The Weekend Wanderer: 22 June 2024

June 22, 2024June 20, 2024 Matt EricksonLeave a comment

“The Weekend Wanderer” is a weekly curated selection of news, stories, resources, and media on the intersection of faith and culture for you to explore through your weekend. Wander through these links however you like and in any order you like. Disclaimer: I do not necessarily agree with all the views expressed within these articles but have found them thought-provoking.

“The Man Who Introduced American Evangelicals to C. S. Lewis” – Justin Taylor at The Gospel Coalition: “Clyde S. Kilby joined the faculty of Wheaton College in 1935 at the age of 33 as an assistant professor of English and dean of men. In 1943 Kilby read a new book published by C. S. Lewis, entitled The Case for Christianity, which changed the course of his life. It was based on two series of broadcast talks Lewis had given for the BBC and was later published as the first two sections of Mere Christianity. ‘I . . . read it right through feeling almost from the first sentence that something profound had touched my mind and heart.’ It was like discovering ‘something bottomless,’ and he was captivated by ‘the depth and freshness of his observations and the permanency of his expression.’ Kilby went on to read Lewis’s whole corpus as it was being published. Nearly a decade later, in December of 1952, Kilby—now chair of the English department at Wheaton—wrote Lewis asking if they could meet when he was in England during the summer of 1953. The two men spent an hour together at Lewis’s rooms in Magdalen College, Oxford, discussing sixteenth-century literature, art, and the Renaissance. Kilby wrote of the conversation: ‘in all his talk there is an incipient good humor and genuineness that makes a conversation with him a real pleasure.'”

“Church ‘Homelessness’ Must Not Be Grieved Too Quickly” – Russell Moore in “Moore to the Point” at Christianity Today: “In his New York Times column this week, my friend David French wrote about what it was like to be ‘canceled’ by his denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America. He later told me how stunned he was by how many people responded immediately—grieving their own ‘cancellations’ from churches or ministries they’d loved and served. I was not surprised at all. Most people, of course, aren’t canceled in the way we typically use that word, but in a way more like the situation described by the late Will Campbell. He wasn’t ‘fired’ by the National Council of Churches, he would joke. They just unleashed a swarm of bees in his office every day until he voluntarily left. Similarly, many people who feel ‘homeless’ these days aren’t told by their home churches or traditions, ‘Get out!’ Instead, they face a quieter form of exile. They face those they love, who expect them to conform to new rules of belonging. Sometimes, that’s to some totalizing political loyalty. Sometimes, it’s to a willingness to ‘get over’ their opposition to whatever their church or ministry leaders now deem to be acceptable sins. Sometimes, this doesn’t even happen to these people in their own churches but in their larger theological or denominational homes, or vice versa. It’s confusing. It’s disorienting. It’s sometimes angering. What it really is, though, is grief.”

“Genius and virtue: Wildcat is less a biopic than a luminous exploration of the tension in Flannery O’Connor’s artistic and spiritual life” – Kathryn Reklis in The Christian Century: “‘I don’t want your praise; I don’t want you to think I am clever,’ Flannery O’Connor (Maya Hawke) says to the priest (Liam Neeson) who has come to offer her counsel and comfort. She is wracked with pain from lupus, forced to move from New York City back to her mother’s home in Georgia, and railing against the limitations of her new life. She and the priest have been discussing whether ‘scandalous writing’ can serve God. She has been carrying on a philosophical argument largely with herself, using the priest as her foil. Then she sits up violently and practically spits out the words, ‘But I do want it!’ Wildcat (directed by Ethan Hawke) is less a biopic than a luminous exploration of the tension between ambition and virtue and the power of constraint as an artistic discipline. We meet O’Connor as a young writer in New York City, trying to pitch her unfinished novel Wise Blood to an editor who wants her to rein in her prickly, often scathing style. ‘I don’t think you need to make [your readers] suffer in order to introduce them to the unusual way your mind works,’ he says pointedly. O’Connor refuses to revise her novel into a more acceptable form. She knows her style is also its substance, an unflinching attempt to see reality without sentimentality. She also believes, in her heart of hearts, that it might represent her genius.”

