Can you believe?

10 September 2026

Can we believe?

John Woolman (source); Sarah Paine (source).

We were taught by renewed experience to labor for an inward stillness; at no time to seek for words, but to live in the spirit of truth, and utter that to the people which truth opened in us.
— John Woolman's Journal.
In the United States, if we continue normalizing lying, and allowing our leaders to just do it flagrantly, it's another sign of precipitous national decline.
— Sarah Paine, "America is repeating the exact mistakes that destroyed the Soviets."

I've spent much of the day thinking about "truth."

Not about every possible aspect of truth, I admit, but one aspect in particular: what we are doing when we are asserting something, and we have a vested interest in being believed.

Back in the seventeenth century, we Quakers sometimes referred to ourselves as "publishers of Truth" with a capital T. Those Friends were in fact eager to publish a particular Truth that they believed they had experienced, that "Christ has come to teach his people himself."

This assertion would be correctly classified by philosophers as objectively "unverifiable," although these early Quakers were simply testifying to their conversion experiences. Furthermore, they believed that their lives needed to be in accord with this experience. Therefore, they rejected violence, hierarchy, luxury, ceremony—in their church lives, in their civic roles, and in their individual lives. In making these assertions about God and about the consequent (verifiable) changes in their lives and practices, they risked ridicule, persecution, even loss of life.

How do you decide whether this or that public assertion is true? In a scientific context, we can ask whether we can make and test predictions based on that assertion. In civil society, we can ask about the credibility of speakers, and whether the promises or predictions they make are verifiable. But probably in all cases, the first thing we test or try to detect is this: are they speaking in good faith?—

do they have a history of speaking thoughtfully?
are they open about their motives and agendas?
are they open to follow-up conversations, to corrections or additional input to consider?
do they threaten dire consequences if their assertions are challenged?
who directs and finances their access to the public arena?

As Sarah Paine says, a culture of lying had fatal consequences for the USSR, and we should not tolerate such a culture here.

Just as we are being swamped by daily dumps of lies from the USA's president and his cheerleaders and true believers, our task of discerning and defending truth is becoming even more complicated. Artificial intelligence offers us many services, but among those services is the ability to generate and broadcast believable lies in just about every form of communication, with whatever gradation on the spectrum of lies, and, if so commanded, to do this with fake or stolen personalities and fake locations.

The motives and methods of such lying are not new. Sadly, lying has been part of American politics from the very beginning, despite our claiming to be founded on "self-evident" truths. The difference now might be the scale, with all its consequences: leaving part of our population through waves of ginned-up outrage; driving others into retreat from public involvement; and moving still others into taking up the challenge of, once again, publishing Truth.

One of the AI users in our circle sent us this fake ad for a breakfast cereal. What was interesting to me was his very simple prompts: a box of cereal on a grocery shelf, with a genuine photo of Slavoj Žižek. All of the text on this fake ad was generated by AI.

Take this offhand humorous and harmless little side-project and scale it up to carry serious messages and urgent commands, attractively and believably crafted, to audiences of thousands and millions, scooping up additional technological resources as it goes, blocking warnings and creating a firestorm of confusion. Perhaps this is one of the channels that those warning about possible AI-driven extinction events have in mind.

We do have a history of countering falsehood. Let's invite people into communities where we listen intently for truth, experiencing the power Woolman referred to (and uttering to the people only that "... which truth opened in us...."—truth is active), and speaking that truth in season and out of season accordingly. And when we individually tire, as we inevitably will at times, we can spell each other. We can eagerly extend our quest for truth by having conversations all over the planet with people similarly interested in listening, waiting, testing, and ultimately blessing everyone.

The power of truth-centered community life may not convince the world that Christ has come to teach his people himself, or that we have all our doctrines exactly right, but they may be able to verify a crucial first step: we speak in good faith.

One of the documents I stumbled on in searching for "truth": a glossary of terms useful for describing information disorder.

Phil Gulley on the truth will out. "The longer I live, the more I quote my mother."

Ron Hogan urges us to proclaim the message.

"Vote safe"? Elon Musk is funding a voting information site that sounds helpful, but... there are "hidden dangers." Snopes did some checking of their own.

A Multwood celebration, October 3, in Portland, Oregon: enjoying and honoring a case study of conversation across Quaker lines.

