Here come the samaras

You've seen this branch before it let everything hang out.

Parabolic

Today's gospel was the parable of the prodigal son. The preacher had a novel twist on its familiar reproof of the elder brother unwilling to celebrate the return of his wayward brother, who had been presumed lost. The elder son had a "scarcity mindset"! But the father, with an "abundance mindset," was the truly prodigal one - prodigal meaning extravagantly generous. (We'd left the younger brother behind by this point.) We should learn to be prodigal too, as our father is prodigal with forgiveness and love! 

But there was a second sermon pushing through this one. The preacher actually began by telling us the news that a super-expensive house in the District of Columbia had just been bought by a shell company, presumably for our unelected megabillionnaire copresident, but that what it cost him was the equivalent of about $60 for a typical middle class person. And at the far end of the retelling of the prodigal son story, she mused about how the drama of the father and his two sons might have looked to their hired hands and the unnamed women of the household (she didn't mention the slaves), and then imagined a version of the story in which the father's "prodigal" largesse extended to everyone. It was all rather confusing. Was she imagining a redistributionist megabillionaire God?

But then this has always been - as it’s supposed to be - a challenging story. Today, perhaps primed by the sermon's prologue, I was stuck on the word "squander" in the description of the younger son's "dissolute living" on claiming his part of the inheritance, which I could not unstick from my sense of what the current regime is doing with everything I hold dear. Is fury at the wanton destruction of moral and cultural capital a scarcity mindset? Must I pray for their repentance and reconciliation, and repent for my own self-righteous squandering of fraternal care?

Detention nation

This is where Mahmoud Kahlil is being detained, one of a string of erstwhile private prisons known now as "Detention Alley," most in Louisiana, the home state of the Speaker of the House. In the icy chill of this multi-pronged move to becoming a xenophobic police state (military bases are to be used as detention centers too, and then there's the terrifying offshore ones), I am cheered a little by Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid's sense that the new administration has swiftly used up its political capital. The already exaggerated "vibe shift" of November is over, as everyone is now realizing the only value of this administration is "domination." 

The Khalil case — and all the cases after it — create an unexpected opening to reframe the entire debate. As long as Republicans insist on being the party of “domination,” Democrats can reclaim the mantle of unabashed patriotism. What would this look like in practice? Over the past 10 years, progressives soured on the American idea. In a 2022 New York Times-Siena poll, only 37 percent of Democrats said they thought America was “the greatest country in the world” — compared with 69 percent of Republicans. To shift would mean embracing American symbols and traditions without irony or qualification. It would mean celebrating institutions such as an independent judiciary, free speech and unfettered debate as uniquely American strengths rather than obstacles to progressive goals. And it would mean explicitly calling out the Republican Party for becoming what it currently is: the anti-American party.

I won't do the "greatest country in the world" thing, but it's clear that we're important enough that we can do great good or, as now, great evil.

Saints vs. strongmen

We discussed my favorite part of James' Varieties today, "The Value of Saintliness." (We go way back. It gave me the name for one of my first first year seminars at The New School, "Preposterous Saints," a preposterously long time ago.) As our society suffers a hostile takeover by the worst kind of patriarchal bullies, some passages resound with a new urgency. This one, for instance, in James' discussion of the prophetic character of the "excess of tenderness" of many saints, something that turns their unworldliness into a promise.

A society where all were invariably aggressive would destroy itself by inner friction, and in a society where some are aggressive, others must be non-resistant, if there is to be any kind of order. This is the present constitution of society, and to the mixture we owe many of our blessings. But the aggressive members of society are always tending to become bullies, robbers, and swindlers; and no one believes that such a state of things as we now live in is the millennium. 

This is characteristic James in this section - speaking for a supposed skeptical "common sense," only to argue that this common sense can already see beyond itself, thanks to the inspiration of the saints. 

It is meanwhile quite possible to conceive an imaginary society in which there should be no aggressiveness, but only sympathy and fairness,—any small community of true friends now realizes such a society. Abstractly considered, such a society on a large scale would be the millennium, for every good thing might be realized there with no expense of friction. To such a millennial society the saint would be entirely adapted. His peaceful modes of appeal would be efficacious over his companions, and there would be no one extant to take advantage of his non-resistance. The saint is therefore abstractly a higher type of man than the “strong man,” because he is adapted to the highest society conceivable, whether that society ever be concretely possible or not. 

My discussions of this passage have tended to stop here, with some reflections on James' will/right to believe, which pertains precisely in cases where there's not enough information to decide an existential question, but how you respond to it is of "momentous" significance to you - and might even contribute to the reality of what you commit to believing. In fact the passage here continues for two more sentences: 

The strong man would immediately tend by his presence to make that society deteriorate. It would become inferior in everything save in a certain kind of bellicose excitement, dear to men as they now are. (374-5) 

James moves quickly on from this, as the saints do, guided by the better possibilities, but reading this in March 2025 it's hard not to see a warning of an anti-millennium. Don't let the haters convince you that humanity is capable of less than you already know it to be capable of: be as saintly as you can. It might not bring about the millennium, just preventing utter societal collapse... or it might.

