Bill's Faith Matters blog

Can (and should) religious beliefs be tested in a court of law?

Religious faith, as a monk friend of mine reminds us, is always and everywhere a wager. That's because of the otherness (and immanence) of God and because of the limitations of what our limited minds can know. False certitude, however, often infects us so that we become convinced about what we think about divine matters and believe we can answer most or all of the eternal questions.

And yet it's also true that it's possible and helpful to look at religious beliefs and doctrines using our ability to discern sense from nonsense.

It's in that spirit that Adrian J. Adams -- a former U.S. Marine with degrees in psychology and law -- offers his new book, Which god is God?: A Lawyer's Look at God and Religion.

The book is both fascinating and troubling. I'm intrigued by the idea of holding religious doctrine and ideas up to the light to see if they make sense, if they can be proved, if they should be rejected for lack of evidence. In effect, Adams drags various religious claims into a court of law and uses rules of evidence to examine them.

Although that's what Adams attempts here, it's quite clear early in the book that the author is a Christian and will attempt to show that the evidence consistently supports Christian beliefs as well as the whole sweep of the Christian story. His verdict is that other faith traditions miss the mark or, worse, mislead.

So, in the end, this is really a book of Christian apologetics and not a book to use in interfaith settings where the goal is to understand one another's faith tradition and to respect the holders of that tradition's beliefs. This book is far too didactic for that. And at times its condemnatory tone -- especially toward Islam -- is both unnecessary and regrettable.

Beyond that, it sometimes misrepresents or oversimplifies certain religions. In the first chapter, for instance, it says that "Hindus believe in many gods." In reality, it is much more complicated than that. Indeed, there's a good argument to be made that Hinduism, in a unique way, is a monotheistic faith, but even that claim must be qualified. Here is a Vedanta site that wrestles with the question, if you want to explore it. Adams' statement about the matter hides as much as it reveals.

The author's approach here reminds me of the big debate a few decades ago over what's called "Intelligent Design." In many ways, it was a response to -- and alternative to -- teaching evolution and it insisted that living organisms are “irreducibly complex,” and, thus, must have been created by a power many people call God.

One of the many drawbacks to such a method of studying world religions is that it can dismiss the necessary role of mystery in faith and promote the assumption that the divine can be fully grasped by human minds and hearts. That represents an unbecoming arrogance, and it moves its holders closer and closer to locked-down fundamentalism, which pretends to have all the answers.

Adams touches on this point in an odd way as he critiques people who claim to be atheists. He writes that they "can never be sure God does not exist since certainty would require complete knowledge of the universe and everything outside its boundaries. An atheist would have to be God to be sure there is no God." Ponder that.

In the end, taking religious doctrine to court to test its truth is kind of a fun idea, but it's really no way to understand what various faith traditions offer and it's not a guaranteed way to determine religious truth. (Speaking of which, in Christianity, truth is not a doctrine or a dogma at all, but a person, Christ Jesus.)

Perhaps one benefit to the approach Adams tries out in this book is that it might cause people to question religious leaders who have the potential to overtake their lives. As he writes about the 1978 mass suicide of members of a religious movement a few decades back, "The nine hundred followers of Jim Jones would not have died if they had demanded proof that he was God's agent and it was God's will that they commit suicide."

If this book can help accomplish that kind of useful questioning, good.

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LEGISLATIVE THREATS TO U.S. NONPROFITS?

Speaking of courts of law, as I was above, people who are connected to nonprofit organizations in the U.S. are expressing alarm over a bill being considered by Congress. As the RNS commentary piece to which I linked you says, "with Americans in every state serving more than 1.5 million tax-exempt nonprofits in the United States, according to the Nonprofit Risk Management Center, House Bill 9495 should concern all of us." If you're part of a nonprofit organization in some way, this one is worth checking out.

One way to give thanks at tomorrow's table

Dear friends:

If you want to, you are free to use this prayer of Thanksgiving at your table tomorrow. I wrote it to share.

Oh, Holy One:

Everywhere we look and everywhere we go we see both trouble and grace. Because you are the source of that grace, we, the source of most of the trouble, ask you to help us heal both the trouble and the troubled.

We give thanks for this astonishing cosmos, which you started from nothing but love in an instantaneous explosion some 13.7 billion years ago. This universe is a work of art from a great artist, as is our small, challenged part of it, the Earth. Move us to show our love for the planet by taking better care of it, helping to heal -- and not further injure -- it.

We also give thanks for each other. Help us to see that all human beings -- whoever and wherever they are -- bear your sacred image and that to dehumanize them is to insult you and your entire creation.

