The Complexity of Loving One’s Neighbor with No Exceptions

Last week I planted a new yard sign near the sidewalk in front of our house. Here is an image that accurately portrays it. What do you think? Is this a good, positive message for my neighbors to read and ponder as they walk up or down the sidewalk?

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Where the Slogan Works

As a challenge to the scope of “neighbor”—refusing to exclude people by ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexuality, or politics—the slogan does real theological work. It echoes the lawyer’s question to Jesus in the Good Samaritan parable (“who is my neighbor?”) and doesn’t allow him to constrict his understanding of who a neighbor is.

In the current cultural moment when Christian nationalism narrows “neighbor” to those who embrace the same ethnic background, national identity, or even the same religion, a sign refusing that narrowing says something real and important, even from a sidewalk.

It is quite clear, surely, that the sign is talking about “neighbors” both near and far. Many of those who see my yard sign are literal neighbors who walk by, many of them going for a longer walk in Canterbury Park, which is just a three- or four-minute walk from where they see my yard sign.

And while there is not a lot of diversity in my neighborhood, it is likely that they will meet someone who is represented on one and maybe more of the strips of the yard sign. Thoughtful people will also comprehend that the sign encourages branching out to respect differences of people far from our local neighborhood. At least, that is my hope.

Where It Gets Harder

The slogan is challenged, though, not by the question of who counts as a neighbor, but far more by the question of what love requires when you consider multiple neighbors. For example, how do you love neighbor A if he/she is mistreating/harming neighbor B? Doesn’t that call into question the last line of the yard flag?

To make it more concrete—and please note I am not talking at all about my next-door neighbors—what should be done if my neighbor is apparently sexually abusing the teenage girl who is his next-door neighbor on the other side?

What does “love your neighbor, no exceptions” signify in cases like that? Doesn’t love of the vulnerable neighbor require action, even though such action would have serious negative effects on the other neighbor?

Love of the one doing harm doesn't mean protecting him from consequences. Silence to preserve the relationship, or treating exposure as unloving, gets this backwards. Real love for the offender includes wanting him stopped—for the victim's sake, of course, but also because continuing the abuse damages his own moral and spiritual condition.

The two loves are not actually in competition. Protecting the vulnerable neighbor is the loving act toward both parties—it is not a trade-off between loving A and loving B, but a recognition that stopping harm serves everyone's good, including the person doing it.

What a Yard Sign Can and Can't Carry

A yard sign is a public signal, not a treatise—its job is narrower than a full theology of love. It can answer the lawyer’s question (who is my neighbor?) but is not built to answer the harder question of what love does amid conflict and harm.

That’s not a defect unique to this sign; most bumper-sticker theology doesn't survive its hardest edge case, and that's not the standard it needs to meet. Silence on a question is different from a wrong answer to it.

Here is the real test for a sign like this: does the simplification it makes point roughly true, or does it point false? On the question it actually answers, this one points true.

One seam worth noting

"Vote like you" sits in a different category from the rest of the list. Looking, praying, speaking, and loving differently are matters of identity. Voting is a chosen act with public consequences. It is closer to a person who acts/does differently than merely one who is different.

The list quietly slides from identity categories into an action category, which is exactly the seam where the abuse scenario also lives. The flag’s implicit answer, “you still love them,” seeking what is best for them, holds for those who vote unwisely as well as for those who, like Neighbor A (mentioned above), abuses his neighbor.

But, again, loving is not condoning. So, sure, we should still love the neighbor who voted for the current POTUS as well as those who are still among his devoted MAGA supporters. But the latter need to be made aware of the harm that Mr. Trump has done to this nation and the world. And our love for them must be "tough love."

[My A.I. “buddy” Claude provided limited assistance researching and drafting this post.]

The Evils of Empire(s)

Soon after reading the striking words, “… every empire is evil,” in Ray Daniel’s book Grace Over Guns (my review of which some of you have seen here) I started working on this article. Rev. Daniel went on to assert that the U.S. is an empire. As such, it “shares the moral failings of all empires.” And now, the U.S. has a president who acts like an emperor (my words, not Daniel’s). 

