Bill's Faith Matters blog

Must we rely only on rare heroes to help desperate immigrants?

The anti-immigrant rhetoric we're hearing in this presidential election time is nothing new in American history. It is, however, mystifyingly paradoxical coming from citizens who make up a nation of immigrants (excepting, of course, for Indigenous residents who, just 100 years ago this year, finally were made legal citizens of the U.S.).

Daniel Greene (pictured here), who teaches history at Northwestern University and who is what's called a "Subject Matter Expert" at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., was in Kansas City last week to speak about all of this and more at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum in Independence. His appearance was sponsored by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education (on the board of which I serve).

Greene first focused on 1930s America, which was struggling through the Great Depression just as Adolf Hitler was seizing and abusing power in Germany.

It was a fraught time everywhere and when careers and lives hang in the balance, sometimes people of faith abandon what the great world religions have tried to teach them. In this case, the idea -- rooted in Judaism and re-emphasized in Christianity -- of protecting the weak, the homeless, the immigrant, the hungry, often got shelved. (Islam, by the way, teaches that all human beings are immigrants.)

The result of that abandonment of principle was a strong wave of anti-immigration sentiment just when Germany's and all of Europe's Jews were facing an existential threat from Hitler's Nazis.

Greene said that he often gets asked this question from people who don't have a good grasp of history: "Why didn't the Jews just leave?" Well, early in the period, some Jews did just that, finding at least temporary refuge in some western European countries, in what later would become the new state of Israel and in several North and South American countries, including the United States.

But, Greene said, "the question should not have been 'Why didn't the Jews leave Nazi Germany?'" Instead, "we want them to ask, 'Why did the United States make it so difficult for immigrants to enter?'"

One answer, he said, was that public opinion polling in the '30s made it clear that a large majority of Americans opposed allowing more immigrants to enter the U.S. And given the Depression and the accompanying high rate of unemployment, that opposition makes at least economic sense even if it violates religious teachings. Elected officials knew that if they adopted a strong pro-immigrant stance, they'd likely be voted out of office.

But the problem is that once you begin to see certain people as undesirable, that attitude can quickly escalate to raw racism, to hatred of "those people," to the kind of bizarre language of bitterness that, as a child, I'd occasionally hear from my maternal grandfather, himself an immigrant from Sweden. He simply had no room for people he called "the Slavs," including a family who lived across from my grandparents' home on East 12th Street in Streator, Ill. My mother was not allowed to play with the children of that family.

I had to ask my older sisters and my parents what that was all about, but I never got a full or satisfying answer, though they found Grandpa's anti-Slav views distasteful and made that clear to me.

So today we again find anti-immigrant rhetoric spewed about by some people seeking political office, including former President Donald Trump. I'm not going to repeat his pet-eating lies and other hateful nonsense here. But if you want an analysis of his thoughts about that, here's one source.

Greene, however, said he did not want to leave the impression that Americans in the 1930s and their government did nothing but evil things when it came to immigration or that somehow America was as bad or worse than the Nazis. He then told several stories of heroic Americans who went way out of their way to save a few Jewish people from Europe. They were thrilling, inspiring stories of heroic citizens who, like so many of their neighbors, could have done nothing -- or worse. (They reminded me of the people Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn and I wrote about in our 2009 book, They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust.)

The world is in a different place almost 100 years later. And yet immigration and the existence of refugees remain difficult matters to resolve in generative ways. Our elected officials for years and years have failed to create fair and equitable immigration policies, and if there is no major reshuffling of power in Washington in the next election, that is likely to continue.

But my question is why so many current American citizens -- many of them people of faith -- seem so willing to ignore or reverse what their religions historically have taught them about how to treat immigrants, the homeless, the stateless, the people who are fleeing for their lives.

I'll wait for your answers.

* * *

AFTER 20 YEARS, CHINA FINALLY FREES A PASTOR

If you needed more evidence of how horrifically the government of China treats people of faith, you need only to read this Associated Press story about an American pastor who was just finally released after 20 years in prison there for helping a church that was not authorized by Chinese officials. The Chinese communist government is among the world's worst offenders when it comes to suppressing religious liberty. Our government should be doing everything it can to call China on this and to make sure the world knows of China's continuing efforts to obliterate freedom.

* * *

P.S.: Speaking of the Holocaust, as I was above, in early 2021, I wrote here about a new book co-authored by D.Z. Stone and by a former German teacher who helped his students uncover a brutal Nazi-era story in their town. The news now is that Germany has awarded the teacher, Dieter Vaupel, the "Merit on Ribbon of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic" of Germany for his work in that regard. You can read about that award here. Vaupel was a true patriot willing to tell a bitter story about his own country, and Germany has done the right thing by honoring that work.

Work on 'reparations' needs more voices of faith

Say the word "reparations," and many white people will picture handing cash to Black people as a way to make up for slavery.

There's a bit of truth in that idea, but it's so woefully inadequate that it prevents a lot of people from exploring the idea of acknowledging the destructive, bleak decisions and policies in our nation's past, then seeing the still-continuing results of all that and finally deciding to do something that can create a better, more just future for everyone.

