4/30/24 – It is good to think about one’s identity, but use actually meaningful sentences. Stop slapping labels on yourself like you’re merchandise marketing yourself to a public that speaks in strings of single words. Present yourself like a unique individual not like a caricature of all things trending. It is quite annoying and meaningless. Happy Tuesday!
4/30/24 – As a country, we need to find a reasonable compromise on abortion that both respects the rights and the needs of the mother with (equal) respect for the sanctity of life. Figure it out.
4/30/24 – Considering all things, since gender dysphoria is a gender identity disorder, wouldn’t it make more sense to treat is with neurological and/or psychological treatments than with physical alteration?
4/28/24 – Birds make everything better and more beautiful. Happy Sunday!
4/28/24 – To escape is sometimes to just look at the beauty and the art in the world around you.
4/28/24 – Other ancient civilizations, for example, those in Asia, such as in India and China, and in Africa, such as in Egypt, which to a certain degree represents the Arab world more broadly, don’t get adequate recognition.
The focus tends to be on what is characterized as the western ancient world, Greece and especially, Italy, which was particularly powerful and influential in the west. However, other ancient civilizations have also had great influence, especially in other parts of the world.
These beautiful pictures capture the romance of the intersection of the ancient and the modern in Cairo, Egypt. If we lived in the world we deserve to live in, one of peace and a truly shared humanity, we would all be able to better appreciate the timeless artistry of kilim rugs, the delicate loveliness of minarets, and the intricate beauty of Islamic and Arabic art and architecture. If we lived in the world we all deserve to live in, we would be able to live in our shared heritage by sharing it with each other as a people of God.
It went viral because we all want this, whether or not we (fully) realize it. “The next day, he was surprised to find that the post had gone viral. People all over the world were resharing it across social media. ‘It evoked emotional reactions of comfort and tranquility, nostalgia and connection,’ he says.”
These dreamy photos of historical Cairo will transport you to another time
4/28/24 – A beautiful piece that speaks eloquently to the universal truth below, while capturing the particular spiritual and earthly journey of the Jewish people. Jewish artists often grapple with the tension of that truth by trying to capture the eternal nature of their spiritual sanctuary, their tabernacle, their ancestral land, which is the state of Israel, and the realities of the Jewish experience in its myriad migratory forms, those due to persecution or war, but also those simply in search of opportunity and a touch of wanderlust. There are many similarities to others’ experiences, and to recognize this truth is to recognize our shared humanity.
“The experience or memory of the modern Jewish artist has included the shared reality of pogroms, wars, persecution, and a modern-day version of Biblical wanderings. Jewish artists’ work intertwined with the reality of the time, as with Felix Nussbaum, the Polish painter who later moved to Berlin and eventually died in Auschwitz with his wife, also an artist. His work reflects wide-eyed fear, as in his 1943, ‘Self Portrait with Jewish Identity Card.’
And thousands of years after the wanderings of the Jewish people in the desert, some critics understand Mark Rothko’s large canvases with blocks of color as a modern day tabernacle. In this way, Rothko, as with many Jewish artists, was both creating a sanctuary serving as a place of worship and also a mobile place, reflecting the enduring reality of wandering in the history of the Jewish people.”
Jewish Art: A Brief History
4/28/24 – In this polarized era, it’s more important than ever to remember that there is no us and them. The truth is that there is just us, and by us, that means all life. Just look at the known universe for proof. We are all immigrants or migrants, even those of us who have lineages that go back millennia to our ancestral lands because we are all guests on a planet we had no role in creating. We are here by God’s invitation, and our time on our temporary home has an end date. From dust we were made, to dust we shall return.
4/23/24 – It just passed…finally. Slava Ukraini! (Please excuse the dysfunction in the USA. What can we say? It’s a miserable and unnecessary state of affairs.)
4/23/24 – Foreign aid packages need to be brought to the floor separately. It’s not fair to the countries involved or to the American people to package them like this. Ukraine and Taiwan are easy. (The only reason MAGA Republicans are taking issue with Ukraine is because they are traitors, sympathetic to the russian poop and followers of the evil one, trump.) Israel is not easy. There is no compromise on Israel belonging to the Jewish people, however, the war is unacceptable as it is currently being conducted.
