Spinning Scripture

Last Sunday the National Mall in Washington, DC, hosted a nearly undiluted festival of civil religion and Christian nationalism, "Rededicate 250."

The event was framed as a national prayer service linked to the USA's 250th birthday. You will not be surprised that this "national" event was predominantly led by evangelical Christian celebrities and a few congenial others, including one representative of a religion other than Christianity (Rabbi Soloveichik of Congregation Shearith Israel in New York City).

I was planning to write this evening about the incongruities of Sunday's spectacle, but Russell Moore in Christianity Today has already done an excellent job, particularly in addressing the use of 2 Chronicles 7:14—in its actual biblical context, not as a tagline for American civil religion.

We do not come to God by way of a National Mall stage, an Oval Office video, a remembered founding, or a reclaimed country. We come through a torn veil, by blood, to a throne of grace. And we come not through a mascot but through a mediator. We can’t “rededicate” ourselves any other way but that.

(For more about Rededicate 250 in historical and constitutional context, see Heather Cox Richardson's commentary from last Sunday. Here's a video of Donald Trump's recorded Scripture reading  at Rededicate 250.)

It's important to detach 2 Chronicles 7:13-14 from its adoption by Christian nationalists and look at the powerful content it really has. I'd like to do that as a set of prompts for individual and communal self-examination—or, to put it another way, as a set of Quaker queries.

First of all, the Temple-centered context, and the focus on Solomon as the audience for this pronouncement, mean we should go much wider than these few verses. But for now, I'll just start with verses 13 and 14.

13 “When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command locusts to devour the land or send a plague among my people, 14 if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land. (NIV)

Comments and queries:

IF: God sets up a conditional commitment. Query: what happens if Solomon and his people don't keep their end of the commitment? Is God implying that the rain or locusts or plague could return? See verses 19-22 for a variety of other consequences.

My people, who are called by my name: Solomon is the head of the united theocracy of Israel. The most immediate identification of "my people" would be that nation, whose worship of their God has just been closely linked to their new Temple and to the successors of David on Israel's throne. The words of Jesus and Paul have grafted us Christians into "my people," but nowhere in the Bible is any other nation-state, including the USA, given exclusive rights to see itself as more "God's people" than anyone else. Query: Do you identify with the people "called by my name"?

Will humble themselves and pray and seek my face: There are many scriptural models for what this looks like (Examples: Psalm 131, Matthew 6:5-6, Luke 18:9-14.) Query: when we pray as a community, can we stay focused on God, with healthy humility, rather than on spectacle? How? Could this be how we respond to suffering, ours and others?

Turn from their wicked ways: Query: who is to do this turning? In this Scripture, God is specifically asking for Solomon and "my people" to decide to turn from evil, not necessarily Democrats or Iranians, or other convenient targets of the day.

Then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin: In 2 Chronicles 7, God is specifically referring to God's attentiveness to the Temple. How and where does God hear from you and your repentant community? (See 1 Peter 2:4-6.)

I will ... heal their land. Awkwardly, God isn't necessarily promising to heal the land from the people's misuse, but to heal it from the plagues and droughts and locusts that God apparently used to get their attention and, we hope, lead them to seek God's face. For what, in your own time and place, do you seek healing? For what do we as a community, seek healing? What is our own commitment to heal the land of our misuse?

Let's please remember that when we use biblical texts in public, we need to be honest about the original context. That's especially true if we are being tempted (or being paid) to exalt or condemn today's nations, leaders, and current enemies, using sacred texts to juice up our political rhetoric. We are certainly free to propose reasonable analogies, but not to do so with arrogance, and not to decree unbiblical limits to God's attention, love, and grace.

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Esther Greenleaf Murer's Quaker Bible Index has a fascinating page devoted to 1 Peter chapters 1 and 2. Scroll down to 1 Peter 2 for references to early Quaker understandings of "temple."

George Fox, "You are the temples of God...." 

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"Where is the loophole in that Scripture?"

Tom Tomorrow. (Note inflation.)
Clipped from source.

Please read this "pre-message" from John Kinney's most recent sermon at Spokane Friends Meeting.

I imagine that many of you with tender hearts have thoughts similar to mine. How many more times can my heart be broken before there is nothing left to break? A few weeks ago, two civilian contractors delivering water for the UN children's fund were shot dead by Israeli troops in northern Gaza, UNICEF said on Saturday, expressing fury over the deaths. The Israeli military said troops saw "two, armed terrorists" approaching, so they "opened fire". The army said the incident was "under review". I often think about the bombing of the Iranian Elementary School. One hundred and fifty students ages 7-12 killed. After the first Tomahawk missile hit, the survivors were moved to a still standing prayer room. The strike was a triple tap. The second tap destroyed the prayer room. The third tap destroyed anything that was left. The “incident is under review”. So far 850 Tomahawk missiles have been used at a cost of $2.6 million each. Total missile cost =$2,210,000,000. As of the end of April the war cost was estimated to be $200 billion. I am one of 152,000,000 people in the US that filed a tax return. If spread out evenly, my contribution to the war works out to be about $1300. The department of war greatly appreciates my financial support. I am complicit. Luke 6:27-28: But I say this to you who are listening: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who treat you badly. Please tell me. Where is the loophole in that scripture? Can it be spun so there is a work around? I pray for peace and I pay for war. I pray for peace and I pay for war. I am having a difficult time coping with my hypocrisy.

You can find John's full message here on Spokane Friends' Web site.

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What's the best television show for children? I don't know, but here's my nominee for the best article on the subject.

Nancy Thomas's new Web site, with links to both of her blogs, as well as information on her books and articles.

Elderchaplain Greg Morgan on ALS and hope.

Ben Richmond's inspiring versification of selected epistles by George Fox is about to hit the streets. We can pre-order from Barclay Press or Amazon.

Source.  

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"Who's been talking?" Canada's Whitehorse.

