(Re)learning my mother tongue

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My first passport.

For me, a former language teacher, there's nothing more humbling than studying a language I thought I already knew.

Family lore says that I spoke three languages before kindergarten: Norwegian, German, and English. In my birth home, Oslo, in my father's parents' home, I was surrounded by Norwegian. Then I lived with my German grandparents in Stuttgart, and German came naturally. During my English-speaking growing-up years in the Chicago area, I often returned to both sets of grandparents and the languages of my earliest years.

Roughly seven decades later, I don't have the same level of confidence at all with those first two languages. So now, long after my language-learning window has closed, neurologically speaking, I'm determined to get some of that confidence back. At least in Norwegian.

Well, I do have a head start, a passive knowledge of probably several hundred words. (Just for context, and humility ... according to Google, the average English speaker knows 20-40,000 words, and even a five-year old might know 5,000!)

Continuing the theme of head start and humility, a whole bunch of those several hundred words are cognates or near-cognates:

• a ball - en ball
• a bank - en bank
• a boat - en båt 
• a book - ei bok
• a bush - en busk 
• a cake - ei kake 
• a cat - ei katt 
• a clock - en klokke
• a cow - ei ku
• a daughter - ei datter 
• a day - en dag 
• a door - ei dør 
• a fish - en fisk
• a flag - et flagg
• a garage - et garasje 
• a glass - et glass 
• a goat - ei geit 
• a hammer - en hammer 
• a house - et hus  
• a night - en natt 
• a plant - en plante 
• a sea - en sjø 
• a ship - et skip
• a son - en sønn
• a tree - et tre 
• a window - et vindu 
• grass - gress 
• paper - papir

Almost as close:

• an airplane - et fly
• a brother - en bror
• a dog - en hund (compare English hound)
• an enemy - en fiende (compare English fiend)
• a father - en far
• a horse - en hest
• a place - et sted (as in English bedstead, homestead, instead of)
• a morning - en morgen
• a mother - ei mor
• a shirt - en skjorte
• a sister - ei søster
• a skirt - et skjørt
• a stone - en stein 
• a word - et ord
• environment - miljø (compare with milieu)
• food - mat (compare with English meat, which once meant food in general)
• hi! - hei!
• goodbye! - adjø! (compare French adieu!)

See how much Norwegian you and I already know?! And don't those words sound sort of like an echo of an ancient form of English? Thanks to Bnorsk.no for many of these examples and many other cognates (verbs, adjectives, etc.) you can find there.

My head start only goes so far; it disappears when I start dealing with a noun's gender. Some Norwegians divide all nouns into two genders, common and neuter. But others prefer to observe the division of common nouns into masculine with the indefinite article "en" (a son - en sønn) or feminine with the indefinite article "ei" (a book - ei bok). In any case, I need to learn the noun's article along with the noun.

To compensate, Norwegian verbs don't conjugate according to subject or pronoun. Whew!

I'm delicately skipping over the subjects of pronunciation and tonality.

I have two different ways of working with my remnant of passive Norwegian. I read textbooks of varying difficulty (such as the three pictured above) and Web sites such as ntnu.edu/now; I enjoy the little bursts of pleasure that I get when I realize that I understand the texts, either by knowing the full words or by recognizing the root words and the word-units in compound words, allowing me to guess their meanings. Context helps, too; I'm more likely to understand political and theological texts than, for example, poetry. It's fun to pick and choose among the various methods and levels of those different resources rather than just sticking to one of them.

This works for increasing my reading and vocabulary abilities. However, I need more help with listening comprehension (this is the area we focused on when we lived in Russia, teaching English) and much more help in speaking. For that, I abandon all pretense of being an advanced learner, and drill myself in the very basics, using Duolingo. I patiently work through exercise after exercise of speaking into the microphone when so instructed, patiently constructing sentences with the right word order, and reviewing my mistakes. Note to self: the word "my" comes after that noun that is mine.

My grandmother Gerd Jakobsen Maurer. Above her,
my great-great grandfather Johan Fredrik Maurer.

