Tatiana Blokhina, Autumn in Bolkhov. Elektrostal Artists exhibition, 2012.
There is nothing new about imagining the world as a village. But today that image really struck me.
It came as I saw the photos and videos coming from Venezuela, with earthquake survivors' faces filling the frames with their personal accounts of disaster. That story on my news feed was followed immediately by the U.S. president blaming vandals for the National Mall's Reflecting Pool scandal, and his vice president and secretary of state spinning their awkward interpretations of war and not-war and maybe-again-war with Iran.
All that was soon followed by accounts of Europe's record-breaking heatwaves. (But nothing about South Asia.)
Speaking just for myself, maybe it takes witnessing disasters—earthquakes, famines, scenes of rubble-filled streets and their desperate inhabitants—to bring the world into human scale. But then, seen in that immediate scale, how do I regard the world's potentates and their conceits? Suddenly Trump, Putin, and other would-be global bigshots can be seen shrunk down to their true scale, not the puffed-up versions they want us to admire or fear. What right do they have—do we grant them—to pollute our village and put our neighbors and ourselves in danger?
I still don't advocate caricaturizing or demonizing them. But let's expose their imperial pretensions, whether they're peddling white Christian nationalism or the equally toxic Russian World ... or whatever actual demon is telling them and us that all our problems would go away if we saw our village neighbors as faceless "others."
We're going through a time when the vision of a global village may seem hopelessly idealistic. But ... is it nevertheless a valid vision? Or, if we surrender it in favor of a more cynical view, what keeps us from ending up behaving as apologists for the supposed realism of raw power, aided by increasingly clever tools of persuasion and disinformation?
Some of us are wonderful at bringing visions to life, whether through imaginative policy studies or through creative arts. Others are more suited to analyzing and exposing the forces which seek to pull down such visions in favor of passivity and mutual suspicion. Still others have the gift of keeping practitioners of these two different approaches in loving contact with each other, so that none of us find ourselves abandoned to disillusionment or resignation.
That's where I hope trustworthy faith communities can find a unique and urgent role.
Have you found such a home? Tell me about it!
Aleksandr Ilichev, North South East West, Elektrostal Palette exhibition, 2012.
It was my effort to make sense of the experiences of Christian women that led me to this new account of American Christianity writ large, and ultimately, to a clearer understanding of the spiritual underpinnings of our current cultural and political landscape.
While Live Laugh Love complements Jesus and John Wayne, it presents a more complicated narrative. To trace the roots of modern Christian women’s culture, I needed to reach back to an earlier era, to the dynamic religious landscape of nineteenth-century America. I also needed to extend beyond evangelicalism to include mainline and charismatic Christianity, Mormonism, and “secular” philosophies of positive thinking. Women’s relationship to power is more complicated than men’s. Women exercise agency, but it is often circumscribed by the authority of the men in their lives. Like Jesus and John Wayne, however, this is a book about whiteness. Although women of color have participated in aspects of this consumer culture and at times have voiced astute critiques of it, the book describes a consumer marketplace that caters primarily to white women’s needs and desires.
Also like Jesus and John Wayne, this story ends in a dark place, as perhaps any history of the United States that runs up to the present must.
The research that gave rise to this book was full of twists and turns. Early on, I was surprised by the frequency with which twentieth-century Christian women quoted the wisdom of Hannah Whitall Smith. A nineteenth-century “holiness” preacher, Smith had popularized a more optimistic version of Christianity than the one I had heard preached from the pulpit of my church. In contrast to Calvinism’s depiction of the persistence of sin even in the lives of believers, Smith taught that a simple act of faith granted believers victory over sin and a profound sense of peace, well-being, and happiness. Despite the fact that Smith had written one of the best-selling religious books of her time, most histories of American Christianity mentioned her only in passing. Why was Smith everywhere in the sources, I wondered, and why had so many other Christian women repackaged her ideas more than half a century after her death?
Following footnotes and traveling to archives, I began to piece together a narrative almost entirely unfamiliar to me. My sources brought me to the court of Louis XVI and to the woods of upstate New York, to the Chinese mission field and along the Mormon Trail. When I ended up back on the terrain of twentieth-century evangelicalism, the familiar had become strange. By then, three interlocking strands had come into focus: Smith’s holiness evangelicalism, Mormonism, and the philosophy of New Thought.
Du Mez totally keeps her implied promise of tracing those "interlocking strands" right through to this very year, including the ways Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity, along with the religious publishing, marketing, and broadcasting enterprises and the phenomenon of multi-level marketing, became part of the mix.
Early in the book, Du Mez addresses her audience:
This book is for the men in the room. It is for readers who have never heard of Beverly Lewis or Rebecca St. James, for those who wouldn’t dream of buying a Thomas Kinkade print or waiting in line for a Magnolia cupcake. You have no idea what you’ve been missing. But this book is especially for the women. It is for girls who braided their hair like Laura Ingalls and tried to obey like Elisabeth Elliot. It is for women who made all the crafts and know all the songs. It is for those of us who were not pretty enough or sweet enough or white enough. It is for women who loved Beth Moore and for women who still love Beth Moore. It is for all of us.
As a white male who came to Christian faith as an adult, I'm among those who never heard of Beverly Lewis or Rebecca St. James. I was aware of the "prairie fiction" and "Amish romance" genres, and of authors Janette Oke, Elisabeth Elliot, and Catherine Marshall, simply because I've worked in three different Christian bookstores, but I was completely unaware of the underlying influences and messages directed at women.