Help us -- especially on this Thanksgiving Day -- to remember the truth that the U.S. was built by crushing and nearly obliterating the Indigenous people who lived here when the European invaders arrived. And those invaders also used enslaved people from Africa to lay this nation's foundations. Once we are reminded of that sordid history, set our hearts and minds aright so that we may find a way forward that honors everyone who dwells in the U.S. And guide that work so that this patchwork nation may be a model for how to live together in peace and freedom.

We also ask that you help us set aside, at least for today, any differences of opinion we have with the people around us and to let us celebrate the miraculous gift of life -- a gift that reveals your love and grace.

We pray all of this in your holy name. Amen.

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A LANGUAGE MYSTERY RELATED TO PLYMOUTH HARBOR

And here is a Thanksgiving-related story about the gravestone of Gov. William Bradford, longtime leader of Plymouth Colony. It describes a Hebrew phrase on Bradford's gravestone and the mystery behind it. Apparently Bradford had a deep interest in being able to read the Jewish scriptures in the original Hebrew -- a praiseworthy desire. Equally praiseworthy would have been an interest in learning the languages of the Indigenous people whose history was forever changed by the assaults of the Pilgrims, Puritans and other colonizers. That interest might have changed that regrettable history.

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P.S.: My latest Flatland column -- about someone sexually abused by a priest but who has spent decades trying to protect others from that horror -- is online here.

A lesson from Judaism about the need for more love now

I still hear it from various Christian corners: Christianity is a religion of love while Judaism is a religion of rules. Sometimes this misinterpretation of the two traditions leads to the facetious joke that first notes some example of God's wrath in the Hebrew scriptures but then dismisses it with this: "Oh, that happened before God became a Christian."

That belittling charge against Judaism is one that Rabbi Shai Held (pictured below) is doing his best to counter. Thus, his 2023 book, Judaism Is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life. And thus, Held's recent talk at Congregation Beth Shalom in suburban Kansas City, a talk in which he insisted that how we treat others is how we treat God and that one of the tasks of Jewish people everywhere after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack on Israel is to respond with more love.

Held's book was published the week after that attack, and he said his immediate response was to wonder who now, in these chaotic circumstances, would want to read a book about love. And yet friends and colleagues told him that it was exactly what the world -- and especially Jews -- needed to hear now.

"But I realized, over the course of a few months," he said at Beth Shalom, "that actually their response was tapping into a deep, deep impulse in the Jewish tradition. . .and that is the claim, the insistence -- just when our hearts are most needy, just when we are most tempted to give into this error, when we feel that grief is all we've ever known -- that the Jewish tradition provides an audacious antidote. It says 'Right now, especially now, more love. Right now, especially when you feel you can't access it at all, more love.'"

Drawing on the history of the people of Israel, Held suggested that "the real purpose of the Exodus was not to bring people to the land. Rather, the real purpose of the Exodus was to free people so that God could live with them." And to live with them in a relationship of love.

That history, however, includes the two destructions of the temple in Jerusalem, first in 587 or 586 B.C.E. and later in 70 C.E. Both were devastating to the Jewish people because it meant the disappearance of God's dwelling place with them. And without the temple, Jews had no place to offer sacrifices to God to atone for sins.

"What do you do when that's gone?" Held asked. Jewish leaders at the time, he said, explained to the people what would replace those sacrifices in the temple: "Acts of love and kindness."

It's interesting how close that theology is to the theology of the Reformed Tradition of Christianity, which is where I live. That tradition insists that we do acts of love and kindness, but not to earn God's favor. Rather, we do such acts out of gratitude for what God already has done for us, starting with the gift of life.

Either way, the result is -- or at least can be -- a kinder, gentler, more loving world in which all people can realize who and whose they are and to live lives of gratitude and love.

To Held's thoughts, it's well worth adding this from Rabbi Irving Greenberg, contained in his book The Triumph of Life: "(L)ove limits itself out of consideration for the other. God leaves some tasks that would be more easily accomplished by Divine power to be done instead by human beings. Thus humans earn their dignity and participate in their own liberation."

Oh, I know that the history of humankind doesn't give us much evidence that we're anywhere close to such a world. Indeed, we're not.

But the failure of our ancestors and of ourselves to reach that goal is no reason to give up. Rather, now is the time to pay attention to what Held said about the Jewish tradition providing "an audacious antidote. It says 'Right now, especially now, more love. Right now, especially when you feel you can't access it at all, more love.'"

And all the world's great religions today said, "Amen."

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WHY IS ISLAM SPREADING IN TEXAS?

Sticking with the Abrahamic faiths today, there's news now that a growing number of Spanish-speaking Americans are converting to Islam, as this story from Texas reports.

