"Shocking honesty"

Vesti's report (in Russian) is here.

Actual PDF report with original cover is available on this page.

... is the way the Russian Vesti network titled its coverage of the release of the Senate report on the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program. Reporter Alexander Khristenko ends his introductory paragraph this way: "... Some have already called the publication of this report 'scandalous.' Will more good or more harm come from this shocking honesty?"

At this moment, I doubt any good would come from repeating my own outrage at having my tax dollars fund torture. I've written on this topic several times, including this summary of my responses to the usual excuses for using torture. (Scroll down to "Sunday No. 2.") If we don't already agree, it probably wouldn't be persuasive now.

I have a different question, and am hoping for a specifically Christian answer. My question is: what is so mesmerizingly attractive about violence and cruelty that we keep using violent and cruel methods repeatedly after they utterly fail to produce the desired results? What is gratified by those methods, and what can we do in the name of Christ to confront that gratification?

I confess that there are at least three assumptions in my question that are themselves arguable:

1. Torture is simply a specific application of violence, and is an expression of belief in what Walter Wink called "the myth of redemptive violence."
2. The power of God is sufficient to overcome any situation in which we're tempted to apply that myth.
3. Those who torture are worth redeeming. Nothing is ultimately gained by simply demonizing the CIA and its contractors and absolving ourselves of any responsibility.

The power of the myth is vividly shown by the excuses provided by the CIA and its apologists for the use of torture in extracting information and preventing future terrorism. It's hard for me to imagine how such powerful, intelligent, and well-paid people can resort over and over to such wishful thinking. If there is any more powerful evidence of the deceptive power of the myth over its practitioners, and danger of soul-death from the practice of torture, I can't imagine it.

My fondest hope is that the Christian community will feel more than just outrage at the abuse of human beings in the supposed service of our defense. As we work out our response, I'd love to believe that there will be a new alliance of activists and evangelists. Torture is evidence of a spiritual vacuum, not just in national leaderships but maybe in all of us who don't confront the ones who torture in our name. Don't we truly believe that God can pull down the strongholds of evil that oppress us and our "enemies" alike? Are we content to let "patriotism" and "defense" and "enemies" be defined only by those who insist on violent answers, generation after bloody generation?

If we believe that the power of God is greater than our violent solutions, and the people of God can take the initiative in meeting evil with that power, let's say so publicly, winsomely, persistently, creatively, and urgently! And let's do it without smears and insults. Let's turn our evangelists loose with this wonderful implication of living with Jesus in our midst, and let's turn our activists loose to teach us about war tax resistance and every other way to say "no!" in the name of Jesus. My guess is that evangelists and activists will reinforce each other in ways we may never have seen since the anti-slavery and women's suffrage movements of the past.

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Coincidentally with the release of the Senate report on the CIA and the resulting controversy, I've been reading John Kenneth Galbraith's autobiography, A Life in Our Times. At the end of World War II, Galbraith was an economist on the team that conducted the Strategic Bombing Survey to analyze the military effectiveness of the vast bombing campaigns on Germany and German-occupied Europe. His team assumed that so much bombing (of cities by night and of strategic objectives by day) must surely have caused great damage to the German war economy. However, even before the end of the war in Europe, they were seeing production figures that told a very different story:

In 1940, the first full year of war, the average monthly production of Panzer vehicles was 136; in 1941, it was 316; in 1942, 516. In 1943, after the bombing began in earnest, average monthly production was 1005, and in 1944, it was 1583. Peak monthly production was not reached until December 1944, and it was only slightly down in early 1945. For aircraft ... and other weaponry the figures were similar.

Very soon George Ball's investigations of the attacks on the cities would produce some equally disturbing conclusions. Thus, for example, on three summer nights at the end of July and the beginning of August 1943, the RAF came in from the North Sea and destroyed the center of Hamburg and adjacent Harburg. A terrible firestorm sweeping air and people into the maelstrom caused thousands of casualties. Destroyed also were restaurants, cabarets, specialty shops, department stores, banks and other civilian enterprises. The factories and shipyards away from the center escaped. Before the holocaust these had been short of labor. Now waiters, bank clerks, shopkeepers and entertainers forcibly unemployed by the bombers flocked to the war plants to find work and also to get the ration cards that the Nazis thoughtfully distributed to workers there. The bombers had eased the labor shortage.

We were beginning to see that we were encountering one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest miscalculation of the war.

Two things really impressed me in Galbraith's story. First of all, he gives a vivid account of how hard some in the Pentagon and the Congress worked to suppress the survey's conclusions. Thousands of brave pilots and crews (not to mention hundreds of thousands of innocent "enemy" civilians) perished because Allied leaders took it on faith that the bombing campaigns were effective. And even after evidence was produced to disprove this belief, that evidence was ferociously discounted. Is this anything different from the responses of Bush-era CIA apologists to the criticisms in the Senate report?

The other major surprise emerging from the survey team's research--and particularly from the questioning of prisoners of war--was how wrong the image of Nazi Germany and its economy had been. Allied leaders and people had this idea that Germany had been fully mobilized, its economy militarized and polished to a high sheen, and everything was managed with total Teutonic competence. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Mobilization had been lackadaisical, production in the early stages of the war was low (on the assumption that resources expended on Blitzkrieg offensives could be replenished between campaigns) and there was plenty of gross incompetence, laziness, and ignorance at all management levels. Promotion to higher pay and responsibility in the Nazi government frequently led to hedonistic lifestyles and corruption. It's just interesting to think that the myth of redemptive violence probably goes hand in hand with mythical enemies.

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"This graphic shows that torture is a global problem," and the CIA's actions may have contributed to its persistence.

"Why it's so rare to hear an apology for torture."

"'Helping Without Hurting': The Global Missions Health Conference." "For all the less charitable stereotypes fulfilled at the GMHC, there were many more endearing impressions...."

If you're an uncritical fan of the U.S. government space program, don't read this article.

"Unseen C.S. Lewis letter defines his notion of joy."

An update on a subject we've mentioned before: "Teaching Orthodoxy in Russian schools."

"Isis: the inside story." Thanks to Jim Forest (Orthodox Peace Fellowship).

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"Open the eyes of my heart, I want to see You." OSLO Gospel Choir.

Stan Thornburg

Source.

I was so tired when I got home this evening that I decided to lie down and get a couple of hours of sleep before sitting down to this homemade computer and pounding out something profound for you. Before pounding, however, I happened to notice a new item in my e-mail. I didn't even have to open the e-mail: the subject line and one-line preview were enough. It was from our yearly meeting superintendent Becky Ankeny. Subject: Stan Thornburg. Preview: "Friends, Stan passed away at 3:30 today. I know his family appreciates your p..."

There'll be nothing here coherent today.

Source.

If you knew Stan, the memories are surely flooding back at this very moment. Tears, too, mixed with laughter as we remember one of the funniest and most profound public Friends of our time.

My first memories of Stan are from a Quaker retreat in the mid-1980's, a retreat on the "future of the prophetic ministry." We met at a strange motel in St. Charles, Missouri, the Noah's Ark. Part of the place really looked like a cartoon ark, with huge fiberglas animals. The oddest thing to me was the fact that, when we were in the conference room for our retreat, the windows were decorated with animals looking at us from outside! It was at that retreat that I heard Stan talking about the "Whamo Theory of Grace," which I summed up this way in a post on evangelical machismo: "...We ratchet ourselves up according to external measures of religious adequacy while God, at the top of our stepladder, waits with a big hammer to clobber us whenever we inevitably stumble."