There's a practical side to this activity, aside from the alleged benefit in preventing or postponing Alzheimer's disease: in a month I plan to be attending the combined Nordic Yearly Meeting in Stavanger, Norway. It will serve as an exam of sorts, and already serves as powerful motivation. 

But the best part of these efforts is the way I feel reconnected to my fascinating and very literate grandmother, with whom I spent many hours in conversation from my first years until her death in 1988.

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The photo of my grandmother comes from this post back in 2005. I still see her and my grandfather in my dreams ... where they're usually speaking English, which they both spoke very well.

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Another advantage of immersing myself in relearning a language: a respite from the day's news.

There's no respite in Ukraine.

Timothy Snyder on the reasons he moved to Toronto last year (and things that were not reasons).

Walter Brueggemann died today. The news and the legacy. Rest in peace!

Michael Marsh invites us to think about our deathbed prayer. (Not a morbid post at all.)

Britain Yearly Meeting's 2025 epistle ... "We are reminded that the central message of the New Testament is one of love." Good, I think so, too, but Mark Russ has a caution.

Three more days to register for the annual sessions of Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends. Location: Reedwood Friends Church, across the street from Reed College in Portland, Oregon. (Online attendance is possible for the main sessions and some of the workshops.)

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Austin John, "Long Distance Call." (The whole set is excellent.)

Quakers in Politics ... what Quakers can bring to political life

Quakers are fond of the phrase “speak truth to power,” often citing it as their mission and their way of acting in the public realm. It is a phrase with great resonance that has entered the general vocabulary of progressive activists, and there are times when it is both apt and necessary. However, there is a certain danger in using the phrase too blithely. It suggests that Quakers who have truth are on one side of an equation and that people with power are on the other—that we are the virtuous outsiders speaking to those others who are insiders. We might better think, along with Catherine West, of trying to “reform the practice of power” through our comportment and practices.

— Quakers in Politics.

In this compact and well-organized little book, Carl and Margery Post Abbott consider what it means for Friends to be political "outsiders" (virtuous or not) as well as "insiders." In just 82 pages, they look at our historical record from our earliest years, the ways our beliefs shape our attitudes to politics, and the experiences of Friends who have actually served in political office and in organizations that lobby the politicians.

This distinction between remaining outside the actual process of political tradecraft, on the one hand, and working actively to influence political outcomes, on the other, recurs again and again. As the authors show through well-chosen cases, the balance between the two approaches has varied through history, and even in the lives of specific Friends. In the 17th century, George Fox gathered our movement through his passionate evangelism, proclaiming that "Christ has come to teach his people himself"—but that same sense of prophetic immediacy led him to plead for social justice in petitions to Oliver Cromwell. When the monarchy was restored and Friends faced severe repressions, he counseled a lower-key approach. Later, he and other Friends once again went public with their calls for religious freedom and social justice.

Anyone with a strict sense of integrity and personal modesty faces a dilemma when considering a life in politics: a certain degree of self-advancement and a readiness to compromise and accept trade-offs usually come with the territory. The Abbotts provide case studies of Friends both accepting and refusing political involvement based on this reality. Confronted with a demand to finance military forces in colonial Pennsylvania, for example, Friends gave up their central role in the colony's government in 1756. Young Quaker men facing conscription in the two World Wars didn't have the option to retire into private life. In the USA, the American Friends Service Committee and the Friends Committee on National Legislation were parts of the Quaker response to those wartime realities. (Margery Post Abbott has been involved in leadership roles within FCNL.)

The book's case studies include several individual Quakers whose lives often reflect a progression from being an outsider to active political involvement. Among the Quaker politicians in the book, the experience of John Bright (the second Quaker ever to serve in the British Parliament, after Joseph Pease) is an interesting example:

John Bright had a family problem.... A majority of voters in Durham wanted him in Parliament, but his wife was dubious, and in-laws deeply concerned. It was commendable, they thought, for Friends to work as quiet persuaders in the manner of John Woolman or public advocates in the manner of Elizabeth Fry, but not to go over completely to the other side to become a politician.... John Bright bridged some of the divides as an unquiet Quaker from a quietist background (literally unquiet because he was one of the most powerful orators of his day). He had no doubt that his Quakerism connected seamlessly to his political liberalism, which took the form of efforts to expand the elective franchise, limit the influence of the landed aristocracy, promote free international trade, disestablish the Church of Ireland, and break up monopolistic power.