My favorite part of the funeral of King Harald V, yesterday, in Oslo, Norway. "Abide With Me." (Here's full coverage of the event.)

03 September 2026

On not being so glib...

Source.

In an interview with David Axelrod at the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics, U.S. representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez commented on the ways the wealth-dominated system tries to keep her in her place: (This is at about the 1 hr 5 min point.)

...[T]hey assume that my ambition is positional. They assume that my ambition is a title or a seat. And my ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country.
Presidents come and go. Senate, House seats, elected officials come and go. But single payer healthcare is forever. A living wage is forever. Workers' rights are forever. Women's rights, all of that.

A finer point to your question is that when you aren't attached, right, when you haven't been fantasizing about being this or that since you were seven years old, it is tremendously liberating. Because I get to wake up every day and say, how am I going to meet the moment? And conditions change radically all the time. So I make my response less to an attachment to some ... title or position and working backwards from there. But I make decisions by waking up in the morning, looking out the window, and observing the conditions of this country. And saying, what move or decision can I make today that's going to get us closer to that future, stronger, faster, and better than yesterday?

We are about two months away from the USA's midterm elections. It's a chance to reverse some of the corruption and cruelty of the MAGA occupation. Times are too urgent to let glib categories shape our evaluation of candidates, but it sometimes seems that's all the media can manage.

So Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and similar candidates are, we're told, too radical for national success. The recent successes of other progressive primary winners reportedly makes the Democratic Party establishment nervous. But none of that gamesmanship interests me. I want someone to vote for who is passionate about justice and sustainability, and who will work for that vision from whatever vantage point they have, not someone who knows how to pander.

Fortunately, "all politics is local," according to the maxim attributed to Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill. Ultimately, everyone running for office must convince their own constituency. Some of those constituencies will be convinced by candidates from the left, others will choose differently. Let those candidates all define themselves by their own words and actions, and their ability to listen to us, not by the categories and conventional wisdom of one or another establishment.

In an article in The Atlantic, "Why Do Rich Kids Love Socialism?", author Tyler Austin Harper makes his point right up front in his article's subtitle: "Having money isn’t at odds with wanting a fairer economic system." Naturally, such "rich kids" come in for some predictable and tiresome mocking, but there's actually something interesting going on:

In a 1977 essay for the magazine Radical America, Barbara and John Ehrenreich coined a term for America’s growing population of college-educated knowledge workers: the “professional managerial class.” The authors noted that members of the PMC tend to have jobs that create and maintain capitalist culture and its associated values. They have jobs in industries—such as the arts, education, medicine, entertainment, law, advertising, and technology—that could be seen as offering proof of capitalism’s ability to provide Americans with lives that are culturally rich, physically healthy, intellectually stimulating, and filled with technologies that make things easier. (Being a staff writer at The Atlantic is a great example of one such job.)
According to the Ehrenreichs, the 20th-century professional class played a crucial role, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, in maintaining the public’s faith in the economic system. The present growing embrace of leftist politics among the professional class suggests that the PMC is no longer especially enthusiastic about that mission. A CBS News/YouGov poll released this month found that Democrats, who belong to a party dominated by the professional class, were almost twice as likely to view socialism favorably (58 percent) as they were to view capitalism favorably (32 percent). Among college-educated Democrats, support for socialism was 71 percent.

Could there be some deeper reason for this development other than blatant hypocrisy in the pursuit of edgy trendiness? [Links are in the original article.] Harper continues,

A teacher who has to buy his own school supplies, an adjunct professor who works at three universities to make ends meet, a social worker who assists the disadvantaged, a nurse whose hospital was bought by private equity, a federal employee who watches lobbying groups kneecap safety regulations, a data engineer who helps make a product that gives teens suicide advice, a student who takes out burdensome loans to get a degree that is no longer a guaranteed ticket to a middle-class life—what should these people think of capitalism as it currently exists? What do you expect them to think? And why is it considered hypocrisy, rather than a defensible moral position, when some members of the PMC decide that the ugliness they encounter in their workplace, corporate office, and daily life is symptomatic of a system that deserves significant, even systemic, reform?