He also told us about the time, early in his pastoral service, when his Friends meeting back in Kansas received a donation request from a big celebrity-led church, promising that the contribution would result in tenfold blessings for the donor. Stan's little Quaker church wrote back to Big Dollar Church with their own request for a contribution, pointing out that by the original logic, that was the best way for the big church to get blessed. A mere $100,000 to the Quakers would net a million for the big one.

A few years later, Stan came to Earlham College and gave a talk "on being a safe male." Our Indiana Yearly Meeting superintendent, David Brock, was on hand for that talk, I remember; probably not a coincidence, because Stan was a speaker for our next annual sessions. The talks he gave at those sessions were extraordinary, perhaps the best conference sermons I've ever heard, and I've heard a lot! I hope they're preserved somewhere.

Somewhere along the way, Stan began writing for Quaker Life--before the advent of online archives, sad to say. I remember him writing about a visit to a hospital: seeing the "admissions" desk, he walked to the desk clerk and started confessing his sins.

For about a dozen years, Stan was pastor at Reedwood Friends Church, who are the lucky custodians of dozens of tapes of his sermons over those years. I used to listen to those cassettes while driving--practically the only reason I would look forward to long car trips. How I've wished that I'd kept my copies of those tapes.

In more recent years, Stan kept a sporadic blog, Born to East Toast, which is a good sampling of his approach to the Bible, to humor, and to surviving long hospitalizations. He also wrote a year-long blog series about "the slow but steady progress of my understanding of GLBTQ folks," which probably complicated his relationships with some in our yearly meeting.

I'm sitting here finding it hard to stop writing about Stan. If I stop writing, I'll have to sit back and actually absorb the news. Here's what I'll do: First, provide a link to the PDF article on open worship that might be the most widely-circulated piece he wrote. Second, quote Stan himself, on the Lenten journey to Jerusalem:

Everyone is invited on this journey! It belongs to no one faith or sect. We will weather the betrayal, suffering, and sacrifice together. Come, join the throngs across our globe on this wonderful, terrible, trek. We will stand stunned into silence before the tomb. We will go crazy with celebration when death’s door makes way for resurrection power.

We will be forever changed.

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A Muslim who has been "active in London's faith scene for some time," writes, "We should revive the East End’s Christian spirit." Several Anglicans respond. (Thanks to Fulcrum.)

Churchill Malimo of Friends World Committee for Consultation asks, "What is eating Africa today?"

Friends General Conference launches a Web site for the New Meetings Project.

It has been years since I've written about torture, but this Washington Post report brings back all the anger, shame, and sorrow.

"The Trouble with Men." And while we're on that general topic, "Gender and headship in eschatological perspective" and "Will there be gender inequality in the resurrection?"

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Stan, the circle will be unbroken.

No. 500

Editorial cartoonist and Friend Signe Wilkinson presented last year's William Penn Lecture at Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. She was in equal parts playful and bluntly serious in her challenge to the assembled Friends: reach out or die. As she challenged them to "double the number of PYM Quakers in the next five years," she added a hopeful note: the yearly meeting's Young Adult Friends had already been able to do exactly that.

I winced a bit as she led her audience through a tour of Quaker-related Web sites ("... If you look on the pages of almost all of our institutions, you will not find on the home page what Quakers believe"), and then compared their opaqueness with some Mormon sites. Reading the "who we are" sidebar on one of those Mormon sites, she added, "You might not agree with that, but now you know what they believe."

As I was considering her video presentation, I happened to come across Brian McLaren's blog post, "Q & R: What about Unitarians?" The recitation of Unitarians' admirable features reminds me of similar lists from Friends, especially liberal Friends, so I paid close attention to McLaren's response. In part, he said, "... the degree to which a religious community deconstructs without reconstructing will put it at a disadvantage. It not only must remove negatives that other communities have: it must have positives that other communities lack." (See the whole post--the context is worth it.)

Here I'm going to beat a drum that I've already probably beaten 499 times before, but, this being my 500th post, I'm going to indulge in some recapitulation. Practically the only unique thing that justifies our existence as a movement, the major plank in our platform, is "Christ has come to teach his people himself." Are we going to live that out or not?? Everything else that we label "quakerly" is either in the service of that radical access, or it's vanity with an antiquarian deodorant.

Others have the Gospel, too--we're not in a competition here, as Wilkinson wisely points out--but we're charged with coming to the Kingdom-building task with a humble spirit and low-overhead ecclesiology based on that revolutionary trust. How do we translate this approach to Christian essentials into a home-page confession intended for an audience not already in love with us?

The purpose of our Quaker community is to learn what it means to live with God at our center, and to help each other work out the implications. You are most welcome to visit, observe, participate, and see what we're about. And we'd love to know what you're asking and learning.

We do take a risk when we try to reduce the nuances of 350 years of faith and practice into one invitational paragraph (never mind the other 17 centuries of biblical anti-authoritarian witness before us). No single statement we could make, no matter how well grounded in our unique history, will satisfy everyone. But I think we've taken into insufficient account the risk of not doing so. The more vague and cerebral and evasive we are, the more we say (without necessarily meaning to) that we only welcome those who are temperamentally allergic to explicit faith. I am not saying we should ignore the hypersensitive--there are many ways to signal to those people that we are not the least bit totalitarian--but spare a thought for those whose readiness to embrace Christian faith is matched by their need for a trustworthy place to grow into full and equal discipleship.

I think it would be both fun and instructive to build some more texts to suggest for our home pages. Feel free to use the comment box or to write to me at johan at maurers dot org.

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Here's Reedwood Friends Church's attempt to put "who we are" on page one. (We're dual members--Reedwood in the USA and Moscow Friends in Russia.)

Ohio Yearly Meeting:

The primary purpose of this website is to share with the wider world the work that God is doing in our community, and to invite others to discern what God is asking of them. We are eager to work with others who seek to follow the Lord as he guides us and teaches us today. We hope that this site will give you a better sense of who we are and what we can say about God’s gracious dealings in our midst. We look forward to getting to know you, too, as you feel moved to respond.

I love the message on Antioch Church's site, "Life is better connected." (Bend, Oregon, USA.) This is my experience, too! (By the way, I draw on their videos liberally for my gospel/blues desserts.)

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Going back a few weeks to "Cult 45"... I hadn't heard about "Gun Appreciation Day," January 19, until Donna Laine of East Whittier Friends mentioned it to me. I appreciated this link she sent: "Four things Christians need to remember about gun control." Thanks to Kent Walkemeyer for bringing this to our attention.

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"Saving Evangelicalism, part two." "Evangelicalism is always going to have its jerks, its egomaniacs, its wackos. Don’t worry about them. Instead, love."

"Blind Teen Stands Up to Putin on Adoption Ban." The more I read about this young woman, the more impressed I am.

Yet another inspiring counterbalance to the recent drumbeat of negative images of Russians: an appreciation of the late Yuri Schmidt.

And yet another: Nadezhda Mandelshtam speaks to us across the years.

Friday PS: Lev Gudkov, of Russia's Levada Center polling organization, on "The Year of Unfulfilled Expectations and a Crisis of Power."

Is this true?-- '...Christians aren’t used to "thinking of something positive to say about themselves."' (Eric Muhr's Dirt Window on "Depravity.")