There are many reasons why faith communities should be helping to lead the campaign for reparations. The most important one is that some of what happened in our nation's history -- from cultural and physical genocide against Indigenous people to enslavement of Black people to the later discriminatory laws and practices that kept most of them in poverty (or prison or both) -- violated a core principle found in all the great world religions: The idea that each person is of inestimable value because each person bears the image of the divine.

But in many places where communities are considering options for reparations, the work is being led not so much by people of faith who are acting as representatives of their religions but by politically appointed folks who see their work as a secular civic duty. In some cases, including in Kansas City, they are doing good work toward finding some kind of solution that can garner enough political support to be implemented. And I wish them success. You can follow the work of the Kansas City Reparations Coalition here and the Mayor's Commission on Reparations here.

But in much of this work, the voices representing institutional religion seem either mostly silent or unable to get much of a public hearing and response for their ideas.

So I was glad to see the current issue of an independent magazine, The Presbyterian Outlook, which covers my denomination (and for which I used to write a monthly column), the Presbyterian Church (USA). It has devoted nearly all the space in this issue to answering the question posed on the cover: "Reparations: How do we right the wrongs of history?"

In one of the articles in that issue, the Rev. Jermaine Ross-Allam, director of the denomination's Center for the Repair of Historic Harms, writes this: "When the Christian descendants of those peoples who committed European colonialism's originating harms finally show up in public -- locally and nationally -- to acknowledge that reparations and reparatory justice are right, necessary and possible, the church can then mobilize other community members. . ."

And William Yoo, who teaches at Columbia Theological Seminary, writes this: "My hope is anchored in my conviction that we must see our church as it is: the work of saints and sinners who did both good and evil, all in the name of God. The sinful history of racial prejudice within our Presbyterian heritage is simultaneously a sobering reminder of human fallibility and a call to enact justice by repairing relations with Black Presbyterians today."

Each faith community has its own history that is part of a larger national story about slavery and its aftermath, a story with both heroes and villains. Which means each one must take the time to understand what happened, publicly acknowledge what went wrong and take actions that can begin to repair what was broken -- often broken on purpose.

Many white Americans, like me, were born into a system that dehumanized other people and, in that process, we benefited in various ways. My job, and the job of others in that category, is to acknowledge that history and to start the work needed to repair the world.

If you are part of a faith community, ask yourself whether that community is responding to this issue in generative ways? If not, maybe you can be part of the solution.

* * *

CAN WE CHARGE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WITH MORAL CRIMES?

Who is morally responsible for actions taken or induced by artificial intelligence? Ah, excellent question. And this RNS article wrestles with that increasingly important question. The authors of the piece write: "According to many modern philosophers, rational agents can be morally responsible for their actions, even if their actions were completely predetermined – whether by neuroscience or by code. But most agree that the moral agent must have certain capabilities that self-driving taxis almost certainly lack, such as the ability to shape its own values. AI systems fall in an uncomfortable middle ground between moral agents and nonmoral tools." It's one more reason that theologians and others who guide our religious lives should be paying more attention to artificial intelligence and both its advantages and its moral vulnerabilities.

The failure behind 9/11 continues to produce a broken world

If Karleton Douglas Beye Fyfe -- a name almost big enough to hold his 6-5 frame and winsome personality -- had died in, say, a car wreck or of cancer at age 31, it would have been a personal disaster for my extended family. (The first photo here shows his name at the 9/11 Memorial in New York City.)

But my nephew KDBF, as we called him, died 23 years ago today as a passenger on the first plane that the 9/11 terrorists slammed into the World Trade Center. So his death instantly became something much larger -- a symbol of radical violence rooted in religiously based vengeance for what the leaders of the perpetrators were convinced were American national sins that could be absolved in no other way.

The nearly 3,000 people who were murdered on 9/11 were, in effect, given the death penalty to pay for what the terrorists' leaders believed were our American government's and our culture's violations of their rigid theological standards.

It was far from the first time that misguided religion had led to bloodshed. Nor did such faith-based horrors end with 9/11, either.

But what they all had in common was the radical failure of some people of faith to understand and act on the key concept at the root of almost every generative religious tradition -- the inestimable value of every human being, a concept that springs from the conviction that each person bears the image of God.

That concept may have been articulated before Judaism enshrined it in its sacred scriptures -- words eventually adopted as part of the Christian Bible and studied by Muslims because Islam requires them to understand the Bible so they can better understand the stories in the Qur'an that are rooted in the Bible. But the book of Genesis is where most people find it today.

As Rabbi Irving Greenberg writes in his new book, The Triumph of Life, "Humans, like all life, are planted in the ground of the Divine. Just as plants rooted in alkaline soil evolve to become more alkaline and more absorptive of the nutrients in the ground, life itself absorbs the distinctive Godly energy and evolves to become more and more like its ground, the Divine. . .That is why the bible describes the human being, the most developed form of life thus far, as being in 'the image of God.' This means that human life, however finite and limited, nevertheless possesses capacities so striking and powerful that they bring to mind the operations of the unlimited capabilities of the Creator." (I recently reviewed Greenberg's book here.)

