The definition of conglomeration, according to Google, is “a number of different things, parts or items that are grouped together; collection.” As granite is conglomerate rock, a Jack Pollock painting builds a conglomeration. They look messy, not all the same, not neatly organized. Yet granite is some of the toughest rock around.The imagination builds concepts from the elements, each of us in our own way. And yet a slab of granite is quite clearly one thing, not many.
Denomination is what we do to sort things by value, like money or postage stamp or churches. Google claims a denomination is an autonomous branch of the Christian church, but that was surely not written by a Christian. John 17:23 bids us be unified. None of us can be autonomous from Christ and none can be autonomous from the rest of the body of Christ — a body is a conglomeration of cells each working to its function, not a sortable by value.
Common terminology notwithstanding, the church is more like a conglomerate than a set of denominations.
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The boy stole something he craved. His mom was livid. “Why?”
“Why would you do this when you know it is wrong? You are grounded until you can explain it to me.”
He may be grounded a very long time. He rarely if ever had seen the inside of a church. His mom doesn’t find God useful, and considers God’s tastes a bit bloody. The devil is relegated to an entertainment zone, not feared as real. In past generations, the mom would be expected to explain to the boy, not the boy to the mom.
Who can explain their own dark side? If we do not acknowledge the scariness of the dark within, how do we find the light?
When young, we have a tendency to act without considering likely outcome. But age doesn’t make us any less tempted. It could just make us carefully consider the consequences, and then make a more careful plan to evade them.
Conscience is the human vehicle that makes us know moral light from dark, and that grounds us to socially acceptable behavior in a group. Child psychologists claim it forms first from the voices of parents inside a child’s head — first audibly and then within the brain recalled as memory, and then as a unique and personal voice.
When the parents do not know or are not available to teach, and we have eliminated required public forums for the community to teach how to overcome temptation based on past wisdom, what is left but commercial predators striving not to teach but to intensely entertain or attract. If God speaks through conscience as the Puritans believed, and the conscience is ill-formed, can a society break its children’s ability to thrive, and in two generations a culture’s ability to thrive? Will we be left then with a macabre Lord of the Flies?
From a Christian point of view, scripture promises the church, the body of the living Christ, will not fail. However, no one promised the surviving church would be American, or even western. Freedom was not one of the three major weapons in combating evil. Rather it was the blood of the lamb, the word of God’s children’s testimony and the willingness of God’s children to give up their lives. In eliminating forced worship with our separation of church and state, we cannot be willing to give up an ability to share authentic un-commercialized stories, not even at the cost of life itself. That would be tossing the baby with the bathwater that made the baby clean.
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When I heard Ted Cruz was evoking the image of solitary five year old in a public restroom I was flabbergasted. Does he really let a five year daughter old go into a public rest room alone? Fathers, both single fathers and fathers on father-daughter excursions, have to take their young children with them to the rest room just like moms do, don’t they?
The image was concocted to counter objections to a law in North Carolinaspecifying how to choose your bathroom.
Maybe it’s just my “New York Values” causing alarm. Before I first moved east I was warned as a college age woman NEVER to use a public rest room in New York City. I believed my expatriate NYC friends. Even New York administrators reflect those ex-New-Yorkers-moved-west values becausemany public restrooms are closed. If they are replaced it will be with individual units that don’t have to be labeled by sex.
Sadly, the most dangerous rooms east or west turn out to be the ones in your home, your friends’ homes and places you gather with what you believe are your friends. That is because most sexual abuse occurs from men that the victims — and often the victim’s families — know. These are mostly men that misuse their authority and/or strength with the children, women, or lower status males in their lives.
If we are at all honest the idea of breaking down public restrooms and showers by gender was never safe. In public, there was always the potential for same sex attack and adult attack of minors, even as far back in the time as the Roman Empire. C. S Lewis discusses it frankly when describing the boys’ schools he was sent to. In Surprised by Joy, he claimed sexual attack was common and unavoidable. That was in the early 1900’s, before you could legitimately blame secularism or individualism.
Science studies indicate our brains just don’t think rationally sometimes inassessing risk. Christians describe the cause of this as the noetic effects of the fall.
Perhaps there is a useful way to think about the issue of bathroom access, using Roger Williams’s thought process. If we use the Roger Williams’s analogy we are all on a ship. We have a right to our different consciences, values, morals, religions but there are certain activities — like not molesting each other — prohibited or required in order to keep the civil peace. When considering legislation we should ask, where has civil peace been at risk? We should gather some facts, about when and how has it most been at risk. Then we can work to reduce the risk.
If we accept the real issue is fear of molestation, and look at the actual crime statistics on that molestation, I contend we will end up closer to whereFrank Bruni and Donald Trump come out on the issue as compared to Ted Cruz and the current North Carolina position. Possibly we want to create new spaces with better privacy and protection. For sure we want to accompany our children in higher risk settings.
Another approach for Christians to look at is what Jesus did when a woman was accused of sexual sin. He pointed out we’re all guilty given his high standards, and asked if anyone cared to throw the first stone. None dared. Transgender people are our neighbors. Some have mocked them, however unfortunately, as if they were somehow someone’s enemy. Jesus said our job is to love our neighbors, even if they are our enemies, to love them as we love ourselves. I don’t know about you, but when I have to go, I don’t want to be hassled to show my birth certificate, I don’t want to discuss which door to choose. If people are choosing to go about their business peacefully, let them be.
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Edward Wightman was a successful merchant and left behind a family when he was burned at the stake in 1612. In fact, I went to college with one of his descendants, Bobby Wightman. The Bobby Wightman of our day is a historian, by hobby if not by trade. As a descendent, he was allowed to dress up in something resembling surgical scrub and go into a room at SMU containing an original copy of the book about the burning of Edward Wightman. He brought a professional that took no-flash pictures, excerpts of which are included in this blog post, thanks to him.
The case of Edward Wightman demonstrates three things:
First, Edward Wightman’s experience in parallel with Roger William’s shows just how hard it was for authorities to distinguish mental delusions of grandeur and other error from genuine if revolutionary inspiration. We still have troubles in our own day with distinguishing rejection of injustice in hopes of making a stronger nation from rejection of national and even human values. 
One of the charges for which Wightman was executed coincides with Roger Williams’s views: an antipathy for infant baptism.
However, that is charge number 13 of 16. Higher up on the list is the view of Jesus common to some liberal modern churches and Islam: that Jesus was a human prophet only.
Charge 8 seemed the most striking. Edward Wightman is charged with believing that he is himself the Holy Spirit. After denying Jesus a place in the trinity, he wants to claim a place for himself!
What we can’t tell from the document is if these charges were exaggerated. Perhaps he was trying to explain how the holy spirit indwells all of us, much as the inner light focused crowd that preceded the Quakers emphasized.
Much of the document reads like a litany of ideas that have been in discussion for over a thousand years. But not charge 8. That charge was either one Wightman himself believed, or was included to make sure everyone could see he had gone too far.
Second, the value of the freedoms of conscience and speech. If Edward Wightman lived in our day in a nation with the separation of church and state, his ideas would be disputed, perhaps ferociously. He might have been debunked and ridiculed by some, even while being revered by others. In our nation however, he should not have be executed unless he disrupted the civil peace. By disrupted, I mean something more harmful than interruption by peaceful protest.
Third, violence prolongs civil unrest, and the other side’s commitment. Unfortunately, we’ve seen both criminals and authorities cross the line to violent action against those with whom they disagree. As with Wightman’s executors, they create survivors dedicated to remembering and to correcting the injustice. The fact that Wightman’s descendants remember and revere him ~14 generations later is illuminating.
What Edward Wightman cannot tell us much about is the alternate decision we chose for a generation. Suppression of free speech via societal norms of “political correctness” seemed to result in a more peaceful world for a time.
