“The Pandemic Has Turned Us All into Gardeners” →

Christopher Ketcham for Outside:

For a city boy like me, born and raised in Brooklyn, where I had spent most of my adult life, this was all very new. Once you get your hands in soil—really get dirty with it, feel it under your fingernails—there’s a change in perspective, and you’re someone different. You've opened the tiniest of windows onto the ecological reality of the forces that sustain human existence, the biogeophysical relationships of water, sunlight, air, earth. Quite suddenly, what seemed mysterious quotients—say, the balance of phosphorus, nitrogen, carbon, and potassium—become commonalities of understanding and, eventually, of wisdom. The plants that depend on all those factors in harmony rise up, or they don’t.

I’ve been channeling my inner gardener these days by following @reb.lettuce.

(Via NextDraft)

File This Under “Why History?” →

Michael Wright, in a May issue of his excellent, inspired weekly letter Still Life:

Art and architecture hold symbolic and social weight. They don't just show us stuff from the past—they make claims on our choices in the present. A gilded film theater made to look like a cathedral from the past makes a religious claim on us now.

Likewise, sculptures of confederate generals make claims about how a state government envisions its relationship to history and the people it governs. All of these artists (and others like Kehinde Wiley and Titus Kaphar and Glen Ligon) can help us see how easy it is to construct histories that rarely tell the whole story. And if we learn to look past the gilded facade, we can begin to see larger histories we share.

Through a series of life circumstances and opportunities I find myself every spring teaching Latin American history to a group of US American university students. My journey to appreciate history has been a long one, mostly taking place after college. I love the challenge inherent in posing the question “why history?” to my group as we experience art and history and how “they makes claims on our choices in the present.” I will definitely be pulling this back out next spring.

If you haven’t already, sign up to receive Still Life in your inbox every week, and be delighted with a weekly dose of poetry too:

[…]
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

—“Beannacht” by John O’Donohue

Thoughts on Frederick Douglass’s 4th of July Speech, 1852

Frederick Douglass delivered this speech to an abolitionist group in Rochester, New York, July 5, 1852. Need a refresher on Frederick Douglass? Here you go. Below I share some lengthy highlights, but the entire speech is over 10,000 words and would have taken longer than an hour to deliver. It’s remarkable. Profound. If you haven’t yet, read the entire speech.

Recently, a few of Douglass’s great-great-great-great-grandchildren read some of the speech in a beautiful piece for NPR:

I came across this speech two years ago, and have been coming back to it occasionally. Douglass’s hopefulness at US America’s youth—that the US was young enough in 1852 to change—tugs at my brain today. Is 244 years-old still young enough to change? I hope so. That this speech is not yet a relic of history, bearing testimony to another time, but is still a prophetic word spoken in 2020 is devastating.

After a fair greeting, he launches in to a speech that seems to point to the usual elevation of the Independence movement, except for the stinging use of the second-person plural possessives, not first-person like you might expect:

This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the Fourth of July. It is the birth day of your National Independence, and of your political freedom.

On the US being young (and thus, hopefully still impressionable):

According to this fact, you are, even now, only in the beginning of your national career, still lingering in the period of childhood. I repeat, I am glad this is so. There is hope in the thought, and hope is much needed, under the dark clouds which lower above the horizon. The eye of the reformer is met with angry flashes, portending disastrous times; but his heart may well beat lighter at the thought that America is young, and that she is still in the impressible stage of her existence. May he not hope that high lessons of wisdom, of justice and of truth, will yet give direction to her destiny?

The heart of it, US American slavery:

Fellow-citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.” To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow-citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave’s point of view. Standing there identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery—the great sin and shame of America! “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse”; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.

And:

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation's ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

Prophetic:

For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! welcome atheism! welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by those Divines! They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke put together have done! These ministers make religion a cold and flinty-hearted thing, having neither principles of right action nor bowels of compassion. They strip the love of God of its beauty and leave the throne of religion a huge, horrible, repulsive form. It is a religion for oppressors, tyrants, man-stealers, and thugs. It is not that “pure and undefiled religion” which is from above, and which is “first pure, then peaceable, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and with out hypocrisy.” But a religion which favors the rich against the poor; which exalts the proud above the humble; which divides mankind into two classes, tyrants and slaves; which says to the man in chains, stay there; and to the oppressor, oppress on; it is a religion which may be professed and enjoyed by all the robbers and enslavers of mankind; it makes God a respecter of persons, denies his fatherhood of the race, and tramples in the dust the great truth of the brotherhood of man. All this we affirm to be true of the popular church, and the popular worship of our land and nation-a religion, a church, and a worship which, on the authority of inspired wisdom, we pronounce to be an abomination in the sight of God. In the language of Isaiah, the American church might be well addressed, “Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me: the new moons and Sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting. Your new moons, and your appointed feasts my soul hateth. They are a trouble to me; I am weary to bear them; and when ye spread forth your hands I will hide mine eyes from you. Yea' when ye make many prayers, I will not hear. Your hands are full of blood; cease to do evil, learn to do well; seek judgment; relieve the oppressed; judge for the fatherless; plead for the widow.”

