Open Worship

A friend recently wrote to me asking whether I knew of a good brief description of what we "programmed" Quakers often call "open worship" or "Communion after the manner of Friends."

(See sidebar here for some terminology information.) 

After doing some looking around, I decided to try to write a description of my own. I hope you'll comment and maybe add your own description, or point me to something better.

Part of the task I've set for myself is to write something that can honor the teaching voice of Friends without using insider language. Have I succeeded? What needs to be changed?

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Invitation to open worship:

It's time to meet with God.

In our worship, we hear from each other, from the Bible, from our children, and from our wider community. Now, for the next period of time, we want to set aside all other plans and concerns, and give our full attention to the Holy Spirit.

This kind of quiet prayerful attention comes naturally to some of us. Maybe you begin with a prayer, "God, I love to be with you among your people." Or with a Scripture: "You have been our dwelling place in all generations." You remember the promise of Jesus to be with us when we gather. Then you are ready to wait in trust: God knows what you need -- and what we need as a community.

It's not quite so easy for others. If you're naturally restless, you're not alone! Follow the advice of Douglas Steere, and think of how you might prepare to meet a deservedly famous leader or teacher: Mother Teresa, say, or Albert Schweitzer. You might stop at the doorstep and adjust your jacket or comb your hair. In the same way, take time to anticipate this meeting with the One who loved you into being. There's no hurry. Don't feel guilty about stray thoughts -- just quietly "comb" them away and return to the Center. If the thoughts persist, maybe you need to take them with you to lay at God's feet: "Lord, this is what keeps gnawing at me; please help."

And, if today, for some reason, you can't quiet your soul, simply rest in the silence. Let the rest of us carry this responsibility for today, and just wait in trust. God's word for you today may come through someone else.

Sometimes the Holy Spirit ministers to us in complete silence -- an outer silence in our meeting room and an inward quietness in your heart. But today you may receive a word or idea that seems to be alive with God's love, direction, and wisdom. Does it align with God's character as revealed in the Bible? Does it shine light on some problem you've been wrestling with? Are you called to a new commitment? After open worship ends, you may wish to write down some notes, or talk with an elder or pastor.

Maybe the word you have received is not just for you. The Holy Spirit may be asking you to tell the rest of us what you have been given. Stand up if you can, or simply begin speaking. A microphone will be brought to you. Speak your full message, but no more. If it seems incomplete, let it be so: someone else may have the rest of the message. This is not a time for announcements or opinions; the time remains dedicated to waiting on the Holy Spirit. But, on the other hand, don't wait until the message is "perfect." Some of us may sound as if we're experienced at speaking in open worship, but all of us tremble inwardly when the Spirit speaks through us. Remember: as soon as you stand up or start speaking, others are upholding you in prayer.

A pastor or worship leader will end the period of open worship by asking, "Are all hearts clear?" If a message is about to burst from your lips right at that moment, it's fine to ask for our attention. In any case, the elders and pastors are eager to hear about your experiences in open worship.

(Also see: "I wouldn't last five minutes.")

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Power of Goodness news:
$7,000 more and we're there!

Power of Goodness, 2nd edition, and teachers' manual.

Back in May, I recounted the history of the trilingual peace education/ community mental health project centered on this book.

Last month, Misha Roshchin delivered the layout files to the printer in Grozny. Now the Friends International Library is in its final fundraising push to raise the money to print enough copies to provide for the whole school system. If we can raise $7,000, we will have 4500 copies available. Ideally, we'd like 6,000 copies, so we're not going to turn away more contributions!

The per-unit cost of this book including the children's art that illustrates the stories, is just under $7. How many copies can you help us print?

[This fundraising campaign has concluded. The book itself has continued to develop under the care of its new hosts, Friends Peace Teams.]

Greetings from Chechen psychologists working with  Peacebuilding UK and Power of Goodness

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Source.  

Last week I was impressed (and slightly shocked) by the sight of a Soyuz spacecraft launched in a snowstorm, with three souls aboard. Two days ago the previous crew of the International Space Station returned to snow-swept Kazakhstan in a Soyuz craft. That spacecraft, looking for all the world like a big Thermos bottle on its side, surrounded by scrubgrass and snow, vividly reminded me that, with all the high technology of the human spaceflight program, Mother Nature still rules.

