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From the bookshelf: March 2023

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Each month my goal is to read five books on a variety of topics and from different genres. Here are the books I read in March 2023. If you click on the title, you’ll go to the longer post on More to Come. Enjoy.

Masters of Tonewood: The Hidden Art of Fine Stringed-Instrument Making (2022) by poet and author Jeffrey Greene is dedicated to exploring how fine stringed instruments acquire the mysterious personalities we admire when they are skillfully played. Wanting to see the birthplace of these magnificent instruments firsthand, Greene takes us on a delightful tour of the seven European “musical forests” where the conditions are such that the Norway spruce can thrive. Along the way he visits with luthiers who take carefully selected pieces of wood and craft them into prized pieces of art in their own right, tonewood millers who carefully cut and prepare the logs for sale around the world, and the foresters who tend to these “renewable gardens” that are under attack by multiple forces in the modern world. It is a pleasing and illuminating deep dive into a fascinating world, skillfully written with the clarity of a poet and the love of an artist.

AMEN? Questions for a God I Hope Exists (2022) by Julia Rocchi is full of wisdom, vulnerability, and questions asked in an open and seeking spirit. Julia’s is a questioning faith where she invites the reader to join in her journey. Essays, quotations, poems, and prayers probe the mysteries that make up life. One reviewer sees in this honest and hopeful exploration, “a psalter for the post-modern, exhausted age.” Julia writes of a God who is imminently approachable and ready to answer our deepest questions. In the blog post, I interview Julia about the role and importance of doubt, mystery, prayer, and community in her spiritual journey. AMEN? is for those who seek to cultivate vulnerability, gratitude, and awe to enrich the precious time we have on earth.

Eight Perfect Murders (2020) by Peter Swanson begins as we learn that bookseller and mystery aficionado Malcolm Kershaw once wrote a blog post for his store’s website titled Eight Perfect Murders that listed the genre’s most unsolvable murders. He is surprised when an FBI agent shows up in his Boston store to ask questions about the list. She has studied a number of unsolved crimes and has a hunch that someone is working their way through the list and leaving dead bodies in their wake. Someone else is also interested in the list and in Malcom, a killer who seems to know much more about the bookseller’s life than he’s ever told anyone. In his investigation into who is committing these murders, Malcolm — to his horror — finds death in places where he didn’t expect it. The plot keeps twisting, and the reader is brought along to see if the killer can literally get away with murder.

The Hope of Glory: Reflections on the Last Words of Jesus from the Cross (2020) by Jon Meacham reminds us that “The work of discerning — or depending on your point of view, assigning — meaning to Good Friday and the story of the empty tomb is a historical as well as a theological process.” There is no better guide through this process than the Canon Historian of the Washington National Cathedral and the author of several seminal books that look at religion’s impact on American society. A life-long Episcopalian, Meacham’s hope in writing this slim volume is to provide illumination to readers so that they may make more sense of the cross “in a world too much given to the competing forces of hostile skepticism, blind acceptance, or remote indifference.” When asked how he can believe in God, Meacham replies that his belief is based “on the same evidence” as with his belief in love. “Both are invisible forces with visible effects.”

Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life (2023) by Dacher Keltner is a scientific and personal look at awe, the feeling we get when we’re in the presence of something vast that transcends our current understanding of the world. For a number of years scientists studied reactions like fear and disgust, “emotions that seemed essential to human survival.” Keltner’s book takes us on a review of a different set of emotions. As humans, we’ve survived “thanks to our capacities to cooperate, form communities, and create culture that strengthens our sense of shared identity — actions that are sparked and spurred by awe.” As it takes us beyond our normal ways of thinking, awe moves us, empowers us, stretches us, and can transform us.

More to come…

DJB

NOTE: Click on the month to see the books I read in January and February. Also check out my Ten tips for reading five books a month.

The Weekly Reader links to written works I’ve enjoyed. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry. 

Image by tank air from Pixabay

Faith, race, and the American experience

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Today is Holy Monday, the third day of Holy Week in the Eastern Orthodox Church and the second for those in the Western tradition. It is another step in the narrative toward the arrest, trial, flogging, and ultimately the Good Friday death on the cross of Jesus of Nazareth. We’ve heard this story so many times that we often forget the horrific — and public — nature of that death.

New Testament scholar Paula Frederickson reminds us:

Crucifixion was a Roman form of public service announcement: Do not engage in sedition as this person has, or your fate will be similar. The point of the exercise was not the death of the offender as such, but getting the attention of those watching. Crucifixion, first and foremost, is addressed to an audience.

Now consider that we could easily substitute lynching in the United States in this description for crucifixion.

Crowd at a lynching (Library of Congress collection)

After being confronted with a revelation, it is the fortunate who wake up to realize they are treading on holy ground. Revelations can serve to open eyes and hearts to new ways of experiencing the world, both seen and unseen. “To paraphrase (Romanian historian of religion Mircea) Eliade, once contact with the transcendent is found, a new existence in the world becomes possible.”

