PublicChristian

Here’s my wife Connie’s response to a relative who thinks Obama loves to see babies die, and argues that almost all abortions are done for the convenience of the mother. We could rant about this for a long time, but I think Connie did a good job in this post on her Facebook page.

Hi R__, I’m not denying past trends, and I am completely Pro-Life:

Remember, my doctor begged me to have an abortion in the 5th month because he knew the baby (Chelsea) was killing me – I weighed 95 lbs at the time. When I refused, he had to send me to Denver because I had no insurance… and subsequently, she had no insurance for the next 13 years because of her pre-existing condition…

…until I got a job at the U.S. Postal Service – Federal Insurance covers you no matter what and we currently pay $314 per month for family insurance!

There have been so so so many instances since then when I so wish I could share my Federal insurance with the people immediately around me who are suffering so much.

I heard it said last night, that if we can spend so many billions of dollars killing Iraqis why can’t we spend a fraction of that saving and healing Americans… including veterans.

» Continue Reading »

In many respects, Americans are freer today than ever before, with more Americans than ever before enjoying unencumbered access to the promise of American life.

I’m quoting Andrew J. Bacevich, retired US Army colonel, professor of history and international relations at Boston University, writing about American freedom, and values in American life today.*

He’s arguing that we’ve used our freedoms to become self-indulgent and arrogant, and to try to force the rest of the world to support that self-indulgence and arrogance.
» Continue Reading »

Here’s Obama on the significance of the Gospel:

In an interview with Christianity Today magazine, Obama said this about his decision to accept Christ,

What was intellectual
and what was emotional joined,
and the belief in the redemptive power of Jesus Christ,
that he died for our sins,
that through him we could achieve eternal life

- but also that, through good works
we could find order and meaning here on Earth
and transcend our limits
and our flaws and our foibles

- I found that powerful.

» Continue Reading »

I.  Young Adult Attitudes Toward American Christianity

Recently I wrote about how young adult “outsiders” – people not involved in churches – think of Christians in this country, based on research overseen by David Kinnaman and reported in his recent book.

[My posts: "They Will Know", "World's View".   Kinnaman's book is unChristian, based on an extensive research project by The Barna Group. It's valuable but not pleasant reading.]

At the end of each of his main chapters Kinnaman includes comments from other Christian leaders. Here’s some of what Brian McLaren had to say (p 172). (Here are a few posts on this site that mention McLaren’s writing.)

II.  How We Got There – The Role of the Prophets of the Religious Right

» Continue Reading »

Here’s a 24-year old (”Jeff G.”) talking about his relationship with God.

God, for me, is like someone who’s already up when you’ve come downstairs in the morning and you’re stumbling to get that cup of coffee and he’s already there with his. And you sit on the front porch in a rocking chair and the sun is just starting to rise over the horizon and he says, ‘It’s a beautiful sunrise!’ And I say, ‘Yeah.’ And that’s it.

Yes!
» Continue Reading »

It’s extraordinary to me that the United States can find $700 billion to save Wall Street and the entire G8 can’t find $25 billion dollars to save 25,000 children who die every day from preventable diseases.

- Bono

Thanks to enewsletter from Sojourners for the quote.

One would hope that this bailout will contribute to some children eating better, » Continue Reading »

The Barna Group exists to provide statistical information to Christian churches and ministries,

to be a catalyst in moral and spiritual transformation in the United States. We accomplish these outcomes by providing vision, information, strategy, evaluation and resources.

After extensive recent research the group’s president, David Kinnaman, wrote a book on the largely negative take on Christianity by “outsiders,” especially younger ones, » Continue Reading »

Recently a fairly open discussion another adult and I had with some teenagers took a few interesting turns (no surprise there!).

One person in the group talked a little about the experience of being on the brink of some serious temptation, turning away from it, and realizing with joy how much you have protected and how much freedom you have gained by pulling back from the temptation.

So some others wanted to pursue that theme. One brought up the temptation to fight. » Continue Reading »

Where’s the outrage?

A real antiwar movement would end our Iraq disaster. But the middle class doesn’t care enough to protest, so the kids who go to community college will keep dying.

“The kids who go to community college” do not include the children of the elected and appointed officials who keep sending “kids” into this quagmire – cauldron. They have the money to avoid both community colleges and wars.