Last week I linked to an article that charged the film Zero Dark Thirty with helping make torture palatable again. Here's a different take on the same concern: Paul D. Miller reviewing the film in Books  & Culture. Not having seen the film, I'm not in a position to take a stand either way, and I don't share his just-war orientation at all, but his modest approach deserves a respectful hearing: "Perhaps the very same act—like using an 'enhanced interrogation' technique--is an obligatory act of self-defense and a damnable act of revenge at the same time for different people, depending on the state of their hearts."

I started this post with Signe Wilkinson's talk at Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Here's her site, with some effective messages of her own. I plan to show some of them to our students here.

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Ana Popovic, Big Pete, and the Mannish Boys:

Interpreter

"The Greeks put Truth at the center, the principle of Truth, and for the sake of that principle you can destroy a man. I have no need of a truth which destroys a man. More than that, anyone who destroys a man destroys God also. The Church bears a guilt toward the Jews!"

This is the voice of a fictional figure, based on real life. The Carmelite monk Brother Daniel, supposedly summoned to Rome to answer charges of heresy, is having tea with his old friend from his Polish years, Pope John Paul II. Novelist Ludmila Ulitskaya has Daniel trying to convince the Pope that by emphasizing Hellenized doctrine and Roman dominance over Christianity's Hebrew roots, the Catholic Church has distorted the Gospel and marginalized itself in its own original homeland.

For over a month, Brother Daniel has been just one of the voices I've been hearing in my head, thanks to Ulitskaya's utterly fascinating book Daniel Stein, Interpreter,based on the life of an actual historical figure, Oswald Rufeisen. The book is not exactly a conventional novel, but rather a scrapbook of documents, letters, transcripts, police archives, sermons, lectures. All of these disparate elements are in a kind of nonchronological Brownian motion, but they all share threads with Daniel, this Jewish resistance worker, collaborator with World War II partisans fighting the Nazis while working for the Germans as an interpreter, who found shelter in a convent at a crucial moment, leading to his conversion and his ultimately becoming the priest for a wildly diverse little Catholic congregation in Israel. And that is about as compact a description as you'll get for these 416 pages. The voices tell us that Daniel is wonderful, crazy, a scary liberal, a hero, a heretic, a defender of the faith, a wise pastor, a dangerous influence,  ... but nobody seems indifferent.

This book is as contradictory as the voices that keep poking at you from inside its pages. (If you could imagine this book as a box with rubber walls, you'd see the surface pulsing here and there with the cries and debates of the characters.) On the one hand, it is absolutely riveting. I've literally never seen important conversations about faith and culture brought to life--not even in seminary--as effectively as Ulitskaya manages to do with her characters as they plead and grouse and proclaim and denounce and grieve and lecture. For example, Valentina, a Christian translator in Poland, visits her old friend Teresa, a former covert nun, now living in Israel with her Orthodox priest husband Efim, and then writes to her hosts about what the trip was like for her:

Perhaps the most amazing discovery for me was the enormous diversity of the Christian trends in Israel. Theoretically I, who all my life have been translating Christian literature for samizdat and only in recent years have seen my translations brought out by official publishing houses, on good paper and with my name as the translator, should have been well acquainted with the diversity of opinion which exists on any theological question. But it ws truly during these two weeks that I saw for myself the diversity of Christians--Greeks, Copt, Ethiopians, Italians, and Latin Americans, messianic churches, Baptists, Adventists, and Pentecostals. The history of all the splits and schisms came to life. There are neither conquerors nor conquered, the Monophysite and the Aryan, the Pharisee and the Sadducee coexist in the same time and space.

I am full of joy and perplexity. What puzzles me most of all is the fact that all this fire-breathing diversity is situated in the heart of active and self-sufficient Judaism, which appears not to notice the immense Christian world. Furthermore, all this is embedded in the domain of Islam, for which Israel is also one of the centers of life and faith. These three worlds appear to exist in the same space but almost without intersecting.

Efim answers angrily, having forbidden his wife Teresa any further contact with her old friend:

The principal and most fruitful path is that of Orthodoxy. I do not want simplified Christianity. Those of whom you speak, all those hosts of reformers and popularizers, are seekers not of God but of an easy path to God. ... You talk of a diversity which delighted you! Valentina Ferdinandovna, do you not really realize that a sumptuous, immensely rich fabric is taken, a little snippet is cut out of it, and people say, look, this is entirely sufficient! It is for this reason that I broke completely with Father Daniel Stein. His search for a narrow, minimal Christianity is a deleterious path. In that scrap which he has defined for himself as "necessary and sufficient" is contained one thousandth, one millionth part of Christianity!

Given that this same criticism has sometimes been aimed at us Quakers, I thought long and hard about this passage. Likewise, I read Daniel Stein's eloquent critique of the doctrine of the Trinity, which echoes that of William Penn--not denying the reality, but questioning both the necessity and the antiquity of church dogma's pseudo-precise formulations. Brother Daniel himself always seemed to err on the side of compassion--the role of "interpreter" writ large--including the time when he was called on to rock-climb his way to a remote cave to bury an ascetic who seemed to have founded a church that was so pure it only had three adherents.

So, again, on that one hand, it's an absorbing book. But on the other hand, it's not easy going. It took me over a month to finish. I found myself reading a couple of chapters, and then finding it necessary to dip into lighter fiction or to share an episode of Foyle's War with Judy while considering at length what I'd read. After all, Ulitskaya's book sits squarely in the middle of some of the most violently contested geographical, psychological, confessional, and intellectual territory of the past century--conflicts that cost tens of millions of lives and set new records for sheer organized cruelty. And even today, at those same intersections, we have so many eager volunteers for the role of combatant, and precious few Brother Daniels to interpret the gospel of peace.

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Photo Andrei Ribakov; source

Among all the documents and texts in Ludmila Ulitskaya's Daniel Stein scrapbook, there are even letters in the author's own voice; they represent cover letters for sections of the manuscript she's sending to a friend (perhaps an editor?). Self-referential devices are risky in any work of art, but here they serve to anchor the reader in reality, pointing gently to the line that separates fiction from history, and giving us a sense of what writing this book cost the author. They also give us a baseline reading of the author's own point of view. For example:

Poor Christianity! It can only be poor. Any victorious Church, whether of the West or the East, totally rejects Christ. That is an inescapable fact. Would the Son of Man in his worn sandals and poor raiment accept into his circle that Byzantine pack of greedy and cynical hangers-on at court who today comprise the Church establishment?

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Two views of the real-life model for Brother Daniel, thanks to the Wikipedia article linked at the top of this post: "The Strange Case of 'Brother Daniel'"; "Daniel Rufeisen Carm."

Now that Oscar season is upon us, "Learning to love torture."

"Speedy Delivery": "Gerard Depardieu’s rapid naturalization as a Russian citizen has raised ire inside and outside of Russia." Read this whole article attentively, and then ask: What about the little matter of adoptions that were about to be finalized when the fatal hammer came down? We now know how fast the bureaucracy can work when truly important issues are at stake.... (Finally, a few related links here.)

"Manifesto--the Case for An American Diaspora." Read this and help me think about whether there's something healthy in what first struck me as a tricky new variation on the old "White Man's Burden." (Thanks to the School of Russian and Asian Studies, via Facebook, for the link.)