The Cross and the Lynching Tree (2011) by James H. Cone is a revelation of a book that invites us to see the world through different eyes, those of the world’s marginalized and oppressed. It takes us into this world through one of our most recognized religious symbols, the cross, and one of America’s most terrible national sins, lynching. The pioneer of Black Liberation Theology begins by noting that though both are symbols of death, “one represents a message of hope and salvation, while the other signifies the negation of that message by white supremacy.”

And we forget that they had the same purpose: to strike terror in the subject community.

This is a deep, penetrating exploration of these symbols and their “interconnection in the history and souls of black folk.” It is a book, writes the president emeritus of Morehouse University, that will “upset your equilibrium in all the best ways.”

“The crucifixion was clearly a first-century lynching,” writes Cone, who died in 2018. “Both are symbols of the death of the innocent, mob hysteria, humiliation, and terror. They both also reveal a thirst for life that refuses to let the worst determine our final meaning and demonstrate that God can transform ugliness into beauty, into God’s liberating presence.”

Over those 2,000 years the cross has been detached from “any reference to the ongoing suffering and oppression of human beings.” It has become a form of “cheap grace … that doesn’t force us to confront the power of Christ’s message and mission.” Cone is out to change that by pointing to the very real connection in the minds of African Americans between the horror of the cross and the suffering of the lynching tree. His life was focused on addressing the great contradiction white supremacy poses for Christianity in America, something we see all too clearly in today’s fascist-oriented Christian nationalism. He wants white Americans to see and understand “the racial context that defined the actual cross bearers in American society.”

Cone takes the reader through the way that the cross and the lynching tree have been seen in the black experience, points to the absence of white theologians in this engagement, holds up the words of black literary leaders, and ends with a consideration of the intersection of the two symbols from the perspective of womanist theologians. Along the way, he brings a variety of individuals — well known and ordinary alike — into the narrative. People like Mamie Till Bradley, the mother of lynching victim Emmett Till; Civil Rights leaders Fannie Lou Hamer and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; preeminent 20th-century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr; social activist Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois; and singer Billie Holiday, who made the song Strange Fruit her own.

Black Americans had to find their own way on this journey.

Cut off from their African religious traditions, black slaves were left trying to carve out a religious meaning for their lives with white Christianity as the only resource to work with. They ignored white theology, which did not affirm their humanity, and went straight to stories in the Bible, interpreting them as stories of God’s siding with little people just like them.

Their language wasn’t the pious theology of white churches. When they consider Jesus’ cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” black cultural critic Stanley Crouch calls it “perhaps the greatest blues line of all time.” It is a language that comes from shared experience and adopts the belief that evil does not have the last word.

Considering the cross and the lynching tree together requires that we speak truthfully about who we are as a people. As Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Institute and founder of The Legacy Museum has said so eloquently, that “requires engagement that we have not yet made” because there is a narrative of racial difference that we have not confronted. EJI’s Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror documents more than 4,000 racial terror lynchings of African-Americans between 1877 and 1950. 

Yet as W. Fitzhugh Brundage writes, “Perhaps nothing about the history of mob violence in the United States is more surprising than how quickly an understanding of the full horror of lynching has receded from the nation’s collective historical memory.”

As lynching has ended, violence in the U.S. has continued and escalated, especially with easy access to guns. Increasingly a symbol of white Christian masculinity, “Guns stand for defending home and family against ‘criminals’ — a term which, in the dogwhistle rich environment of the right, means ‘non-white people.’” 

If we want to redeem the soul of America, we need wider perspectives, humility, empathy, and a new way of thinking about the stories we tell. James H. Cones’ examination of the cross and the lynching tree is one important step in that journey.

More to come…

DJB

Photo by John Mark Arnold on Unsplash

The Delta Rhythm Boys rattle those dry bones

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One of the most evocative stories in the Old Testament is Ezekiel’s encounter with God in the valley of the dry bones.

The hand of the LORD was upon me, and he brought me out in the Spirit of the LORD and set me down in the middle of the valley; it was full of bones

Ezekiel is famously asked, “Mortal, can these bones live?” His answer is perfect for those who are open to mystery: “O Lord God, you know.”

In other words, you tell me!

But Ezekiel has faith in the face of mystery and begins to prophesy to the dry bones, as he’s instructed.

(And) as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. I looked and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them …

The Vision of The Valley of The Dry Bones,’ Gustave Doré – 1866. (Wikimedia Commons)

Can’t you just hear the rattling of those bones!

When Ezekiel’s encounter in the valley of the dry bones was part of the lectionary last Sunday, I immediately checked ahead in the bulletin to see if the choir at St. Alban’s was going to sing the classic Dry Bones.

Alas, they never do … perhaps because any good choir would realize that the Delta Rhythm Boys have already put down the definitive version of the song.

The story of the Delta Rhythm Boys begins in an era of segregation and Jim Crow laws: the 1930s at Langston University, the only historically Black college or university (HBCU) in Oklahoma.

