"Plato
formulated what he named the “universals” as the True, the Good, and
the Beautiful. He held that if we are to live a whole and mature life,
the three had to work together harmoniously in us. The American church
has deleted Beauty from that triad. We are vigorous in contending for
the True and energetic in insisting on the Good, but Beauty, the forms
by which the True and the Good take shape in human life, we pretty much
ignore. Plato, and many of our wisest teachers who
have followed him, insisted that all three—Truth, Goodness, Beauty—are
organically connected. Without Beauty, there is no container for Truth
and Goodness, no form, no way of coming to expression in human life.
Truth divorced from Beauty becomes abstract and bloodless. Goodness
divorced from Beauty becomes loveless and graceless." --Eugene Peterson
Wednesday, March 19, 2025
Jews, Greeks and the Universals: Truth, Goodness and Beauty
Sunday, March 16, 2025
F/Elon, Arlington National Cemetery, DEI and 1984
F/Elon and MAGAts are all about cancelling:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz03gjnxe25o
Arlington Cemetery strips content on black and female veterans from website
On the cemetery's website, internal links that directed users to webpages with information about the "Notable Graves" of dozens of black, Hispanic and female veterans were missing on Friday.
The pages contained short biographies about veterans such as Gen Colin L Powell, the first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which is the highest rank in the military after the president.
They also told the life stories of members of the Tuskegee Airmen, the country's first black military airmen.
Earlier this year, the Defense Department had to reinstate training materials on the revered airmen after a national outcry over their removal following Trump's orders on DEI.
Information on Hector Santa Anna, a World War II bomber pilot and career military leader who has been called a hero of the war, has been taken down, as well.
Visitors to the site may also have trouble finding information, as links to major sections have disappeared. It no longer lists pages for African American History, Hispanic American History and Women's History.
Content still exists on some notable women buried there, including former Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and 14 veterans from the unit recently featured in the Oscar-nominated movie The Six Triple Eight, but it is only found from a direct search.
I am reminded of this scene in Orwell's 1984:
O'Brien was looking down at him speculatively. More than ever he had the air of a teacher taking pains with a wayward but promising child.
'There is a Party slogan dealing with the control of the past,' he said. 'Repeat it, if you please.'
"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past," repeated Winston obediently.
"Who controls the present controls the past," said O'Brien, nodding his head with slow approval. 'Is it your opinion, Winston, that the past has real existence?'
Again the feeling of helplessness descended upon Winston. His eyes flitted towards the dial. He not only did not know whether 'yes' or 'no' was the answer that would save him from pain; he did not even know which answer he believed to be the true one.
O'Brien smiled faintly. 'You are no metaphysician, Winston,' he said. 'Until this moment you had never considered what is meant by existence. I will put it more precisely. Does the past exist concretely, in space? Is there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects, where the past is still happening?'
'No.'
'Then where does the past exist, if at all?'
'In records. It is written down.'
'In records. And- ?'
'In the mind. In human memories.
'In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?'
'But how can you stop people remembering things?' cried Winston again momentarily forgetting the dial. 'It is involuntary. It is outside oneself. How can you control memory? You have not controlled mine!'
O'Brien's manner grew stern again. He laid his hand on the dial.
'On the contrary,' he said, 'you have not controlled it. That is what has brought you here. You are here because you have failed in humility, in self-discipline. You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one.
Friday, March 07, 2025
Pacific Northwest Conference Ministerium Discussion on Chrisian Nationalism
Saturday, March 01, 2025
Immigration Resources for Informed Ministry
https://coda.io/@sylvie-hauser/bwm-resources
Immigration Resources for Informed Ministry
Monday, February 10, 2025
Reich on the End of Law
Today in response to JD Vance's assertion that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” Robert Reich wrote an essay, "The End of Law?"
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/what-to-do-about-a-lawless-president?utm_source=substack&publication_id=365422&post_id=156421708&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&utm_campaign=email-share&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=true&r=1ra4oc&triedRedirect=true
Vance said on a 2021 podcast, “When the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
Here’s Vance in a February 2024 interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos:
Vance: “The president has to be able to run the government as he thinks he should. That’s the way the Constitution works. It has been thwarted too much by the way our bureaucracy has worked over the past 15 years.”