I was aware of Hannah Whitall Smith's book The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life, because it was on my Canadian charismatic relatives' bookshelf as well as on the shelves of those bookstores. It had been in print ever since it was published in 1875.
In this book, The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life, Smith identifies with "we Quakers," the faith of her family and young adulthood, although later she and her husband were baptized by the Baptists and became Holiness celebrities in the context of Atlantic-culture evangelicalism. (She eventually rejoined Quakers through Baltimore Yearly Meeting.) What I didn't realize until reading Live Laugh Love was how her book was appropriated for the purpose of creating a specific message to women: you must decide to be happy, whatever your outward circumstances; that's (more or less) the only control you have. Other parts of her spiritual heritage, particularly the freedom she insisted upon to preach as a woman, and her belief in universal salvation, were de-emphasized and forgotten.
Du Mez mentions the neglect of Smith in histories of American Christianity. (I just checked Peter W. Williams's 604-page America's Religions and found one tiny mention of her, misspelled, paired with David Updegraff as "Quakers with evangelical leanings..." in a list of those participating in an early stream of the Holiness movement. No mention of her book.) This lack of recognition reminded me of Agnes Sanford, whose central role in the healing-prayer movement of the twentieth century while almost invisible to the academic world, was documented in William de Arteaga's book Agnes Sanford and her Companions: The Assault on Cessationism and the Coming of the Charismatic Renewal. (See this post.)
But the main reason I'm referring to Du Mez's careful study of Hannah Whitall Smith's work is that it is just one example of how she presents her many sources and the ways they influenced each other to this day, including the role of women in the Christian networks that now seek to remake the USA into a theocracy.
I found insights, references, and connections to highlight on practically every page of this book. It took over my life these last few days. Du Mez's writing is intense ... sometimes I was struck deeply by the bondages imposed on women under Christian pretenses, sometimes I cheered the Christian resistance to those bondages, but I was never bored. If you have any interest in these themes and variations of faith, politics, and culture, I can't recommend this book highly enough.
Hoping I'm not stretching fair use to the breaking point, here's another excerpt, this time related to the book's name.
Two years after William James published The Varieties of Religious Experience, an Iowa woman named Bessie Anderson Stanley submitted a poem to a magazine contest asking readers to define “success.” The person who achieved success, Stanley wrote, was one who “has lived well, laughed often, and loved much.” The poem won the $250 cash prize, enough to pay off the mortgage on Stanley’s home. Reprinted in various anthologies, the poem entered the popular lexicon in condensed form. Over the years, one variant was mistakenly attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, an error popularized by advice columnists Ann Landers and her sister, Abby. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, few bothered to ask where the phrase gracing glittery tumblers, decorative throw pillows, and Hobby Lobby wall art had originated. In 2021, online retailer Wayfair stocked more than fifty-six thousand Live Laugh Love products, and DIY marketplace Etsy reported over one hundred thousand searches and listed more than eight thousand products carrying the words. ... But the phrase’s popularity was more than a décor trend associated with “basic” white women. Its ubiquitous appearance on wall stencils and household items was a result, in part, of the enduring popularity of mind-power—if the mind could shape reality, then visual reminders to think positive thoughts could produce positive transformations. Where there was a wish, there was a way....
Live Laugh Love is a book about love and fear, longing and greed, about Mary Kay makeup, Christian romance novels, Joyce Meyer Ministries, and Ballerina Farm. Its cast of characters includes true believers and charlatans, well-intentioned people and predators, and it is not always clear who is who. This is also a book about politics. White Christian women often claim to be apolitical; if you ask them, they will tell you that their lives revolve around faith and family, yet what they think about faith and family informs their views on education, taxation, welfare, economic inequality, immigration, law enforcement, and what it means to be American. Far from trivial, the products women consume influence how they see the world they live in and the world they hope to create. Ultimately, this is a book about power—about women’s power to define their own lives, men’s power over women, and the power women wield over one another. It is about discipleship and devotion, authority and submission, manipulation, cruelty, and control.
These excerpts and my comments are based on a digital galley proof obtained through Netgalley. I was made aware of the galley when I joined the Live Laugh Love Launch Team. When the book is printed and made available in September, I may need to check and revise these quotations. However, what you've read so far accurately represents the author's promises to us readers, and the amazing work she has put into fulfilling them.
Lamorna Ash, author of Don't Forget We're Here Forever: A New Generation's Search for Religion, which I reviewed in this post, will speak at Westminster Quaker Meeting's meetinghouse on Saturday, June 20, 7 p.m. London time, in person and online. Theme: "Quakers and a new generation’s search for religion." Details here. (Thanks to Bunhill Fields Quaker Meeting's newsletter for the link.)
Elderchaplain Greg Morgan on Rosalie, her gratitude, and her quilt.
Every year on the 12th May, MO asks people across the country to record their day. This might include what they did at work, what they ate, what they heard or watched, and whatever else they got up to. Anyone based in the UK can send us their diary, and we accept submissions both online and by post.
Diaries can take whatever form you feel comfortable with. If you’d rather type, great! If you’d prefer to photograph or sketch your day, that’s also great! Diaries don’t have to be formal, and they definitely don’t have to be perfectly written or spell-checked. We’d always rather receive an imperfect diary than none at all.
