Beyond ideology

After several months at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station and a swing for some hiking through Tazmania, our son Cully stopped to visit on his way home to Maine. Tazmania helped him re-orient to the sights and scents of Fall. An occasional re-orientation helps us move beyond ideology.

William Barr isn’t there yet. When Kaitlan Collins asked why he will vote for Donald Trump, Barr said, “I think the real threat to democracy is the progressive movement and the Biden administration.”

Justice Samuel Alito seems enamored with making sweeping ideological policy rather than focusing on the specific case before the court, opining that the immunity case can be “one for the ages.”

Our son Rob sent this YouTube link to a poignant 30-second political ad reflecting the impact of recent ideologically-driven state legislation regarding reproduction.

Dartmouth College’s approach to the conflict between Hamas and Israel was the “Last Minute” segment on last night’s Sixty Minutes. Bill Whitaker concluded the segment with, “American education might benefit from a few more Dartmouths.”

From “College campus chaos continues amid anti-war protests,” CBS Sixty Minutes, April 28, 2024

Who are your mentors?

Our son Rob spends most of his available energy doing medical research. He linked me to the best article on any subject that I’ve read in a long time. A post from Everything Is An Emergency by blogger Bess Stillman, “Debugging the Doctor Brain” is good reading if you’ve been (or might be) in an Emergency Room. It’s relevant to any vocation or avocation. Here’s an excerpt:

Do emergency medicine for 80 hours a week for three to four years —the length of an ER residency—and a resident doctor will have spent around 10,000 hours on direct patient care. It’s during those encounters that doctors are (supposed to be) guided towards developing and deepening the fundamental mental models that run in their cognitive background while evaluating each new patient.

Dan Luu’s Why don’t schools teach debugging got Stillman “thinking about the way science and medical education universally teaches the fundamentals: badly.” Stillman wrote, “In medicine, we often mistake the speed of initial understanding with a students’ capacity for mastery.” I believe this is true in every significant human endeavor. Stillman’s post will connect with your life’s experience.

Stillman reminded me of my student pastor days. Years 1-3 were my last three undergraduate years. Years 4-6 were my three seminary years. Stillman helped me see my student pastor time as a “theological residency,” with older clergy colleagues and gracious laity complementing my faculty and fellow students. They were my mentors. Who are your mentors?

From Massachusetts General Research Institute

Among the urgent

Tyranny of the Urgent was a 1967 InterVarsity Press booklet by Charles Hummel. Among the urgent issues before us in 2024, the sad embrace of religious nationalism by evangelical Christianity helps me understand a variety of related issues. Diana Butler Bass helps me understand the insidious temptations of religious nationalism and its impact behind many of today’s headlines.

Bass is a long-time observer of the influence of right-wing politicians over evangelical Christianity. She has a strong presence on YouTube. She’s written eleven books. Her posts from The Cottage are available at Substack. A January 25, 2024 post replies to: “I don’t understand how Christians, especially evangelicals, can support Donald Trump. I don’t understand any of this.”

From her introduction to The Cottage:

… I am a Christian (even though that label is more than a bit awkward these days) and I write from that perspective, with a generous heart toward wisdom wherever it is found. The “creed” that guides me most closely aligns with these 1,000 year old words from the mystical poet Ibn Arabi:

There was a time I would reject those
who were not of my faith.
But now, my heart has grown capable
of taking on all forms.
It is a pasture for gazelles,
An abbey for monks.
A table for the Torah,
Kaaba for the pilgrim.
My religion is love.
Whichever the route love’s caravan shall take,
That shall be the path of my faith.

Or, in the simple words of Jesus: “Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself.”

Coffee with Diana

Technology helps me adapt an ancient faith rhythm–an early focus for the day, which I consider prayer, a consciousness that seeks to embrace all reality within the realm of self-transcending grace.

A cup of coffee accompanies Substack emails of the day, sent overnight from several trusted sources: Heather Cox Richardson, Robert Hubbell, and Joyce Vance. Then follows a daily meditation (also emailed overnight) from Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation.

Yesterday, a second cup of coffee was accompanied by a Diana Butler Bass newsletter (which comes twice weekly via Substack email). Her passion is the history of religion and she always moves me deeper into a realm of consciousness that for me is a realm of prayer.

Bass knows evangelical Christianity’s foray into religious nationalism. (More about her on Friday.) Yesterday, Bass covered an evangelical battle among Congressional Republicans.

From “The Great Divorce? Evangelical Style,” in The Cottage, a newsletter via Substack by Diana Butler Bass, April 23, 2024.

54 years

Earth Day began 54 years ago in 1970. Heather Cox Richardson captures its historical context in her “Letters from an American” post for today, which notes the bi-partisan beginning of the environmental movement, facilitated by President Richard M. Nixon:

In February 1970, President Nixon sent to Congress a special message “on environmental quality.” “[W]e…have too casually and too long abused our natural environment,” he wrote. “The time has come when we can wait no longer to repair the damage already done, and to establish new criteria to guide us in the future.”

Richardson closed her post with a quote from President Joe Biden, who encouraged “all Americans to reflect on the need to protect our precious planet; to heed the call to combat our climate and biodiversity crises while growing the economy; and to keep working for a healthier, safer, more equitable future for all.”

Happy Earth Day 2024.

