... even when such violence serves a strategic purpose. When that strategic purpose does not exist, however, the moral case evaporates altogether. Israel now finds itself in a morally untenable situation. Rather than incur the world’s growing wrath, increased economic pressure, and the greater likelihood of future violence, Israel must reverse course and pursue alternatives to its campaign of mass death in Gaza.
—Robert A. Pape, "The Unparalleled Devastation of Gaza: Why Punishing Civilians Has Not Yielded Strategic Success." Foreign Affairs, August 7, 2025.
Robert Pape's article is behind a paywall, unfortunately. (It might almost be worth subscribing to Foreign Affairs for just this article, but I've seen consistently good argumentation in this periodical, even when I disagree.) Briefly, the author draws on his studies of previous wars that included mass destruction of civilian populations to conclude that, even setting morality aside (which he doesn't), such destruction rarely serves the claimed strategic goals.
I thought to myself, "Robert Pape...why does that name sound familiar?" Here's why: I'd just come across a reference to his book, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War, in an article that was very timely in a completely different way, because it referred to the bombing of Hiroshima 80 years ago this past week.
(A personal aside: I've written before on this blog about how the Grinch stole Hiroshima, so I don't intend to repeat those points here. But Judy and I just celebrated our 45th wedding anniversary, and, not by coincidence, our wedding took place on August 9, the anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki. Several of the guests at our wedding had been taking part in the annual Hiroshima-Nagasaki peace vigil in Boston. I now reflect that we were married on the 35th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, and our latest wedding anniversary last week coincided with the 80th anniversary of that bombing. At the actual time of those bombings, my mother was a resident of Kobe, Japan.)
Pape's book was cited in an article by Graham Parsons on the Lawfare site, "The World Learned the Wrong Lesson from Hiroshima." Parsons takes on the arguments for the strategic usefulness of bombing civilian populations, in the face of the popularity of such arguments.
Teaching ethics at West Point for 13 years, I faced this view on a daily basis. Many of my students assumed that ethics is a kind of luxury. It helps service members defend their actions to themselves and to others. But it doesn’t help them win. I remember one student concluding, “Just war theory is a great way to lose a war.”
Parsons refers to the USA's current secretary of defense Pete Hegseth as an extreme proponent of the utter irrelevance of ethics in warfare. So, in the context of the atomic bombings, "Hegseth has chosen his side in the conflict between strategy and morality that Hiroshima supposedly reveals."
Parsons continues,
But Hiroshima reveals no such conflict. Contrary to the conventional discourse, many historians have concluded that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not cause Japan to surrender.
...
What was most consequential in the eyes of Japanese authorities was not the vulnerability of the civilian population to U.S. bombs, but the entrance of the Soviet Union into the war against them. The Soviets surprised the Japanese by declaring war and invading Manchuria on the same day as the bombing of Nagasaki. The Japanese leadership, who knew that their war was unwinnable for some time, was hoping the Soviets would act as a neutral arbiter of negotiations between Japan and the U.S. so that Japan could end the war while avoiding unconditional surrender. When the Soviets declared war, that possibility was off the table and Japanese leaders saw no better option than unconditional surrender.
Honestly, I've never thought about the similarities between the atomic bombings of Japan and the rubbishing of the Gaza Strip. Whether we can draw a parallel between Japanese motives and those of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, I'm struck by a very telling similarity: the apparent assumption that the greatest possible amount of death and destruction serves any kind of defensible goal, even within the logic of warfare. Graham Parsons is right, we've not learned the lessons of Hiroshima, and we're certainly not applying them to today's daily slaughter of Palestinians.
Reality check: drawing from research published in The Lancet, Robert Pape writes,
In sum, the authors of the study suggested that Israel’s campaign has caused at least an additional 26,000 Palestinian deaths and perhaps over 120,000 additional deaths, with the true death toll possibly exceeding 186,000. Taking that into account, as of late July 2025, Israel’s war in Gaza has led to the deaths of between five to ten percent of the prewar population of about 2.2 million. This represents an unprecedented slaughter. Israel’s campaign in Gaza is the most lethal case of a Western democracy using the punishment of civilians as a tactic of war.
Present tense: yesterday's compiled "impact snapshot" from the Gaza Strip.
Back in the mid-70's, I spent a lot of time in the Russian-language holdings at Carleton University's library. Somehow I came across a book entitled The Atheist's Companion. It was composed of encyclopedia-style articles on the world's religions, along with assessments of their inadequacies in Marxist terms.
Having recently discovered Quakers at the time, I flipped through the book to see if it said anything about us. It did! To my amusement, it listed a lot of our positive features, and then abruptly dismissed our "reactionary morality" as "sterile."
Thanks to the Internet, I found the text of this propaganda classic, so you can see this assessment for yourself:
The Quaker sect arose during the English bourgeois revolution among the urban poor, on the basis of Anabaptist and other heresies, as a result of disillusionment with a revolution that gave nothing to the people. Its founder George Fox (1624-1691) came to the conclusion that the truth is not in the sacred books, but in the hearts of people. Truth should be sought in the “inner light” that illuminates a person and that testifies to the presence of Christ in the believer. The doctrine of the "inner light", which is placed above the scriptures and the church, is the main point of Quakerism.
The term "Quakers" means "tremblers", the name given in mockery, due to the convulsive movements, seizures, which in early times accompanied Quaker prayers. Quakers deny any specific worship and sacraments, rites, clergy. Quaker meetings take place in empty rooms; silently, with covered heads, they sit in anticipation of being illuminated by the light from above, until some member of the community will feel "full of light" and will begin to preach. Singing and music at Quaker meetings are not permitted. Marriages between Quakers are accomplished with a simple promise of fidelity in the presence of elders. Burials take place without any ceremony. Quakers are characterized by a rejection of luxury; at first they did not allow themselves theatre, dance, or sports. Quakers place a high value on the independence of the individual, and therefore they do not remove their hats before anything or anyone; they deny titles and address everyone as “thee” and “thou” [not the plural "you" to individuals]; they do not kneel.