Henri Nouwen: "You do not have to be a great prophet..."

Screenshot from source.

Clowning in Rome: Reflections on Solitude, Celibacy, Prayer, and Contemplation (1979).

You do not have to be a great prophet to say that coming decades will most likely see not only more wars, more hunger, and more oppression, but also desperate attempts to escape them all. We have to be prepared for a period in which suicide will be as widespread as drugs are now, in which new types of flagellants will roam the country frightening the people with the announcement of the end of all things, and in which many new exotic cults with intricate rituals will try to ward off a final catastrophe. We have to be prepared for an outburst of new religious movements using Christ's name for the most un-Christian practices. In short, we have to be prepared to live in a world in which fear, suspicion, mutual distrust, hatred, physical and mental torture, and an increasing confusion will darken the hearts of millions of people.

It is in the midst of this dark world that the Christian community is being tested. Can we be light, salt, and leaven to our brothers and sisters in the human family? Can we offer hope, courage, and confidence to the people of this era? Can we break through the paralyzing fear by making those who watch us exclaim, "See how they love each other, how they serve their neighbor, and how they pray to their Lord"? Or do we have to confess that at this juncture of history we just do not have the needed strength or the generosity and that our Christian communities are little more than sodalities of well-intentioned people supporting each other in their individual interests?

I was at the book sorting table at Mustard Seed, the excellent charity shop run by the Episcopal church down Woodstock Blvd., when I noticed that someone had brought in a wonderful selection of books by Henri Nouwen. I picked up Clowning in Rome because that book was new to me. Opening it to a random page, I found myself in the "Introduction," where the words above came from.

Nouwen's closing queries haven't lost their urgency, thirty years after his death and nearly half a century after he wrote them. But here's my new query, and I'd love your comments: don't we see some evidence that the church might be actually growing in the strength needed to provide light, salt, and leaven? And here's another question, maybe secondary but fascinating to me as a political scientist: what aspects of this recent growth is being provoked by overreach among those "new religious movements using Christ's name for the most un-Christian practices," and those movements' attempts to enmesh themselves with the structures of political power? (I have more than just the USA in mind.)

One of the ways I try to stay aware of some of today's positive ferment in the church, as well as the ways we're constantly being tested, is the podcast The Convocation Unscripted, which I've linked to several times. I'm tempted to build an index of links to show more evidence, but you can think up keywords and search for them online as well as I can. What I'd love to know is what you're finding out directly through your own experiences and decisions. Still echoing in my mind are the words from John Perkins that I quoted two weeks ago: "I want worship and justice to be done in the same building."

1. Do you see evidence of growth in the church's capacity to challenge oppression, scare tactics, division, climate denial, and Christian nationalist heresy? (Yes, that's my particular selection!)
2. For those yearning to get involved, what are some points of engagement?
3. What new challenges are, in turn, resulting from this fresh energy?
4. How can we encourage each other, give each other times of respite, and make room for joy and lament among us? How do we welcome all sorts of temperaments, including those who usually get on our nerves?

Within myself, I'm finding new love for this messy church that gave me a spiritual home a half century ago, and continues to frustrate and delight me on a daily basis.

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Speaking (very respectfully) of clowns, as Henri Nouwen does in his book, I see that Paulist Father Joachim Lally has recently celebrated the 60th anniversary of his ordination. I vividly remember Joachim Lally from our years in Boston, when I was on the staff of Beacon Hill Friends House and Father Lally was at the Paulist Center, just a short walk away. In those years, his diverse ministry gifts included clowning, but I knew him best from our work together with the organization Social Action Ministries of Greater Boston, where I represented our residence and program center.

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One of the participants in The Convocation Unscripted, Jemar Tisby, is ringing an alarm bell: "Pastors, You Cannot Stay Silent on Civil Rights."

Speaking of respite, here's an extraordinary (but also ordinary in an essential way) post by Beth Allison Barr, "Writing at a time like this."

Something in Nouwen's words about "exotic cults" and "new religious movements" reminded me of this article, "Is It the Voice of God, or Just Craziness?" by Joe Kelly in Quaker Life back in 2000. Now, as then, Joe ministers among Friends of the Light Meeting in Traverse City, Michigan, USA.

You already know that "the far right doesn't have a monopoly on Christianity" but it's nice to see an acknowledgment in secular media. Bill McKibben writes in The Guardian....

...A generation of Americans has grown up convinced that Christianity is a freak show, and another generation – those inside the evangelical tent – have grown old unchallenged in their thinking that scripture somehow demands the various cruelties we’ve seen play out in the “culture wars”.

Micah Bales (Berkeley Friends Church) on "Becoming Servants of the Unknown God."

I’ve never debated any Athenian philosophers. I’ve never even visited Greece. But my situation – and yours – is in some ways very similar to the one that Paul faced two thousand years ago.

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From "The Bible and the Blues" at Reedwood Friends Church, here are LaRhonda Steele and Ed Snyder with "Up Above My Head." (This is the last of the six songs LaRhonda Steele performs in the course of the full meeting for worship; I encourage you to play the whole video.)

(Let me know if you can spot Judy and me....)

Based in the UK? Your May 12 invitation.

Clipped from the 12th May diary invitation page of the Mass Observation Archive Web site.

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Every year on the 12th May, MO asks people across the country to record their day. This might include what they did at work, what they ate, what they heard or watched, and whatever else they got up to. Anyone based in the UK can send us their diary, and we accept submissions both online and by post.

Diaries can take whatever form you feel comfortable with. If you’d rather type, great! If you’d prefer to photograph or sketch your day, that’s also great! Diaries don’t have to be formal, and they definitely don’t have to be perfectly written or spell-checked. We’d always rather receive an imperfect diary than none at all.

This year, we are keen to hear your thoughts and feelings about nature and wellbeing, as well as anything else you would like to share about your day. Tell us if you go out and experience nature on 12 May. Where did you go? How did this experience make you feel? If you were at work or indoors, is there somewhere else you would have liked to have been instead?

