Tag Archives: Ann Gaylia O’Barr

Inviting the Poor to Our Good Times

Apparently, Jesus enjoyed a good time. He was no killjoy rabbi but was often invited to feasts and gatherings.

His only rebuke about such gatherings had to do with who was invited: did invitations to the feasts include even the poor and unfortunate of society?

No one of us is wealthy enough to erase all poverty or hunger or sickness. As far as I can tell, that is not the point. The point is that, if we are following Christ, one of our tasks is ministering to people in need.

In fact, Jesus taught that those invited into the kingdom at the last judgement are those who ministered to the hungry, the thirsty, the strangers, the poorly clothed, the sick, and those in prison.

We aren’t just saved from our sins; we find a new vocation.

As we are blessed, so are we called to bless others.

Stepping Out

The Pan American Boeing 747 taxied down a runway of the JFK airport around 9 p.m. on December 4, 1990, and lifted off. I watched the New York City metropolitan area spreading out in a vast sea of lights. It was the first international plane trip of my life. I was beginning my first assignment as a U.S. Foreign Service officer.

The takeoff began my trip to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, with a change of planes in Frankfurt, Germany, then to Riyadh. In Riyadh, I was to change planes again for a final short flight to Saudi Arabia’s port city of Jeddah.

Looking back, I have to laugh at all the mistakes a hyped up newbie Foreign Service officer could make. I had packed my suitcase too full, and it was obvious, once I landed in New York City for consultations, that it wasn’t going to last out the trip.

Fortunately, a kind officer in the New York office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service took me to a luggage store for a better suitcase.

Of course, the new suitcase was possibly the reason I identified the wrong one when I, seriously jet lagged, changed planes in Riyadh. Eventually, the luggage was sent back to the right person in Riyadh, and mine returned to me in a day or so.

However, due to the fact that I had no luggage for my first evening in Jeddah, I had to attend a welcoming reception wearing the travel-stained outfit I’d worn for several days. I also developed a blister on my foot from walking around in my travel shoes.

My first assignment began a few weeks before the the start of the First Gulf War. It pitted Iraq against Saudi Arabia, with the United States and other allies supporting Saudi Arabia.

Due to new assignments and training, the former officer had been transferred to another job before I arrived, so I missed training with the one I was replacing. I fell into my visa services job with no overlap as the war began.

After daytime duties in the visa section (overflowing with foreign nationals seeking visas to leave the country now coveted by Saddam Hussein), I worked in the control room in the evenings. This operation was a command center overseeing American wartime activities, including supervising high level U.S. officials coming to confer with Saudi Arabian officials on the war efforts.

I not only survived but treasured that first foreign assignment as a time of comradery with fellow Americans seeking to serve our country in a time of crisis.

I had joined the Foreign Service with the hope of living in other countries and enjoying an exciting and meaningful vocation. I was not disappointed.

Writers and Faith

“Where faith and poetry both work is in getting people to accept that things don’t line up in an easy way. And by learning that, ideally, we learn how to be with each other and how to be in a relationship with God.” (Shane McCrae, “Obliqueness and Extravagance; A Conversation with Rowan Williams and Shane McCrae,” Image, Winter, 2022)

As I remember, I was not a particularly early reader. Somewhere, however, as the alphabet came together in words, I discovered the joy of story. I read, and I mimicked by writing stories myself. I wrote all kinds of stories: children having adventures, solving crimes, righting wrongs.

Through stories, as I continued writing them into adolescence and adulthood, I dealt with everything from boredom to the wrongs in the larger world. My ability to right wrongs might be limited, but I could call out the wrongs and show how the characters of a story dealt with them.

I learned that a struggling individual has need of the “serenity prayer.”
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference. (First publicized by Reinhold Niebuhr)

Writing is a tool. Like any tool, it can be used for good or bad—to build up or to tear down. Not everything built is good, nor is everything torn down bad. As the prayer says, we need, not only talent or opportunity, but wisdom.

And so some of us who are Christians, humbly asking God’s guidance, begin to write what we are given.

Renewing Democracy

Actually, the United States does not have a democracy. We do not elect our national leaders by popular vote. We elect them by people called electors, sent to Washington in early January every four years by the states after the presidential election.

