Barriers revisited (partly a repost)

Source.  

THE Truth of God, being received into the inward parts, is found to be of a living, powerful nature, working mightily there for the cleansing and redeeming of the hearts. Yea, this is certainly witnessed, that as the mind joined to deceit is thereby defiled, so the mind joined to the truth of God is, by its power and virtue, purified.

Now, having felt this, and being filled with the love and good-will of God to the souls of others, how can we but testify it to others, who stand in need of God's truth (and its cleansing property and virtue) as well as we; especially being thereunto moved and drawn by the Spirit of the Lord?

— Isaac Penington, published posthumously in 1680; source. (My italics.)

In our meeting, we're frightfully private.

— Member of an unprogrammed meeting in Britain Yearly Meeting.

Yesterday I had my second cataract surgery this year, and I'm still getting used to the results. To reduce screen time on blog night, the solution is obvious: repackage an old post. So the second half of this post is an item I published back in 2016, near the beginning of our last academic year in Russia.

What reminded me of that post, "Barriers," was a conversation just a week ago with a British Friend. We were talking about whether Friends in her meeting felt freedom to reveal their faith. From her comments I gathered that, whatever the reasons, this kind of sharing rarely took place.

It may have been small comfort, but I replied that this sort of diffidence was not unique to unprogrammed Friends. (For a brief definition of "unprogrammed," see the sidebar here.) I particularly remember our beloved First Friends Meeting in Richmond, Indiana, forty years ago, discussing how to grow their rapidly-shrinking congregation. "What we need are young couples," someone said. (I'm sure I've told this story before!) My internal reaction was, "No!" What they needed was more confidence in their identity as God's people. It was a congregation with many mature disciples who had done amazing things with their lives. We found out accidentally that one of the harmless-looking older members had been a worker for racial justice in the South in the late 1940's! We were in great sympathy with the Sunday school teacher who asked those older Friends, "Some of you have been Quakers for 60 years—why can't you tell us more about why you became Friends and what you've learned about God in those years?" One of the answers she got was, "Our generational culture is very private."

In the first generation of the Quaker movement, there was little or no social incentive to be among us; you'd be risking legal danger and possibly mob violence, and you'd certainly earn the disapproval of the religious establishment. Either direct experience of God's power, or the desire to be among people who persuasively testified to such a direct experience, might overcome those dangers and lead you to throw in your lot with those despised Quakers.

What attracts people to us now? I've known Friends who reflect this same power, joy, and convincing conduct, but in my experience, our most attractive feature for many is a social atmosphere of gracious idealism and doctrinal vagueness that draws in seekers who are much like the people already among us. There are variations, of course; some of our churches echo the cliches of the (American) evangelical culture, but however pointed the preaching may be, the ethical consequences of that preaching (discipleship, or if you prefer, the Quaker testimonies) are often weak or absent altogether. If this seems unfair, let me know! (And what drew you?)

One explanation for our reluctance to testify to a powerful faith might be that we simply aren't experiencing the spiritual outpouring that shaped the first generations of Friends. The torch has been passed to others in the Christian movement who are living out a reality that we'd rather read about at a safe distance, for example in quaint ancient Quakerese.

But there's another explanation that may be less pessimistic. We have developed a barrier, an inhibition, that keeps our mouths shut. Maybe, if we dared, we might be free to share words and deeds (according to our gifts and temperaments, and always subject to the discipline of knowing when to speak and when to listen!) that would convey the love of God and the demands of justice.

I'll leave it at that. Here, with some minor edits, is that original "Barriers" post.

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"How can I explain something to you if you don't even watch TV?"
A meme found on vk.com (original scene from late-era Soviet film Heart of a Dog, which I recommend).

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When I was around eight years old, the subject of God came up one day in my grade school classroom. (There weren't the same restrictions on God-talk in public school then that there are now; that's another discussion.) Our teacher said, "Why should we be afraid to talk about God?" I was startled and panicky—in fact I was afraid to talk about God, and couldn't even imagine making my mouth emit the word.

I made a mental note of this reaction, but didn't analyze it at the time. Later, I connected it with the fact that, in my family, any mention of religion was absolutely forbidden, along with any mention of disease or death. Whatever the roots of this barrier, it blocked me from communicating with anyone about a huge part of what it means to be human.