“Tony Evans says he is ‘stepping away’ from leading Dallas megachurch due to ‘sin’” – at Religion News Service: “Tony Evans, the longtime leader of a Dallas megachurch and bestselling author, has announced that he is stepping back from his ministry due to ‘sin’ he committed years ago. ‘The foundation of our ministry has always been our commitment to the Word of God as the absolute supreme standard of truth to which we are to conform our lives,’ Evans said in a Sunday (June 9) statement to his Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship church that was posted on its website. ‘When we fall short of that standard due to sin, we are required to repent and restore our relationship with God. A number of years ago, I fell short of that standard. I am, therefore, required to apply the same biblical standard of repentance and restoration to myself that I have applied to others.’ Evans, 74, was not specific about his actions but said they were not criminal.”

“The Attention Cottage” – Alan Jacobs at The Homebound Symphony: “In the last few days I have come across, or had sent to me, anguished cries from people who have recently been dragged on social media and cannot fathom the injustice of it, and I find myself thinking: You haven’t figured this out yet? You complain about your words being taken out of context when you post them in an environment whose entire structure — as we have all known for fifteen years now — demands context collapse? How many more times do you plan to smack your head against that unyielding wall?

I wrote recently about some things that everyone knows, and here are two more things that everyone knows:

Our attentional commons is borked, it’s FUBAR; it’s not stunned or pining for the fjords, it has ceased to be, it is bereft of life, it is an ex-commons.
The death of the attentional commons has had dramatic and sometimes tragic consequences for every individual’s store of attentiveness.

What I want to argue today is that the attentional commons cannot be rebuilt unless and until we rebuild private and local/communal spaces of attentiveness.”

“Spirituality Among Americans” – From Pew Research Center: “In recent decades, Americans have become less likely to identify with an organized religion. Yet a new Pew Research Center survey shows that belief in spirits or a spiritual realm beyond this world is widespread, even among those who don’t consider themselves religious. The survey finds that:

83% of all U.S. adults believe people have a soul or spirit in addition to their physical body.
81% say there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, even if we cannot see it.
74% say there are some things that science cannot possibly explain.
45% say they have had a sudden feeling of connection with something from beyond this world.
38% say they have had a strong feeling that someone who has passed away was communicating with them from beyond this world.
30% say they have personally encountered a spirit or unseen spiritual force.

Overall, 70% of U.S. adults can be considered “spiritual” in some way, because they think of themselves as spiritual people or say spirituality is very important in their lives.

Music: Adam, “River on Fire,” from Dig

The Weekend Wanderer: 27 January 2024

January 27, 2024January 25, 2024 Matt EricksonLeave a comment

“Religious but not spiritual? Meet the skeptics favoring ritual over the supernatural” – Kathryn Post at Religion News Service: “From what she eats to how she ties her shoes, religion shapes nearly every moment of Michelle’s life. An Orthodox Jew living in New York City, she follows a line of discipline guided by halacha, or Jewish law. She keeps a kosher kitchen, and on shabbat she doesn’t drive or turn on lights, following ancient strictures against lighting a fire on the Lord’s day. The one part of Judaism Michelle said she’s not necessarily sold on is the whole ‘God’ thing. ‘I have zero desire or inclination to stop being a practicing Jew,’ said Michelle, who asked to keep her last name private out of concern for her employment at a faith-based organization. ‘I recognize about myself that I am skeptical about the God stuff and the Torah stuff. I don’t really believe all that. I don’t feel like I need to.’ The phrase ‘spiritual not religious’ has become a near-catch phrase in American culture, and the percentage of Americans who describe themselves as having spiritual leanings without adhering to a given faith continues to climb. But only rarely have pollsters plumbed for those who separate their religion from their spirituality in the other direction: the religious but not spiritual. While few studies dedicated to the group exist, a December 2023 study on spirituality from Pew Research Center found that 1 in 10 Americans can be categorized this way.”

“The Connection Between Racial and Environmental Injustice” – David Swanson at his occasional newsletter: “I’m glad for you, the readers of this little newsletter to be some of the first to learn the title of my forthcoming book. After a bit of brainstorming back-and-forth with my publisher, InterVarsity Press, and input from friends and family, here’s where we landed: Plundered: The Tangled Roots of Racial and Environmental Injustice. If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to share some of the assumptions behind the title. Plunder is a theme that runs through the book, particular in my description of the force which animates both environmental and racial injustice. For a couple of reasons, this is something that felt very important as I was writing. First, it’s been my experience that most people who care deeply about confronting systemic racism don’t see its connection to environmental destruction, and vice versa. If they intuit a connection, it remains vague: both are expressions of injustice. But, as I do my best to show in the book, the connection is precise and deep. I go as far as to say that addressing either racial or environmental injustice without addressing the other guarantees that our efforts will never address the root cause behind both.”