This year, we are keen to hear your thoughts and feelings about nature and wellbeing, as well as anything else you would like to share about your day. Tell us if you go out and experience nature on 12 May. Where did you go? How did this experience make you feel? If you were at work or indoors, is there somewhere else you would have liked to have been instead?
I found out about the Mass Observation Archive from an English Friend who is a registered observer for the program. I've been fascinated ever since.
Mass Observation seeks to document the everyday lives of British people as directly as possible from the people themselves. Registered Mass Observers respond several times a year to "directives," which ask about specific aspects of daily life. For example, the current directive seeks attitudes and experiences related to immigration and asylum-seekers, among other topics. Here's the official explanation of this observer role and a link to the handbook for observers, along with a description of one-off opportunities to submit observations.
The other major documentation project, and the one that especially interested me, is the annual May 12 diary invitation, which is open to anyone living in the UK. The Mass Observation Archive's May 12 program began in 1937, with the coronation of King George VI, and, in its original conception, ran well past the end of World War II. The project was relaunched in 1981. Its early years can be sampled through compilations, including these two fascinating books available on the Internet Archive: Private Battles: How the War Almost Defeated Us, and Wartime Women: A Mass Observation Anthology.
Sources: History Workshop (left); Internet Archive (center and right).
Do we in the USA have similar efforts to collect direct accounts of daily life, as well as responses to shared national experiences? StoryCorps comes to mind, but it seems far more controlled, edited, and packaged for media.
I answer surveys regularly from three different research organizations, but they decide the topics and questions, and I usually have to choose from a very incomplete set of possible answers. Usually there's no room for my own voice.
A very specific but worthwhile channel in the USA might be the logbooks at National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management interpretive stations and similar guestbooks at other major tourist sites. For example, when our family moved from Indiana to Oregon (via Madison County, Virginia!), we visited several sites marking the historic Oregon Trail. At Baker City we were invited to write our own family's story of how we came to be on the Oregon Trail in the interpretive center's logbook. I haven't been able to find out how those stories are (or aren't) collected and preserved. Do you know, by any chance?
Other attempts to cover at least a bit of this territory in the USA are represented by the books and recorded interviews by Studs Terkel and other oral historians and archivists. However, none of these quite approach the idea of the UK's Mass Observation Archive: inviting direct and unfiltered contributions to the national record from potentially the whole population, along with topical observations from hundreds of volunteer observers. It's very tempting to me to ask whether this difference in data collection reflects different ideas of civic duty and community-mindedness vs individualism.
One important aspect of MO's May 12 program is, of course, the use of this specific date every year, whether or not anything "important" happened on that day in the nation's life. In 1937, that was the date of the new king's coronation, and researchers wanted actual testimony rather than the mass media's take on the event, but, since then, MO simply wants accounts of people's ordinary day. The occasional one-off invitations are also fascinating—I remember being very moved by my friend's account of the funeral of Elizabeth II.
Have you found ways to contribute to the national memory of your country?
Speaking of one-day archives, do you remember the series of photography books entitled A Day in the Life of ... a number of countries including Canada, the USSR, Spain, Japan, the USA, along with the states of Hawaii and California? They were published back in the 1980's, assembled by the editing team of Rick Smolan and David Elliot Cohen with the participation of hundreds of photographers. Here on the Internet Archives is the volume on the Soviet Union, and here is the one on Canada. Pictured: the volume on Spain, the edition we've owned for nearly forty years.
Related: Diaries; Innocence (scroll to Studs Terkel interview at end).
Like Britain at Suez in 1956, Washington will likely pay a heavy price for its “micro-militarism” in the Strait of Hormuz. Close allies, the bedrock of U.S. global power for 80 years, have refused any military support for Washington’s war of choice, prompting Trump to call them “cowards.” In response to his thundering threats of civilian and civilizational destruction (both war crimes), Trump has been condemned by world leaders. Oblivious to the dangers of war in a region that is the epicenter of global capitalism, Washington is now proving ever more dangerously disruptive of the global economy, making China look like a far more stable choice for world leadership. Moreover, while the U.S. military has proven its tactical agility in destroying targets, it clearly can no longer capture meaningful strategic objectives.
On "local hero" John Henry Newman, the Cadburys of chocolate fame, and "parochial" life at its best. Thanks to Mary Raber for the link.
This year, Russia's Victory Day (May 9) will look a little different, particularly in Moscow.
Robert P. Jones on the U.S. administration's report on anti-Christian bias, including the report's absurd selectivity.
"Nobody likes to be called a quitter," says Nancy Thomas. But as she writes, she concedes that some losses may also be gains. "As often happens when I write this blog, I’m processing my situation and coming to a place of hope."
Source: David Sipress, New Yorker via Seraphim Sigrist's Facebook page, commenting on his own back pain.
... [T]he gifts of the Holy Spirit are revealed in community. As such, they are for all the community, and so one gift does not quench the others, even when, as happens often, they are opposite. So the analytical does not quench the emotional, the gift of tears does not quench that of laughter, the gift of the spiritual elder does not contradict that of the psychologist, the gift of ecstasy does not stand in disharmony with that of calm.
Bishop Seraphim Sigrist (Orthodox Church in America) died last Saturday morning. There must be many people all over the world who are going through what I'm feeling now. Yes, it's true that we believe that "he fell asleep in the Lord," but he gave us so much wisdom and care and sheer fun that I, for one, can't help feeling sad and very sorry for us.
