A truly stellar news conference

Vera C. Rubin Observatory and what it's looking at. (Source and description.)

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At Monday's unveiling of the first images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory on Cerro Pachón in Chile, director Željko Ivezić promised, 

... At the end of presentation you will get the link [to this site/application] and then you can spend the rest of your day enjoying these ten million galaxies.

Ivezić made this promise as he presented stunning initial images from the Rubin Observatory's Simonyi Survey Telescope and its world-record-sized digital camera. In the hour and a half news conference I linked above ("Monday's unveiling"), his wonderful presentation, given with both awe and humor, starts here. If you are a space or cosmology nerd or a fan of science journalism, you'll want to see all of the rest of this video, but if not, Scientific American has done you a great service by summarizing the presentation, and selecting several shorter videos, in their article, "Majestic First Images from Rubin Observatory Show Universe in More Detail Than Ever Before."

Most news headlines these days don't give us much joy, but I found this Rubin Observatory presentation and press conference, clunky as it was in places, very inspiring. Željko Ivezić's enthusiasm, and the heartfelt comments from the news conference panel (question-and-answer portion starts here), gave a wonderful human dimension to an otherwise tech-heavy theme and the staggering cosmic scale of the images themselves.

You might ask what distinguishes this earth-bound observatory from the Hubble and James Webb telescopes in space. Those amazing space tools can focus on very specific places, at distances that take us close to the apparent origins of our universe. The Rubin Observatory, on the other hand, will photograph the entire sky that's visible on its mountain, through full revolutions of the earth, over and over. These high-resolution images will be compiled over a ten-year period. Scientists and other viewers worldwide will be able to gain access to the images, including celestial movements and changes, and evidences of dark matter and dark energy. The compilation is called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time. Here's how it compares to other astronomical survey projects and catalogs, but one of its main advantages is simply the combination of the unprecedented speed of its repeating image-capturing cycles, without losing high resolution.

Rubin in 1963 using Kitt Peak National
 Observatory's 36-inch telescope with
Kent Ford's image tube spectrograph
attached. (Source and description.)

Instead of spending the last two days just looking at ten million galaxies, I've enjoyed reading about Vera Rubin and some of her contemporary colleagues, such as Kent Ford, Geoffrey Burbridge, Margaret Burbridge ... and following up some of the numerous links on their Wikipedia pages.

In case you see politics in everything, as I tend to do, notice  that several of the initial speakers in the long video puffed the USA's role as the world leader in science. That made it all the more interesting to notice the incredible variety of immigrants, international participants, cultures, and languages involved in the Rubin Observatory program.

It's also interesting to note that the press conference press handler turned away a question about future funding in light of federal budget cuts. (One earlier projection estimated running costs of $40 million per year.)

Now, back to the images .... Or as Željko Ivezić says, "Warp One, engage!"

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A few more words about the Rubin Observatory: here are the project's four main science goals.

"Racist is a tough little word," wrote linguist John McWhorter in The Atlantic. "Many of us think its meaning is obvious, but it has evolved quite a bit from its original signification over the past several decades."

What would you say? What are useful current definitions of "racism," "systemic racism," and "racist," based on your own experience or on sources you trust and recommend? In a brief survey, I'd like to ask you five questions that may help me write a related blog post, but, if that happens, nobody's comments will be attributed without permission.

Citing COVID-19 restrictions dating to 2020, city authorities in Moscow are not allowing protests (not even single-person picketing) at the site of the restored Joseph Stalin sculpture at Metro station Taganskaya. It reminds me of the scandal that surrounded restoration of a quotation lauding Stalin in the rotunda of Kurskaya station back in 2009, a time when we often passed through that station. (You can see part of that quotation in my photo: "Stalin raised us to be faithful to the people, and he inspired us to work and to perform great deeds.") Back in 2009, protesting didn't seem to be all that risky.

An urgent question (and an offer of practical resources for local Friends meetings) from Wess Daniels: Who gave us Guilford College?

Joseph and his brothers: Tom Gates continues his series on Quakers and the end of scapegoating.

Micah Bales on the Gerasenes and their unhappy reaction to a healing. (Context: Luke 8:26-39.) And how would we react?

Our reading this morning leaves us with no doubt: Healing is hard. True healing disrupts as much as it restores. The transformation that Jesus brings ripples out from those who are being healed to touch the whole fabric of society. When we get healed, we’ll find ourselves in a new kind of trouble. Holy trouble. 