Source: The Mass Observation Archive (MO), Get ready for our national diary day.

I found out about the Mass Observation Archive from an English Friend who is a registered observer for the program. I've been fascinated ever since.

Mass Observation seeks to document the everyday lives of British people as directly as possible from the people themselves. Registered Mass Observers respond several times a year to "directives," which ask about specific aspects of daily life. For example, the current directive seeks attitudes and experiences related to immigration and asylum-seekers, among other topics. Here's the official explanation of this observer role and a link to the handbook for observers, along with a description of one-off opportunities to submit observations.

The other major documentation project, and the one that especially interested me, is the annual May 12 diary invitation, which is open to anyone living in the UK. The Mass Observation Archive's May 12 program began in 1937, with the coronation of King George VI, and, in its original conception, ran well past the end of World War II. The project was relaunched in 1981. Its early years can be sampled through compilations, including these two fascinating books available on the Internet Archive: Private Battles: How the War Almost Defeated Us, and Wartime Women: A Mass Observation Anthology.

Sources: History Workshop (left); Internet Archive (center and right).

Do we in the USA have similar efforts to collect direct accounts of daily life, as well as responses to shared national experiences? StoryCorps comes to mind, but it seems far more controlled, edited, and packaged for media.

I answer surveys regularly from three different research organizations, but they decide the topics and questions, and I usually have to choose from a very incomplete set of possible answers. Usually there's no room for my own voice.

A very specific but worthwhile channel in the USA might be the logbooks at National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management interpretive stations and similar guestbooks at other major tourist sites. For example, when our family moved from Indiana to Oregon (via Madison County, Virginia!), we visited several sites marking the historic Oregon Trail. At Baker City we were invited to write our own family's story of how we came to be on the Oregon Trail in the interpretive center's logbook. I haven't been able to find out how those stories are (or aren't) collected and preserved. Do you know, by any chance?

Other attempts to cover at least a bit of this territory in the USA are represented by the books and recorded interviews by Studs Terkel and other oral historians and archivists. However, none of these quite approach the idea of the UK's Mass Observation Archive: inviting direct and unfiltered contributions to the national record from potentially the whole population, along with topical observations from hundreds of volunteer observers. It's very tempting to me to ask whether this difference in data collection reflects different ideas of civic duty and community-mindedness vs individualism.

One important aspect of MO's May 12 program is, of course, the use of this specific date every year, whether or not anything "important" happened on that day in the nation's life. In 1937, that was the date of the new king's coronation, and researchers wanted actual testimony rather than the mass media's take on the event, but, since then, MO simply wants accounts of people's ordinary day. The occasional one-off invitations are also fascinating—I remember being very moved by my friend's account of the funeral of Elizabeth II.

Have you found ways to contribute to the national memory of your country?

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Speaking of one-day archives, do you remember the series of photography books entitled A Day in the Life of ... a number of countries including Canada, the USSR, Spain, Japan, the USA, along with the states of Hawaii and California? They were published back in the 1980's, assembled by the editing team of Rick Smolan and David Elliot Cohen with the participation of hundreds of photographers. Here on the Internet Archives is the volume on the Soviet Union, and here is the one on Canada. Pictured: the volume on Spain, the edition we've owned for nearly forty years.

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Related: Diaries; Innocence (scroll to Studs Terkel interview at end).

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Wikipedia's article on the Mass Observation Archive.

Alfred McCoy on American "micro-militarism" in historical perspective.

Like Britain at Suez in 1956, Washington will likely pay a heavy price for its “micro-militarism” in the Strait of Hormuz. Close allies, the bedrock of U.S. global power for 80 years, have refused any military support for Washington’s war of choice, prompting Trump to call them “cowards.” In response to his thundering threats of civilian and civilizational destruction (both war crimes), Trump has been condemned by world leaders. Oblivious to the dangers of war in a region that is the epicenter of global capitalism, Washington is now proving ever more dangerously disruptive of the global economy, making China look like a far more stable choice for world leadership. Moreover, while the U.S. military has proven its tactical agility in destroying targets, it clearly can no longer capture meaningful strategic objectives.

On "local hero" John Henry Newman, the Cadburys of chocolate fame, and "parochial" life at its best. Thanks to Mary Raber for the link.

This year, Russia's Victory Day (May 9) will look a little different, particularly in Moscow.

Robert P. Jones on the U.S. administration's report on anti-Christian bias, including the report's absurd selectivity.

"Nobody likes to be called a quitter," says Nancy Thomas. But as she writes, she concedes that some losses may also be gains. "As often happens when I write this blog, I’m processing my situation and coming to a place of hope."

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One of my favorite samples of Chicago....

Boredom for Dummies (and everyone)—partly a repost

Detail from Japanese Pearl Harbor attack plan. Source.

First, a few words about our latest war.

When I heard the first news bulletins about the 2026 Iran War, I couldn't help thinking about Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, that "dastardly" attack that happened while negotiations between Japan and the USA were still underway. U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull expressed his sense of betrayal very plainly to the Japanese negotiators.

The U.S./Israeli opening attack on Iran also happened during a period of active negotiations, facilitated in good faith by Oman.

I'm sure you have as much access to good analysis and commentary on this war as I do, so today I don't plan to say more here. I'm just aware that there are people alive at this moment, in Iran, Lebanon, Israel, perhaps the Gulf states, and beyond, who will not see tomorrow. May God have mercy on them, and on us.

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Wess Daniels (from Reedwood
Friends Weekly)

Last Sunday afternoon, Reedwood Friends Church here in Portland, Oregon, hosted C. Wess Daniels (biography) for a fascinating afternoon advertised as a session on "The Practice of Silence as Resistance in an Attention Economy."

It turns out that one of the themes that Wess has bravely connected to the topic of silence is boredom.

Boredom.

