I remember Walter Mondale's acceptance speech as the Democratic party candidate to challenge U.S. President Ronald Reagan in the 1984 general election—particularly these lines:
By the end of my first term, I will reduce the Reagan budget deficit by two‑thirds. Let's tell the truth. It must be done, it must be done. Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won't tell you. I just did.
The idealism in these few sentences (about the need to reduce the deficit by increasing revenue, and the pointed willingness to be candid) did not serve Mondale well in his losing campaign. But I admired the thought.
In my blog post last year on the tax covenant, I summed up the ideal of righteous taxation this way: Ideally, by paying taxes, we citizens are simply upholding a covenant we have with each other.
We have made promises to each other—"to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common Defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity" (preamble to the U.S. Constitution), setting up a government for these purposes and assigning that government, through our legislature, the practical tasks needed to fulfill those promises.
We know that these tasks cost money, so our legislators make a list of those costs and institute sources of revenue, including taxes. That's the covenant: to decide on the tasks needed for the "general Welfare," from which we all benefit, directly or indirectly, and to pay our fair share for those tasks.
Now we all know it's not really that simple. The best machines can get sand in the gears, and no human organization is completely free from inefficiencies and waste. Worse than that, when you have big streams of money going by, there'll usually be some people with buckets, trying to catch some along the way. That's why we have audits and inspectors general, but even in the best systems, we know that we won't achieve total perfection in getting the revenue to its promise-fulfilling destinations. Even so, by and large, the tax covenant can still hold. During Bill Clinton's presidency, the federal government ran a surplus four times, taking four small bites each year out of the federal debt.
The reason I'm so stubborn about preaching up this covenant is that for generations, populist politicians have been trading on the unpopularity of taxes. (Just think of how unpopular tax collectors were during New Testament times, although it didn't help that, in those times, the tax collectors themselves took a cut from the revenue.) It's convenient for those politicians to overlook the link between revenue and the legitimate expenditures approved by the people's representatives. I want that link to be strong and evident.
Then along comes a figure of such monumental disregard for common decency and legal norms, along with an animal magnetism for which J.D. Vance's ten-year-old epithet of "cultural heroin" is not too strong. It turns out that this personality can drug even legislators to the point of impotence. He has now gained the U.S. presidency a second time, despite the Founding Fathers' warnings against the rise of demagogues who rise by "flattering the prejudices of the people."
I'm guessing that, if you're read this far, you are probably not a follower of this figure and his MAGA movement. But how does all this specifically endanger the tax covenant?
We are (or should be!) willing to pay for the expenditures that our elected legislators have approved, and for the means to reduce wastage and corruption in the process. (If we don't like what they've approved or how the money is spent, we should be ready to replace those legislators and/or strengthen the safeguards.) But what should we do when the money is redirected or expropriated by the most powerful man in the system?
What if millions and billions of our tax money are being misspent to:
replace a congressionally-mandated bipartisan 250th birthday celebration for the country with a celebration centered on the president, partly using money diverted from the bipartisan events?
demolish the East Wing of the White House, deceptively promising that private contributions will finance the replacement?
repair and refurbish the National Mall's Reflecting Pool through a no-bid contract, announcing grandiose goals for the project at a fraction of the still-increasing cost?
pay for operations at the U.S. southern border, including stretches of the border wall, with money intended for military housing and schools?
pay his own properties to house his security details for his numerous golf holidays?
upgrade a gift airplane from another country (a gift already of dubious legality), to bring that airplane up to Air Force One standards? (At least $400 million, perhaps much more.)
begin a war of choice with Iran?
Few of these acts, taken singly, are unique to the present administration, but the scale is unprecedented. Among the rest of us, it's the cynicism generated by not knowing where our tax money is actually going that worries me. And aside from such direct defiance of legislative decisions, we see an apparent utter lack of concern for the transfers of wealth from the 99% to the 1% resulting from the "Big Beautiful Bill" and the lack of attention to the national debt.
Finally, there are all the instances of corruption, self-dealing, and conflicts of interest that come across our news channels, perhaps beyond our ability to keep track. But it's worth paying attention, if only to keep referring back from today's swamp to the cleansing vision of that most basic American covenant: a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. For that ideal, I'll stubbornly continue to resist the cheap wisdom of cynicism.
Sarah and James Polk; Donald Trump Sources: left, right.
He is a bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man.
—Congressman Abraham Lincoln on President James K. Polk.
Unlike the 2026-? war with Iran, the Mexican-American War (1846-48) actually included a U.S. congressional declaration of war, but one that was arguably obtained under false pretenses. Essentially, the U.S. army had to lure Mexican soldiers into a fight in order to obtain a pretext for war.
Abraham Lincoln consistently opposed this war, and he bluntly gave his reasons in, among other occasions, this powerful speech in the House of Representatives in January 1848.
His arguments seem to me to apply pretty well to the war that we and Israel are in now, against Iran. The war with Mexico was an unconstitutional war, based on fiction; it was supposed to be a short war; the supposed gains of the war should have outweighed the losses in combat, but didn't; in any event, the object was to steal from Mexico, which Lincoln judged an offense to the honor of the USA. Lincoln memorably referred to the way that war's romantic propaganda distracts from the shameful reality: ...
... [Polk aims] to involve the two countries in a war, and trusting to escape scrutiny, by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory—that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood—that serpent’s eye that charms to destroy, he plunged into it, and has swept, on and on, till, disappointed in his calculation of the ease with which Mexico might be subdued, he now finds himself, he knows not where.
I do my fair share of following war news on the Internet. So much of the coverage features analysts and commentators doing their best to make sense of an insane war. I see them sitting behind impressive desks or standing in front of charts and digital displays covering whole walls, but mostly what they are doing is trying to guess what this or that inarticulate soundbite might mean.
The reality, which they are not really equipped to analyze in terms of dignified commentary is this: the war was initiated by two corrupt men, one of whom is a completely rogue U.S. president. The news programs are reduced to providing us endless scenes of smoke rising from the impacts of missiles, drones, and the remains of midair interceptions, punctuated by excerpts from bombastic, factually irrelevant statements and press conferences. Donald Trump's contribution to this scene is his constant referral to himself. Everything is about him and what he feels in his bones. Even Stalin pretended to be answerable to structures and committees! This is not a scene that lends itself to rational commentary, but those analysts have jobs to do, cameras pointing at them, and three minutes and fifteen seconds to fill before it's the next well-meaning analyst's turn.
