This recurring illness kept me fairly lethargic during Lent. This was the most erratic period of posting on this blog in 5 years. Take them or leave. I give them to Orthodox Christian readers to enjoy. Others, I hope get an education.
Does the Church support human rights?
The fallacy of Pascal's Wager; I highly recommend this one. Nietzsche attacked Pacal's Wager. It does not apply (cannot apply) to Orthodoxy. Why a Protestant idea is heresy:
Response to Protestant Arguments Against Orthodoxy
Orthodox Priest responds to Jay Dyer What to wear to an Orthodox Church The differences between the Orthodox, Roman Catholics, and Protestants
A fair legal system, effective law enforcement, secure borders, and a robust military are necessary East of Eden, in this our fallen human community. Nevertheless, the Orthodox theological tradition gives primacy to the fundamental dignity and worth of every human being—because, as one of our funeral hymns puts it, “even though I bear the scars of my sins, I am an image of Your ineffable glory.” Most importantly, the Gospel teaches that Christ will judge us by how we will have treated the bearers of the divine Image, whom he calls “the least of my brothers”: the poor, the hungry, the stranger, and the imprisoned (Mat 25:31–46).
Patriotism—that is, working for the spiritual, cultural, and material prosperity of our nation and for its good name abroad—is natural and good; and all those to whom we, the people, entrust limited and temporary civil authority, should be held to that standard. But Christians answer to a higher calling: above all, they are “citizens of heaven” (Phil 3:20) having “no abiding city” in this age (Heb 13:14), and “dwelling in their own countries, but simply as sojourners,” with “every foreign land as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers” (Epistle to Diognetus, 5). Paraphrasing the greeting of St Clement of Rome’s Epistle to the Corinthians, our identity is that of “the Church of God sojourning (ἡ ἐκκλησία τοῦ θεοῦ ἡ παροικοῦσα)” in 21st-century America: Orthodoxy is not an ornamental addition to whatever one construes as “American identity.”
Yesterday started off both as a mess and something good. I missed my ride - got the time he was coming completely screwed up in my head. However, I felt well enough to go to church, so I started walking. Just to prove that I could.
The problems erupted in the evening. After a nap and a light dinner. I did not get to sleep until around 4 AM. I got some reading done. The email attended, but mostly it was a lot of hot baths. All I can say of that is that I got started on the introduction to Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments.
The best thing was a long chat on the telephone with J. I like to think I amuse her.
Trump's trip to the correspondent's dinner got interrupted; he seems to have never been in danger. He is reaping what he sowed - hatred breeds violence. Can we survive his ugliness?
Up at nine this morning, a trip to the convenience store, and finishing off this blog post. I also did one for the new writing blog.
History is full of powerful actors who believed the world’s complexity could be overcome by will and might. Hoja has been subverting confident authorities for at least seven centuries, while refusing to be pinned down, even as a hero. If his tales can be said to have an overall lesson, it is against the comfort of easy answers.
Declaring hard power as all that matters, as Miller has done, doesn’t just mean ignoring others’ humanity – it also means ignoring our own human capacity for curiosity and intellectual humility.
There are several important drivers of political violence at work in the U.S. today, according to my own research and research by other scholars. The United States is currently very politically polarized, meaning that Americans are sharply divided against one another along partisan lines. They are suspicious and hostile toward one another, and this produces a tense and volatile environment for politics and public life. This has produced a “zero-sum” environment in which every election and political contest is a “do or die” moment.
What stands out to me is the moral dimension of polarization in the U.S. Each side views members of the other party not as merely having a different view on politics but rather as evil or immoral. The polarized environment has made political violence more normalized. It has also dampened public backlash against political violence when it occurs. This makes political violence more likely.
Political rhetoric has become much more divisive and violent in nature. This works hand in hand with polarization and helps to further normalize political violence. In particular, when politicians use demonizing or dehumanizing rhetoric to attack their opponents – for example, using words that depict their opponents as subhuman – this fosters extremism and helps motivate extremists to hurt their opponents physically.
Disinformation is also an important driver of political violence. A number of people who have engaged in recent acts of political violence seem to have been motivated by conspiracy theories and other forms of disinformation, often gleaned from social media. Disinformation plays a particularly important role in the context of social media communities, where people are exposed to large amounts of disinformation and are hermetically sealed off from other sources that might challenge their worldview. This facilitates radicalization and has been shown to fuel political violence in some cases.
Finally, I think an important factor is also the current assault on democratic norms and democratic institutions in the United States. U.S. democracy is experiencing pressures that are unprecedented in the modern era. This has had a very damaging effect on Americans’ trust in government, confidence in democratic institutions and value for democratic rule itself.
My work shows that individuals who are skeptical about democracy are much more likely to express support or tolerance for political violence.
Chuck Todd posted a video this morning with an indictment of the health of our political life and a plea for a better America. I agree with him, but I doubt if either of us will get the result we want.
And we should be proud to be part of a movement that will not be cowed by attempts at intimidation. The pro-democracy movement will resist efforts by this administration and its MAGA minions to use Saturday night as an excuse to criminalize political dissent, silence legitimate criticism, and curtail our civil liberties.
Such efforts got underway within hours of the shooting at the Washington Hilton.
On Sunday morning, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said, “I don’t think this should be lost on anyone . . . that we have a third assassination attempt on President Trump—in that same week we learn that the Southern Poverty Law Center has been paying and generating hate.”
I’d say in response that I don’t think it should be lost on anyone that this is mere demagoguery in defense of the baseless indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and in defense of using Congress’s investigative powers, as Jordan intends to do, to abet DOJ. Of course Jordan doesn’t quite say that there is any connection between the shooter and the SPLC. But he implies one that should not “be lost on anyone.” This is pretty classic McCarthyism—or, for that matter, Trumpism.
Meanwhile, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) tried to use Saturday night’s incident as an excuse not just to get new funding for the Department of Homeland Security but to increase the power of the Senate Republican majority: “At a moment of national danger, if Democrats refuse to fund DHS, I would say this would be the time to nuke the filibuster for good.”
In fact, Democrats are refusing to provide new funds not for the whole of DHS but merely for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol, neither of which has anything to do with Saturday’s shooting, but which have a lot to do with the administration intimidating opponents. But Trump wants more money for those agencies, and he wants to get rid of the filibuster. This fake “moment of national emergency” is the excuse.
And Speaker Mike Johnson intends to try once again this week to move legislation in the House reauthorizing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act without any real civil liberties safeguards.1 Expect to see him and his lieutenants use this “moment of national danger” to try to overcome opposition to the bill, even though there’s no connection between Section 702 and the events of Saturday night.
More broadly, we should expect a sustained effort in the days and weeks to come to intimidate and silence critics of the Trump administration in the same vein as the notorious National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” issued after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. There will be attempts to justify further investigation, chilling, and criminalizing of speech as part of a crackdown on “domestic terrorism.” According to NSPM-7, one of the “common threads animating this violent conduct” is “anti-Christianity.” So President Trump has already called Cole Tomas Allen “anti-Christian”—though as it happens he was active in a Christian group at college, and spends considerable time in his manifesto trying to justify his actions by appealing to scripture.
The plan is that I am going to the grocery and then to a movie. Trying to break things up today. I want to work ont he blogs today and tomorrow.
LIFT aims to support Indiana filmmakers in telling powerful, uplifting
stories of inspirational Hoosiers. We will offer $5,000 grants to five
filmmakers to produce five-minute short films that effectively capture
these stories. If selected, filmmakers or filmmaking teams have two
months (April 15 - June 15) to complete their films. In addition to the
financial support, Hoodox and Indiana Humanities will provide mentorship
opportunities throughout the process.
Ink
Drinkers Anonymous is a small, independent bookstore located in Muncie,
Indiana. We have a deep love for books and passion for representation.
You can find books by a variety of authors of different backgrounds, but
we love to highlight diverse and underrepresented authors.
Wednesday and Thursday nights I did not get to sleep until morning. Throbbing pain kept me awake.
I could not make it to church. I either could not stay awake long enough in the mornings or I just could not walk that far.