4/23/24 – It’s a bit surreal to watch Bernie Sanders, a Jew, fighting for Palestinians during Passover. He is right that the war stopped being (exclusively) about Hamas. Update: He just said that he would vote no…of course.
4/22/24 – It is important to note that there are many good journalists, some of whom risk their lives to tell important stories and help us protect our rights, freedoms and democracy.
4/22/24 – The propaganda has lost the public trust. It’s going to be hard to get it back.
4/22/24 – “What’s happening there? Why is NPR telling me what to think?” Right. As every educator knows, it’s a lot easier to think for your students or to tell them what to think than to teach them how to think for themselves.
4/22/24 – The propaganda, who generally hate Christianity, might consider that the Pope routinely dresses down the clergy in rather humiliating, public fashion. Where is the dressing down of the propaganda? At least, we have these couple examples of well-deserved criticism.
I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.
Chasing sensationalism contributed to the evil one, trump’s, win.
Trump, Project 2025, the Supreme Court and the Election with Hillary Rodham Clinton
Oh yes, and we all still notice that the propaganda also serves as Taylor Swift’s advertising campaign.
4/21/24 – Today is Good Shepherd Sunday. Billy Graham was a man of deep faith, who genuinely loved the Lord and brought millions to Christianity. However, the church is mostly made up of clergy who quietly do the Lord’s work day in and day out. They are the good shepherd who tend to their flock. They go to their people in or out of distress, sometimes in the middle of the night, for births to deaths and everything in between. We appreciate them, but we don’t thank them enough. To our good shepherds, thank you. You help us heal our brokenness with your wisdom, kindness, love and compassion.
4/21/24 – The church is incredibly diverse. How could it not be? It spans the globe and has billions of believers. This is an interesting article about the misuse of the term “evangelical.”
The Line Between Good and Evil Cuts Through Evangelical America
4/21/24 – Truth: You can’t be freed from suffering. Anyone who’s telling you that you can be freed from suffering is lying to you. Signed, simply being human.
4/21/24 – Happy Sunday!
4/21/24 – The Vatican is correct as it relates to human dignity. It is very important to maintain the organic, natural nature of human beings. Once that is destroyed, the continued existence of the human species will be gravely threatened. Within liberals, there is a paradox that they simultaneously want a more natural world, free of chemicals, the torture of animals, the extraction of fossil fuels, etc., but when it comes to preserving the natural order of humans, our own species, they go full-blown scientism. Whether or not one agrees with the Vatican, it is much more consistent than either liberals or conservatives.
4/19/24 – The logic was something along the lines of: If the other party is fighting, we’re winning. Really!? Is that how that works? In that case, who needs foreign enemies. They just need partisanship, right? The reason we do the right thing is because we are people with integrity. You don’t capitalize on other people’s mistakes to try to elevate yourself. It just ends up bringing you and, in this case, the country and the world down. It wasn’t the right thing to do. It was wrong.
4/19/24 – Flashback Friday.
10/25/23 – This. They didn’t get the evil one, but they got someone who’s worse than McCarthy. “10/4/23 – Apparently, they are planning to nominate the evil one, trump, for speaker. So, if they do so, what will Democrats do? Or they didn’t bother to think through their position? 10/4/23 – McCarthy also prevented the federal government from shutting down. If one is going to say a bunch of negative things that are entirely correct, one does also need to acknowledge the positive things that are also correct. There are certain people who are evil, such as the evil one, Trump, and one doesn’t need to do this with them. But McCarthy isn’t evil. He’s actually a rather run-of-the-mill politician. “Kevin McCarthy gave up his soul not for Wales but for something worse—Donald Trump. It will be of little comfort to McCarthy to know he’s hardly the only one to have done so.” Didn’t the evil one want the shutdown? McCarthy was punished immediately after he did the right thing and prevented it. Tell us: how do reinforcement and punishment work? What message does this send to other Republicans who do the right thing? Encourage the behavior you want to see in others.
