The Geography of Bliss (Eric Weiner)

I liked this. It could have easily devolved into a series of national clichés (the British are glum, the Swiss are precise like their watches, etc). But Eric Weiner is a much better writer than that, he has extensive international pedigree, and genuinely cares about the people he meets in these different places. I recommend this one.

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Quotes:

I’ve always believed that happiness is just around the corner. The trick is finding the right corner.

I had no marketable skills, a stunted sense of morality, and a gloomy disposition. I decided to become a journalist.

We humans are creatures of the last five minutes. In one study, people who found a dime on the pavement a few minutes before being queried on the happiness question reported higher levels of satisfaction with their overall lives than those who did not find a dime.

“When Americans say it was great, I know it was good. When they say it was good, I know it was okay. When they say it was okay, I know it was bad.”

Believe it or not, most people in the world say they are happy. Virtually every country in the world scores somewhere between five and eight on a ten-point scale.

Worst of all was Freud. While not technically a brooding philosopher, Freud did much to shape our views on happiness. He once said: “The intention that Man should be happy is not in the plan of Creation.” That is a remarkable statement, especially coming from a man whose ideas forged the foundation of our mental-health system.

Rusty handled a bong the way Yo-Yo Ma handles a cello.

A sense of calm sneaks up on me, a feeling so unusual that, at first, I am startled by it. I don’t recognize it. But there’s no denying its presence. I am at peace.

A lot of Switzerland works on the honor system, like the little rest huts that dot the Alps. There’s food inside. You eat the food and leave some money behind.

Or consider this statement: “In general, people can be trusted.” Studies have found that people who agree with this are happier than those who do not.

One study found that, of all the factors that affect the crime rate for a given area, the one that made the biggest difference was not the number of police patrols or anything like that but, rather, how many people you know within a fifteen-minute walk of your house.

Choice translates into happiness only when choice is about something that matters.

Karma pauses one of his pauses and then answers with a suggestion, a prescription. “You need to think about death for five minutes every day. It will cure you, sanitize you.”

Compromise is a skill, and like all skills it atrophies from lack of use.

All of the moments in my life, everyone I have met, every trip I have taken, every success I have enjoyed, every blunder I have made, every loss I have endured has been just right. I’m not saying they were all good or that they happened for a reason—I don’t buy that brand of pap fatalism—but they have been right. They have been . . . okay. As far as revelations go, it’s pretty lame, I know. Okay is not bliss, or even happiness. Okay is not the basis for a new religion or self-help movement. Okay won’t get me on Oprah. But okay is a start, and for that I am grateful.

When Ambition is your God, the office is your temple, the employee handbook your holy book. The sacred drink, coffee, is imbibed five times a day. When you worship Ambition, there is no Sabbath, no day of rest. Every day, you rise early and kneel before the God Ambition, facing in the direction of your PC. You pray alone, always alone, even though others may be present. Ambition is a vengeful God. He will smite those who fail to worship faithfully, but that is nothing compared to what He has in store for the faithful. They suffer the worst fate of all. For it is only when they are old and tired, entombed in the corner office, that the realization hits like a Biblical thunderclap. The God Ambition is a false God and always has been.

France’s most famous epicure, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, believed that food is the mirror to our souls: “Tell me what you eat, and I’ll tell you what you are.”

I don’t believe in such miracles, but others do, and my life is richer as a result.

happiness is a choice. Not an easy choice, not always a desirable one, but a choice nonetheless.

As a rule of thumb, the more fucked-up a country, the more said country insists on crisp bills.

And what are the cultural ingredients needed for democracy to take root? Trust and tolerance. Not only trust of those inside your group—family, for instance—but external trust. Trust of strangers. Trust of your opponents, your enemies, even.

The Soviets denied God’s existence yet tried to improvize a spirituality.

“Not my problem” is not a philosophy. It’s a mental illness.

In Britain, finding out someone’s name isn’t pro forma. It’s an accomplishment.

dogs and gardens, the two pillars of English happiness. Especially dogs.

Maybe this is how enlightenment happens. Not with a thunderclap or a bolt of lightning but as a steady drip, drip, drip until one day you realize your bucket is full.

There it is again: that Hindu belief that all of life is maya, illusion. Once we see life as a game, no more consequential than a game of chess, then the world seems a lot lighter, a lot happier.

Paradise is a moving target.

only a fool or a philosopher would make sweeping generalizations about the nature of happiness. I am no philosopher, so here goes: Money matters, but less than we think and not in the way that we think. Family is important. So are friends. Envy is toxic. So is excessive thinking. Beaches are optional. Trust is not. Neither is gratitude.

I wonder if happiness is really the highest good, as Aristotle believed. Maybe Guru-ji, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, is right. Maybe love is more important than happiness. Certainly, there are times when happiness seems beside the point. Ask a single, working mother if she is happy, and she’s likely to reply, “You’re not asking the right question.”

Karma Ura, the Bhutanese scholar and cancer survivor. “There is no such thing as personal happiness,” he told me. “Happiness is one hundred percent relational.”

Zone One (Colson Whitehead)

Another "art" writer tackling a pop culture theme, similar to what happened with The Last Wherewolf. This is a very well written book. A little slow in the first two thirds, it picks momentum as it moves towards the end. Whitehead makes this more than a standard "shoot'em in the head" zombie story by turning it into a metaphor of 21st century life in New York City. It also invites the reader to decide who are the real monsters: the zombies, the equally carnivorous (and also cynical) government, or the zombie hunters. In the end, zombies and humans are just trying to survive. The book's contribution to the zombie fauna is the "straggler": the zombie who has become immobilized, mysteriously frozen into repeating one single gesture of his or her previous life. Very haunting.

This invites comparison with the other zombie book i read recently: World War Z. They both try to deal realistically with the impossible problem of how to dispose of the enormous amount of leftover zombie "biomass" after a zombie calamity, but Zone One is shorter, better written, and it refreshingly avoids indulging on the American military fetish.

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Quotes:

Their lives had been an interminable loop of repeated gestures; now their existences were winnowed to this discrete and eternal moment.

PASD, or Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder.

New York City in death was very much like New York City in life. It was still hard to get a cab, for example. The main difference was that there were fewer people.

Bring out your dead.

That’s the way we’ve always done it. It’s what this country was built on. The plague merely made it more literal, spelled it out in case you didn’t get it before.

“Stop! Can You Hear the Eagle Roar? (Theme from Reconstruction),”

At their core, Last Night stories were all the same: They came, we died, I started running.

He stopped hooking up with other people once he realized the first thing he did was calculate whether or not he could outrun them.

He’d never met anyone in the camps or the great out there who had made it out of the city after the first couple of days. They left the doors unlocked.

Beauty could not thrive, and the awful was too commonplace to be of consequence. Only in the middle was there safety.

Mustn’t humanize them. The whole thing breaks down unless you are fundamentally sure that they are not you.

He’d always seen himself in them, the robots who roved the galaxy in search of the emotion chip, the tentacled things that were, beneath their mottled, puckered membranes, more human than the murderous villagers who hunted them for their difference.