It’s the time of year we especially remember Dr. Martin King. We often forget how very anti-war he was about our mess in Vietnam. It stands to reason he would be at least as vocal against our invasion and attempted occupation of Iraq. And he was the kind of guy who would care particularly about “the kids who go to community college.”

I recommend for your attention this excellent recent comment by bookaholic. Here are some excerpts.

This little bit about Jesus: “he was not energized by and focused on his enemies” is some kind of key.

I spent several years in a small town where a favorite topic of conversation was the bad things other people did… At the same time, the atmosphere seemed to be saturated with high-profile Christianity; there was lots of God talk, much of it from the same people who were dispensing the negativity and gloom.

It’s possible to cultivate a habit of being energized by and focused on (fill in the blank). If you fill in the blank with something you don’t approve of, that disapproval will come to have a dominant role in your life and thoughts.

I have an unfortunate tendency to focus on the bad behavior of Christians, then I wonder why I have to drag myself to church…

Here are excerpts from a letter JeanValJean posted in a comment. See the full letter here.

I am the mother of a gay son and I’ve taken enough from you good people. I’m tired of your foolish rhetoric about the “homosexual agenda� and your allegations that accepting homosexuality is the same thing as advocating sex with children. You are cruel and ignorant. You have been robbing me of the joys of motherhood ever since my children were tiny.

My first born son started suffering at the hands of the moral little thugs from your moral, upright families from the time he was in the first grade. He was physically and verbally abused from first grade straight through high school because he was perceived to be gay. He never professed to be gay or had any association with anything gay, but he had the misfortune not to walk or have gestures like the other boys. He was called “fagâ€? incessantly, starting when he was 6 …

You have the audacity to talk about protecting families and children from the homosexual menace, while you yourselves tear apart families and drive children to despair …

If you want to tout your own morality, you’d best come up with something more substantive than your heterosexuality. You did nothing to earn it; it was given to you …

Both sides of my family have lived in Vermont for generations. I am heart and soul, a Vermonter, so I’ll thank you to stop saying that you are speaking for “true Vermontersâ€? …

You use religion to abdicate your responsibility to be thinking human beings. There are vast numbers of religious people who find your attitudes repugnant.

[See also, What Was The Sin of Sodom?]

That is the clear import of an article in the Washington Post.

“The reports are stunning,” said Matthew L. Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. “What’s critical is the consistency of the increase, which leads to the conclusion that it has to have been conscious and deliberate.”

No. Don’t tell me our highly honored values of unrestrained capitalism, and of profit as the wisest arranger of human affairs, can work against the common good!

Unfortunately there are Americans who talk as if profit really is the one true and reliable motive for human behavior, and wealth accumulation is the one ultimate standard to show us who is worthy and who is not.

To that way of thinking, if we conclude that the profit motive, left unsupervised, sometimes (or often) leads to unbridled evil, what do we have left? No way to motivate people! No effective value system!

Fortunately there are many of us who believe our faith, our Bibles, our Christ provide us with much more powerful motivation and much more humane and true values.

“People need to be aware of this,” said Sally Fogerty, Massachusetts’s associate commissioner for community health. “If a person is trying to quit and is having a hard time, it’s not just them. There is an increasing percentage of nicotine that they are ingesting, and that may make it more difficult.”

As the article says earlier, “nicotine is highly addictive.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [also had something to say] …

“We know nicotine is addictive, so if the amount of nicotine in cigarettes is increasing, it could make it even harder for the 70 percent of smokers who want to quit and the more than 40 percent who try to quit every year,” Corinne Husten, acting director of the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, said in an e-mail message.

So here we have it. There are true American capitalists who would actually choose to harm fellow Americans or deliberately make their lives more difficult in order to improve the power and comfort of those who own or run these huge, powerful corporations.

No spokesman for a tobacco company would speak on the record about the Massachusetts findings yesterday.

What moral consequences can we expect at home in the US when we continue to practice unjustified and indiscriminate violence against countries, cities, and families around the world? What can we expect among the great masses of America if the rulers are self-indulgent, dishonest, violent, or exploitive towards their own citizens?

I don’t know the dynamics in any detail, but I believe we should fully expect that corruption at the top will sooner or later breed violence and indifference locally in the cities and the neighborhoods – not only in the broader American economy or towards people in other nations.

I can’t prove it statistically, of course. But, you know, the Apostles and Prophets, even Jesus himself, never tried to prove their accusations, analyses, and predictions. Sometimes you’re just right. And sometimes you even know that you’re right – whether you can prove it to the satisfaction of everyone else or not.