One final section, going to the heart of it, condemning the hypocrisy of lauding liberty abroad but not working toward it at home, and finally, pointing out the hypocrisy in the Declaration of Independence:

Americans! your republican politics, not less than your republican religion, are flagrantly inconsistent. You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization, and your pure Christianity, while the whole political power of the nation (as embodied in the two great political parties) is solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the enslavement of three millions of your countrymen. You hurl your anathemas at the crowned headed tyrants of Russia and Austria and pride yourselves on your Democratic institutions, while you yourselves consent to be the mere tools and body-guards of the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina. You invite to your shores fugitives of oppression from abroad, honor them with banquets, greet them with ovations, cheer them, toast them, salute them, protect them, and pour out your money to them like water; but the fugitives from oppression in your own land you advertise, hunt, arrest, shoot, and kill. You glory in your refinement and your universal education; yet you maintain a system as barbarous and dreadful as ever stained the character of a nation—a system begun in avarice, supported in pride, and perpetuated in cruelty. You shed tears over fallen Hungary, and make the sad story of her wrongs the theme of your poets, statesmen, and orators, till your gallant sons are ready to fly to arms to vindicate her cause against the oppressor; but, in regard to the ten thousand wrongs of the American slave, you would enforce the strictest silence, and would hail him as an enemy of the nation who dares to make those wrongs the subject of public discourse! You are all on fire at the mention of liberty for France or for Ireland; but are as cold as an iceberg at the thought of liberty for the enslaved of America. You discourse eloquently on the dignity of labor; yet, you sustain a system which, in its very essence, casts a stigma upon labor. You can bare your bosom to the storm of British artillery to throw off a three-penny tax on tea; and yet wring the last hard earned farthing from the grasp of the black laborers of your country. You profess to believe “that, of one blood, God made all nations of men to dwell on the face of all the earth,” and hath commanded all men, everywhere, to love one another; yet you notoriously hate (and glory in your hatred) all men whose skins are not colored like your own. You declare before the world, and are understood by the world to declare that you “hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; and are endowed by their Creator with certain in alienable rights; and that among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”; and yet, you hold securely, in a bondage which, according to your own Thomas Jefferson, “is worse than ages of that which your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose,” a seventh part of the inhabitants of your country.

Perhaps that’s enough for now. Now let’s let it sink in.

---

See also:

Text inspired by Douglass’s speech, performed by Daveed Diggs (via Kottke):

And, James Earl Jones reads excerpts of the speech, for Voices of A People’s History of the United States:

“An Introduction to Joy” →

Speaking of Rob Bell, he recently released his talk from his 2018 tour on YouTube. It’s worth watching the entire hour. It’s funny, awkward, and challenging. He talks about life and death and Ecclesiastes and a lot of other things—landing on joy.

Josh Graves:

ROB BELL DOING ROB BELL WORK ON THE POWER OF JOY. SO GOOD. SO GOOD. Worth your time and reflection. Life is too short to not be present for all the wonder and joy that exists in each day. Joy = the hallmark of a truly integrated/healthy leader.

What is the Bible? How an Ancient Library of Poems, Letters, and Stories Can Transform the Way You Think and Feel About Everything

This is a great book.

A book about the Bible? Really?

Yes. If you’ve forgotten (or maybe you never knew?) that the Bible is surprising and fun, even in its ancient antiquated ancientness, this book will help you see the surprising, subversive nature of stories like Noah and the flood or God telling Abraham to kill his son. Stories that seem barbaric on the surface are stories that invite you to ask questions. They’re stories that subvert themselves in order to say something about the God who loves, blesses, and graces. The point is that to take the Bible seriously you go below the surface level of any story. It’s one of the reasons why I feel so uncomfortable reading simplistic stories from a kid’s Bible to my 4-year-old daughter. The surface-level is often not the point. The point is what lies below the surface, turning upside-down the conventional wisdom about who God is.

I read it when it came out in 2017 and just read it again. There’s personality. Depth. It’s fun. It’s a book about the Bible that makes you want to read the Bible more and gives you hope that others reading the Bible might start loving people more and fighting less.