(The small photo here shows a stone marker where KDBF was buried in North Carolina.)

The failure to understand that foundational concept about the preciousness of each human being helps to explain why the 9/11 terrorists murdered Karleton and so many others. And why already this year some 100-plus people in Kansas City have been fatal victims of gun violence. It's why so many of our social systems treat people of different racial and economic backgrounds in prejudicious ways. And it's why the concept of white supremacy has had such staying power.

Had he lived, Karleton (pictured here a few months before his death), would be 54 now. His extended family, including me, continue to miss him like crazy -- his quick humor, his touching sensitivities, his loving, giving nature, his capacious brain.

But as I think about such things today, I am painfully aware that the primary reason he's not still alive today is that some people either were never taught or they never understood or they just willfully violated the idea that each human being is of infinite value because each one bears the image of the creator.

Our continuing failure to live as if that's true is why the world remains in desperate need of what Jewish people call tikkun olam, or a commitment to repair of the world. Let's be about that task today in memory not just of Karleton but of all people who have ever fallen victim to this failure.

(My book about 9/11 and the trauma it put my family and the world through -- and what we can do about that now -- can be found here.)

* * *

A NEW NATIONAL CATHOLIC REPORTER EDITOR

There's some good, Kansas City-related news about The National Catholic Reporter, the independent newspaper based here in KC. As this RNS story reports, James V. Grimaldi, a member of the Grimaldi family reared here in KC, has been named NCR's executive editor. Grimaldi comes to NCR from The Wall Street Journal and brings a wealth of experience and a history of great reporting (he's been part of reporting teams that have won three Pulitzer Prizes). His brother Mike and I worked together for a time at The Kansas City Star, and I've also known his brother Tom. Mike's wife, Carol, is a leader in my Presbyterian congregation. James Grimaldi will work from NCR's offices in Washington, D.C. The paper is in many ways the progressive voice of the Catholic Church in the U.S. and has been a leader in covering such stories as the abuse scandal involving priests and the bishops who covered for them. I used to write a regular column for NCR, though now I just do occasional book reviews for the publication.

* * *

P.S.: A little KC-area seminary news: Central Seminary (also known as Central Baptist Theological Seminary) will move this December from its current location at 6601 Monticello Road in Shawnee to a new, smaller location at 8620 W. 110th St. in Overland Park. Central is an American Baptist (not Southern) seminary. The Southern Baptist seminary in our area is Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, North. More details about the Central move can be found here.

Loving a forest can teach people of faith how to love congregations

Forests -- not unlike religious congregations -- are profoundly complicated beings. And both often need help to remain healthy.

Which is why I want to introduce you to a lovely and engaging new book, How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World, by Ethan Tapper. (The book's publication date is next Tuesday, but it can be ordered now.)

The author did not write this to help people in congregations think about how to keep their faith communities healthy. That idea might have been pretty far from his mind, I'm guessing.

But so much of what he writes -- quite elegantly, I might add -- corresponds to the questions of the health of congregations, so I'm going to draw from the insights of this Vermont forester and suggest how and where they might apply to faith communities.

Of course, you may read this book as simply a well-written look at one man's commitment to stopping the degradation of a forest that he now owns and to return it to health in a balanced, diverse way -- an individual commitment that may have broad and positive ecological applications. And that may inspire you to do what you can to promote ecological sense and justice. That would be a wonderful use of this book.

But because the interests of this blog tend toward matters of faith, I will draw from it some lessons that congregational leaders might think about applying to rescue declining faith communities.

After finally getting his college degree, Tapper, who earlier in life had lost sight in one eye in an accident, began work as a forester in Vermont. Part of his job was "helping private land-owners understand how to care for their forests."

He eventually bought some land in northwest Vermont and "began to truly understand how forest management could be restorative and regenerative, how it could enrich forests, how it could help forests rediscover their true capacity for life. I began to truly understand how the cutting of a tree could be an expression of compassion and humility, an act of healing, an act of love."

And so it can be with congregational management. Sometimes in religious communities what goes wrong and leads toward their diminishment are things that have been allowed to grow without pruning, to invade areas of ministry the way non-native plants invade a forest to its detriment. The leaders of houses of worship must find ways to grow effective worship services, healthy programs and various approaches to ministry by knowing what to change and when, what to fertilize and what to let die.

And if that's true for programming and worship approaches, it's also true of leadership. There is a time for long-time leaders to hand things over to younger members, even if the elders are worried that the "kids" are immature and won't know what they're doing. Change isn't always life-giving, for sure, but lack of change almost never is.

Here's one way Tapper puts that idea as it relates to forest management: "(F)orests are socioecological systems (and). . .our lives are forever stitched into the green flesh of the biosphere, that the separation of the human world from the wild world is an illusion. We cannot care for ecosystems without recognizing that we will always rely on them and we will always tax them, that human life will always be precious and worth nourishing and will always come at a cost."