However, it allowed hatred to linger in hiding. Instead of experiencing peer pressure to find common ground, quiet disrespect survived and replicated resulting in massive polarization. Simultaneously victims thought they had chances they never had. They were in essence denied the opportunity to protest against their accusers. A whole generation was interviewed by managers trained in what not to say so no one could tell if they discriminated in hiring, promotion etc. The managers could even deny it to themselves. However, the higher unemployment and remaining statistical disparities in pay do not lie. The difference in the results of musical auditions behind screens vs. in person do not lie.
It turns out the resulting silence was not peace. The results accross time are not that different from the silence of continuing injustice after execution. The only working solution we’ve found is the sometimes loud, sometimes ferocious debate — with words and demonstration.
The silent discriminators have been unmasked. The new loud discussion has begun. May we keep it to a war of words, and remember the lessons of Edward Wightman even as we reject the silent desperation of politically correct injustice.
Originally published on Medium in About Rekindled.
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A review of Reza Aslan’s Zealot, The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
Reza Aslan is one of the voices in the USA media explaining Islam to Christians today. He is popular, because he makes most Muslims seem anti-extreme, a comforting thought and one that helps promote the unity of humanity against extremism in our time. I read his book about Jesus in part to calibrate his credibility. My theory is he will be similarly accurate when evaluating Islam’s faith history, and that errors in his view on Islam would not be something I can so easily detect.
The book provides valuable historical context and there is much to learn from it. However, Reza suppositions in the story at crucial junctures that seem hard to justify. Other reviewers have commented it is possible footnotes would have helped to decipher the sources of his hypotheses. In any case, these changes have consequences, and need examination.
Here are key examples I see:
Both Reza Aslan and Christian tradition have Luke and Paul hanging out together after Saul’s conversion to become Paul. Christian tradition is Luke was a respected competent historian and a likely mentor to Paul. Aslan thinks less of Luke. The divide becomes one of Luke mentoring Paul vs. Paul mentoring Luke. As with any relationship the relationship was likely two-way. Why does it matter? Because Aslan frees himself to say Luke is putting in fiction or covering truth over to create a dispute that he believes is larger than what was documented by Luke between Paul and the other apostles. In the end Christians rely on the judgement that Luke is competent by Irenaeus(2nd century), and by the Nicaean council (4th Century) that made his books part of the scriptural canon. This judgement was further confirmed by the archeological research of Sir William Mitchell Ramsey (20th Century) who said “You may press the words of Luke in a degree beyond any other historian’s and they stand the keenest scrutiny and the hardest treatment.”
1) Aslan seems to discount some scriptures while elevating others, sometimes based on historical analysis, but not always. Most Christians stand guilty of this same crime. An example Aslan does not justify well concerns the story of the Good Samaritan. Aslan clearly recognizes this parable is in response to the question “Who is your neighbor?” and that Jesus really told the parable (p. 100–101). Christians believe this story shows Jesus came for everyone. However, later in the book (e.g. p. 134–135) Aslan decides that Jesus would have had a traditional Jewish view of what the messiah should be and do and therefore that he would come for the Jewish nation only. Aslan purports the church changes the scope of Jesus’s audience. Believing Jesus to be inspired, Christians believe that Jesus saw the scriptures in ways previously unseen. Jesus would come to be the light to the nations that the Jewish people had been intended to be, but had not been faithful enough to God to fulfill to date. In the end, saying Jesus provided the new interpretations showing he would come to Israel first to be light to all the world vs. the body of Christ the Church provided the new interpretations need not be such a large distinction except that Aslan would make the divide so large as to represent two different faiths (p. 196). Scriptures Aslan finds contradictory do not seem so in their context, as other analysis (e.g. Robert Allen King: though you will have to endure some lengthy opinion to get to the detail), explains. For Christians it is Aslan that is in error, but with a cleverness, along the lines of the tradition of the serpent seducing Eve in Genesis 3. Because Christians believe God to be the final authority behind scripture, Christians believe He expects us to know it well enough to find a other author’s errors.
