Books of the summer, part two: Furious Minds—plus more about "less"

Hardcover (2025) and trade paperback (2027, "with a new afterward by the author"). Source.

---

Laura K. Field writes in her first chapter:

I have been writing about New Right intellectuals since 2019. The most common response I get when I mention this to liberals is something along the lines of “Trumpy intellectuals? Now that’s an oxymoron!” or “Hahaha, I think you mean dumb fascists!” While the impulse is understandable, it’s also mistaken and counterproductive.

Many on the left assume that the only serious reason to support the GOP has to do with finance and tax returns, and that right-wing voters are racists. But people’s motives are mixed, and America’s reactionary intellectuals are armed with more than greed and prejudice. They also have reasons and arguments that they appear to care about, whole epochs and libraries full, ready-to-hand. What the writer Matthew Rose says about the radical right is true of the New Right, too:

Almost everything written about the “alternative right” has been wrong in one respect. The alt-right is not stupid; it is deep. Its ideas are not ridiculous; they are serious. To appreciate this fact, one needs to inquire beyond its presence on social media, where its obnoxious use of insult, obscenity, and racism has earned it a reputation for moral idiocy. The reputation is deserved, but do not be deceived. Behind its online tantrums and personal attacks are arguments of seductive power.

---

When we went on vacation to Maine this past summer, I brought along Laura Field's compilation and guide to the intellectuals who inform and defend the MAGA occupation of the USA, Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right. I spent more time with the book than just about any other activity. The result: a book with maybe more highlighting than untouched text.

"Key people and institutions of the MAGA New Right"

The book mentions several hundred individuals, publications, podcasts, and organizations, and I'll never remember them all. I had heard of some of them—20% or so, based on a quick scan of the index—but most were new to me. They hold (and clash over) a variety of specific priorities, and indeed change their views at times, but the majority seem to agree on several basics.

Michael Anton, who was one of the first to defend Trumpism in intellectual terms, defined it in September 2016 as “secure borders, economic nationalism, and America-first foreign policy.” This is a useful shorthand that captures some of the fundamentals. The New Right is indeed, with very few exceptions, anti-immigration. It stands against free trade and globalism. And it represents a turn against the neoconservative interventionism in foreign affairs that characterized the first part of the twenty-first century. But if those are the ribs of the New Right’s politics, Anton’s formulation hides the spine, which is a staunch social traditionalism and rejection of liberal pluralism and egalitarianism; in other words, the various New Right policy prongs are organized around a traditionalist (usually white, Christian, and patriarchal) social vision and homogenizing nationalism meant to counter and replace pluralistic liberalism. The New Right views mainstream liberal America—the “woke” America that embraces plurality and equality, including across various formerly marginalized identities—as an all-encompassing, monolithic “regime” of elite oppression (which they often also refer to as the “enemy”). Culture warriorism—which we might define as an excessive emphasis on rhetoric and media performance over policy formulation and real-world political negotiation—plays a major role on the New Right because at bottom this is a movement driven by reactionary social values and principles, not specific policy concerns.

The movement also varies in its political extremism, but a frequent point of agreement is that the New Right must not count on winning elections. One way or another, it must take over and establish permanent rule. There is no place for pluralism in these visions.

Field's ability to deliver intense research, made more readable with lively bits of humor and self-disclosure, and with allusions to classical literature, reminded me of the Quaker classicist Sarah Ruden. I appreciated the ways Field lived up to her Chapter One pledge to approach her subjects seriously and with fairness, conceding the point when New Right commentators made valid criticisms of today's liberal failures and intellectual laziness. She also recounts the role conservatives such as Leon Craig and the influence of Leo Strauss had in her own education.

I don't feel qualified to give her book a full and competent review, though I can testify that it is absorbing reading. The coverage of religious influences—Catholic integralism, Calvinists, the New Apostolic Reformation—is well done. In lieu of a more complete assessment on my part, here are links to a positive review in The Atlantic, a very negative review in the Claremont Review of Books written by Michael Anton, one of the people she wrote about, and her lively reply to that negative review. Enjoy ... if that's the right word.

