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The books I read in April 2022

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Books start conversations. Each month I have a goal to read five books on a variety of topics and from different genres in order to learn and to start conversations with readers and others I encounter along the way. Here are the books I read in April 2022. If you click on the title, you’ll go to the longer post on More to Come. Enjoy!

Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, (2020) by Anne Applebaum is a clear-eyed look at the motivations and tactics of authoritarians and their followers who have taken over political parties formerly dedicated to democracy. These authoritarians — individuals driven by resentment and envy, true believers in the righteousness of a moral system that elevates them while punishing those they do not like, grifters looking to make a windfall, elite intellectuals who will destroy their countries to maintain power, and those who cannot tolerate complexity — have adopted a similar playbook in a variety of countries. Applebaum is a compelling narrator who brings context for those who only occasionally become attuned to European affairs. She also has a way of synthesizing history over centuries into digestible portions. Highly recommended.

Short Stories by Jesus: The enigmatic parables of a controversial rabbi (2014) by Amy-Jill Levine is the highly praised study of the parables of Jesus written by a self-described “Yankee Jewish feminist who teaches in a predominantly Christian divinity school in the buckle of the Bible Belt.” Levine writes in an easy-to-read style spiced with humor. But she is serious in wanting her readers to understand the parables in the same way as their original audiences did. She notes that these stories are less about revealing something new and more about tapping into “our memories, our values, and our deepest longings.” Parables should reframe our vision, serving “as keys that can unlock the mysteries we face by helping us ask the right questions: how to live in community; how to determine what ultimately matters; how to live the life God wants us to live.” Powerful and recommended.

Being Home: Discovering the Spiritual in the Everyday (1991) by Gunilla Norris looks at the tasks we do — from awakening in the morning to locking the door at nightfall — and puts them in the context of living in place. “How we hold the simplest of our tasks,” writes Norris, “speaks loudly about how we hold life itself.” All of us have daily routines and Norris posits that “as human beings we have a strong intuition that deep within our dailiness lies meaning, a huge dimension.” Her search is for how best to speak of that sense of the sacred, especially when it is both fundamental and beyond knowing.

Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment (2021) by Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey makes an interesting, sometimes compelling, but ultimately unsatisfactory case as to why our pursuit of happiness makes us unhappy. To understand how the modern sense of happiness developed and to ultimately make their case against liberalism, the Storeys examine the writings of four French philosophers from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. But the book misses the point that democracy itself is a moral position that allows people to make their own choices and that is messy by design.

Being There by Peter Keese is a short book of stories that came from the author’s Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) career. Our third stage group chose to read it with the hope that the stories would help us in expanding our knowledge of how to “be there” with others in our changing circumstances. While the book did stimulate conversations among us around being there for others, there is not enough of value to recommend it.

Every now and then you get a dud. But keep on reading!

More to come…

DJB

NOTE: To see which books I read in January, February, and March, click on the links.

Image: Detail from the library at Biltmore estate, Asheville, NC, by DJB

Thinking about what we know but don’t know that we know

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Knowing of my life-long challenges in using a foreign language, I’m very sympathetic to non-natives trying to learn the idiosyncratic English language. Throughout middle and high school, I struggled with Spanish classes. * During my sabbatical, cab drivers in Rome would laugh whenever I tried to use Italian to give the location of the American Academy.

Learning different languages is one way of showing respect for others and widening our perspectives. However, I am the first to recognize that I don’t have an ear for foreign languages. It isn’t something I’m proud to admit.

This tin ear syndrome had me worried, as I have travels upcoming for National Trust Tours to Scotland (English speaking, but with that often-undecipherable Scottish brogue) and Norway (the name of the National Trust there is Fortidsminneforeningen, for goodness sake!), along with a personal trip to France (my friend Janet Hulstrand tells me to just say bonjour).

Another friend, who was born in Union City, Tennessee, has traveled the world as a beloved educational expert with tour groups but still lives in her hometown. When I told her of my fears, she had the perfect remedy.

“David, just tell them you’re from Tennessee,” Grace suggested, “and that we’re not allowed to say foreign names.”

Hey, works for me. And it has the added advantage that it is entirely believable.

The topic of learning English came up around the dinner table with Andrew the other night when we were discussing the correct order that adjectives have to be put in front of nouns in English. Adjectives, writes Mark Forsyth, author of The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase,

“absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-color-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac.”

We tried a few phrases at dinner, and yes, it does work most of the time. Another writer notes that the data from tests suggests that, in fact, the conventional order is followed 78 percent of the time. So, it is natural to say that you’ve adopted a “cute little black puppy” but not a “black little cute puppy”. However, the rule isn’t hard and fast. “Big bad wolf” places the opinion adjective after the size.

I don’t know about you, but I never heard this rule taught in school. My children — who have had exceptional educations in grammar through the years — were never taught this rule. Candice, a teacher, never heard it while she was growing up.

The point is, there are some things as native speakers we just know, but we don’t know that we know them. Such as the correct order for adjectives.