In addition to such iconic Quakers as Margaret Fell and John Woolman, some of the political activists and politicians mentioned in the Abbotts' book include John Greenleaf Whittier, Elizabeth Fry, Herbert Hoover, Emily Greene Balch, Nitobe Inazō, Paul Douglas, Lon Burman, Thomas Lung'aho, Simeon Shitemi, A. Mitchell Palmer, Raymond Wilson, Richard Nixon, Elton Trueblood, Miriam and Sam Levering, Bayard Rustin, Catherine West, Marian Hobbs, Jo Vallentine, Judith Kirton-Dowling, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, and many others, some of whom the authors interviewed personally. Some of these figures were advocates and reformers; some operated ecumenically or collaborated with secular movements while others stayed within Quaker structures; and some were elected to political office themselves. The authors treat Nixon with conspicuous fairness, it seems to me; and I was glad to see Madlala-Routledge included, since she had a government role in South Africa that would rarely if ever fall to a Friend: Deputy Minister of Defense.

Margery Post Abbott and Carl Abbott;
source.

The Abbotts also describe how Friends have built organizations for more effective influence on politicians, for creating forums where political actors can meet for candid, off-stage conversations, and for raising awareness among Friends based on these activities. The American Friends Service Committee and its British counterparts are among those organizations; the authors also cite the Quaker United Nations Office, the Quaker Committee on European Affairs, and the Quaker Peace Network - Africa.

Inevitably, an introductory treatment of Quakers in politics could not cover every possible angle and remain within the "Quaker Quicks" series format. Evangelical Friends are acknowledged (including an interesting quotation from Lon Fendall) but not treated at the same length as more politically progressive Friends; and the country with the third largest Quaker population in the world, Bolivia, is not represented, though the dilemmas faced by Friends are generally similar to the patterns already covered in the book. Several of the earlier chapters beg for enlarged treatment, such as the relationship between personal faith and public policy, and the role of the Bible in forming Quaker approaches to politics, both in terms of policy and in terms of personal discipleship as a political activist. Some faith-in-politics subtopics may already be covered in earlier "Quaker Quicks" (peace, for example), and maybe Quakers in Politics will inspire others.

Despite these limitations of scale, the Abbotts' book definitely keeps its persuasive promise:

We believe that it is important that there be Quaker voices inside the political process as well as outside, and we address both the pitfalls and promise of being a “political Quaker.”

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The tag "politics" is my fifth most frequent tag...

The joy of politics

"Our life is politics"

Thoughts on hope and cynicism.

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Global Christianity in statistics, and the changing challenges of getting the data: a conversation with Gina Zurlo.

Quakers in Lebanon: a forgotten minority?

Another case study of politics and faith: Do the people of Florida face sentences of "five years in jail for driving someone to church"?

The people of Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends: a conversation with Gil George, part one, and part two.

Two blues-related items from The Guardian:  Ottilie Patterson, the forgotten first lady of British blues; and photos from the Juke Joint Festival in Clarksdale, Mississippi.

Nancy Thomas considers "stuff"—General Stuff, Specific Stuff, "stuff" as verb, and what Woolman said about "outward cumbers."

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Classics! Two numbers by Henry Gray (1925-2020), Lynwood Slim (1953-2014), and Kid Ramos.

Judy Maurer: Accents, eggnog, and foreigners in our midst

This week, I’m delighted to welcome my wife Judy Maurer as guest blogger.

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A few days before Christmas, a well-dressed woman in Winco approached me with a bottle of Irish creme in her hand. “Is this drink for the Christmas?” she asked.