---

But wait, there's even more! 

Ellerie Brownfain had some helpful comments on last week's post, But wait!... With her permission, I'm posting those comments here:

Your blog post is spot on. It is light and lovely and beautifully written. I especially enjoyed how it begins with the Bible and that joyful refrain of "But wait, there's more!" From there you carry the reader through the whole story of the church to where Friends find ourselves today. That is a great deal of ground to cover with such a gentle touch.

Your "But wait, there's less!" made me smile and then gave me much to think about. I appreciate writing that does both.

I was recently in Germany walking around in Reformation history. So I could not help noticing a few points you may wish to consider.

Your list reads as though each movement waited politely for the one before to finish. They did not. Luther posted his 95 Theses in 1517. Within a few short years the Radical Reformation was already underway right alongside him. These movements grew up together like siblings and squabbled like them too. The first Anabaptists were Zwingli's own students in Zurich. They decided their teacher had not gone nearly far enough. Teachers everywhere will sympathize.

Poor Zwingli seems to have been left off the guest list. He came before Calvin and did a great deal of the "less." He became the people's priest in Zurich in 1519 and started preaching straight through the Gospel of Matthew. No set readings. Just the Bible in plain Swiss German. His reform really took off in 1522 over a plate of sausages. Some of his friends ate them during Lent. Zwingli was there and did not eat but he defended them from the pulpit. That may be the only time sausages started a reformation.

From there things moved quickly. The city council held public debates and sided with Zwingli. In 1524 the church walls in Zurich were whitewashed of all images. The organs were silenced as well. By 1525 the Mass was gone and the Lord's Supper became a simple memorial meal served at plain tables.

Luther was not about to let that go. In 1529 Prince Philip of Hesse invited them both to his castle at Marburg. Philip was a Protestant prince with a Catholic problem. The emperor Charles V wanted everyone back in the Roman fold, and Philip hoped a united front might change his mind. So he gave the two reformers room and board and hoped for the best. Luther and Zwingli agreed on fourteen points and parted over the fifteenth, which was the Lord's Supper. The story goes that Luther chalked "This is my body" on the table and kept pointing at it. Friends would say they never found the sense of the meeting. Philip was left without his alliance. One can only imagine how dinner went.

Zwingli's end is a sobering one for Friends. In 1531 he rode out with the Zurich army against the Catholic cantons and was killed at Kappel. His own students the Anabaptists had already refused the sword. So the removal of sacred images might sit more comfortably in your section with Zwingli and Calvin. And the peace testimony has an older family tree than we sometimes remember.

Luther also kept more than we tend to remember. The Lutherans held on to altars and images and vestments and much of the old liturgy. Some of them even kept their bishops.

The early English Baptists did write confessions of faith. The best known are from 1644 and 1689. As you say, "soul competency" came later. It was an American Baptist named E. Y. Mullins who gave it that name in 1908. The English root of that idea is Thomas Helwys. In 1612 he wrote to King James asking freedom of conscience for everyone. The king answered by putting him in prison where he died. Many early Friends came out of the General Baptists who followed Helwys. So in a way they are our cousins.

I was especially moved by your closing. Meeting seekers with open and searching conversation.

— Ellerie Brownfain

---

Added Friday: A "Big Read" online book conversation with Defying Tyrants author Matthew Taylor on October 8 (two days after the book is released; you get a free excerpt when you register). I commented on his previous book, The Violent Take It By Force, in this blog post: Enthusiasm and politics.

Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor on a secular vision of end times, courtesy of the mega-rich. Serious question: is this a fair article?

The AP's Evelyne Musambi on the "loud" Quakers in Kenya.

"Treat me like a human." Eric Trump and Josephine Johnston on the prescience of one of my favorite films, Children of Men.

Elderchaplain Greg Morgan is Remembering Bruce.

A farewell post "of sorts" from Tom Engelhardt (but not the end of TomDispatch!).