She’d become partial to cachaça after a six-month thing with a Brazilian guy whose constant referencing of his nationality was a cornerstone of his personality,

We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.

“You know why they walk around? They walk around because they’re too stupid to know they’re dead.”

A Thread of Grace (Mary Doria Russell)

Beautiful and brutal. I liked the beginning and middle, but didn't like the end.

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Quotes:

How could anyone live with so much fear?

“Like Papa used t’say, ‘Christ’ll take what nobody else wants.’ ” “And so there is hope, even for pigs like you,” the nun replies.

Schramm pushed himself up from the table and stood there, slump-shouldered and swaying, far away. “You must learn not to be kind,” he told Renzo finally. “Be as blind and as deaf as you have to be. Feel nothing. Only the heartless will survive.”

The last kilometer is as steep as a ladder against a wall: a challenge for the strong, the experienced, the well-equipped. For the desperate, it’s simply necessary.

Broad back against the mountainside, he takes a deep breath of thin air to power a heartfelt oration concerning the height of mountains, the weight of other people’s luggage, the unreasonable ambition of Germans, and the direct involvement of pigs and whores in the parentage of Dwight David Eisenhower,

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” he says when he can speak again. “I have murdered 91,867 people.”

Stop seeing real Jews, and it’s easy for people to believe lies.

“Shall I tell you why young men love war?” Schramm offers dreamily. “In peace, there are a hundred questions with a thousand answers! In war, there is only one big question with one right answer.” He pours them each another shot, emptying the bottle. “War smashes all our petty problems and sweeps the shards into one huge, patriotic pile. Going to war makes you a man. It is emotionally exciting and morally restful.”

“Jews are simply members of the human race.” After a thoughtful pause, Renzo adds, “I can think of no worse insult.” “There are plenty of people who can,” Schramm warns. “They never saw you. They don’t know your name. They don’t know anything about you, but they hate you.

“I never understood the logic. You’re Communists to a man, but you own all the banks. You’re subhuman, but you’re running the world.”

Bombs do not drop from God’s hand. Triggers are not pulled by God’s finger. Each of us chooses, one by one, and God’s eye does not turn from those who suffer or from those who inflict suffering. Our choices are weighed. And, thus, the nations are judged.”

Ten percent of any group of human beings are shitheads. Catholics, Jews. Germans, Italians. Pilots, priests. Teachers, doctors, shopkeepers. Ten percent are shitheads. Another ten percent—salt of the earth! Saints! Give you the shirts off their backs. Most people are in the middle, just trying to get by.”

“You are a very dangerous man, Padre. You are an ordinary, decent fellow who aspires to saintliness.”

“I’m paying a debt to a surgeon who was killed in Abyssinia. He can’t collect.”

Slowly devotion to family and community condensed to stubborn determination.

God save us from idealists!” Renzo cries softly. “They dream of a world without injustice, and what crime won’t they commit to get it?” Rubbing at his knee with both hands, he mutters, “I swear to God, Mirella, I’d settle for a world with good manners.”

“I’ve sworn off ethics,” Renzo explains to the faint and fading pink puddles. “What’s the point?” he asks. “Too much for me,” he admits, face to the rain. “You sort it out.”

“There’s a saying in Hebrew,” he tells her. “ ‘No matter how dark the tapestry God weaves for us, there’s always a thread of grace.’

Claudia Kaplan is yet another casualty of a war that began long before it started, and has not ended yet. Immense, intractable, incomprehensible, that conflict remains the pivot point of two centuries, the event that defines before and after. Hundreds of millions killed, wounded, maimed, displaced. The last survivors are dying now. Their children and grandchildren are fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy that the dry bones shall live again, but the poison still seeps down, contaminating generations.

The Phantom of the Post Office (Kate Klise, M. Sarah Klise)

Another good installment in the 43 Old Cemetery Road series, continuing the tradition of cute macabre humor and epistolary storytelling. Read the installments in order for best effect.

We got this before it was officially out. Carol Stream Library rocks!

Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (Kim Cooper)

From the 33 1/3 series. Good introduction to the Elephant 6 people and their creative process. Everybody but Jeff Mangum.

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Quotes:

I know that it was really scary for him—as it is for everybody—sharing things with the outside world, when the things that you’re sharing are almost the whole of your insides, the thing without which there’d be no purpose to you.

After their set, a friend told them he’d had to go outside and walk around for a long time, because the experience was so emotionally overwhelming.

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is one of the fuzziest records ever made, and yet it is completely lacking in over-the-counter fuzz effects.

Microphone distortion is an artificial device you can use in the studio as a production and engineering choice, to simulate the energetic sound that you’re trying to get. It’s there, the people are playing it—how do you catch it on tape? You do certain artificial things to capture it.

When he first heard Jeff sing “I love you Jesus Christ,” he didn’t know how to take it. As someone who’d always had problems with organized religion, he was repelled. But as a songwriter, he was stunned by the profound and fearless honesty with which Jeff was expressing his faith. Jeff didn’t seem to give a damn what anyone thought of him, or if he seemed uncool. And it’s this naked honesty, Martyn thinks, that has brought so many people to the record—even folks who aren’t themselves religious are touched by Jeff’s faith and his guts.

there’s this extra quality of rawness and reality. It’s listening in to people’s lives, and when you capture that it resonates for people who hear it.

In the years following Aeroplane, Jeff began exploring his spiritual interests, reading Krishnamurti, traveling, spending time in a monastery and, as Laura saw it, becoming a more calm and centered person.

The Year of Living Biblically (A. J. Jacobs)

Funny and poignant, a normal guy's attempt to tackle the whole Bible in one year.

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Quotes:

As I read, I type into my PowerBook every rule, every guideline, every suggestion, every nugget of advice I find in the Bible. When I finish, I have a very long list. It runs seventy-two pages. More than seven hundred rules. The scope is astounding. All aspects of my life will be affected—the way I talk, walk, eat, bathe, dress, and hug my wife.

“You just have to tell them that you have a hunger and a thirst. And you may not sit at the same banquet table as them, but you have a hunger and thirst. So they shouldn’t judge you.” I love the way he talks. By the end, perhaps I’ll be able to speak in majestic food metaphors like Reverend Richards.

Inspired by my ex-uncle Gil, I had purchased some tassels from a website called “Tassels without Hassles.”

Inspired by my ex-uncle Gil, I had purchased some tassels from a website called “Tassels without Hassles.” They look like the kind of tassels on the corners of my grandmother’s needlepoint pillows.

When it comes to the Bible, there is always—but always—some level of interpretation, even on the most seemingly basic rules.

There is an upside to the Bible’s infertility motif: The harder it was for a woman to get pregnant, the greater was the resulting child.

I’ve rarely said the word Lord, unless it’s followed by of the Rings. I don’t often say God without preceding it with Oh my.

The prohibition against mixing wool and linen comes right after the command to love your neighbor. It’s not like the Bible has a section called “And Now for Some Crazy Laws.” They’re all jumbled up like a chopped salad.