It’s pretty long—322 pages. But you can read the first 200 pages as a cohesive unit (even though he bounces all over the place, Rob Bell Style™), and then just enjoy the final 100+ pages of “The Questions That Always Come Up” after the fact. Even the endnotes are good, sort of an annotated bibliography or reading list with commentary. Just look at the table of contents—some of the chapter titles made me laugh out loud.

Here are a few of my highlights and takeaways.

But the Bible is a book about what it means to be human. And we are all, before anything else, human.

On the weirdness, in this case, of advice regarding throwing pearls to pigs:

Where does the one thing take you, and then why is the next thing after it? Why would the writer place them in that order?

And always, always keep in mind: the weirder, the stranger, the more unexpected—
it’s probably intentional.
That’s what’s so powerful about so much of the Bible. It’s about the disruption that occurs when you’re jarred out of your present mode of thinking and seeing.
It’s the moment of upheaval when you realize that the way you’re living or thinking or treating people isn’t working. You’re the one throwing pearls to pigs, and it’s absurd. And you need to stop.

On the flood:

But to dismiss this story as ancient and primitive is to miss that at the time this story was first told, it was a mind-blowing new conception of a better, kinder, more peaceful God whose greatest intention for humanity is not violence but peace and love.
It’s primitive, but it’s also really, really progressive.

On being human:

What does this story tell us about what it means to be human? We have tremendous power and ability as humans. We can invent things and build things and dream things up and then make them. It’s extraordinary, and it’s to be celebrated and enjoyed. (Say it with me now: HD flat screen. Chipotle. Almond Surfboards. Anything made by Apple. Rickenbacker guitars. I could go on. So could you.) We also have the tremendous capacity to use our energies and minds and power and abilities to further our own purposes through greed and empire building at the expense of those around us, making the world less and less of a peaceful place where everybody is thriving.

On death and resurrection:

Death is the engine of life. All around us, all the time. This death-and-life rhythm is built in to the fabric of creation.

So when you read the Bible and it tells the story of a death that is somehow the engine of new life in the world, this is not a new story. This is not a new truth. This is how the world has worked for a long, long time. This idea—this truth—did not come out of nowhere.

If you think about it, after the first 10 pages or so of the Bible, the story zooms way in to focus on one family: Sarah and Abraham’s. And the rest of the Bible is about their family. About that:

Now, let’s think about this in relation to the Bible. What is the Bible about? It’s about a tribe of people who have this sense that they are called to be a tribe unlike the other tribes. At that time, tribes existed to serve themselves, to accumulate and form alliances for self-preservation. But this tribe—this tribe starts with a story about a man named Abram whose God tells him that the whole world is going to be blessed through him. This tribe believes they have a calling that extends way beyond themselves, to the ends of the earth. It’s a tribe that exists not just for their own well-being but also for the well-being of all the other tribes.

That’s probably enough.

I read the Bible a lot and have for 20 years, since I was about 12 years-old. I like to read the Bible with other people, and do that quite a bit with friends and neighbors. This book makes me want to read the Bible even more. If you don’t read the Bible, but you’re curious, this book will give you about 50 ideas about where to start.

“Happy to see that American tourists have been annoying for over 120 years.”

Craig Mod, commenting on a 1896 travel account called Mountaineering and Exploration in the Japanese Alps:

In fact, a different passage from Weston’s introduction really knocked me back. Tourism in Japan has increased some 10x in the last five years, bringing with it a sense of being crushed. One of the weirdest COVID corollaries has been remembering what pre-tourist-crush Japan felt like. Many of the tourists only spend a few days (two nights, three days is very common for many tourists from Asia), rush from Instagrammable (Wechattable?) site to Instagrammable site, taking photos, hopping on overnight buses to save time and maximize “trip value.” And so, to see this in Walter’s 19th century introduction was a shock:

A Japanese writer has, not without justice, somewhat bitterly complained of the numbers of foreign tourists who come to his country, and after rushing through it “at the rate of forty miles an hour” (though the average speed of the express trains is only about half that pace), then hurry home to record their impressions and pose as authorities on what they have only glanced at along the way.

Nothing changes, ever; now is not unique; tomorrow will also not be unique — this seems to be the wisdom to be gleaned here.

If you are interested in travel, culture, creativity, or walking, then check out Ridgeline. It’s consistently great.

