Today is the great Christian feast of Pentecost, commemorating King Jesus pouring out the Holy Spirit upon his people. In honor of this great event in salvation history, we present magnificent pieces from two different Bach Pentecost cantatas.
The first is the opening Chorus from Cantata BWV 172, “Erschallet, ihr Lieder, erklinget, ihr Saiten!” (“Ring out, you songs, resound, you strings!”). On the great festive days of the Church, nothing is more joyous and celebratory than hearing a choir raise its voices to the accompaniment of the bright sounds of Bach trumpets.
Ring out, you songs, resound, you strings!
Oh blessed times !
God will prepare our souls to be his temples.
• • •
The second selection is a recording by the Choir and Orchestra of the J. S. Bach Foundation, at the Protestant church Trogen in Switzerland, featuring the Alto Solo, “Wohl euch, ihr auserwahlten Seelen,” (Happy are you chosen souls) from Bach’s Cantata BWV 34. The soloist is Margot Oitzinger. Some have called this the most beautiful aria Bach ever wrote, and I think it fitting to combine the bright and brilliant festive nature of our first piece with this intimate and moving song of comfort for those in whom God made his dwelling place.
Happy are you, you chosen souls,
whom God has picked for his dwelling.
Who can choose a greater salvation?
Who can count the abundance of blessings?
And this is the work of God.
”It is talk-compelling. It puts you in a good temper, it makes you satisfied with yourself and your fellow beings, it sweeps away the worries and cobwebs of the week.”
A new survey by the Pew Research Center of 18 Eastern and Central European countries, including Russia, has revealed a resurgence of Orthodox Christianity since the time the Soviet Union fell. Orthodox Christians make up about 57 percent of the total population of Eastern and Central Europe, and are a substantial majority in almost 10 of 18 countries. However, the study found that few Orthodox engage much in religious practice.
The region’s Catholics, in comparison, while likely to report identical religious beliefs, are much more likely than Orthodox to be involved in a number of religious practices like weekly church attendance, taking Communion, fasting, and sharing their belief or faith. About 28 percent of Catholics attend church every week.
Pew also reported last week that 17% of all U.S. newlyweds had a spouse of a different race or ethnicity, marking more than a fivefold increase since 1967, when 3% of newlyweds were intermarried. In that year, the U.S. Supreme Court in the Loving v. Virginia case ruled that marriage across racial lines was legal throughout the country. Until this ruling, interracial marriages were forbidden in many states. There were some interesting variations by race and sex, as you can see below:
In sporting news, Mr. Met was caught giving hometown fans the bird this week.
The employee has been reassigned, which is tragic considering all the surgeries it took to shape his head into a giant baseball.
Here’s some good news for those of you with too much money. You can now buy samurai armor for your pets.
Or, if you’ve got more time than money, you can do what Vanyu Krastev [what a great name] does in his hometown in Bulgaria. More pics here.
Pastor Keith Gomez, leader of the “old-fashioned, independent” Northwest Bible Baptist Church in Elgin, Illinois, argued in a recent sermon that if it wasn’t for slavery, black people “would still be in Africa with a bone in their nose fighting lions.” Gomez, who is also the “founder and president” of Providence Baptist College (his highest earned degree is a B.A. from Hyles-Anderson College) gave the following advice to his 1,000 member congregation:
When you get in the Pauline — are y’all listening to me? — when you get into the Pauline epistles, you’re getting in the doctrine. So why would you get in Philemon when he’s trying to teach you how to treat your slave? If they should be slaves.
See, what you wanna do is turn in to TBN [Trinity Broadcasting Network] and listen to them odd birds who don’t know doctrine whatsoever. And then you hate slavery because we were taught to hate that. Because we’re so nasty.
And some of you little whities can’t get it either. If it wasn’t for slavery, those folks would still be in Africa with a bone in their nose fighting lions. And if you don’t like that, you can lump it any way you want. That ain’t a prejudice. That is factual and historical.
Okay, I think I need a shower now. Or maybe a story of a woman moving from homeless to a being a Harvard grad:
Here’s a question you may not have thought of before: If you are attracted to women, but not women with penises, are you a bigot? More specifically, are you trans-phobic? This person would say yes. If anyone can actually watch the whole thing and follow the logic you are a better person than I:
Even if you escaped being the kind of bigot that doesn’t want to have sex with people who have penises, you are not out of the bigotry woods yet. You may be squirrel-speciesist. A peer-review journal, Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, last month published a paper by Teresa Lloro-Bidart, an associate professor of liberal studies at Cal Poly. It was titled, When ‘Angelino’ squirrels don’t eat nuts: a feminist posthumanist politics of consumption across southern California. I made sure this wasn’t satire before I quote the abstract for you:
Given that the shift in tree squirrel demographics is a relatively recent phenomenon, this case presents a unique opportunity to question and re-theorize the ontological given of ‘otherness’ that manifests, in part, through a politics whereby animal food choices ‘[come] to stand in for both compliance and resistance to the dominant forces in [human] culture’. I, therefore, juxtapose feminist posthumanist theories and feminist food studies scholarship to demonstrate how eastern fox squirrels are subjected to gendered, racialized, and speciesist thinking in the popular news media as a result of their feeding/eating practices, their unique and unfixed spatial arrangements in the greater Los Angeles region, and the western, modernist human frame through which humans interpret these actions. I conclude by drawing out the implications of this research for the fields of animal geography and feminist geography.
Which brought to mind this question:
Would it be piling on to mention that Sceptic Magazine recently got a hoax article published in another peer-reviewed academic journal? Well, I’m going to anyway. It was titled, The conceptual penis as a social construct, and the authors deliberately made it as absurd as possible [“Manspreading — a complaint levied against men for sitting with their legs spread wide — is akin to raping the empty space around him”] but heavily littered with left-wing academic jargon. It got high remarks from the reviewers the journal assigned to it, and so was published in the journal Cogent Social Science. Here are the abstract and some findings:
Anatomical penises may exist, but as pre-operative transgendered women also have anatomical penises, the penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a social construct isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity. Through detailed poststructuralist discursive criticism and the example of climate change.
We conclude that penises are not best understood as the male sexual organ, or as a male reproductive organ, but instead as an enacted social construct that is both damaging and problematic for society and future generations. The conceptual penis presents significant problems for gender identity and reproductive identity within social and family dynamics, is exclusionary to disenfranchised communities based upon gender or reproductive identity, is an enduring source of abuse for women and other gender-marginalized groups and individuals, is the universal performative source of rape, and is the conceptual driver behind much of climate change.
Okay. Enough of that. How about we cleanse the palate with an incredibly cute video of young pandas keeping their human from sweeping up some leaves?
You probably don’t want to watch Jim Bakker link the Manchester bombings to the attacks on the Republican Party to the closing of the Ringling Brothers circus (hint: no more elephants) to the collapse of the “Hillary Steps” on mount Everest. But if you have four minutes and a few million brain cells to spare, have at it:
A judge in Massachusettsdenied a defendant’s request to juggle during his trial. And a Utah judge has ruled that a man cannot marry his laptop. Why don’t we just shred that constitution, ya know?
President Trump took the U. S. our of the Paris accords, a deal that was signed by 194 other countries. The only two countries who are not part of the Paris accord, besides us, are Nicaragua and Syria. And they’re doing great, of course, so why would we not join them?
A robot ‘preacher’ that beams lights from its hands and can give automated blessings to the faithful has been installed in Wittenberg, Germany, the home of the Reformation.
After the robot wishes users a ‘warm welcome,’ it asks them if they want to be blessed by a male or female voice. It then asks the believer ‘what blessing do you want,’ which results in the robot making a mechanical sound as it raises its arms to the heavens and starts to smile. Lights then start to flash in the robot’s arms as it says “God bless and protect you” and recites a biblical verse. Church spokesman Sebastian von Gehren said: “It is an experiment that is supposed to inspire discussion.” The robot can also shoot deadly lasers from its eyes if you have sinned, but that option is only available in the Catholic and Baptist models.
Chaplain Mike is pleased to announce that one of his booklets, Guide Me Safely Home, Lord, has now been published by Catholic Publishing House in Korea. Please pray that it will be used to bring comforting thoughts and words there to people who are dying and to those who love them.
Well, that’s it for this week. I hope you got filled up. I leave you with a few minutes of Gregorian chants as we depart.
You tossed the earth
Into the oceans of space
Where it floated, glowing
Green against blackness.
From that tiny impact
Ripples circled outward,
Reaching warm fingers of water
Into the emptiness between the planets,
Lifting stars as lightly as
Drifting blossoms on their waves.
Not even at the farthest reaches
Of the universe do they ebb:
For against what rocky shore
Will love break, saying
I can go no farther?
Minds, Brains, Souls, and Gods: A Conversation of Faith, Psychology and Neuroscience – Part 4, Chapter 5: Have Benjamin Libet’s Experiments Exploded the Free-Will Myth?