Kevin McCarthy Got What He Deserved”
10/18/23 – Taking a cynical, calculated approach to Republican dysfunction is not the way to go. Jim Jordon as Speaker is not a good outcome for the country and, therefore, for Democrats. They should have helped McCarthy keep his job, or find some suitable Republican alternative. Do the right thing and stop with the machinations or indulging in schadenfreude. Grow up!
10/2/23 – If need be, Democrats need to vote for McCarthy so that he can retain his job. We need to move beyond politics and start solving our problems. We need to work together as Americans and as global citizens.
4/19/24 – Too much politics. Not enough principles. Too much tech. Not enough analog. Too much social media. Not enough real-world interaction. Etc.
4/19/24 – We said a long time ago that Democrats should have crossed the aisle for McCarthy. They did not. Think about how much misery they would have saved Ukraine and others if they had done the right thing from the start.
4/16/24 – Much is uncertain. One thing is certain. Extreme liberals will destroy life on the planet with their scientism (science worship), aided and abetted by the propaganda.
4/13/24 – One idea to help revitalize rural areas and small towns is for them to invest in charging stations for EVs. This would help both the environment and these areas, as people could spend time and money in them while their vehicles charged up.
Also, this article/podcast addresses several questions about EVs.
You asked, we answered: Your questions about electric vehicles
4/10/24 – Yes, it’s a propaganda event, but only for a country that prides itself on state-sanctioned baby rapists, sodomizing rapists, rapists more generally, and, of course, torturers. A country that no longer produces anything of any value to the world. A country that has become a full-blown kleptocracy. A country that violently represses its own people. A country whose leaders care about nothing else but power and money. That’s the modern Russian state. It’s sick and sad.
“‘To be able to show off an American citizen who has chosen to reinvent themselves, to reform themselves and become a part of the Russian war machine seems to provide evidence that Russia is winning a much bigger spiritual war,’ he said.” Sure, Russia is winning a “spiritual war,” but only if you’re on the side of evil.
US military veteran accused of having explicit images of a child apparently joined Russian army
“Kamardin, 33, recited a poem condemning Russia-backed insurgents in eastern Ukraine. The next day, police with a search warrant burst into the apartment he shared with his wife Alexandra Popova and another friend, and took the poet into custody. Police beat Kamardin, Popova and their flatmate, and raped the poet, both his wife and his lawyer said.”
A lonely radio nerd. A poet. Vladimir Putin’s crackdown sweeps up ordinary Russians
4/10/24 – The evil one, trump, doesn’t give a crap about abortion. He’s a self-serving lunatic who’s desperate to stay out of prison.
4/10/24 – The world needs fewer people and more animals. Happy Wednesday!
4/2/24 – One shouldn’t get everything their way. Part of being a mature, reasonable person is conceding even if you might be right. Grace has tremendous value. It is dignified. It is love.
4/2/24 – Some more great pictures from Easter.
AP Photos: Easter Sunday around the world
4/2/24 – The way many Israelis and its government have treated both Palestinian Christians and Muslims is not correct. Also, this war is not well-executed, and it has turned into at least as much a quest for revenge as for justice. Netanyahu is a terrible person. (We also had a terrible leader, the evil one, trump, so we can sympathize with the Israelis who would like to get rid of him but can’t.) There have been too many innocent lives lost, harmed or displaced, including the tragic deaths of the workers with World Central Kitchen. May their courageous, humanitarian souls rest in peace.
Do all reasonable people wish there were peace in the Middle East? Of course, we do, but if people think the problems in the Middle East are isolated to Israel, they are not. That is simply fiction. Christians have fled the entire Levant due to war, persecution, discrimination, or Israeli’s restrictions. The rest of the Middle East, which also holds considerable religious significance for Christians, has treated them even worse than Israel has.
The propaganda would know this if they followed the persecuted church at all, but they don’t. So please spare us the anti-Semitism masquerading as deep concern for Christians. The propaganda hates Christianity, and we all know it. They also hate Islam because they hate religion in general. So, if you’re Muslim, don’t fool yourselves.
This is not actually about Muslims or Palestine. It’s actually about many liberals’ hatred and jealousy of the Jewish people. Look at how white people, especially Europeans, have treated them throughout history. Their fragile white egos can’t handle a successful ethnic group that is not white.