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"What Evangelical Women Want: the political gender gap."

Grandfather and granddaughter teaching together: sounds like a fabulous collaboration. Wish I'd been there.

Stan Thornburg on Peter's denial: "Does our 'accent' clearly show that we are people of another Kingdom?"

"Quakers and Occupy: UK summary."

Happy Thanksgiving! Judy's Thanksgiving feast for our colleagues at the New Humanities Institute included cranberry-pear sauce, apple-cranberry-raisin cobbler, cardamom braid with turkey salad filling, pumpkin bread with a tvorog cream layer, and rice salad with kiwi and grapes. This is the fourth time we've put on a Thanksgiving meal for our Institute family. In honor of the holiday, here's a strangely fascinating video on Thanksgiving symbols from Matthew Weathers at Biola University. Thanks to Open Culture.

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Angela Strehli -- yet another take on a wonderful old classic, with Marcia Ball on keyboard:

Snow shorts (and some Occupy thoughts)

Earlier this week. Our institute visible on left (through the trees); City Hall on right.

We've had winter for about ten days, but as I write this on the late evening of the 17th, I must report that winter seems to have retreated temporarily: the temperature is about 40 degrees F.

Monday morning at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan was quite a different story. I was watching the launch of Soyuz TMA-22, and to my amazement, the countdown continued through a snowstorm that was approaching whiteout. After years of getting used to Florida spacelaunches, with all those multiple TV cameras and clear visibility, it was startling to see just one view of the launch pad, and that view getting more and more obscured as snow hit the TV camera lens.

Via NASA TV.

As the minutes ticked by before launch, I couldn't help wondering how many pounds of snow were on the rocket itself. Of course most of my thoughts and prayers were with the crew and vehicle, remembering that this launch had been delayed until investigation of the failed Progress supply-delivery launch last August was complete. Although the Soyuz launch vehicle has a good track record for reliability, the Russian space program overall has been a dismal story in recent years--and may stay so for years longer.

Two days after the successful launch, I was delighted to be back online for the successful docking of the Soyuz orbital craft with the International Space Station.

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Meanwhile, back at the New Humanities Institute, we've been keeping warm, thank you. On Sunday we celebrated our sixteenth anniversary as a higher education institution.



We had a wonderful party, with skits and songs contributed by students and alums (as usual, I was roped into one of the improv drama skits...). And today we marked International Students' Day with a surprise for all students in the mid-morning classes. Instead of going to their normal classes, students were presented with a bucket of numbers, selecting their classroom by chance. In each classroom, a teacher had prepared a lesson on some subject completely outside their normal academic area. One teacher presented her collection of dolls and taught students how to make cloth dolls. Another teacher guided a class in creating edible art. Still another cooked plov with her students. And another taught her students ten out of the hundreds of ways scarves can be knotted into items of clothing or accessories. Other classes learned art history, self-defense techniques, care for cats, and so on. I showed students how to use Linux Mint and a variety of open-source programs such as GIMP to edit photos, Audacity to edit sound files, LibreOffice programs, and so on. At the end of the period we gathered in the fitness studio to report how we'd used the period.

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I've been following developments in the Occupy movement with mixed feelings. Having watched month after month of police actions against the tiny groups of pro-democracy campaigners here, it's disheartening to see the kind of baton-thumping and pepper-spraying that Occupy encampments have faced. But I also recognize that city governments are walking a very thin line between freedom of assembly and public safety, and their law-enforcement actions (and mistakes) don't necessarily mean they're a tool of the "1%".

So I'm not all that tempted to second-guess either the activists or the local governments. I'm observing all of this (from a frustrating distance) on a couple of levels:

First of all, something in my heart yearns for a moral revival to sweep the capitalist world. As I'm not the only one to point out, the enmeshed ties of business and government and economic mechanisms, and their resulting concentrations of wealth and power, have become so complex that technical reforms seem wholly inadequate, even if the political will existed to apply them. A higher-level moral awakening, powerful enough to guide both policy decisions and economic transactions, is desperately needed. Obama talked in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign about an empathy gap; rarely has that gap seemed wider than now--coinciding with the gap between the highest paid and lowest paid, and the gap between financial executives' bonuses and their actual performance. Closing this gap must become more important than the ruthless individualism now prevailing, but overcoming the gap won't happen if progressives demand that only the "others" change. We need to understand and address the fears (founded and unfounded) behind that ruthlessness. To me, this is first and foremost a spiritual challenge. Christians: this is your moment to take the Message out of the meetinghouse and into the streets. (Evangelicals: yes, I'm talking to us, too! Let's show that this adjective "evangelical" still has some actual content!)