Terrorist behavior

The ICE abduction in broad daylight of an international PhD student in Boston yesterday is another case where the current administration commits lawless outrages in infernal bundles. No charges have been made against the student, but her visa has apparently been revoked - along with those of at least 300 others across the country, presumably with similarly thin justification. Even so, why was she arrested rather than just notified? Why were the ICE officials masked? Why was she moved to another state? (To a for-profit prison, no less!) This is the behavior of a police state, and part of a campaign to terrorize all international students. Free Rumeysa Ozturk!

Shower

Keeping hope alive

As the wasteland of the new regime opens out before us, Rebecca Solnit calls in the elders and ancestors to help us resist the false comforts of doomerism:

As Mariam Kaba said, "hope is a discipline." 

As Václav Havel said (well before he helped liberate his country from totalitarianism), “Hope is … is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something is worth doing, regardless of how it turns out.” 

“Part of our work as people who dare to believe we can save the world is to prepare our wills to withstand some losing, so that we may lose and still set out again, anyhow.” --Julian Aguon 

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” --James Baldwin

I needed this shot in the arm.

Unmet need

"Religion and Ecology" had a field trip to the Met today, to see "Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature" and take a stroll through the Asian art wing looking for Buddhist works, but, as often happens, many students weren't able to come. The museum is too far from school for students with classes immediately before and after ours to be able get there and back. I'd asked those whose schedule didn't allow going today to go on their own time, and everyone to share a few pictures with some thoughts online, but many probably won't go. How to make them want to? Here are the pictures, with comments, which I posted... 

I found myself going back and back to this early ink painting of Friedrich's - this is the lower right corner. I don't know how he manages to convey misty moonrise light so well...

Seeing this famous painting, familiar from many a book cover, in the context of Friedrich's other works, was quite revealing. In no other work is the human form so large or dominant. The human is lost or exalted or absorbed in nature in most of the others... making this a most unrepresentative work of his!

I think Friedrich's landscapes pulse with sentience, especially when uncluttered by explicitly Christian symbols! "Bushes in the snow (From the Dresden Heath II)" is one of a pair which flummoxed viewers when originally displayed for the depicted trees' unremarkableness, and one an otherwise enthusiastic reviewer of this exhibition found uncanny and threatening. Is nature so inhuman?

In Friedrich's painting of the Alpine peak "The Watzmann" (this is a detail), he's put the mountains he knows and loves in the foreground, with the mountain peak Friedrich never saw (but a friend had sketched for him) in the background. I'm charmed by his familiar trees, and intrigued by the intermediate mountain he conjures up...

The different meanings people projected onto this painting are fascinating. Is the forest friendly or, as some of the nationalistic interpretations after the defeat of Napoleon imagined, hostile, even murderous - at least toward invading Frenchmen?!

This is another wonder of atmosphere. It looks misty but if you get close, every detail of the tree's branches is there - as if you'd approached it through a fog. This is also my favorite of his explicitly Christian works, perhaps because the crucifix is not facing us but looks away into the distance...

This 14th century painting of Kannon (Avalokitesvara) in the Japanese collections is one of the few Buddhist works with natural details beyond the figures of enlightened anthropomorphic beings...

Closeup of the 6th century Chinese stele in that first hall of Chinese art, with glorious animated trees (which reminded me of Friedrich's "Bushes in the Snow" above). Or maybe it's a single double-stemmed tree, relating to the story of how the (male) disciple Sariputra took the form of a woman - that's them on both sides of the tree(s)!...

It's worth going to the Caspar David Friedrich exhibition just to see this amazing painting. This isn't all of it, but registers my surprised discovery that the human figure, perhaps a monk, is not alone before the sublimity of sea and storm and sky, but is kept company by birds.

Doesn't this make you want to go too, for a closer look of your own?

In nuce

Religious studies folks know that William James was thinking about religion long before and well after Varieties but it's still fun to what what seems like the kernel of that major project in his first public address on pragmatism, "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results," delivered in California in 1898.

The horror and heartbreak go on and on, and on, and on ...

Encore!

Went to the spring concert of the Stonewall Chorale last night, a 47-year old group (the nation's oldest gay and lesbian choir) which rehearses and performs in our church. The centerpiece of the program was Sarah Kirkland Snider's 2018 "Mass for the Endangered," to poems by Nathaniel Bellows. It was interesting music but the most joyous thing about the occasion was seeing our church space full to overflowing, a reminder that this precious place means so much to so many. I've said for years that part of its power comes from the many activities and communities it provides a sanctuary for, and it was good to experience this anew as construction makes much of the campus temporarily inaccessible. The Chorale managed just fine without a green room and the crowd seemed unperturbed at the porta-potties outside. Their director informed us that we'd soon have a beautiful new and more accessible entrance.

Don't ax

Beyond the anger and fear, it's hard not to be overwhelmed by sadness.

I sorrow for the so many affected by reckless vandalism of government programs and aid, domestic as well as international. But I'm sad also for those so consumed by resentment that they'd stop planting trees altogether just to take shade away from the most tree-poor neighborhoods in the land.