And they're certainly not entirely useless. Today I heard Jon Stewart say, "War is how Americans learn about geography."
I appreciated Anne Applebaum's blunt description of this unprecedented dependence of a whole country, and its fateful global consequences, on an incompetent and thoroughly corrupt individual.
Donald Trump does not think strategically. Nor does he think historically, geographically, or even rationally. He does not connect actions he takes on one day to events that occur weeks later. He does not think about how his behavior in one place will change the behavior of other people in other places.
He does not consider the wider implications of his decisions. He does not take responsibility when these decisions go wrong. Instead, he acts on whim and impulse, and when he changes his mind—when he feels new whims and new impulses—he simply lies about whatever he said or did before.
Back in our own communities here in the USA, are we living life as usual, or are we in one or another form of the chaos the people at the top have unleashed? Our "dual reality" was well illustrated in an illustration on Vox by cartoonist Pete Gamlen:
Sigal Samuel's accompanying article: Your friends are still acting like everything is normal in America. What do you do? She describes this dual reality in the terms proposed by a German Jewish political scientist and labor lawyer, Ernst Fraenkel, who observed the pre-WWII Germany becoming divided into a compliant, passive, and comfortable "Normative State" and its terrifying parallel "Prerogative State" under direct, arbitrary, and repressive state power. Remain passive and compliant and maybe you won't someday find yourself abruptly transferred from normalcy to repression, a transfer that is entirely at the discretion of those in power.
As Samuel's article acknowledges, we're not yet quite at that point in the USA, but that may be small comfort to Renee Nicole Good of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and her family ... and all those on the left side of Pete Gamlen's graphic.
Sigal Samuel's article ends with several suggestions of how we can avoid fatal passivity and regain connection across these divides for the sake of justice. Here are a few of mine; please add yours! As always, the best-fit involvement takes into account your own spiritual gifts, your temperament, and the mutual obligations you have with your own community.
Keep observing the realities around you to the best of your capacity, and don't let propaganda from any side or camp (including your own!) do your thinking for you.
Send blessings and prayers to the individuals you become aware of as you follow the news. (Even though the USA's news channels tend to show Arabs as faceless masses, for example, look for the human beings as best you can, and pay attention to their credible spokespeople.)
Join ethically-organized and ethically-led protests. The more local protests and movements may be just as important as the mass downtown events.
Following the principles of evangelism with integrity (for example, "permission evangelism"), tell people about Jesus. Help differentiate his tender leadership from the misrepresentations promoted by white Christian nationalism, but do it from intimacy with the Prince of Peace rather than a sly motivation to one-up those whom you oppose.
Cultivate good relationships with your legislators and local media. Take wise steps to become known as a reliable source of helpful quotations for journalists.
Grieve with those who grieve, rejoice with those who rejoice; be kind to each other and to yourself. It's a race—an urgent one—but not a competition.
Pete Gamlen's cartoon really caught me in a deep place. Sometimes I've been feeling so far from either of the dual realities. And for some reason, around the time I found myself resisting this sense of alienation, I watched a couple of those smoking cityscape videos as Israeli bombs fell on Lebanon. I began meditating on the dead people lined up at Heaven's gate, and praying for them to be at peace.
"Rank Strangers" in our classroom in Elektrostal, Russia.
We Quakers are not known for speculating about life after death, or about what heaven is like. But I couldn't help wondering what was happening to those whose bodies and souls were being violently separated by high-tech munitions, some of which were paid for by our taxes. In this swirl of alienation and distress, I remembered a recording made by one of my favorite blues musicians, harpist Charlie Musselwhite. It was a track from his album One Night in America, "Rank Strangers to Me," originally created by the gospel writer Albert E. Brumley, Sr. It's a song we used as one of the gapfill exercises in our listening comprehension classes at the New Humanities Institute in Elektrostal.
I don't know many songs that combine grief and hope as well as this one:
I wandered alone to my home by the river
Where in youth's early dawn I was happy and free
I looked for my friends, but I never could find them
I found they were all rank strangers to me
Everybody I met seemed to be a rank stranger
No mother or dad, not a friend could I see
They knew not my name and I knew not their faces
I found they were all rank strangers to me
"They've all moved away", said the voice of a stranger
"To a beautiful home by the bright, crystal sea"
Some beautiful day, I'll meet 'em in heaven
Where no one will be a stranger to me
Everybody I met seemed to be a rank stranger
No mother or dad, not a friend could I see
They knew not my name and I knew not their faces
I found they were all rank strangers to me
Detail from Japanese Pearl Harbor attack plan. Source.
First, a few words about our latest war.
When I heard the first news bulletins about the 2026 Iran War, I couldn't help thinking about Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, that "dastardly" attack that happened while negotiations between Japan and the USA were still underway. U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull expressed his sense of betrayal very plainly to the Japanese negotiators.
The U.S./Israeli opening attack on Iran also happened during a period of active negotiations, facilitated in good faith by Oman.
I'm sure you have as much access to good analysis and commentary on this war as I do, so today I don't plan to say more here. I'm just aware that there are people alive at this moment, in Iran, Lebanon, Israel, perhaps the Gulf states, and beyond, who will not see tomorrow. May God have mercy on them, and on us.
Wess Daniels (from Reedwood Friends Weekly)
Last Sunday afternoon, Reedwood Friends Church here in Portland, Oregon, hosted C. Wess Daniels (biography) for a fascinating afternoon advertised as a session on "The Practice of Silence as Resistance in an Attention Economy."
It turns out that one of the themes that Wess has bravely connected to the topic of silence is boredom.
Boredom.
He's been thinking about how to attract more Guilford students to silence as a topic and as a practice ... and not just the Quaker students. Furthermore, he's certainly not hiding from the topic of boredom. He's not defining "boredom" as a danger for budding practitioners of silence, but boredom as a part of something good! Boredom as a superpower!