Quakers teach that one should not count on changing the people at the head of the government in order to make things better; improvement can only be expected from the spirit. They deny violence, war, oaths, and preach “non-resistance to evil”; they teach about universal brotherhood; they widely practice charitable work and religious tolerance. Quakers’ reactionary morality, which replaces social revolution with moral evolution, is sterile.
Each community meets once a month for moral discipline, to provide advice, and to resolve any disputes between individual members. The highest authority is the yearly Quaker meetings of a given country, below that level are the quarterly meetings of several congregations.
At first, Quakers were cruelly persecuted. For example, in 1656-1658, 9,000 Quakers in England were imprisoned. The Toleration Act of 1689 put an end to the persecution of Quakers in England. In 1682, the Quaker Penn bought the land on the Delaware in North America from the English government, and founded the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania, but it was not until 1724 that the Quakers ceased to be persecuted in other colonies of North America. The Quakers advocated for the freedom of blacks, some of the Quakers participating as armed soldiers in the war between the North and the South. In 1957 there were 180 thousand Quakers, of which 120 thousand were in the USA, 22 thousand in England, 20 thousand in East Africa. Quakers advocate peaceful coexistence.
Setting aside our reactionary morality for the moment, you can draw your own conclusions about the selectivity and uniformity of this description of Friends, and its compressed timeline. I wonder why the words "Friend," "Society of Friends," "Friends church" never appear.
You may have noticed that the word "spirit" is not capitalized, but in Soviet times publishers also didn't capitalize "God." (Dostoevsky gave God a capital G, but his Soviet-era publishers did not.)
"Peaceful coexistence" isn't just an abstract term. It was a policy and a propagandists' talking point granting that the NATO countries and the USSR could live together peacefully, and challenging the Western countries to make the same declaration. Of course, one could say that "peaceful coexistence" might be an example of a substitution of "moral evolution" for "social revolution."
One final note: this is the second edition of The Atheist's Companion. Nobody apparently thought to do any fact-checking in revising the first edition from 1959. As it turns out, the 1961 entry on Quakers is almost identical to the 1959 edition, with no corrections. There are two interesting changes:
In 1959, in the first paragraph, there's a bit more to the description of George Fox. "George Fox (1624-1691), having immersed himself in the Holy Scriptures, came to the conclusion...."
The 1959 edition also doesn't have that final sentence in the 1961 edition's third paragraph—nothing about our bourgeois morality. In fact, the 1959 edition, however inadequate, is 100% positive about us. I can't help wondering whether Nikita Khrushchev's anti-religious campaign at the time affected the book's editors.
Speaking of descriptions of Friends in Russian, see this exercise from a recent Woodbrooke study course in Friends, conducted in Russian. (Here's the Russian-language original of the exercise.)
Following up on last week's link to Russian Communists' rejecting Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin, here's Alexey Uvarov's article on "Rehabbing Stalin."
This high praise for Nancy French's book Ghosted: An American Story from Christianity Today editor Russell Moore will save me a lot of words:
I didn't know writing could be this haunting and hilarious, heartbreaking and exhilarating all at the same time. I did not want it to end. This tour de force of storytelling and sense-making is one of the most gripping and beautiful memoirs in a generation.
Nancy French was born and raised in the Appalachian foothills, a grandchild of the mountain culture, and grew up in a church community that nurtured her faith and gave her love and care ... until the devastating day that it didn't. She attended a Church of Christ college ... until she couldn't stomach the chapel's lazy positivity and stopped attending, even though chapel attendance was compulsory.
As a result, at age twenty, "by now my affection for Rush Limbaugh and church had disappeared and I considered myself a feminist, atheist, liberal." That was the moment when she encountered David French, a Republican Christian law student, an encounter that resulted in a restoration of faith (well, not the exact same faith), a marriage that has lasted three decades and counting—and a career in ghostwriting for Republicans that didn't last quite as long.
Obviously, there's nothing terribly linear about French's story, with each swoop and dive reflecting something of the wrenching spiritual, political, and cultural turmoil of her country in those decades. Her story includes betrayal, giddy hope, predators protected by churches, miracles, allies lost and found—it's a good thing she's an excellent storyteller! Take a look at these reviews for more of what I mean:
Ghosted has many important messages, including powerful testimony against the shame of being a childhood target of sexual assault in the church. I hope everyone who needs these messages will read this book. But there's something else that intrigued me as a lifelong lefty: the passing references to the way conservatives see us. I'm not necessarily talking now about who is objectively more correct about policy and morality; it's the cultural assumptions and conclusions that seemingly entitle them to dismiss us (and us them).
For example, here French is commenting on the reactions to the book she co-authored with Sarah Palin's daughter Bristol:
I’d thought that people of both parties would rally around Bristol and show her compassion. That’s not what happened. It slowly dawned on me that when the Democrats loudly proclaimed “believe all women,” they really meant “the right kind of women”—meaning not “right” on the political spectrum at all. I shouldn’t have been surprised. They had embraced Ted Kennedy, even though he flipped his car, sent his female passenger careening into a pond, and left her there to die. They revered Bill Clinton, even though he was credibly accused of rape by multiple women.
Bristol was well spoken and the book was clear. However, a nuanced, trauma-informed conversation did not arise from her revelations. Bristol told the truth, and Democrats laughed. After seeing how people mocked this young mother, I was fully confident the Democrats were not only wrong on the issue of women, they were callously wrong. They harbored and protected abusers of women, and Republicans alone would stand against sexual injustice.
In spite of my certainty, the truth turned out to be much more complicated than I thought.
Soon a major turning point for French came: the acclamation Donald Trump received from the very people whose ostensible values she cherished and represented in her writing, and who, as it turned out, turned against her and her husband when they found that contradiction intolerable. As those contradictions mounted up with every Trumpian assault on rhetorical decency, she lost many clients, and kept the few that agreed to her condition that she would not write pieces in favor of Trump.