I squelched the desire to quiz her about her native language and how it navigated without articles like “a” and “the”, since the use of those tiny words was clearly not intuitive for her. But like my students in Russia, she was able to get her point across well, without being able to land exactly on where one used a “the” or an “a”. Normally, it’s not a problem -- unless you want to say, “My husband has the money” and you end up saying, “My husband has money.”

But I left all that aside and said, “If they’re Irish-American, it would be perfect.”

“I want traditional drink” she said. Again I squelched a desire to explain that in America, what one perceives as traditional at Christmas flows from your parents or grandparents’ ancestry. Lefse for Norwegians, stollen and marzipan for Germans, and all that. I also didn’t explain that usually, the ones with English ancestry got to decide that their traditions would be mainstream traditional in the US. I’m not entirely sure why that is, since Spaniards were first in to invade North America in any numbers, and then the English.

Instead I just tried to explain about “eggnog”. I wrote it out on my smartphone for her, because what is a “nog”? How would she know how to capture that in her memory? She seemed perplexed that she should look for it in the dairy section.

After nine years in Russia, it’s a familiar point of stress for me. Going to a social gathering as a foreigner means trying to figure out what is the accepted practice. Everyone else knows it, accepts it as gospel truth as the-way-it-should-be-done, but you have no idea, and even have to set aside your own sense of the-way-it-should-be-done which is so embedded in your view of life that you don’t realize it is just your culture’s sense of the-way-it-should-be-done. So what the others think is the civil and polite thing to do may seem at the least perplexing. So my worry tended to be: “when I stumble over a social obstacle, will the others think my cluelessness is charming, or rude?”

Asking a stranger in a grocery store is a good tactic. I told her that the Irish creme in the fancy bottle would be a very good thing to bring to a party in America, but she repeated that she wanted to bring “traditional drink.”

Painful things have happened since I left the US to go to Russia in 2008. In 2017, I came back to a country in which people speaking English with accents are no longer as willing to engage in a conversation about where they are from. But I hoped I had built up enough rapport with her so that she would be willing to talk. So I asked.

“Iraq,” she replied.

“Good. I’m glad you’re here.You’re safe.” She seemed surprised, but when she caught my eye again while quizzing grocery store employees, probably about traditional drinks, she beamed.

During the worst of the Ukraine crisis, when Russian media blamed the “decadent West” for everything that went wrong, I felt vulnerable in Russia as a westerner. State media is dedicated to telling the news in just such a way to make people more compliant with what the leadership wants to do anyway. (I know. This never happens in the US, right?) Blaming foreign countries, and foreigners in their midst, is always a good strategy for deflecting blame away from the realities of this country. This tactic works particularly well if there is significant corruption among the political leadership, but what would we in the US know of that, right?

In the spring of 2014, when pro-Russian separatists took over parts of eastern Ukraine, the Russian leadership was in desperate need of these tactics. Stereotypes are particularly useful in these times, and state media trotted them out. They flooded state and social media with reports of the “Godless West”.

I grew up in a very conservative area of the US southwest, and was regularly subjected to films in school about “Godless Communists”. So as Yogi Berra said, it felt like “deja vu all over again,” but with a mind-numbing twist: I was now defined as the enemy. A wise Russian friend told me that the easiest way to rile people up against the enemies of Russia was to dust off and use again the Soviet-era stereotypes of Americans, as we had been the most frequent targets during the Cold War. It would have been a farther reach to enrage the populace against western Europeans. State media was just doing what came easier.

It was particularly painful when our good friends bought into these stereotypes. In my own living room, an old friend asked with wide-eyed wonder, “Can a man find a woman who would take care of her husband in America?”

I felt like saying, “you’ve seen with your own eyes how I take care of Johan -- and he takes care of me. Do you really think I’m the only American woman who takes care of her husband?”