Christianity Today's "Most Redeeming Films of 2012." (Personally, at this point I've only seen #10, plus one of the honorable mentions. Guess which one?)

"Evangelicalism is worth saving, but only if it can be reshaped." By the way, the image of a "pastor" in this article brought Ulitskaya's Brother Daniel back to mind!

Update on an old story: "Judge Weighs Sanctions Against Russia in Dispute over Religious Texts."

Consider yourself warned: "(For Real) Reality Christian Programming, Coming Soon."

"Can Forgiveness Play a Role in Criminal Justice?"--an important case study. Thanks to Patricia Stewart for the reference.

Darrell Jackson interviews Mike Frost: "What does it mean for a church to be 'mission-shaped', 'missionary', or 'missional'?" (Mike Frost's book Exiles was my book of the year in 2006.)

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Dessert tonight comes from Barcelona:

Cooing cross-culturally

Tonight, thanks to our friend Simon Lemarchand, we finally got to see a Russian cult film that I've heard about for a long time--and best of all, we got to enjoy his English fansubbing.

The film is Kin-Dza-Dza!, directed by Georgi Daneliya, and released by Mosfilm in 1986. Two Soviet citizens, Vladimir and Gedevan, encounter a confused alien near a bakery in downtown Moscow. He only needs a bit of help--some warm socks and someone to tell him what planet he is on, so he can push the right buttons on his handheld space-time transporter and get home. The disbelieving Vladimir, impatient to bring home the bread and spaghetti his wife asked him to get, takes a joking stab at the device, and he and the Georgian student next to him, Gedevan, suddenly find themselves in a desert; the alien and his device are nowhere to be seen.

They gradually realize that they are on another planet, Pliuk, in the galaxy Kin-Dza-Dza--a planet where class relations are linked to wealth, chromatic distinctions of pants, and how many times you must squat in the presence of the other. The technology is rusty, shabby, falling apart--and far in advance of Earth's. The planet's environment has been plundered--all available water has been converted into fuel for their interplanetary conveyances. Earthly matches (the striking end of matchsticks) are precious enough to purchase galaxy-spanning add-ons for spacecraft.

Almost every moment of this bittersweet comedy is an illustration of the challenges of learning another culture--starting at the very first dismissive encounter with the barefoot alien. The inhabitants of the desert planet Pliuk cannot believe how dense their visitors are about the most elementary aspects of Pliuk's cultures, including the importance of knowing whether you are a Chuttle or a Patzak. (Both visitors--Russian and Georgian alike--are, it seems, Patzaks.) It's important to get these things straight, or you could find yourself cut in half by a tranklucator beam.

In some ways, the film is a priceless introduction to Russia (at least late Soviet Russia). The observatory attendant who looks up their planet's Tenture index gives a classic sendup of Soviet customer service. Much of the dialogue is pitch-perfect Russian humor, with its rhetorical questions and tart common sense. (Any inhabitant of Pliuk, who wanders into the neighboring galaxy and lands on planet Alpha, is converted for their own good into greenhouse plants by Alpha's guardians of interstellar morality. Our earthbound travelers, upon hearing the official Alpha explanation that this is actually a blessing for the crude Pliukians, observe that the Alphans themselves cavort happily in nature rather than inhabiting flowerpots, and ask whether the Pliukians shouldn't decide for themselves what constitutes a blessing.)

There are also the requisite moments of melancholy--as when Gedevan, anticipating being marooned forever, addresses a letter to his family and friends who might somehow learn about his sad fate. There is a sweet heroism about Vladimir's and Gedevan's refusal to abandon each other--or their fickle Pliukian friends.

Language learning is an important aspect of crossing cultures. Chuttles and Patzaks on Pliuk speak a very simple language. Aside from a few technical terms and one curse-word, the language consists of a single word: ku. This word serves as a sort of intensifier and inflector for their real communication, which is telepathic. They communicate with our non-telepathic heroes by learning their language by direct mind-reading. It might not do that much good for earthlings to learn Pliuk's languages, though; as they're told, everyone on Pliuk lies, even in their thoughts. This makes playing chess even more interesting than it might otherwise be.

I've barely scratched the surface. It's amazing how rich and detailed a film can be when it is filmed mostly in sand dunes. You can sample this two-part film through these links: part one, part two. (But this evening's fansubbing was better.) There's also a Russian-language film about the film.

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Unrelated links:

Torture watch--Noah on Cheney; Sullivan; Sullivan again. Or skip them all and have a happier day, maybe.

Salam Fayyad intends to build the Palestinian state from the inside out: Haaretz; Palestine Telegraph.

On Chris Rice's Reconcilers blog: "Illuminating a God Movement." (Thanks to Prof. Rah's Blog for the reference.)

Contemporary Poetry Review: Ernest Hilbert interviews Erica Dawson.

Latino evangelical leaders have varying approaches to the 2010 census. Some say "boycott," others do not.

Greg Boyd, God, and the ELCA tornado.

"The war that has taken my life..." (from Joe Volk, Friends Committee on National Legislation.)

Millennium Project: 2009 State of the Future.

Speaking of the future, what happens when judges get "linked in"?

For Russian speakers: Here's a lively edition of the television panel show "Open Studio" on the perennial topic of whom Russia should befriend.

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This week I've wandered far from the subject of Quaker communication, but I recommend the comments that came in for last week's post. Still want to get more responses to my challenge: what are we Friends telling the world that is not all about us??

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Even less related: "You've got the right Taildragger tonight!" Howlin' Wolf in 1970.

Saturday PS: Please ask for a torture commission

Friends Committee on National Legislation is asking us to write or call to urge President Obama to appoint a bipartisan commission of inquiry on allegations of torture. (Writing instructions; calling instructions.) Please prayerfully consider whether you might join this important campaign.

I can think of a couple of thoughtful observers of the USA in Russia who really expect a higher standard of behavior from the USA than from other countries. In Russia, I never get into comparisons, and certainly I'm NOT a mouthpiece for the USA. But at the same time, it grieves me when we Americans as a nation betray those who had expected better. What do I say to my friends?

Here's a chance to move things in the right direction. "Repent and believe the good news," says Jesus. We know that the Good News is VERY good, but who can doubt that this is also a season for repentance? Here's what I wrote, through the FCNL facility, to President Obama:

Thank you for releasing the torture memos and for stating unequivocally that the United States will not torture.

Please create a nonpartisan, nonvindictive commission of inquiry to investigate how and when deliberately cruel interrogations, including repeated waterboarding, were actually carried out, and by what authority. Is it true, as some charge, that at least one person was tortured simply to get information confirming a link between Al-Qaeda and Iraq, because evidence for that link was politically needed?

I absolutely agree that our main thrust in this difficult period should be the future, not the past. At the same time, the USA should never join the ranks of those countries where public officials can commit criminal acts with impunity. Furthermore, those who tortured "innocently," with motives of pure patriotism, should by virtue of that same patriotism be willing to have their actions examined by fair-minded commissioners of inquiry. We cannot go "into the future" with the essential doctrine of due process under a cloud.
Sincerely,
Johan Maurer

Thank you!

Twin Rocks shorts

• Lord, Save Us From Your Followers: Filmmaker Dan Merchant, producer and director of the film of this name, was the guest speaker for this year's Northwest Yearly Meeting pastors' conference.
  