It says that while "the majority of Latinos in the state are Catholic, research estimates there are now tens of thousands of Latino converts to Islam throughout the country. A 2020 survey found that at least 9 percent of the country's Muslims are Latino converts, up from 5 percent in 2017."

What's going on? A Rice University lecturer thinks he knows: "It's the quintessential American story of community building. The Irish and Italians did it. And now they're doing it not through Christianity but through Islam. They will have a positive immediate impact on the ground there."

Watch for this to happen beyond Texas.

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P.S.: My latest Flatland column -- about someone sexually abused by a priest but who has spent decades trying to protect others from that horror -- now is online here.

When voters stay home because they're baffled by lies

One of the intriguing results of the recent presidential election was the voter turnout, which was down more than 8.5 million votes compared with turnout in 2020.

As I write this, the turnout this year as counted so far was just under 147 million compared with the 2020 turnout of about 155.5 million.

What happened? Lots of theories, some of which make sense. (It is true that the 2024 turnout, even though sadly down from 2020, was the second highest in the last 50 years. But that gives me almost no comfort at all, given that voter apathy over that time may have had different sources but it's still disturbing. In fact, in some of those years turnout was barely above 50 percent of registered voters. Beyond that, only three times in those 50 years did voter turnout in a presidential race exceed 60 percent of registered voters. Absolutely appalling. And as for any supposed mandate won by Donald Trump, the reality is that he received less than 50 percent of the popular vote.)

What I think may be contributing to the voter turnout problem today -- and what I want to focus on -- is what happens when truth, an idea at the core of religious thinking, gets undermined by lying politicians at a time when there's diminished and distrusted media to report on them.

And so I turn to Anne Applebaum's new book, Autocracy Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. It's a deeply reported and profoundly disturbing book by a great journalist who reports on the spread of authoritarian governments around the world and the tools autocratic leaders use to gain and keep power. And since we now have a president-elect who has shown many signs of loving authoritarianism, we'd do well to pay attention.

Applebaum explores the subject of big lies, a term once associated with Adolf Hitler but now a tactic in widespread use around the world by one autocrat after another.

"The political scientist Lisa Wedeen," Applebaum writes, "has observed that the Syrian regime tells lies so ludicrous that no one could possibility believe them -- for example that Syria, at the height of the civil war, was an excellent tourist destination. These 'national fictions,' she concluded, were meant not to persuade people who were spinning the stories. Sometimes the point isn't to make people believe a lie; it's to make people fear the liar."

In fact, Applebaum writes, such strongmen as Vladimir Putin and the leaders of Syria, Venezuela, China and other countries "lie constantly, blatantly, obviously. But when they are exposed, they don't bother to offer counterarguments. . .

"This tactic, the so-called 'fire hose of falsehoods,' produces not outrage but nihilism. Given so many explanations, how can you know what actually happened? What if you can never know? If you can't understand what is going on around you, then you are not going to join a great movement for democracy or follow a truth-telling leader or listen when anyone speaks about positive political change. Instead, you will avoid politics altogether. Autocrats have an enormous incentive to spread that hopelessness and cynicism, not only in their own countries, but around the world."

I am not suggesting that all of our American political leaders have completely abandoned speaking truth and instead are seeking to control every aspect of the national narrative, though others have made something like that charge.

But I am suggesting that if American voters begin to lose faith in the idea that they can find reliable sources of truth about what's actually happening and use that information to make informed voting decisions, then we will see voter turnout shrink.

And when that happens, the people lose control of their governments and cede it to people hungry for power -- not to aid the common good but to aid their own circumstances and personal dreams of power and wealth. So when voter turnout in Kansas City (the area overseen by the Kansas City Election Board) was barely 54 percent of registered voters in this most recent presidential election, it's not just appalling, it's frightening. It and similar voter turnout figures nationally reveal an electorate that is abandoning its patriotic duties and ceding power to people who want it for their own uses.

The idea of the "common good," which is central to the major world religions, gets crushed when this happens, as does the religious idea that we have a responsibility to care for one another because each of us bears the image of God.

I wish I knew exactly what to do about this horrifying reality. What I do know is that the place to start is by naming it and joining with our neighbors, friends and fellow citizens to talk about it and seek answers together.

Before it's too late.

(The graphic here today came from this site.)

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WHEN RELIGION GETS SIDELINED AS A PEACEMAKER

What the author of this RNS opinion piece says about Israel -- that religion there often gets ignored when it could help solve conflicts -- is true not only there but throughout the world. Or at least it could be true if religion could resolve its own conflicts and disagreements with other branches of religion. What good is religion that doesn't bring peace but more conflict?