This will be a continuation of the discussion we had last week. Benjamin Libet and his colleagues studied the timing of events in the brain and their relation to mental phenomena and published a study in 1983. It had been shown that electrodes attached to the head can record what is called a “slow negative potential shift” that occurs while someone is expecting a signal to which he will respond by making a movement. A related discovery was that a similar kind of “readiness potential” occurs before a person makes a voluntary action. Libet showed that this readiness potential change in the brain takes place as much as half a second before a subject mentally decides that he intends to make a movement.
Benjamin Libet
Researchers carrying out Libet’s procedure would ask each participant to sit at a desk in front of the oscilloscope timer. They would affix the EEG electrodes to the participant’s scalp, and would then instruct the subject to carry out some small, simple motor activity, such as pressing a button, or flexing a finger or wrist, within a certain time frame. No limits were placed on the number of times the subject could perform the action within this period.
From Wikipedia : “During the experiment, the subject would be asked to note the position of the dot on the oscilloscope timer when “he/she was first aware of the wish or urge to act” (control tests with Libet’s equipment demonstrated a comfortable margin of error of only -50 milliseconds). Pressing the button also recorded the position of the dot on the oscillator, this time electronically. By comparing the marked time of the button’s pushing and the subject’s conscious decision to act, researchers were able to calculate the total time of the trial from the subject’s initial volition through to the resultant action. On average, approximately two hundred milliseconds elapsed between the first appearance of conscious will to press the button and the act of pressing it.
Researchers also analyzed EEG recordings for each trial with respect to the timing of the action. It was noted that brain activity involved in the initiation of the action, primarily centered in the secondary motor cortex, and occurred, on average, approximately five hundred milliseconds before the trial ended with the pushing of the button. That is to say, researchers recorded mounting brain activity related to the resultant action as many as three hundred milliseconds before subjects reported the first awareness of conscious will to act. In other words, apparently conscious decisions to act were preceded by an unconscious buildup of electrical activity within the brain. Libet’s experiments suggest to some that unconscious processes in the brain are the true initiator of volitional acts, and free will therefore plays no part in their initiation. If unconscious brain processes have already taken steps to initiate an action before consciousness is aware of any desire to perform it, the causal role of consciousness in volition is all but eliminated, according to this interpretation.”
To be fair to Libet, he also finds that conscious volition is exercised in the form of ‘the power of veto’; the idea that conscious acquiescence is required to allow the unconscious buildup of the readiness potential to be actualized as a movement. While consciousness plays no part in the instigation of volitional acts, Libet suggested that it may still have a part to play in suppressing or withholding certain acts instigated by the unconscious. Libet noted that everyone has experienced the withholding from performing an unconscious urge.
The deterministic viewpoint is summed up by material atheist Jerry Coyne:
The experiments show, then, that not only are decisions made before we’re conscious of having made them, but that the brain imagery can predict what decision will be made with substantial accuracy. This has obvious implications for the notion of “free will,” at least as most people conceive of that concept. We like to think that our conscious selves make decisions, but in fact the choices appear to have been made by our brains before we’re aware of them. The implication, of course, is that deterministic forces beyond are conscious control are involved in our “decisions”, i.e. that free will isn’t really “free”. Physical and biological determinism rules, and we can’t override those forces simply by some ghost called “will.” We really don’t make choices — they are made long before we’re conscious of having chosen strawberry versus pistachio ice cream at the store.
Coyne’s opinion was echoed last week by iMonk commenter Klasie Kraalogies:
Dynamical systems are deterministic. But they are non-linear in their determinism, ie, they appear to be indeterminate because of their complexity, especially within certain parameters – at that point where the parameters of the system causes it to go chaotic. Chaotic systems are not completely unpredictable either, yet one has to step through them to see what would happen, and can only make broad predictions as to potential outcomes.
Malcolm Jeeves responds to Libet experiments by noting the follow up attempt to replicate Libet’s experiment by Mark Hallet, Chief of the Human Motor Control Section at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Maryland in his paper, “The Timing of the Conscious Intention to Move”. Colleagues of Malcom re-analyzing Hallet’s data critiqued his analysis by pointing out it had the effect of systematically biasing the majority of the measurements of the conscious intention to move toward later times, and at the same time biasing the early readiness potential to earlier times. They thought that a fairer analysis will probably show that the time of the conscious intention to move is not significantly different from the onset time of the readiness potential. That is a very different interpretation from that advanced in the Libet paper.
Jeeves then notes a paper by Jeff Miller at the University of Otago titled, “Effects of Clock Monitoring on Electroencephalographic Activity: Is Unconscious Movement Initiation an Artifact of the Clock?” which took a fresh look at what the dependent variable in the Libet experiment was actually measuring. Their results challenged the conclusion that intentional movements are initiated by subconscious motor area activity.
Jeeves notes of the Miller study:
If their results hold up and their interpretation is accepted, then it will turn out that a lot of ink has been used, mainly by philosophers, grappling with the question of how our subjective feelings of acting freely can be defended. I think there is a lesson here. As scientists we work as hard as we can to ensure that any deductions made from our experimental results are the only ones possible, or at least the most plausible, before we rush to the defense of wider beliefs that a quick interpretation seems to imply…
…suggesting that the whole notion of free will has to be reexamined and, as some would claim, turned upside down, on the basis of Libet’s experiments and those that have followed it. Nothing could be further from the truth if we listen to those who are actually working on these experiments and understand what the results do and do not show.
Malcolm then points out this is not merely an academic or philosophical “angels dancing on the head of a pin” type discussion. It can have an “in-real-life” pernicious effects. He cites the example of a group of Italian scientists who found that undermining free-will beliefs had already been shown to influence social behavior. In their study they asked the question of whether undermining beliefs in free will might affect the brain correlates of voluntary motor preparation of the kind studied by Libet. One of two groups in their experiment called the “no free will” group, read a passage from a famous book claiming that scientists now recognize that free will is an illusion. The other group, the control group, read a passage on consciousness from the same book that did not mention free will. What they found was that the readiness potential that they measured was reduced in those individuals who were induced to disbelieve in free will. This they said was evident more than one second before participants consciously decided to move, a finding that suggest that the manipulation influenced intentional actions at preconscious stages.
Finally, Jeeves notes that a 2012 study by Aaron Schurger of the National Institutes of Health and Medical Research in Saclay, France that challenged Libet’s basic assumption, that EEG recordings showing a signal in the brain a half a second earlier than a decision to act was made, were interpreted as suggesting that “the brain prepares to act well before we are conscious of the urge to move”. Schurger presented the evidence from his EEG studies and says, “We have argued that what looks like a pre-conscious decision process may not in fact reflect a decision at all. It only looks that way because of the nature of spontaneous brain activity”. They conclude, “If we are correct, then the Libet experiment does not count as evidence against the possibility of conscious will”.
On consciousness and free will over the centuries there have been two general views. On the one hand, a dualist view claims that the brain and the mind are separate, that scientists simply study the brain, and that consciousness is a separate feature of the mind. On the other hand are the views of Coyne, Libet, Hallet et. al. which claims that the evidence does not support a dualist understanding. Their view is labelled “monism”. This is the view that mind is a product of the brain. Jeeves view is what he calls “dual-aspect monism”; that the mind and brain are both aspects of single reality. The mind and our consciousness is an emergent property of the complex physical system we are.
Last week iMonk commenter Stephen raised this question in a discussion with Robert F:
Why is mind an illusion if it evolved through physical processes? Why can’t you know anything if your mind is physical?
To which Robert F responded:
Do you agree that the mind’s experience of its own ability to choose one course of action over another, or others, is not an illusion? That it has a degree of freedom, not libertarian or absolute, to influence its own choices as a primary cause rather than being entirely fated to predetermined ends by the mechanism of cause and effect?
Or do you think that our experience of our own contingent freedom as minds and selves is completely illusory, that mind is only a link in a chain of cause and effect? If you think that our direct experience of our own contingent freedom is always illusory, that you have no more real volition than a star or stone, then you can no more know anything than they can. Isn’t that self-evident?
Robert F went on to say:
I guess volition and mind do get mixed up here, since the only way for mind to become aware of the world it finds itself in is to make choices that exert influence in and on that world. I see the mind as a causal agent, itself directly caused by God shaping the physical world into an instrument suitable for the experience, choices and expression of mind. If you want to call that Ghost in the Machine, go right ahead. It is totally compatible with my primary experience of myself, and the development of my awareness of self, including mind, and world. That awareness cannot be explained in its entirety by material processes, however much it may depend on them to find and develop itself in the world.
Later in the comment thread, Iain Lovejoy noted this cogent observation:
This discussion seems backwards. Only consciousness is directly experienced. Everything else is a deduced construct derived from that experience. The existence of the brain, of atoms, molecules, of physical reality itself is evidenced only by the conscious experience of it. It cannot be logically and consistently maintained, as far as I can see, that consciousness is somehow an “illusion” or of less certain or concrete existence than the material world, since the existence if the material world can only itself be evidenced by accepting as valid ones conscious perception of it.
To which Robert F responded:
Exactly. And this awareness of itself and the world around it is related to the mind’s ability to make non-predetermined, contingent choices in the non-self-aware world that the mind finds itself inhabiting. If the mind cannot make free choices not completely determined by material cause and effect, then it can no more know anything than a star or stone can.