We Will Feast: Rethinking Dinner, Worship, and the Community of God

This book by Kendall Vanderslice is a series of snapshots of different churches in the US and the way they center their times together around food and drink. It’s about eating and drink as worship. Of course I’m drawn to it since the way we gather as small faith and hope communities here in Arequipa is around the table. One of my favorite snapshots was Garden Church, where the liturgy includes working in the garden together before a time of worship and a meal:

“When we gather here at the Garden Church,” Anna says, “we remember that we gather because we believe that all should be fed in body, and mind, and spirit, and we want to cultivate a place that has those healing leaves. A place where more peace, and justice, and reconciliation, compassion, and hope can be cultivated together. When we gather around God’s table,” she says, “all are welcome to feed and to be fed.”

Vanderslice analyzes the entire enterprise of food:

At their core, these views recognize the interconnectedness of food, humanity, and all of creation. Fundamentally, these writers and thinkers long to see the deep brokenness of the world healed through our choices in food. They agree that food will be central to God’s complete restoration of creation. A robust theology of eating entails challenging the injustice in the growth, production, and distribution of food. But given the complexities of farming, cooking, and eating, it can be overwhelming to know where to start.

Sometimes the mark of a good book is the list you’re left with of books to read next. This was definitely the case. From her notes, the following are now on my list:

• Fred Bahnson - Soil and Sacrament: A Spiritual Memoir of Food and Faith
• William Rubel - Bread: A Global History
• Norman Wirzba - Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating
• E. N. Anderson - Everyone Eats: Understanding Food and Culture
• Claudio Carvalhaes - Eucharist and Globalization: Redrawing the Borders of Eucharistic Hospitality

Finally, on the opportunity white churches have to learn from Christian communities of color:

To laud the dinner-church model as something altogether new or as the ticket to fixing issues of diversity in the church only perpetuates the very ideas of white dominance that have pervaded the church, particularly the [US] American church, for generations. In reality, most of the pastors whom I have spoken with recognize that their own churches are modeled after their observations of the power of food in communities of color. The dinner-church model is increasing in popularity among white communities because it recognizes the importance of embodiment and food in a way that white communities have historically devalued. This trend, then, is a valuable opportunity for white Christians to recognize the need to learn from traditions outside of our own. It is a valuable space for white Christians to recognize a desperate need for the meal-centered practices that others have long used. It’s a way to recognize the power embedded in the process of eating together and the importance of Christ establishing his church around a meal. Even so, it is not the model that will inevitably heal the church’s racial wounds. But perhaps it is a start toward recognizing that in one bread, we are one body.

The Robcast: Apocalyptic Hope →

Rob and Kristen Bell have been recording together since the beginning of quarantine in the US. They’re great to listen to together. Here are two bits I loved from their recent episode (Overcast):

The apocalyptic truth is this human capacity to create rituals that open our eyes to the depth and meaning and joy of life, and we can do this, we have everything we need for this, and we’re living in this system that tells us we don’t have.

And:

This word politics comes from this Greek word politicos which means citizen…we’re citizens, and we’re all participating in this shared common life we have together. Politics is actually a good word.

Politics is how we’ve arranged ourselves, and that there’s something sacred about our shared life together. And so, for awhile, I’ve been very passionate about people reclaiming politics as a good word, how do we arrange our lives together? What matters? Where does wealth go? What do we do with our shared resources? What most people know about politics is the hijacking of our lives together.

🎧

We're All in a Somnambulistic Haze Now (iPhone 11 Pro with Craig Mod) →

It’s super fun to see someone who actually knows something about photography talk about iPhone 11 Pro and taking pictures. Craig Mod in a past issue of the consistently excellent Roden newsletter:

Unless you’ve been in a somnambulistic haze the past decade, none of this is out of the blue. Nearly six years ago (!) I (over-) wrote an essay called Software is the Future of Photography. At that time it was somewhat heretical to imagine non-camera-shaped-objects replacing “true” cameras. Namely: smartphones. People got Internet Upset at you for suggesting this. Especially when you suggested it in The New Yorker and were, like, pissing yourself with nerves because: the goddamned New Yorker. Anyway — six years later, software innovation in photography is chugging along at full speed and the smartphone has become the number one image production tool for most of the world.

The implications of this are protean, shifting year-by-year — from allowing average folks to capture the banalities of their beach vacation, to getting better front-line data and reports from protestors and war-zones around the world. The social and political implications of better, easier photography in the hands of more people, all of the time, can’t be overestimated. Furthermore, it’s inevitable that the algorithms will point backwards out of the phones and into the single-purpose cameras themselves. Leica is restructuring the company, in part, around computational photography. And which dork among us wouldn’t be excited to see Deep Fusion level enhancements work in real-time seamlessly integrated into an M12, or M13? Fat, fast glass, big sensors, smart chips. Yes, please.

The evolution of this story is one of the most intriguing to follow in technology.