And I am sure, as no doubt many of us are, that the morality practiced by those at the top will “trickle down”.

On one hand, the money is supposed to trickle down, but doesn’t.

On the other, we always hope – or pretend – that the morality at the top won’t trickle down, but it does. It does cause moral and psychological repurcussions in us and our kids.

Hosea 4:9
And it will be: Like people, like priests.
I will punish both of them for their ways
and repay them for their deeds.

Who was responsible in this case? Where did the evil originate – with the people or with the priests? It doesn’t much matter; the result is the same for both. But we do know the Bible often blames the priests, the kings and nobles, and the judges for misleading and exploiting the rest – the great bulk of the people. (Jeremiah 23 and Ezekiel 34 are classic. So also much of Isaiah – ch 58 for example. And the theme is strong in the short book of Micah.)

I sense increasing levels of generalized cynicism and anger in our country, greater depths of fear and of despair, even increasing violence.

Part of it, we know, is being deliberately cultivated – that in itself is rotten moral leadership and has a terrible trickle-down.

And I think I see increasing insensitivity to the troubles and tragedies of people around us, people not ourselves – a hopelessness and disregard toward the world around.

Judith Nygren in the Omaha World Herald (June 15, p B1) wrote recently about Omaha’s striking upsurge of violence against women this year. At a press conference a number of speakers

“urged the community to speak up and help end the recent spate of slayings known or thought to have been committed by husbands or boyfriends.”

The article gave good advice, as did the speakers. And a number of agencies provide services helpful to women caught in dangerous relationships.

And don’t blame the problem on Omaha per se.

“Last year Omaha didn’t have a single domestic homicide.”

But

“Then came 2006 and the mounting number of area women killed by a partner or (possibly) a boyfriend or husband.”

But here’s the touchy part, the part that can make you catch your breath.

“An important part of ending abuse is assuring victims – even abusers – that the community cares, that people are reaching out with support.”

Ah, there’s the rub. If the nation’s leaders are insensitive to the violence they are doing – what’s to become of any caring spirit in the rest of us? What if “the community” in general learns to just no longer care?

Of course a connection cannot be proven between any corruption at the top and a shocking surge of domestic violence in Omaha. It’s easy to say that this is just an unexplailnable statistical blip. It may well be.

But clearly there is a moral and social-psychological principle here even if this violence in Omaha turned out to be not an example of it.

“As a man sows, so shall he also reap” – or the contemporary version, “What goes around comes around” surely applies to societies and nations as well as to individuals. And it is wise and true whether you can ever tie it to specific circumstances or not.

Dealing with large societies makes it very difficult to tie such a principle to specific events. But the value of having the guidance the Bible provides is that we can come to understand crucial principles that are true anyway – regardless of contemporary statistical ‘proof’.

We really need to heed those clear moral guidelines if we do not want to reap those clear moral trickle-down consequences.

[For a stronger version of this, focused more on the impact on youth, see Political Leaders Corrupting Our Youth.]

I promised to share some responses I got in church when I read two lists of questions from the pulpit a couple of weeks ago. (The two lists are at the bottom of this post.) I had asked the congregation to watch for differences between the two lists. Their initial responses focused on the following issues. [The "first" list is one being promoted by Dobson and others as representing a "Christian worldview." ]

Both lists are at the bottom of this post.

• There is no love in the first list.
• The first list requires only yes or no answers. The second list requires a lot more.

» Continue Reading »

Here’s a letter I sent to the editor of the McCook Daily Gazette. It was published Thursday. I think the prominence of someone like Rush Limbaugh is a moral issue, and has a strong negative impact on the quality of citizenship in society. So, that needs to be said. Don’t you think?

Some of my best friends are Limbaugh addicts (”dittoheads”). You don’t always agree with all your friends, right? I personally am sad to hear Rush is coming back to McCook airwaves. I fear he will undermine habits of good citizenship, and will damage families and spiritual lives.

Unfortunately, he behaves like what Isaiah calls a “scoundrel.” » Continue Reading »

Thanks to Georgia Stillwell, via Truthout.com Georgia Stillwell is a member of Military Families Speak Out.