He's been thinking about how to attract more Guilford students to silence as a topic and as a practice ... and not just the Quaker students. Furthermore, he's certainly not hiding from the topic of boredom. He's not defining "boredom" as a danger for budding practitioners of silence, but boredom as a part of something good! Boredom as a superpower! 

Maybe it's best if I let  Wess explain it himself. Here are two of his blog posts that contain some savory hints of the content he shared so engagingly with us last Sunday:

Let’s Get Bored Together: The Practice of Silence and Resisting the Attention Economy. (February 26, 2023)

A Shot of Light - Getting My Head Above Water. (September 5, 2025)

By the time we met on Sunday, Wess had some other interesting stories to tell from his experiences with students—for example, when he asked them to interview trees.

All of this reminded me that I wrote about "boredom for dummies" back in October 2017, just after our final trip to the USA from Russia. Here it is:

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The Amtrak Empire Builder.

... I don't have time for those who don't know what time is.

These words from Boris Pasternak came back to me during the long, slow hours we spent on Amtrak's trains from New York City to Chicago, and then from Chicago to Portland, Oregon.

To tell you the truth, I really needed those long, slow hours of sitting by the train window and letting time carry me into my future. In my last weeks and days in Elektrostal, time went by with dizzying speed, and my mind struggled to keep up, storing up impressions and sensations against the uncertainties of that future. It's likely that we'll never live in Russia again. (Yes, we hope to visit, but even that is uncertain. In any case, I don't think we'll ever again be residents.)

We are learning about gravitational waves rippling through space and time, thanks to Albert Einstein and the recent LIGO observations. For most of us, it's not news that time also seems to be experienced in waves, now compressed and now just dragging along. I love living in the moment, but slow moments, and stretched-out periods where time nearly seems to stop, are equally precious to me.

In a moment of unguarded boastfulness, I once said that I was never bored. That claim didn't stop me from preparing for the transatlantic flight and the train trip by loading my Amazon Fire with episodes of Doctor Who and the Vietnam War series, along with two novels, two books of theology, a history of Protestant missions, and two autobiographies—by Norwegian politician Gro Harlem Brundtland and American astronaut Scott Kelly. But much of the time, day and night, I just watched the country scroll past the window. I felt no pressure to savor or memorize or store up—I just let the planet be the planet and me be me.

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Boredom is not a problem to be solved. It is the last privilege of a free mind.

These words open Gayatri Devi's essay on boredom, published on the Guardian Web site about two years ago. Her essay seems to assume a definition of boredom as a state of discontent resulting from lack of external stimulation. (Dictionaries, on the other hand, often seem to focus on boredom as a state resulting from the wrong kind of stimulation—tedious, repetitive, uninteresting.) She rightly recommends not curing boredom by reaching for new sources of stimulus, such as the ever-handy smartphone. Instead, she recommends "metathinking"—in a sense, observing yourself as you slide into boredom, considering what makes you bored, "how your mind responds to boredom, what you feel and think when you get bored."

I would just add a couple of things that are, maybe, already implied in Gayatri Devi's advice:

• Learn to enjoy your own company. This doesn't mean to give yourself a free pass on everything that might appear on a Fourth Step AA inventory -- but look beyond your imperfections to the whole of yourself, the person whose God-given mind is capable of thought, reflection, observation, intention, reconciliation, synthesis of old and new ideas, and so much more. That apparently empty period of time, whether it's at on a slow train or in line at a bank, is just a golden opportunity to get to spend some time with your complicated self. (Learning to enjoy your own company is a good step toward confronting temptation and addiction. God loved you into being, as Anthony Bloom said, so it's time to look at yourself with God's loving intention in mind.)
• Reframe slow time as prayer time. You can ask God or your own memory banks for prayer concerns that you may have forgotten or just heard about or that simply beg for your attention. Devi mentions Wordsworth's daffodils; you might instead choose or form a short prayer along the lines of the prayers I mention here....

Make me an instrument of your peace.

Yes.

Lord Jesus, have mercy.

I want to dwell in you.

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Back in 2011, I wrote about reading Pasternak's words about time as I sat waiting my turn at the bank branch in Elektrostal.

(End of repost. Original is here.)

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John Kinney speaks to Spokane Friends on abundance and scarcity.

Elizabeth Glass Turner calmly considers American evangelicals and the Epstein files.

Luis Parrales: The raw experience of love restored writer Christopher Beha's faith, or at least the possibility of faith. "Beha’s response is to describe himself as 'a skeptical believer'; for him, moments of certainty commingle with moments of doubt." Such restorations have happened to other writers, too.

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Also at Reedwood Friends Church: Last Wednesday we welcomed musician Dann Pell and his resonator guitars for a wonderful evening of music.

Some of his songs reminded me of the bard tradition in Russia, though in Dann Pell's case, there is an amazing balance between the poetry and spirituality of the lyrics and his intense and often intricate fingering.

Dann is from Exeter Friends Meeting of Caln Quarter in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. He's originally from Chester County, which, a lifetime ago, I knew well....

Don't miss a chance to hear him yourself, or invite him to your meeting or church. Here's a video that gives you a better sense than my words could.

Digesting 2025

Sergey Kadyrov's audiovisual Christmas card from Elektrostal, Russia. Link to video.

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Methodists organize Christmas Eve vigil at ICE facility,
Portland, Oregon. Source.

For me, the constant theme for this year has been faithfulness to Christian discipleship in a country under occupation.

Enough of these posts over the past year have been on this theme, so it's not necessary for me to belabor it here. I'm just grateful to be part of a faith community that has not surrendered to the intolerable.

Two of this year's high points for me involved my relationship with the land where I was born. In July I was present for the departure of the sloop-replica Restauration, sailing from Stavanger to New York City on the 200th anniversary of the original departure of the first organized emigration of Norwegians to the USA. And in November I received word that my application to regain my Norwegian citizenship had been approved. (It had been lost when I became a U.S. citizen at a time when Norway didn't allow dual citizenship, which it now does.)