Robert F – I knew he’d have my back
My hat is off to you, Robert, you have summarized my beliefs in this matter better than I ever could. God has indeed created, through the evolutionary process, an embodied being that is able to relate to Him. That is why I believe that evolution has a teleos and that teleos is a relationship with Him and with others. Love God with all your being, and love others as yourself. Now I could end this post here and I think end it well, except late in the day last Thursday, with the discussion seemingly over, Imonk friend and blogger , J. Michael Jones,(his new book is offered at the top of the iMonk Authors) weighed in with a comment. Mike is a medical practitioner in neurology for 35 years, and one of the most thoughtful Christians I know, so I thought I would give him the last word:
I have the feeling that I just walked into a bar or a coffee shop, where there was an excellent discussion, still hanging in the air, but now the group has moved on down the street to another bar, leaving behind only empty coffee cups, mugs and the burnt ends of old stogies. I think this is a wonderful topic and am so glad it has been discussed here. I just wish I had not come to the table so late.
J. Michael Jones
I will give my perspective as someone who has worked in neurology for 35 years and thought about this a lot. First of all, I think it is dangerous to move towards a deterministic view point. I’ve seen that happen before for theological reasons (what we called at the time hyper-Calvinism). It never ended well. A close friend took his own life as his one effort of self-actualization to break the chains of Christian determinism.
While neurological science has a lot to discover there are some known impressions. The structure of the brain, of course, has a profound influence on our behavior and thinking patterns. In nature vs nurture discussion, that structure has powerful genetic influences and then the influences of life experiences. Those can be emotional (PTSD), physical (closed head injury) or things like strokes. Forms of dementia, as mentioned in a previous post on this topic, would be another. In these events, brain structure is actually altered with different new pathways established, which can’t be easily reverse if at all.
However, in a poor example, the brain structure is like the computer hardware (memory, processor, etc.). We have some congenital software pre-loaded. The basics. But then through our learning, which happens every day, we are constantly rewriting that software, repairing it and changing it. It is more fluid in a computer because it is stored as digital (1s and 2s) electrons within memory chips (if I have that right and others here know better). In the brain, the memories are laid down in more physical changes such as new pathways. New, nerve endings are formed to connect different neurons. So, those pathways, once established, are not easily erased or rewritten but have to over-ridden with new circuits. So it is more complicated with us.
Now here is where it comes to conjecture. I believe that there is free will at the juncture where we (meaning ourselves, which you can define as our soul or our collective state of consciousness) decides the input into that software writing process. I could make the free will choice to surrender to Isis and have them imprison me and torture me for a year. Then, when I am released (if I were so lucky), I may have permanent damage to my brain from the chronic stress. I may never recover. But I made the choice to surrender and I don’t think I was forced to by some behavioral manipulation, spiritual fixed response or brain structure layout.
On a more subtle basis, this programming, I think relates to the Biblical concept of the renewing of the mind as in Romans 12:2. We do have a choice of input.
One big mistake evangelicals have made is seeing the body-mind connection in the same way the Pharaonic Egyptians or Pythagorean (Metempsychosis) see it. In that view, the brain is just a bowl of jelly and we (our consciousness) are purely spiritual beings who just happen to inhabit the body. In that model, there are no physical structures being laid down to form new ways of behavior. It is a mist that can change on a dime. Therefore, they believe that when you become a Christian, you can, by will, become perfect overnight. When that, of course, can’t happen, then you must start this life-long charade of pretending to be better than you really are, or could be.
The last thought is about patients I’ve seen with frontotemporal dementia, which is a brain structural problem (poorly understood), that impacts the judgment more than memory, at least at first. I had a patient, strong Christian man, who was arrested when he walked up to a middle school girl in broad daylight and grabbed her crotch. He later, at a family reunion, he asked his granddaughter if he could feel her breast. The family was totally embarrassed and could not understand why he had been so influenced by Satan and turned away from the Lord. I was able to get a brain PET scan and prove to the judge that his behavior was structural, not of his own choice and therefore was not culpable.
This is hard to deal with, but none of us, in my opinion, realize the haunting depths of the Fall, giving us diseases of the body and the mind.
‘I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill.’ I will tell of the decree of the Lord: He said to me, ‘You are my son; today I have begotten you.
• Psalm 2:6-7
Although all the elements of the gospel remain irreducibly vital, Jesus’s reign is the most important stage for us today.
• Matthew W. Bates
…the ascension demands that we think differently about how the whole cosmos is, so to speak, put together and that we also think differently about the church and about salvation.
• N.T. Wright
• • •
This past week (and Sunday in some churches), Christians celebrated Jesus’ ascension. In our congregation, one of the readings was this description from Acts:
So when they had come together, they asked him, ‘Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?’ He replied, ‘It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority.But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.’ When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going and they were gazing up towards heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, ‘Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up towards heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.’
• Acts 1:6-11
In the Creed each week we affirm: “He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of God. He will come again to judge the living and the dead.” I don’t think it was until I started practicing my faith in a liturgical tradition that I ever heard much about the ascension. And even now, it is emphasized only once a year to any great extent. I think it’s safe to say that most of us don’t give it pride of place in our thinking or conduct of the Christian faith. However, the ascension is a key component, the climax and culminating event in the biblical narrative of Jesus.
Bates makes the point that Jesus’ ascension, by which he was enthroned on high, is the very point of the gospel. The gospel is “The King Jesus Gospel” (McKnight). It is the story of “How God Became King” (Wright). The ascension is the means by which Jesus took the throne where he rules today. This is the culminating act in “the finished work of Christ” and it is the most important aspect of that work for our lives today. As Bates observes, the other works of Christ look back to the past — his incarnation, life and ministry, death, burial, and resurrection. But because of the ascension, a new age has been inaugurated — the age in which we now live — under King Jesus. As Bates puts it:
The kingdom of God, the reign of God on earth as in heaven, has been effected through God’s chosen agent, Jesus the Messiah, the Christ, the king— God’s very own Son.
Some of the best material I have read on the ascension is from the pen of N.T. Wright, whom Bates also acknowledges as a key thinker today about the subject. In his book, Surprised by Hope, Wright asserts that our failure to grasp the significance of this event has led to all kinds of bad theology and practice.
First, in many churches where thinking has become captive to Enlightenment rationalism, the idea of a person “ascending to heaven” seems ridiculous. There has been a tendency to collapse the ascension into the resurrection and to spiritualize both. “He ascended into heaven” means something like “Jesus went to heaven when he died and is now present with us all.”
On the other hand, others, equally captive to modernism, insist upon a purely literalistic reading of the text: Jesus rose bodily into the air and “up” into the clouds, showing his friends the bottom of his feet before he disappeared up into “heaven.” I’m not sure that’s exactly what smartphone video would have captured, but whatever the disciples saw (or thought they saw), Jesus somehow disappeared from their sight and was no longer available to sensate experience. One problem with a purely literal interpretation is that it tends to reinforce a certain view of “heaven” — that it is a place which is “up there” in the sky beyond the clouds. I’m persuaded that the text is trying to describe something rather indescribable, and that it leans more toward metaphor than literal reporting.
I find Wright’s alternative envisioning of “heaven” to be persuasive.
Basically, heaven and earth in biblical cosmology are not two different locations within the same continuum of space or matter. They are two different dimensions of God’s good creation. And the point about heaven is twofold. First heaven relates to earth tangentially so that the one who is in heaven can be present simultaneously anywhere and everywhere on earth: the ascension therefore means that Jesus is available, accessible, without people having to travel to a particular spot on earth to find him. Second, heaven is, as it were, the control room for earth; it is the CEO’s office, the place from which instructions are given. “All authority is given to me,” said Jesus at the end of Mathew’s Gospel, “in heaven and on earth.”
• Surprised by Hope, 111
In the light of this, Wright makes the case that the ascension is of vital importance for the church today because of what it says about our relationship to the risen and enthroned Christ. What it says is that Jesus is both with his people and absent from and over his people. When people downplay the ascension, Wright says, our tendency is to emphasize the presence of Jesus with the church, which can easily lead to identifying Jesus with the church and embracing a triumphalism that sees the church as the answer to the world’s woes. However, if we take the ascension seriously, we know that Jesus is not only with us but also that he also stands over us and addresses us as Lord and King, along with all people and all creation. By this we are humbled to realize our calling to serve the world in our King’s name as he did and as he instructs, empowered by his presence in the midst of our flaws and weaknesses. “All authority on heaven and earth has been given to me,” Jesus said, “Therefore, go…”
Let me close by mentioning that the ascension and enthronement of Jesus is not only an article of faith and rejoicing for me. It also causes my soul deep anguish and trouble for the questions it raises. The big one is this, and if you’ve been reading Internet Monk, you will recognize it as my greatest theodicy question: If Jesus is on the throne and reigning, why then is the world still in the shape it’s in? Why do we still cry and lament, “How long, O Lord?”
I don’t know how to adequately answer that question and am still troubled by it, but I find some help in two observations.