As an aside, this line is funny in retrospect:

I had been inside for 24 hours, was antsy.

He wrote this in October 2019 (soon after iPhone 11 Pro shipped). As I write in April 2020, 24 hours inside is nothing.

Tom Wright on COVID-19: Lament instead of Answers →

This is a (weirdly?) busy time, and I’ve had this post as an open tab for a couple of weeks. It was originally published at the end of March, well before Holy Week. It’s as pertinent now as when it was originally published, and maybe even more prescient as there’s more uncertainty now on the world stage with how we come out of this.

It’s a concise post, and the title gives you what you need to know: “Christianity Offers No Answers About the Coronavirus. It's Not Supposed To.”

Wright suggests that the proper reaction for Christians is lament:

But perhaps what we need more than either is to recover the biblical tradition of lament. Lament is what happens when people ask, “Why?” and don’t get an answer. It’s where we get to when we move beyond our self-centered worry about our sins and failings and look more broadly at the suffering of the world. It’s bad enough facing a pandemic in New York City or London. What about a crowded refugee camp on a Greek island? What about Gaza? Or South Sudan?

Why lament?

The point of lament, woven thus into the fabric of the biblical tradition, is not just that it’s an outlet for our frustration, sorrow, loneliness and sheer inability to understand what is happening or why. The mystery of the biblical story is that God also laments. Some Christians like to think of God as above all that, knowing everything, in charge of everything, calm and unaffected by the troubles in his world. That’s not the picture we get in the Bible.

So, what is the point?

As the Spirit laments within us, so we become, even in our self-isolation, small shrines where the presence and healing love of God can dwell. And out of that there can emerge new possibilities, new acts of kindness, new scientific understanding, new hope. New wisdom for our leaders? Now there’s a thought.

Small shrines where the presence and healing love of God can dwell…May more followers of Jesus of Nazareth be this.

‘Melt Thy Rifles Into Garden Tools’ →

Patricia Brown, writing for the NYT Opinion section:

The venerable art of blacksmithing is not generally considered to be a radical act. But for Michael Martin, a 36-year-old Mennonite from Colorado Springs, the malleability of glowing metal from a forge’s inferno makes it the perfect vehicle for addressing gun violence.

Mr. Martin, a former youth pastor, was inspired to learn blacksmithing after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in 2012, in which a deranged young man with an AR-15 assault rifle killed 20 children and six educators. Three months later, Mr. Martin started Raw Tools, a nonprofit organization dedicated to converting the “swords” of contemporary America — handguns, assault weapons and semiautomatic rifles — into garden tools, or erstwhile plowshares, at once fulfilling the Old Testament mandate and forging a new kind of public ritual for processing grief.

Raw Tools has been on my radar since its inception in 2012 (after the Sandy Hook massacre) because of Shane Claiborne. I was thrilled to see it pop up in the NYT (albeit in the Opinion section).

This project is hands down my favorite literal application of something from the Bible. Prophets like Isaiah (2:4) and Micah (4:3) from the Hebrew scriptures envision the world without war, where instruments of violence can be turned into garden tools. I would normally caution readers of the Bible before taking any specific section too literally, but this is beautiful and necessary.

As a Mennonite, Mr. Martin comes from a long tradition of nonviolence and considers his work a form of conscientious objection (“raw” is “war” spelled backward). The first gun he converted into a garden tool came from a friend in Colorado Springs who wanted to get rid of an AK-47 he had bought for protection after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Since then, Raw Tools has transformed several hundred guns, with help from a “disarming network” of volunteer blacksmiths around the country. With the exception of a tattoo on his arm in which “War No More” is scribbled on a fig, Mr. Martin resembles the tools he makes — simple, direct and without embellishment. He relies on small grants from local foundations and Mennonite organizations. “Our work,” he said, “is about a cultural shift, to get communities and neighborhoods to rethink the tools they use to keep themselves safe.”

Nelson Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom

I finally read Nelson Mandela’s autobiography Long Walk to Freedom. I say “finally” because I should’ve read the book six years ago when it was on the curriculum for a study abroad program in Zambia that I directed, but I was just too busy with grad school and directing the program that I put it off.

What a moving, inspiring story. Before reading the book, I knew very little about Nelson Mandela’s life, work, and cause. I hadn’t even read the wikipedia article. If you’re in the same boat, do yourself a favor and learn some about this man’s life. One of the most striking aspects is the sheer amount of time he was in prison—27 years.

Twenty. Seven. Years.

Talk about patience. He considered his entire time in prison as part of the struggle to end apartheid. Near the end of the book, after he’s released and he’s approaching the first multi-racial election in South Africa’s history, he encourages patience of those black South Africans who think everything might change quickly. This man knew patience.