Still visiting The Atlantic ... Jonathan Chait considers "The Apocalyptic Style in Woke Thinking: much of the climate movement, particularly its most radical elements, has pivoted to Palestine."

Apparently if we care intensely enough about climate change (he cites the example of Greta Thunberg), we are not supposed to "pivot" to another major concern.

The draining of energy away from issues that once seemed so urgent has been slightly disorienting, even humorous. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently repeated a catchphrase that has circulated on the left, “Woke 1 was crazy,” which simultaneously laughs off the excesses of the social-justice left while implicitly assuming that a Woke 2 is just around the corner. The reality, however, is that Woke 2 is already here, and Gaza is its current preoccupation.

It's very fair to point to the excesses of the "apocalyptic style" in advocacy, whether it's in climate change or the campaign for a truly fair resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It's also very important to ask whether the zeal for either cause, or any cause of equal gravity, is driven by powerful ideals or some form of self-gratification. Are you genuinely trying to open the eyes of the greater public, or is your favorite audience already in the activist subculture whose good opinion you crave?

But it is totally unfair to mock genuine idealists when they may suddenly realize that, in the midst of their care for an ecologically sustainable future for our children and grandchildren, they also become aware that Palestinians are being killed by the tens of thousands, and others may become ethnically cleansed from their homes. If you or I become aware of mass human agony today, don't we have the right to switch priorities for a time? We may earn criticism for not having all the facts, or for ineffective advocacy, but good-faith efforts to respond to catastrophe don't deserve the dismissive label of "woke."

Once again, the socialists are coming!

Prince Harald playing with the Roosevelts' dog Fala.
Source.

Norway lost its beloved "national grandfather," King Harald V, exactly a week ago.

This YouTube video is a fair introduction to his life and influence.

Among his many personal qualities as a hardworking and devoted servant of his country, King Harald was a living link between the generation that grew up during World War II and our own time. When the Germans invaded Norway in 1940, Prince Harald was just three years old. He and his mother and sisters spent most of the war in the Washington, DC, area, including some time in the White House as guests of the president. At age 8, Harald attended Franklin D. Roosevelt's fourth inauguration, standing just behind the president.

Rest in peace!

Here are some of the arrangements for Harald's funeral in Oslo on this coming Wednesday.

Two amazing singers! I've cued up a place in the documentary Dolly and Friends: Making a Soundtrack where Dolly Parton gets together with Mavis Staples.

27 August 2026

Can we go back to the Garden?

... a lakeside conversation on George Fox’s letters

A guest post by Judy Maurer

A lakeside conversation.

A week ago we sat with old friends on the shore of a lake in Maine, my husband and I. We were only a few feet from where my great-grandfather pitched a tent and built a lean-to cook-shack to fish for a month each year.

I’ve spent time here most every summer since I was a baby. In a profound way, this is home.

Our conversation with our friends, Ben and Jody Richmond, that day turned to Ben’s new book on George Fox’s epistles. Fox inspired Quakerism back in the seventeenth century, during the turmoil of the English Civil War and its aftermath.

Ben had read these epistles deeply and came to recognize a lyrical quality in them. He formatted selections like poetry, so we could hear the cadence, too.

I had brought the book out with me to the shore. My copy was bristling with bookmarks. I picked it up and told him which was my favorite epistle. Jody said, “Read it aloud. It was written to be read aloud.”

So I read to them, and to the chipmunks and ducks along the shoreline and the loons farther out, George Fox’s Epistle 163, with the line and paragraph breaks Ben had given it:

My dear friends,—

Live
in the life
in which is the unity and peace
one with another,

and lowliness and humbleness
of heart and mind....

And so,
this is the word of the Lord God
to you all:

live
in the power of the Lord God,
in which
is peace, love, unity,
and dominion

in the life
and power of God,
which was before enmity was;

and in the light,
which was before darkness was;

and in the life,
which was before death was:

and so, in that
feel unity and life
in the power of God.

And so, the seed of God
feel over all that set,
which makes to suffer;

which was before it was,
and will remain
when that is all gone.

And so,
feel the top-stone over all laid,
that his life ye may feel over all,

and in that live.

I asked Ben about the repetition of “was before”, as in “which was before darkness was.”

His answer was fascinating. I asked him to say it all over again, and this time I’d record it. Ben collected himself and began again. I’ve lightly edited his words.