What's important, he writes (and here what he says applies directly to both forests and congregations), is "a vision of relationship and responsibility, freedom and power, resilience and humility, legacy, beauty and change. . .In a world that is both human and wild, both wounded and vibrant, both suppressed and emergent, this is a vision both for how we manage forests and take care of ecosystems and how we manage ourselves, how we take care of each other."

Tapper draws an interesting distinction between forests and orchards that he began to notice once he "learned to reimagine the forest as something messy and imperfect, complex and undefinable, dynamic and expansive over space and time." Congregations that become well-ordered, no-surprise orchards can survive for a time, but in the end they will lack the dynamism and the resources to grow and thrive like a healthy forest because they fear the very changes that will save them.

When Tapper purchased his Vermont forest, what he found was "a monoculture of diseased beech saplings." It took courage and foresight for him to begin pruning (and, in some cases, eliminating) things and replanting or at least opening up space for nature to take its course. If that reminds you of some religious congregations, then the leadership of them needs to learn the hard lessons for life-giving pruning and restoration.

There is much more to this sweet and disturbing new book, but if congregations are to learn anything from its lessons that were meant for forests, one of those lessons is to make changes with humility, recognizing that time may prove those decisions to have been mistaken. But the bigger mistake will have been not to try.

* * *

WHY ARE THERE SO MANY EXORCISM FILMS NOW?

Filmmakers are producing more and more films about exorcism, and Joseph Holmes, the author of this Religion Unplugged piece about this trend, thinks it has to do with the shifting place of religion in American culture. As he writes, "People who can speak the language of both faith and film will be in high demand as the people most capable of speaking to one of the only audiences will have a unified meta narrative. And because that unified meta-narrative is specifically religious, the stories being told will likely be more overtly religious as well." The internet and social media have fractured the culture in countless ways, and finding an audience for any sort of entertainment, sport or idea is increasingly difficult. Maybe the culture needs an exorcism, too.

Jesus was more than a morals teacher, but he was that, too

The idea that Jesus of Nazareth was a great teacher of morals isn't new, but it has something of a rocky history. Which is to say that some Christians over the years have thought it was a wildly inadequate thing to say about Jesus.

For instance, the famous British theologian and author C.S. Lewis, in his classic book Mere Christianity, argues that to say he was simply a moral teacher misses the point:

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic -- on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg -- or else he would be the Devil Himself."

Well. Oh, my. And similar responses. Lewis had a certain way with words.

The other end of the who-was-Jesus spectrum, however, tends to affirm what Christianity calls the full divinity and full humanity of Christ and his work of salvation but then ignore his moral teachings.

David P. Gushee, who teaches Christian ethics at Mercer University, has written a new book (to be published Sept. 10), The Moral Teachings of Jesus, that looks at 40 different moral teachings of Jesus and tries to unpack the meaning of them for people today.

Gushee seems to be in essential harmony with Lewis' sentiment, though he almost certainly wouldn't have worded it the way Lewis did. And Gushee's argument is that Jesus, the incarnation of God, was, in fact, a wonderful teacher of morals, though often the teaching is so deep that it takes some unpacking to find the core message.

Indeed, Gushee writes, "Jesus says, give me a pure heart and deeds of mercy rather than ritual purity, if a choice must be made." It's a point that Jesus made over and over, as Gushee emphasizes in this new book.

In parables, sermons and conversations with his disciples, Jesus is almost always teaching how to live a moral life, and as Gushee correctly summarizes, "true greatness" for Jesus "takes the form of servanthood." No wonder Christianity is a difficult faith to live out consistently and with grace.

Gushee believes that the "Beatitudes," found in Matthew 5's account of the "Sermon on the Mount," constitute "the most significant body of moral teachings, not just of Jesus, but of any biblical figure." This counter-cultural list of "blessings" shows Jesus challenging the conventional wisdom of his day -- in a memorable way.

Starting with the Beatitudes, Gushee writes, Jesus is "offering a description of the kinds of people who are ready to participate with him in interrupting this timeless, fallen world with deliverance. He is offering a kingdom ethic." Yes, and it's an ethic that runs counter to much of today's focus on me-first, on wealth as a measure of importance, on limiting one's community to people like you.

Indeed, Gushee writes, "Jesus teaches very hard things, offering an aspirational ethic, pretty much impossible, an ideal to strive for but always beyond our reach." And: "Jesus teaches a scale of values that is upside down from standard human values." If only we could hear that message from his brief time on Earth.

In the chapter on loving our enemies, Gushee notes that "Jesus is calling us to action, not feelings. . .People who are determined to love their enemies are the freest and, in some ways, the most powerful people in the world."

If Christians are to "obey God's will out of a humble, meek, just, merciful, pure heart that is seeking God's kingdom," Gushee writes, it "would define a 'Christian' not simply as someone who believes certain doctrines but as somebody who lives a certain kind of life. That is not how Christianity is defined in many churches." You can almost hear a deep sigh from the author there.

As Gushee rightly concludes, "our moral work on Earth is not about judging who is good and who is evil, but attending to the battle between the two that goes on within ourselves."

Oh, and not rooting for evil.