I never met him in person. The closest we came to meeting each other was when I visited the Pleasantville campus of Pace University to conduct marketing interviews at a time when he was working in the library. We actually met through a Facebook chat when he contacted me to consider joining an ecumenical fellowship that, during the peak COVID years, was meeting online. That invitation led to, among other things, five years of correspondence that I'm very grateful to be able to revisit anytime. We chatted about Japan (where he served as Bishop of East Japan, and where my mother was born and raised), our experiences of Russia, several mutual friends there, the intersections of Eastern Orthodox and Quaker Christianity, authors and artists we both admired, and the joys and puzzles of ecumenical life. We sent each other many links over the years; it was he who told me that Friends Journal had published an interview with the Norwegian author Jon Fosse, whom he was reading at the time.
Looking over that correspondence, I am amazed at my own openness with him in writing about my family and early life. I've no doubt that many others found him to be a person of surpassing empathy as I did. And some of you lucky people knew him for far longer than my five years.
His scope of knowledge, interests, sympathies, and ability to detect unexpected affinities and hidden kinships across all those fields was amazing. And he frequently made those connections with gentle playfulness.
In his positive review of Bishop Seraphim's book Theology of Wonder, the Christian Reformed scholar James Peyton wrote words that ring very true, more generally, of what I came to know and love about our friend. In the Calvin Theological Journal (pages 479-481), Peyton wrote,
There is no question that the author is a gifted theologian: It is clear that Bishop Seraphim is well-acquainted with a wide spectrum of views and controversies, both among Christians of various stripes and with the views of practitioners of other faith traditions throughout the world. However, he never makes such familiarity the point of his presentation or of any of the sections; indeed, he wears his extensive learning lightly. He is not concerned to show us how much he knows, although he knows a great deal: He refers deftly to the understandings current among Hasidic Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, and various kinds of Muslims. He cites with considerable dexterity literary figures from various cultures, across many centuries, and in a host of genres. Unostentatiously, the author weaves these all into a seamless tapestry that invites readers to appreciate that "all things (considered in their depth) led into eluctable mystery" (93): Bishop Seraphim is concerned to show us how much he does not understand—or, better put, what no one can comprehend. In the best traditions of the rich Eastern Orthodox tradition in which he stands, this little book offers a contemporary—and very accessible—mystical theology.
Maybe he truly was a seraph cast among humans, sent on some mysterious mission. A seraph on earth would move awkwardly in crowds, his wings more hindrance than help, yet he would ache constantly for the divine presence he had known before. That longing defined Seraphim. I have never met anyone so profoundly nostalgic for heaven.
The fourth Global Ecumenical Theological Institute (GETI) in Wadi El Natrun, Egypt—an Eastern Orthodox perspective. (How I wish I could talk about this report with Eden Grace!)
You've heard of virtue-signalling. Now we have vice-signalling and vitriol-signalling.... (Skip these links if you want to stay on the sunny side of the street.)
Kristin Du Mez, Bruce Berglund, and the Moscow Playbook.
Writer and poet Nancy Thomas on the writing vocation, technological interruptions, and ... what rhymes with Forsythe?
This time, our "Baby Scratch My Back" version comes from Otis Redding (audio only with slideshow). It's probably my favorite version strictly for vocal performance. Musicians: Booker T. & the M.G.'s (Steve Cropper, Donald Dunn, Al Jackson Jr., Booker T. Jones) along with pianist Isaac Hayes and a horn section including Wayne Jackson, Charles "Packy" Axton, Andrew Love, Floyd Newman, and Sammy Coleman.
"A flag of peace and freedom"—a design for a post-colonial Russian flag. Source.
Since the death of Alexei Navalny, I've not written much here about the theme of the "beautiful Russia of the future." I continue to think about Russia often, and am in touch with some of our friends and colleagues of our years in Elektrostal, but the ongoing war, and the repressive political context, has complicated these relationships, to my sorrow and frustration.
However, I was reminded that this state of affairs won't last forever, Here's the communication I received today, written by two old friends, that reminded me:
Planting Seeds for Healing
A brutal war is raging in Ukraine and near the border with Russia. Will there be a winner in this conflict? I think not. In war, everyone loses. Both sides have lost many lives. The destruction in Ukraine is immense.
All wars eventually come to an end, and this one will not be an exception. When this war is over, the reconstruction begins.
However, it is not just the infrastructure and buildings that must be rebuilt. It is the lives of the people that will need restoring and healing—a return to mental and physical health. For every soldier who is killed, many lives are affected—parents, children, siblings, spouse, friends—and their lives will never be the same. Some sources estimate over one million killed plus many other wounded. There will be a great many people on both sides with unimaginable losses who suffer from trauma, stress, depression, hatred, grief, shame, regret, and many will carry unthinkable physical injuries for the rest of their lives.
Healing is a long-term process which will require dedicated professionals and volunteers who believe that, with compassion and understanding, it is possible to do healing work with individuals and groups. This process begins now in anticipation of the eventual end to this terrible war and the normalization of travel: willing professionals must be located; a sustainable program developed; volunteers
trained; money raised for transportation, office space, supplies, outreach.