The strictest Sabbath keepers today are probably the Orthodox Jews. In postbiblical times, the rabbis wrote down a complex list of forbidden behavior. It’s got thirty-nine types of work, including cooking, combing, and washing. You can’t plant, so gardening is off-limits. You can’t tear anything, so toilet paper must be pre-ripped earlier in the week. You can’t make words, so Scrabble is often considered off-limits (though at least one rabbi allows Deluxe Scrabble, since the squares have ridges, which provides enough separation between letters so that they don’t actually form words).

The Hebrew scriptures prescribe a tremendous amount of capital punishment. Think Saudi Arabia, multiply by Texas, then triple that.

He is serious. This isn’t a cutesy grumpy old man. This is an angry old man. This is a man with seven decades of hostility behind him.

The Bible is right: A deluge of images does encourage idolatry. Look at the cults of personality in America today. Look at Hollywood. Look at Washington. I’d like to see the next presidential race be run according to Second Commandment principles. No commercials. A radio-only debate. We need an ugly president. I know we’re missing out on some potential Abe Lincolns because they’d look gawky and gangly on TV.

The outer affects the inner. Behavior shapes your psyche as much as the other way around.

This is what the Sabbath should feel like. A pause. Not just a minor pause, but a major pause. Not just a lowering of the volume, but a muting. As the famous rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it, the Sabbath is a sanctuary in time. At about 1:30 I hear Julie come home. I call out

This is what the Sabbath should feel like. A pause. Not just a minor pause, but a major pause. Not just a lowering of the volume, but a muting. As the famous rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it, the Sabbath is a sanctuary in time.

I still can’t wrap my brain around the notion that God would change His mind because we ask Him to. And yet I still love these prayers. To me they’re moral weight training.

The point is, I don’t see the world as a collection of soulless quarks and neutrinos. At times—not all the time, but sometimes—the entire world takes on a glow of sacredness, like someone has flipped on a unfathomably huge halogen lamp and made the universe softer, fuller, less menacing.

When will it sink into my skull that there is no such thing as an obscure Bible verse?

The Tiffany of ten-string harps is an Indiana-based shop called Jubilee Harps. (Motto: “Home is where your harp is!”)

a white-haired man near Rockefeller Center started yelling at me. “A ten-string harp? The Bible actually says an eight-string harp, not a ten-string harp!” He could have been playing with my mind, or he could have been your garden-variety crazy, hard to tell.

I used to order kosher meals on airplanes because someone told me that they were better—the reasoning was that the airlines have to give the kosher meals special attention and can’t throw them in the vat with everyone else’s slop.

That’s the paradox: I thought religion would make me live with my head in the clouds, but as often as not, it grounds me in this world.

I found a tremendously disturbing Food and Drug Administration website that lists the “natural and unavoidable” amounts of insects for every kind of food. One hundred grams of pizza sauce can have up to thirty insect eggs. One hundred grams of drained mushrooms may contain twenty or more maggots. And if you want oregano on your mushroom pizza, you’ll be enjoying 1,250 or more insect fragments per 10 grams.

My only other brush with tefillin was a book I was sent a few years ago at Esquire. It was by Leonard Nimoy—Star Trek’s Spock himself—who, as it turns out, is also a photographer and a quasireligious Jew. His book contained racy black-and-white photography of half-nude women wrapped in tefillin, a sort of Mapplethorpe-meets-Talmud motif. (Brief but relevant side note: You know Spock’s famous split-fingered “Live long and prosper” salute? It’s actually a sacred hand position used by the Jewish priestly class, the kohanim.)

Here, at the halfway mark of my journey, I’ve had an unexpected mental shift. I feel closer to the ultrareligious New Yorkers than I do the secular. The guy with the fish on his bumper sticker. The black man with the kufi. The Hasidim with their swinging fringes. These are my compatriots. They think about God and faith and prayer all the time, just like I do.

Stop looking at the Bible as a self-help book.

My quest is a paradoxical one. I’m trying to fly solo on a route that was specifically designed for a crowd.

Before I leave, I ask the obvious question: What do the Samaritans think about the parable of Good Samaritan? Well, not surprisingly, they don’t object. They like it. There is even a Samaritan-owned Good Samaritan Coffee Shop in the West Bank. Benyamim tells me he has given Jesus’s parable a lot of thought and has his own take on it: It was autobiographical. Benyamim believes that the wounded man is meant to represent Jesus himself.

And then I am hit with a realization. And hit is the right word—it felt like a punch to my stomach. Here I am being prideful about creating an article in a midsize American magazine. But God—if He exists—He created the world. He created flamingos and supernovas and geysers and beetles and the stones for these steps I’m sitting on. “Praise the Lord,” I say out loud.

These people have perfected the art of ignoring the homeless. Their body language is very clear: “I am unable to look up for even a second because I am so deeply involved in observing this discarded Tropicana pineapple juice carton on the track.” It’s heartbreaking.

The law of fair weights and measures appears an impressive six times in the Bible. By way of comparison, the passages often cited to condemn homosexuality: also six.

Passover. If you’re even remotely Jewish, you know it as the religiously themed, springtime version of Thanksgiving.

Passover. If you’re even remotely Jewish, you know it as the religiously themed, springtime version of Thanksgiving. And if you’re Christian, you probably know it, at the very least, as the meal that Jesus was eating at the Last Supper.

I’ve learned that men of my vintage aren’t having a whole lot of sex. I think I’m hanging out with too many new fathers.

I could adopt the cognitive-dissonance strategy: If I act like Jesus is God, eventually maybe I will start to believe that Jesus is God. That’s been my tactic with the God of the Hebrew Bible, and it’s actually started to work.

That’s the big secret: The radical wing of the Christian right is a lot more boring than its liberal detractors would have you believe.

I hope Ralph’s right. I hope the Bible doesn’t endorse gay bashing.

I call Greenberg. He has plenty to say about the Bible and homosexuality. But the point I find most fascinating is this: God and humans are partners in a quest to reveal new meanings of the Bible. The letters of the Bible are eternal, but not its interpretation.

There are always two active parties. We must have reverence and awe for God, and honor for the chain of tradition. But that doesn’t mean we can’t use new information to help us read the holy texts in new ways.

It’s an odd way to live. But also kind of great and powerful. I’ve never before been so aware of the thousands of little good things, the thousands of things that go right every day.

I keep a record of wrongs. It’s in my Palm Treo in a file I’ve labeled “Stuff.”

The Catholic and Lutheran services I’ve been to have been like well-orchestrated Bach concertos. This is like Ornette Coleman free jazz. All spontaneous.

I snap myself out of it. It was too much. How could I come back to New York and tell Julie I was saved at a serpent-handling church in Tennessee? I force myself back down. I’m not ready to surrender yet.

The only genuine-ish biblical robe that didn’t cost several hundred dollars was at a Halloween costume store. There it was, next to the Roman emperor togas: a shepherd’s robe.

“Let me drop an atom bomb on you,” said this Karaite; his name is Nehemiah Gordon, and he runs the Karaite website, the Karaite Korner. “You can’t follow all of the Bible literally because we can’t know what some of the words mean.”

