Bill's Faith Matters blog

Time for a brief humor break on the blog today

In the early days of this blog I occasionally would devote a post to what I thought were some decent examples of faith-based humor.

For no reason I can explain, I haven't done that in several years. Until today.

The jokes I'm offering here are not original. If they were, they'd be funnier. Instead, I wandered around the internet and found them hanging out in some disreputable spots, waiting for someone like me to come along, snicker a little and then give them a new home. You're welcome, little jokes.

And, yes, there is a place -- indeed, an honored place -- for humor in religion. In fact, some years ago a guy named Elton Trueblood wrote a whole book called The Humor of Christ. Now, it's true that not much seems funny if read in the poetic King James Version of the Bible, first published in 1611. But that shouldn't make it impossible to see the humor, Trueblood argues.

At any rate, here are a few of the jokes I found lollygagging about the internet. Enjoy. Or not.

A priest, a minister, and a rabbit walk into a blood bank.

The rabbit says, I think I might be a type o.

(Actually, the blood type of every journalist is typo.)

Jesus was in the desert for 40 days and 40 nights. It was supposed to be 20 but he was a carpenter.

The next joke once was voted (in England, I think) the funniest religious joke ever told. See what you think:

Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody loves me." I said, "God loves you. Do you believe in God?"

He said, "Yes." I said, "Are you a Christian or a Jew?" He said, "A Christian." I said, "Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me, too! What franchise?" He said, "Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?" He said, "Northern Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?"

He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region." I said, "Me, too!"

Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912." I said, "Die, heretic!" And I pushed him over.

And, finally (you're welcome) this:

There were two brothers who were the worst criminals in town. One of them died. The surviving brother went to the local priest and said, “I’ll donate $10 million to the church if you give the eulogy, but you have to say that he was a saint. You have to actually use those words.”

The priest thought a minute and said, “OK, I’ll do it.” The brother was shocked that he agreed so fast, but he kept his word.

At the funeral the priest gets up and says, “This man was thief, a rapist, a liar and a crook. There wasn’t one good thing about him!” Then he stares at the brother in the audience and continues, “but compared to his brother, HE WAS A SAINT!”

OK, enough.

* * *

AN ANGLICAN ARGUMENT FOR BRIEF SERMONS

Maybe 30 or so years ago, my church invited an Episcopal priest and teacher named Randall Balmer to be a speaker at one of our events, and I was impressed with his brains and heart. Today, he's a religion professor at Dartmouth College. I happened to run across this article he wrote recently for Good Faith Media, and I wish to argue with him a little about his idea that sermons should not be longer than 10 minutes.

You can read his whole article via the link above, but here, briefly, is his argument: "Culturally, in this internet age of social media, attention spans are short. For better or worse, most congregants can no longer abide long, elaborately argued sermons. . . It’s simply a recognition that amid the flurry of distractions in modern life, preachers must make accommodations. Those who refuse to do so might claim some sort of moral high ground, but that real estate, like it or not, is contracting."

Years ago, I heard someone say this about sermon length: "Sermonettes make Christianettes." That idea stuck with me and I think it has merit. In my Presbyterian tradition, most sermons run from 15 to 20 or more minutes. A well-constructed sermon of that length never seems as long as the clock says it is because it is engaging and causes listeners to reflect on what God, through the preacher, is trying to tell us that day about life. Eight-to-10-minute sermons might work once in a while, but I think they short-change the congregation and underestimate people's capacity for serious reflection.

Balmer's quick-hit idea reminds me of the title of a seminar I once heard about but didn't attend. It was called "What -- If Anything -- Is Anglican Preaching?" And it was presented by and for Episcopalians who were having a bit of fun with the habit of brief sermons.

It's true that the gospel needs to be proclaimed in both a left- and right-brained way because people learn in different ways. The sermon is a left-brained way while the Eucharist, or Holy Communion, is a right-brained way. Episcopalians get both at each service. We Presbyterians generally offer Communion only once a month. That's our failure, one I've never convinced anyone to fix. But surely the answer isn't a sermonette. Your move, Randall.

Understanding grief over loss of any life, including a pet's

When I was perhaps eight or 10 years old, our old family dog -- a Siberian husky named Sitka -- died after a brief illness that I remember as cancer.

What I recall most distinctly was that all six of us -- my three sisters and I plus our parents -- sat around the old kitchen table and cried together. Even my father. It was, to my recollection, the first time I had ever seen him cry. I'm guessing that he cried when his mother, my Grandpa Tammeus, died, also of cancer -- far too young -- a few years before Sitka left us. But I have no memory of him doing so.