There is a registered non-profit in the US that has been supporting projects in Russia and Ukraine for 29 years. Its supporters believe that an intense effort will be needed to answer the call for help from both sides in this war. They want to be involved and are looking for others who want to engage with the creative and inclusive process of assessing needs, connecting with the people in both countries, developing programs, raising funds, and implementing such healing.
Knowledge of the Russian or Ukrainian language is not necessary.
I can vouch for the authors of this invitation and hope that, if something stirs in your heart, you'll get in touch with the authors through that e-mail address.
Quakers have been involved in Russia and Ukraine for many years, dating back to Peter the Great. I know personally some of those who now carry these concerns for healing, but the majority of them are now 70 or more years old. If there are younger Friends with a concern for this part of the world, I'd love to hear from you. (johan@canyoubelieve.me.) And so would those who wrote the invitation above.
When I started studying the Russian language in high school in Evanston, Illinois, I didn't feel alone. It was great fun to go to the University of Illinois campus in Chicago on May 15, 1971, for the Illinois State Russian Contest, and see a whole lecture hall full of high school students with similar enthusiasm. (I won a "Superior" certificate!)
Stats for high school students of Russian then and now are hard to find, but college level enrollments have taken a dive since those years. At their peak (1990), there were about 44,500 students of Russian in the USA. (I wasn't one of them; I majored in Russian at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario.) By 2021 the number had gone down to 17,598. And that's before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which I'm sure made the language even less popular among those from non-Russian backgrounds. In my high school years, the Cold War (and the alarm over Sputnik I) gave some of us a sense of urgency, but the current grievous situation hasn't had the same effect.
As writer and critic Dmitri Bykov noted back in 2022, commenting on the full-scale invasion,
It is clear that Russia crossed many red lines. It cannot live any longer as it did in the past. The world will no longer see [in Russia] a place of spirituality, a place of great culture, a place representing victory over fascism.
That may all be true, now and for some time to come, but all the severe judgments, indictments, cultural boycotts, social and economic isolation, and other consequences that this nation has brought down upon itself through coercion, passivity, and toxic cynicism, I can't help continuing to cherish the vision of a "beautiful Russia of the future." And a key component for recovering that beauty is the gift of healing.
It may well be the case that young adults in the United States view Christianity as an impediment to women’s equality, a view amplified by the “Orthodoxy as Masculinity” narrative. But that is not what Orthodox Christianity proclaims.
My first passport photo, with Oslo district police stamp.
My German grandparents and brand new me, at my Norwegian grandparents' home in Oslo.
It was a year ago, on November 21, 2024, that I began the process of regaining my Norwegian citizenship. Two days ago, I received a notice from the Norwegian government that began with the word "Congratulations." It was a notice that I'm once again a Norwegian citizen.
I was born a Norwegian citizen, but when my parents both became U.S. citizens and, later, had me naturalized as well at age 10, I became subject to the Norwegian rule that didn't permit dual citizenship. When that rule was changed, they set up a procedure for former citizens to apply for citizenship once again.
So I applied and paid the fee on that day in November last year, and on the same day I began the search for the necessary documentation of my or my parents' U.S. naturalizations. Most of the year was taken up looking for those documents, but we finally got them, thanks to the genealogy department of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. That was the most expensive part of the process, but ultimately successful.
It would have been easier if I had inherited my parents' own copies of their naturalization papers, but somewhere in all the drama of their lives after I left home, those papers were lost.
I also had to apply for a certificate of conduct from the Norwegian police. I left Norway before the age of two, and have been back for only brief periods since, so I haven't had an opportunity to be noticed by the police, but all the same I was glad to get it in writing. (I'm thankful for their patience with me; having optimistically—twice!—misjudged the time it would take to get naturalization records from the U.S. government, I ended up applying three times for that certificate, each of which was good for three months.)
Then I gathered up all these documents. and Judy and I took Amtrak to the Norwegian consulate in San Francisco to hand them in. About five weeks later, I received the good news.
Now that I'm a dual citizen, it's fair to ask why I went to all this trouble. After all, I'm already a resident of my favorite planet, and a grateful subject of the Prince of Peace. All I can say is, all my life I've had Norway in my heart, and I've always believed that one's public connections ought to reflect one's inner reality. (Furthermore, I never realized as a child that this particular outward connection would be cut. I just knew that my alien status delayed our family at the U.S. port of entry whenever we returned to the USA from abroad.)
Maurer family grave, Old Aker Church, Oslo.
I remain very loyal to the USA and its values. In the language of my parents' naturalization documents, I remain "... attached to the principles of the Constitution of the United States and well disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States." I see no conflict in gratefully claiming, at the same time and with equal loyalty, my deep roots in the place where I was born, and the joy and completeness I always feel when I return to that birthplace.
And finally, with a Norwegian father, and with a German mother who was born and grew up in Japan, and other relatives in Norway, Germany, Canada, and South America (at least!), I will always cherish all of my favorite planet.
We're about to be on the road on Thursday, so I'm posting this a day early. Hope to post again on (U.S.) Thanksgiving.
Journalist Elena Kostyuchenko loves her country, according to the title of her very moving, often distressing book, but it's a complicated love.... I recommend the book, but it's not fun material. Maybe this review will help explain. I'm not sure Kostyuchenko's book conforms to my foreign ideas of how to write about Russia, but then she has seen and endured many things I've not, and she's not on a mission to correct us.
Heather Cox Richardson: "Sugar dating," Epstein, and Abraham Lincoln's warnings about "the same old serpent."