Until January 6, 2021, few Americans paid attention to the electoral college, meeting after each presidential election to certify the vote. For most of our history, it functioned as a kind of rubber stamp after the November election.

Where did this “electoral college” come from? Some of our nation’s founding leaders, back in the late eighteenth century, didn’t trust the idea of ordinary citizens electing their leaders. They wanted a group of supposedly enlightened state leaders to actually decide on the outcome of the presidential election. Ordinary citizens would elect these “electors” who would then make the choice for them of the next president.

We all know how that turned out.

Nothing humans devise is perfect. We must constantly fine tune even well-thought out designs. After the January 6, 2021 calamity, perhaps we should examine the idea of political parties, whose development the founding citizens didn’t foresee.

One suggestion for overcoming the power of political parties is ranked choice voting. Voters rank political candidates on their ballots instead of voting only for one.

Another is overcoming gerrymandering. Gerrymandering allows winners of an election to create voting districts that don’t reflect the population density but instead create weird districts that tie the favored party into divisions that favor them.

Regardless of the methods chosen, we need voting laws which decrease the power of parties and increase the power of individual voters.

Free to Worship as I Please

The first amendment to the U.S. Constitution proclaims: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . .”

This freedom from government interference may be the main reason religious institutions have flourished in the United States. We can choose our religious preferences or not, as we think best. Religious institutions are maintained by people who believe in them. They wither and die if they no longer are seen to meet needs.

John Leland, a Baptist minister in 1802, called an established religion “spiritual tyranny—the worst of despotism. It is turnpiking the way to heaven by human law, in order to establish ministerial gates to collect toll. It converts religion into a principle of state policy, and the gospel into merchandise.” (Quoted by Brian Kaylor and Beau Underwood, “A Danger to the Church,” Sojo.net, January 2023.)

Freedom of religion reaps other dividends. The first responders against slavery, racial injustice, poverty, war, and other injustices have tended to come from religious leaders. They often operate as our conscience.

Freedom of religion, it turns out, is more likely to promote lively religion.

We Have Met the Enemy

For several years after the end of the Cold War in the 1990’s, we assumed that democratic traditions would take over the world. However, we discovered that democracy was more fragile than we thought. Indeed, democracy requires continued care from the nations who endorse it.

Previous to the Russian invasion of Ukraine early in 2022, the United States attempted to decrease global involvement in democracy. The country’s failures in Afghanistan and its less than stellar performance in the Middle East soured the country on commitments abroad.

Europe, however, was another story, even though Americans weren’t keen on involvement even there until the Russian attempt to take over Ukraine. The obvious desire of most citizens of that country to resist what was obviously an invasion of a sovereign European nation changed American ideas about resistance.

Robert Kagan, of the Brookings Institution, in an article about our change, wrote: “Russia’s invasion has changed Americans’ views not only of Ukraine but also of the world in general and the United States’ role in it. (“A Free World, If You and Keep It,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2023)

This change mirrors the past history of the county. Americans were not keen to become involved in the two world wars of the twentieth century until it became evident that what was happening in Europe and Asia concerned us as well.

Writing about U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt, Kagan said that his “interventionist policies from 1937 on were not a response to an increasing threat to American security. What worried Roosevelt was the potential destruction of the broader liberal world beyond American shores.”

Kagan traces the path of the United States as it grew from this reluctant involvement in affairs beyond our shores to a perhaps belated understanding that if the U.S. doesn’t defend a democratic world order, no one will.

Indeed, Kagan believes that the absence of American involvement in world affairs will in itself encourage dictatorship and great power conflict.

He does not mention one obstacle hindering our acceptance of the continued role we can play toward a more democratic world order. This is the danger of refusing to allow one of our own elections to stand as proved and certified.

As Walt Kelly’s comic strip character Pogo said “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Commuter Rebellion

One thing we learned from the Covid period: American workers dislike the commute. Office workers freed to work at home by the pandemic discovered how much they enjoyed the new found casualness. They also enjoyed the extra time gained by skipping that long ride into the office.

We long ago separated home and office. Now we wonder why workers, having found the possibility of working from home, don’t want to deal with lost time in commutes and other restrictions involved with their office jobs.

Maybe we should question why the long commute happened in the first place. Why did we allow this distance between work and home?