Nadya Tolokonnikova (of Pussy Riot fame) and her prison cell installation in a downtown Los Angeles gallery.

“One thing that I just don’t vibe with in modern American society – there’s an entire thing about safety. And I’ve lived my life in a way that safety was the last thing that I would care about,” she said. “This is a thing I think about a lot lately. We need to be less safe, be ready to offend ourselves and other people. Otherwise, Maga people are just going to keep winning, because they’re not afraid.”

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At least the second time I've ended with this clip: Gino Matteo and Jason Ricci ... "I need Jesus to walk with me."

Belonging to Friends

Speaking with my mentor, Deborah Haight, at
Canadian Yearly Meeting 1976. Also in the frame,
Duncan Wood (at right), Katharine Wood (behind
Deborah). St. Thomas, Ontario.

My very first experience of a Quaker meeting took place in Ottawa, Ontario, on August 11, 1974. In my diary entry for that day, the headline was "My first visit!!!" There were 24 of us altogether in that four-sided meeting space, including two relatives I brought along for safety, since I was very nervous about this unfamiliar thing called "church." (If you've been following this blog for a while, you know that I grew up in an anti-church family.)

I needn't have worried. By the time the hour of silence (during which there were four spontaneous messages arising from various participants) came to an end, I knew I belonged.

As I got more and more acquainted with Quaker ways, I learned that the process of realizing that one "belonged" had various names, especially "convincement" and "conversion." In my own life, conversion came first, earlier that same year, when my reading of the Sermon the Mount, Matthew's version, led me to trust Jesus. I concluded for myself that conversion was a matter of opening my eyes and heart to an inward light that could illuminate a path through life. Becoming convinced, on the other hand, meant that, at least in my specific case, the companionship of Quakers provided the best, most direct guides along that path.

All this was no random accident, I realized. My family's chaos (combined, ironically, with its cult of obedience) and the public agonies of the Viet Nam War era, had already led me to nonviolence and a rejection of authoritarianism. I couldn't say where worldly contingencies and the Holy Spirit's guidance merged in my case. But once I realized that I didn't want to practice my newfound faith all alone, a peace church with almost zero hierarchy was bound to appeal. I wanted to go public. I wanted to belong officially!—whatever that meant.

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Despite my inherited suspicion of the religion industry, I came to realize how important a concrete sense of belonging was to me. As I found out, that led to another term in Quaker culture: "membership." With indecent speed, I applied for membership in Ottawa Meeting. I was interviewed and accepted into membership in less than ten months after that first visit. My fiftieth anniversary as a member of Friends was June 5 of this year.

The following summer, July 26-31, 1976, I attended my first ever Quaker yearly meeting sessions, at Alma College, St. Thomas, Ontario. There I found out that perhaps my yearning for membership was not universal for Canadian Friends. The subject of membership was one of the hot topics of the yearly meeting sessions—specifically, should committee service be limited to members?

Although it was clear that Friends were split on the issue, I was impressed by the civility with which Friends on both sides put their cases, and by presiding clerk Philip Martin's care in guiding the process without putting his own thumb on the scale. Friends eventually approved a decision not to limit committee service to members in most cases. After the decision had been adopted, Philip spoke personally of his deep concern that weakening the concept of membership was a dangerous precedent.

Much more recently, during my academic year in Birmingham, England, I attended a monthly meeting in which an application for membership was approved for a long-time attender who was 85 years old. He stood up and, with a twinkle in his eye, conceded that his application was a bit late in the day.... To which I can only add that temperaments vary! For me, at age 21, ten months to seal the deal seemed like forever. But those dear Ottawa Friends, almost before the ink was dry on my membership certificate, put me on a Yearly Meeting committee and sent me as a representative to what was for me a life-changing experience, a triennial conference of the Friends World Committee for Consultation.

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A link to the Kindle version.

I found a somewhat different but very fertile understanding of convincement, conversion, and membership in a recent Pendle Hill Pamphlet, Matt Rosen's Awakening the Witness: Convincement and Belonging in Quaker Community. In particular, he suggests putting convincement first, something like an inward baptism, or as he suggests with a phrase sometimes used by early Friends, they "received the Truth in the love of it."

(Unfamiliar with Pendle Hill Pamphlets? Here's an introduction.) 

Rosen's description of convincement has, indeed, the fragrance of conversion already in it, as if it would be unnecessary or unhelpful to make too fine a distinction between the two. Convincement can also have an element of conviction, a realization that God's grace has been denied or resisted up to that point.