The Delta Rhythm Boys

As Jay Warner writes on the Vocal Group Hall of Fame website:

Second-year student Lee Gaines had been chosen by school president Dr. Isaac Young to form a university quartet. Lee, a sousaphone player who had led his freshman vocal quartet to a first prize in class competition, recruited first tenor Elmaurice Miller, second tenor Traverse Crawford, and baritone Essie Atkins while keeping himself on bass. The group arranged to transfer to Dillard University of New Orleans after meeting Dr. Horace Mann Bond (father of politician Julian Bond), who got the boys excited about the new music program he was assembling at Dillard as its new dean. In their haste, the group arrived at Dillard a week before classes and had to move furniture and clean floors in order to settle in at the dorm ahead of time.

During the school year, the tutelage of Professor Fredrick Hall and the various concerts at the college and in New Orleans sharpened the group’s harmonies on their repertoire of folk songs, spirituals, and Mills Brothers pop.

But the quartet (plus pianist) was so popular that once they hit the road, they never returned to school. After a seven-month stint in 1936 singing in Buenos Aires, the group moved to Harlem into the house where composer Eubie Blake was living. Blake heard the group rehearsing and suggested they audition for the Broadway show Sing Out the News, an integrated play requiring a black vocal group. The quartet won the audition which set the Delta Rhythm Boys off on a long and successful career.

Quick: Which singers performed in more motion pictures than any other group in history? The Beatles? Wrong. THE MILLS BROTHERS? Wrong again. The Delta Rhythm Boys appeared in 15 films from the early ‘40s to 1956. But this was only one of the many achievements of the pioneering rhythm and blues group. If their name doesn’t have the same familiar sign as THE INK SPOTS or Mills Brothers it’s because their 50-year career yielded only one chart hit. But in terms of singing, they were a hit every time out and became popular through the media of radio, live performances, films, and even Broadway shows.

In 1942, they began playing Las Vegas (when it only had two hotels), and they followed this up post-WWII with successful tours in Europe.

In 1949, the Deltas made their first trip to Europe, performing in Stockholm and then London. They went on to record numerous Swedish folk songs in Swedish (for Metronome Records in Stockholm) and Finnish folk tunes in Finnish.

The group were fine musicians, writing and arranging their own songs, and they sang more than spirituals.

With the changing American music scene, the Delta Rhythm Boys decided to relocate permanently to Europe. Through the 1960s, 70s, and 80s the group continued to perform to enthusiastic audiences. Founder Lee Gaines died in 1987, after 50 years of leading the group that the Mills Brothers regularly cited as their favorite.

We’ll end this celebration of the Delta Rhythm Boys with the wonderful Lee Gaines singing lead in the tale of Joshua at the walls of Jericho … and stick around to hear that great low note at the end.

Now that’s music to rattle any bones!

More to come…

DJB

Observations from … March 2023

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A summary of what was included on More to Come in the month of March. If you receive my monthly email update, you can skip this post.

Few things say “retirement” better than being able to watch NCAA basketball tournament games guilt-free in the middle of the day. This has been a terrific tournament, made even more entertaining by the fact that I don’t have a dog in this hunt. All the #1 seeds from the power conferences were gone by the round of 16, which is my idea of how it should play out each year. I was able to email my friend and (also retired) colleague John Hildreth in real time when his Furman Paladins pulled off a shocking upset of Virginia on Day 1. Oh. My. Goodness. March Madness indeed!

Now that the Final Four is set, I’m cheering for anyone but UConn (which has won the championship before). My support is probably the kiss-of-death for the underdogs!

But even with wall-to-wall basketball and The good, the bad, and the ugly of Opening Day of the baseball season to distract me, I wasn’t a couch potato the entire month. Let’s take a look and see what roared in with those blustery March winds on More to Come.

AUTHOR INTERVIEW AND FAMILY MILESTONES TOP READER VIEWS

Three posts were bunched together at the top of the reader favorites this month. On the family front, March is a busy time with both my birthday and anniversary.

  • Journeys are often about finding either something we’ve lost or discovery of something we’ve never seen before. And when we’re lucky, a journey with a lifetime partner is one of extraordinary discovery, as I write on our anniversary. In spite of myself I’ve been very lucky.
  • From certainty to mystery is a perfect description for my life after 68 years on this earth. It is surprising just how much I’ve forgotten since I was sixteen and knew everything.

On a more sublime note, my second author interview of the year ― this with friend and former colleague Julia Rocchi ― was also a reader favorite. A questioning faith is focused on AMEN? Questions for a God I Hope Exists, a new book full of wisdom, vulnerability, and questions asked in an open and seeking spirit. Take a look if you haven’t already. You’ll enjoy the conversation Julia and I have about the role of community, doubt, and prayer in a life of faith.

LIVING IN COMMUNITY

One of the ways we can live a good life of purpose, enlivened by joy, is to embrace community. Learning how to live together in ways that strengthen our fellow citizens is not only good for democracy, but also for our soul. Three March posts examine different aspects of this idea.

