Category: Notes Anthology

“Someone who thinks the world is always cheating him is right. He is missing that wonderful feeling of trust in someone or something.” – Eric Hoffer

metaphysical belonging, 

— a sense that your life fits into a broader scheme of meaning and eternal values.

If you lack metaphysical belonging, you have to rely on social belonging for all your belonging needs, which requires you to see your glorious self reflected in the attentions and affirmations of others. This leads to the fragile narcissism that Lasch saw coming back in 1979: “The narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem. He cannot live without an admiring audience. His apparent freedom from family ties and institutional constraints does not free him to stand alone or to glory in his individuality. On the contrary, it contributes to his insecurity.”

David Brooks

Discover Joy

God, who is forever pouring out God’s whole being from all eternity, wants you to flourish. God wants you to be filled with joy and excitement and ever longing to be able to find what is so beautiful in God’s creation: the compassion of so many, the caring, the sharing. And God says, Please, my child, help me. Help me to spread love and laughter and joy and compassion. And you know what, my child? As you do this—hey, presto—you discover joy. Joy, which you had not sought, comes as the gift, as almost the reward for this non-self-regarding caring for others.

Dalai Lama

Cosmic Dance

When we are alone on a starlit night; when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children; when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet Bash? we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash—at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the “newness,” the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.

Thomas Merton

Memory

We honor pain through memory and we know that people die twice—the second time when no one on earth still speaks their name.

In Judaism God is called Zochair kol Hanishkachot—the one who remembers all things forgotten.

Hebrew has a word that applies only to bereaved parents, shakul. Can one conceive of a history so studded with such loss that there needs to be a designated word?

For the Jewish people amnesia is not an option. Jewish memory is both a tribute and a harbinger. It is what we owe to God, and to those who suffered and those who died. The dead should not be forgotten in the press of the everyday. The poignancy of loss cannot be fully calmed by the blanket of passing time.

David Wolpe

Heartbreak

Heartbreak is about crushed expectations. The problem is that we’ve made romance into such a fantasy that anything short of a Hallmark movie feels like failure. We’ve created generation after generation more in love with this idealized love than with the person. The inability to distinguish this is what causes so much pain.

Why don’t we have high school classes about romantic relationships? We could separate the fantasy from the reality to forewarn our children so they can better handle the flood of hormones and peer pressure. Instead, we give them useless clichés like, “When it’s love, you’ll just know.” While that may be true, most people “just know” many times—and are wrong.

 Kareem Abdul Jabbar

Modern World

The modern world is a culture of “fatherless children” (sometimes quite literally). The past (and thus the place and source of our origins) is always seen as something to be overcome. The notion of “progress” includes a forgetting of the past and the reduction of its power in our lives. We seek to self-create and self-define our lives as though we had no source outside of ourselves.

Fr Stephen Freeman

Cultural Christianity 

When we insert religion inside of culture, culture wins every time. Most of us are Americans or our nationalities first, and then maybe, once in a while, we are Christians. That’s just obvious—it’s our cultures that form us. We want to believe, we keep pretending we believe, but we really don’t.

Richard Rohr

Scripture 

The purpose of Scripture is to not to get a passing grade in Religion 101, rather, the purpose of Scripture is to bring people to believe in Jesus, to come to Jesus, to grasp hold of Jesus, to rest in the one whose yoke is easy and whose burden is light (Matthew 11:30)

Michael Bird

The Irony of Infamy

By the time Rose’s 24 -year career came to an end in 1986 he had become MLB’s all-time leader in hits, games played, at bats, singles, and outs. He was Rookie of the Year, won three World Series championships, three batting titles, two Golden Glove Awards, and one Most Valuable Player Award. He also made 17 All-Star appearances at an unequaled five different positions: first base, second base, third base, left field and right field.

 …eighteen months after Rose was banned from baseball and the same year Rose would have been first eligible for the Hall of Fame, its directors voted to exclude individuals on baseball’s permanently ineligible list. This new rule prevented Rose from ever being admitted to the Hall of Fame. 

“What, are they waiting for me to die?” Rose repeatedly would say of his chances of getting into the Hall of Fame. “Wouldn’t that be horrible if I died next week and then next year they reinstated me?”

Well, he’s dead, but the controversy continues.
If, some day, he is inducted to the HOF, will he be remembered for baseball or betting?