I got to thinking about this “what we know but don’t know that we know” situation in relation to other parts of our lives. Like in leadership positions at work. There were times in my career when I was frustrated because someone else on the team didn’t seem to know how to respond to a situation. Something that, in my mind, was perfectly obvious. But on reflection, I’ve seen that a great deal of what I learned that shaped my references around how to work effectively came from being exposed, beginning at an early age, to that world. I saw how other people (usually white men) reacted and dealt with opportunities and challenges.

It didn’t occur to me until later that perhaps others who did not have that same privilege — because of their gender, race, or country of birth — didn’t “know” the same things I took for granted. And of course, just like with the “correct order of adjectives before a noun” rule, a good many of the things I “knew” to be so in my bones could be handled differently and just as effectively.

Part of this has to do with strengths, as I mentioned in a 2020 post. Business consultant Robert Glazer explained his past frustration in coming away from situations where he was asked to step in to meet a challenge and quickly helped solve the problem. Why couldn’t the others see what he saw so easily? His perspective on this changed permanently, he writes,

“…after I heard a speaker share a crucial insight on the topic….“What’s easy for you is often hard for someone else.” She explicitly pointed out that we frequently assume, often wrongly, that something that is easy for us should be just as easy for everyone else.”

There are so many things we “know but don’t know that we know” because of our cultural background and our personal strengths. The next time the thought comes into my mind that someone should just “know” how something is done, I’m going to stop and remember the words of the great Satchel Paige, “It’s not what you don’t know that hurts you, it’s what you know that just ain’t so.” **

We could all benefit by taking it easier on ourselves and especially on our fellow travelers along life’s highway. So, lighten up!

More to come…

DJB

*I thought I remembered the correct Spanish phrase to use for directions to the library, until my kids told me one day that I had it totally wrong. And it really didn’t matter, because if a Spanish speaker had responded to my question, I would not have understood a word they said.

**The quote is often attributed to Mark Twain, with this adaptation by the great Negro Leagues pitcher.

Image by Amador Loureiro on Unsplash

Echoes of the past

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On a picture-perfect spring day, the treasured Dentzel Carousel at Glen Echo Park — fresh off celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2021 — opened today for another summer of joy, laughter, and memories, as it has done for generations of Washingtonians. We were there to welcome the carousel on the first day of the new season.

As we approached, that familiar sound of the Wurlitzer organ could be heard in the distance.

Installed in 1921 by the Dentzel Carousel Company of Germantown, Pennsylvania, the Glen Echo Park carousel is one of only 135 functioning antique carousels in the country and one of the few still in its original location. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the carousel is truly a Washington area treasure! Known as a “menagerie carousel” because of the variety of its animals, the Glen Echo Park carousel includes 52 animals: 40 horses, 4 rabbits, 4 ostriches, 1 giraffe, 1 deer, 1 lion and 1 tiger. It also features two circus chariots. With its playful animals and striking ornamentation, the carousel has been an iconic symbol of the Park throughout the site’s amusement park years and into its current phase as an arts and cultural center for the past half-century.

Glen Echo Park

We were there with local friends, three of whom had been in the same Sacred Ground class, an Episcopal Church film- and readings-based dialogue series on race, grounded in faith. One of our friends, Lacey Gude, had memories of riding the Dentzel carousel as a child, and she had told the study group of its role in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The class decided that a field trip was in order!

Picketers, including future Maryland State Senator Gwendolyn Greene Britt, stand outside Glen Echo Park in 1960. (Photo source: National Park Service)

In the summer of 1960, Howard University students led protests at the Park along with local residents. The students rode the carousel and were arrested for doing so in violation of the privately-owned amusement park’s segregation policies. The case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. Their continued protests under the heat of the summer sun – and the active engagement of community members in the fight – led to the amusement park’s desegregation, opening the venue to everyone for its 1961 season and beyond.

Glen Echo Park
Lacey (center) with DJB and Candice in front of the 1921 Wurlitzer Organ
Candice and DJB take a turn on the carousel.
Parents helping their young charges prepare for a ride…as they have done for generations.

Carousel of Memories is an excellent 2021 production from Maryland Public Television that covers much of the history of the carousel, from its installation to the work to desegregate it in the early 1960s, from the preservation effort to save it from being sold to a collector (the last gift coming in anonymously on the afternoon of the deadline) to the loving, 20-year restoration.

Lacey, Candice, and Linda at the Glen Echo carousel

It was a lovely day to recall echoes of the past, remember those who put their lives on the line for democracy at another time that it was threatened, and to hear the laughter of children making memories.

More to come…

DJB

Image: Ticket for the 2022 season at the Dentzel carousel, by DJB

Working our way through the darkness

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“The point of all these changes was not to make government run better,” Anne Applebaum writes in the opening pages of her sobering Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (2020). “The point was to make the government more partisan, the courts more pliable, more beholden to the party.”

Applebaum is explaining the true motivations — the point — behind the moves of the nativist Law and Justice party in 2015 Poland shortly after taking power in a narrow electoral win. Moves that included the improper appointment of judges; writing laws to punish judges whose verdicts contradict party policy; firing thousands of civil servants, army generals, and diplomats with decades of experience; replacing experts with incompetent political loyalists; and wrecking cultural institutions. Because they did this without a mandate, they stopped using ordinary political arguments and began identifying existential enemies instead.