Thursday was pretty much nothing but misery. However, I did make it to the eye doctor. I am not without risk of glaucoma. While on the northside, I stopped at Yummy's for lunch. It is a local buffet. Two plates, I felt full. When I got home, the pain flared. I got an idea that I thought might help.
I did group but not The Dumpling House.
That got me through most of Friday. The idea seemed to help. Mostly. Only I was so tired when I got up this morning that I gave up on being away at 6 AM on Saturday.
Today, I walked down to Wheeling and Riverside to catch the bus. It was late, and the spasm almost had me ready to go home. Necessity kept me in place. Something good came of that: I am pretty sure I saw small sanpping turtles sunning themselves on the embankment. It seems to me there were upwards of a half dozen. Maybe three or four more swimming. No sign of any fish.
I got my groceries at Payless and came home.
No going to the art shows, no go going to Ink Drinkers, no church, but a lot of soaking in the bath. A walk down to the convenience store a few minutes ago felt like a hike.
All I did today was get “After Making Landfall” submitted.
I will go to Liturgy tomorrow. I need some peace and hope.
I have been writing this for some time, but Why Israel is losing Americafrom Englesberg Ideas may be more eloquent and compelling than I have. Maybe not as compelling as the Iran debacle Netanyahu conned Trump into. Would it also be that the rise in antisemitism is blunted. Netanyahu hides behind Zionism, a nasty right-wing strain of Zionism does profit from him. What interests Netanyahu is power and fear of losing his libety. Those are not diseases peculiar to the Jews.
A word of caution is necessary, however: Bibi appears drunk on never-ending wars, and he will try to keep Israel in the fight as long as possible to distract from his weakened political position. As a case in point, look at the IDF invasion of Southern Lebanon. Moreover, if the Iran and Lebanon wars ended now, Bibi would be compelled to resume facing his corruption trial. He will also face an inevitable investigation into the Israeli intelligence and military failures prior to the Hamas attack on 7 October, an inquest that will include his government’s alleged role in propping up Hamas. The odds are that he will do all he can to continue Israeli military activity on multiple fronts to forestall his date with destiny; the next Israeli elections may finally be his undoing.
I can quibble with that a little. Someone had to write the songs. It took a black man to write America onto the world.
Americans are experiencing a great deal of social and political trouble
right now because we do not know what we want, cannot agree about what
we should want, and know only that what the other side wants must be the
wrong thing. But if you travel around the rest of the world, it is easy
to see what they want. The éminences grises ofWestern
Europe, the Boomer welfare-staters, want to be Portland, “the place
where people in their 20s go to retire,” or, even better, to be Austin
in the 1990s, where young people went to retire for a bit and then start
tech companies that would make them billionaires. (The Europeans are
really feeling the great missed opportunity of the turn of the century.)
The elderly men who run China want to take over the American role as
the world’s big dog. A bunch of graybeards in the Muslim world dream of a
new caliphate or maybe some form of state-capitalist techno-monarchy
that will give the Gulf states the dynamism and energy to finally do
something interesting with all that oil money instead of building the
seventh Louis Vuitton boutique in Dubai. But the young and the hungry
around the world, from India to Ukraine, want something different: They
want choices and agency and fun and freedom that may not look exactly
like our version of it but that is freedom nonetheless. They want to rock.
It is the soundtrack you want when you do cool stuff and invent
things and make things and pile up insane stacks of money, and there are
a lot of billionaires who started off sleeping on someone’s floor and a
few billionaires who will go back to it before the end. It all goes
together: the Sony tech-bro nerd who served as vice president of
technical standards responsible for “interoperability norms” of products
such as the Blu-ray disc? That guy, James Williamson (no relation), was
the guitarist in the Stooges. Not some weekends-and-summers dad-rock
cover band—the Stooges, with Iggy Pop, playing on Raw Power, no less. How did that happen? “My sister was bringing home Elvis records,” he told Clash
magazine, “and so I thought, ‘I gotta have a guitar.’” He heard Elvis,
and he never looked back. Or how about a tugboat captain, of all
unlikely things, who got a doctorate in medieval literature at the
University of Texas at Austin, writing a dissertation on the poems of
Cynewulf? Sterling Morrison had a job before all that: He was a guitarist in the Velvet Underground. My friend Charles C.W. Cooke, the erudite, Oxford-educated National Review
writer and all-purpose Florida man? A touring rock musician as a
youngster, and a pretty good one. Charlie is as English an Englishman as
Lemmy was—he lived for a time in a house that had once belonged to
Oliver Cromwell—but he will tell you that he has always been, for as
long as he can remember, a kind of American-in-waiting.
