Twitter and its rivals

From top: home screens from Threads, Mastodon, Telegram.

Back in 2018, when data harvesting and the manipulative use of social networks were attracting lots of attention, I wrote this blog post about Facebook and Vkontakte. I described and defended my use of these services, and listed some of their virtues and hazards. I still use them in more or less the same ways.

A year or two earlier, while we were still living in Russia, I had joined another service, Twitter, where I expressed political opinions I usually didn't post on Facebook and Vkontakte, the services that I relied on for news of family and friends. Part of the thrill of Twitter was seeing news stories and opinions fresh from journalists' and commentators' keyboards, before they had been sanitized and published (or sometimes even verified!). I abandoned Twitter shortly after it became X, not because my own feed had become appreciably more toxic, but because of the way its new owner treated employees and critics. Still, I admit that I missed that outlet, and still do.

Some of that craving is taken up by Telegram, which I joined shortly after leaving Russia. Telegram combines elements of instant messaging, microblogging, interest groups, and news feeds. Those news feeds include such users as The New York Times, Washington Post, TVRain (Дождь), the BBC (and its Russian service), and numerous Russian-language and Ukrainian channels—media outlets and individual journalists and commentators. 

Telegram is also a platform for personal messaging, but so are many other platforms. I'd just as soon stick with the reliable (so far) channels for that kind of communication (e-mail, Facebook and FB Messenger, Vkontakte, and phone-based texting) and, less often, Whatsapp (important for overseas contacts), and not have to cover every possible channel. There are some apps and clients that promise to combine personal messages from a number of sources, but I've never found that covers all of them, and most are not Web-based. (If you have suggestions for cross-platform message handlers that are browser-based or Linux-compatible, please comment! I prefer desktop platforms, not services that are exclusively phone-based.)

Back to news and opinion: Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky are among the services that may take over Twitter's place in my search for fresh news and opinions. So far I've found a number of my favorite authors on all three of them. In a promising development, all three services are finding ways to become mutually accessible. For example, here's the way to bridge Mastodon and Bluesky; and you can authorize Threads to share posts in the larger fediverse.

The days are not long enough to camp out at all of these various sources, and it remains to be seen whether their cultures remain as mellow as they mostly are now. (Well, Telegram can't exactly be called mellow, but in my chosen feeds, it's not snarly!) How well might they resist external predators and internal exploiters? In the meantime, dipping around in each of them for brief visits seems more productive than developing a premature loyalty to any one in particular. However, if you've become committed to one or two platforms out of all these choices, and would like to tell me why, I'd love to know.

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Here are a few other overviews of these various platforms, their similarities and differences:

• Amaris Castillo at Poynter: As journalists think of leaving X for Bluesky and Threads, media experts see pros and cons.
• Jay Peters at The Verge: The hunt for the next Twitter: all the news about alternative social media platforms.
• Marie Boran at Newsweek: How Top X Rivals Fared Since Elon Musk Sparked Twitter Exodus.
• David Gewirtz at ZDNET: I tried replacing Twitter with Bluesky, Threads, and Mastodon: Here's what I found.

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The latest Humanitarian Situation Updates for Palestine from the United Nations:  Gaza Strip; West Bank.

Chimène Keitner of Lawfare on the Netanyahu/Gallant arrest warrants.

The Haaretz newspaper’s editorial board described the ICC’s decision as an “unprecedented moral nadir” for Israel. (Netanyahu responded to Haaretz’s coverage of the war by sanctioning the newspaper.) Hungary’s Victor Orban greeted news of the ICC warrant with an invitation for Netanyahu to visit, deepening cleavages between European countries committed to the rule of law and those challenging the “liberal international order.” Absent a change in leadership, Israel’s international isolation from that order will continue to deepen. Even if the Israeli government changes course (which is highly unlikely, especially given the results of the recent U.S. presidential election), the damage to Israel’s standing and reputation—with ripple effects on Jews in the diaspora—will take decades to repair. Meanwhile, the human toll is irreversible, and rebuilding Gaza will take decades, if not centuries.

John Crace of The Guardian on the UK House of Commons debate on assisted dying: "...ultra-rare Commons sight: intelligent debate." You can see the debate itself on parliamentlive.tv.

Human rights defender Olga Karach doesn't want to "disappoint" Lukashenko.

William Barber on CNN: here's what Trump's second coming tells us about the country and the future.

But what you saw election night is not the whole of America. It’s a part of America in a particular moment around the election. You have to stop and say, wait a minute, this is the same America that I went to sleep in the night before. It’s not some strange America. This is part of America. America has always had multiple stories running at the same time.

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Austin John and McKinley James perform B.B. King's "Ruby Lee." Enjoy the whole set; they're fine musicians.

If Jesus only knew (Thanksgiving repost)

Happy Thanksgiving! Today I'm reposting my Thanksgiving post for 2015 (below). At that time we were still living in Elektrostal, Russia. Much of our Thanksgiving Day activities revolved around the holiday meal we offered our colleagues at the New Humanities Institute.

It was a custom we began in 2008 and repeated each year we lived there. A store not far from our apartment supplied turkey. Only once did we order a whole turkey; usually Judy took turkey legs and made a delicious filling for turkey cardamom braid loaves. She also made cranberry sauce, pumpkin bread with a layer of tvorog, wild rice, pomegranate jello salad, and an apple-cranberry-raisin crumble. All in the service of love and wonderful conversation.