Stephanopoulos: “The Constitution also says the president must abide by legitimate Supreme Court rulings, doesn’t it?”
Vance: “The Constitution says that the Supreme Court can make rulings, but if the Supreme Court — and, look, I hope that they would not do this — but if the Supreme Court said the president of the United States can’t fire a general, that would be an illegitimate ruling, and the president has to have Article II prerogative under the Constitution to actually run the military as he sees fit.”
In other words, if the Supreme Court rules against Trump on an important issue, there’s a fair chance the Trump-Vance-Musk regime will thumb their nose at it.
What then? Impeachment isn’t a possibility because Republicans run both chambers of Congress and haven’t exactly distinguished themselves with integrity or independence.
If Trump simply ignores the high court, is that the end of law?
I say yes. That's the end of law. And when law ends,
things go one of two ways:
1)"In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as they saw fit." --Judges 21: 25
2) “Democracy represents the disbelief in all great men
and in all elite societies: everybody is everybody else's equal, 'At bottom we
are all herd and mob.” Thus, the will of the Ubermensch rules.
Sunday, February 02, 2025
Sermon for the Feast of the Presentation by Fr. BIrch Rambo
Luke 2:29-32
“Now, master, let your servant go in peace according to your word,
because my eyes have seen your salvation.
You prepared this salvation in the presence of all peoples.
It’s a light for revelation to the Gentiles
and a glory for your people Israel.”
Father Birch preached an amazing sermon today, just what I needed to hear given the darkness that has descended around us. 23:46-37:25
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVhHUthW8Qk
Sermon for the Feast of the Presentation
"Today is Candlemas, the Feast of the Presentation of our Lord Jesus Christ at the Temple. Since the mid 300's, the Church has celebrated Mary and Joseph's keeping of the Law and Simeon's Spirit-inspired song of light and freedom... "
After speaking about that event, and how like Simeon and Anna, many are still waiting for redemption and hope, Fr. Birch picks up the Host at 36:12. "Light is weird. Sometimes its one thing, sometimes it's another, depending upon what we're looking for. Always both. Sometimes wave, sometimes particle. Sometimes man, sometimes God. Sometimes matter, sometimes spirit. Always both, and by the time we see it, it has already happened. It contains every color of the rainbow. It has moved through the universe since the universe began. Take the light out with you. LEt it grow, and become strong, and fill you with wisdom. God show the world that the night is past, winter is over, and even though the world is cold and dark, the light has come."
Monday, January 27, 2025
A Hidden Life: A Film for Our Time
This film is even more relevant now.
Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life is not a typical World War II drama
The latest from the director of The Tree of Life deconstructs religion and nationalism by looking at someone who refused to fight.
https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/5/20/18631526/a-hidden-life-review-terrence-malickEveryone wants to imagine themselves the hero in a movie about heroes. Not everyone wants to consider what it would take to do what’s right when nobody may ever know — when their actions will be hidden.
A Hidden Life is not a hero’s story.
Instead of battlefield valor or underground daring, the latest film from Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life, Badlands, Days of Heaven) is a tale of something much more difficult to emulate: goodness and courage, without recognition. It’s about doing what’s right, even if it seems the results hurt more than they bring good to the world.
It’s set during World War II, but our Austrian protagonist Franz Jägerstätter, based on a real-life conscientious objector, does not save Jews from Nazis or give rousing speeches. In the end, what he’s done counts for what seems like very little.
A Hidden Life is Malick’s most overtly political film and one of his most religious, urgent and sometimes even uncomfortable because of what it says — to everyone, but specifically to Christians in places where they’re the majority — about the warp and weft of courage. It’s a film that seems particularly designed to lodge barbs in a comfortable audience during an era of rising white nationalism. Jägerstätter could have lived a peaceful life if he’d simply ignored what was happening in his homeland and been willing to bow the knee to the fatherland and its fascist leader, whose aim is to establish the supremacy of Franz’s own people.
But though it will bring hardship to his family and the harshest of punishments to himself, he simply cannot join the cause. The question A Hidden Life then forces us to contemplate is an uncomfortable one: Does his life, and his death, even matter?