The Bible may have not been dictated by God, it may have had a messy and complicated birth, one filled with political agendas and outdated ideas—but that doesn’t mean the Bible can’t be beautiful and sacred.

If you try to literally follow Leviticus 19:18—“You shall love your neighbor as yourself”—well, you can’t.

“C. S. Lewis said the distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuthhounds conceive.” In short, pretending to be better than you are is better than nothing.

As you probably know, the most important part of a modern bar or bat mitzvah isn’t the Torah portion or lighting the candles, it’s the theme. You’ve got to have a theme: sports, Camelot, whatever.

So at this suburban Jersey country club, my son’s hands locked around my neck, his head pressed against my shoulder, I chose to accept this feeling and ride it to the end. To surrender. If I had to label it, I’d say the feeling is part love, part gratefulness, part connectedness, part joy.

Driving back to New York, I ask myself, why did that just happen? Did it have something to do with my frazzled state after Nancy’s death? Maybe. Was it because my project is about to end, and I forced myself into the state? Yeah, probably. But even if it was manufactured, it was still real.

The year showed me beyond a doubt that everyone practices cafeteria religion. It’s not just moderates. Fundamentalists do it too.

But the more important lesson was this: there’s nothing wrong with choosing. Cafeterias aren’t bad per se. I’ve had some great meals at cafeterias. I’ve also had some turkey tetrazzini that gave me the dry heaves for sixteen hours. The key is in choosing the right dishes. You need to pick the nurturing ones (compassion), the healthy ones (love thy neighbor), not the bitter ones. Religious leaders don’t know everything about every food, but maybe the good ones can guide you to what is fresh. They can be like a helpful lunch lady who—OK, I’ve taken the metaphor too far.

The first is from the pastor out to pasture, Elton Richards. Here’s his metaphor: Try thinking of the Bible as a snapshot of something divine. It may not be a perfect picture. It may have flaws: a thumb on the lens, faded colors in the corners. But it still helps to visualize.

Around the World in 80 Days (Jules Verne)

My daughter Laura has discovered Jules Verne. We read together (separately), Journey to the Centre of the Earth, now Around the World in 80 Days and we're getting started on 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea(s). I've read all this in Brazil, in Portuguese, when i was about her age, borrowing each green-leather bound book from my Grandfather Gustavo's collection. They are great books, exciting and rewarding.

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Quotes:

“Monsieur is going to leave home?” “Yes,” returned Phileas Fogg. “We are going round the world.”

Phileas Fogg, who was not travelling, but only describing a circumference,

In the way this strange gentleman was going on, he would leave the world without having done any good to himself or anybody else.

“Why, you are a man of heart!” “Sometimes,” replied Phileas Fogg, quietly; “when I have the time.”

“The valves are not sufficiently charged!” he exclaimed. “We are not going. Oh, these English! If this was an American craft, we should blow up, perhaps, but we should at all events go faster!”

If anyone, at this moment, had entered the Custom House, he would have found Mr. Fogg seated, motionless, calm, and without apparent anger, upon a wooden bench.

Phileas Fogg was free! He walked to the detective, looked him steadily in the face, and with the only rapid motion he had ever made in his life, or which he ever would make, drew back his arms, and with the precision of a machine knocked Fix down.

Chapter XXXVII:  In Which It Is Shown That Phileas Fogg Gained Nothing By His Tour Around The World, Unless It Were Happiness

Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening (Diana Butler Bass)

Sometimes i hate it when i finish reading a truly awesome book... i'll miss this one. Will probably have to read it again. I believe at the end of the year we will still be saying that this is one of the most important books of 2012. Go Diana, go! You rock.

Quotes:

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Strange as it may seem in this time of cultural anxiety, economic near collapse, terrorist fear, political violence, environmental crisis, and partisan anger, I believe that the United States (and not only the United States) is caught up in the throes of a spiritual awakening, a period of sustained religious and political transformation during which our ways of seeing the world, understanding ourselves, and expressing faith are being, to borrow a phrase, “born again.”

Ellen is still reaching for connection. Even after leaving the church, she attempts to create some sort of new faith community through books, the Internet, charity, and her workplace.

there are four American Gods: the Authoritarian God (31 percent of the population), the Benevolent God (23 percent), the Critical God (16 percent), and the Distant God (24 percent).

American churches were organized on the same principles and structures as were twentieth-century American corporations.

However, in a roundabout way, their criticism actually demonstrates authentic spiritual longing. Somewhere these young adults have evidently heard that Christianity is supposed to be a religion about love, forgiveness, and practicing what Jesus preached and that faith should give meaning to real life. They are judging Christianity on its own teachings and believe that American churches come up short. Thus, their discontent about what is may reflect a deeper longing for a better sort of Christianity, one that embodies Jesus’s teaching and life in a way that makes a real difference in the world.

Insofar as religion was guardian, pastor, and priest of the old order, it will have to give way and is already doing so. Western Christendom has ended; a “Christian America” survives as mythic memory and political slogan.

No matter how fractious, wounded, irksome, hypocritical, or potentially destructive it can be, religion makes a difference, especially in the lives of the disadvantaged, the oppressed, and the poor.

The awakening going on around us is not an evangelical revival; it is not returning to the faith of our fathers or re-creating our grandparents’ church. Instead, it is a Great Returning to ancient understandings of the human quest for the divine.

As a pastor asked me, “Can we stop reciting the creed now? I’m tired of it driving people away from church.”

During the last few centuries, to ask “What do you believe?” in the religious realm was to demand intellectual answers about things that cannot be comprehended entirely by the mind. Thus masked as objective truth, religion increasingly became a matter of opinion, personal taste, individual interpretation, and wishful thinking.

People became quite militant about the answers they liked the best. The what questions often divided families and neighbors into rival churches, started theological quarrels, initiated inquisitions, fueled political and social conflict, and led, on occasion, to one losing one’s head.

SPIRITUAL QUESTION I: How Do I Believe?

SPIRITUAL QUESTION 2: Who Do I Believe?

when we insert ourselves as the ones who must trust, the tone changes and the Apostles’ Creed takes on the quality of a prayer. Instead of factual certainty, the creed evokes humility, hope, and a bit of faithful supplication.

Notice that when we insert ourselves as the ones who must trust, the tone changes and the Apostles’ Creed takes on the quality of a prayer. Instead of factual certainty, the creed evokes humility, hope, and a bit of faithful supplication. It moves the action of the creed from the brain to the heart. Changing a single word, “believe,” to its original sense of “trust” transforms the text from a statement of dogma to an experience of God.

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, pointed out in a recent book that the Christian creeds are similar to the Three Jewels of Buddhism, the vows that shape a Buddhist way of life: “I take refuge in the Buddha; I take refuge in the Dharma (Teaching); I take refuge in Sangha (Community).”

The Religious Question: How Do I Do That?

Increasingly, as the church was externally defined as a national entity and a corporation, learning how meant being trained in how to: the professional and programmatic techniques to become an expert.

SPIRITUAL QUESTION 1: What Do I Do? The Art of Intention

From a historical perspective, borrowing simply means that conventional religious institutions—marked by “us” versus “them” attitudes—do not have adequate resources to respond to contemporary questions.

SPIRITUAL QUESTION 2: Why Do I Do It? The Art of Imitation

The primary why for any Christian practice is that the action, in some way, imitates Jesus.

The ultimate model for programmatic church was Willow Creek Community Church, located north of Chicago.

Spiritual practices are more like crafts than programs.

The path to Christian sainthood may not be as mystical as is often thought—it may be a matter of putting in the time to practice.

We are to be learners on the way, then initiates, apprentices, skilled practitioners, and masters. Not just members of a church.

SPIRITUAL QUESTION I: Where Am I?

the question “Who am I?” and its emerging answer, “I am my journey,” appear to be new contours shaping our sense of selfhood. In the twenty-first century, it may be better to ask “Where am I?” as a path toward understanding who I am.

SPIRITUAL QUESTION 2: Whose Am I?

This, I suspect, is the root of many people’s anxiety about church—that religion is the purveyor of a sort of salvation that does not address their lived struggles.

As a movement preposition, “through” reminds us that we are not static. Through God new possibilities open for growth as we move beyond our perceived limitations to new strengths, insights, and compassion.

And the reverse question is equally helpful: “Who is God through me?” What does God actually look like to others when I enact God’s love and justice in the world?

“Just putting a bunch of people together in a church building doesn’t make them a community. Community is about relationships and making connections. That’s spiritual work. And it may or may not happen in a church.”

Other than joining a political party, it is hard to think of any other sort of community that people join by agreeing to a set of principles.

Long ago, before the last half millennium, Christians understood that faith was a matter of community first, practices second, and belief as a result of the first two. Our immediate ancestors reversed the order. Now, it is up to us to restore the original order.

Jesus did not walk by the Sea of Galilee and shout to fishermen, “Have faith!” Instead, he asked them to do something: “Follow me.” When they followed, he gave them more

Jesus did not walk by the Sea of Galilee and shout to fishermen, “Have faith!” Instead, he asked them to do something: “Follow me.” When they followed, he gave them more things to do. At first, he demonstrated what he wanted them to do. Then he did it with them. Finally, he sent them out to do it themselves,

They discovered that proclaiming the kingdom was not a matter of teaching doctrine; rather, the kingdom was a matter of imitating Jesus’s actions.

It may seem as if religion is on a trajectory of unstoppable change, but genuine spiritual change does not result from historical determinism. Spiritual awakening is not ultimately the work of invisible cultural forces. Instead, it is the work of learning to see differently, of prayer, and of conversion. It is something people do.

Anxiety is frequently the mark of personal transformation, for anxiety is a primary emotion when the heart feels disoriented and lost.

Awakening is not a miracle we receive; it is actually something we can do.

What do you do to participate in awakening? To rouse others? To move to spread the good news of a new spiritual awakening? Perform faith. Display the kingdom in all that you do. Anticipate the reign of God in spiritual practices. Act up and act out for God’s love.

Awakening cannot occur without laughter and lightness.

Churches cannot be clubs for the righteous, institutions that maintain religious conformity in the face of change, or businesses that manage orthodoxy and personal piety. Churches must be more like Rolling Thunder or holy flash mobs. They must grasp—in a profound and authentic way—that they are sacred communities of performance where the faithful learn the script of God’s story, rehearse the reign of God, experience delight, surprise, and wonder, and participate fully in the play.

There is no specific technique that can be employed, no set program to follow to start a great awakening. If you want it to happen, you just have to do it. You have to perform its wisdom, live into its hope, and “act as if” the awakening is fully realized. And you have to do it with others in actions of mutual creation.

prepare by reading and learning the holy texts of faith in new ways.

engage two new practices of faith. One should be an inner practice, such as prayer, yoga, or meditation, and the other, an outward practice, such as offering hospitality to the homeless or learning to be a storyteller.

have fun.

These are hard times, worrisome times, and serious times. Try to enjoy the life you have and play along the way.

participate in making change.

This awakening will not be the last in human history, but it is our awakening. It is up to us to move with the Spirit instead of against it, to participate in making our world more humane, just, and loving.

Basic Training (Kurt Vonnegut)

A previously unpublished novella by a young Kurt Vonnegut, not as good as his best, but already showing off how great a writer he was.

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Quotes:

In an eon came evening, to cool, and to displace the sounds of daytime with whispers and croaks and sounds like rusty hinges from grass-tuft sanctuaries in woods and pastures, and from lily pads a quarter of a mile away.

You’re evidently going to have to learn the hard way that your happiness for the rest of your lives depends on how well you fit yourselves into other people’s plans, not vice versa; and on how willing you are to submit to the judgment of someone who knows more than you do.

Plenty in Life is Free - Reflections on Dogs, Training and Finding Grace (Kathy Sdao)

A surprisingly good book, a reflection on dog training as spiritual practice, and living grace.

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Quotes:

Plenty in Life is Free,

she makes a clear case for replacing the “Nothing in Life is Free” training mindset with an approach that creates something else Kathy and I have had conversations about—an emotionally intact animal.

It turns out that my concerns with NILIF have at least as much to do with my own spirituality and personal view of relationships as with the pros and cons of NILIF as a training regimen.

Life has a way of revealing falsehoods, mostly, I believe, through suffering. It causes disillusionment, literally. Illusions get shattered.

Major General Geoffrey Miller, who was in charge at Guantanamo Bay, visited her in Baghdad and said, ‘At Guantanamo Bay, we learned that the prisoners have to earn every single thing they have. He said they are like dogs and if you allow them to believe at any point that they are more than a dog, you’ve lost control.’”

The whole paradigm of physical dominance needs to go.

In the long run, communication trumps control.

When working with extremely challenging dogs, I’m occasionally tempted to distill my training advice to, “Reward any behaviors the dog does except the three you consider most annoying.”

I suggest our new paradigm could be about exchanging reinforcers: your dog gives you reinforcers (in the form of good behavior) and you give reinforcers to your dog, back-and-forth in a continuous flow.

“Reinforce behaviors you like; prevent reinforcement for behaviors you dislike.”

make sure you’re creating a “to do” list of behaviors, rather than a “don’t do” list.

Just consider that perfection is vastly overrated. You can safely let some things slide.

most pet dogs experience life as a series of relatively mundane stretches of time punctuated by Big Thrills.

Dog Training as Spiritual Practice

quote by Nelson Mandela in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom: “A leader is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind.”

Each morning that I wake to see my two old dogs eager to begin another day’s adventures, I say aloud, “Thank you God for one more day with my companions.” And I’m reminded that this word, so descriptive of their role in my life, translates literally to “bread fellows.”

This, though, runs the risk of messing up the sacrosanct hierarchy of “human dominates/outranks dog.” Good. Out with this dogma! Give up your devotion to hierarchiology (a great term coined by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their 1969 book, The Peter Principle). Consider rank (hierarchy) rank (stale and smelly).