  • A spirit of thankfulness is recognition that no one creates or acts in a void. It also contributes to our personal well-being. Turning gratitude into thankfulness has four easy tips for building a stronger practice of radical gratitude.
  • History teaches us many things. In Equality means equality we learn, for instance, how ordinary people have worked together to save democracy. History also shows us that “once you give up the principle of equality, you have given up the whole game … you have stamped your approval on the idea of rulers and subjects.” Just hope that no one in power decides that you belong in the lesser group.
  • A new book on the science of the everyday experiences of awe speaks to how this simple recognition of things greater than ourselves takes us beyond our normal ways of thinking. The transformational power of everyday wonder shows how awe moves us, empowers us, stretches us, and can transform us, awakening the better angels of our nature.

BOOKS

Pieta
Michelangelo’s Pieta in St. Peter’s

Besides AMEN? and Awe, I reviewed three other books during the course of March.

  • Wood that rejoices in transmitting music is poet and author Jeffrey Greene’s love letter to the wood that makes our stringed instruments sing. My review was also high in reader views this month and is worth a look.
  • A lie never lives to be old is the March selection in my monthly murder mystery series. In Eight Perfect Murders, Peter Swanson has written a thriller full of plot twists, lies, and intrigue.
  • Open to mystery is a review of historian Jon Meacham’s exploration of the intersection of history and theology. This is a slim but thoughtful volume.

MUSICAL TREATS FOR THE LATE WINTER SEASON

Photo © Colin Gillen/framelight.ie

March’s Saturday Soundtrack musical offerings featured an anniversary, a holiday, and a regathering of friends.

  • Celebrating Doc was written during the month when Doc Watson would have turned 100. A new album by fans as diverse as Dolly Parton and Yasmin Williams was released to celebrate the occasion.

CONCLUSION

Thanks, as always, for reading. As you travel life’s highways, do your best to treat others with kindness, undertake some mindful walking every day, recognize the incredible privilege that most of us have, and think about how to put that privilege to use for good. Women, people of color, LGBTQ individuals, immigrants, and others can feel especially vulnerable…because they are. Finally, work hard for justice and democracy because the fight never ends.

More to come…

DJB

You can follow More to Come by going to the small “Follow” box that is on the right hand column of the site (on the desktop version) or at the bottom right on your mobile device. It is great to hear from readers, and if you like them feel free to share these posts on your own social media platforms.

For the February 2023 summary, click here.

Image by Xuan Duong from Pixabay

Old Glory at Opening Day

The good, the bad, and the ugly of Opening Day

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Today is opening day of the baseball season for the homestanding Washington Nationals.

The Nats play the 2022 division-winning and 2021 World Series Champion Atlanta Braves. The starting pitcher for the Nationals finished last year with a won-loss record of 6-19 and a 6.31 ERA. Yes, Patrick Corbin avoided the 20-loss mark, but just barely. Many saw him as the worst starting pitcher in baseball.

So, I have very mixed feelings about this year’s season.

Let’s get the ugly out of the way first.

Baseball has sold its soul to the gambling interests. The game is awash in gambling advertising and, like horse racing did long ago, it seems intent on pushing betting into stadiums and driving away long-time fans. All for the lure of “easy” money.

What truly disturbs me about sports betting [wrote a mentor] is the dislocation of joy. The joy is supposed to be in watching the game. Monetizing it, as you point out, changes the focus — as if there could be no simple pleasures which are not really about cash.

That baseball will continue this alliance with the devil is not a surprise. As Robyn Ryle wrote,

Let me put it more plainly — the players want baseball to be good. The owners just want to make money. Period. End of story.

Next, let’s tackle the bad.

The Nationals will be very bad — again — in 2023. It didn’t have to be that way, but the Lerner family tore down the 2019 World Series champion team and fielded a historically bad one in what is almost record-breaking time. The fans and local government enriched the Lerner’s original $450 million investment to the point where they are now are seeking to sell for more than $2 billion. As a way of saying thanks for our financial and emotional investment, they turned a great — and fun — team into a mediocre AAA franchise.

The Washington Post had a piece as we approached Opening Day speaking to the loss of fans that has resulted from ownership’s moves. One fan who, like me, has decreased his season ticket package (I’m going to half the games of past years) said it well. “The goodwill from fans has worn really, really thin.”

Especially given that all our former star players are killing it for other National League teams.

Joe Posnanski has been writing about “fun” players and teams recently, and he had this to say about the Nationals.

[T]he 2018 Washington Nationals had Trea Turner (fun!), Bryce Harper (so much fun!), Juan Soto (delightful fun!), Max Scherzer (ferocious fun!) and a bunch of what John Updike called “gems of slightly lesser water,” like Anthony Rendon and Stephen Strasburg and Matt Wieters and Howie Kendrick and Ryan Zimmerman and others you could say brought at least a little fun to the party.

What I’m saying is that the 2018 Nationals were as fun as any team in baseball.

And the 2023 Nationals are so devoid of fun, they need Kevin Bacon to show up and rescue the whole town.

Five years should not be enough time to completely and utterly tear down such an awesome team. But it is — frankly, they did it in much less time. Washington GM Mike Rizzo had a quote earlier in camp where, in talking about the Nationals’ minor league system, he said; “It’s the best group of upside players we’ve ever had.”