The world is full of them. It is a big glorious mess, as freedom must
be—even well-ordered freedom of the Anglo-Protestant variety that we
have goaded into so many mutations over the past 250 years.
We have long known that student achievement is heavily dependent upon
parental income, and that students from impoverished backgrounds face
barriers their wealthier classmates do not. What is less recognized is
the fact that the results of standardized testing often reflect the
reality that students in some school districts are more prosperous than
students in other districts, and that higher average test scores reflect
that economic reality rather than the quality of the education
provided.
Hicks and his research team set out to measure the extent to which
superior test scores were a result of higher prosperity, and the extent
to which those scores could be attributed to superior teaching–what he
dubbed the “value added” dimension. They found that “some Indiana
districts are dramatically outperforming what their demographics would
predict, while others are leaving potential on the table.”
Hicks wrote:
In this model of Indiana’s 290 public school corporations, there were
only two issues that correlated with test scores: our poverty measures
and the share of Asian students in the school (but only tests at 8th
grade and above). This held across the 3rd- and 8th-grade ILEARN and
10th-grade SAT share who met the college-ready benchmark.
School size didn’t matter. The share of White or Black students
didn’t matter. And the English language learner share didn’t matter —
which is sure to disappoint anti-immigrant folks in the state.
So, what affected school performance is poverty, plain and simple —
that is among the most studied and clear findings of the last
half-century of social science research.
The brief points to two major forces that can
blunt the return to full-time employment for households in poverty.
First, some costs rise alongside work hours—particularly expenses tied
to health care, transportation, and childcare. Second, income gains can
coincide with reductions in assistance as eligibility changes and
benefits phase down, creating complex tradeoffs that vary by household
and circumstances.
“The takeaway is not that work doesn’t matter—it
does,” Dr. Wornell said. “It’s that policy design matters, too. The goal
should be to ensure that taking more hours reliably translates into
greater stability and upward mobility.”
The brief doesn’t point to a one-size-fits-all
solution. Instead, it lays out several policy approaches that research
suggests can help ensure work leads to higher net resources. These
include smoothing benefit phase-outs, reducing key household costs, and
improving coordination across public supports.
Education can lead to children getting out of poverty.
A better policy on the poor moving to full-time work can raise whole families.
Why does Indiana do so little for our people living in poverty?
Our research initiative included convening an advisory group of
academic, government, nonprofit and business leaders from Indiana who
provided insights on why young men are falling off an educational and
employment cliff as well as ideas for reversing this dangerous trend.
The advisory group’s recommendations include:
Launching a public-awareness campaign aimed at parents to educate
them on the dangers of social media and the need to promote healthier
use of technology.
Establishing a public-awareness campaign to educate men on responsible fatherhood.
Promoting public policies that encourage, rather than discourage, marriage.
Crafting state policies to curtail children’s access to social media.
Working with Indiana’s professional sports and philanthropic organizations to revive neighborhood sports leagues.
Enlisting boys and young men in community-building efforts at the neighborhood level.
Developing more reentry initiatives to help nonviolent juvenile offenders reconnect with their communities.
Providing men with more incentives to serve as mentors and teachers.
Developing more effective methods to help young men see the connection between education and career opportunities.
Supporting work-based opportunities that provide meaningful career experiences.
Recognizing the role of digital technology in shaping male behavior
and well-being, acknowledging that Big Tech is part of the problem
facing boys and young men and crafting legislation to shield our
children from the dangers of algorithm-fueled social media.
The release of our study is the start of a vital conversation that
needs to happen in every school, nonprofit, religious institution and
industry in Indiana. Our state is losing the contributions of far too
many young men in our communities.
So, again, why does Indiana do so little for its citizens?