My own role was not exactly heroic. I chopped and diced and provided extra hands when necessary, arranged packaging and transport, and took photos (below, all from 2012).

We would serve the meal in the faculty break room at 11:10 a.m., during the first long break of the academic day. Every seat was taken. All day long, our colleagues would come to the buffet and help themselves; there was even a bit left for the evening school instructors.

After the first one or two occasions, everyone had caught on. Sometime in early November, we would start getting asked, "Are you going to do your American Thanksgiving meal again this year?" or "Isn't it about time for that thing you do each November?" How I miss hearing that question!

Judy hard at work the evening before; ready to start packing; awaiting transport to the Institute.

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If Jesus only knew (2015)

Christ and the Sinful Woman,
by Elena Cherkasova

Recently we went to the Cosmas and Damian Church near the Kremlin to buy some books. In the church bookstore, Judy was struck by this icon of the scene in Luke where the sinful woman kisses and anoints the feet of Jesus. This fascinating image now hangs near the door to our kitchen.

Here's the story from Luke, chapter 7, verses 36 through 50.

When one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, he went to the Pharisee’s house and reclined at the table. A woman in that town who lived a sinful life learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee’s house, so she came there with an alabaster jar of perfume. As she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them.

When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, "If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is—that she is a sinner."

Jesus answered him, "Simon, I have something to tell you."

"Tell me, teacher," he said.

"Two people owed money to a certain moneylender. One owed him five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. Neither of them had the money to pay him back, so he forgave the debts of both. Now which of them will love him more?"

Simon replied, "I suppose the one who had the bigger debt forgiven."

 "You have judged correctly," Jesus said.

Then he turned toward the woman and said to Simon, "Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—as her great love has shown. But whoever has been forgiven little loves little."

Then Jesus said to her, "Your sins are forgiven." The other guests began to say among themselves, "Who is this who even forgives sins?" Jesus said to the woman, "Your faith has saved you; go in peace."

I love this story for a lot of reasons. For one thing, it manages to convey both grace and realism at the same time. The grace is unconditional: "Your faith has saved you; go in peace." Period.

But at the same time Jesus presents Simon with a very unsentimental comparison between the two debtors. It's another reminder of Jesus' upside-down kingdom where the first will be last, and the last first.

Two other points struck me on this Thanksgiving Day.

First, I tried (and will continue trying) to put myself in the woman's place in this scene. I've been forgiven, and I would like to wash Jesus' feet with my tears and wipe them with my hair. No, not literally, but I can work on this question: what prayer and what action would be an equally worthy thanksgiving for the grace that turned my life around and gave it meaning? How can I thank God sufficiently for my new family? ... by which I mean all the people in the world who are also figuring out how to live with God at the center. And, if "sufficiently" is not possible, can I at least abandon all pretenses and all worries about the rest of the audience as I pour out my honest tears?

The second point is more or less the reverse: I put myself in Simon's place. Whom have I examined and found wanting? I don't think I have been so arrogant that I questioned Jesus' ability to see people for who they really are, but how often have I taken one small aspect of a person and used that small aspect to minimize them? Maybe this person is on his or her way to a fateful meeting with God, and my attitude should, at the very least, not get in the way! When Jesus points at the sinful woman and resets my perspective, am I ready to repent and experience the same uninhibited joy that she shows? Or will I keep grumbling with the crowd, just as I used to do? ... "Who is this who even forgives sins?"

The icon today (Portland, 2024).

The central paradox of this amazing scene for me is that salvation is free but it isn't cheap. Look what that woman did! In a society that set a huge store on social position and reputation, this woman must have realized that as soon as she set foot in that company, people would be thinking about "what kind of a woman" she was. Sustained by her faith, she crashed through barriers too numerous to list, all in order to express her love. That sounds very costly to me. However, Jesus not only tells her that her sins are forgiven, but that her own faith (not his magic, nor his decree) has saved her. That's it! No doctrinal tests, no bait-and-switch, just immediate and radical affirmation.

I like to think of her as my sister.

Comments on the original post are here.

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Back to 2024.

I'm repeating a link from two weeks ago, because this resource, the Daily Quaker Message, has been even more helpful than I had hoped. Here's today's post.

And in the last month, British Friend Craig Barnett has started a substack-style blog, Quaker Renewal. Among his early posts, I especially appreciated "What is spoken ministry for?"

Russia's human rights and media project OVD-Info unveils a new Web resource devoted to criminal repression for anti-war stance in Russia. In other difficult news stories from Russia, the last major museum devoted to Stalinist-era repression, Moscow's GULag museum, has been closed. And some of the rehabilitations of WWII-era convictions are being reversed. (Article from BBC Russian service is here.)

Open Culture introduces us to the CIA's Simple Sabotage Field Manual, originally published by the Office of Strategic Services, based on simple methods to sabotage enemy organizations by making them stupid. Fascinating! The manual itself is here on the CIA Web site.

Micah Bales on political power and the true kingdom of Christ.

Sarah Thomas Baldwin on suffering and the deeper life.

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This lovely song from Big Daddy Wilson, originally included with the November 2015 post, reflects my gratitude still today.

Valiant for the Truth (guest post) and first principles

Near Firbank Fell, Cumbria, England. Photo by Judy Maurer.

Valient for the Truth

by Judy Maurer

The day after the presidential election was called, I had lunch with a good friend. In pain from a recent injury, she had misjudged the distance and was very late. I was good with that because I needed time to simply calm myself and sit for a long while. A Thai restaurant in Milwaukie, Oregon, served that purpose well.