---

Denmark's Delta Blues Band, "Come On in my Kitchen," featuring Miriam Mandipira.

But wait! ...

Source.  

I recently watched a sermon by Terry Anderson, pastor of Lilly Grove Missionary Baptist Church in Houston, Texas. His theme: "Hardship on the Way Home." My feelings about the full sermon are complex, but I really appreciated his closing, which was a mini-sermon in its own right. It gave me some thoughts about Quakers. Here's how he began the closing (I've edited lightly) ...

I'm through now [closing his Bible], but there's more beyond.

I was watching an infomercial the other day and they were selling knives or whatever it is they were selling and they they said if you buy it at a certain time you get two for the price of one, and when the commercial was almost over, he said, "Wait, there's more! If you buy it at this price I'll give you four more at the same price." 

... But wait, there's more! (You're going to help me close with this one thing.) If there's anybody here this morning believing that this all that this life is all there is to it, I'm through now.

... But wait, there's more! Eyes have not seen ears have not heard, neither has it entered the hearts of men the good things that God has in store for them that love him.

... But wait, there's more! God shall wipe all tears from their eyes and there shall be no more deaths nor crying, for the former things are passed away.

... But wait, there's more! There's a tree bearing fruit, and the leaves on the tree are good for the healing of the nations. That's one kind of fruit in January and another kind of fruit in February and if you don't get there until March there's another kind of fruit in March. If you don't get there until April there's another kind of fruit in April.

... But wait, there's more! God himself has more. God has a rainbow around his shoulder to absorb the light of his presence, that the saints will get a chance to behold his face.

... But wait, there's more! Abraham is there, Isaac, and Jacob is there, (anybody here help me preach here a minute), Moses and David, Jacob and Nehu. There's more, I tell you. There's Paul and Silas. That's Matthew and Mark, Luke, and John.

... But wait, there's more! There's Rebecca and Sarah, there's Deborah and Ruth. That's Naomi and Elimelech.

... But wait, there's more! My mother is over there, my father is over there, I got some family over there.

... But wait, there's more! I see a number that no man can number coming from the north, from the south, from the east and the west….

So now I totally admit that it's comparing apples and oranges, but sometimes the Protestant historical stream we find ourselves in as Friends might evoke a different refrain: "But wait, there's less!"

... But wait, there's less! The Lutherans rejected the leadership and hierarchy based in Rome, along with five of the seven sacraments, the doctrine of purgatory, and obligatory use of the Latin language. Ordinary church members gradually gained access to the Bible in their own languages.

... But wait, there's less! The Radical Reformation rejected infant baptism and brought us baptism at the age of decision. Also, they opposed the enmeshment of church and state (in most cases) and rejected state violence. They eliminated sacred images, and ended the use of oaths to "swear" the truth.

... But wait, there's less! The Calvinists emphasized the role of elders in church government rather than bishops, simplified church furniture and altars, and eliminated saints' days and most other feast days from the church calendar. 

... But wait, there's less! The English Puritans (inside and outside the Church of England) rejected common prayer books and other set liturgies, and continued to reduce or eliminate church hierarchies. Many of them challenged compulsory clerical garb, such as vestments.

... But wait, there's less! The English Baptists incorporated most or all of the preceding "there's less!" developments ... affirming baptism at the age of personal confession of faith, and reducing adherence to formal theological creeds as a condition of fellowship, in favor of what became the concept of "soul competency." Baptists rejected any remaining vestiges of a parish system or payment of tithes to the state church.

... But wait, there's less! Early Quakers did not observe any outward sacraments, even as they pleaded for the inward spiritual realities represented by baptism and communion. There was no paid or ordained clergy, although Friends voluntarily supported a vigorous ad hoc movement of evangelists and missionaries. For the first half of our history, worship consisted solely of communal prayer, without pre-arranged elements, and with vocal participation (at least theoretically) based on the Holy Spirit's immediate inspiration of anyone present. The church was the people; their buildings, when they had them, were "meetinghouses." They contributed to the end of slavery, although perhaps less than we now give them credit for.