Also near the end of the story:

I had cast the first vote of my life.

Having just had the mid-term elections in the US, that quote smacked me in the face.

The audio version was fantastic and only (ha!) 27 hours long. I haven’t yet watched the movie.

‘A Delicious Layer of Jargon’ →

Robin Sloan wrote his most recent PRIMES TinyLetter on the beauty of internet forums (fora? Ha!):

It is still, even in 2018, in the age of Facebook and YouTube, of leviathan platforms that seek to absorb all exchanges for all purposes, to be the one place for everyone and everything -- it is still an internet of forums.

There’s a forum all about lawnmower maintenance that has been, basically, my repair manual for the huge zero-turn Cub Cadet we use at the olive grove. I’ve never posted, don’t even have an account; I find its threads mainly via Google search, years worth of questions asked and answered. It’s a bare-bones installation of the venerable forum software phpBB, unchanged since the early 2000s, and it’s wonderful.

One that he highlighted is one I use often: WordReference. Here’s what he had to say about it:

First, there's WordReference, used mainly by translators. There are sub-forums for not just different language pairs but different directions: Italian into English presents a different set of questions than English into Italian.

Living in Peru, one of the greatest values I get from WordReference is the region-specific definitions and forum entries for Spanish. Peruvian Spanish is worlds apart from Chilean Spanish, even though I can drive to Chile in five hours.

He ends the letter with why he has such an affinity for forums. His first reason:

Their stunning specificity. This provides both a baseline of civility and a delicious layer of jargon.

The letter isn’t publicly available, but I’m happy to forward it to you. If this peaks your interest, here’s how Robin Sloan describes his newsletter:

Brief appreciations of interesting and durable media artifacts sent on some prime-numbered days.

Vulture: “The Best Podcasts of 2017 (So Far)” →

Nicholas Quah, writing for Vulture:

A lot has happened in the upper echelons of podcasting this year, and I’ve been tasked with assembling a list of the best shows released so far. In the spirit of acknowledging how bonkers this task is — finding the cream of the crop in an ecosystem as young, relatively decentralized, and maddeningly chaotic as podcasting — I’d like to share my thought process in putting together the list. As a critic, I’m looking for a very specific thing: shows that say something about the medium, push the form forward, and exemplify the best qualities of what podcasts can do. Craft is a little more important to me than the stories themselves, which comes from a more general belief that as important as certain stories are, it’s even more important that they be told well. I’m also valuing podcasts that function well as stand-alone experiences, though I’m fully aware that puts comedy, conversational, and “after-show” programming at a disadvantage. Of course, this also means that more established shows have the additional burden of being ranked against themselves. And finally, all of this is couched within the tastes and preferences of myself, a lowly mortal human.

Alright, enough throat-clearing. Let’s jump in.

Not a single one makes my list, but that’s unsurprising. I like his emphasis on the craft of a podcast and meta-analysis of what pushes the medium forward.

It’s fascinating to see a list of podcasts on Vulture, a clear sign that Serial catapulted podcasting into the public eye. Curious, I clicked to see what the oldest Vulture piece is with the “Podcasts” tag, and it dates all the way to the end of 2007. But there wasn’t another until 2010—one article (!)—and then two in 2011, four in 2012, and six in 2013. Serial was announced in the middle of 2014, launched in the fall, and since there have been a whopping 147 Vulture pieces about podcasts.

In short, it only took ten years for podcasting to catch on.

Two More Cents on Longevity for Religious Podcasts

From my post about my favorite religious podcasts over a year ago:

I worry that these podcasts aren’t sponsored enough. Everything I listen to in the tech world is sponsored and a good business for those who host the podcast. It ensures it’s worth their time to keep making a great podcast. Luke Norsworthy has had a monthly sponsor most months this year. The Liturgists have just launched a Patreon campaign to fund more episodes like the one they put together on LGBTQ. Of all the episodes I’ve listened to of Nomad, they’ve never hinted at trying to make some money, except joking about raising money to interview Christian thinkers and practitioners in US America.

I hope that some of these folks can find a sponsorship model that works for them and is sustainable, so they can continue to produce great content. It takes a lot of work to produce a really good show. Their work deserves to be compensated.

Not much has changed. Of all the podcasts in the Religion and Spirituality category I listen to, Luke Norsworthy’s is still the only one I ever hear ads on. The Liturgists have a hugely successful Patreon (bringing in almost $16,000/month). Nomad has also gone that route, and are bringing in enough to pay some of the bills (though I don’t think they’re anywhere near the scale of The Liturgists). Following this trend, Peter Enns and Jared Byas have have just kicked off their Patreon campaign for the Bible for Normal People, as have the DeConstructionists.