Reverberation from the Echo Chamber

The Importance of Being Wrong

A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right , basically all the time , about basically everything : about our political and intellectual convictions , our religious and moral beliefs , our assessment of other people , our memories , our grasp of facts . As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it , our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient .
Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority , the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition . Far from being a moral flaw , it is inextricable from some of our most humane and honorable qualities : empathy , optimism , imagination , conviction , and courage . And far from being a mark of indifference or intolerance , wrongness is a vital part of how we learn and change . Thanks to error , we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world .
... it is ultimately wrongness , not rightness , that can teach us who we are .
_{Schulz, Kathryn. Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error}

The above quotes capture the paradox each of us find ourselves in as we strive for meaningful and authentic lives. An unrelenting pursuit of rightness is pitted against our incontrovertible fallibility. Amazingly, left to our own devices, rightness will almost always win out.
Our desire for rightness leads us to echo chambers where our “rightness” is amplified and error is filtered out. Like a butterfly from a cocoon, we emerge in the beauty of our rightness, confirmed in our infallibility.

The cost of rightness can be high.

Avoidance of controversial issues or alternative solutions creates a loss of individual creativity, uniqueness and independent thinking. Rightness binds and blinds us.
An “illusion of invulnerability” (an inflated certainty of our rightness) can prevail.
Stereotyping of, and dehumanizing actions toward, dissenting persons can develop. As true believers we can produce fantasies that don’t match reality.
Interpersonal communication outside our echo chamber is stifled. Immersion in the
comfortable confines of an echo chamber may result in significant losses, not the least of which, can be family and community relationships.Echo chambers reinforce our natural
tendency to restrict our relationships rather than expand our social interactions.
Residing within an echo chamber strips our lives of serendipity and wonder. We trade off the opportunity to engage the endless diversity of the world around us.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

Self sufficiency 

 …the saying in the Sesotho language is: Motho ke Motho ka Batho. A person is only human in relation to other humans.

…as a Christian the idea of self sufficiency is close to anathema. How else do we live the Christian life except in the context of the faith community as we engage the world around us?

Keith Regehr

role of God in mental health

I don’t think you can grow tomatoes by praying for them to appear out of thin air. There is this thing called gardening that God gave us to grow and cultivate tomatoes. In a similar way, God gave us technologies that promote mental health and well-being and it would be foolish not to use these when needed. And yet, I also think it’s a mistake to ignore the role faith and spirituality plays in psychological well-being. As I describe in The Shape of Joy (due out in about two weeks), one of the best kept secrets of psychology is that faith and spirituality have been repeatedly shown to be predictive of health and happiness. God is good for you. 

This isn’t to say we should approach God in a therapeutic, utilitarian manner. I know a lot of pastors and theologians who worry about reducing God to “the therapeutic.” I tend to respond to this concern with Augustine: Our hearts are restless until they rest in God. If God is our Creator and the ground of our being then it stands to reason that we’ll thrive when we make contact with and abide in that ground. Mental health improves when psychology makes contact with ontology. Living in the real matters.

Richard Beck http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2024/09/psalm-69.html

Ethics

Ethics are formed. We are not born able to naturally make ethical decisions for the good of others. Have you ever seen a group of toddlers play? “Mine!” and “No!” are phrases that characterize the toddler years. Nor do we coincidentally happen upon becoming a virtuous person. The process by which ethics, and therefore character, is the academic study that spiritual formation engages in.

Kelly Edminson

Contemplation 

Parker Palmer writes, “The function of contemplation in all its forms is to penetrate illusion and help us to touch reality.”

Contemplation is any way we can find to help us penetrate illusion and touch reality—and reality will always be bigger than us. It will always leave us a bit uncomfortable, a bit off center stage. If we’re still on center stage, it isn’t Reality.

Richard Rohr

Famine

Timmo Gaasbeek, a disaster expert who has modeled the crisis for a research institute in the Netherlands, told me that he foresees 13 million people starving to death in Sudan by October 2025, with a margin of error of two million. Such a toll would make this one of the worst famines in world history and the worst since the great Chinese famine of 65 years ago. By way of contrast, the famous Ukraine famine of the 1930s killed perhaps four million people, although estimates vary.

Nicholas Kristof NYT

A convenient rationale  for euthanasia:

“The patient is mercifully put out of our misery.”
G Ezell

Remembering your reading

If we can’t remember the things we’ve read and watched and even loved, do they still “count”?