Hey, look, maybe it works out that way … but it strikes me as an utterly ridiculous thing to say. Upside players? In the 2010s, the Nationals at different times had in their system Harper, Strasburg, Soto, Turner, you can throw Anthony Rendon in there, you can throw Lucas Giolito in there, I’m just going to tell you right now that as promising as this system might be, they are not going to develop a half dozen players like THAT. Rizzo has offered several quotes along these lines (“we don’t rebuild, we reload”) that suggest he’s struggling to make sense of just how quickly things got so disastrously bad in Washington.

I would only quibble with Joe by suggesting that while Harper is a unique talent, he was not the “fun” player he’s become while playing in Washington. The 2019 Nationals were even more “fun,” especially after a Baby Shark named Gerardo Parra arrived.

Parra brought joy back to Washington baseball after too many seasons of pinning our hopes on the talented but moody and aloof Harper. Heck, Parra even got that old head case Stephen Strasburg to dance and laugh in delight when enveloped in a group hug.

Now we’re all struggling to figure out how it got so disastrously bad so quickly.

But there’s always some good in Opening Day.

Nats Rainbow
Nothing says hope better than a rainbow at a baseball stadium

Hope exists on Opening Day. My predictions for the 2023 Nationals could be wildly pessimistic.*

More importantly, Opening Day means spring is here. And sitting in a stadium with a beer and friends is just great, no matter the quality of the game.

Plus, I love baseball’s new rules!

I thought I would hate the pitch clock, but guess what? I was WRONG! I’ve watched a few innings of spring training, and the pace is fabulous … like the games of my youth. A little over two hours is just perfect for a baseball game, and spring training with the new pitch clock showed that baseball can drop from over three hours average to just under two and one-half hours.

Don’t believe me? Just watch Landon Knack throw an entire half inning in the time that it once took Pedro Baéz to throw one pitch!

Baseball has gained an average of more than a half hour of dead time in the last 40 years. Players will take up all the time you give them … so give them less time. Thomas Boswell even came in from retirement to say how much he loves the pitch clock.

In the end, the rule changes are designed to make the game better for fans. And I’m one fan who is all in with those changes.

Let’s play ball!

More to come…

DJB

*I wouldn’t bet on it.

Image of Opening Day 2017 at Nationals Stadium by DJB.

Sunset in Maine

The transformational power of everyday wonder

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What gives you goosebumps? Brings you to tears? Causes a chill? Makes you sit up and say, “Whoa!”?

I get goosebumps when listening to Bach’s Double Violin Concerto live, when my congressman passes by at the July 4th parade, and when a California Condor swoops near the edge of the Grand Canyon. I cry at sad yet hopeful movies, when watching loving interactions between mother and child, and when saying goodbye to someone I may not see for a long time. I feel an effervescent chill when singing Take Me Out to the Ballgame with thousands of fans and when finding a completely unexpected flavor upon tasting an exquisitely prepared dish in a Parisian restaurant.

And when the Furman Paladins pull off a shocking upset of Virginia during the NCAA March Madness tournament, I definitely jump up and yell Whoa!

Goosebumps, tears, chills, and Whoas are all emotional responses to things greater than ourselves. Awe — of things extraordinary and ordinary — is the feeling we get when we’re in the presence of something vast that transcends our current understanding of the world. We respond emotionally in the moment, but then we begin an intellectual searching.

As it takes us beyond our normal ways of thinking, awe moves us, empowers us, stretches us, and can transform us.

Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life (2023) by positive psychologist Dacher Keltner is a scientific and personal look at awe. For a number of years scientists studied reactions like fear and disgust, “emotions that seemed essential to human survival.” Keltner’s book takes us on a review of a different set of emotions. As humans, we’ve survived “thanks to our capacities to cooperate, form communities, and create culture that strengthens our sense of shared identity — actions that are sparked and spurred by awe.”

After twenty years of studying how we can live a good life of purpose, enlivened by joy and community, Keltner says he has discovered an answer.

Find awe.

Fear, horror, and anxiety are emotions that might be confused with awe. But Keltner notes that “feelings of awe are located,” on the emotional spectrum, “near admiration, interest, and aesthetic appreciation.” Awe unfolds in a space of its own, “one that feels good and differs from feelings of fear, horror, and beauty.”

Brief moments of awe, he notes, “are as good for your mind and body as anything you might do.” And those moments are all around us. They can be found without having to jump on a plane to visit the Grand Canyon or Paris. They are there in what he identifies as “the eight wonders” of life.”

… which include the strength, courage, and kindness of others; collective movement in actions like dance and sports; nature; music; art and visual design; mystical encounters; encountering life and death; and big ideas or epiphanies.

Keltner quotes the English writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley in describing what vanishes during awe. It is “the interfering neurotic who, in waking hours, tries to run the show.” It is our default self that focuses on how we are distinct, independent, in control, “and oriented toward competitive advantage.” That overactive default self makes us too focused on ourselves, at the expense of others.

Thankfully, the top two awe-inducing factors are other people. Research shows that what certain experiences of awe tend to have in common is community.

Sociologist Robyn Ryle writes, “We cry when we see people forming community. Or reinforcing community. When the audience responds to Beethoven’s symphony. When a ghost story suggests that even after death, maybe we’re not alone. What moves us most frequently are our attempts to bridge the great, lonely divide between us.”