  As part of his presentations, we saw the full movie, which presents, by turns, both the ugly and hateful face of the contemporary evangelical church in the USA, and its most extraordinarily gracious face. Dan doesn't shield the viewer from full-on exposure to our reputation among many in today's America--judgmental, hypocritical, vindictive, shallow. Interestingly, he contrasts these indictments (gleaned from street interviews as well as TV samplings) with what these same people say about Jesus, who enjoys almost uniform approval from this skeptical public. Why the gap?
  
  In the film, one of Dan's street-interview devices is wearing white overalls covered with bumper stickers and asking people-in-the-street for their reactions. He also presents a game show, "Culture Wars"; includes a Michael Moore-like segment proposing to change the name of St. Paul, Minnesota, to something less religiously offensive; and, adapting an idea used at Reed College, sets up a confession booth at a Pride Northwest festival in which he confesses TO gays and lesbians, asking forgiveness for Christian hatefulness. He interviews such observers as Tony Campolo, John Perkins, Tom Krattenmaker (USA Today), former senator Rick Santorum, and almost senator Al Franken. But nothing in the film portrays the polarized extremes as vividly as the confrontations between Ron Luce's Battlecry demonstrations and the counterdemonstrators in front of San Francisco's City Hall. Dan Merchant's subsequent teasing out of the human realities of those confrontations is a theme throughout the movie--and beyond, as Dan told us about his ongoing friendship with Sister Mary Timothy of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
  
  In our discussion with Dan Merchant and each other, Friends had a tender discussion of the nature of grace, of "loving but not condoning," and of the priority of relationship. It just would not work to tear bits of that discussion out of context and report them here, but I can pretty well guarantee that any group willing to grapple with this film thoughtfully will have an equally valuable conversation.
  
  Shortly after the pastors' conference ended, Gregg Lamm let us know that a national distribution contract for the film--to get it beyond the church and college circuit and into commercial theaters--was perhaps on the edge of being concluded.


• One of the participants at the conference was Mike Berry, pastor at CrossRhythm Church, Annapolis, Maryland. Among many other interesting things, Mike told an amazing story of the legacy of slavery on Annapolis, and its effects on the spiritual vitality of the area. He went on to describe his and the church's participation in an act of reconciliation between the descendants of slaves and the descendants of the slaveowners and their allies. For video clips of this story, see the "Foundation for Transformation" videos here.


• Many of the pastors' conference attenders had read Gregory Boyd's The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church, in preparation for the book discussion scheduled for day two of the conference. I had not read the book, but remembered the coverage Greg Boyd got in the mainstream media when, as the evangelical pastor of Woodland Hills Church in Minnesota, USA, he questioned the alignment of conservative Christianity with nationalist politics. (See this interview.) This alignment is sometimes present among evangelical Friends, including Northwest Yearly Meeting, so I was impressed by the seriousness, depth and forbearance of the discussion led by Newberg Friends pastor Gregg Koskela.

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Do you know any women church planters?

"Torture is a moral issue." -- Friends Committee on National Legislation. -- National Religious Campaign against Torture..

A different kind of conference: QuakerSpring. This year it's June 9-14, 2009, Barnesville, Ohio, USA.

George Fox and a Great Basketball Team to Be Gathered.

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After that wonderful conference at Twin Rocks, I'm looking for something bluesy but with more than usual grace. Jean-Rene's beautiful version of "Twelve Gates to the City" qualifies:

Tea with the President

Click on photo for original interview (Russian); go here for a translation.

I saw a few fragmentary references in the mainstream English-language press to a long interview with Dmitri Medvedev, conducted by Novaya Gazeta editor Dmitri Muratov and published in his newspaper yesterday. Immediate assessments seemed to cluster around the following points:

• Interview contained no substantial news.
• It's important that Medvedev's first presidential interview went to a newspaper known for being critical of the Kremlin and the ruling party--a deliberate encouragement to so-called liberals.
• Don't get too encouraged; Medvedev is playing "good cop" to V.V. Putin's "bad cop."

I don't want to join the "what's the subtext" analysis game, either optimistic or cynical. It's sufficient for me to notice that Russians themselves are all over the map on these questions, including those commentators questioned by the Western press.

I'm more interested in why such a long interview got such brief notice from Western reporters. Medvedev said a lot about the values and ideals that motivate him; much of the interview was an extended meditation on the meaning of democracy, surely a crucial topic for our times. Do Western editors assume we all already know what Medvedev thinks, or we don't care, or he's not saying what he really thinks? The Western press publishes a fair amount of material that feeds distrust of Russia; why not publish some firsthand material that helps readers make up their own minds?

Of course, it really might be true that all of Medvedev's assertions are designed to spray idealistic perfume on an essentially authoritarian project, or that his fine words conceal a high-stakes behind-the-scenes struggle among the interests competing for power in today's Russia. The reality is far more complex, but in any case, ideals and values, such as those placed squarely in the public arena by this interview, have a power of their own. And as Medvedev surely realizes, their future betrayal would also have a terrible negative power, reinforcing the cynicism that perpetuates corruption and the "legal nihilism" that he claims to oppose.

For a newspaper editor and a president to have a courteous on-the-record conversation on civil society and judicial independence cannot in itself be a bad thing, whatever we might guess (without actually knowing!) about motives; but cynicism is spiritual poison!

Finally, I appreciated this interview simply as a reminder about how typically Russian it is--a conversation over tea, touching on important ideas, thinkers, even a new film. It's a fascinating glimpse of two men, one of whom is wrestling with countless complex leadership issues, while the other struggles to understand the role of journalism in a time and place where his own co-workers can be killed with apparent impunity.

A few of my favorite moments (my translations; boldface follows Web format of original):

Novaya: On April 15 you will be holding a presidential council on civil society and human rights. ... Do I understand correctly that civil society is more important to you than "official society"?

D. Medvedev: You know, for Russia, "civil society" is a category that we've still not learned to understand completely. Everywhere in the world, civil society is the flip side of the state. The state isn't just a political machine, it is a form of organization in life that is based on state power and relies upon law, whereas civil society is the human dimension of any state. Although it functions within legislative boundaries, still it operates by its own human rules, which by the way aren't always expressed in judicial form. Not long ago, many people didn't understand what we meant when we said "civil society." The state--now that was more or less clear, but what is this thing called "civil society"? The society of citizens? But aren't we like all citizens of our country? But now there's an understanding that civil society is an essential social institution of any state, a feedback institution--an institution of people who don't occupy government posts but participate actively in the life of the country. And it's absolutely essential for the president of the country to have meetings, contacts with the representatives of civil society. I want to point out that these contacts are never simple for any power structure anywhere, because civil society and the representatives of human rights organizations always have a great number of grievances addressed to the state and its leaders. They've got many questions. And sometimes there's a reluctance to answer. But for that very reason these contacts need to be made part of the system, for example in the framework of the council you mentioned. I'm counting on having an interesting conversation with them--probably a tough one. But that's what makes it valuable.

. . .

Tony Halpin of The Times speaks with Russia Today about the Medvedev/Muratov interview.

Novaya: Dmitri Anatolyevich, ... I'd like to turn to your favorite theme, courts and their independence. I'd like to ask about the "second YUKOS case" [charging Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev with embezzlement and other crimes; trial underway in Moscow]. Is the outcome of this case a foregone conclusion for you? The outcome of the first case, sadly, was obvious to the majority of those following the case. Is the outcome a foregone conclusion this time? Here's what someone wrote to me: Maybe Medvedev at first will make phone calls to judges, including the judge in the YUKOS case, and say: "You're independent, you're independent, I remind you, you're independent, you're independent, you're independent"--putting the controls on "manual" in order to restore judicial culture.