In my mind, however, I made a vow: I would not bear false witness against my liberal neighbor.
That one decision was the beginning of the end of my political ghostwriting career.
I hope that progressives, even in the shadow of Donald Trump's devastating attacks on political and ethical norms, are willing to make the same commitment against bearing false witness against their (our) opponents.
Here's a podcast in which Julie Roys, a Christian investigative journalist who often focuses on church-related corruption and abuse, interviews Nancy French.
Back on March 27, Medardo Gómez, Lutheran bishop of El Salvador, died. He made a deep impression on me during a visit back in the time of the civil war and death squads. Rest in peace!
My heart is pounding, words are lining up impatiently at the tip of my tongue, the silent room suddenly feels as if it's holding its breath, I'm starting to tremble.... Should I speak?
The first time I had this experience in a Quaker meeting for worship was around Christmas 1974, at Uwchlan Meeting in Downingtown, Pennsylvania. I knew the theoretical answer to my urgent question. In the words of Ruth M. Pitman in the Canadian Friend magazine (later published as "On the Vocal Ministry"):
It is understood in such a Meeting that any messages that are spoken strive to be God’s word for these people at this time; that is, no one will speak unless he has prayerfully considered two questions: whether the message is God’s or his own, and whether it should be given to these people now, or is for the individual alone.
But I had been among Friends for only a few months, and furthermore, this particular group was not my home meeting. Who was I to say whether God was the source of my thoughts in this time and place? What business did I have interrupting this peaceful assembly?
I did overcome my self-doubts, and spoke a message on spiritual power in the context of the recent oil embargo. I make no claims as to the merits of this first message, but the experience felt like a sort of baptism.
Confession: I approached the book with some initial skepticism, which may say more about my prejudices than anything about the book or author. First of all, Rhiannon Grant's Quaker community is Britain Yearly Meeting, which despite its variety is typically described as liberal. Its meetings for worship are, except for special occasions, unprogrammed (see this post for a bit about "programmed" and "unprogrammed"). Although I spent my first eight years as a Friend in similar cultures in Canadian, New England, and Baltimore Yearly Meetings, the rest of my Quaker experience of forty-plus years have mainly been among programmed Friends served by pastors. Would any of her observations apply where I live?
My second apprehension: would a book-length (even a Quaker Quicks-length) treatment come across as an attempt to groom the aesthetically perfect unprogrammed meeting, pitched to the comfort level of Atlantic-culture demographics in terms of class, education, verbal fluency, and long attention spans, or would there be room for Holy Spirit spontaneity, of grief, ecstasy, confession, prophecy, song, all that potentially attaches to Quakers quaking?
My apprehensions were unfounded.
First of all, Rhiannon Grant is clear about her own Quaker context, but is aware of the range of worship styles among Friends, including programmed worship. More importantly, her practical guidance on speaking in worship seems to me to apply to any Friends meeting in which time is set aside for what programmed Friends often call "open worship." As she says early on, "The understanding of this book is that when we are open and willing in the stillness of meeting for worship, any of us can be moved to speak." That's why "any of us" can benefit from her observations.
She doesn't address the specific situation of a Friends pastor or regular speaker preparing a sermon, but even here many of her suggestions would be useful. It's clear that in her culture, advance preparation of a message is usually inappropriate—but there is no hint of taboo. (My own belief is that the work of worship-planning and sermon-writing should be surrounded by the same level of sensitivity that we expect in meeting for worship. I'm sometimes startled by how similar sermon-writing can be to giving spontaneous messages in unprogrammed worship.)
Another feature of Grant's book: its kind, unpretentious, open-ended tone, often grounded in personal experience, with touches of humor. Examples:
Contrasting ordinary speech with ministry during worship: (Link added.)
In ministry, by contrast, the majority of the source is inspiration: even if I have done a little bit of planning, like being asked to read from Advices & Queries, I wait to be led to speak and to feel what would be right to read. Usually, I don't speak at all unless that strong inspiration arrives. There will still be a little bit of me in there—including whatever I feel about having to speak in front of others—but ego is in the minority and the promptings of love and truth are in the lead.
There can be times when it is hard to tell which element is strongest. Am I really inspired to say this, or do I want to say it? Am I sharing this story about having a wonderful spiritual experience on holiday because it's brought me insight, or because I want other people to know about my holiday and my spirituality?
When you have finished saying what you have been given to say:
After giving ministry, there can be a sense of relief. If you experience physical sensations like shaking, they might either stop or briefly get worse. Sometimes I experience a wave of anxiety about the mundane social side of the situation—in my discernment process, I focussed on the message, and it's only afterwards that I ask myself whether I said something ridiculous and whether everyone hates me now.
What about theology? Rhiannon Grant explicitly says that theology is a secondary concern for this book, and refers readers to her books that focus more directly on theology. As a self-described evangelical Quaker (sometimes in despair that the word "evangelical" doesn't communicate what I stubbornly think it ought to!), I'm guessing that she and I are probably not in the exact same place. This book, however, communicates a warm theological hospitality that enhances rather than weakens the practical guidance she gives for speaking in worship.
One of her book's great virtues is that it simultaneously honors and demythologizes the ministry of speaking in worship. Grant recognizes its high value as a way God shapes us as a community and guides us toward other ways of ministering to our world. At the same time, she considers all the various temperaments we find among us, including those who speak too readily, and those who feel totally unready to speak at all. She describes various ways that spoken ministry can derail a meeting for worship—and how Friends might respond—but also points out that disruption might at times be God's actual intent! She holds up the precious service of elders or other experienced Friends who can encourage the budding minister or help those whose ministry can be unhelpful. She considers the practice of "afterword" or "afterwords," a time after the end of the worship when thoughts that did not seem to rise to the level of ministry during worship—perhaps less than prophecy but more than casual discussion—can be shared with the group. She describes a variety of ways to organize this supplementary opportunity, and outlines their advantages and disadvantages.