Suburbs were birthed by a rebellion against city life: everything from often less adequate schools in the city to perceived higher crime rates. Suburbs were the answer: mothers and children in a safe environment, while fathers earned the money to make possible the newer, safer life.

However, some women found the safe life also a boring life. They were safe from the supposed evils of the city but also away from its liveliness and excitement, not to mention career opportunities.

The advantages of suburbia faded as more women desired entry into the work force. The idea of dad going off to work in the distant city while mom stayed with the children also has changed with the need for two incomes for many families.

Of course, these are the fortunate families with two parents. Single parent households face the hardships of trying to raise a family on one income, including the often impossibility of affording a suburban home.

Cities, however, are more than job centers. They also are centers for creation: music and drama and often for learning found in city colleges and universities.

The abandonment of the city by many of the middle class certainly increased the problems of homelessness and drugs and mental illness for those left behind . These unfortunates need our compassion and help, but our beleaguered cities need more than that. They also need safe, affordable neighborhoods for workers as well.

 

Generations

Plough magazine devoted its Winter 2023 issue to the topic of “generations.” In the recent history of western nations, interaction between generations has become less important. Suburban growth led first to the nuclear family, then to an increase in single adults living away from any daily family connection.

As the family became less important, so did institutions that nurtured family, including religious gatherings and school support groups. Society became tethered to careers and the office. Social gatherings tended to coalesce around career.

The Covid pandemic isolated us further. Even our work togetherness deteriorated as workers carried out their duties through remote settings.

I grew up a long time ago in a community where neighbors met each other in unplanned social gatherings. We would sit out on our porch during the summer and neighbors would stop by and chat for a while. During the winter, they visited spontaneously in the evenings in our living room. I sat on the floor and listened to the adults tell jokes and share ideas.

Those same neighbors joined to support local school carnivals and other events to raise money for school projects. Churches sometimes hosted events for the entire neighborhood. Members of one church would support the events of neighboring churches.

We should not paint such an idyllic picture of such times that we forget the sins of the era, as well, like segregation and all white governments. Yet some of the movements that led to the dismantling of those systems were crafted in small groups of friends and in neighborhood settings.

Our current tendency to isolation can only increase unhealthy practices like drug use and hatred spewed over internet channels. And certainly, face to face meetings are not always ideal, as they can be overtaken by uncivil groups seeking to cause disruption.

What encourages civility and neighborliness? Perhaps those casual meetings between neighbors, as well as small groupings of the like-minded can begin to overcome the processes that are pulling us apart.

Worth a try, at least. Better to carry out the old saying: “It’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness.”

Did Women Follow the Wrong Example?

The entry of women into the modern workforce did not in itself change our era. What changed was the kind of model they chose. They tended to follow the male model of the past few centuries.

Women have been part of the work force since the beginning of time. Women have worked on farms and in home-based shops for millennia. Regardless of discrimination, they formed an active part of a society’s economic life.

In addition, women did what men could not do but was essential to the survival of the human race. Though men were essential to the act of procreation, they had nothing to do with carrying a child or birthing it. Until the past century or so, the child’s very existence depended on feeding from the mother for its first few months or year of life.

On the other hand, in times past, fathers were less separated from their children in their growing-up years. Even when the men worked, the children were close by for whatever lessons their fathers wanted to give.

Though gender differences were acute, with men having privileged roles, they were at least present while their children grew up.

With the rise of the modern city and its division into city and suburb, women became less a part of economic life, and men became less involved with their children.

In the suburbs, out of the stream of economic activity, some women rebelled against what seemed to them a wasteland, a prison of sorts.

The advent of birth control, safer pregnancies and births, and bottle feeding, meant less attention to the childbearing and rearing role. All women, whether mothers or not, could find purpose beyond traditional roles.

But women still remain essential for continued life, in a way men do not.

Men can more easily leave their role of fatherhood and in some cases never even consider it. Physically, they are not tied to children as the mother is in pregnancy and birthing.

In the sixties, battles were fought over a woman’s worth to society and her right to a place in the job force, equal opportunity in management roles, and breaking the glass ceiling.

The word “house husband” was bandied around. Some men have indeed assumed a larger role in the family.