Awe moves us out of thinking about ourselves and awakens the better angels of our nature. We sense “we are part of a chapter in the history of a family, a community, a culture.” Stepping into a “mental state of openness, questioning, curiosity,” we embrace mystery and are moved to wonder.

Examining the evolutionary science, Keltner notes that by getting outside ourselves, awe “integrates us into larger patterns — of community, of nature, of ideas and cultural forms — that enable our very survival.” He shares stories from everyday life of how awe can transform us, placing the stresses of life in larger contexts.

And it doesn’t cost anything.

In fact, research shows that wealth undermines everyday awe and our capacity to see the moral beauty in others. People who have less wealth report feeling more frequent awe and more wonder about their everyday surroundings. Keltner encourages us to take awe walks, where we purposefully look for awe-inspiring everyday moments; where we tap into our childlike sense of wonder.

Living a life open to awe helps us understand that we are part of systems larger than ourselves. It is about “knowing, sensing, seeing, and understanding fundamental truths.” It is a recognition that there is much we cannot know in this life. It is an embrace of mystery, and the fascinating journey we share with others in this time and in this place.

Our remarkable, mysterious life is all about change. Communities evolve. Nature grows, dies, and decays before being born anew. Sunsets turn from bright orange to deep purplish blues.

Embrace the awe. Allow yourself to wonder.

More to come…

DJB

The Weekly Reader links to written works I’ve enjoyed. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry. 

Image of a sunset in Brooklin, Maine, by DJB

Equality means equality

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America is experiencing a series of dispiriting upheavals that would be completely disorienting if we hadn’t seen similar challenges before. Racial injustice, the whitewashing of history, book banning, our gun fetish, misogyny, homegrown terrorism, fake news, religious intolerance, the marginalization of LGBTQ communities, oligarch-favoring government, and more are all part of our past and present.

Too many people want to ignore this part of our nation’s history.

So much of what we are experiencing comes down to money and power, just as it did with the Southern slaveowners and the Gilded Age oligarchs of the 19th and 20th centuries. Seeing others as unequal is the price that must be paid in order for those who feel threatened by democracy to maintain their grip on power. They reject the fundamental American ideal of equality. But as historian Heather Cox Richardson notes,

Once you give up the principle of equality, you have given up the whole game … Once you have replaced the principle of equality with the idea that humans are unequal, you have stamped your approval on the idea of rulers and subjects. At that point, all you can do is to hope that no one in power decides that you belong in the lesser group.

Those of us who seek to understand the lessons of the past also live in the present and very much care about the future. Understanding where we’ve seen these challenges before brings us in touch with ordinary people who figured out how to work together to save democracy. History gives us a way to think about our current responses to these challenges.

“The burden of citizenship,” writes journalist Anand Giridharadas, “is committing to your fellow citizens and accepting that what is not your fault may be your problem. And that, amid great change, it is in all of our interest to help people see who they will be on the other side of the mountaintop.”

History is clear that the fight for democracy never ends.

Cotton Fields

To move forward, we first have to understand our history of racial injustice, not ban it.

With our 400-year history of slavery, Jim Crow, lynching, and mass incarceration, one should hardly be required to point out that racial injustice is in the air we breathe. It makes perfect sense to try and understand that history and consider ways to break the destructive pattern. Yet the current whitewashing of that history from politicians as diverse as the suburban-friendly Glenn Youngkin to Ron “Trump 2.0” DeSantis seeks to impose a color-blind racism that erases the culpability of whites from the oppression of people of color.

Color-blind racism is an ideology that “explains contemporary racial inequality as the outcome of non-racial dynamics.” When conservatives in Oklahoma pass laws to restrict the teaching of the impact of past racists acts such as the Tulsa Massacre on the world today, we see color-blind racism at work, undermining efforts to reckon with our past. “Although the perpetrators of the Tulsa Race Massacre did bad things,” writes professor Kathryn Shumaker, the conservative lawmakers would have us believe that the perpetrators’ “actions do not shape the world we live in — even though White rioters murdered scores of Black Tulsans and destroyed more than 1,200 buildings in the Black Greenwood neighborhood, annihilating decades of accumulated Black wealth.” 

We cannot build the type of informed citizenry a democracy needs on false stories.

For most of our country’s history, the media has been partisan. “Fake news has existed as long as American journalism has been around,” notes historian Jacob Soll. Thomas Jefferson and other founders were attacked by newspapers supporting their rivals. William Randolph Hearst built an entire media empire based on muckraking tabloids. But for several decades in the twentieth century, the most rabid partisanship was reined in by rules such as the fairness doctrine. That was undone in the regulatory cutbacks of the Reagan years, and the internet has made it easy to spread lies and disinformation.

The Dominion Voting Systems defamation suit against Fox News Network has shown that the network consistently and willingly lied about the outcome of the 2020 election. But those paying attention have known this for years. Fox is “a disinformation machine designed to destroy trust in democratic institutions, including the idea that America’s electoral system is free and fair,” writes historian of authoritarianism Ruth Ben-Ghiat. “Fox also serves as the GOP’s de facto propaganda arm.”

