are important for Americans to learn to recognize. So it's not that there's a direct comparison necessarily. And comparisons, I think, as many people have said, can be very easy or facile.
There were certain signposts which were important on the road to terror in the 1930s. ... These signposts are important for Americans to learn.
But in terms of looking at signposts, I think these are important, and I could talk a little bit about what some of them were, if you'd like me to.

They had my attention, though a sort of reflex skepticism came with it. I was familiar with some of the comparisons of the MAGA movement with Volk-and-violence fascism, but, I confess, any sort of linkage with Stalinism hadn't occurred to me. Then I remember what someone in Buzuluk, Russia, told us back in 2008, "Hitler was a kindergartner compared to Stalin," and I kept listening.

Here's a link to the full broadcast and transcript, but these are a few of the points that stood out to me:

A trigger event: In the Stalinist case, one of the triggers was the assassination of Politburo member Sergei Kirov, which led to the notorious trials that eliminated prominent opposition politicians and led to ever-widening purges. Terms such as "terrorists" and "enemies of the people" came into frequent use.

Is it fair to cite the words of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, shortly after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, in this connection? On the Monday after Kirk's death, Miller and vice president Vance made these comments on the episode of the Charlie Kirk show hosted by Vance:

STEPHEN MILLER: The thing about anger is that unfocused anger or blind rage is not a productive emotion.
JD VANCE: Right.
MILLER: But focused anger, righteous anger, directed for a just cause is one of the most important agents of change in human history.
VANCE: Charlie showed that. Amen.
MILLER: And we are going to channel all of the anger that we have over the organized campaign that led to this assassination to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks.

There are several ways that MAGA authoritarianism is on full display now, and one of them is the creation of an internal army that includes ICE, an army under the direct control of the president, an army that does not respect the normal disciplines and safeguards of policing, such as detentions and arrests based on probable cause, carried out with minimal force. Real police officers do not knock people down as ICE and related forces do frequently in full view of camera-toting witnesses. But perhaps the most Stalinist aspect of this whole scene is the preparation of all of us to accept this by repeated use of untruthful and dehumanizing language to describe the "enemies of the people" who deserve such treatment.

The subversion of science: Another of Chakrabarti's guest, historian Paul Josephson, summarized Stalin's support for pseudo-scientific doctrines such as Trofim Lysenko's assertions that living organisms could be trained to adapt to new environments directly, rather than by evolution, to the great advantage of (for example, as he claimed) agriculture. This seemed to be in accord with the Marxist-Leninist vision of the "New Soviet Man." With Stalin's finger on the scales, this wasn't simply a debate among rival geneticists; those who disagreed with Lysenko could find themselves unemployed, even imprisoned, and the agricultural practices based on his principles were disastrous. One of the worst effects was the isolation of Soviet science from the rest of the world during the high period of this doctrine.

Now we have a U.S. administration that seems to be compulsively negative about climate research and non-carbon energy sources, ready to ban certain already-conducted research from appearing on government Web sites, cutting funding to health research it doesn't like, and promoting views on vaccination that are nearly 100% outside scientific consensus.

Stalin in the Kremlin is concerned about
each one of us. Source.

Finally, the cult of personality. Once again, Chakrabarti on the secret speech:

Comrades, Khrushchev said, the cult of the individual acquired such a monstrous size, chiefly because Stalin using all conceivable methods to support the glorification of his own person. End quote.
Khrushchev said, those around Stalin, willingly, quote, used the most dissolute flattery, made Stalin into a Godhead, transforming him into an infallible sage. End quote. They believed Stalin's own description of himself as, quote, the greatest leader. Quote, sublime strategist of all times and nations. Quote, finally, no other words could be found with which to lift Stalin up to the heavens, Khrushchev said.

Fast forward to the present era. Drawing on the On Point transcript:

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Goldman, if I can, I'd like to go back for a moment to the concept of the cult of personality. Because it was so central to Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech after Stalin's death. I think you can argue in the affirmative that there is a, in fact, for probably a decade, there has been a cult of personality built around President Donald Trump.
And it may, Trump, it may be reaching, its apotheosis right now. For example, this summer at a cabinet meeting of the president's chief advisors, this is how all the cabinet members began their remarks. This is from August 26th.
LUTNICK: This is the greatest cabinet working for the greatest president, and I just want to say thank you. I'm having the time of my life.
NOEM: You committed when you ran for president to make America safe again, and today the average family and individual that lives in this country is safer than they've been in years because of what you've done.
WRIGHT: God bless your efforts. God bless your assembly of this team around this table. We're bringing the American dream back.
CHAVEZ-DeREMER: If you all haven't stop by the Department of Labor, Mr. President, I invite you to see your big, beautiful face on a banner in front of the Department of Labor because you are really the transformational president of the American worker.
ROLLINS: I do believe we're in a revolution. 1776 was the first one, 1863 or so with Abraham Lincoln was the second. This is the third, with Donald Trump leading the way.
WITKOFF: And there's only one thing I wish for that Boel Committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since the Nobel Peace, this Nobel Award was ever talked about, to receive that reward.
CHAKRABARTI: All right. In order, that was Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, AG Secretary Brooke Rollins, and Special Envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff.

One final quote from the program, from Wendy Goldman, summing up the stakes while still reminding us that we're not "there" yet, by any means. To ask about the lessons in Stalinism for the USA is not an invitation to alarmism, but to vigilance and compassionate solidarity. I'm eager to hear whether you think Goldman has made a fair case.

I think this is something we need to all, as Americans, pay very close attention to. Folks, there's a playbook here. And when we study history and then when we live through these tumultuous contemporary times, we hear echoes of that history. And those echoes are chilling. So for example, part of the playbook is that certain groups are demonized.
There's a playbook here. ... When we live through these tumultuous contemporary times, we hear echoes of that history.
That happened in the Soviet Union and it's happening here. Here, we're demonizing immigrants, often hardworking people who have been in this country for many years. Some of them may be here illegally. They pay taxes. They do some of the most difficult jobs in the country. Their children go to school.
We have people here who are illegal, whose children are in the military. These groups have been demonized as criminals. And sometimes it's difficult to know what kind of America we're living in. So on the one hand, everything is going normally. And people can say, fascism, this is nothing like fascism, Soviet terror.
This is nothing like Soviet terror. And then at the same time, you can look out the window and see masked men who are armed, who are literally disappearing Americans off the streets of our cities. That's a different America and that's an America that I think we all need to pay attention to. Similarly with the attack on left wing people, this is reclassification of people with dissenting views as domestic terrorists, that is straight out of the playbook of the terror, and these are the kinds of things we really need to pay close attention to.

How ICE may be threatening religious freedom. (Religion News Service.)

The Convocation Unscripted calls out glee over ICE brutality. Here's part of Jemar Tisby's response:

If we're coming back to the "what do we do part," here's a real simple one: re-read the gospels. 'Jemar, why do you say re-read, I've been reading that all of my life.' Yeah, but now we're under a fascist regime, and it might hit different when we re-read the gospels. And in particular, I'm thinking about Matthew 5, of course, Beatitudes. But then, "blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you, because of me.' And then, "Rejoice, and be glad." All of this is abstract, until you are living in persecution, until you are living in oppression.

Enough of Stalin and DJT for today! Just as important in the grand scheme: Beth Woolsey has a foster cat story. (With a nod to our own former street cat who's napping in the top drawer of a file cabinet....)

Dessert: Rick Holmstrom with a nice song whose name I couldn't figure out or find in his discography. (Can you?) If you like it, enjoy the whole set.

09 October 2025

The Restauration arrived today

Source.

The commemorative voyage of the sloop Restauration from Stavanger, Norway, to New York City, ended today, with its docking at Pier 16 a few hours ago.

Luke Maurer and I were present to witness its departure from Stavanger back on July 4, the same date that the original Restauration left Stavanger in 1825, marking the start of the organized immigration of Norwegians to the USA two hundred years ago.

The original ship made it safely to New York Harbor on October 9, 1825, and discharged the 53 people on board, including the baby born during the voyage. However, the ship was seized by the port authorities, and its captain arrested, because the number of passengers had exceeded the maximum allowed for a vessel its size. The end of that story was happy; for reasons that nobody seems to know for sure, the U.S. president, John Quincy Adams, ordered the release of the ship and its captain, and cancellation of the heavy fine that had been imposed. (Here's Henry Cadbury's summary of the story, including Quakers' involvement.)

My first passport.

This commemorative voyage and its safe arrival in New York City are bright spots in the day's news. The history of Norwegian migration is important to me, at least in part because I'm part of that history. My Maurer ancestors seem to have come from Germany via Denmark, with the original Johan Fredrik Maurer arriving in Norway from Denmark around 1840. Some of his descendants are among the million or so Norwegians who emigrated to other countries in the years after the Restauration. Eventually I became one of the Norwegian immigrants to the USA.

It seems to me that the Norwegian and USA organizers of the 1825-2025 Restauration commemorations have conducted themselves with admirable diplomacy. But, in my private opinion, the story of President John Quincy Adams pardoning the captain and restoring the vessel to its owners has special meaning in this MAGA era. Back in 1825, it must have been assumed at the highest levels that immigrants were good news. In our own time, most economists agree.

I admire the strength and courage of those Norwegian pioneers of 1825. They endured a lot in their search for economic opportunity and religious freedom. On the other hand, there definitely were incentives to leave their homeland; the Norway of two centuries ago was one of the poorer countries of Europe, with no hint of the prosperity to come in the mid-20th century, and major restrictions on religious dissidents. Today's immigrants coming to the USA from a variety of places, also propelled by hopes of freedom and opportunity (or just plain survival!), and often ready to endure great risks to get here, are no less admirable. And in view of the USA's stagnating demographics, no less needed.

Benjamin Wittes on U.S. strikes on vessels off Venezuela: "When I say murder here, I am not speaking in hyperbole or using the term in some colloquial sense."

Several Quaker organizations have united to offer us an urgent statement on genocide in the Gaza Strip, and are asking Friends churches, meetings, and other organizations to endorse the statement. Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends did so at our fall gathering this past weekend, even as we followed the first hints of a possible cease-fire.

During the fall gathering, some of us had an opportunity to see this video from B'Tselem on "Our Genocide."

And some words about emergency relief plans for when the cease-fire begins, from the U.N.'s emergency relief coordinator Tom Fletcher.

A simple prayer for dark times: Micah Bales on the Lord's Prayer, its message, and its misuse.

For us, as the church of Jesus Christ, the greatest danger right now is that we fail to see clearly that this government is weaponizing our own Christian tradition against the people. They are quoting the Bible to justify their policies. But this is all a smokescreen. When they mock immigrants and use children as pawns, that’s not the gospel. That’s not “on earth as it is in heaven.”

This is surely a rerun, but this may be my very favorite Albert Collins clip. "Same Old Thing."

02 October 2025

The Bible, MAGA, and a new mission field

The 2020 census counted about 258 million adults in the USA. If about 23% of them were evangelical Protestants, that group number would number about 36 million. And, as surveys indicate, if 80% of those 36 million voted for the current president, that means 20% of them did not. That's 7.2 million evangelical Protestants who dissented one way or another from the majority choice.

Of course these estimates are rough, and there are many other Christian categories not included, but I'm intrigued by that specific minority. It may seem discouragingly small, but it's far from nothing, and as MAGA continues to pursue an aggressive anti-Christian agenda behind its thin Christian facade, might it be growing?

(If these sorts of statistics intrigue you, I recommend this and other research by the Public Religion Research Institute, along with this election study by the Pew Research Center.)

What do I mean by "thin Christian facade"? I certainly don't mean a facade that is inexpensive to produce. You can look no further than Charlie Kirk's organization, Turning Point USA, and its Web site, and its YouTube channel (4.48 million subscribers) for evidence of voluminous content and high-quality production values.

What is missing? I don't see much evidence of whole-life conversion, of putting our loving Creator at the center of one's life and relationships, of "regarding" others as Paul invited us to, of loving enemies, of engaging the principalities and powers spiritually, of remembering the Matthew 25 priorities that Jesus taught, not to mention God's promise that Abraham and his descendants will bless all the nations of the earth, even as they're commanded not to mistreat or oppress foreigners/strangers/immigrants.

The facade is thin because it differs so little from all those blood-and-country mythologies that falsify history, identify danger with "the other," misuse sacred language served with hypnotic music to whip up enthusiasm, and license extreme responses.

One writer, Mitchell Sobieski, has taken the risk of inventorying these scandalous divergences from biblical faith in the form of an open letter from Jesus. (I wouldn't use this device myself, but the inventory itself is important.)

Drew Strait speaks during the Catholic Social Tradition
Conference at the University of Notre Dame in Notre
Dame, Indiana, on March 21, 2025.
(Brian Kaylor/Word&Way); source.

Another helpful commentary comes from Drew Strait, who teaches at the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary: "How to Challenge MAGA's Biblical Authoritarianism." It's a good presentation, but I'd like to expand on his apparent assumed audience, "progressive ecumenical Christians." It's urgent for some of those 7.2 million evangelicals who aren't sold out to MAGA to participate. Could some of them serve in a new mission field—an outreach to those among the 80% who might be ready, even yearning, to consider genuine good news for all nations?

I appreciated Peter Wehner's recent Atlantic article, "Fully MAGA-fied Christianity."

Politics fills the void left by faith, and it’s doing so in ways that I’ve never quite seen before. For many fundamentalists and evangelicals, politics meets the longing and the needs that aren’t being met by churches and traditional faith communities. If there is something useful that has come of the Trump era, and there’s not much, it is that it has offered a diagnostic CT scan of much of American Christianity. Trump and the MAGA movement capitalized on, and then amplified, the problems facing Christian communities, but they did not create them.

After giving us a gallery of the kinds of personalities filling that void and meeting those needs, Wehner seems, in my own mind, to be addressing the new mission field:

The churches and denominations that are not militantly MAGA but are still overwhelmingly composed of Trump supporters often get less attention than churches and denominations that are hyper-politicized, but they’re also essential to the Trump coalition. So it’s useful to understand the complex dynamic at play in those spaces.
I say complex because, every Sunday, millions of Christians attend churches that are nondenominational and that are affiliated with conservative Protestant denominations. These churches aren’t particularly political, and they are led by pastors who preach thoughtfully on topics such as loving your enemy and turning the other cheek, which Jesus talked about during his Sermon on the Mount; and on verses like this one, found in the Book of Ephesians, written by the Apostle Paul: “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.”
The great majority of people attending these churches wouldn’t consider those verses to be woke talking points; they would view them as the inerrant word of God. They would earnestly pray that those words would sanctify their life and that they would become more like Jesus. And almost to a person, these congregants would say that Christ is at the center of their life, their “all in all.”
Yet many of them will spend part of the rest of the week, and maybe much of the rest of the week, in the right-wing echo chamber, in the company of conflict entrepreneurs, having their emotions inflamed, feeling the same way toward their enemies as Donald Trump does toward his enemies. And it will all make perfect sense to them.

How might we begin (or, more hopefully, continue) to chisel away at this "perfect sense to them," this immersive correlation of Christ, their "all in all," and Fox News? Judy Maurer wrote recently about the power of narrative and community in offering a better way. To my mind, it's an incomparably better way of experiencing the love and power of Jesus and his community between Sundays, and re-engaging in missions that really could bless the nations. Do you have useful experiences in your own community to overcome this gap between Sunday faith and daily practice?

25 September 2025

Praise and prophecy

Screenshot from source.

Last Sunday, Daniel Smith-Christopher gave a sermon, "Disciples of the Sacred Story Tellers," at Reedwood Friends Church, that touched on, among other things, one of the recurring contrasts in the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible:

We're all familiar with many of the difficult and troubling and sometimes violent attitudes in some of the passages of the Old Testament. It's why so many people have asked me over the years, "Old Testament! What's a Quaker doing studying and teaching the Old Testament? Aren't you a bit out of place?"
I enjoy sharing my thoughts as to why I don't think I am out of place at all. So, here's the strangely compelling part: sacred storytellers whose names we will never know in each case, sacred storytellers in the Old Testament seemed to keep offering gentle, loving, sometimes compassionate stories in the face of terribly violent texts.

Daniel gave several examples of the way the Bible's storytellers provided this kind of contrasting content alongside some of the warnings of divine violence coming from various biblical prophets. See the video; he gives three interesting examples of prophets and storytellers.

It seems to me that this fits in with the divine dialogue that the Bible invites us into. That dialogue is what I try to enter into when I am particularly challenged by something in the Bible, something that seems contradictory or strange, something that I just don’t understand. Sometimes the participants in the dialogue are the biblical record and me, and sometimes I’m imagining a dialogue between different voices in the Bible itself.

In this post, my example of contrasting messages compares the psalms of praise and the warnings of the prophet Amos. Fifteen psalms include the imperative verb Hallelu (that is, "praise") followed by a short version of God’s name, Yah: so, Hallelujah. The last five psalms in the Bible are all part of this group of Psalms, but they vary in their descriptions of whom they’re asking to praise God, including the monsters of the deep sea. Psalm 150 keeps it simple … where, why, and how to praise:

Psalm 150

1 Praise the Lord.
Praise God in God’s sanctuary;
praise God in God’s mighty heavens.
2 Praise God for God’s acts of power;
     praise God for God’s surpassing greatness.
3 Praise God with the sounding of the trumpet,
     praise God with the harp and lyre,
4 praise God with timbrel and dancing,
     praise God with the strings and pipe,
5 praise God with the clash of cymbals,
     praise God with resounding cymbals.
6 Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.
Praise the Lord.

On a Sunday last spring, one of our Camas Friends Church attenders gave a brief opening message, what we call the "First Word," and his text for that message was one of these last five praise psalms. As he read that psalm with dignity and reverence, I felt like a thirsty cactus getting a needed rainshower. If there’s one temptation some of us Quakers sometimes give in to, it’s the temptation to overthink things. Sometimes maybe we just need to let go and praise.

(By the way, that First Word speaker also talked about the reason we praise. It's not because God has an inferiority complex and needs our reassurance that the Creator of the Universe really is the Supreme Being. Now God might demand that we must not look for other gods, idols, and cultish substitutes, but goodness knows we can praise with our lips while drifting away with our souls. At our best, we praise because that is the soul’s natural response to the gift of life. If we’re responding to our being loved into existence by God, and, as Spokane Friends' John Kinney says, we realize that the stones will be rolled away from our own tombs as well as Jesus’s, our gratitude as expressed in praise seems like a natural and unforced expression.)

Contrast this imperative of praise in the psalms with what Amos is saying in the mid 700’s BC. Maybe you remember the context here: Amos has been reading the riot act to the people of Israel, particularly to the Northern Kingdom, accusing them of the same crimes of idolatry and oppression that he has seen in the surrounding Gentile nations, and saying that God demands the same purity and the same ethical standards of all of them, Israelites and Gentiles alike. He warns Israel that the woes that will fall on those Gentiles will also fall on his own audience. You can’t mock God. Judge for yourself:

Amos 5:12-24

12 For I know how many are your offenses
     and how great your sins.
There are those who oppress the innocent and take bribes
     and deprive the poor of justice in the courts.
13 Therefore the prudent keep quiet in such times,
     for the times are evil.
14 Seek good, not evil,
     that you may live.
Then the Lord God Almighty will be with you,
     just as you say God is.
15 Hate evil, love good;
     maintain justice in the courts.
Perhaps the Lord God Almighty will have mercy
     on the remnant of Joseph.

16 Therefore this is what the Lord, the Lord God Almighty, says:
“There will be wailing in all the streets
     and cries of anguish in every public square.
The farmers will be summoned to weep
     and the mourners to wail.
17 There will be wailing in all the vineyards,
     for I will pass through your midst,”
says the Lord.

18 Woe to you who long
     for the day of the Lord!
Why do you long for the day of the Lord?
     That day will be darkness, not light.
19 It will be as though a man fled from a lion
     only to meet a bear,
as though he entered his house
     and rested his hand on the wall
     only to have a snake bite him.
20 Will not the day of the Lord be darkness, not light—
     pitch-dark, without a ray of brightness?

21 “I hate, I despise your religious festivals;
     your assemblies are a stench to me.
22 Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,
     I will not accept them.
Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,
     I will have no regard for them.
23 Away with the noise of your songs!
     I will not listen to the music of your harps.
24 But let justice roll on like a river,
     righteousness like a never-failing stream!”

I wonder if you were as struck as I was by the apparent condemnation of the praises commanded in David’s time and now banished from Amos’s gloomy vision. The God of Amos doesn’t appreciate their festivals and assemblies. “Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps.” This seems to me to be clearly a different voice.

By the way, it does not scandalize me that the Bible has voices that don't always agree with each other. The Bible is much more credible to me with these awkward juxtapositions than it would be if some ancient public relations copy-editors had made sure that nothing odd stuck out at us from these sixty-six-plus books. The Bible was compiled by a mixed process of prayer and church politics, and the end product did not conceal the different sources and different points of view of the authors. I believe that the Scriptures are God-inspired, as Paul said to Timothy, but God’s inspiration acts in the assembly process as well as in the writing process, and takes full advantage of the varieties of human temperament.

Along with Amos’s impatience with pious sacrifices and praises, he has some interesting things to say about “the Day of the Lord.” Quakers have traditionally had two related interpretations of this phrase. One concerns the end of history, when the Lamb of God has the victory, when redemption rules, and the New Jerusalem is revealed. The other is our individual Day of the Lord, our Day of Visitation, our invitation to accept or reject God’s free offer of grace and redemption. Most early Quaker theologians assumed that this offer would be made to everyone, whether or not they had had outward access to the Christian gospel. In other words, culture and geography were not barriers to salvation. (See the quotation from Robert Barclay here.)

Amos paints the Day of the Lord with his usual gloomy colors. “Woe to you who long for the day of the Lord. Will not the day of the Lord be darkness, not light—pitch-dark, without a ray of brightness?” This is Israel’s destiny if they do not give up the sin and injustice he spends nine chapters condemning. There is an alternative in these same verses: “Seek good, not evil, that you may live. Then the Lord God Almighty will be with you, just as you say God is. Hate evil, love good; maintain justice in the courts. Perhaps the Lord God Almighty will have mercy on the remnant of Joseph.” This is the boundary line between Amos’s stern gloom and the promise of the New Jerusalem and its life of praise: We won’t just say God is with us, and assume that nothing needs to change, but we will wake up to the reality that following God has content and consequences, so that, if we have anything to do with it, justice will roll on like a river and righteousness like an everlasting stream.

What does that justice and righteousness look like? Here's a glimpse from George Fox’s experience of what he called the "restoration." (Page 27 of his Journal, Nickalls edition.)

Now was I come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God. All things were new, the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter. I knew nothing but pureness, and innocency, and righteousness, being renewed up into the image of God by Christ Jesus, so that I say I was come up to the state of Adam which he was in before he fell.

In case you think that Fox was referring to himself as a special case, he has some specific instances of what this will look like for everyone in the restoration—for example, specifically for men and women:

[Speaking to the men, now… same Journal, p. 667]
And thy ruling over thy wife and eldership [over her] is in the Fall [that is, the capital-F Fall of Adam and Eve], for thou art in the transgression and not an elder in the image of God and righteousness and holiness, before transgression and the Fall was, nor in the restoration where they are helps-meet in the righteousness and image of God, and in the dominion over all that God made. …

And on p. 668,

I was moved of the Lord to recommend to Friends, for the benefit and advantage of the Church of Christ, that the faithful women who were called to the belief of the Truth, being made partakers of the same precious faith, and heirs of the same everlasting Gospel of life and salvation as the men are, might in like manner come into the possession and practice of the Gospel order, and therein be meet-helps unto the men in the restoration, in the service of Truth, in the affairs of the Church, as they are outwardly. That so all the family of God, in civil, or temporal things, women as well as men, might know, possess, perform, and discharge their offices and services in the house of God, whereby … all the members of the spiritual body, the Church, might watch over and be helpful to each other in love.

Fox has a fascinating understanding of what the Day of the Lord means here. At some time, the whole of creation will be like this, but we are not to wait! We ourselves are to go back through the flaming sword. When we ourselves experience all things being made new, and the creation giving forth a new smell, beyond what our words can utter, we will have a sense of what right praise is, and I predict that we will give way to it with great freedom and joy. The world is a long way from this New Jerusalem, and it may certainly be that our beloved, suffering planet will undergo a time of darkness as Amos predicted for Israel. (See "The long defeat, part one.") Darkness seems to be descending in various places even now. But at this very time, maybe it is given to us, and to faithful communities everywhere, to live out a discipleship of justice and righteousness, just as Amos said we might and must.

What does that discipleship look like in the community? What steps do we take so that, in George Fox’s words, “all the members of the spiritual body, the Church, might watch over and be helpful to each other in love”?

Eighteen years ago I taught a course in American studies at the New Humanities Institute in Elektrostal. The photo shows me in front of the class, with a diagram of the life cycle of a movement.

On the first day of the class, I gave my very oversimplified theory of history to the students: History is something like a constant debate between idealists and skeptics, or to put it another way, between optimists and cynics.

Whether it’s in the councils of state or in your typical church fights, they’re usually guaranteed to get on each other’s nerves. I think in the short run, skeptics usually win, but in the longer run, idealists have a fighting chance to prevail, if you’ll excuse the expression. In any case, when the idealists and the skeptics actually meet and converse, they have a real opportunity to bless each other. Each one, no matter how crazy or sensible, centrist or extreme, an ecstatic praise-giver or a gloomy prophet, is a child of God, and if they can, even for a moment, glimpse that of God in each other, they can move closer, together, to that river of justice and righteousness that, deep inside, both of them want.

This blog post is partly based on a message I gave at Spokane Friends Meeting last spring.

Two items from Facebook... Colin South, former director of the Ramallah Friends School, writes to the Israeli embassy in London and to the Israeli prime minister. And David Goode passed along this interesting item from Brian Drinkwine: little Charlies or little Christs?

Timothy Snyder on the virtues of a certain movie superhero. (I may have to see the film after all.)

Kristin Du Mez on life on the eve of finishing a book-length manuscript. (Includes some good links.)

"Walk in Beauty": Remarks by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew at Fordham University last Tuesday.

In the courtyard of the high priest's house, Peter denies knowing Jesus but is unmasked by his own Galilean accent. In a classic post by our late friend Stan Thornburg, he wonders whether we Christians have lost our accent.

Ever get this feeling? "No Rest." Chris O'Leary Band.

18 September 2025

Television, censorship, and first principles

Screenshot from source.

When Judy and I were a young married couple, we had a black and white television that had been a gift from Judy's father. My most vivid memory from that TV was the final episode of M*A*S*H.

In the post-M*A*S*H era, we became very fond of the weekly courtroom comedy Night Court. In fact, on one memorable day, the black and white TV died. It was Night Court's day of the week. What to do?! Somehow in an hour or two we managed to choose and buy a new TV, drive home, hustle it into the house, and plug it in before the show began.

Our regular television diet in those years also included Star Trek: The Next Generation, Northern Exposure, and Inspector Gadget. Some part of our daily schedule was shaped around that sort of television entertainment, always tied to their fixed broadcast times. At some point, we signed up for cable TV as well. However, eventually the Internet disrupted all that. When broadband Internet became available, we explained to our kids that our family budget could allow Internet (at first, DSL on our home telephone line) or cable television, but not both. Which did they want? The Internet won.

So: it's been years since I was a regular TV viewer. The few TV shows that we still watch, separately or together, we access on streaming platforms at times we choose, and most of them have only a handful of episodes per season. Basically, regular television evenings are a thing of the past.

These last few days I've been following the controversies over the ending of the Late Show with Stephen Colbert and the indefinite suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! I don't remember ever seeing full episodes of these shows or any of the other late-evening comedy/talk shows on television; I'm basically a random consumer of the clips that show up on YouTube and elsewhere, particularly Seth Meyers' "A Closer Look." When the networks and their owners claim that their traditional broadcast business model is no longer sustainable (one of the explanations for cutting Stephen Colbert), I can't contradict them. We're mostly not in their shrinking audience base.

The abrupt cutoff of Jimmy Kimmel's show, linked with his deliberately misinterpreted comments on the murder of Charlie Kirk, is being treated by many commentators as an alarm bell, even as a Reichstag fire moment. That was my first reaction as well: we've crossed a line into full-blown authoritarianism. But I have two comments that might be clarifications or diversions—you decide.

First: I agree with those connecting the dots between corporate mergers, the president's dislike of criticism, and astoundingly biased Federal Communications Commission leadership. However, I would not look to the television networks' owners (and the television stations' owners) as guarantors of the First Amendment. Certainly they should prioritize loyalty to their long-time talent above placating MAGA, but the brutal truth is that they've always been in it for the money and they will be even more so in this uncertain era. The first-amendment violation is not on those companies' side; they're entitled to broadcast, or not, whomever they want, and the once-applicable FCC fairness doctrine died nearly 40 years ago. The violation is the organized, malicious leverage wielded by the president and his gang against the "agents of Lucifer," namely those of us who now find ourselves under their occupation.

The cancellations (recent and future) of television comedians aren't the Reichstag fire, but they're arguably part of the smoke. The emergency has already happened: the wholesale appointment of unqualified executive-branch and "independent"-agency top managers who are bought and paid for by MAGA; the slashing of safety-net programs and the abandonment of balanced budgeting (including the idea of rational revenue increases) in favor of tax benefits for the wealthiest; encroachments on the constitutional roles of courts and Congress; willful and dangerous denial of climate change; the reversal of years of hard-won progress in racial justice; and a police-state approach to urban crime and immigration enforcement—all happening at a pace that threatens to overwhelm all our civic and constitutional guardrails.

Second (at the risk of introducing a tangent): The political content delivered by the late-evening comedians on Trump's hate list doesn't exactly conform to the first principles I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, and that I committed myself to after Trump's victories (first, second). Often those comedians rudely ridicule and mock and taunt their MAGA targets, making full use of tightly edited video clips and graphics. No pratfall captured by a camera goes to waste. Nobody is fooled; these performers are quite up front in what they're doing. It can be a very seductive comfort to see our political opponents, some of whom are themselves past masters at political insult and able to hide behind the impunity of high office, get a taste of their own medicine.

Don't get me wrong; their biting humor, whatever my doubts about fairness and good taste, is protected speech under any interpretation of the First Amendment, and this brand of political rhetoric has ancient traditions. But what does a steady diet of these commentaries do to our (my) ability to regard these opponents as made in the image and likeness of God?

That blog post of mine from two weeks ago drew these comments from Ken Rubesh on Facebook, who gave me permission to repost them here:

We must ourselves not fall into the same mind as the ones we despise. We must ourselves avoid the three sins of politics.

Impugn the motives of your adversary: To dispute policy or disagree on substantive issues is what politics should be about. To react to a disagreement by always calling your opponent a liar is to assume motive that you, most often, have no right to do. It is to disregard good faith on any discussion and arrogantly assumes your own purity at the expense of others. If we are to get anywhere in our political discourse, we must first assume that all arguments are from good faith and not intentionally intended to deceive, however misguided they may be.
Speak in vitriolic/glistening generalities: Powerful generalities incite the emotions with no substance. They are the lazy way to engage politically. They are intentionally hard to contradict because they have no grounding with which reason against. They make huge assumptions that are not evidenced by facts.
God is on my side: To claim the moral and religious high ground in a secular society is not only unfair but presumptuous. ‘Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s’ not only supports taxes for the common good but presumes the right to a secular, unbiased government while respecting all religious views. To take on Politics as a moral and religious cause is to invite Cultism and allegiance to a person rather than principle.

Just one additional comment from me: to resist is not to despise. Resistance that has integrity always grants the humanity of the opponent. Even with heightened vigilance for danger, resistance seeks openings for communication, hoping to address together these overriding questions: What are the specific blessings you and we would like to see for our country and our world as a whole? Whom do we not wish to bless, and why?

David Van Reybrouck in the Guardian: "We must not let the shooting of Charlie Kirk become Trump's Reichstag fire."

Lili Loofbourow in the Washington Post: "Kimmel’s suspension confirms what many suspected after Colbert’s cancellation: Media companies must punish Trump critics if they want their mega-mergers approved."

William Barber and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove provide some moral context for responding to Charlie Kirk's death and its aftermath.

Meanwhile, in our own city, "A more complicated protest outside Portland’s ICE facility." Thanks to Norma Silliman for the link.

Sunday, September 21: British Quakers join UK churches in an urgent call to pray for peace in the Middle East.

Greg Morgan pays tribute to Fred White, his high school chemistry teacher and lifelong friend. Who is your Mr. White?

Is old age God's way of preparing us for heaven? Nancy Thomas offers metaphors, poetry, and hope.

Aki Kumar, "Scratch My Back." (Kid Andersen is playing Slim Harpo's guitar.)

11 September 2025

"Is grief my default setting?"

Source.

Wikipedia tells me that the novel I've just finished reading, "Will and Testament (Norwegian: Arv og miljø) is an absurdist fiction novel written by Norwegian author Vigdis Hjorth."

I was about to protest the word "absurdist"—the novel captivated me with its crystalline realism—but then I clicked on the link to the entry on absurdist fiction, and I forgave Wikipedia, although I still resist any implication of meaninglessness.

As much as I would like to recommend this novel without spoilers, it's important to reveal that emerging memories of incestuous rape are part of its story and its energy.

As the narrative starts, the three sisters and a brother grapple with family conflict over an apparently unfair division of their inheritance. The stakes get higher when their mother overdoses, and later, when their father has a fatal accident.

(But was that division of the inheritance truly unfair or isn't it?—even the central character, daughter Bergljot, wants justice but not to be bribed for her silence or forced to reconcile with a family that doesn't believe her.)

Once that basic conflict over the inheritance (and the alienation Bergljot persistently defends) had fully engaged me, several constant features of Hjorth's writing kept pulling me deeper in. Some of them touched on my own experiences, and some echoed my family history.

The first element is obsessive repetition, Bergljot's need to keep returning to her wounds, grievances, arguments, suspicions, self-doubts, self-justifications, over and over.

I thought to myself, don't I too lose sleep rehearsing what unfair thing had happened to me, and what I would say when I got my day in court, so to speak, and what chances were there that anyone would believe or even hear me?

As Bergljot tries to cope with all these personal uncertainties (including a mother who seems to attempt suicide as a way of punishing the alienated daughter), her feverish prose reflects her stress:

I existed in a trance of fear, of loss, it was fog and confusion, I did the laundry. It felt like I was drowning in laundry, I hated doing the laundry, back when my life was normal, that is to say numb, I used to regard it as the dullest, most exhausting chore, having to do the never-ending laundry. The contents of the laundry basket and the mountains of clothes lying next to the overflowing laundry basket, the heavy bedsheets and duvet covers and tablecloths as well as curtains, piles of underpants and socks and dirty tea towels, I would curse all that laundry back when my life had been simple and undramatic. If it hadn’t been for all that laundry, I used to think back then, then I would have been more content, I would have been able to read the books I ought to read and longed to read, but rather than read them, I was forced to start yet another load of washing and when that was finished, I had to hang up the heavy, unmanageable sheets to dry, and it would rain or it would be winter so I had to drape them over doors and chairs because the clothes horses were too small and already covered with socks and pants and shirts and tops, I cursed the laundry. But now that my world had imploded and I was raging and grieving, it was the laundry that kept me going, the time it took to do the laundry and hang it up and when it was finally dry, to fold it, put it away in the cupboards when the children were asleep at night, and then fall asleep myself knowing the laundry had been done and dried and folded and was ready, clean and waiting in the cupboards, I’m surviving on laundry, I thought to myself.

She looks for comfort in marriage and affairs, but mostly in alcohol. Over and over, she retreats into the fog of glass after glass of beer or red wine. Her stresses leak into her dreams, and she turns to psychotherapy.

Four times a week I lay on the couch talking in turns about pain, shame and the minutiae of everyday life, and every now and then we would suddenly experience a breakthrough. I dreamt that I picked up a hitchhiker who was going to Drøbak, as was I. Then I took a wrong turn, I went off the main road to Drøbak, I got lost and couldn’t find my way back to the main road, and I felt guilty on account of the hitchhiker who was inconvenienced by my uselessness and would be late getting to Drøbak. Then I thought I saw the main road, the lights from the main road; if I drove under the garage door in front of me, I would get back on it. I had accelerated to drive under the garage door when it started to close, I stepped on the gas to get through before it closed completely, but didn’t make it, it came down too quickly and it slammed into the car, we were startled and shocked, but at least we were alive, the hitchhiker ashen-faced and with his trouser pockets turned out and the car a complete write-off. Then Mum showed up and said in her usual cheerful manner that it could probably be fixed, although everyone could see that was impossible. Then I spotted a five-øre coin on the road and bent down to pick it up because finding money brings good luck, and I told myself by way of consolation that it might turn out to be my lucky day after all. I picked it up only to discover that it was just a button.
A five-year-old? he asked.
No, a five-øre coin, I said.
You said a five-year-old, he said.
I meant a five-øre coin, I said, and repeated my dream: When the garage door came down, it felt as if I was crushed.
Almost as crushed as a five-year-old, he said, and I felt an electric shock go through me.