If you go through Fox's journal, and you go through the letters, you find that this language of returning to Eden—life before death, light before darkness—is there throughout Fox's writings.
Fox is inviting us to experience life before the Fall. I think it’s a real through-line in all of Fox's writing.

Over the years, as I've looked at it, I've found out that the language of entering back into the Garden of Eden, of being in "the light before darkness was"—"which was before enmity was"—is picking up the same theme. It’s a way of understanding salvation that has content for our life today.

Ben's book, bristling with tabs.

Sitting listening to Ben, part of me was flipping through Genesis 2 and 3 in my mind. God tells Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; the Snake tempts her; she and Adam eat it; God gets angry, throws them out of the Garden and puts down a flaming sword.

Ben continued:

The whole business about coming back through the flaming sword into the paradise of God, and the possibility of living that life now, struck me as really just powerful and wonderful. And I went around being excited about that for quite a while, and then I realized that I had no idea what it meant!

It occurred to me that it'd make a great topic for some biblical workshops. So I did with different groups of Friends an exercise where we would read Genesis 2 and 3 and I would ask them to brainstorm what was characteristic before the Fall and what was characteristic after the Fall.

Wonderful conversations came out of that. But what was really fun for me was that from that, you could often derive what we call Quaker testimonies.

The first "not good" statement is in Genesis 2. It’s God saying that it was not good for Adam to be alone. He didn't have someone who could be a real helpmeet for him. After the fall, one of the curses is for Eve—"your desire will be for the man, and He will rule over you."

So here is the testimony of women’s equality, and also community, because we aren’t to live alone, but to live together with others.

People start talking about these things, and suddenly the picture emerges of a life that is countercultural and we recognize it as being good. Well, that is so amazing!

At this point Johan brought up his blog post on Ben’s book. He read aloud from Fox’s epistle 291 “To All Women’s Meetings,” as Ben presents it:

Mary Magdalene, and the other Mary, were the first preachers of Christ's resurrection to the disciples, and the disciples could not believe their message and testimony that they had from Jesus, as some now-a-days cannot; but they received the command, and being sent preached it.

So is every woman and man to do, that sees him risen, and has the command and message; daughters shall prophesy as well as sons.

So they are to be obedient that have the Spirit poured upon them; women are to prophesy. And prophecy is not to be quenched. They that have the testimony of Jesus are commanded to keep it, whether men or women….

Then Johan skipped down a few paragraphs.

So both men and women be helpsmeet in the image of God, in the righteousness and holiness, in the restoration.

What we’re set on this planet to do

“Adam and Eve do eat of the fruit of the tree—the tree of the knowledge of good and evil," Ben continued.

It's really important that we remember that it's not just the tree of knowledge, as if being knowledgeable about things was a really bad idea. It's the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”
It's talking about moral knowledge and moral decision-making. It’s about who gets to decide what is to be termed good and what's to be termed bad. In the creation story every day it was "God looked and saw that it was good."
Then God creates humankind, and that's very good. The Man-creature Adam is lonely and that's bad. But God gets to make that decision as to what's good and what's bad.
Knowledge itself, and creativity and all that, in this story is a good thing. It's what we're set on this planet to do, to till the garden and to name the animals and to do all the kind of stuff that makes life interesting.
But then there's this interesting phrase about "in the cool of the evening they heard the sound of the voice walking through the Garden."
That proximity to God, to hearing the voice of God, is central. It’s also central that the phrase "in the cool of the evening" can also be translated "at the time of the moving of the Spirit." It's talking about the ruach, a Hebrew word for the Spirit. Ruach also means the breeze. The "cool of the evening" is a poetic translation of "the breeze," which is Spirit.
It makes me really happy when I think about that, to say when we return to the Garden, we return to that time, which we experience now as the moving of the Spirit. We have the living voice of God coming into us. Sometimes in our quiet worship and other times in life, we recognize: that's the voice of God.
And that's the whole point, to get back in touch with that voice of God that makes Eden, Eden.
So in Fox's Journal, the experience of going through the flaming sword into the paradise of God would be available to all who receive or obey Christ.

And I reply, "That's terrific. That's even better the second time. Maybe we should go through this a third time!"