First, Jesus himself told us that the kingdom and the way it comes is a mystery. It is like a mustard seed, like leaven, like buried treasure. Whatever I might expect “triumph” to look like is probably misguided. Add to this the fact that Jesus destroyed death by dying himself, and I realize that my notions of Christ’s “reign” and how it will play out are not likely to be very accurate.
Second, the fact that the next step after Jesus’ ascension was the pouring out of the Holy Spirit upon the church to empower us for service shows me that a major part of the kingdom-coming plan is for God’s Spirit-filled people to participate in the ongoing work of Jesus on earth, doing it in the same fashion he did — by laying down our lives for others daily. The Epistle to the Ephesians tells us:
God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all” [emphasis mine] (Eph 1:20-23).
Perhaps my “theodicy” is more of an “anthropodicy” — why haven’t we, as the King’s ambassadors, done a better job of taking up our cross and following him?
A Tumultuous Relationship with the Bride By J. Michael Jones
An Inherent Church
I was born into a family that attended a Southern Baptist church, deep within the hollows of Appalachia. While I’m sure there are a broad spectrum of Baptist church experiences, mine must have been on the shady end, or at least one would hope.
As a child, the things that you learn are kneaded deeply into your soul and that was no different for our concept of church. The purpose of going to church was clear, it was about pretense and penitence. Everyone in our community behaved very differently within the hallowed walls of the little white chapel than we did in our public lives. Apparently, we believed that God was limited in His perception and therefore easily duped.
The pretense wasn’t limited to the mischievous behavior of the laity. The pastor had a mistress on the side for all those years and it was common knowledge by everyone, save his wife. Many, including my dear mother, even helped to provide him cover for his sexual liaisons. The amazing thing that it was not a bigger scandal than it was. It continued as a clandestine narrative because none of us wanted meddling. We all had secrets to protect.
The worst folly happened within those walls. The architype Christian was a thirty-something-year-old man, Jake. He never cursed or drank, even out in the community. He was not a connoisseur of rock and roll and had a crewcut. He was well dressed, wearing a tie and suit coat, even on week days. Jake was pointed out, on many occasions, as the Christian man that we boys should emulate. Jake, however, had one vice. He used his position of Sunday school and music director to habitually, sexually abuse the young boys of our church. I don’t know how I escaped his sticky fingers all those years. It did often require serpentine maneuvers, something like a football running back, to avoid him. He did get his hands on my brother once. The incredible thing was, everyone knew about this behavior but preferred—for the sake of peace—to say nothing.
It was also a place where we were taught that you should never ask questions. Faith, the kind of faith that pleases God, must be rich in credulity. Thinking, so we were told, was worldly. In fact, all material things were worldly and it was going to burn . . . and the incineration was close at hand. God dwelled in the wispy clouds and that was our only aspiration, to someday dwell there too.
The only reason that we faithfully attended the Sunday show was due to the second factor, penitence. It was deeply ingrained within that subculture that the one Christian behavioral requirement was attending church. Not to do so, would aggravate God immensely. If you felt especially guilty, as we often did, we could attend Sunday evenings or Wednesday nights too.
The one redeeming value was that we were exposed, although only as background chatter, to the Bible and its wonderful stories. They were just irrelevant. It was no surprise that we all left the church as soon as we could drive and had our own cars. We had left, in spirit, many years earlier.
The Token Church
When I was a senior in high school, I was requisitioned (by God’s grace) into a new Christian world via a psychology teacher. He was on staff with a para-church organization at a nearby university. Within this new group, I had a total retooling of my faith into a far more authentic Christianity. However, my involvement with this group, for next fifteen years, took me into a strange world of church artifices.
There was no question that the parachurch organization functioned as our real church. It was the best experience of koinonia in my life. It was so good, that in some ways it ruined me. No future church could ever aspire to that level intimate fellowship and mutual support. However, because we didn’t call ourselves a church, we did not have a Biblical church leadership structure. There were no elders. Each chapter was an autocracy, controlled by one professional staff member.
During those days, we were required to attend the local church to look respectable within the Bible Belt culture. However, at the same time, it was an unspoken perspective that we were to look at the local church people with contempt. They didn’t take Christianity as seriously as we did, so we thought. The local (Presbyterian Church in American, PCA) church was our token church. It was our Trojan Horse into the world of Christian decency.
One year, during a brief lapse of pretentious, we decided to call ourselves a “house church.” We chose elders and tried to structure ourselves more like a real church. The local pastors were deeply distressed about this new development. This movement swept through our parent organization, at least in our region. Howard Snyder’s book, The Problem of Wineskins, may have been the catalysis for this thinking. However, since the professional staff received most of their financial support from local congregations (we college students were too poor to contribute much) it didn’t take long before there was a drying up of funds for the organization. This caused an immediate reversal in that approach. Their theological convictions followed the money. There was a quick return to the previous system of local church association, although with an ostentatious purpose.
I stayed with this organization through college, graduate school, and into my married community life. My wife and I eventually went to the mission field in the Middle East with this same group. Prior to the mission field the autocratic leadership structure caused no significant problems because we were led by benevolent leaders. On the mission field that changed. I was faced with the dilemma of having a leader who was abusive to us, under the guise of being God’s will. This development, and my countering rage, caused me to have a tragic disillusionment with all of Christianity.
The Illusive Church
I arrived back in the US two years later as a clinically depressed agnostic. I would probably never darken the doors of another church again if it had not been for my wife’s insistence. She hoped that getting me back in church would aid in my recovery. But something had changed deeply within my psyche and soul. When you experience some kind of mental breakdown, something literally breaks within your brain. You can feel it breaking. Suddenly, from then on, the world looked different. Some said that I was—after my crisis of faith—seeing the world through a (negatively) tainted lens. But it felt like the fake, rose-colored spectacles had been replaced by a pair of x-ray glasses, the kind that use to be advertised in the back of Popular Science. Sudden you see through the pretense and the shamming is no longer satisfying.
Over a period of a year, my wife led me by the hand (literally) from church to church. I felt like I was walking, zombie-like, into a performance, where I knew the script from my years as a staunch evangelical. But each stage (vestibule) had a different cast of actors, yet, all saying the same lines. I knew almost exactly, the next word that would come out of the person’s mouth. It was quasi-scriptural-Republican clichés. I couldn’t stomach it! In my new frame of mind, I was brutally honest and that created the kind of dissonance as when an actor flubbed his lines while on stage. Jaws would drop. If I said that I was depressed or skeptical, which I was, they would rebuke me, just before walking away. The stranger would point out that it was my fault because “God never fails.” Sometimes they would add things like, “You must not have the Holy Spirit. I do and I’m always happy,” or “I don’t doubt because God said it, I believe it, and that settles it!”
In the vestibule of yet another cookie-cutter evangelical church, the conversation strangely took another sudden detour. It wasn’t me who deviated from the script this time. It was man named Dave. When I told him that I was struggling with depression after a hellish missionary experience, he instantly grasped my shoulder with is right hand. He looked me in the eye and said, “I want to hear all the details. Let’s meet for lunch after church.” He was instantly ready to drop his plans for the day, just for me.
During that lunch at Burger King, Dave, the pastor of his church, and I sat for two hours. I told the saga our missionary experience in intimate detail. The two men were my first listeners for the story. I wasn’t half-way through the telling when Dave started to cry. This caused me to start sobbing too. I had not cried in fifteen years. I had thought, in my previous life of a “godly man,” that there would be no need for tears if you had faith. Dave helped me to set my tears free and they flowed for months. It was the turning point of my dilemma. I soon dismissed my thoughts of ending it all. I was not completely better, but I now had hopes of being better someday. On that day, I found the real church again.
From that point and over the next fifteen years I took out on a journey to get well and to try and understand why my previous brand of faith had left me with a severe disenchantment. I undertook an intense personal study of scripture, science, philosophy, religions, psychology, and Church history, looking for answers.
Church. Photo by astrid westvang
The “Perfect” Church
Through four moves we had six evangelical church associations. As I was slowly getting healthy and returning to faith, I entered a phase where began to search for the ideal church. Once, I tried to reproduce the type of koinonia that I had experienced in college. After a year of preparation, I started a house church. It was a catastrophe after just one year in existence. There were five families in the church, each with a profoundly different agenda. One family insisted that we arm ourselves with weapons and survival gear for the coming war with Bill Clinton and Janet Reno. That family was more lucid than some of the others. Apparently, my church attracted those who had fallen off the far right-end of evangelicalism.
With our last move, we came to an island with limited church choices. I was still in search for that perfect church. My hope this time rested on finding a church with true “Biblical” structure and doctrines, based on the precise certainty that I had learned with the PCA. I found one such church.
I spent eight years with this new church and became quite involved, even becoming an elder. However, from the beginning, I saw a troublesome problem. On paper, this church had a good structure, with elder oversight of the pastor and with deacons for serving the body the church. However, in practice, it was something else. It was a return to an autocracy type of structure, with this pastor in absolute control. But he was more like my missionary boss, not a benevolent dictator.
Spiritual certainty, breeds a type of insatiable arrogance. The pastor had a bad temper. Even a minor defiance of his orders would quickly set him off. This was an unhealthy situation, but I stayed. I was hoping that I, and the other elders, could eventual change things. Our attempts were futile.