However, we gave little consideration to the modern separation of jobs and homes. The choice to have children or not to have children is quite proper. But for those who make a responsible decision to have children, the career deck is, more often than not, stacked against them.

Yes, child care can be made more affordable and available. But what about when a child is sick? Has special needs?

Or when a pandemic means the child cannot be in school or child care?

Ultimately, the parents are responsible, career or not.

Perhaps we should question the great separation of the past century or so between work and home.

Some separation is necessary, of course. We don’t wish a family living in a coal mining community to live in a coal mine. Nevertheless, the advent of the office job meant that many jobs were not in dangerous locations. Yet, we emptied families out of our cities for the suburbs and built super highways and faster cars and neglected mass transit.

Perhaps we should consider what happens when cities become childless.

Societies die without children. With children, but without responsible child rearing, societies crumble.

A society cannot function without responsible child rearing. For a vibrant society, children must be taken care of:  loved and listened to and provided proper food, health care, schooling, and housing. Society damages itself when it does not invest in the children and the parents who make its continued existence possible.

Taming Culture Wars

The supposed clash between different political groups in the United States has been described as a “culture war.” The painter and author Makoto Fujimura has described such a war “as a polarized mindset, viewing culture as territory to dominate rather than a common space Christians share with their neighbors.” (Quoted in “Defiant Joy,” Cosper, Mike; Christianity Today, December 2022)

In fact, we are all subject to human frailties and incompleteness. Jesus may be “the answer,” but none of us completely comprehends that answer, much less lives it. Thinking that we do, that people must see things the way we do is to choose the way the religious critics of Jesus did during his time on earth.

They ended up collaborating with the Romans to kill Jesus, just as too many people calling themselves Christians have taken part in religious wars to slaughter their “enemies.”

Perhaps we start with gratitude that God gives us the ability to think and ponder and observe and learn. We are each imperfect but with wonderful possibilities. We can look at those with whom we disagree as possibilities for our own learning.

We listen to them and converse and examine ideas. If they ask questions, we answer them with compassion and humility, grateful that we are talking, not fighting. We look to learn from them as well as share our own convictions.

Jesus spent much of his time in conversation with people, listening to them and answering their questions. People followed him because he attracted them and inspired them and gave them hope of a better way. They talked to him and listened to his answers and sometimes were changed. Surely, if we’re going to follow his example, we are called to that same way of interacting with the world.

The Winter Ahead

Growing up in the shadow of the Cold War, I remember the joy we felt after Soviet Union satellite countries began throwing off Soviet rule and establishing democracies. Was that only thirty or so years ago?

Ukraine now braces for Vladimir Putin’s reawakened desire for a Russian empire as winter clamps down. Democratic governments worldwide have moved toward more autocratic rule. Xi Jinping has consolidated his rule in China, though lately his Covid lock down has caused problems.

Of course, we have no guarantee that changes in either Russia or China would bring in more humane regimes. Given the trends lately, some are understandably pessimistic.

Perhaps the greatest risk is to the country that has, since the mid twentieth century, been seen as the guarantor of democracy, the United States.

Trembles from the January 6th 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, as well as continuing threats from groups espousing armed insurrection, continue to worry us. That numerous courts have upheld Joe Biden as the legally elected president of the United States seems not to matter for some. If you lose, the present pattern seems to be, you simply ignore the facts and declare a fraudulent election.

One major reason the United States was victorious in the long Cold War against the Soviet Union was the staying power of U.S. democratic traditions. Despite our nation undergoing long needed changes to overcome racial sins of the past, the people hung together against outside enemies.

We overcame huge disagreements, yet were united in holding to and even increasing our democratic practices.

Now we spend too much time fighting simply to remain humane and to overcome insidious slurs. And almost daily, it seems, moral pygmies decide to use guns to hurt as many people as possible.

How can we overcome these harmful trends even as winter provides an even more challenging environment?

Courage, perhaps, to uphold those who attempt civil discussion about real problems. Common sense to ignore those who would waste valuable time on lies or meaningless accusations.

Loving Our (Political) Enemies

Today, we are faced with a rise of what is called “Christian nationalism.” In this movement, the Christ story is supposedly tied to America.