… I wish I could tell you that since my son has returned to civilian life our family is whole and happy, but this is not the case. My 21-year-old son is homeless, unemployed …

I remember the day I got the phone call … My son was back in the states. I fell to the floor sobbing, thanking the creator that my son was alive. Little did I know at the time that all that returned was a physical shell. My son’s spirit and soul must still be wandering the streets of Iraq.

You’d have to know my son – this child turned man. My son used to be a sensitive guy. I remember when he wanted a kitten because dogs scared him. We went to a farm and he picked the scrawniest, ugliest, smallest kitten there. My son slept with that cat until the day he left for boot camp. Is this the same person that used to hold my hand as a teenager or throw his arm around me when we were out in public? … Is this the son who held me in his arms as we cried together at the airport when he was leaving for Iraq? Where is my son? GEORGE BUSH, GIVE ME BACK MY SON!

My son wouldn’t look me in the eyes when he first returned from Iraq. He always seemed nervous and jumpy. Riding in the car with him he weaved from lane to lane avoiding any road debris. Toll booths made him crazy. He didn’t sleep at night and seemed on edge. Alcohol was becoming his way to induce sleep …

I had an emergency phone call from my son’s ex-girlfriend. She told me through her tears that my son had driven his car over an embankment. She saw the car and said she couldn’t believe he survived. She had talked to some of his friends who told her that he was crying that night and talking about the war.

Whenever my son gets a few beers in him his friends tell me he talks about the war. They describe it as “crazy talk.” He wants the blood of the Iraqis he killed off his hands. He then left and drove his car at high speed over an embankment … The first time I spoke with him I began crying, telling him how much I loved him. His response, “Whatever.”

During the second conversation he said he feels better. Does he feel better because his body feels bruised and broken? It now matches his insides … this is the state of my family.

People say to me he volunteered, he knew what he was getting into. My son was still a teenager, he had no idea what he was getting into.

Can anyone really comprehend war unless they’ve been there?

Did you hear that George W Bush, service-evader? Dick Cheney, you who had better things to do than serve when your country called? [See “bullet go by their ears�.]

The war has come home … it is coming home with each soldier.

My son’s body survived Iraq … nothing else.

It’s that problem of the evil we do as a nation, as a culture, coming back to bite us.

You say this kid has emotional problems. Yup; that’s for sure. Maybe the people who sent him there do too. In fact, it seems likely.

You say he’ll get better. Maybe. We all hope so. Maybe he will not even survive – that is happening to some of them, you know. And he will never be completely “better”.

You say that it’s just one story, it doesn’t mean much. I say, it’s one of many, which means there is lots of this kind of damage happening to American families – and all for the transparent and well-known lies of this White House and it’s political and media supporters. And it means that “family valuesâ€? don’t apply to the (usually) lower class kids, and their families, who have to do this wealthy and unaccountable Administration’s dirty work.

This is a very real part of the state of our Union.

What is your calling? Many of us actually have several in this complex society. I’ve been enjoying the first 50 or so pages of The Michael Eric Dyson Reader*, in which he talks several times about his calling to be “an intellectual.” Dyson is controversial – a word which sometimes just means the target is talking seriously about important things – but I don’t think he will cause you any heart attacks. (As usual, I added some underlines and boldings.)

I can’t remember when I became an intellectual – a person with a great passion to think and study and to distribute the fruits of his labor in useful form … There is no great advantage in admitting that one is, or wants to be, an intellecutal. (For confirmation, one need only look at politics …) (p xix)

He is (or was two years ago) “Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities” at the University of Pennsylvania. He’s also a preacher, and has been a pastor.

It’s nearly as tough these days being a preacher as it is being an intellectual, particularly with the ignorance that parades under the banner of religious belief.

He’s willing to take positions that don’t fit today’s version of political correctness.

… errant believers like me who feel that God doesn’t need the protection of the state. (p xx)

So does he think of intellectual work as a calling?

My religious background has a lot to do with how I see the life of the mind: not as career but vocation, and not as a pursuit isolated from the joy and grief of ordinary folk, but as a calling to help hurting humanity … to talk back to suffering – and if possible to relieve it. I wanted to be as smart as I could be about the pain and heartache of people I knew were unjustly oppressed …

The intellectuals I admire most are just as eager to preach resistance to ignorance, pain, and yes, evil, as evangelists are to promulgate spiritual salvation. I haven’t the slightest interest in using my academic perch to proselytize students or colleagues to my way of thinking about God. (Get me in a pulpit, and it’s a different matter altogether.) (p xx)

He deals radically with the old problem of which is more crucial in your presence in the world – the formal shape of your theology, or the practical shape of your moral life?