If you haven’t heard of Jägerstätter (played by August Diehl), well, that’s sort of the point. He was not, by most measures, a remarkable man. An Austrian farmer in a small village, with a beloved wife Franziska (Valerie Pachner), several small, towheaded children, and aspirations for a quiet life, Franz wrote no books, made no films, led no movements. He was, in a word, ordinary.
Jägerstätter did eventually become better recognized for his part in the war. In 1964, the American sociologist Gordon Zahn wrote his biography, titled In Solitary Witness. Thomas Merton included a chapter about him in his 1968 book Faith and Violence. An Austrian TV series told his story in 1971, and in 2007, Pope Benedict XVI declared him a martyr. He was beatified on October 26 of that year.
But he is no household name for most people, and his life was profoundly unspectacular, save for the way he swam against the current. His pastoral life at home is interrupted by the rise of the Third Reich. Franz does his military service at a base, away from the war, without seeing combat, and soon is sent home to his happy family. But Hitler adulation is rising, and it creeps into their small village. Soon, people are greeting one another with “Heil Hitler.”
Franz has heard what is happening in war — the exterminations, the persecution and slaughter of innocents — and he becomes certain that his faith will not permit him to participate if called to active military service again.
His conscience might have permitted him to serve in a hospital, but for one thing: All Austrian soldiers are required to swear an oath of loyalty to Hitler. And he refuses.
It’s a true story, and a simple one, but couched in Malick’s signature style, it becomes something more lyrical and pastoral. The home that the Jägerstätters share is in a place that looks, quite literally, like paradise, all green and gray and sunshine. Even their hard labor on the farm takes on significance: This is good land, and what it produces is good, too. The life they live has importance, as part of the larger creation.
When Franz realizes he cannot yield, though, he and his family become pariahs, spat upon and shunned by most of their neighbors. Love of their country means love of Hitler, and everyone around them, even Franz’s mother, is willing to accept this. Hitler, they say, only wants to help his country and his people, who were in degenerate shambles before he came to restore order. “He did what he had to do,” an old man from the village proclaims in the town square. “He was not content to watch his nation in a state of collapse,” he says, deriding the “foreigners” who turned their homeland into “Babylon.” How could anyone object to that who truly loved his home?
Much of the film’s nearly three-hour runtime is devoted to the couple’s wrestling with Franz’s conviction. You can see why. From the distance of history, it’s easy to imagine that we all would do what he did, that we would see evil for what it is and resist it. At the time, though, people accuse him of being conceited, of sticking to principle because he feels he’s above everyone else, of harming his family and his village needlessly. “Don’t you think you ought to consider the consequence of your actions for them?” someone asks him. Even the ministers agree. Yet Jägerstätter stands firm.
A Hidden Life is not, primarily, a valorization of the life of Franz Jägerstätter, who lived in private and died in obscurity when the Reich executed him in 1943. It is, instead, a surprisingly pointed indictment of the audience by Malick, who has no punches to pull.
I happen to know this film has been in the works for many years. I had conversations about the project five or six years ago, when I worked at Christianity Today; that’s only worth saying because A Hidden Life feels as if it could have been written last year, a movie created in direct critique of our age, in which radical right-wing nationalist sentiment and white supremacy too often cloaks itself in the disguise of Christianity.
In this film, swearing allegiance to Hitler — and, more importantly, to his nationalist ideals — is frequently compared to bending the knee to the Antichrist. That’s not a small matter, but Malick (not normally known for his left hook) seems to have come out swinging. Franz’s faith is not showy, but he is horrified when he consults his village priest and he stops short of condemning the Third Reich. The bishop, too, glosses over the issue when Franz comes seeking counsel. “The priests call them heroes, even saints,” Franz says of the way the clergy speak of those who engage in the Third Reich’s military atrocities.
There’s no way this is an accident. A Hidden Life may have been in the works for years, and it tells a story from nearly eight decades ago, but it is the work of an American filmmaker who is watching the state of the world. When Franz resists his neighbors’ pleas to make nice with the government, there’s a purpose. When he says Christ’s example will not let him swear fealty with his mouth and believe something else in his mind and heart, he is doing something that would seem daring today in the churches of America or Europe, in those places where to be Christian is construed to mean supporting a xenophobia Christ never would have stood for.