2) Aslan seems to actually believe what he says on page 177, that even though Jesus says “it is written” when he prophesies being destroyed and rebuilt in three days there is no such scripture. This is a beautiful case in point of Jesus putting scriptures together in ways previously unseen. He takes the substitution of messiah for the light of Israel from Ezekiel — and realizes his own body is a temple of the Lord. He is quoting Hosea 6:2 and applying these substitutional insights. These are common concepts in the Christian faith especially given the writings of Paul but would, as Aslan correctly notes, have seemed strange and novel and mysterious when Jesus first spoke them.
3 ) James the Just vs. Paul the Inspired …. hmm. Surely there was a controversy, that much is documented. However, Christians believe that is the honest tension between a man who knew Jesus as human since his childhood and one who only knew him first hand as vision and in prayer. Jesus’s transformation had to be one hard to completely comprehend. Christians can be vicious as they argue, but Luke documents that they did come out on the other side of that argument united. Great leadership allows that to happen —Jim Collins calls is facing the brutal facts — the passion in the arguments enables a better resolution. But Aslan hypothesizes that the argument never really ended, that one side of the argument was silenced in the temple destruction. Even if Aslan is correct, a Christian would have said there are no accidents, if God had wanted a remnant of that other argument to survive he would have made it so. If Luke is competent, he explicitly says the controversy was resolved while all the parties were alive.
In any case, it is Paul who seems like us, experiencing the risen Jesus in vision and prayer. We can all be like Paul, we cannot all be like James the Just. Paul’s way of meeting Jesus we can all know first hand. In that sense, Paul was the first of our kind.
Reza Aslan is most caught when he approaches the resurrection. He does a great job here. He is caught because, as he points out, the loyalty of the witnesses is a remarkable testament the depth of their testimony. Yet if he says as modern historian that a miracle occurred he will lose his Western secular credentials as historian. That is a sad fact of our age. Many would-be Christians stumble at this point. The good news Christians proclaim is you can meet Paul’s Jesus in prayer first, while unable to suspend disbelief. You can follow Jesus asking him to help in your remaining unbelief. Reza Aslan says you can also meet a James the Just version of Jesus in history … and that may be so. If one continues to pray for help with remaining unbelief, that too is good news. It may be worthwhile to get additional introduction to that historical Jesus by Craig Keener or N T Wright.
Originally published on Medium in About Rekindled
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After finishing the 2015 Boston marathon, Gianclaudio realized his ID was gone and, not speaking English, he could not find his way to his people or his hotel. Being clever, he went for the the airport directly, but he was taken for by many homeless or worse.
The story of Gianclaudio P. Marengo’s survival has a lucky ending: he was recognized for the civilized but lost Italian he was and returned to people he knew by an officer who said he did “what anyone would have done”. Except that they didn’t and often don’t. It takes real character and empathy to reach out to the dispossessed.
In 1912 John Keenan as not so lucky. Not Without Peril tells the haunting story of how the inexperienced surveyor dressed too light for the changing Mt. Washington weather and suffered overexposure and dehydration.
He was seen, the first time within 24 hours, by an experienced man who should have been able to help. However, he was asking for strange landmarks and it sounded like he was not being truthful. The man pointed him toward civilization and left him with two miles to go on the road. For several days, appearing physically sound but too deranged to be understood as needing help he was spotted several times. Eventually massive manhunts searched for him, but he was not found. His parents never got a body back.
This phenomena of studying failures and near failures explains the fascination with Rob Hall’s expedition on Everest — where living people were also left behind — even though people on the same mountain in the same time on a better team survived. My racing coach used to be really bothered by the relative lack of fame for Ed Viesturs, a leader that does it right.
Multiple major negative events disable. Leadership matters. Planning for supplies required during disaster matters. Communication with those able to assist matters.
The book 1491 begins to examine what really happened to the indigenous peoples of America. When Roger Williams arrived, multiple rounds of disease had already wiped out much of the population. He was seeing remnants of a vast civilization. Early Roger Williams seems to still detect the civilized nature of the indigenous culture.