(This "there's less!" listing is admittedly an oversimplification of complex and overlapping historical developments! See Ellerie Brownfain's comments in next week's post—scroll down to But wait, there's even more!)

... But wait, where does the "there's less" end? Each round of reformers felt that the elimination of structures and traditions strengthened Spirit-led discipleship. In many cases, the old structures also continued to exist, resulting in political tensions, even civil wars.

Reformers often saw themselves as confronting corruption and nominalism. As their causes advanced, their advocacy of the rights of individual believers also arguably weakened any concept of a global Christian movement.

... But wait, there's less! Some Friends became positively anti-ecumenical, apparently believing that we were more advanced than the rest of Christianity, even as our numbers began to shrink.

... But wait, there's less! Some of us welcomed new insights into the Bible's formation and interpretation, thereby gaining appreciation for its role in daily discernment, but others questioned whether the Bible was even all that necessary.

... But wait, there's less! George Fox taught that "Christ has come to teach his people himself," and early Quakers experienced this amazing Reality for themselves. Now some Friends aren't sure they knew what they were talking about, or were perhaps captives of their own limited worldview and vocabulary, in comparison to our own obviously advanced views where Christ is optional.

... But wait, what's left? Worldwide, most Friends remain faithful to our Christian and biblical roots, but instead of continuing to explore the rich discipleship experiences of those early Friends, have sometimes felt more comfortable importing elements from generic evangelicalism.

If all we Quakers had left were a choice between a smug sort of boutique Quakerism and a hybrid evangelicalism, with little evidence of growth in this time of worldwide crisis, I'd be pretty bummed. But I see evidence that, here and there, new people are visiting us and asking what we have to offer. (I've personally seen this in several widely separate places.) Have you seen this, too?

When we are lucky enough to meet such seekers, I'd like us to consider not answering with another formulaic expression of how wonderful we are, but entering into some searching conversations about what our visitors are looking for and why; how this present age is treating and challenging them; and what they dared hope we might all do together.

Then, we might be in a position to say, prayerfully and with honest hope,

... But wait, there's more!

---

One of the channels we Quakers have to consider how to meet seekers' questions and hopes is the Friends World Committee for Consultation, sponsors of World Quaker Day. FWCC is one way we can meet the danger of an unintentional drift apart from each other. (Disclaimer: I worked for FWCC for ten years, so I'm not exactly unbiased!)

Some of what I've seen on the growing edge of Friends reminds me of Lamorna Ash's observations.

---

Yurii Sheliazhenko offers a "Concise Quaker guide to the Bible" in Ukrainian and English.

Paul Parker on "Unleashing the everyday prophet," presented on the Daily Quaker Web site (which I recommend supporting).

Quakers in Britain joined a Jamaican delegation for reparation talks.

Scotty Utz in Friends Journal on "beating guns" and the Guns to Gardens Movement. The article includes a link to a Quaker Talk video interview.

More on Live Laugh Love: Author Kristin Du Mez's article in the New York Times and the work of the photographer/illustrator Francesca Hummler. Du Mez: "I didn’t see the images until today’s story published, and I was blown away." Post includes gift link to the article in the NYT.

FRIDAY UPDATE: Live Laugh Love is #5 on the NYT nonfiction bestseller list.

---

Mavis Staples and Bonnie Raitt, "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?"

Books of the summer, part one: Ghost Stories

Before I get to the book, allow me just a few comments on this blog.

This post is number 1,200 since I began posting weekly 22 years ago. More often than I'd like to admit, I'm repeating myself, saying things (maybe slightly differently) that I already said five, ten, twenty years ago.

When I catch myself doing this, it makes me think about posting less frequently, maybe on a less rigid schedule. Back in the days when blogs were more fashionable, it was conventional wisdom that posting with a reliable frequency was a must. But there are now lots of ways to announce a new post, and regularity may not be as important. What do you think?