Grant's book is well-organized. Her first few chapters define her terms and concepts, and would be helpful to anyone mystified by how we Friends use terms that mean different things among us than they do in the wider world. After some basic observations on worship among Friends, she describes the ways that speaking contributes to the depth and power of worship, and the general patterns that often prevail when things are going well.
Then: when things are not going so well, what might be happening, and how might we respond? Her list of possible dysfunctions is telling...
Popcorn ministry (too many messages too quickly, without enough time in between to absorb them or to discern one's own participation)
A message is too long
Predictable ministry
Absent ministry
Inappropriate ministry, and
Is it really wrong?
On that last point, it's worth quoting her directly:
It isn't always clear about how to draw a boundary about what's acceptable or not, and being told to trust your discernment might only make things worse if discernment is not already a strong and regular practice in your life. Add in issues of politeness, status, insecurity about belonging to the community, challenges around the role of authority without hierarchy, along with some questions about theology, which touch on very personal religious matters, and the situation is undoubtedly sometimes very difficult.
...
If my community is also a body, I have to expect that the painful will come with the pleasurable and that things I don't notice and can't control will be happening alongside the things where I have some choice. It's part of the gift of being together.
The following sections of the book help us apply all these insights to ourselves, our own discernment on whether or not to speak, how we speak, and how we then return to the quiet center from which our ministry arose. Finally, Grant addresses questions of assistive technology, online and hybrid worship, and the sometimes awkward questions arising from these newer modes of worship. She ends her book with a list of print and online resources.
If your Friends meeting or church uses this book in a discussion group or a class for newcomers, I think you'll be delighted with its scope. Rhiannon Grant succeeds in linking her central topic—speaking in meeting for worship—with just about all aspects of our life as a worshipping community. Her approach is grounded but not rigid, and should lead to many fertile conversations.
Here is an older guide to "Open Worship" including whether and when to speak during worship. It was adapted from a pamphlet written by the late Stan Thornburg, who served Friends churches in Mid-America and Northwest Yearly Meetings. His chart has been used and adapted to various formats in several Friends meetings and churches.
And here again is the link to Ruth M. Pitman's "On the Vocal Ministry." Ruth Pitman identifies with Conservative Friends and has been a frequent contributor to Quaker Religious Thought. In this post from 2017, I said more about Pitman's tract and my first experience of speaking in meeting.
Patrick Nugent's article (1996) "On Speaking in Meeting for Worship" appeared in this issue of Friends Journal, starting on page seven.
Here are Friends' opinions on the use of queries as framing for open worship, part one, part two.
Mass Observation, May 12. Are you in the UK? Are you planning to participate in this national diary? (With thanks to Rebecca Rosewarne for the link.) Does your country have a similar archive project?
Revoking international students' visas "makes America smaller, not stronger." I have a Palestinian friend, a young doctor who is scheduled to arrive soon for a residency in the USA, so these days I'm very alert to this concern.
Mondoweiss on Gaza: Israeli forces are working toward making Gaza uninhabitable for its current population, but they are running low on soldiers.
May's theme at the Daily Quaker Message is peace and nonviolence. I continue to appreciate these daily posts. Here's Tuesday's post, with a quote from Duncan Wood.
Sarah Thomas Baldwin: When we "spiritually amphibious creatures" can't quite find our souls.
Beth Woolsey's Irrational Joy Project. (Also: "...wallowing is an underrated stage of grief.")
Here (audio only) is the late Joe Louis Walker's version of "Wade in the Water." Rest in peace.
Memories of Elektrostal, Russia, in winter, thanks to Sergey Kadyrov (composer and videographer). (Not related to tonight's post.)
The president of the United States is vigorously putting his authoritarian stamp on all aspects of federal government. With the help of technocratic lieutenants, he is cutting ties with past practices and norms as quickly as possible, hoping to carve and cut as much as possible before (if ever) the courts, the Congress, or the people slow him down.
A crucial part of his core support is a network of charismatic Christians who believe that Christian authoritarianism is actually better than democracy, that their leaders are apostles and prophets in the biblical mode, and that their opponents are in the service of Satan. How might those of us Christians who value democracy, and are emphatically not in the service of Satan, organize our responses?
Last week I summarized at least one school of interpretation of all these developments. This week, I want to consider how we in the Church (capital C) might be responding. My ideal is a mutually respectful division of labor according to our spiritual gifts, temperaments, and leadings. And I'm organizing these tentative thoughts using the metaphors in my post from May of 2021, "The church is like a ...." As always, your additions, improvements, and personal stories are very welcome.
My overall point is this: each of us can do, and is called to do, only so much. Our strength is in Jesus, not in anxious overwork, and the church can be our point of coordination and mutual support.
"The church is like an incubator."
Are you a pastor or elder, a member of the meeting of ministry and counsel? Whatever your title, perhaps you have a calling as one who cares for souls. You can hold open space for grief, for lament, for the recognition of our losses, for our disillusionment and discouragement, and also for those whose idealism flares up in the face of all this.
You can watch for the new growth of leadership and prophecy for our times among young and old alike, and let them know you've noticed and are ready to connect them with mentors.
You will see who among you, and who in your broader community, has lost jobs as a result of the administration's slashing of the federal workforce and its contractors, and the cost of the MAGA war against the hard-won gains of the civil rights movement, and connect those people with aid.
Your role in the church might be to administer the funds or shepherd the connections that respond in practical ways to these challenges.
If you have the gift of prayer or healing, you will certainly be needed to uphold all of these ministries, and to pray protection over the community and its places of work and worship.
Consider how to bring children and newcomers into conversations that might come more naturally to some than to others.
How can our worship faithfully reflect the joy, grief, and commitment that we honestly feel as we put ourselves and our situation into God's hands? As Larry Norman asked fifty years ago, "Why should the devil have all the good music?"