Over pad Thai, my friend pointed out that the Quakers who were conscientious objectors in World War II knew what to do when the system was against them: they networked. They knew each other well.

Quakers were also active in Germany in the rise of Nazism, in helping Jews escape and caring for those who were left. As the war progressed and France was occupied, Quakers remained to help. By then, Quakers had to tread carefully on both sides, Allies and Nazis, if they wanted to feed the hungry rather than join the military. Both systems were against them.

My point now is that we have been here before. In the coming years, our commitment to welcome and uphold the rights and safety of LGBTQIA+ people inside and outside of our community will mean the system will be against us.

In 2022 we as a yearly meeting approved the following statement: “We recognize the unequal burden Black, Indigenous, and People of Color have suffered historically and presently. We will make restitution to Indigenous and African American people. We will renounce white supremacy and learn to live in peaceful ways with our environment.”

Living into that commitment will mean that the system will be against us.

Daniel Hunter, in his excellent article on the Waging Nonviolence website, stated that one of the keys to resisting an autocrat’s goals of “fear, isolation, exhaustion, and disorientation” is nurturing community. We know how to do this. We, as the Society of Friends, have been in times like these before.

Indeed, Quakerism was forged in times like these.

The Fells' Swarthmoor Hall. Photo by Judy Maurer.

In the middle of the violence and chaos of the English Civil War, new religious ideas around egalitarianism were floated, and some took root. In 1650, an itinerant trader who had emerged from a period of profound depression heard a voice telling him there was a “great people to be gathered.” Several years later, George Fox met up with Margaret Fell, a spiritually restless woman of the landed gentry at her estate in northwest England (see photo)

The collaboration from that relationship, and the protection given by her husband, a judge, meant that the great people to be gathered were organized into the Society of Friends.

We had strange ways. Women were prominent leaders in the movement. We would not swear in court, because stating the Truth should be enough. Men refused to take off their hats to honor the nobility. In those days, one was supposed to use “you” to address those with high status. We insisted on saying “thee” and “thou” to all, “without any respect to rich or poor, great nor small,” as Fox said. Pronouns were important then, too.

In 1649, Charles I, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, was beheaded and the monarchy ended. Oliver Cromwell was pronounced Lord Protector; he ruled more or less like a king, although with a parliament. Cromwell was a Puritan, but he gave some measure of protection to Quakers.

Then the political winds shifted. In 1660, Charles I’s son, Charles II, returned from exile and was crowned. By then, the people were longing for stability. Charles II wanted loyalty. Puritans and the Church of England wanted control over the religious lives of the English. The nobility wanted to keep their top spot in a “well-ordered society” that happened to have them as the chosen-by-God elite. Quakers’ strange egalitarian ways were seen as a threat to all of that.

Public humiliation, family splits, loss of property, imprisonment, and deaths resulted. Meetings for worship were declared “unlawful assemblies.” The jails were so bad that a sentence of a month or so often became a death sentence from dysentery and other diseases. In 1660 alone, about 300 Quakers died from the persecution.

To endure, Quakers knew to stick together. Individual Quakers volunteered to substitute themselves for other Quakers in prison, to give them respite to regain their health. They actually went to prison for each other. Now that’s community! There are reports that in some meetings, all the adults were imprisoned, so the children carried on the work of their homes and meetings.

We endured, we persevered, then we did good things for the wider society with what we learned while enduring.

In a book forthcoming from Barclay Press, Ben Richmond has versified many of Fox’s epistles. Here’s one written in 1663:

Sing and rejoice,
ye children of the day and of the light;
for the Lord is at work
in this thick night of darkness
that may be felt.

And truth doth flourish as the rose,
and the lilies do grow among the thorns,
and the plants atop of the hills,
and upon them the lambs do skip
and play.

And never heed the tempests
nor the storms, floods nor rains,
for the seed Christ is over all,
and doth reign.

And so be of good faith and valiant for the truth:
for the truth can live in the jails.
And fear not the loss of the fleece,
for it will grow again;

and follow the lamb,
if it be under the beast's horns,
or under the beast's heels;
for the lamb shall have the victory
over them all.

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Now in our own thick night of darkness, we remember that we are children of the day and of the light.

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Judy at Firbank Fell.

"Valiant for the Truth" is crossposted from the Newsletter of Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends. Links to the Sierra-Cascades newsletter archive (and a subscription link!) are here.

Judy van Wyck Maurer lives in Portland, Oregon, USA, with her husband Johan. She is clerk of Communications for Sierra-Cascades and editor of the yearly meeting's newsletter. Other guest posts by Judy on this blog are here. 

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First principles 2.0

I was glad that Judy wrote the essay above for our yearly meeting's newsletter, and allowed me to repost it here, because in my search for a new set of first principles for Donald Trump's second term as U.S. president, I found a core principle right at the heart of George Fox's psalm.

T. Canby Jones. Source.

And so be of good faith and valiant for the truth:
for the truth can live in the jails.

(Maybe some of you who have memories of our late Friend T. Canby Jones, can picture him smiling in the background, saying "... and the nonviolent Lamb shall have the victory.")

