In 1984 it was "Two Minutes' Hate"; now it's 5 minutes' hate I guess. Hussein Rashid explains the context for the event here, and further background information on how what originally was (so I gather) a protest against a speaker for a charity event devolved into a spectacle of indiscriminate hate-mongering is here as well. To some extent, this is standard-issue stuff, a group of idiots exercising their free speech rights to make known their bigotry and ignorance, but the way the public officials fire up the crowds brings to mind some of the worst incidents in American history.
Kamis, 03 Maret 2011
Religion, Consensus, and Conflict in Wisconsin
Paul Harvey
A number of good pieces have analyzed the conflict over public unions and collective bargaining in Wisconsin from religious history perspectives. Some, such as Kim Bobo over at Religion Dispatches, have reproduced mainstream Protestant liberal and Catholic support for the workers, while our own Heath Carter has weighed in here more skeptically on the same issue. From the other side of the divide, Julie
Ingersoll has investigated the justifications in Christian Reconstructionism for union-busting, and Diane Butler Bass explains Governor Scott Walker's evangelical surety (you Cheeseheads have Colorado Springs to thank for that, apparently, yet another gift we've given to the world). Over at Immanent Frame, John Boy's "The Cross and the Cheeseheads" summarizes much of this discussion and provides some other links as well.
But here is what I think is the best short piece on the religious angle of the story I have read on this: Paul Grant, "Neighbor Against Neighbor in Wisconsin," a succinct and eloquent essay on the passion about public order and public works that underlies this conflict (hat tip to Janine Giordano Drake and Seth Dowland for calling my attention to it). Just a brief excerpt:
In the 1870s, waves of Scandinavians and Germans came, motivated this time by poverty. These were the builders, the people who brought their Northern European instincts for consensus-building and cooperation to bear on their projects. It is because of them that Wisconsin is stacked with credit unions, farmers markets, co-ops of every variety, native grass seed exchanges, strong public libraries, and impressive music departments in tiny rural high schools. Largely Lutheran and Catholic, the bedrock Wisconsin way of doing culture is to blur the boundaries between public and private . . .
Why does this matter? It helps explain the anger of the moment. We are seeing a collision of distinct traditions of political conversation—one grounded in mainstream American traditions of brinkmanship, and another drawing on midwestern traditions of consensus-building. It is not insignificant that Governor Walker was born in Colorado Springs to a Baptist minister: he represents national political cultures.
It's often pointed out that Wisconsin gave us both Robert LaFollette and Joseph McCarthy, so this "brinksmanship" is certainly not entirely new; and of course serious labor conflict in Wisconsin and elsewhere is not new either. Nonetheless, Grant's piece helped me understand something of the way this movement has combined passion and order, and also something more about the religious motivations undergirding Governor Walker and his supporters.
A number of good pieces have analyzed the conflict over public unions and collective bargaining in Wisconsin from religious history perspectives. Some, such as Kim Bobo over at Religion Dispatches, have reproduced mainstream Protestant liberal and Catholic support for the workers, while our own Heath Carter has weighed in here more skeptically on the same issue. From the other side of the divide, Julie
Ingersoll has investigated the justifications in Christian Reconstructionism for union-busting, and Diane Butler Bass explains Governor Scott Walker's evangelical surety (you Cheeseheads have Colorado Springs to thank for that, apparently, yet another gift we've given to the world). Over at Immanent Frame, John Boy's "The Cross and the Cheeseheads" summarizes much of this discussion and provides some other links as well.But here is what I think is the best short piece on the religious angle of the story I have read on this: Paul Grant, "Neighbor Against Neighbor in Wisconsin," a succinct and eloquent essay on the passion about public order and public works that underlies this conflict (hat tip to Janine Giordano Drake and Seth Dowland for calling my attention to it). Just a brief excerpt:
In the 1870s, waves of Scandinavians and Germans came, motivated this time by poverty. These were the builders, the people who brought their Northern European instincts for consensus-building and cooperation to bear on their projects. It is because of them that Wisconsin is stacked with credit unions, farmers markets, co-ops of every variety, native grass seed exchanges, strong public libraries, and impressive music departments in tiny rural high schools. Largely Lutheran and Catholic, the bedrock Wisconsin way of doing culture is to blur the boundaries between public and private . . .
Why does this matter? It helps explain the anger of the moment. We are seeing a collision of distinct traditions of political conversation—one grounded in mainstream American traditions of brinkmanship, and another drawing on midwestern traditions of consensus-building. It is not insignificant that Governor Walker was born in Colorado Springs to a Baptist minister: he represents national political cultures.
It's often pointed out that Wisconsin gave us both Robert LaFollette and Joseph McCarthy, so this "brinksmanship" is certainly not entirely new; and of course serious labor conflict in Wisconsin and elsewhere is not new either. Nonetheless, Grant's piece helped me understand something of the way this movement has combined passion and order, and also something more about the religious motivations undergirding Governor Walker and his supporters.
Update: Janine Giordano is working on her own piece on the Wisconsin issue as well as a response to Grant, so with any luck that will be up here soon!
Playing Jane: Black Mormon History and Memory
Paul HarveyWhile our blog contributor Chris Jones is getting ready to ace his comprehensives, he sent along this outstanding piece by Harvard graduate student Max Mueller: "Playing Jane: The History of a Pioneer Black Mormon Woman is Alive Today," published online at the Harvard Divinity School Bulletin. Highly recommended reading, particularly if (like me) you know absolutely nothing about this subject. The article discusses the historical re-creation efforts of Jerri Halwell, who "plays" the remarkable character of Jane Manning James, an African American woman who served in Joseph Smith's household, became a convert, made the trek to Utah, and remained a faithful member of the Church until 1908. A brief taste from this piece (footnotes omitted):
Last summer, I went to Salt Lake City to look for Jane Manning James in the archives of the LDS Church History Library and the archives of the Utah Historical Society. I hoped that Jane would speak to me from scratchy microfiche and dusty letter-books. I hoped she would tell me how she dealt with the precarious place in which she lived out her life as a black Mormon pioneer in Zion, simultaneously at the center and on the margins of the nineteenth-century Mormon experience. I planned to "ask" her: How did you understand your status as a beloved member of the community, celebrated as a friend of the first prophet's family, as a pioneer of 1847, and as a steadfast member of the LDS Church? At the same time, how did you come to terms with LDS Church policy that, due to your race, defines you as innately cursed and thus unworthy to receive the same blessings as your fellow white saints?
Although this was my plan, during my time in Salt Lake City, I found that the archives are not the only or even the best place to find Jane. Certainly, the archives shed light on the question of how Jane in writing subtly challenged the Church's marginalization of blacks within Mormon history and within the Mormon community. But it was in my interviews with Jerri and in my observations of her reenactments that I discovered the canon is not closed on Jane's story. The legacy of Jane's black Mormon experience unfolds today in the lives of modern black Mormons like Jerri, who strike a precarious balance between their ongoing struggles with the Mormon "folklore" about black spiritual inferiority and the spiritual truth they find within their own Mormon testimonies of faith.
Continue reading here.
Rabu, 02 Maret 2011
An Exploration of Unconditional Love cont....
* Create together some common cause you are both interested in and committed to accomplishing. This opens up the possibility of working together, in communication with each other, in agreement about what you are both dedicated to accomplishing. You feel helped by each other, grateful to each other, willing to acknowledge each other, and capable of bringing about results in the world together. Actually creating something together is a lot of fun. Babies are fun to create, although they are a hell of a lot of work for a long time. Creating is a lot more fun than bitching and whining.
* Stay involved with other people committed to telling the truth and to something bigger than their own comfort. An honest relationship with other couples supports your couple. Couples need another couple or two for friends. If intimacy doesn't extend to friends and extended family, the network of support is too thin. If you have even one good friend to both people, to whom both can talk and who supports both in telling the truth, you have a great resource.
* Make requests from your mate for what you want but stay willing to take care of yourself. You can practice this by picking something you usually bitch about your mate's not doing for you, and then sit down with them and practice. You say something like this: "If you want to please me, if you want to know what would make me happy, here is what I would really like for you to do . If you don't do that; it's O.K, I'm a big girl (boy), and I will take care of it myself. You are not obligated to make or keep me happy or to do what I want. I am responsible for my own happiness. If I get mad at you, I will handle it, and I'll get over it. If I get disappointed, I'll be responsible for my own disappointment." Wouldn't it be great to be married to someone who really did that? This is a fine basic sort of position to come from to relate to other people in general: here is what I want, but you don't have to provide it for me. You are invited and requested, but not obligated, to take care of me.
* Stay involved with other people committed to telling the truth and to something bigger than their own comfort. An honest relationship with other couples supports your couple. Couples need another couple or two for friends. If intimacy doesn't extend to friends and extended family, the network of support is too thin. If you have even one good friend to both people, to whom both can talk and who supports both in telling the truth, you have a great resource.
* Make requests from your mate for what you want but stay willing to take care of yourself. You can practice this by picking something you usually bitch about your mate's not doing for you, and then sit down with them and practice. You say something like this: "If you want to please me, if you want to know what would make me happy, here is what I would really like for you to do . If you don't do that; it's O.K, I'm a big girl (boy), and I will take care of it myself. You are not obligated to make or keep me happy or to do what I want. I am responsible for my own happiness. If I get mad at you, I will handle it, and I'll get over it. If I get disappointed, I'll be responsible for my own disappointment." Wouldn't it be great to be married to someone who really did that? This is a fine basic sort of position to come from to relate to other people in general: here is what I want, but you don't have to provide it for me. You are invited and requested, but not obligated, to take care of me.