By long practice, my last post for 2025 is a selection of the year's posts, one per month....

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JANUARY: 1975: From Mississippi to Moscow.

My 1975 visit to Russia began even before I left London. Shortly after I boarded Aeroflot's IL-62 to Moscow, before I had taken my seat, the airplane began taxiing. The two seats next to mine were occupied by two delightful middle-aged women who had boarded in San Francisco and who now helped wedge me into my seat. Almost all the floor space was taken up by their numerous bottles and packages of goodies (apparently no need to secure carry-on items!), but after a bit of rearranging, I was fine. Soon they were offering me all kinds of yummy pastries, and insisted on adding cognac to my coffee.

Full post.

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FEBRUARY: Enthusiasm and politics.

It is no surprise that many Americans have not heard of the "network of networks" that compose Independent Charismatics, particularly those centered on Peter Wagner's New Apostolic Reformation. (See this post, Are we agents of Lucifer?, for a brief introduction.) Those of us who just catch occasional glimpses of Pentecostal and charismatic subcultures may find them either absurd or disturbing, especially if we rely on video clips of "preachers gone wild" and the like. We are therefore likely to underestimate the appeal and reach of those subcultures.

Full post.

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MARCH: The tax covenant.

Ideally, by paying taxes, we citizens are simply upholding a covenant we have with each other. We have made promises to each other—"to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common Defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity" (preamble to the U.S. Constitution), setting up a government for these purposes and assigning that government, through our legislature, the practical tasks needed to fulfill those promises. We know that these tasks cost money, so our legislators make a list of those costs and institute sources of revenue, including taxes. That's the covenant: to decide on the tasks needed for the "general Welfare," from which we all benefit, directly or indirectly, and to pay our fair share for those tasks

Too bad it doesn't end there!

Full post.

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APRIL: Malice in Wonderland, part two.

Looking back at the first principles I proposed back in November, are they adequate for this era of flagrant and gleeful cruelty? I still feel strongly about not dividing our country into pro- and anti-Trump populations, and resisting the degradation of civil discourse. What other disciplines and practices should we consider? For myself, I'm constantly drawn back to Jesus, who was himself mocked and whipped before being crucified. What can we say to those who proclaim faith in Jesus even as they mock and whip others and look to their MAGA audiences for approval? The case for actual evangelism seems more urgent than ever.

Full post.

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MAY: Patriotism revisited.

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

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

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

Full post.

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JUNE: Belonging to Friends.

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

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

Full post.

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JULY: The whole Jericho Road.

"... We all hold critical roles...." [Libby Willcomm, on working to rescue now vs working for systemic change.] Exactly. And here's what I would love to see: that "mutuality" would also become mutual accountability and mutual trust. The next time the question of how to prioritize our resources comes up, I hope I'll remember (or better yet, someone else will remember!) to invite us to go around the group and ask how we arrive at our priorities, and how we make our contributions accordingly.

Maybe you have ways I've never heard of, to address the systemic causes or the most effective methods of direct relief. Unless we talk, I might never know. Even if I don't sign on to your priority, I can pray for you, and support you in the direction you've chosen, knowing that our whole community will then be more effective in keeping God's promises ... rather than one-upping each other on which of us have chosen the better path. I think it's also good to let each other know how we arrive at the amounts or forms of giving that we choose.

Full post.

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AUGUST: Fiercely inspirational.

[Lamorna] Ash makes me think about what a conversation between Francis Spufford and Flannery O'Connor might be like. Her survey of Christianity in the UK ranges from rigidity with a happy salesface, to bass-driven ecstasy, to personal histories of toxic power games, to encounters with mysticism ancient and modern, to utter serenity, and everything in between. Her 60 interviewees have variously been converted, disillusioned, reconverted, with all levels of investment in making—or not making—their personal experiences and confessions congruent with the institution they're in at the moment. She candidly reports how this research and writing project is affecting her own life, even as she awaits a diagnosis on her mother's symptoms that suggest dementia may be coming.

She is not simply reporting on what Christianity looks like to some of her Generation Z contemporaries. She's also wrestling with Christianity's own primitive and sometimes compelling strangeness, and its multifaceted persistence. She thinks about the difference between the Nicene theologians wrestling so deeply with the nature of Christ, and those Christian thinkers of our own era who can't get beyond sex.

Full post.

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SEPTEMBER: First principles 3.0?

[An "EXCELLENT post" from "your favorite blogger."]

Two days ago, I had a chance to hear Howard Macy read his draft chapter on "Blessing Enemies" from his forthcoming book with the working title Living to Bless. This chapter of his book is based on Matthew 5:43-48, but not only: Howard traces the "love your enemies" theme throughout the Hebrew and Christian Bible.

Howard's full chapter is a compelling lesson in why and how we bless our enemies, while not denying the dangers they may pose. Here's the challenge for me: its teachings can be applied to our fractured world this very day, if we're willing. 

Full post.

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OCTOBER: "The cult of personality and its consequences."

Yesterday morning on our public radio station I heard Meghna Chakrabarti open her On Point program with these words:

It would later be called the Secret Speech, but on February 25th, 1956, a cold morning in Moscow, no one knew what to expect. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev stood before the 20th Congress of the Communist Party and did the unthinkable.

For a few wild moments, before she went on to explain her reasons for referring to this speech, my memories flashed back five decades to my student years at the Institute for Soviet and East European Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa. In those years, I studied Russian language and literature, Russian history, and the politics of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact. The "secret speech" was a landmark event in Soviet history, and I remember being fascinated by the speech itself and the varied commentaries on Khrushchev's motives, what he should have said, what he should not have said, and the uneven progress of the destalinization efforts that followed.

Full post.

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NOVEMBER: Could we end up on the same page?