“Reflections on the Evangelical Fracturing, Ten Years In” – Jake Meadow at Mere Orthodoxy: “While reading an ARC of Mike Cosper’s forthcoming book, I was caught up in how Cosper described the church planting scene of the mid 2000s, particularly as it existed around the then still embryonic Acts 29 network. There was a blending of innocence and confidence and hopefulness that Cosper captures well. I wasn’t part of it directly, but I remember listening to Mark Driscoll sermons and then Matt Chandler sermons at the time and picking up something of the atmosphere from afar. (I was born in 1987, left the fundamentalist church I grew up in in 2005, spent 18 months in an attractional megachurch more in the Willow Creek stream than Mars Hill, and then found my way to RUF and the PCA in 2007, where I have been ever since.) From about 2005 until the early 2010s it seemed as if Acts 29 might represent the defining movement in the next wave of evangelicalism: They had found a way of blending the best insights of the attractional movement of Bill Hybels and Rick Warren with the theological and missiological acumen of Tim Keller and John Piper. Moreover, because of their particular grunge-inflected aesthetic they naturally avoided some of the worst excesses of the attractional movement, which was a tendency toward the superficial and happy clappy. Their strength here wasn’t necessarily a product of any special virtue—Gen X tends toward the brooding and melancholic, after all, and virtually all their leadership were poster children for Gen X. But the resultant synthesis of their many influences was compelling.”

“How social media algorit hms ‘flatten’ our culture by making decisions for us” – Tanya Mosley interviews Kyle Chayka on NPR’s Fresh Air: “If you opened Facebook, Twitter or Instagram about a decade ago, you’d likely see posts from friends and family, in chronological order. Nowadays, users are hit with a barrage of content curated by an algorithm. Passionate about plants? Sports? Cats? Politics? That’s what you’re going to see. ‘”‘[There] are equations that measure what you’re doing, surveil the data of all the users on these platforms and then try to predict what each person is most likely to engage with,’ New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka explains. ‘So rather than having this neat, ordered feed, you have this feed that’s constantly trying to guess what you’re going to click on, what you’re going to read, what you’re going to watch or listen to.’ In his new book, Filterworld, Chayka examines the algorithmic recommendations that dictate everything from the music, news and movies we consume, to the foods we eat and the places we go. He argues that all this machine-guided curation has made us docile consumers and flattened our likes and tastes.”

“ADD Revisited” – Alan Jacobs at his blog, Homebound Symphony: “On the first day of my Christian Renaissance of the Twentieth Century course — mentioned here — I played for my students a few minutes of the first movement of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto. We paused to talk a bit about the musical language of late Romanticism, about Rachmaninoff’s gift for lush melody, etc. Then I played them this [Rachmaninoff’s Vespers]. Hard to believe it was composed by the same man, isn’t it? But (I suggested) that’s the difference between a young Russian composer in 1901 — he wrote that concerto when he was 27 — and a middle-aged Russian composer living through overwhelming political turmoil and world war. In time of desperate need Rachmaninoff, not a churchgoer, turned to the liturgical and musical inheritance of Orthodoxy to make sense of his world, to begin the long healing that would be necessary.”

“REVIEW: Why Do the Heathen Rage?: Flannery O’ Connor’s unfinished novel raises persistent questions” – Katy Carl in Current: “Staring down our own limitations requires the greatest degree of courage. Writing in 1963 to editor and anthologist Sr. Mariella Gable, novelist Flannery O’Connor forthrightly unburdens herself of the creative and spiritual barriers preventing her next work: ‘I can’t do again what I know I can do well, and the larger things I need to do now, I doubt my capacity for doing.’ The revelation is more poignant because we know, as O’Connor knew, that she was slowly dying from complications caused by lupus. The O’Connor who sent that letter was mere months away from death. Yet some of her finest work still lay ahead of her. ‘Parker’s Back’ articulates an incarnational spirituality set sternly against Gnosticism. ‘Revelation’ renders the long-overdue comeuppance of a prejudiced farm wife who, in an iconic final scene, receives a mystical vision that upends the unjust racial hierarchies of the Jim Crow South. O’Connor completed both stories during her last months of life. But when she writes to Sr. Mariella about ‘the larger things,’ O’Connor seems to mean not these works for which she ought to be most remembered but her novel-in-progress Why Do the Heathen Rage? In this unfinished work, now available to the public in its first edition, O’Connor strives to grow beyond her comic gifts. She seeks to develop the latent strengths of her Dostoyevskian religious consciousness, chronicling life after the violent moment of grace while also handling social questions in earnest.”

Music: Sergei Rachmaninoff, Vespers, Op. 37 – II. “Blagoslovi dushe moya“

The Weekend Wanderer: 16 September 2023

September 16, 2023September 13, 2023 Matt EricksonLeave a comment

“Over 2,500 killed in Morocco earthquake: ‘We must embrace people in their pain and accompany them'” – Jonatan Soriano in Evangelical Focus – Europe: “An earthquake measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale has shaken the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, leaving at least 2,500 dead and 3,000 injured. Rescue teams continue to search for people under the rubble. The epicentre of the quake was in the village of Iguil, located 63 kilometres southwest of the busy tourist city of Marrakech, which has suffered damage to its cultural heritage. So far, the Moroccan government has accepted aid from four countries of the international community: Spain, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, while the Moroccan Interior Ministry says it is still studying other offers of help it is receiving. Even neighbouring Algeria, with which Morocco has had a diplomatic conflict for years, has offered its support, assuring that it will open its airspace to facilitate the arrival of humanitarian aid…..in Marrakesh ‘a coordination group has been formed which has been bringing in more people and agencies, mostly of Christian inspiration, and also with the participation of international churches.’ ‘The main local church here is helping as much as it can, although without clearly identifying itself as Christian,’ he says. Morocco ranks as the 29th most hostile country for Christians according to the annual Open Doors World Watch List. The focus of the aid being organised, says Andrés, is ‘to provide assistance to those who are already working,’ and as far as possible also ‘to the families who have suffered losses.'”

“This Milwaukee doctor sees kids shot every week. She wants the gun violence to stop.” – Ashley Luthern in The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “Dr. Megan Schultz, a pediatric emergency physician, started her career at a Boston hospital. In three years, she treated two children for gunshot wounds. Then, she took a job at Children’s Wisconsin in Milwaukee. She treated three kids who had been shot — in her first week. Dozens and dozens more patients have followed since then. Schultz, 41, knows how to save a life. What she wants more, though, is for her patients to have not been shot in the first place. ‘It is morally and emotionally exhausting to see children shot by guns as often as we do,’ she said. She is one of many physicians across the country drawing attention to laws and political decisions they believe put their patients at risk….In an op-ed published this summer in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Schultz and Dr. Ryan Scheper, another pediatric emergency physician, called on the state Legislature to enact stronger gun legislation, citing decades of research. More than 140 of their Children’s Wisconsin colleagues signed the letter. ‘When I talk about this with my colleagues, we are stunned that more people are not crying about this all the time,’ Schultz said in an interview.”

“What Men Are For: When Lone Ranger masculinity bottoms out” – Richard V. Reeves in Comment: “When I was thirteen, my father lost his job. He was hardly alone: this was in the early 1980s in the UK, and he worked in manufacturing. It took months for him to find work. Each morning he would appear at the breakfast table, freshly showered, in a shirt and tie. Then he would go to his desk to check for new job postings and send out résumés. One day I asked him, ‘Why do you still dress so smartly when you don’t have a job to go to?’ He looked at me and said, ‘I do still have a job. My job is to get another job so I can take care of all of you.’ I’ll never forget that moment. I saw, for the first time, that Dad’s job wasn’t just that mysterious thing he went off to do every morning. It was a manifestation of the relationship of care between him and the rest of the family. Three years later, he had to find a job again. This time he found work halfway across the country. But I was flourishing in my school and had friends I loved. My parents were reluctant to move me. So for two years, Dad left home at dawn every Monday morning, returning sometime on Friday afternoon. When I asked him about it years later, he said, ‘It’s just what you do, isn’t it?’ My father’s masculinity is relational. It is shaped and affirmed by his roles as a father, a husband, and community member.”