"The church is like an observatory."
Not everyone can cope with the constant stream of news, rumors, and social-network posts that reflect the administration's actions and their consequences. But if you can do so, your careful work in discerning truth from exaggeration (from whatever side), urban legends, and outright false witness will be an important contribution to the whole community.
If you are an observer, part of your role might be to identify reliable sources of information, as well as predictable sources of misinformation (inaccuracies and exaggerations) and disinformation (deliberate deceptions and false narratives, no matter how persuasive).
Are you a legal expert or lawyer? In collaboration with other observers, you may see opportunities to initiate or join legal challenges to unlawful, unethical, or unconstitutional acts.
The prophets among you will be needed to give voice to God's leadings, and confirm them through consultation and mutual accountability among each other. Remind the community that, whatever other business the faith community may have, agenda item number one remains, "What does God want us to say and do at this time and place?"
Prophets can help us know when the time has come for civil disobedience.
You and other observers in your own community can be in frequent touch with other communities that have similar commitments to faith and trustworthiness.
"The church is like a laboratory."
Be curious! The Christians who choose authoritarianism over democracy have their reasons, and their own version of idealism. If you are feeling led, and are equipped and prayed-for in your community, reach out to our opponents and ask questions, supply accurate information, build relationships, pray for them, and bring your insights back to the rest of us.
Do you have the gift of evangelism? Pray for opportunities to open up a more complete witness of grace than the opposition offers. Be ready to explain concepts of spiritual warfare that that are not politically manipulative. For those who have never seen what spiritual unity looks like when nobody is excluded, be sure your community is ready to demonstrate what we preach, and don't conceal our failures!
When civil disobedience is called for, be prayerful and creative. Look to the past for inspiration (for example, in George Lakey's books) but also innovate. Build coalitions with trustworthy allies. Consider tax protests and boycotts, and be prepared to explain your actions to the public without resorting to activist jargon. Accept failure and learn from it, without losing heart. Stay in constant touch with pastors, elders, stewards, and prophets, cherishing your unity with those who may be called to prayer and stewardship but not to disobedience.
Does your community have divisions between mystics and activists, between cynics and idealists, conservatives and radicals, between those who rage and those who mourn? This is the time to experiment with new commitments to love and learn from each other, and use our differences to keep each other sharp and honest. There's nothing wrong with conflict, conducted ethically among those who love each other.
This list is just a start. Its biggest weakness: no stories. I could tell a few ... and make this post far too long. Better idea: please tell some stories of your own, and add some ideas and color to this list. Also, I'd love for us to know who else is working on church-based responses to the threat of Christian-sponsored authoritarianism. Let's build the network.
(Note: See the items from Beacon Hill Friends House in the link list below, under "Coming in March.")
March 5, 7:30 p.m. and March 19, 7:30 p.m. Eastern time: Organizing for the Time We Are In, Session Two ("Know Your Rights and Community") and Session Three, online from Beacon Hill Friends House.
Since OCHA began systematically documenting demolition incidents and displacement in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, in 2009 until recently, the main direct driver of displacement of Palestinians was the demolition of homes for lacking building permits issued by the Israeli authorities, due to restrictive and discriminatory planning regimes applied in Area C and East Jerusalem. However, in the past two years, displacement patterns have shifted, reflecting broader changes in the protection environment for Palestinian communities, particularly herding and Bedouin communities in Area C. In 2023, settler violence became a leading cause of displacement with more than 1,600 people displaced due to settler violence and access restrictions (mainly in Bedouin and herding communities), compared with about 300 people displaced by lack-of-permit demolitions in these communities. Between 2020 and 2024, settler-related incidents targeting Bedouin and herding communities that resulted in casualties, property damage or both increased nearly sevenfold, rising from about 50 incidents in 2020 to approximately 330 incidents in 2024.
Waffen-SS recruitment poster (detail). See full graphic below.
The young man walked toward me with a smile, shook my hand, and said, "I'm on your side."
His next statement, however, was not reassuring: "Hitler has seen some of your letters."
For an instant, I felt flattered that someone as high up as the Fuehrer had taken notice of me. The next moment I felt the full flush of horror. Wasn't this young man supposed to be part of the Resistance? And what year was this, anyway!?
This dream (in my first night of dreams in 2025) had started innocuously enough. I was on a train, expecting to see a familiar face when I got to my destination, Stuttgart. It was a familiar context: I often have dreams in which my grandparents appear—my father's parents or my mother's parents, depending on whether I'm dreaming of Norway or Germany.
I stepped off the train and went into the waiting room, looking around for my grandmother. She wasn't there. Once again, I scanned the people on the wooden benches, looking for anyone familiar, and that's when the young man approached me.
It was confusing. I had the strong impression that he was indeed an ally, a part of the resistance against fascism, but why did he mention the chief fascist himself? And why did that young man look so strikingly like a stereotypical "master race" poster child?
Before I could untangle my confusion, the dream came to an end. However, unlike most of my dreams, I remembered this one with crystal clarity, so I continued to try sorting it out.
My first question: where did that young man come from? I think the image came from a recruiting placard for the German occupation forces in Norway, specifically for their SS forces and their "Norwegian Legion."I had seen this placard before, most recently at the impressive Norwegian Resistance Museum in Oslo last July. The invitation to join the common fight against Bolshevism is based on a blatant visual appeal to a myth of racial solidarity. The explicit identification of their mutual enemy was "Bolshevism," but, in Nazi usage, that political term often signified "the Jews."
Here are some other influences that probably went into the creation of my confusing dream:
As the 80th anniversary of World War II's end approaches, I've kept up my usual reading habits, which have always included a proportion of books about that war, its roots and its aftermath. After all, that war and its associated deportations and migrations resulted in my hybrid Norwegian-German family. Last week, for example, I read Eight Days in May: The Final Collapse of the Third Reich, by Volker Ullrich, the most detailed account I've seen of this period.