Maybe it's best if I let Wess explain it himself. Here are two of his blog posts that contain some savory hints of the content he shared so engagingly with us last Sunday:
By the time we met on Sunday, Wess had some other interesting stories to tell from his experiences with students—for example, when he asked them to interview trees.
All of this reminded me that I wrote about "boredom for dummies" back in October 2017, just after our final trip to the USA from Russia. Here it is:
The Amtrak Empire Builder.
... I don't have time for those who don't know what time is.
These words from Boris Pasternak came back to me during the long, slow hours we spent on Amtrak's trains from New York City to Chicago, and then from Chicago to Portland, Oregon.
To tell you the truth, I really needed those long, slow hours of sitting by the train window and letting time carry me into my future. In my last weeks and days in Elektrostal, time went by with dizzying speed, and my mind struggled to keep up, storing up impressions and sensations against the uncertainties of that future. It's likely that we'll never live in Russia again. (Yes, we hope to visit, but even that is uncertain. In any case, I don't think we'll ever again be residents.)
We are learning about gravitational waves rippling through space and time, thanks to Albert Einstein and the recent LIGO observations. For most of us, it's not news that time also seems to be experienced in waves, now compressed and now just dragging along. I love living in the moment, but slow moments, and stretched-out periods where time nearly seems to stop, are equally precious to me.
In a moment of unguarded boastfulness, I once said that I was never bored. That claim didn't stop me from preparing for the transatlantic flight and the train trip by loading my Amazon Fire with episodes of Doctor Who and the Vietnam War series, along with two novels, two books of theology, a history of Protestant missions, and two autobiographies—by Norwegian politician Gro Harlem Brundtland and American astronaut Scott Kelly. But much of the time, day and night, I just watched the country scroll past the window. I felt no pressure to savor or memorize or store up—I just let the planet be the planet and me be me.
Boredom is not a problem to be solved. It is the last privilege of a free mind.
These words open Gayatri Devi's essay on boredom, published on the Guardian Web site about two years ago. Her essay seems to assume a definition of boredom as a state of discontent resulting from lack of external stimulation. (Dictionaries, on the other hand, often seem to focus on boredom as a state resulting from the wrong kind of stimulation—tedious, repetitive, uninteresting.) She rightly recommends not curing boredom by reaching for new sources of stimulus, such as the ever-handy smartphone. Instead, she recommends "metathinking"—in a sense, observing yourself as you slide into boredom, considering what makes you bored, "how your mind responds to boredom, what you feel and think when you get bored."
I would just add a couple of things that are, maybe, already implied in Gayatri Devi's advice:
Learn to enjoy your own company. This doesn't mean to give yourself a free pass on everything that might appear on a Fourth Step AA inventory -- but look beyond your imperfections to the whole of yourself, the person whose God-given mind is capable of thought, reflection, observation, intention, reconciliation, synthesis of old and new ideas, and so much more. That apparently empty period of time, whether it's at on a slow train or in line at a bank, is just a golden opportunity to get to spend some time with your complicated self. (Learning to enjoy your own company is a good step toward confronting temptation and addiction. God loved you into being, as Anthony Bloom said, so it's time to look at yourself with God's loving intention in mind.)
Reframe slow time as prayer time. You can ask God or your own memory banks for prayer concerns that you may have forgotten or just heard about or that simply beg for your attention. Devi mentions Wordsworth's daffodils; you might instead choose or form a short prayer along the lines of the prayers I mention here....
Make me an instrument of your peace. Yes. Lord Jesus, have mercy. I want to dwell in you.
Back in 2011, I wrote about reading Pasternak's words about time as I sat waiting my turn at the bank branch in Elektrostal.
Luis Parrales: The raw experience of love restored writer Christopher Beha's faith, or at least the possibility of faith. "Beha’s response is to describe himself as 'a skeptical believer'; for him, moments of certainty commingle with moments of doubt." Such restorations have happened to other writers, too.
Also at Reedwood Friends Church: Last Wednesday we welcomed musician Dann Pell and his resonator guitars for a wonderful evening of music.
Some of his songs reminded me of the bard tradition in Russia, though in Dann Pell's case, there is an amazing balance between the poetry and spirituality of the lyrics and his intense and often intricate fingering.
Dann is from Exeter Friends Meeting of Caln Quarter in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. He's originally from Chester County, which, a lifetime ago, I knew well....
Don't miss a chance to hear him yourself, or invite him to your meeting or church. Here's a video that gives you a better sense than my words could.
Back when I was first interested in Russia and the Soviet Union, in my mid-teens, physicist Andrei Sakharov proposed a new twist on Marxist determinism: that, among other factors, the demands of industrial management, the rise of consumer demand, and the danger of nuclear annihilation would cause the great rival superpowers to take on each other's better traits and eventually converge. The resulting societies would feature both rational economic planning and freedom of thought.
Sakharov did not live to see much of the "end of history" phase and the idealists' disappointments in both superpower camps—both with their individual fragilities and their discontented peripheries. The year 2000 featured secret bargains, manipulations, dangerous theatrics, and general confusion in both Russia and the USA, with Vladimir Putin and George Bush ending up on top. Not exactly the convergence that Sakharov had in mind.
In both systems, the neocons (creatively defined for my purposes!) relatively quickly demanded the right to define reality for the rest of us. Putin arguably was ahead in this development, as he and his allies slowly but surely extinguished independent media and built the cult of the indispensable leader. "Putin is Russia, and Russia is Putin," proclaimed Vyacheslav Volodin, currently speaker of the State Duma, in 2014. And since that year, just in terms of government process (setting aside the ultra-nationalist intellectuals and church leaders who are his favorite influencers), Putin alone is the stubborn owner/driver of the war in Ukraine.
The USA's equivalent developments, although far less linear and absolute (we did elect two Democrats in those years), have reached the point where Donald Trump can assert to a journalist that "MAGA is Trump" and that, in starting yet another war, he faces no opposition in true MAGA.
In this Russian bookstore, someone put the Constitution in the fantasy section. (Originally used here.)