* * *

FAITHFUL SISTERS CHALLENGE CORPORATE AMERICA

One reason I know a little about the women religious who are part of the Benedictine community at Mount St. Scholastica in Atchison, Kan., is that my wife is a Benedictine oblate and her group of oblates does periodic retreats there under the guidance of one of the sisters. So I was especially intrigued to read this Associated Press story about how the 80 nuns there are among corporate America’s most persistent shareholder activists.

They understand that their religious beliefs require some kind of response to help fix this wounded world, and they have chosen to make sure America's corporations (well, some of them, anyway) are considering matters of economic justice as they also make money for their shareholders. As the AP reports, the sisters "have taken on the likes of Google, Target and Citigroup — calling on major companies to do everything from AI oversight to measuring pesticides to respecting the rights of Indigenous people." To which I say, good for the sisters. See what you say after you read the story.

* * *

P.S.: Human rights violations continue in appalling ways in Turkey. Which is why I wrote this blog post and this one, both in 2019, and why I'm giving you several links here to more recent unjustified actions taken by the Turkish government. In early May, as this article notes, Turkish authorities "detained 14 minors, all reportedly aged 15, during raids in Istanbul for alleged links to the Gülen movement." A freedom-advocacy group called Advocates of Silenced Turkey has reacted by releasing this recent call to action. It also has released this report and this one as supplemental information. If you are in the Kansas City area, the organization that knows the most about all of this and that can tell you how you can help is the Dialogue Institute of Kansas City. And it wouldn't hurt to let you members of the House and Senate know you want them to be aware of all this and to help shape U.S. policy that will oppose this kind of abuse. 

* * *

ANOTHER P.S.: You can get an email with a link to my blog every time it publishes by registering here. It's free and easy.

Racial and religious varieties can strengthen our nation

Once upon a time, when I knew a lot more than I know today, I thought, sort of, that the world would be a lot more peaceful if everyone became, say, a Presbyterian like me. Or a Methodist. Or a Muslim. Or a Jew. Or, or, or. . .

My immaturity and foolishness were little short of monumental. My thinking at the time, as I recall, was that such unanimity would end a lot of fighting that is rooted in religious differences. But I abandoned that naivete when I realized, among other things, that some of the most bitter religious wars happen within, not between, religions.

As the decades since then have gone by, I've certainly recognized the growing religious diversity in American life. But I've come to recognize that the strength of that diversity isn't just that there are more voices at the table. Rather, the strength is that we can begin to learn what is most beautiful about traditions not our own and can begin to have a deeper appreciation for the common humanity of everyone at the table.

Which is why I see considerable value in the religious diversity we are seeing at the national political level as described in this Religion News Service article.

We have now a Christian presidential candidate with a Hindu maternal background who is married to a Jewish man. That candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, is running on a ticket with a Lutheran man who is governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz. In the other party, the vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, is, as the RNS story notes, "a Protestant turned atheist who married a Hindu woman before converting to Catholicism in 2019."

My friend Eboo Patel, founder and president of Interfaith America, is quoted in the RNS story this way: “It’s a positive diversity story for America, for people from different religious backgrounds to be married to each other and to say, my experience with the other person’s faith strengthens my own and makes me a better person.”

As a Protestant Christian, I am aware that in his second letter to the church at Corinth, the Apostle Paul wrote this: "Do not be mismatched with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and lawlessness have in common? Or what partnership is there between light and darkness? What agreement does Christ have with Beliar? Or what does a believer share with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols?"

This is generally referred to as Paul's warning to couples not to be "unequally yoked." It was written at a time when an internal battle was going on within Judaism over whether this new band of Christ followers could or should remain under the umbrella of Judaism. And Paul was writing specifically to address a series of conflicts and problems within the body of Christ followers in Corinth.

The question, then, is whether his advice to that small group of people 2,000 years ago should be universalized to all places and all peoples at all times. I'll let the professional theologians wrestle with that question, but it seems to me that Paul was trying to strengthen a newly forming religious body that needed to focus and define itself internally before it could be taken seriously by the rest of the world.

In our world, the faiths I've mentioned above -- Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism -- have found their sea legs and are prepared to stand on their own and to be strong enough to be in relationship with other faith traditions from which they can learn a thing or two even as they maintain their own integrity -- a divided integrity, to be sure, but with divisions that in many ways give strength to the core of the tradition.

I grew up in a family in which my three sisters and I had a second-generation Swedish-American mother and a third-generation German-American father. In our childhoods, we were six white American Presbyterians.

Today our extended family from that narrow, white Protestant base includes people of Japanese, African-American, Korean, Filipino and Chinese descent. And we're pretty much all over the map in terms of religious affiliation, including those with no religious affiliation at all.

I consider that change healthy and good because I've been enriched by it. In the same way, I think our country is being enriched by the variety of racial and religious expressions we're seeing among those active at the national political level.

I prefer not to go back to my earlier vision of a nation where everyone would be a Presbyterian. For one thing, if that were the case, pretty much all we'd ever do is hold committee meetings.