I think, by and large, my first principles 1.0, from the eve of Trump's first inauguration in 2017, remain useful—especially if you help improve them. Briefly summarized, and with a few edits, here they are:

1. Don't hide from the truth. We mustn't let either denial or cynicism do our thinking for us. Remain sober, clear-eyed, and vigilant, drawing intelligent conclusions from the evidence. Recognize the differences between the chaos of 2017-2021 and the planning that has already gone into 2025-2029, even though the potential for utter chaos is still there, too.
2. Do not divide the USA into pro- and anti-Trump populations. To me, this is part of what "good faith" means. Listen with grace and curiosity, respond from your center to the actual human you're with, not a caricature. (And the political scientist in me has an intriguing reminder: only 64% of eligible voters cast ballots in November 2024. The non-voters far outnumber the tiny plurality of Trump's victory.)
3. Resist the degradation of civil discourse. Do not use condescending mockery of anyone, or of their diets, appearance, or class origins. Don't mock their faith communities, although it's perfectly fair to propose contradictions between their publicly-proclaimed faith and their behaviors or policies.
4. Finally, count the cost of protracted resistance, and organize accordingly. Some of us are Quakers in part precisely because we dislike any kind of combativeness. We will probably need to help each other learn some new skills and disciplines in the area of a dignified ferocity and persistence in engaging in needful conflict for the sake of the Cross. In the division of labor that's inherent in the New Testament concept of spiritual gifts, I hope some of our pastorally-gifted Friends will stay mindful of the psychic cost of being in nearly constant conflict. How will it affect those of us who are naturally inclined to rage, or are even addicted to rage? How will it affect those of us who are totally conflict-avoidant?

What additions, improvements, and implementations can you contribute? Robert P. Jones, sociologist of religion and a member of The Convocation Unscripted podcasters, provided a possible example of the first and last points above. In a recent podcast, he advocated "... deciding ahead of time what [our] bright lines are.... If they come to round up immigrants in our community, we show up. ... If they are targeting Muslims in our community, we are showing up." It is hard to believe that a mass deportation plan could ever work, but even a partial attempt would involve much conflict and cruelty. I want to establish ahead of time what, in the name of Jesus, my response would be if the attempt were made. For the truth, we are told, can live in the jails.

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Steve Rabey on the death of a remarkable evangelist: Sunday came for Tony Campolo. In Christianity Today: Champion of 'Red Letter' Christianity. Tony Campolo in Quaker Life.

Rebecca Solnit in The Guardian: Do not give authoritarians what they want.

Beloved Spear asks: Who might be the largest group caught up in a deportation net? Answer: Conservative Christians.

Craig Mokhiber in Mondoweiss: Arrest warrants are issued for Netanyahu and Gallant, but the fight is far from over.

In doing so [issuing the warrants], the judges have given the world a glimmer of hope that the international legal system is not dead yet, that Israel is not above the law, that the abusive power of U.S. empire is not without challenge, and that justice may indeed be on the horizon. But if that justice is to prevail, all who believe in justice must remain vigilant.

The ICC warrants were issued after the longest delay in the Court’s history, during which Israeli and U.S. persecution of the court, slander of the Court by pro-Israel media and lobby proxies, and personnel shake-ups, were also unprecedented.

But the glare of global public attention, its demands for justice, and the principled convictions of the ICC judges prevailed, at least for now.

Victoria Barnett: There's no such thing as a Bonhoeffer moment.

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Ending on a warm note... Steve Guyger in Vienna, "So Glad You're Mine."

 

The Spirit of Freedom

The online book launch of the new book by Mark Russ, The Spirit of Freedom: Quaker-shaped Christian Theology, takes place on Tuesday, November 26, 7:30 - 8:30 pm, UK time. More information on registering for this free program, and buying the book, is on Mark's blog. Again: November 26—see you "there."

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Usually I start a book review with a quotation from the book that (to me) expresses the heart of the author's message. In reviewing the places I've highlighted in The Spirit of Freedom, I see that I have marked 73 notable passages in a 99-page book. It's that rich!

In his preface, Mark Russ states that he is writing "unsystematic theology," in contrast with academic theologians who may spend a lifetime "seeking to fit all the pieces of the theological jigsaw puzzle into a neat and tidy pattern." However, his book is well-organized, starting with an exploration of the theology of British Quakers' Advices and Queries, especially those advices that concern our relationship with God, our devotional life, the constancy of our prayer, and the ways we live together with those whose experiences of God may differ from our own.

After these fertile chapters on the spiritual disciplines of British Friends, and the theological content and implications of those disciplines, Russ turns to a series of topics that are often awkward for contemporary Quakers, particularly in the liberal Quakerism of Britain Yearly Meeting: evil and sin. His treatment of the reality of evil is "both sobering and hopeful"—arguing for a view of evil and human freedom that does not charge God as the author of evil, but, instead, observing that evil is what happens when we (even in the pursuit of good things) turn from the Light and "become less freely our true selves."

Other challenges arise in our spiritual lives when we encounter times of spiritual coldness, or when we feel our hopes have been betrayed.

I said that God will not allow us to live in denial. Neither will God leave us to despair. The Light not only reveals our sin, it renews our courage to persevere. When we let go of reliance on our own strength, we can be filled with the strength of God. When we give up the need to be "good people," we can rest in the love of the Creator whose creation is fundamentally good. Out of the heart that trusts in God shall flow rivers of living, spiritual water (John 7.38), refreshing and rejuvenating. We may be able to find this spring alone, but the work is much easier when we undertake it together in a worshipping community.