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P.S.: Give a read to this this article from current issue of The Atlantic. It's by a Palestinian and may be the best and most hopeful thing I've read about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since Hamas attacked Israel more than a year ago.

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ANOTHER P.S.: I've eXited X, formerly Twitter, and now can be found on Blue Sky here. Join and follow me there, please.

Why ritual and celebration are so crucial to a purposeful life

A dozen or so years ago, I chaired a congregational task force that our then-new pastor had asked to think about what God might be asking us to do now and about how to accomplish those tasks.

One thing was clear to me as we began to organize for this work: We were part of a stream of history that, in our case, began when the church was organized as an anti-slavery congregation in 1865. And if we didn't understand or acknowledge that history our work would be detached from both reality and our own story.

So, in harmony with ideas in Caring Liturgies: The Pastoral Power of Christian Ritual, a book about ritual, celebration and history by my friend Susan Marie Smith, an Episcopal priest, our task force created a small ritual that we used to begin each meeting.

As the photo here shows, we took short strands of red ribbon for each year of our congregation's existence and, one by one, tied them together while saying something like: "In 1879, Second Presbyterian Church (then we said something that happened in that year) and our church sought to understand and follow God's purposes for us."

In fact, in the end, we named our final document the "GPS Report," in which GPS stood for God's Purposes for Second (Church)."

There are, of course, many reasons to be careful with ritual and to make sure that our celebratory gatherings are connected to our history and that they move us into the future in generative ways.

As Smith writes in her book, "Ritual is powerful, both for good or for ill. Positively, it can gather the community in a structure strong enough to hold many people, conflicting points of view and varied emotions together in unity. It can be engaged to empower and heal participants, and to release and redeem them from the stranglehold of emotion, psychological or spiritual oppression."

As participation in institutional religion in the U.S. has dwindled over the last 50 or more years, I'm afraid our understanding of -- and perceived need for -- ritual and celebration dwindled, too. And if ritual and celebration all but disappear, our means of knowing who we are as a faith community also can melt away.

I'm not talking here about empty, repetitive words and actions, songs and signs used to fill a worship service out of some ancient habit, rarely re-evaluated. Those can be either soul-crushing or uplifting. Depends. Rather, I'm talking about ritual and celebration that is imaginative, engaging and even thrilling.

An example: One recent Thursday evening we gathered at my congregation to formally install our new senior pastor. The words, the music, the atmosphere all were deeply moving and highly celebratory. We even had small bags of snacks to share to remind us how much of Jesus' own ministry happened around meals, including the Last Supper.

But despite much new energy in our congregation because of our new pastor's arrival and her excitement and wisdom, the turnout for the installation was disappointingly small. I was, in fact, sort of shocked.

Oh, there were a few understandable reasons (or at least excuses) offered for that. It was an evening event, meaning that some of our older members might have been reluctant to be driving at night. It was a weeknight, meaning families with younger children were busy with their school-day routines. And it was two days after an exhausting -- and, to many of us, deeply disappointing -- election, and some just weren't in a celebratory mood.

But the reality was that many people missed a wonderful opportunity to use ritual and celebration to set our new pastor off on what we hope and trust -- because of her many gifts for this work -- will be a wonderful ministry with us. She told me later she wasn't disappointed by the turnout but just grateful to everyone who showed up. That reflects a good attitude but her saying that also freed me and my wife to be disappointed and a little angry on her behalf.

So my message to my own congregation's members and to you who are reading this is that thoughtful ritual and joyful celebration are vital in a purposeful, examined life. Create new, better and more memorable rituals if that's what's needed, as we thought it was on the GPS task force. But most of all this: Just show up. You'll be glad you did. And, afterward, you'll be rewarded by what you didn't miss.

(The other photo here shows the front lawn of my church, a lawn in which -- in another ritual, both celebratory and sad -- we bury the ashes of some of our deceased members.)

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MORE YOUNGER WOMEN ATTRACTED TO FAITH

A new survey indicates that young women (Gen Z and Millennials) are more religious than young men of the same age -- a significant shift. I'm reminded of a story from my congregation about a woman who was asked to be the first female elder when (nearly 100 years ago) our denomination's rules changed to allow that. She refused, claiming that "if you allow women to be elders, the men around here will do nothing." Not, perhaps, an affirmation of gender equality but not a bad interpretation of reality.

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P.S.: Because every religious tradition has a lot to say about the meaning of death, I write a fair amount about the subject. I also read obituaries -- even of people I don't know. So today I want to share with you one of the best obits I've ever read. It's about a woman I didn't know but wish I had. And you can find it here. It's the kind of obit that makes you sad not to have known the deceased but also makes you more committed to live an examined life of meaning and love -- and joy.