Obviously, something happened between grade school and my decades of working for the church! But I'm glad that I remember that block. These memories came back to me the other day when I was talking with some colleagues about expanding our students' access to informal English-speaking opportunities. "Some of my students do a great job with grammar and vocabulary," said one colleague. "But when it comes to speaking in a group, they just can't open their mouths. There's that old psychological barrier."

These young people aren't exactly facing the same barrier in speaking English as I encountered in talking about God. (Or, rather, not talking about God.) There's no actual danger in overcoming the language barrier, but there are several hazards in crossing into God-talk territory. For me as a child, there was a safety issue within the family. But, on another level entirely, do we want it to become too easy to talk about God? Is there a place for some reluctance to become glib about the Ultimate?

We Quakers have a number of indirect ways of referring to divine realities—terms such as the Inward Light and the Seed, used generations ago to avoid an unseemly familiarity with holy realities, much as biblical Hebrew and its readers made substitutions for the Name. In my early years as a Friend, I remember hearing vocal ministry that referred to "the Author and Finisher of our faith" rather than naming Jesus explicitly. Nowadays Quaker terms such as Inward Light can mistakenly be used in the service of weakening our ties with Christianity, but that old impulse to curb our verbosity when referring to God still seems valid to me.

Even so, "faith comes from hearing the message," so there is something to be said for not letting psychological barriers get in the way of that communication. Part of our evangelistic task might be to confront the false barrier of cultural piety. Are we marked by a gooey sentimentality, a cloud of goofy cliches, or any other signals that you must, to gain entrance, turn off your critical faculties?

In John Updike's novel Rabbit Is Rich, there is a fascinating scene where the Episcopal priest, Archie Campbell, attends a family meeting to discuss Nelson's and Pru's intended marriage. The minister mildly defends "our brand of magic" while everyone else is trying to negotiate how much or little churchiness is necessary to accomplish the desired outcome—a respectable wedding. Rabbit's own defense of faith is not exactly zero ("Hell, what I think about religion is ... is without a little of it, you'll sink") but the church-wedding discussion is mostly about appearances, not reality.

As long as it seems that the religion industry is just selling one or another form of respectability, people will find their "magic" elsewhere. And rightly so. Maybe it's not a psychological barrier that blocks the audience from yielding—maybe it's a healthy boundary!

What exactly is the alternative that evangelists with integrity are offering? I think that there is no formula, no doctrine, no scare tactic, no magic that equals meeting someone who looks at you with God's love in their eyes, who offers access to a community that is shaped by trust in God. Some people in that community will know how to communicate this invitation quietly, with an assurance that doesn't depend on using loaded words. Others will know how to communicate with contagious enthusiasm, with generous love that covers a multitude of incautious cliches. There are infinite variations on this spectrum, and somewhere in God's economy, they probably all meet some blocked person's condition.

Along my own route, several people and incidents helped me overcome the barrier. Studying Asian civilizations in high school introduced me to whole cultures not shaped by the assumptions of Western materialism. The anti-war movement brought me physically into churches for the first time in my life. (It wasn't as weird in a church as I thought it would be. Specifically, it was the Ebenezer A.M.E. Church in Evanston, Illinois.) My high-school fascination with writers such as Dostoevsky and Alan Paton played their part. But I remember a much earlier crack in the barrier: a tract I happened to pick up off the floor of our apartment building's lobby, not so long after the incident with the teacher. This tract described someone's conversion. In the process of getting to know God, this writer would walk way outside of their normal routes to pass a church that had Christ's name on it. That Name had such an attractive power for the writer. Hmmm, that's interesting, I thought. Even though I didn't understand or respond to that tract's invitation at the time, I somehow understood even then what the writer was feeling.

If I have any ability at all to represent the Gospel effectively, I believe that in part it's because I still vividly remember being a non-believer who couldn't even say the word "God." But I am not permitted to define my path or emphasis as the only one. I'm glad to share the responsibility of communicating God's welcome with many others, some of whom have very different approaches to removing barriers.

(Originally published on September 7, 2016. To date there's one comment, from the late Vail Palmer, referring to Adria Gulizia's then-new blog: "That blog about suffering and God's suffering with us is so profound. What else would a God who truly loves us be up to?")

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Source.  

Right Sharing of World Resources has a new mailing address:

PO Box 2102

Richmond, Indiana

USA 47375-2102

Catch up with Right Sharing's latest news here. And learn more about the search for a new general secretary here.

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Diana Chandler (The Roys Report) on the dwindling Christian presence in Gaza. 

