Category: Main Blog

“What do a church, a community, a sermon, a liturgy, a Christian life mean in a religionless world?”

These are not the words of some contemporary church leader looking at decades of declining participation in religious life, at churches turned into brewpubs and condos, at the decline of a learned clergy. These are, in fact, the words of letter written 74 years ago from Tegel Prison, in Berlin, part of the correspondence between the prisoner, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and his dear friend, Eberhard Bethge. Bonhoeffer, a pastor and theologian in prison, struggled in his correspondence to understand what might come next for the faith he cherished, not because the churches of Germany were already empty, though they would certainly become vast and empty edifices in the decades after the war, desiccated husks of what had once been alive. No, he was concerned that German Christianity had been emptied of Christ, had become a secular nationalist cult that was swallowed whole by the Nazi hate machine. It was an anxious time for those Christians of the Confessing Church, that group that refused Nazi ideology and control. It was an anxious time for Bonhoeffer, no doubt, in prison for his own role in a conspiracy against Hitler, against the Nazi hate machine, and Allied bombers filled the sky above, so that death might come from the drop of a bomb or from the hangman’s drop. Continue reading “Anxious: May 6, 2018”

There was a seismic event in the music world this week when the Pulitzer Prize for music composition went to the rap artist Kendrick Lamar for his album DAMN. The music Pulitzer is traditionally awarded to some obscure, rarified work, almost always classical, rarely jazz, not ever something that regular people might actually hear, that might sell. I really do listen to Lamar’s complex and charged hip-hop, as do millions of others.

The music Pulitzer can feel like an after-thought, always the last category listed. The other twenty awards are given for journalism, including photojournalism, and writing, both fiction and non-fiction. The focus on journalism and writing makes sense, as Joseph Pulitzer established the prizes through provisions in his will, and he made his fortune in publishing, though he never would have received his own prize, since Pulitzer was probably the foremost practitioner of fake news in his time, is regarded as the father of yellow journalism. Continue reading “DAMN: April 22, 2018”

This may come as a shock to you, but subtle isn’t always my strong suit. Sometimes big flashing lights are needed to get my attention, neon everywhere, a spiritual Times Square. The good news is that the Holy Spirit, or the universe if that’s what you prefer to call divine mystery, while sometimes subtle, can also sometimes smack you upside the head to get your attention. This was the case for me on Monday.

First thing in the morning, the Rev. Rob McCall stopped by the Pastor’s Study for one of our periodic chats. During the conversation, he suggested a book, “The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World – and Us,” by Robert O. Prum. At lunch in the Parsonage, I opened the most recent copy of “The Christian Century” to a book review of “Humanism and the Death of God: Searching for the Good After Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche.” Then I started researching this week’s text, about Paul and conversion and stories of conversions, which immediately brought me to Darwin’s infamous deathbed conversion, at which point I looked up and said “Okay, I get it.” Continue reading “Darwin: April 15, 2018”

On the night of September 14, 1927, one of the most famous dancers of that age got into a Amilcar CGSS, a low-riding model of a French sports car that won the Monte Carlo Rally the same year. The woman’s trademark was her beautiful flowing scarves, and it was her scarf that did her in that night, for these were the days of open-wheeled vehicles, and the scarf she was wearing caught in the passenger side rear wheel, pulling her from the vehicle and breaking her neck. While the accident happened in Nice, her cremains ended up in Père Lachaise, the Paris Cemetery that contains a who’s who of famous artists and thinkers, both French and international, for Paris has long attracted the creative, the brilliant, the dissolute, the mad, the city of lights and lovers and artists.

So there, along with that dancer, Isadore Duncan, you can find tombs that hold or once held the remains and cremains of Richard Wright, Gertrude Stein, Maria Callas, Édith Piaf, dozens of others. I was wandering in Père Lachaise one bright spring day, guidebook in hand, looking for the tomb of Oscar Wilde, when I was stopped by another tourist, one who was clearly having a very good time, maybe too good of a time to be strictly legal if you know what I mean. “Dude, you’re going the wrong way. It’s over there,” he informed me, gesturing off in exactly the opposite direction. He was directing me not toward the great Irish writer, but toward the grave of Jim Morrison, lead singer of the Doors, and a source of consternation for the families of others in the cemetery. Continue reading “Wait For It: Easter 2018”

“Police have yet to identify Clark as the suspect or victim.”

These words are taken from March 23rd reporting in the Washington Post. Five days earlier, the police in Sacramento were searching for an individual who was breaking into vehicles in the neighborhood. A police helicopter followed a suspect, then officers approached on foot. They found 22 year-old Stephon Clark in his grandmother’s backyard holding a white iPhone, and within six seconds, they had fired twenty rounds, killing him.