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ANOTHER P.S.: There's some good recent news from Central Baptist Theological Seminary here in the KC metro. Central has been chosen to participate in the Climate Science in Theological Education (CSTE) Grant Initiative of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion (DoSER) program. You can read about the details here.

Maybe a little cosmic perspective will help us now

Years ago, while reading Annie Dillard or maybe Kathleen Norris -- at any rate, some smart female author -- I was struck by the idea that there is something in each of us that is older than we are. Indeed, we carry around atoms that were part of stars that had once exploded.

As Kansas City area singer/songwriter Greg Tamblyn notes in his song "All These Atoms":

Fifteen billion years ago
The big bang was quite a show
All this time and now here we are, but
parts of you were once a star 

Greg might have been a billion or two years off on the age of the cosmos (today it's usually put at something like 13.7 billion years), but he's right that parts of you were once part of a star.

It's both a humbling and an encouraging idea, and I've just run across it again in Timothy Snyder's new book, On Freedom, a book I mentioned in passing recently on the blog here.

At one point in the book, Snyder writes about nuclear fusion, which, he says, can be -- and should be -- our source of energy for the future if we want to avoid the worst results of climate change that's being driven by human activity.

"When stars die," he writes, "they expand and then contract; and in doing so fuse more massive and more chemically complex elements, with more protons and neutrons. The building blocks of your body, molecules of carbon (six protons) and oxygen (eight), were created in this way by fusion inside a prior generation star. Our human bodies are archives of the universe, records of the life and death of stars."

Fusion, Snyder insists, is "the original source of almost all the energy needed by life on Earth. If we could harness it directly, a new kind of freedom would present itself."

I was pondering all this the other day as I was watering the newly expanded native plants Peace Garden at my church. The plants we put into Mother Earth on Oct. 27 are settling in for the winter so, we hope, they'll bloom in the spring, summer and fall of next year. But each of those plants also contains atoms from long-ago exploded stars. Which may be why Indigenous people here who retain their ancient culture understand that plants have been around a lot longer than humans and, thus, we should learn from them.

Plants and larger trees have ways of communicating with one another and helping each other to flourish even when they're quite different. It's a model humanity would do well to adopt, especially in the aftermath of a brutal election season that revealed to us both the best and the worst in humanity.

So I hope the star-carrying native plants that I now water once a week (today's my day again) will survive the winter and emerge with fresh strength and a lively future. And I hope the same will be true for those of us who are star-carrying animals, ones that puzzle over the meaning of life and of our purpose here. (And one of our purposes, surely, is to think about all of this.)

(The image of the Big Bang above today came from here and the caption there bears this note: "Image credit: Romolo Tavani via Getty Images")

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WHAT SOME CHRISTIAN VOTERS FORGOT OR IGNORED

Immigrants from Latin America and their descendants played a big role in the outcome of this year's presidential race. Now one of them, Miguel A. De La Torre, professor of social ethics and Latinx studies at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, has a sharp word to say from an evangelical Christian perspective to white evangelicals (and others) who supported the winner:

"I do have good news, my dearest white evangelicals. You, too, can be saved. Salvation is just as much for you as it is for those you have relegated to your margins. It begins with the rejection of eurocentric theology and philosophy. Like the rich young ruler who asked how to obtain salvation, the answer begins with putting away your idols, specifically this idol you call god. . .

"We all find our salvation, our liberation, when we live in radical solidarity with the oppressed of the earth, signified by the broken body of Jesus given unto us. Those at our margins whom we think we must save are the ones who will bring about our own salvation."

Want to have no church-state barrier? Move to Russia

If we want to see what it looks like when a religious tradition allows itself to become a political pawn of a national government, Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church provide one of the clearest examples.

As this Wilson Center report (a blog of the Kennan Institute) describes it, "Equating political dissent with heresy has become a central tactic of the Russian state, allowing it to silence opposition and enforce ideological conformity based on an orthodoxy of the Russian church and the 'Russkiy Mir' (or Russian World). These efforts are not limited to the geographic borders of Russia. Attacks on religious alternative to the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) have become a key part of Russia’s war against Ukraine."

It's been clear for some years now that the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill (pictured here with Russian President Vladimir Putin), has become a sycophant of Putin. In fact, the text at the link I just gave you on Kirill's name mentions that he once described Putin's rule as "a miracle of God." Whatever independence from the Kremlin that the church might once have had is simply gone now, and if Kirill isn't on the Kremlin's payroll, he should be.