And yes, the recent lies over “woke banks” is more of the same.

History tells us that equality means equality.

With a wide-open study of our history, children and adults alike are being exposed to lives different from their own and ideas different from their own — which creates compassion and empathy. They also learn how we overcame past challenges to democracy, which strengthens our community. As author Jodi Picoult wrote, “Books help people find common ground; book bans spotlight the differences between us.”

Heather Cox Richardson again:

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln, then a candidate for the Senate, warned that arguments limiting American equality to white men and excluding black Americans were the same arguments “that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world…. Turn in whatever way you will — whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.”

Either people — men, in his day — were equal, or they were not. Lincoln went on: “I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it…where will it stop?”

It won’t stop until we decide to continue the fight for the ideals of equality. For Giridharadas reminds us that, “It isn’t enough to be right about the world you want to live in. You gotta sell it, even to those you fear.”

More to come…

DJB

Image: Photo montage by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay.

Nine years later…on the road again with a new album

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Nine years after their last tour and the last album of new music, the precocious bluegrass child prodigies who’ve grown into middle age as some of the best progressive string band musicians of this or any generation are back.

Yes, Nickel Creek has a new album entitled Celebrants, released yesterday, and they’re supporting it with a summer-long tour which comes around to Charlottesville (where I saw their “Farewell for Now” tour in 2007 and their “25th Anniversary Reunion Tour” in 2014) on May 1 of 2023. They are also playing at Wolf Trap on July 23rd.

The band shared teaser videos before the full release date, as seen for the songs Strangers and Holding Pattern below.

And they were also out road-testing a few songs, as seen in these videos taken in January in London which feature tunes from the new album.

The band was last together to support the album A Dotted Line, which was their first album in eight years when it was released. I wrote a review of the concert at the time but want to repost a couple of my favorites from that period: the original Destination and their cover of Mother Mother’s rather bizarre Hayloft.

And finally, for a real trip down memory lane, here’s the band from an early Austin City Limits show performing their signature tune The Fox.

Good to have you back together, Sara, Chris, and Sean.

More to come…

DJB

Photo credit: Nickel Creek.com

Open to mystery

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John Leland and the Rev. Will B. Dunn were my father’s favorite Baptist preachers. Only one was real, however, and it wasn’t the “deep-friend Southern preacher” of cartoonist Doug Marlette’s imagination.*

Leland, on the other hand, was very real: a religious leader in the new American republic of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He came to mind recently when a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian quoted the Baptist preacher on the need for a broad and tolerant approach to religious faith.

Experience teaches us that men who are equally wise and good may differ in political as well as in theological or mathematical opinions.

A strong supporter of the separation of church and state, Leland also warned Americans: “Guard against those men who make a great noise about religion, when choosing your representatives.”

We clearly need a sense of history in today’s discussions of religion and theology.

The Hope of Glory: Reflections on the Last Words of Jesus from the Cross (2020) by Jon Meacham is a devotional work that reminds us, “The work of discerning — or depending on your point of view, assigning — meaning to Good Friday and the story of the empty tomb is a historical as well as a theological process.” There is no better guide through this process than the Canon Historian of the Washington National Cathedral and the author of several seminal books that look at religion’s impact on American society.

In a context-setting prologue Meacham provides the reader with his personal beliefs established as a lifetime Episcopalian who is “in no sense an evangelical.” He doesn’t share the view that faith in Jesus is the only route to salvation and Meachum is no proselytizer. In support of that position, he provides the useful commentary of Leland and Thomas Jefferson (who were friends) as to the validity of other perspectives.

Meacham personally adheres “to the broad outlines of the Christian faith as it has come down through the Anglican tradition.” His hope in writing this slim volume is to provide illumination to readers so that they may make more sense of the cross “in a world too much given to the competing forces of hostile skepticism, blind acceptance, or remote indifference.”**

Meacham freely admits that why God would need to redeem his own creation — the central tenant of the crucifixion and resurrection — is a mystery. But so is the reason “why He would create a world in the first place and, having created it, why he would populate it with human beings whose free will would lead to sin and suffering.” Meacham references the assertion of the distinguished rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel that God “did not make it easy for us to have faith in Him, to remain faithful to him.” Whatever one thinks of Christianity, Meacham suggests, Jesus gave birth to a lasting vision of the origins, nature, and destiny of human life, “a vision drawn from the religion’s deep roots in Judaism.” In that vision,

Humility was essential; generosity vital; love central.

History is horizontal while theology is vertical, writes Meacham, and “their intersection is a motive force behind our religious, national, and personal imaginations.”

The stories we tell ourselves about who we are, what we love, and how we live are furnished and fired by the factual and the fabled. … Fact is what we can see or discern; truth is the larger significance we extrapolate from those facts.

In seven short meditations, Meacham takes the reader from “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” to the final, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” Not all of the meditations — beginning with the first — take a traditional approach. Meacham is interpretive rather than literal, reminding us that the gospels tell stories in language that was foreign to Jesus. While most interpretations of those first words speak of absolution of the world’s sins, Meacham asks us instead to focus on the concerns of St. Luke, the gospel writer, who was seeking to bring as many souls into the fold as possible. Luke’s words of forgiveness help make the faith more accessible and appealing.