She was describing the direction taken by a majority of what used to be the center-right party in Poland. But as Applebaum takes us through changes in the decades since the end of the Cold War, she could just as easily have been describing life in Hungary, Spain, France, Italy, and — with some differences — Britain and the United States. Different countries. Same playbook. In this work, she covers them all.

The people leading these changes in these various countries — some of whom used to be friends with Applebaum and her husband Radek Sikorski, who served as a deputy foreign minister in the Polish government before the ascension of the Law and Justice party — are a combination of individuals driven by resentment and envy, true believers in the righteousness of a moral system that elevates them while punishing those they do not like, grifters looking to make a quick buck, and elite intellectuals who are seeking to maintain their power and will launch a war against their fellow educated elites to do so. To see those who buy the seductive lure of authoritarianism — the people who elect and then support these leaders — she turns to behavioral economist Karn Stenner’s description of the individual with an authoritarian predisposition: one who favors homogeneity and order. People who “cannot tolerate complexity.”

Without stating it so directly, Applebaum makes the compelling case that many of the people leading these changes are morally blind. They have no empathy when others get in the way of what they want. And they are preaching to a crowd that often uses the moral language of Christianity and national pride to justify crushing those who are different.

When the blind lead the blind, both fall into the ditch. *

There is much to recommend in this important book. Applebaum is, first and foremost, a compelling narrator. She brings context for those who only become attuned to European affairs at times when an authoritarian bully attacks a freely elected democratic state. She also has a way of synthesizing history over centuries into digestible portions. The Future of Nostalgia — her chapter describing the lead up to, and reasons for, Brexit — is simply the clearest I’ve ever read on the topic.

That chapter title comes from a book by Russian essayist and artist Svetlana Boym, where she describes two types of people who deal in nostalgia:

  • Reflective nostalgics are people who miss the past and dream about the past, but they really do not want the past back.
  • Radically different are the restorative nostalgics, the mythmakers and architects who do not “want to merely contemplate or learn from the past.” Instead, “they want to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps.” Applebaum adds, “They want to behave as they think their ancestors did, without irony.”

Believing that something essential about England was dead and gone in the move to be part of the European Union, the “Leave” campaigners were willing to cheat in the Brexit election, lie about the impacts, and throw away long-held democratic norms because they saw the stakes of hanging on to what made England so special as worth any price. Other chapters on Spain and Hungary are also compelling and clear.

It is in the description of the rise of Donald Trump and today’s authoritarian (some would say fascist) Republican Party that some of my quibbles with Applebaum’s work came forth. She makes no secret of the fact that she is a right-center “John McCain” type of Republican. As such, she can’t quite let go of grousing about “authoritarians” on the left in the U.S. and how bad their actions are. I get that there are authoritarians on both the left and right. But her argument may have been more persuasive had she not relied on the 1970s radical fringe group the Weather Underground as one of her chief foils, her description of their work giving them undue influence. She also has a difficult time admitting that conservatives have long been on the wrong side of civil rights, and she never suggests that the policies of the New Deal and the Civil Rights era were enormously popular — which they were — until Republicans spent fifty years hammering home the coordinated message that Americans should hate these things they appreciated and wanted.

Nonetheless, there is much of value to take away from Applebaum’s book. Most importantly, democracy is fragile. No system of government will last without continued work to keep it fresh and serving a new generation. Her final two paragraphs hit at what is critical. The precariousness of the current moment seems frightening, but it has always been there. Our checks and balances never guaranteed stability. Liberal democracies always demand some tolerance for cacophony and chaos, “as well as some willingness to push back at the people who create cacophony and chaos.” History could — and probably will — “reach into our private lives and change them.”

We always knew, or should have known, that alternative visions of our nations would try to draw us in. But maybe, picking our way through the darkness, we will find that together we can resist them.

For other recent essays and articles on various aspects of the threat to democracy, you may wish to read:

  • Ukrainians are consoling us (Thinking About, March 14, 2022) — Historian Timothy Snyder, the author of On Tyranny, writes that “Because Ukrainians are resisting, not just on the battlefield but as a society, they console us all.  Every day they act is one when we can reflect, and hope. People do have values. The world is not empty.  People do find courage. There are things worth taking risks for.”
  • It’s time to confront the Trump-Putin network (The Guardian, March 2, 2022) — Rebecca Solnit‘s take on how Russia has staged a military attack on the west for the past eight years.
  • The right targets queer theory (The Nation, April 19, 2022) — Candace Bond-Theriault takes a look at how the person who propped up the conservative white Christian nationalist crusade against critical race theory (CRT) is now rallying his base to oppose yet another fabricated foe: queer theory. 
  • Letters from an American by historian Heather Cox Richardson on April 22, 2022, where Richardson describes Republican lies and the need for accountability, and this especially powerful one from April 23, 2022:

Let’s be clear: the people working to keep Trump in office by overturning the will of the people were trying to destroy our democracy. Not one of them, or any of those who plotted with them, called out the illegal attempt to destroy our government.