On her blog, Life in an Old Growth Forest: Reflections on Aging, Nancy Thomas is exploring the dark part of the forest the way she knows how, by writing.
Marcelle Martin and Windy Cooler on the role of discernment in public ministry: an introduction to faithfulness groups on the Friends Incubator for Public Ministry Web site, and more information on their January 7, 2026, online conversation.
Speaking with my mentor, Deborah Haight, at Canadian Yearly Meeting 1976. Also in the frame, Duncan Wood (at right), Katharine Wood (behind Deborah). St. Thomas, Ontario.
My very first experience of a Quaker meeting took place in Ottawa, Ontario, on August 11, 1974. In my diary entry for that day, the headline was "My first visit!!!" There were 24 of us altogether in that four-sided meeting space, including two relatives I brought along for safety, since I was very nervous about this unfamiliar thing called "church." (If you've been following this blog for a while, you know that I grew up in an anti-church family.)
I needn't have worried. By the time the hour of silence (during which there were four spontaneous messages arising from various participants) came to an end, I knew I belonged.
As I got more and more acquainted with Quaker ways, I learned that the process of realizing that one "belonged" had various names, especially "convincement" and "conversion." In my own life, conversion came first, earlier that same year, when my reading of the Sermon the Mount, Matthew's version, led me to trust Jesus. I concluded for myself that conversion was a matter of opening my eyes and heart to an inward light that could illuminate a path through life. Becoming convinced, on the other hand, meant that, at least in my specific case, the companionship of Quakers provided the best, most direct guides along that path.
All this was no random accident, I realized. My family's chaos (combined, ironically, with its cult of obedience) and the public agonies of the Viet Nam War era, had already led me to nonviolence and a rejection of authoritarianism. I couldn't say where worldly contingencies and the Holy Spirit's guidance merged in my case. But once I realized that I didn't want to practice my newfound faith all alone, a peace church with almost zero hierarchy was bound to appeal. I wanted to go public. I wanted to belong officially!—whatever that meant.
Despite my inherited suspicion of the religion industry, I came to realize how important a concrete sense of belonging was to me. As I found out, that led to another term in Quaker culture: "membership." With indecent speed, I applied for membership in Ottawa Meeting. I was interviewed and accepted into membership in less than ten months after that first visit. My fiftieth anniversary as a member of Friends was June 5 of this year.
The following summer, July 26-31, 1976, I attended my first ever Quaker yearly meeting sessions, at Alma College, St. Thomas, Ontario. There I found out that perhaps my yearning for membership was not universal for Canadian Friends. The subject of membership was one of the hot topics of the yearly meeting sessions—specifically, should committee service be limited to members?
Although it was clear that Friends were split on the issue, I was impressed by the civility with which Friends on both sides put their cases, and by presiding clerk Philip Martin's care in guiding the process without putting his own thumb on the scale. Friends eventually approved a decision not to limit committee service to members in most cases. After the decision had been adopted, Philip spoke personally of his deep concern that weakening the concept of membership was a dangerous precedent.
Much more recently, during my academic year in Birmingham, England, I attended a monthly meeting in which an application for membership was approved for a long-time attender who was 85 years old. He stood up and, with a twinkle in his eye, conceded that his application was a bit late in the day.... To which I can only add that temperaments vary! For me, at age 21, ten months to seal the deal seemed like forever. But those dear Ottawa Friends, almost before the ink was dry on my membership certificate, put me on a Yearly Meeting committee and sent me as a representative to what was for me a life-changing experience, a triennial conference of the Friends World Committee for Consultation.
I found a somewhat different but very fertile understanding of convincement, conversion, and membership in a recent Pendle Hill Pamphlet, Matt Rosen's Awakening the Witness: Convincement and Belonging in Quaker Community. In particular, he suggests putting convincement first, something like an inward baptism, or as he suggests with a phrase sometimes used by early Friends, they "received the Truth in the love of it."
(Unfamiliar with Pendle Hill Pamphlets? Here's an introduction.)
Rosen's description of convincement has, indeed, the fragrance of conversion already in it, as if it would be unnecessary or unhelpful to make too fine a distinction between the two. Convincement can also have an element of conviction, a realization that God's grace has been denied or resisted up to that point.
In Rosen's exploration of convincement stories from Quaker history, we see that it might also involve decisions that will involve commitment and sacrifice. To embark on the Quaker path in the early years of persecution certainly did involve personal risk. Even now, risks are there, ranging from mystics facing ridicule among the militantly secular, to financial sacrifices for war tax refusers, and jail time for prophets engaged in civil disobedience or evangelists in closed societies.
What distinguishes conversion in Matt Rosen's pamphlet is its progression beyond the point of convincement.
As convincement leads into lifelong conversion of the heart, and as the heart is turned around, one slowly becomes “established in the Truth.” One learns to recognize and follow the voice of the inward Teacher and learns to hear this Teacher speaking in the experience of others. Convincement is an initial step. Some early seekers were convinced of the Truth by itinerant preachers but did not “grow up in the Truth” once those preachers left town. They were not settled on the foundation they had been pointed to. So, part of the work of publishing Truth was helping to establish the newly convinced. This meant encouraging and supporting community, grounded on the promise of Christ’s presence in the midst as gatherer, leader, priest, prophet, and friend.