We Quakers haven't exactly gone through a civil war, but we have had a number of severe divisions, as a result of which (as Kevin [Camp]pointed out) we're often appealing to the same history and the same Quaker language and drawing very different conclusions. Kevin's post urges us not to let divisions demoralize us, and I agree.

In two periods of my service with international Friends organizations—ten years with Friends World Committee for Consultation and seven with Friends United Meeting—I visited hundreds of Friends communities, and I found among them many Friends who, with varying degrees of stubbornness, would fit Kevin's descriptions of people as different as chalk and cheese according to their preferred interpretations of core Quakerism. But over all those years, I caught glimpses of progress as well. Maybe we won't be reading from the exact same page anytime soon, but there are many Friends who are at least looking at each other's favorite pages....

Full post.

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DECEMBER: Continuing the work.

There's a Russian phrase, both precise and vague at the same time, that translates to English as "in times like these...."

In times like these, we write about Friends' service in Russia with love and enthusiasm tempered with discretion. We don't give names of people and partner organizations. We do emphasize our nonviolent and truthful principles, just as we "harmless and innocent people of God" did in earlier turbulent times—the years of our movement's origin.

As a former member of the board of Friends House Moscow, I appreciated receiving this report on the meeting held this autumn in southern France. I'm grateful for the permission to use it here, with one or two edits. Links were added by me.

[The report follows. See the full post.]

Full post.

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Video: On his radio and streaming-video show Full Contact, the acid-tongued Vladimir Solovyov says the mission of Russia is to save humanity on a civilizational level, countering the evil West. Along the way, he makes a point about Donald Trump and Greenland: If the USA deems the annexation of Greenland is necessary for our security, why shouldn't Russia carve itself a piece of land from its neighbors for the sake of Russian security?

On violence and the Bible: John Kinney at Spokane Friends Church. From earlier, here's an interesting exchange among Anabaptists: Why Conrad Kanagy is not a red-letter Christian, and Spencer Bradford on why "Is God violent?" isn't the right question.

Nancy Thomas on the biblical House of Bread.

Are you like this author and me? We just don't use the telephone anymore the way we did not so long ago....

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A Christmas rerun. One of the comments on this video of a contemporary Norwegian Christmas song: "When I hear this song, it's Christmas... Thank you for that, Oslo Gospel Choir."

October shorts

Klamath Falls. This shirt is available here.
Photo by Judy Maurer.

No Kings Day v.2, October 18, found us in Klamath Falls, Oregon. For some reason, I didn't expect much No Kings Day participation in Klamath Falls, maybe because in 2024 Klamath County voted for the current U.S. president by a margin of 41 percent over Kamala Harris.

As it turned out, participants made an impressive showing in Klamath Falls, lining along both streets, both sides, of a major intersection, and garnering lots of car-horn (and truck horn) approval.

The evening before, in a segment entitled "Older, Wiser," Rachel Maddow spoke on her television show with environmental activist and journalist Bill McKibben concerning the impressive proportions of older people in public actions such as No Kings Day. Back in 2021, McKibben launched an organizing campaign, Third Act, to mobilize people over the age of 60 for climate change activism. Among other things, McKibben said,

I think one reason that older people have been turning out in such large numbers, and they have been heavily overrepresented in these demonstrations, is because everybody can tell, with the heart, can tell that the Trump regime is bad news. But if you have 15 presidents, in your experience, you know that it's not just bad news. You know that it's utterly different from every president that we've ever lived through before, good or bad; that this is a complete rupture with the America that we knew. And I think that may strike old people harder. We've certainly noticed at Third Act that there's a huge willingness of people to be out in the street over and over again, and not just at these demonstrations.

I didn't do a count, but I'm fairly sure well over half of the participants in Klamath Falls were in the demographic group McKibben described.

In this archived interview, Bill McKibben describes his Methodist faith and experience.

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While in Klamath Falls, we enjoyed a reunion with Klamath Falls Friends Church. We stayed with the pastors, Leigh and Joe Tolton, and enjoyed the incredible view of Upper Klamath Lake from their home.

This was our seventh visit to Klamath Falls Friends over the years, and we felt very much at home. Joe gave a sermon on simplicity (and how it differs from plainness), based on Matthew 10:7-14, and with illustrations from the life of Diogenes the Cynic. It evoked a number of fruitful reflections from attenders during the open worship.

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Why Trump's demolition of the East Wing is so shocking. Is it shocking to you? Washington Post art and architecture critic Philip Kennicott explains his own reactions.

The leader as builder is an ancient idea, older than the Egyptian pyramids, older than the great public monuments of Rome, older than Emperor Constantine’s clumsy effort to eradicate memories of his predecessors by repurposing and rebranding their works as his own. Photography reanimated this ancient idea for a mass modern audience, rendering the leader as a colossus relative to the toy-sized representations of his architectural legacy. For democracies and authoritarian regimes alike, the image projected competence, the power and skill to serve the people with public works and leave a lasting legacy.

...

Trump made speedy demolition his priority, and speedy construction of the new ballroom is essential to his symbolic purpose, to offer a stark contrast to the dysfunction of Congress and, by extension, the torpid rhythms of democratic self-governance. He is the master builder, the developer who can cut through red tape. That image, whether deserved or not, is why many people voted for him. But to shred precedent is simply to set new precedents. And the precedent he is setting is that history doesn’t matter; laws, procedures and customs are irrelevant; and there is no role for collaboration, transparency and review in the construction of new buildings. Buildings are gifts to the people from leaders who are infallible, not the organic expression of civic values and ideals.

I can't tell whether the visceral shock of seeing FDR's East Wing utterly destroyed helped distract us from an arguably more important story: the U.S. military strikes on boats in South American waters. Another instance of making "speedy demolition" a priority?—and again we see striking passivity among the representatives and senators whom we pay to behave as coequal participants in governing the country.