This kind of grief over the death of a pet is quite common, but often it's passed over quickly by people who see their friends experiencing it and who tell those friends to get over it. It was, after all, just a dog. Or just a cat.

Barbara Allen, author of Broken Heart, Shared Heart, Healing Heart: Navigating the Loss of Your Pet, wants to tell people who are dismissive of grief over the death of an animal to understand more fully how real and painful such grief can be.

This small book (176 pages) makes that case with lots of stories and advice from a woman who serves as a chaplain at an animal hospital. Do animals need a chaplain? Not so much. The chaplain is there for the owners of the pets, owners who often feel lost and deep in grief.

And if you, like me, had given little thought to the need for such chaplains, we're not alone. The chaplaincy work with which I'm most familiar has to do with providing comfort and guidance for people in various situations unrelated to the loss of pets. I've written about such chaplaincy here and here and here.

Allen makes a persuasive case for taking grief over a pet's death seriously: "We grieve because we love," she writes (more than once).

And in the process, she offers a helpful review (and update) of the work on grief done in the 1970s by researcher Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who became well known for describing, initially, five stages of grief, which later got updated to seven. Many people came to assume that the stages Kübler-Ross described happened sequentially.

But, as Allen writes, "people are not expected to experience all the stages while grieving, or even in a particular order."

Allen's book also tells intriguing stories of pets owned, loved or written about by well-known people such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Billy Graham and others.

In the end, Allen writes to assure people they aren't out of their minds to feel grief over the death of the animals they've loved and cared for. And that the love and care they offered deepened the meaning and richness of their own lives.

I think even my father, at Sitka's death, understood that.

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A TEN COMMANDMENTS CHALLENGE

It should come as no surprise to anyone that some folks have filed a lawsuit against Louisiana’s new law mandating the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools. There's a clear case to be made that the law is an unconstitutional way to allow the government to favor one religion over another. That doesn't mean the Ten Commandments are useless today. Indeed, just imagine what a wonderful and peaceful world we'd live in if every human being kept the rules laid out in the Decalogue. But they are, in the original, rules God gave to the Jewish people. Later, Christianity made them part of its scriptural canon. Public school students of other faith traditions can learn about the Ten Commandments in classes that teach how religion has helped to shape the U.S. and its policies and practices. But putting them on school walls is a way of saying to the students that these rules should hold sway over their lives, which means they are being used to teach a particular type of religion. So let the courts consider all this and, I hope, do the correct and constitutional thing.

Let's look unto the hills, open our eyes and wonder

Estes Park, Colo. -- I write columns for an online magazine called Flatland. It's not based here in the Rocky Mountains for obvious reasons. Nothing about the land is flat here.

But it turns out that living on flat land can blind us to the astonishing diversity of the land and of the life that grows in (and out of) that land. Unless we are careful to pay attention, to be mindful, we can wind up not seeing the surprising varieties of plant and animal life that surround us. We seem to need trips to differently shaped lands to restore our sense of wonder.

Here in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, it's impossible not to see the jagged and verdant land that sustains humanity and the rest of life, from the common squirrels to the shockingly long list of wildflowers that call this home -- from the prickly pear to the columbine, the spotted coralroot to the fairyslipper, the elephantella to the parry primrose. And on and on and on.

Well, of course, you probably can live in the mountains long enough that your senses become numb and you no longer see all of this, just as we plains people fail to notice the richness of life on the flatland -- the butterfly milkweed and the narrowleaf coneflower, purple poppy mallow and the soapweed. And, as I've said, on and on and on.

As author Annie Dillard has written, the Creator simply seems to "love pizzaz."

One way we could learn much more about both the marvelous variety of life and of our obligation not just to notice it but to help protect it so that human activity doesn't kill it off would be to pay more attention to the way Indigenous residents of this land have learned to understand it and care for it. The book to read is Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

The Indigenous approach to the land differs in essence from the approach that the first white European invaders brought to this land. That difference is this: We white people think we own the land. Indigenous people believe that they belong to the land.

I have been to the mountains many times -- the Rockies here, the Appalachians, the Catskills and the Himalayas, where, for a time, I once lived in my boyhood. In fact, from a hill above Woodstock School, which I once attended in Landour-Mussoorie, I was told that what I was seeing on the far horizon were the snows of Tibet. (It was a reunion of classmates from that school that brought me here to the Rockies recently.)