Interview with Jennifer Graber
Randall Stephens
[I crosspost here a selection from a short interview with Jenn Graber. The full interview is at the HS blog.]
"Americans incarcerate," writes Jennifer Graber in her new engaging book The Furnace of Affliction: Prisons and Religion in Antebellum America (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). "Though the United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population," she writes,
"it has almost a quarter of its prisoners." Such facts make the long history of American prisons and their maintenance all the more interesting. Graber, an assistant professor in the department of religious studies at the College of Wooster, analyzes the "intersection of Christianity and politics in the American penitentiary system."* Her interesting account also looks at the religious dimensions of discipline and the ideas that undergirded punishment from the 1790s to the 1950s.
Randall Stephens: You write that antebellum Americans disagreed on much when it came to prisons, but most “affirmed religion's central importance” to prisons and reform. How was criminal justice “religious” in this era?
Jennifer Graber: If you were concerned about criminal punishment in the early republic, there were lots of things to fight about. Once the states began to build prisons, the big debate was between a discipline out of Pennsylvania that featured total solitary confinement and one out of New York that combined labor in workshops during the day with solitary confinement at night. Partisans for these two systems called the other side un-American and un-Christian. Beyond the rival disciplines, people debated the best way to reform inmates. They argued about what was more important: a good Sunday School teacher in Sing Sing or clean water and decent food in Sing Sing? Without fail, everyone interested in the debate claimed that “religion”—and they used the word “religion” even though they meant variations of evangelical Protestantism—was central to inmate reformation and the overall health of American prisons as strong institutions. What they didn't realize is that their common evocation of “religion” masked significant differences. For instance, they all thought that prison chaplains were necessary, but disagreed—sometimes violently—over the role these ministers should play inside institutions. Or, they all assumed that God ordained the civil authorities to punish lawbreakers, but varied on the question of that punishment’s severity.
Stephens: What kinds of problems did evangelicals target in the prison system? What can we learn about them by the sort of reforms they pursued?
Graber: Their first target was colonial-era punishments, whether it was steep fines, corporal punishments such as whipping or branding, or the gallows. They joined a trans-Atlantic movement to reform punishment and were active in the construction and administration of the first prisons. Protestant evangelicals—and I include many Quakers in this group, which might ruffle some historians’ feathers—envisioned the prison as an ideal site for prompting criminals’ conversion and reformation.>>>
[I crosspost here a selection from a short interview with Jenn Graber. The full interview is at the HS blog.]
"Americans incarcerate," writes Jennifer Graber in her new engaging book The Furnace of Affliction: Prisons and Religion in Antebellum America (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). "Though the United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population," she writes,
"it has almost a quarter of its prisoners." Such facts make the long history of American prisons and their maintenance all the more interesting. Graber, an assistant professor in the department of religious studies at the College of Wooster, analyzes the "intersection of Christianity and politics in the American penitentiary system."* Her interesting account also looks at the religious dimensions of discipline and the ideas that undergirded punishment from the 1790s to the 1950s. Randall Stephens: You write that antebellum Americans disagreed on much when it came to prisons, but most “affirmed religion's central importance” to prisons and reform. How was criminal justice “religious” in this era?
Jennifer Graber: If you were concerned about criminal punishment in the early republic, there were lots of things to fight about. Once the states began to build prisons, the big debate was between a discipline out of Pennsylvania that featured total solitary confinement and one out of New York that combined labor in workshops during the day with solitary confinement at night. Partisans for these two systems called the other side un-American and un-Christian. Beyond the rival disciplines, people debated the best way to reform inmates. They argued about what was more important: a good Sunday School teacher in Sing Sing or clean water and decent food in Sing Sing? Without fail, everyone interested in the debate claimed that “religion”—and they used the word “religion” even though they meant variations of evangelical Protestantism—was central to inmate reformation and the overall health of American prisons as strong institutions. What they didn't realize is that their common evocation of “religion” masked significant differences. For instance, they all thought that prison chaplains were necessary, but disagreed—sometimes violently—over the role these ministers should play inside institutions. Or, they all assumed that God ordained the civil authorities to punish lawbreakers, but varied on the question of that punishment’s severity.
Stephens: What kinds of problems did evangelicals target in the prison system? What can we learn about them by the sort of reforms they pursued?