The final blow came around my fifth year with this church. Rigid churches are known for splitting theological hairs and requiring allegiance to very specific views. This church adopted a theological position that the universe is only six thousand years old. While normally, this should not be an issue in any church, it became an issue when it was made a litmus test for being a “true believer.” I made it clear where I stood, but I subdued my own opinion for the sake of my family. My kids were still at home and I did not want to take then through another church move. My wife was deeply committed to her circle of friends at this church.
It was during this final two years with this church that my personal studies, which had started fifteen years earlier, was reaching its culmination. I was realizing that I am no longer and evangelical. I had been attempting to put the proverbial square peg in a round hole. I knew the time had come for me to move on.
I waited until my last child had left home before making my move. This move became very difficult for two reasons. I knew that my leaving would morph the pastor into his Mr. Hyde persona . . . and it did. I almost had to get a police restraining order to keep him away from me, after a nasty verbal assault at my house. The second problem was my wife said that she would not come with me this time. But I knew for certain, that my staying would lead to my spiritual demise. For the next four years, until my wife eventually joined me at my new church, our marriage faced one of its greatest challenges. She was committed to this pastor who saw me as a malicious person for leaving his church. It was awkward to say the least.
The Accommodating Church
There was one other church on our island that I had also considered, even before we had moved here. It was old Presbyterian (USA). The building was the closest to a cathedral on our island. It was also attended by many thinking people. This included several with PhDs, retired professors, artists, scientists, professionals as well as a blue-collar workers and fishermen. It was a true cross-section of our culture. It was growing and alive.
The one barrier to my considering this church it at first, was the fact the pastor is a woman. It had been deeply engrained into my fabric that such a church was “unbiblical.” Indeed, the church that I was leaving followed scripture strictly, that no woman should have leadership over a man, not even to teach a Sunday school class where men were present. For me to move to this church, it required me to have a Peter-on-the-roof type of experience. Women here have many key roles and that was a new concept for me. The women’s character and perspective have been a blessing to me.
If churches have one trait to define them, my previous church was defined by “law,” and my new church, defined by “grace.” My new church has a wide spectrum of views. Some members, have a liberal theology that I’m sure I would not agree with. Others, far more conservative than I am. This political season, you could see the bumper stickers on the cars in our parking lot, which completely crossed the political spectrum. But it is a church of peace and respect. What binds us together is not agreement, but a mutual dependence on God’s grace.
This church reflects the attitude of the leadership. It is a humble church that acknowledges that, in this life, we cannot always have certainty. But one point of certainty we can have, and that is the gospel compels us to love immensely, especially those who are different than ourselves. It is a church that understands human failures and the absolute need for Christ’s redemption. I feel more at home in a church than I have ever felt before. Unless there is a major change, my searching has finally found a rest.
Note from CM: Today is Memorial Day in the United States. I can think of no better way to honor and memorialize those who have given their lives in service to our country than to re-post this recent brilliant speech that speaks to “the better angels of our nature” as Americans. Here is the full text of the remarks delivered May 19, 2017 by the mayor of New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu, upon his removal of the last of the city’s several Confederate monuments.
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Thank you for coming.
The soul of our beloved City is deeply rooted in a history that has evolved over thousands of years; rooted in a diverse people who have been here together every step of the way — for both good and for ill. It is a history that holds in its heart the stories of Native Americans — the Choctaw, Houma Nation, the Chitimacha. Of Hernando De Soto, Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, the Acadians, the Islenos, the enslaved people from Senegambia, Free People of Colorix, the Haitians, the Germans, both the empires of France and Spain. The Italians, the Irish, the Cubans, the south and central Americans, the Vietnamese and so many more.
You see — New Orleans is truly a city of many nations, a melting pot, a bubbling caldron of many cultures. There is no other place quite like it in the world that so eloquently exemplifies the uniquely American motto: e pluribus unum — out of many we are one. But there are also other truths about our city that we must confront. New Orleans was America’s largest slave market: a port where hundreds of thousands of souls were bought, sold and shipped up the Mississippi River to lives of forced labor of misery of rape, of torture. America was the place where nearly 4000 of our fellow citizens were lynched, 540 alone in Louisiana; where the courts enshrined ‘separate but equal’; where Freedom riders coming to New Orleans were beaten to a bloody pulp. So when people say to me that the monuments in question are history, well what I just described is real history as well, and it is the searing truth.
And it immediately begs the questions, why there are no slave ship monuments, no prominent markers on public land to remember the lynchings or the slave blocks; nothing to remember this long chapter of our lives; the pain, the sacrifice, the shame… all of it happening on the soil of New Orleans. So for those self-appointed defenders of history and the monuments, they are eerily silent on what amounts to this historical malfeasance, a lie by omission. There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.
For America and New Orleans, it has been a long, winding road, marked by great tragedy and great triumph. But we cannot be afraid of our truth. As President George W. Bush said at the dedication ceremony for the National Museum of African American History & Culture, “A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them.” So today I want to speak about why we chose to remove these four monuments to the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, but also how and why this process can move us towards healing and understanding of each other. So, let’s start with the facts.
The historic record is clear, the Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and P.G.T. Beauregard statues were not erected just to honor these men, but as part of the movement which became known as The Cult of the Lost Cause. This ‘cult’ had one goal — through monuments and through other means — to rewrite history to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity. First erected over 166 years after the founding of our city and 19 years after the end of the Civil War, the monuments that we took down were meant to rebrand the history of our city and the ideals of a defeated Confederacy. It is self-evident that these men did not fight for the United States of America, They fought against it. They may have been warriors, but in this cause they were not patriots. These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for.
After the Civil War, these statues were a part of that terrorism as much as a burning cross on someone’s lawn; they were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city. Should you have further doubt about the true goals of the Confederacy, in the very weeks before the war broke out, the Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, made it clear that the Confederate cause was about maintaining slavery and white supremacy. He said in his now famous ‘cornerstone speech’ that the Confederacy’s “cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
Now, with these shocking words still ringing in your ears… I want to try to gently peel from your hands the grip on a false narrative of our history that I think weakens us. And make straight a wrong turn we made many years ago — we can more closely connect with integrity to the founding principles of our nation and forge a clearer and straighter path toward a better city and a more perfect union.
Last year, President Barack Obama echoed these sentiments about the need to contextualize and remember all our history. He recalled a piece of stone, a slave auction block engraved with a marker commemorating a single moment in 1830 when Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay stood and spoke from it. President Obama said, “Consider what this artifact tells us about history… on a stone where day after day for years, men and women… bound and bought and sold and bid like cattle on a stone worn down by the tragedy of over a thousand bare feet. For a long time the only thing we considered important, the singular thing we once chose to commemorate as history with a plaque were the unmemorable speeches of two powerful men.”
A piece of stone — one stone. Both stories were history. One story told. One story forgotten or maybe even purposefully ignored. As clear as it is for me today… for a long time, even though I grew up in one of New Orleans’ most diverse neighborhoods, even with my family’s long proud history of fighting for civil rights… I must have passed by those monuments a million times without giving them a second thought. So I am not judging anybody, I am not judging people. We all take our own journey on race.
I just hope people listen like I did when my dear friend Wynton Marsalis helped me see the truth. He asked me to think about all the people who have left New Orleans because of our exclusionary attitudes. Another friend asked me to consider these four monuments from the perspective of an African American mother or father trying to explain to their fifth grade daughter who Robert E. Lee is and why he stands atop of our beautiful city. Can you do it? Can you look into that young girl’s eyes and convince her that Robert E. Lee is there to encourage her? Do you think she will feel inspired and hopeful by that story? Do these monuments help her see a future with limitless potential? Have you ever thought that if her potential is limited, yours and mine are too? We all know the answer to these very simple questions. When you look into this child’s eyes is the moment when the searing truth comes into focus for us. This is the moment when we know what is right and what we must do. We can’t walk away from this truth.
And I knew that taking down the monuments was going to be tough, but you elected me to do the right thing, not the easy thing and this is what that looks like. So relocating these Confederate monuments is not about taking something away from someone else. This is not about politics, this is not about blame or retaliation. This is not a naïve quest to solve all our problems at once.
This is however about showing the whole world that we as a city and as a people are able to acknowledge, understand, reconcile and most importantly, choose a better future for ourselves making straight what has been crooked and making right what was wrong. Otherwise, we will continue to pay a price with discord, with division and yes with violence.
To literally put the Confederacy on a pedestal in our most prominent places of honor is an inaccurate recitation of our full past. It is an affront to our present, and it is a bad prescription for our future. History cannot be changed. It cannot be moved like a statue. What is done is done. The Civil War is over, and the Confederacy lost and we are better for it. Surely we are far enough removed from this dark time to acknowledge that the cause of the Confederacy was wrong.
And in the second decade of the 21st century, asking African Americans — or anyone else — to drive by property that they own; occupied by reverential statues of men who fought to destroy the country and deny that person’s humanity seems perverse and absurd. Centuries old wounds are still raw because they never healed right in the first place. Here is the essential truth. We are better together than we are apart.