In a profoundly authoritarian governmental system, there is little or no room for anything that doesn't meet the political needs of the ruler, and in this case that means that both Russia's government and the ROC persecute followers of faith traditions other than the ROC.

As the Wilson Center report notes, "The focus of especially ruthless suppression by the ROC and the Russian state are other denominations of Christianity, particularly Protestantism, which professes the individual’s relationship with God unmediated by earthly authorities. According to the ROC, Protestant churches that skirt the state-driven dictates of the ROC are effectively cults that distort the essence of Christianity. Under the pretext of protecting society from these so-called cults, anti-cult organizations and their representatives intentionally spread defamatory information about these groups in the media and organize campaigns to discredit them."

Mis- and disinformation? Whoever heard of politicians and their backers engaging in such stuff? (Fake rhetorical question.)

Even the 2024 annual report of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, in a gently worded way, notes this: "Over time, the Russian government has granted special recognition and privileges to the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate." It's what a church gets when it leaps into bed with a secular government. And it's why the ROC leadership has backed Putin's despicable, murderous and criminal war in Ukraine. The Wilson Center report puts it this way: "Patriarch Kirill continues to publicly bless Russian soldiers as they go to battle against Ukraine and frame the invasion as a 'holy war'.”

The problem in Russia is partly Putin's fault, of course. But the ROC itself and its leadership are the real source of the problem because they are the ones that have compromised the church's theology in much the same way that many Christian churches in Germany caved in to Adolf Hitler's evil rule. It was only a small group of Christian leaders known as the Confessing Church that resisted and that published the anti-Hitler Theological Declaration of Barmen.

Similar concerns about almost-unquestioned support for certain brands of politics and the governments deeply influenced by those brands have been raised in the U.S. because of the close association of what's been too-broadly called the "Christian Right" with the Republican Party, beginning roughly with the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Instead of playing the patriotic role of being critical of governmental policies that injure or in other ways burden the poor, the homeless, the elderly and others whom our economy doesn't serve well, many representatives from that branch of the faith have cheered on the very trickle-down economic policies that contribute to poverty, mass incarceration, failing educational systems and more, harming the very people about whom Jesus seemed to care the most.

So there are lessons for America's religious institutions in what has been happening in Russia. As the song "Dance with the Devil" by the rapper and activist Immortal Technique puts it: "So when the devil wants you to dance you better say never, a dance with the devil might just last you forever."

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THE 9/11 PLEA DEAL COMES BACK TO LIFE

The plea agreement between the military court at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay and three of the terrorists involved in the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. seems to be back in play. Thank goodness.

As this Lawdragon article explains, a military judge has ruled "that the (U.S.) Secretary of Defense did not have the legal authority to withdraw from plea agreements reached with three of the defendants by the official he appointed to oversee the court." So it now appears, as the article notes, that "the signed plea deals with the accused plot mastermind, Khalid Shaik Mohammad, and two co-defendants," Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al Hawsawi, may move forward.

In those plea deals, the three "agreed to plead guilty to all charges related to their alleged roles in the 9/11 attacks in exchange for the death penalty being removed as a sentencing option." They also agreed to answer questions posed by family members of those they helped to murder in the 2001 terrorist attacks. As a member of a 9/11 family, I had already submitted my questions before the plea deal got cancelled. So we'll see if I get answers to them eventually. (My nephew was among the nearly 3,000 people murdered that day.)

Late in this past week, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said he hadn't changed his mind that he's the person who should make the final decision about the plea deals. If he appeals the military judge's decision overturning his action to stop the plea deal, I hope the courts will rule against Austin.

By the way, Lawdragon, the source of the article to which I linked you, was started in 2005 as a digital publication covering legal matters and has come to be depended on as a reliable source of news about the cases at Gitmo, as has the relentless and excellent reporting of Carol Rosenberg of The New York Times. Here is the article Carol wrote about this matter. Here, too, is a link to the August column I wrote for The Kansas City Star praising the plea deal.

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P.S.: Once again, voter turnout in Kansas City this past Tuesday was simply appalling. As The Star reported, "Turnout in the part of Kansas City within Jackson County, which is served by the Kansas City Election Board, saw a voter turnout just under 54%. That’s the lowest turnout for a presidential election since at least 1996." Among the many threats to our democracy -- before and after the election -- low voter turnout is one that is simply self-inflicted and is impossible to justify. Let's gather together election experts, lawyers, social workers and many others to figure out what it will take to fix this. Nothing about our democracy, including religious freedom, is safe if voters simply sit on their hands.