This comes close to proclaiming the worship of a country. It also elevates political parties to claiming almost godly status. If our side loses, we, being God’s people, must prevail even if it means physically overcoming the other side, as was attempted at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Christianity can be championed in at least two ways. Too often, the church of the early modern era chose the political, nationalistic route: Those who didn’t follow the prescribed belief of an established church risked being killed, tortured, or exiled.

Though they certainly had their faults, the revived Christian groups of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries chose a decidedly better way of championing Christianity. Groups of Christians, not countries, were more likely to carry Jesus’ story to the non-Western world. This movement included “good works” like feeding the hungry and setting up schools, in home countries as well as on mission fields.

Today, we risk falling again into the trap of “might makes right.”

“Democracy is currently facing an unprecedented crisis, both in the United States and around the world.” (Daniel K. Williams, “The Forgotten Christian Cause: Preserving Democracy,” Christianity Today, October 17, 2022)

We are all sinners, prone to error. Until we recognize that we are not capable of playing God ourselves, democracy may be in danger.

“Democracy in the U.S. will succeed only if parties on both sides are ‘willing to allow their worst enemies to govern if they win an election.’” (Historian James Kloppenberg, quoted in the Williams article.)

 

Blessed Be the Tie

I grew up in the segregated South, and churches were, for the most part, as segregated as any other gatherings. White Christians have much to repent of.

On the other hand, the civil rights movement of the 1960’s owes much of its success to Christian church leaders, the majority black but including white Christians as well.

My own church was segregated, although not purposely so. No sermon that I ever heard in that church preached segregation. It was a working class, lower middle class white church in a working class, lower middle class white neighborhood.

We can be faulted for not having questioned the culture in which we operated. We didn’t respond to racism when we should have. We didn’t think about abolishing nuclear weapons, either. Nor were we found in the ranks of those working for women’s equality.

Yet, in looking back, I find redemption in the love that permeated my church for those who were there, not a small thing. The greatest love I knew after the love of my family came from that church.

That love planted its seed and enabled me to grow and one day led to conviction for my own racial sins and to ask for forgiveness and to change.

Love indeed covers a multitude of sins. In an imperfect world, it also changes us and leads us toward overcoming those sins.

Finding the Lost Continent

“Violent conflict exists in 20 African countries, and potential upsets in others cannot be ruled out. The violent activities of extremist groups are spreading.”

So wrote Mark G. Wentling, a retired diplomat (“Much Cause for Worry; A Clear-eyed Look at Africa,” The Foreign Service Journal, September 2022.) Wentling spent most of his career working in aid programs for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID.)

At one point, back in the 1970’s, when Wentling began his work in Africa, the future seemed hopeful. Many countries were gaining their independence from colonial rulers. Today, writes Wentling, “It is difficult to find an African country where competent and honest governance prevails and where justice is rendered to the people.”

Wentling details numerous areas of concern: population growth that has not made the transition the rest of the world has made toward sustainable birth rates; a massive movement of the population into cities without historical parallel; low educational and health standards; and an agricultural system unable to meet the continent’s food needs.

Of course, since the Portuguese first explored Africa’s coastal areas, too many developed countries have seen Africa as merely a treasure for them to exploit, beginning with slavery and extending to its mineral and natural wealth. Except for the work of a few missionary and aid organizations, Africans were not given the freedom or the means to make the transition taken earlier by today’s developed nations.

Wentling ends his article on a pessimistic note: “It seems few Americans care about Africa. I care, but I am helpless to change the course of history. I can see that if the negative trends of this large and diverse continent of more than 2,000 ethnic groups are not reversed, there is much cause for worry.”

These words do not have to be the epitaph on a continent with such possibilities. Some have seen the possibilities and determined different courses. They include two past presidents, Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush. African writers also are more prevalent, bringing their stories to Western readers.

Perhaps what is needed now is more awareness, not only of Africa’s needs, but also of her gifts, of how revolutionary Africans would be if her young people were given the educational and vocational training they need.

Perhaps if we centered on encouraging the skills, both educational and vocational, for ordinary Africans, the people themselves would be able to change their governments and protect their vast resources.

We Have Never Been a Christian Nation

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . .” (First Amendment to the United States Constitution)

We Americans tend to forget how revolutionary was the founding of our nation without a state religion. So long as a religion does no obvious harm, it has usually been acceptable for a group of Americans, large or small, to practice it. Certainly groups have been persecuted, but the U.S. government is forbidden by the Constitution to favor any religion.