So I'm not unused to being in the mountains. But in between my time in the hills, I forget about their ability to speak of eternal things. Perhaps I should reread my friend Kathleen Norris's wonderful book Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, to help me remember how the earth on which I walk is holy -- every bit of it. God told Moses once to take off his sandals because the ground on which he was standing is holy. Well, it's all holy ground. And, in the words of the title of a book by Kelly Nathaniel Hays, every bush is burning.

Here's an idea for the rest of the summer -- let's get off our screens now and then and be mindful of the gifts all around us that come from the generative land, which always and everywhere needs our help.

(I took the top photo and my artist wife Marcia took the photo at left, both at the YMCA of the Rockies in Estes Park, Colo.)

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AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE 10 COMMANDMENTS ON SCHOOL WALLS?

A wise rabbi argues here against posting copies of the Ten Commandments in Louisiana public schools, as required by a newly passed law there. Then, to have a bit of fun with the silly posting idea, he proposes instead posting the "Holiness Code" from Leviticus 19, which includes such rules as: "Leave the corners of your field for the poor. That is the commandment to engage in charitable acts that ameliorate poverty." That posting act, too, might be as unconstitutional as the posting of the Ten Commandments will turn out to be, but at least it might help create a better, more caring society.

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THE BOOK CORNER

Now and then I get asked to write an endorsement, or blurb, for someone's book. For instance, Catholic author Frances Etheredge recently requested one for his new book, The Word in Your Heart: Mary, Youth and Mental Health. Here's what I wrote:

Teenagers and other young adults today have become what author and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls — in the title of his latest book — “The Anxious Generation.” Because of the extraordinary, disorienting and destructive pressures of social media and what Haidt calls the “great rewiring of childhood,” mental illness among such young people is growing in epidemic proportions. This new book by Francis Etheredge seeks solutions to this catastrophe by rooting itself in both Catholic tradition and the author’s personal experience of mental distress as an adolescent. Thus, it is another helpful tool for trying to solve a disaster that is robbing young people of their present and, at times, even their future. 

Juneteenth is helping to teach American history's realities

Over the last several years -- especially since Juneteenth became a national holiday -- I've been gratified to find more white friends waking up to what a symbolically important date this is, not just in Black history but in broader American history.

As the National Museum of African American History & Culture site to which I linked you above explains (for those of you who still may not understand the holiday), "Even though the Emancipation Proclamation was made effective in 1863, it could not be implemented in places still under Confederate control. As a result, in the westernmost Confederate state of Texas, enslaved people would not be free until much later. Freedom finally came on June 19, 1865, when some 2,000 Union troops arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas. The army announced that the more than 250,000 enslaved black people in the state, were free by executive decree."

And it adds this: "Juneteenth marks our country’s second independence day. Although it has long been celebrated in the African American community, this monumental event remains largely unknown to most Americans."

And isn't it telling that it took 100 years for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 finally to give Black Americans a legal foundation for being voters?A hundred years. So they may have been freed in 1865 but they weren't in any serious sense considered legally empowered citizens for another hundred years, by which time I was halfway through college.

I've been thinking about the matter of racial history in more personal terms in the last few months as Juneteenth has approached.

Probably that's because, in addition to other speaking engagements, I've begun doing a series of presentations at area Presbyterian congregations about threats to our democracy, and my co-presenter is Yvette Walker, editorial page editor of The Kansas City Star, where I spent most of my journalistic career.

Yvette, a Black woman, and I, a white man, seem to be very much in agreement about what's happening politically in our country and we even share some ideas about how people might respond to it in useful ways. But I'm struck by the experiences she's had primarily because she's Black -- experiences I've not had.

In matters of race relations, there are at least two levels to consider -- the personal and the systemic -- and they turn out to be related. Which is to say that Yvette's experiences of voting, of home ownership, of employment are personal, but they all happen within economic and cultural systems that find their roots in the long years of slavery in the U.S. and the post-slavery years when the defeated South did everything it could to keep Black people in what many Southerners believed was their divinely appointed place of subservience.

So the Black experience in this country is inevitably affected in fundamental ways by the systems of discrimination (housing, education, health care, on and on) that were created in the post-slavery years. In short, they affect the Yvettes of this country in ways that they haven't affected white guys like me. All of which is why, this Juneteenth, there finally is at least semi-serious talk about repairing the damage that slavery, Jim Crow and other systemic outrages have created.

One question, as I wrote about here, will be whether it's possible to educate white people enough about the injustices that reparations are meant to reverse so that they will provide political support for recommendations that finally can create a good-faith effort to repair our broken history.