Several people have suggested another idea: creating a book out of (a few of!) these 1,200 posts. Instead of unintentionally repeating myself, I could deliberately weave together those apparently important recurring themes into chapters.

I'm not under any pressure (that I know of) to decide these things, so on to today's comments on the first of my favorite books of summer 2026.

---

I've been reading Siri Hustvedt's novels for about thirty years. It took me a lot longer to get acquainted with Paul Auster.  At some point I vaguely realized that Hustvedt and Auster were a married couple, but now, reading Ghost Stories: A Memoir, I'm finally getting a sense of what that marriage of two dedicated and celebrated writers contributed to each of them, and to us readers.

Both writers realized as teenagers that they wanted literature and writing to be at the center of their lives. The 43 years of their marriage covered the whole of Auster's life as a published writer. Hustvedt was also writing fiction and nonfiction that whole time, during which they were each other's intimate collaborators, in constant conversation.

Mostly, Paul and I talked to each other, in the house, on walks, and when we traveled together to one place or another. When we were apart, we talked on the telephone every night if we could. Our marriage was a dialogue, the precise wording of which is mostly lost to memory. I’m glad I saved his little notes to me, from the very first one—Dear S. I have recorded some of them in this book, my book of mourning him. Writing is action. Sentence by sentence, block of prose by block of prose, I have tried to bring something of the man back on the page, something of who he was for me.

Toward the end of this moving, sorrowful, sometimes playful, and endlessly affectionate book, after Siri Hustvedt describes and documents her husband's last months and days and moments, considers what immortality may or may not be, quotes Auster's letters to his then-grandbaby, reveals the tumultuous start of their relationship, and describes sensations of his presence happening even as she sits there writing...

... she says this:

And I say it again. Paul Auster, my husband of forty-three years, is dead, and I can’t get him back, not as I want him, not as a breathing, heart-beating, warm-as-a-furnace body in our bed, not as a fully visible man smiling that slight smile at me, the one touched by irony, the smile that was as good as an exaggerated wink across a room because I knew him. The Blue Team boy, that outstanding fellow who became a famous writer, is dead. But I’m alive, and I’m a creature of us, of AND, of Bartleby and the Princess on the Pea; of slapstick; demented luggage; the Plenum of Problems Theory; the organic model of erotic love; sea creatures and small whales. We wrote out the dreams we dreamed while we sat at our desks writing, and we read those dreams aloud to each other in the green chairs.

If not all of those references are immediately clear (for example, the "demented luggage" and "of AND"), they're all explained in turn in the preceding pages. May they help tempt you to read this beautiful memorial to an endlessly fertile love.

Paul Auster died on April 30, 2024.

On April 27, Paul said he wanted to come back as a ghost.

I am telling ghost stories.

---

Review of Ghost Stories: A Memoir in The Guardian.

---

PS: A book I've already reviewed,  Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made, by historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez, has now been released. My recommendation stands.

Here's a link to publisher's description of the book; and to Kristine Johnson's helpful review and road map.

---

Mimi Marstaller on refreshed Quaker practices with deep roots: "Here's what happened last Sunday," part one, at Portland (Maine) Friends Meeting. Part two: Zoom worship.

Sarah Thomas Baldwin on "How to belong at church." I've sometimes wondered about that myself....

We can exchange being known or belonging for fitting in. There’s a lot of “fitting in” in Christian circles. But fitting in means “I have to become more like you” in order to earn a place at the table.

Belonging means I can be me and still have a seat beside you.

Elderchaplain Greg Morgan: "We All Deserve Dignity."

J. Michael Luttig's warning to U.S. midterm voters and all defenders of democracy, via Heather Cox Richardson.

Climate Desk: The USA's Environmental "Protection" Agency has "announced a final plan Monday that guts the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards."

EPA spokespersons did not respond to a request for comment about what science they are using to support the claim that greenhouse gas emissions don’t contribute significantly to dangerous air pollution.

---

Sue Foley, "Southern Men." (Recorded in Canada....)

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.

---

From 17 years ago: Publishers of Truth.

---

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.)

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.

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."