When the U.S. Empire was Considered “Good”

There is a long history of the U.S. being considered an empire, and that was considered meritorious. In a 1785 letter, George Washington praised New York, calling it the “Seat of the Empire.”

According to my A.I. buddy Claude, this use of empire is “unambiguously positive—a term of pride tied to size, wealth, influence, and status as a center of commerce, culture, and innovation.” Consequently, after the U.S. defeated Spain in the Spanish-American War of 1898, Great Britain began to express pride that its former colonies had become a world empire.

After the U.S. acquired colonial possessions of its own, Britain no longer saw America as a resentful ex-colony but as a fellow imperial power with shared interests. That stance of the U.S. as an empire was justified by President McKinley and his supporters.

A little over three decades later, the Empire State Building was constructed, completed in a remarkable 13½ months in 1930-31. At that time, it was the world’s tallest building, and it was so named as a monument to the identity and global stature of the Empire State, New York.

But beginning in the 1960s, the word or concept of empire began to be called into question, and the glamor of empires became greatly tarnished.

When the U.S. Empire Became “Bad”

By the 1960s most of the 20^th century empires of the world had fallen. Empire had become morally discredited and anti-imperial movements were global. Thus, in the shadow of a global collapse of empires, to much of the world, the U.S. looked like the last Western empire trying to hold back Asian self‑determination (in Indochina).

Civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. linked racial injustice at home to imperial violence abroad. In “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” his April 1967 speech at Riverside Church in New York City, MLK charged that the U.S. was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

Recently, in addition to Daniel’s negative views of empire (mentioned in the first paragraph above), last year Herald Press also published Kat Armas’s book, Liturgies for Resisting Empire. Ms. Armas was born in Cuba, so she knows something about the evils of empire because of how it affected the country of her birth.

In her first chapter, “Resisting Empire, Embracing Joy,” Ms. Armas cites words from “Christ in the Rubble,” Munther Isaac’s Christmas 2023 sermon that went viral. Rev. Dr. Isaac is a Palestinian Lutheran pastor, and in that sermon, he spoke with prophetic urgency against what he calls “empire theology.”

Isaac insists that Christ is found not in the triumphs of empire but in its ruins, among the wounded, the displaced, and the silenced. His witness turns lament into resistance, calling the church to stand where God stands: with those crushed beneath the weight of empire.

That is Ms. Armas’s position: standing against the imperialism of the U.S. and Israel and for the Palestinians who have suffered so much, and who are continuing to suffer although the media spotlight has now shifted to other matters.

What about the U.S. Empire Now?

The current POTUS seems to embrace an imperial mindset with he himself being the most powerful emperor in the world. We have seen what he has done in Venezuela, and how he has profited by his imperial actions. And we have heard his imperial musings about Greenland, Panama Canal, Cuba—and even Canada (the possible 51^st U.S. state!).

But regardless of when or where it is, as Dr. Diana Butler Bass posted on her Substack account on August 22, whenever or wherever it is, the evil of empire “is always the denial of the dignity of human beings, demeaning them, and treating them with no grace, mercy, or empathy.”

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Note: Next month U.S. Empire: A Handbook, edited by Mischa Honeck and Mahshid Mayar, will be released. It synthesizes recent historical scholarship on the U.S. as an imperial power and probes fierce contestations over the place and meaning of empire in US history at this time when the U.S. is renegotiating its position as a leading actor on the world stage.

Two Impressive Poems Worth Contemplating

My previous blog article was about a large steamship, but this post begins with part of a poem about sailboats. It is the third stanza of an impressive poem that I probably heard first as a college freshman. Here are the words of the third stanza of “’Tis the Set of the Sail,” by Ella Wheeler Wilcox:

One ship sails East, / And another West,
By the self-same winds that blow,
'Tis the set of the sails / And not the gales,
That tells the way we go.

Ella Wheeler was born in 1850 and married Robert Wilcox in 1884. He died in 1916, three years before she passed away in 1919 at the age of 69. Ella wrote the powerful poem cited above in 1916, quite possibly while she was grieving over her husband’s death.

Recently, June and I were reading Leif Enger’s novel I Cheerfully Refuse (2024) about Rainy, a man who was sailing a small boat up the west coast of Lake Superior. Rainy’s voyage on that large lake is a good illustration of Ella’s insight that “’Tis the set of the sails, and not the gales, that tells the way we go.”

In Enger’s novel, Rainy learned that by trimming his sails—angling them one way to reach the shore, and another way to follow the long sweep of the coast—he could choose to go ashore to buy supplies or travel north toward Canada, where he wanted to go as he was grieving his wife’s tragic death.  

Thus, Rainy could move through grief and uncertainty with intention rather than just going where the wind blew him. The lake didn’t change, the winds didn’t soften, but his deliberate choices made all the difference. And so it is with all of us as we travel through life.  

Ella also composed another impressive poem in 1909. It was titled “Who is a Christian?” and here are the words of that complete poem:

Who is a Christian in this Christian land / Of many churches and of lofty spires?
Not he who sits in soft upholstered pews / Bought by the profits of unholy greed,
And looks devotion, while he thinks of gain. / Not he who sends petitions from the lips
That lie to-morrow in the street and mart. /Not he who fattens on another's toil,
And flings his unearned riches to the poor, /Or aids the heathen with a lessened wage,
And builds cathedrals with an increased rent.

Christ, with Thy great, sweet, simple creed of love,
How must Thou weary of Earth's 'Christian’ clans,

Who preach salvation through Thy saving blood
While planning slaughter of their fellow men. / Who is a Christian? It is one whose life
Is built on love, on kindness and on faith; / Who holds his brother as his other self;
Who toils for justice, equity and PEACE, / And hides no aim or purpose in his heart
That will not chord with universal good. / Though he be pagan, heretic or Jew,

That man is Christian and beloved of Christ.

It seems that Ella never was a member of a Christian denominational church, but the first part of the poem can be seen as valid criticism of many CINO (Christians in name only) people then as well as of many contemporary MAGA-type Christians now.

The second half of this poem is the kind of faith that we progressive Christians seek—and also acknowledge in the actions of many people who do not self-identify with Christianity.  

There are many, indeed, who toil for “justice, equity and PEACE,” and who seek to do that which will “chord with universal good.” And, yes, no matter if such a person “be pagan, heretic or Jew,” they can also be considered a “Christian and beloved of Christ.”

Although Ella Wheeler Wilcox was not a professing Christian, it is remarkable that she could fathom what it means to be a follower of the universal Christ even by those who don’t consciously know him.

1 John 4:7 (NIV) says that “love comes from God” and that everyone “who loves has been born of God and knows God.” Then the very next verse declares, “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”

So, what does this say about the MAGA Christians who are hateful toward the immigrants seeking safety/refuge in the U.S. as well as toward LGBTQ people and women who advocate pro-choice? Perhaps 1 John 4:8 applies to them: “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”

On the Way to Japan (August 20, 1966)

This blog post is different from most of the 1,130+ posts I have made over the past 17 years. It is a personal narrative of life-changing events that began on my 28^th birthday, events that have greatly impacted me and June and our children from then until the present.  

SS President Cleveland

August 15, 1966, was a significant birthday party in Kansas City. In addition to my immediate family, several extended family members and a few personal friends gathered in Swope Park for the last birthday I would celebrate in the U.S. until 1971. That is because our family of four (our two other children were born later), started to Japan that day for a five-year term as missionaries.

We flew from the old Kansas City airport to San Francisco, where we had time for some much-needed rest and relaxation before boarding the President Cleveland Steamship on August 18 for a 13-day voyage to Japan. It was the best vacation June and I had ever had. The seas were calm, the meals were bountiful and delicious, and having some carefree leisure time was wonderful.

June and I married in 1957, the month we graduated from junior college. I was then a full-time student for the next eight years. Throughout the year of 1965, I was under considerable pressure to finish my doctoral dissertation. Kathy, our daughter who turned five that year, often included these words in her prayers: “Help Daddy get his thesis done so we can go to Japan.”

A few days after leaving San Francisco, the steamship stopped in Hawai’i, and we had an enjoyable and somewhat tiring day, sightseeing near and around Waikiki Beach and other places on that beautiful island of Oahu. By evening, the four of us were so tired we decided to turn in early. Because of going to bed so soon, we missed having an interesting experience.

When we arose the next morning, we found a notice that had been slipped under our cabin door the night before. It said that a famous Italian actress would be on deck for the filming of a movie scene that very evening. So, Sophia Loren was there on our ship that night, and we never even knew she had been there until she was already gone!

September 1, 1966, was a thrilling day for our family. That is the day our ship arrived in Yokohama, the harbor city not far south of Tokyo. We woke up early that morning and went up on deck, and what a wonderful view we had! There in the distance we saw Mt. Fuji, perhaps the most beautiful mountain in the world. That was a good omen, as It usually is not visible from the Tokyo area.

About a week later, we started language school and began the long, difficult process of trying to learn the Japanese language. In addition to learning English from birth on, I had studied several languages up until then (in this order): Latin, Greek, French, German, Hebrew, and even a smidgen of Danish. However, I had never studied a language in order to converse in it.

With Japanese, though, the challenge was not only learning to speak but also learning to read. In addition to the two fairly simple fifty‑sound syllabaries, one must learn around 2,000 Chinese characters (kanji) in order to read at the level of a high school graduate. I had to learn many more than that, for I was designated to become a college professor.

October 1968 was a grueling month as my teaching career began then. This was why we started on our trip to Japan more than 25 months earlier. It ended up, though, that my “career” at Seinan Gakuin University and the larger school complex involved many administrative jobs as well as teaching in the classroom.

I never sought any administrative position—and I never turned one down, as refusing to take a position to which I had been elected to or appointed for would have seemed presumptuous. Beginning in 1970, I served in six admin positions, including two four-year terms as Chancellor and one year as Chair of the Board of Trustees. Except for the last four years, I also continued to be classroom professor, .

If I had it all to do over again, I would choose with no hesitation to do exactly what we did beginning on my 28^th birthday.

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** I am now wondering if I have perhaps discovered when the year of my death will likely be. Since I have always emphasized balance, perhaps leaving for Japan on my 28^th birthday and being in Japan for 38 years indicates that perhaps my passing will be in the 28^th year of our retirement from Japan, which will be in 2032. Even that might be pushing it, as I would turn 94 that year.

Don’t U.S. Muslims Deserve to Have a Senator?

Previously, I have written two blog posts about Islamophobia (in January 2016 and May 2013). But this month that phobia has reared its ugly head again, so I decided to change my planned blog post for today in order to write about Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and the recent Islamophobic attacks upon him. 

On August 4, Abdul El-Sayed won the primary election for the U.S. Senate in Michigan. Even though he was opposed by the Democratic “establishment,” which spent big bucks to oppose him in favor of their preferred candidate, El-Sayed (b. 1984) narrowly won the election. I had been pulling for him, mainly because of his progressive views.

In addition, I think it is only fair that U.S. citizens whose religion is Islam have a person of their faith in the Senate—and there never has been a Muslim Senator to this point. There are at least 1.1% of U.S. citizens whose religion is Islam, so 1% of the Senate being Muslim seems fair to me. (At present, there are four House members who are Muslim, slightly over 0.9%.)

El-Sayed holds an MD degree from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He was also a Rhodes Scholar and has a Doctorate (DPhil) in Public Health from Oxford University. Following graduation, he chose a career in public health, academia, and government. He self-identifies as a public health physician and epidemiologist.

El-Sayed’s political views deserve widespread support by progressives. I encourage you to read the excellent New York Times interview with the Michigan politician posted on August 7 (see here; the image at the head of this post is from the photo in that article, taken by Nick Hagen for the Times).

Among other things, Tim Balk, the interviewer, said to the Muslim candidate, “There are Jewish folks in Michigan who say they’re anxious about some of your comments. They’re anxious that they could make them less safe in Michigan. What’s your message to them?”

I was impressed by Abdul’s response: “My commitment to Jewish safety is the same as my commitment to the safety of my own daughters. Antisemitism is a scourge.”

This also is noteworthy: a Religion News Service piece on his Senate primary win reports that El-Sayed has said he believes in the fundamental separation of church and state, adding that he wants to protect the kind of America where everybody can pray how they choose to pray, or choose not to pray at all.

Some Republican politicians have unfairly pilloried El-Sayed. Despite what Abdul has said and the full support he has from even the Democrats who opposed his election, Republican leaders such as the POTUS and Ted Cruz have spoken out strongly and untruthfully about him.

In his Truth Social post on Wednesday (Aug. 5), Trump leveled a series of attacks on El-Sayed. According to Time magazine, the POTUS called the Michigan politician ‘a man of hate’ who was ‘full of sh‑t.’ Ted Cruz’s invective was even harsher.

On that same Wednesday afternoon, Sen. Cruz (R-Texas) used the authority of his Judiciary subcommittee of the United States Senate to hold a hearing purporting to demonstrate that there has been a decades-long Muslim conspiracy, led by the Muslim Brotherhood, to undermine and control the United States. He stated that El-Sayed is “the crowning achievement of that conspiracy.”

In addition to the unseemly Islamophobic attacks, Abdul is also being attacked for being a Communist, as seen in Trump and his MAGA supporters, and renounced for being a Marxist.

Gary Bauer, a conservative evangelical commentator who writes the American Values daily email newsletter, also posted this on Aug. 5: “All of the socialist leaders were celebrating today. Bernie Sanders, AOC, Mamdani and Marxist professors on every U.S. university faculty see the future looking more like Marx and less like Jefferson.”

That is the sort of criticism coming from the Religious Right, who are mostly MAGA supporters and agree with Trump’s recent screed against Communism. And that is even though El-Sayed declares that he is a capitalist and won’t even self-identify as a democratic socialist.

I fully support the senatorial candidacy of El-Sayed, a Muslim, as well as that of Adam Hamilton, a widely known and highly respected Methodist pastor in Kansas, and of James Talarico, a recent seminary graduate in Texas.

What a difference it will make when Abdul, Adam, and James take their Senate seats in January of next year! (It’s OK to have high hopes, isn’t it?)

What Does Taking Up One’s Cross Mean?

Some of this blog’s readers were surprised that I quoted Jesus’ words in my July 20 post. What I was advocating with those words, though, is certainly relevant for people who are adherents of other religions—or of no religion—also. When carefully considered, many of the latter may well be implementing Jesus’ words more than most conservative evangelical Christians are. 

In this post I am thinking primarily of Jesus’ words in Luke 9:23.** Here is the NRSV translation of that verse: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.”  

Traditionally, that important verse has been interpreted along the following lines, and here again I am using assistance from Claude, my A.I. “buddy.” (He/it told me in less than five seconds what I would have written in 15 minutes or more before chatbots became available.)

For many/most conservative evangelicals, taking up one’s cross means “personal sacrifice or suffering endured for one’s faith—enduring persecution, ridicule, or hardship for holding to Christian belief and behavior (often framed around culture-war flashpoints: refusing certain entertainment, standing firm on sexual ethics, facing mockery for evangelizing).”

This is the “quietist or status-quo-affirming” position. Since the cross is about internal spiritual struggle, it is not seen as having anything directly to do with the political world. If it does become a bit politicized, it is usually understood as bearing social stigma for “traditional values” positions.

However, the real meaning of Jesus’ words in about taking up one’s cross is quite different.

New Testament Christians were opposed by both religious and political powers. The Jewish leaders saw Jesus and his followers as a threat to their religious authority, and Caesar saw Jesus, who claimed to be Lord, and the Christians who called him Lord as a threat to his political power. Both powers first wanted to get rid of Jesus and then sought to eradicate his followers.

Crucifixion was one of the main forms of capital punishment used by Rome in New Testament times. It was specifically used for insurrectionists and rebels against Roman rule. That means of execution was designed to be maximally public and degrading. It was usually carried out along roadsides near cities, precisely as a deterrent against sedition.

“Pilate also had an inscription written and put on the cross. It read, ‘Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews’” (John 19:19).

That’s part of why the charge on Jesus’s cross ("King of the Jews") matters—it marks him as executed for the crime of insurrection/treason against Rome, not blasphemy.

So, what does taking up one’s cross mean in the present day for us USAmericans? Among other things, it means opposing the Trump “regime” and his efforts to demonize his political opponents by calling them Communists (see this YouTube video of his July 4 speech).

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** Were these really the words of Jesus? My local Thinking Friend Phil says that he thinks the same words in the Sermon on the Mount were Matthew’s words and not necessarily something that Jesus said. I disagreed, saying to Phil that even though the writer of the Gospel of Matthew may not have literally heard and written down those words when he heard Jesus say them, I think they would have been accurately handed down by “oral tradition,” which was very reliable in New Testament times, long before there were printed documents to hand down.

 

Aspiring to Be a Voice of Reason and Guidance

Early on the morning of July 12, I had a very vivid dream about the world being in chaos. I then woke up thinking, “The world’s in chaos and needs voices of reason and guidance.” At that point, I decided that I need to spend less time doing rather meaningless activities and more time seeking to be an outspoken voice of reason and guidance. Please join me in that endeavor.

Is the world in chaos? Well, it is not as chaotic as I saw in my dream that morning. But, yes, in many ways I think there are ample reasons to assert that the world today is, indeed, in chaos.

The physical world is in chaos because of environmental problems that are bad now and only going to get worse. For example, the glaciers are melting, the seas are rising, droughts are increasing, and reservoir levels are falling. We are experiencing the effects of “overshoot,” about which some knowledgeable people have warned us about for a long time.**

The geopolitical world is also in chaos in many places because of wars (such as in Iran, Ukraine, Sudan) and widespread immigration (because of necessity or desire). Co-Pilot told me that the world is experiencing the highest levels of forced displacement ever recorded, driven by war, persecution, state collapse, climate disasters, and economic desperation

In the world of ordinary people, chaos is seen in what can be called social decadence. A large part of such moral decadence is due to the President, about whom Michael Steele recently called a “disgusting man … with no moral code. “(This was in March, said in reaction to Trump’s gloating over Robert Mueller’s death.)

The current social decadence in the U.S. under the present POTUS is evident to anyone willing to look objectively. That decadence was quite apparent in the primetime speech Trump delivered on July 16.

Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist (2008) and currently a Distinguished Professor of Law. He has also been an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times. Early on July 17, he posted on his Substack account “more or less every word he spoke was a lie, including ‘a,’ ‘and,’ and ‘the’.”

And this is what Jen Rubin asserted on her July 13 Substack post: “To pretend there is any moral equivalence between the parties when it comes to handling moral depravity is to become an apologist for the party that has eschewed every standard of decency in favor of ruthless pursuit of power and cultist loyalty to a depraved narcissist.”

Fairly recently, I have become a regular reader of David Rothkopf’s Substack posts. (He is a foreign‑policy analyst and author. Among his many books is Traitor: A History of American Betrayal from Benedict Arnold to Donald Trump, issued shortly before the 2020 presidential election.)

On the same day Rubin’s article was posted, Rothkopf (b. 1955) wrote how the USAmerican society

became so degraded, our values so diluted by our desire to be comfortable, that we allowed the most profoundly evil political leader in our history to become president and to echo the Nazis and authoritarians from centuries past as he compiled an administration, built a government, of people who were equally morally bereft, amoral, and immoral.

That is not to say that any democratically elected leader will be a saint or perfect. That is impossible. But we can value moral rectitude more than we do.

What can we do to be a voice of reason and guidance in this chaotic world? This is perhaps the question that most of us have, especially those of us who were adults (at least 18) when the U.S. celebrated its 200^th anniversary.

One of Jesus’ most challenging and most neglected admonition is “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23, NRSV). 

As you know, Jesus also said, “Come to me, all you who are struggling hard and carrying heavy loads, and I will give you rest. Put on my yoke, and learn from me. I’m gentle and humble. And you will find rest for yourselves.” (Matt. 11:28-29).

Most Christians, including most preachers/pastors, have emphasized the Matthew passage far more than the challenging words from Luke 9. But rest has meaning only after strenuous efforts for doing good and being a voice for reason and guidance.

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** Many of you will remember that I have written about this in the past, inspired to do so by Michael Dowd (1958~2023), the eco-theologian and “evolutionary evangelist.” Here is a link to a blog article in which I wrote about Dowd and his challenging ideas:

https://theviewfromthisseat.blogspot.com/2022/01/facing-grief-of-looking-up-looking.html