Nevertheless, the majority of Americans until the beginning of the post World War II years probably thought of America as “Christian.” Other groups existed, of course. Some followed Judaism or were even (usually quietly) agnostics or atheists. However, the culture, most supposed, was “Christian.”

Leave aside the fact of our failing to act as Christians in practices like slavery and our relations with the area’s original inhabitants. The point is that we were, the majority would have said, a Christian nation. That was the fallback position.

However, the United States was a young nation with plentiful land and opportunities and freedoms unavailable in many parts of the world. Immigrants flocked here. Countries suffering hardships from war and dictators sent wave after wave of immigrants to this country.

Roman Catholic numbers grew steadily. Jewish immigrants increased. Russians came and also Asian immigrants. More Hispanics arrived from south of the border, joined by smaller groups of Haitians.

The latest immigrants have included Muslims escaping wars in the Middle East and most recently the collapse of Afghanistan.

As each group is joined by others, diluting and diluting again the former immigrant mix, some of those already established in the United States tend to resent the newcomers. These new people are different, not like our ancestors, not truly American. Of course, unless you count the original inhabitants, we’re all interlopers or descendants of such.

Each established group is tempted to believe that they are true Americans, not the newcomers with different religions and styles of clothing.

We have made many mistakes in our attempts to make the world in our image. That is not what this essay addresses. Nor does it address the need for a sane immigration policy with proper safeguards for both would be immigrants and the country they flock towards.

What should be understood, however, is that American Christians must give up the idea that America has ever been a “Christian” nation. A nation can be influenced by certain faiths, but it can never be “Christian.”

Christians, it is supposed, worship Jesus Christ. To try to make America in some way an example of a “Christian” nation is to defeat the religion of the Jewish teacher who chose to enter Jerusalem on a donkey, not striding in on the prancing steed of a conqueror. He did not worship power politics nor should we.

“Take as Many Pills as You Need . . .”

Several years ago I had surgery from which I fortunately recovered quickly. While I was in the hospital following the surgery, a nurse brought me pills to guard against any pain I might be feeling. She said I could take them whenever I needed to, as they apparently weren’t habit forming.

Fortunately, I don’t remember feeling much pain. I recovered quickly and soon stopped taking any pills.

Later we learned about the efforts of some in the pharmaceutical industry to push as many pain pills as possible in order to make as much money as possible. Apparently the medication was pushed whether the pills were needed or not or whether they might be dangerously addictive. (As we found in frightening ways, some indeed were.)

Sam Quinones, in his book, The Least of Us (True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth) tells a horrifying story of this shameful part of our past, when addiction was ignored so drug makers could make more money.

The story reveals how we too often see illness or injury as a part of the consumer culture: a way to make money, not as a need for healing.

I champion capitalism as long as it pertains to buying and selling the normal goods of a society and as long as capitalists pay their fair share of taxes.

However, any caring society, it seems to me, will do better if all people have access to safe and basic medical care, whether they are rich, working/middle class, or poor. Children, especially, should not have to depend on the income of their parents to grow in a healthy, safe environment.

That means, for me, seeing certain activities like the healing and treatment of illness as a public good, closely regulated to encourage good health, not to feed our normal capitalist system.

Christian Nationalism? Which Christianity?

Recently, we’ve seen discussions about saving “Christian America.”

What would it look like to “save Christian America”?

Which Christian America would we save?

A generally establishment Protestant Christian America? An evangelical Christian America? Would it allow citizenship for those practicing Roman Catholicism? What about Greek Orthodoxy?

Not atheists or Jews or Muslims, I suppose. That does, however, seem to suggest taking a lesson from some Middle Eastern countries which uphold Islam as the state religion. Is making some form of Christianity a test for holding office any better than Iranian mullahs dictating an Islamic government?

Unfortunately, saving Christian America might end up like saving Christian Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Religious wars devastated Europe. Christians who didn’t agree with other Christians killed their Christian enemies with sword and torture while presiding over mass devastation of the countryside.

Getting to practical considerations, what kind of litmus test would we require of seekers after public office? What must they swear to uphold in order to have a “Christian” America?

Maybe we could just require Christian office holders to “follow Jesus.”