Indivisibility is our essence. Isn’t this the gift that the people of New Orleans have given to the world? We radiate beauty and grace in our food, in our music, in our architecture, in our joy of life, in our celebration of death; in everything that we do. We gave the world this funky thing called jazz, the most uniquely American art form that is developed across the ages from different cultures. Think about second lines, think about Mardi Gras, think about muffaletta, think about the Saints, gumbo, red beans and rice. By God, just think.
All we hold dear is created by throwing everything in the pot; creating, producing something better; everything a product of our historic diversity. We are proof that out of many we are one — and better for it! Out of many we are one — and we really do love it! And yet, we still seem to find so many excuses for not doing the right thing. Again, remember President Bush’s words, “A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them.”
We forget, we deny how much we really depend on each other, how much we need each other. We justify our silence and inaction by manufacturing noble causes that marinate in historical denial. We still find a way to say ‘wait’/not so fast, but like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “wait has almost always meant never.” We can’t wait any longer. We need to change. And we need to change now.
No more waiting. This is not just about statues, this is about our attitudes and behavior as well. If we take these statues down and don’t change to become a more open and inclusive society this would have all been in vain. While some have driven by these monuments every day and either revered their beauty or failed to see them at all, many of our neighbors and fellow Americans see them very clearly. Many are painfully aware of the long shadows their presence casts; not only literally but figuratively. And they clearly receive the message that the Confederacy and the cult of the lost cause intended to deliver.
Earlier this week, as the cult of the lost cause statue of P.G.T Beauregard came down, world renowned musician Terence Blanchard stood watch, his wife Robin and their two beautiful daughters at their side. Terence went to a high school on the edge of City Park named after one of America’s greatest heroes and patriots, John F. Kennedy. But to get there he had to pass by this monument to a man who fought to deny him his humanity.
He said, “I’ve never looked at them as a source of pride… it’s always made me feel as if they were put there by people who don’t respect us. This is something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime. It’s a sign that the world is changing.” Yes, Terence, it is and it is long overdue. Now is the time to send a new message to the next generation of New Orleanians who can follow in Terence and Robin’s remarkable footsteps.
A message about the future, about the next 300 years and beyond; let us not miss this opportunity New Orleans and let us help the rest of the country do the same. Because now is the time for choosing. Now is the time to actually make this the City we always should have been, had we gotten it right in the first place.
We should stop for a moment and ask ourselves — at this point in our history — after Katrina, after Rita, after Ike, after Gustav, after the national recession, after the BP oil catastrophe and after the tornado — if presented with the opportunity to build monuments that told our story or to curate these particular spaces… would these monuments be what we want the world to see? Is this really our story?
We have not erased history; we are becoming part of the city’s history by righting the wrong image these monuments represent and crafting a better, more complete future for all our children and for future generations. And unlike when these Confederate monuments were first erected as symbols of white supremacy, we now have a chance to create not only new symbols, but to do it together, as one people. In our blessed land we all come to the table of democracy as equals. We have to reaffirm our commitment to a future where each citizen is guaranteed the uniquely American gifts of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
That is what really makes America great and today it is more important than ever to hold fast to these values and together say a self-evident truth that out of many we are one. That is why today we reclaim these spaces for the United States of America. Because we are one nation, not two; indivisible with liberty and justice for all… not some. We all are part of one nation, all pledging allegiance to one flag, the flag of the United States of America. And New Orleanians are in… all of the way. It is in this union and in this truth that real patriotism is rooted and flourishes. Instead of revering a 4-year brief historical aberration that was called the Confederacy we can celebrate all 300 years of our rich, diverse history as a place named New Orleans and set the tone for the next 300 years.
After decades of public debate, of anger, of anxiety, of anticipation, of humiliation and of frustration. After public hearings and approvals from three separate community led commissions. After two robust public hearings and a 6-1 vote by the duly elected New Orleans City Council. After review by 13 different federal and state judges. The full weight of the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government has been brought to bear and the monuments in accordance with the law have been removed. So now is the time to come together and heal and focus on our larger task. Not only building new symbols, but making this city a beautiful manifestation of what is possible and what we as a people can become.
Let us remember what the once exiled, imprisoned and now universally loved Nelson Mandela and what he said after the fall of apartheid. “If the pain has often been unbearable and the revelations shocking to all of us, it is because they indeed bring us the beginnings of a common understanding of what happened and a steady restoration of the nation’s humanity.” So before we part let us again state the truth clearly.
The Confederacy was on the wrong side of history and humanity. It sought to tear apart our nation and subjugate our fellow Americans to slavery. This is the history we should never forget and one that we should never again put on a pedestal to be revered. As a community, we must recognize the significance of removing New Orleans’ Confederate monuments. It is our acknowledgment that now is the time to take stock of, and then move past, a painful part of our history.
Anything less would render generations of courageous struggle and soul-searching a truly lost cause. Anything less would fall short of the immortal words of our greatest President Abraham Lincoln, who with an open heart and clarity of purpose calls on us today to unite as one people when he said: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds…to do all which may achieve and cherish — a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
In tribute to the Coptic Christians of Egypt and all Christians being persecuted for their faith today, we present four movements from one of Bach’s cantatas for Easter VII. The text and themes are taken from the Gospel passage, John 15: 26 – 16: 4, in which Jesus warns his disciples that following him will provoke reactions from others that will include banishment and persecution. Indeed, those who will do these things will think they are serving God by getting rid of the Christ-followers.
When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf. You also are to testify because you have been with me from the beginning.
I have said these things to you to keep you from stumbling. They will put you out of the synagogues. Indeed, an hour is coming when those who kill you will think that by doing so they are offering worship to God. And they will do this because they have not known the Father or me. But I have said these things to you so that when their hour comes you may remember that I told you about them.
I did not say these things to you from the beginning, because I was with you.
Today, we stand before God and intercede for all those who experience opposition, ill treatment, and even a martyr’s death on account of their faith in Jesus.
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They will banish you.
But the time comes that,whoever puts you to death will think that in this way he is serving God.
Christians must on earth be true disciples of Christ. At every hour they should expect, until they achieve the joy of victory, torture, banishment and great suffering.
The consolation of Christians is and remains God’s watchful care over his church. For even though at times the clouds gather, yet after the storms of affliction the sun of joy has soon smiled on us.
”It is talk-compelling. It puts you in a good temper, it makes you satisfied with yourself and your fellow beings, it sweeps away the worries and cobwebs of the week.”
Half Mast
THE HISTORY OF MEMORIAL DAY IN THE U.S. From PBS.org
Originally called Decoration Day, from the early tradition of decorating graves with flowers, wreaths and flags, Memorial Day is a day for remembrance of those who have died in service to our country. It was first widely observed on May 30, 1868 to commemorate the sacrifices of Civil War soldiers, by proclamation of Gen. John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of former Union sailors and soldiers.
During that first national celebration, former Union Gen. and sitting Ohio Congressman James Garfield made a speech at Arlington National Cemetery, after which 5,000 participants helped to decorate the graves of the more than 20,000 Union and Confederate soldiers who were buried there.
This event was inspired by local observances of the day that had taken place in several towns throughout America in the three years after the Civil War. In 1873, New York was the first state to designate Memorial Day as a legal holiday. By the late 1800s, many more cities and communities observed Memorial Day, and several states had declared it a legal holiday. After World War I, it became an occasion for honoring those who died in all of America’s wars and was then more widely established as a national holiday throughout the United States.
When Is Memorial Day?
In 1971, Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act and established that Memorial Day was to be celebrated on the last Monday of May. Several southern states, however, officially celebrate an additional, separate day for honoring the Confederate war dead, sometimes referred to as a Confederate Memorial Day: January 19 in Texas; third Monday in Jan. in Arkansas; fourth Monday in Apr. in Alabama and Mississippi; April 26 in Florida and Georgia; May 10 in North and South Carolina; last Monday in May in Virginia; and June 3 in Louisiana and Tennessee.
Memorial Day is celebrated at Arlington National Cemetery each year with a ceremony in which a small American flag is placed on each grave. Traditionally, the President or Vice President lays a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. About 5,000 people attend the ceremony annually.
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LET’S EAT!!!
Memorial Day is, of course, a great time to gather with friends and family, light up the grill, and enjoy wonderful food together. Here is a list of articles from Bon Appetit that should cover most everything you’d want to know about making the feast grand. Below you can find a few examples of culinary delights for the cookout from several of the articles there.
Hey Ted! Do you guys cook lobster on the grill up there in Maine? This looks fantastic to me.
Grilled Split Lobster
When it comes to seafood, my wife loves scallops. How do these look, dear?
Grilled Scallops with Lemony Salsa-Verde
Everybody (who’s a carnivore, that is) loves burgers, right? My mouth can’t stop watering looking at this one.
The BA Burger Deluxe
For our non-meat eating friends, here’s a veggie version.
Ultimate Veggie Burger
How about a few amazing sides?
Smashed Potatoes with Chorizo Aioli and ScallionsCrispy Potato Salad with Chiles, Celery, and PeanutsGrilled Corn and Poblano Salad
If you are blessed to enjoy a feast on Memorial Day weekend with loved ones, may you eat, drink, and be merry in the Lord. But let us also take time to pause and consciously remember that there are far, far too many around the world who will feel the ache of hunger and thirst, no matter what day it is.