From “10 Surprising Facts About Earth Day,” by Solcyré Burga and Simmons Shah, Time, April 21, 2024

Migrant

Jews, Christians and Muslims are spiritual descendants of Abraham. A biblical affirmation of faith in Deuteronomy 26:5-10 begins with a self-identification: “My ancestor was a wandering Aramean who went down into Egypt with a few people and lived there and became a great nation….”

The U.S., once proudly a nation of immigrants, inspired the French to honor us with the gift of a Statue of Liberty that graces New York Harbor, which inspired Emma Lazarus’ poem, “The New Colossus.”

The Atlantic published an article with winners from the 2024 World Press Photo Contest. Venezuelan photographer Alejandro Cegarra inspired me with his photograph, “The Two Walls.”

From “Winners of the 2024 World Press Photo Context,” by Alan Taylor, The Atlantic, April 18, 2024. (Extra credit if you can identify the railroad cars and their owner.)

Honeycomb

We try to camp a few days each month, with a 7-10 day trip in the Spring and a longer trip in the Fall. This week, we spent a few days at a campground in Honeycomb, Alabama, at the foot of Gunter Mountain on Lake Guntersville, a few miles from Grant.

A sign on US 431 points to Grant and the Kate Duncan Smith DAR School. We went to Grant (pop. 1,047) and drove around the school. It was formed in 1924 as a private school by the Daughters of the American Revolution, one of several envisioned by the DAR for remote sections of the former Confederacy.

The KDS DAR School is still owned by the DAR and is operated as a public school by the Marshall County Board of Education. We enjoyed a picnic lunch at a park, with barbecue and hand-dipped ice cream from Porky’s No. 2 on Main Street in Grant. I don’t know the whereabouts of Porky’s No. 1.

The KDS DAR School plans a centennial celebration for October 3-4.

From our campsite at the Honeycomb Campground (founded in 1964), which is another public/private partnership between Vista Recreation and the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Closure

The upcoming closure of Birmingham-Southern College awakens memories from my years as pastor in Jackson, Tennessee (2005-2010). While there and into 2011, I was a trustee of Lambuth University. When the university’s president told an emotional student assembly that the school would close, he asked me to offer a prayer. That was tough.

A year or so earlier, at one of many fund-raising meetings with friends of Lambuth, I was introduced by a student as an alumnus. I thanked him for the honor, but said, “I’m not a Lambuth alumnus, but I’ve learned a lot since I’ve been here.” Lambuth had operated on a shoestring for decades and the Great Recession put the school over the edge.

While in Jackson, I remembered with envy the relative strength of Birmingham-Southern. Upon my return to metro Birmingham in 2010, I discovered that BSC was not as strong as in the Neal Berte era (1976-2006). Institutions do not die suddenly and, usually, death is due to multiple causes. Today, it’s difficult to be a small liberal arts college.

Lambuth became the University of Memphis– Lambuth Campus, Jackson’s first four-year public university. Closure is painful for students, faculty, staff, alumni and friends. Church-related colleges are rooted in a tradition that embraces death and resurrection. This doesn’t remove the pain, but it provides a basis for hope to face the unknown with grace.

From “Nearly 170-year-old private college in Alabama says it will close at the end of May,” by the Associated Press, via NBC News, March 27, 2024

History

Professor Ron Robel (1934-2007) asked why I was a prospective History major. I said, “American history.” He replied, “Oh, how tragic!” Robel’s passion was Asian history. Later, I switched to Political Science, but if I had known someone like Heather Cox Richardson, I would have stayed the course.

As a white kid in Alabama, I was “protected” from much of American history. Ron DeSantis isn’t the first politician seeking to sanitize history. Richardson reveals that I have much to learn. Good historians can help us avoid a collective amnesia that is harmful, and can be fatal, to a society.

Richardson’s April 12, 2024 installment of “Letters from an American” describes the context of South Carolina’s April 12, 1861 attack on the US installation at Fort Sumter. Leaders of both South and North underestimated their opponents’ determination, which led to 620,000 deaths. One excerpt:

Southern white elites celebrated the idea of a new nation, one they dominated, convinced that the despised Yankees would never fight. “So far as civil war is concerned,” one Atlanta newspaper wrote in January 1861, “we have no fears of that in Atlanta.” White southerners boasted that “a lady’s thimble will hold all the blood that will be shed” in establishing a new nation.

From “A Bible Salesman: Trump Is Not the First Political Con Man to Compare Himself to Jesus Christ,” by Heather Cox Richardson, Milwaukee Independent, April 7, 2024.

Heather Hahn

The General Conference of the United Methodist Church will gather in Charlotte, North Carolina from April 23 through May 3. On April 10, UM News published an 11-minute video preview of General Conference by journalist Heather Hahn, a multi-media news reporter for UM News..

Hahn is a graduate of Austin College in Sherman, Texas and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (1998). From 2000-2009, Hahn worked for two newspapers in Louisiana and Arkansas, for one year as editor of the Arkansas United Methodist Newspaper, and since 2010 she has worked for United Methodist Communications in Nashville, Tennessee (the parent of UM News).

For 14 years, Hahn has provided exemplary coverage of the complex, controversial events leading to the upcoming General Conference. No one has a clearer understanding of the issues. No one has been as consistently fair and honest about those issues. Hahn’s 11-minute video and transcript are available here: “General Conference recap: Homosexuality debate.”