How the Kremlin wants its audiences to think about Putin's cabinet reshuffle. (Meduza.)

Sam Adams (Slate) asks why A24 is burying its January 6 documentary.

The Fines have called their film nonpartisan, and in a less toxic political climate, its premise, that an election should not be disrupted by mobs in tactical gear assaulting law enforcement officers, ought to be one both sides could endorse without pause or equivocation. But....

Micah Bales asks whether we have been pruned.

From the perspective of our American individualism, this seems like a hard pill to swallow, but it is in fact good news.

Frederick Kaufman (UnHerd) on the mythical masculinity of Donald Trump.

“My power is great, greater than you believe, and I have gold and silver in abundance.” That was [Robert Bly's] Iron John’s promise to his acolyte. It is also Trump’s promise to MAGA and the manosphere. Thus do hordes of Redditers, Snapchatters, Xers, Instagrammers and sundry other amo-packing denizens of incel message boards feel the pain of the billionaire who now stands trial for hiding hush money payments to a porn star. And here, too, Trump will rely on truths Bly articulated decades ago — that much like infants, his followers will “refuse to remember ugly facts”, that they will “look away from disorganisation, abuse, abandonment."

The Open Culture Web site passes along playlists of the "3,300 best films and documentaries on YouTube." View the list at your own risk.

Nancy Thomas writes about choosing books to keep, Henri Nouwen, Rembrandt's Return of the Prodigal Son, and a visit to ... us!

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Jason Ricci, "Scratch My Back"—2024 (below) and nine years ago.

Medium and message

I confess! I enjoyed Maureen Dowd’s book Are Men Necessary? What I’m actually confessing to, I guess, is a twinge of guilt about that enjoyment.

The actual content of her book is conveyed more accurately by the subtitle, When Sexes Collide, but she’s not about to forgo the opportunity, provided by recent genetic research, to set up the mischievous frame of our (men’s) possible optional status in the distant future. The Y-chromosome is supposedly shrinking to a theoretical vanishing point, just as the theoretical range of reproductive options for women is increasing.

On another level of optionality, it turns out that men supposedly have a fairly narrow range of utility. (Apparently, from the numerous men thanked by Maureen Dowd in her introduction, that utility includes being able to help her write a book about why they might not be necessary.) We are lazy and aggressive, but useful for lifting heavy things; according to Paul Rudnick, “Men only evolve with a gun at their head. Men want a babe and don’t care about her earning power.”

Her survey of men’s limited utility is unwittingly supported by another recent book, Manliness, by Harvey Mansfield, who frequently defines manliness as one facet or another of aggressiveness: “In the end, aggression is all there is.” Mansfield feels that men have a corner (though not a monopoly) on the ingredient he feels is most indispensable to manliness, “philosophical courage.” But if that is the basis of our indispensability, then we may be in trouble: all it would take to prove the case for our optional status is to disprove the thesis that men are more courageous on behalf of philosophically definable goals than women … or to construct a plausible vision of a world in which such courage is not necessary nearly as often, because society is less threatened by rampant aggression.

Maureen Dowd teases her readers only briefly with this theme of men’s dispensability. Most of the content of her book concerns two interrelated observations, mostly confined to the American scene, and summarized early on:

First: “Little did I realize that the sexual revolution would have the unexpected consequence of intensifying the confusion between the sexes… Or most curious of all, that women would move from playing with Barbie to denouncing Barbie to remaking themselves as Barbie.”

Second: “Whether or not American feminism will be defeated by American conservatism, it is incontrovertibly true that American feminism was trumped by American narcissism.”

In the service of amplifying these observations, Maureen Dowd surveys relationships between men and women, and women’s sense of self, in a variety of settings: How we meet, flirt, date, assess each other, and divide restaurant checks; how we (they?) decide when to get married and have children (or how we recognize or deny the biological and chronological issues involved); how we deal with aging, or don’t; and how all of this affects American politics.

Some of her observations are truly sobering. For example, what does it say about men’s and women’s abilities to see each other clearly and respectfully, when we learn how devastatingly differently we assess the value of intelligence? Dowd quotes a British study that says men’s chances for marriage go up 35% for each 16% increase in IQ, whereas women’s chances go DOWN 40% for each 16% increase in IQ. This intuitively makes no sense at all to me, but Dowd provides lots of anecdotal backup to these statistics.