Israel belongs to the Jewish people. Period. Not Christians. Not Muslims. Ideally, all three Abrahamic religions could live there in peace and religious harmony, but that doesn’t seem to be the way things are playing out. This is quite unfortunate, and there is much blame to go around. Is it what Christians want? No, it’s not, but the right thing to do is to respect that the land belongs to the Jewish people and just leave if we can’t make this work.
Don’t begrudge the Jewish people. Christians and Muslims would have no religion without them. This is also a historical fact. It’s not worth it to continue to fight like this. Let the Jewish people have their land. Let them have peace. We can’t have peace in the world without grace and love. This is a way to express love of God, whether Christian or Muslim, by showing the Jewish people, who have been persecuted throughout history, some grace.
4/2/24 – God bless the persecuted church around the world, today and every day. God loves them with a deep and abiding love. May our God of hope sustain them physically, emotionally and spiritually. Pray for them, our true believers in Christ.
4/2/24 – One of the paradoxes of Christianity is that (then and perhaps still now) the people who were best suited to adopt its beliefs were the Jewish people. Why? Because, aside from Jesus as the Messiah, which they don’t believe unless they are Messianic Jews, the vast majority of Christianity’s beliefs and traditions came directly out of Judaism, and everybody else were Gentiles, who, at the time, had no spiritual formation in Christianity’s core tenets.
When Constantine converted to Christianity, he had no knowledge of the faith because he wasn’t a Jew. He was a pagan, who came to believe in monotheism while still not fully understanding the Jewish theological concept of one God. He also didn’t initially know the Christian rites that existed from the beginning, such as baptism, or its moral expectations, such as the Ten Commandments. He routinely violated the commandments, such as murdering his own wife and son, and procrastinated on baptism to avoid going to hell.
How is this still relevant 2,000 years later? For as surprising as it might be, because there is still considerable ignorance about the faith, its beliefs and demands, and ironically, especially from the “Christian Nationalists,” who sometimes still worship Nordic or pagan gods. Also, looking at the state of Christianity in Europe, the supposed cradle of Christianity, it is clear that its strong pagan streak, presently manifested as hedonism and/or science worship, is particularly obstinate among the self-described superior white race.
“Christian Nationalism” is a political movement with allusions to a religion that they barely understand. The degree of Constantine’s sincerity is debatable. Likely, it was a combination of genuine belief, however flawed in its understanding, and political ambition. MAGA are generally less sincere in the faith, and they reveal their theological and historical ignorance regularly.
Where Constantine ended the persecution of Christians and maintained religious freedom for all even while establishing Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire, MAGA are damaging the faith in their quest for political power and by forcing their more extreme religious values on a secular, diverse society.
Lastly, Constantine may have confused Jesus Christ with Sol Invictus, the son god, but it was at the origins of the faith, i.e. about 1,700 years ago, and at least it was still a god, not an evil, dangerous demagogue. What is obvious to many observers, even the nonreligious who don’t know much about Christianity, of our bizarre, modern-day religious saga is that MAGA treats the evil one, trump, like their messiah, casting aside Christians’ true Messiah, Jesus Christ. There is a Commandment about this. It’s the first one because it’s the most important.
4/2/24 – Everyone needs to stop rewriting facts and history according to what matches their feelings or views. Everything is hard enough. It’s obnoxious and intellectually and morally wrong. Knock it off!
4/2/24 – God loves Palestinians and Israelis alike, but Jesus was not a Palestinian Jew. Thou shall not give false testimony. He was a Hebrew, an Israelite from the land of what was then Judea. He was not Palestinian. There were Jews, and everybody else were Gentiles. Palestinians were Gentiles. They are Arabs. The Romans were colonizers. Everybody knows this, and it’s right there in the Bible. Stop making things up! Judea was and is Jewish land. Accept it, and move on.
This Easter, let’s not try to pretend Jesus was a ‘Palestinian Jew’
4/2/24 – To all of the overt and covert racists who think black people are inferior, just sit your ignorant a—es down. You know nothing. There is no evidence to support these views. Black people are beautiful, smart and talented. They are a gift to the world, and God loves them as they are.