“How Ethan Hawke’s Flannery O’Connor Biopic Confronts the Author’s Controversial Legacy” – Andrew Quintana in Vanity Fair: “Flannery O’Connor, the gothic short story writer born in Savannah, Georgia, was, in her own words, ‘an integrationist by principle and a segregationist by taste.’ Born in 1925 and now regarded as one of her generation’s greatest and most pointed authors, she used the N-word freely in her correspondence. According to an article in The New Yorker, she felt uncomfortable sitting next to Black people on the subway. In her later years, she refused to allow James Baldwin to visit her Georgia farm, writing, ‘In New York it would be nice to meet him; here it would not.’ She criticized Baldwin who, while useful in her eyes for describing the Black experience, had no business trying to describe ‘everything else.’ For O’Connor, this ‘everything else’ boiled down to whiteness, a thorny domain she mined and satirized in her creative work. Only recently has the culture—and in turn the backlash—truly caught up with O’Connor, with the University of Maryland removing her name from a college dorm in 2020, after a petition circulated online. It’s quite a moment, in other words, to try to make a movie about Flannery O’Connor. But here we are with her first biopic, Wildcat, starring Maya Hawke and directed and co-written by her father, Ethan Hawke, which had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival last week; it will debut at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 11. The film has an acute awareness of both its subject’s brilliance and her status as a literary lightning rod, focusing less on her biography and more on the short stories that cemented her reputation.”

“Sinead O’Connor was once seen as a sacrilegious rebel, but her music and life were deeply infused with spiritual seeking” – Brenna Moore in Religion News Service: “When news broke July 26, 2023, that the gifted Irish singer Sinead O’Connor had died, stories of her most famous performance circulated amid the grief and shock. Thirty-one years ago, after a haunting rendition of Bob Marley’s song ‘War,’ O’Connor ripped up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on live television. ‘Fight the real enemy,’ she said – a reference to clerical sex abuse. For months afterward, she was banned, booed and mocked, dismissed as a crazy rebel beyond the pale. Commemorations following her death, however, cast the protest in a very different light. Her ‘Saturday Night Live’ performance is now seen as ‘invigorating,’ the New York Times’ pop critic wrote, and ‘a call to arms for the dispossessed.’ Attitudes toward Catholicism, sex and power are far different today than in 1992, whether in New York or O’Connor’s native Dublin. In many people’s eyes, the moral credibility of the Catholic Church around the world has crumbled, and trust in faith institutions of any sort is at an all-time low. Sexual abuse, once discussed only in whispers, is now beginning to be talked about openly. I join the chorus of voices today who say O’Connor was decades ahead of her time. But leaving it just at that, we miss something profound about the complexity and depth of her religious imagination. Sinead O’Connor was arguably one of the most spiritually sensitive artists of our time.”

“The dying light of fireflies” – John Jeremiah Sullivan in UnHerd: “This summer I spent some weeks in the north woods, in a cottage on Lake Michigan, in an eerie little crescent of absolute climatic perfection between Canadian wildfires and the 110-degree South. It was 68 and crystal blue. Once a week, a heavy morning storm would move into the bay and throw everything into ecliptic shadow, then withdraw and leave it glistening. There were a few smoky days, when the air stung your eyes. On one of them I got a message from my old friend Stacey Clarkson James. She was the art editor at Harper’s Magazine when I worked there 20 years ago. We bonded when everybody in the office took a personality test one afternoon. It was supposed to determine whether you were a ‘Dreamer’ or ‘Practical’. Stacey and I both scored 97% Dreamer. She’s hilarious and sharp and compulsively creative. As a kid in South Carolina, she used to sing in malls with her family. Her message said that her husband Sam’s book about fireflies had finally been printed. I knew what she was talking about from having followed the project from a distance, over text. Her husband, Samuel James, is a world-class photographer who grew up in Cincinnati. When she met him, they were in the New York journalism scene but parachuted out as a couple and landed in the forested Appalachian foothills of his native Ohio, the southern part, not far from the Kentucky border. It’s the middle of nowhere, frankly, even by southern Ohio standards, but their immediate visual environment is very beautiful and state-parkish.”