I don't know the answer to that question, but because Juneteenth is entering our country's consciousness more fully, I'm a little more hopeful that some day -- maybe not in my lifetime -- people of all races and cultures and religions in the U.S. can live together in something like harmony.

(P.S.: From half a world away, my friend from India, Markandey Katju, has an interesting take on racial matters in the U.S. You can read his thoughts here.)

* * *

ANOTHER STAIN ON RELIGIOUS LEADERSHIP

One more pastor (is there no end to this list?) has confessed to sexually assaulting a girl. Why does being ordained to ministry seem to free some men from moral and ethical obligations -- the very kind of moral guidelines the religion of those pastors teaches? Call it sin. Or call it the degraded human condition. Whatever you call it, such behavior makes it clear why an increasing number of people shy away from religion because of the hypocrisy of some of the people who lead it.

What A.I. robotic preaching might really sound like

Among the various publications and organizations for which I write is a service that provides model sermons for Christian pastors.

The idea of "Proclaim Sermons" is not to let preachers escape their weekly duties by simply reciting a Proclaim sermon as if they had written it themselves. Rather it's to give them another resource related to the weekly lectionary selection of Bible verses on which sermons often are based. If they need an example of how someone might approach this week's biblical texts they can find a Proclaim sermon based on those texts and then decide if that might be a path forward for them.

Preaching, after all, is serious business. Which is to say that the preacher's job is to provide the congregation with what the church considers to be the word of God as found in the biblical text and then to make it clear to listeners what the preacher thinks God is really saying to them. This work is not for the faint of heart.

At any rate, I know from experience what it takes to write and deliver a sermon based on biblical texts and I can tell you it's a very human and humbling enterprise. Which is why I am profoundly skeptical of the idea of using Artificial Intelligence to produce such sermons. The author of the article notes this: "Our tendency to conflate quick responses with correct responses when talking to humans also transfers onto the chatbot, which we can’t help but personify. A fast and confident-sounding chatbot may mimic the authoritative voice of a reference work, and it may draw from and contribute to our habits of laziness when seeking out truth and our impatience when engaging each other."

Later in the article is this: "Some clerics have voiced concerns about A.I. writ large, ranging from the pastoral – how should a priest help a parishioner following an automation layoff? – to the theological – can an LM be possessed by a demon?" (LM in that sentence means "language model," but I'll leave it to you to take it from there.)

Out of curiosity, I asked ChatGPT to write a sermon based on the journey of the Magi (often called the three Wise Men) to see the Christ child in Bethlehem. The story is told in Matthew 2:1-12, and is the subject of the latest sermon I just turned in to Proclaim Sermons (we write way ahead). I first turned in my sermon and only then asked ChatGPT for its version.

My sermon ran, according to Proclaim guidelines for its writers, about 1,600 words. The ChatGPT sermon clocked in at a tidy 550 words, including its opening two words, "Dear Beloved" and also counting the next five scintillating words: "Today, we gather to reflect. . ." By which time many of the people in the pews of my congregation would be drifting toward doing what author Kurt Vonnegut says people come to church to do: Daydream about God.

By comparison, I will give you no comparison of that A.I. sermon to what I wrote for my Matthew 2:1-12 sermon because mine is proprietary. It belongs to Proclaim Sermons now. But I sure as hell didn't start out the way the ChatGPT sermon began.

The rest of the ChatGPT sermon contained nothing outrageous or objectionable. But it was almost entirely devoid of life, of surprises, of fresh language. It was the theological equivalent of an average sixth-grader's theme on the subject of why rules of discipline in a school are important. Snore.

What I have concluded is that I should -- at least so far in the development of A.I. -- always and everywhere resist the idea that serious Christian sermons (or sermons in any faith tradition) should come from ChatGPT or any A.I. source. Perhaps some day, long into the future, the technology may have developed enough that A.I. could produce at least a model for a sermon that has an original idea.

As for how scientists can plan for that day, I turn to this reliable adage: Man plans, God laughs.

(The image here today came from here.)

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ESTES PARK, Colo. -- There won't be the usual second item here today because I'm in Colorado for a brief reunion of people with whom I went to school in India when I was a boy. Yes, I grew up in Woodstock, Ill., and, for a time, attended Woodstock School in India, but the same-name deal was simply a coincidence. Indeed, I have several other Woodstocks in my life.

A theologian's death offers a chance to think theologically

The recent death at age 98 of German Reformed theologian Jürgen Moltmann (pictured here) offers all of us -- no matter our faith commitment -- to think anew about why the work of theologians is vital, even if sometimes their thinking gets expressed in words that seem next-to-impossible to understand.