* * *

ANOTHER ECHO OF THE ABUSE SCANDAL IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

The despicable, long-running sexual abuse scandal involving priests and bishops in the Catholic Church will be brought into the light again on the upcoming visit of Pope Francis to East Timor. As the Associated Press story to which I've linked you reports, "(T)he church in East Timor today is stronger than ever, with most downplaying, doubting or dismissing the claims against (Bishop Carlos Ximenes) Belo and those against a popular American missionary who confessed to molesting young girls. Many instead focus on their roles saving lives during the country’s bloody struggle against Indonesia for independence." It's not yet clear whether the pope will meet with victims on his trip or how he will interact with this compromised bishop. But the whole saga is one more reminder for the church -- and for all other institutions and individuals who have tried to cover up the crimes of sexual abuse -- that eventually the truth will emerge. Given that, the only rational and moral policy is to tell the truth from the start and to seek justice for the victims. It's not clear why that seems to be such a hard lesson to learn.

What can the process of 'restorative justice' offer?

Do you know what "restorative justice" is?

The link I've given you will give you a definition from the Law School of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

I've been aware of the term for quite some time and thought I had a decent sense of what it is about, but my knowledge and understanding were increased recently when I watched this Zoom presentation on the subject offered by the Equal Justice U.S.A.'s Evangelical Network, which, among other things, works for the elimination of the abhorrent death penalty across the U.S.

What I found particularly interesting in the hour-long presentation was the idea that the principles of restorative justice -- recreating order and fairness as opposed to simply punishing wrongdoers -- also can be applied in arenas outside the criminal justice system. Even in families. And in countless ways, the principles behind healthy religious traditions are in harmony with the idea of restoring right and healthy relationships versus merely administering retribution for crimes or sins.

It's what the whole theology of salvation in Christianity, for instance, is all about.

In the Zoom presentation, EJUSA's Evangelical Network manager Sam Heath spoke with Lindsey Pointer, a restorative justice author, educator and researcher. Heath noted that the criminal justice system often is unable to repair relations and make sure that everyone involved in a crime -- from the criminal to victims to witnesses -- has a chance to be made whole again.

Pointer said that using restorative justice principles outside the legal system -- in traumatic family situations, for instance -- "can be a more challenging area of application " than using it for its original purpose. Despite that, she said, people increasingly are seeing the use of restorative justice techniques "as a way of life and bringing it into all areas -- bringing it into families, bringing it into workplaces, bringing it into spiritual communities."

The restorative justice approach to conflict resolution, Pointer suggested, requires participants to ask open-ended questions to try to understand how the original act of injustice happened and why.

The phrase that emerged in the Zoom conversation was that participants need to be "curious, not furious." Which, of course, requires those victimized to hold their fire at least for a bit while they seek to understand what led the person who committed the unjust act to imagine that it was necessary or justified.

In all such cases, Pointer emphasized, the use of restorative justice techniques is voluntary. If both sides (or more if there are more than two sides) don't agree to try this way to resolve and restore things, one side cannot do it alone.

Again, I was struck by the many ways that restorative justice parallels the best techniques promoted by healthy religion -- forgiveness where it is appropriate and healing and deep conversation about how the injustice happened in the first place.

Lindsey Pointer's website, to which I linked you above, offers additional resources about restorative justice that you may find helpful.

(And speaking of restorative justice, it can't happen to someone to whom the state has applied the death penalty. That's one more reason I oppose capital punishment. In that view, I differ from my boyhood friend from India, Markandey Katju, former justice on India's Supreme Court. He has written this column to tell his readers why I'm wrong. See if you think he makes sense.)

* * *

WHY DOES THE STORY OF JESUS' ON EARTH MATTER? 

The Jesuit magazine America has just reprinted this 1971 article about the historical Jesus of Nazareth and his relationship to current Christianity. The piece remains amazingly relevant as it explores the thorny question of how much of Jesus' life on Earth his current followers need to know to be able to follow him as savior and a member of the Holy Trinity. The author, an Australian Jesuit priest who died recently, wrote this in the piece: "First, Jesus must not be turned into a contemporary. He is rightly viewed within the historical framework of the first century. To describe Him as a revolutionary leader, a truly secular man or the first hippie may be emotionally satisfying, but for the most part these stereotypes are intellectually worthless." In fact, if Jesus is not first understood in his original Jewish context, he cannot be understood at all, I would say.

* * *

P.S.: If you missed my latest Flatland column -- about clergy who come from families full of clergy -- it is still available for free here.

An Olympic athlete who's also a pretty good theologian

I have never known quite what to do with athletes who publicly praise God for what they achieve in competition.

That's because it always has seemed presumptuous to me to imagine that God cares even a little whether the Tigers beat the Royals or the Blue Streaks smash the Lasers or Jill beats LaToya in a 100-meter dash.

And yet there must be -- and are -- successful athletes who are grateful to have a generative relationship with God but who don't praise God for helping them win or blame God if they lose.

Maybe I've found such an athlete in four-time Olympic gold medalist Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone (pictured here).

