Sharp language

The internet has provided all of us with an advanced class on using innuendo, piercing invective and anger to make a point with our writing.

Now, instead of simply seething or ranting, just about anyone can write an email or a social media post that absolutely destroys someone else.

To what end?

If the goal is to persuade, it’s clearly not working.

If we want to let someone know we’re upset, it might be easier to just say so.

The purpose of speech is to alert others to our point of view, and the purpose of conversation is to connect and to persuade.

It’s not clear that making language angrier or more cutting is helping much.

-- Seth Godin, Sharp Language

Indy 500

This is one impression gig!  Couldn't have been a better day.

Pics here….

Contemplative Nonviolence

Through contemplative nonviolence, we focus on the nonviolent Jesus and the Holy Spirit of peace, love, and compassion, and in so doing, we undergo a lifelong, daily, ongoing conversion to nonviolence, a new beginning that starts every time we sit to meditate. In this contemplative practice, we deal with our inner violence and surrender ourselves to the God of peace, even if we do not want to or do not understand why we should. We undergo a cold-turkey withdrawal from violence. . . . It’s painful and uncomfortable—and literally our salvation. This journey for the sobriety of nonviolence will continue for the rest of our lives. . . . It’s a long-haul, ever-deepening awareness, a daily surrender of our violence to God, so that over time we are transformed by God’s disarming love and sent into the world of war as God’s peacemakers. . . .

-- John Dear

Those who follow Jesus should attract the same people Jesus attracted and frustrate the same people Jesus frustrated.

-- Shane Claiborne

Randoms...?

We tend to stick with what we like — which more often than not are just things we’re familiar with.

It doesn't seen hard to observe (unless there was trauma involved), that many (most?) people return to the ways and values they grew up with.

It seems a little conspicuous how indifferent change is to our opinions about whether or not it should happen.

How much of self-acceptance is correlated to our perception of how much we would lose if we more fully did (accept ourselves)?

Prior Randoms...?

Injustice

Ahead and Around

'Poem for the week' -- "Ahead and Around":

Met, quarreled, quilled the bird of peace,

Untidied a pleasant plane.

Ahead accused Around of complete deceit,

Around accused Ahead of being discontented.

Neither listened to each.

Either lined on,

Making round straight and straight round,

Permitting nothing in-between,

Licked space clean,

Fattened unhappily and flew

Along the geometrical faith of two-and-two,

Hated apart; and far and far

Each wanderer

Hoped toward a spiritually reconnoitered heaven.

“For,” cried sinuous Around,

“More and less than I, am I,

Nature of all things, all things the nature of me.”

Ahead echoed the cry.

Sped toward its own eternity

Of the sweet end before the bitter beyond, beyond.

And both were brave and both were strong,

And the ways of both were like and long,

And adventured freely in fettered song:

One that circled as it sang,

One that longitudinally rang.

The spite prospered. The spite stopped.

Both earned the same end differently,

Prided along two different paths,

Reached the same humility

Of an old-trodden start.

Birth is the beginning where all part.

Death is the beginning where they meet.

-- Laura Riding Jackson

How People Think

How people think about the country depends on the stories they hear about it.

-- Heather Cox Richardson

In the old days, there was a lot of hope that the information age would make us smarter. It didn’t. Instead, high-speed communication, combined with algorithms that discern our biases and feed us what we want, helped us sort ourselves into echo chambers.

-- Rachael Larimore

Symptoms vs Causes

For all the things that politics is interested in legislating, it seems like it’s much more about how to deal with symptoms than it is about causes.

Perhaps, that’s because it is really difficult to legislate things in the causal realm. But, endless treatments of symptoms without recognition of the disease, in the end, is somewhere between futile and hopeless.

At some point, all you end up doing is legislating your legislation, because you're not really working on the problem.

In 2004, a ten-year federal ban on assault weapons expired, and since then. mass shootings have tripled. Zusha Elinson, who is writing a history of the bestselling AR-15 military style weapon used in many mass shootings, notes that there were about 400,000 AR-15 style rifles in America before the assault weapons ban went into effect in 1994. Today, there are 20 million.

-- Heather Cox Richardson

We must find those among us who are willing to work for the service of the people, rather than for power. Because until that happens, nothing substantive will change.

...finish here.

Intellectual Humility Deficit

Instagram: Adam Grant

At the root of our polarization problem is a deficit of intellectual humility.  Too many people refuse to admit that they might be wrong.

Diversity of thought open minds.  Intensity of conviction closes them.

Knowing your knowledge is incomplete is a prerequisite for learning.

-- Adam Grant

To Notice

I'm wondering...if it is our job to notice.

Should Feel Like

Christianity should feel like, "my love for others continues to deepen," not "my beliefs are more correct than anyone else's."

-- Ben Cremer

The opposite of faith is not doubt — it's certainty. 

-- Paul Tillich

What If Jesus

Randoms...?

We assume a lot, until we’re forced to reconsider.

Almost any serious engagement of life seems to result in a shift in the questions we're asking.

God seems to delight in using surprise to awaken us.

How do you react to this observation — life will tame you, one way or another?

Prior Randoms...?

We Just Don't See How Deep It Is

Or Something Like That

On the Lighter Side:

Meaning of Life?

What is the meaning of life? That was all — a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.

-- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Simulated

Much of our lives seem to be increasingly simulated.  Is there is a tipping point over the degree to which our experience with life is simulated?  What is impacted when our orientation to reality is less and less with real things?  

It appears we are now capable of simulating nearly everything that one can experience in life. AI is, basically, premised on the notion that we can have something virtually, as opposed to actually having it (…and, we seem to have become quite content with this).

But, is anything being lost, particularly when this becomes so pervasive; in so many of the dimensions of our lives? 

Gaming is obviously one example.  But, what about so many other things now?  People say they like nature, but how many actually spend time in it...as opposed to just looking at it or watching something about it?  Many of our home environments are freshly designed for the purpose of entertaining others — how many actually ever have anybody over?  

Even food is simulated now — you can just drink the basic ingredients you need.  And then there is the changing nature of money — it's hard to tell what is real money and what isn't.  Our sense of sexuality doesn't really even seem to require actual sex with another person.  What about our social-media influenced ideas about real connection with others (...or relationships in general)?  …the list goes on and on, and on and on.   

Many of our experiences are less and less with real things, but rather just simulation of real things.

When is the consequence of this like a tipping point, from which we no longer really know what reality actually is or how to relate to it?  Is this still a premature concern, or are we already in too deep to know any better?

...finish here.

False Assumptions

Instagram: stephenmattson

Information

I've noticed...I tend retain information more than the source of the information.  This helps with bandwidth, but also reduces it from time-to-time...when the source is essential to the information.

What We Need Most

What we need most

in order to make progress

is to be silent

before this great God

with our appetite

and with our tongue,

for the language

he best hears

is silent love.

-- St. John of the Cross, Sayings of Light and Love

HOW POLITICS POISONED THE EVANGELICAL CHURCH

The movement spent 40 years at war with secular America. Now it’s at war with itself.

I’ve spent my life watching evangelicalism morph from a spiritual disposition into a political identity. It’s heartbreaking.

Evangelicals — including my own father — became compulsively political, allowing specific ethical arguments to snowball into full-blown partisan advocacy, often in ways that distracted from their mission of evangelizing for Christ.

To many evangelicals today, the enemy is no longer secular America, but their fellow Christians, people who hold the same faith but different beliefs.

How did this happen? For generations, white evangelicals have cultivated a narrative pitting courageous, God-fearing Christians against a wicked society that wants to expunge the Almighty from public life.

I’ve heard casual talk of civil war inside places that purport to worship the Prince of Peace.

And, far from feeling misplaced, these conversations draw legitimacy from a sense of divine justice. The Church is not a victim of America’s civic strife. Instead, it is one of the principal catalysts.

Having convinced so many evangelicals that the next election could trigger the nation’s demise, Christian leaders effectively turned thousands of churches into unwitting cells in a loosely organized, hazily defined, existentially urgent movement — the types of places where paranoia and falsehoods flourish and people turn on one another.  ...continue here.

-- Tim Alberta

Randoms...?

Sometimes you just have to you put yourself in a quiet enough place that you can hear the sounds of life.

It may not be comforting, but it is helpful to know that often the catching-on of a good idea is mostly a matter of timing — when the moment merges with a good idea that makes or allows it to become something of substance.

God is always thinking of you and in ways you can’t even imagine — often through other people.

So, how about...we just stop clicking / scrolling stuff that looks 'outrageous'?

Prior Randoms...?

Effects of Remote Schooling and School Poverty on Reading

MarketWatch

Contact Zone

'Poem for the week' -- "Contact Zone":

Contact 

That’s when two stuff 

Touch, yeah? 

Just like when the tides come in 

And touch the shores

Bringing what it will. 

Fish from the deep 

Limu from the shores 

ʻOpihi from the rocks 

Coconuts on the drift 

Logs from the continent 

People from around the world 

Plastics and ʻopala of all sorts. 

The shore has no choice 

It has to accept 

Whatever the tides bring. 