Theology, of course, means the study of God. And there is no subject more important to help us understand what in the world we're doing here and why we're doing it.

Moltmann, whom I once heard speak at a dinner at Nazarene Theological Seminary in Kansas City, brought with him a personal story of redemption that seemed to shape the work he did to find ways to understand and express not optimism, which can be cheap and phony, but hope, which in serious theology can help explain our purpose and give us the fuel to do the human work of co-creation and love.

As the story of Moltmann's death to which I've linked you notes, "his experiences during the Second World War deeply scarred him, and his three years as a post-war prisoner of war led him first to despair and eventually to conversion, finding God in human suffering."

Moltmann was a prisoner of war in England, Scotland and Belgium and was frankly surprised by the gentle, loving treatment he received as a fellow human being who, despite being an enemy combatant, was cared for as a beloved child who was precious to God. It transformed his life and made him want to devote his life to the study of this God of unending love.

It should have been no surprise that Moltmann found his primary love to be the idea of hope, rooted in the salvific work of God through Christ Jesus. To Moltmann, and to all serious Christian theologians, hope was and is different from mere optimism, which often collapses in the face of human evil. Hope, in Moltmann's view, was and is eternal and rooted in the astonishing and unpredictable resurrection of Christ and what that meant for humanity.

As the Rev. Richard A. Ray wrote years ago in a review of a Moltmann book called The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology, "Moltmann's program flat out stimulates strong preaching. . .And it reminds us, with this concluding phrase concerning the 'universal Easter laughter' in the cosmos, that theology must have at its heart a confession that is less like a blueprint and more like a haunting melody of transcendent song."

Years ago, when I found my way back to church after leaving as a young man convinced that church members were mostly just hypocrites (I discovered I was one of them and needed help), I began to pay more attention to the eternal questions with which theologians wrestled.

Eventually, I felt called to help others recognize the importance of those questions and to take seriously the call to explore possible answers for our own lives. So I began to teach a class in various locations that I called "Theology Even the Clergy Can Understand." Over time, I'm betting that I got much more out of that effort than did those who participated in the classes.

It turns out that it's easy to set aside the core and demanding theological questions and, instead, focus on simply trying to lead what people call "a good life." Isn't that, after all, what life is all about?

But, in the end, we seriously shortchange ourselves when we do that. The risk is that we will live an unexamined life, never taking divine matters seriously, never challenging God. As French Reformed theologian Jacques Ellul has said, we are obligated to insist that God speak when we encounter God's silence in the face of human suffering.

"Hope," Ellul wrote in Hope in Time of Abandonment, "comes alive only in the dreary silence of God, in our loneliness before a closed heaven, in our abandonment. God is silent, so it's man who is going to speak. But he is not going to speak in God's place, nor in order to decorate the silence, nor in taking his own word for a Word from God. Man is going to express his hope that God's silence is neither basic nor final, nor a cancellation of what he had laid hold of as a Word from God."

In the end, Moltmann's death can -- and, I think, should -- reinvigorate us to re-explore the eternal questions, to find theologians who can speak to us, make sense for us of the puzzlements of life. At their best, theologians do extraordinarily important work. We'd do well, no matter our personal religious history or current commitments to faith, to shut off our twinkling screens and pay attention to their insights.

Look. Life can be really hard. Trying to get through it successfully without understanding some basic theology seems to me like trying to do calculus without a grasp of basic arithmetic.

(Here, by the way, is a lovely tribute to Moltmann from someone who teaches theology.)

So let me close with these words (written in the masculine style of the time) from Moltmann, found in his book The Source of Life:

"(T)he Christian vision of hope says: 'Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people.' What in history is particular to Israel will become universal in God's future: All peoples and the whole of humanity will be freed and sanctified, because the holy God will dwell with them, letting them share in his eternity and his livingness, as his fellow householders."

* * *

ANOTHER CLERGY DEATH TO MOURN

This will be a two-death blog post. I also need to tell you about the death, at age 95, of the great American civil rights leader, the Rev. James Lawson, whose list of accomplishments and heartaches was long, as you can read in the obit story to which I've linked you. James was not the only Lawson on the front lines of the civil rights movement. His brother Phil, also a pastor, spent part of his also-long career here in Kansas City, and you will find him mentioned in the first paragraph of this Flatland column I wrote in 2017. The old civil rights leaders are mostly gone now -- sometimes via natural causes, sometimes via assassination -- but they leave a legacy that should inspire all of us to continue their work.