As this story recounts, she says her growing Christian faith helped her see that her self-worth wasn't based on whether she won when she was racing or hurdling on the track. She came to grasp the idea that her value as a human didn't depend on whether she won fancy metals.

She now understands that her value is, instead, rooted in knowing that she is loved by God.

Learning that, she says, "really just washed me clean of a lot of those thoughts and feelings and emotions that I had, and it’s my source now of how I overcome fear.”

As a multi-metal winner at this year's summer Olympic games, she naturally has gained more media attention and has not shied away from trying to explain what part faith plays in her life. That advantage often seems to turn athletes into misguided theologians who think they won because God preferred that result. Athletes who talk about their faith in God can lead people to imagine that they are crediting God for their victories.

I don't think that's what McLaughlin-Levrone is saying. And if I'm right about that, good for her.

The flip side of all this is about religious leaders using the language of athletics to encourage their followers. For instance, in I Corinthians 9:24, the Apostle Paul says to those receiving his letter, "Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it."

Not all such language is theologically silly. But it's easy to imagine that the vicissitudes of life are some kind of athletic challenge for which we just need better shoes or more aerobic training. The comparison of life to an athletic contest almost inevitably breaks down.

But sometimes athletes -- and achievers in any field -- come to understand that they aren't worthy human beings just because they won a gold medal or a Pulitzer Prize. Rather, their lives are precious because they are made in the image of God, who loves them without reserve.

* * *

MORE QUESTIONS ABOUT THE SHROUD OF TURIN

Yet another investigation into the mysterious Shroud of Turin, which some people think is the burial cloth of Jesus, has been completed. To the surprise of many, as this story reports, this time researchers suggest the cloth may really be about 2,000 years old and might actually be Christ's burial cloth. All of which raises the question of how much actual, verifiable history is required for the claims of Christianity to be true. Might it be possible for followers of Jesus today simply to adhere to his moral teachings and ignore the faith tradition's claims of history -- his birth, ministry, death, resurrection? Or is the incarnation incomprehensible without verification of historical events surrounding Jesus?

Oh, and this New York Post story describes how artificial intelligence has been used to show us the face of the man on the Shroud of Turin. To me, the image looks a little too much like a white man who has had a hard day wrestling cattle, but I'll check that out if and when I get to see Jesus.

* * *

P.S.: You can get an email with a link to my blog every time it publishes by registering here. It's free and easy.

* * *

ANOTHER P.S.: Here's a link to a Zoom gathering (about an hour long) in which Mindy Corporon and I participated a few days ago. The subject was religion-based violence and how to respond to it. The gathering was sponsored by the Interfaith Center of Miami University in Ohio. Mindy founded the SevenDays organization about 10 years ago after a neo-Nazi murdered her father, son and another person at Jewish facilities in the K.C. area. I serve on the SevenDays board.

A path toward renewal in a time of religious decline

Several years ago, when John Philip Newell (pictured below) and I were teaching different classes at the same time at Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico, we had a conversation that led me to rethink the idea of "original sin."

Philip, former warden of Iona Abbey in Scotland and a leading expert in Celtic spirituality, has a way of making me and others rethink things.

His new book does that over and over again. It's called The Great Search: Turning to Earth and Soul in the Quest for Healing and Home, and it was published just yesterday by HarperOne.

In many ways, the book is Philip's response to the decline of participation in institutional religion that has been evident first in Western Europe and now in North America. In short, one of his primary explanations of this movement away from traditional faith is that people are not very interested nowadays in learning what religion has to teach about God. Rather, they're much more interested in some kind of personal experience of and with God in their lives. So they're searching.

"We are," he writes, "seeking healing as an Earth community, and we are longing for a new sense of home spiritually. . .(W)e need new vision if we are to find healing in our relationship with Earth and one another."

To help readers with this search, Philip introduces them to the lives and writings of nine people who can be guides, including Martin Buber, Carl Jung, Julian of Norwich, Jalaluddin (sometimes Jalal al-Din) Rumi and Rabindranath Tagore.

This, Philip writes, is a wonderful time to be on such a search because we "are living in a moment of grace. It is the realization of the interrelatedness of all things. It is a consciousness rising to the fore in nearly every great discipline of thought and study, inviting us to know that what we do to a part we do to the whole, and that the well-being of each is fulfilled only in the well-being of the whole." (That view seems similar to what's called Ubuntu theology, which is often associated with Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa.)

The chapter on Austrian-Israeli philosopher and theologian Martin Buber is especially helpful as Philip unpacks what Buber meant by an "I-Thou" versus and "I-It" relationship. He writes:

"'Everything is waiting to be hallowed,' says Buber. Everything and everyone is yearning to be truly seen and reverenced." That idea contains within it one of the cores of healthy religion -- the concept that each human being bears the image of God and is precious in God's sight. First, of course, we have to recognize that about ourselves before we can usefully acknowledge it about others and prevent ourselves from dehumanizing anyone.

To achieve that, Philip writes, will require us "to commit ourselves to turning again to the sacred essence of one another and Earth. It is this that will enable a true restoration. . ."