D. Medvedev: I can tell you that any kind of manual control comes with a high cost. I'm not just speaking about courts. We simply must direct our efforts towards ensuring that the machinery of state works reasonably well on its own. In connection with courts and their specific processes, I'll answer briefly. It's possible that for a given person the outcome of one or another case is predictable. It's their freedom, their privilege, as a free analyst, let's say, one without government responsibilities to say: I believe it will turn out this way. And later to say, See, I told you! Or--forgive me, I made a mistake.

But for a public servant, and even more for the president, there is not, and can't be, that kind of freedom to comment.

Predicting a judicial decision, a judicial sentence, by a president is unlawful. It's a sign of a violation of law. For all other independent commentators--it's a personal matter. Government officials or the president, however, cannot and should not get involved in any kind of predicting in any judicial process, including the one you've mentioned.

Novaya: Here you're almost repeating a noteworthy eighteenth-century phrase from Emperor Frederick--I'm quoting from a lecture by M. Mamardashvili. When Frederick wanted to seize a mill from a miller, the miller said to him: "Mr. Emperor, besides you, we have judges in this country." The emperor left the miller in peace and ordered the following inscription to be placed on his residence: "Mr. Emperor, besides you, we have judges in this country." This was a good thing for the miller--he had an emperor, but he also had judges.

D. Medvedev: There are other maxims on this subject. For example: "The whole political system exists for the sole purpose of allowing judges to fulfill their functions without interference." Hume said that.

Novaya: An excellent thought.

. . .

Novaya: I recently saw Andrey Khrzhanovsky's film on [poet Yosif] Brodsky. It had that wonderful phrase, "In Russia, inhumanity is always the easiest thing to organize." In fact, inhumanity is always easier, while justice and freedom are more difficult. I wish you luck on your difficult journey.

Medvedev: Thank you. I can't help but agree--it really is more difficult.

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Quakers Uniting in Publications--QUIP--is (are?) meeting this weekend on the Pacific coast, but this evening, participants gathered with local Friends at Newberg Friends Church for an informal meal and conversation time. Among many other things, we heard that QUIP has remodeled its Web site--take a look. Among the great reunions this evening, it was also wonderful to meet someone new to me--Sherryll-Jeanne Harris, the current editor of The Canadian Friend--a publication that I served briefly as guest editor and business manager too many years ago. The evening passed much too quickly, but by now I hope all the participants have safely arrived at Twin Rocks to continue their work together.

Technocrat, meet interrogator: these legal memos from the U.S. Justice Department to the Central Intelligence Agency try to define the line between acceptably abusive and humiliating interrogation, on the one hand, and impermissible torture on the other. In my opinion, the tragic absurdity of the task is reflected in the incredible detail and skewed logic. Really, you can write recipes for combining waterboarding with sleep deprivation?

Part of me wishes I'd not read these memos. There are countries whose interrogators would cheerfully waterboard and hack off fingers without benefit of 46 pages of legal opinion, and I'm glad I'm not from one of those countries. But, honestly--how much better do I feel that we can deliberately, carefully, reason our way through to such cruelty?

I wish Barack Obama would go further and initiate investigations, but in a way I understand why he doesn't--he needs every bit of the loyalty and energy of the executive branch to carry out a program that is already massively different from his predecessor's. But that should not stop the other branches of our tripartite government from weighing in--particularly the Congress, which now finally needs to assert its role in our government's system of mutual accountability.

Other recommended links:

A (rare?) example of national modesty: Norway says "the North Pole is not ours." ~~ Jesus from a Middle Eastern perspective. ~~ The American Way--something in Bob Herbert's passionate op-ed felt like a memorial to my sister Ellen.

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Paul Oscher, veteran of Muddy Waters' band, slows it down and asks "What Have I Done?"

Two Sundays

Two weeks ago, among the February shorts, I mentioned the Northwest Yearly Meeting consultation on Russia. We wrapped those meetings up this past Saturday.

The global outreach board now needs to consider our recommendations. In the meantime, I want to mention a special gift that Tigard Community Friends Church gave us....

Sunday No. 1.

First, some impressions of Tigard Community Friends--a meeting I'd never visited before. The Sunday we were there, many of the young people were on the road (Bible quizzing, I think) and so we probably have a skewed idea of the congregation's demographics. Entering the meetinghouse, you see a large gathering area with lots of tables and chairs, additional chairs in rows off to the side, and a table with different kinds of coffee and other things to drink, as well as pastries and fresh fruit. It was a wonderfully inviting social space. Even an introvert like me found it easy to chat and get acquainted. At other tables, people were having intense conversations; and at others, people sat alone.

When it was time to start gathering the meeting, someone called for our attention, right there in that gathering space, and invited us to talk about our prayer concerns and celebrations. Some people took their seats in the rows of chairs, but others stayed right where they were, finishing their little meals or drinks at their tables. It was the Sunday after Kibaki and Odinga had reached their peace agreement in Kenya, so that was one of the themes of this time, along with many personal concerns. People spoke in their natural voices, as far as I could tell, not with an obvious church voice.

After around twenty minutes, it was time for us to go next door into the meeting room, which felt comfortable and intimate, probably not bigger than the gathering space. I loved how the two periods--that first gathering around the tables and the worship time in the meetingroom--felt seamlessly connected.

After the meeting for worship, we received our gift: Tigard Friends had agreed to suspend their normal adult Sunday school for this Sunday and, instead, gather with us for an extended period of unprogrammed worship to pray and discern. Dan Cammack, one of Tigard Friends' pastors and the clerk of the Yearly Meeting's global outreach board, opened and closed the worship, ending with a period of intercession and commissioning, with participants standing all around us, their hands on our shoulders or each other's shoulders. It was truly encouraging; I felt a deeper level of assurance despite my nagging impatience to be back in Russia with students and friends.

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Sunday No. 2.

Source.  

This past Sunday--a week after the Tigard experience--I was back at Reedwood Friends for meeting for worship for the first time since last September. Carole Spencer spoke on the universality of the covenant invitation, drawing from Isaiah 56:1-8, particularly verse 3:

Let no foreigner who has bound himself to the LORD say,
"The LORD will surely exclude me from his people."
And let not any eunuch complain,
"I am only a dry tree."

I had come to worship burdened by George Bush's veto of the bill prohibiting torture. (White House. New York Times.) In particular, why would so many members of Congress, evangelical celebrities, and ordinary American patriots provide so little resistance to Bush's insistence on the freedom to torture?

Carole's sermon seemed to confirm in me that Americans are not equipped by their churches or their culture to question the "us/them" assumptions behind Bush's assertions on wiretapping and torture. These so-called protections are to safeguard "us" (don't ask who that includes) and are only aimed at "them."