Graber: Their first target was colonial-era punishments, whether it was steep fines, corporal punishments such as whipping or branding, or the gallows. They joined a trans-Atlantic movement to reform punishment and were active in the construction and administration of the first prisons. Protestant evangelicals—and I include many Quakers in this group, which might ruffle some historians’ feathers—envisioned the prison as an ideal site for prompting criminals’ conversion and reformation.>>>
Selasa, 01 Maret 2011
An Exploration of Unconditional Love cont...
Desperation is a terrible basis for union.
If the couple I just talked about had gotten married when they got scared they were about to lose each other, and stayed married on that basis, it would have been a desperate union. That kind of marriage sucks.
Loving the holy human prototype is more important than loving the personality.
The holy human prototype is the person you see when you look into someone else's eyes without prejudgment. The holy human prototype is like a child. It is the noticer. It is the being, just like you, just across from you. It is the being who, you can tell by just looking, like looking in a mirror, has the same kind of electric circuitry as yourself. You can love that being of the other as much as you love yourself. When that being is a child, you can love him/her more than yourself. Beings do a better job of loving each other than minds.
Things That Help Couples Have A Powerful Relationship
* Complete any incomplete relationships with your parental family. Go have a revealing conversation with your father, mother, brother, sister, or any important earlier relation. This gives you completion as well as practice in renewal. This helps you finish incomplete situations from the past so you can begin living in the present, being present to each other, and living toward the future.
This is one of the most frequent mistakes we make. How can we have a clean clear relationship if we ae stuck with too many connections to the past? We start making excuses for these connections and we are lost at that point.
If the couple I just talked about had gotten married when they got scared they were about to lose each other, and stayed married on that basis, it would have been a desperate union. That kind of marriage sucks.
Loving the holy human prototype is more important than loving the personality.
The holy human prototype is the person you see when you look into someone else's eyes without prejudgment. The holy human prototype is like a child. It is the noticer. It is the being, just like you, just across from you. It is the being who, you can tell by just looking, like looking in a mirror, has the same kind of electric circuitry as yourself. You can love that being of the other as much as you love yourself. When that being is a child, you can love him/her more than yourself. Beings do a better job of loving each other than minds.
Things That Help Couples Have A Powerful Relationship
* Complete any incomplete relationships with your parental family. Go have a revealing conversation with your father, mother, brother, sister, or any important earlier relation. This gives you completion as well as practice in renewal. This helps you finish incomplete situations from the past so you can begin living in the present, being present to each other, and living toward the future.
This is one of the most frequent mistakes we make. How can we have a clean clear relationship if we ae stuck with too many connections to the past? We start making excuses for these connections and we are lost at that point.
Peter Gomes, Harvard Minister and Theologian, Dies at 68
Randall Stephens
This obituary for Peter Gomes appeared in the Boston Globe this morning. Gomes was a wonderful preacher and author. The sermons I heard him deliver at the Harvard Memorial Chapel were always as memorable as the were filled with meaning.
The Rev. Peter J. Gomes, who was known internationally as Harvard's pastor and was just as pleased to call himself a son of Plymouth, died Monday night at Massachusetts General Hospital. He had suffered a stroke in early December and his death was confirmed by a hospital spokeswoman.
He was 68 and had divided his time and identity between a 1799 house in his hometown and Sparks House, the 19th-century residence reserved for the leader of Memorial Church in Harvard Yard. . . .
Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet and Nobel Laureate, told The New Yorker that the Rev. Gomes's "style is full of cadence, roguery, and scampishness, which is redemptive. With Gomes there is always an element of masquerade as he tempts his audience into complicity."
The man who during four decades at Memorial Church would become known as the conscience and soul of Harvard, was the grandson of a Baptist preacher and was baptized a Catholic.>>>
This obituary for Peter Gomes appeared in the Boston Globe this morning. Gomes was a wonderful preacher and author. The sermons I heard him deliver at the Harvard Memorial Chapel were always as memorable as the were filled with meaning.
The Rev. Peter J. Gomes, who was known internationally as Harvard's pastor and was just as pleased to call himself a son of Plymouth, died Monday night at Massachusetts General Hospital. He had suffered a stroke in early December and his death was confirmed by a hospital spokeswoman.
He was 68 and had divided his time and identity between a 1799 house in his hometown and Sparks House, the 19th-century residence reserved for the leader of Memorial Church in Harvard Yard. . . .
Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet and Nobel Laureate, told The New Yorker that the Rev. Gomes's "style is full of cadence, roguery, and scampishness, which is redemptive. With Gomes there is always an element of masquerade as he tempts his audience into complicity."
The man who during four decades at Memorial Church would become known as the conscience and soul of Harvard, was the grandson of a Baptist preacher and was baptized a Catholic.>>>
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