As powerful as my initial conversion seemed to be (and its precedence in my own life, having happened before I began attending Friends meeting), I cannot say that I'm still just riding the momentum of that experience. Learning to pray without ceasing is still the aim of my life, and, fifty years later, success still varies. So, for me, Matt Rosen's reflections ring true.
His observations on membership are equally interesting.
Historically, Quakers have understood membership to be a covenant relationship between an individual and a meeting community. Membership is a little like a marriage. The member commits to supporting the community, to growing in fellowship, and to being accountable for their gifts, and the meeting commits to supporting the Friend in ways both pastoral and practical. The process of applying for and being welcomed into membership recognizes that someone already belongs to a community, just as a Quaker marriage recognizes what God has already done in the life of a relationship.
My suggestion, then, is that membership and convincement can come apart. It could be possible to be a member who is not a convinced Friend ... and it is possible to be a convinced Friend not in membership....
Rosen notes that the earliest generations of Friends did not have formal membership at all. (And in the context of persecution, there would hardly be an incentive to claim to be a Friend except on the basis of actual convincement.)
The structure and significance of meetings and membership may change, as they have before, but convinced Friends will recognize their Guide in the experience of others and seek each other out. Truth doesn’t stand or fall with our current structures. I experience this as a liberating realization. As Sydney Carter reminds us in the “George Fox” song, “the Light will be shining at the end of it all.” And if that is true—if, like Fox, we are not building one more religion—then we have time to stop and listen, to experiment and re-imagine, trusting that the Light does and always will shine in the darkness, and that come what may, even if we are pressed on every side as the early Friends were, the Light will not be overcome. The foundation will stand. And all people will be drawn to God in God’s good time— rescued, guided, and knit together by the Divine hand.
I recommend Matt Rosen's pamphlet as a good resource for looking at the interplay between conversion, convincement, and membership in your own faith community and in the full variety of experiences and temperaments among you.
A Yougov survey tells us what we already suspected: men are more likely than women to rate themselves as above average in their sense of humor, intelligence, confidence, and self-awareness. (!) (However, most people I know personally seem to be above average in not claiming to be above average.)
Blues from Denmark. Michelle Birkballe, "Cry to Me."
Last week Can You Believe? turned twenty years old. My post last week on "Rocket Science" was post number 1,081. Those posts have collected 2,005 comments on the Blogger platform, plus an uncounted number on Facebook and a handful elsewhere.
When I started this weekly weblog, in early June 2004, I was in my last weeks of a year-long academic fellowship at Woodbrooke Quaker Study Center in Birmingham, England. Two experiences in that year helped whet my appetite for a blog-like channel:
First, during my very first two weeks at Woodbrooke, Dan McCracken and Ron Woodward asked me to contribute to a feature on the Barclay Press Web site at the time, the Conversation Cafe. The assignment: two weeks of daily essays from me, followed by similar series of essays from a group of other writers. During those two weeks, I ended every day by writing an essay, which would arrive eight hours earlier in Newberg, Oregon, owing to the time zone difference, and be ready for that day's post. Here's one sample.
When my two weeks were up, I had enjoyed the experience very much, and found it helpful for my own personal reflections, but it didn't dawn on me to find another channel to continue creating that sort of expression.
My theme for my Woodbrooke academic year was "Evangelism and the Friends Testimonies," and I began reading and corresponding to build up resources for this theme. This title was admittedly a bit provocative, since the word "evangelism" was not in frequent use among British Friends, but my Woodbrooke collaborators were good-natured about my choices. My goal was to help Friends begin conversations between the Quaker groups that, broadly speaking, preferred to do outreach by emphasizing the Christian invitation to "repent and believe the Good News," and those who preferred to demonstrate their faith through prophetic action in the world, in the service of peace and nonviolence, simplicity and equality, leadership based on spiritual gifts instead of social status, governance based on community discernment, and care of Creation. Were there ways that the advocates of each emphasis could make creative connections with the advocates of the other priority?
After several months of accumulating resources, I realized that I needed a new way of sharing those resources and drawing more people into the conversations. I turned to the most popular form of Internet-based discussions in those years, namely Internet forums. I set up a forum on a service called Network 54. When it appeared that this platform might not last forever, I exported its contents to a Google group, which can be found here: Evangelism and the Quaker Testimonies.
Toward the end of my Woodbrooke year, my hunger for such exchanges of ideas, and my desire to provoke further consideration of the connections between faith and practice, particularly faith and politics, was not satisfied by the static format of online forums. That's when I discovered the Blogspot platform and decided to give it a chance by posting a paragraph or two. To my immense delight, a Friend who may have been the very first Quaker blogger, Martin Kelley, responded right away with an encouraging comment. (Also see Martin's "The Early Blogging Days.")
I actually think my desire to go public with blog-like essays and invitations to dialogue started even earlier—when I was part of the Quaker Life staff, during the years 1993-2000. I provided a column for just about every issue during my tenure. There's a sample editorial halfway down this blog post. The pace was more leisurely for a monthly publication, as I now remember fondly, and I'm thinking that after twenty years of weekly posts on this blog, maybe it's time to slow things down.
Another reality: blogs don't have the readership they used to. In my peak month, some years ago, I got about 40,000 views. Last month my count was down to 16,349. That is a raw total; it includes people who are drawn by some search that somehow included me in the results, and I'm sure that it took the vast majority of them just a second or two to realize they weren't going to find what they needed on a blog mainly intended for a Christian and mostly Quaker audience.
Thank you for your good company to this point. As for the future, I've decided nothing so far ... except that I will be back next week.
Our friend, Ukrainian pacifist Yurii Sheliazhenko, has been on trial in Kyiv.
Many Palestinian farms, properties, and orchards in the West Bank are under constant physical and legal harassment, including the Tent of Nations near Bethlehem, while the world's attention is (for good reason) focused on the Gaza Strip. (Thanks to Gordon Matthews for the link.)
In my Genius of the Cello post, mentioned above, I described how we used such films in our classes in Russia. Another film we used was Standing in the Shadows of Motown, because so much American English slang comes from musicians. In the first clip below, Jack Ashford of the Funk Brothers demonstrates the "Motown Sound," using the song "Ain't Too Proud to Beg" as his example. ... "You see how that feels? That's part of the Motown sound, right? Now I'm going to add my tambourine to it."
The second clip: Joan Osborne, "What Becomes of the Brokenhearted?"
The dream is almost always the same. I'm out in the open country. There's a roar overhead, and I see a missile crossing the sky, and I instantly know it's carrying a nuclear warhead. It's on its way to a target somewhere behind me. I take off and run. There's a blinding flash and the dream ends.
Well, occasionally I manage to dive into a depression, feel the heat and shock pass by, shake off the dust, and realize that I've apparently survived. Then the dream ends.
I've continued to have these dreams since childhood. They're stored in my brain alongside memories of the Cuban missile crisis, air raid shelter signs, the air raid siren tests every Tuesday at 10:30 a.m., and classroom instructions on what to do during a nuclear attack.
On March 26, 1970, our high school classes were canceled owing to a snowstorm, but I was already at school. One class had scheduled a viewing of the British pseudo-documentary The War Game, portraying a fictional nuclear attack on the UK. The teacher decided to offer a viewing to anyone interested. Not really wanting to trudge two and a half miles back home in the snow, I joined the audience, and got many more searing images for my apocalyptic dreams.
We are not yet really free from the threat of nuclear warfare, but the shadow of another threat has become at least equally prominent in our times: global ecological catastrophe. The first threat may seem more vivid and immediate; some would argue that the second may be more inevitable in the long run. Has this second threat—climate change's worst scenarios—become our younger generations' version of nuclear dread?
Although both threats originate in a sort of shortsighted human arrogance, there are important differences between them. The decision to use nuclear weapons is in the hands of specific human beings who are, or should be, perfectly capable of choosing not to use them. (Of course I'm glossing over the possibilities of miscalculations, insanity, and equipment failures.) Nuclear war is not inevitable, whereas ecological degradation is already well underway. Human interventions to avoid catastrophe are possible at several points on the chart above ("Global warming and climate change"), and many scientists and activists have specified what those interventions should look like, but the track record of our species in acting at the required scale is not promising.
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.
There is, however, some evidence that doom and gloom messaging can spur climate action, as long as it falls on the right ears at the right time. For example, research has found that climate distress, climate anger and climate anxiety are all associated with increased climate action under some circumstances.
I'd like to recommend a better way. Cherice Bock, an environmental scientist and theologian, and Quaker minister, has an alternative vision—one that has two major advantages over the doom mentality. She describes this vision in her short, carefully organized and well-written book, A Quaker Ecology: Meditations on the Future of Friends.
The advantages of her approach:
First, her vision of an Eco-Reformation has great persuasive power. She anchors her vision in powerful biblical insights and the raw honesty of acknowledging the toxic effects of individualism, racism, and colonialism, even in our own Quaker histories. She writes beautifully about the healing effect of repentance and of reweaving ourselves into the ecology around us and within us through what she intriguingly calls "watershed discipleship." If a new, wider Reformation among people of faith adds to our united ability to reach the scales needed for crucial interventions, Cherice has made a valuable contribution toward that end.
Second, no matter how far we succeed in sharing this vision, no matter what the eventual outcome of our efforts to mitigate climate change might be, this is how we should live along the way. Cherice is blunt when she needs to be, but she personally models the power of honesty and a non-shaming repentance in describing, for example, the history of her own family on lands once inhabited by Indigenous nations. And her watershed awareness carries with it a sense of joy and embodiment.
Cherice subtitled her book, Meditations on the Future of Friends. Although I'm convinced that her theological and ecological insights have wide application beyond Quakers, the history and current state of Friends in the USA give an important context to her book—and give me a sense of positive urgency. As she says, "I was inspired by earlier generations of Friends; I want to be part of my own generation's faithfulness."
Nancy Thomas looks at the patriarchs, the Psalms, Ecclesiastes ... and old age. "The tree or the insect."
This link is hard to post. Ashley Wilcox tells us that ALS is likely to keep her from reaching old age.
More ripples, via Meduza, from the death and burial of Aleksei Navalny. Shura Burtin cautions us against unrealistic faith in the "beautiful Russia of the future." On the other hand, here is a Russian university instructor who is tired of being afraid.
The documentary film Butterfly in the Sky celebrates the legacy of the long-running television show Reading Rainbow, which I remember watching with our kids. Here's the trailer and context. (Thanks to Lithub.com for the link.)
Michelle Birkballe (Denmark) covers Solomon Burke's classic "Cry to Me." (Link to Burke's original.)