So, above all but nutrition and shelter, dogs need translators—cultural liaisons and advocates to help them make sense of the mystery of living with humans.

Besides, the world surely doesn’t need another dictator, benign or otherwise. But it never has enough lovers.

I gladly relinquish the chance to have Stepford dogs—mindlessly obedient and lacking humor—in exchange for the vibrant, silly, somewhat unpredictable dogs by my side.

Letters from the Earth (Mark Twain)

Sarcastic Mark Twain book aimed at the Bible and Christianity. Sometimes it hits the mark, sometimes it simply reveals the prejudices of his time.

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Quotes:

Man is an experiment, the other animals are another experiment. Time will show whether they were worth the trouble.

there has never been an intelligent person of the age of sixty who would consent to live his life over again. His or anyone else’s.

The two Testaments are interesting, each in its own way. The Old one gives us a picture of these people’s Deity as he was before he got religion, the other one gives us a picture of him as he appeared afterward.

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (Catherynne M. Valente)

Very good adult fairy tale, reminiscent of Tolkien. Laura loved it. Hoping for a sequel.

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Quotes:

“I came for you, September. Just you. I wish you the best that can be hoped for, and no worse than can be expected.”

“Because when humans come to Fairyland, we’re supposed to trick them and steal from them and whap them about the ears—but we’re also supposed hex them up so that they can see proper-like. Not everything, just enough so as to be dazzled by mushroom glamours, and not so much that we can’t fool you twice with Fairy gold.

We all live inside the terrible engine of authority, and it grinds and shrieks and burns so that no one will say, lines on maps are silly.

Stories have a way of changing faces. They are unruly things, undisciplined, given to delinquency and the throwing of erasers. This is why we must close them up into thick, solid books, so they cannot get out and cause trouble.

though you can have grief without adventures, you cannot have adventures without grief.

Death is not a checkmate … it is more like a carnival trick. You cannot win, no matter how you move your Queen.”

As all mothers know, children travel faster than kisses.

Journey to the Centre of the Earth (Jules Verne)

I read this "in parallel" with Laura. It's as cool today as it was when i read it for the first time, in Brazil (when i was probably as old as Laura is now).

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Quotes:

In Sneffels Yoculis craterem kem delibat umbra Scartaris Julii intra calendas descende, audas viator, et terrestre centrum attinges. Kod feci. Arne Saknussemm

Descend into the crater of Sneffells Yokul, over which the shadow of Scartaris falls before the kalends of July, bold traveller, and you will reach the centre of the earth. I have done this. Arne Saknussemm

Oh, how hard it is to understand the hearts of girls and women. When they are not the most timid of creatures, they are the bravest. Reason has no part in their lives.

Thus were formed those huge beds of coal which, despite their size, the industrial nations will exhaust within three centuries unless they limit their consumption.

‘Science, my boy, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.’

‘So. Fate is having fun with me, is it?’ he cried. ‘The elements are in league against me! Air, fire, and water combine to block my way! Well, they are going to find out just how strong-willed I am! I won’t give in, I won’t move back an inch, and we shall see whether man or Nature will get the upper hand!’

‘Axel,’ the Professor replied very calmly, ‘our situation is almost desperate, but there are a few chances of our escaping, and I am considering these. If we may die at any moment, we may also be saved at any moment. So let us be prepared to seize the slightest opportunity.’

‘But the compass! The compass! It pointed north! How can we explain that fact?’ ‘Good Lord,’ I said disdainfully, ‘the best thing to do is not to explain it. That’s the simplest solution.’

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African / Written By Himself (Olaudah Equiano)

Strange book. I later read that some of the story is disputed, for example, there are some records where he indicated he was born in the USA. In any case, he had a very interesting life indeed.

He only came to be an abolitionist late in life. The parts of the story where he works in ships that are transporting slaves for sale are a little unexpected.

Neighing sea horses, really?

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Quotes:

O, ye nominal Christians! might not an African ask you, learned you this from your God, who says unto you, Do unto all men as you would men should do unto you?

cheering myself with the reflection that there was a time allotted for me to die as well as to be born, I instantly cast off all fear or thought whatever of death, and went through the whole of my duty with alacrity; pleasing myself with the hope, if I survived the battle, of relating it and the dangers I had escaped

I had a mind on which every thing uncommon made its full impression, and every event which I considered as marvellous. Every extraordinary escape, or signal deliverance, either of myself or others, I looked upon to be effected by the interposition of Providence.

I grant, indeed, that slaves are some times, by half-feeding, half-clothing, over-working and stripes, reduced so low, that they are turned out as unfit for service, and left to perish in the woods, or expire on a dunghill.

the whole term of a negro's life may be said to be there but sixteen years!

It was very common in several of the islands, particularly in St. Kitt's, for the slaves to be branded with the initial letters of their master's name; and a load of heavy iron hooks hung about their necks. Indeed on the most trifling occasions they were loaded with chains; and often instruments of torture were added. The iron muzzle, thumb-screws, &c. are so well known, as not to need a description, and were sometimes applied for the slightest faults. I have seen a negro beaten till some of his bones were broken, for even letting a pot boil over.

But had the cruel man struck me I certainly should have defended myself at the hazard of my life; for what is life to a man thus oppressed?

any person in whose custody a bible was found concealed was to be imprisoned and flogged, and sent into slavery for ten years.

One morning we had vast quantities of sea-horses about the ship, which neighed exactly like any other horses.

I found none among the circle of my acquaintance that kept wholly the ten commandments. So righteous was I in my own eyes, that I was convinced I excelled many of them in that point, by keeping eight out of ten;

Mockingjay (The Final Book of The Hunger Games) (Suzanne Collins)

I actually liked this one better than the first two. At least it didn't go into uncritical praise for the military.

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Quotes:

I don’t know what to tell him about the aftermath of killing a person. About how they never leave you.

“And that, my friends, is how a revolution dies.”

It takes ten times as long to put yourself back together as it does to fall apart.”

The differences between the Capitol and 13 are thrown into sharp relief by the event. When Coin says “wedding,” she means two people signing a piece of paper and being assigned a new compartment. Plutarch means hundreds of people dressed in finery at a three-day celebration.

There’s no going back. So we might as well get on with things.”

I know this would have happened anyway. That what I need to survive is not Gale’s fire, kindled with rage and hatred. I have plenty of fire myself. What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again.

I’ll tell them how I survive it. I’ll tell them that on bad mornings, it feels impossible to take pleasure in anything because I’m afraid it could be taken away. That’s when I make a list in my head of every act of goodness I’ve seen someone do. It’s like a game. Repetitive. Even a little tedious after more than twenty years. But there are much worse games to play.

His Shoes Were Far Too Tight (Edward Lear)

A good sample of the nonsense poems of Edward Lear, selected by Lear fan Daniel Pinkwater, and illustrated by Caleb Brown.

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Quotes:

Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live:
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue
And they went to sea in a sieve.