A post-election hope written before we voted

I am writing these words a week before yesterday's Election Day, so I don't know whether American voters have chosen as our president a serial liar, authoritarian and convicted felon who tried to overthrow the government he once headed or whether they have elected our flawed but capable vice president to be our first female president.

What I do know is that our task as citizens is much the same either way. We must insist that our elected officials at all levels put the common interests of the people above partisan politics. And, individually and collectively, we must be active citizens who don't fall into despair about our future and, therefore, leave that future to others.

That responsibility became unexpectedly clearer to me recently as I sorted through a bin full of poetry that I had written in college and not long after. My goal was to keep some of those foolish words from ever being made public and to save our children from having to paw through them after I'm part of the Dead Poets' Society.

What struck me about this winnowing process, however, wasn't just the rare poem that still seemed to work but, rather, my clear frustration and even anger at the time I wrote them about what I was seeing in the world and my response to it.

Most of these poems were written in the 1960s when America was responding haltingly to the Civil Rights Movement, to the war in Vietnam and the lies our government was telling us about that, to a pervasive culture of rock 'n roll, to a growing drug culture, to the renewed stirrings of the movement to liberate women and to much else.

Here is the start of one I entitled "Of a short time ago":

When I was at Dean Street School

and Clarence Olson Junior High School

and Woodstock Community High School,

each of a slightly different shade

of brick, each of a reputedly different

academic level (which they said had

nothing to do with the color of brick)

mostly it was a time of Eisenhower

and that other slowly beating heart Nixon,

one of whom, I remember, went to Korea

though neither ever really went

to find out about America,

which they could have done

in any of my three schools.

 

For I remember being taught

about Dick and Jane and Sally,

whose major worries were Spot and Puff

and whether they would

knock over mother's jar of face cream

or track mud all over mother's

newly waxed linoleum floor,

which, though waxed, never ultimately waned,

for somehow linoleum floors

seemed in that pleasant time

to possess much more resignation

and stamina to be walked upon

that did those people of different shades

about whom we never spoke seriously.

When I was near the end of fifth grade, my family and I moved to India for two years, and my view of the world widened almost unimaginably. I saw the American world in which I'd grown up in a small, almost-all-white, almost-all-Christian town through different eyes.

By the time I wrote the poem above and others, I was, as I say, in college in the 1960s and the culture and world were in turmoil.

And I was increasingly both disillusioned by -- and hopeful about -- much of that. The moral center of our lives seemed to have drifted off into consumerism and into ignoring the economic, political and other systems that were crushing some of our citizens. I took all of that on in some of the poetry I was writing. But I also was finding my own moral bearings with the help of some of the poetry, theology and other works I was reading.

I was particularly moved by W. H. Auden's poem, "September 1, 1939," about the day Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Auden began by bemoaning "a low dishonest decade." And he pointed to the future with these lines:

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

But then, at the end, this clear-eyed poet told all of us what, in fact, all of us already knew but were choosing to forget or ignore:

Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

And there it is, our task: To show an affirming flame. We must act now with justice and must overcome whatever "negation and despair" we've fallen into after this election. We must move ahead -- no matter who won yesterday -- and show that we have not abandoned our freedoms, our individual sovereignty, our mutual citizenship.

In Timothy Snyder's new book, On Freedom, he writes about what he calls "negative freedom," which is the bogus idea that we can be free only if certain restraints are removed. He puts it this way: "Negative freedom is the fantasy that the problem is entirely beyond us, and that we can become free simply by removing an obstacle." Freedom, he says, requires sovereign, autonomous individuals who know how to be free and, thus, unpredictable, even in societies that seek to crush those attributes. Such individuals are sovereign, unpredictable and mobile.

"Russia," he writes, "has become a genocidal fascist empire for many reasons, but one of them is negative freedom. That concept made it hard to see that its oligarchy was the antithesis of freedom (rather than a side effect) or that Putin was a fascist (rather than just a technocrat seeking wealth). And America has become a flawed republic threatened by oligarchy and fascism for many reasons, but negative freedom is among them. It leads us to think that we have solved our problems when we have privatized them, when in fact all we have achieved is separating ourselves from one another."

What we need, then, no matter who won yesterday's presidential election, is to come together as a common people whose roots are in many places and ethnic, religious and cultural traditions, a common people dedicated to the idea that this is a nation of, by and for the people. If we fail in that task, we risk sacrificing what the United States has meant to the freedom of the world and its people. And the world cannot afford anything like that.

* * *

WHERE I VOTE, THE SYSTEM WORKED

When I arrived at my polling place yesterday morning next door to where I live, it appeared that there was almost no line. I prefer to use the voting machines, which print out my ballot. So I was told there were a few people ahead of me but to wait at the end of that line of eight or nine voters.