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THE BOOK CORNER

Mound City: The Place of the Indigenous Past and Present in St. Louis, by Patricia Cleary. Why am I writing about a just-published book on Indigenous history on a blog that focuses on religion, spirituality and ethics?

One answer is that the cultural and physical genocide committed by white European invaders on Indigenous people living on this land has many religious roots, including the Doctrine of Discovery, about which I've written most recently here.

The author of Mound City clearly is focused on the St. Louis region, though she teaches history at California State University-Long Beach. And there is much to learn about the people who, centuries ago, built amazing and huge mounds just east of St. Louis in Cahokia, Ill., as well as in what today is St. Louis itself on the Missouri side of that state line.

My interest in this information stems from my connection to a committee at my church that is working to improve race relations in the Kansas City area, including relations with area Indigenous residents through a relationship with the Kansas City Indian Center. My ignorance about Indigenous matters was, at the beginning of all this, enormous. Still is, but I continue to learn.

When we don't understand our own history, the present makes little sense to us and the future has no roots. That's no way to live. This book can help fill in some gaps in your own knowledge of history.

* * *

P.S.: The other day here I mentioned the 100th anniversary of the signing of federal legislation that finally made Indigenous people in the U.S. citizens. Here is a good story from Indian Country Today with a helpful look at what has happened since the bill was signed by President Calvin Coolidge.

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P.S.: Speaking of death, as I was above here, last evening the state of Missouri once more covered itself with shame by executing another death row prisoner. The arguments against capital punishment are many and persuasive -- except, of course, to politicians with power who don't want to look weak to constituents who are all gung-ho about revenge. How sad.

In a divisive time, I celebrate resilient human goodness

No doubt you've heard of the idea of "the common good," which, as the Stanford University site to which I just linked you says, "refers to those facilities — whether material, cultural or institutional — that the members of a community provide to all members in order to fulfill a relational obligation they all have to care for certain interests that they have in common."

One of those common interests has to do with health. Which is why we have physicians, nurses, mental health counselors, a pharmaceutical industry and so much more, including health insurance. The core idea, of course, is that when our personal health breaks down in some way we often need the help of others to repair matters.

There are several ways people in the health field can operate: They can promise to do no harm and, beyond that, to devote themselves to treating others in the way they would want to be treated if they were the ones in need. Or they can be in it for the money or merely to survive financially, giving little or no thought to the common humanity they share with those they allegedly serve.

I want to assure you that there still are people in this serving-others health field who consistently hold to the first model of serving others while treating them with respect and care. I recently experienced that very thing and, at a time when social media is aflame with nasty voices dehumanizing others, I was reassured that we can at the very least be civil to people with whom we may disagree.

What brought me into contact with such servant hearts was a medical issue I had that affected my internal plumbing. Without variance, every person connected to St. Luke's Hospital of Kansas City who was part of the solution to my problem (and, yes, there was a solution) seemed to me to be intensely focused not simply on getting a paycheck but, rather, on caring for me as a fellow human being in need.

In theological language, they were acting out the concept that each person is of inestimable value and deserves to be treated as such. In Judaism and Christianity, this idea goes back to the first book in the Bible, where each person is declared to be created in the image of God.

This blog post is not meant to be a commercial for St. Luke's. No doubt there are other excellent health care facilities that also employ people who embody this core value. And no doubt sometimes people have had experiences either at St. Luke's or at other facilities that did not match my own recent gracious care.

But every person who cared for me -- Mary, Luke, Sarah, Sara, Sarah, Satin, Grio, Brooke, Rebecca and others -- in my pre-operation preparation, the surgery itself and the post-op time -- seemed at every moment to treat me as someone precious to them.

We are in a distressing and nasty political season full of invective, lies, damned lies and statistics. The instinct of some of our so-called leaders seems to be to reduce others to inhuman tools of Satan. Some days it's not just disappointing, it's shocking and appalling. And, in that atmosphere, we may begin to assume that this ferociousness affects everyone, especially if we pay attention to social media.

It does not. There still are people who know how to value others, even if they disagree with those others. There still are people who seem to wake up every day wanting to give themselves in service to others. Not all such people are in the medical field, but that's where I most recently experienced them.

May their numbers increase. And when you, too, experience the kind of loving care that I did, may you affirm the caregivers -- in the moment, if possible.