If I had to choose I’d rather sink with the atheists who say they don’t believe in God, yet love God’s children, and show it with the work they do and in their compassion for the vulnerable, than rise with believers whose view of God is shriveled and vicious, and who punish others, and themselves, ultimately, with hard-hearted moralizing, and a cruel indifference to the suffering of the unwashed that grows from the despostic ill-temperedness of the self-righteous. (p xx1)

Ouch!

Then a few sentences on the responsibilites of an intellectual vocation.

It was Jesse Jackson who once remarked to me, “If you say something I can’t understand, that’s a failure of your education, not mine,” and he was right. (p xxvii)

I work hard to stimulate the gift God gave me. I’m constantly striving to get better, to get clearer, sharper, and more eloquent. I think one of the ways that occurs is through testing ourselves in situations where people are unpersuaded by our beliefs and we have to make a case for them with as much passion and precision as possible …

I want young people to say the same thing about intellectual engagement [as about sports] … I want young people to say, as the folk in the ’60s and ’70s used to say, “Got to be mo’ careful,” in admiration of such linguistic and intellectual skill. Not for show, but for war, against ingnorance, misery, and oppression. I want young folk to say, “I wish I could do that. I wish I could be like Mike!” I have no qualms in hoping for that, because I want to seduce young people unto excellence, since they’ve often been sabotaged by mediocrity. (p 16)

… structural humility is surely in order. The best we can do is to represent the truth as honestly and clearly as we understand it, with all the skills at our disposal … if we truly believe that our vocations are manifestations of ultimate purpose we’ll want to do our level best to stay at the top of our games as an acknowledgment of the gifts God has given us.

And that last sentence applies no matter what the vocation(s) may be – certainly not only to intellecutual work!

*The book is The Michael Eric Dyson Reader, 2004, Basic Civitas Books.

We can work on being thankful from two directions.

First:

Our word “thank” comes from an older word, “think.”

To be thankful today for the most precious things in our lives, we have to think about those things. And it really is a valuable exercise.

Spend a few moments today seeing and thinking about the precious, truly valuable gifts you have received.

Then, it goes a step further. This is from one of my favorite philosophers:

Therefore what is not effectually known is precisely what is not adequately loved.     - Robert Earl Cushman

Thanksgiving is a time to work on both ends of that project.

• Pay attention to what we care about.
• Love what we want to pay attention to.

This particular holiday is a very appropriate time to think about our lives, our loves, our deep values. And that thinking will strengthen our love for and our investments in those things. Thus, being thankful (”think-ful”) is a very productive, healing, focusing, uplifiting exercise.

I’m going to disappear for a few days.

The college I teach and train at is promoting a pilot-project Youth Potential camp and I’m one of the counsellor / trainers. We’ll be at Dancing Leaf Cultural Center with some local high school kids (in a town this size that pretty much means neighbors) Wednesday through Saturday. Lots of serious discussion, plus some horsing around. We may be a little optimistic about how much we can do in four days – but then kids can sometimes be wonderfully responsive. It’s a challenge and a privilege.

A neighbor woman and friend of ours is Navajo, and grew up on the reservation in northwest New Mexico. Since her Navajo spirituality is very precious to her and a fundamental part of her life, we invited her to visit with my “Religious Foundations of Ethics” class last semester.

During her talk she repeatedly used the word “sacred,” as in:

• If you move a yucca plant in order to enlarge the garden, treat it decently because it is a sacred plant.
• Do you see your children as the sacred beings they really are?
• The corn meal is sacred.
• The four sacred mountains.
• You enter the hogan in a certain way to honor the sacredness of the place and of the family that lives there.
• That is a sacred animal.
• My sister is a sacred being.

She was making it sound like everything in life is to be regarded as sacred. Then one student asked her what she meant by the word, since she used it so frequently. Her first response was very brief: “Respect”. You respect that person, thing, place, etc., because respect is profoundly appropriate and utterly necessary. If you do not have and show respect, you are ignoring and violating the reality that is there, which is a part of you.

Serious respect, appropriate and necessary — what if we felt toward everything and everyone around us such a respect, such in alert realism? There might be a steep learning curve involved in this! What if we as Americans practiced that toward each other and toward other nations?