My question is: why won’t more podcasts do advertising? The medium is proven to work well for ads. Is the scale not there yet? Are advertisers not interested in this demographic? Not likely—advertisers are interested in everyone with a pulse and a wallet. Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled that guys like Tim and Dave (we’ll miss you on the show every other week, Dave!) of Nomad are finally getting some compensation for the incredible product they’ve shipped consistently for 8+ years. I’d just like to see the Patreon campaigns alongside some simple ad reads, so that those who can’t or don’t want to pay $12-60/year to listen to podcasts can, in some way, support the creators. The Talk Show, ATP, and Hello Internet know how to do ads—really well. Their podcasts are a significant part of their income, and I don’t have to pay anything to enjoy it or to feel like I’m supporting them. I suspect the hosts of these religious podcasts have rarely listened to shows outside of their genre. They may not know that independent podcasters can advertise, that there is a classy way to advertise on podcasts, and that Squarespace, Hover, and Audible will sponsor just about anyone with a big enough audience.

Back to this emerging Patreon phenomenon. $1/month isn’t a lot, but $5/month for one podcast is. To compare, Netflix gives you access to a tremendous catalog of entertainment for only $8/month. Apple Music gives you access to almost all of the music, ever, in the history of the universe, for $10/month. $5/month for one show—even the best show—is pricey in comparison. I realize that people who pay that much do so to support the creators of the podcast directly, or to access bonus content that isn’t otherwise available. I just worry, again, that it’s not sustainable, given that these podcasters are now having to do even more work to make their Patreon more appealing to their patrons.

And while we’re talking about leaving money on the table, what about Amazon affiliate links? With all of these interview shows with authors, surely some percentage of listeners buys the book. As far as I can tell, Nomad, Newsworthy with Norsworthy, the DeConstructionists—whose whole format depends on interviews—aren’t using affiliate links to the books that they link to. It may not have a big impact on their bottom line, but why not get a small kickback, especially since they’re doing free advertising by interviewing the book’s author. Even The Bible for Normal People, who aren’t just interviewing people coming out with new books, speak with authors and link to a book or two of theirs in the show notes. Let your audience know that buying the book through your link will give you a small kickback. We’re thrilled to help.

I’m interested in longevity because I love these shows and want them to be sustainable. They’re a tremendous resource and should be compensated. Direct listener support through sites like Patreon is an important piece of the puzzle. But the vast majority of listeners will never pay to listen to podcasts. I bet they would listen to a 60-second ad read though, and maybe even benefit from it.

Who is going to connect these podcasters to companies wanting to advertise to new audiences? If I had the time, I’d give it a go.

The Art of Changing your Mind →

Maria Popova at Brain Pickings:

The fact that we humans have such a notoriously hard time changing our minds undoubtedly has to do with the notion that “human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished,” which belies the great robbery of the human experience — by calling ourselves beings, we deny our ever-unfolding becomings. Only in childhood are we afforded the luxury of inhabiting our becoming, but once forced to figure out who we want to be in life, most of us are so anxious about planting that stake of being that we bury the alive, active process of our becoming. In our rush to arrive at who we want to be, we flee from the ceaseless mystery of our becoming.

To show up wholeheartedly for our becoming requires doing one of the hardest things in life — allow the possibility of being wrong and incur the anguish of admitting that error. It requires that we grieve every earlier version of ourselves and endure the implicit accusation that if the way we do a certain thing now is better than before, then the way we did it before is not only worse but possibly — and this is invariably crushing — even wrong. The uncomfortable luxury of changing our mind is thus central to the courage of facing our becoming with our whole being.

This gem from Steinbeck himself:

Again I’m sorry. But I’m not ready to be a hack yet. Maybe later.

Greg McKinzie’s “The Hermeneutics of Incarnational Evangelism” (i.e. Reading the Gospel with Peruvians) →

Greg McKinzie, in a great piece for Fuller Studio connecting his 6+ years in Arequipa reading Mark with Peruvians to what he's studying now at Fuller:

I have to confess that, as far as the struggle to live in solidarity went, I failed far more than I succeeded. Yet there were moments when, reading Mark with my Peruvian friends and neighbors, their struggles, their wisdom, and their wonderful culture gave me eyes to see. What follows is one example of the ways that reading Mark in solidarity with Peruvians shaped me as an interpreter.