Ben’s book, Poetry and Passion of the Lamb’s War: From the Epistles of George Fox, is available on Barclay Press and Amazon. Reedwood’s own Paul Anderson wrote a preface to the book. Paul’s usual clear and enlightening style of writing serves us well here.

Paul wrote,

From poetry to prophecy, as we hear and read some of the most salient missives of George Fox, their meanings then and now produce a ‘homecoming festival’ within us and among us.

Ben has included for each epistle a short introductory note as well as scriptures that find an echo in the epistle.

Judy's article was originally written for Reedwood Friends Church's monthly periodical The Glance. Crossposted with permission.

Friends Incubator for Public Ministry: "Supporting Ministry through Scripture and Imagination," an online series of seven guided meditations and worship-sharing sessions, begins this coming Sunday.

Tributes to Dolly Parton from the Literary Hub and Diana Butler Bass.

Happy 21st birthday to Mike Farley's The Mercy Blog. While you're there, enjoy his reflections (with Cynthia Bourgeault's help) on grace, contemplative practice, and wordlessness.

Jemar Tisby: Why the church needs a theology of history.

Speaking of grace, here's McKinley James's version of "Let Me In."

20 August 2026

More on Quakers and Japan

Crown Prince Akihito and Elizabeth Gray Vining, 1949.

Source.

The chief reason why I wanted to come [to Japan] is that in her new constitution Japan has renounced war as an instrument of national policy. Other nations must follow. I believe that out of her great suffering and defeat Japan will draw a new strength and a new vision that will enable her to lead the world in ways of peace.
You are the generation that will have to do it.... I come to you in friendship and in the hope that I can take a small share in helping your many distinguished teachers to prepare you for your great task.
— Elizabeth Gray Vining, speaking to Crown Prince Akihito's school class at the beginning of her service. (Windows for the Crown Prince, 1952.)

In a couple of recent posts, I've touched on the relationships among diverse Quakers and the country of Japan (the country where my mom was born and raised). Back in July, Sergei Grushko's article mentioned Japanese students at Quaker colleges during World War II, and then my Hiroshima-Nagasaki post went on to summarize a few more connections.

Those few instances of U.S. Quakers serving in Japan or serving Japanese people made me wonder whether there has ever been a full-length study of that history. The relationship between the Quaker movement in Japan and Philadelphia Yearly Meeting seems to be well-covered in the recent book Friendly Connections: Philadelphia Quakers and Japan Since the Late Nineteenth Century. I've not read this book (it's on my wishlist!... price $156) but the review in Friends Journal gives an idea of its scope. It includes accounts of Elizabeth Gray Vining's and Esther Rhoads's roles in the education of Crown Prince (now Emperor Emeritus) Akihito.

(I highly recommend Vining's own account of her years as his tutor, and how that engagement came about.)

What might understandably be less emphasized in a Philadelphia-centered account is the major role of Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, in building and maintaining Quaker relationships with Japan over the last 140 years. During our years in Richmond, when I was a student at Earlham School of Religion and and Judy worked with Earlham's East Asian studies program, we got to know three of the people who contributed to those relationships—professors Jackson Bailey and Len Holvik, and Earlham's president Landrum Bolling. Jackson Bailey (nephew of biblical scholar Moses Bailey) had been a conscientious objector who served as a cook in the U.S. occupation forces in Japan. As Chuck Yates says in the Earlham brochure, "The History of Japan at Earlham,"

Deeply impacted by his time in Japan, Bailey dedicated his life to improving relations between Japanese and Americans. In his over thirty years of labor, he did not quite succeed in creating a world where war and its sorrows are impossible, but there are certainly thousands of people on both sides of the Pacific for whom those things are now unthinkable, thanks to Jack’s efforts.

(Forgive another personal aside: One of my most vivid memories of Earlham was from 1983. A graduation reception brought together Jackson Bailey, his uncle Moses Bailey, and British Quaker writer Elfrida Vipont Foulds. Foulds gave the commencement address at the graduation itself, and received an honorary doctorate. Her speech was an amazing blend of pastoral advice and storytelling which managed to captivate an audience of students and families whose highest priority had not been to sit and listen to a speech!)