The more power, wealth and privilege we have, the harder our hearts will become and the harder it is to let in the Light. We shouldn't expect change from the hard-hearted leaders of the nations any time soon. We need to show them how it's done.

Mark Russ often weaves together the individual's trials and discoveries and the life of the community. One very helpful chapter examines how that weaving of individual and corporate ministry can happen during our worship together. In a succeeding chapter, he describes how some communities can "squash" our ideas and initiatives—yes, even among Friends! I would like every such congregation to hear Mark's words: "Our job is not preservation but renewal. We are not curating a museum but messily making the artworks ourselves."

One source of disillusionment for many idealistic Quakers can come from our inability to convince our whole community—maybe our whole yearly meeting—to take up a cause that seems self-evidently urgent to us. Russ candidly discusses the actual hard work that it might take to give a concern sufficient visibility, but also points out that our leading to take a stand may be for you and me, and not our whole diverse community.

After I enthusiastically joined Quakers in my late teens, I gradually learned that the Quaker community can't give me everything I need. I've had to let the ideal Quaker community in my imagination die. What I can expect of my Quaker community is that they will offer me a space to seek the energizing presence of the Spirit, take my experience of the Spirit seriously, and give me the support and tools to test what I think the Spirit is leading me to do. Fellow Quaker Martin Kelley said to me on social media: "I think at its best, Quakerism gives individuals non-judgmental community support to try something unproven, risky, or just a bit odd. Sometimes this slowly coalesces into a group norm but in the meantime, it's the building of individual leadings that starts change." What matters is if the work is Spirit-led, not that the work is labeled as "Quaker."

The last chapters of The Spirit of Freedom are encounters with aspects of our human diversity that can enrich us, if (as the author demonstrates) we apply the tools of theology to expand and humanize them. Our Quaker resistance to "times and seasons" (the liturgical calendar, for example) is open to challenge: are we insisting on living in abstractions rather than acknowledging our human reality?

To say that all days are equal risks every day becoming dull and grey. A testimony against times and seasons that don't address the way we are creatures of time isn't a sustainable testimony

A further consideration for post-Christian British Quakers involves calendars rooted in the Christian year. Typically, Mark Russ doesn't prescribe an ideal resolution, but opens up a deeper conversation.

The next chapter, "Bear Theology," describes the spiritual blessings of open affection among gay men: "The more time I spend in the company of body-loving bears, who are not afraid to express their friendship through physical affection, the more my internalized homophobia is chipped away." His chapter on "A Quaker Theology of Trans Inclusion" includes a profound treatment of what it means to change our name, and the transformation (and continuity) involved with a new body.

Few of us are who our parents expected us to be. All of us have much to learn about who we are. One day we will all see one another face to face, and I expect many of us will be surprised.

The final chapter, "Quaker Theology and Whiteness," represents, according to Mark Russ,  "... a new stage in my theological journey" ... one that will no doubt result in other helpful contributions from Mark Russ to Quaker theology in the future. He makes his motivation clear: "Whiteness has a long history of entanglement with theology." And not just theology in the abstract; through personal experiences, the author shows how even "good" Quakers can find themselves caught in that entanglement. He uses the concept of "sin" creatively to open up his topic, and explores both the insights and the limitations of early Quaker theologian Robert Barclay in confronting this particular embedded sin.

Although Mark Russ wrote the chapters of The Spirit of Freedom over a period of more than ten years, the book has a natural flow. It's coherent and compelling. His voice is always empowering, never shaming. He honors his own central query for doing theological work: "Does our God-talk help us to flourish, or does it diminish us?" I believe this book will help us flourish—and it makes the hard work that this will require seem very worthwhile.

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As in his previous book, Quaker Shaped Christianity, Mark Russ specifies that he's primarily addressing the Quaker culture he himself experiences—that of British Quakers today. However, he also welcomes conversations with the worldwide Quaker community. He is open about his own Christian orientation, which is a precious grounding for his many insights and commitments, but there's no hint of Christian territorialism or triumphalism in his writings.

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Friends Committee on National Legislation asks us (in the USA) to call our Senators as soon as possible in support of the Joint Resolutions of Disapproval to block offensive weapons shipments to Israel. Floor votes are expected this next week. For FCNL's guidance and assistance on this campaign, follow this link.

Esau McCaulley on Threads: (... and see the comments, too.)

For us christians writing and thinking in the public square: What do we have to say that is not already being said by secular pundits and analysts on the right and the left? What is distinctively Christian about our witness in this moment and not a baptism of political ideas that come from elsewhere.

Two thoughtful articles in The Guardian on our recent U.S. election. Oliver Hall, a phone-bank volunteer; and Ben Davis, a democratic socialist who works in political data.

What do you think of Timothy Snyder's chain of submission?

"Rejecting the bargain": Kristin Kobes Du Mez cites Robert Jones's research showing how massively U.S. Christians supported the winners of our recent national elections. Then she goes on ...

For Christians who are deeply troubled by this strong show of support for a candidate and platform that seem to undermine core Christian teachings, the decision to attend church the Sunday after the election was a fraught one. Some pastors, too, wrestled with whether or how to address our political reality from the pulpit.

(What actually happened at her church? Keep reading.)

In the Russian Reader blog: Making Russia Great Again. (Don't draw hasty conclusions from the first item in this post... please keep reading.)

At some point I will stop hiding behind other people's links and attempt to write some first principles of my own concerning the outcome of November 5. I'm just not quite ready yet. Of course I'd love to hear from you.