I heard a guy talking the other day about how he interacts with clerks, checkers, tellers, ticket-agents, etc. He likes to bring a smile into their day, some pleasantness, and has several techniques ready for achieving that. “It’s a small thing,” he said, “but eternity is in it.”

“Eternity is in it.” “Do you see your children as sacred?” Now there’s some moral — maybe even political — guidance for us. In each interaction with other humans, even in our thoughts about them, “eternity is in it.”

If the Christian conviction — of a Personal Creator who is the Just One and who is also Redeeming Love — is true, then eternity IS in our choices to extend love, respect, and recognition of sacredness to other humans, not to mention to animals and the broader environment. That’s really what the “dominion” assignment in Genesis is about. Christian theology provides, as does our friend’s Navajo spirituality, a solid ground for that. Constant recognition of sacredness and the practice of appropriate respect are the foundations of “everyday activism.”

And they are an implicit part of the American liberal tradition. Sadly, this is not a part of the “Christianity” that the currently dominant powers in this country choose to identify with. That is a great and grave error; and sometimes it can be hard to maintain our own convictions and values in the face of it. But we need to be sure to practice the reality daily, even against this sand-storm of false theology and warped dominionism.

We, at least, in our days and places can live that sacredness, that respect, and bring eternity here. It counts. That is a big part of my faith.

We got a new electronic game for Christmas; so I summoned all my engineering know-how and went to work installing the batteries. The instructions warned me not to mix new batteries with old. Tell me – if we can’t even mix new batteries with old ones how come every year they give us a large set of new days (365!), but we have to mix them in with the same old us? Sounds like trouble to me.

The nice thing, of course, is that you’re not yet as used up as an old battery. Even better, you may be old (a very relative term), but unlike old batteries you are still somewhat adjustable.

New Year’s is the time we talk about doing some adjusting. Usually we pick something unpleasant, unhealthy, or otherwise negative to work on; and often we are frustrated in the effort. Let’s look at it from the other direction. How about pinning down some pleasant, healthy, or otherwise beneficial aspect of our personalities or activities and give that a little reinforcement for the months to come?

Suppose you were going to send in to this paper, SNN, a 1- or 2-sentence summary of something good that you did this year. What would you pick? Let the action be pointed out for its own sake, without your name attached; but you yourself will thus be reminded – and that’s what I’m after.

Let me suggest a few areas where we might have something to report, or to remember and try to do again.

Tongue-biting. Abe Lincoln wanted us to move on “with malice toward none.” There is a lot of malicious talk around today – especially on radio and TV. But it’s also in our homes, schools, and workplaces. Did you bite your tongue now and then this year? Then there is much less social acid sloshing around where you live. That’s a good thing. Don’t hurt your arm, but a little pat on your own back is not inappropriate. And if we actually spoke up in a way opposite from malice – well, another pat. Hey, these are good things! If they show up some more in 2003, all the better.

Mary Pipher says, “A great deal of the social sickness in America comes from … age segregation.” “A great deal of the social sickness”! Did you cross one of those socially acceptable barriers to be present with, seeing and hearing and understanding, someone older or younger? It can be embarrassing, but also fun. If Pipher is right, that’s an important contribution to social healing for America! Wow. Then go do it. Was there an example of that for you in 2002? That’s good. Notice it. Tell yourself it’s valuable. Then do it again this year. We’re picking up good things and amplifying them by giving them attention. We’re helping to heal our culture!

“Any old dead fish can float downstream,” as my Dad often said. Our American values and way of life do a lot of good for us, and we could appreciate that more than we do. But as a culture we also have some bad patterns going, aspects of life in which we’d be smart to swim against the flow. So, is there a pat- yourself-on-the-back incident from 2002 where you chose to swim the “wrong way,” regardless of the guff you took or how uncool you seemed? Or did you encourage someone else when they were scraping together the courage to do the same? Notice it. That’s a habit worth developing further.

New year – same old people – but maybe not quite. We’re still us, but we can be adjusting ourselves, and thus the culture we live in, by noticing and approving of good things we do, and then repeating them in the new days to come.

by Larry Harvey, published in Southwest Nebraska News, January 3, 2003

from a new book I bought last night on the way to Chicago…

“There’s nothing more debauched than thinking….

Nothing’s sacred for those who think.

Calling things brazenly by name,

risque’ analyses, salacious syntheses,

frenzied, rakish chases after bare facts….”