The relationships of Friends and Japan on the Philadelphia track and on the Earlham track may seem to run separately and parallel, but there's considerable overlap. For just a couple of examples:

Thomas Jones of Fairmount, Indiana, married Esther Balderston of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1917, and both served as Quaker missionaries in Japan under that yearly meeting until 1924. Thomas Jones later served as president of Fisk University and then Earlham College. Son T. Canby Jones, whom we knew as a professor at Wilmington College, was born in Japan. Canby's education was in the Philadelphia orbit, at Westtown School and Haverford College, before going off to Yale.

Esther Rhoads, Crown Prince Akihito's second Quaker tutor, is another bridge person between Philadelphia Friends and Earlham. Since Friends from both of these tracks of Japan-Quaker history were involved with Tokyo Friends School, there are probably many similar overlap stories waiting to be chronicled in a more comprehensive history. Maybe such a history has already been written, and I simply haven't found it. If you know of such a resource, please share....

And if the book Friendly Connections itself has more about Earlham than the review suggests, let me know that, too.

My own Quaker journey began in 1974. I joined Friends in Ottawa Meeting (unprogrammed, generally liberal), but within a year or so I found out about programmed Friends and a Quaker culture that was relatively more Bible-oriented than most Canadian Friends were. I found it easy to move between these different Quaker cultures, but found many Friends in each barely knew (or actually did not know) that the others existed.

Having read the accounts of U.S. Quakers and Japan, I wonder whether, several generations earlier, relations between "orthodox" Quakers in (say) Indiana and Quakers in the eastern yearly meetings were far more routine and relaxed than they've seemed during my time ... despite the lack of today's mobility and Internet channels. What might have reduced that earlier overlap? Among the totally unsubstantiated theories I've come up with was the consequences of the end of the series of organizations known most recently as the Young Friends of North America, a movement that at its height brought together young adult Quakers from all over the continent.

Another theory: when the yearly meetings that had divided in the 19th century began reuniting, this may have had the unintended and perverse effect of accentuating the theological differences in the larger U.S. Quaker landscape. For a possible case study, see Ruth Pitman's "The 1955 Union and the Future of Friends."

Or, on the third hand, maybe we're simply talking about changes in patterns among what was always a small subset of Friends—those who are fascinated or inspired by the Quaker movement as a whole rather than prioritizing their faithfulness to the nearby communities they know best. God knows we need both priorities, and perhaps we move back and forth from one to the other as we go through life. Again, your thoughts are most welcome.

Visiting my mother's school in Kobe.

Jack Kirk. Source.

Max Carter remembers the late Jack Kirk. Max writes that Jack was the "consummate encourager..." which was exactly my experience. Jack encouraged me through some concrete terrors, including my first sermon in public, when my Quaker Hill Bookstore boss Fred Boots asked me to substitute for him at Paoli Friends. Jack also shepherded me through my first writings for Quaker Life during his editorship there. His obituary reveals that he, too, found it congenial to move between Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and pastoral Friends. Despite the sad occasion, I find it impossible to look at his photo without smiling. I can just hear him saying, "Let's key in on the central issues...."

Brian Drayton pays tribute to writer and documentary filmmaker John Crowley.

Turns out that Julia Curlee, CIA analyst and provider of presidential briefings, was the wrong kind of American. "The White House needed me—until the fact that I am trans became public."

Daily Quaker Message, from Thomas R. Kelly: "It takes no time, but it occupies all our time."

Philip Gulley knows what faith is and isn't. "While I don’t always have faith, I do know faith when I see it."

Whitehorse and a mighty fine editor, "Come On In My Kitchen."

13 August 2026

Rejoice and be glad...

“Sermon on the Plain” Jesus Mafa series, Cameroon [François Vidil], Vanderbilt University. Source.

Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you. [Matthew 5:11-12]

You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor. [Exodus 20:16]

It’s no longer Republican vs. Democrat.
It’s not even common sense vs. crazy.
It’s America-loving vs. America-hating COMMUNISTS, and today’s Democrat [sic] Party has shown us who they really are.
Democrats want to destroy America. Republicans LOVE America and will FIGHT to keep the United States the greatest country in the history of the world. [Mike Johnson, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives]

I cannot necessarily advise you to rejoice and be glad in this season of rhetorical venom now dominating all forms of media. Nor can anyone guarantee that today's insults and falsehoods won't lead tomorrow to actual persecution. For some, it already has. But even if you understandably want to retreat from this noise and take some time for peace and quiet, you're entitled to rejoice. You're in good company. "In the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you."