Another major issue: economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett tells Dowd that it’s more difficult than ten years ago for women to have careers AND raise a family. “The trend lines continue that highly educated women in many countries are increasingly dealing with this creeping non-choice and end up on this path of delaying finding a mate and delaying childbearing. Whether you’re looking at Italy, Russia, or the U.S., all of that is true.”

A point that gave me, as an evangelical Christian, something to think about: “America has always been conflicted about sex, its puritanical side clashing with its prurient side. But now, with the ascendance of the prudish religious right, and the numbing oversexualization of commerce and culture, America seems positively bipolar about sex.” In this context, how do we in fact raise healthy, ethical young people, and then support their ascendance into full citizenship and leadership?

A poignant statistic: In 1990, Americans spent $1 billion on anti-aging creams, pills, devices, and surgery; 2005’s figure was $15 billion.

Now, about my guilt: How can I enjoy a book that is so … frothy? As a readable survey with a huge brief, maybe it can’t help skimming the surface, but Dowd goes from observations about women in Islamic Arabic cultures to Barbie dolls, with zero transition and an almost militant superficiality and bounciness. She’s constantly subverting her own voice of authority with outrageous puns (and I know from puns!) and double entendres for which she supplies … er … flags. As in “... she has, er, put her finger on something.” This sort of breezy commentary is hardly a new genre, but it's one I personally hardly ever read. Serious information is supposed to be delivered by serious people. But maybe the almost flirtatious breeziness of Dowd's book is the ideal vehicle to convey, not just in observation and description but in candid self-reference, a lively impression of the state of personal and sexual identity among some of us.

But of whom? Most Quakers I know would not recognize themselves in any corner of her book. That may be precisely a problem in its own right. How do we communicate with Barbie? If we have no desire to do so, does this say more about us than about Barbie?

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Indian summer in Elektrostal:

Manly shorts

Ruth Marcus wrote a column in the Washington Post on the mess that's resulted from too much manliness (by Harvey Mansfield's definition) in the Bush administration. Many bloggers rose to the administration's defense with such rhetorical gems as "...I think the nation needs MORE manliness, not less of it. Especially in the Congress, a body that seems to fatally lack cohones [sic]." Also: "... Would you like for us to leave U.S. foreign policy to the American Castrati? We already have tried that: it was called the the Carter and Clinton Administrations."

I think it is possible to have a more nuanced conversation on this subject. Being a man, I am not eager to be required either to support George Bush or reject manliness. Nor could I reconcile myself to a definition of "manly" in which the central word, "man," is associated with what Paul Berman calls a "cowboy romance of ruthlessness."

Most of all, I want to resist being shaped by the coercive pressures of public labels. The positive qualities of masculinity, which I cherish in myself and in other men, and which I'd probably define in ways similar to Harvey Mansfield, are qualities I can at times choose to embrace, express, control, or modify in myself. I can also honor their presence (and their absence!) in women; biology may distribute manly and womanly qualities among the sexes with statistical unevenness, but in any given individual it doesn't have the last word.

So, for me, the word "manly" has a basically positive ring, but I don't arrange my life to be sure I measure up to someone else's assessment based on that word. That form of risk-avoidance just wouldn't be manly.

PS: Are manly men supposed to smell like carnations? My Norwegian uncle Martin Jensen, who was a sea captain on the Wilhelmsen line for much of his life, used Roger & Gallet carnation-scented soap, at least at home. That scent brings back fond memories of him and his second-floor apartment in the house where my father grew up, on Godalsvei in Oslo, where I spent my very first years of life, and where I always want to return. Uncle Martin has been gone many years, but I wouldn't be surprised if a tiny hint of that scent were still there. [Relevant update: My favorite birthday present this year was a box of three huge bars of this very soap.]

With womanly and manly courage, the Christian Peacemaker Teams are refusing to leave Iraq precipitously after their bittersweet reunion with three of their four kidnapped coworkers. They do, however, promise to discern their longer-term future in Iraq based on what I'd consider good criteria, taking particular account of recommendations of Iraqis.

One criterion they do not use is the costs incurred in the hostages' rescue. As Jenny Kleeman pointed out in her Guardian article, "How grateful was Norman Kember supposed to be?": "After all, he might argue, he would never have been in the country to be taken hostage had Britain not deployed troops there in the first place."

The Ekklesia Web site has a good summary and roundup of resources concerning the Christian Peacemaker Teams and the second-guessing that they're enduring from critics, at least some of whom seem to have more venom than courage.