To what end did they seek to overthrow our democracy?

The current Republican Party has two wings: one eager to get rid of any regulation of business, and one that wants to get rid of the civil rights protections that the Supreme Court and Congress began to put into place in the 1950s. Business regulation is actually quite popular in the U.S., so to build a political following, in the 1980s, leaders of the anti-regulation wing of the Republican Party promised racists and the religious right that they would stomp out the civil rights legislation that since the 1950s has tried to make all Americans equal before the law.

But even this marriage has not been enough to win elections, since most Americans like business regulation and the protection of things like the right to use birth control. So, to put its vision into place, the Republican Party has now abandoned democracy. Its leaders have concluded that any Democratic victory is illegitimate, even if voters have clearly chosen a Democrat, as they did with Biden in 2020, by more than 7 million votes.

Former speechwriter for George W. Bush David Frum wrote in 2018: “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.” And here we are.

More to come…

DJB

*Jesus of Nazareth (Matthew 15:14).

Image by Zelle Duda on Unsplash

Being there for the everyday

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For much of my life, I have felt the day was incomplete if I walked out of the house without making the bed. I wasn’t sure how that habit came to be deeply imbedded into my life or why it was so important. I just knew that it was.

Then I read the following:

Plumping the pillow. Pulling on the sheets. The bed reminds me that I am creating my future every moment.

If I leave a mess, I will find what I left sooner or later. I will not be exonerated from any of my actions — though knowing Your love, I will be forgiven much.

Those few sentences to open a meditation on making the bed are part of Being Home: Discovering the Spiritual in the Everyday (1991) by Gunilla Norris. These simple words are typical of how Norris looks at the tasks we do — from awakening in the morning to locking the door at nightfall — and puts them in the context of living in place. For “how we hold the simplest of our tasks speaks loudly about how we hold life itself.”

All of us have daily routines, and Norris posits that “as human beings we have a strong intuition that deep within our dailiness lies meaning, a huge dimension.” Her search is for how best to speak of that sense of the sacred, especially when it is both fundamental and beyond knowing. This book is an invitation to a process. It is also an invitation to realize that our memories and our prayers change over time.

Standing at the bottom of a stairway…

I remember going down the stairs on my bottom as a toddler. Thud…thud…thud… It was energizing. I want to reclaim bumping along again…

But life intrudes as an adult, seen every day in reading the paper.

The terrible fascinates. This reading the paper trains my fear. I can feel it. I want to know the disaster even as I recoil. I am not separate from the deaths, the demands, and the dealings, the disasters, the deceits, the demagogues, and the diplomats.

This is our incompleteness, our separation, our greed at work. Let me own my part. The world’s hunger is mine. The world’s helplessness is mine. The world’s failure to love is mine. Sober me to this connection in my life. Let the news be printed on my conscience. Help me bear it.

There is a pulse and rhythm to Norris’s words, just as there is to the locking and unlocking of the door each day. And those words speak to many on so many levels. When Bishop Desmond Tutu, Thich Nhat Hanh, Henri Nouwen, Rabbi Harold Kushner, Joanna Macy, Anne Bancroft, Brother David Steindl-Rast, and Madeleine L’Engle write your jacket blurbs, it suggests you have something profound, no matter how simple, to say. I am glad I chose to read Being Home. It was a crossing the threshold moment.

Many times today I will cross over a threshold. I hope I will catch a few of those times. I need to remember that my life is, in fact, a continuous series of thresholds: from one moment to the next, from one thought to the next, from one action to the next….

On the threshold the entire past and the endless future rush to meet one another….

Let me live on the threshold as threshold.

Life teaches us that not every threshold we cross leads to success, not every choice we make is a winner. There are instances when we step across and fall.

And sometimes your book group picks a dud.

I turned to Being Home for refreshment after slogging through a dud of a book.

Being There by Peter Keese is a short book of stories that came from the author’s Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) career. Our third stage group chose to read it with the hope that the stories would help us in expanding our knowledge of how to “be there” with others in our changing circumstances. Several in the group have left executive positions and moved into semi- or full retirement, with the changes in relationships that move can bring.

The book did stimulate conversations among us around being there for others. One of our members talks about his work toward being a “non-anxious presence” in others’ lives, which I find a worthy goal. There are snippets of good suggestions along that line in some of the stories, but not enough to recommend it. And the author’s approach to personal relationships — especially with women — made me think I was living again in the 1950s with a well-meaning but paternalistic father.

Simply put, there are much better works on the topic of “being there.” Such as Being Home.

For a sampling of other thoughts on the topic on More to Come, see:

More to come…

DJB

Image of threshold from Pixabay

All that we owe our teachers

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We were delighted when our son, Andrew Bearden Brown, announced that he will be attending the Boston University Opera Institute beginning this September. Andrew will be pursuing a Performance Diploma in Opera and is certainly excited about what the next two years holds in store.

One of the key reasons Andrew chose the BU program is the chance to study under Dr. Lynn Eustis, a professional soprano and the author of The Singer’s Ego: Finding Balance Between Music and Life, among other works. Andrew was fortunate to attend her master classes during his years at the Royal College of Music in London. (BU and RCM have a reciprocal arrangement between faculty.)