In Rosen's exploration of convincement stories from Quaker history, we see that it might also involve decisions that will involve commitment and sacrifice. To embark on the Quaker path in the early years of persecution certainly did involve personal risk. Even now, risks are there, ranging from mystics facing ridicule among the militantly secular, to financial sacrifices for war tax refusers, and jail time for prophets engaged in civil disobedience or evangelists in closed societies.

What distinguishes conversion in Matt Rosen's pamphlet is its progression beyond the point of convincement. 

As convincement leads into lifelong conversion of the heart, and as the heart is turned around, one slowly becomes “established in the Truth.” One learns to recognize and follow the voice of the inward Teacher and learns to hear this Teacher speaking in the experience of others. Convincement is an initial step. Some early seekers were convinced of the Truth by itinerant preachers but did not “grow up in the Truth” once those preachers left town. They were not settled on the foundation they had been pointed to. So, part of the work of publishing Truth was helping to establish the newly convinced. This meant encouraging and supporting community, grounded on the promise of Christ’s presence in the midst as gatherer, leader, priest, prophet, and friend.

As powerful as my initial conversion seemed to be (and its precedence in my own life, having happened before I began attending Friends meeting), I cannot say that I'm still just riding the momentum of that experience. Learning to pray without ceasing is still the aim of my life, and, fifty years later, success still varies. So, for me, Matt Rosen's reflections ring true.

His observations on membership are equally interesting.

Historically, Quakers have understood membership to be a covenant relationship between an individual and a meeting community. Membership is a little like a marriage. The member commits to supporting the community, to growing in fellowship, and to being accountable for their gifts, and the meeting commits to supporting the Friend in ways both pastoral and practical. The process of applying for and being welcomed into membership recognizes that someone already belongs to a community, just as a Quaker marriage recognizes what God has already done in the life of a relationship.

My suggestion, then, is that membership and convincement can come apart. It could be possible to be a member who is not a convinced Friend ... and it is possible to be a convinced Friend not in membership....

Rosen notes that the earliest generations of Friends did not have formal membership at all. (And in the context of persecution, there would hardly be an incentive to claim to be a Friend except on the basis of actual convincement.)

The structure and significance of meetings and membership may change, as they have before, but convinced Friends will recognize their Guide in the experience of others and seek each other out. Truth doesn’t stand or fall with our current structures. I experience this as a liberating realization. As Sydney Carter reminds us in the “George Fox” song, “the Light will be shining at the end of it all.” And if that is true—if, like Fox, we are not building one more religion—then we have time to stop and listen, to experiment and re-imagine, trusting that the Light does and always will shine in the darkness, and that come what may, even if we are pressed on every side as the early Friends were, the Light will not be overcome. The foundation will stand. And all people will be drawn to God in God’s good time— rescued, guided, and knit together by the Divine hand.

I recommend Matt Rosen's pamphlet as a good resource for looking at the interplay between conversion, convincement, and membership in your own faith community and in the full variety of experiences and temperaments among you.

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Screenshot from source.  

Next in the USA's bombsites? Rick Steves wants to help Americans get to know Iran.

Matt Fitzpatrick seems to think that you can't assassinate your way to peace.

Dana A. Williams on what it was like to be a writer whose editor was Toni Morrison. (And here's an article I linked to in an earlier post, Toni Morrison's rejection letters.)

Steve Curwood interviews Rev. Mariama White-Hammond: Juneteenth Plays a Role in Environmental Justice for All.

A Yougov survey tells us what we already suspected: men are more likely than women to rate themselves as above average in their sense of humor, intelligence, confidence, and self-awareness. (!) (However, most people I know personally seem to be above average in not claiming to be above average.)

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Blues from Denmark. Michelle Birkballe, "Cry to Me."

The benefit of the doubt, part three (prequel)

As Israel strikes Iran with the stated purpose of eliminating that country as a nuclear threat, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy points out, 

Iran would not be this close to possessing a nuclear weapon if Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu had not forced America out of the nuclear agreement with Iran that had brought Europe, Russia, and China together behind the United States to successfully contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions. This is a disaster of Trump and Netanyahu's own making, and now the region risks spiraling toward a new, deadly conflict. A war between Israel and Iran may be good for Netanyahu’s domestic politics, but it will likely  be disastrous for both the security of Israel, the United States, and the rest of the region.

Quote: "This is a disaster of Trump and Netanyahu's own making."