“They prefer the fruits

from the forbidden tree of knowledge

to the pink buttocks found in glossy magazines….”

“During these trysts of theirs the only thing steamy is the tea.

People sit on chairs and move their lips.”

[or sit at computers and move their fingers]

from Wistawa Szymborska, Poems New and Collected 1957-1997, Harcourt, 1998, p208. She is Polish, was born in 1927, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996.

December 7, 2004

I apologize for my five-day absence from these pages. Among other things, I’m working to get up a whole new site structure that has better compatiblity with more browsers. It will also allow more extensive participation and interaction — since I’m sure there is a lot of good thinking and writing to be done by several of you who frequent this site. In the meantime, here are excerpts from a Christmas article I wrote not too long ago.

“Some can and some cannot enjoy the lights, music, special programs, parties, gifts. Some enjoy them but find that the pleasure does not carry over into the rest of life. There is a variety of reasons making December a painful time of year for people. And for some this is the first December that will be terribly painful, but it will set the tone for years to come.”

“A student of mine who works in an emergency room recently wrote, ‘Christmas is a hard time of year for most people because of torn, broken relationships and emotionally distant families. Loneliness is the actual theme of the season …. December is not Christmas lights and candy canes: instead it is chemicals and cries for help.’ ‘A child’s innocent faith in the magic of Christmas morning is broken over years of disenchantment.’”

“In my philosophy class last week we talked about success, happiness, and fulfillment. One student read a quote from Benjamin Franklin. “Happiness depends more on the inward Disposition of mind than on the outward Circumstances.” So I asked whether they agreed with that. Heads nodded. “Really? Do you really believe that?” They were serious. They agreed with it. Franklin does not tell us the “outward Circumstances” carry no weight. They can carry a lot of weight indeed. But he says “the inward Disposition of mind” is even more influential.

“So I want to make a suggestion – that we try to pull back a little, each one of us, from the mania, or the pain, of the season. Pull back to see how we could in fact harvest some happiness from these holidays.” ….

“I’m not telling you what kind of a holiday season to have. But I believe that there is happiness available even in this time of increased stress.”

Here are 4 paragraphs from an article I wrote on Thanksgiving for Southwest Nebraska News a few years ago.

Our word “thank” developed from an even more common good old five-letter word – think. Thank comes from think. I don’t know just how the development went, but we can imagine. I think of your kindness. I think of you and want to let you know that I think of your kindness. Then somehow this use of “think” begins to be pronounced a little differently. I thank of you. I thank you. I give thanks. Maybe it went something like that.

Sometimes we do not enjoy truly good aspects of life because we do not practice “thinks-giving” toward them. Sometimes we even lose very precious things because we have not taken time to discover how precious they are….

Humans have brains; we are rational creatures capable of giving focused attention. We ought to apply those gifts to the most wonderful, most precious, or most beautiful things in our lives. There’s something about the way we’re made that enables joy and a sense of blessedness to come from calm attentiveness to the truly good things in life. Seriously. There is increased pleasure available to those who will notice the blessings they already have. It’s a matter of leveraging present blessing into even greater happiness. It’s not pollyannaish; it’s the realism of attending to and getting full value from one’s assets.

Plus, of course, being a “thinks-giver” makes me more alert to preserve and promote the things I value, since I am more aware of what they are.

A vote for Bush has been and still is a vote to give more freedom to the purveyors of pop cultural garbage (”salacious entertainment”), those who will trade anything for a pile of bucks. And they call this the “morality vote.” This is from the NYTimes, via dailykos.com, Nov 11.

“Values always take a backseat to the needs of money once the elections are won.” Under this perennial “trick” Republican politicians promise to stop abortion and force the culture industry “to clean up its act” – until the votes are counted. Then they return to their higher priorities, like cutting capital gains and estate taxes.

Mr. Murdoch and his fellow cultural barons – from Sumner Redstone, the Bush-endorsing C.E.O. of Viacom, to Richard Parsons, the Republican C.E.O. of Time Warner, to Jeffrey Immelt, the Bush-contributing C.E.O. of G.E. (NBC Universal) – are about to be rewarded not just with more tax breaks but also with deregulatory goodies increasing their power to market salacious entertainment. It’s they, not Susan Sarandon and Bruce Springsteen, who actually set the cultural agenda Gary Bauer and company say they despise.