What does it mean for a book, a show, an experience to “count,” anyway? Do you need to be able to recall the plot in detail? Should you be able to describe scenes or bits of dialogue, larger themes, cultural relevance? Or is it enough to just remember enjoying a book, or to be able to conjure a feeling it inspired? I was mulling these questions when I came across this essay by James Collins from 2010. In it, he describes books that he loved about which he remembers nothing: “All I associate with them is an atmosphere and a stray image or two, like memories of trips I took as a child.”

Collins suspected, as I do, that the books he can’t remember must have had an effect on his brain anyway, that the experience of reading and engaging with the texts must have changed him in some deeper way, leaving “a kind of mental radiation — that continues to affect me even if I can’t detect it.” I want to believe that my immersion in the fascinating characters and rich plot of “Creation Lake” by Rachel Kushner are performing some kind of alchemy in my brain even if — and it seems unthinkable, halfway through the book — I am likely to forget it all.

Maryanne Wolf, a neuroscientist, confirmed for Collins that inability to recall a book’s details shouldn’t be taken as evidence that we didn’t assimilate it in some way. “We can’t retrieve the specifics, but to adapt a phrase of William James’s, there is a wraith of memory,” she told him. “The information you get from a book is stored in networks. We have an extraordinary capacity for storage, and much more is there than you realize. It is in some way working on you even though you aren’t thinking about it.”

Melissa kirsch NYT

Envy

Envy is the dominant destructive emotion in most people. It’s a tricky emotion in that it can be both healing and lethal. A small dose can motivate a person to excel, but a large dose can lead a person to hop on an endless treadmill of chasing what they can never catch. It’s an addiction that only increasing amounts can satisfy and even then the satisfaction is fleeting and the hunger returns.

Kareem Abdul Jabbar

A Good Story

Let this be said: evangelicalism loves a good conversion or spiritual life story. Let this be added quickly: but only so long as the story confirms the boundary lines.

Scot McKnight

Today’s post introduces what is planned to be a regular feature in SMTTA. “Reverberation from the Echo Chamber”. I will share excerpts from an essay entitled “Echo Chambers” written in 2018. You can read the complete essay HERE.

“Reverberation from the Echo Chamber”

Who are we?

My hope is readers will gain an awareness of echo chambers. More importantly, readers will better understand personal implications of residing in an echo chamber.
This is not about Republican or Democrat, et al. It is not about giving up what we believe to be right. It is not about proving the other side wrong.
It is ultimately irrelevant whether we are right or wrong about our cause.
Continual, unfiltered reinforcement of our rightness, will, ironically, result
in unhealthy outcomes that can result in destructive consequences.
It is revealing to read comments on controversial subjects that appear in social media. There is no limit as to how despicable comments can be. Living constantly in an echo chamber can transform us in ways that are inexplicable. The “safety” of an echo chamber is a darkness that shields us from face to face interaction and allows us to escape responsibility and grants permission for words and conduct that we would never consider otherwise.

Consider two comments posted recently on Linkedin I believe illustrate the point:

Bull@#$% comments from trolls or morons are completely useless and waist of my time to read. I am not neatral in what i am.I stand without doubt a hardcore constitutional republican ,a Master automotive technician, and above all
a christian. So call me what you want i am confident in my beliefs, ideas and religion.What the naysayers have to say has ZERO EFFECT ON ME and makes no difference to anyone but the one calling names.

… we should all support each other…men ,women and others.we are all gods children.lets stop dividing ourselves into categories.men ,women, black ,white straight ,gay.lets just be one people with the same mission.being good citizens of our wonderful country.I agree that women should not put down other women nor should any group denounce other groups just to self promote or to attack others you dont agree with.Lets debate and find common ground and work together for the greater good for all.

The first comment was, obviously, in response to a subject a commenter did not agree with.
The second comment came in response to an idea a commenter agreed with.

The most revealing thing about these two comments is that the author of both was the same person.
I wonder which one he would say most represents who he is??

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

I intend to live forever … So far, so good.

Scarcity 

Brene’ Brown describing the impact of scarcity upon our lives:

We get scarcity because we live it…Scarcity is the “never enough” problem…Scarcity thrives in a culture where everyone is hyperaware of lack. Everything from safety and love to money and resources feels restricted or lacking. We spend inordinate amounts of time calculating how much we have, want, and don’t have, and how much everyone else has, needs, and wants.