The cold-war stereotype in Russia is that American women are selfish, independent feminists who won’t lend a hand to their own families. Another good friend insisted to me that I must have learned to cook in Russia, after I left the US. The unstated part was, “everyone knows that women in America don’t bother to cook for their families.” Since I had just provided a yummy home-made treat for the teachers’ lounge, then it stood to reason that I had learned to cook in Russia. Really? One learns to make apple crisp in Russia? In most of these cases, I was too stunned to argue.

While our friends believing in Soviet-era stereotypes was the most painful, being outside their care, as foreigners in public, was the most frightening. I polished my public Russian image so I could blend in. In addition to my black leather coat, silk scarf, brick face without smile in public, I stuffed an orange and black -striped ribbon in my purse so I could whip it out and tie it on at a moment’s notice. This ribbon was the Russian nationalists’ symbol; I would look safely like a Russian nationalist with a St. George’s ribbon on my purse.

Once when I was in Moscow I called home and said, “Johan -- I forgot to tell you. I moved that carry-on suitcase -- the one to take if they knock on our door.” High-profile deportations of westerners -- politicians who were proving their mettle by deporting hapless English teachers -- were enough of a thing that I put everything I would need for a sudden deportation back to the US right next to our front door. Some of our students believed it was enough of a threat that they described for us what cars the immigration service would use - the Russian equivalent of an FBI Black Maria.

And I resolved, once I returned to the US, to help individual foreigners in the U.S. feel welcome. In the Old Testament, the foreigner is sometimes an example of a marauder, but more often of the vulnerable, as in Deuteronomy 24:17-19 “Do not deprive the foreigner or the fatherless of justice, or take the cloak of the widow as a pledge. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there. That is why I command you to do this. When you are harvesting in your field and you overlook a sheaf, do not go back to get it. Leave it for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hands.”

Even back then, foreigners were vulnerable, without status or protection, and God told Israelites to treat them well. That part has not changed. We must treat the foreigners among us well, particularly if our country had much to do with making their country a dangerous place to live in. While we’re at it: What national problems might be hiding behind these “enemies” and distractions being thrown at us? What does our political leadership not want us to see? Let’s focus on those problems. Let’s reject fear, so that God might bless us in all the work of our hands.

Judy Maurer is a member of Moscow Friends Meeting, Russia, and Eugene Friends Church, USA. From 2008 to 2017 she and Johan taught English at the New Humanities Institute in Elektrostal. Before leaving for Russia she was a publicist and fundraiser for ARMS - Abuse Recovery Ministry and Services. She is writing a book on anger and angry people.

Photo: at Cathedral of Elijah the Prophet, Yaroslavl.

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Mike Farley: The heart being the place where God's love meets us (Romans 5.5-6) it meets too there the one whom we are holding in our heart.

Red Cross photos from Russia of the Civil War era. (Last two photos are from the region where Friends worked in famine relief.)

Bridget Collins in The Guardian on the top 10 Quakers in fiction. (Thanks to Martin Kelley for the link.) I would have included the Birdwell family in Jessamyn West's The Friendly Persuasion, particularly Eliza, among my own top ten. What do you think of the list?

Remembering Lamin Sanneh and Friend Samuel Snipes.

Jackie Pullinger warns us that we're going to feel stupid for eternity if ...

And to add to our current season of major space exploration stories, could these repeating fast radio bursts be from aliens?

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One more time for this delightful blues collaboration with James Harman at the BluesMoose Cafe:

Russian avos' and American politics

Source.  

Last week I recommended not including judgments about a candidate's faith when criticizing that candidate. My reasoning: (1) Unless we've dialogued directly with the candidate, we're relying on third parties for our information about the candidate, and many of the channels for our information are committed to influencing us with a biased message. (2) We risk hypocrisy.

There's an important role for our own faith, of course, as we speak out about the candidate's behavior and policy positions. For example, I find it disheartening to consider the likelihood that Hillary Clinton as president would continue to follow Washington DC's conventional wisdom on defining and fighting terrorists. If anyone has heard of new proposals to engage our so-called enemies in an honest confrontation over their grievances (and ours), I'd love to know. Otherwise, I expect the long list of military and CIA failures in much of the world to keep growing.