Here we are 

In this swirling muliwai 

Of ideas and manaʻo 

Philosophies and spiritualities. 

Like the tides 

Ebbing and flowing 

The shore has no choice. 

But we do!

-- Imaikalani Kalahele

The Time That Is Given

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.

-- J.R.R. Tolkien

Don't Know What It Is

What do you do when you feel like something is happening to you and you don’t know what it is?

When it feels like you are becoming something that you are not yet (or not fully aware of yet) — when your sense-of-self feels too connected to who you have been. And, in some way, that combination of 'have been', 'are', and 'becoming' sense of things is disorienting.

Put another way, do you ever wonder if you already are something that you haven’t yet become?

Like some cosmic game of Wordle, something has selected your word, but you don’t know what it is yet. And, you are trying to use the information that you have to deduce something, via a process of elimination, that is already there...and it isn't really working. Having just turned 59, maybe my sense of things is that there are only so many more guesses — like being on guess 5 (out of 6).

These days, I feel like this is happening to me. Something is moving, but in slow motion. I keep going, but not sure where or why...not knowing what is happening (or if something even is).

What If...nothing is happening...and I just want it to?

...finish here.

May...

May your strongest convictions lead
to curiosity, not to fundamentalism.

May your deepest wounds lead to
healing, not to destructive patterns.

May the worst of you lead to humility,
not to gaslighting others.

May you always keep an open heart,
and an open mind, towards hope.

-- Carlos A. Rodriguez

This could easily be a mantra for me — so many elements I aspire to.

Basic Humanity

Ever noticed...that TV works when it appeals to your basic humanity? 

The problem is, that much of the time anymore, the part of humanity it appeals to is your basic fears.

Just look at the subject matter of most television programming; at its core, what are the consistent subjects that are being portrayed and why?

What dynamic is being activated / habituated in us when we so regularly diet on fear?

Mothers Day: Unity, Liberty, Charity

In essentials, unity; in nonessentials, liberty; in all things, charity.

-- St. Augustine

Though most certainly not intended as such, I can't quite imagine a more Mothers Day-appropriate description of many good mothers.

Randoms...? (from Others)

This is what happens in a nation captured by negative polarization. There are millions of people that aren’t merely unpersuadable — our cocooned media landscape makes them effectively unreachable. It’s not just that opposing messaging doesn’t break through; they’re not even aware of their opponent’s argument.

-- David French

If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy. 

-- David Frum 

The ego has a need to feel separate and superior.  It sees its own faults in other people.

-- Richard Rohr

In the Greek language, the phrases “love neighbor” and “love yourself” are connected by the word os, which is like an equal sign. This suggests we are called to love the self and the neighbor in exactly the same way. When we don’t love ourselves, it is impossible to love our neighbor. . . .

-- Jacqui Lewis

...any thread? Prior Randoms...? (from Others).

Learning Loss in Math

The Morning

Anywhere

Visual - "Anywhere":

Dismals Canyon, AL

I can reflect on the past. 

I can wonder about the future. 

But, the only day I can live, is today. 

...and, like this image portrays, I can do that anywhere.

Neithersideism

Sometimes, I’m asked by readers, “You’re kind of hard to make, politically, these days. Whose side are you on, anyway?” To which I respond: “You’ve heard of bothsidesism? Well in the last decade or so, I’ve become an adherent of neithersideism.”  

Why should I have to pledge my troth to chiselers, demagogues, and performing monkeys? To partisan gasbags and green-room gangsters and social-media harlots? AOC vs. MTG — to take but two party mascots — ain’t really a choice I’m interested in making, no matter how many partisan hacks stick a gun in my back and tell me it’s my God-appointed duty to do so. 

Neither, best I can tell, has any real interest in setting our country right. They’re much more interested in outrage — both provoking it and feigning it. Exhibitionistic rage is the fuel that fires their engines. And they’re not opposites, so much as bookends: professional hysterics whose entire careers are designed to agitate and inflame.

-- Matt Labash, Against Performing Monkeys

...a tidal wave of political narcissism opposed to the idea of social responsibility.

-- Garrison Keillor

My main thought is that too many view this all as a game. For whatever reason — maybe they're young and childless, or their kids aren't actually in school? — they see things in the abstract. You age into a community with other people's families and children and you get along to go along and you grow to love their kids and you find that most people on the local level just want to live reasonable, decent lives, because caring about other people is the only reason to be alive. This discourse is so divorced from that. I don't know how to square it. At the school bus stop, at the ice rink: I am awash in people just being people, regular people. The gender wars, the fascism this-or-that: none of it registers. Whence all the alarmism? The discourse is alarming. I get that. It really is. But if you quit participating in it..."