Brown goes on to share this assessment from Lynne Twist: 

For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is “I didn’t get enough sleep.” The next one is “I don’t have enough time.” Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don’t have enough of…Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we’re already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds are racing with a litany of what we didn’t get, or didn’t get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to that reverie of lack…This internal condition of scarcity, this mind-set of scarcity, lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, our prejudice, and our arguments with life.

Brueggermann and Grace

Walter once told me that he is disliked by progressives because he still believes in the old formula, that it is by grace alone that we are saved. And then he confided in me, “Conrad, I have to work to stay in that place of grace.”

And I love that old truth. Work to stay in the place of grace. For without the work there is but cheap grace. But without the grace, the work matters not. And is ultimately, expensive work.

The Nature of Focus

Focus is fundamentally different from mere attention. Attention can be fleeting, easily shifting from one thing to another, often beyond our conscious control. It’s our reaction to the constant barrage of sensory inputs we face each day. In contrast, focus is the sustained, intentional direction of our mental faculties toward a specific goal or object. It involves narrowing our field of vision, both literally and figuratively, which deepens our engagement with what we are focusing on.

Hyperfocus, often described as the intense concentration seen in individuals with ADHD, illustrates the power of focus. During hyperfocus, distractions fade, and the person becomes deeply engrossed in their task. However, this state can also lead to neglecting other important aspects of life. The challenge is to harness the benefits of such focus while maintaining balance.

Brad Vaughn 

Penny wise?

A conservative estimate holds that there are 240 billion pennies lying around the United States — about 724 ($7.24) for every man, woman and child there residing, and enough to hand two pennies to every bewildered human born since the dawn of man. (To distribute them all, in fact, we’d have to double back to the beginning and give our first six billion ancestors a third American penny.) These are but a fraction of the several hundreds of billions of pennies issued since 1793, most of which have suffered a mysterious fate sometimes described in government records, with a hint of supernaturality generally undesirable in bookkeeping, as “disappearance.” As far as anyone knows, the American cent is the most produced coin in the history of civilization, its portrait of Lincoln the most reproduced piece of art on Earth. Although pennies are almost never used for their ostensible purpose (to make purchases), right now one out of every two circulating coins minted in the United States has a face value of 1 cent. A majority of the ones that have not yet disappeared are, according to a 2022 report, “sitting in consumers’ coin jars in their homes.”

It’s crucial that they remain there. Five years ago, Mint officials conceded that if even a modest portion of these dormant pennies were suddenly to return to circulation, the resulting flow-back would be “logistically unmanageable.” There would be so unbelievably many pennies that there most likely would not be enough room to contain them inside government vaults. Moving them from place to place would be time-consuming, cumbersome and costly. (Just $100 worth of pennies weighs a touch over 55 pounds.) With each new penny minted, this problem becomes slightly more of a problem.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/01/magazine/worthless-pennies-united-states-economy.html?unlocked_article_code=1.HU4.9zWx.OIYO7dNndhkq&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

0.99

Retail legend claims that the “odd cents” pricing strategy (a Parisian trick imported by Rowland H. Macy to his New York City dry-goods store) proliferated after the cash register’s invention in 1879, as a tactic to prevent sales clerks from stealing. If a customer paid $3 for a $3 item, the logic went, a cashier could stealthily pocket the bills; if the price was $2.99, the customer would be owed a coin; to open the register, the cashier would need to key in the sale, thus creating, within the register’s hidden recesses, an incorruptible record of the transaction. That consumers tend to associate these prices with better deals (incorrectly, according to studies) was an added benefit.

Clarity of Scripture

Pop Protestantism believes in the clarity of Scripture in the sense of its perfect perspicuity. That is to say, that Scripture is clear enough that a Christian does not need a Pope or professor to tell them what to believe about the Bible. The plain sense of Scripture, combined with the illuminating power of the Holy Spirit, is sufficient itself to lead believers into truth. Which means I don’t take Bible study tips from an Italian guy in a pointy white hat wreaking of garlic let alone from a liberal “religion” professor at Penn State wearing a Che Guevera T-Shirt. Plus, if you combine the clarity of Scripture with a thing called soul competency where each soul is competent enough to interpret the Bible for himself and herself, then, you really can say that Bible interpretation requires only two things: Me and my ESV.

