The killing of Michael Brown and the lingering, malignant racism in our country that has led to such agonized and powerful feelings of justice not being served point to an undeniable reality that hurts all of us and that demands a response from our community.
That reality includes but is much bigger than the question about whether the officer who shot Michael Brown had valid reason to fear for his life. In a sense it doesn’t really matter what you think about the reliability of eyewitness accounts or the way the investigation and grand jury proceeding went down. What is impossible to ignore in the ghastly light of the violent death of another young, unarmed black man and its affect on the people of Ferguson is the following:
1. There are entrenched, gaping, racial and economic divides in our society.
2. Violence is bound up with those divides, both as a result of them and as a means of enforcing them.
3. The mere fact that reactions to the decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson have been so different in the black and white communities is proof of a wide gulf that separates the experiences of those groups. Lets get biblical with our language here. There are those whose realities are shaped by powers and principalities most of us don’t ever see. There are forces of darkness that most people in this country are privileged to ignore. To deny this experience isn’t a sign of greater enlightenment, it is a sign of arrogance born of self-righteousness.
Part of a sermon series on how to be more grateful, the How-to-be-Grateful series if you will, co-pastor Neil talks about how you can't force it, how he broke his arm, and so much more.
On All Saints Day, Christians have traditionally remembered those they have lost. Co-pastor reflects on the hope that despite the reality of death, all will be well.
At Techny Towers, a retreat center in Techny, Illinois, there resides a collection of paintings depicting various scenes from the New Testament and Jesus’ life. The interesting (great? bizarre?) thing about these paintings is that everyone is Chinese, including Jesus! All the characters are drawn wearing traditional Chinese clothing, sporting fu manchus, and just looking so so dope. Here is a website I found depicting “Chinesus.”
When I first saw these paintings, I laughed. A lot. I had never before seen an Asian Jesus. Black Jesus, white Jesus, lego Jesus, but for whatever reason, it never occurred to me that there could also be a Jesus who looked like me. The more I looked at those paintings, I started liking them more and more. Why not an Asian Jesus? We here too!
From Last Week Tonight with John Oliver - “How is Ayn Rand Still a Thing?” It’s funny, but also misses a deeper point: no one should be baffled or shouting “Gotcha!” at political conservatives who love Ayn Rand; the fusion of religious traditionalism and economic libertarianism was an intentional strategy and major victory for the modern Right in the U.S., theorized by the political thinker Frank Meyer, embraced by Reagan, and creepily dubbed Fusionism. It’s held together enough to shift our country rightward for a while, it’s now starting to show some cracks, but this video just shows how self-contradictory it is. Trying to combine a purist form of economic individualism with values of community and the importance of moral and religious traditions is like trying to mate a grizzly bear with a banana slug. You end up with a slimy monster that will eat your face. Only this one isn’t imaginary.
"I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one - that my body might - but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature, daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it - rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Whoare we? Where are we?”
Caroline, Riley, Patrick, and Tanya, people in the Root and Branch Community, share their stories about their grandparents as we reflect on caring for those we love, aging, and the ways God speaks to us through family.
Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale, argues provocatively that “if you want to be good and do good, empathy is a poor guide.” Most of the respondents find reasons to disagree with him, and so do I, but a more limited form of his argument makes sense to me - that empathy alone is not enough to guide us living moral lives. Cool rationality and warm but healthily self-differentiated benevolence can be just as important as feeling a ricochet of someone else’s suffering in your own gut.
"We shouldn’t see ourselves as archaeologists, minutely studying each feeling and trying to dig deep into the unconscious. We should see ourselves as literary critics, putting each incident in the perspective of a longer life story…
Think of one of those Chuck Close self-portraits. The face takes up the entire image. You can see every pore. Some people try to introspect like that. But others see themselves in broader landscapes, in the context of longer narratives about forgiveness, or redemption or setback and ascent.”
Two of my current heroes, Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of My Struggle, the six-volume, 3,600-page Norwegian novel about a man writing a six-volume, 3,600-page Norwegian novel, and Michael Silverblatt, the brilliant and super-humane host of the public radio show “Bookworm,” recently sat down for a conversation that indirectly but powerfully cuts to the heart of why Root and Branch was created.
I was sitting outside a room full of ministers, waiting for my turn to be examined for my fitness to enter the long process of maybe one day becoming one myself.
My wise friend and mentor, Michael, who had accompanied me to the meeting, pulled out his early generation smartphone and slowly loaded a YouTube video. He held out the phone in front of me.