When we see accomplished artists, writers, doctors, and business leaders, we so often forget that they usually stand on the shoulders of giants: their teachers. Dr. Eustis will be among the latest of an amazing group of teachers who have directed and nurtured Andrew’s musical career since he and his twin sister Claire were four-year-olds in the children’s choir at Trinity Episcopal Church in Staunton, Virginia. I am reminded everyday of what these educators have brought to Andrew’s life and to the world around them, and I want to take the time to recognize and thank them.

Carol Taylor — An award-winning choral director and organist at McGill University, Carol fell in love with the sound of tracker organs and then fell in love with George Taylor, who happened to build world-class tracker organs (with his partner John Boody) in little Staunton, Virginia. She was the choirmaster who was Andrew’s first teacher.

Bert Wirth — Bert was Andrew’s inspiring grade school music teacher at Christ Episcopal School in Rockville. Broadway star Brandon Victor Dixon, also a CES alumni, credits Bert with his start in musical theatre.

Head choristers: Andrew and Margaret (Max) Potter in 2006
Christine Buras, Max Potter, Andrew, and Mike McCarthy following the WNC’s Elijah, 2022

Canon Michael McCarthy — Andrew began his career as a treble at the Washington National Cathedral (WNC) in Mike’s very first class in 2003. That began a 20-year relationship as teacher, mentor, supporter, and colleague. Andrew currently works as a staff tenor at the Cathedral under Mike’s direction and most recently sang tenor solos in WNC’s production of Mendelssohn’s Elijah, where three of the soloists (Christine Buras, Max Potter, and Andrew) were alumni of the boy/girl chorister program of the cathedral.

Andrew in 2005
Andrew with Leonard Slatkin in November 2005 after singing the treble solo in the Chichester Psalms

Sarah Hoover — Now the Associate Dean for Innovation, Interdisciplinary Partnerships and Community Initiatives at Peabody Institute in Baltimore and one of Musical America’s 30 Music Professionals of 2019, Sarah taught Andrew voice lessons during his days as a treble at the Cathedral and has been an ongoing champion of his career.

Rosa Lamoreaux — Rosa has a “flawless sense of style and incandescent presence” when singing on stages around the world in opera, oratorio, chamber music and as a recitalist. She was another of Andrew’s voice teachers at WNC, and she helped Andrew not only with his vocal techniques but with his stage presence.

Diane Atherton — Another wonderful performer who has graced our lives and become a good family friend, Diane has sung to acclaim across the U.S. and throughout the U.K. and Europe. Diane was one of Andrew’s voice teachers who helped him transition from his treble to his tenor voice, not always an easy road to navigate.

Andrew as Corny Collins in Hairspray (credit: St. Albans School)

Benjamin Hutto — Ben was a very dear teacher, mentor, and friend of Andrew’s who passed away in 2015. This is the same Ben Hutto who was given a shout out by Stephen Colbert on one of his first Late Night shows. In addition to casting Andrew in lead singing roles in several musicals during his high school years at St. Albans School, Ben hired Andrew while still in high school for his first professional job as a paid singer in the choir at St. John’s Lafayette Square.

Rosanne Conway, accompanying Andrew at his STA Voice Recital

Rosanne Conway — While piano was not Andrew’s first love, Rosanne taught both Andrew and Claire so much about music and life as their piano teacher during the middle and high school years. Rosanne is so dedicated to her students that she joined our family for an afternoon at Rick Jones piano to play dozens of instruments and help us pick out one that still graces our home.

Fred Jodry — Fred is the Director of Choral Activities at Brown University where he took a special interest in our Urban Studies major who also wanted to sing and learn as much as possible. Over the years Fred has become more than a teacher, but a supporter and mentor to Andrew, most recently giving him his first opportunity to sing the role of the Evangelist in the St. John Passion with the Schola Cantorum of Boston and the Providence Baroque Orchestra.

Andrew with Arlene Cole
Andrew with his Advanced Music professor, Arlene Cole

Arlene Cole — Recently retired after 50+ years teaching at Brown University, her Advanced Musicianship class ranked as Andrew’s favorite and most challenging class in the music department. She was consistently ranked among the top professors across the entire university.

Brad Fugate — Andrew’s voice teacher during his years at Brown, Dr. Fugate is also a musical scholar whose work has included study on the theoretical underpinnings of listeners’ reception of the singing voice (particularly that of the countertenor) and its relationship to cultural norms of gender and sexuality in three countries with distinctly different cultures—Britain, USA, and Japan. 

Elizabeth Daniels — Liz has been the vocal coach extraordinaire who has worked closely with Andrew during his early professional career here in DC. She is lauded as one of the region’s top teachers of vocal technique, and we see her often at Andrew’s local performances, giving real-time feedback and encouragement.

Andrew in Robinson Crusoe
Andrew in his Act II costume for RCM’s production of Offenbach’s Robinson Crusoe

Justin Lavender — Andrew was under Justin’s tutelage as vocal coach during his two years at the Royal College of Music in London. Justin — who was persuaded by none other than Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten to abandon nuclear engineering for music — has had an impressive career in opera and teaching.