Both of these countries' constitutions nominally have power distributed among several branches. In Russia, the legislators and judiciaries go through the motions of their jobs but, when the stakes involve the interests of those at the top, they see no point in resisting.
Our situation may be less bleak: the judiciary still displays some independence, but the president's party's majorities in both houses of the U.S. Congress mostly continue to fall in line. In the present case of Iran (and Israel and most of the Persian Gulf states), what the president wants is what he gets. Iran is, of course, just the most recent target of U.S. bombs and artillery in the past 13-1/2 months, after Somalia, Iraq, Yemen, Iran (June 2025), the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, Syria, Nigeria, and Venezuela. In almost every case, Trump gave the orders personally and did not deign to invite Congressional consent. And now he supposedly gets to decide personally who will be the next leader of Iran.
One of the lonely critical Republican voices in Congress, representative Warren Davidson of Ohio, points straight to the constitutional illegality of Trump's process, as reported in The Guardian:
Make no mistake, Iran is an enemy of the United States. As our military engages them, they do so justly. [sic] Unfortunately, they are not yet doing so constitutionally.
For some, this debate will be about whether we should even be fighting in Iran. For me, the debate is more fundamental: is the president of the United States, regardless of the person holding the office, empowered to do whatever he wants? That’s not what our constitution says.
In fact, the U.S. Constitution, and most Republicans' unwillingness to defend it, is at the heart of several of today's crises as we transition from a republican democracy to a personalist authoritarianism. Due process and equal protection of the law came into the Constitution after a terrible Civil War, but today's legislative timidity in the service of throwing out immigrants is shameful. So is the attempt to organize a permanent governing majority through federal legislation, when the Constitution makes it clear that the states are to make election rules.
In 1967, a group of anthropologists contributed papers on war at a conference of the American Anthropological Association. The resulting book, War: the Anthropology of Armed Conflict and Aggression, opened my eyes to the possibility of studying war as a human behavior just like many others, subject to the same disciplines of observation and analysis totally apart from the myths, justifications, and deference it usually gets in real life. One of the contributors proposed that societies are usually either in a "relaxed" state or a "mobilized" state, and anthropologists should study the process by which a society goes from one state to the other. A respondent pointed out that, in modern conditions, most of society can remain in a "relaxed" state while specialists conduct wars on our (supposed) behalf, often without ever seeing their opponents, not to mention the collateral damage. To me this raises a question that I hope you can help me answer: how do we mobilize, not in favor of war, but in favor of our Constitution, before our "relaxation" becomes utter and permanent passivity?
Or, as one of our Moscow friends used to say to us, ironically, "Welcome to Russia!"
Speaking of Friends World Committee (previous link), the Section of the Americas has opened up registration for its annual sessions on Saturday, March 21. This year the sessions will be 100% online.
Once again, another version of "Scratch My Back." I've presented this one at least twice before, but it takes me back to Chicago like no other.... Illinois Slim does the chicken scratch.
The commemorative voyage of the sloop Restauration from Stavanger, Norway, to New York City, ended today, with its docking at Pier 16 a few hours ago.
Luke Maurer and I were present to witness its departure from Stavanger back on July 4, the same date that the original Restauration left Stavanger in 1825, marking the start of the organized immigration of Norwegians to the USA two hundred years ago.
The original ship made it safely to New York Harbor on October 9, 1825, and discharged the 53 people on board, including the baby born during the voyage. However, the ship was seized by the port authorities, and its captain arrested, because the number of passengers had exceeded the maximum allowed for a vessel its size. The end of that story was happy; for reasons that nobody seems to know for sure, the U.S. president, John Quincy Adams, ordered the release of the ship and its captain, and cancellation of the heavy fine that had been imposed. (Here's Henry Cadbury's summary of the story, including Quakers' involvement.)
My first passport.
This commemorative voyage and its safe arrival in New York City are bright spots in the day's news. The history of Norwegian migration is important to me, at least in part because I'm part of that history. My Maurer ancestors seem to have come from Germany via Denmark, with the original Johan Fredrik Maurer arriving in Norway from Denmark around 1840. Some of his descendants are among the million or so Norwegians who emigrated to other countries in the years after the Restauration. Eventually I became one of the Norwegian immigrants to the USA.
It seems to me that the Norwegian and USA organizers of the 1825-2025 Restauration commemorations have conducted themselves with admirable diplomacy. But, in my private opinion, the story of President John Quincy Adams pardoning the captain and restoring the vessel to its owners has special meaning in this MAGA era. Back in 1825, it must have been assumed at the highest levels that immigrants were good news. In our own time, most economists agree.
I admire the strength and courage of those Norwegian pioneers of 1825. They endured a lot in their search for economic opportunity and religious freedom. On the other hand, there definitely were incentives to leave their homeland; the Norway of two centuries ago was one of the poorer countries of Europe, with no hint of the prosperity to come in the mid-20th century, and major restrictions on religious dissidents. Today's immigrants coming to the USA from a variety of places, also propelled by hopes of freedom and opportunity (or just plain survival!), and often ready to endure great risks to get here, are no less admirable. And in view of the USA's stagnating demographics, no less needed.
Benjamin Wittes on U.S. strikes on vessels off Venezuela: "When I say murder here, I am not speaking in hyperbole or using the term in some colloquial sense."
Several Quaker organizations have united to offer us an urgent statement on genocide in the Gaza Strip, and are asking Friends churches, meetings, and other organizations to endorse the statement. Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends did so at our fall gathering this past weekend, even as we followed the first hints of a possible cease-fire.
During the fall gathering, some of us had an opportunity to see this video from B'Tselem on "Our Genocide."
And some words about emergency relief plans for when the cease-fire begins, from the U.N.'s emergency relief coordinator Tom Fletcher.
For us, as the church of Jesus Christ, the greatest danger right now is that we fail to see clearly that this government is weaponizing our own Christian tradition against the people. They are quoting the Bible to justify their policies. But this is all a smokescreen. When they mock immigrants and use children as pawns, that’s not the gospel. That’s not “on earth as it is in heaven.”
This is surely a rerun, but this may be my very favorite Albert Collins clip. "Same Old Thing."