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Julia Steinberg entered Stanford University as a progressive. Her path to conservatism began her first year. Her story, "The Appeal of the Campus Right: It's Not About Trump," interests me because I have a friend in England who has undergone a similar transformation.

Steinberg arrived at Stanford expecting to participate in the progressive community there.

As the school year got under way, however, I began to notice something that grated on me. Debates in the classroom, whether about socialism or Plato or the Quran, felt highly delicate, as if everyone was afraid of offending everyone else. Rather than “I disagree with so-and-so,” it was more socially acceptable to say “piggybacking on so-and-so’s point,” even if there was a disagreement. When I finally found someone willing to have an extended intellectual debate with me—my problem-set partner for a logic course—I was interested to learn that he was a staff writer at the Stanford Review, the conservative publication on campus. He invited me to a meeting during winter quarter, and, mostly out of curiosity, I decided to attend.

What I saw there was the opposite of what I’d found in my classes: Students were encouraged to disagree with one another. At each meeting, students had to present—and defend—the articles they were working on; then the group would debate three topics, such as how the U.S. should respond to the war in Ukraine and whether Silicon Valley’s relevance was waning. I kept going back to Review meetings, but I didn’t tell many of my friends—I didn’t want to be judged.

Why the eggshell-walking among progressives? (Yes, I've noticed this, too.) I think it is partly because of the compulsive need to be right, and consequently to one-up everyone who differs. Deviations on issues of effective anti-racism, for example, cannot be tolerated. I hunger for the arenas where differences can be argued on their own alleged merits and defects, rather than as reflections of your or my obvious and intolerable defects. 

These tendencies have made their way into a number of progressive Quaker communities. If these tendencies toward monopoly-style rightness are not challenged, I see a real danger of decline and an eventual future as small clubs of Quaker specialness rather than genuine churches. If I'm worrying needlessly, please tell me! 

As Britain Yearly Meeting's Advices and Queries advise us (under no. 17), "Think it possible that you may be mistaken."

I'm not asserting that these kinds of personalizing of arguments and threats of shunning don't happen among conservatives as well. I particularly think of the theobros.... But I hate to see it among those who claim to defend freedom of speech and thought, and trustworthiness of process, as crucial values for an interdependent community.

Much of MAGA is not conservative in any classical sense.

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Becky Ankeny looks at the Beatitudes for their prophetic content.

What can we learn from these beatitudes and the Old Testament sources they derive from? We learn that centering our hearts on God’s character and God’s faithfulness is the place to start. (I’m trying contemplative prayer for this purpose.)  It is always right to pray. It is not the last resort; it is the only resort in hopeless times. Prayer is the expression of hope when there is no basis for hope. 

Death Bloom: a message of hope for times of transition. Amy Straub prepares to leave Zambia, not knowing what comes next. She reminded me of what it was like to realize we were approaching the end of our time in Russia.

More on powerlessness and prayer from Tricia Gates Brown. Her post reminded me of Anthony Bloom's words here (scroll down to the second quotation). 

C. Wess Daniels on the power of the persistent widow—and on translators' choices.

Mike Farley on silence and language. "All of practice comes down to stillness in the end...."

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"Needed Time" (Eric Bibb, surely a rerun here! But it's a needed time.)

Digesting 2024

Aurlandsfjord in July.

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As usual, in this last post of the year, I've picked out twelve blog posts from this past year as a sampling of what I've been up to on this site during the year. This was the year "Can You Believe?" celebrated its twentieth birthday. (Today's post is number 1,110.) I'm grateful for your company and always eager to hear your own thoughts and responses.

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JANUARY: Pure intention, part three: Fox, Penn, and deconstruction.

Back in 1974, as an enthusiastic new Quaker, I was eagerly immersing myself in the journals of George Fox and John Woolman, the book of discipline of London Yearly Meeting, Barclay's Apology, and William Penn's Key, along with the other writings and tracts that I mentioned here. Something in this material struck me in a new way today. Maybe it occurred to you a long time ago! But here's what I realized: the early Quakers might strike us now as staunch defenders of Christian faith, but they themselves did an enormous amount of deconstructing. And they did so at great cost and risk.

Full post.

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FEBRUARY: Saying goodbye to Aleksei Navalny.

Navalny at a court hearing in February 2021:

This teaching—“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied”—appears somehow esoteric and odd, but in fact it is the central political doctrine in modern Russia. Your Honor, what is it, this phrase or slogan, the most important political slogan in Russia? Where does power lie? Power lies in truth.

Full post.

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MARCH: "...Nature cannot be fooled ..."

Sometimes I'm tempted to succumb to a doom mentality. For all we know, extinction might be inevitable no matter what we do. Countries and empires have come and gone, civilizations have perished, species have vanished. The planet itself will survive our misdeeds—as Richard Feynman reminded us in his famous appendix to the Rogers Commission investigation into the Challenger explosion, "... nature cannot be fooled." However, at some point even planets will vanish into their dying suns. Our loving Creator will archive us one way or another (I vote for "heaven"!) but, short of that, nothing about our long-term future is guaranteed.

Before I reject doom entirely (you knew I would, right?), I found this article in Scientific American intriguing: Beyond the Doom and Gloom, Here's How to Stimulate Climate Action, by Madalina Vlasceanu and Jay J. Van Bavel.

Full post.

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APRIL: "Are Quakers part of the Church?"

Just to get a bit more argumentative.... Considering those Quakers who do not believe they're part of the larger Church: do they even see themselves as members of the larger Quaker family?

My understanding of the Quaker movement is that the first generation of Quakers decided to go to Christ directly instead of relying on the Christian establishment of their time. In turn, those founders told their descendants (us) that we could do the same. Along the way, we've learned a lot about what it means to rely on Christ at the center of our meetings, including the ethical consequences. But at the same time, the "establishment" and the other rebels and reformers who preceded and followed us have also been listening and learning—making discoveries and mistakes along the way, just as we have. That's what we are part of, not the creation of a whole new separate religion.