4/1/24 – That’s fun. They looked amazing! There are some churches where entire African families will come dressed from head to toe in the same beautiful African prints. Lovely, and so cute! Everybody is welcome to our churches, especially the poor and marginalized, no matter how they’re dressed. We come dressed not to impress others with worldly things, but to show our respect to the God we love. It’s great when people come dressed well, and when immigrants come dressed in their home country’s traditional attire. It puts on full display the diversity of the Body of Christ.
These parishioners showed off their “Sunday’s best” this weekend
4/1/24 – Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” He is.
4/1/24 – Our civilization has taken millennia to develop. It can be destroyed in seconds. Remain humble and faithful to the Lord. All glory is fleeting.
4/1/24 – Before we have to return to the insane asylum that is American politics and other worldly preoccupations, let’s reflect on what was a soul-reviving Holy Week. It was a much-needed blessing and break from a world gone mad.
One would be forgiven for thinking of Christianity as a “white man’s religion,” but as the late Billy Graham said, it’s not. One of the many intriguing questions is: why did Rome become arguably the center of the faith, in which resides Vatican City, even though Paul and Jesus’s disciples evangelized throughout the world: the Middle East, Europe, Asia and Africa? Within what we now consider to be Europe or “the west,” why wasn’t the center Greece?
Perhaps Jesus, who most historians and theologians understand to be a brown Jew, meaning neither white nor Roman, thought that “the white man” most needed to hear his message. Rome was the center of earthly power. Also, wouldn’t it be poignant if the very people who put Jesus to death were conquered by him? (No, it wasn’t the Jews. Stop with the anti-Semitism. Ultimately, Pontius Pilate was in charge of the province of Judea, and he made the call.) This reversal of power for the ancient persecuted church in Rome is often attributed to Constantine’s conversion, but perhaps it should actually be credited to God.
The Roman Empire is no longer. Italy is a small fraction of what was once that mighty empire, but Christianity has come to dominate the world. One can find it almost everywhere on the planet. It takes different expressions influenced by the people and the culture that make the universal religion its own.
Linguistically, in the Catholic Church, there is often a considerable amount of Latin, some Greek, and some Spanish during standard masses. The language Jesus spoke, however, was Aramaic, which is most closely related to Hebrew and Syriac, all three of which are Semitic languages. Syriac and the Syriac rite are still spoken and practiced in Eastern churches.
That said, both Greek and Latin played a considerable role in the early church, but the closest language to Latin, which was the language of the Roman Empire, that is spoken in the Catholic Church as part of its standard Liturgy of the Word or of the Eucharist is actually Spanish, since it’s a Romance language. It is definitely not English.
There is also the outstanding question: exactly how “white” are Italians and Greeks anyway? They certainly don’t seem genetically as “white” as the people from England to which a certain political camp is peddling American exceptionalism. The Pilgrims and Puritans were Northern Europeans, who hadn’t experienced conquest from, for example, the Moors of Africa. They were much more likely to be raided by Vikings to their north.
Therefore, genetically, ethnically, and linguistically white people don’t have any special inheritance to Christianity. In addition, Romans came to dominate Christianity through power and politics, starting with Constantine. This is obviously contrary to the message of Christianity, but the arc of this worldly power was relatively flat and short in comparison to the high and long arc of Christianity’s divine power.
MAGA’s claims to Christianity are, as usual, absurd and detached from historical and other evidence. More generally, the cross isn’t a flag, a country, a culture, a language, a people or a genetic ancestry. It is the most powerful expression of God’s love in human history. It is a love that we don’t deserve but was given to us nonetheless. To use this love to spread hate again goes contrary to Jesus’s message. If we are to escape from our self-inflicted misery, there is only one way – the way of the cross, and this way, this truth, this life belongs to the world, from the beginning to the end, from the alpha to the omega, no matter the language, culture or people.
AP Photos: Young and old participate in Holy Week religious processions on Italy’s Procida island
Good Friday in Latin America
Hours to make and seconds to destroy, Holy Week flower carpets are a labor of love in Guatemala