Music: Yo-Yo Ma, “Nature at Play: Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 (Live from the Great Smoky Mountains)”

The Weekend Wanderer: 20 May 2023

May 20, 2023May 20, 2023 Matt EricksonLeave a comment

“The Weekend Wanderer” is a weekly curated selection of news, news, stories, resources, and media on the intersection of faith and culture for you to explore through your weekend. Wander through these links however you like and in any order you like. Disclaimer: I do not necessarily agree with all the views expressed within these articles but have found them thought-provoking.

134638 “Died: Tim Keller, New York City Pastor Who Modeled Winsome Witness” – Daniel Silliman in Christianity Today: “Tim Keller, a New York City pastor who ministered to young urban professionals and in the process became a leading example for how a winsome Christian witness could win a hearing for the gospel even in unlikely places, died on Friday at age 72—three years after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Keller planted and grew a Reformed evangelical congregation in Manhattan; launched a church planting network; cofounded The Gospel Coalition; and wrote multiple best-selling books about God, the gospel, and the Christian life. Everywhere he went, he preached sin and grace. ‘The gospel is this,’ Keller said time and again: ‘We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.’ Keller was frequently accused—especially in later years—of cultural accommodation. He rejected culture-war antagonism and the “own the libs” approach to evangelism, and people accused him of putting too much emphasis on relevance and watering down or even betraying the truth of Christianity out of a misplaced desire for social acceptance. But a frequent theme throughout his preaching and teaching was idolatry. Keller maintained that people are broken and they know that. But they haven’t grasped that only Jesus can really fix them. Only God’s grace can satisfy their deepest longings.”

“‘There are many worlds in me’: Asian American Christians reject conformity” – Kathryn Post at Religion News Service: “In her poem ‘I Have a New Name,’ spoken-word artist Hosanna Wong boldly lists the names God calls her in Scripture: Friend, chosen, greatly loved. But when she first released her bravura anthem of acceptance in 2017, it was under a pseudonym. ‘Early on, a handful of leaders told me that my background might stand in the way of me being effective in the places and spaces I felt called to,’ Wong, 33, told Religion News Service in a recent interview. ‘So they suggested that I don’t go by the last name “Wong.”‘ After performing for most of her career as ‘Hosanna Poetry,’ Wong, 33, now records under her own name. She’s one of several Asian American Christian leaders who have rejected the mold that others tried to force them into, forging a more expansive faith that acknowledges the rich dimensions of their identity. But being open about who you are isn’t easy when you’ve been ‘shape shifting,’ as Wong put it, from an early age. Growing up in San Francisco in the 1990s, Wong felt most at home serving alongside her dad at his Christian outreach ministry for people living without homes and battling addiction. ‘We had outdoor services two to three days a week. People brought their alcohol bottles, people brought their needles. That’s how I learned church,’ said Wong, whose father was a former gang member who battled heroin addiction. ‘That’s where I learned that Jesus could save anyone’s soul and redeem anyone’s story … and that’s also where I learned the art of spoken word poetry.'”

052023-voices-word-play-therapy “The Word became relationship” – Samuel Wells in The Christian Century: “Fawlty Towers is getting a reboot. If you’ve seen the original series, you’ll know it’s one joke stretched out over 12 episodes. John Cleese’s Basil Fawlty is the proprietor of an undistinguished hotel in the seaside town of Torquay. He’s surrounded by foolish people—some of his staff, several of his guests—but he has to find a way to contain his barely suppressed rage enough to be polite to his guests and communicate with his staff. His attempts and failures to do so constitute the endless cycle of wild flailing and ultimately explosive violence that make the series agonizing, hilarious, and gripping viewing. But what if it weren’t a comedy? What if Fawlty Towers were actually a profound portrayal of human life, in which communication is largely impossible and conventions of civility are always on the point of snapping, whereupon violence inevitably ensues? Think about what it’s like to try to communicate with a relentless puppy that just won’t calm down, a youth group that won’t listen to instructions, a terrorist who won’t be reasonable, or a roommate who’s like a brick wall. In all these situations, violence lurks just beneath the surface. Words aren’t helping. You’re perilously close to a place beyond words. Civilization is about learning ways to resolve tension and conflict without violence. But sometimes the best of us can teeter toward becoming profoundly uncivilized. Which is why some of the most moving stories are about how two people can make a journey from a standoff of frustrated and scarcely suppressed violence to a relationship of genuine peace. Virginia Axline was a primary school teacher in 1940s Ohio who went back to college and studied with psychologist Carl Rogers. She developed the practice of child-centered play therapy, which offers warm, nonjudgmental acceptance to children and patiently allows them to find their own solutions at their own pace.”