In the meantime, humans continue to be sacrificed on the altars of brutality. Last Saturday, two of the first headlines I glimpsed on my Yahoo home page were "Nigeria said it would hand deposed Liberian dictator Charles G. Taylor over to the Liberian government for trial" and "Bound, Blindfolded and Dead: The Face of Atrocity in Baghdad." Yes, some people continue to argue, after millenia of these cycles of violence, that the only effective response is yet more violence.

Some of these arguments are serious and modest and regretful, tempered with sophisticated understandings of the contradictions involved. (And then there is our administration and its trail of collaterally-damaged corpses and traumatized soldiers.) The Prince of Peace, tortured and put to death by people trapped in the myth of violent solutions, and then raised by God to lead us out of death-worship, does not sigh and nod his head in weary resignation, watching passively as so many of us refuse to give up those violent shortcuts. Jesus replaces history's cycles of revolutionaries and reformers, escapists and cynics, with his own steadfast loving leadership, to which we respond with courage, commitment, gratitude; with doubt, uncertainty, mistakes; with conversion, and community.

The first image that greeted my waking eyes this morning was that of newly-freed hostage Jill Carroll and her gracious demeanor in that first intense hour of being the world's media focus. President Bush spoke for many when he said, "I'm really grateful she was released and thank those who worked hard for her release, and we're glad she's alive." In turn, I'm grateful for everyone working for the release of those being held by the coalition, and everyone working for the universal and evenhanded provision of what we Americans used to take nearly for granted: due process.

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On giving, receiving, and fundraising. I just want to encourage Friends to re-read and comment on the item from Eden Grace that I posted on the day before yesterday. I appreciated Robin M.'s thoughts from a professional fundraiser's point of view, and Eden's explanation of what kind of fundraising was referred to in the original document from Uganda.

One of the most thoughtful, generous, and spiritually centered philanthropists I've ever known died a week ago today. One of Miles Edwards's obituaries is here on the George Fox University Web site. An interview that he gave an Oregonian reporter as he lay dying is here.

Year-end shorts (well, perhaps not short shorts)

Radioactive Muslims: To my utter relief, I'm still capable of outrage. This story of our government monitoring radiation levels at mosques, homes, businesses, and office buildings associated with Muslims—almost all U.S. citizens, for what that's worth—was the stimulus I needed.

I'm all for monitoring any location that is linked to a credible threat, whatever the religion of its owners. That's what courts, judges, and warrants are for. Any time frame beyond the very first half-day after receiving the credible threat gives the monitors time to get a warrant. Any delay after that is blatantly illegal. If we Quakers finally succeed in living in apostolic power and shaking the countryside for ten miles around, as George Fox challenged us to, I expect that we too would be subjects of urgent monitoring, but after that first tremor, there better be a warrant.

In this present case, why were warrants not obtained? Since the agencies involved refuse to comment on this specific situation, perhaps we'll never know. The U.S. News story says, "Officials also reject any notion that the program specifically has targeted Muslims. 'We categorically do not target places of worship or entities solely based on ethnicity or religious affiliation,' says one. 'Our investigations are intelligence driven and based on a criminal predicate.'" Is it possible that this many locations were each fingered in some kind of "criminal predicate"? Or, as seems more likely to me, the investigators were perhaps acting on a suspicion or rumor or disinformation campaign involving Muslims in general and nobody in particular. How long can civil liberties survive when such repeated monitoring of whole religions and ethnic groups without judicial oversight can be carried out on government say-so?

On the other hand, now that we do know something of what happened, what would have been the proper response of the government to rumors or allegations of terrorists' nuclear intentions? One thing I'm sure of: somehow, the system of checks and balances must be involved.

Thank God that some of those government officers have consciences. Because of that golden thread of idealism—because some have the courage to risk demotion and perhaps worse—what is hidden in darkness gets forced out into the light. Sadly, I'm not betting we've seen everything. And if we citizens and our legislators do not impose political consequences on an administration so hell-bent on doing whatever it wants, there will be more. Jefferson's line, "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance," is often used to justify a strong military, but its application is far wider. It takes aim at any form of laziness or passivity that surrenders the public arena to the arrogant.

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2006: The Year of the Boy? Arthur O. Roberts, Quaker philosopher and poet, has just published his reflections for January 2006, hopefully to be available soon on this section of the Northwest Yearly Meeting Web site. [UPDATE: It's there now.] (If you're not familiar with his monthly reflections, enjoy browsing awhile.)