Folks who don’t understand the symbolic world of Texas took to social media to rebuke the Osteens for taking pictures with their son and flashing a hand sign in the shape of longhorn cattle, which represents the slogan of the University of Texas.
The Christian Post apparently thought this was news.
They cited several Twitter critics, including:
Twitter user @ian_indimuli asked Joel Osteen and his son, “Why on Earth would you use the devil sign? My goodness a thumbs up would work or you don’t have thumbs?”
“Doing horns?! Even though is UT, that symbol ain’t good! Thats devil’s symbol!” Twitter user @isaachogg wrote.
Ah, good old fashioned journalism. Ya gotta love it.
• • •
WILLOW CREEK TO OPEN NEW NORTH CAMPUS
Willow Creek Community Church will be opening its newest campus location in Glenview, Illinois, on the first Sunday in December.
Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture (AS+GG) has designed the new Willow Creek North Shore, now under construction at the Glen, in Glenview, Illinois. The 72,000 square-foot Willow Creek North Shore was designed to feature a large 1200-seat, state-of-the-art auditorium in the center of the facility with administration offices, adult ministry spaces, educational classrooms for all ages, a café, and a large sky-lit preassembly area surrounding the main sanctuary. There will also be several gathering points throughout the building. Additionally, two open landscaped, elliptical-shaped courtyard spaces will bring natural light into the sanctuary and to the corridors accessing the classroom and office facilities.
…A youth group worship room, located at the north end of the building and facing opposite to the auditorium, will strengthen youth ministry activities, while the Harvest Café, located in front of the auditorium, will be used for more casual meetings and as a gathering space on Sundays for those who wish to watch the service on video screens. The café will have direct access to two landscaped courtyards that can be used for weddings, funerals, and other functions.
The design concept was inspired by the form of a mustard seed, a biblical reference that symbolizes the strong faith and fellowship of the congregation, as well as the connection the building will have to nature. The building’s elliptical shape was designed to strategically bring the experience of the outdoors inside to the occupants.
People complain about nursing homes a lot: the food’s no good or there’s not enough staff, and so on. It’s a long list. But the top complaint, according to the federal government, is eviction from a nursing home.
Technically, it’s known as involuntary discharge, and in 2015 it brought in more than 9,000 complaints. Now, a couple of states are looking for ways to hold nursing homes accountable for unnecessary evictions.
One of those states is Maryland. Brian Frosh, the state’s attorney general, says that, in Maryland, more than half of all involuntary discharges have come from just one small chain of nursing homes run by Neiswanger Management Services, or NMS Healthcare.
“Your odds of getting evicted from an NMS nursing home are about a hundred times what they are of any other nursing home in the state,” says Frosh.
Maryland is now suing NMS for Medicaid fraud. The suit alleges that the company charged the state for services it didn’t deliver, specifically for discharge planning. Nursing homes are supposed to make sure a resident has a safe place to go. But Frosh says that NMS sent residents with complex medical needs to homeless shelters or to unlicensed board-and-care facilities.
For example, according to the complaint, a woman with severe dementia was dropped off in front her son’s home. Someone from NMS “just opened the car door and let her out and drove away,” says Frosh. “Her son found her wandering around several hours later when he came home from work.”
The company’s motivation was purely financial, says Frosh. To understand his argument you need to know two things. First, Medicare pays nursing homes a lot more than Medicaid does. And, second, Medicare payments for long-term care only last for 100 days. Frosh says that NMS evicted hundreds of residents just as they were transitioning from Medicare to the lower-paying Medicaid.
“We cite emails in the complaint that offer a bounty for getting patients out quickly,” says Frosh. “A hundred bucks is offered for somebody who can make a bed vacant within two hours.” That made more room for new patients who were on Medicare.
The article also cites problems in the state of Illinois, where evictions have more than doubled in the last five years. State Senator Daniel Biss, who has sponsored legislation to stop nursing home facilities from performing unwarranted evictions, says, “We’re seeing nursing homes that have made a financial decision that they would like a certain type of resident,” meaning residents that are compliant and don’t require too much staff attention and time. If they don’t fit the mold, Biss notes, “they’re able to essentially drop them at the hospital and walk away…”
That’s the question Mark Silk asks at Religion News Service.
…In contrast to the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Israel, Pope Francis did not exactly roll out the red carpet.
He squeezed Trump into an early morning slot so as not to have to cancel or delay his regular Wednesday general audience in St. Peter’s Square. And because of the gathering crowd, the President of the United States was ushered into the palace through a small side entrance used by Vatican employees.
…Then, during the meet-and-greet with the Trump entourage, Francis proceeded to make a fat joke at the President’s expense, asking his wife, “What do you give him to eat, potica?” A sweet Slovenian nut roll of which the pope is himself fond, poticais inarguably fattening.
Of the subsequent private meeting that followed with only a translator present, the communiqué issued by the Vatican indicates that discussion between the two men ranged from areas of presumed agreement (“life,” freedom of religion and conscience, peace and protection of Christian communities in the Middle East) to those of presumed disagreement (health care and assistance to immigrants).
Of climate change and whether Trump will pull the U.S. out of the 2015 Paris Agreement the communiqué makes no mention. But we may infer that Francis was sending a message by giving Trump a copy of his climate change encyclical, Laudato Si’.
• • •
HEY EVANGELICALS! WATCH THE CATHOLICS DO SCIENCE RIGHT.
In a forgotten corner of the pope’s sprawling summer estate at Castel Gandolfo in the hills outside Rome, an unusual group of astronomers and cosmologists looks to the heavens for divine inspiration.
Twelve Catholic priests and brothers live, work and pray at the Vatican Observatory as they explore some of the universe’s biggest scientific questions, from the Big Bang theory to the structure of meteorites and stars.
“The observatory exists to show the world that the Catholic Church supports science,” says Brother Guy Consolmagno, an astronomer from Detroit who is also the observatory’s director.
“We have two jobs — to do science and show the world. My job is to make sure the other scientists have the space and resources to do the work.”
…The observatory recently hosted an international conference to discuss black holes, gravitational waves and other scientific questions.
Pope Francis personally greeted the 35 participants, who included the 1999 Nobel laureate in physics, Gerald ‘t Hooft from the Netherlands; British mathematician Sir Roger Penrose; and Renata Kallosh, a theoretical physicist from Stanford University.
The house where I live is on a three-acre square of land. One side of the square faces a barely paved county road; the other three are surrounded by farm fields owned by a farmer who lives nearby. My family enjoys this setting. It’s quiet. The nearest traffic is a mile and a half away. Perhaps one car an hour comes down our road. When I stand outside, I can hear the wind. At night the loudest sounds are coyotes yipping, the odd whooping cry of a screech owl, or, in the spring, an orchestra of frogs. On clear nights the sweep of the Milky Way is visible, and we see the progression of the moon through all its phases. On our property I’ve seen garter snakes, rabbits, toads, frogs, a mink, several weasels, far too many skunks, a baby snapping turtle, twin fawns, argiope spiders, blue-tailed skinks, bats, and birds. A great congregation of birds lives here. One of my favorite is the marsh harrier. He doesn’t show up frequently, but when he does, he skims the fields like a seagull skimming the sea. Bob-whites lob their calls as aggressively as competing tennis players, killdeer skitter and complain, kestrels scan the ground from the electric wires, and overhead turkey vultures circle in the updrafts. Indigo buntings, red-wing blackbirds, goldfinches, and a variety of woodpeckers add color.
We can go outside barefoot and feel the soft earth harden in the days after a rain. We can lie down on the grass without self-consciousness; the first day in spring when I can stretch out on the ground is one of the happiest days of the year for me. We can be casual about what we wear outside, especially during the summers when the farmer is growing corn. By the first week of July, the corn forms enough of a wall that we can walk outside in our pajamas and not be seen. We need to pay close attention to the season, though: the first morning after harvest has occasionally come as a shock to the sleepy, pajama-clad person taking the dogs out, who stands exposed to the school bus trundling past.
But still, I love the openness and the wide view of the surrounding fields. Wide views do not occur naturally in this part of Indiana, where the land is only slightly rolling and forest is the natural ecosystem. In summer the fields are lush green during the day and flickering with fireflies at night. In fall they turn golden brown, then, when the crops are harvested, every contour lies bare to the eye. Morning and evening foxes and coyotes will lope across the dangerously open expanse, or a frantic deer will stand frozen in the middle of the bare fields, head up, then dash for the small strip of woods to the south of us.
It looks like a rich and healthy ecosystem, and in some ways it is. But the health has more to do with the wealth of Indiana’s soil, water, and climate and with human neglect as factories move and towns dry up. Where human beings have interacted intensively with the land, there are some problems, not obvious to the casual observer now but with the potential for future harm.