Every single one of these teachers is part of Andrew today. Enjoy his rendition of Tu vivi, e punito from Handel’s Ariodante (HWV 33) opera and give thanks for all these amazing musicians contribute to so many students like Andrew, helping make our world a bit more beautiful.

More to come…

DJB

Image: Andrew Bearden Brown (© 2015 | Kristina Sherk Photography | https://www.kristinasherk.com

The power of stories

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While many of the world’s citizens are observing Passover, Ramadan, and Easter, it seemed an appropriate time to consider the work of a self-described “Yankee Jewish feminist who teaches in a predominantly Christian divinity school in the buckle of the Bible Belt.” *

Short Stories by Jesus: The enigmatic parables of a controversial rabbi (2014) by Amy-Jill Levine ** is the highly praised study of the parables of Jesus. I’ve been reading this insightful book during this particular time of spiritual convergence.

Levine writes in an easy-to-read style spiced with humor. But she is serious in wanting all her readers — Christians, Jews, and anyone who cares about what ultimately matters — to understand the parables in the same way their original audiences heard and understood them. Too many of the parables have been turned into Christian allegories (or “domesticated” as she terms it), beginning with the evangelists (Luke comes in for special criticism here) and continuing through present-day commentators. In her mind, these interpretations smooth out the parts that may be difficult to hear and recasts them in ways that Jesus and other first century Jews would not recognize.

We look for these easy interpretations, Levine asserts, for many reasons. Among them:

  • in many churches, parables function as children’s stories,
  • many priests and pastors are not comfortable challenging their congregations with the real message of the parables, and
  • it is safer to assure the faithful “that our souls are saved through divine grace rather than to suggest that our societies are saved through personal and corporate aid to the poor.”

Parables should reframe our vision. Levine notes that these stories are less about revealing something new and more about tapping into “our memories, our values, and our deepest longings, and so they resurrect what is very old, and very wise, and very precious. And often, very unsettling.”

Religion has been described as being “designed to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. We do well to think of the parables of Jesus as doing the afflicting.” Driving home the point, Levine continues. “Therefore, if we hear a parable and think, ‘I really like that’ or, worse, fail to take any challenge, we are not listening well enough.”

Levine also sets out to correct current-day misunderstandings about Jews and Jewish customs and religious thought at the time of Jesus. Much of what is misconstrued comes from a perspective of antisemitism, and more than one reviewer has read her thoughtful — but not chiding — criticism and seen themselves reflected in the mirror. Along the way Levine also takes aim at sexist and homophobic theologies.

She begins the book with a very effective examination of the triple parables about “The Lost” from the Gospel of Luke. Lost sheep, lost coin, lost son. She explores the way in which the evangelists — in this case specifically Matthew and Luke — treat the same stories in different fashions and have different interpretations. To my mind this bolsters her overall point that parables are meant to be understood and interpreted in different ways. She helps us see what or who is the main point of the parable, noting that titles matter. We often get that wrong. (Nowhere in the parable does Jesus mention a prodigal son, for instance.) But she also repeatedly notes that we must understand the historical context before we can truly consider the parables for our time. She quotes New Testament scholar Ben Witherington, III, to make this point. “A text without a context is just a pretext for making it say anything one wants.”

After all of her examinations of context, Jewish life in the first century, historical and current misinterpretations, and more, Levine then closes each chapter with her short but powerful perspective on one or more possible interpretations. She asks in the parable of the lost sheep when was the last time we took stock, or counted up who was present rather than simply counted on their presence. Do we follow the example of the woman who lost the coin and take responsibility for the loss? In the case of the father who had two sons, Levine suggests that the scriptures of Israel (the context) can give us hope for our own reconciliations, from the personal to the international. As is true in each of these parables, finding and acting on what ultimately matters requires an effort on our part.

How does a writer come to this perspective? Levine notes that she was raised in a predominantly Catholic neighborhood in Massachusetts and grew up knowing and loving many aspects of the Christian tradition — although she is herself an Orthodox Jew. She completed her undergraduate work at Smith College and earned her doctorate at Duke University. According to one profile, Levine accepts the Orthodox Jewish tenet of the afterlife but “is often quite unorthodox” overall.

In looking at these eleven parables, Levine asserts that Jesus told parables because they serve…

…as keys that can unlock the mysteries we face by helping us ask the right questions: how to live in community; how to determine what ultimately matters; how to live the life God wants us to live.

The best teaching comes not from “spoon-fed data” but from narratives — the all-powerful stories — that remind us of what we already know but are resistant to recall. The best teaching comes from “stories that community members can share with each other, with each of us assessing the conclusions others draw, and so reassessing our own.”

A powerful — and recommended — book.

More to come…

DJB

*On Friday, April 15th, Jews began the celebration of Passover to mark the exodus of Israelites from enslavement in Egypt. On the same day, Christians observed Good Friday to commemorate the crucifixion of Jesus before celebrating Easter Sunday when he rose from the dead. Over the weekend, Muslims continued observing Ramadan, a month of prayers and fasting to memorialize the transmission of the Koran. The rare overlap on the calendar of the three observances occurs about every 33 years.