In line with the secularisation-theory sociologist Steve Bruce, Dandelion notes how liberal forms of British Christianity are contributing to their ‘own demise through diffuse belief systems, poor belief transmission and the lack of seriousness’, all of which discourages conversion. He includes Quakerism among this trend. And while Quakerism might function as a gateway drug to ‘religious seriousness’ for the 47 per cent who come from ‘no immediately prior religious affiliation’, it is often the features which first draw the non-religious to Quaker meetings—a laxity and neutrality in the place of dogma and formality—which then sends them off to other denominations, looking for services with a more robust structure, elders and leaders who might help teach them how to believe. [Page 128.]
The year reached its end, and I was still attending St Luke’s [West Holloway, London, link added] any Sunday my hangover did not intern me to bed. I learnt the order of ceremonies. Each time I felt something unlock within me as I admitted my guilt for whomever I had harmed that week alongside everyone else in the congregation, after which the associate priest, Rev. Martin Wroe, would say, ‘Whatever it is, whatever it was, whatever it will be, God forgives you. Forgive yourselves, forgive each other,’ and then offer us the sign of the Cross. Not every time, but most times, after taking communion I felt a further unlocking, even a coming together of the disparate parts of my life. [Page 280.]
Albert Fowler.
Members of the Society of Friends are increasingly disturbed by the comment that Quaker Meeting is a fine place for seeking, but one must go elsewhere if one’s object is finding. [Two Trends in Modern Quaker Thought: A Statement of Belief (1961), page 12.]
Much has been made of the argument that the universal variety of Quaker belief is the growing edge of the Society of Friends. Large numbers of convinced Friends have come in through this door. That the universal may also be the dying edge of the Society is seldom mentioned, but many would-be Friends turn away when they find the Christian ties of a Meeting no longer binding and the drift toward what John McCandless calls practical atheism running strong. Paul Lacey tells of people he has talked with who have found the Society of Friends a kind of incubator where they can develop just enough to realize that the real conditions of life and worship lie outside it. Many of these people, having looked to the Quaker Meeting as a source of inspiration and deepened faith, pass beyond it to find fuller meaning elsewhere. [Page 19.]
I first heard about Lamorna Ash in the pages of The Guardian. The opening teaser for Ash's edited excerpt in The Guardian, "Could I become a Christian in a year?", was irresistible:
After two friends unexpectedly converted, Lamorna Ash discovered a new generation of young people turning to faith. As she investigated the phenomenon, one of her first steps was to spend a week on a working retreat on Iona. And then something strange happened…
This intro is a bit misleading. In just about all of her fourteen chapters plus prologue, introduction, conclusion, and epilogue, strange things are happening every few pages, so the intriguing part of the teaser is not the "something strange" dot dot dot, but "a new generation of young people turning to faith." This is not your typical glib summary of contemporary church life in Britain. In any case, the excerpt sold me: I had to buy the book. And, most likely, so should you.
Ash makes me think about what a conversation between Francis Spufford and Flannery O'Connor might be like. Her survey of Christianity in the UK ranges from rigidity with a happy salesface, to bass-driven ecstasy, to personal histories of toxic power games, to encounters with mysticism ancient and modern, to utter serenity, and everything in between. Her 60 interviewees have variously been converted, disillusioned, reconverted, with all levels of investment in making—or not making—their personal experiences and confessions congruent with the institution they're in at the moment. She candidly reports how this research and writing project is affecting her own life, even as she awaits a diagnosis on her mother's symptoms that suggest dementia may be coming.
She is not simply reporting on what Christianity looks like to some of her Generation Z contemporaries. She's also wrestling with Christianity's own primitive and sometimes compelling strangeness, and its multifaceted persistence. She thinks about the difference between the Nicene theologians wrestling so deeply with the nature of Christ, and those Christian thinkers of our own era who can't get beyond sex. And she wonders out loud about her own path. Should she remain an outside observer, or should she be open to crossing the line into conversion territory; and is she being influenced by what we, the readers, might think?
Lamorna Ash's paternal grandmother "was the last true Christian in our family. She went to an Anglican church every Sunday of her life, except for the few years she attended a Quaker meeting in Muswell Hill." For part of the time of Ash's writing project, when she wasn't on one of her many research visits elsewhere, she attended that same meeting, which led to some very interesting comments about British Friends. I couldn't help remembering some of Albert Fowler's words from his 1961 pamphlet on Two Trends in Modern Quaker Thought, quoted above.
I don't want to press the parallels between Ash and Fowler too hard, because I know that many British Friends are already aware of contemporary liberal Quakerism's weaknesses as well as its strengths (and the same goes for Friends in the USA), and I personally know that some of them would certainly not fit into the "laxity and neutrality" description. Also, I'm not sure those early Friends were "fiercely heterodox" exactly, since Fox and others were arguing for a more faithfully biblical Christianity. "Fiercely nonconformist," maybe. Even so, I am grateful for the frank assessment from this clear-eyed young commentator who has seen Christian alternatives many Quakers would either not know about or perhaps shrink from with horror.
Lamorna Ash has a lot of credibility with me simply based on the homework she's done. (I'm sure she'd have a more fun way of putting it.) You already know she references Ben Pink Dandelion, who has, she suggests, "the best name in academia." She also knows one of my favorite contemporary British books on Christianity, Francis Spufford's Unapologetic. (My comments on his book are here.) Her other sources include Harold Bloom, Julian of Norwich, Gillian Rose, George Fox, Rosemary Moore, Thomas R. Kelly, Karl Rahner, William James, David Bebbington, Tanya Luhrmann, Krista Tippett and Eugene Peterson in conversation, Pope Francis, and two Augustines.
Yesterday's MAGA scandal of the day (or at least in the top five): According to the Washington Post, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security wants to be sure that no federal disaster relief money would go to agencies or nonprofit organizations that help undocumented immigrants.
Mark Russ and Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre team up for a six-session online course: Whose Friends are we? Mark explains on his blog: "Emerging from my PhD research on Quaker theology and Whiteness, I’ve developed an online course for Woodbrooke reflecting on what it might mean for Quakers to be friends of God, Christ and each other in the 21st century." Mondays, October 13 to November 17. More details here.