mkc-peace-footwashing “Inspired by footwashing, Ethiopian turns rebel fighters toward peace” – Meserete Kristos Church News in Anabaptist News: “A demonstration of humility through footwashing in an Ethiopian peacebuilding training inspired one man to persuade more than 600 rebel fighters to turn from their violent ways. Meserete Kristos Church, the Anabaptist church in Ethiopia, has been engaged in peacebuilding efforts in Benishangul-Gumuz Region, home to ethnic-based violence and rebels fighting the government. Trainings have included activities based on community dialogue and reconciliation, as well as humility. In one such training, MKC director of peacebuilding Mekonnen Gemeda demonstrated humility’s importance in building peace in communities torn apart by ethnic violence. He asked for two volunteers, a Muslim and a Christian, and informed them he would wash their feet. Many participants did not believe he would do it until they saw it. One of the volunteers was Dergu Belena. He was from a Gumuz ethnic group, which initiated armed conflict against the government and killed people from other local ethnic groups. After the training, Belena went to the district government administration and asked for a gun with bullets. The administrator asked him why he wanted to get a gun. He told him, ‘I am cleansed from my past wrong thoughts and ready to be an ambassador of peace in my community.'”

Thomas Merton house “The mystery of Thomas Merton’s death—and the witness of America magazine’s poetry editor” – James T. Keane in America: “In last week’s column I wrote about John Moffitt, the America poetry editor from 1963 to 1987 who was a disciple of Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda for many years, and of Moffitt’s correspondence with another disciple of Vedanta Hinduism, J. D. Salinger. The author of The Catcher in the Rye was one of many Western devotees of Hinduism and Eastern monastic traditions whom Moffitt met or corresponded with over the years. Another was Thomas Merton, whom Moffitt met at a conference on monasticism outside Bangkok in December 1968—the conference where Merton died. The two had never met in person before, though their youthful interests in religion have a curious point of connection. In his autobiography The Seven-Storey Mountain, Merton traced his interest in religion to reading Aldous Huxley’s Ends and Means, a collection of essays on religion, ethics and the nature of the universe. Huxley was among the many literary and cultural luminaries who had taken an interest in Swami Vivekananda’s teachings, and he eventually became associated with the Vedanta Society of Southern California, even writing the introduction to an English translation of The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. (Readers interested in Sri Ramakrishna, the Hindu monk whose teachings Vivekananda sought to spread, might profit from this 1986 America essay on him by Francis X. Clooney, S.J.) The Bengali translator of the book was Swami Nikhilananda, the spiritual guide to both Salinger and Moffitt. Credited with rendering Ramakrishna’s mystic hymns into free verse was (you guessed it) John Moffitt.”

“Of Songs and Stories: What Bruce Springsteen Learned From Flannery O’Connor” – Warren Zanes at LitHub: “Shortly after the birth of his sister Virginia in 1951, Springsteen’s family moved in with his paternal grandparents. They would stay there through 1956, but the years spent in that house would remain with Springsteen, a thing to untangle. It was a period of his childhood that, in his telling, would come to the fore in Nebraska. ‘I know the house was very dilapidated,’ Springsteen told me. ‘That was something that embarrassed me as a child. It was visibly ramshackle, my grandparents’ house. On the street you could see that it was deteriorating. I just remember being embarrassed about it as a child. That would have been my only sense that something wasn’t right with who we were and what we were doing. I can’t quite describe it. It was intense. The house was eventually condemned. Really, it fell apart around us. I lived there when there was only one functional room, the living room. Everything else was pretty much finished.’ In the living room was the portrait of his aunt Virginia, his father’s sister, an image Springsteen has described on a few occasions. Virginia, at age six and out riding her bicycle, was hit and killed by a truck as it pulled out of a gas station on Freehold’s McLean Street. In some misguided tribute to Virginia’s early and sudden death, Springsteen’s grandparents withheld discipline from their first grandchild, Bruce. It was a twisting of logic that likely seemed beneficent, if only to minds stuck in grief. His was a terrible freedom. When Bruce pushed, there was nothing there to push against.”