Full post.

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MAY: Looking back at 1968, with the help of Doris Kearns Goodwin.

All of this drama might make for absorbing reading in the hands of any competent historian. But Doris and her husband had deep emotional stakes in retelling these stories for each other—and now Doris for us. They were eleven years apart in age, and at times their disagreements reflected their deepest political and personal allegiances—Richard to the Kennedy family, for example, although the example is an oversimplification; and Doris to LBJ. Many times they had different recollections or interpretations of important events, and their conversations seeking a fuller understanding are part of the sweet essence of the book. They recreate a half-generation of American politics where passionate advocacy for economic and social justice (despite all the hardball political maneuverings they recall together) was worth putting one's whole career on the line. Equally challenging for both of them were the times they had to insist on saying goodbye to a titanic political figure simply in order to reclaim one's own life.

Full post.

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JUNE: The long defeat, part one.

God loves us but does not necessarily restrain our violent hand.

Of course it is true that we don’t necessarily know when God’s intervention did happen, only when it apparently didn’t. So God didn’t restrain the hands of Russian soldiers in Ukraine, though we have to wonder what happened in the minds and hearts of the thousands of soldiers who have apparently deserted since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. And God didn’t prevent the loss of thousands of innocent children in the Gaza Strip since the Hamas attack. It just doesn’t seem right to me to say that all of us who prayed our little heads off for peace and reconciliation just weren’t using the right words, or we failed to mobilize enough people to pray enough times day and night to finally persuade God to act. Ever since we ate those apples in the Garden of Eden, too many of us humans think we know better than God how to fix conflicts by eliminating our enemies, and God hasn’t seen fit to set us all straight.

Full post.

Part two.

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JULY: Exceptional shorts. (Quaker exceptionalism and Scandinavian exceptionalism.)

My late cousin Johan Fredrik Heyerdahl and I used to discuss some of the complexities and contradictions of Norwegian identity. My visit to Norway later this year will be my first since his death, and I'll intensely miss his wonderful company. I'm sure I'll have some good conversations with relatives and friends, but in the meantime I've started my preparations by reading Michael Booth's The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia.

Some of this territory was well covered by Robert Ferguson's excellent Scandinavians: In Search of the Soul of the North, which I briefly described in this post: "Shame is what turns societies around." What I like about Michael Booth's book is his undisguised irritation at the exaggerated admiration that the Scandinavian countries sometimes bask in.

Full post.

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AUGUST: Religion and boredom.

In her important commentary on the passing of old-school church culture and what might be replacing it, Christianity after Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening, Diana Butler Bass writes,

...[A]nger is not the only emotion people express when talking about religion. Many people are just bored. They are bored with church-as-usual, church-as-club, church-as-entertainment, or church-as-work. Many of my friends, faithful churchoers for decades, are dropping out because religion is dull, the purview of folks who never want to change or always want to fight about somebody else's sex life....

In all of the fifty years since I started attending weekly services, this has not been my experience at all; quite the opposite. However, I cheerfully acknowledge that I am a peculiar case—peculiarly unqualified to comment on Diana Butler Bass's assessment.

Before I deal with my disqualifications, I should acknowledge that she backs up her comments with statistical evidence of alienation from established religion, and that the trends she pointed to twelve years ago, when her book was published, have more or less continued along the same lines. (However, "boredom" isn't an explicit category in any of those statistics!)

Full post.

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Tree of discipleship. Source.

SEPTEMBER: Growth for growth's sake.

If I honestly believe (backed by experience) that ...

• Quaker faith and practice is a way of knowing and following God;
• Our communities are trustworthy, leadership is based on spiritual gifts rather than social distinctions, and the pathways for new people to become members and leaders are made clear;
• We have a message and a practice that is very different from the toxic agendas of white Christian nationalism and other distortions that have brought the word "Christian" into disrepute;
• I have found healing and hope in this faith and the community it has shaped...

... then, shouldn't I feel an obligation to care about growth? I believe so. It seems urgent to me to work toward ensuring that our faith and the communities formed by that faith are accessible to anyone who might need that kind of community.

There is nothing about this obligation that requires me to exaggerate Quakers' virtues, or to conceal our defects. I certainly don't need to claim that no other faith communities are equally trustworthy or equally capable of healing and giving hope.

Full post.

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OCTOBER: A song of quiet trust.

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]

... 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.

Full post.

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NOVEMBER: Saying goodbye.

[Sarah] 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.

Full post.

Also in November, some guest reflections from Judy Maurer on resources for Quaker discipleship from the early history of our movement, as we consider the repercussions from the U.S. presidential election.

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DECEMBER: More on deconstruction and curiosity.

I was stunned by the painting's blatant colonialist condescension, an observation that I'm hardly the first to make! The original intention was surely to elevate piety and charity as noble characteristics of the Empire and its self-attributed civilizing mission. And if it were possible to neutralize the imperial agendas from Christian missionaries' work in the golden age of Western missions (some would say not possible!!), there were cumulative blessings in many places. (See Robert Woodberry's "The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy.")

But it's equally true, as historian Michael Ohajuru quotes in the "Black History Walks" Youtube video on that painting, "When England came to Africa, they had the Bible, we had the land. They said, 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land."

Part of what shook me at the gallery was the realization that, had I been around in 1863, when this painting was first exhibited, I probably would not have been shocked....

Full post.

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Richard Beck on the colonialism of disenchantment.

Is literacy in decline? Here's Karen Swallow Prior on how the church can help meet the need.

Michelle Boorstein considers the "prosperity gospel" and its influence on pro-Trump Latino voters. (Washington Post gift link.)

Becky Ankeny meditates on the meaning of the crucifixion and what it means for us: taking up the cross and dying, not necessarily "heroically" but by "ordinary virtue," by daily choice.

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Sean "Mack" McDonald pays tribute to Albert King during this wonderful concert in France: