A truly stellar news conference

Vera C. Rubin Observatory and what it's looking at. (Source and description.)

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At Monday's unveiling of the first images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory on Cerro Pachón in Chile, director Željko Ivezić promised, 

... At the end of presentation you will get the link [to this site/application] and then you can spend the rest of your day enjoying these ten million galaxies.

Ivezić made this promise as he presented stunning initial images from the Rubin Observatory's Simonyi Survey Telescope and its world-record-sized digital camera. In the hour and a half news conference I linked above ("Monday's unveiling"), his wonderful presentation, given with both awe and humor, starts here. If you are a space or cosmology nerd or a fan of science journalism, you'll want to see all of the rest of this video, but if not, Scientific American has done you a great service by summarizing the presentation, and selecting several shorter videos, in their article, "Majestic First Images from Rubin Observatory Show Universe in More Detail Than Ever Before."

Most news headlines these days don't give us much joy, but I found this Rubin Observatory presentation and press conference, clunky as it was in places, very inspiring. Željko Ivezić's enthusiasm, and the heartfelt comments from the news conference panel (question-and-answer portion starts here), gave a wonderful human dimension to an otherwise tech-heavy theme and the staggering cosmic scale of the images themselves.

You might ask what distinguishes this earth-bound observatory from the Hubble and James Webb telescopes in space. Those amazing space tools can focus on very specific places, at distances that take us close to the apparent origins of our universe. The Rubin Observatory, on the other hand, will photograph the entire sky that's visible on its mountain, through full revolutions of the earth, over and over. These high-resolution images will be compiled over a ten-year period. Scientists and other viewers worldwide will be able to gain access to the images, including celestial movements and changes, and evidences of dark matter and dark energy. The compilation is called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time. Here's how it compares to other astronomical survey projects and catalogs, but one of its main advantages is simply the combination of the unprecedented speed of its repeating image-capturing cycles, without losing high resolution.

Rubin in 1963 using Kitt Peak National
 Observatory's 36-inch telescope with
Kent Ford's image tube spectrograph
attached. (Source and description.)

Instead of spending the last two days just looking at ten million galaxies, I've enjoyed reading about Vera Rubin and some of her contemporary colleagues, such as Kent Ford, Geoffrey Burbridge, Margaret Burbridge ... and following up some of the numerous links on their Wikipedia pages.

In case you see politics in everything, as I tend to do, notice  that several of the initial speakers in the long video puffed the USA's role as the world leader in science. That made it all the more interesting to notice the incredible variety of immigrants, international participants, cultures, and languages involved in the Rubin Observatory program.

It's also interesting to note that the press conference press handler turned away a question about future funding in light of federal budget cuts. (One earlier projection estimated running costs of $40 million per year.)

Now, back to the images .... Or as Željko Ivezić says, "Warp One, engage!"

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A few more words about the Rubin Observatory: here are the project's four main science goals.

"Racist is a tough little word," wrote linguist John McWhorter in The Atlantic. "Many of us think its meaning is obvious, but it has evolved quite a bit from its original signification over the past several decades."

What would you say? What are useful current definitions of "racism," "systemic racism," and "racist," based on your own experience or on sources you trust and recommend? In a brief survey, I'd like to ask you five questions that may help me write a related blog post, but, if that happens, nobody's comments will be attributed without permission.

Citing COVID-19 restrictions dating to 2020, city authorities in Moscow are not allowing protests (not even single-person picketing) at the site of the restored Joseph Stalin sculpture at Metro station Taganskaya. It reminds me of the scandal that surrounded restoration of a quotation lauding Stalin in the rotunda of Kurskaya station back in 2009, a time when we often passed through that station. (You can see part of that quotation in my photo: "Stalin raised us to be faithful to the people, and he inspired us to work and to perform great deeds.") Back in 2009, protesting didn't seem to be all that risky.

An urgent question (and an offer of practical resources for local Friends meetings) from Wess Daniels: Who gave us Guilford College?

Joseph and his brothers: Tom Gates continues his series on Quakers and the end of scapegoating.

Micah Bales on the Gerasenes and their unhappy reaction to a healing. (Context: Luke 8:26-39.) And how would we react?

Our reading this morning leaves us with no doubt: Healing is hard. True healing disrupts as much as it restores. The transformation that Jesus brings ripples out from those who are being healed to touch the whole fabric of society. When we get healed, we’ll find ourselves in a new kind of trouble. Holy trouble. 

Nadya Tolokonnikova (of Pussy Riot fame) and her prison cell installation in a downtown Los Angeles gallery.

“One thing that I just don’t vibe with in modern American society – there’s an entire thing about safety. And I’ve lived my life in a way that safety was the last thing that I would care about,” she said. “This is a thing I think about a lot lately. We need to be less safe, be ready to offend ourselves and other people. Otherwise, Maga people are just going to keep winning, because they’re not afraid.”

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At least the second time I've ended with this clip: Gino Matteo and Jason Ricci ... "I need Jesus to walk with me."

"The church is like a ... "

Source.  

Today I want to propose three metaphors for the church, and explain why they appeal to me:

incubator
laboratory
observatory

... But first, some context: 

During our Russia years, we often found it difficult to convey what the word "church" meant to us. This was true among our students, and also among some of the attenders of our Quaker meeting. Many were generations removed from traditional parish involvements. Instead, sometimes the most obvious models were discussion groups, peer support groups, and self-help or self-improvement groups.

When western Quakers first came to Elektrostal, one of the earliest local participants in the new meeting thought at first that the visitors were bringing a new self-help practice, a sort of western version of Transcendental Meditation. It did not help matters that these were precisely the years that, with the Iron Curtain newly lifted, Russians were flooded by New Age and self-help celebrities and books of varying quality and integrity. In today's Russia, the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that it is easy to forget how diverting those ideas seemed at the time.

The fact that the new Quaker visitors were English speakers was in itself an attraction; some of the early participants in Moscow and Elektrostal were eager to learn and practice their English. This doesn't of course mean that they had no interest in the spiritual dimension of these new ideas -- it's always possible to have more than one motive to participate in anything -- but it's worth noting that several early participants now live in English-speaking countries.

Another observation from those early years: almost no families or married couples participated. There may be as many reasons for this as there were individual participants, but it reinforces for me the sense that people did not see the new meetings as communities with cross-generational dimensions -- communities within which one might be born, married, and buried. It wasn't until we had been in Russia for several years that I began noticing another disconnect: some Russian participants in the Quaker community felt that their Quakerism was a way of expressing their interest in social justice or ethics, while their souls remained in the care of their Russian Orthodox (or, in one case, Baptist) connections. (I first wrote about this here: More thoughts on the hyphen within.)

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Back in the mid-1970's, Avery Dulles wrote the first version of his book Models of the Church. The "models" he describes are helpful and evocative, and together they build up a sense of the inclusivity and continuity of the Body of Christ. However, the language of these models might be a bit dense and abstract for those who have never connected with church as we understand it. My own most basic understanding of church in a Quaker context is this: a church is a group of people who gather around Jesus, learning (and helping each other learn) what it means to live with him at the center of our lives, including the ethical consequences. My three metaphors are intended to illustrate what this might mean in real life.

Incubator. When I was a brand new Christian (age 21), getting to know my very first church, I was fortunate that this congregation, Ottawa Friends Meeting, was full of wonderful encouragers. I've written about some of them (Deborah Haight; Anne Thomas) but it was true of the body as a whole as well. I don't know who exactly noticed that I had the temperament of an evangelist and had cross-cultural interests, but Ottawa Friends soon put me on their outreach committee and, later, proposed me for Canadian Yearly Meeting's Foreign Missionary Board. (Canadian Friends no longer supported missionaries, so this board disbursed endowment earnings to support international concerns.)

There's more. Elizabeth Oxlade, editor of the Canadian Friend, recruited me to help with her publication. After I spent a summer in Mendenhall, Mississippi, with John Perkins and the Voice of Calvary organization, Ottawa Friends helped me raise money for VOC. When Friends World Committee for Consultation met in Hamilton, Ontario, the meeting sent me as an observer -- a formative experience for a very new Friend, and one that had a fateful influence on my life. (To sum it up briefly: I eventually served on FWCC's staff for ten years.) Maybe there's a better word than "incubator" to tag this function of noticing new or young people and giving them the support and encouragement they need to try out their spiritual gifts, but in any case, that's what Ottawa Friends did for me.

What is your meeting or church doing to notice and nurture the spiritual gifts of people who maybe haven't been noticed up to now?

Laboratory. Once upon a time, when I was the new general secretary of Friends United Meeting, I went to the Lilly Endowment and tried to argue that they should give us grants to study certain trends in American Christianity, because we Friends were small-scale enough to do detailed research economically. I had in mind the liberal-evangelical divides, the controversies over same-sex relationships, and the increasing obsolescence of the traditional denomination.

This last area of course was of immediate interest to me as a denominational bureaucrat with an increasingly restless constituency. The liberal wing and the evangelical wing of FUM both had lots of people who wanted to break ties with us. Our stress points mirrored those of much larger denominations, but surely it would be easier to study us instead of denominations ten or a hundred times larger.

(Parenthetically, the Lilly Endowment's Craig Dykstra was proposing an interesting way of understanding those stresses. He traced the evolution of denominations in the USA more or less as follows:

• the early federal model -- parallel to the new country's federal structure;
• the corporate model, with departments for all the activities a self-respecting denomination would have, and a corresponding management structure
• finally, the licensing and regulatory functions that might give a denomination reason to exist when the previous conceits lose their appeal.)

The church-as-laboratory is a place where we can experiment with setting love and mercy and grace as top priorities, where we dare to test the ability of (for example) liberals and evangelicals to challenge each other lovingly, where rural and urban people learn to spot cultural tensions hiding behind theological labels, where we learn what happens when we take risks -- such as not paying military taxes.

In our laboratories of love, success is not always guaranteed. In the tensions around same-sex marriages, Northwest Yearly Meeting seemed to defy the odds for years, until it didn't. 

Observatory. The church is (potentially) a unique institution in our society. Our unity as participants in this institution is -- or should be -- based before all else around our relationship with God. All of the categories and labels that determine our other social and economic connections, fade in importance compared to the faith that brings us together in church. This unusual connection point gives us a platform to observe the forces at play in the world. As we pray together, discern together, and compare notes together, maybe we can see things differently -- with some chance to set aside our human biases in favor of learning what blesses or breaks the heart of God.

My first explicit experience of church as observatory came in February and March 2014. In the post "The zombies are coming out," I described the discussion our Moscow Quaker meeting had on February 23, the day Ukraine's political crisis came to a head. In retrospect, my mild description of our discussion wasn't completely candid about how lively, even heated, that discussion became at times. Meeting for business was scheduled for one week later, March 1, and we realized we Moscow Friends should somehow have something to share with the worldwide Quaker community. This led to our agreement to form a prayerful observatory, to pay careful attention to the course of events in Ukraine and Ukrainian-Russian relations in the days that followed, and to come prepared in a week to compare observations and see if we could say anything in one voice.

I was presiding clerk of Moscow Friends at the time. Despite my so-called faith, I approached that meeting for business with some dread. However, love prevailed: in the end, we were able to approve a statement in that meeting -- and another a week later.

The concept of church as observatory could easily become misused to imply that the church should become some sort of political watchdog. Our "telescope" is the discernment of the whole group, watching not just the news of the day, or the events that match our passing political fascinations, but the activities of the principalities and powers and evil in high places -- and the complicity of the church. There are certainly seasons of special focus, such as the church's role in casting out white nationalism, but we always remember that "... we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer." (2 Corinthians 5:16; context.)

What do you think are the strengths and weaknesses of these metaphors? What other metaphors help you make the meaning of "church" more alive and accessible to non-churchy audiences?

Part two: Lifeboat, garden, and portico.

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Jinan Bastaki on the history of South African apartheid ... and its relevance for Israel and Palestine today.

The UN's emergency plan for Palestinian recovery.

The Ryanair/Minsk scandal and the ensuing disinformation campaign.

Paul Parker marks a decade as Britain Yearly Meeting's senior staff member.

If I were in my beloved Chicago, I'd be going here. (Chicago Reader coverage of the Vivian Maier exhibition.)

Screenshot from Muscle Shoals.

Swampers drummer Roger Hawkins died last Friday. National Public Radio's obituary includes a few samples of his work. Washington Post's obituary. At this point in the documentary Muscle Shoals, we hear Wilson Pickett describe Roger Hawkins, and Jerry Wexler tells Roger what he thinks of him. A Hawkins sampler.

Sonic the Hedgehog turns 30. (Technically, his first appearance was actually 30 years ago in February. Why am I mentioning this? Some context here, on Sonic's 15th -- scroll down.)

Nancy Thomas apologizes for taking Sam Hill's name in vain.

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In case you think I'm taking myself too seriously, this ought to be reassuring. Mark Hummel and Jason Ricci -- "Just Your Fool."

Trust, the first testimony (now it gets personal)

Source.  

For years, I've been claiming that the number one Quaker testimony isn't peace, simplicity, equality, integrity, etc. -- it's trust. Without trust in God and each other, we'll continue to employ the world's time-honored methods of violence, greed, elitism, regardless of our denominational mythologies.

About four years ago, I tried to sum all this up in a blog post entitled "Trust, the first testimony," in which I argued that trust is "the crucial link between faith (or conversion) and discipleship." I want to apply that assertion to a particularly tender area of our lives: sex.

What drove me to make these few observations was a pair of articles sent to me by people close to me:

1) "Girls Just Wanna Be Heard: In her new book, Nancy Jo Sales explores how teenage girls on social media provoke attention—but fails to show how they also demand respect."

2) "Is This the End of the Important, Inappropriate Literary Man?"

Both of these articles (and many of the links embedded in them) are important on their own merits. They reveal some of the sharp dilemmas involved in reporting on how sexual intimacy is solicited, resisted, imposed, and exposed. These articles helped me realize that, even as a teacher of teens and young adults here in Russia, occasionally entrusted with glimpses into their nonacademic realities, I have lived a sheltered life for decades. May these articles provoke many helpful conversations, even conflicts where needed.

As a Christian, and specifically as a male Christian, I see a major untouched area in these conversations. I want to understand how to add this underrepresented element -- you guessed it, the element of trust -- not just into insider Christian conversations, but into the wider secular conversation. If it's already there and my sheltered situation keeps me from hearing about it, I'd like to know.

And here's why: trust is not just a discipleship issue, it is (I believe) wonderfully erotic.

Rhetorical question number one: Isn't it true that when lovers trust each other, their intimacy gains freedom and passion? After all, they are in putting themselves in situations of incredible physical and emotional vulnerability. Doesn't safety and security count for something? When risks are taken, can't they be taken more readily if communication is utterly open and forgiveness is already part of the covenant?

More questions: what are the long-term implications of trust? I remember Mary Cosby telling an audience at Wilmington Yearly Meeting that biblical teachings on sexual faithfulness had nothing to do with God wanting us not to have too much fun: it was more analogous to the signs that warn us, factually, that BRIDGE FREEZES BEFORE ROAD SURFACE. As much as we might like to believe in recreational, unattached sex, are we truly ready to deny the devastating effect of betrayal, whether or not that impact was anticipated by either or both partners?

What struck me forcefully in those articles I cited above is our culture's failure to tell men (and I suppose not only men) that their desire to have sex at any given moment is NOT SACRED. It in fact CAN BE RESISTED. No matter how strong our personalities, no matter how accustomed we've become to being flattered and even seduced, no matter how much we enjoy projecting our influence through specifically sexual channels, we have no more right to manipulate anyone into disadvantageous sexual situations than we have to drive our beloved sportscars through town at 150 mph.

Are there things we can teach sexually energetic people that respect their personalities and give them honest guidance about how to manage the task of being trustworthy sexual beings? When I joined the staff of Friends World Committee back in 1983, my colleague Gordon Browne told me that, when I traveled in the ministry, opportunities for recreational sex would pop up, often as a side-consequence of being seen as a safe mediator in local congregations' difficult situations. If I hadn't been alerted in advance to the seductiveness of the visiting-hero role, I would likely have found out about it the wrong way.

Working a twelve-step program in light of my family's legacy of alcoholism also proved very helpful in managing sexual yearnings. Just as my father hid stashes of alcohol around the house, I learned that we can develop human "stashes" ... people who serve in our minds as fantasy candidates for future sexual adventures, should the opportunities present themselves. These insights don't at all guarantee sainthood or prevent temptation, they're simply tools to reinforce the deliberate work of being trustworthy.

Let's put it all a bit more positively: there doesn't seem to be a lot of teaching or testimony on the wonderful outcomes that resisting gratification can have in the long run. Isn't the best form of seduction -- if that is what you want to call it -- the cultivation of honest mutual trust? This is where discipleship and eroticism meet: the lifelong task of being trustworthy, in all its daily challenges and recovery from failures, leading to relationships that far exceed any "conquest" in sheer passion and enduring sweetness.

We should also be honest about the appetite for novelty that is part of the mythology of unbounded recreational sex. Sorry, it's not a lifestyle; it's an addiction, plain and simple. Novelty is just one facet of sexual experience, but its exaggerated importance leads to depression, jail, or death, just like any other fatal addiction -- not to mention the consequences for partners, assuming you're not a total sociopath.

So this might be the proposition that the disciple can discuss with the secular conversation partner: deferring gratification for the sake of building trust has a huge long-term erotic payoff. Just as with every other aspect of Quaker discipleship, we are going back through the flaming sword into the paradise of God, where there was no hierarchy, greed, or violence, and where we were naked and unashamed.

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Friday PS: A bit more on that issue of men (or anyone it pertains to) learning that their desire for sex isn't sacred:

What seems to be happening is that we no longer tolerate the assumption that "boys will be boys." I remember the crushing disillusionment that came when I heard about charges that some male Friends in Canadian Yearly Meeting were behaving as sexual predators. Not very many, true, but in those very first years I was a Quaker, I had this giddy impression that Canadian Yearly Meeting was some kind of idealistic alternative world. OK, I was naive (and my personal life was not at the saintliest level, for that matter), but I wasn't entirely wrong. My mentors and most of the people I admired were just as wonderful as I thought they were. But not everyone.... Being male, I was not a target of the behavior at the center of the complaints. I was clueless and oblivious. As it turned out, generations of Quaker daughters had been told the same thing that girls were being told in the secular world: the best response to predatory behavior was to endure, avoid, and pass the warnings quietly along the grapevine, rather than making a fuss. But the historical moment had arrived when that conventional wisdom was finally rejected.

When anonymous reports of predatory behavior are published, or borderline predators are accused on social networks, such as the Jezebel article above describes, injustices are bound to happen. Not every accusation will emerge from a 100% clear-cut predator/victim encounter. My point is that sexually aggressive people are now living in a far riskier world, and they have to face the question of whether their preferred lifestyle and image are really worth it.

A related issue: the disconnect between Christians in the Atlantic culture, primarily western Europe and North America and related nations, and Christians in the rest of the world. Sometimes the issue of homosexuality is the hot fault line in the breakdowns between those two broad camps, as exemplified by the tensions in the Anglican communion worldwide. But I think there are deeper issues relating to the different ways we understand the relationship between individual and community. For one thing, some societies whose majorities live at a subsistence level simply don't get the Western individualistic attitude toward sex as an unbounded recreational activity. I've heard Kenyan Quakers ask bluntly: "Why is sexual freedom so much more important than economic justice?"

The challenge doesn't go in just one direction, however. Sometimes I suspect that non-Western Christian leaders use morality as a rhetorical club when convenient for confronting Westerners who defend sexual and reproductive freedom, but they don't then turn around and scrutinize the behaviors of their own predators. Male-dominated leadership patterns are not exactly guaranteeing justice in their own territories.

Again, trust turns out to have a central role. If our only source of unity comes from finding out whether we have the same allies and the same enemies, we will remain divided. When we determine that the only unity worth having is in Christ, we can begin to let down our guard long enough to explore tenderly what that most precious unity actually looks like.

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More on trust and consent: What's so urgent about sex?

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... from Matrimony in the True Church: The Seventeenth-Century Quaker Marriage Approbation Discipline, by Kristianna Polder:

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Oregonian writer's quick thinking on Dutch Bros coffee story earned her a zillion hits. (And her original story.)

Greek Catholics respond to appeal of Orthodox intellectuals.

Earlier this month, the mathematician and poet Aleksandr Esenin-Volpin died. He was the son of the great "peasant-poet" Sergei Esenin. Among the many tributes to Esenin-Volpin, here's one that honors his civic courage.

While we're at it: A literary map to the Moscow metro.

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Mother is it ok if I call you mama?
My own walked away when I broke the law
And standing on the bridge
Feeling like falling
Would you pray for me mama?
St. Teresa
Have mercy on my soul

Rightsizing

The Great Moscow Circus on Vernadsky Prospect.  Up until this past weekend, I'd never been to the circus in Russia, to the horror of some of our friends. On Saturday I corrected this deficiency. I still have some nagging questions about circuses in general, but it was very impressed by the art and spectacle here.

In the world of business, "rightsizing" is sometimes a euphemism for the unpleasant prospect of "downsizing" -- for reducing the workforce. But in the context of American politics, maybe "rightsizing" could be exactly the concept that could unite both conservatives and progressives as a goal for government reform.

When I was in university in Canada, zero-based budgeting was just coming into vogue as an important principle in Canadian public administration. But the "zero" doesn't mean reducing the government to zero in accordance with some ideological talking point, it means that every line item must justify itself rather than coast from year to year. It means that the resources allocated to the government must be sufficient to pay for the tasks assigned to the government by the people through the legislative process -- no less, no more.

In practice, even with the help of computers, starting each budget cycle at zero for each of the thousands (millions) of federal government budget lines is impractical, but every program and office can sooner or later take its turn to face something like the following grilling:

• Is this program doing what it should? How do we know? Does it need to continue?

• Is this program leaking money or resources? Is it trustworthy or does it resist examination?

• Can its functions be integrated with another program, another department, a public-private collaboration, without sacrificing accountability? How do we preserve the expertise it has built up while not just letting it coast?

No doubt many such questions are already asked, but how do citizens find the answers? Most U.S. taxpayers don't begrudge taxes well spent, but debates that polarize around "tax and spend liberals" and "drowning government in a bathtub" avoid tackling this central question: slogans aside, how exactly do we gain and keep the taxpayer's trust?

Let's remind ourselves why we have a government at all. In the words of the U.S. Constitution, the institutions it sets up are intended "... 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...." These are not inconsequential goals. Even if they can be met in part simply by maintaining a right division of labor with the constituent states and the people themselves, there is still plenty for the federal government to do on behalf of the whole country. But how do we keep trust and proportionality in the process?

Here are some of the ways I'd love to see this theme influence our debates on government:

Am I just a total idealist, or can we in fact use budgetary discipline to build bridges between conservatives and progressives? Where are our pilot projects? How can we creatively harness the skepticism each group has about the other, and the ways we can correct each other's blind spots, so that neither cynicism nor complacency wins the day?

Can we take a more inclusive and systemic approach to "the general Welfare"? For example, let's take health care financing and health insurance. Disease and trauma hit every single person at some point, so why should medical care not be classified as a social benefit just as fire and police departments, schools, and public libraries meet similarly near-universal human needs? Somehow, in the USA, we have defined fire departments and public libraries as suitable for public support, but the far more expensive institutions of health care have been defined as mostly reserved for private markets. Only public health  (screening, contagion, and some mental health and addiction concerns) and health insurance for retirees are recognized as requiring at least some fire-department-like attention. I really don't understand why we should trust the enormous bureaucracies of private insurance companies, given their financial incentives, to be more honest and caring than a well-run government. And if a government isn't well-run, if it doesn't serve us well, then that is the problem we need to sort out.

Critics of single-payer health care financing correctly say that taxes would have to increase to cover a centralized system, and defenders say that the savings from eliminating the huge private bureaucracies and cost-calculating systems now in place would more than cover the cost. But do these critics and advocates actually confer with each other rather than shouting at external audiences? If they do, please help me find the conversations, because this is a major issue in the current presidential campaign, and I hear almost nothing now but one-upsmanship.

What is the proper role of government in regulating our "militias" well, including guns held in private hands? In most of the world, for better or for worse, it is long-settled practice that the government has a monopoly on lethal violence. People are of course allowed to hunt, but not each other. Our Constitution protects gun ownership, but how we buy and sell guns, and of what type, and where we carry them, is of immediate and understandable interest to law enforcement -- those whom we expect to maintain that lethal monopoly. How do we have a thoughtful conversation about our expectations of government to regulate a better balance between gun-owners' rights and the protection of the general public?

There's a lot of dishonest rhetoric around these functions of government. For example, we already have a fair amount of gun control in place at various levels of government: rules about buying guns, carrying them on public transport, prohibiting many kinds of weapons altogether, and similar common-sense "infringements"; but because civility on this subject has broken down so thoroughly, we can't even begin systematic improvements to this patchwork approach. As a result, there is nothing "well regulated" about our government's function of keeping us safe from guns. Can we ever establish an arena to compare our different understandings?

I have the sense that many militant gun-rights advocates feel the government is not trustworthy in this area any more than it is in budgeting and taxation. But again, sort that out separately; your private gun collection, or your off-balance neighbor's, is more likely to cause local mayhem than a renaissance of good national government. And please be honest: no politician on the national scene today wants to take anyone's legally-acquired and safely-stored weapon away from them.

Finally, can our country's worldwide imperial pretensions be rightsized? As a Christian pacifist, I have some predictable prejudices in this area, but even setting that dimension aside for a moment, I want to know when and where we can ask (for example) questions about the $65 billion we've spent on Afghanistan's military forces and $25 billion on Iraq's, neither of which seem ready for prime time. These are not Golden Fleece-sized scandals -- these sorts of unaccountable expenditures dwarf most of the welfare programs that seem so dispensable to many politicians. As with health care financing reform, incremental approaches to our worldwide military expenditures probably won't work. We need to figure out how we fit into the world community generally and how to pay for the space we take up in that world system. In the meantime, it seems to me that there's still an important place for war tax resistance. One Christian family's taxes pays for only a few moments of this permanent war, but if a significant proportion of the evangelical community decided it had enough....

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Nicaea II ... will it happen?

All Christians are refugees.

Richard Ostling and Terry Mattingly and the same old question: do journalists (and does anyone) understand who evangelicals are?

Today the ruble sank well below the 80-per-dollar mark. In the meantime, Russians face economic uncertainty with, among other things, a national treasure of a different kind: humor.

My previous gun control proposal -- free guns!

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Jean-Rene Ella performs a Skip James song ...

"Don't look for enemies! Look for friends!"

"Don't look for enemies! Look for friends!" Peace demonstration in Moscow, September 21, 2014. Source.

"The enemy of my enemy" is a policy that guarantees
incoherence and confusion. (Source.)

This may be important advice for all of us at a time when every major controversy seems to demand villains. And it was a wonderful, very welcome reminder to see this slogan on the streets of Moscow, where the photo above was taken, when peace advocates were being attacked as traitors. But in a world where "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," where false communities based on authoritarianism and identity politics are common, it's worth thinking about what "looking for friends" really means.

A few weeks ago, our pastor at Eugene Friends Church, Clyde Parker, said in his sermon that (slightly paraphrased) if you don't know my shadow places, you don't know me.  The places where I have struggled, failed ... these are what I'd prefer you didn't know about, but if I keep them hidden from you, I'm undermining our friendship. When I open up to you about what's concealed in my unlit places, I'm basing our friendship on truth, not on shared enemies or even on shared ideals and visions, as important as those ideals might be.

I think this is true not just for people, but as the sign in Moscow implies, it's also true for communities and nations. But it's hard for empires to look for friends, instead of gaining allies by bullying or buying them. You'd think, for example, that the USA would be a bit restrained in criticizing Palestine for joining the International Criminal Court--in other words, for being even more willing to acknowledge the rule of law than the USA is. (The USA has announced that it will not join.) But it's normal behavior for Americans to criticize the failure of the rule of law elsewhere while rejecting the scrutiny of others.

Russia, too, resists looking at reality. Russian officials complain about NATO expansion while demonstrating no understanding of its neighbors' horrible memories of Russia's own historical expansionism, particularly during the Soviet era. One of our friends, a Russian, traveled in the Baltic countries, visiting local Quaker meetings, during the height of the tension around Crimea. She reported that local citizens' fears of an imminent attack from Russia were very real, even though, objectively, an actual attack was highly improbable.

If large nations found ways to be honest and even contrite about their own sins, they might be pleasantly surprised at how ready others are to become friends. Isn't it worth a try? "NO!" -- I can imagine national leaders saying. "My own political base depends on looking strong." And so, for lack of genuine friendship, the whole enemy-driven imperial apparatus keeps shambling, snarling, bullying along.

Let's get in its way. Let's be persistent in repeating and implementing that Moscow demonstrator's call to seek friends, not enemies. May it gain resonance in this new year.

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Righteous links:  ~ Remembering Gleb Yakunin, the priest who fought the establishments (plural). More on Father Gleb. ~ New politics of torture. ~ Israel rejected the ticking bomb defense of torture. ~ The tragedy of the American military, and where Fallows' article falls short. ~ Why Jesus wouldn't attend anti-Muslim demonstrations. ~ Stalker as a video game.

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Music to count musicians by. (How many are there in this video?) Enjoy!

Straw feminists

Any question about who's boss here? Source.

As an evangelical Christian, I feel I have no choice but to be a feminist. Otherwise, everything I believe about the Gospel being GOOD NEWS for all men and women, boys and girls, and all that I believe about the SOVEREIGNTY of God, would go out the window. It would turn out that all my trust that  God was doing something new in Jesus, would be just pious decorations for the way power has always been arranged in this world. Christian faith and practice would be hostage to whatever the local culture felt about who should be on top, and who should meekly obey.

So here is what the current patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church says about feminism (from a speech to the Ukrainian Union of Orthodox Women just this past Tuesday; original here):

... It is completely obvious that the woman is the keeper of the domestic hearth, the well-defined center of family life. Nobody would dispute this. The man directs his attention out beyond the home, working and making money; but the woman's attention is turned inward, toward home life and the children. And if this extremely important function of the woman is destroyed, then so is everything else: from the family of our birth to the land of our birth. No wonder we say Motherland--it's no coincidence, because the woman is the keeper of the home.

We know how it functions, this false propaganda of false values. It imposes a belief that to name a woman's role as mother is humiliating--that there are higher and more noble tasks for women, that women who carry out their inherent service (yes, I would call it service) are put into some kind of subordinate relationship to men.

...

I consider that the phenomenon we know as feminism to be very dangerous. This is because feminist organizations proclaim a pseudo-freedom that ideally should be realized outside the bounds of marriage and family. In the center of feminist ideology we don't find family or bringing up children, but a completely different role that frequently contradicts family values. It's probably no coincidence that most feminist leaders are unmarried women. I noticed this as far back as when I was working in Geneva at the World Council of Churches. At the time the theme of feminism was only starting to arise. While still a relatively young person, I was surprised that the leaders of the so-called feminist movement had no connections with family obligations, with very few exceptions. All the subtleties of mutual relationships--love, faithfulness, concern, responsibility--were reduced by feminist ideologues to social, political, financial levels, to the distribution of power and influence. This is, I believe, exactly where feminism goes astray.

...

Given all of this, I'd also like to say that I don't see anything bad about women making careers in politics, business, and many other areas presently dominated by men. But I must say that in many of these professional fields women achieve great success. This is evidence that, with the right allocation of responsibilities, with the right ordering of priorities, a woman can do both: carry out her service as wife and mother and make a contribution to society.

For many people I know, these sentiments would serve as an easy target for savage criticism and mocking. The news stories I've seen about this speech have emphasized the stereotypical gender roles and the description of feminism as "dangerous." And at about the time the patriarch gave this speech, two FEMEN activists had just greeted Russian president Vladimir Putin in Germany with their bare breasts and backs painted with rudely-worded political slogans, as if to confirm the "danger."

What can I say about Kirill's words that doesn't play into facile categorizations? Here are a few things for starters; maybe you have more.

What did he get right? The roles of wife and mother are precious and important beyond any possibility of dispute. A community, town, country, where these roles are cherished will be a better place to live. Anyone who does not value these roles should not be put into a position of power over those who do, because such a turnaround would surely lead to the ruin of the community.

But here's my point: I do not personally know a single feminist who proclaims the superiority of a "pseudo-freedom" that depends on being "outside the bounds of marriage and family." Not a one! I don't know who was working at the World Council of Churches in Kirill's youth, but is he in conversation with today's Christian feminists, those who are not ignorant of the "subtleties of human relationships"? Or does it serve his argument to ignore their existence in favor of just one narrow stream of feminism, namely those easiest to caricaturize?

Kirill accuses those ideologues of reducing human relationships to political and financial categories. But the male leaders of the church industry (and not just in Russia!) are not above swinging their political and financial clout--their "power and influence"--against people they disagree with. Listen to Kirill lay down the law in an earlier speech: "God willed that the apostles were men, that men fulfilled the apostolic ministry of the church; fortunately, in Orthodoxy, women are not attempting to promote a reconsideration of this provision of apostolic tradition. Men perform the hierarchical functions within the Church."

What is most disheartening about these speeches is their anti-evangelistic quality. This kind of talk must be very comforting to those who are already totally dedicated to the viewpoint that there is only one way to organize society, and that only men are qualified to define the boundaries around men's and women's roles. But for those who have an unquenchable, even God-given hunger for something more miraculous, something more trust-based rather than boundary-based, how can this rhetoric bring them to Jesus?

When will the time come for Quakers to raise a loving but unequivocal dissent?

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By the way, by acknowledging the justice of Kirill's defense of marriage and motherhood, I don't grant women any monopoly on keeping "the domestic hearth." When Judy and I were young parents, each working part-time and staying home part-time, I cherished my daytime hours with my children. I resented being praised, by those who didn't know me, for "babysitting" my own children! (This was a quarter century ago.)

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Two other articles I read this week have contributed to these reflections. Please read this one ("Linguistic Look at Russia's Human Rights Record") as soon as possible; I don't know when it will disappear behind a pay wall. I've often seen this phenomenon of Russians and Westerners talking right past each other because they have fundamentally different ways of analyzing and defining normal behavior. Russians themselves are divided along the linguistic lines described by Olesya Zakharova. For evidence, read descriptions of the debate going on right now in Russian legislative circles over the draft laws to protect believers' feelings.

Look at this item on homosexuals' rights in Russia, and again you can apply Zakharova's analysis.

The other article is by our friend and colleague Becky Ankeny, superintendent of Northwest Yearly Meeting, "God's Will for Women...." The powerful heart of her argument is this: "...the witness to equality makes space for women to be equally obedient to God as men can be." The issue now facing men: Are we going to be obedient to God in this matter, or are we going to prioritize our own "power and influence," dishonestly flattering the sacredness of motherhood while marginalizing the real mothers and wives who are among our most powerful feminists?

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E.J. Dionne, Jr., "What we can learn from Margaret Thatcher and David Kuo."

"What's the point of teaching foreign languages?"

"Irrepressible Moscow." (Thanks to aldaily.com.)

In honor of tomorrow's Cosmonauts Day. (1981 television program, in Russian.)

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A fascinating documentary about the blues in Russia. As Olga Ponomaryova says, "I did not choose the blues, the blues chose me. That's the way it is.... I compare it to when I go to church for confession. The situation is exactly the same: you can't lie."

Saint Petersburg Blues from Jazzgazz on Vimeo.