It soon became clear that one of the only two voting machines was being used by someone who seemed catatonic. She just sat there. Eventually one of the poll workers told some of us in line that he was not allowed to tell voters to hurry up. But after 40-plus minutes, the young woman seemed to appeal for help. So, as required by law, two poll workers, one from each party, sat with her and answered whatever questions she had. Eventually, she finished.

People died so I could be free to vote in such elections, so it was no big deal to wait a few extra minutes for a confused -- and perhaps new -- voter to finish. I was just glad the system worked. Oh, and that the Brookside branch of the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection (pictured here), my voting place, had set out three boxes of candy as a way of thanking voters. (I took only one small piece, just for the record.)

* * *

P.S.: I was honored that my blog was a finalist this year in The Pitch's contest for "Best Local Blog/Substack". You can find a list of the winners and finalists here.

Pope Francis' new encyclical gets to the heart of life

From time to time, popes issue teaching documents called encyclicals. Perhaps the most famous one from Pope Francis has been "Ladauto Si." Released in 2015, it focused on how humans have been damaging mother Earth and what to do to make repairs.

The latest encyclical was issued Oct. 24 and is called “Dilexit Nos,” which is Latin for “He Loves Us,” as this AP story reports. It's an important document if for no other reason than that it accurately describes the distracted, almost pointless way many of us live and it calls us to something far more meaningful.

Here is Francis' description of that empty-hearted life: "The symbol of the heart has often been used to express the love of Jesus Christ. Some have questioned whether this symbol is still meaningful today. Yet living as we do in an age of superficiality, rushing frenetically from one thing to another without really knowing why, and ending up as insatiable consumers and slaves to the mechanisms of a market unconcerned about the deeper meaning of our lives, all of us need to rediscover the importance of the heart."

Is that an accurate description of your life? I try not to let it be true of mine, but I frequently fail and need to find a more meaningful path than the superhighway on which I sometimes seem to be speeding (to where?).

The pontiff, of course, is using the term "heart" the way many of us use it, which is to say that heart refers to the core of our spirit, our intellect, our soul, our emotions, our very being. That understanding takes the heart far beyond its foundational biological functions in our bodies and, instead, the heart becomes a stand-in name for who we are at our most important and basic level. Heart language is poetry. And useful poetry at that.

The pope put it this way in this encyclical: "From ancient times, then, there has been an appreciation of the fact that human beings are not simply a sum of different skills, but a unity of body and soul with a coordinating center that provides a backdrop of meaning and direction to all that a person experiences."

Pope Francis then gets to what I consider the heart of the issue:

"Instead of running after superficial satisfactions and playing a role for the benefit of others, we would do better to think about the really important questions in life. Who am I, really? What am I looking for? What direction do I want to give to my life, my decisions and my actions? Why and for what purpose am I in this world? How do I want to look back on my life once it ends? What meaning do I want to give to all my experiences? Who do I want to be for others? Who am I for God? All these questions lead us back to the heart."

It turns out that questions like these are the precise focus of a college class that a pastor I know is teaching this semester at William Jewell College in Liberty, Mo.

The Rev. Dr. Mike Graves (whose last book I wrote about here late last year) is the teacher and the class is called "A Life Worth Living." Mike has asked various people, including me, to be a companion to one of the students in the class. Which means meeting with that student once a week (in person as often as possible) for 14 weeks. So I've been connected to a smart and thoughtful young woman and I'm very much enjoying our conversations and I hope she is. (She keeps showing up for them.)

Perhaps other high school or college teachers could use Mike's model and the pope's new encyclical to gather young people together to answer the pope's questions, which, as he writes, "lead us back to the heart."

When I was in college I discovered a tendency to dismiss as "sophomoric" the common, if aching, questions about life that young people ask. I don't know why. I still think they're among the most important questions of life. And I'm glad the pope has provided a text to guide people through some of them. You will know you're doing this process right if, at the end of the day, you feel a little more ignorant.

* * *

WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT THIS CANDIDATE'S RELIGIOUS IDEAS

As Religion News Service columnist Mark Silk correctly notes in this new column, the ideas of a Christian Nationalist movement called the New Apostolic Reformation "have spread through MAGA world" that is led by Donald J. Trump. Trump, he writes, "is driven inexorably toward the exclusivism of a political religion. And it’s the NAR’s political religion that’s on offer from the Republican Party this Election Day." Which is one more reason that people of faith should know about the religious leanings of candidates. If you want to know more about NAR and Christian Nationalism, I recommend this new report from ProPublica.