I remember attending a conference before our mission team moved to Arequipa. A man who had been a missionary kid in Peru spoke about the work that remained unfinished a generation after his parents had returned to the United States. He interpreted the perpetually unfinished houses of Peruvian barrios as an analogy for the problem—the unsightly image of rebar sticking up from nearly every rooftop. Yet after I had lived in a few of those unfinished houses, hung laundry on their flat roofs bristling with rebar, and watched the families around me build additions poco a poco (little by little), rebar jutting toward the sky became a symbol of hope. Faced with the impossibility of building multiple stories at once but committed to making space for multiple generations of the family, Peruvians leave the rebar sticking out of the roof level so they can tie into the existing structure when they add the next floor of the house. This is a long-term proposition that often becomes the inheritance of the next generation. I can’t see rebar now without thinking of the tenacious hope of the working poor who make up the vast majority of Peru’s population.

I’m coming up on 3 years in Arequipa, in large part thanks to Greg.

Brueggemann’s “Resistance to Multitasking” →

I just finished Walter Brueggemann’s book Sabbath as Resistance. It’s thin and, as is the custom for Brueggemann, packed. Two lines from the book’s penultimate chapter, titled “Resistance to Multitasking”:

Multitasking is the drive to be more than we are, to control more than we do, to extend our power and our effectiveness. Such practice yields a divided self, with full attention given to nothing.

Brueggemann was just interviewed about this book and his short book on money in back-to-back episodes of the Nomad podcast. Here’s the Overcast link.

It’s common to equate multitasking with productivity, one of our highest held values in US American culture. Brueggemann isn’t arguing against productivity itself, just the idolatry of productivity. Practicing sabbath is supposed to make me as an individual more human, and us as a society more just.

One more bit:

Sabbath is a big no for both; it is no to the worship of commodity; it is no to the pursuit of commodity. But it is more than no. Sabbath is the regular, disciplined, visible, concrete yes to the neighborly reality of the community beloved by God. We used to sing the hymn “Take Time to Be Holy.” But perhaps we should be singing, “Take time to be human.” Or finally, “Take time.” Sabbath is taking time…time to be holy…time to be human.

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On Margins 001 →

Craig Mod interviews Jan Chipchase, creator of the Field Study Handbook, in the pilot episode of his podcast, On Margins:

The world is very fuzzy.

If you've ever traveled—even just across the neighborhood—and been struck by the experience of similarities and differences, you'll find this interview interesting.

The tagline for The Field Study Handbook:

Travel anywhere, make sense of the world, and make a difference.

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Rowan Williams on Prayer →

Another fascinating interview from the folks at Nomad, this one with Rowan Williams (Overcast). From the episode description:

What actually is prayer? What happens when we do it? What difference can it make, if any, to the events and circumstances we find ourselves in? Should we expect to sense God in prayer, or perhaps even hear him communicate to us? And if so, why do so few of us ever seem to have these sorts of experiences?

For many of us, these questions, and others like them, have led us to a place of disillusionment and prayerlessness. And yet we still yearn for the deep, rooted, holistic connectedness that prayer promises.

The episode is called “The Problem of Prayer” but I think of it more as “Prayer after Faith.” It was fascinating to hear a whole episode on a practice so basic (my one year-old daughter bows her head and says “Amen!”) yet so enigmatic to many of us who have moved beyond the faith of our childhood. Tim states it well when he says: many of us go through some sort of faith deconstruction and, while we may come back around on a number of things, prayer can be left out. There's a lot here to address that. Namely, allowing the Divine to work on you in silent contemplation.

I listened to this three times over the last couple of months before linking to it, just to make sure it was as good as I thought it was on my first listen.

Two more bits that stood out to me:

You don’t go to prayer saying “come on, tell me something.” You go and you say, “Ok, this time is yours. I’m going to try to clear my mind and let you be you for a bit.” And I hope when I get up from that, some balance will have shifted a bit…my judgment, my perception will be that little bit less selfish, that little bit less stupid than when I started (18:45).

On what difference prayer might make to personal circumstances:

First of all, blindingly obviously, it changes you…

The other thing is much harder to get clear. We don’t fully understand how God brings about anything in the world…Now God has made a world in which there are free and fairly intelligent people as us. We can make a difference of a different order. And what if part of the difference we can make is praying. Here’s a situation…(25:29).

He also goes on to talk about being close to the twin towers on 11 September 2001 and seeing the first responders at work, as well as a good bit on the practice of silent contemplation.

Postscript on Nomad 3.0

Nomad is one of my favorite podcasts of all time. Once again, it’s undergoing some change: one Dave (Ward) for another (David Blower). The banter was still good. David talks about his face hurting after the interview with Rowan Williams. And Dave Ward will be coming back occasionally. It seems like it’s only good news for the future of Nomad.

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