Proponents of torture in the popular media, including the television programs where torture seems to extract life-saving information, often pose exaggerated dilemmas that put critics on the defensive, making us seem squeamish and out of touch with the way the world really works. On the contrary, we do know how the world works--we do know that (setting aside the purest pacifism for the sake of discussion), World War II was won more easily because the average German or Japanese soldier in American captivity expected and received decent treatment. We also know that many Americans presently guarding prisoners in today's conflicts are treating their charges decently, despite the controversies that swirl around them. Does anyone seriously doubt that an American reputation for decency makes the whole world safer, including Americans? And can anyone seriously assert that to damage that reputation would benefit us? Furthermore, how much abuse of that reputation, systemically tolerated, would finally replace that reputation with a more "realistic" take-off-the-gloves post-Geneva Bush-Cheney snarl? Is it too late?

Supporters of cruel methods say that we need to have them on the implied menu so that our enemies can't simply train and prepare for the limited methods in the U.S. Army's manual. That argument also bears examination: What if all our enemies prepared themselves on the basis that Americans were decent and had values that disallowed cruelty? Again, let's be realistic, not sentimental! I can imagine that we would probably fail to crack a few hard nuts (would we have cracked them before, given suicide bombers' willingness to pay an ultimate price?). Even so, despite those possible losses, isn't it realistic to expect that if our global behavior reflected such a commitment, we would have thousands fewer enemies? Or do we seriously believe, as a hard, objective fact, that every self-described enemy of the USA is either evil or deluded, that no legitimate grounds ever exist for opposing the USA?

And before we dismiss those more humane methods, let's remember that some of them are the same methods that police departments and prosecutors' offices have used for generations to obtain convictions of so-called hardened criminals. They're not Sunday school! As for McCain's assertion that there are additional methods, not in the Army's manual, that are still consistent with the Geneva Convention, why not propose language to permit those methods, or to provide for research into effective interrogation while still accepting a robust safeguard against cruelty and torture?

As for the most exquisitely fine-tuned hypothetical situation, where torture is truly likely to obtain a lifesaving piece of information from a weak, believable, but nevertheless irredeemable villain, let the interrogator take the risk of violating the law! Let that conscientious, modest, reluctant torturer courageously face the consequences of a decision to cross the boundary of decency for a supposed higher good. Bonhoeffer faced this very dilemma in choosing to support the assassination of Adolf Hitler. Judgments must sometimes be made that I would have hoped to go another direction, and I can accept that, but (again, sticking with realism!), human nature being what it is, torture with official protection and immunity is far different and more corrupting than the possibility of an occasional extreme decision under extreme pressure, with accountability.

The logical arguments for permitting cruel methods seem so weak to me that I can only believe that George Bush has another agenda, and I believe that Steven Lee Myers in the NYT article puts his finger on it when he says, "At the core of the administration’s position is a conviction that the executive branch must have unfettered freedom when it comes to prosecuting war." But that's another reason for urgent opposition: part of America's supposed decency are the values of freedom, democracy, and the rule of law. There is in fact no legitimate war going on, but even if there were, we are still not a monarchy nor a dictatorship. At least not yet.

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In any case, Christians have no permission to declare anyone outside the circle of decency and grace. Any claims of a mission to advance freedom and claims to be protecting "us" must always be subjected to a test: whose freedom, whose protection? Two days ago, speaking to the National Religious Broadcasters, Bush said that "The liberty we value is not ours alone. Freedom is not America's gift to the world; it is God's gift to all humanity." It is up to his audience not just to say "Amen" as the broadcasters did, but to measure assertively whether our policies and actions are actually for "the world" or, in the final analysis, just "us."

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Back at Reedwood, at the end of meeting for worship, without a pause, we went into a called meeting for business. At the previous regular monthly meeting, a concern had been raised about immigration raids and prosecutions that had separated American-born children from their parents and caused other hardships of similar gravity. A group had offered to draft a minute, and this called monthly meeting considered their draft. During the half hour of discussion, it was clear that our heart was in making a public statement to declare support for undocumented immigrants and against disruptive enforcement, but we were less sure about making policy recommendations or implying more innocence for undocumented immigrant workers than was factual. To my great relief, the meeting was able to agree with the minute in principle and entrusted the writers to complete the drafting and publish the minute.

It was a great example of the immediate relevance of biblical and Quaker theology.

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Righteous links:

Friends Committee on National Legislation's torture page. Why the Iraq "war" may continue indefinitely: Tomdispatch nails the eight fundamentals of the faith for our "experienced" policy establishment. William Safire on waterboarding. "Pardon me: I'm busy being consumed by Jesus." Aj Schwanz comments on local author Paul Louis Metzger's Consuming Jesus: Beyond Race and Class Divisions in a Consumer Church. The importance of story: Scot Bower recounts the nonviolent prayer-based movement that helped bring down the Berlin Wall in 1989. FRIDAY PS: Another example of vital storytelling: "Being on the side of the crucified," via Ekklesia. Nadine Hoover writes on war tax resistance as discipleship in her Friends Journal article, "Yielding to our faith." On the same topic, see Atlanta Friend Julia Ewen's important article from Easter 2006. On spreading the gospel of democracy in Russia; a former British ambassador comments.

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Buddy Guy accompanies Cat Power (second half of this video):

How not to prepare for worship

As in many other Palm Sunday celebrations, our Reedwood children entered the meetingroom waving palms and leading us in song. After a moving series of hymns, including "When I survey the wondrous cross on which the Prince of Glory died," we listened carefully to Ken's sermon and entered into the spaciousness of open worship.

The problem was, I hadn't prepared well. We had stayed up late the night before working on our taxes, searching high and low for various bits of paper. This is probably not what was meant by the Friendly advice on coming to worship with heart and mind prepared.

Then on Sunday morning, before meeting, I saw that Sean's Russia Blog had posted a new item, "The stamp of Guantanamo." Sean's post was prompted by a Human Rights Watch report "detailing how the USA sent seven 'enemy combatants' held at Guantanamo Bay to Russia. The result was all seven, Rustam Akhmiarov, Ravil Gumarov, Timur Ishmuratov, Shamil Khazhiev, Rasul Kudaev, Ruslan Odizhev, and Airat Vakhitov, were repeatedly tortured and brutalized by Russian police and security forces."

Sean's post haunted me in open worship. I thought about Aleksei Tolstoy's trilogy, The Road to Calvary, whose Russian title translated literally is "The Torture Walk." You probably already know where this is going--how our tax money was used to send seven souls on a torture walk to Russia, and this awkward truth was hitting me on the week we commemorate the death and resurrection of our tortured Savior.

I spoke a few words along these lines. A little later another Friend got up and recalled an earlier Easter season meeting for worship during which a previous pastor had preached on the theme of the spiritual, "Were you there when they crucified my Lord?" Her sermon had been amplified by a visiting Catholic priest, who said that part of the power of the Holy Week experience was to understand that we had not only been there but that by our disobedience and passivity we had participated in the execution. Having meditated on this dimension of the Passion, however, we would come to Easter and receive the forgiveness and restoration offered freely by God. Our Friend finished his recollection by saying that, as a Quaker, he wasn't entirely sure of this theology, but felt that it included an important insight.

I don't know how many of those present made the connection between the Guantanamo "torture walk" and the Road to Calvary, but the Middle School leader for our Sunday School told me later that a discussion about torture had taken up half the class time. Good! There's no more beautiful way to honor Holy Week than to spread the news: We Christians, disciples of a young man whom the worldly powers tried to humiliate and crush, are fed up with the torture of those created in God's image. We don't want to condone it, vote for those who condone it, pay for it, or obtain "safety" through it.

The Human Rights Watch report says that the worst torture in this case was not done by Americans, but by Russians. It is a meaningless distinction and a foul place to hide. How far do we postpone reform in Russia (as well as here) by signaling that, whatever our public democratic pretensions, we're actually glad that the Russian torturers are available for our use? The worldly-wise will tell us condescendingly that we are blissfully ignorant of the things they must do on our behalf to protect us. But how can they protect us from the corrosion of our souls that results from the acid drip of their cynicism?

Thus might I hide my blushing face
while his dear cross appears;
dissolve my heart in thankfulness,
and melt mine eyes to tears.

(Isaac Watts)

Religious behavior

Being spiritual in public. I've just read two remarkable books. Because they arrived on my reading pile by different routes, their convergence was coincidental. Or at least I can't take credit.

The first one was on my public library branch's "new books" shelf: My Faith So Far: A Story of Conversion and Confusion, by Patton Dodd. An increasingly dissolute high school student in a relentlessly conventional Colorado Springs family (including an evangelical older sister) makes a decision for Christ and reinforces it by becoming involved with a charismatic megachurch. There his transformation continues: he tries to conform to the expectation that he will speak in tongues as evidence of the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and he sheds his worship-service inhibitions to the point that he can dance with greater and greater enthusiasm during the praise music. (He describes the evolution of his worship dance, and the variations of other worshippers, with delicious precision.) It dawns on him that there can be only one college for him: Oral Roberts University. With an amazing combination of affection and candid, increasingly skeptical scrutiny, the author took me through his year at Oral Roberts. At the risk of giving away the ending, I'll say that, in this process, he does not lose his faith, but he loses most of his certainty.

The next book, a novel recommended by one of my colleagues, seemed at first to be from another planet entirely: a convent in rural New York State in 1906. However, Mariette in Ecstasy, by Ron Hansen, also deals with extravagant religious behavior; also combines sympathy with scrutiny; also comes to a warmly uncertain conclusion. Both books reveal the intricate interplay among the factors that drive religious behavior: desire to please God; desire to please the community; desire to experience the promised blessings; preservation of one's own integrity; a yearning for passion and self-sacrifice; varying degrees of desire to know what's real.

John Punshon once divided Western religious people into two groups with two characteristic questions: the children of the Enlightenment ("How can I know what is true?") and the children of the Reformation ("Where will I spend eternity?"). Can members of either group really plumb the depths of spiritual experience without geninely, not dismissively, wrestling with the other group's central question?

Finally, what can we find in Quaker literature, either fictional or autobiographical, that corresponds in depth of self-reflection to these books? I'll start with a couple of suggestions: Quaker Strongholds by Caroline Stephen (Pendle Hill abridgement in pdf form here). What about the Quaker novels of Jan de Hartog? Which of the beloved Quaker journals have a sufficiently thin shield of piety or agenda to serve this purpose?

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Why torture is always wrong. Christianity Today didn't publish my letter about Christian celebrities, Karl Rove, and torture (see "Plain language, part two") but they did far better: They made David Gushee's article, "Five Reasons Torture is Always Wrong," the cover story of their February issue. I recommend it highly, although I worry that those who need to read it will give it wide berth. The dramatic cover of the magazine gives them more than fair warning. As Charles Marsh says (as quoted by Ted Olsen), "The Hebrew prophets might call us to repentance, but repentance is a tough demand for a people utterly convinced of their righteousness."

Gushee's article is not (yet) on the Christianity Today Web site, but a somewhat longer version of the article is available in MS Word format from David Gushee's own site.

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Why isn't Bush being 'tough on Russia'? Fred Hiatt's opinion piece, "Bush's Big Silence," is one of the latest in a pundit genre whose driving question is one or another variation on "why isn't the USA doing more to remake Russia into our image?"

Hiatt writes, "... [N]o other nation has regressed from openness to authoritarianism during Bush's time in office as dramatically and decisively as Russia -- and with less apparent objection from Bush." Hiatt's question is in the subtitle of his piece: "Will the President Object to Russia's Regression?"

Is Bush really in a position to "object"? Consider this:

1. The USA does not understand Russia's challenges, or Vladimir Putin's situation, well enough to influence Russia intelligently. For example, do we truly understand how little power or control Putin actually has outside of the long but thin shadow of the Kremlin? Yes, Putin's authoritarian tendencies are real, but as I've said before, all the levers he's grabbing were there before he arrived; and how can we blame him, considering the unbelievable complexity of Russia's problems, for grabbing every lever he can?

The way we Americans treat some countries—lots of attention, lots of pressure, then suddenly a vacuum, "benign neglect," and consequent policy-drift until the next self-serving occasion of urgency—does not build up an investment in serious relationships on either side. We don't have to know everything about Russia perfectly in order to be taken seriously in the relationship, but there must be a more serious effort to find common ground. When someone as well-informed as Fred Hiatt writes, "... [W]hile an authoritarian Russia may offer tactical cooperation from time to time according to its interests, it cannot be a strategic partner of the America that Bush described in his second inaugural address, because the two countries' values and goals will differ so sharply," I'm tempted to despair.

2. Neither do we understand the ingenuity and the irrepressible energy of Russians. (This isn't universal, of course; there's plenty of passivity, too, often explained and excused with cynicism. See Nancy Ries's classic study, Russian Talk.) Russians will largely say and do what they want, in whatever ways they can invent, regardless of whether the Kremlin officially approves. However, they might not do it in ways that will contribute to a foreign-financed NGO's list of successes. Speaking of NGOs, I wonder how many American critics of Russia are aware of the USA's legal restrictions on foreign funding of American organizations? And on the strict regulations on organizations eligible to receive tax-deductible gifts in the USA?

3. I can't help wondering whether Bush doesn't criticize Putin in ways that Fred Hiatt would appreciate, not because Bush has other democratic-Middle-East fish to fry or because of strategic war-on-terror calculations, but because Bush admires Putin's authoritarianism? After all, Bush did not intend for us to find out that he asked the National Security Agency to fish around in our telephone calling patterns. (I thought about that during the most recent USA/Canada/Russia conference call concerning the Friends International Library's Chechen language project.) Nor were we supposed to find out about extraordinary renditions. Admittedly, we are all certainly supposed to know that the USA never practices torture—but we are to leave the definition of torture to those who know best.

Or perhaps Bush is properly worried about Putin's ability to point out American hypocrisy. Putin has, after all, pointed out that America's attack on Iraq, without U.N. mandate, was a variation on the law of the jungle. In any case, this is not the time for our country to become internationally sanctimonious.

Before someone accuses me of cutting Putin slack in ways that I'd never do for Bush: I understand that both of these men are power politicians. Both have demonstrated that they (or their associates) will do whatever it takes to get their short-term job done. Both apparently know who their enemies are, and neither gives any quarter. Both seem to me to be tone-deaf concerning the need to project wisdom and long-term perspectives to their constituencies. But, still, I find Putin's utter lack of pious pretensions comparatively refreshing.

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Terrorism as religious behavior. Back to my opening theme, but in a more ominous variation: When is terrorism actually a form of publicly enacted religious self-abandonment? I hadn't thought about this extreme in connection with the books I mention at the top, but the thought came to me with this sentence I read this morning: "A man who believes himself to be the chosen instrument of God is capable of infinite mischief and infinite destructiveness." It's part of David Bromwich's review of Terry Eagleton's new book Holy Terror. Another book to add to my "religious behavior" pile.