Sometimes Roger’s own language gets in his way. When he calls men “another of Adam’s degenerate seed” that is actually a complement. His worldview is that all men descended from Adam are sinners, all born degenerate in some way until redeemed by the sacrifice of Christ. Much as when evangelicals today feel obligated to communicate what the Bible defines as sin so that people realize a need for the offered redemption, Roger was calling all men degenerate, including indigenous people. In contrast, some English claimed the natives were not human at all. So in claiming they are descendants of Adam, he is saying they are fully human and can be redeemed just like anyone else.
Long decades of trying to Anglicize people while simultaneously treating them as less than human, combined with rampant loss of needed resources to support their lifestyle, changed people. Native peoples that were not desperate in the 1630’s surely were by late in Roger Williams’s life. Like the dehydrated John Keenan they were unable to obtain assistance in any meaningful way. They were striking out in ways that seemed strange and inappropriate to Englishmen, and likely to prior generations of indigenous. Desperate times lead to desperate people. It is in that context Roger Williams’ succumbed to calling the people that burned houses and towns, barbarians. It would be a mistake to think of it as broader or more meaningful than that.
The book Decoding Roger Williams lets Roger Williams speak one last time through a manuscript only recently deciphered. The document shows many of his critics to have been fabricating lies about him but it also documents disappointing language where Williams joins many in his day referring to the indigenous people as barbarians. The later is a symptom of the larger tragedy unfolding.
My mathematics professor taught that some famous mathematicians made their most egregious errors right after the “it is clear that”. The word “barbarian” means “it is clear that this person is uncivilized. It seems to me that those that call another “barbarian” are the most likely to be barbarians themselves.
Originally published on Medium in We are all Overcomers
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When I was young my grandmother watched the first step on the moon with me on our black and white TV.
She did not believe it was occuring. She thought it was staged. I was certain it was true and the most exciting thing I would see in my whole life. Now a NASA team discovered evidence of brine — indicating contemporary liquid water on MARS. It is even more exciting than Neil Armstrong’s first steps. Why?
Liquid water on earth almost always means life.
Photo: David Gallo TED Talk of Underwater Astonishments
In the ocean, on land, in a frozen wasteland, in the air, once there is water, life finds a way to survive, even when the water is intermittent. We only know our own story. But if there is life on other planets, it is probably on Mars. Mars life is likely to be under the crust, deep down in bodies of liquid protected from radiation and thin air.
As a David W. Dunlap article suggests, it is time to unleash our imaginations. I confess that when I read C S Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet it was hard to enjoy. It seemed so far fetched. Back then we thought all the water left the planet billions of years ago, if it was ever there. The lack of vision was my own.
C S Lewis revealed as a visionary, a Jules Vernes.
C S Lewis has long been one of my favorite authors. This almost makes up for the day I found out there was no real Malcolm writing C. S. Lewis letters behind his book Letters to Malcolm. I’d always wanted to read the other side of the arguments. Malcolm was all in his imagination.
Newly discovered potential for life tickles the imagination and catalyzes hope.
It is like finding out we are pregnant, before we know if it is a boy or a girl.
We’ve only discovered 3% of the life under our oceans. We won’t even know at first if the life we’ve found on Mars is common with or distinct from life on Earth.
Gazing at NASA’s images provides hints at next season’s designs from the master artist who made our sunsets and mountains.
They are like a sonogram of an embryo. They are like learning there could be new Picasso’s hidden underground. Will Martians be smart? Will they think we are just food?
Will we be able to communicate with Martians? Will Martian creatures be a new food source, bringing to Modernest Cuisine a new dimension?
This time, the team had women in line positions.
Congratulations to the whole team!! I am sure that the team is much larger than the picture at left. While there were no visible women in the project list during development, there are women on this chart of the surface operations team.
Reaching Mars represents overcoming …
a distance challenge, a hostile environment challenge, in an endurance feat for individuals and organizations. It is a giant leap for mankind.
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