**Levine’s official title is University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies, Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies, and Professor of New Testament Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Whew — what a mouthful! I can see why she developed her own moniker.

Image by Frantisek Krejci from Pixabay.

The quest for contentment

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In the document announcing our independence as a country, we put our national aspirations out for all to see.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Much has been written about all three rights, as Thomas Jefferson described them. I most recently focused on that pursuit of happiness.

Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment (2021) by Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey — a husband and wife team who direct the Tocqueville Program at Furman University — makes an interesting, sometimes compelling, but ultimately unsatisfactory case as to why our pursuit of happiness makes us unhappy. While the book made unexamined assumptions and left important questions unaddressed, I am still glad that I discovered it on my recent visit to Books, Inc. in Alameda.

To understand how the modern sense of happiness developed, the Storeys examine the writings of four French philosophers from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Each is studied in-depth in separate chapters.

  • As described by the authors in The Art of the Ordinary Life, the first — Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) — wrote in the midst of France’s religious wars and spoke of new ways to “loyally enjoy” the human condition as something inherent to our being.
  • That is followed by The Inhumanity of Immanence which examines the writing and life of Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), who criticizes Montaigne’s thesis and points instead to the need for “an anguished but clear-eyed search for God.”
  • The third in their quartet — Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) — is profiled in The Tragedy of Nature’s Redemer, where his efforts, from the perspective of the authors, to “reconcile Montaignean immanence with Pascalian depth” ultimately fails.
  • The fourth chapter, Democracy and the Naked Soul, studies Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), who arrives for his famous visit to America and observes a people “restless in the midst of their well-being.”

These four chapters are, in many ways, fascinating. I’m no expert on French philosophers but I found much here to appreciate. The writing, however, goes from fluid and clear to dense and academic, sometimes in the same paragraph. Much of the dense writing was unnecessary from my perspective, as it seemed to be inserted as a way for the authors to prove their academic chops. At times I felt I was reading an extended George Will column, but then perhaps I’m not the intended audience.

The introduction on the four French thinkers and the four profiles are followed by a concluding chapter entitled Liberal Education and the Art of Choosing.

The introduction and conclusion discuss how today’s students (the Storeys both teach) cannot make choices because they are afraid of missing out on other things that could (in some unrealized world) make them happy. The opportunity loss, if you will. I found this framing to be unsatisfying and indicative of the conservative “get over yourself and make a choice” tone that came out the more I read this work. Why can’t their 21-year-old charges just make up their minds to be a doctor or lawyer for crying out loud! I happen to know many individuals who have had incredibly satisfying, meaningful, and — yes, dare I say — happy lives who didn’t decide what they were going “to be” at age 21. And the Storeys don’t provide many solutions for how to deal with this quest for happiness that leads to unhappiness except to suggest one go back and understand the historical sources that led to this situation, make a choice, and get in the field.

Why We Are Restless is in many ways an attack on liberalism, although one handled with more care and with nuance seldom seen in today’s discourse. Liberalism is not perfect and should certainly be held up for examination. But in stating their case, the authors seem to understand intellectually that much of our modern quest for individual happiness came as a result of excessive authoritarian and religious rule over individuals, churches, communities, and nations. In my reading of the Storeys’ work there was not a great deal of criticism of the destructive power of those forces of control that seem to animate conservatives today.

The authors fret that in a democratic society, “the restlessness that grows in the shadow of the ideal of immanent contentment” becomes a politically destructive phenomenon with “ritualistic idol smashing.” However, there is little or no recognition that much of this breaking up of norms of appropriate human behavior today is coming from the libertarian and conservative branches of our communities. Like the trashing of the rule of law. This was an interesting book to read in the midst of a time when an authoritarian government is leveling cities, committing war crimes against civilian populations, and doing so while claiming to be carrying out a holy war. Too many on the right today don’t understand that democracy is a moral position.

Defending the right of human beings to control their own lives is a moral position. Treating everyone equally before the law is a moral position. Insisting that everyone has a right to have a say in their government is a moral position.

Heather Cox Richardson

This is an important topic. I believe strongly in the value of community. I also believe, in the words of Susan B. Anthony, that one does well to “distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.” In my experience, happiness grows when we take the time to be grateful for others. When we interact with community.

Yes, there is a balance to be struck between individual happiness and community good. But not all is solved by a pointed quest and the making of decisions just to “move into the field.” Those choices are often forced on individuals by a community that does not see the humanity in individuals, especially those who differ from the prescribed norms.

And there are many in the world who have found happiness without that anguished search for God. Perhaps they have attended college somewhere other than where the Storeys and their supporters teach.

For other thoughts on happiness, joy, gratefulness, and community, see:

More to come…

DJB

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

Lincoln’s Funeral Train

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Early in the morning of April 15, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln breathed his last. The night before, he and his wife had gone to see a play—a comedy. One of the last men to talk to him before he left for the theater said it seemed the cares of the previous four years were melting away. The Confederacy was all but defeated, and the nation seemed to be on its way to a prosperous, inclusive new future.