On another level, I don't worry too much about whether Occupy activists have a single perfectly aligned message. Their biggest message, after all, is simply that they exist. Their numbers, their persistence, their sheer nuisance value, says "this is what happens when you push people too far, when you stress the fabric of democracy beyond endurance with your wealth and your ideologies of sanctified selfishness." Therefore I'm hoping that, as a social phenomenon that demands attention, the demonstrators have staying power. And I hope that those who are not involved directly, whether they're in the 99% or the 1%, begin to notice that our cities are a lot less boring, a lot more fertile, when hundreds and thousands of motivated, engaged idealists meet together with new hope, new creativity, new messages. Do these audiences really want things to calm down into the previous torpor where only hyperventilating television personalities took charge of telling us what we think?

But a literal occupation of territory, day and night, with tents and toilets and all the energy required to maintain and defend that occupation, is a powerful distraction that plays directly into the hands of fearmongers. I'm happy to see a reasonable infrastructure to sustain a constant presence that respects a balance of interests and communicates engagingly with local governments. But there's not much future in acting as dismissive to the claims of the common good as those who put their own wealth first. Closing the empathy gap is a two-way process.

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"Occupy Wall Street's Image Problem."

Peter Blood on "The Biblical Roots of Quaker Worship." Please read carefully and comment. I think this would be a fabulous piece to use for adult education in many meetings.

If every child were aware of his or her crucial importance to the family, what would the world be like? "What the Eisenhowers knew."

"Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Power in Japan." A repost with new comments.

It is long past time for Friends to begin a conversation on nuclear power and the much larger issue of how we know what to believe. Many among us insist that what is overwhelmingly the safest of the large sources of electricity should meet standards that no other energy source meets. Many Friends insist that the scientific community is lying about the safety of nuclear power. And overwhelmingly, we as a community insist that solutions to climate change be only the ones we like, even when scientists and policy experts find these solutions partial or even counterproductive.

"Putin, the Confucius Prize, and Western Double Standards."

Turkey and its regional priorities: an interview with H. Akin Unver. (Thanks to foreignpolicyblogs.com for the reference.)

Pepe Escobar examines the Iran nuclear-weapons hue-and-cry. And the Christian Science Monitor recapitulates the history of warnings about Iran's nuclear-weapons capabilities.

An Israeli journalist reports on Palestinian freedom riders.

"Why is Google in love with Bletchley Park?"

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Magic Slim!

What is "carnal"?

Source.

Campolo recounts his "famous line": Other than giving our lives to Christ, there's nothing more important than responding to the needs of the poor, with all that we are and all that we have. Lovingly sacrifice--that's what the world's looking for. The world's tired of churches that seem to spend most of the money they collect on themselves. I mean you look at the typical church budget and ask how much money is being spent on keeping the church going and how much is really spent on the poor. I was speaking some years ago at Wheaton College in a line that made me famous. Few lines make people famous but I have been both praised and condemned for this one line. 'Cause I was doing my best, I was really doing my best to sensitize these young people to the suffering of poor people and why they need to respond and give their lives to the needs of the poor. And you know at Wheaton they have to go to chapel every day--it's required--and they're sitting there, 2500 of them, and you know they have Billy Graham on Monday and Luis Palau on Tuesday, so, who is this guy? And I'm pumping away as best I can, and I'm frustrated, and I'm an Italian from Philadelphia, and when we get frustrated we lose control, and I yelled, "while you were sleeping last night, 40,000 children died of either starvation or diseases related to malnutrition ... 40,000 children die every single day from starvation or diseases related to malnutrition," and everybody just sat there, and I said, "And what's worse is, most of you don't give a shit." I have never seen an audience wake up like that audience woke up. I mean, you should have been there. They were nudging ... "Did you hear?" All over I saw ... [whispering] "He said 'shit'..." and I said, "And what's worse is, you are more upset with the fact that I said 'shit' than that 40,000 kids died last night, and that's what's wrong with our Christianity." Tony Campolo at Christian Assembly, Forest Falls, California, December 5, 2009

Around 1993 or 1994, my first or second year at Friends United Meeting, we published an article by Vince Stults in Quaker Life reflecting the passion for holistic mission he (we) wished would become infectious among Friends. In the article, he mentioned Tony Campolo's famous line about Christian students who didn't seem not to "give a shit" about 40,000 children dying of preventable causes every day.

