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.
A couple of weeks ago I sat in as Steve participated in an online Evangelical Covenant Church/Pacific Northwest conference ministerium discussion about Christian Nationalism. It was divided into three parts, each with a main thesis to consider, and further questions:
Discussion #1: Christian Nationalism in Historical Perspective
Agree or Disagree:
"The United States was founded as a Christian nation and should remain that way."
Further Discussion Questions:
1. In what ways has Christianity, historically, influenced national identities? What are the benefits and dangers of this influence?
2. How has Christian Nationalism shaped the way many Americans view the
relationship between their faith and government? What are the ways these views may or may not line up with the Bible?
Discussion #2: Christian Nationalism and the Teachings of Jesus
Agree or Disagree:
"The mixing of faith and nationalism is necessary to preserve moral values in America."
Further Discussion Questions:
1. In what ways has the Church, potentially, been complicit in allowing Christian Nationalist ideas to misrepresent Jesus’ articulated mission in the Bible?
2. What are the key differences between following Christ and adhering to Christian Nationalist ideology? How can we know when or if we’ve “crossed the line?
"The church is called to be a prophetic voice that critiques both culture and government when necessary."
Further Discussion Questions
1. Can churches help their people discern how to be patriotic citizens while staying centered on a loyalty to Jesus, as Lord, rather than on political or national identity and ideology?
2. What are practical ways pastors can help their congregations recognize and resist Christian Nationalist influences
Under the leadership of Board of World Mission staff member Rev. Angelica Regalado-Cieza, a cohort of seven persons representing the Northern and Southern Provinces has been formed to learn more about immigration issues in the United States through a six-week Fuller Theological Seminary course. Throughout this course, resources are provided for participants to share with their denominations. Below, we have compiled those resources for use in Moravian congregations and ministries. Many of the documents are provided in both English and Spanish; click the arrow next to each resource title to view all available documents.
Finding a Trustworthy Lawyer
Spanish
English
Rights Card
List of Important Documents and Information (Spanish and English in the same document)
Family Preparedness Plan
Know Your Rights
Risk Factors for U.S. Citizen Children of Immigrant Parents (Spanish and English in the same document)
Traumatic Separation Tips for Caregivers
Understanding Child Trauma
Sesame Street Resource for Comforting Kids During Community Stress
What Does it Mean for a Ministry to be Trauma-Informed? (English only)
Self Care Contract / Manual
Advocacy: Story of Self, Story of Us, Story of Now (English Only)
How to Call Your Members of Congress (English only)
How To Meet With Your Members of Congress (English only)
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?"
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.
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."
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-malick
Everyone
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 (TheTree 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?
A Hidden Life tells a story that might never have mattered
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.
Heather Cox Richardson reports, "Trump’s team has told the staff at Department of Health and Human Services—including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—to stop issuing health advisories, scientific reports, and updates to their websites and social media posts. Lena H. Sun, Dan Diamond, and Rachel Roubein of the Washington Post report that the CDC was expected this week to publish reports on the avian influenza virus, which has shut down Georgia’s poultry industry."
All this is a continuation of his anti-science philosophy, " If we stop testing right now, we'd have very few cases, if any." –President Donald J. Trump on COVID‐19 (20 June 2020). And look where that led us: https://edition.cnn.com/.../covid-disappearing-trump.../ (This is a profoundly disturbing visual that only goes through Oct. 31, 2020. As of April 13, 2024, 1,219,487 Americans have died of Covid. Imagine how many screens would be needed, set side by side, to capture THAT figure.)
<Americans depend on timely information from the CDC, the FDA and other agencies to avoid foodborne illnesses and stay aware of other health issues, said Dr. Peter Lurie, president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “When it comes to stopping outbreaks, every second counts,” Lurie said in a statement. “Confusion around the vaguely worded gag order is likely to lead to unnecessary delay in publishing urgent public alerts during active outbreaks.”>https://www.statnews.com/2025/01/22/trump-administration-orders-health-communications-pause-cdc-hhs-fda/
God help us, and God help the world. The US must be considered a massive vector for upcoming diseases.
I gather that Brooks, as a college-educated intellectual, hates
populism, (if populism is taken to be a political strategy of
appealing to “the people” by pitting them against “elites”
who are blamed for disregarding the will or concerns of the people. )
However, given the depth of economic and social inequality in the US,
it may be that populism is the only way to restore balance. But then
the question becomes, whose populism? authoritarian populism (MAGA) ,
or progressive populism ("FDR's New Deal")?
The former
identifies scapegoats in order to consolidate power, with the goal of
deconstructing the institutions of democracy. Heather Cox Richardson
describes it this way: "If you have ten people in a room, eight
of them just want to get by. They just want to put food on the table
and have a good time and have their friends and have a nice life. But
there are two people who want to control everybody else, and the way
that they get that power is to get six people to turn against the two
at the bottom."
The latter avoids
scapegoating and deconstructs powers that limit economic and social
inequality--political, corporate and media elites-- thus
strengthening the institutions that further democracy. Think FDR's
"New Deal" or Bernie Sanders.
It's harder for a
camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a conservative
intellectual to affirm progressive intellectuals' ideas. I hope
Brooks will be able to move from "maybe" to a full
validation of progressive populism.
In 2022, after re-reading the Fellowship of the Ring in the last chapters I was struck by how much American evangelicals (and today I would add those of the NAR) have in common with Boromir. -------------- In Chapter 10, "The Breaking of the Fellowship," Boromir, who has been eyeing Frodo ever since they emerged from the mines of Moria, attempts to convince Frodo to give him the ring:
<"You seem to ever think only of its power in the hands of the Enemy: of its evil uses not o its good. The world is changing, you say. Minas TIrith will fall, if the Ring lasts. But why? Certainly, if the Ring were with the Enemy, but why, if it were with us?" "Were you not at the Council?" answered Frodo. "Because we cannot used it, and what is done with it turns to evil."
Boromir got up and walked impatiently. "So you go on," he cried. "Gandalf, Elrond--all these folk have taught you to say so...Yet I often doubt if they are wise and not merely timid. True hearted Men, they will not be corrupted. We of Minas Tirith...do not desire the power of wizard-lord, only strength to defend ourselves, strength in a just cause...it is mad not to use [the ring], to use the power of the Enemy against him. The fearless, the ruthless, these alone will achieve victory. What could not a warrior do in this hour, a great leader? What could not Aragorn do? Or if he refuses, why not Boromir? The RIng would give me power of Command. How I would drive the hosts of Mordor, and all men would flock to my banner!">
1) Boromir, believes that if he had power, he could restore Gondor's greatness. American evangelicals believe that if they have power, they can restore America's greatness. 2) Boromir rejects the warnings of the wise; American evangelicals have rejected the warnings of those who are wise (for example, Russell Moore, Tim Keller, Beth Moore, Ron Sider, Roberta Hestenes, etc.) 3) Both Boromir and American evangelicals admire the fearless and ruthless, not those who are humble and merciful. They have embraced worldly "virtues" rather than authentic ones. 4) Both Boromir and American evangelicals believe they are oppressed, and so seek power "to defend themselves." 5) Boromir wants to use the Ring/power to win against the Enemy; American evangelicals want to use political power to win culture wars. . 7) Both Boromir and American evangelicals want to be in position to command, not to follow and serve. Both end up supporting a radical individualism, breaking the community/fellowship that once was the product of their obedience and loyalty.
However, my daughter urged me to remember that Boromir's redemption comes through a willingness to die rather ingloriously, trying to save two small hobbits (who aren't the 'important ones'), and confessing his error to Aragorn. May evangelicals and charismatics soon follow Boromir's arc.
