Constructive Faith

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”

Though many know that I was once a member of the on-stage audience of kids for an episode of “The Jim and Tammy Show,” starring Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, few will know that I once served as a youth “ambassador” during a Billy Graham crusade, trained to stand up front during the altar call to receive children who were ready to be “saved” as the congregation of thousands gathered in the arena sang “Just As I am.” The call to ministry, if you believe in such a thing, goes back to my childhood.

Graham, who died this week, was a Southern Baptist, as was I during my childhood. Despite being a Southern Baptist and from North Carolina, Graham supported desegregation, and was a close friend of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Graham made some missteps around race too, but no one is perfect.

More conservative than not, Graham was still able to engage with others who did not share his particular interpretation of scripture. To be sure, he was not out there marching for marriage equality, but he was not quite the hate-filled demagogue that his son, Franklin, has proven to be. So while he described himself as an “evangelical,” meaning he sought to share what he understood as salvation through Christ with others, I am hesitant to call the elder Graham a fundamentalist in the way the term is used today. Continue reading “Teresa: February 25, 2018”

A recent issue of the New York Times Sunday Magazine featured two articles on artificial intelligence. One story described the use of a deep neural network in determining when to switch from curative care to palliative care. This decision, to switch from healing to comfort, is agonizing and emotional, for patients and families that must consent, for those who provide care and realize that there will be no cure. The timing of the decision is critical, for there is a sweet spot, a window between three and twelve months before death, when making the right decision makes a world of difference, can make for a good death.

Enter Anand Avati, a graduate student at Stanford. His team started with data on 200,000 deceased patients. They entered all of the data for the first 160,000, including medical records of diagnoses, procedures, hospitalizations, and treatments, as well as the actual date of death, then used the remaining 40,000 patients to test the accuracy of their algorithm. The results were remarkable. Not only did the algorithm successfully predict those who would die within the nine-month palliative care window with 90% accuracy, but it also was 95% accurate in identifying those who would live longer than twelve months, in other words, those for whom it was definitely too early to switch from curative to palliative care. Continue reading “Mummy Dearest: February 18, 2018”

In an age of dangerous tweets, we can easily forget that our hyper-connected world is not the first to see relationships and anger ping-pong across the globe, though admittedly things are way faster today, much too fast for some of us. In fact, there were key people, connectors if you will, long before six degrees of Kevin Bacon, people who seemed to know everybody even before Facebook “friends” and SnapChat, especially in small elite worlds like those of royalty, the super rich, and the arts.

Let us start with the British naturalist Gerald Durrell, who spent an important part of his childhood on the Greek island of Corfu, seen in both the BBC television movie “My Family and Other Animals,” named after his first autobiographical work, and in the recent ITV and Masterpiece co-produced mini-series “The Durrells of Corfu.” Gerald’s career was one of only two distinguished careers in the same family. His older brother Lawrence was a novelist best known for his Alexandrian Quartet, at one time seriously considered for a Nobel Prize. And it is Lawrence, not Gerald,who appears on the list of lovers of that infamous 20th century connector, writer, memoirist, and sexual revolutionary Anaïs Nin, best known for her liaison with the novelist Henry Miller and possibly his wife June. Continue reading “Manufacturing Enemies: February 11, 2018”

The emperor Hadrian is best known for the wall constructed during his reign to mark the northern border of Roman Britannia, appropriately called Hadrian’s Wall, but the empire he ruled was massive, half again as big as the continental US, stretching from modern England to the Middle East, and it is to that eastern edge of that empire that we turn our attention this morning, to the Palestine of those ancient Roman times and to the Palestine of today.

The Bar Kokhba rebellion, a full-scale war between Judeans and Romans, broke out in the year 132 of the Common Era, while Hadrian was emperor and a little over a century after the execution of Jesus. This third and final Jewish War was devastating for both sides. It is believed that more than 580,000 Jews were killed, with many more dying of famine and disease in the following years. Countless thousands of Jews were carried off in chains, enslaved, while all the rest were prohibited from Jerusalem and the region around it. Roman casualties were heavy as well, with the 22nd Legion disbanded completely due to heavy losses, and the 9th never recovering, disbanding a few years later. The only worse defeat suffered by Roman forces to that date might have been against the Germanic tribes at Teutoburg Forest, an infamous battle that left Augustus literally banging his head into the wall while shouting “Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!” Continue reading “Wells and Walls: February 4, 2018”

The public intellectual Andrew Sullivan, in a recent piece for New York magazine, wrote about what some believe are excesses in the #MeToo movement. And there appear to be some excesses, cases like that of Aziz Ansari, where morning after regret can morph into the public pillory, or that of James Franco, where there was no force or power involved, just general sleaziness and a man making promises he didn’t intend to keep. Do we really need to tell young people that seducers lie? They should even be able to figure that out even with their faces down to their smartphones.

In his article, Sullivan described his own experience with hormone replacement therapy and the very real emotional and physical effects of testosterone washing though his body. The piece, titled “#MeToo and the Taboo Topic of Nature” in no way challenges the right of women to be free from assault, harassment, and even pressure. The things that have been in the news have been both breathtaking and really not at all surprising. As we watched the Met simulcast of Tosca yesterday, I mentioned to Dr. Garfield that the operatic villain Scarpia looks relatively mild compared to Harvey Weinstein. Continue reading “Peter Beatbox: January 28, 2018”

Some of you grew up in multi-cultural environments. I can’t imagine how awesome that must have been.

I never saw a bagel as a kid, never ate Indian food. My late ’60’s world was pretty mono-chromatic and mono-cultural, so it was quite exciting when I was ten years-old and the scandalous divorcee who lived in the house behind ours sold it to an elderly Chinese couple who had, stereotypically, made it in America by opening a laundry business. Their discarded Chinese newspapers were sources of mystery and wonder to the neighborhood kids.

As is typical for immigrant families, they had worked hard, and the second generation thrived, going on to colleges, professional schools, and successful careers. But we were no sophisticates, didn’t quite understand the gifts that every wave of immigrants has added to our stew-pot nation. The most important topic of neighborhood discussion wasn’t the wonder of their success. It was the vegetables Mr. Yip was growing in what seemed chaotic disorder in this suburban paradise of orderly rows, beans that were too long and cabbages that didn’t look like cabbage. He had a sense of humor about it all, no doubt a necessary survival trait as a stranger in a strange land. One day, when my dad and his close friend Baxter were standing where the four backyards joined, Baxter yelled out to ask Mr. Yip why he was digging such a deep hole. Without missing a beat, he responded that he was going home. Continue reading “Mr. Miyagi: January 21, 2018”