One reason to be so grateful for such care is that this kind of caring-for-others work can deeply affect the caregiver's own physical and mental health. As the great essayist Jill Lepore writes in her book The Deadline, "Taking care of vulnerable people and witnessing their anguish exacts an enormous toll and produces its own suffering. Naming that pain was meant to be a step toward alleviating it. But it hasn't worked out that way because the conditions of doing care work -- the emotional drain, the hours, the thanklessness -- have not gotten better."

Oh, and by the way: The surgery I had is quite common among men who have passed middle age (whatever that is). And that tempts me to think that the human body was God's science fair project -- on which he got a D.

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WHAT'S BEHIND ANTI-LGBTQ+ POLL RESULTS?

A new poll related to Pride Month shows Americans are deeply divided about the influence of LGBTQ+ people on the rest of society, this Los Angeles Times story says. "Three out of four Democrats who said LGBTQ+ people have had an impact on the U.S. see that as positive, according to" the nationwide poll. But "nearly the same share of Republicans, 77%, said the influence of LGBTQ+ people has been somewhat or very negative." I don't put a lot of faith in polls these days for many reasons, but if these figures are close to accurate, my guess is that what's influencing those opinions most is the long-taught but inaccurate idea that the Bible condemns homosexual orientation. I describe that sordid history in this essay. How people read scripture continues to shape the world even as commitment to religion declines. And when people read it literally, as opposed to seriously, it leads to trouble.

An AI 'priest' gets defrocked almost immediately. Good.

After some 11 years, the senior pastor of my congregation left almost three years ago to become the senior pastor of the American Church in Paris. Months later we hired a transitional pastor, whose excellent work will wrap up at the end of July when we install a new senior pastor.

All of this seems like a lot of human moving around, especially when we could have chosen the path that a group called Catholic Answers took, which was to create an artificial intelligence priest who would answer theological questions.

But perhaps that wouldn't have been a wise choice. After all, as this National Catholic Reporter column describes, that organization "decided to pull their 'Father Justin' (pictured here) chatbot character only two days after showcasing him. The chatbot was subjected to scathing criticisms from Catholics of diverse ideological persuasions." (And, just for the record, there really are Catholics of diverse theological persuasions.)

As Rebecca Bratten Weiss writes in the column to which I've linked you, "Of course, 'Father Justin' was not exactly a robot. Nor was he ever actually ordained, as Catholic Answers president Christopher Check hastened to note when he explained in a public statement that the app had been taken down and would be replaced with a new non-clerical character."

As Weiss also notes, congregations need a lot more than a mechanical device to answer their theological questions, especially when, as with "Father Justin," he often seemed not to know what he was talking about: "The AI priest's confusion on doctrinal matters highlights the problem with approaching catechesis as though theology and church teaching were reducible to a set of simplistic rules to be memorized and regurgitated. In this respect, poor confused 'Father Justin' could be regarded as an avatar for a whole religious subculture that fixates on legalistic formulations to the neglect of actual theologica or pastoral practice."

Congregations, of course, need much more in ordained leaders than someone who can explain complicated theology. Otherwise the French writer Denis Diderot never would have written this: "I have only a small flickering light to guide me in the darkness of a thick forest. Up comes a theologian and blows it out.”

In Weiss' analysis of the "Father Justin" issue, she also makes a point about the role of women in some faith traditions: "I don't really believe that an AI chatbot is going to lead to a sci-fi-esque android invasion of the magisterium. But I have to wonder whether some Catholics would be more likely to welcome a robot pope overlord than they would be to accept a woman in a position of ministerial leadership. At any rate, the priestly chatbot is a reminder to Catholic women that many of our co-religionists would rather turn to an AI figure in the guise of a male than treat a real, live woman as a religious authority."

Sad to say, even in such Christian branches as the Presbyterian Church (USA), of which my congregation is a member, women (who weren't allowed to be ordained as pastors until 1956) still often struggle to break through the stained-glass ceiling.

That's a bigotry that hurts the whole church, especially the non-AI flesh-and-blood people in the pews. Sigh.

(When the photo here today appeared with the NCR column I've quoted above, it had these cutlines: "This is a screenshot of 'Father Justin,' an AI chatbot simulating a priest in order to answer questions for the conservative apologetics platform Catholic Answers. Hours after the April 23 launch, Father Justin was 'laicized' after his responses to questions about the faith sparked social media furor. (OSV News screenshot/Catholic Answers)"

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QUESTIONING THE MORALITY OF IVF

The other day I wrote here about the need for moral and ethical oversight of science and technology. Here is an example of a faith group trying to do that. The top ethicist for the Southern Baptist Convention says invitro fertilization is an immoral method of having a baby. This is important evidence that not all of us will agree with what representatives of religious groups will say about how to create moral and ethical boundaries for science. But it's only by listening to all views on these difficult matters that we can come to some broad agreement about how to use and how to restrain technology and science. IVF has given many couples the opportunity and privilege of being parents. In my view that outweighs the SBC objections. But our culture as a whole -- not the SBC and certainly not me -- should have the final say on all this.