The Daily Quaker: A daily devotional e-mail with Quaker quotations. 

Each email has three parts: a query to ground you; a message to inspire you; and an invitation to participate in a spiritual exercise. 

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I'm in the mood for some raw Charlie Musselwhite,who's a long, long way from home. (Part of a Mark Hummel blues harp blowout.)

.

Saying goodbye

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Toward the end of her book Goodbye to Russia, Sarah Rainsford, BBC reporter who was expelled from Russia in 2021 as a "security threat," wrote:

Still in our kitchen.

When I got kicked out, people would tell me it was a 'badge of honour' and congratulate me for getting under the Kremlin's skin. At first that niggled, because I still felt the loss. The remnants of my many years in Russia as either student or reporter were all around me in London, as reminders of the enormous time and effort I'd invested. My bookshelves were loaded with Russian literature and history. I had crates full of notebooks from reporting trips across the country and a phone full of contacts and friends I'd probably never see. Even squeezing the last drop of shampoo from a bottle marked in Cyrillic script felt stupidly like the end of an era.

Six months later, the invasion of Ukraine killed that nostalgia dead. Reporting from the Donbas at first, and then places like Bucha, I was documenting what Russia was doing instead of being forced to hear its denials and distortions.

When I returned from Ukraine in March, I binned all the Putin mugs. For a long time I couldn't bear to see any of the Russia stuff. I couldn't bear even to continue writing this book.

The two books I'm recommending today both offer intense exposure to the realities of today's Russia. Sarah Rainsford's book hit me more personally: it reminded me of my own experiences in Russia on almost every page. She started studying Russian at the same age I did. Her first experiences in the country were at age 18 (in 1992); mine didn't happen until I was 22 (in 1975). I returned to Russia, often to attend board meetings of a Quaker organization, nearly every year between 1994 and 2007, the year we began our ten-year period of service in Elektrostal under Quaker sponsorship. Rainsford spent twenty years as a BBC reporter in Russia, many of those years overlapping with my visits or with our residency in Elektrostal.

Rainsford's book opens with her personal experience of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. At that moment she was in Kramatorsk, Ukraine, and she vividly describes the buildup of tensions just prior to those first hours of invasion, as well as the opening blows of the invasion itself. Her book is framed by those February events, and how it has influenced her relationship to a country into which she invested much of her life.

Much of the book is a well-organized succession of journalistic experiences accompanied by her candid personal reflections. Many events and tragedies of her years as a BBC reporter and producer in Russia may be familiar to you: the incompetent response to the sinking of the submarine Kursk in 2000; the mass tragedy of September 2004 among the students and parents of Beslan, and the death of Anna Politkovskaya, who had refused to give up her coverage of human rights abuses in Chechnya; later, the assassination of Boris Nemtsov; the poisoning of Vladimir Kara-Murza; the suicide of independent journalist Irina Slavina ("Blame the Russian Federation for my death"); the banning of the Memorial organizations.

Along the way, she introduces us to some of the unforgettable personalities who were caught up by these events—or who sparked them. Among them: opposition activist Anastasia Shevchenko in Rostov-on-Don, in 2019, who was arrested for her links with an "undesirable organization," and consequently unable to be with her daughter Alina, when Alina died in an intensive care ward. This incident of gratuitous cruelty sparked a "March of Mother's Fury" in Moscow, with one participant telling Rainsford that "the case proved you could now be arrested in Russia for nothing at all." Rainsford went on to say, "Russia had dozens of political prisoners by 2019, far too many to tell all their stories or attend all their trials. But for me, Anastasia always stood out." The personal tragedy of mother and daughter was one element, but it was also an example of a new category of political repression in the wake of Ukraine's independence movement: the suspicion of people with links, however tenuous, to "undesirable" foreign organizations.

Rainsford's book encompasses the last years of Alexei Navalny's activism in Russia, his poisoning in 2020, followed by treatment in Germany and his return to Russia and immediate arrest on January 17, 2021, and, eventually his death in prison in February of this year, and his burial in Moscow. 

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Navalny's own account of his life and activism, Patriot: A Memoir, also touched me at a personal level. I loved Sarah Rainsford's book in part because of something we share: a nearly lifelong interest in Russia, as students and then as visitors and residents. Both of us have had to wrestle with the realization that somehow Russia includes both a capacity for extraordinary humanity and self-sacrifice as well as a capacity for systemic cruelty on a mass scale, fueled by greed and assisted by centuries of dysfunctional relationships between those with power and everyone else.

At least that's what it looks like from the outside. Navalny, on the inside of this reality, seemed to have made a decision not to tolerate this contradiction. If Russia is to flourish, cruelty and arbitrary absolutism must be confronted and defeated. The first two-thirds of his book recounts how he came to this conclusion; the last part shows how he paid the price for his convictions, through his prison diaries and many of his Instagram posts right into this year.

The most attractive aspect of his book is also the most difficult: his own cheeky voice. It just seems so odd and delightful that one of Russia's most prominent opposition politicians could be the very opposite of the wooden-faced political operatives, drawing from a limited list of familiar cliches, who usually dominate the scene. Navalny almost died as a result of the Novichok poisoning in Tomsk, but his account of gradually coming out of his coma is sheer comedic genius. That's the joy and tragedy of this whole book: it's funny and refreshing and often very entertaining, even when he describes the remorseless and sadistic realities of maximum security prison life...