Cherice Bock explains the background of the chapter she wrote with Catalina Morales Bahena for the new book Hungry for Hope: Letters to the Church from Young Adults, due to be published today. Their chapter is entitled, “Reclaiming ‘Enough’: Away from Scarcity Toward True Abundance.” For more on the book, visit hungryforhopebook.com.
It has been a bit more than twelve years since the late Pope Francis began his papacy, and just three short days since his death in his Vatican residence.
I won't attempt to write an obituary; you've probably seen several already. Here are some that I found interesting:
Soon after Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected pope in 2013, our friend Margaret Benefiel published a very helpful blog post: Papal Leadership without Easy Answers. Her article reinforced my own hopes that the new pope's leadership would give a powerful witness to humane and evangelical (in the broad sense) values.
As I wrote at the time in my post Simon and Francis, I had two particular hopes for the leadership of Pope Francis, one personal and one more global. On a personal level, I wanted his help in my own battles with cynicism, which I imagine is an occupational hazard for all political scientists, however idealistic.
In turn, I wanted to be one of the pope's Simon-like helpers in my own microscopic way, by committing to pray for him daily, which I've done.
I described my more global hope for his pontificate in my response to Margaret's post:
It's a mysterious and (hopefully) fertile anomaly that the titular head of a Christian confession automatically becomes a world leader, entitled to visibility and influence in an otherwise severely secular and often ruthlessly pragmatic circle. By design, Providence, or both, John Paul II became a hugely important figure on the global stage in his own time. He created and exploited disequilibrium in Eastern Europe on a mass scale. What I hope for Francis is that he will create and exploit disequilibrium in a more specific realm: the "world leaders" themselves, in how they envision leadership, the image of leader, the "God-bearing" quality inherent in spiritually grounded leadership. By helping them, consciously or unconsciously, "confront the gap between their espoused values and lived values," he might help accomplish a shift that is just as important as adoption of this or that policy.
As a role model and idealistic provocateur, Francis definitely succeeded. His political critics on the right ("He's a communist!") may not have realized how rooted Francis was in longstanding Catholic social teaching, but what gave his position added credibility were the ways he consistently advocated and modeled care for people in poverty and distress, for the earth, and for peace. He was criticized by progressives for not changing doctrines sufficiently, but he had the gift of forming friendships across all sorts of social, cultural, and theological differences, in full view of his critics and skeptics.
This consistency, and the creative (and sometimes humorous) ways it was shown, ministered directly to my own struggle against cynicism. It's harder to say whether all of this made an impact on his peers among world leaders. Now, in the wake of his death, the presidents and potentates of the world are praising him, but few of them seemed to try to meet his standard in their own lives and careers. (If I'm forgetting about someone, please correct me!) Even so, his example proved that it was possible. And in the meantime, his inspiration lit up the lives and efforts of many mystics, philosophers, and activists worldwide who might otherwise have been subdued by cynicism.
Pope Francis was sometimes criticized for not taking a stronger pro-Ukrainian stance after Russia's full-scale invasion. However, one powerful incident for me was his challenge to the Russian Orthodox patriarch, Kirill, as told in this article by CNN's Delia Gallagher.
In one of my posts about the strange popularity of hell among some Christians, I compared Grayson Gilbert's God and the Pope's God.... God's sweet revenge.
Many world leaders are showing up on Saturday for the funeral of Pope Francis. As Harriet Sherwood (the Guardian) points out, from a diplomatic point of view, there may be both risks and opportunities.
Diana Butler Bass on Francis, his amazing final sermon, and the stakes in choosing his successor.
Ashley Wilcox, A.L.S., and her very particular path to marriage. A powerful article.
Nancy Thomas, her leftover chicken gumbo, and her hidden inner critic. (I really would like to pre-order her book. Watch this space!)
This afternoon, Judy and I went to St. Olave's Church on Hart Street, about a fifteen-minute walk from here, for today's lunchtime recital. The musicians were the Quartet Concrète. The first work they performed was Bach's "Komm, süßer Tod, komm selge Ruh" (Come, sweet death, come, blessed rest). I couldn't find a video of this quartet performing that piece, so the video below is another arrangement altogether. (Here's the quartet in a different recital; they're good!)
I'm including the video below in memory of Pope Francis, although I don't think the lyrics to "Komm, süßer Tod" exactly match his outgoing personality. ("For I am weary of the world...."—I don't think so.) His death reminds me more of the way he sometimes went to sleep while praying, because it is good to fall asleep in the arms of God.
Last week, I proposed "under occupation" as a way of absorbing what the new Trump regime was imposing on us, and considering how to respond. I'm not going to try to list all the developments since then, that, taken together, feel like a occupation—you know as much as I do about all that. Here are just a few reflections, with references, on the past week.
Lawsuits: In my list of links last week, I included a lawsuit challenging a U.S. Department of Homeland Security policy change. That change allows DHS to invade "sensitive locations" such as places of worship, schools, and hospitals in order to arrest immigrants suspected of violating the law. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Friends, New England Yearly Meeting of Friends, and Baltimore Yearly Meeting of Friends, along with two congregations within Baltimore Yearly Meeting.
Since then, several other faith communities have joined the lawsuit, including New York Yearly Meeting. In that same list of links, I provided a link to this legal challenges tracker. At that point it listed 24 lawsuits challenging various executive actions of the Trump administration. As of today, the number of complaints has grown to 37.
The favored religion: Today, in a document entitled "Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias," Donald Trump announced that his administration "will not tolerate anti-Christian weaponization of government or unlawful conduct targeting Christians. The law protects the freedom of Americans and groups of Americans to practice their faith in peace, and my Administration will enforce the law and protect these freedoms. My Administration will ensure that any unlawful and improper conduct, policies, or practices that target Christians are identified, terminated, and rectified." (More in Reuters' coverage.) I wonder, will this protection extend to Catholics and Lutherans defending migrants, or "nasty" Episcopal bishops who preach the Gospel in the president's presence? And what about our neighbors who peacefully practice other religions, or none?