The interpretation I've often heard of Matthew 5:11-12 is that it refers to the persecution that Christians experience when they testify publicly to their faith. There are places in the world where skeptical publics or oppressive governments make public faith hazardous. But by and large the USA is not one of those, although performative victimhood may claim otherwise.

Here's the more likely situation: Sometimes it's Christians who are doing the insulting and false witnessing.

Howard Carter ("The Jesus Guide to Happiness, part 8"):

... This beatitude runs contra to the predominant way in which we think of people who are blessed, or happy in our society. We are a society that values comfort and ease, getting ahead and being liked, we want the worlds high five not to be slapped down. We would see the absence of persecution and opposition and oppression, not its presence, as a sign of being blessed. Being maligned or imprisoned or disadvantaged for doing the right thing or believing in Jesus does not readily sound like something to rejoice over, party down about, it seems far from being blessed.

Jamie Arpin-Ricci asks the obvious question "why would we be persecuted? Why should our faithful commitment to build a kingdom characterized by humility, mercy, peace, reconciliation and justice cause people to hate us and harm us?" It’s a good question isn’t it? His response is that "the sad truth is this: Injustice is a profitable venture.. the power structures of the world, be they political, economic, military or even religious have a long history of establishing their power base through the casual neglect or blatant exploitation of others, all too often the poor as we become a people characterized by making justice in the world, calling other to join us, we actively threaten those very systems and powers of injustice."

It may be sadly ironic that Christian politicians such as Mike Johnson, Russell Vought, and Pete Hegseth join with the forces of persecution against Christians who prioritize the Sermon on the Mount, but let's not waste time feeling smug and superior, or in sharpening our own verbal swords. Here's Jamie Arpin-Ricci ("Pope Trump? Politics and the Normalization of Contempt"):

What's especially important to recognize is that this approach is not exclusive to Trump or those who support him. While the right has unquestionably taken this further than most, everyone is prone to this tendency. It is a pattern anyone can fall into, particularly when emotions are high, the stakes feel existential, and, perhaps above all, we believe we have the moral high ground. Even after I posted about this dynamic recently, one of the first responses agreed with me, then when on to call Trump a "piece of crap." The irony wasn’t lost on me.

This isn't about tone-policing or respectability politics in the face of injustice. Anger has its place, and naming harm is essential. If someone is functioning in ways that reflect fascism, then calling them a fascist is not out of line. But the impulse to strip people of dignity, even those causing harm, mirrors the same logic used by those we oppose: that some people simple deserve it. That logic underwrites every form of systemic oppression. When we adopt it, even against oppressors, we reinforce the very dynamics we claim to resist.

Look at it this way: when we normalize contempt and dehumanizing language, we are implicitly saying that such behaviour is acceptable when you are "in the right". However, since everyone believes that of themselves, it simply reinforces the pattern. Here’s the catch: the marginalized and oppressed always pay the highest price in these dynamics, so by contributing to the normalization of this behaviour, we contribute to the very harm of those we are seeking to protect.

In case we miss the point, this Scripture is in the same sermon in which Jesus says, (verses 43 and 44, context),

You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you....

How can we love our political and spiritual opponents and thereby experience the joy and gladness Jesus promises? There is a blessing, even a joy, to be gained in practicing restraint, in resisting the temptation to give someone the what-for, and instead persistently, prayerfully, intelligently focusing our resistance on the specifics of correcting biblical malpractice and the specifics of advocating justice in season and out of season, and thereby defending the precious reputation of the Gospel.

Repentance may be unlikely, but it's not impossible, and we are not the ones to block it.

More commentaries on Matthew 5:1-12: Amy G. Oden. Osvaldo Vena. Jillian Nelson. Elaine Wainwright. Andrew McGowan.

How people in seven countries see the US. (Yougov survey.)

Why Trump-supporting Christians are driving Gen Z away from church. (Premier Christian magazine.)

Live Laugh Love on the road: some of the places Kristin Du Mez will be visiting on her book tour.

Poetry from Nancy Thomas: "Things that defile."