Campolo has recounted that incident many times, but back in the early '90's, probably many of our readers had not heard of it. We expected some discomfort with our use of an expletive in our Christian periodical, and we hoped that on balance Tony's urgency would explain our momentary departure from our normal squeaky-clean editorial practice--that, in fact, our readers would experience that same creative discomfort that Tony surely hoped he had produced among the Wheaton College students.

In fact we did receive some unhappy responses from readers, as well as positive responses. One letter came from a rural Friends meeting in Indiana Yearly Meeting. (Maybe someone can get hold of that issue of the magazine and fill in the details.) That letter politely eldered us for our "carnal" spirit.

Although I grew up in an atheist family and had no personal background in conservative or Holiness Christianity, and my favorite music pre- and post-conversion has been blues (about as carnal as music can get, maybe), it seemed to me that I knew quite directly what the writers meant. They were charging us with gratifying a sensation-loving element in ourselves and our readers--neither edifying the readers nor glorifying God. This kind of conduct doesn't become those who have been made new creatures in Christ. I'm sure those Friends knew we had no intention of being uselessly offensive, but they wanted us to know that we had crossed a rhetorical line that was important to them.

This reluctance to gratify worldliness is an element of the culture that formed most members of Indiana Yearly Meeting and most students at Wheaton College. After all, if Campolo's audience had not come from such a culture, the use of that word would not have made any impact. Furthermore, a word used spontaneously in a face-to-face encounter may be more forgivable than a premeditated repetition in a magazine that ends up in the hands of readers of all ages and conditions.

To this day I still believe we were right not to cut that incident from Vince's article. After all, the church is God's provision for keeping God's promises to the world's poor and oppressed people, and Tony's discontent with the church's response was well-founded. You can be as "holy" as you like, but if evangelical Protestantism can go on for year after year after year and still not be a threat to the principalities and powers who grind the faces of the poor--and if we can even get enmeshed with those unholy powers--then clearly all that respect for propriety is neither edifying believers nor glorifying God. An occasional outburst of indignation is not the issue; putting all our energy into suppressing our emotions would be far more costly than cleaning up after ourselves when we slip up. Should anyone be able to think about 40,000 preventable deaths among children every day without losing it?

But ... but ... at the same time our critics were not wrong! The way we conduct ourselves in the Lamb's War does make a difference. The catharsis of rage has an addictive quality of its own, as does the feeling of superiority when we think we're flipping the bird to the "oppressor"--objectifying that human being who happens to be a banker or broker or politician, while avoiding our own complicity, and basking in the glow of our moral superiority. The demonic patterns that dramatically impoverish and enslave some of us also wreak a more subtle havoc on the rest of us; and all of us--rich and poor alike--have the right to hear the Gospel preached with 100% of the love that it contains for every single hearer. How will a Quaker message that connects the dots of passionate Christ-centeredness and economic discipleship be heard if its bearer does not show that love?

So here's a task that calls mystics and prophets, introverts and extroverts to be collaborative and creative. How does the Christian's word in the public arena--say in the Occupy movement--reflect both the unconditional love of God for all those trapped in oppressive systems, and the urgent need for those systems to be questioned, redeemed, pulled down? And who will carry out the ministry of eldership, as that rural meeting did for us at Quaker Life?

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These thoughts were stirred up in part by an article in Index on Censorship: "Voina: Russia's Robin Hoods." (Caution--a lot of offensive stuff in this article.) I know personally that for many people here, even in this post-Soviet space, there is a big difference between what people say privately and what they'll say or do in public. So, I'm already predisposed to like someone who believes "that it was his duty as an artist to express openly what other people fear to express...." And I strongly believe that neither the presence nor the absence of a political message invalidates art. For me, the more complicated question is: where is transcendent hope in campaigns like Voina's? Is it possible to be as audacious, as courageous, as whimsical, as over-the-top as these people have been in their passion for freedom, and still testify, as Quakers and indeed all Christians do, to a love that is directly available to the whole audience, including the security services?