Suspect or victim? Is it possible he was both? Or have we decided that summary execution for minor crimes is okay, if he was in fact guilty of a minor crime? Maybe we’ve just gotten bored with this story, on an endless repeating loop. Police shootings of unarmed African-Americans have remained steady, but there is a lot less news coverage these days. And what does any of it have to do with us, here where less than 1% of our population is African-American? Continue reading “Suspect or Victim: Good Friday 2018”

Scholars agree that quite a few of the letters attributed to Paul in the New Testament were not written by Paul, or even during his lifetime. They can sometimes tell because the letters address issues and structures in the life of the church that came decades after Paul’s death. They can also tell because of word choice and grammar, for even through the pen of the scribe, we can hear a very distinctive voice that we know to be Paul. The challenge, of course, is that Paul’s belief, his theology, probably evolved during his year’s of ministry. He is likely to have picked up new vocabulary in his travels as well, something that seems even more likely as he was a polyglot, someone fluent in multiple languages, Aramaic and Greek at the very least, and probably classical Hebrew and Latin as well. Continue reading “Quotidian: Maundy Thursday 2018”

It had been an adventurous weekend, part of a long adventurous journey. I had been in Poland at the start of the week, a quarter century ago and about this time of year, but the pope being Polish at the time, I had concern about the availability of basic services during Holy Week, so I headed south, to what seemed a safer bet, the newly independent Slovak Republic. But Bratislava had its own issues, and a certain exuberance, and by the time Easter Monday arrived, I’d been involved in a Slovak wedding reception and attended a match by the local football team, SK Bratislava, though don’t ask me for details, for they got lost somewhere at that wedding reception.

But Easter was quiet, a time for recovery, and by Monday my South African traveling companion and I were prepared to get back to what sightseeing could be done with most institutions and businesses closed. And so it was that we caught sight of a strange Eastern European tradition, one I have mentioned before, though seeing is not understanding.

There were almost no women on the streets, but tons of boys and young men walking around with what looked like woven rods bedecked with ribbons. It turns out that on Easter Monday, young women are drenched with cold water, struck with these willow whips, which get a new ribbon for every victim, and in return must offer things like coins and colored eggs to those who assault them. The rationale is that this whole ritualized abuse makes women stronger before spring, as if they were cattle being prepared for calving. What it actually does is make girls and women hate Easter, as noted in a 2015 Guardian article by Jana Kasperkevic, who grew up in Slovakia but now lives in New York, safe from this toxic tradition. Continue reading “Shiphrah and Puah: March 25, 2018”

Local residents have called the police response to the first bombing in Austin, Texas, which killed 39 year-old construction worker Anthony Stephan House on March 2nd, underwhelming. The victim was a person of color, and there had been a drug arrest at a somewhat similar looking home in the neighborhood three days earlier, so investigators decided early on that that first bomb was misdirected retaliation, though you could drive an aircraft carrier through the holes in that theory. Then this past Monday, two more bombs went off, one killing 17 year-old Draylen Mason, a high school senior and promising musician, and another injuring 75 year-old Esperanza Herrera, three victims of color, two African-American and one Latina. What is increasingly looking like a series of hate crimes has been further complicated by the fact that the third bomb was, it turns out, misdirected, with a different address on the package, though that address has not been made public.

These bombs were very sophisticated, leading some to invoke a name from our past. But let’s start first at Harvard in the middle of the last century, where Dr. Henry Murray ran the Psychological Clinic from 1937 to 1962, except for his period of service in the OSS during the Second World War. Murray developed an approach he called personology, which sounds very New Age guru, but isn’t, Murray engaged in decades of experiments using human subjects, even supervising Timothy Leary’s early research, which might suggest a progressive edge, but Murray turns out instead to be a sinister figure, best known for the experiments he ran at the end of his career. Continue reading “In Power: March 18, 2018”

John Perry Barlow had robbed his third bank in as many weeks, and with a pile of money and a gargantuan thirst, he crossed the border into Mexicali. He had been on a bender for a full week when he managed to stagger out into the blinding light of day. In the dusty unpaved street he saw a catch-colt drawing a coffin cart and nearby, a woman who might have been fifty or a hundred and fifty trying to turn a patch of scorched ground green. It was a moment that would change his life. In his later years, only a few friends knew that he was a fugitive, had once been a man of violence. The John Perry Barlow most knew was a man who constructed irrigations systems from spare parts and put a new roof on the school house, a man who would stand up to the bandits, for there were still bandits, and he knew them as he knew himself. He was the protector of that town well into the early 20th century.

Or maybe, just maybe, John Perry Barlow was the son of Wyoming Mormons who dropped acid with Timothy Leary, walked away from admission to Harvard Law and from a contract for a novel with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, publishers of luminaries like Flannery O’Conner and Jack Kerouac. He would become a writer in another form, eventually putting his immense talent to work as a lyricist for Bob Weir and the Grateful Dead, penning hits like Mexicali Blues and Cassidy. Continue reading “What is truth? March 11, 2018”

As Rome approached what it understood to be its thousandth year, many felt that theirs was a nation in decline. Roman values had been undermined by modern ways of thinking and wave after wave of immigrants from other cultures that had been absorbed into the empire, making Rome less Roman. They needed to make Rome great again, and to do that meant getting back to tradition. So it was that the nationalists, with the help of the armed forces, installed Messius Quintus Decius as emperor in 248, though it would take a year for him to consolidate his power.

Once his position was secure and difficult senators had been bullied into submission, Decius did what needed to be done. He knew what it would take to bring prosperity back to Rome. He issued an executive order that everyone must sacrifice to the old Roman gods, for clearly the nation was being punished for not sticking to that old time religion. Those who completed their sacrifice received a certificate called a libellus, proof that they were loyal. Dozens of these libelli have been recovered. Continue reading “Donatists: March 4, 2018”