My recent reading also included the powerful story of Daniel Finkelstein's mother and father, Two Roads Home: Hitler, Stalin, and the Miraculous Survival of My Family. Finkelstein's mother Mirjam and her family were caught in Nazi Germany's mass brutality and the Holocaust, all of which the author describes in heart-stopping detail. This amazing story is interwoven with the equally miraculous survival of the author's Polish-born father Ludvik, who somehow survived Stalin's mass savagery. I cannot recommend this book highly enough, even though it puts us face to face with the reality of our human capacity for mass cruelty committed by leaders and followers and whole societies who all seemingly could have chosen differently.
Among the factors that seem to have reliably fueled this cruelty is racism in all its demonic forms, of which antisemitism has played a persistent and outsized role for many generations. All of these forms are rooted in the primordial sin of objectification, which to my sorrow and distress as a follower of Jesus, seems to have found expressions in today's white Christian nationalism, and not just in the USA.
The other sources for the "resistance" theme of my dream are no doubt the stabbing heartaches of the daily news: the genocide (as Amnesty International names it ... and I'm persuaded) in the Gaza Strip, committed by the armed forces of a nation that acts with near-total impunity; and then there's the ongoing "special military operation" in Ukraine, committed in the lethal service of a "great power," its leadership, and its "Russian World" mythology; in short, a gang whose other organizing principle seems to be to embezzle money and natural resources from its own population while suppressing most means of protest.
Add to all that: the uncertainties of our post-January 20 USA, with a new administration whose saving feature so far seems to be its own internal contradictions.
I have a feeling that there are going to be some more interesting dreams in my future. I'll keep looking for my grandmother ... and for the resistance.
Latest United Nations reports on the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Your tax dollars at work. And since that last OCHA report: Israeli air strikes hit "safe zone."
What are the odds that artificial intelligence will wipe out the human race in the next 30 years? Ask Geoffrey Hinton.
From top: home screens from Threads, Mastodon, Telegram.
Back in 2018, when data harvesting and the manipulative use of social networks were attracting lots of attention, I wrote this blog post about Facebook and Vkontakte. I described and defended my use of these services, and listed some of their virtues and hazards. I still use them in more or less the same ways.
A year or two earlier, while we were still living in Russia, I had joined another service, Twitter, where I expressed political opinions I usually didn't post on Facebook and Vkontakte, the services that I relied on for news of family and friends. Part of the thrill of Twitter was seeing news stories and opinions fresh from journalists' and commentators' keyboards, before they had been sanitized and published (or sometimes even verified!). I abandoned Twitter shortly after it became X, not because my own feed had become appreciably more toxic, but because of the way its new owner treated employees and critics. Still, I admit that I missed that outlet, and still do.
Some of that craving is taken up by Telegram, which I joined shortly after leaving Russia. Telegram combines elements of instant messaging, microblogging, interest groups, and news feeds. Those news feeds include such users as The New York Times, Washington Post, TVRain (Дождь), the BBC (and its Russian service), and numerous Russian-language and Ukrainian channels—media outlets and individual journalists and commentators.
Telegram is also a platform for personal messaging, but so are many other platforms. I'd just as soon stick with the reliable (so far) channels for that kind of communication (e-mail, Facebook and FB Messenger, Vkontakte, and phone-based texting) and, less often, Whatsapp (important for overseas contacts), and not have to cover every possible channel. There are some apps and clients that promise to combine personal messages from a number of sources, but I've never found that covers all of them, and most are not Web-based. (If you have suggestions for cross-platform message handlers that are browser-based or Linux-compatible, please comment! I prefer desktop platforms, not services that are exclusively phone-based.)
Back to news and opinion: Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky are among the services that may take over Twitter's place in my search for fresh news and opinions. So far I've found a number of my favorite authors on all three of them. In a promising development, all three services are finding ways to become mutually accessible. For example, here's the way to bridge Mastodon and Bluesky; and you can authorize Threads to share posts in the larger fediverse.
The days are not long enough to camp out at all of these various sources, and it remains to be seen whether their cultures remain as mellow as they mostly are now. (Well, Telegram can't exactly be called mellow, but in my chosen feeds, it's not snarly!) How well might they resist external predators and internal exploiters? In the meantime, dipping around in each of them for brief visits seems more productive than developing a premature loyalty to any one in particular. However, if you've become committed to one or two platforms out of all these choices, and would like to tell me why, I'd love to know.
Here are a few other overviews of these various platforms, their similarities and differences:
The Haaretz newspaper’s editorial board described the ICC’s decision as an “unprecedented moral nadir” for Israel. (Netanyahu responded to Haaretz’s coverage of the war by sanctioning the newspaper.) Hungary’s Victor Orban greeted news of the ICC warrant with an invitation for Netanyahu to visit, deepening cleavages between European countries committed to the rule of law and those challenging the “liberal international order.” Absent a change in leadership, Israel’s international isolation from that order will continue to deepen. Even if the Israeli government changes course (which is highly unlikely, especially given the results of the recent U.S. presidential election), the damage to Israel’s standing and reputation—with ripple effects on Jews in the diaspora—will take decades to repair. Meanwhile, the human toll is irreversible, and rebuilding Gaza will take decades, if not centuries.
Human rights defender Olga Karach doesn't want to "disappoint" Lukashenko.
William Barber on CNN: here's what Trump's second coming tells us about the country and the future.
But what you saw election night is not the whole of America. It’s a part of America in a particular moment around the election. You have to stop and say, wait a minute, this is the same America that I went to sleep in the night before. It’s not some strange America. This is part of America. America has always had multiple stories running at the same time.
Austin John and McKinley James perform B.B. King's "Ruby Lee." Enjoy the whole set; they're fine musicians.
Underground prayer cell, Transfiguration Monastery, near Buzuluk, Russia.