And as I'm thinking about this, I'm reading Eric Metaxas's Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. I just read about Dietrich Bonhoeffer's uncompromising "no" to the representatives of the "German Church" as they put the pressure on him and his fellow German clergy in London. He delivered this "no" time and time again--always with unfailing courtesy to Hitler's heretical errand-boys. No doubt there's sometimes power in passion, even in outrage; there's also power in restraint.

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Brian McLaren, "Q & A: Exegeting Matthew 25."

Many thanks to Benigno Sanchez-Eppler and Susan Furry of New England Yearly Meeting for their work on Raíces cuáqueras: Heredad de textos, an online library of Spanish-language Quaker materials and related links.

"Quantum Theology: Our Spooky Interconnectedness."

"Media to be controlled with ever more sophisticated technical means." But it doesn't mean censorship.

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Delta Moon, "Tilt-a-Whirl":

The Gathered Meeting, part two

The gathering of Russian-speaking Friends, supported by the European and Middle East Section of Friends World Committee for Consultation, took place two weekends ago in Kremenchuk, Ukraine. Judy and I were both able to be present. Judy reported on a European Friends gathering in Tolna, Hungary, the previous weekend, and (as promised) I led a discussion on Thomas Kelly's "The Gathered Meeting."

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My slide show from Kremenchuk. English translations of quotations and queries are below.

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In my session, I began by telling the story I mentioned two weeks ago, about how I first encountered this inspiring essay. It also seemed important to acknowledge the chain of relationships that made this essay even more alive for me. At the Friends World Committee triennial in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1976, I was helping Gideon Juma of Pemba Yearly Meeting by pushing his wheelchair around the McMaster University campus. The wheelchair, and my resulting relationship with Gideon Juma, allowed me to be places and see people I might otherwise not have dared approach in my timid status as a recent convert.

For one thing, I attended sessions of the Africa Section caucus and met Friends who remembered me many years later when I began serving Friends United Meeting. Also, various weighty Friends who joyfully greeted Gideon also included me in the fellowship. One of them was Douglas Steere. He gave me his new publication, "On Confirming the Deepest Thing in Another," the substance of which he proceeded to confirm by being very encouraging to me. It was in that booklet that I first read this story:

Thomas Kelly was a colleague of mine in teaching philosophy at Haverford College for almost five years until his sudden death in 1941 at the age of forty-seven. His Testament of Devotion, which is a devotional classic of the flavor of Brother Lawrence's The Practice of the Presence of God, has been translated into a number of languages and has been widely read. After his own college years in a small mid-western college, he spent the year of 1913-14 at Haverford College, where he came as a graduate student to study under Rufus Jones. He came to Dr. Jones's study during the first week of his time at Haverford, and in the course of their visit, he blurted out, "I want to make my life a miracle." Instead of cutting him down to size or passing this over as a young man's emotional extravagance, Rufus Jones quietly confirmed this longing in Thomas Kelly, and before his life-span was out, he did become a miracle--a miracle that long after his death is still moving many of his readers to confront the one thing needful. 

Rufus Jones confirmed this Godly longing in Thomas Kelly, who in turn passed it on to another Jones -- T. Canby Jones, one of a group of Haverford students who gathered around Thomas Kelly. Canby went on to teach at that same "small mid-western college," Wilmington College, for many years. That's where Judy and I got to know him better during the years we lived in Wilmington and Judy served as the college's director of financial aid. (I was on the Friends World Committee staff in those years--the imprint of my experiences in company with Gideon Juma were long-lasting!)

In 2005, Canby gave a talk at the Friends United Meeting sessions in Iowa. After giving the main part of his message on the peaceable Lamb who gives the victory (previewed here), he reminisced a bit about Thomas Kelly. I especially remember him recalling the moment that he heard about Kelly's death. At that moment, Canby said, he knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that we can have victory over death.

Here are the excerpts and discussion questions we used at Kremenchuk. The main structure of the essay follows William James's description of mystical experience, considered point by point (emphases added):

The experience is ineffable; it is not completely describable in words. We live through such hours of expanded vision yet never can we communicate to another all that wonder and power and life and re-creation which we knew when swept along in the immediacy of the Divine Presence.

Question: Is it worth describing? When? To whom? Why?