Donald Trump, the other candidate in our de facto binary process, is another story altogether. He doesn't present us with a predictable set of likely policies, nor does he fit the behavioral profile for the role of our country's national representative to the world. He is the very definition of a loose cannon -- and that is his appeal to many of his supporters, because the tight cannons in charge up to now have not delivered for them.

In her article, "Trumputin: What Russia can teach us about the US election," Natalia Antonova writes,

Perhaps one of the most telling lines about Trump supporters was recently published by conservative writer David Frum, who quoted this line from his discussions with fellow Republicans who are set to vote for Trump: "You believe in institutions because they work for you… But our people don’t believe in institutions any more."

People who have lost faith in institutions have lost faith in institutional change. This makes them especially vulnerable to promises made by firebrand demagogues. And it places them further beyond the reach of facts or logic.

. . .

Arkady Ostrovsky argued that the west should not have gloated when it won the Cold War. I similarly want to caution Clinton supporters from gloating should their candidate beat Trump at the polls.

This is not about winning an election anymore. The Trump phenomenon has exposed deep fissures in our society and political system. It has exposed the fact that an unwieldy, inflexible two-party system no longer adequately addresses the interests of millions of Americans. It has exposed the fact that many voters have lost faith in traditional legislators. It has exposed the fact that our citizens are fearful and mistrustful of each other.

These fearful and mistrustful citizens may well be aware of the doubts that many of us have about their loose-cannon champion. They may even have taken our worries into account, and have decided that the fruit-basket upset they want to see in the establishment is worth the risk. It reminds me of the Russian concept of avos', which linguist Natalia Gogolitsyna describes as follows in her book Untranslatable Russian Words:

This colloquial word and expression combines the meaning of "perhaps," "I wish," "on the off-chance" and "hopefully," which creates problems when translating. In Russian folklore, it has both positive and negative connotations.

Two of her examples of usage are particularly interesting to me in the context of Trump's supporters:

... the concept of "Russian avos". What is it? In fact it is the habit of living in conditions of limited information. Living and surviving. Valery Milyayev

... a Russian can't work like an Englishman; even now we do everything on the off chance. Andrei Konchalovsky

I wonder if "limited information" in the Russian context might be understood a bit loosely as "a sense of limited personal efficacy." Might that also be behind Trump's followers' mood? Could that result in the sort of cynicism that often seems to be poisoning the politics in both countries? As a result of this sense of being marginalized without recourse, are people in both countries more willing to do things on the off-chance?

I was already thinking over this impression that some of Trump's supporters were in an avos' mood, when I walked into our institute here in Elektrostal a few days ago -- my first time there since returning from the USA. One of my colleagues asked, "If it's not a secret, what do you think of your presidential candidates?" I mentioned my doubts about Trump, and she replied, "If Clinton wins, we already know how she feels about Russia -- she's not exactly our friend. In any case, we more or less know what she will do. Don't you think it would be a lot more interesting, even fun [veselo] if Trump became president? After all, he'll have advisors, a cabinet; people will make sure that he can't do too much harm. And life will not be boring!"

I'm not as ready as my Russian colleague to throw the USA on the mercy of a Trump-shaped avos', but I suspect that her Russia-centric outlook on our presidential choices is not that far from some of his home-grown supporters, including those in my extended family. How do we reach them to compare notes about the risks facing us on election day? Concerning communication with Trump's supporters, Antonova recommends:

As George Lakoff has argued, when cold, hard facts don't work, values, empathy and positively-framed truth do much better. Simply relating to each other better as human beings works.

This is why I don’t have any hatred for Trump supporters, even when they yell at me to “go back to Russia” on Twitter. I know they want me to hate them. But I don’t want to give them what they want, nor do I want to play their game. It’s not a game a rational person can win. Putin supporters, who’ll call you a "Russophobe" when you so much as question their leader, taught me that a long time ago. [Links in original.]

Finally, I can simply remind myself that, whatever pretensions a president might put on ...