As I read her recounting this dream to her therapist, I absolutely recognized having had similar dreams about my life and my parents. As for the role alcohol played in my family, I don't even want to start.

Bergljot is a dramatic arts magazine editor and theater critic, so it is not surprising that writers and poets are mentioned and quoted: In the midst of crisis, she goes to see Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt, for example, in an intriguing updated staging. The Danish writer and poet Tove Ditlevsen, and the Norwegian poet Rolf Jacobsen, also flash by several times.

Bergljot demands that her family believe her account of her father's crimes. After all, if she made up all these public charges, she would be a monster, in which case why is everyone demanding that she return to the family? This endless loop of contradictions doesn't get resolved in the novel, leaving us readers to ponder what a resolution might look like—in Bergljot's life and in yours and mine. At the end, just a reminder: trauma is intergenerational, and children have questions of their own.

Have I always been grieving? Is grief my default setting? And is it only the emotional side of my grief that has lessened? Deep down have I always been sad? Only when I’m calm, when I’m alone, when I work intensely, is my sadness less painful. That’s why I’m calm, that’s why I work so hard, that’s why I’m alone.
...
... Every war ever fought on this earth has proved that you can’t ignore history, sweep it under the carpet, and that if you want to reduce history’s destructive impact on the future, everyone’s version of what happened must be brought out into the open and acknowledged.

Suddenly – in December
Suddenly – In December. I stand knee-deep in snow
Talk to you and get no answer. You’re keeping quiet.
My love, now it’s happened after all. Our whole life,
the smiles, the tears and the courage. Your sewing machine
and the long nights of work. Finally our travels:
   – under the snow. Under the wreath of cedar.
It all went so fast. Two staring eyes. Words
I couldn’t catch, that you said over and over.
And suddenly nothing more. You slept.
– And now they’re all lying here, days and summer nights,
the grapes in Valladolid, the sunsets in Nemea
   – under the snow. Under the wreath of cedar.
Quick as a switch flicking off,
the tracings behind the eye flash out,
wiped from the slate of a life-span. Or maybe not?
Your new dress, my face and our old stairs
and everything you brought to this house. Is it gone
   – under the snow. Under the wreath of cedar?
Dear friend, where is our happiness now,
your good hands, your young smile,
your hair’s wreath of light on your forehead and that
girlish glint in your eye, your spirit and
steady abundance of life and hope?
   – under the snow. Under the wreath of cedar.
Companion beyond death. Take me down with you.
Side by side, let us see the unknown.
It’s so desolate here and the hour is getting dark.
The words are few now and no one’s listening anymore.
Dearest, you who are sleeping. Eurydice.
   – under the snow. Under the wreath of cedar.

Rolf Jacobsen (this poem was partially quoted in Will and Testament). Translation by Roger Greenwald, published in Did I Know You? Selected Poems.

Vigdis Hjorth's novel, with its elements drawn from her own life, became controversial in Norway when her own family members objected to the publication of these supposed family revelations. For more on this aspect of the novel, see the reviews by Holly Williams in the Observer, and by Lara Feigel in the Guardian.

Tim Adams interviews Vigdis Hjorth.

Natasha Sholl on writing people you know.

I'm very interested in the ethics of disclosure of family secrets in autobiographical writing. I've been fairly open about my own experiences on this blog, in part to make up for an incident I've probably told before. One day after a particularly painful beating the previous evening that I'd received for some undoubted mischief on my part, I ran into a neighbor on our apartment building's stairs. What was all that shrieking and crying that was coming from your apartment last night? she asked. Without missing a beat, I answered that we must have had the television on too loud.

In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's unjustifiable and tragic death yesterday in Orem, Utah, in the online world we're often being presented with a menu of two choices for our response. Kirk is a worthy martyr, ultimate victim of leftist cancel culture, or he was a fascist fanatic and a Christian heretic. I appreciated this calm appraisal. I can grieve his loss and pray for his family and friends while continuing to reject his theology and its political enmeshments.

Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum (Foreign Affairs) on "The Logic Behind Trump’s Assault on the Administrative State."

Ungoverning also dissolves the branches of government and unifies the separation of powers into a single office—or more accurately, a single person. It is not about creating what some constitutional scholars call a “unitary presidency”: an executive branch that responds to the president’s directives. It is about creating a strongman. This motivation explains Trump’s reliance on executive orders, which signal not only policy shifts but also the necessity of personal command. As Trump once put it, 'I alone can fix it.'
...
In his desire to weaken the state and rebuild it around him, he has made chaos the new standard. The range of future possibilities for Washington is thus wide. It is reasonable to wonder whether there will even be a regular presidential election in 2028. Trump, after all, has flirted with the idea of seeking a third term; his official store sells 'Trump 2028' hats. The worst-case scenarios seem more plausible than ever before.

Philip Gulley on good goodbyes. (На русском языке.)

On 9/11, we remember that war does not work. (From the Daily Quaker Message, which again I highly recommend.)

Rick Holmstrom, "Lucinda."