The U.S. Secretary of State says that there was no U.S. participation in Israel's attack, but is Trump guilty of a share of the responsibility for Israel's perceived need to attack today?

Truthfully, I'm not in the mood to give the president, who has zealously reversed so many policies of the Obama and Biden years respectively, the benefit of the doubt in this case. Is that fair?

"The benefit of the doubt" has become an important concept to me, a way of identifying and warding off false witness, needless self-pity, and cynicism. I first wrote about this principle in my regular column in Friends United Meeting's Quaker Life magazine, back in June 1998:

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About a year and a half ago, Ellen Cooney, the co-founder of Start-Up Education (see her article), spent six weeks with us at FUM as a volunteer. She had told us she was willing to do anything; she simply wanted to spend time being part of a working group which met daily for Friends worship, and (as a General Conference Friend from Atlanta Meeting) to get to know FUM better.

Knowing of her professional consulting background, we wanted the benefit of her observations of FUM as an organization. She interviewed each staff member privately, talked with several leaders at the yearly meeting level, and studied our organizational charts and documents. She then made a presentation to all of us staff with suggestions for working more productively with each other and more responsively to the constituency. Of her many good ideas, one stood out for its simplicity and central importance: "Learn to give each other the benefit of the doubt."

Ellen said that this principle was one of the ground rules at a large consulting firm where she had worked. When she and her co-workers did not know why someone had done something, and especially when it looked like a mistake or a personal slight, this principle was so ingrained in the corporate culture that many negative assumptions and grudges were nipped in the bud.

We are beginning to learn that when we want to know, "Why would he do that without checking with me? Why did she send that letter without copying to me? Why were they invited and not me?" we need to think, "Until I get a chance to ask, I better give them the benefit of the doubt. They must have had a good reason."

Recently I served on a committee, but missed a meeting because I was not notified. I could have dreamed up all sorts of reasons why I wasn't invited: My input was not valued. I had asked too many questions at the previous meeting. Maybe I was only on the committee as a token to appease some faction. The reality was much simpler: this time, notifications had been done within the committee instead of by a yearly meeting office, so the procedure had been unclear. It was the sort of simple oversight that I might easily have done myself.

The principle of "the benefit of the doubt" is incomplete without personal follow-up whenever necessary. We gave National Friends Insurance Trust (see cover story, March 1998) the benefit of the doubt long after we should have demanded clearer information on the security of our health insurance. The "benefit of the doubt" principle simply says that, if we don't understand why someone did something, we assume that "they must have had a good reason" until we have more complete and direct information; it doesn't excuse us from obtaining that information (first-hand if possible) whenever we should do so.

This principle is just as important in relations between groups as it is between individuals. When FUM decided to stop sending doctors to Lugulu Hospital in Kenya (intending to send money to pay Kenyan doctors instead), some Kenyans saw this as a sign that FUM wanted to weaken ties with Kenyan Friends. Thank goodness they didn't just keep this negative and incorrect interpretation to themselves. The leaders at Lugulu, and our own appointees, told us that the personal relationships were more important than money; the human exchange needed to be continued. As a result, the decision was reversed.

Right now, we're trying to make FUM more productive and responsive to God's leadings and to you. We are trying new ideas, taking more risks and will inevitably make more mistakes. Never stop holding us accountable, but our work together will be much more lively and joyful if, until we all have our facts straight, we agree to give each other the benefit of the doubt.

Original article (archived) is here. The March 1998 cover story on the National Friends Insurance Trust is here. (See table of contents for that issue to see the full coverage.)

At the time this was written, I was serving as general secretary of Friends United Meeting, sometimes nicknamed the "orthodox" branch of Friends. Ellen Cooney's Atlanta Friends Meeting was part of Friends General Conference, a broadly more liberal association of Friends congregations. Ellen is currently serving as the director of development for Monteverde Friends School in Costa Rica.

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In an earlier post on this blog, Benefit of the doubt, part one, I described this principle's value in helping me distinguish between realism and cynicism.

In Benefit of the doubt, part two, I applied the principle to my observations of our then-new president, Donald Trump. See if you think my analysis there still applies (if it ever did!).

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Marilynne Robinson's Notes from an Occupation.

Simultaneous with corruption there is also a clash of worldviews that is rarely acknowledged. The country is said now to be polarized, an image that implies that we lie along the same continuum of belief, at opposite extremes but with an expansive middle ground between the two sides that awaits only certain moderating concessions to bring us closer. This metaphor does not really suggest the nature of our problem or the depth of it. It has not been helpful. It is past time to try considering a new image for our situation.