... But we already know how the story ends.

We can tell that he often took pride in his political accomplishments. Among the high points of the book is his account of running for mayor in Moscow in 2013; his use of street-level and door-to-door campaigning was traditional in democracies but unusual in Russia. Navalny attributed some of his campaign initiatives to his love of the American television drama The Wire.  "In one season there was a storyline about the hero running for mayor of Baltimore. I explained to our staff responsible for organizing meetings with the public that I wanted the same scenario: a stage, chairs for the elderly, groups of other people standing around. That is probably entirely typical in an American election campaign, but no one had done anything like it before in Russia."

In his attempted campaign for president in 2017, he took mass campaigning of this sort to a national level with thousands of volunteers and dozens of campaign offices. But he also often poked fun at himself, writing (for example) about his difficulties in front of the television camera.

A more caustic brand of humor comes out in his accounts of his trials. The material is very rich: in at least two prominent criminal trials, he is accused of "crimes" that are actually normal business practices. One of the trials ended with Alexei's brother Oleg being sentenced to prison for three and a half years, while Alexei himself was given a suspended sentence. For Alexei, seeing his brother in prison while he remained outside was worse than being in prison himself.

In his final post-Novichok prison years, Navalny occasionally confessed to discouragement, but usually his droll voice quickly returned. For example, he gave four reasons for wanting to complete this book, which he had started before returning to Russia from Germany. First, he simply wanted to. Second, he had promised his agents. And then ...

Reasons three and four for writing this book might sound overly dramatic, and if everything ends badly, this will be the point at which my more emotional readers may shed a tear. (Oh, my God, he could see it all coming; imagine how that must have felt!) On the other hand, if everything works out for the best, this could be the most pathetic part. It could be tidied up with a bit of editing or simply omitted, but I have promised myself that this is to be a very honest book.

Reason three, then, is that if they do finally whack me, the book will be my memorial.

Reason four is that, again, if they whack me, my family will get the advance and royalties that, I hope, there will be. Let's face it, if a murky assassination attempt using a chemical weapon, followed by a demise in prison, can't move a book, it is hard to imagine what would. The book's author has been murdered by a villainous president; what more could the marketing department ask for?

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This is Russia, too.... I'm taking the opportunity to re-run a slideshow that I posted here in 2013. It's the pages of a booklet presented to me by one of my former students on the occasion of my 60th birthday. (I added translations, and the second slide to explain the title reference to Shurik.)

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Ken White's "Thoughts the Day After." Thanks to Tina for the link.

Jeremy Morris considers decolonizing area studies. Russian version/на русском языке.

Greg Morgan on "Safe Passage" at the end of life.

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J.B. Lenoir, "Eisenhower Blues."

A song of quiet trust

It's been about 25 years since I gave a series of messages at the annual sessions of Northwest Yearly Meeting of Friends. The messages were linked to this psalm:

Psalm 131 (New English Bible)

1 O LORD, my heart is not proud,
  nor are my eyes haughty;
  I do not busy myself with great matters
or things too marvellous for me.
2 No; I submit myself, I account myself lowly,
  as a weaned child clinging to its mother.
3 O Israel, look for the LORD
  now and evermore.

For the last three years, I've been giving sermons once a month at Spokane Friends Meeting, in Washington state, USA. Several of my sermons have been encouragements to enter into a conversation with the Holy Spirit on what the Bible is showing us through texts that seem to contain a lot under the surface. Last month, partly in response to the feverish political climate in the USA these days, I wanted to offer something that could bring the fever down a bit—and this psalm came back to me from that series I wrote a quarter century ago. It seemed to meet the need.

I had no memory of what I actually said in those long-ago messages. I hope they were suitable at the time, but now I had no choice but to take a fresh look at the text. 

At first I assumed that I would use the New English Bible translation, because that was the first Bible I ever owned and the first place I got to know this psalm. But in preparing for my Spokane message, I looked up the psalm in the New Interpreter's Study Bible. The commentary there said that verse two seems to suggest that the psalm might have been written by a woman. So I looked again at the translation included in that Bible, the New Revised Standard Version, and look what I found:

Psalm 131 (New Revised Standard Version)

1 O LORD, my heart is not lifted up,
    my eyes are not raised too high;
  I do not occupy myself with things
    too great and too marvelous for me.
2 but I have calmed and quieted my soul,
    like a weaned child with its mother;
    my soul is like the weaned child that is with me. [see note]
3 O Israel, hope in the LORD
    for this time on and forevermore.

[Note: Or my soul within me is like a weaned child]

Not sure which version to choose for this message, and further intrigued by that note with its alternate reading, I went to a Hebrew-English interlinear Bible to see if that second reference to the “weaned child that is with me” was in that resource ... and indeed it is.

One of the reasons I am so fond of this psalm, especially in the context of preaching, is that it reminds me that, when I speak in meeting for worship, my job is to be faithful, not clever. My task is confined to two things: first, to point toward trustworthy sources of inspiration and vision, and, second, to suggest some implications of those sources as a way of encouraging you to do the same, to consider the implications for yourselves. It is not my purpose to do your work for you, to show off my own cleverness (as obvious as it is), or to one-up someone else, or to even hint that I’ve covered all the possibilities.