To an absent friend we can only say what Philip said to Nathaniel concerning Jesus, "Come and See." And such must always be the report of any experience of God, by individuals or in groups. "He is wonder and joy, judgement and power. And he is more than all these. Come and see."

* * *

The experience has a knowledge-quality. The covering of God in the gathered meeting carries with it the sense of insight of knowledge. We know Him as we have not known Him before. The secrets of this amazing world have been in some larger degree laid bare. We know life, and the world, and ourselves from within, anew.

Question: Is there knowledge that is "indescribable"? What does knowledge consist of? What is impossible to convey, and what must be conveyed?

We have been re-energized with that Power and re-sensitized by that tenderness to meet the daily world of men [and women] with new pangs and new steadiness.

* * *

It is transient. The sense of Divine covering in a group is rarely sustained more than three-quarters of an hour, or an hour. One can not seize hold upon it and restrain it from fading; or restore it the next Sunday at will. Each such meeting is a gracious gift of the Eternal Goodness, and the eyes of all must wait upon Him who gives us meat in due Season.

Question: How are we to understand the word "gift"? How do we learn to expect and receive a gift, rather than to "earn" it by way of rules and formulas?

* * *

It carries a sense of passivity within it. ... It is as amazing an experience as that of being prayed through, ... Instead of saying "I pray" or "he prays," it becomes better to say "Prayer is taking place."

Question: In our times, is it really possible to stop seeing ourselves as "initiators"? How does culture get in the way, and how (on the other hand) does it empower us? What role does Quaker discipleship play?

* * *

A fifth trait of mystical experience may well be added to James' list—the sense of unity, unity with the Divine Life who has graciously allowed us to touch the hem of His garment, unity with our fellow-worshippers, for He has broken down the middle wall of partition between our separate personalities and has flooded us with a sense of fellowship.

Question: When we experience this unity in a gathered meeting, what remains afterwards? How should this influence our future behavior in the faith community?

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One condition for such a group experience seems to be this: some individuals need already, upon entering the meeting, to be gathered deep in the spirit of worship. There must be some kindled hearts when the meeting begins. In them, and from them, begins the work of worship.

Question: Is this your service? (Did you already know this or are you just beginning to realize it?) How should we support you?

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A second condition concerns the spoken words of the meeting.... Brevity, earnestness sincerity and frequently a lack of polish characterize the best Quaker speaking. The words should rise like a shaggy crag upthrust from the surface of silence, under the pressure of yearning contrition and wonder. But in another sense the words should not rise up like a shaggy crag. They should not break the silence, but continue it.

Let's try enumerating the "categories" of helpful vocal ministry:
● biblical quotations
● personal experience
● calls for attention to concerns, situations, tasks
● vocal prayer
● singing
● what else?

Can such a list really be assembled? How will new attenders know what's appropriate? How will we know what is prophetic?

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Julie Ryberg's Cary Lecture at German Yearly Meeting. Julie speaks to the condition of Friends in Europe from personal experience, with three themes: "... what goes on within me when I see the truth about myself and my life. Another is about the dialogue between you and me when we speak the truth about our lives. Yet another is about learning to live the truth in the context of a Quaker community. In each of these aspects, I have experienced a different face of God."

Two fascinating book reviews in Books & Culture: One of them starts out with the question, "Will we, as Earthlings, ever find extraterrestrial life, and what will it mean if we do or don't?" And the other addresses "the patient, cumulative work of consensus science"--particularly in light of (or heat of) carbon cycle arguments.

The calm, straightforward tone of this book, and the huge mass of consensus science on which it is based, are the product of another marvel, the human mind. The patient, cumulative work of thousands of researchers has delivered us a timely warning about our future, a warning that could have been delivered at no other moment in the planet's history. The warning is stark: the carbon cycle, at the root of what we like to think of as the planet's natural cycles, runs on very slow geologic time. Global warming, by contrast, is a fast and furious affair that so far has raised the planet's temperature about a degree Celsius, enough to start the rapid melt of Arctic sea ice and knock many other systems out of kilter.

"Iranian Ballistic Missile Developments: Non-Barking Dog and Dead Monkey." (Thanks to William Sweet at Foreign Policy Blogs.)

With no comment from me: "The Soviet ways are attractive not only to Putin, but to his harshest critics too."

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Blues from Moscow: JW Jones and the Jumping Cats.