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

(Psalm 119:45-46, NIV; context)

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Part two (March 2019). And an update for 2024.

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More on Russians and our American political season: Why Russians don't care about Trump, Clinton, and the DNC hack; on the other hand, here's why Russian Facebook users love Donald Trump.

Micah Bales on what it means to follow Jesus in the age of Trump.

Building our house in the storm: Brian Drayton writes to Friends of New England Yearly Meeting as they gather for their 356th annual sessions.

...Examinations of the interaction of race and the law have tended to focus on when minorities are subject to legal process, not their treatment when administering it.

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Blues from Brazil: After enjoying their recorded music for several years, I finally heard the Igor Prado Band live at the 2016 Waterfront Blues Festival. Here they are, performing "Memphis Train" and (at 8:30) "Give Me Back My Wig!"

Kind cats

Our kind cats.

"Your cats are so kind!"

The photo above prompted this comment from one of our students in Elektrostal. It reminded me that I've always loved the way English-learners in Russia tend to use the adjective "kind."

It's rare that a single word in one language is a perfect translation for a single word in another language. Words carry clusters of nuances that often are either wider or narrower than the most obvious equivalent in the other language. The Russian language provides lots of examples, as I've noted before.

Today's example is the word "kind," one of the translations of the Russian word "dobry" (and several other Russian words, for that matter). When those of us who speak English as more or less a first language use the adjective "kind," we're usually referring to people, referring to their warm, generous, tender spirits. We also use the word to describe acts associated with those sorts of people: "That was a kind thing to do."

The Russian use of this English word often goes wider. When our student described our cats as "kind," based on the photo, I think she was referring to qualities for which we might use the words "sweet" and "cute" and "appealing." (Our cats really do have these qualities, by the way--and I say this as a dog person.)

Another way that Russians frequently use the English word "kind" is in describing works of art, especially films. I can't count how many times I've heard the classic Soviet films described by Russians as "kind" in referring to those films' gentle promotion of positive values and attitudes. And it's true; many Soviet-era films, and especially children's cartoons, had a moral core of kindness that might be hard for Americans to square with our image of the Soviet system's systematic cruelty and duplicity.

Given the reality of this Russian paradox--kindness and cruelty in such a tight binary orbit--could it be that the sensitivity to kindness among some Russians is a sort of compensatory mechanism? It's not for me to say. I don't like generalizing about actual human beings. But this conversation about our cats took place only a couple of days after I was talking with another Russian friend about a bit of organizational politics I'd witnessed a couple of years ago, when a treasurer was replaced rather brusquely (to my mind) by another member of the organization. The new treasurer seemed to me to have acted quite aggressively in laying claim to the job, and I couldn't help wondering whether I could have done something at the time to insert more grace into the situation. My conversation partner confirmed that the earlier treasurer had indeed felt bruised by the whole episode. "It's our Russian mentality," she said. "In this country, people are disposable."

Without robbing her of the right to make an observation about her own country's shadow side, treating people as disposable is a constant danger in any country where God's universal love is denied either in theory or (what's worse, when believers are involved) in practice. I'm glad that, in Russia, there are antidotes, such as this intriguing fascination with kindness.

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For a somewhat related Russian case study, see this article: "For God's sake, Putin was not 'hitting on' Peng Liyuan. Also, there's nothing wrong with Russian chivalry." (Kind regards to Lynn Gazis-Sax for this timely reference!)

A heritage of kindness, justice, and cultural integrity in song: Annie Patterson and Peter Blood's new song collection, Rise Again, has a home on the Web. "Rise Up and Sing."

In China, "Cracks in the Atheist Edifice."

"The problems between our countries are between politicians, not Christians"--an interview with two Russian Protestant leaders visiting the USA as part of an ecumenical delegation. I would have asked some other questions--including some follow-ups--but the interview is interesting at face value.

"What is Self-Righteousness and Why Is It Annoying?"

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This is not the first time I've featured Eric Bibb's version of this song, but this is a different performance, and in any case, this continues to be my prayer....