Our three acres are surrounded by thousands of acres of corn and soybeans. The two crops are generally rotated each year, but not always. Small patches of trees have been cleared away since we’ve lived here, making an open expanse for several miles in most directions. In the spring, trucks spray anhydrous ammonia and spread lime. Sometimes field tile is put in to drain the land more efficiently; this involves large machinery digging a system of trenches throughout the field and perforated plastic pipe being unspooled like thread and laid in the trenches. Once the field is ready, the huge planters drive through. The driver sits in a comfortable, enclosed cab high above the field; the planting these days is directed by satellite GPS. Modern machines tow huge booms of seeders behind them that can plant a forty-foot width with every pass of the field. Our house, a four-bedroom American four-square, is slightly less than forty feet wide.
After the plants emerge, strange-looking vehicles on high wheels creep across the fields like spiders, spraying the crops with herbicide and pesticide. At least once a year, crop-dusting airplanes zoom overhead, trailing poison as a squid trails ink; recently helicopters have been spraying as well. I can hear the engines overhead barely in time to rush out to the clothesline and haul in the laundry, call the dogs, and close the windows.
When the crops are dry and brown, the combines start their march across the land, lights and engines scouring the fields far into the night. Some of the newer combines can harvest eighteen rows at a time. Huge tractor trailers wait by the side of the road to take the winnowed corn or beans to the grain elevator. The days of harvest break into our quiet life. The farmer who works around us is responsible for several thousand acres of crops, so he often harvests at night. He parks four or five vehicles – tractor-trailers to haul grain, his and his workers’ pick-up trucks, perhaps a tractor and grain wagon or tanker for refueling – alongside our property. He leaves the engines running and the lights on, even when the vehicles aren’t used for several hours.
After weeks of that frenzy, the fields are bare and quiet. They might be tilled once before spring, but generally the old stalks lie scattered over the tire tracks pressed into the dirt. The winter winds are strong here – actually, the winds are strong all year round – and each dry stalk forms the foundation for a drift of snow, or of dirt if snow doesn’t fall. I don’t see many living things on the fields after the weather turns cold except for the occasional coyote, fox, or deer I described earlier. In fact, the fields, as opposed to our acres or the native forests, are not much visited by any species. Even farmers don’t set foot on their land over the course of a year. Let me not exaggerate – perhaps once a year, the farmer who works the fields around us will walk over a few feet of his field with his helpers and point and talk. Sometimes he’s directing someone to cut off the branch of one of our trees that hangs over his field. The last two years he’s overseen an experimental test patch in the middle of his field, but he’s left a bare dirt track big enough to drive a truck through, so he doesn’t have to walk there.
What are the results of this type of farming? Well, it does produce a lot of commodity crops and can be efficiently worked by a small number of people. However, it doesn’t produce most of the food we actually eat, despite many farmers’ claim to be feeding the world; our food is grown far away from this rich land, in California or South America – the broccoli, asparagus, peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes, pinto beans, Brussels sprouts – all the variety of vegetables that we actually eat. We would struggle to live on the great bounty of these fields, and we wouldn’t be happy doing it. I especially would suffer; I’m allergic to corn and don’t eat much soy.
And the efficiency and small work force have their costs: first, the benefits of the advanced machinery need to be weighed against its costs and the amount of debt the farmers incur to keep up with the technology. Our neighboring farmer and his wife have taken several million dollars in government subsidies in just the last few years. (The information is easily available on a public website.) Despite the image of the American farmer as a rugged individualist, most farmers considered successful these days are sustained by the government and the banks, not the land. This is true not only of their equipment but of the petroleum used to run it, subsidized in ways both obvious and unseen, the roads maintained for them and worn down by them, and the whole transportation system as well as the trade agreements that enable them to sell what they grow in markets around the world.
Second, replacing human labor by technology has led to unemployment, in farming as in other industries. The biggest farmers have the biggest debt, and the most rapidly increasing rate of debt is for farm machinery, which unlike land loses its value rapidly. The almost 200 billion dollars currently in farm debt could cover quite a few salaries of farm hands who could take the place of the most expensive machinery. Instead that money is going, in many cases, to overseas banks and manufacturers; even when the lenders are American, the debt payments, unlike salary payments, do not stay in the same community where the farmers work. Sociologists in recent years have bemoaned the rural decline in population, the “hollowing out” of the farming states; surely this problem begins not with the loss of the people but with the draining away of all profits before they can circulate through local businesses.
So the economic impact of modern hi-tech commodity farming is less than positive; what about the environmental impact? Here is what I observe: Snow drifts over the bare fields to block roads and creep back across the pavement as soon as the plow goes by. In some places local government will install ugly orange plastic fences along the road to try to keep the drifts down, but I haven’t seen any effort to restore natural windbreaks beside roads. When the snow isn’t too deep, those same drifts, as well as the snow on our property that is downwind from our neighbor’s fields, get a thin coating of brown dirt blown from the fields. It’s not very pretty.
Local farmers plant rows according to the convenience of the machinery, not the contours of the land. When it rains, topsoil runs down between rows and along the cleared area beside our property.
The farm land is so compacted and sprayed that very few things other than genetically modified crops can survive on it, but mutant ragweed is beginning to take off, as are a few other weeds that have been naturally selected for herbicide resistance. In contrast, unfarmed areas of central Indiana are burgeoning with uncontrollable life.
There are simple things that farmers could do to improve these and other problems. They could have smaller fields separated by patches of forest. Planting a larger variety of crops in narrower strips would slow disease and pest transition and make it easier to really rotate crops, not just swap corn and beans. They could give up ditching the fields for drainage – an expensive and destructive process that never seems to end – and instead create wetlands where water naturally collects. They could provide a more natural rotation of animals and plants. These and many other ideas have been known for millennia.
So why don’t they? First is the conservative nature of farming. Any activity that involves a large and long investment for an uncertain outcome is going to be conservative; no one wants to experiment when a year’s income is riding on the results. Farmers tend to stick to what has seemed to work.
But even when things don’t work so well, farmers will keep doing them if there are financial incentives to do so. This is the second reason. Government programs have tended to encourage big agribusinesses and have been less friendly to smaller, more varied farms.
Third, farmers love their machines. All Americans do. We always fall for the promise that new technology will make our lives more fun, more productive, and more sophisticated. And the people who have outdated technology, whether cell phones or tractors, get made fun of.
Finally, there is a mistaken aesthetic that dictates how people see and judge the land around them. And honestly, the land here looks pretty good. Or at least it looks pretty. But the cost of those perfect fields and vast expanses of monoculture may be more than we can pay. Our aesthetics are as damaging to the environment as our greed or carelessness. So we need to move toward a new aesthetic.
How much of the world are we responsible for tidying up? Nature is messy by our standards. A patch of disturbed earth becomes populated with a swirling mob of what we’d call weeds – dock, plantain, dandelion, mulberry, crabgrass, lamb’s quarters, and a hundred plants I don’t have a name for. And that bothers us. We spray, mow, and weed, in the process disturbing the natural succession of plants. We say that keeping our lawns, gardens, and fields as pure monoculture is more efficient and attractive. I drove with farmers past fields of soybeans shortly after the introduction of Round-Up, and they talked about how beautiful the thick carpet of identical plants is. They’re not wrong. The lush uniformity is beautiful. But I’m not sure we have the right to expect the same sort of beauty from nature that we can create within our houses. Should a farm field look like wall-to-wall carpeting? Should every molehill be leveled, every fence row scorched, just because we think it looks nicer?
We have neighbors down the road whose property has been described as a doll’s house because of its detailed perfection. It’s a good description – they treat their two acres as if it were as entirely under their control as a doll’s house. The fences have lines of brown under them where the mower can’t reach and herbicide has been sprayed. Their lawn is grass only, no violets or dandelions. Their mature hardwood trees are all pollarded to be a matching height. It’s pretty, I suppose. It’s also horrifying as an illustration of their attitude toward natural beauty. To speak in hyperbolic terms, those neighbors are conducting an all-out war on nature, with policies of scorched earth and ethnic cleansing, and the result is extreme totalitarianism.
Farmers around here will tell you that they are aiming for efficiency, but they are also motivated by this false aesthetic of human-imposed purity. I watch while they grub out a small patch of trees that they had no problem maneuvering around, just so the field looks “clean.” It’s a competitive aesthetic, too. People in this small community will criticize landowners whose fields aren’t clean, whose yards aren’t mowed to velvet – in other words, who leave any toe-hold for nature in their property. Rabbits and deer have no right to a corridor of shelter; killdeer and quail have to keep packing up and moving as their surroundings are cut down; coyotes are shot. And once we’ve expunged the aborigines, we can live the imperialist lifestyle we like.
I have some sympathy, I guess. I’m all right with keeping my house clean, but I have to decide how far my household extends. If I find insects on my kitchen counter, I kill them. But should I kill the insects in my yard? All the insects in the world? How much of the natural world do we have the right to control at the same level that we control our houses and yards? If we are going to live in a better balance with the surrounding fields than we do now, we have to change not only our acquisitiveness and our focus on profit and exploitation; we also have to learn to see beauty in what we now consider messiness.
One author who writes compellingly on this subject is Matthew W. Bates, in his book 
Some of the best material I have read on the ascension is from the pen of N.T. Wright, whom Bates also acknowledges as a key thinker today about the subject. In his book, 
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