I wrote my first post on prayer and place in the context of the Pussy Riot controversy twelve years ago in Russia, when the dissident rock band of that name managed to get into the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, near the Kremlin, and performed their musical prayer against Vladimir Putin.
In the post, I confessed my "mixed feelings about the very concept of sacred space." In my final post about the controversy, I wrote, "I have grown to have a lot of respect for them [the dissident musicians], but it's a complicated respect." I also wondered whether we Westerners with our diminished sense of reverence (is this fair?), were qualified to comment.
On reverence (freely expressed or compulsory), I also wrote a separate post.
All of these related themes came back to me when I read Mark Russ (Jolly Quaker) posting about Thicc places: a Quaker on pilgrimage. My best service to you now would be to reduce my own verbiage in favor of persuading you to read Mark's post. I'll just add a couple of thoughts:
First: I utterly agree with Mark that both the journey and the destination are important, for the reasons he expresses so well. I also want to take into account our varying temperaments. For some of us, the regular pilgrimage, perhaps every week, to our usual places of worship, and the anticipation and fulfillment of the worship itself, are all that we need. Those who go on pilgrimage to a more remote or special location might anticipate a more immersive experience than they experience in that regular cycle; are those of us who find no such need in ourselves qualified to deny them?
My red flags would go up only if those pilgrims inform us on their return that they're now superior to the rest of us. That's never happened in my experience; what actually happens is that they're eager to share the riches they've gained with the rest of us, and we listen eagerly, to everyone's benefit. It was wonderful to hear my cousin Johan Fredrik Heyerdahl talk about walking the Camino de Santiago when he was about the age I am now. I experienced a somewhat similar pilgrimage without leaving home when I read Timothy Egan's marvelous book A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith.
In my experience, this last century of Russian history, with religious repression followed by Orthodox triumphalism and state-church enmeshment, has intensified and complicated all concepts of sacred space.
Second: Might it be true that those who argue for a flat and fastidious Quakerism, one that denies any forms of specialness, are often perfectly happy to go on holiday to interesting and, to them, exotic destinations? Maybe they would be willing to consider that traveling with a spiritual intention or hope would be equally legitimate? This line of questioning does have its own complication: the cost of such travel, whether or not it is for spiritual gain, surely puts some forms of pilgrimage beyond the reach of many people.
I'm reminded of my dislike of the way spiritual books are sometimes marketed. See my comments on Richard Foster's Sanctuary of the Soul—go to this post and scroll down past the movie stuff.
If I'm making unfair correlations, let me know!
We Quakers generally downplay sacred actions as well as sacred places, but maybe you'll see why I loved this Threads post from Karen Swallow Prior, which I present not to one-up anyone, but simply as a reminder to remain tender:
My parents love their church immensely. For health reasons, however, they’ve had to join the service online for some time now.
Yesterday, I was taking them lunch and unintentionally arrived before the service had ended. It was communion Sunday.
When I saw the two tiny cups of juice and two tiny crackers my father had set on the kitchen table, I felt like I had entered some of the holiest, most sacred ground I’d ever been honored to enter.
Issa Amro: "It's a miracle that I even exist." His organization, Youth Against Settlements, has just won the Right Livelihood Award, one of the prizes sometimes known as the "Alternative Nobel Prize."
This afternoon at St Olave's Church and its free concert series every Wednesday and Thursday, we heard a wonderful piano concert by Kanae Furomoto, including the famous "Raindrop" prelude by Chopin. Here it is performed by Alice Sara Ott:
For several days, I've been thinking about Benjamin Netanyahu's speech at the United Nations General Assembly. The specific words that pulled at me were these: "I have a message for the tyrants of Tehran: If you strike us, we will strike you. There is no place—there is no place in Iran—that the long arm of Israel cannot reach. And that’s true of the entire Middle East."
(My italics.)
I'm not going to evaluate the whole speech, which is based on the unquestioned assumption of Israel's total innocence and victimhood in the region and at the UN. For just one example of the one-sidedness of the speech, its "blessing" does not take into account the treatment of Palestinians. Their existence in limbo has been prolonged indefinitely because Israel's leadership for generations has seen no advantage in resolving this cruel anomaly. The resulting inevitable bloody clashes, as each side "teaches lessons" to the other, are exploited as just another proof of Israel's victimhood.
Right now I'm more interested in the words, "If you strike us, we will strike you." On one level, that's the history of the human race. In any long-standing conflict, each side says these words to the other, taking turns with every action and reaction. It's true that one side's case may have more justice than the other's, but rarely do we see 100% good fighting 100% evil. Each side, however, usually portrays the conflict in those terms.
The politicians who raise the banner of "If you strike us..." are speaking to at least two audiences—the enemy and their own voters. The enemy doesn't need this information; they already assume the customary game is going to continue. The voters are supposed to understand that these politicians are their heroes, doing their heroic job to defend them, and deserve to remain in office.
What the "if you strike us" politicians are not making clear is the moral implication of their threat. "If you strike us, there must be death and destruction on your side. Our only choice is to kill people. We hope guilty people will die, but innocent people will also die. Instead of finding a more creative and lasting response to your attack, one that saves people on both sides of our conflict, we prefer to waste those lives."
In my fantasy world, Netanyahu's speech would have included ways that Iran could be part of "the blessing" and that the grievances of Palestine's allies could be addressed. (After all, the treatment of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank are the ostensible reasons for the current hostilities against Israel.) To go even deeper into fantasy, he could also have admitted that Israel is not always innocent.
Those would be politically hazardous steps to take. When Barack Obama told international audiences that the USA was not always innocent, he was endlessly attacked by his political adversaries for "apologizing for America." Netanyahu's own political situation is far more precarious, and he would probably not survive the revolt within his coalition that would result. But the space might well open up for a wiser approach to the present conflicts.
In 2007, an ecumenical delegation with Quaker participation went to Iran and met with counterparts there, including an Iranian ambassador who quoted a proverb: "Build a bridge to me, and I'll build 99 bridges back to you." How many innocent people must die for lack of serious bridgebuilding?