It's Martin Kelley's "pet theory that Quakerism is always dying and simultaneously always being reborn." (Introductory article for the June-July issue of Friends Journal, "Quaker Revivals.") Martin also has some interesting observations on how "Insiders" and "Seekers" use the Quaker Net.

Mark Russ on God's wrath and vengeance—and what we lose if we entirely deny those aspects of the Divinity. It might just be me, but I was reminded of R.W. Tucker's "Revolutionary Faithfulness."

Robert Garon on Genesis: God's rest vs Egypt's pyramid scheme.

Aristotle reminds us that politics is not just power.

Brian Zahnd's tribute to Walter Brueggemann.

See you at No Kings Day.

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Ending scenes and credits from Blues Brothers 2000, including glimpses of my lifelong blues icon Junior Wells. He died a month before the film was released. As some reviewers acknowledged, it was not much of a movie—except for the soundtrack and the incredible list of participating musicians. It's bittersweet to watch this clip now; so many of them are no longer with us.

(Re)learning my mother tongue

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My first passport.

For me, a former language teacher, there's nothing more humbling than studying a language I thought I already knew.

Family lore says that I spoke three languages before kindergarten: Norwegian, German, and English. In my birth home, Oslo, in my father's parents' home, I was surrounded by Norwegian. Then I lived with my German grandparents in Stuttgart, and German came naturally. During my English-speaking growing-up years in the Chicago area, I often returned to both sets of grandparents and the languages of my earliest years.

Roughly seven decades later, I don't have the same level of confidence at all with those first two languages. So now, long after my language-learning window has closed, neurologically speaking, I'm determined to get some of that confidence back. At least in Norwegian.

Well, I do have a head start, a passive knowledge of probably several hundred words. (Just for context, and humility ... according to Google, the average English speaker knows 20-40,000 words, and even a five-year old might know 5,000!)

Continuing the theme of head start and humility, a whole bunch of those several hundred words are cognates or near-cognates:

• a ball - en ball
• a bank - en bank
• a boat - en båt 
• a book - ei bok
• a bush - en busk 
• a cake - ei kake 
• a cat - ei katt 
• a clock - en klokke
• a cow - ei ku
• a daughter - ei datter 
• a day - en dag 
• a door - ei dør 
• a fish - en fisk
• a flag - et flagg
• a garage - et garasje 
• a glass - et glass 
• a goat - ei geit 
• a hammer - en hammer 
• a house - et hus  
• a night - en natt 
• a plant - en plante 
• a sea - en sjø 
• a ship - et skip
• a son - en sønn
• a tree - et tre 
• a window - et vindu 
• grass - gress 
• paper - papir

Almost as close:

• an airplane - et fly
• a brother - en bror
• a dog - en hund (compare English hound)
• an enemy - en fiende (compare English fiend)
• a father - en far
• a horse - en hest
• a place - et sted (as in English bedstead, homestead, instead of)
• a morning - en morgen
• a mother - ei mor
• a shirt - en skjorte
• a sister - ei søster
• a skirt - et skjørt
• a stone - en stein 
• a word - et ord
• environment - miljø (compare with milieu)
• food - mat (compare with English meat, which once meant food in general)
• hi! - hei!
• goodbye! - adjø! (compare French adieu!)

See how much Norwegian you and I already know?! And don't those words sound sort of like an echo of an ancient form of English? Thanks to Bnorsk.no for many of these examples and many other cognates (verbs, adjectives, etc.) you can find there.

My head start only goes so far; it disappears when I start dealing with a noun's gender. Some Norwegians divide all nouns into two genders, common and neuter. But others prefer to observe the division of common nouns into masculine with the indefinite article "en" (a son - en sønn) or feminine with the indefinite article "ei" (a book - ei bok). In any case, I need to learn the noun's article along with the noun.

To compensate, Norwegian verbs don't conjugate according to subject or pronoun. Whew!

I'm delicately skipping over the subjects of pronunciation and tonality.

I have two different ways of working with my remnant of passive Norwegian. I read textbooks of varying difficulty (such as the three pictured above) and Web sites such as ntnu.edu/now; I enjoy the little bursts of pleasure that I get when I realize that I understand the texts, either by knowing the full words or by recognizing the root words and the word-units in compound words, allowing me to guess their meanings. Context helps, too; I'm more likely to understand political and theological texts than, for example, poetry. It's fun to pick and choose among the various methods and levels of those different resources rather than just sticking to one of them.