-- Ben McGrath

Law and Order

Why are we SO interested in law and order?

Especially, since it is often Christians who seem to lead this charge (though the Christian element less and less looks like what we thought it did).  Americans, in general, are armed to the teeth now.  Is that why you can almost smell the fear involved in this preoccupation?  Are we afraid and therefore armed, or armed and therefore afraid?

I’m not saying that law and order is not important or has no benefits — certainly it does, especially socially. But, the obsession with it, especially when promoted by certain groups of people, is conspicuous and reveals a real lack of something — like a false belief that if we could just have it or maintain it, we would be fine. 

And, clearly, that is not true. There is still a huge gap between conformity (and even obedience) and...love.

There are very significant reasons why there is so much in the biblical Old Testament after the Pentateuch (law). God was interested in far more than compliance, even noting (at length sometimes) that God really wants something more than the mere offering of sacrifices, which again we tend to see primarily as the 'orderly' payment of penalties. 

But, it is true that this something more IS much more difficult to manage or control.  So, perhaps this is why we prefer the simplicity of even rudimentary collective calls for law-and-order (or, we could just shoot them...you know, the disorderly).

Really, though, where is the ideology (if not the expression) of love these days?

...finish here.

Who Can Give Them Nothing

You can easily judge the character of a person by how they treat those who can give them nothing.

-- Simon Sinek

What Is Sadness Doing To Me?

I’m wondering…about an abiding sadness I am feeling.

Ever since my son, Conner, had a seizure on December 20, 2021, I have had a growing sense of this.

He had another seizure on Saturday and I sank into tears at the news, even before knowing any of the details.  

I'm clearly carrying something, like an abiding sadness...for him, for his wife, for all of us who know him.  

So, I'm also wondering about how such a thing works for me.  What does abiding sadness do to people?  What is it doing to me?

I'm guessing this answer will take time to discover....

So many people are suffering, in one way or another (at that level, we are all in this together)....

Perhaps the illusion is more when we think we're not...or shouldn't have to, or that it's not normal.

Perhaps it is awareness of our suffering that is the issue we can work with, rather than the myriad ways we've come up with to deny that we do.

Perhaps it is the shared-ness of our suffering that illuminates something in us, like the true nature of our collective humanity.

So, I wonder what sadness is doing to me.  It can feel bad.  But, maybe it isn't; maybe it is doing something for me, like opening me up to something far more common than I'd prefer to think.  Maybe it provides me a more accurate view of my humanity and how I assess that in relation to everyone's humanity.  Maybe it gifts me with a compassion for our collective and individual experience.  

And, maybe, that compassion enables a kind of love that is more accessible to all those around me.

"Be Not Afraid"

Nadia Bolz-Weber describes how Christians might interpret the oft-given scriptural command to “Be not afraid":    

Never once have I stopped being afraid just because someone said that.  

I AM afraid. . . .

So maybe our hope for becoming unafraid is found in . . . the part where Jesus calls Herod a fox and then refers to himself as a mother hen.   

A mother hen.   

Maybe that beautiful image of God could mean something important for us: and by us I mean we fragile, vulnerable human beings who face very real danger. I can’t bear to say that this scripture is a description of what behaviors and attitudes you could imitate if you want to be a good, not-afraid person. But neither can I tell you that the Mother Hen thing means that God will protect you from Herod or that God is going to keep bad things from happening to you.   

Because honestly, nothing actually keeps danger from being dangerous.   

A mother hen cannot actually keep a determined fox from killing her chicks. So where does that leave us? I mean, if danger is real, and a hen can’t actually keep their chicks out of danger, then what good is this image of God as Mother Hen if faith in her can’t make us safe?  

Well, today I started to think that maybe it’s not safety that keeps us from being afraid.   

Maybe it’s love.  

Which means that a Mother Hen of a God doesn’t keep foxes from being dangerous . . . a Mother Hen of a God keeps foxes from being what determines how we experience the unbelievably beautiful gift of being alive.  

God the Mother Hen gathers all of her downy feathered, vulnerable little ones under God’s protective wings so that we know where we belong, because it is there that we find warmth and shelter.   

But Faith in God does not bring you safety.   

The fox still exists.   

Danger still exists.   

And by that I mean, danger is not optional, but fear is.    

Because maybe the opposite of fear isn’t bravery.  Maybe the opposite of fear is love. So in the response to our own Herods, in response to the very real dangers of this world we have an invitation as people of faith: which is to respond by loving.

-- Nadia Bolz-Weber

WOAH!