The executive order mentions religious freedom in general several times, but the heavy emphasis (judge for yourself) is on eradicating anti-Christian bias. The Biden administration is charged with "an egregious pattern of targeting peaceful Christians, while ignoring violent, anti-Christian offenses." The charges include the completely coincidental timing of Easter Sunday 2024 and "Transgender Day of Visibility." I can't help suspecting that to score points with a crucial part of his base, Trump might actually contribute to a whole new wave of genuine anti-evangelical bias as religious and secular people alike absorb this embarrassing enmeshment of government with the Christian knockoffs that suit this cruel and irreligious regime.
Ethnic cleansing, American style: Joe Biden's active participation in the rubbishing of the Gaza Strip was bad enough, but here comes Donald Trump with an amazing new embellishment: remove the whole population and create a "Riviera of the Middle East"! Meanwhile, as Michael Arria (Mondoweiss) points out, (1) the West Bank may face equal threats, and (2) "A Trump-appointed member of the United States Holocaust Memorial" (Martin Oliner) "has published an Op-Ed calling Palestinians 'fundamentally evil' and not worthy of 'any mercy.'"
Meanwhile, up in space: First, another false witness against Joe Biden. Last month, Elon Musk posted on X "that the president [Trump] had asked SpaceX to bring the two 'stranded' astronauts back to Earth. Musk added that SpaceX would do so, and, 'Terrible that the Biden administration left them there so long.' Trump chimed in, "I have just asked Elon Musk and @SpaceX to 'go get' the 2 brave astronauts who have been virtually abandoned in space by the Biden Administration. They have been waiting for many months on Space Station. Elon will soon be on his way. Hopefully, all will be safe. Good luck."
The actual situation, and the complicated planning and spaceship-swapping involved (no fault of Biden's!) is described by Ars Technica's Eric Berger.
A history lesson: "What follows is a step-by-step account of how Hitler systematically disabled and then dismantled his country’s democratic structures and processes in less than two months’ time—specifically, one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours, and 40 minutes." Timothy W. Ryback (gift link) in The Atlantic.
Rebecca Gordon (Tomdispatch) sums up:King Donald, old and new litanies, and the Faithful Fools.
Heather Cox Richardson's own summary of the occupation's progress, and a few instances of resistance. (Don't blame her for the "occupation" metaphor; it's mine.)
A pro-Russian disinformation source produced a video discrediting USAID, and apparently Elon Musk and Donald Trump, Jr., have taken the bait.
Becky Ankeny has been speaking to Silverton Friends Church about the crucifixion of Jesus. Last month she spoke about the resurrection.
Micah Bales at Berkeley Friends Church on Jesus and his inaugural sermon.... "'All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.' Wow, what a guy! He’s going to make Israel great again." Shouldn't he have stopped while he was ahead? More to the point: What has God anointed him to do?And are we ready, not just to admire, but to follow?
Greg Morgan, Elderchaplain: "Religious faith is an important source of peace for many facing death, but it’s no guarantee...."
Once again, an invitation to join our weekly online prayer meeting for peace, under the care of Friends World Committee for Consultation, Europe and Middle East Section. Every Tuesday, 1:30 p.m. London time. See this page for more information.
Christone "Kingfish" Ingram and his band perform "662."
As usual, in this last post of the year, I've picked out twelve blog posts from this past year as a sampling of what I've been up to on this site during the year. This was the year "Can You Believe?" celebrated its twentieth birthday. (Today's post is number 1,110.) I'm grateful for your company and always eager to hear your own thoughts and responses.
Back in 1974, as an enthusiastic new Quaker, I was eagerly immersing myself in the journals of George Fox and John Woolman, the book of discipline of London Yearly Meeting, Barclay's Apology, and William Penn's Key, along with the other writings and tracts that I mentioned here. Something in this material struck me in a new way today. Maybe it occurred to you a long time ago! But here's what I realized: the early Quakers might strike us now as staunch defenders of Christian faith, but they themselves did an enormous amount of deconstructing. And they did so at great cost and risk.
This teaching—“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied”—appears somehow esoteric and odd, but in fact it is the central political doctrine in modern Russia. Your Honor, what is it, this phrase or slogan, the most important political slogan in Russia? Where does power lie? Power lies in truth.
Sometimes I'm tempted to succumb to a doom mentality. For all we know, extinction might be inevitable no matter what we do. Countries and empires have come and gone, civilizations have perished, species have vanished. The planet itself will survive our misdeeds—as Richard Feynman reminded us in his famous appendix to the Rogers Commission investigation into the Challenger explosion, "... nature cannot be fooled." However, at some point even planets will vanish into their dying suns. Our loving Creator will archive us one way or another (I vote for "heaven"!) but, short of that, nothing about our long-term future is guaranteed.
Just to get a bit more argumentative.... Considering those Quakers who do not believe they're part of the larger Church: do they even see themselves as members of the larger Quaker family?
My understanding of the Quaker movement is that the first generation of Quakers decided to go to Christ directly instead of relying on the Christian establishment of their time. In turn, those founders told their descendants (us) that we could do the same. Along the way, we've learned a lot about what it means to rely on Christ at the center of our meetings, including the ethical consequences. But at the same time, the "establishment" and the other rebels and reformers who preceded and followed us have also been listening and learning—making discoveries and mistakes along the way, just as we have. That's what we are part of, not the creation of a whole new separate religion.
All of this drama might make for absorbing reading in the hands of any competent historian. But Doris and her husband had deep emotional stakes in retelling these stories for each other—and now Doris for us. They were eleven years apart in age, and at times their disagreements reflected their deepest political and personal allegiances—Richard to the Kennedy family, for example, although the example is an oversimplification; and Doris to LBJ. Many times they had different recollections or interpretations of important events, and their conversations seeking a fuller understanding are part of the sweet essence of the book. They recreate a half-generation of American politics where passionate advocacy for economic and social justice (despite all the hardball political maneuverings they recall together) was worth putting one's whole career on the line. Equally challenging for both of them were the times they had to insist on saying goodbye to a titanic political figure simply in order to reclaim one's own life.
God loves us but does not necessarily restrain our violent hand.