This works for increasing my reading and vocabulary abilities. However, I need more help with listening comprehension (this is the area we focused on when we lived in Russia, teaching English) and much more help in speaking. For that, I abandon all pretense of being an advanced learner, and drill myself in the very basics, using Duolingo. I patiently work through exercise after exercise of speaking into the microphone when so instructed, patiently constructing sentences with the right word order, and reviewing my mistakes. Note to self: the word "my" comes after that noun that is mine.

My grandmother Gerd Jakobsen Maurer. Above her,
my great-great grandfather Johan Fredrik Maurer.

There's a practical side to this activity, aside from the alleged benefit in preventing or postponing Alzheimer's disease: in a month I plan to be attending the combined Nordic Yearly Meeting in Stavanger, Norway. It will serve as an exam of sorts, and already serves as powerful motivation. 

But the best part of these efforts is the way I feel reconnected to my fascinating and very literate grandmother, with whom I spent many hours in conversation from my first years until her death in 1988.

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The photo of my grandmother comes from this post back in 2005. I still see her and my grandfather in my dreams ... where they're usually speaking English, which they both spoke very well.

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Another advantage of immersing myself in relearning a language: a respite from the day's news.

There's no respite in Ukraine.

Timothy Snyder on the reasons he moved to Toronto last year (and things that were not reasons).

Walter Brueggemann died today. The news and the legacy. Rest in peace!

Michael Marsh invites us to think about our deathbed prayer. (Not a morbid post at all.)

Britain Yearly Meeting's 2025 epistle ... "We are reminded that the central message of the New Testament is one of love." Good, I think so, too, but Mark Russ has a caution.

Three more days to register for the annual sessions of Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends. Location: Reedwood Friends Church, across the street from Reed College in Portland, Oregon. (Online attendance is possible for the main sessions and some of the workshops.)

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Austin John, "Long Distance Call." (The whole set is excellent.)

Nancy French ... on not bearing false witness

Source.

Eiffel Tower, Paris, Tennessee Nancy French's home town. Source.

Nancy French, Instagram, 2024. Source.

This high praise for Nancy French's book Ghosted: An American Story from Christianity Today editor Russell Moore will save me a lot of words:

I didn't know writing could be this haunting and hilarious, heartbreaking and exhilarating all at the same time. I did not want it to end. This tour de force of storytelling and sense-making is one of the most gripping and beautiful memoirs in a generation.

Nancy French was born and raised in the Appalachian foothills, a grandchild of the mountain culture, and grew up in a church community that nurtured her faith and gave her love and care ... until the devastating day that it didn't. She attended a Church of Christ college ... until she couldn't stomach the chapel's lazy positivity and stopped attending, even though chapel attendance was compulsory.

As a result, at age twenty, "by now my affection for Rush Limbaugh and church had disappeared and I considered myself a feminist, atheist, liberal." That was the moment when she encountered David French, a Republican Christian law student, an encounter that resulted in a restoration of faith (well, not the exact same faith), a marriage that has lasted three decades and counting—and a career in ghostwriting for Republicans that didn't last quite as long.

Obviously, there's nothing terribly linear about French's story, with each swoop and dive reflecting something of the wrenching spiritual, political, and cultural turmoil of her country in those decades. Her story includes betrayal, giddy hope, predators protected by churches, miracles, allies lost and found—it's a good thing she's an excellent storyteller! Take a look at these reviews for more of what I mean:

• A secular review (Publisher's Weekly).
• A review from a Christian viewpoint (in the late lamented publication Current).
• A slightly more critical review ("But I complain too much") in the Englewood Review of Books.

Ghosted has many important messages, including powerful testimony against the shame of being a childhood target of sexual assault in the church. I hope everyone who needs these messages will read this book. But there's something else that intrigued me as a lifelong lefty: the passing references to the way conservatives see us. I'm not necessarily talking now about who is objectively more correct about policy and morality; it's the cultural assumptions and conclusions that seemingly entitle them to dismiss us (and us them).

For example, here French is commenting on the reactions to the book she co-authored with Sarah Palin's daughter Bristol:

I’d thought that people of both parties would rally around Bristol and show her compassion. That’s not what happened. It slowly dawned on me that when the Democrats loudly proclaimed “believe all women,” they really meant “the right kind of women”—meaning not “right” on the political spectrum at all. I shouldn’t have been surprised. They had embraced Ted Kennedy, even though he flipped his car, sent his female passenger careening into a pond, and left her there to die. They revered Bill Clinton, even though he was credibly accused of rape by multiple women.

