What should be left behind?

There is no spiritual or political scenario where you can abandon Christian virtue for the sake of the alleged greater good, and if a Christian politician abandons Christian virtue, then Christian believers should abandon him or her.

                                                                        -David French

A Little Read

 

Je vous préviens, que si vous ne me dites pas que nous avons la guerre, si vous vous permettez encore de pallier toutes les infamies, toutes les atrocités de cet Antichrist (ma parole, J’y crois)—je ne vous connais plus, vous n’êtes plus mon ami.

So starts Tolstoy's War and Peace. Ironically in French, left that way in the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation.* Character Anna Pavlovna jumps right in complaining about Napoleon, who is going to attempt the invasion of Russia, and lose over 500,000 soldiers in that futile endeavor.

*a wonderful work of translation! Try to get the out-of-print hardback edition. Why would anyone want a book that is 1250 pages long as a paperback? Unless you didn't want to actually read it. Or like I was in 1989: much too broke to afford anything but. I still have that old book. It is two volumes now, having broken in half, with yellow pages flying when I take it off the shelf to look at my underlines.

Thinking and Responding

(Christ and the Woman of Samaria at the Well, 1640)

Art can be a way of thinking, especially when the thoughts cannot keep up with the input. When the words and the theories don't fit the experience. You know you want to say something, but you can't even think it properly.

Many people feel that in the current American experience. I know I do. 

I especially appreciate Jon Guerra, whose art (song, poetry) has captured and coalesced some of my swirling ideas. He is a thoughtful Christian artist wrestling with the words of Jesus as well as the culture and politics of today. Thank you, Jon!

Some of Jon's Songs: 

The American Gospel  (Spotify)  (Youtube Music)

Citizens  (Spotify)  (Youtube Music)

In the Beginning Was Love  (Spotify)  (Youtube Music)

Nothing to Say to the New York Times  (Spotify)  (Youtube Music)

And Russell Moore's podcast interview with Jon is also very good: (Russel Moore's site)   (Youtube Music)

Standing Up

 Standing up to the abuse of power is inherently difficult. It can also be inspiring. People who do so often look back proudly on their actions and are justly celebrated for it after a crisis has passed. But crises usually do not end on their own. Resolving them requires courage and action.

-NYT editorial board

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/06/opinion/trump-law-firms-universities.html

Possible

 

I am reminded of what seemed so impossible in 1986: The end of apartheid in South Africa. Perhaps that is why only we young people were out protesting at the time. We had not yet grown old enough to restrict our activities to the realm of the reasonable, or our ideas only to the possible. Lydia Polgren from the New York Times gets this:

"In his 2020 book 'Neither Settler Nor Native,' the political theorist Mahmood Mamdani offered the idea that South Africa’s transition was possible because of an extraordinary act of creativity and imagination in which the holders of what were once seen as fixed, eternal and opposed identities — settler and native — mutually surrendered those identities and took on new ones, as fellow survivors of a brutal colonial project who would try to build something new from its ruins. It is hard to imagine such a project in Israel and Palestine in these dark days. But what was possible once can be possible again."   (Quote from Lydia Polgren, 'South Africa is Not a Metaphor,' NYT, 6/1/24)

The Power of the News

The newspaper press is a great power, but just as an unchained torrent of water submerges whole countrysides and devastates crops, even so an uncontrolled pen serves but to destroy. If the control is from without, it proves more poisonous than want of control. It can be profitable only when exercised from within.
                                                         -Gandhi (autobiography Beacon, 1993 p. 287)
 

Who is the Terrorist?

What happened Dec 17, 2009?

What happened to the Bowers? (disturbing to watch)
more info on this incident from 2009 click here

Would it be so bad to make it a policy to not allow assassinations by plane, be it robot plane or cruise missile or CIA plane?  The CIA and now the military has argued for so long that these tools are necessary to fight the difficult battles that they have.  As the Wiki-leaks show, there is nothing hidden that will remain so for long.  And in the end, I would hope I was on the side that did the right thing.