"How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!"
Who has written such volumes of stuff!
Some think him ill-tempered and queer,
But a few think him pleasant enough

O! My aged Uncle Arly!
Sitting on a heap of Barley
Thro' the silent hours of night
Close beside a leafy thicket:
On his nose there was a Cricket
In his hat a Railway Ticket;
(But his shoes were far too tight.)

Catching Fire (The Second Book of the Hunger Games) (Suzanne Collins)

I didn't like this book at all, and it gave me nightmares. But i couldn't stop reading it.

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Quotes:

And then it happens. Up and down the row, the victors begin to join hands. Some right away, like the morphlings, or Wiress and Beetee. Others unsure but caught up in the demands of those around them, like Brutus and Enobaria. By the time the anthem plays its final strains, all twenty-four of us stand in one unbroken line in what must be the first public show of unity among the districts since the Dark Days.

“You just remember who the enemy is,” Haymitch tells me. “That’s all. Now go on. Get out of here.”

“We had to save you because you’re the mockingjay, Katniss,” says Plutarch. “While you live, the revolution lives.”

“Katniss, there is no District Twelve.”

The Machine Stops (E. M. Forster)

Highly prescient and slightly creepy novella about the ways technology has the potential to enhance but at the same time diminish human beings.

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Quotes:

‘You talk as if a god had made the Machine,’ cried the other. ‘I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything.

‘O Machine!’ she murmured, and caressed her Book, and was comforted.

Man is the measure. That was my first lesson. Man’s feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong.

How can I possibly explain this? It was naked, humanity seemed naked, and all these tubes and buttons and machineries neither came into the world with us, nor will they follow us out, nor do they matter supremely while we are here.

‘Beware of first- hand ideas!’ exclaimed one of the most advanced of them.

‘The Machine,’ they exclaimed, ‘feeds us and clothes us and houses us; through it we speak to one another, through it we see one another, in it we have our being. The Machine is the friend of ideas and the enemy of superstition: the Machine is omnipotent, eternal; blessed is the Machine.’

But there came a day when, without the slightest warning, without any previous hint of feebleness, the entire communication-system broke down, all over the world, and the world, as they understood it, ended.

Letters To A Young Contrarian (Christopher Hitchens)

Extraordinary advice from Hitchens. I read this slowly to make it last, and when i finished, i felt like i was saying goodbye to a friend. The chapter on religion doth sting, but i'm sure we deserve it.

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Quotes:

I have become inured without becoming indifferent. I attack and criticise people myself; I have no right to expect lenience in return.

while courage is not in itself one of the primary virtues, it is the quality that makes the exercise of the virtues possible.

The other positive and affirmative element in Rilke is his approach to Eros. He had a high intuition about sex, both as a liberating force and also as the best riposte to the foul suggestions of death. His seven so-called Phallic Poems are among the best non-love verses since the brave days of Marvell and the Metaphysicals; they openly announce that fucking is its own justification.

The truth cannot lie, but if it could, it would lie somewhere in between.

I cringe every time I hear denunciations of “the politics of division”—as if politics was not division by definition.

we are mammals, and the prefrontal lobe (at least while we wait for genetic engineering) is too small while the adrenaline gland is too big.

And it was in order to survive those years of stalemate and realpolitik that a number of important dissidents evolved a strategy for survival. In a phrase, they decided to live “as if.”

There’s a small paradox here; the job of supposed intellectuals is to combat oversimplification or reductionism and to say, well, actually, it’s more complicated than that. At least, that’s part of the job. However, you must have noticed how often certain “complexities” are introduced as a means of obfuscation. Here it becomes necessary to ply with glee the celebrated razor of old Occam, dispose of unnecessary assumptions, and proclaim that, actually, things are less complicated than they appear.

Very often in my experience, the extraneous or irrelevant complexities are inserted when a matter of elementary justice or principle is at issue.

So I practise cognitive and emotional dissonance. The most I can claim is that I do it consciously, while waiting for better days.

(I have my answer ready if I turn out to be mistaken about this: at the bar of judgement I shall argue that I deserve credit for an honest conviction of unbelief and must in any case be acquitted of the charge of hypocrisy or sycophancy. If the omnipotent and omniscient one does turn out to be of the loving kind, I would expect this plea to do me more good than any trashy casuistry of the sort popularised by Blaise Pascal. One could also fall back upon the less principled and more shiftily empirical defense offered by Bertrand Russell: “Oh Lord, you did not give us enough evidence.”)

what really matters about any individual is not what he thinks, but how he thinks.

Sigmund Freud was surely right when he concluded that religious superstition is ineradicable, at least for as long as we fear death and fear the darkness. It belongs to the childhood of our race, and childhood is not always—as Freud also helped us to understand—our most attractive or innocent period.

However, those who persecute religion are to be avoided at all costs. Antigone taught us to trust the instinct that is revolted by desecration.

What I propose to you is a permanent engagement with those who think they possess what cannot be possessed. Time spent in arguing with the faithful is, oddly enough, almost never wasted. The argument is the origin of all arguments; one must always be striving to deepen and refine it; Marx was right when he stated in 1844 that “the criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism.”

After all, believing what I believe about the likely randomness of human life, why do I care to write a tract like this one, advocating what I consider to be the glories of Promethean revolt and the pleasures of skeptical inquiry? What’s the point? I have no answer to the question, which I believe to be unanswerable, and that is one unassailable reason why I so heartily distrust those who claim that they do have an answer. But at least they have the question, and that’s something.

Nowadays, “public opinion” is more smoothly and easily ventriloquised. I am sure you have had the experience of making up your own mind on a question and then discovering, on the evening news of the same day, that only 23.6 percent of people agree with you.

One must have the nerve to assert that, while people are entitled to their illusions, they are not entitled to a limitless enjoyment of them and they are not entitled to impose them upon others.

One way of facing this impossible position was to be as grim as possible and to treat all hopes as illusions. For those facing a long haul and a series of defeats, pessimism can be an ally.

the moment of near despair is quite often the moment that precedes courage rather than resignation. In a sense, with the back to the wall and no exit but death or acceptance, the options narrow to one. There can even be something liberating in this realisation.

Ruthless and arrogant though power can appear, it is only ever held by mere mammals who excrete and yearn, and who suffer from insomnia and insecurity. These mammals are also necessarily vain in the extreme, and often wish to be liked almost as much as they desire to be feared.

all human achievement must also be accomplished by mammals and this realisation (interestingly negated by sexless plaster saints and representations of angels) puts us on a useful spot. It strongly suggests that anyone could do what the heroes have done.

The essential element of historical materialism as applied to ethical and social matters was (and actually still is) this: it demonstrated how much unhappiness and injustice and irrationality was man-made. Once the fog of supposedly god-given conditions had been dispelled, the decision to tolerate such conditions was exactly that—a decision.

Distrust any speaker who talks confidently about “we,” or speaks in the name of “us.” Distrust yourself if you hear these tones creeping into your own style.

I want to urge you very strongly to travel as much as you can, and to evolve yourself as an internationalist. It’s as important a part of your education as a radical as the reading of any book.

In one way, travelling has narrowed my mind. What I have discovered is something very ordinary and unexciting, which is that humans are the same everywhere and that the degree of variation between members of our species is very slight.

Meanwhile, it could be worth bearing in mind that, if you really care about a serious cause or a deep subject, you may have to be prepared to be boring about it.

Dante was a sectarian and a mystic but he was right to reserve one of the fieriest corners of his inferno for those who, in a time of moral crisis, try to stay neutral.

Serbian and Croatian irredentists and cleansers openly fought under the banners of their respective Christian Orthodox and Roman Catholic faiths and were often blessed by priests and prelates. The Bosnians resisted for the most part as Bosnians;

Those who try to condemn or embarrass you by the company you keep will usually be found to be in very poor company themselves;

The next phase or epoch is already discernible; it is the fight to extend the concept of universal human rights, and to match the “globalisation” of production by the globalisation of a common standard for justice and ethics.

as William Morris put it so finely in The Dream of John Ball: Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of defeat, and when it comes it turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.

The high ambition, therefore, seems to me to be this: That one should strive to combine the maximum of impatience with the maximum of skepticism, the maximum of hatred of injustice and irrationality with the maximum of ironic self-criticism. This would mean really deciding to learn from history rather than invoking or sloganising it.

Picture all experts as if they were mammals.

Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity.

Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence.

Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.

Black Like Me (John Howard Griffin)

A wonderful book, from a remarkable man. Very few people could have pulled this out, and even fewer would have survived it. John Griffin not only survived, but became a better man on account of his research.

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Quotes:

We no longer have time to atomize principles and beg the question. We fill too many gutters while we argue unimportant points and confuse issues.

How else except by becoming a Negro could a white man hope to learn the truth?

I learned a strange thing - that in a jumble of unintelligible talk, the word “nigger” leaps out with electric clarity. Yo u always hear it and always it stings.

“You’ve got to plan ahead now,” he said. “You can’t do like you used to when you were a white man.

After a while Joe took a pocket Bible from the green serge army shirt he wore and began reading the Psalms to himself.

“Blessed St. Jude,” I heard myself whisper, “send the bastard away,” and I wondered from what source within me the prayer had spontaneously sprung.

The whites seemed far away, out there in their parts of the city. The distance between them and me was far more than the miles that physically separated us. It was an area of unknowing. I wondered if it could really be bridged.

“We need a conversion of morals,” the elderly man said. “Not just superficially, but profoundly. And in both races. We need a great saint - some enlightened common sense.

The Negro often dreams of things separated from him only by a door, knowing that he is forever cut off from experiencing them.

The Negro learns this silent language fluently. He knows by the white man’s look of disapproval and petulance that he is being told to get on his way, that he is “stepping out of line.”

I had grown so accustomed to being a Negro, to being shown contempt, that I could not rid myself of the cautions. I was embarrassed to ride in the front seat of the car with a white man, especially on our way to his home. It was breaking the “Southern rule” somehow.

What did we fear? I could not say exactly. It was unlikely the Klan would come riding down on us. We merely fell into the fear that hangs over the state, a nameless and awful thing. It reminded me of the nagging, focusless terror we felt in Europe when Hitler began his marches, the terror of talking with Jews (and our deep shame of it).

It is perhaps the most incredible collection of what East calls “assdom” in the South. It shows that the most obscene figures are not the ignorant ranting racists, but the legal minds who front for them, who “invent” for them the legislative proposals and the propaganda bulletins.

He saw the Negro as a different species. He saw me as something akin to an animal in that he felt no need to maintain his sense of human dignity, though certainly he would have denied this.

“When you force humans into a subhuman mode of existence, this always happens. Deprive a man of any contact with the pleasures of the spirit and he’ll fall completely into those of the flesh.”

I could only conclude that his attitude came from an overwhelming love for his child, so profound it spilled over to all humanity. I knew that he was totally unaware of its ability to cure men; of the blessing it could be to someone like me after having been exhausted and scraped raw in my heart by others this rainy Alabama night.

We spoke of the whites. “They’re God’s children, just like us,” he said. “Even if they don’t act very godlike anymore. God tells us straight - we’ve got to love them, no ifs, ands, and buts about it. Why, if we hated them, we’d be sunk down to their level. There’s plenty of us doing just that, too.”

“When we stop loving them, that’s when they win.”

It was thrown in my face. I saw it not as a white man and not as a Negro, but as a human parent. Their children resembled mine in all ways except the superficial one of skin color, as indeed they resembled all children of all humans. Ye t this accident, this least important of all qualities, the skin pigment, marked them for inferior status.

In Montgomery, the capital of Alabama, I encountered a new atmosphere. The Negro’s feeling of utter hopelessness is here replaced by a determined spirit of passive resistance. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.’ s influence, like an echo of Gandhi’s, prevails. Nonviolent and prayerful resistance to discrimination is the keynote.

The monk laughed. “Didn’t Shakespeare say something about ‘every fool in error can find a passage of Scripture to back him up’? He knew his religious bigots.”

The car soon arrived, with children waving and shouting from the windows. I felt their arms around my neck, their hugs and the marvelous jubilation of reunion. And in the midst of it, the picture of the prejudice and bigotry from which I had just come flashed into my mind, and I heard myself mutter: “My God, how can men do it when there are things like this in the world?”

If we could not accept our somewhat different practice of racist suppression of black Americans, how could we ever hope to correct it? Our experience with the Nazis had shown one thing: where racism is practiced, it damages the whole community, not just the victim group.

I learned within a very few hours that no one was judging me by my qualities as a human individual and everyone was judging me by my pigment. As soon as white men or women saw me, they automatically assumed I possessed a whole set of false characteristics (false not only to me but to all black men). They could not see me or any other black man as a human individual because they buried us under the garbage of their stereotyped view of us.

Heaped on top of the economic reprisals and the dangers of physical reprisal was perhaps the most damaging reprisal of all - the deliberate character assassination that sprang into play the moment a man suggested that there ought to be equality among citizens, and this in a land where we claim equality as a first principle. How easy it was to destroy a man’s good name and reputation by suggesting he was in some way subversive or by calling him a communist.

It got so bad that Lillian Smith wrote: “It’s high time we stopped giving the communists credit for every decent, brave, considerate act” white men might show in regard to black men.

racism always hides under a respectable guise - usually the guise of patriotism and religion

In spite of everything, however, those days of the early and mid-sixties were full of hope.

There are thousands of kinds of injustice but there is only one kind of justice - equal justice for all. To call for a little more justice, or a moderately gradual sort of justice, is to call for no justice. That is a simple truth.

Having recognized the depths of my own prejudices when I first saw my black face in the mirror, I was grateful to discover that within a week as a black man the old wounds were healed and all the emotional prejudice was gone.

he answered to a higher will that demanded merciful acts in a merciless world.

Look around, sisters and brothers, the Global Village arrived while we were out to lunch or napping through re-runs of starving children on the death channel. Look inward to the Great Spirit and know that the reality of human nature has been—and will always be—universal. Black Like Me means Human Like Us.