As a longtime observer of Malick’s work (though I’ve found his post-Tree of Life films lacking), I was startled to see just how biting A Hidden Life is, particularly toward any Christians, or others, who might prefer their entertainment to be sentimental and comfortable. In one scene I can’t get out of my mind, an artist painting images in the nearby church tells Franz, “I paint their comfortable Christ, with a halo on his head … Someday I’ll paint the true Christ.”
The implication is painfully clear — that religious art prefers a Jesus who doesn’t accost one’s sensibilities, the figures who make us feel good about ourselves. We want, as the painter puts it, to look up at the pictures on the church’s ceiling and “imagine that if they lived in Christ’s time, they wouldn’t have done what the others did” — in other words, if we had been around when Jesus was, we’d have known better than to execute him.
When, of course, most of us most likely would have just gone along with the crowd.
It’s an especially interesting story for Malick to tell. The filmmaker is strongly influenced by his Christianity, but also by the philosopher Martin Heidegger. In 1969, Malick published the authoritative translation of Heidegger’s The Essence of Reasons, just as he was abandoning a doctorate at Harvard on Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein. His films often hew closely to and examine — in both narrative and form — ideas about the essence of humanity and phenomenology advanced by Heidegger. (You can detect as much Heidegger as the Bible in The Tree of Life.)
But Heidegger, whose philosophy often feels unusually gentle and empathetic to the human condition, also famously joined the Nazi Party on May 1, 1933, shortly after being elected rector of the University of Freiburg (and about a decade before Jägerstätter’s execution), and he remained part of the party until the end of the war.
For most people of goodwill who find Heidegger’s work valuable (and I include myself here), his apparently willing association with the Nazi Party is confounding and infuriating. How could a man who wrote those ideas apparently ignore what was happening around him? Or, worse, condone it?
There are few answers, though people have been wrestling with them for decades. It is at least one lens through which to read Malick’s imagined scene between Jägerstätter and a Nazi Party official, in which Franz tells the official that he does not condemn anyone, assuming that some swore their allegiance to Hitler and find themselves in a position from which they cannot back away. It’s a troubling scene, one that indicates Malick’s main interest is in Jägerstätter and not in parsing out the ethics of everyone in the entire Nazi apparatus — but it does read as the filmmaker’s own wrestling with the thinker’s legacy.
Which is why Jägerstätter strikes me as in some ways a necessary corrective to our valorization, and particularly American Christians’ valorization, of figures like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Corrie ten Boom. Both of them are rightly admired, praised, and lauded for their attempts to take down Hitler (in Bonhoeffer’s case) and save Jews from being sent to concentration camps (in ten Boom’s). Bonhoeffer died for his efforts; ten Boom lost her sister Betsy in a concentration camp and narrowly escaped death herself.
But it is in our human nature to love the story of a person who did great things: saved lives, wrote books, stood against the dictator who wiped out millions of lives. It is less common for us to celebrate a man who threw away a comfortable life and simply refused to do what he knew he could not, and paid with his life.
Instead, A Hidden Life dares us to imagine that the latter is at least as important as the former — and maybe more so.
A Hidden Life is everything Malick’s devotees could want from a movie: beautiful, poetic, hewing closely (particularly at the end) to films like Days of Heaven and Tree of Life. His camera observes his characters from all angles, sometimes straight on, sometimes from below, sometimes distorted in a wide-angle lens shot close to the face, creating the intimate feeling that we’re experiencing their interior lives rather than just watching passively.
Its end, in which Franziska anticipates meeting Franz again — in narration that closely recalls the end of Tree of Life in particular — is a note of hope. Malick concludes, by way of a thesis, with lines from George Eliot’s Middlemarch:
The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
Jägerstätter’s refusal to bow the knee looked pointless in his time, but in its own way, it was a kind of heroic act, though not the kind that ordinarily merits the Hollywood treatment. The things that are not so ill with us are because people we’ll never hear about did what they had to do for people they’d never know, and who’d never know them. A hidden life is worth living, and giving up, so that others may live.