From what I’ve just said, you can see why I loved the way John Kinney began his message to Spokane Friends the previous week—and here I’m quoting from his online text:

When I give a message, it is presumptuous of me and you to think that I know what I am talking about. I am groping in the dark. What I say makes sense to me but I am confident that there are theologically and spiritually astute people that could poke holes in most of what I say so always take my message with a grain of salt.

Exactly! The same caveat goes for everything that I say when I visit you.

John Kinney talked about some of the realities we encounter when we do intercessory prayer for others. When our prayers don’t result in healing, is it because we were two prayers short? John’s message reminded us of some important Scriptures that illuminate this picture: in Romans, Paul says that the Holy Spirit intercedes for us through wordless groans; and in Matthew, God causes the son “to rise on the bad as well as the good, and sends down rain to fall on the upright and the wicked alike.” We are to pray continually, but not babble on as if God didn’t already know what we need. In light of God’s promises and the Bible’s teachings on prayer, the temptation to overthink all these questions becomes unbearable, at least for some of us. 

… And it’s at that moment Psalm 131 becomes the healing song of quiet trust that I need.

Maybe some of you have seen this cartoon:

Maybe this isn't exactly theology, but it's an example of the tangents we can go on when we overthink something. God is both deeper and more direct, but we don’t become aware of it until we, like the dog in the third frame, are in an attitude of acceptance rather than reaction.

Does this mean that the good dog was wrong to contemplate the meaning of “good”? I honestly don’t think so. I don’t think God gave us our brains to torture us when we encounter something we don’t understand. I remember Paul saying in 1 Corinthians 14:15 “...I will pray with the spirit, but I will pray with the mind also; I will sing praise with the spirit, but I will sing praise with the mind also.” His point is that our participation in worship should be in language that is understandable to others, but in this cause he honors the role of the mind. Back in the same letter, chapter two, Paul says, “‘For who has known the mind of the Lord, so as to instruct him?’ But we have the mind of Christ.”

Going back to Psalm 131, “...My eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.” I don’t interpret this as a way of telling us that piety equals dumb passivity, but that when we encounter Godly mysteries in Scripture and in life, we simply acknowledge our limitations, and don’t make our intellects a sort of limitation beyond which we won’t allow God to go. We don’t stand above those mysteries in some sort of detached or superior position, the way the citizens of the Snarky District live:

(By permission of cartoonstock.com.)

Instead of overthinking, or resorting to irony or intellectual distancing, we can enter into dialogue with the text. Even comparing translations might be part of that dialogue. I think it is entirely consistent with Psalm 131 to ask God to help us discern what the implications of the Scripture are for us.

For example, the question that really touches my heart is the meaning of the weaned child. How do I apply this image? Quoting, “I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.” In this scene, my soul is not trapped by my arrogance or skepticism or the temptation to react on my own terms, but what is my soul’s relation to God in this receptive place? Is God my mother in this image? Having been weaned, am I now in the world as God’s creation, in some way separate from my Creator? But in any case, I’m not far off; my soul is like the weaned child, still with its mother but now vulnerable to the world’s hazards, just like every other person in God’s creation.

As it happens, this image recalls a very specific memory from my early childhood. When I was about three or four years old, my beloved German grandma, my Oma, was teaching me how to tie my shoes. I was living with her and my Opa in their house in Stuttgart, Germany, before I went to Chicago to be reunited with my parents. As my grandmother helped me with my shoelaces, she told me about the Good Shepherd who loved me. Those memories came back to me years later, even as I was living in a family where faith was a taboo subject. It’s like my soul was never cut off from the silver thread that led back to my grandmother’s care.

(Here’s a picture of my Oma holding me, alongside my mom and my Opa. I included this picture so you can maybe glimpse some of the care that gave me that silver thread that never broke.)

Back to Psalm 131. This is my reality: my soul can relax, stop obsessing, and enjoy companionship with God, but at the same time, it remains true that I’m as vulnerable as any other creature. My hope isn’t in any physical shield or force, but in remembering, as Israel is exhorted to do in the third verse, to “hope in the Lord, now and forevermore.”

At Spokane Friends meeting for worship, I ended my sermon and we went into open worship. For that period of quiet, I offered these queries for those who wanted to continue to reflect on the psalm:

• Is there comfort or discomfort for you in Psalm 131, or perhaps both?
• In either case, can your questions open up a place of dialogue?
• Are there people in your life or past who personify God’s ongoing love for you? Are there other ways you’ve experienced this love? Do you feel free to ask for more?

Another set of queries that comes to me now, as election day in the USA draws ever closer:

• In this moment, is there a tension between "calming and quieting" our souls, and being conscientious and persistent participants in a nation's civic life?

The hope I have for today is not a denial of reality, but a deeper perspective, "now and forevermore." In another election season, eight years ago, I mentioned another psalm that I also keep before me these days: (Psalm 119:45-46, NIV; context)

I will walk about in freedom,
     for I have sought out your precepts.
I will speak of your statutes before kings
     and will not be put to shame...

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Heather Cox Richardson comments on the Madison Square Garden spectacle of a few days ago.

We're just back from another four-week visit to London. I continue to be fascinated by the two (at least two) Englishes we experience in these visits, and how they influence each other. As Ben Yagoda says, it's a two-way street.

Sarah Thomas Baldwin on the subversive spiritual quality of "lingering." (With references to the events of February 2023 at Asbury University.)

A serious look at an influential periodical of my teenage years. Were you also a loyal reader of MAD?

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Sarah Quintana, "Rolling and Tumbling" in French.