Of course, one test for a “Jesus follower” might be a test Jesus mentioned, the “last judgement test.” The only ones accepted at the end of the age are those who followed Jesus in his concern for the “least” people—the poor, jailed, hungry, and so on. Possibly we could make this a criteria for leadership.

 

That Voting Privilege

There may have been an election or two for which I was eligible to vote and did not, but I don’t remember it.

I once searched out a notary public in Kotzebue, Alaska, to notarize my vote. I have voted absentee from Saudi Arabia, Tunisia., and Washington, D.C.

I have voted in various towns in the United States: Jackson and Adamsville in Tennessee, Oak Park in Illinois, and other towns in California and Georgia, whose names I barely remember.

As a U.S. Foreign Service officer, I have helped overseas Americans cast absentee ballots for their home states when they were abroad in foreign countries.

My connection with voting began early. I played around polling booths growing up in Nashville, Tennessee, where my parents helped as poll volunteers.

Also, of course, I have lived in countries where citizens couldn’t vote, where elections were not held at all.

These experiences cause me to wonder why so many Americans don’t bother with voting.

I’m particularly saddened by the efforts of a few misguided individuals to discourage some Americans from being able to easily vote.

Perhaps, they need to experience what it’s like to live in countries where only privileged individuals have a voice.

The Lost Sabbath

Uncomfortable Sunday best clothes. Curtailment of sports and recreational pastimes. Long, boring sermons.

These are pictures we retain of puritanical Sabbath laws. Trish Harrison Warren suggests a different purpose for a Sabbath rest. (“How to Fight Back Against Inhumanity at Modern Work,” The New York Times, October 16, 2022.)

Today, Warren suggests, we need to revisit the Sabbath again: “When a careerist culture meets a digital revolution that allows unlimited access to work, something’s got to give.”

For workers in the beginning of the industrial revolution, who often toiled from sunup to sundown six days a week, a day off was a much needed day of rest, a day to connect with family, and perhaps to think of a deeper meaning for life. After all, in many ancient cultures, slaves and menial workers had no days off. One day was very much like any other. Surely, the beginning of a Christian Sabbath would have been welcome.

For several years of my life, I worked as a computer programmer. Most of what I did was, to me, boring and without meaning. I commuted to the city, swiped my badge before entering the work place, and settled in to staring at a computer, making minute changes for hours to computer programs.

I can understand why workers, working more and more on remote computer stations, would prefer at least the benefit of doing their jobs in a comfortable home setting. They at least can wear comfortable clothes, eat their own meals, and forgo a time-consuming commute. But, of course, if work can be done at home, one is indeed not limited by commutes or a set number of hours.

Computer monitoring also may mean that those who work selling to the public can be tasked minutely even to the bathroom breaks they take. Forget stopping to chat with a fellow worker and fostering a human connection.

Writes Warren, “The labor movement fought to change both culture and policy to limit our work weeks, and the 40-hour work week eventually became a norm.”

Today, we’re again overdue for a humanizing of work practices in keeping with our latest machine revolution.

Turning the U.S. Into a Democracy

The United States, at this time, is not a democracy, that is a country ruled solely by its citizens. The founding of the country certainly was at the forefront of the movement to give power to citizens, compared with most other countries in the world at the time. As the years passed, however, we did not build on this beginning as we should have.

We have certainly progressed from those white mostly upper class men who hammered out a constitution for the new nation in the late 1780’s. The progress, however, has been slow and incomplete.

It took us almost a century to rid the country of slavery, and the racism that lingers from that time still impedes us. The election of senators by citizens and not state legislatures was granted in 1913. Women weren’t give the right to vote until 1920.

We also are burdened, as we discovered on January 6, 2021, by a relic from the past, the electoral college. This gives power to individual states to elect the president rather than to the popular vote. It also allowed for the growth of political parties, not foreseen by many of the country’s founders at the time.

One suggestion for giving more power to citizens over political parties is the institution of ranked-choice voting. Voters rank candidates by choice. The two candidates with the most votes win. They could be from different political parties, the same party, or have no party affiliation. It would tend to give more power to voters and less to political parties.

Who knows? In time, perhaps we might eventually tackle the problem of gerrymandering, in which outsize power is given to party leaders to set voting boundaries.