In the chapter on psychologist Carl Jung, Philip notes that Jung questioned whether the world's religious traditions "have penetrated deeply enough beneath the surface. Many of us today share Jung's doubt. Is our desire for light being sufficiently nurtured by religions as we know it? If not, how do we more fully access the yearnings of the Spirit within us? And how can our religious traditions more deeply serve these yearnings?"

Philip's warning to institutional religion is clear and sharp: "If religion fails to enable a direct experience of the divine, depending instead solely on the testimony of great teachers and prophets of the past, it will collapse. If it is not pulsating with the warm red blood of experience and a fresh awareness of the living presence of the Spirit within us and among us, it serves no useful purpose for the well-being of humanity and Earth today."

And in his chapter on Rumi, he adds this: "Let go of everything that is not love. This will be the rebirth of true religion."

My hope is that all people of faith (or of little or no faith) will learn from this book that each of us can find a road that leads to a lively, generative spirituality that can help heal our wounded world.

 * * *

A GRASSROOTS EFFORT TO UNPLUG CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM

This RNS opinion piece describes how a mostly apolitical couple in Texas began to put two-and-two together to figure out a source of much of the political and social division they were finding. What they found was Christian Nationalism.

"Understanding this worldview," the article says, "helped the (couple) connect dots between the fights they saw fracturing their small Texas community and, increasingly, the entire country. They created a website, called 'See It. Name It. Fight It.' to educate others about Christian nationalism, how to identify its influence in their communities and how to fight back against it. Today, they have more than 20,000 followers on X."

I find that encouraging because recently I've given a couple of talks to different church groups about this subject and have used a book called Baptizing America, which I wrote about here, to acknowledge the role that Mainline Protestant denominations, like mine, have had in creating and maintaining Christian Nationalism, which I describe as being rooted in the unbiblical idea that God has blessed the U.S. in a unique way -- an idea that amounts to idolatry.

* * *

P.S.: You can get an email with a link to my blog every time it publishes by registering here. It's free and easy.

* * *

ANOTHER P.S.: My friend from boyhood, Markandey Katju, a former justice on India's Supreme Court, has written this article about anti-slavery activist John Brown and, well, me. So if you need an airy diversion today, now you have one.

The choice of hate over love repeatedly scars human history

At least two things about the human species continue to surprise me. First, the capacity to love unreservedly. Second, the capacity to destroy people and things with vicious acts of hatred.

As for love, I'm reading (and soon will review here on the blog) my friend John Philip Newell's about-to-be-released new book, The Great Search: Turning to Earth and Soul in the Quest for Healing and Home.

The pages are full of examples of great teachers who have shown us how to love and why it's so central to being the people we were created to be.

At the same time, I've just read this article from The Conversation about the 10th anniversary of the start of the Islamic State (ISIS, or simply IS) group's genocide in Iraq. It's an account of the destruction that hate can rain down upon its targets.

And I am left to wonder again why hate so often seems to trump love.

Part of it, of course, has to do with false certitude when it comes to religious beliefs. The list of wars, crimes and other destructive acts that are rooted in malformed religion is depressingly long. And the ISIS-led genocide is included in that list of sorrows.

As The Conversation article notes, "thousands of people from Iraq’s marginalized communities, including Yazidis, Christians and Shiite Muslims, were killed in Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, and the surrounding areas" starting in 2014.

As the author of the article, Alda Benjamen, who teaches history at the University of Dayton and who was born in Iraq, writes, "Yazidis and Christians continue to suffer marginalization, the regions they inhabit remain unstable, and their heritage is subject to ongoing destruction. As a scholar of Iraq, I have a particular concern about the loss of intangible heritage such as prayers, songs and historic narratives -- which I am now working to preserve."

Benjamen also concludes that the "aim of IS, as my colleagues and I found, was to erase not only these communities themselves but also the forms of intercommunal coexistence that had characterized northern Iraq historically. Many of the religious sites IS targeted were revered by multiple religions."

The ongoing results of such acts of hatred scar human history over and over. And movements to repair some of what and who has been damaged often get dismissed as unnecessary or too little and too late. But humanity cannot recover from its brutal history without a recognition of what humans did and to whom. Without that, there's no path toward healing and reconciliation and, well, love.

My hope is that the work Benjamen and others are doing will begin to bring healing and a better future to Iraq. But similar reclamation work elsewhere will always be necessary until love replaces the hatred that led to such destruction. And that change may have to happen one person at a time. Sigh.

* * *

A CAMPAIGN OF DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS

Religion scholar and analyst Mark Silk, in this essay, describes the two approaches to politics that are rooted in the religious views that guide Donald Trump and Kamala Harris -- one that looks back to an imagined American past and one that looks forward to an imagined American future. He notes that Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan was borrowed from the 1980 slogan of the Ronald Reagan-George Bush ticket and is "simply a continuation of this restorationist ideology." Harris' new slogan, "We're not going back" is a rejection of that. Makes me wonder whether a candidate who advocated just staying where we are as a nation would have any chance of winning. Maybe not.

* * *

P.S.: You can get an email with a link to my blog every time it publishes by registering here. It's free and easy.