When Jesus speaks to one of the two men being crucified alongside him, Meacham reminds us of the history of crucifixion, and that it was reserved by the Romans for insurrectionists against the state. These two men were not mere thieves.

“If anything, the account of Jesus’s redemption of the insurgent at Golgotha” — today you will be with Me in Paradise — “should give anyone claiming to know the mind of God enormous pause.” Paradise, a Persian word signifying a garden or enclosed park, symbolizes the “gift of everything.” The meaning is far beyond our “control and comprehension.”

“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me” leads Meacham into the heart of the matter. Only the gospel writers Matthew and Mark include these words, and Jesus, in their telling, is more of a tragic and ultimately human character. When asked how he can believe in such a God, Meacham replies that his belief is based “on the same evidence” as with his belief in love. “Both are invisible forces with visible effects.”

Throughout this thoughtful work, one of our most celebrated historians grapples with the intersection of history and theology. Facts lead him to accept as truths the belief that we should …

… love one another as we would be loved, take care of the least of these, keep the feast in remembrance of Our Lord’s sacrifice, and remain open, always open, to the mysterious grace of God.

More to come…

DJB

*Some Will B. Dunn humor…

Will B. Dunn
The Rev. Will B. Dunn as featured in Kudzu by Doug Marlette

**My beliefs on theology and religion are closely aligned with Meacham’s, who writes, “Literalism is for the weak; fundamentalism is for the insecure.”

The problem with arguing from biblical texts, of course, is that the books contradict themselves. Fighting verse to verse is like a guerrilla war that never ends.

The Weekly Reader links to written works I’ve enjoyed. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry. 

Michelangelo’s Pieta in St. Peter’s Rome, by DJB

Journeys

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Journeys are literal and figurative, temporal and spiritual. Nowhere is that more evident than with the time two people spend together over a lifetime as partners.

Today is our 41st wedding anniversary, and Candice and I are on a literal journey for a few days of celebration. When we were married in 1982, I was a poor graduate student in Atlanta. We found time during my spring break to get married and take a honeymoon trip to Prospect Hill — a 1732 farmhouse bed & breakfast outside Charlottesville that has since gone upscale. Over the years, we’ve taken literal anniversary trips back to Prospect Hill and then to Mohonk, Copenhagen, Rome, and last year — for our 40th — to France.

At Prospect Hill in 1982
The newlyweds – on our honeymoon at Prospect Hill
20th Anniversary Dinner
20th Anniversary Dinner at Prospect Hill
Candice and David celebrate their 32nd anniversary in Copenhagen, March 20, 2014
Our 32nd anniversary – celebrated in Copenhagen in March 2014
34th anniversary
Celebrating our 34th wedding anniversary at Ditirambo in Rome
35th anniversary dinner
Celebrating our 35th Anniversary at a snowy Mohonk Mountain House in March 2017
Celebrating our 40th wedding anniversary on March 20, 2022 at Washington’s Blue Duck Tavern

But we continue on the figurative and spiritual journey that began back when we were oh so young. A journey that has gone through the inevitable twists that come when two very different people come together after recognizing — in Conrad Aiken’s beautiful words — that …

Music I heard with you was more than music, and bread I broke with you was more than bread.

Journeys are often about finding either something we’ve lost or discovery of something we’ve never seen before. And when we’re lucky, a journey with a lifetime partner is one of extraordinary discovery.

I’ve been very lucky.

You find out things about each other that are unexpected. As one version of the saying goes, “When you search for a needle in a haystack, you come to know the haystack.” When you search for love with one person over decades, you come to know that person.

Neither one of us is perfect. We often disagree. The enduring challenge is to love across differences. Alain de Botton said in Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person,

The person we are best suited to is not the person who shares our every tastes (he or she doesn’t exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in tastes intelligently — the person who is good at disagreement.

Candice is good at disagreement, in that she never makes that disagreement personal, hurtful, or permanent.  To paraphrase de Botton, she tolerates differences with generosity.

Popular culture suggests that “knowledge makes love less compelling,” notes author Kathryn Schulz with a nod to scholar and activist bell hooks. “Yet knowledge — a deep, intimate, sometimes hard-won understanding of both one’s partner and oneself — is ‘an essential element of love.'” And yes, indisputably, love is mysterious.

Love, like life, like all truth, is paradox.

In a short poem by Robert Frost called Devotion, Schulz notes that what we really want is more of the same.

The heart can think of no devotion

Greater than being shore to the ocean —

Holding the curve of one position

Counting an endless repetition.

The luckiest of all conditions “is to wish only for what we already have.”

Yes, in spite of myself I’ve been very lucky.

Happy anniversary, my love. Let’s continue on these journeys together.

More to come…

DJB

With appreciation for the writings of Madeleine L’Engle and Kathryn Schulz about love and journeys.

Photo of Candice and David in the gardens at Giverny on our anniversary trip to France in 2022. Credit: Claire Holsey Brown