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P.S.: The United States is not the only country in the world struggling with election campaigns and questions about future and present leadership. The government of India is currently led by a man (in the midst of a re-election effort) with authoritarian tendencies and who has made a series of disastrous decisions that favor Hindu Nationalism. My friend Markandey Katju, a former justice on India's Supreme Court, has written this piece about Prime Minister Narendra Modi and why Indians should reject him for the good of the subcontinent. Markandey and I don't always agree on things, but he's right about this and, thus, I commend this article to you. By the way, the good news as of late Tuesday is that it looks as if Modi's party may barely get a majority in the government, much less the super majority he was predicting. So that's excellent news. In fact, Markandey, a committed atheist, sent me this email note about Modi's election results last evening: "God (who does not exist) has saved us."

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A FINAL SAD P.S.: I've just learned of the death Monday of the great German Reformed theologian Jürgen Moltmann at age 98. I have read several of his books and once had the privilege of hearing him speak. He had a fascinating history and contributed a lot to the world of theology -- theology that was much more than day-dreaming about God but was directed at helping people live examined and generative lives. Here is the announcement of his death from the World Council of Churches.

Why science must have consistent ethical oversight

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I spent a fair amount of time writing articles for The Kansas City Star about moral and ethical concerns related to science.

I explored such questions as this: Who owns your newly mapped human genome? And, for that matter, who owns the genetically modified seeds for growing genetically modified crops? And on and on.

It was clear to me then that these questions could not -- and should not -- be left to scientists without consideration of points of view raised by ethicists and by people representing religions. Failing to consider the moral and ethical issues raised by those fields and disciplines, I was sure, would lead to various scientific nightmares and disasters.

It's one reason, for instance, that organizations such as the Center for Practical Bioethics, based in Kansas City, exist.

All of which leads me today to link you to this article from the "Sightings" column regularly published by the Martin E. Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School. It's by David Barr, a visiting assistant professor of Religion at Berry College in Rome, Ga.

"Reservations about human genetic engineering," he writes, "generally fall into two camps: those who worry it is unnatural and those who worry it will be unfair." In response to the "unnatural" argument, Barr responds this way: "Genetic engineering is unnatural, but so is nasal spray."

And in response to the "unfair" concern, he says, "The second concern, rather than condemning too much technology, is often not about technology at all." When his students raise that concern, he says, they "tend to be afraid that new technologies will reinforce existing inequalities and systems of oppression."

Well, you can read the rest of the piece and see if you think Barr makes sense. My purpose in bringing the article to your attention is to argue that the fields of religion and ethics need to be wrestling with these difficult scientific issues (including artificial intelligence) and that we not only should encourage that but also have a clue about what answers and approaches they're offering.

If we cut those fields out of almost any human field of endeavor, we impoverish those who are tasked with making decisions about the roads forward.

This is not to suggest that we leave health care or high-tech (or any) issues to barely educated religious leaders who distrust science because it sometimes conflicts with religious dogma or scripture. Rather, it's to suggest that people of faith and their leaders need to understand more deeply than they usually do how science and technology are changing how we live and whether those changes challenge such long-held and widely held beliefs about the inestimable value of every human being.

If science and technology are challenging that core value, they should, in turn, be challenged -- and quickly -- so that the idea of the high worth of every single human life doesn't get diminished.

If the people you consider religious or ethical leaders are scientifically or technologically illiterate, you might want to look for some who are, in fact, literate in those areas. Neither the flat-Earthers nor the merely unread among religious leaders can be of much help to us in a time when failing to notice the changing approaches to these fields can lead to disaster. And, yes, as I noted above, I'm including the field of artificial intelligence in all this.

As Barr says in the piece to which I've linked you: "Religions can help us articulate visions of the human good that have positive content, rather than just negative condemnations of injustice. They can help us learn the lesson that there are realities -– sacred, natural or both -– before which we ought to hold back, that there are mysteries to be respected, not removed."

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P.S.: There's no usual second item here this weekend because I'm taking a brief medical time off. All is good. Back soon. In the meantime, you can catch up with faith news through the Religion News Service.