The rhetorical strength of the "If you strike us" language, presented without any references to moral implications, depends on people accepting it as true and obvious. Christians particularly ought to be saying, in season and out of season, that it is not true and obvious at all. We are not to return evil for evil. (1 Peter 3:9; context. Romans 12:17; context.)
We might think that all we need to do is put more energy and creativity into evangelism, making the world more aware that paths to genuine peace do exist, that we are not trapped in endless rounds of counterstrikes, and there is a global community that has arisen around a Prince of Peace who has overcome death. I agree. But of course there's a problem with that. The awkward question arises: do we Christians ourselves believe that we are not to return evil for evil? After all, "if you strike me I will strike you" is Donald Trump's own attitude to conflict, and God knows how many Christian followers have become admirers of his belligerence. Apparently it turns out that it's hard to believe in Jesus.
Juan Cole, writing before the current stage of the Israeli-Lebanese war, described how U.S. president Joe Biden's Mideast strategy was disastrously falling apart.
Bloomberg's Matt Levine: Is there a way to automate (via AI) the things we like about Warren Buffett?
You know what I'm talking about. It's the contagious power of hope ... The chance to vanquish the demons of fear, division, and hate that have consumed us....
America, hope is making a comeback.
—Michelle Obama at the Democratic National Convention, August 20, 2024.
During the U.S. presidential election campaign of four years ago, I wrote a blog post, "The mere sound of his name will signal hope." The real audience for that blog post was me. I was trying to convince myself that, whatever the outcome of that race (Biden vs Trump), hope had to be anchored in something deeper than election outcomes.
Maybe you remember those days. As I wrote then, "This uncertainty is incredibly stressful. I know people who are asking whether now is the time to begin planning emigration to some country that is on a less self-destructive path. Maybe I'm somewhere beyond naïve, but even as I work to keep us away from the edge, I also know I will keep hoping whatever the outcome."
In the event, Biden received 51.3% of the popular vote, compared to Trump's 46.85%. and prevailed in the Electoral College by a count of 306 to 232. Of course, election day itself was not the end of the stress; the vote totals weren't available until the fourth day after the election, and Trump wouldn't acknowledge the results for yet another eight days after that. Even then, he refused to concede, asserting that "the Election was Rigged" and went on to wage a campaign of election sabotage through January 6, 2021, and beyond.
It might seem that, at the time, hope was vindicated by the results of the 2020 U.S. election, but the COVID 19 crisis, its human costs and economic consequences, were still with us. Ahead were the debacle in Afghanistan, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Israeli tragedies and the ruthless responses in Gaza and the West Bank. Our human capacity for chaos and cruelty still require worthy advocates of hope to remain very sober.
Here's one question about today's U.S. politics that also keeps me very sober: how can it be that the 2024 presidential election predictions still seem so close, when one of the two principal candidates continues to operate by standards so obviously unworthy of any serious contender for the nation's most responsible job: boast and blame and belittle.
At a press conference last week, Trump revealed the true cynicism of his approach: "All we have to do is define our opponent as being a communist, or a socialist or somebody that’s going to destroy our country." Not that he limits himself to these charges; ugly comments on race, appearance, and intelligence are routine, and who can forget his obsessions with nicknames and crowd sizes? He is apparently confident that the right combination of lies and slurs will give him a winning hand, while we just wonder just how tens of millions of our fellow citizens could possibly agree, to the point that the results of polls still show a close contest!
(Do any of the core supporters of this man ever ask themselves, "What about his doomsday predictions last time, concerning the dangers of a Biden victory? Did any of those warnings actually come true?")
When I stop to ask myself where my own hope comes from, I have a superficial answer and a deeper one:
First of all, right now, after four days of a happy (if endlessly repetitive and carefully filtered) Democratic National Convention, I have grounds for hope that our 2024 elections will select the sole presidential candidate who actually appears competent to serve as the head of our country's executive branch.
However, I remember Len Vander Zee's quotation from J.R.R. Tolkien: "I am a Christian….so I do not expect history to be anything but a long defeat, though it contains…… some glimpse of final victory." (Context in this post.) As hard as we work for a specific outcome in any situation, nothing is guaranteed. Ultimately my hope rests in that promise of final victory.
To tell the truth, my hope doesn't depend on defining that victory with certainty. My best glimpses are in the Bible, but my understanding is rooted in trust, not in intellectual precision. I believe that, at the end, you and I will experience God's hospitality according to the promise Jesus made to his friends as he prepared to say goodbye to them—on his way to be executed as a political threat:
Don’t let this rattle you. You trust God, don’t you? Trust me. There is plenty of room for you in my Father’s home. If that weren’t so, would I have told you that I’m on my way to get a room ready for you? And if I’m on my way to get your room ready, I’ll come back and get you so you can live where I live.
—John 14:1-3. (The Message.)
Another glimpse of victory comes a bit earlier in the same Gospel—and again I'm glimpsing through trust rather than claiming to understand exactly what it will look like. It will be good.
You need to know that I have other sheep in addition to those in this pen. I need to gather and bring them, too. They’ll also recognize my voice. Then it will be one flock, one Shepherd.
John 10:16. (The Message.)
Politicians of goodwill and integrity will always seek to serve their inclusive "one flock," and the forces of privilege may, for the foreseeable future, seek to keep us fearful and divided. We, and the generations to come, will still be required to choose hope and integrity each time the challenge presents itself, rarely knowing for sure what the outcome will be in any given struggle. I'm incredibly grateful for the ultimate vision of a room in God's home, and pray for insight in every season to reflect that vision in the ways we treat each other ... and the ways we choose our leaders.
Lil' Ed and the Blues Imperials play a song written by Lil' Ed's uncle and one of my earliest favorites among Chicago blues musicians, J.B. Hutto. (Here's Hutto's version, audio only.)