Bristol was well spoken and the book was clear. However, a nuanced, trauma-informed conversation did not arise from her revelations. Bristol told the truth, and Democrats laughed. After seeing how people mocked this young mother, I was fully confident the Democrats were not only wrong on the issue of women, they were callously wrong. They harbored and protected abusers of women, and Republicans alone would stand against sexual injustice.

In spite of my certainty, the truth turned out to be much more complicated than I thought.

Soon a major turning point for French came: the acclamation Donald Trump received from the very people whose ostensible values she cherished and represented in her writing, and who, as it turned out, turned against her and her husband when they found that contradiction intolerable. As those contradictions mounted up with every Trumpian assault on rhetorical decency, she lost many clients, and kept the few that agreed to her condition that she would not write pieces in favor of Trump.

In my mind, however, I made a vow: I would not bear false witness against my liberal neighbor.

That one decision was the beginning of the end of my political ghostwriting career.

I hope that progressives, even in the shadow of Donald Trump's devastating attacks on political and ethical norms, are willing to make the same commitment against bearing false witness against their (our) opponents.

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On the "conservative" label.

A grievously neglected commandment.

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Here's a podcast in which Julie Roys, a Christian investigative journalist who often focuses on church-related corruption and abuse, interviews Nancy French.

Back on March 27, Medardo Gómez, Lutheran bishop of El Salvador, died. He made a deep impression on me during a visit back in the time of the civil war and death squads. Rest in peace!

Christine Patterson on the importance of cultural intelligence for service in a divided world.

A poll suggests that Israelis increasingly hold genocidal views concerning Palestinians. Not coincidentally, the Israeli government announces the creation or "legalization" of 22 new settlements on the West Bank. Britain Yearly Meeting minutes its discernment that genocide is occurring in Gaza.

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Sue Foley, the "Ice Queen" of blues guitarists, gives us an extended solo....

Patriotism revisited

A 2023 USA naturalization ceremony. Source.

It is my intention in good faith to become a citizen of the United States and to renounce absolutely and entirely all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which at this time I am a subject or citizen.

I am, and have been during all of the periods required by law, a person of good moral character, attached to the principles of the Constitution of the United States and well disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States.

—Extracts from the naturalization petition form used at the time my parents became U.S. citizens.

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Last week I wrote about the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, and how postwar migrations and displacements brought my parents to the USA, where they met as university students. About five years after their arrivals as students, they became U.S. citizens.

I've been thinking again about the theme of patriotism, which has fascinated me both as a patriot (at least to my mind!) and as a Christian political scientist and pacifist. I noted the language in the naturalization petitions submitted by both of my parents, renouncing all other allegiances and claiming to be "attached to the principles of the Constitution" and "well disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States."

As a legal standard that would-be U.S. citizens must meet, these promises seem to me to form a defensible definition of patriotism. Note that there is no requirement to agree that the USA is a better, superior, grander, more perfect country than any other on the planet.

1953 Chevy. Screenshot from source.

General Motors begged to differ, in an advertising jingle I remember from childhood:

See the USA in your Chevrolet.
America is asking you to call.
Drive your Chevrolet through the USA.
America's the greatest land of all.

Of course the USA is not the only country in the world whose citizens, or at least some of them, believe they live in "the greatest land of all." And, they might even be able to explain why they believe this. In the case of the USA, my idealistic preferred explanation to justify claims of the USA's greatness is John Gunther's famous line that the USA is "a country deliberately founded on a good idea"—an idea whose most succinct expression might be the first three words of the U.S. Constitution: "We the people...."

As an aspiration it is powerful, and it's part of our notorious American exceptionalism, but in these fractious times, are "we" still "we"? And as for "the people," is our government still, in Abraham Lincoln's words, "of the people, by the people, for the people"?

One thing seems clear to me about American patriotism. If it becomes detached from that "good idea," then it degrades into cultish compulsory slogans, chiefly useful for attacking one's political enemies.

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Back in 2012, while I was reading Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands, I wrote a blog post with this question: What can Christians do to inoculate our nations against murderous and cultish forms of patriotism?