Except that such a view is neither truly Protestant nor a healthy approach to biblical interpretation.

If you look at the Protestant confessions, whether the Westminster Confession or the London Baptist Confession, the clarity of Scripture only applies to the things necessary for salvation. So yeah, reading the Gospel of Mark and Epistle to the Romans, you can figure out “What must I do to be saved?” without doing a Master of Divinity. But after that, all bets are off, not everything is clear, some stuff is disputed and debatable, and some things are downright baffling!

Wayne Grudem is correct that Scripture’s clarity does not deny the difficulty of some passages and the need for effort in interpretation. He writes:

I understand the clarity (perspicuity) of Scripture as follows: Scripture affirms that it is able to be understood but (1) not all at once, (2) not without effort, (3) not without ordinary means, (4) not without the reader’s willingness to obey it, (5) not without the help of the Holy Spirit, (6) not without human misunderstanding, and (7) never completely.

Which means with some assistance and some effort, one can attain knowledge of God through Holy Scripture. As Thomas Cranmer, the Anglican Reformer, put it,

This Word, whosoever is diligent to read and in his heart to print that [which] he readeth, the great affection to the transitory things of this world shall be minished in him, and the great desire of heavenly things that be therein promised of God, shall increase in him. (A Fruitful Exhortation to the Reading and Knowledge of Holy Scripture)

And yet, precisely because Scripture is complex we need translators, historians and teachers to explain to us things like: women “will be saved from childbirth”; Who were the Nephilim or Pharisees? What is the kingdom of God? To help us wrestle with tensions like divine sovereignty and human responsibility or justification by faith and judgment according to works. This stuff is not self-evident and cannot be figured out after a 15-minute search on Wikipedia.

Michael Bird 

Free Ride

Ana Ley, who covers mass transit, wrote a story this week focused on buses that quantified the problem in New York City with a jarring statistic: On nearly half of all bus rides in the city, people now skip paying the fare. As a result, about one million riders ignore the bus system’s most basic rule every weekday.

Antimaterialist 

an “antimaterialist,” that you believe reality is more than what science can investigate or reveal. An antimaterialist believes that truth is greater than facts, that reality includes more than the empirical.

Richard Beck

Weddings

Hassan Ahmed, 23, is charging his guests $450 for a ticket to his wedding next year in Houston, where he lives. Mr. Ahmed said he hadn’t heard back from many of his 125 wedding guests. But he has already spent over $100,000 on the wedding, including deposits for the venue, the D.J. and the photographer. In a video on TikTok, he said he was confused by the response, noting that many of his guests had spent more money on Beyoncé or Chris Brown tickets.

View from the Front Porch

As a result of participation in a recent class at church, I have been thinking about slippery slopes. The class focused on the interaction of Christians with the world on difficult subjects, i.e. LGBTQ+.
Leaders provided helpful information, stimulating hard but healthy conversations among participants. Varied viewpoints produced some anxiety. Rebuttals to ideas that conflicted with conventional thinking were often conciliatory but concluded with a warning that embracing them would be a slippery slope; implying danger and severe consequences and closing further discussion.

Slippery slope is an ideograph:

[a tool of persuasion, ideographs avoid arduous and often painful work of intimate, meaningful communication. Perfectly suited to a culture characterized by ambiguity, relativity and utility, they have metastasized into most arenas of communication, religious, business, personal, et al; rhetorical critics use chevrons or angle brackets (<>) to mark off ideographs.]

In personal communication, ideographs can impede conversation. For example, injecting “unbiblical” or “unchristian” can shut down a conversation that otherwise has potential for understanding and deepening relationship. Christ followers, called to love neighbor can ill-afford the use of ideographs.

Use of ideographs may indicate an anxious attachment to God.

“…those with anxious attachments to God have greater anxiety about abandonment, greater fears of being rejected by God. Consequently, these believers fear doing anything that might risk God’s disapproval. These fears interfere with faith development as any questioning or change in one’s beliefs risks making a “mistake.” A “better safe than sorry” dynamic comes to regulate how these anxiously-attached believers hold their beliefs and read the Bible.
Richard Beck

Slippery slopes are a reality and require deep and meaningful conversations. Christians best equipped to navigate slippery slopes are those securely attached to God.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY