Handle with Care

Carolyn Houts, the Seat cousin closest to me in age, was a Baptist missionary to Ghana from 1977 until her retirement in 2010. One year when she was on furlough (aka stateside assignment), she gave June and me a wood carving that we have displayed and enjoyed through the years. 

The Ghanaian wood carving is of a hand holding an egg. It is a deeply symbolic piece rooted in the Asante (or Ashanti) cultural tradition. During many of the years she was in Ghana, Cousin Carolyn (1942~2019) lived in Kumasi, the capital of the Asante region, and spoke Twi, the local language.**  

On his website (see here), a Ghanaian artist says he carves the hand holding an egg sculptures with a powerful African proverb in mind. That proverb is about the delicate nature of leadership and authority in Ghanaian culture. Here is the English translation of that proverb:

To be a ruler is like holding an egg in the hand; if it is pressed too hard it breaks; but if not held tightly enough it may slip and smash on the ground.

The metaphor shown in the hand-holding-egg carving stresses that authority is not absolute or unbreakable, that leadership must be firm enough to maintain control and effectiveness yet gentle enough not to destroy trust, and that true leadership requires restraint and careful judgment.

The symbolism of the wood carving is applicable to various relationships in addition to those of people in places of leadership and authority. For example, it reminds supervisors and mentors to manage their relationships with those “under” them in ways that inspire rather than intimidate.

The carving also speaks to the relationship between friends, speaking of how to offer support and when to step back as well as how to be present without being intrusive.

In romantic relationships, the image of a hand holding an egg portrays the delicate balance between intimacy and independence, between caring deeply and avoiding possessiveness.

The egg metaphor also depicts the challenge of parenting. As I have done previously, I asked Claude, my AI “friend,” if the egg-in-hand carving could be related to the challenge of being a good parent. Here is the first paragraph of the answer I received:

The egg metaphor captures the essential challenge of parenting: how to provide guidance, protection, and structure while allowing space for growth and independence. Parents who grip too tightly may crush their children's spirit, confidence, or natural development. Those who hold too loosely risk their children falling into harm or lacking the security they need.

I thought that was an excellent statement, and I soon began to think about my own parents and their parenting practices of 75 years ago, which I still remember with appreciation.

My parents never went to college, and I am quite sure they didn’t read any books about child psychology or self-help books about how to be good parents. But in thinking back to the summer in 1950 when I turned 12 until I started college in the fall of 1955, I think they were exceptionally good parents.

As we lived on a farm, probably already by 1950 my parents had given me baby livestock, which I raised and then sold their offspring. As I wrote in my book subtitled The Story My Life, my father “was wise in getting me started at a young age in making money on the farm.”

On the following page, I wrote that my parents “were skillful in helping me gain a sense of independence from a very early age—and I have always appreciated that.”

Long before they had seen the wood carving that my father’s niece gave June and me, to an exemplary degree they put into practice holding the “egg” with care, not too tightly or too loosely.

I think June and I also did that in rearing our four children, the youngest of whom is now 53—but I guess you’d have to ask them if they think we did, in fact, handle the egg with proper care.

_____

** Soon after Carolyn returned to the U.S. in 2010, I posted a blog article titled “In Praise of Cousin Carolyn” (you can access it here). She also lived for many years in Accra, the capital and largest city of Ghana. Kumasi is about 160 miles (by car) northwest of Accra.

In Admiration of Stanley Hauerwas

On May 10, I posted a blog article titled ”In Admiration of John Wesley and Methodism.” This post expresses my admiration for Stanley Hauerwas, a contemporary Methodist scholar who is celebrating his 85^th birthday next week. 

(Hauerwas in 2022)

Stanley Martin Hauerwas was born in Dallas on July 24, 1940. He grew up in a working-class household located in a suburban area of that Texas city. His father was a bricklayer, and Stanley worked summers with his father from the age of nine.

Upon finishing high school, Stanley enrolled in Southwestern University in Texas, the first in his family to attend college. Then he went to Yale, where he earned his B.D. (M.Div.) degree in 1965 and completed his Ph.D. in theology and ethics in 1968.*

Even though he became a theology and ethics scholar, he retained much of the blue-collar culture of his boyhood. His “salty” language was criticized by some people who thought a university professor shouldn’t use “unacceptable” language.

Hauerwas married in 1962, the year he finished college, and six years later, his only child, a boy, was born. His wife struggled with mental illness, though, and they divorced after 25 years of marriage. In 1989 he married Paula Gilbert, a theologian and an ordained United Methodist minister.

I first learned about Hauerwas by reading Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (1989), a book co-written with William Willimon. That was a rich read for me, and it influenced how many Christians perceived their role in society.  

When I recently looked at the notes I took when I read Resident Aliens again back in 2008, I wrote, “Thirty-six years ago, the authors contended, ‘The times are too challenging to be wasting time pressing one another into boxes called liberal or conservative. The choice is between truth and lies’ (p. 160).”

And then in the concluding sub-section of the last chapter, they aver that

the challenge facing today’s Christians is not the necessity to translate Christian convictions into a modern idiom, but rather to form a community, a colony of resident aliens which is so shaped by our convictions that no one even has to ask what we mean by confessing belief in God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Hauerwas’s newest book is Jesus Changes Everything, a small volume edited by Charles Moore and released by Plough Publishing House in March 2025.** Much in that book is a reaffirmation of what he and Willimon emphasized in Resident Aliens.  

In his ten-page introduction of the author, Moore says that “Hauerwas eludes categorization. He is neither conservative enough for the conservatives nor liberal enough for liberals” (p. xxiv).

In the concluding paragraph of that introduction, Moore states,

Stanley Hauerwas and his writings were a large reason why 30 years ago I left a professorship at a seminary and moved 2000 miles with my wife to join the Bruderhof, a Christian community that shares possessions in common in accordance with the Sermon on the Mount.

Then, in an article published by the Bruderhof in March 2025, Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren writes that she “became a pacifist because of Hauerwas” and that she has “friends who went to seminary to study theology because of Hauerwas’s work. His words change people.”

Hauerwas is a Mennonite theologian/ethicist, as well as being a lifelong Methodist and active in an Episcopal church. Unlike Warren, I became a pacifist long before I knew about Stanley Hauerwas, but I was delighted when I learned that he became a devotee of Mennonite scholar John Howard Yoder.

Unfortunately, Yoder (1927~97), who was arguably the most significant Anabaptist scholar of the twentieth century, badly tarnished his reputation because of his “abusive behavior toward women,” which became public in the 2010s. But his influence on Hauerwas was long before that.

In The Politics of Jesus (1972), Yoder argued forcefully that the life, death, and resurrection of Christ necessitates a nonviolent discipleship as the definitive Christian ethic. Hauerwas adopted and extended that conviction: nonviolence is not optional but obligatory for loyal followers of Jesus.

Authentic Christians are “disciples” of Jesus rather than mere “admirers,” and the primary task of the church is to be the church, a faithful community of Jesus-followers, rather than an organization trying to do things for the benefit of society. Yes, indeed!

 _____

  * I feel considerable affinity with Hauerwas. Born just two years earlier, I am the son of a (working-class) farmer and the first male in the direct-line Seat family to attend college, finishing with a B.A. degree in 1959, graduating from seminary with a B.D. in 1962, and then finishing work for my Ph.D. in 1966. When it comes to nationwide influence, books written, and scholarly articles published, though, there is absolutely no comparison.

** Moore is a contributing editor and author for Plough, the publishing arm of the Bruderhof community, introduced in my 12/5/20 blog post. Moore is also the editor of Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Søren Kierkegaard (1999), a valuable, easy-to-read book, as well as the compiler and editor of Called to Community (2016; 2^nd ed., 2024). Hauerwas wrote the Foreword to the latter.  

The Importance of the Magna Carta Then and Now

What does, or should, an 800-year-old document have to do with the present civil rights of U.S. citizens, asylum seekers, and others seeking to live safely in this country? 

Painting of King John signing the Magna Carta

The Magna Carta was first signed in June 1215, although the final version was not issued until 1225, ten years after it was first granted, under pressure, by King John, who reigned as King of England from 1199 to 1216.

According to Britannica, “By declaring the sovereign to be subject to the rule of law and documenting the liberties held by ‘free men,’ the Magna Carta provided the foundation for individual rights in Anglo-American jurisprudence.”

I was surprised to learn, though, that the opening clause of the Magna Carta states that “the English Church shall be free, and shall have its rights undiminished and its liberties unharmed.” I asked Claude (my AI “buddy”) if that is related to the principle of the separation of church and state.

Claude stated that “while the Magna Carta's church clause wasn't the ‘basis’ for American church-state separation, it was part of a long constitutional tradition about limiting government overreach that ultimately influenced American thinking about religious liberty.”

The Magna Carta was revolutionary in many ways, though, because it established the principle that even the king was subject to law. In addition, key provisions included protections against arbitrary imprisonment, limits on taxation without consent, and guarantees of due process.

Last week, the U.S. celebrated Independence Day, and it is noteworthy that the American colonists invoked the Magna Carta against British rule, and concepts embodied in the Magna Carta were included in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

Several years before July 4, 1776, there was strong opposition to the Stamp Act of 1765, an act of the British Parliament that imposed a direct tax on the British colonies in America. Remembering the Magna Carta, the colonists strongly rejected “taxation without representation.”*

The Boston Tea Party of 1773 was also based on the core idea of the Magna Carta, stating that the king could not impose taxes without the "general consent of the realm." The colonists viewed the Tea Act of 1773 as a violation of that ancient English right.**

While there may not have been explicit references to the Magna Carta by the British colonists who initiated the Revolutionary War, it is quite certain that their grievances against King George III and the British governance of the Thirteen Colonies were based on key ideas incorporated in the Magna Carta.

What about the current U.S. government and the Magna Carta? It seems quite clear to most top U.S. politicians (and their supporters) who are not MAGA adherents that the 47^th President is saying and doing things that stand in opposition to the Magna Carta—and the U.S. Constitution.

Once again, Claude came through with a list of “several areas where President Trump’s 2025 actions have raised concerns that relate to principles found in the Magna Carta,” a list that seems completely accurate to me. It includes:

 1) Due Process Violations. Legal experts say that the manner in which Trump is targeting some law firms runs afoul of the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment guarantee of due process. These violations are even more evident in Trump’s aggressive deportation of immigrants.

  2) Arbitrary Executive Action. Directly related to the above is Trump’s executive order using a wartime authority for law enforcement purposes, targeting people for arrest based solely on their ethnicity/nationality. This is the sort of arbitrary action that the Magna Carta sought to prevent.

  3) Targeting of Legal Professionals: The actions against “enemy” law firms, restricting access to federal buildings, and terminating government contracts due to their association with former special counsel Robert Mueller resemble the kind of arbitrary punishment that the Magna Carta was designed to prevent.

  4) Immigration Enforcement Changes: Trump ended the policy from 2011, which prohibited immigration arrests in sensitive areas such as courthouses, schools, churches, and hospitals. Currently, my church is considering how to respond if ICE agents show up seeking “illegals” during a worship service.

In summary, Claude states, “The Magna Carta’s core principle was limiting arbitrary royal power and ensuring legal protections.” However, some of Trump's 2025 executive actions “echo the kind of unchecked executive power the Magna Carta was designed to constrain.” That, sadly, seems to be the case, indeed.

_____

  * If you need to review what the Stamp Act was, as I did, Wikipedia, as usual, provides a helpful explanation (click here).

** For additional information about the Boston Tea Party, see my December 15, 2013, blog post (here).

 

What about Deconstruction?

In recent years, much has been written about Christian deconstruction. That may be a new term/concept to many of you, but it is something worth thinking about, for ourselves and for the people around us who are struggling with their faith or lack thereof. 

What is deconstruction? Well, in the physical world, we are all familiar with construction as meaning “the act or process of building something.” Similarly, deconstruction means the selective dismantlement of building components as opposed to demolition. It is construction in reverse.

Then there is the related word reconstruction, that is, “the act or process of building again something that was damaged or destroyed.” (Of course, Reconstruction was the term used for the turbulent era from 1865 to 1877 as the Confederate states were reintegrated into the United States.)

For quite some time, though, deconstruction has been used as a philosophical or literary term. In philosophy, it refers to the endeavor to understand the relationship between a text and its meaning. Philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930~2004) introduced that concept of deconstruction.

Somewhat surprisingly, since Derrida described himself as Jewish “without being Jewish,” his ideas about deconstruction have been influential among evangelical Christians, and especially among those who have become “progressive.”

Consider the construction, deconstruction, reconstruction process. Everyone acquires a constructed worldview, which for most people is linked to religious beliefs. The worldview or basic beliefs of children are constructed primarily by their parents and/or teachers (such as Sunday School teachers).

Most people grow up accepting what they have been taught without question—until they don’t. Some never change or veer very much from their other-constructed worldview or religious faith. Those who remain rooted in family and community structures into which they were born often make little change.

However, because of life experiences, critical thinking, and/or contact with different worldviews, most people who leave their birth “cocoon” begin the often rather painful process of deconstruction. That is true now for most Christian believers, of course.

According to Claude, in such cases, deconstruction for Christians

refers to a critical examination and dismantling of traditional religious beliefs, practices, and interpretations of scripture. This process involves questioning long-held assumptions about faith, doctrine, and biblical interpretation to uncover underlying power structures, cultural biases, and historical influences that may have shaped Christian understanding.*¹

The final paragraph of Claude’s response to my question states, “The ultimate goal for many deconstructive theologians is not destruction but reconstruction—building a more authentic, inclusive, and contextually relevant understanding of Christian faith.” Touché!

Is deconstruction good or bad (beneficial or harmful)? In the past, I have written how “unexamined faith is not worth having,” and posted blog articles about “Growing in the Faith” (2/28/17) and about the importance of expanding one’s worldview (7/30/24).*²

From a Christian point of view, I think it is harmful when deconstruction ends up destroying one’s Christian faith, as it sometimes does. However, it is certainly beneficial when it leads to growth, an expanded worldview, and a faith strong enough to meet contemporary challenges to a Christian worldview.

The reconstructed faith may differ from the institutional Christianity to which one was formerly linked, but it may, in fact, be more closely linked to the real message of Jesus Christ.

Two examples of the latter are Martin Thielen and Jim Palmer, both former pastors and both now outside of organized Christianity as a religion but still Jesus-followers, it seems to me.

Thielen is a former Baptist and Methodist pastor. He elucidates the deconstruction and reconstruction of his Christian faith in “My Long Farewell to Traditional Religion (and What Remains),” posted on his Doubter’s Parish website.

Palmer is an M.Div. graduate of Trinity Divinity School and served many years as a Christian pastor before leaving the ministry in 2000. He started the online Center for Non-Religious Spirituality in 2021, creating a community for people to explore spirituality apart from the core beliefs of traditional religion.

Palmer, who writes extensively, also has a Substack newsletter titled “deconstructionology.” Some of you might like to read “What if …”, his June 27 post, which lists “17 ways to transform candidates for the hereafter into lovers of the world.”*³

Best wishes to all of you who are currently working on deconstruction and reconstruction—and I encourage any of you who may still need to begin deconstruction to start that process soon.

____

*¹ Claude is now my AI chatbot of choice, and it (he?) gave an excellent response to my inquiry, “What does deconstruction mean for Christian theologians?” The words cited above is the first of six paragraphs produced in just a few seconds. (You can find an introduction to Claude here.)

*² The former was the title of my June 20, 2018, blog post and also of the 17^th chapter in my book Thirty True Things Everyone Needs to Know Now (2019). Then, in connection with the latter blog article, in my 8/20/24 post I wrote about deconstruction for the first time.

*³ While Palmer now identifies as non-religious, much of what he posted in his June 27 newsletter is not much different from what Pastor Jarrett Banks posted in his June 25 Substack blog article.  

The Current Need for Senators Like Margaret Chase Smith

Seventy years ago, Senator Margaret Chase Smith delivered her “Declaration of Conscience” speech. I don’t usually praise Republican senators, but Smith was a courageous politician, and the country needs more like her today.*¹ 

Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) was a U.S. Senator from 1947 until his death at age 48 in 1957. He became widely known nationwide after giving a speech to the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, W.V., in February 1950.

In that speech, McCarthy showed a piece of paper that he claimed contained a long list of known Communists working for the U.S. government. He declared, "The State Department is infested with Communists.” That was the beginning of the so-called “Red Scare” that soon spread across the U.S.*²

According to Wikipedia, “Barely a month after McCarthy’s Wheeling speech, the term ‘McCarthyism’ was coined by Washington Post cartoonist Herbert Block.” He and others “used the word as a synonym for demagoguery, baseless defamation, and mudslinging.” 

Margaret Chase Smith (R-Maine) was a U.S. Senator from 1949~73. She died 30 years ago (in May 1995) at the age of 97, the last living senator to have been born in the 19^th century. She became widely known nationwide after giving a speech on the Senate floor on June 1, 1950.

In that speech, Smith presented a “Declaration of Conscience,” which was endorsed by six other Republican senators. It embraced five statements, the first of which began, “We are Republicans. But we are Americans first.” And here is the fifth statement in full:

It is high time that we stopped thinking politically as Republicans and Democrats about elections and started thinking patriotically as Americans about national security based on individual freedom. It is high time that we all stopped being tools and victims of totalitarian techniques—techniques that, if continued here unchecked, will surely end what we have come to cherish as the American way of life.

Sen. Smith called for the country, the Senate, and the Republican Party to re-examine the tactics used by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and (without naming him) Senator McCarthy.

Where are the senators like Margaret Chase Smith today? Despite all the malicious things done and said by the current POTUS, to this point there has been hardly any dissenting voice coming from the Republican senators (or House representatives). This is a real and present danger to the U.S.

Eminent lawyer and law professor Alan Dershowitz’s book War on Woke: Why the New McCarthyism Is More Dangerous Than the Old was published last year, and it merits our attention.

Dershowitz contends that the new McCarthyism challenges the basic tenets of the classic liberal (in the traditional sense) state: Freedom of expression; due process; presumption of innocence, right to counsel, equal application of the law; and tolerance and respect for differing viewpoints.*³

I disagree with the honorable law professor when in the Introduction he states that the “bedrock principles” just mentioned are “rejected by McCarthyite extremists on both the hard left and the hard right.” He seems to go out of his way to endorse “bothsidesism.”

All the “basic tenets” mentioned above are being primarily disregarded by the President and ignored by the top Republican politicians.

Now, five full months after the inauguration of Trump 2.0, is high time for conscientious Republican senators and House members to step up and speak out against the undemocratic policies of the POTUS and his tendency toward embracing fascism.

There is some limited Republican opposition to Pres. Trump, dating back to his first term. That is mainly seen in Sen. Susan Collins (from Maine, like Smith), Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), and also Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.) since 2024.

Currently, there is also some opposition by fiscal conservatives such as Sen. Rand Paul (also from Ky.) and Ron Johnson (Wis.).

In addition, there are also a few GOP senators opposing the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” passed by the House at the end of May. That opposition is seen mostly in statements made by Senators Josh Hawley (Mo.), Jerry Moran (Kan.), Thom Tillis (N.C.), and John Curtis (Utah).

Still, most Republican senators vote in lockstep with the President. What the country badly needs, though, are politicians like Senator Margaret Chase Smith, who for the good of the nation will speak out against not only their own Party’s senators but especially the President.

_____

*¹ I am indebted to Heather Cox Richardson for prompting me to write this blog article. Her May 31 newsletter was a long, informative piece about Sen. Smith.

*² It is noteworthy that Clay Risen’s 460-page book Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America was published earlier this year. He writes in the Preface that “Trumpism and the MAGA movement” is not the same “as McCarthyism and the John Birch Society. But there is a line linking them” (viii). It is also worth noting that McCarthy's primary lawyer, Roy Cohn (1927~86), was also Donald Trump's lawyer in 1973 when the Justice Department accused Trump of violating the Fair Housing Act.

*³ Dershowitz (born in 1938 and about two weeks younger than me) became Harvard Law School's youngest full professor and is now Emeritus Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law.

 

How Will You Celebrate June 14?

Saturday, June 14, will be a busy day. That day here in the U.S. has long been celebrated as Flag Day. It is also the anniversary of the U.S. Army. Additionally, June 14 is President Trump’s 79^th birthday, and his planned military parade in Washington, D.C. However, many plan to celebrate Saturday as No Kings Day. 

Flag Day in the U.S. has long been celebrated on June 14. The first official national flag was formally approved by the Continental Congress on June 14, 1777. Then in 1861, Flag Day was initially proposed to rally support for the Union side of the American Civil War.

Although President Wilson issued a proclamation in 1916 that designated June 14 as Flag Day, it was not until August 1949 that Congress officially established “National Flag Day” on that date. But even now, it is not an official federal holiday.

Two years before the approval of the flag, the United States Army was founded on June 14. Thus, this year will be the 250^th anniversary of the Army. (Since there was not yet a nation called the United States in 1775, it was first called the Continental Army.)

The current website of the U.S. Army says, “Since its official establishment, June 14, 1775 — more than a year before the Declaration of Independence — the U.S. Army has played a vital role in the growth and development of the American nation.”

President Trump was born on June 14, 1946, so this year his 79^th birthday will be on Flag Day. As has been widely covered in the news media, the POTUS has planned a huge military parade in Washington, D.C. for that day, partly to commemorate the Army.

During his first term, Trump sought to have a big military parade. Those plans, however, were shelved because of the projected cost and concerns that some of the military vehicles, particularly tracked vehicles like tanks, would likely significantly damage D.C. streets and necessitate expensive repairs.

But now by linking Flag Day, the milestone anniversary of the Army, and his birthday, the POTUS has planned an extensive parade on the evening of June 14. At 6:30 p.m., the parade will begin near the Pentagon and Arlington National Cemetery before crossing into D.C.

The planned parade will feature 150 military vehicles, 6,600 soldiers, and 50 aircraft to fly overhead. U.S. Army tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, Paladin howitzers, and other military equipment from Texas arrived by train in the nation’s capital last Saturday to take part in the massive parade.

There will also be a multitude of protest marches on June 14. Most of the marches are linked to Indivisible, the anti-Trump organization initiated in 2016 as a reaction to the election of Trump as the 45^th POTUS.

“No Kings” is the theme of the more than 1,550 protest marches that are planned for every major city except for Washington D.C.* (There are at least five separate marches planned for the greater Kansas City area.)

The No Kings protest marches are in direct response to what organizers view as Trump’s military parade being “straight out of the authoritarian playbook.” It can easily be seen in the POTUS’s attempt to solidify his image as a “strongman” and, thus, clearly contrary to democratic values.**

All of these protest marches have great symbolic significance: the timing was deliberately chosen, of course, to counter the military parade on Flag Day / Trump’s birthday. The flag doesn’t belong to him. It belongs to all U.S. citizens and shouldn’t be co-opted by an authoritarian President’s parade.

It cannot be emphasized too strongly, though, how important it will be for all of the protest marches to be completely non-violent. If violence should break out anywhere, that would likely invoke federal troops deployed to quell such violence as was done in Los Angeles over this past weekend.

Personally, through the years, I have taken part in a few protest marches both in Japan and here in the U.S. Since I am now an old man, however, I don’t have the energy/stamina to participate in a local No Kings march on Saturday.

But if you have the time, interest, and energy to do so, I strongly encourage you to celebrate June 14 by taking part in one of the protest marches on that day.

_____

  * The NoKings.org website (see here) gives the reason for there being no protest march in the nation’s capital on the 14^th.  

** According to Wikipedia, “In politics, a strongman is a type of authoritarian political leader—civilian or military—who exerts control through military enforcement and has, or has claimed to have, strong popular support. Strongmen typically claim to have widespread popular support, portray themselves as the only one capable of solving the country's problems, and espouse a disdain for liberalism and democracy.” Doesn’t that sound a lot like Trump?!

 

Pentecost Witness for a Moral Budget

Pentecost was a highly significant Christian event that occurred fifty days after Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection. Unlike Christmas and Easter, it is not widely celebrated even by many devout Christians, and certainly not by the general public.

This year, though, Jim Wallis and his friends/supporters are promoting what he is calling “Pentecost witness for a moral budget.”¹ 

U.S. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) speaks to the media on May 22 after the House narrowly passed the "big, beautiful bill."

Jim Wallis’s Substack blogsite is called “God’s Politics.” On May 8, he posted a call there for people to join him on June 10, two days after Pentecost, in “a public procession and vigil led by clergy and congregants, religious and lay leaders, at the U.S. Capitol before a key Senate vote.”

That vote will be “on a reconciliation package that threatens to slash care for the sick in Medicaid, limit feeding the hungry in SNAP, and crippling other vital social programs that support and uplift vulnerable people among us.” It may even restrict Medicare.

It will likely be early July before the Senate votes on the budget bill, but on May 22 (at 6:56 a.m.!), the House passed the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (BBB) by a vote of 215 for and 214 against, with one dissenting Republican House member voting “present.”²

Wallis has long emphasized that a budget is a moral issue. That is because tax policies and government budgets affect people’s lives. They have moral consequences—and the moral standard is the biblical vision of economic justice. (Jim wrote about that in his best-selling book God’s Politics, 2006.)

The Poor People’s Campaign is also emphasizing a moral budget. At 7:56 a.m. on May 22, exactly one hour after the House passed the BBB, the leaders of the Poor People’s Campaign wrote that “now 215 Republican members of the House have put their name on this one big, ugly payout to billionaires.” (I encourage you to read their full blog post here.)

The prime leader of the Poor People’s Campaign is William Barber, whom I have mentioned, and lauded, several times since first introducing him in a September 2016 blog post. (He was also on my list of Ten Most Admired Contemporary Christians that I posted in March 2017.)

The week before Wallis’s June 10 event, Barber is hosting a protest on the east side of the Capitol, in front of the Supreme Court at 11 a.m. (ET) on June 2. In announcing that gathering, Barber wrote,  

As the cries of the poor grow louder and the policies of the powerful grow colder, we must rise. Across lines of faith, race, and region, moral witnesses will converge at the very steps where justice has been delayed, where truth has been trampled, and where budgets have become weapons against the vulnerable.

Now is the time to protest the harmful provisions of the BBB. Even though it will be more than a month before the Senate votes on their version of it, now is the time to be aware—and to make others aware—of how immoral the House-passed version of the BBB is.

Before the House vote, the President was touting the “merits” of the BBB. He is reported to have said, “This is the greatest bill … the most important bill this country, just about, has ever done, in terms of size and scope. That’s why we call it the great, big, beautiful deal.”

However, as Mark Wingfield posted on May 27, “Apart from evangelicals and die-hard Trump supporters, America's religious leaders find the president's ‘big beautiful bill’ … to be immoral, unkind and un-Christian.”³

That’s why now, a month and more before the Senate vote, as a Pentecost witness for a moral budget, we who agree with Wingfield and the religious leaders he cites need to write our Senators, urging them to vote No—and maybe we can convince friends and family members to do the same.

_____

*1 On May 29, Jim posted a Stackpost article (here) similar to what he posted on May 8. Many of you know who Jim Wallis is and my longstanding appreciation for him, but if you don’t, please take a look at the blog post I made about him in July 2021 by clicking here.

*2 See here for details about the content of the BBB on a government website. Since it is such a “big” bill, it includes much more than merely budgetary matters.

*3 Wingfield is Baptist News Global’s executive director and publisher. The article cited above is quite long, but if you want to read it all, which I hope some of you do, here is a link to it:
Faith leaders decry 'big beautiful bill' as immoral and un-Christian

Beware of Cruel Optimism and Hopium

People are often bifurcated as being either optimists or pessimists, but I have long tried to be neither. Rather I have tried to be a realist. Recently, though, in an article by Chris Smith, I came across a new term (to me), “cruel optimism,” and that strengthened my stance against optimism.**  

“The Rise of Cruel Optimism” is the title of the eighth chapter of Stolen Focus by Johann Hari, a British journalist. Hari (b. 1979) in turn introduces Lauren Berlant’s book, Cruel Optimism, published in 2011 by Duke University Press.

Berlant (1957~2021) was an American scholar who was a professor of English at the University of Chicago from 1984 until the year of her death. In a July 2021 essay in The Nation magazine, she was deemed “one of the most esteemed and influential literary and cultural critics in the United States.”

Cruel Optimism was Berlant’s most influential book, and Hari states that in it she explains that cruel optimism “is when you take a really big problem with deep causes in our culture like obesity or depression or addiction—and you offer people, in upbeat language, a simplistic solution.

“It sounds optimistic,” he continues, “because you were telling them the problem can be solved and soon—but it is in fact cruel because the solution you’re offering is so limited and so blind to the deeper causes that for most people it will fail” (p. 150).

Consider a couple of examples of cruel optimism. Hari’s first example is stress. Self-help books often suggest that meditation and mindfulness are helpful ways to reduce stress. While it is true that they may help reduce the symptoms of stress, they do nothing to eliminate the stressors.

Hari goes on to say that it is cruel optimism to think that meditation and/or mindfulness can “cure” stress, for the stressors “are often socioeconomic in nature: low wages, poor working conditions, poor or nonexistent health insurance” and the like.

Chris Smith gives another good example: greenwashing. As I explained in a blog post in February 2024, greenwashing is “the act or practice of making a product, policy, activity, etc. appear to be more environmentally friendly or less environmentally damaging than it really is.”

Smith asserts, “Greenwashing aims to make the consumer feel good about themselves, while doing little or nothing to address the present climate change.” It is cruel optimism because it leads people to buy what they don’t need by mistakenly thinking they are helping the environment even though they aren’t.

Cruel optimism is an example of “hopium.” This latter term means holding on to false hopes that prevents us from accepting reality. Hopium differs from hope in that the optimism it fuels is unwarranted or irrational. Like opium, it may make one feel better temporarily but causes harm later on.

Just before the 2024 presidential election, Russell Moore, the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, wrote (here), “...there’s a kind of ‘hope’ that is meant to numb us, to distract us from thinking about what could be a bleak future.”

Moore goes on to say that there is a deficient type of hope similar to the deficient type of grace that Bonhoeffer called cheap grace. Thus, “Cheap hope” is “actually not hope. It’s a hopioid.”

In his book God Can’t, Thomas Jay Oord writes about the danger of religious people praying with great hope for their sickness to be cured. In reality, though, Oord avers, “Instead of bringing hope, prayers for healing lead some to despair.”** Their hope becomes a type of hopium and cruel optimism.

In closing, I share a comment local Thinking Friend Anton Jacobs posted in response to my April 30 blog article. Anton, who admits to being pessimistic often, wrote, “…my main hope is that my sense of hopelessness is mistaken.”

I thought that was a helpful stance that is neither cruel optimism nor an example of hopium.

So, yes, let’s beware of the negative attitudes of cruel optimism and hopium. But for those of you who at times (or often) tend to be a victim of pessimism, I hope that you can embrace the hope that your sense of hopelessness is mistaken.

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** Chris Smith, the founding editor of Englewood Review of Books (ERB) introduced the term “cruel optimism” (which he said was new to him as it was to me) in an April 3 email sent to subscribers to the ERB online book review website, which he launched in 2008.

** The full title of Oord’s book is God Can't: How to Believe in God and Love after Tragedy, Abuse, and Other Evils (2019). I introduced Oord and his book in January (see here).

In Admiration of John Wesley and Methodism

Three hundred years ago, in 1725, John Wesley was ordained as a minister. Hardly anyone has been more instrumental in the spread of the Christian faith than Wesley. 

(John Wesley, c.1766)

Early on a February morning when John was five years old, a fire broke out in the rectory. All the large family except John, who was sleeping on the top floor, were able to flee to safety, and they all thought the boy had perished in the fire. But he was “miraculously” saved by escaping through a window.

John never forgot the significance of that event and not long before he died in 1791, he penned a statement he thought would be fitting for his grave marker. It began, “Here lieth the Body of John Wesley, A Brand plucked out of the burning.”*¹

The first chapter of a recent book about “John Wesley, the fearless evangelist,” begins with an account of that February 1709 fire. In the concluding paragraph of that chapter, the author writes,

In that nearly tragic event from his childhood, he saw a providential deliverance and the call on his life to help deliver those who would otherwise be engulfed in the spiritual flames of the wrath of God to come.*²

Wesley graduated from Christ Church, Oxford University in 1724. Then following in his father’s footsteps, at the age of 22 he was ordained as a minister in the Church of England in October 1725.

After his ordination, John wrote in his diary, “Leisure and I have taken leave of one another. I propose to be busy as long as I live.” And busy he was! During his lifetime, Wesley is said to have ridden 250,000 miles on horseback and to have preached over 40,000 sermons!

The most important event in Wesley’s spiritual life occurred on May 24, 1738, a month before his 35^th birthday. This was not long after he had returned to England with a strong sense of failure. In October 1735, he and his younger brother Charles had embarked as missionaries to the colony of Georgia.

Wesley was deeply impressed by the faith of the Moravian missionaries he met aboard the ships both going and returning from the “new world.” In contrast to the terror he felt when strong storms threatened the ships, the Moravian Christians were calmly singing hymns.*³

Back in England, Wesley sought out the Moravian Christian community on Aldersgate Street in London and went to one of their services on the evening of May 24. There he felt his heart “strangely warmed,” and that was the beginning of a “new” John Wesley.

Shortly thereafter, Wesley returned to Oxford and delivered a sermon titled "Salvation by Faith," based on Ephesians 2:8: "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God" (NKJV).

Wesley’s preaching about salvation by faith alone was not well received by the Church of England (CoE). He soon experienced considerable opposition, especially after he began “field preaching” in 1739. The latter was preaching outside rather than in a “proper” CoE church building.

Wesley began to form small Methodist groups across England, but he never broke with the CoE. However, in 1784 the Methodist Episcopal Church was organized in the U.S. by Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury, and from the 1820s until 1967, Methodism was the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S.

For 240 years now, Methodism has had significant positive impact on the U.S. and countries around the world. It has been a leading force in evangelism by fueling religious revival and emphasizing personal faith and salvation.

Methodists in the U.S. have also been in the forefront of social reform, being deeply involved in social justice movements, including abolitionism, temperance, and women's rights.

According to their website (see here), the United Methodist Church is now

… a worldwide connection of about 10 million members in more than100 countries including Africa, Asia, Europe and the United States. United Methodists are people of God who share a common mission and values. The church and its members are called to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.

Thank God for all the good done by John Wesley and Methodism!

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*¹ These words come from Zechariah 3:2 in the Old Testament. A more contemporary English translation renders these words as “a burning stick snatched from the fire” (NIV). Roy Hattersley (b. 1932) is a prominent British politician and author. Among his many books is The Life of John Wesley: A Brand from the Burning (2002).

*² These are the words of author Jake Hanson in his book Crossing the Divide (2016). The last ten words sound similar to Jonathan Edwards’s famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741), although I doubt that Wesley himself would have phrased it that way.

It is interesting to note, though, that Wesley, who undoubtedly became one of the greatest preachers and theologians in British history was born in June 1703, and Edwards, generally recognized as one of the greatest preachers and theologians in American history, was born in October 1703.

*³ The Moravian missionaries were sent by Herrnhut, the community of faith established by Nicolas Ludwig, Count von Zinzendorf in 1722. At that time, it was a part of Saxony in the Holy Roman Empire. It is now in Germany and roughly only ten miles from the borders of Poland and of Czechia.

The Moravian Church traces its beginning back to Jan Hus, the Czech reformer who was burned at the stake in 1415. The last part of my November 20, 2019, blog post was about Hus and ends with a reference to the founding of the Moravian Church in 1727.