While you're waiting for the full essay, here's a representative excerpt. After citing a number of statistics from our yearly meeting and George Fox University, almost all indicating a spread of ten percent or more between male minorities and female majorities, Arthur says:

Certain public educators over the past decade have expressed concern about boys’ education. They note a pattern of higher drop-out rates, more trouble-making, lower academic performance. diminishing enrollment in colleges, etc. It’s a touchy subject, however, and has elicited some strident feminist reaction, especially to charges of “feminization” of curriculum and pedagogy. Feminist scholars insist gender bias persists favorable to boys, not to girls. (See rebuttal at www.drheller.com/jan95.html). Three decades’ worth of social effort makes it difficult to overcome a mind-set about females requiring special efforts to rectify disparities. It’s hardly “politically correct” to posit a male group needing special attention. . . . But in respect to education, at least, it seems logically compelling.

I was immediately reminded of a sorely-missed friend and collaborator of mine, the late Betsy Moen, who died twelve years ago in Madurai, India, while doing research on gender patterns in activist leadership. In the late 1980's, she and Oswald Murray and I led a Right Sharing of World Resources study tour in Jamaica. While there, Betsy gave a talk at a seminar organized by Geoff Brown at the University of the West Indies, and the next day she summarized her talk on a Jamaican Broadcasting morning television interview show.

Her talk was entitled, "Why Target Women?" She explained why women were "targeted" in much contemporary economic development work—resources devoted to women were far more likely to benefit the whole family, according to credible research, whereas men tended to spend additional resources on themselves.

However, after describing the efficacy of targeting women in development work, Betsy asked a powerful question: what are the assumptions and consequences of this strategy for men? Are men just a problem to be bypassed, or are they themselves worthy of attention? Clearly, the old development methods of transferring more money and power to men don't work, but is neglect the only other option? Have we assumed that men cannot be educated to be responsible fathers, productive economic partners, collaborative leaders?

Betsy's point: while in any given class, women may be more exploited than men, still men are exploited, too; and, equally with women, they need to open their eyes. Most of all, we should not be "targeting" people, as if they were mere subjects, fair game for our development theories; we should be targeting systems.

So ... Arthur's queries about paying more attention to the education and development of boys make sense to me. To give focused attention to the special needs of boys is not to reverse the drive toward equality, it is to examine reality and expose oppressive systems. However, I do have one caution: if the attention toward male brain research and boys' unique development patterns becomes just another trendy grant magnet, rather than an honest approach to an understudied subject, both boys and girls will lose.

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The Return, again. Earlier this year I wrote about Andrei Zvyagintsev's amazing film, The Return. Now that we're paying attention to boys, with Arthur Roberts's encouragement, I wanted to report the lively discussion we had in our TV room recently when a friend of mine came over to our house and saw this movie with our family. Rather than describe the exact discussion we had, I'd like to encourage you to rent or borrow the film yourself and watch it in a group. What does it say about boys, about fathers, about their relationships? What myths of manhood are evident, and (here's where our discussion got lively) which of those myths actually have some health to them? Are the apparent exaggerations of masculinity in the film peculiar to Russia, or are they more universal? (Are they even exaggerations?!) Is it riskier to exaggerate masculinity or to marginalize it? Are these our only choices?

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Righteous links: If you read Russian, you might enjoy this article about our new Friends International Library trilingual version of Lighting Candles in the Dark, entitled Power of Goodness. ~~ Has President Bush himself fallen victim to sophisticated pattern analysis of his communications? Read this. ~~ The wonderful urban monastics at 24-7prayer.com have started a new program, Living Generously, an international evangelical program that has a lot in common with our own Right Sharing of World Resources. ~~ One of the best essays to emerge from our waiting and waiting and waiting for the return of our Christian Peacemaker Teams hostages in Iraq: Gene Stoltzfus's examination of the culture of terrorism.

Friday/Saturday update: More links. Direct link to Arthur's "Year of the Boy" article. ~~ The grass is always greener, and the power more plentiful: the view across the Russian-Ukrainian border. ~~ Frank Decker on "When 'Christian' Does not Translate" (pdf) in Mission Frontiers, September-October 2005. ~~ And Anita David's eloquent message, "Our Day," from Baghdad, on Electronic Iraq.