The bullet that killed Lincoln had been delivered by John Wilkes Booth, a famous actor poisoned by the belief that Lincoln’s use of the federal government to end human enslavement as a central part of the nation’s economy was tyranny. 

Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, April 15, 2022

Democracy remains under attack today. As Dr. Richardson notes in her letter, the fear of democracy has brought us to the edge of losing our government. We learned yesterday in an exclusive story on CNN about 100 text messages between Senator Mike Lee of Utah, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, and Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. The messages were obtained by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

These text messages show elected members of our government eager to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 election in which a national majority of 7 million people had chosen Democrat Joe Biden as president.

On the day I cast my ballot in that 2020 election, I wrote about Senator Lee’s fear of democracy in a long post entitled History tells us democracy is the objective. It was prompted by this quote from Senator Lee:

Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prosperity are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.

Utah Senator Mike Lee *

Little did I know back in October of 2020 what was still to come.

In 1990, on the album Norman Blake & Tony Rice 2, Norman sang one of his songs, a mournful ballad entitled Lincoln’s Funeral Train (The Sad Journey to Springfield). In 2017, Greg Graffin — punk rocker, evolutionary biologist, and lead singer for the band Bad Religion — released a powerful cover of Blake’s tune on his solo album Millport with images of what we lost and what was at stake in the fight to save democracy.

The entire song is powerful, but Blake’s refrain nails the essence of the fight against modernity and democracy by traitors to our country.

With the portrait of a martyred man
Shot down by a traitor
Now toll the bell and bid farewell
To the great emancipator

I have written a great deal about the threat to democracy in our times. Here are links to some of those posts:

More to come…

DJB

*Senator Lee was also recently in the news for mansplaining the constitution to Judge (soon to be Justice) Ketanji Brown Jackson during her confirmation hearings to the Supreme Court. Spoiler alert: he was wrong.

Image: Lincoln’s Funeral Train in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Credit: the University of Illinois collection.

The books I read in March 2022

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Each month I have a goal to read five books on a variety of topics and from different genres. Here are the books I read in March 2022. If you click on the title, you’ll go to the longer post on More to Come. Enjoy!

The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate (2016) is a fascinating and controversial work by German forester Peter Wohlleben. For those who want to criticize his science, there are experts available to make that case. Others simply appreciate how much Wohlleben’s love for the forest comes through this work as he explains his observations on the processes of life, death, and regeneration. Wohlleben uses his gifts for storytelling to help build new metaphors to inspire a public that too-easily forgets what every schoolchild knows: plants are living beings.

Taking Tea with Mackintosh: The Story of Miss Cranston’s Tea Rooms (1998) by Perilla Kinchin is an engaging and lovely look at women’s history, tea culture, and design in turn-of-the-century Glasgow. The book is filled with beautiful historic and contemporary photographs of tea rooms, furniture, and paintings designed by preeminent Scottish architect Charles Rennie Macintosh and his wife, the artist Margaret Macdonald. But beyond the design eye candy, I was especially taken with the story of Catherine (Kate) Cranston, the owner of a chain of Glasgow tea rooms. Kinchin uses the backdrop of the temperance movement and the suffragette-influenced culture of the tea rooms to paint the intriguing story of how Cranston built a business empire by serving both men and women in spaces designed by leading-edge architects and designers of the period.

Raven Black (2006) is the first in the Shetland Island mystery series of author Ann Cleeves. I was quickly brought into this story of lonely outcast Magnus Tait, who stays home on New Year’s Eve and becomes the prime suspect when the body of a murdered teenage girl is discovered nearby the next morning. Inspector Jimmy Perez has his doubts about how quickly the community comes together to point the finger at Magnus, and in his work to unravel the true tale we find out a great deal about the Shetland Islands and this small, isolated community. The ending was certainly a surprise and Cleeves cleverly wraps up this story by pointing to future mysteries to come.

American Dialogue: The Founders and Us (2018) is an insightful work by historian Joseph J. Ellis. I returned to read the sections on the law and James Madison during the recent Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Madison’s greatest achievement was recognizing that the Constitution presented a “framework for debate” and that “argument itself became the abiding solution,” an understanding — supported strongly by Thomas Jefferson — that provides the springboard for Ellis’s strong and sustained attack against the misconception of “originalism” as most proudly practiced by Antonin Scalia and described by Justice William Brennan as “arrogance cloaked as humility.”

Jesus the Forgiving Victim (2013) by priest, theologian, and author James Alison is a fascinating book, unlike almost any other I’ve come across on faith. It flows from the insight into desire associated with the great French historian and philosopher René Girard and focuses on the non-moralistic nature of Christianity. Grace, not laws or morals, is the theme that he explores through twelve insightful essays. Alison is best known these days for his firm but patient insistence on truthfulness in matters gay as an ordinary part of basic Christianity in the Catholic church and beyond, and for his pastoral outreach in that sphere.

Enjoy reading!

More to come…

DJB

NOTE: For blurbs on the books I read in January and February, click on the links.

Image: Open book by lil foot from Pixabay.