"Clothes Line (Wrap It Up)." I've heard the Nightcats perform this song live several times, and I've also posted it here several times. This is the most recent version, I think:

06 August 2026

Hiroshima-Nagasaki shorts

(left) Urakami Cathedral cross, Nagasaki, on display at Wilmington College's Hiroshima-Nagasaki Memorial Collection until 2019 (my photo); (right) graphic from Wilmington College's Peace Resource Center (source).

Last week's post considered some of the political and spiritual difficulties World War II posed for Quaker colleges in the USA. Among the specifics of that story was the welcome that those colleges extended to a group of Japanese American students whose families had been forced into relocation camps by the notorious Executive Order 9066.

Thanks to an article posted today on the Web site of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, "The political implications of Hiroshima’s scarred 'maidens'," by Alex Wellerstein, I've been thinking about other Quaker involvements with Japanese and Japanese Americans—and the nuclear bombings—originating in that war.

First in chronological order were American Quakers who had special ties to Japan before the war, and who became advocates for the incarcerated Japanese and Japanese American families in wartime. The case I knew best was Herbert Nicholson, whose nephew Ed Nicholson used to tell us stories about his uncle.

(Ed died in 2018, and his wife of 63 years, Chris Nicholson, just died this past July 29. Aside from many other ties between the Nicholsons and Judy and me, they were great encouragers of our service in Russia.)

Another Quaker advocate for incarcerated Japanese people and their families was Floyd Schmoe of University Friends Meeting in Seattle. After the war ended, he expressed his concern for war-torn Japan and the consequences of the atomic weapons by beginning a project called Houses for Hiroshima. Of all the people mentioned in these stories, Floyd was the only one I met personally, thanks to my work with Friends World Committee in the 1980's.

The "Hiroshima 'maidens'" story mentioned above, published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, also had a Quaker connection. During the young women's stay in the USA for plastic surgery, they were accommodated by Quaker families, and spent time at Pendle Hill in Wallingford, Pennsylvania. More details in this Wikipedia article.

Those years—the 1950's—were a peak time for hydrogen bomb testing in the Pacific Ocean, which led to a series of protests against those tests, the weapons being tested, and the radioactive pollution resulting from the tests. Barbara Reynolds and her husband Earle were among those who sailed into the test zones in protest. She later established the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Memorial Collection at Wilmington College in Ohio, USA, part of the college's Peace Resource Center. Judy and I got to know and appreciate the work of this center during the years we lived in Wilmington.

One of the remarkable exhibits in the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Memorial Collection was a charred cross from the ruins of the Urakami Cathedral in Nagasaki. In 2019, as described in this Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists post, the director of the Peace Resource Center, Tanya Maus, accompanied the cross on its journey home to Nagasaki.

There is a gap in this very brief summary: the experiences of Japanese Quakers themselves during the war. The only Japanese Quaker meeting I've personally attended, the one in Osaka, was founded after the war. I have family ties to Japan—my mother was born and raised in Kobe—but, sadly, those ties don't connect with Quakers. My mother, having survived the war and eventually moving to Germany and then the USA, never spoke to me about her war years. Her primary political concern in my childhood years was the threat of Communism.

I'd love to have more examples of connections among these themes—Quakers, Japan and Japanese people, and World War II. Please share additions and corrections.

God bless the memory of those who risked everything for peace and justice in those brutal years.

I mentioned our own short visit to Hiroshima here.

Nagasaki shorts.

Why I got sour on Hiroshima-Nagasaki commemorative events. (I'm not necessarily proud of it....)

David Harrington Watt and Marian Ronan in Friends Journal: "The work continues: Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the struggle against nuclear weapons."

A Wikipedia summary of the debate for and against the use of atomic bombs in World War II.

Nuclear History: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the stories we must never forget—an online presentation by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Tuesday, August 18, 10:15 a.m. U.S. Central Time via YouTube.

Ezra Klein talks with Jasmin Sun about the peculiar challenges of campaigning for and against AI-related data centers.

Kathryn James: "Why is Anthropic Destroying Books?" (And why is it considered legal?)

From Friends Peace Teams: "Peace and War in Lviv, Ukraine." "...The nervous system adapts...."

More blues from Denmark: Delta Blues Band, "Yonders Wall."