To me, the only healthy patriotism is functional, not mythological or tribal or cultic or anything involving ultimate loyalties that only God can claim. Functional patriotism treasures the mutual obligations of a nation's citizens, and gives us an investment in each other's success—not our own private aggrandizement. Functional patriotism promotes intelligent statecraft on the international stage, and the building up of institutions that promote trade and communication and prevent war. Functional patriotism encourages young people and newcomers to cherish the languages and cultures that we have the honor to host within our borders. Functional patriotism asks leaders to be as patriotic in deeds and sacrifice as those leaders want the rest of us to be. And functional patriotism understand that nations and empires come and go; they learn to recognize the limits that sustainability imposes so that the good things we stand for can last, and so the planet will flourish under our stewardship, not shrug us off on account of our abuse.

I'd love to think that we Christians can counter the blasphemies of cultic patriotism with the ethics of biblical discipleship and a style of participation that proclaims God's grace rather than our demands for privilege.

Here are some of my other blog posts on these themes.

On the roots of the USA's "City on a Hill" exceptionalism, and John Winthrop's "biblical modesty": Exceptional pride.
On being a "grateful immigrant": An immigrant/patriot revisits January 6.
On safety ... for whom? Safety and "the nature of the world in which we live."

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The last chapter of Clarence White's new book, I Changed My Mind About..., has a thoughtful chapter on what Christians' relationship to their country should be. Excerpt (with Clarence's permission):

Most people in this country who attend a church never struggle with the question of what the relation of a Christian to their country should be. This is a rich area to think about, and has its own constellation of tributary issues.

For most of my young life I did not question this either, until I went to seminary. As I learned to think theologically, my understanding of what is involved in this issue began to profoundly change. That change has made me an outlier among even my friends. Even people who respect me personally and theologically have trouble with my thinking in this area.

The shift in my thinking is connected to the change in my thinking about war, as I outlined in chapter 5 of this book. When I had the life-changing experience of having my eves opened about Christian non-violence as I sat in a Mexican restaurant with Professor Wil Cooper, it was probably a natural development from that experience that my thinking about how a Christian should relate to his or her nation would also evolve.

To me, the issue is the Lordship of Jesus Christ. When Wil Cooper told me our job is not to calculate contingencies of what may happen if we do or do not use force, but rather our task is to simply do what Jesus said to do in the Sermon on the Mount, I knew immediately in a profound way that Wil was right. As I have written, that shook me like nothing ever had in my life up to that point, and the vision of that has never waned in the subsequent 42 years. I was tremendously shaken, and 42 years later I have been completely unable to shake myself loose from the impact of this imperative.

For the rest of the chapter, see Clarence's blog, Ramblings of a Retired Theologian. The full book will be published June 1; the Kindle version is already available.

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Director Robin Truesdale has made her excellent film Sweet Home Monteverde (my review here) available on YouTube:

The Russian Federation's "root causes" for the invasion of Ukraine.

For Putin and his regime, Ukraine’s democracy, its aspirations for EU and NATO membership, and its cultural independence represent an existential threat to the authoritarian model they have constructed. Ukraine’s success would demonstrate to Russians that a different, more democratic future is also possible for them, a prospect the Kremlin finds intolerable.

Two recent posts from the Daily Quaker Message: Ukrainian Quakers React to the War and Conscientious Objectors in Japan.

A useful overview of Friends Peace Teams, prepared for the annual meeting of Friends World Committee for Consultation, Europe and Middle East Section. (I serve on the Europe and Middle East team of Friends Peace Teams.)

Nathan Perrin on community and legacy vs isolation and chaos.

One of the valuable lessons we can take from both Mennonites and Sámi is that legacies that go on are the ones that are communal in nature. The communities that survive are the ones that dare to remember and, even more surprising, dare to celebrate. They have both lived through centuries of persecution through intentional love and service.

U.S. democracy continues to decompose daily before our eyes. Heather Cox Richardson. The Contrarian.

Wess Daniels on empires, good shepherds, refugees, and the Gospel of John, chapter ten.

Has the "Global Aid Industry," for better or worse, come to an end? 

Nancy Thomas and a harvest of poems from Psalm 119.

“Open my eyes that I may see….” Psalm 119:18, GIMEL

Open my eyes, Lord,
when the Bible gets boring.
When familiarity stiffens my brain cells
and my heart feels paralyzed;
when legality repulses
and the light grows dim,
open my eyes, Lord.

I am a stranger on earth,
an alien among ordinary people,
an imposter in church—
unsanctified, blind
and mostly silent.
How will your commands bind my wounds?
Will they bring me
to the place where I can say,
Your statutes are my delight!?

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A great place to be: Nathan James and the late James Harman at the Blues City Deli.