Of course it is true that we don’t necessarily know when God’s intervention did happen, only when it apparently didn’t. So God didn’t restrain the hands of Russian soldiers in Ukraine, though we have to wonder what happened in the minds and hearts of the thousands of soldiers who have apparently deserted since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. And God didn’t prevent the loss of thousands of innocent children in the Gaza Strip since the Hamas attack. It just doesn’t seem right to me to say that all of us who prayed our little heads off for peace and reconciliation just weren’t using the right words, or we failed to mobilize enough people to pray enough times day and night to finally persuade God to act. Ever since we ate those apples in the Garden of Eden, too many of us humans think we know better than God how to fix conflicts by eliminating our enemies, and God hasn’t seen fit to set us all straight.
JULY: Exceptional shorts. (Quaker exceptionalism and Scandinavian exceptionalism.)
My late cousin Johan Fredrik Heyerdahl and I used to discuss some of the complexities and contradictions of Norwegian identity. My visit to Norway later this year will be my first since his death, and I'll intensely miss his wonderful company. I'm sure I'll have some good conversations with relatives and friends, but in the meantime I've started my preparations by reading Michael Booth's The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia.
Some of this territory was well covered by Robert Ferguson's excellent Scandinavians: In Search of the Soul of the North, which I briefly described in this post: "Shame is what turns societies around." What I like about Michael Booth's book is his undisguised irritation at the exaggerated admiration that the Scandinavian countries sometimes bask in.
In her important commentary on the passing of old-school church culture and what might be replacing it, Christianity after Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening, Diana Butler Bass writes,
...[A]nger is not the only emotion people express when talking about religion. Many people are just bored. They are bored with church-as-usual, church-as-club, church-as-entertainment, or church-as-work. Many of my friends, faithful churchoers for decades, are dropping out because religion is dull, the purview of folks who never want to change or always want to fight about somebody else's sex life....
In all of the fifty years since I started attending weekly services, this has not been my experience at all; quite the opposite. However, I cheerfully acknowledge that I am a peculiar case—peculiarly unqualified to comment on Diana Butler Bass's assessment.
Before I deal with my disqualifications, I should acknowledge that she backs up her comments with statistical evidence of alienation from established religion, and that the trends she pointed to twelve years ago, when her book was published, have more or less continued along the same lines. (However, "boredom" isn't an explicit category in any of those statistics!)
If I honestly believe (backed by experience) that ...
Quaker faith and practice is a way of knowing and following God;
Our communities are trustworthy, leadership is based on spiritual gifts rather than social distinctions, and the pathways for new people to become members and leaders are made clear;
We have a message and a practice that is very different from the toxic agendas of white Christian nationalism and other distortions that have brought the word "Christian" into disrepute;
I have found healing and hope in this faith and the community it has shaped...
... then, shouldn't I feel an obligation to care about growth? I believe so. It seems urgent to me to work toward ensuring that our faith and the communities formed by that faith are accessible to anyone who might need that kind of community.
There is nothing about this obligation that requires me to exaggerate Quakers' virtues, or to conceal our defects. I certainly don't need to claim that no other faith communities are equally trustworthy or equally capable of healing and giving hope.
1 O LORD, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. 2 but I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me. [see note] 3 O Israel, hope in the LORD for this time on and forevermore.
[Note: Or my soul within me is like a weaned child]
... One of the reasons I am so fond of this psalm, especially in the context of preaching, is that it reminds me that, when I speak in meeting for worship, my job is to be faithful, not clever. My task is confined to two things: first, to point toward trustworthy sources of inspiration and vision, and, second, to suggest some implications of those sources as a way of encouraging you to do the same, to consider the implications for yourselves. It is not my purpose to do your work for you, to show off my own cleverness (as obvious as it is), or to one-up someone else, or to even hint that I’ve covered all the possibilities.
[Sarah] Rainsford's book encompasses the last years of Alexei Navalny's activism in Russia, his poisoning in 2020, followed by treatment in Germany and his return to Russia and immediate arrest on January 17, 2021, and, eventually his death in prison in February of this year, and his burial in Moscow.
Navalny's own account of his life and activism, Patriot: A Memoir, also touched me at a personal level. I loved Sarah Rainsford's book in part because of something we share: a nearly lifelong interest in Russia, as students and then as visitors and residents. Both of us have had to wrestle with the realization that somehow Russia includes both a capacity for extraordinary humanity and self-sacrifice as well as a capacity for systemic cruelty on a mass scale, fueled by greed and assisted by centuries of dysfunctional relationships between those with power and everyone else.
At least that's what it looks like from the outside. Navalny, on the inside of this reality, seemed to have made a decision not to tolerate this contradiction. If Russia is to flourish, cruelty and arbitrary absolutism must be confronted and defeated. The first two-thirds of his book recounts how he came to this conclusion; the last part shows how he paid the price for his convictions, through his prison diaries and many of his Instagram posts right into this year.
Also in November, some guest reflections from Judy Maureron resources for Quaker discipleship from the early history of our movement, as we consider the repercussions from the U.S. presidential election.
I was stunned by the painting's blatant colonialist condescension, an observation that I'm hardly the first to make! The original intention was surely to elevate piety and charity as noble characteristics of the Empire and its self-attributed civilizing mission. And if it were possible to neutralize the imperial agendas from Christian missionaries' work in the golden age of Western missions (some would say not possible!!), there were cumulative blessings in many places. (See Robert Woodberry's "The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy.")
But it's equally true, as historian Michael Ohajuru quotes in the "Black History Walks" Youtube video on that painting, "When England came to Africa, they had the Bible, we had the land. They said, 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land."
Part of what shook me at the gallery was the realization that, had I been around in 1863, when this painting was first exhibited, I probably would not have been shocked....
Is literacy in decline? Here's Karen Swallow Prior on how the church can help meet the need.
Michelle Boorstein considers the "prosperity gospel" and its influence on pro-Trump Latino voters. (Washington Post gift link.)
Becky Ankeny meditates on the meaning of the crucifixion and what it means for us: taking up the cross and dying, not necessarily "heroically" but by "ordinary virtue," by daily choice.
Sean "Mack" McDonald pays tribute to Albert King during this wonderful concert in France:
